Leadership Caffeine: Let Your Questions Be Their Guide
Filed under: Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leadership Skills, Management Education, Middle Management, Organizational Transformation, Performance, Professional Growth, Strategy, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
The art of asking questions is a leadership power tool.
A good question from a leader is like a pebble thrown into a pond. While the splash occurs at the impact point, the question encourages people to think experiment and even innovate, long after the initial asking.
The best leaders wield their questions like a concert musician wields his or her instrument, adjusting and adapting the tone and tenor and pace depending upon circumstances.
Jack Welch, the former Chairman and CEO of G.E. was famous for his view on this topic, although in true Welch fashion, there was a bit of a bit to his view on questions:
“Leaders probe and push with a curiosity that borders on skepticism, making sure questions are answered with action.”
I like everything about his view here, except the point on skepticism. Jack and I will have to agree to disagree on that one.
How’s Your Questions to Comments Ratio?
Long-time readers know that I advocate monitoring your Questions to Comments ratio as a personal key performance indicator. The further north you are of a 1:1 ratio with good quality questions, the more effective you are at delivering on some key leadership objectives.
5 Reasons Why You Want to Lead With Great Questions:
- You are creating a learning atmosphere
- Your questions show your team members how much you respect their insights
- You are encouraging people to think independently
- You are teaching others how important it is to question assumptions about projects, strategies, competitors and market forces. All of these areas and the dominant logic behind them demand constant reconsideration.
- You are promoting an effective communications culture where the tough issues are free to be examined and ideas suggested.
Your goal with your questions as Mr. Welch highlights is to encourage action. You want experiments, improvement initiatives and innovation efforts to be the by-products of your probing, not a series of never-ending debates.
Developing your skill with questions takes deliberate practice and some healthy self-awareness to acknowledge that asking might just be more effective than telling.
Some leaders mistakenly assume that they are in charge because they are smart. The most effective leaders recognize that they are in charge because they know how to tap into the talents of people that are smarter than they are. Questions are the tool for tapping into that talent.
11 Questions to Help Jump-Start Your Team’s Curiosity
1. Why are we winning? (What’s working and how do we do more of it?)
2. Why are we losing? (What’s not working and what can we fix or stop?)
3. Why are our competitors winning? (How well do we understand their strategies?)
4. What are the customers saying?
5. What do the customers really mean? (How well are we interpreting their Voice?)
6. Are we doing the right things? (Do our priorities tie closely with our strategy?)
7. What are the assumptions about the world (markets, industries, our capabilities) that underlie our strategy and are they valid?
8. What resources do you need from me to help you and your colleagues execute on priorities?
9. How are you measuring progress? Why?
10. What are our major risks and our plans to identify and deal with them?
11. What have we learned and how are we translating the lessons learned into improvements?
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Learn to wield questions to both gain insights and stimulate your team’s thinking. The best dividend of a consistent approach to asking a lot of the right questions, is that you teach those around you to both ask and think about the right issues. Additionally, in this fast moving world, yesterday’s assumptions and strategies are easily turned into tomorrow’s business road-kill unless you and your team members stay alert. Now, are there any questions?
The Anachronistic and Oxymoronic Tyranny of Marketing Control
Filed under: Management Innovation, Marketing, Middle Management, Organizational Transformation, Professional Growth, Social Commentary
The new world of marketing frightens many experienced marketing professionals.
For those accustomed to believing that they have some form of inalienable right to control everything that is said or published about their firm in the name of “managing the brand,” these are difficult times, indeed.
As individuals and groups inside organizations seek to tap into the many remarkable and generally free tools to connect, engage and converse with their audiences, old-line marketing managers increasingly lash out and assert their power in the name of the brand.
Someone forgot to share the memo that everything changed. (Does anyone send memos anymore?)
The Experienced Marketing Manager’s Last Grip on the Old World:
- “How will I protect the brand?”
- “How do I ensure that people don’t say the wrong things?”
- “How do I ensure message consistency?”
- “How do I ensure that people perceive us as in our true light…the way I open every press release? You know…it goes something like, “Acme, a market leader in…”
4 Marketing Management Practices that Stifle and Smother:
1. Social media policies that reflect the tone: “this stuff is dangerous and we’re going to control what you do.”
2. Arcane and insane approval processes that require marketing to approve everything that is communicated externally. (Aaaargggghhhh!)
3. An attitude of, “I own the brand.” Bull. Your customers own your brand…your institution decides how it is perceived through transactions and experiences.
4. A reliance on old-line interruption-focused marketing tactics, where you choose the time and place to attempt to engage your audience.
The New Tasks of Today’s Marketing Manager:
- You should work tirelessly to ensure that you have a well-defined positioning and messaging strategy that means something to the people that count. Emphasis on the last few words of that sentence.
- You should work hard to engage your employees and colleagues in understanding and spreading this message.
- You should absolutely monitor customer and marketplace response to your message and your value proposition, and you should keep it fresh and relevant.
- You should focus on providing every way possible for your people to build value, create visibility, make connections and to monitor and engage in discussions about what’s important to your business and to your customers. Teach your people about the new tools of marketing and encourage experimentation and learning.
Oh, and I have no qualms about you ensuring that pages and blogs and profiles incorporate your well-honed messaging and your logo standards. And of course, people need to conduct themselves as professionals and have the modicum of common sense that it requires not to divulge inappropriate information.
After that, get over it.
It’s this last point that frightens the marketing control types.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Marketing has always been too important to be left to the marketing department. It’s an institution wide activity that support’s Peter Drucker’s purpose of an enterprise: “To acquire and keep customers.” Marketing manager, sorry, but you don’t own marketing. You are the proprietor of a set of activities and you are an enabler of marketing processes, but you most definitely don’t own marketing.
While there are perils and potential time-wasters in this new world of communication and connection sufficient to merit some amount of worrying, the best solution is to shift your attitude from “How can this stuff hurt us and what do I have to prevent?” to “How can this stuff help us and what do I have to train/educate/enable?”
You cannot control your way through a world where everyone else is talking to everyone else. Somewhere out there, a group of people that you care about is exchanging ideas on things that they care about.
Are your people listening and engaging? Or, are they still waiting for you to decide that it’s safe to open the gates of your marketing fortress?
The Feedback on Feedback
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Management Education, Middle Management, Organizational Transformation, Performance, Professional Growth, Project Management, Talent Management, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
Note from Art: at the end of this note, I indicate the release of my new Building Better Leaders on-line program to help professionals at all levels improve their feedback skills. The timing of this launch and the close relationship to the content in this post is entirely not coincidental.
Over the past several years beginning with the work for Practical Lessons in Leadership with my co-author, Rich Petro, I’ve made a professional hobby out of exploring the fascinating and very real fear that so many people have for delivering constructive feedback.
One of my favorite interviews for the book was with a retired CEO who when I posed the question on whether he had any regrets, without hesitating, responded: “I really regret that I never learned how to have the tough discussions with the people that worked for me.” He quickly added, “To this day, I wonder how much money that I cost my companies.”
While many readers may be quick to conclude that this gentleman made it to CEO without mastering the fine art of feedback, my pushback is that good enough isn’t good enough, especially when you are talking about a skill set in the C-Suite that can dramatically impact the organization’s working environment and ultimately its performance.
As I’ve moved several years beyond the work for the book, I continue to poll and survey various professional groups. And while my informal approach to research on this topic would not qualify as a well designed study, I’m pretty comfortable extrapolating the results to the broader population. By the way, my informal sample size is approaching 2,000 people from all types of organizations and at all levels of leadership.
My Feedback on Feedback:
- A majority of respondents indicate never receiving any formal training on feedback.
- A majority of experienced managers answering my anonymous surveys describe delivering negative feedback as one of their major weaknesses.
- Most leaders are not evaluated on their feedback skills and effectiveness.
- A majority of respondents indicate that they frequently delay delivering tough feedback. The exception is for situations where safety or security are involved.
- A majority of respondents indicate that they feel better about delivering constructive feedback if they deliver praise at the same time. (Note: this sugarcoating or sandwiching is one of my pet peeves. For anyone interested, check out my post: “Why I Hate the Sandwich Technique for Delivering Feedback.”
- And in a carry over from the earliest surveys on this topic, a gross majority of respondents indicate that they wish that their managers were better at delivering feedback.
I’ve expanded my inquiries on feedback to the world of informal leaders (Project Managers in particular), and the feedback on feedback here is equally challenging. These professionals are definitely not trained on feedback, and they clearly recognize the impact that their lack of comfort with this tool has on their ability to deal with troubled project teams.
And finally, with a keen eye and ear for the “F” issue inside organizations, when I am called upon to help struggling firms and teams with strategy or other performance issues, it is a safe bet that the feedback culture is unhealthy. Discussions may be collegial, but they don’t focus on the real performance issues of people and teams.
Why Do We Fear Feedback?
Marshall Goldsmith offers up a great perspective (I paraphrase): There’s only two things wrong with providing successful people with feedback. They don’t want to hear it from us and we don’t want to give it to them.
It’s a human thing. We fear negative reactions. We are overly concerned that people won’t like us if we criticize them. My CEO example described earlier was worried that he would create a negative working environment, and he didn’t want to damage whatever team and one on one credibility existed in that environment.
The fears are all understandable. I suspect that everyone one of us can empathize with the source of those fears. We just need to move beyond them.
The Power of Feedback:
There are no silver bullets in leadership, but feedback comes darned close. Used properly, this is the leader’s most powerful tool for promoting and strengthening positive behavior and for identifying and improving less than desirable behaviors.
High quality professionals…the type you want to surround yourself with, want and appreciate effective feedback. For teams and individuals that perform at acceptable levels, feedback can help them move from good to great.
Feedback as Ken Blanchard says, “Is the Breakfast of Champions.”
Conquering the Fear and Cultivating Your Feedback Skills:
My own experience training hundreds on this topic has shown that once people understand the power of this leadership tool, mastering it includes:
- Learning to construct complete, behaviorally-focused and business-oriented feedback messages.
- Learning to deliver these messages in a frank, respectful and effective (concise, timely, brief) manner.
- Understanding how to manage even the toughest of discussions.
- Setting the stage for active coaching and more feedback on the behaviors in question.
- Practicing using a “system” that incorporates all of the above. Practice, and more practice, and then some more. Of course, the gross majority of the practice is in a live fire setting.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
This most difficult of human interactions in the workplace is also one of the most important. The fear, much like the fear of public speaking is mostly in our minds, and with some deliberate practice, all of us are capable of improving our skills, and as a result, improving our performance, the performance of our teams and of our organizations.
It’s time to move beyond the fear.
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I’m excited to offer my own easy method for people to begin moving beyond the fear of feedback, in a new short and remarkably cost-effective on-line program called simply, “How to Deliver Feedback,” at my Building Better Leaders site. For less than the cost of a cup of coffee per day, leaders, informal leaders and professionals at all levels gain access to 5 lessons on feedback, all supported by action guides, recommended workplace developmental actions, and practice forms and cases. The “Back to School” pricing on this program is $55. It will go up on October 20th. And for anyone desiring mentoring support, I am happy to offer that for an additional fee.
I hope to see you and your team members in the program!
Leadership Caffeine: In Praise of Consistency
Filed under: Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leadership Skills, Making Decisions, Management Education, Middle Management, Performance, Professional Growth, Talent Management, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
Take a few minutes to think about the best leaders that you’ve ever worked for. What terms best describe them?
Chances are the word “consistent” didn’t show up in the top five.
Perhaps it should.
Consistency may just be the very unsexy and uninspiring element to your leadership style that will help you grow your credibility and allow you to create and sustain a working atmosphere that allows your team members to prosper.
It may also help you stand out with those charged with choosing you for success.
As leaders and professionals, we have a need to communicate and reinforce our brand and our professional value proposition every minute of every day. We are after all, constantly under observation.
In case you missed that memo, your every utterance and your every non-verbal cue is subject to ordinary and extraordinary scrutiny by those that work for you and with you. Send out conflicting messages, act in a manner dissonant from what people expect, and you inadvertently start a game of “guess what the boss meant.” There are no winners in this game, except your competitors.
12 Leadership Activities Where Consistency is Priceless:
- Setting expectations.
- Making decisions.
- Communicating and reinforcing values and ethics.
- Reinforcing accountability.
- Responding to adversity.
- Engaging others in pursuit of solutions.
- Responding to the mistakes of others.
- Supporting the development of others.
- Encouraging learning.
- Treating others with respect.
- Providing feedback.
- Following up.
And in case you’re not yet convinced, consider…
6 Reasons Why Consistency is Critical to Your Success:
1. Your consistent behavior over time strengthens your professional brand and value proposition. Consistent behavior where it counts, like the 12 items above, provides tangible evidence that your “do” matches your “tell.” Consistency becomes a key part of your authenticity, and this authenticity is visible to all.
2. Consistency removes useless “noise” from the working environment by minimizing the guessing games about your intentions or about your responses to possible situations.
3. Your consistent behavior helps minimize the gap between the type of leader you think you are and the type others perceive you as. Most leaders struggle with a perception gap. We see ourselves in our mind’s eye as one type of leader, and others perceive us through their own eyes as something potentially very different. The action of striving to remain consistent in your behaviors helps minimize this awareness/perception gap.
4. Your consistency helps reduce fear and uncertainty in the workplace. With a nod to Dr. Deming, one of your key tasks is to create a healthy working atmosphere, and the best way to do that is to eliminate fear. When people understand who you are and what you stand for and how you approach core issues, they are free to pursue their work without worry of surprises from the boss.
5. Used properly, consistency reinforces accountability. How you set expectations and respond to performance issues goes a long way towards setting the tone and tenor for the performance of the larger group.
6. Consistency creates confidence in those above you. Never forget that while we own our careers, others choose us to succeed. Those in positions of power are looking to minimize risk and make choices that further their careers. Your visible consistency in core areas and the resultant clear value proposition improves your odds of selection.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Don’t confuse consistency with lack of creativity or some strange obsessive-compulsive leadership disorder. You need to be consistent and easy to read where it counts. This doesn’t mean you can’t encourage creativity, experiment with the tools of management and leadership and push the envelope on risk in pursuit of even bigger rewards. It just means that you’ve decided that there are certain behaviors where consistency gains you a lot more than it costs you.
Management Excellence Book Series: Power by Jeffrey Pfeffer
Filed under: Career, Fresh Voices, Leadership Skills, Life and Business, Management Education, Management Excellence Book Series, Marketing Yourself, Middle Management, Professional Growth, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
Power and influence are topics in the workplace that everyone recognizes but that few talk about. I suspect that after reading Jeffrey Pfeffer’s newest book, Power (available 9/14), this will change.
Pfeffer does a great job drawing the topic out, making it relevant and then politely suggesting that we ignore the development of our own influence…and ultimately, our power, at our own career peril. The book is filled with good examples, practical guidance, and I suspect for some people, eye-opening perspectives on why you should care about cultivating your influence.
I posted recently on this topic in a Leadership Caffeine piece, entitled: “The Noble Pursuit of Power and Influence,” which was in part inspired by a cover-to-cover reading of Jeffrey’s book. The topic is easily misconstrued and even inappropriately linked to the many ethics and legal violations that we’ve seen from too many leaders during the past decade. The comments and feedback on the post reflect both the recognition of the importance of the topic and some of the angst that we have over those that actively and overtly pursue power. At the risk of being redundant, I suspect that “Power” will help move the conversation towards the positive.
My bottom-line: this is an important “Why” and “How” guidebook for the modern professional.
Enjoy the conversation!
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Disclosure: a copy of the book was provided at no charge for my review.
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