Management Week in Review for February 18, 2011

February 18, 2011 By 8 Comments

Note from Art: every Friday, I share three thought-provoking management posts for the week. Fair warning: I take a broad view of management, so my selections will range from leadership to innovation to finance and personal development and beyond.

This week’s selections feature content on gaining control of your body language, ensuring that your participative leadership approach is genuine, and dealing with employee and management communication challenges during periods of change.  Enjoy!

From Nick Morgan at Public Words: The Body Language Series. In case you haven’t noticed, I cannot get enough of the great personal development suggestions that Nick offers at his Public Words blog. This excellent series on dealing with your own body language issues in front of an audience is well worth your time, even if your not on stage regularly. As Nick indicates, “Most people go through their days telegraphing their state of mind, and it’s typically distracted.” As leaders, we need to be focused and engaged, and Nick’s guidance in this series of short, idea-filled posts will help.

From the post: “Is body language really necessary?” A frustrated executive asked me that once.  He had his hands full with learning his talk, coping with the technology, and, well, picking out his tie.  His question was really, “Do I have to think consciously about my audience’s body language – and my own – with everything else I have to do to deliver a great speech to that audience?  It’s just too much to worry about!” My counter-intuitive answer is no.  Let me explain… “

From Bret L. Simmons writing at his Positive Organizational Behavior blog: The Participative Leader Charade. Bret pulls no punches when it comes to his views on effective leadership or lousy leaders and their practices. This post will smack you right in the leadership face  and force you to think about your perception of your own leadership style and your possible hypocritical reality.

From the post: “If you call yourself an inclusive leader, yet your de facto test of whether or not people “fit” the culture is everyone gets along, or at least never questions or disagrees with you, then you have an integrity gap.”

From John Baldoni writing at HBR Blogs: Help Employees Listen When They Don’t Want to Hear. John offers a nearly endless stream of great management and leadership ideas in his blog posts and books, and I’m hooked. In this post, John tackles the vexing issue of communicating and gaining buy-in during times of change, and he reminds us: “Communication isn’t just about what management says; it’s also about how employees listen.”

From the post: “Leadership is ultimately a reciprocal process. While managers are the initiators of change initiatives, employees must follow through. Not only is this implied in an employment relationship, it is how managers and employees work together. Employees who willfully tune out because they do not like something are not fulfilling their part of the bargain.”

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OK, that’s it for the week. Thanks to the authors above for sharing their wisdom. I’ll be back next week with another cup of Leadership Caffeine. Don’t forget to check out my new Management Excellence Toolkit Series. We’re currently focused on sharing ideas for improving individual and group decision-making skills.

And of course, I’m always interested in working with you to support your development and the development of great leadership and management practices in your organization. Contact me to discuss your needs for coaching, speaking or training.


Filed Under: "To Do" List, Leadership, Leading Change, Marketing Yourself Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Management Excellence Toolkit Part 2: Mind the Decision Traps

February 16, 2011 By 2 Comments

Note from Art: Your decisions define you as a leader and a manager, yet we spend very little time in our busy lives finding ways to improve our abilities in this area. This Management Excellence Toolkit Series will help you recognize the challenges and pitfalls of individual and group decision-making and offer ideas on improving performance for you and your co-workers.

Part 1 of this series emphasized the importance of developing, updating and referencing a Decision Journal as part of your program to improve your decision-making effectiveness.  In Part 2, we focus on understanding a bit more about how we make decisions, and I introduce the topic of Decision Traps.

How We Decide and The Invisible Traps that Haunt Us:

A good number of researchers and scientists summarize our decision-making process as one of Pattern Matching coupled with Emotional Tagging.

We process situations based on prior experience looking for signs of patterns, and once the patterns are recognized, we attach stored emotional tags to those situations.  Much of this happens in the background, with neurons firing in many areas of our brains simultaneously. Our first recognition of the output is often what we describe as our “gut” feeling about a situation.

While the system works well for many familiar situations, it is not without its imperfections.  In particular, as we are exposed to new situations that “don’t compute,” our response and decisions are potentially flawed based on our mis-application of an invalid pattern.

There are other vexing and mostly invisible flaws in the machine, including a good number of cognitive biases that lead us, our groups and our organizations into decision-making traps with alarming regularity. The results can be inconvenient to catastrophic.

An Example-When the Pattern Didn’t Match:

In one of my favorite articles on this topic, “Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions,” at HBR (subscription or purchase may be required), the authors describe how Matthew Broderick (the general…not Ferris Bueller), the head of the Homeland Security  Operations Center during Hurricane Katrina, fell victim to a pattern-matching error.

Broderick, who had served in Vietnam, learned that early reports of disasters were often very wrong, and had developed a process of waiting for the “ground truth” to validate or invalidate the initial information. This served him well on the battlefield, and it also worked fine later at Homeland Security during other hurricane situations.  Of course, all of those other hurricanes took place around cities above sea level…a very different situation from New Orleans.

Through a series of conflicting reports, including a CNN report of people allegedly partying on Bourbon Street, Broderick closed the day by indicating in a situation report that the levees had not been breached, although he indicated this would require re-checking the next day. And then he went home.

Broderick was a victim of his own pattern-matching approach, and his experience in seeking and relying on the ground truth let him down (and many others) in a situation that was subtlely and importantly different from his store of experiences.

Vigilance and Prevention Are Critical:

Unfortunately, there are a great number of ways or memories, minds, biases, filters, environments and influences can lead us astray as we pursue the process of making decisions. Throw us into groups, and the social factors in team settings increase the odds of getting it wrong in a big way.

There are no simple cures for avoiding decision-making traps and cognitive biases. The best offense in this case is a strong defense, built on awareness of the traps and hypersensitivity to how situations are framed and decisions developed. Of course, for those offensive minded players and coaches out there, once your strong defense is in place, building processes and strengthening the culture to avoid the traps is eminently doable.

Vigilance is key. Forewarned is Forearmed.

Meet the Decision-Making Traps:

Over the next few posts, we’ll explore some of the more vexing decision traps and cognitive biases, complete with examples and hopefully, your input.

We’ll explore and offer preventive measures for:

  • Escalation of Commitment/Sunk Cost trap: the irrational pursuit of a failed approach. The legacy issues are the tough ones to let go.
  • Over-Confidence Bias and other Estimating and Forecasting Errors. Your leadership style and the culture in your organization contribute to costly estimating and forecasting issues of all sorts. And mix a group in the equation, and watch out for a really dangerous level of over-confidence to emerge.
  • Status Quo Trap: given our druthers, we will typically opt for the decision that best defends the status quo. While there are places and cases for this, the historical record of business is littered with organizations that never emerged from this trap.
  • Groupthink: everyone thinks of Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs fiasco, but rest assured, you and your team members are quite susceptible to the suspension of reality and suppression of contradictory opinions that characterize this dangerous trap.
  • Framing errors: how an issue is framed…and whether it is framed in terms of gains or losses will most definitely impact the choices developed and the final decision.
  • Anchoring Trap: Our own biases, the first information we hear, casual comments from colleagues are all contributors to our propensity to grab hold of early information and then view all other subsequent data through that filter.
  • Confirming Evidence Bias: imagine our excitement when we find data to support our perspective. How objective are we about contradictory data? Turns out…not so much.

And a few more.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Like it or not, we don’t make decisions precisely the way the textbooks describe the process: define the problem, gather and assess the data, identify options and choose the best option. While we might work through those phases, there’s often nothing rational about how we navigate each one…and we most definitely don’t make the “rational choices” that economists would have us believe are the only appropriate outcomes.

This is a big topic…with HUGE leadership and management implications.  The first step is awareness of the issues…and then we move to mitigation.  Stick with us…keep updating your Decision Journals and I’ll see you in the next post as we breakdown a number of those traps into symptoms, signs and preventive measures.

Remember, forewarned is forearmed.  Here’s to better decisions!

Filed Under: "To Do" List, Career, Decision-Making, Leadership Tagged With: , , , ,

Leadership Caffeine-Get it Right When Starting Up with Your New Team

February 15, 2011 By 11 Comments

Stepping into the role of new (to the team) leader for an existing team is a daunting task. It’s also a time rich in opportunity for everyone involved, if the new leader executes a proper start-up strategy and avoids the most common start-up pitfalls.

The 4 Stages of New-Leader Assimilation

Regardless of your background and success, teams tend to view the new leader with a bit of healthy cynicism. You’re the newbie, and you haven’t done anything to earn the respect of the current team members. Manage the process properly, and you will help the team move quickly through the first few of the four stages of new leader/team relationship:

1. Doubt and Uncertainty-People wonder: Who are you? Why are you here? Why should we listen to you? What can you do for us? What does this mean for us? What do you mean for me?

2. Hope-Their eyes open: Maybe you can help, I wonder…, Perhaps this is different. Maybe I should jump in.

3. Belief-Momentum builds based on respect and credibility earned: She does care. Her focus is truly on us. She’s helping us succeed. This is different. Perhaps I should…

4. Trust-A bond is forged and the nature of the relationship is positively changed forever: This person is focused on helping our business, our team and me. I’m going to give my trust, because she’s earned it.

Your goal is to move quickly beyond the cloud of Doubt and Uncertainty to Hope and then Belief. Trust is something that comes much later, usually after a lot of reinforcement and after individual team members have engaged and benefitted in some form from your leadership support.

Fair warning, many new leaders start shooting themselves in both feet from the moment they open their mouths for the first time, and end up destroying any possibility of progressing through the stages. Once Doubt and Uncertainty turn to Cynicism and Disregard, it’s all over for you with this team.

5 Key Issues at Start-Up:

As the new leader, you’ve got to:

1. Understand the business mission of your team and how it fits in the bigger picture of the firm’s strategy. You owe your team context for their purpose and reinforcing (or building) the linkages between team priorities and organizational priorities is a key task. Of course, you need help from your boss, your peers and your internal and external customers to gain this context for yourself. Your networking, questioning and listening skills are critical in this phase.

2. Break the Ice…help the team get to know you and of course, you need to get to know your team members as individuals and as performers in a group. In both group and one-on-one settings, you’ve got to ask and execute on these questions:

  • What’s working?
  • What’s not?
  • What do you need me to do?

The first two create content ripe for group assessment and action. The third one opens the door to identifying opportunities for you to knock down walls and accelerate your movement through the stages.

3. Identify opportunities to help the team…while quietly assessing performance and talent. You won’t know this team and the people for a while and unless there are raging people problems, resist a rush to judgment. I tend to begin realigning new teams very carefully at around the 45-day mark, with a target to have this part of the job completed by day 90.  Your actions here must be preceded by a great deal of observation and listening.

4. Begin forming an effective working atmosphere based on accountability, transparency, fairness and a propensity towards action. Once you break the ice and get people talking about key issues and obstacles, you can support their efforts to deal with the issues. Establish accountability and standards for quality from the start and don’t let go of these key issues.

5. Identify opportunities to support the development of your team members.  Within the 90-day window, but somewhere beyond the first 30 days, it’s appropriate to add to your list of questions above:

  • What do you want to do here?

For those team members going forward with you, you owe it them and to yourself to provide developmental opportunities that allow people to explore their desired directions.

4 Common Pitfalls of the Start-Up Leader

Avoid:

1. Making it all about you. You’ve invaded their world…it’s truly all about them, not you.

2. Asserting your agenda without context for the team and its’ perceived mission or for the culture and values of the team.  Again, it’s their team…until you’ve earned the right to say “my team” or better yet, “our team.”

3. Imposing your way instead of helping the team understand the need for a new way.

4. Operating with a hidden plan. “The Secret Plan” didn’t help Nixon engender trust when talking about unraveling the Vietnam conflict, and not talking about the expectations from your boss for the team engenders doubt and cynicism. (Note to my readers: I may be showing my age with the Nixon comment here. I was only 7 when he uttered those words, and I didn’t believe him then.)

The Bottom-Line for Now:

For a brief moment in time as you start-up as the new leader of an existing team, you have a remarkable opportunity to make a difference. You get one shot at working your way through The 4-Stages. Don’t squander the opportunity by tripping all over yourself.

Filed Under: Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leading Change, Professional Growth Tagged With: , , ,

Management Week in Review for February 11, 2011

February 11, 2011 By 3 Comments

Note from Art: every Friday, I share three thought-provoking management posts for the week. Fair warning: I take a broad view of management, so my selections will range from leadership to innovation to finance and personal development and beyond.

This week’s selections feature content on corporate struggles in a changing world, ideas on creating organizations that drive remarkable commitment from their employees and customers, and a buffet of great leadership reading options at the February Leadership Development Carnival. Enjoy!

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop’s “Burning Platform” Memo as reported in the WSJ Blogs and many others. If you’ve not had a chance to read the full text of Elop’s “Our Platform is Burning” memo, this is must reading for all students of management, leadership and strategy. Nokia is a prime example of how not to cope with, respond to or leverage the global pressures in our world, and Elop pulls no punches in highlighting his firm’s transgressions. Read this…think about it and re-read it again. Then go spend some time looking around your organization and check to see if your platform might be burning (or require burning).

From the Memo: “Over the past few months, I’ve shared with you what I’ve heard from our shareholders, operators, developers, suppliers and from you. Today, I’m going to share what I’ve learned and what I have come to believe. I have learned that we are standing on a burning platform. And, we have more than one explosion – we have multiple points of scorching heat that are fuelling a blazing fire around us. For example, there is intense heat coming from our competitors, more rapidly than we ever expected.”

and

“The battle of devices has now become a war of ecosystems, where ecosystems include not only the hardware and software of the device, but developers, applications, ecommerce, advertising, search, social applications, location-based services, unified communications and many other things.”

From John Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing, “The 7 Verbs of Commitment.” John raises some compelling questions and offers his considerable expertise on what it takes to create that culture and company that drives remarkable commitment from all of the players in the ecosystem…customers, partners, suppliers and of course employees. This post is all about capital “M” Marketing, and raises issues that should keep all of us…especially CEOs awake at night.

From the post: “In the end, what every business seeks is commitment – from our customers, our staff, our partners, and our entire collaboration universe. Commitment erases friction, creates momentum and drives substantial profit. But in a world where most everything our companies offer can be acquired somewhere, perhaps even from our own company, for free, how do you create the kind of company, product or service that drives people over the edge to commit…?”

Hosted at Inflexion Advisors by Mark Stelzner, The February Leadership Development Carnival-A Love Story. Heres a buffet of fifty of your soon to be favorite leadership bloggers sharing some of their favorite recent posts. The Leadership Development Carnivals are coordinated by my good friend and great blogger at the aptly named, Great Leadership blog, Dan McCarthy. This month’s episode was produced by Mark Stelzner, and I can assure you that you will not be disappointed by spending some time checking out the sweet leadership treats just in time for Valentine’s Day.

From the lead-in to the Carnival: “The emotions attached to February 14th range from wide-eyed hopefulness and heart-pounding anticipation to downright disdain and overt hostility. As many attribute the same feelings to their organizational leadership, I thought we’d focus this month’s Carnival on our favorite Hallmark holiday. That’s right, it’s the leadership development carnival of love featuring fifty of the sweetest posts from the past few weeks.”

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OK, that’s it for the week. Enjoy your weekend! I’ll be back Monday with a fresh cup of Leadership Caffeine.

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About Art Petty: Art coaches high potential professionals and develops and delivers  workshops and programs on leadership, professional development and building high performance teams.Contact Art to discuss your needs for a program or keynote.

And whether you are an experienced leader seeking to revitalize and develop as a professional, or, a new leader looking for guidance on starting up successfully, check out Art’s book with Rich Petro, Practical Lessons in Leadership at Amazon.com.

Filed Under: "To Do" List, Crisis Leadership, Leadership, Professional Growth Tagged With: , , , ,

It’s Time to Burn the Old Script Used by New CEOs

February 10, 2011 By 15 Comments

Now playing (again and again) at a theater or office near you:

New CEO or Top Leader Arrives, and…

  • The Royal Audiences begin, where a tone of “I’m here to save you” is unspoken but clearly articulated by the new CEO.
  • Change is the underlying theme in her words, yet the reason for change is not clear, and exactly what will change is left to the imagination of the populace.
  • Some old faces disappear to be replaced quickly by faces familiar to the new CEO. The henchmen have arrived. A few of the former team join the squad and their other face becomes visible to all.
  • The inquisitions begin…where people are lined up in front of note-taking head-nodders and the formerly good employee is reduced to an apologist for past transgressions imagined through the very filtered view in the rear-view mirror. There’s always at least one inquisitor jester that turns the victim’s discomfort into humor for the inquisitors.
  • Fear grows like a quiet cancer in the workplace. Employees respond just as they always do to fear. Innovation ceases, infighting increases and good people update their CVs.
  • The trumpets blare and the announcement of a new strategic evaluation is made. The court is convening to rethink everything. The doors shut, and occasionally open to allow a select few into the hallowed rooms.
  • Fear grows and some people scurry to leave and some scurry desperately to survive.
  • Very quietly, more faces disappear along with their institutional knowledge, leaving a mild tinge of bitterness in the workplace environment after having invested blood, sweat and time, just to see it be summarily devalued. Those that remain feel cast adrift.
  • The trumpets blare once again and the new strategy is handed down to cheering throngs, none of whom are cheering for the new strategy, but rather for the fact that they might have a chance to keep their jobs.
  • A large number of trivial change initiatives are embraced with false enthusiasm.

And the leader looks down upon the populace and smiles, secure in her knowledge that she has saved the kingdom from itself.

Over time, this new leader becomes the old leader, a new normal is established and due mostly to the hard work of the employees, some things change and life goes on until it’s time to start the process all over again.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Sadly, this script is still visible and in wide use. I’m watching the movie from one degree of separation at an organization right now. There’s no sign of real leadership and all signs indicate the script will play out as anticipated.

It’s time to burn this script and start over.

Filed Under: Leadership, Leading Change Tagged With: , , ,
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