Leadership Caffeine: 7 Signs that Monotony and Routine Have Taken Over
Filed under: Innovation, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Performance
Let’s face it, there’s much about the world of work for many that is monotonous or at least fairly routine. It’s easy in many roles to get lulled into the rhythms and routines of days, weeks and months. Wake-up, dress, get on the train, drink coffee, meet, talk, write, plan, meet some more and run to catch the express train home. Rinse and repeat.
Monotony and routine are the natural born killers of creativity and innovation. Like weeds invading a spring lawn here in the Midwest, these twin killers quickly overwhelm the healthy pursuit of better, new and different.
Good leaders like good gardeners take preventive measures to minimize the opportunity for monotony and routine to take root. However, even the best lawn-maestros know that there will be some encroachment of unwanted pests and other destructive forces. Being ever vigilant, they are on the lookout for the first signs of trouble and stand ready to spring into action.
7 Signs that Monotony and Routine are Infecting and Impacting Your Team:
1. Cue the nonverbal cues: people that are engaged, excited and inspired show it in many ways. Their pace is quick, their voices strong and upbeat and their eyes and faces show interest and animation. Learn to pay attention to the body language of your team members…these cues rarely lie.
2. Accountability fades into acceptance. High performance teams impose their own self-policing mechanisms for performance. When a team member fails to meet team standards or to live up to team values, the group takes action and requires accountability. When this self-correcting system is not visible…and when poor or incomplete performance is grudgingly tolerated, you can reasonably guess that monotony and routine have taken root.
3. Fire watching becomes a cultural hobby. I’ve seen this many times in tired environments. Problems are treated like a fire burning in a wastepaper basket while people just sit there watching it. “Yep, that looks like a fire,” says one person. “How can we be certain that is a fire?” asks another. “Maybe the boss wanted a fire in that can,” intones another. “Yeah, you’re right. We better not touch it. Besides, I don’t think we’re responsible for fires,” adds the next. If fires are springing up and burning out of control without anyone take action, something is wrong.
4. There’s a lot of fighting and no playing. Great groups know how to fight and play well together. Tired, frustrated, bored groups just fight and then bicker about each other. Be sensitive to the bicker o-meter in your organization and if it starts heading in the wrong direction, it’s time to take action.
6. Beware when failure is met with resignation and acceptance instead of a healthy frustration supported by a redoubling of efforts. Engaged people and teams fight failure with energy and creativity.
7. Be concerned when new initiatives and goals are met with a swirl of nothing. Tired and cynical teams (symptoms of monotony and routine) tend to choose an ignore strategy for new initiatives, confident in the understanding that with a long enough period of inaction, the initiatives usually fade into the ether of other management blah blah. This passive-aggressive behavior is more common than you might think and is a definite indicator that you’ve got team trouble.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Recognition is the first step on the road to recovery. Good managers and leaders do more than judge team performance by the numbers in a report. They tune in to the attitudes, behaviors and the myriad of other clues that indicate that monotony and routine have taken up residence. And then they take action.
Of course, great leaders don’t wait for the visible signs…they are active every day in implementing preventive measures to make certain that monotony and routine don’t have a chance to grab hold and take root. (If you’re looking for some ideas, I suggest reviewing some of the recent Leadership Caffeine posts here at Management Excellence.)
Isn’t it time that you stamped out Monotony and Routine in your workplace?
It Takes Time and Experience to Find Your Leadership Voice
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Management Education, Professional Growth
Note from Art: this post was prompted by a series of questions from some early-career professionals about the process of developing as a leader.
I’ll grant you that the concept of “Leader’s Voice” is a bit abstract. In my mind, it’s much more than the spoken-words or communication approach of a leader. I suppose “leadership style” is a close neighbor. Close, but not exact.
A leader’s voice is that combination of factors: presence, demeanor, attentiveness, engagement, decisiveness, approach, bedside manner, confidence, humility, genuineness and so much more.
As an early career leader, you have little depth or breadth in your leadership voice. You struggle or at least strive to be relevant to your team members and your organization, and many flail in the process.
Over time as you gain experience, learn and build confidence, a complex leadership personality begins to emerge. This is what those around you will take as your style, but you know that it is much more than an outward fashion statement. It’s who you are as a person that also happens to serve as a leader.
Learning to lead is for most a journey of discovery. For those just embarking on this journey, the early phase is filled with awkwardness, uncertainty and a great deal of excitement. It’s like going to a new high-school where you don’t know the players and rules and cliques, except now you don’t just get to be an observer or a victim. You’re that awkward kid with braces and out-of-fashion clothing, and your supposed to be in charge.
With the passing of time and the benefit of experience-both good and bad, your leadership voice begins to emerge and take shape. If you are conscientious about your role and charter, this voice is characterized by the recognition that title is mostly meaningless and that you serve at the discretion of those that you lead.
With the benefit of experience, your core leadership behaviors…supporting and helping, coaching and delivering feedback, and your ability to articulate vision and give it context through goal-setting and daily managing, all contribute to this deepening leadership voice.
In discussions with experienced leaders, I’ve heard many stories about that moment-in-time when they recognized that they finally were comfortable in their leadership skins. It’s usually a new leadership role, and the moment-in-time is characterized by a sense of calm that in spite of all of the unknowns, the way forward was clear.
“I know my role, I understand how to use the tools of my trade and I am confident that I know how to gain the support and ultimately the commitment of the people around me,” was the description that one leader put on this moment-in-time recognition.
Another offered: “I’ve figured out how to get people involved, gain trust and provide help from day one in a new role. People feed off of my confidence, and I work hard to make certain that it never crosses over to arrogance.“
These individuals have found their leadership voices.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Don’t confuse the moment-in-time and this quiet confidence that I’m describing as sudden enlightenment…or as that point where learning ceases. Developing as a leader happens in waves and it never stops. And for anyone that believes that they’ve mastered it, remember that pride goeth before the fall.
However, given experience and commitment to developing as a leadership professional, that point where you finally have found your leadership voice is the time where you are capable of elevating your game and creating the best results for yourself, your team and your organization. It’s also when your ability to help others to find their own voices is most powerful. Don’t squander this great opportunity.
Leadership Caffeine: 7 Odd Ideas to Help You Get Unstuck
Filed under: Career, Innovation, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Management Education, Performance, Professional Growth, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
While some argue that the natural order of life is towards entropy (a gradual decline into disorder), I would argue that the natural tendency of most humans is towards a kind of comfortable sameness and consistency in their daily lives.
The pursuit of different requires more energy than the descent into routine. It is most definitely easier to not change.
There is comfort in routine. It feels good, like the hot shower that you take and the well-worn sweats that you put on after a long day at work.
We like to see familiar surroundings and familiar faces. Consider a situation as trivial as your health club and your workout routine. There’s comfort in seeing the same, often nameless people at 5:30 a.m. We belong, we are one of them, and everything is in balance when we assume our place with this familiar group. Shift your workout to a mid-day routine, and the entire feel of the place changes, although the facilities and equipment are the same. It’s different and slightly discomforting.
While comfortable and comforting, routine is the enemy of growth and progress and innovation. Routine is carried out in muscle memory. Spend too much time doing the same things the same way and existence becomes one of pre-programmed decisions and choices that carve deep mental ruts in our minds that make change all the more difficult.
Routine is the enemy of growth. The false comfort of sameness masks a slow decline and ultimately decay.
Top Performers Fight the Routine:
High performance individuals in all areas of life, from leaders to athletes to great individual contributors work hard everyday to fight the gravitational pull of getting stuck in the proverbial rut.
High performance teams and organizations find their comfort not in sameness or routine, but in embracing the ambiguity of the world and the constancy of change and the constant need to change.
Many of the best leaders that I’ve known, worked for or worked with go out of their way to push themselves and their teams to constantly do things different to keep their senses sharp, their individual and collective minds expanding and their ideas fresh. They work hard at getting and staying unstuck!
7 Odd Ideas to Help Leaders and Teams Get Unstuck:
1. Fight the tyranny of the Outlook calendar and recurring meetings. There are few things worth talking about over and over again, and yet many in organizations perceive that they are doing their jobs by scheduling and conducting these self-aggrandizing events. Fight the tyranny of others ruling your calendar!
2. Rotate leadership. More and more organizations are adopting an IDEO-inspired approach of choosing leaders for initiatives not based on seniority or level, but based on the group’s assessment of who the right leader is to help the team succeed with the initiative or project at hand. Simple sounding…and in some organizations, heresy, but this is a true opportunity to innovate in management and importantly, to ensure that every new initiative benefits from a fresh way of looking at things. This is also a powerful opportunity to help your team members build their own leadership skills.
3. Break the back of bad-habit brainstorming! As odd as it sounds, I’ve observed a “sameness” and routine to brainstorming that is actually counter to the intended creative idea generating intent of the activity. Groups come together and rehash the same ideas that they didn’t adopt in the last round. There’s no edge, no excitement and nothing new as an outcome. Try introducing anonymity into the process (variations of the Delphi technique); add outsiders/newcomers to the group and mix up methods for post-brainstorming idea selection.
4. From time to time, do something completely off-task with your group. One manager creates vexing cases (business problems, people issues, strategy issues) that are different from but analogous to her work situation and facilitates the group through analysis and solution development. Just getting people to think about other problems in other fictional settings is helpful in creating new pathways for problems in the current setting.
5. Introduce your team to the management innovators and great leaders of today and yesterday. Another manager regularly exposes his team to other leaders, cultures and approaches leveraging the massive volume of content available on YouTube and increasingly at places like Harvard and Stanford. I do this in my management classes as well and long after the textbook and PowerPoint content is forgotten, people remember meeting (virtually) Jim Collins, Meg Whitman, John Chambers, Guy Kawasaki, Eric Schmidt, Jack Welch, Jim Goodnight and yes, even longtime favorite, Herb Kelleher.
6. Play a game. One of my favorite activities to run is the Dollar Bill Auction, which is guaranteed to both be fun and teach everyone about the realities and dangers of escalation of commitment. Another of my favorite professionals, Kay Wais, at Successful Projects, LLC is creating games for Project Managers, and has recently introduced a well-received Project Risk board game. I love the idea of introducing different ways of learning about important topics.
7. Change up your personal routine. I recall asking one of my senior managers what was up when I noticed a series of changes in his daily routine. He was dressing different, arriving at work at a different time and even parking on the other side of the building. His response was something to the effect of, “I’m pushing my team to mix things up in an effort to break out of our sales slump and it’s helping me to think differently by changing up my old routines.” Sales improved significantly that next quarter.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Take comfort in being uncomfortable about being comfortable. If you followed that, you get my point in this post. We talk endlessly about the accelerating pace of change in our world and we see it in play daily. And then many of us go back to our usual routine. It’s time for you to recognize the need for change in yourself, and as a leader, for you to find ways to stimulate new thinking, promote different approaches and make the existence of change part of the excitement of working in this world.
What are your odd or not so odd ideas to stimulate change?
7 Ideas to Stimulate Experimentation in Your Organization
Filed under: Innovation, Leadership, Leading Change, Management Education, Management Innovation, Organizational Transformation, Performance
Dan Ariely offers an interesting piece in the April, 2010 Harvard Business Review on “Why Businesses Don’t Experiment.” In this brief essay (only available for a fee as of this writing), he offers two main reasons for the lack of experimentation:
“…experiments require short-term losses for long-term gains. Companies and people are notoriously bad at making those trade-offs.”
“Second, there’s the false sense of security that heeding experts provides. When we pay consultants, we get an answer from them and not a list of experiments to conduct. We tend to value answers over questions.”
I’ve certainly observed the impediments to experimentation that Ariely highlights and a good many more. In some organizations, there are so many systemic and cultural disincentives to experimentation that it’s a wonder that executives and employees are able to decide what to have for lunch today that was different from yesterday.
In spite of the natural inertia towards the sure thing or the shortcut (external advice in lieu of more risky and time-consuming experimentation), I’ll offer my few cents worth on why and how you and your firm can use experimentation as a means of building value and confounding competitors.
Why Experimentation is Healthy for Your Business
- Great strategies don’t spontaneously generate, take root and grow on their own, based on the magical beans provided through a consultant’s input. Value creating ideas and approaches are most often the output of enlightened trial and error…and sometimes unenlightened trial or just plain fortunate errors.
- If your firm and your teams are not experimenting, your firm is slowly choking off the supply of future innovation. Most often, the deteriorating quality of ideas that turn into valuable offerings is met with what Jim Collins describes as the “Undisciplined Pursuit of More.” This flailing about is an attempt to rapidly make up for the dearth of good ideas created by a rigid culture and leadership. Instead of a pipeline of ideas, firms grasp at straws and all ideas can be rationalized as potentially good.
- Teams that fail together in pursuit of experimentation stand a better chance of succeeding in the end. While that might seem like a “call to failure,” it is intended as a call to learning.
- Facilitating a culture of experimentation is a great way of facilitating a culture change away from command and control leadership, particularly if experimenters are given the opportunity to own ideas. It’s a great sign when a firm embraces reality that top leaders aren’t there because they have the best ideas.
Rethink Everything to Stimulate Experimentation
The obvious areas for experimenting include your products and services and tweaking with various elements of your marketing mix. Before you go too far down the experimentation path however, remember that your business is a system and virtually every part of how and what you do is worth rethinking.
Other opportunities for experimentation include: organizational structure, project approach, strategy formation and execution, talent development, cross-functional collaboration, promotional approaches, engaging with customers, thought-leadership strategies and so many others that don’t involve impacting your product.
7 Ideas to Stimulate Experimentation in Your Organization:
1. Build the expectation into your culture that experimentation is part of the job. Think 3M, Google and others that expect their employees to spend some significant amount of their time on items unrelated to their core job or their current task list. Part of successfully pulling this off is genuinely providing the time and supporting resources.
2. Create systems for experimenters to turn ideas into processes, offerings and approaches. This of course requires you to ensure that the decision-making process is uncomplicated or made less complicated and that when the time is right, there is money and support available for next steps.
3. Put your top leaders on the hook for fostering innovation by monitoring over time how their efforts contribute to innovations that make money, cut costs or differentiate.
4. Quit emulating your competitors. Too many firms suffer from competitor envy and move through time monitoring and reacting. I’m all for a healthy amount of monitoring and improving upon or outflanking, but the cases of pure raw emulation that I’ve seen are remarkably counterproductive and unprofitable.
5. Embrace social media! If you are blocking access to social media, wake-up and recognize that there has never been a more fertile source of innovation than the discussions being shared and ideas emerging on Twitter and via blogs. And the ability to research, experiment and gain insights from specific audiences in near real-time fashion is unparalleled. It’s time to knock down the social media firewall and free your people to think and engage!
6. Recognize that for some offerings and processes, the best approach to innovation might come through external collaboration efforts. Your partners in the value chain are looking for opportunities to experiment as well, and these types of collaborative relationships can be fertile grounds for experimentation and innovation. Having said that, be aware that making these work is a nontrivial task.
7. Build a new hero class in your culture, where experimenters and experiments that yield successful outcomes are celebrated and become part of the folklore of the firm. Be careful not to trivialize this issue with dumb employee or team of the month awards. Use some finesse and create heroes. And find ways to remind people that everyone is invited into that club…all they need to do is earn their way in on their own or as part of a team.
The Bottom-Line for Now
When walking into a client organization, one of the areas that I assess is how rich or poor the culture is when it comes to experimentation. Healthy cultures and winning organizations encourage experimentation and the opposite generally holds true.
And when seeking to facilitate a culture change, remember that these things don’t happen as a result of an executive order, they happen over time with tons of support, reinforcement and a constant refueling of the pioneer spirit.
Now, ask yourself: what are your people doing today that may just build a new future for your organization?
Leadership Caffeine-Teach Your Team to Make Better Decisions
Filed under: Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leadership Skills, Making Decisions, Management Education, Product Management, Professional Growth, Project Management, Strategy, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
Note from Art: What started out as a cup of Leadership Espresso ended up as a Double-Tall! Enjoy the extra sips and let’s hear your thoughts on this important topic.
If you were to embark upon a rugged and lonely journey to the top of the mountain to ask for enlightenment from the Oracle of Management, I suspect that you would be left with the words “decision-making” to ponder on your long walk back to civilization.
And while that might not sound much like enlightenment, remember that oracles by their nature offer only vague but profound observations to stimulate learning.
In spite of the lack of a concrete answer from this journey, I’ll throw in my two-cents worth that decision-making is in fact the essence of management. It’s also darned hard to do, difficult to teach and challenging to get right more often than not.
As humans, we make tens of thousands of decisions ranging from the mundane to the profound. Decisions open up new paths, close off old ones and usher in an entirely new series of issues and decisions that ultimately affect us in so many ways that it is hard to fathom.
History of course can be explained in hindsight as a series of critical decisions that ultimately determined the fate of civilizations, empires, nations and tribes.
Think about your own professional experience. If you’ve spent any significant amount of time in the workplace, you can certainly look in the rear-view mirror and see decision-points that impacted the fate of teams, companies, or tasks. Projects hinge on decision-making effectiveness, as do new product launches and business strategies.
I recall distinctly watching and listening as a newly hired and early career professional as a firm’s market leading position was sacrificed on the alter of ego and ignorance with a single utterance from an executive. Most of us in the room suspected that the decision was bad at the time, but the true impact wasn’t clearly understood for several years.
Alternatively, I’ve participated in long and tough discussions and decision-making processes with teams that ultimately translated into good and great outcomes on both small and large scales. From projects that succeeded to produce great results to products and strategies that captured market segments and grew revenues and profits. In hindsight, the decisions seem so clear and obvious, but in real-time, they were tense, ambiguous and even frightening.
Talent related decisions are some of the most common and painful. Anyone that has hired a significant number of people has made one or more mistakes. What was it about your own decision-making process that failed you or that obfuscated your ability to assess the individual properly? It’s hard to say, but chances are you’ve learned from that mistake and refined your process.
While machines can be taught to make decisions based on rules and data, humans have the advantage and disadvantage of….well…of being human. There are many complex factors at play in our decision-making processes, ranging from our own personalities (think right or left brain), our personal experience sets and biases, to the many complicated environmental factors and human and group dynamics and risk and reward issues that make effective decision-making a truly complex task.
On the other-hand, we’re paid to make decisions and we’re responsible for helping our groups and teams do this effectively more often than not. What’s a leader to do?
The Bad News-There Are No Decision-Making Silver Bullets
A review of much of the management literature on decision-making showcases a great deal of fascinating discussion without a lot of substantive guidance. There is apparently no silver-bullet for us as managers and leaders on ensuring that we make good decisions or on ensuring that we build teams and cultures that make more good decisions than they do bad calls.
As I look back on my own career (yep, there’s that experience bias) as well as my observations of many, many teams and leaders, I’ve formed an informal and I’m sure imperfect, but hopefully, helpful list of tools to guide managers on strengthening their decision-making effectiveness and that of their teams. These include:
11 Suggestions for Strengthening Your Own and Your Team’s Decision Making Effectiveness:
1. People need context to make decisions. The best context in a firm starts with a galvanizing vision and is strengthened with a clear strategy and highly interconnected goals. If you’ve worked in firms with and without this clarity, you’ve lived and know the difference. The absence of vision, strategy and clear, meaningful goals equates to complete lack of context for any decisions. They are all good and bad and there is no way to discriminate. Fix this!
2. If your organization fails on point number one, you need to fix this at the team or group level. Quit complaining about the lack of guidance and define the playing field and goals for your team. Yes, this puts accountability on you and requires you to turn ambiguity into something concrete. Get over it and get on with it.
3. Your own decision-making style infects-positively or negatively, everyone around you. Ponder too long and you paralyze. React too quickly and you increase risk and the likelihood of team whiplash by finding that you have to quickly reverse decisions. You must deliberately develop a style that balances the need for clarity with the reality that much of business is steeped in ambiguity.
4. Beware of the evil paternal twins of groupthink and group polarization. Know your enemies and keep them visible and teach your team how to keep them at bay.
5. Create diversity where there is none. Beware the damage from having hired and cultivated too many like-minded professionals on your team. They may be great, but in group dynamics, the lack of diversity of thinking styles is your enemy. Draw in external help to challenge thinking.
6. Keep the Devil’s Advocate in a cage and let him out for periods of time. Tom Kelley of IDEO fame showcases the potential destruction of the Devil’s Advocate run amuck. No one said this creature needs to live amongst you every day, but opening the cage door from time to time is both terrifying and helpful.
7. Use approaches other than discussion or face-to-face to make decisions to reduce biases and change dynamics. The Nominal Group technique or the Delphi Method both offer opportunities to reduce the presence and impact of group biases.
8. Constantly teach your group to both assess their decisions and improve their decision-making processes. This is a never-ending task of the effective leader.
9. Resist your own natural tendency to opine. John Chambers at Cisco (Harvard Video) described as one of the most critical issues in transforming from a command and control culture to one of collaboration, his need to not tell the answer to everyone after ten minutes of discussion.
10. Reward, don’t shoot messengers and failed experimenters. Remember Deming’s point number 8: “Eliminate fear in the workplace.” Live it.
11. Create and teach a risk framework. What’s the worst that will happen? Can we bear the worst? If we cannot bear the worst, what can we change to reduce the worst? While many will argue appropriately that a good risk framework is much more involved, you can do worse than start with these three questions.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Ultimately, your career and your company hinges on the decisions that you and others around you make. Given the broader forces affecting us all…speed, globalization, the march of technology and an exciting spread of diversity in our workplaces, this process of making decisions won’t get any easier. I don’t have the silver bullet for you either, other than to offer that you need to wake up every morning and walk in the door prepared to find a way to improve as decision-maker while teaching others to do the same.
Now, what are you going to do about it?
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