Leadership Caffeine: Change or Learn to Say, “Would You Like Fries with That?”
Filed under: Innovation, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leadership Skills
Note from Art: Consider this tough love intended to motivate leaders everywhere to rethink and refine their approaches.
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In the prologue to my recently published collection: Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development, I write:
For experienced and developing leaders, the emerging environment is likely to offer a Dickensian world filled with Best of Times opportunities and Worst of Times challenges. Now might be a good time to revise your thinking on your role as a leader and to begin cultivating the skills and experiences required for success during the exciting and perilous journey ahead.
What I Wanted to Say:
I stand behind the words…and in fact, my only regret is that I didn’t say something a little stronger, such as:
Wake up! Change now or become leadership road kill! Either start cultivating the new leadership skills or stand in front of a mirror and practice saying, “Would you like fries with that?” because this may be your money phrase in the not so distant future.
“Hey, Who Moved My…”
Much of the pablum that is passed off for guidance on leading others ignores the reality that the context in which we lead has changed from just a few years ago, and it continues to change faster than any of us can truly understand.
Now before your fingers burn a path to your keyboards to remind me of the timeless nature of and attributes of leading, I get the point in spades. Character always counts, no one ever screwed up by showing respect, your job is to develop people, you better be able to inspire people to act…paint a vision and all that great stuff. It’s good…its timeless and UNLESS it’s blended with the new skills of leading, it may prove to be USELESS.
Context is King. Meet King Context-7 Ways the World of Leading and Managing Has Changed
While it’s a bit disheartening to realize that those of us with some experience and a bit of gray are vestiges of a bygone business era, we truly are. That doesn’t mean we can’t be relevant, but first, we have to understand and accept some of the important contextual changes in our world of business:
1. Our management structures and approaches are products of late 19th century and early 20th century thinking. As Gary Hamel offers, they were designed for another goal…to get people out of the fields and into the factories and to optimize their ability to do the same thing over and over. They weren’t designed to cope with the need for rapid innovation, constant change and frequent disruption. Gary is right…the practice of management must change to cope with a world where exponential change is the norm.
2. Oversight as a core task of those in power is no longer the point, yet it is still widely practiced. I still find managers uncomfortable with the idea that work might actually take place somewhere and sometime when employees are out of sight. Oh, and yes, imagine that it might take place at some point in time when the “normal” work day has ended. My guidance: “get over it.” Control is no longer the point.
3. Technology tools aren’t necessary evils, they are tools essential for survival, connectivity, speed and idea sharing. Too many leaders struggle to know which end of a tablet is up (answer: neither)…much less, how to turn the power on and use it. By the way, if you’ve not purchased an e-book, grabbed your news from Flipboard, tweeted about something interesting to a group of industry peers and used Evernote to capture a few great web sites for future reference in the past few hours, please grab your hairnet and watch out, the grease is hot by those fries. You’ve got to participate in the activities of the day to understand their implications for the world of work.
4. Ambiguity is the order of the day. Get over it. By the time things become clear in most markets, the opportunity is missed. You need to build capabilities in your organization to go from idea to execution to learning to refinement, and to do that, you need great people who are comfortable that you’ve got their backs.
5. The Silos in our organizations are still there and they are still rusting in place. Teams that cross boundaries are now the principal means of getting work done and silo control is a game no longer relevant. Your goal as leader is to help teams form fast, support their efforts to execute and then ensure that they are able to disband and reform on the next opportunity.
6. Your Cultural Intelligence may just be the most important asset that you aren’t doing anything about. It’s a global world…we’re all working across cultures, and chances are your workplace is (or should be), filled with diversity. Learning to tap the different world-views of your colleagues is a critical mission for leaders today…and it takes deliberate effort to learn and understand how to competently navigate across cultures.
7. The most important tool of management you probably don’t know enough about is Project Management. Too many treat it like an administrative process instead of a critical tool to enable value creation, learning and strategy execution. Heck, I struggle to find leaders who even get that project management is so much more than an endless stream of Gantt charts and status meetings. It’s time to dig in on this important new way of getting work done.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Welcome to the leadership blender, where speed and adaptability are essential for survival. Control is something from a 1960’s era sitcom (Get Smart), where ironically and fittingly, Chaos was the primary adversary. Sorry, Chief, but Chaos won. Adapt, or repeat after me, “Would you like fries with that?”
Learning to Collaborate at the Top
Filed under: Innovation, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Leading Change, Management Education
The July/August issue of HBR focuses on the issues around building collaboration into the workplace. It’s required reading for all of us.
If you’ve spent any amount of time inside the walls of an organization, you understand the promise and perils of collaboration. Great things can happen when we reach across silos and boundaries and seek to work together in pursuit of shared interests. However, as team guru Prof. J. Richard Hackman offers when talking about the potential of teams, “just don’t count on it.”
I’m going to set aside my usual focus on project teams and raise my sights just a bit to the rarefied air of the senior levels of organizations. In both my executive and consulting experience, I’ve observed or have been a part of situations where otherwise really smart people crash and burn on the shores of potential internal (strategic) collaboration. In many of these cases, there’s good money and important marketplace moves that were left on the table as a result of a failure to collaborate.
Two Common Senior Level Collaboration Pitfalls:
1. Navigating the rocky waters of moving investment emphasis to emerging and new opportunities.
How many of you have seen this movie before? The legacy business got you here and even made you great, but the new businesses are essential for survival and future success. However, no one can agree to reduce investment in one area and ramp up in another. After all, this would require executives to sublimate their egos and potentially risk displaying to their direct reports that one area is more or less important than the other. Horrors!
This issue derails just about every management group I’ve encountered. A few get through it, but most flounder until they endure a shock to the system or a metaphorical clubbing across the head.
2. Leveraging disparate products and varied pockets of internal expertise to deliver a systems offering to clients.
There’s typically a great deal of talk about the potential customer benefits or competitive differentiation that might result through internal product and service integration (i.e. across business units), but without true senior level advocacy, the ideas and talk fail to gain traction. And while more than a few of the internally generated “integration” ideas are just that…internally generated ideas with no real basis…some of them are potentially valuable. Unfortunately, most never reach the point where they are properly vetted.
And Then the CEO is Left to Steer Through the Rocky Shoals of Potential Collaboration:
Both of the situations described above often achieve lip-service interest or token compliance. People see the potential opportunities or the underlying logic. However, more often than not, both fall victim to overt or passive-aggressive behaviors driven by egos, turf-wars, loss-of-control fears, politics and any other human issues that drive our behaviors. Frequently, the CEO is stuck alone, attempting to steer the ship of state through these rocky waters without crashing.
A good number of these Captains on the Sea of Collaboration are focusing on trying not to fail…instead of trying to succeed.
While this isn’t a defense of the CEOs who struggle to navigate these internal and strategic collaboration opportunities, it is at least empathy. They are most definitely trying to keep the plates spinning for all stakeholders, from the board and market (investors) to direct reports and entire groups of people. It is understandably difficult. Of course…that’s why they earn the big bucks.
Helpful Thoughts from “Are You a Collaborative Leader?”
Herminia Ibarra and Morton T. Hansen writing in the July/August issue of HBR, offer the following on the complexity of driving collaboration:
“Part of the problem is that many leadership teams, composed of the CEO and his or her direct reports, actually don’t operate as teams. Each member runs his or her own region, function, or product or service category, without much responsibility—or incentive—for aligning the organization’s various projects and operations into a coherent whole.”
and:
“Persuading people to contribute countless hours of effort in partnership with people they don’t necessarily like to solve important problems requires consummate leadership skills. Managing egos so that each person’s commitment, energy, and creativity is unleashed in a way without disadvantaging others demands an impresario personality.”
In addition to their research supporting what we already know…that the challenge to foster collaboration is a difficult leadership task, the authors offer that the skills required to succeed in this endeavor can be learned and strengthened:
“It requires strong skills in four areas: playing the role of connector, attracting diverse talent, modeling collaboration at the top, and showing a strong hand to keep teams from getting mired in debate. The good news is, our research also suggests that these skills can be learned—and can help executives generate exceptional long-term performance.”
The Bottom-Line for Now:
While it’s possible to head down a slippery slope of collaboration paralysis, most organizations and most leaders I’ve encountered are in no danger of that slide. Perhaps some new measures of accountability for strategic collaboration are required. After all, what gets measured gets learned and gets done.
Send in the Clones. The Abuse of “Must Have” in Recruiting and Hiring
Filed under: Innovation, Leadership, Management Education, Middle Management, Organizational Transformation, Performance, Talent Management
Aside from a few obvious technical and vocational roles, there are very few positions in most organizations that absolutely “Must Have” someone who has held the identical role in the same industry with the same job.
Nonetheless, the use of “Must Have” remains a staple in recruiting and hiring. It’s too bad, because over-reliance on “Must Have” can lead to a chronic case of mediocrity or worse, a terminal case of recycled bad ideas from industry participants.
Who Fits this Description?
Recently, a friend sent me a series of executive position descriptions he was considering responding to. His excellent qualifications exceeded the scale and scope of the roles, but didn’t quite match the exact requirements. The “Must Have” lists were long and loud, and just as they caused my colleague to pause, they are certain to frighten away most talented people who have not lived a life that precisely matched this nearly impossible-to-replicate list of required experiences.
While I get the need for some “Must Haves”…I don’t want a mechanic setting my son’s broken arm, and no one wants a real estate broker advising them on estate planning, there’s a point when the list turns from essential to ridiculous.
Now as a bit of truth in advertising, I’ve made a career out of scouting and engaging talent from everywhere but my competitors. I never had an urge to reinvent their same lousy practices or to recycle the people who have been busy changing badges but going to the same trade shows for years.
The excessive reliance on “Must Have” is particularly disturbing in an era when:
a. There’s so much remarkable talent available for hire.
And
b. Now more than ever, firms need to infuse established businesses with different ways of thinking and acting.
Measure Twice, Cut Once on Your “Must Haves”
The “Must Have” issues I am focusing on are for managerial or leadership positions where the keys to success are much more about critical thinking, leadership effectiveness, talent development and operating effectiveness, than they are about specialized industry experience.
“Do not apply unless you have X years working in Y industry.”
Great people with highly transferable and mature skill-sets are kept out of the game by an irrational belief that there’s something particularly special/unique/special about your industry and business.
Newsflash: your firm and your industry have the same general issues and challenges as every other firm and industry.
That’s crazy! We’re different. We’re unique.
No you’re not. You have the same challenges in your firm for creating winning strategies, engaging and keeping the right talent, operating effectively and responding to or acting upon global and industry forces. The variables change from sector to sector and firm to firm, but when you peel back the layers, the issues are the same.
It takes too long to bring people up to speed. We don’t have time .
When it comes to getting the best talent on your team, you always have time to help them learn an industry or marketplace. It’s much easier to teach someone an industry and market than it is to teach them how to think strategically, lead effectively and operate efficiently.
Having shifted industries four times in my life, I can tell you from experience that there is a learning curve, and once you power through that curve, the issues are eminently comprehensible. It doesn’t take a long career or a rocket scientist to understand industry forces, to plug in to customers, and to understand your firm’s “unique” position and value proposition.
A Few Dividends from Relaxing the Must-Haves in Your Hiring Decisions:
- You gain a broader pool of talent to draw from. Yes, this means more work for you. Take solace in the fact that it is the right work.
- The outsider offers a a fresh set of eyes with a broader base of knowledge on how problems have been solved and how customers in other worlds have been served. The observations and ideas can infuse a team and business with new life. (And yes, it will annoy those who are practitioners of the “That’s not how we do it here” religion.)
- You have an excuse to challenge conventional thinking. People with diverse experience aren’t burdened by the baggage of looking through the same narrow industry lenses for many years, and their presence provides an opportunity for you to tee up some “sacred cow” discussions in front of the barbecue.
- Professionals with a fresh view regularly ask annoyingly good questions, including: “Why do we do it this way?” Or my favorite, “What if… ?” followed by “Why not?”
- The effort you expend to help people learn and understand your business and market affords an opportunity for you to rethink issues and approaches. It’s always good to refresh your view and challenge your assumptions.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
The best ideas might be found far afield from where you’ve been working and watching. Whether they come from a different industry entirely or from a different part of the value chain, your best talent may be a non-traditional candidate who fails the “Must Have” test.
Relax the “Must Have” filters in the right places and take a broader look before you make your next hire. You might just be bringing in the individual who can help you rethink your business.
It’s Time to Start Teaching Your Teams to Succeed
Filed under: Innovation, Leadership, Management Education, Organizational Transformation, Performance, Project Management
“I have no question that when you have a team, the possibility exists that it will generate magic, producing something extraordinary… But don’t count on it.” -J. Richard Hackman with Diane Cotu, Why Teams Don’t Work, HBR (article requires fee/subscription).
If you’ve ever been part of a truly effective team…a high performance team, you know the experience is memorable and potentially career altering.
For those who’ve lived and thrived on a high-performance team, the memory of what it was like to work with a motivated, caring, challenging (but respectful), accomplishment-focused group of individuals provides sustenance for the lonely, near-death experiences that characterize so many other team and project experiences in the workplace.
This Would Be Easy If it Weren’t For the People:
If you are in the unenviable role of pulling together a group to tackle a project, you’ve got more than a few obstacles to overcome, including:
- People
- The egos of people
- Histories, biases and prior experiences of people
- Politics (yep, people again.)
- Communication challenges in working with…you guessed it, people.
Compounding the interpersonal and social challenges found in groups referenced above, groups struggle to learn how to make effective decisions, how resolve conflicts and how to be creative together.
At the end of the day, this group stuff would be really easy if it weren’t for the people.
The Basics Provide the Foundation, But Sometimes You Need a Little Help from Your Friends:
Even if you get everything right up front with a new team…a clear and compelling reason for being, clear roles, group-generated team values, proper organizational support and so forth, you will still run head-on into the human factors referenced above. Every time.
Sometimes you just need help to get beyond the noise created by throwing a group of people together and expecting them to become productive at a high level. A number of years ago in my role as a software company executive, our team and Board agreed that we would invest to completely redevelop the firm’s core software. This Bet-the-Company project called for adoption of new approaches and new technologies and after sputtering along for a period, we recognized the need for help.
This strategic initiative would have died on the ash-heap of failed software development projects if it weren’t for the help of some great people at the firm, Construx , who helped us rethink not only our development approach, but, how we worked together to cut through all of the issues described above. (Note: I have no affiliation or relationship with Construx, just high regard. Thanks, Jerry)
The true value in the approach provided by Construx was not so much the consulting…it was great, but the cultural transformation that resulted in how teams and people worked together. And while not every project merits (or can afford) high-powered consultants, can you truly afford to allow your teams to sputter and struggle along, seriously endangering the health of your business?
If getting work done in groups and via teams is important in your firm, perhaps it’s time to get some help in rethinking how these entities work together.
A Timely and Relevant Editorial Comment:
As an aside, one of my unofficial observations on team performance inside organizations is that over time and based on a series of poor experiences, managers and leaders begin to accept suboptimal outcomes from project teams as the norm. Team members are very aware of the group’s performance problems, but for many reasons, too few people feel empowered to take on the problems and drive change.
Strengthening Team Potential and Performance Beyond the Building Blocks:
Great groups and high-performance teams find a way to be creative together, to fight and then move forward together and to make many more right than bad decisions together. They move quickly across the gap spanned by starting up and breaking the ice on one side to achieving trust on the other side. For some groups, this span is simply never bridged.
Whether you draw upon great outside advisors and coaches to help your teams improve, or, you leverage your best internal talent (good formal and informal leaders) to observe and coach your teams on the difference makers, just do something. Don’t accept consistently poor performance, when high performance may just be a short distance away.
Recognize that new groups don’t naturally know how to work together…don’t know how to fight together and they don’t know how to make decisions together. In many cases, they don’t really know how to talk with each other on the tough performance topics. It’s not that you don’t have smart people in your organization and in these groups, it’s more about how difficult it is to do this right together.
Teach your teams great practices in creativity and problem solving and hold them accountable to applying those practices and tools.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
I’ll echo Hackman’s quote at the opening of the post: the potential for extraordinary with teams is always there…just don’t count on it. Improve your chances of success with group efforts by teaching your teams to work together. A little effort will go a long way towards strengthening your organization.
Leadership Caffeine: Motivate with Context
Filed under: Innovation, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Management Education, Middle Management, Organizational Transformation, Performance, Strategy, Surviving Lousy Leaders, Talent Management
Overheard:
Why are we doing this project?
I don’t know who is making these priority calls. They don’t make any sense.
We’re so far removed from the customer, no one notices what we do.
During my review, I was encouraged to innovate more. I don’t know what that means.
Context and the “Walk In the Door” Test:
In workshop settings, I frequently poll participants on what I call, “The Walk In the Door Test.” It goes something like this: “When you walk in the door in the morning, can you connect your priorities to the strategic priorities of your firm (or business unit)?”
I’m never surprised, but always disappointed that only about half of the participants admit they CAN connect their priorities to the important issues of their firm. The rest are honest (and frustrated) enough to admit in public, that they struggle with understanding the context for their work.
A few weeks ago, a corporate trainer indicated to me: “I’m not certain what the managers want their people to get out of the program, but I’m going to train them anyways.” Too bad for the participants.
Beware Context Deficit Disorder:
The employees quoted above, the disconnected and under-informed trainer and my honest survey respondents all share one thing in common…they all suffer from Context Deficit Disorder (CDD).
Too many mediocre managers and lousy leaders send their teams into battle on a daily basis armed with nothing more than a “go get ‘em,” and a metaphorical slap on the back. There’s no connection between the work and the key objectives of the firm or the pursuit of creating value for customers.
Think of the many mediocre (or worse) customer experiences you encounter in a typical week. There’s the inattentive server, the cashier who never makes eye contact, the grumpy phone support personnel or, my favorite, the guard dog receptionist you came up against at the doctor’s office. They all lack proper context for their work. (We’ll leave the doctor who rushes through your examination seemingly on a mission to set a new land-speed record for spending as little time as possible with patients, for another topic on another day!
These individuals lack context for the importance of their work and the impact they have on people who vote with their dollars and feet. I’ll dump the blame squarely on the shoulders of the managers who allow their people to engage with others without providing clarity for their mission and building in accountability for carrying it out in good form.
Forget the Posters and Cheerleading and Instead, Provide Clear Context:
We waste fortunes inside our organizations on misguided programs and oddball incentives, seeking ways to motivate and inspire people to work hard, innovate, create, care and to live up to their potential, when the real solution is literally on the tip of our tongues.
People do their best work when they understand how their work fits into the bigger picture. This is the critical context that fuels revolutions, promotes perseverance and encourages creativity. People working for a cause are exponentially more powerful than people working for a paycheck. Management by paycheck is little more than motivating people at the end of a gun barrel. Alternatively, management by context creates a sense of purpose that is essential for tapping into people’s extra stores of energy and their best creativity.
Of course, context comes in many sizes and shapes. I don’t necessarily expect the front-line cashier to be familiar with the nuances of the firm’s strategies, however, I do expect this individual to have an absolutely clear understanding of how customers help the business go and grow. Alternatively, the project manager leading a major new development initiative must understand how the project fits into the firm’s future plans to open new markets, capture more customers and beat competitors.
While the level and detail of context may vary by position and mission, it must be present for everyone all of the time.
5 Ideas for Curing Context Deficit Disorder
1. Establish connectivity. Never ask someone to do something with out linking the request to a clear business rationale.
2. Create forums to improve understanding. Provide opportunities for the people doing the work to ask questions about the value of the work.
3. Create forums to improve understanding, part 2. Don’t keep the strategic issues locked in a drawer. Share liberally on the big picture issues in your market and with your customers and involve people in translating high-level goals into meaningful and connected front-line activities. Help your people improve their “Walk in the Door Test” results!
4. Make metrics meaningful. If you are going to the trouble of developing scorecards and other systems of measurement, make certain you both share and explain the metrics to the people being measured.
5. Provide opportunities for the people doing the work to share ideas for improvement. And then let them implement these ideas.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
This topic reminds me of the old story about the workers moving a pile of rocks. When asked what he is doing, the first worker indicates, “I’m moving this pile of rocks from here to there.” The second one is asked the same question and responds, “I’m helping to build a cathedral.” I certainly know which one I want on my team. Do your employees and team members see the future cathedrals in their work at your organization?
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