Leadership Caffeine: Quit Managing Reduced Expectations
Filed under: Career, Crisis Leadership, Current Affairs, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leading Change, Life and Business, Making Decisions, Management Education, Management Innovation, Organizational Transformation, Professional Growth
Note from Art: Sometimes we all need a kick in the seat of the pants.
A great friend and talented product manager once offered in a moment of frustration that he viewed his principal job as one of “managing reduced expectations.”
This brilliant, but depressing turn of words reflected bigger business problems, including a logjam in development that effectively precluded us from doing anything to enhance the competitiveness of our products in a timeframe shorter than something that you might find on a geologic time-scale. .
The “managing reduced expectations” theme seems to be prevalent in our society right now, and it is a dangerous mind-set. Spiraling debt, a never-ending string of mortgage defaults, long-lingering unemployment, embattled and embittered government, corruption, a seeming shift of the balance of economic and productive power away from North America, and a potentially unsolvable morass in Afghanistan are all contributors to this collective mood referenced in the media and heard on the street daily. Throw in a good old-fashioned ecological disaster and some remarkable leadership letdowns at BP (unconscionable) and HP (Huh? We all thought that this guy was brilliant!) and the process of managing reduced expectations is now epidemic.
It’s remarkably easy to let the broader environmental factors and forces dictate our personal emotions and before we know it, an attitude of blind resignation sets in and dominates our thinking and our actions.
Just a few phrases that I’ve heard recently:
“We see a huge opportunity for our new product, but corporate is telling us that we can’t invest in the brainpower that we need to take advantage of the opportunity.”
“Times are tough and we’re not going to pursue this project this year.”
“We’re not running leadership training anymore. We killed that in this year’s budget planning.”
What the Hell Are You Thinking?
Sorry for the strong title on this section, but again, “What the hell?”
You’re telling me that you are going to take it lying down while your future is decided by someone wielding the expense-cutting sword to hit arbitrary targets?
You’re not pursuing a project that will define your future and perhaps change the course of your firm, because no one is working hard enough to cull the portfolio or find the money.
And you gave up developing your people because why?
The Bottom-Line for Now:
In the imitable words of the character, Red Foreman, on The 70’s Show: “Dumb Asses.”
It’s time to quit managing reduced expectations. There’s a big, troubled world out there filled with emerging markets and emerging consumers hungry for basics and then eventually luxuries. Of course, to seize opportunities here and abroad, you’ve got to jettison old ways, take risks that might have seemed incomprehensible yesterday, and work unceasingly on surrounding yourself with people that can-do and don’t take no for dumb-ass reasons.
Redouble your efforts to invest in key future projects. Sacrifice sacred cows in company-wide barbecues to fund critical new investments. Streamline decision-making processes. Jettison your 1970’s era management structure and approach. Fight hard to hire the right talent and for crying out loud, redouble your efforts to develop the talent that you need to survive, sustain and grow.
Long ago, Deming called for a Transformation in management practices and thinking. It hasn’t happened yet. Now would be a good time.
As a starter, why not try reinventing yourself instead of taking it and letting the era roll you over. The change starts with you on your team. Start managing towards high-expectations and find every way possible to reinforce this behavior, reward successes and build enthusiasm.
The alternative is that your career and your firm will be locked in irons. Let’s not create a “lost era” here in America. It’s completely unacceptable.
Leadership Caffeine: 4 Signs that Your Leadership Approach is Working
Filed under: Crisis Leadership, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Management Education, Middle Management, Organizational Transformation, Performance, Talent Management
Most leaders struggle to understand whether they are helping or hindering the cause. Except of course for those leaders/narcissists who believe that their every utterance is sheer genius wrapped in pure motivational gold.
The feedback from your manager, while important, tends to be based on either numbers or fairly casual observation. And feedback from your team members is welcomed, but you never really know for sure whether it’s the unvarnished type.
The “Am I Helping?” issue is particularly important when a troubled team or organization gains a fresh leader. I’ve lived this situation a number of times and I’ve spoken with leaders familiar with navigating the throes of turnarounds and significant change initiatives about how they measure their own effectiveness. Most agree that while the indicators of progress and personal leadership effectiveness aren’t posted on the wall every day, the signs are present in the workplace for everyone to read.
Whether overtly or through their interpersonal and working dynamics, it turns out that your team members make it pretty clear whether you are helping, hindering or just taking up space, time and valuable oxygen. However, it’s up to you as the leader to learn to read these important but often subtle signs and to adjust accordingly.
4 Signs that Your Leadership Approach is Working:
1. Conversation Quality Improves: most troubled teams or organizations struggle to create high-quality conversations that focus on facts, tough issues and ideas and options. Often, the dialogue reflects denial or it unduly preoccupies on the negatives in the situation. The effective leader helps conversations move in the right direction by creating an environment of transparency and candor. Easy words, but a difficult task that takes time and a nearly constant care and feeding by the leader.
2. Idea Flow Increases: an important by-product of improved conversation quality is the increased flow of ideas for fixing today’s problems and forging the future. Troubled teams led by lousy leaders are conditioned to focus on what’s right in front of them and to ignore the bigger picture. Alternatively, effective leaders recognize that the one and only way to create the future is to leverage the collective grey-matter of the team. These leaders look for the flow ideas to start as a trickle and they know that things are working when the trickle turns into a torrent of innovation and value-creation.
3. Collaboration Returns: troubled teams struggle to work together and often fail to translate squabbling into anything resembling constructive output. Groups on the mend tend to rediscover the fun and power of working together, and what was just recently a “No Collaboration Zone” begins to look and act like an environment that recognizes that people are interdependent upon one another.
4. Pride Returns and Quality Breaks Out All Over: the shift from an unhealthy environment where people do what they are told to a situation where personal pride drives individual and group accountability for quality is a powerful sign that a leader’s approach is fostering the right results. Effective execution becomes important to the group and the pursuit of high-performance moves from lofty words to tangible goals. This tends to be a longer-range lagging indicator than several of the others and as it kicks in, the leader must recognize that his/her job is to increasingly emphasize knocking down obstacles and supporting the emergence of new leaders in the workplace.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Effective leaders understand that the measures described above are important outcomes of a great deal of hard work and not just accidents. Effective leaders gauge their own progress by the visibility and trends of these measures more than by the traditional measures of performance or the often slightly (or majorly) biased input of managers and team members. Get these right and top and bottom-line improvements flow.
While there are no gauges to precisely indicate the barometric pressure changes created by your approach to leading, awareness of and sensitivity to these measures is an important starting point.
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Summer Shorts for June 25, 2010 from Management Excellence
Filed under: Career, Crisis Leadership, Current Affairs, Leadership, Management Education, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
With a father and sons weekend in the offing, I’ll keep the shorts short (bad combination of words!) and offer you encouragement to get out and enjoy the all too fast-moving weekends of summer. Here in the Midwest, we feel good about cracking 2-digits on the number of weekends that make up our available summer, so, there is no time to waste.
Some quick-thoughts and fast links:
-The Rolling Stone and a Presidential Leadership Dilemma
It seems as if I may be the only person in America that thought that General McChrystal should not have been fired for some ill-advised name calling. I had the good fortune to poll Veterans old and new as well as anyone else that would opine. The Veterans in particular were unanimous in support of the decision. While some agonized over the loss of a good man and the destruction of a career, all that I spoke with agreed the line had been crossed.
As an aside, I never tire of listening to those that have served. They offer inspiration and education in every conversation.
Leadership Tip of the Day and The “I Want to Lead” Series of posts at Building Better Leaders
When Rich and I wrote Practical Lessons in Leadership, one of my early chapters included a segment on “The 7 Questions for Ambitious, Aspiring Leaders.” This was intended to prompt some appropriate investigation on the part of aspiring leaders and offer experienced managers a tool to leverage when responding to the “Hey, I think I’m ready to lead,” pronouncements of their team members.
I am running a blog series featuring each question and some supporting suggestions as part of my Leadership Tip of the Day program at Building Better Leaders. This week, I wrote on the first two questions:
#2 “Do you understand the true role of a leader?”
Along with:
And
“7 Signs Your Leadership Approach is Working“
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Enjoy your weekends! I’ll be back Monday with a fresh cup of Iced Leadership Caffeine!
Hyper-Reality, Slimy Weasels and the Biting Words of a General
Filed under: Crisis Leadership, Current Affairs, Leadership, Making Decisions, Professional Growth, Social Commentary, Talent Management
Note from Art: this is not a political blog and there is no intent to communicate political leanings in this post. We are witnessing an unfortunate and fascinating leadership situation that involves poor judgment, bruised egos and potentially huge implications in the theater of conflict. Both lives and the difference between success and failure may be impacted by the outcome.
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I rarely follow a post with a related post, but the current stir created by General McChrystal, the senior military leader in Afghanistan, with his poor word choices and poor judgment in communicating with a reporter, begs a follow-on to Monday’s Leadership Caffeine post, The Word Selection of Journeyman Leaders.
General McChrystal clearly was not familiar with the Hyper-Reality approach to communicating preached and practiced by Ray Dalio, president of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund.
In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, entitled, “Money Talks: A Hedge Fund King Philosophizes on Truth and Weasels,” we learn a bit about the 295 principles that make up Mr. Dalio’s philosophy of “hyper-realism.” Specifically, we learn about Principal No. 11, which addresses the fact that, “Employees are not allowed to talk critically about someone unless the person is present.” It goes on to say:
“Principal No. 11: “Never say anything about a person that you wouldn’t say to him directly. If you do, you are a slimy weasel.”
As reported in the journal, if the employee breaks the rule three times, they can be fired.
Generaly McChrystal, for your transgression, you are a slimy weasel. Two more times and you are out. Now, please get back to doing what you have shown over a career that you can do so well and help us resolve this mess.
Mr. Obama, this is neither your McClellan or your MacArthur moment. (Although the historical repetition of the “Mc/Mac” is uncanny.) This is your opportunity to deal with a subordinate that slipped. Say what you have to say face-to-face and show us that you as the leader can take a shot to the ego and then let your General get back to work.
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Follow-Up from Art. Obviously, Mr. Obama did not agree. Again, a fascinating case in leadership.
What If? Why Not? And Other Incredible Business Adventures
Filed under: Crisis Leadership, Innovation, Leadership, Leading Change, Strategy
While we celebrate companies that pursue and succeed in radically changing the rules of the game, let’s face it, most organizations run on inertia.
For every company that redefines their little part of the world and changes our culture just a bit, there are plenty of firms that run on autopilot until the fuel runs out and the plane needs to be ditched in the ocean. The forces of globalization and digitization create storms and headwinds for some that are just too strong to overcome.
From Apple and Best Buy to Netflix, Starbucks, Zappos and Zipcar, there are firms and leaders that produce cultures and armies of people that thrive on redefining the rules in their own vision and along the way, they change our lives, habits, vocabulary and our view on the world.
These firms have dared to ask, What If? and Why Not?, and then they had the audacity to move forward and change the rules.
For the rest, there’s frustration, shock and amazement as their business models disappear. The CEO of Blockbuster describing how he likes how his moribund firm matches up with the competition is shocking, laughable and sad all at the same time. His $36 million or so in market capitalization versus the billion-plus of his disruptive competitor is all of the scoreboard that any of us need to see to know that there is no match.
I hear frequently from managers and owners about how their firms can no longer make money in their traditional businesses. In some cases, since they don’t know what to do, they’ve settled on trying to just lose less money. That’s equivalent to allowing yourself to bleed out slowly. The outcome is still the same, but the pain lasts a lot longer.
When I ask why they aren’t rethinking their businesses…whom they serve, what problems they are capable of solving and how they can position themselves in arenas where there are profits to be cultivated, the answers are shoulder shrugs mixed with looks of resignation and acceptance. If looks could talk, theirs would say, “Who is John Galt?”
I’ve noticed that no one in these firms is asking What If? and Why Not? Instead, they are filled with leaders and managers doggedly defending the status quo as if their lives hung on perpetuating what they know. Ironically, their business lives hang on what they don’t know but should be seeking.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
There’s no silver bullet, quick fix or sure-fire method to rethink and reinvent a business. In fact, many cannot be reinvented and the highest and best use of capital may well be to fold.
For some however, there’s a process that combines the speculative questions of What If? and Why Not? with the courage to ask and answer How Can We? and then to say, Let’s Try It!
If your plane is running low on fuel and the storm clouds look ominous, it may be too late. But before you decide to pull the ripcord and let the business plummet into the abyss, try asking and answering some simple but profoundly tough questions.
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