A Fresh Start, a Format Change and a New Daily Feature
Something funny happened on the way to producing and writing two blogs. I discovered that I am only capable of managing one competently. Oh, and I’m certain there are at least a few management lessons here in my blogging misfire.
A little bit of background. My primary blog is Management Excellence, where I offer thoughts and ideas on best practices on a wide continuum of leadership and management content. And while I don’t pretend to have cracked the code on how to produce the world’s greatest business blog, I am confident that my three to four 700+ word essays per week offer readers some heart-felt and hard-won perspectives and ideas on improving their performance and the performance of their teams and organizations.
The flaw in my original plan here at the Building Better Leaders blog was to attempt to replicate the same format that I use at Management Excellence. And while I manage pretty effectively to never run out of ideas, I absolutely proved incapable of creating the time or mustering the creative energy needed to produce 6 or 7 full-length essays every week. Fast forward a few months with a busy training and teaching schedule…and a never-ending nagging guilt over a blog that was effectively frozen in time here at Building Better Leaders.
Blogging, Microblogging (Tweeting) and Mini-Blogging:
While business remains brisk (a good sign for the economy), I’ve managed to gain permission from my family to disappear for a few days and update both of my web sites..content, messaging and format, and also to rethink the proper use of the blog here at Building Better Leaders. My conclusion is to learn from experience and not attempt to trick myself into believing that I can redouble my efforts and pull off now what I was unable to sustain earlier. Instead, I am shifting the format to offer what I describe as a Mini-Blog…something that falls somewhere between a tweet and one of my full-fledged essays.
Leadership Tip(s) of the Day:
While I’m hopeful that I will come up with a far more compelling name than “Leadership Tip of the Day,” until such time as that creative brainstorm occurs, the blog here at Building Better Leaders will henceforth consist of a “Leadership Tip of the Day.” (Hey, how often do you get to use the word, “henceforth?”)
The notion of the “Tip” will constrain my usual desire to expand into a full-fledged essay, and the implication that a “tip” is something helpful and useful will push me on the quality front. I suspect that I may exceed the singular constraint of “Tip” by offering multiple suggestions, short-lists and other compound suggestions, but I will absolutely keep them short and sweet.
OK Enough…What’s Today’s “Tip,” Art?
See, it’s working already! OK, here goes…with an emphasis on my own lessons-learned in the process of attempting to bite off more than I could digest.
The First Post: 4 Lessons Learned from A Blogging Misfire that You Can Apply in Everyday Situations:
- Be mature and self-aware enough to recognize when you’ve made a mistake. In spite of my true desire to create and deliver two full-fledged blogs, I misfired on my ability to execute.
- Before changing course, consider alternative approaches to realizing your original goals. The intent and objectives might be good…and the execution the problem.
- Take action quickly to change direction once you’ve recognized your mistake. (Do as I say, not as I did!)
- Beware “escalation of commitment” issues, where in spite of evidence to the contrary, you stubbornly pursue your original path. It can be a soul-searching and difficult process to recognize whether you are on a fool’s errand. In these situations, it’s critical to have someone in your life that is comfortable telling you that your baby is ugly.
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Now, what should I do about that dual Twitter identity?
In Memoriam
Memorial Day, 2010
To those that served and to those that served and sacrificed, we honor and thank you.
The Problem(s) with Teams
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Management Education, Middle Management, Performance, Professional Growth, Project Management, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
It’s increasingly likely that you will spend a good deal of your professional time working on temporary teams. It’s also likely that you will experience a fair amount of frustration and even team failure along the way.
Most organizations have yet to meet a problem (or opportunity) that they won’t throw a team at to solve. Let’s face it, it’s tempting to assume that a group of motivated, diverse individuals will trump the lone soldier when it comes to creativity, problem-solving and planning.
Or, at least it’s comfortable to think so.
Harvard Professor, J. Richard Hackman, author of the outstanding book, Leading Teams, and Professor Leigh Thompson at Kellogg (Northwestern) and author of another outstanding book, Making the Team, offer their separate but similar insights on the world of teams and teaming. We are well served to consider their findings.
Professor Hackman in an interview in Harvard Business Review: “I have no question that when you have a team, the possibility exists that it will generate magic, producing something extraordinary… But don’t count on it.”
and
“Research consistently shows that teams underperform, despite all the extra resources they have. That’s because problems with coordination and motivation typically chip away at the benefits of collaboration.”
In a similar vein, Professor Thompson offers in her book, Making the Team, “Teams are not always the answer- teams may provide insight, creativity, and knowledge in a way that a person working independently cannot but teamwork may also lead to confusion, delay, and poor decision-making.”
Fallacies and Challenges to Conventional Thinking About Teams:
Professor Hackman identifies some common fallacies, including:
- More inclusion is better. Art’s comments: Increased group size adds new complexities and the common practice of including people due to ego or politics breeds a whole set of dysfunctional issues.
- Harmony is required for high team performance. Art’s comments: There’s certainly a natural desire for people to work in an environment where the tension is low. This is another area where research contradicts traditional thinking. Teams with some tension may very well out-perform the more collegial groups.
- Having a deviant in the group is bad. Art’s comments: Interesting word choice. This deviant…the person capable of standing up against the group-think of teams is similar to the character referenced in my post, Help Wanted-Leaders with Moral Courage, and similar to the Heretic referenced by management blogger (No Smoke and Mirrors) and frequent commenter at this site, Mark Allen Roberts. The potential for massive decision-making errors in group settings is countered by ensuring someone is confident enough to challenge the conventional thinking at the right time.
- Long-standing teams lose their edge as members grow to accept the shortcomings and foibles of others. Art’s comments: the research conducted by Hackman and others indicates just the opposite. Long-standing teams offer the potential for significantly improved quality and performance.
Professor Thompson challenges conventional thinking about teams with the following:
- Conflict among team members is not always a bad thing-it may be necessary for effective decision making as it can foment accuracy, insight, understanding, trust and innovation.
- Strong leadership is not always necessary for strong teams-a leader has two main functions: structure the team environment and coach the team members.
- Good teams can still fail under the wrong circumstances. To be successful in the long run, teams need ongoing resources and support.
And finally, a comment from Professor Thompson on that classic of all techniques to straighten out the dysfunctional team, the Retreat.
- Retreats will not fix all conflicts between team members unless they address the structural and design problems that plague the team on a day-to-day basis in the work environment.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
It’s relatively easy to generate a saccharine-sweet list of things that we need to do to create effective teams. We’ll get to the list of best practices right after we spend some time thinking about the pitfalls and obstacles that make effective team development a tough job.
There’s no doubt in my mind that it is increasingly critical for us to learn how to perform well on teams and how to create high performing teams. It’s also important to recognize that for some issues, the reflex action to “put a team on it,” may be wrong. Thanks to Professors Hackman and Thompson, you’ve got some research-backed food for thought as you consider how to improve team performance.
I’ll be back soon with some thoughts on the decision-making pitfalls of groups. Yes, it turns out that we’ve got a lot of problems in this area as well.
Hey, this would be easy if it weren’t for the people…
Help Wanted: Leaders with Moral Courage
Filed under: Career, Crisis Leadership, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Life and Business, Making Decisions, Management Education, Professional Growth
Take a few minutes today and stop and think about the issues highlighted by the following questions:
- Think about the meetings that you are typically involved in where major decisions are cast. Is there anyone in these meetings with the courage to stand against the direction of the group?
- Is anyone willing to take a stand against the all-too-common ego-driven, poorly constructed and potentially dangerous courses of action emerging from the process of real-time rationalization that unfolds in too many group settings?
- Will anyone stand against the position of the highest-ranking person if his/her position is focused on the wrong issues…short-term gains, greed, and pleasing Wall Street, while ignoring the profound issues of personal and environmental safety and sanctity?
- Are you capable of putting your job on the line in opposition to choices that reflect movement away from goodness?
If the answers are mostly no, it’s time ask and answer these additional questions:
- What is it about our culture and our leadership that makes it difficult to say yes to some or all of the above?
- Why might I struggle to be this person that stands up against the prevailing wisdom?
These questions speak to the practical application of concepts like values, ethics and leadership. They also are barometers of organizational culture, character and the personal characteristics of your moral or social courage.
It’s nice to think that most people and most organizations if given the choice between clear right and wrong would opt for right, but reality and a solid decade of scandals, horrendous decisions and now, environmental disasters, suggests that we’re not ready to declare victory on this issue.
Moral Courage:
In case you’ve not tripped across the phrases moral character or social character, they are described in various venues as:
“the ability to put ethics into action. It means standing up and standing out in defense of principle, even when others are standing aside.”
Or,
“The ability to act rightly in the face of popular opposition, shame, scandal or discouragement.”
Situations such as ignoring the dangers of a failed back-up system in an undersea oil well because of time and money pressures, or, launching a space shuttle due to public relations pressure in spite of data that says the potential for disaster is high are obvious examples where moral courage failed.
And while your issues might lack the potential for grand disasters and widespread loss of life or damage to the environment, there are many, many situations with high-stakes that scream for someone with the courage to stand up and cry “foul.”
Sources of Moral Courage in Business:
- Moral courage in an organization starts at the top, with clearly articulated values and leaders that live, act, enforce and teach those values. And of course, it goes way beyond those important issues.
- Hiring practices need to identify individuals that understand and have displayed moral courage in other settings.
- Compensation frameworks have to be carefully crafted to reinforce values and moral courage and not to tempt or overtly encourage people to violate those values in pursuit of revenue and income.
- Decision frameworks need to relentlessly challenge individuals and teams to think through potential adverse impacts and to call out cases where the risk of moving away from goodness is high.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Moral courage may sound lofty and not actionable or teachable, but I would argue just the opposite. I would also argue that it is our absolute obligation as leaders to display and foster this type of behavior and to reward examples that support moral courage and severely punish those that violate it.
Admittedly, the words are easy and the work of building or changing a culture to reflect one where moral courage is the order of the day is difficult. Hey, no one said that leading was supposed to be easy. Anyone can point fingers and make excuses. On the other hand, people worthy of being called leaders accept responsibility, make the difficult calls for the right reasons and avoid the temptations that so easily derail so many of us.
Leadership Caffeine-5 Ideas for Improving Your Ability to Engage as a Leader
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leadership Skills, Making Decisions, Management Education, Organizational Transformation, Performance, Project Management, Talent Management, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
Some leaders move through their days like a flat rock skipping over the surface of a pond. They are focused on personal efficiency and speed, and the faster they move and the more decisions that they make, the better they believe they are doing as leaders.
Their days are blurs of decisions, quick meetings, hurried hallway exchanges and even more hurried text and e-mail messages, often created while they are present but not engaged in the event or conversation of the moment.
These transactional leaders define victory in the form of quantity, not quality. They take pride in keeping things moving and they truly believe they are helping others navigate through their own busy days.
There are undoubtedly environments and situations where transactional leadership is essential. For example, the operating room, fighting a fire and the battlefield are all settings where this type of leadership can mean the difference between life and death. However, even in these extreme cases, people have typically worked and succeeded and failed and learned together, and there are deep bonds that enable a second-to-second type of environment to work effectively.
Transactional Leadership is Costly:
The cost of leading from a purely transactional approach is the loss of ability to engage and truly understand people, situations and complex problems. There’s no depth to the exchanges, and relationships are superficial at best
Transactional leaders exhaust and frustrate their employees, engendering animosity or at least an overarching sense of malaise in the workplace. Many front-line and first-time leaders fall into this convenient style-trap simply because they don’t know any better.
If improving performance, fostering a culture of learning and innovation and developing the confidence to tackle the tough topics are all important for your firm, it’s time to engage more and transact less.
5 Ideas for Improving Your Engagement Effectiveness:
1. Stop and focus. While it may seem unnatural, you need to force yourself to stop what you are doing and focus all of your energy and attention on the individual(s) in front of you. One former transactional manager described the process of literally having to take a second or two to clear her mind, orient herself in the present and focus exclusively on the current situation. She found it particularly helpful to make certain that any of her electronic distractions were on silent and upside down, or better yet, out of site.
2. Ask clarifying questions & teach, don’t tell. Instead of jumping to solutions, force yourself to ask questions to understand the broader context of the issue at hand. While it might be easy for you to offer a solution after a few minutes of discussion, you are better served to help people arrive at a conclusion. Leaders that engage understand the importance of this approach as a teaching tool.
3. Take time to follow-up. The issue exchange is not the end of transaction, but the beginning of a long-term relationship. Reach out to someone that offered good ideas or showed initiative and say thanks and offer encouragement.
4. Recognize the great battles raging inside of everyone. With thanks to Tom Peters for reminding us all of this, remember that everyone (and this means you too!) has a great battle raging inside. This may be personal, professional or spiritual, but it is a mostly silent battle that is THE priority of the individual in front of you. Look for signs, provide relief if you sense that is needed or just quietly respect the battle in the professional and courteous manner that you deal with the individual.
5. Change your definition of leadership success. Instead of focusing on valuing your ability to make snap decisions as fast as issues are presented, it’s time to completely rethink your definition of success. True success as a leader occurs over time in the form of professional development for others, great and sustained results for the organization, innovation, and building an environment where people thrive.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
There are always opportunities for you to improve your effectiveness at engaging with your team members and colleagues. While you may sense that you are slowing down, sometimes, you need to slow down to allow everyone else to speed up.
Quit transacting and start engaging!
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