Want to Lead? Consider These Questions: #7 of 7

July 29, 2010 By Leave a Comment

compassNote: the Seven Key Questions for Ambitious, Aspiring Leaders, are presented in the book, Practical Lessons in Leadership by Art Petty and Rich Petro.  I’ll explore each question here at Building Better Leaders through individual “Leadership Tip of the Day” posts, offering ideas for investigation and discussion.

The first six questions in this series challenged you to think through issues that are both philosophical and powerfully practical:

  1. Why do you want to lead?
  2. Do you understand the true role of a leader?
  3. Do you understand that the skills that made you successful as an individual contributor are not the skills that will carry you forward?
  4. Are you prepared to give up your domain expertise as your foundation for results?
  5. What do you believe are the skills and personality traits that you need to succeed as a leader?
  6. Do you understand that you will be judged by the output of your team and held accountable for this output?

If you’ve made it through the investigation of questions 1-6, it’s time for you to consider what your daily work life will be like as a leader.

7. What do you imagine your workday life to be like as a leader?

For those accustomed to having some semblance of autonomy over their daily lives, the transition to a role as a leader can shock the system.  This move from a “me-centric” daily routine to “everyone but me” focus has caught many an early leader by surprise.  The “day in the life” discussion fostered by this question will help clarify what a leader does everyday and how it differs from the role of individual contributor.  One suggestion is to allow aspiring leaders the opportunity to shadow you from time to time, as a means of understanding just how unglamorous leading can be.  Another suggestion is to have the aspiring leader spend a little bit of time with other leaders and interview them about their daily and weekly activities.

The Takeaway from The 7 Questions:

The Seven Key Questions for the Ambitious Aspiring Leader are powerful conversation starters to support a manager’s leadership development activities.  They are not intended to be delivered in machine-gun style, but rather to be used in concert with an approach to helping individuals discover and explore the profession of leadership.  Not everyone should lead, yet someone motivated by advancement might believe that leadership is the best or only way to achieve this goal.  An effective mutual discovery process is the leader’s best friend in helping identify leadership talent and in helping individuals come to their own conclusion on whether leading is a good choice for their own careers.

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

Innovation is Everyone’s Business

July 28, 2010 By 11 Comments

Fresh ideasTake a poll in your firm on whether people feel responsible for innovation in their jobs or in their departments, and I’ll offer an educated guess on the outcome. Those involved in engineering, design, marketing and product management will feel a strong sense of responsibility to innovate.  For others in supporting or operations-focused roles, the need or ability to innovate will be rated towards the low end of perceived priorities or even capabilities.

That’s a shame.  A good innovator and good innovations are terrible things to waste, regardless of functional role.

This “I” word has been a hot topic for several years now, giving rise to entire shelves of books and legions of consultants, and yet the majority of people that I connect with in organizations from small to large, tend to view innovation as someone else’s job. This view ensures that some of the best ideas and solutions to vexing problems for internal and external customers are left behind in the pursuit of the urgent day-to-day work of many employees.

It’s time to alter organizational and leadership thinking about the concept of innovation and get more leaders and people doing the right things to push out of their transactional modes in search of new ways to create value.

First, A Working Definition of Innovation for All of Us:

In interviewing individuals inside of a number of small and large firms that have successfully fostered cultures where innovation is viewed as everyone’s business, the definition that emerged was:

Innovation is solving vexing problems in unique and reproducible ways

While the continuous improvement group might be quick to claim some of that real estate, the intent of the “innovators” offering up that definition was to look beyond incremental operational improvements to solving significant problems that adversely impacted an internal or external customer group.

The adoption of the definition helped create awareness that everyone was responsible for recognizing upstream or downstream problems and pulling together the people and resources to find solutions.  Solutions include process changes, technology adoption, new products and new approaches.

7 Suggestions for Jump-Starting an Innovation Focused Culture:

1. Challenge leadership to stand-up and own this one. Leaders at all levels own the responsibility for fostering an atmosphere or working environment that encourages innovation in all corners of an organization. While there’s no simple formula for building a successful innovation culture, it starts with the simple, but significant leap of faith for leaders to say, “Yes, we want all of our people thinking beyond tasks and looking for problems to solve and new ways to better serve their customers.”

2. Promote situations that jump-start the right thinking. People don’t innovate on command, so, it’s imperative that leaders and managers create situations where typically transaction-focused individuals can step back and look at the bigger picture of their work.  Choose simple but important questions and conduct ideation sessions around the topic, such as:

  • What gets in the way of serving our (internal/external) customers?
  • What in our working environment frustrates you?
  • What are our customers telling you that they wish we could do for them?
  • If you could fix one thing about how we do our work, what would that be?

3. Create an outside-in view. Move beyond the functional four walls and invite customers in your value chain to sit down and share their insights, observations and needs.  An example might be the order-processing group engaging with sales, shipping and manufacturing to gain a better understanding of how things flow and where the opportunities are to change and improve.

4. Go beyond process and promote innovation as a way to compete.  The most innovative teams that I’ve worked around include a few marketing communications groups and professionals that found ways to out-promote, out-maneuver and out-perform much better heeled competitors, while operating on a shoestring budget.  The push to innovate, adopt new technologies and to put a spin on traditional activities to shake up the customers was a core part of this organization’s success.

5. Celebrate innovation victories. It’s fun and easy to celebrate the blockbuster new products, but the type of innovation we’re describing is much less visible to the outside world.  People are people, and the recognition that their work is making a difference in someone’s job or life reinforces positive innovation behaviors.  Don’t skimp on the opportunity to celebrate.

6. Incorporate innovation activities and challenges into professional development activities.  Making this part of the PD plan reinforces the cultural imperative to innovate.

7. More work for leadership.  Once started, the innovation machine needs care and attention.  Your role transitions from getting things going to providing on-going support and enabling capabilities.  You need to challenge yourself to step-up and recognize the need to both channel the innovation as well as to let it run on occasion.  And remember, your job is to knock down barriers.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Critics of this proliferation of innovation thinking typically suggest that too much distracts from the business of execution.  And while I’ll agree that a culture of the “undisciplined pursuit of more,” is a problem, it’s up to leadership to ensure that the intent and approach here stays true to the mission of getting more people focused on solving the right problems for the right customers. Difficult, but not impossible, and well worth the investment in leadership capital.

Filed Under: Leadership, Leading Change, Management Innovation, Performance, Professional Growth Tagged With: , ,

Starting Fast as a Leader With Your New Team

July 27, 2010 By 5 Comments

The Starting LineThe “start-up” phase with a new team is challenging for even the most experienced of leaders. If you’re an “all new” leader…someone hired from outside or at least outside of the team, there’s an inherent degree of uncertainty and apprehension about you.  No one knows your style or your agenda, and frankly, while you have authority and respect conferred by title, you have not earned credibility or trust.

One of the fastest ways to ramp up and help people develop some early comfort with you is to sit down and listen to them. Notice that I didn’t say talk.  This is an exercise in listening, paying attention, gaining insights and discovering your true situation with your team members. You’ll have ample opportunity to talk in the future, but, start-up is a time for listening.

Set Up Face-to Face Meetings with Your Team Members:

One of the first things that I do in a new leadership role is publicly indicate that I’m going to meet privately with all direct team members. I’ve extended this to indirect team members as well, and I advise including them, unless the size of the group makes this step prohibitive.  I indicate that I will pre-publish the agenda, provide everyone with a few days for people to think through their thoughts, and then I will reach out to schedule the meetings.

The public indication is good for morale and pre-publishing the agenda helps people to frame their thoughts and ideas.  Of course, to earn credibility here, you’ve got to keep to your commitment, so once public, there’s no backing down.

The Agenda-3 Questions:

  1. What’s working?
  2. What’s not?
  3. How can I help you help our business?

These 3 simple questions provide the participants with a broad degree of freedom to offer company and departmental criticism, identify areas to strengthen and improve, and share insights on the obstacles that they see keeping them from contributing at greater level. I’ve yet to attend one of these sessions that wasn’t rich in input and much needed context for me in my new leadership role.  Of course, people feel good that they’ve had a chance to share, and that you cared enough to listen.

What’s Next?

Take good notes, follow-up each session with a personal thank you note (or e-mail), and take care to live up to any commitments that you made during the discussion. Invariably, there are some easy to resolve issues that you can and should commit to fixing.  For the more strategic items, acknowledge the input and promise to consider it as you deliberate or pursue broader team discussions on the issue.

I also like to roll-up the broader business and departmental input (not personal or personnel) and hold a larger team meeting where I share the feedback.  Much of this content can help to define priorities for improvement or action.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

I can’t take credit for originating these questions or even this approach.  I read about it somewhere, jotted it down and have used it for years, while long since forgetting the original source.  It’s never failed to help “break the ice” for all parties, and get the discussion focused on the business of the business and off of the fact that there’s a new leader in charge.  Use it in good health.

Filed Under: Leadership, Uncategorized

Leadership Inspiration from the Howard Schultz HBR Interview

July 27, 2010 By 5 Comments

valuesIf you’re looking for a breath of fresh leadership air and some hope in this world after watching CEOs doing the Perp Walk or the Resignation Shuffle, read the interview, “We Had to Own the Mistakes” with Howard Schultz, Starbucks Chairman and CEO, in the July-August, 2010 issue of Harvard Business Review.

While Schultz is no stranger to our world as an iconic founder of one of the world’s most successful and formerly fastest growing firms, one might argue that he didn’t earn his leadership stripes until faced with the unexpected challenging of turning the firm around.

Love the coffee or not, it’s hard to leave the interview without a sense that Shultz has a firm handle on what it takes to lead successfully in this era of transparency and extreme employee distrust (well earned) of those in charge. I’ll let you read the interview, but I don’t mind pointing out the areas that particularly resonated with me, including:

  • The frequent use of the phrase: “I am responsible,” in reference to the firm’s troubles following his departure from the CEO seat. (He remained the firm’s Chairman.)
  • His refusal to throw the former management team under the bus for the firm’s troubles: “There was a different team here-very good people who deserve respect and not the burden of responsibility.  I was chairman of the company, and I am culpable.” There he goes again with that responsibility thing! Did you hear that, Tony Hayward?
  • The admission that organizational and leadership hubris created the problems.  “We had never had much competition.  Everything we did more or less worked, and that produced a level of hubris that caused us to overlook what was coming.”
  • His view to leading the turnaround of the firm: “The challenge was how to preserve and enhance the integrity of the only assets we have as a company, our values, our culture and our guiding principles and the reservoir of trust with our people.” That statement takes my breath away.

And without stealing  too much more thunder from a great and inspirational read, Schultz serves up example after example where he and the firm stood up and made the hard call in spite of overwhelming pressure.  Decisions to maintain health care benefits, never sacrifice quality for cost savings, invest in retraining the staff and introduce new offerings when the pundits all said they were horrible mistakes, are a few of the examples of moral courage in action.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

I jumped off the Starbucks train a few years ago when the experience began to sour.  Poor service, expensive prices and noisy, cramped stores that no longer facilitated work or networking plus coffee drinking, were enough to send me in search of some local roasters.  After reading the interview, I may just have to learn that funny drink ordering language again and see if Howard’s refreshing leadership approach has filtered down to the store level.

Thanks Howard, for painting a picture of what good leadership sounds and acts like.

Filed Under: Decision-Making, Leadership, Leading Change, Values Tagged With: , , ,

The Triple Threat to Good Decisions: Data, Time and Emotion

July 22, 2010 By 7 Comments

Right or Wrong? There are few situations more challenging to teams than dealing with a tough, emotionally-charged issue and decision-choice while facing significant time pressure and seemingly contradictory data.

If that type of situation sounds uncommon or unrealistic, consider that many firms and management teams make critical priority calls and strategic choices under just such circumstances. The decision to launch Challenger was a prime example, with all three factors playing a huge role in this tragic call.  Countless corporate strategic misfires owe their outcome to this triple-threat of data, time and emotion.

While many situations don’t involve life-safety issues, this triple-threat is something that every manager should be critically sensitive to in their group and strategic decision-making.

Data, Bloody Data

Let’s start here first. We would like to believe that we are making data-driven, fact-based calls on key issues. Unfortunately, the data quality facts don’t back that opinion.

Our firms have invested small fortunes in powerful data warehousing, enterprise management and analytics software programs, yet report after report substantiates that the data in our systems is crap.  It’s poor quality, obsolete and just plain wrong.  (Visit The Data Warehouse Institute for more on this topic.)

Beyond the fatal data quality issues, we struggle with too much information and the very real and challenging issue of how to interpret the data.  Given this challenge, it’s common for individuals and groups to engage in a game of data-roulette, including:

  • Looking for the data that confirms our opinion and then seizing upon this confirmation evidence at the expense of potentially contradictory error.
  • Sampling on the dependent variable instead of the independent variable.  This common logic error has people looking at the wrong issue and improperly attributing cause and effect.
  • Ignoring the data.  Given the volume of data typically just a click away, it’s easy for individuals and groups to quickly become confused or overwhelmed or both.  Another outcome of too much data is analysis paralysis.

Time after Time

Most timelines for business initiatives are contrived, yet many managers and groups allow artificial deadlines to impact the quality of their decisions.  Certainly, we all know that time is money and that windows of opportunity can close, and yet, I wouldn’t let either of those clichés drive me to make a poor quality decision.  I’ll accept that speed of decision-making is important, but only if it is counter-balanced with quality.

Watch Out When Emotions Rule the Day

My favorite, nausea inducing line of all is, “You’ve got to take off your (insert your functional hat) and put on your business hat.”  That invitation to suspend logic, slice your IQ and commonsense in half and make a poor call is often a ploy to both manipulate and to quickly resolve an emotion-laden issue by imploring someone to suspend judgment.

We don’t’ make good decisions under emotional stress, and that goes for relationships and major life events as well as business situations.  Our well documented and well-established fear of change, its’ close cousin, our propensity to pursue something that looks like the status quo, and our over-reliance on gut calls to reduce or avoid conflict and resolve time-pressures and data ambiguity issues all contribute to crappy decision-making.

7 Suggestions to Keep the Triple Headed Monster of Poor Decision-Making Locked Up

I pull no punches on this topic.  As the leader, you are on the hook for teaching your team to make good decisions.  Your firm depends upon it and your career depends upon it.

1. Strive for Crystal Clarity on the Issue! Frame the issue and carefully conduct a process- check to ensure that you are all looking at the same core issue and decision.

2. Hit the Brakes! If time-pressure takes over, it’s your job to hit the brakes!  I’m not certain of attribution, but the phrase: “slow down and think carefully before you do something stupid” jumps to mind here.

3. Hit the Brakes, Part 2: Too many managers are fearful of raising their hands and saying, “hold it.”  As a leader, foster a culture where people don’t get knee-capped for pulling the chain to stop the production line, and as a professional, develop a spine.

4. Just the Facts! Spend time assessing what you know, and very importantly, defining what you still need to know to make a decision.  This last part….”what we need to know,” is often skipped.

5. Turn Data Into Information and Knowledge.  Monitor data integrity and quality, and work with your group to carefully wrap it in meaning. This step is the source of many of the errors described above, so note your assumptions, watch out for framing and confirming evidence errors.  Consider involving objective 3rd parties to help look at and interpret the data and data needs.

6. Recall Drucker’s Saying: “Every Decision is a Risk-Taking Judgment.” Teach your team to think through and prioritize on risks.  Use face-to-face and anonymous input to ensure that risks are identified without the bias of social interaction.

7. Vent the Emotions and Then Move On: De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats does this brilliantly.  Use his process, or, at least create an opportunity for everyone to vent and then challenge them to focus on facts, risks, opportunities and ideas.  (Frankly, Six Thinking Hats process is a tool that has the potential to improve discussion and decision quality.  Consider identifying an experienced facilitator to help you with this process.)

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Time pressures, emotional factors and data issues are at the root of many poor life and business decisions.  High performance teams and effective leaders recognize these factors, talk openly about them when they start to encroach, and work hard at locking them back in their cage when quality of judgment is in danger.  It’s time to slay this triple-threat to effective decision-making in your environment.

Filed Under: "To Do" List, Decision-Making, Leadership, Performance, Professional Growth, Strategy Tagged With: , , , , ,
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