Constancy of Purpose In Pursuit of Success

July 31, 2008 By 2 Comments

Deming’s first of his 14 Points for Management reads: Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive and to stay in business, and to provide jobs.

The phrase, “Constancy of Purpose” strikes me as perhaps the best way I’ve heard to describe that intangible but palpable drive that propels the most effective individuals and the most successful organizations. 

Instead of being singularly focused in pursuit of our goals, most professionals that I know struggle to find even a shred of time to work on the most important priorities.  It’s not that they don’t have the time, but rather, they allow the noise in the environment to keep them from focusing. 

Other individuals fail to recognize their true priorities, or at least they fail to understand how to connect their priorities to the firm’s priorities, and as a result, they work on what they want to, or they do little or nothing at all.  This is as much a leadership failure as it is the failure of the individual.

I marvel at top executives that talk about “empowered employees” and hold round-tables and town-hall meetings in an effort to create the illusion of focus and connectedness, but that fail to figure out how to light the fuse that creates the constancy of purpose in the minds and hearts of every single individual in the organization.  These leaders understand that they are supposed to do something, and as a result, they drive a lot of activities but don’t necessarily create a constancy of purpose in the organization. In military parlance, they are “all action and no vector.”

Organizations and individuals march forward when they have a clear goal and sight and are driven by some deep collective conviction that when successful, the world will be a better place, that they will be better professionals and that their positions and as a result, their families will be secure.  The earlier that a leader understands that creating “constancy of purpose” is a core task, the faster they are on their way to truly fulfilling their obligation and responsibility as a leader.

Creating Constancy of Purpose on Your Team:

  • Don’t assume that everyone around or under you understands why they are there and what their priorities are.  It is up to you as leader to provide this critical context.
  • Constantly focus on connecting your team’s output and activities to the organization’s big picture.
  • In the absence of a broad organization “constancy of purpose” (most environments), it is up to you as leader to manufacture one for your team.  Better yet, engage your team in creating their own overarching purpose.  Just remember that you still need to plug it into the organization’s pursuit of success, however success is defined.
  • The best ideas often reside in the minds of the quietest people.  Create opportunities for the silent but brilliant individuals to contribute.  
  • Everyone drifts from the true north of their priorities—you need to allow an appropriate amount of drift for individuals and teams and no when and how to help them reorient.
  • If you are at the top of the food chain, you do own mission, vision and values, and they need to be much more than posters on the wall in conference rooms and lobbies.  You cannot spend enough time thinking about and working on making the mission, vision and values come alive for the organization.  It’s not a campaign or a one-off meeting…your goal is to make these often trivial and trivialized words serve as the rallying cry and standards for performance and behavior.

The Bottom Line for Now:

Leadership is profession and leading is a true privilege.  This most difficult of all human endeavors—leading, motivating and guiding teams to achieve can be done by seeking compliance or providing inspiration.  I’ll place my bet on the leader that fuels the collective and individual passions of a firm’s employees.  What’s your firm’s Constancy of Purpose?

Filed Under: Leadership, Leading Change, Strategy, Surviving Lousy Leaders Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Great Things Happen When Confidence and Capitalism Collide

July 29, 2008 By 1 Comment

In this time of bad financial news, high energy costs, record deficits and global turmoil, it’s exciting to meet people that see opportunities in the headlines.  I had the great fortune to meet someone recently that has the right attitude about making lemonade out of the bumper crop of lemons we are experiencing this year. 

This individual has a self-stated mission of seeing the U.S. energy independent from foreign oil  producers, and has the confidence, resources and conviction needed to just possibly pull it off (or at least make a big difference).  He’s investing heavily in all-things renewable, and he has no qualms about the fact that he will make a lot of money along the way to helping us become energy independent.  Mission, vision and a tidy profit all at the same time.  Ayn Rand would be proud.

There are more than a few leadership lessons that I take away from meeting and listening to someone very confidently talking about knocking down regulatory walls at the same time he is helping solve huge engineering and infrastructure challenges.  What might appear as insurmountable barriers to many are just problems to be solved and opportunities waiting to be realized.   It would be easy to listen to this type of talk and think of the top 100 reasons that come to mind why it will never work.  The hard job is to jump over to his side of the fence and see the only logical outcome: success!

Corporate offices are filled with Devil’s Advocates, Naysayers and Professional Critics.  These are the people that take someone’s seed of a vision and work hard to ensure that it is crushed into oblivion to serve as more grist for the big corporate mill.  Some of the best-educated, smartest people you will ever meet fill these roles.  They are so smart, that they easily see everything that can go wrong in pursuit of a vision.  My advice: do yourself a favor and fire these people and replace them with individuals that are excited by the vision and singularly focused on helping realize it.  You’ll be happy you did.

Filed Under: Leadership Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Living, Learning and Leading in an Increasingly Virtual World

July 25, 2008 By 3 Comments

Somewhere between the world I grew up in and the world that we are living in today, everything about working, leading and learning began to change.  It’s increasingly a virtual world, and everything about communicating, interacting and developing relationships feels a bit different than it used to.  While many/most of us are compliant with the changes in communications (telex to fax to e-mail to IM, web conferencing etc.), I wonder how many of us are truly working to become competent at living and working in this world. 

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reminded of the changes in how we live, learn, earn and engage, and I’m working hard to adapt. 

  • A valued colleague sends me a note expressing frustration over the challenges of leading remotely.  I can’t believe I haven’t spent more time on this valuable topic.  Stay tuned.
  • I delivered a webinar and I realized that I have to get better at communicating without interaction.  I’ve set a schedule to begin doing some of these blog posts as podcasts as a means of increasing my comfort and competence communicating to an invisible audience.
  • I signed up to teach an on-line course expressly for the purpose of discovering what it means to “teach” on-line.
  • My kids don’t use their phones for talking.  If I want to reach them, I send a text message and get a response practically before I’m done typing.  (I saw this coming a few years ago when I asked my youngest son why he never calls friends on the phone.  He looked at me kind of funny and said, “Why would I want to talk with one person when I can be on-line with all of my friends at the same time.”)
  • I am busy working on an on-line content strategy to augment my own face-to-face seminar/workshop activities. 

The common thread in all of these items is the shift in how we work, lead and learn.  Like it or not, the world is becoming more and more virtual everyday, and those of us that are old enough to remember life before fax machines and e-mail will be well-served to quit fighting the trend and start learning how to become competent and comfortable communicating to no-one and everyone at the same time. 

It was just a few years ago that I received my first request to fund an employee’s pursuit of an on-line degree.  I am a staunch advocate of the importance of the face-to-face network developed at school, especially for MBA students, and while I approved the request, I recall challenging the value.  Since that time, I know of dozens of professionals that have had great experiences earning degrees on-line.  I still question whether there is any chance that you can develop a close network in that manner, but hey, this is the era of Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn, where it is seemingly more about contacts than close relationships.  (I’m still suspicious of that premise.)

One of the critical leadership skills of our time is developing comfort and competence at leading distributed teams.  There are still some firms that insist on their managers and leaders being housed within a line of sight, but they are showing their lack of understanding of how the world is changing.  The literature on leading remotely seems to offer superficial guidance from people adapting old models to new situations.  I suspect that as time moves on, the profession of leadership will evolve to take into account the very distinct skills and approaches needed to lead effectively while never coming into personal contact.  (As a side note, I deal with many people on the receiving side of remote leadership.  At best, the leader to employee relationships they describe are superficial.  We haven’t figured this one out yet. )

The Bottom-Line for Now:

The difference between compliance with new technologies and new styles of communicating and competence at leveraging these tools and styles for results is significant.  Deriving value from virtual leader/employee relationships or on-line learning is a very different task for all parties involved than it was in the almost bygone era of face-to-face.  It’s time to quit fighting the changes and learn how to master the new opportunities to engage.  I still struggle to see how these new methods will replicate the richness of face-to-face communication, but that’s my problem to deal with as the world keeps changing.  In the meantime, if you are looking for me, don’t call…I’m busy learning how to communicate all over again.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Don’t Miss the 39th HR Carnival at HR Capitalist!

July 24, 2008 By Leave a Comment

If you are after thought-provoking, practical content from scores of leading authorities in HR, Leadership  and Management, then click-thru to the great Carnival being hosted by Kris Dunn at HR Capitalist.  You won’t be disappointed.  Thanks to Kris for an awesome job.  

Filed Under: Leadership Tagged With: , , , ,

Decision-Making and The Three Rules of Risk Management

July 24, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Your decision-making style says a lot about you as a leader.  Some people make a lot of decisions with little more than a gut hunch to guide them and others spend a lot of time gathering insights and information to support their decision.  Others struggle to make decisions on anything and might still be considering what to order for breakfast when it’s time for dinner.  And still others avoid making decisions because taking a stand increases the odds that they will be held accountable for results.  

Our decision-making style is driven in large part by our tolerance of risk, something that can change based on many personal and professional circumstances.  An executive guiding a turn-around might operate with a high-degree of risk tolerance, while a project manager leading a construction project might have a much lower risk tolerance.  First-time leaders might not have formed a solid decision-making style and might process risk at a slightly more conservative level than how they perceive their direct manager dealing with it. 

A participant in a recent leadership workshop that I conducted offered up the Three Rules of Risk Management that she learned from her father (an engineer).  I am grateful that she shared and appreciative of the wisdom her father passed along in these simple but powerful rules.

The Three Rules of Risk Management

1. Don’t risk more than you can afford to lose.

Good advice for corporate leaders, mid-level managers and everyone in their personal lives.  Determining what you can “afford to lose” is of course the key issue here, and sometimes not so easy to calculate.  A patient requiring a heart-transplant to live has one definition and a single parent that needs a paycheck to feed his family has another.  It’s OK to agonize over this one a bit…it is the foundational data point of the Three Rules.

2. Never risk a lot for a little.

Common sense, yes, but I see this one violated everyday. People risk their credibility arguing over who’s right and who’s wrong on small issues.  Boards and executive teams pursue ill-conceived acquisitions based on questionable assumptions.  Marketing and development teams invest heavily in new products without a good understanding of the problem they are trying to solve for their prospective buyers. The operative issue here is defining whether the perceived end game or outcome is worth a lot (usually the assumption) or some fraction of a lot (usually reality).  Align risk with the true definition of the outcome.

3. In general, take the risk if you can affect the outcome.

In my opinion, this is the most profound of the three rules, and another point worth agonizing over as you formulate your decision.  Hoping that the dice roll your way is what helped build all of those grand palaces in Las Vegas.  You cannot control the dice…they have a mind of their own, and in a business environment, hoping for the market to move your way is a guarantee that you will make your better-prepared competitor rich.  You cannot affect the outcome of most situations at 100 percent, so once again, you are left to sort what you can control and what is beyond your control.  This rule guides you to accept risk if you can control a significant portion of the outcome. 

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Learning to think through your risk-environment can help you make the right calls on the tough issues.  The Three Rules are not a silver-bullet, but they do offer a simple framework for mentally processing the implications of a decision. 

In general, I’ve found that most people prefer working for leaders that make a lot of decisions and that make decisions quickly.  Certainly, a leader that is slow to make up her mind or that will never make a decision has an adverse impact on her team and her organization.  Alternatively, a leader that is too fast to decide or that decides more on a hunch than a good understanding of the facts, issues and risks, is prone to making significant mistakes as well.  The trick is finding the right balance, and balance is about understanding and measuring your risks against possible returns.  Use the Three Rules to find the right risk/return balance for your decisions. 

Filed Under: Decision-Making, Leadership Tagged With: , , , , , ,
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