Management Excellence Book Series Podcast: Strategic Speed
Filed under: Fresh Voices, Leadership, Leading Change, Management Education, Management Excellence Book Series, Management Innovation, Organizational Transformation, Performance, Strategy, Talent Management
Every year, a number of the large consulting firms publish surveys outlining the issues that keep global corporate leaders awake at night. Inevitably, the topic turns to strategy and more specifically to the headaches and challenges of executing strategy.
For those of us that have labored in the corporate world for a couple of decades, it comes as no surprise that translating ideas into programs and projects and then executing these programs accurately and quickly to seize market opportunities is darned difficult.
It also turns out that we’re not so good at it for a lot of reasons, most of which have to do with people.
It is this critical issue of improving strategy execution (speed and quality) by focusing on the people & leadership issues that bedevil so many programs, that the authors of: Strategic Speed-Mobilize People, Accelerate Execution, take on in this interesting, and research and helpful tool-filled new book. This is a practical, interesting and immediately useful book for anyone engaged in the work of creating and driving strategy and execution.
I had the good fortune to connect recently with Jocelyn Davis, one of the co-authors (along with Henry Frechette, Jr., and Edwin Boswell) of Strategic Speed, for an interview, where we discussed the high failure rate of strategies, the meaning of “strategic speed,” and a number of other issues important to anyone interested in improving strategy execution. Jocelyn’s insights into the book and the world of strategy and leadership were fascinating.
Enjoy the interview.
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-In case you missed it, check out my recent interview with Bob Sutton on his new book, Good Boss, Bad Boss.
-Note from Art: the authors supplied my review copy of Strategic Speed.
Leadership Caffeine: The Noble Pursuit of Power and Influence
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leadership Skills, Life and Business, Management Education, Product Management, Professional Growth, Project Management, Surviving Lousy Leaders, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
Note from Art: no ethics or morals were harmed in the making of this post.
Power and influence are not dirty words. Both are components of every organization’s environment and both must be carefully cultivated to succeed as a formal or informal leader.
Power and influence provide the motive power behind organizations and initiatives and the lubrication that keeps the parts and people from binding and grinding and self-destructing.
Nothing happens without the application of power and influence wielded by those that have carefully cultivated these qualities. And while the notion of someone actively pursuing power might seem reprehensible or dirty or immoral to some, I’m not sure why.
Frequently Overheard:
“I don’t want to play the games.”
“I’m sick and tired of politics”
And the always colorful and image evoking, “He must have pictures…”
We’ve all heard those statements and perhaps nodded in agreement. Yet the presence of humans in the working environment guarantees that there will be those that are more effective at connecting, engaging, motivating, and ultimately getting things done through others. And these aren’t necessarily the smartest people or the hardest workers, but they are more than likely the smartest workers.
Intelligence is More than I.Q.
Those that cultivate power and influence work hard on managing themselves. They are emotionally intelligent. These power-pursuers also are innately aware of the impact that they have on others, and they draw upon well-honed skills to manage external perceptions and to adapt to changing situations. They are socially intelligent.
Personal Branding & Building Respectful Relationships:
Those with power and influence have carefully thought through their own personal brand and value proposition, and work hard reinforcing this brand through their actions and behaviors. Their focus is on getting work done through others and asserting their agenda, and to do that, they must forge respectful relationships, build strong social networks and guiding coalitions and they must support others more often than they ask for support.
And my informal observation on those that successfully cultivate organizational power and influence is that they are masters at managing upwards. This is different than sucking up. It’s understanding your boss’s agenda and priorities and helping her succeed, and it’s leveraging those priorities to grow visibility, get involved with key projects and to curry support.
Backroom Dealers and Dirty Politicians Need Not Apply:
While the bad eggs in the corporate world grab the headlines and the cool orange prison garb that’s been so executive fashionable for the past decade, the gross majority of people in organizations do not resemble those characters.
I’ve worked in and around companies with hundreds to hundreds of thousands of employees and while there have been some blog post worthy lousy leaders, they are the exception not the rule.
From top executives to truly powerful individual contributors that serve as influencers on key strategic choices and projects to those leading from the middle, there are great collectors and noble users of powers almost everywhere.
The abusers and the abusive exist and their tactics are reprehensible. I don’t have an easy answer if you are victimized by one of those creatures, other than to indicate that if you improve your cultivation of power and influence, you will be better able to deal with or avoid the situation and person the next time.
6 Reasons Why Pursuing Power and Influence is a Good Career Move:
1. Productivity. Those with power and influence get more done. You can print this and put it on a bumper sticker!
2. It’s honest, hard work. The pursuit of power and influence in an organization involves figuring out how to stand out from the crowd. This is generally best accomplished by some combination of darned hard work, great ideas, building good social networks and helping your boss succeed. Nothing wrong with those pursuits!
3, It’s about supporting your brand authenticity. The act of pursuing power is in large part a personal branding activity. You have to decide what you stand for and you need to communicate and substantiate your value proposition through your actions. Professionals should take responsibility for their personal branding, and the pursuit of power and influence requires that you live up to your stated value proposition. People are generally not naïve and can smell a hollow value proposition and an inauthentic leader a few miles away.
4. You cultivate critical growth skills. Gaining power and influence requires great people skills…great social intelligence. Part of cultivating great people skills involves understanding how you are perceived by those around you, and this means that you must be alert and open to feedback and to making the effort to improve based on the feedback. This growing power and influence stuff is honest, hard work!
5. You create a multiplier effect. As you cultivate power, you have the ability to extend your good across the organization. It’s easy to talk about how you wish things would work. Those with power and influence are able to define how things truly work and extend their vision across teams and entire organizations.
6. You create demand for you. Your senior leaders want to see people with ambition, commitment and an interest in doing more. As long as your approach to growth doesn’t involve stepping on the heads and hands of those that you are scrambling over, we really like aggressive people that are willing to help in the good fight.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
The pursuit of power and influence is noble. Given the choice between an individual self-confident enough to cultivate power and one not interested in “playing the game,” I know where I’m going every time. The real “game” is about winning by serving customers and stakeholders and legally beating the snot out of competitors.
What’s your strategy to grow your power?
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Coming Tuesday: the latest episode of the Management Excellence Book Series, featuring a podcast interview with Jocelyn Davis, co-author of Strategic Speed. Also, in case you missed it, check out the prior episode with Bob Sutton, author of Good Boss, Bad Boss.
Finding Time to Focus or, Speed Kills
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Leading Change, Making Decisions, Management Education, Organizational Transformation, Performance, Social Commentary
More observations on business and culture from an unofficial leadership anthropologist.
The lot of professionals inside many organizations can easily be characterized by a series of endless status meetings, hurried hallway conversations and messages quickly dispatched on a pda while walking, ignoring the meeting in process or consuming a protein bar on the run.
Space aliens observing from afar might get the sense of a hive type atmosphere with a seemingly endless amount of activity, but almost no perceived vector. Clearly people fawn over those with power, but the output of all of this fawning and excessive movement might not be visible to these distant observers. Nonetheless, work gets done, customers are served and growth often created. I do however, worry and wonder about the human costs and the cost to the organization in lost-ideas, missed opportunities and a much more superficial existence.
If you work in one of these fast-paced cultures, the issue of finding time to focus on people and strategic priorities is a true struggle. The problem is compounded if you get caught up in the common notion that success equates to being perceived by the right people as busy.
Beware the Micro-Transaction Trap:
I’ve noticed a tendency for some in hive type cultures to get caught up in achieving a maximum number of touches per day. The goal becomes one of earning attendance to meetings where you need to “be seen,” and minimizing the amount of time that you spend on any one topic. Deep thinking is not promoted, because you are too busy engaging in micro-transactions. These are quick sound-bite type engagements where surface topics are covered and conversations on deep issues forestalled for another time.
Another Way:
I contrast the micro-transaction or hive style culture with my own experiences working and partnering with a number of different U.S., Asian and European organizations, where thinking time is valued, and discussions are typically allowed to run a useful course…one not dictated by the next entry in an Outlook calendar.
While I cannot say conclusively whether these more deliberate organizations are more successful than their hive-like counterparts, they are all market leaders and they do well retaining and developing employees.
What I can say from personal observation and interaction is that this more deliberate style certainly seems more humane, more enjoyable and to me, one heck of a lot more productive on the right issues. Strategic issues are tackled, learning takes place and coaching and nurturing of talent is a focal point.
5 Reasons Why Lack of Focus Extracts a Toll Personally and Organizationally
1. Speed drains and kills. Constant movement and micro-transactions draw upon instinct and adrenaline. Survival is the goal, movement is required and it becomes habitual. There’s no deep processing going on in this constant sense and respond environment. Frankly, I want some deep thinkers on my team.
2. Excessive focus on pace squeezes out good leadership practices. A key to successful leadership is finding time to focus on others. While sometimes the army is engaged, and sense and respond are required for a period of time, eventually, there must be an opportunity rest, reflect, learn, plan and reset. An always on, micro-transaction culture is a formula that promotes leadership ineffectiveness and rapid troop burnout.
3. All activity, no vector equals poor or suboptimal results. A lot of activity and no vector is a huge waste of physical and mental energy. Strategy sets the vector, and unless this strategy is clear to all, the motion is for show, not for go or dough. Lack of focus extracts huge opportunity costs from an organization.
4. The criteria for getting ahead are off-key. If it’s required to be constantly visible to the people in power to succeed, frankly, the leadership is fatally flawed.
5. Unbridled speed accelerates mistakes. Speed is a powerful motivator and a false god. Speed creates waste and allows mistakes to run further faster. The effective use of speed is a different story. (I have a great podcast interview coming up with Jocelyn Davis, one of the co-authors of Strategic Speed, where this notion of effective speed is shared in detail.)
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Speed kills, and so does inaction compounded by over-analysis. There must be a happy medium or at least a workable balance of speed and activity with the slow, thoughtful dialogue that leads to new ideas, performance improvements and effective coaching. If you live and work in a hive type atmosphere, you’ve got a tough task, but one worth fighting for on a daily basis. Learn to slow down and focus at least once a day.
Leadership Caffeine-Give Your People Room to Run
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Management Education, Middle Management, Surviving Lousy Leaders, Talent Management, Values, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
Overheard: “If I don’t stay on top of my people, nothing gets done.”
If lousy leadership were a crime, the owner of the quote above might just merit a short stretch of quality alone-time to reflect on the implications of his statement. There are so many things truly wrong with the style of leadership that the statement connotes, that I’m not certain where to start.
I regularly run into examples of leaders operating on the frontlines and even the top-lines that equate leading with policing and oversight. In sessions where I poll on the behaviors of great and lousy leaders, the horror stories of micro-managing bosses and inspector and critic style managers are so plentiful that it’s often difficult to rein in the discussions.
The perception that being boss involves constant policing has not yet been bred out of our culture.
There are certainly core issues that demand oversight. Issues of ethics, legal compliance, and discrimination all merit constant vigilance. And maintaining appropriate operational control is absolutely a leader’s responsibility. However, there’s a line that is crossed when the boss extends intense vigilance to the day-to-day and sometimes minute-to-minute work effort of team members. Move too close to this line or, cross it, and you guarantee a tense working atmosphere, a loss of initiative and a deficit of creativity. What should be a creative and productive experience becomes more like a prison experience.
Gaining compliance is not leading. Any two-bit despot can gain compliance by inducing fear through excessive oversight.
In conversations with individuals describing leaders that they admire, commonly referenced behaviors are they exact opposite of the overbearing and over-the-shoulder manager:
Doesn’t micromanage me
Let’s me do my job
Asks me how she can help
Sets clear expectations and then lets me go
Doesn’t jump all over me when I make a mistake…but rather, he asks me what I learned.
We need more leaders that generate those types of comments from their team members.
11 Reminders that Your Job as a Leader is About Building, Not Guarding:
1. Focus on the working environment! You own the responsibility to create and sustain a positive working environment. You cannot do that by micro-managing.
2. Create the right type of oversight by creating a culture of accountability for the values and norms in that environment.
3. You are a teacher. Teach and train. And then teach some more.
4. You are a coach. Observe and provide timely constructive AND positive feedback. Everyday.
5. Be approachable, but don’t spend all of your own time approaching. Give your team room to run.
6. Create context, not confusion. Clarify and communicate. Create context for key organization strategies and goals.
7. Expectations and accountability drive performance. Set clear and challenging expectations for individual and team performance. This is not micro-managing, it is good management.
8. Remember, you’re there to help, don’t hinder. Knock down obstacles and free your people to run.
9. Defend, don’t distract. Learn to shield team members from distractions. Keep your people free to run, part 2.
10. Stay out of the way. You are a distraction most of the time. See the prior item.
11. Assert only when you need to. Don’t assert often. If you have to assert often, review the prior 11 items.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
We’re all responsible for developing the next generation of leaders. Let’s get this right and help educate and train the micro-managing boss out of existence.
Beware Context Canyon When It Comes to Leading Change
Filed under: Leadership, Leading Change, Management Education, Middle Management, Organizational Transformation, Professional Growth, Talent Management, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
We invest a great deal of time talking and writing and preaching about change. We discuss resistance to change, fear of change, our own need for personal change and the challenges that organizations face when it comes to embracing change.
We’re not very good at changing, but we sure like to talk about it.
Spend a few sleepless nights channel surfing the infomercials (a discomfiting experience in more ways than one), and you’ll realize that there’s a tremendous amount of energy that goes into selling us stuff to help us change in all area of our lives.
In my non-scientific polling and personal leadership anthropological meanderings, I’m comfortable generalizing that most change initiatives fail. From diets and fitness programs to resolutions and new corporate directions, failure to change is epidemic.
While I suspect that our failure to change our own individual habits is a close cousin to change failures in business, I’ll focus on the latter here.
We Create Our Own Context Canyons:
Most managers and management teams spend a great deal of time processing on the drivers of change. By the time they start discussing or announcing changes, the issues and often the approaches are well-baked in their minds, while the rest of us on the receiving end are left with the deep thoughts of, “Huh?” or, “Why?” or, “Huh?”
The result is a gaping hole that I call the “Context Canyon” between managers suggesting change and employees processing on the implications of change. Depending upon the culture, resistance will range from loud and overt to quiet and passively aggressive. Nonetheless, resistance will reign supreme until the “Context Canyon” is filled-in not just by the managers, but also by the rest of the organization taking the time to internalize the case for change.
5 Common-Sense Ideas to Help with Change:
1. Recognize the Context Canyon. You and your peers may have worked through the case for change for months. You’ve had time to process on the rationale and think through and even debate options and alternatives. Mentally, you’ve long since accepted the need to change. Remember that if the first time that your employees hear about the change is when you announce it, they are just starting their mental processing journey. Your springing it on them has put them on the defensive from the beginning.
2. Involve People in Change Discussion Early and Often. People typically want to contribute to the discussions on change. They want to do their part to facilitate changes that will better serve customers and improve value for stakeholders. Treat them as an extended team of advisors. You show remarkable leadership courage and you show your respect for your employees by engaging them up-front on discussions about change.
3. Get the Why? Right! Again, beware the Context Canyon. People might hear your rationale on Why change is required, but that does not mean that they agree with your logic and your case. A pronouncement from on high typically does not equate to agreement or acceptance. Create safe opportunities for individuals and teams to ask questions, offer their thoughts and process on the case for change.
4. Ask for Help on the What? After awhile, the discussions on “Why Change?” need to move towards “What to do?” You’ll gain stronger organizational support by inviting and listening to active input, than you will dictating changes. Additionally, the shift in discussion from “Why?” to “What?” actually serves to strengthen the case for change. Remember, your organization requires the same amount of time that you do to process-on and internalize the case.
5. Address the WIIFM. Don’t fool yourself. People might be expressing concern about the organization, but everyone is thinking about, “What’s In it for Me?” (The less selfish sounding version is: “What does this mean for me in my job?”) This is the 600-pound gorilla on the back of the elephant in the room. The more time that you put into spanning Context Canyon, and the more that you allow your employees to help you “design the way forward,” the easier it is to deal with WIIFM. Your willingness to allow people to define how they have to change puts a great deal of individual and organizational angst to rest.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
While watching the various infomercials and pitch-people offering all manner of goods to improve our lives in the kitchen, the bedroom and the bank account, it occurred to me that we needed an offering to help us successfully navigate changes in our organizations and jobs. For only three installments of $39.95, I’ll help you navigate Context Canyon. And for the first 20 organizations to order, I’ll throw in the knife set.
There are no silver bullets or magic products that promote change. Use good old-fashioned common-sense based on human psychology. Context is King and involvement promotes engagement.
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