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.
Leadership Caffeine: 5 Ideas for Infusing Fun Into the Workplace
Filed under: Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Life and Business, Management Education, Middle Management, Performance, Professional Growth, Talent Management, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
You heard it here first. It’s OK to Have Some Fun as a Leader.
Most of the popular press on leading and leadership focuses on the challenges, strain and pains of leading, leaving one to assume that signing on for the role is akin to a vow of chastity or at least a vow of silence.
You don’t often hear the “F” (for fun) word used in sentences with the words, leader, leading or leadership. And while I’ll encourage you to keep the red noses and floppy shoes and squirting flowers safely at home for your own use at birthday parties, I’m going to step out on a limb and encourage you to not make this a miserable experience for you or your team members.
And let’s face it, there’s not been much fun to go around in the world for at least a few years. Just be really, really careful what your definition of the word fun is, or, you’re liable to feel like you took a vow of poverty once you and your floppy shoes get bounced out of the show for inappropriate actions.
5 Ways to Infuse Fun Safely into Your Workplace:
1. Start by smiling a lot more. Smiles are contagious and that’s more than just popular lore. Our mirror neurons fire when we observe someone engaging in a particular behavior, and the positive act of smiling is one that all of us appreciate. Your smile as the leader will have an uplifting impact on everyone that you encounter. Of course, choosing to grin during a crisis will have the opposite effect. Use this technique liberally when the seas are calm and the wind is at your back.
2. Improve the quality and frequency of your positive feedback delivery. Effective positive feedback reinforces the right behaviors, offers encouragement and provides motivation for the receiver and for observers. Avoid calling out “Atta boys” for trivial reasons. “Way to make that pot of coffee this morning, Smith.” Be specific, link the feedback to business issues and dispense the positive encouragement in a ratio in excess of 1:1 versus constructive feedback.
3. Celebrate the right victories. If your team or organization is in crisis, celebrate the small victories that help propel you in the right direction. Depending upon your role or level, some of these small victories might seem insignificant, but each success strengthens the foundation for future successes. Spring for pizza or, at least take a few minutes to thank everyone. Remember to provide visibility to the teams that drove the results and then drive home with a smile on your face, knowing that this was the right thing to do. Remember to adapt your definition of the “victories to celebrate” as conditions improve or worsen.
4. Ensure that people know that their work is important. There’s almost no stronger motivational technique than ensuring that your team members understand that what they are working on is important. Whether it’s important to internal customers or external customers doesn’t matter, as long as they have context for the value of their work. Working on something important makes work relevant and yes, even fun.
5. Increase involvement. There are individuals laboring in all sections of firms that have ideas of value to offer, but have no outlet for those ideas. When is the last time that you invited someone from Accounting to one of your team’s brainstorming session? Mix things up, break down some walls and get people involved!
The Bottom-Line for Now:
OK, so my definition of “fun” might be a little more mundane than many others. It’s unlikely that I’ll be invited to choreograph any big Fun Fairs soon. However, if nothing else, take away from this post the reality that you as the leader have a tremendous impact on the working atmosphere at your place of business. Apply some or all of the 5 simple ideas above, and you’re likely to see a palpable increase in enthusiasm, motivation, performance and yes, even smiling and occasional light conversation. And you’ll have a lot more fun in the process.
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Updates:
-The August Management Excellence Newsletter is out on Tuesday, August 17th. Sign up to receive this newsletter (I guard your e-mail address with an unrivaled ferocity!), and you’ll be on the receiving end of subscriber-only content. Register at Management Excellence or Building Better Leaders (far right column).
-Look for the Management Excellence Book Series to launch this week with my podcast interview with Bob Sutton on his new book, Good Boss, Bad Boss!
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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Leadership Caffeine: 6 Ideas to Improve Team Performance Today
Filed under: Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Management Education, Middle Management, Performance, Professional Growth, Values, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
The world of work has increasingly become the world of teams and group activities, and to quote Richard Hackman, author of, Leading Teams-Setting the Stage for Great Performance,
“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.”
If your organization is like most, you’re leaving money on the table in terms of team productivity and performance. Social and interpersonal factors, motivation issues, lack of group cohesion and the general up-front churn that teams display as they form, are just a few of the areas where you can pick up immediate productivity improvements with a little bit of smart leadership.
As an aside, many senior project managers and executive sponsors provide this type of leadership for major project initiatives. The focus in this post is on the gross majority of group, team or committee activities that fly below the radar of formal project management leadership and executive sponsorship. These are often manager-led initiatives or cross-functional groups coming together to tackle a problem.
6 Ideas to Improve Team Performance Today:
1. Control Your Urge to Put a Team On It-use groups carefully and sparingly and avoid the reflex action to set up a work group, committee or project team for every issue that comes your way. Carefully assess whether a group effort truly stands the best chance of success. There are many situations where the right individual can work with stakeholders and across functions and accomplish the goals or solve the problem more efficiently and effectively than a team.
2. If You Must Set Up a Team…Please Ensure that Goals Are Clear and Compelling: unclear goals promote “churn and flail,” and mundane tasks drive lackadaisical performance. As the responsible organizational leader (not necessarily the work team leader), you must ensure that the goal of the initiative is crystal clear and linked to a key business imperative. Vague goals and unclear context are productivity and morale killers.
3. Starting Today, Rethink the Approach to Choosing Team Leaders. Instead of seniority or rank, work-team leadership must be based on a single criterion: “Who is the person best suited to help us succeed with the task at hand?” Depending upon the nature of the task, an individual with good facilitation skills, or a person that works well across functions might be better suited than a functional manager or the most senior person on the group.
4. Define the Group’s Values Up-Front. Don’t make a career out of this, but definitely don’t skip describing and memorializing the required group behaviors for discussion, debate, attendance, participation and work-completion.
5. Use Simple Assignments to Save Time. Every meeting must have a note-taker (scribe), a timekeeper and a traffic cop. The traffic cop enforces the rules in play (e.g. brainstorming) and helps the team stay on topic and work towards an outcome.
6. Assign a Coach. If the group is expected to work together for more than a few days, it is helpful to ask for an objective 3rd party set of eyes to assess team processes and interpersonal dynamics. You don’t need to spend money to bring in an outside resource with a fancy certification. One organization used representatives from HR (a great way to help get this group engaged with the business of business) and another identified and specified a coaching role and rotated the responsibility between individuals. The coach is not part of the working team, but rather an occasional and objective observer that reports back to the designated team leader on group dynamics and group processes.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
We are well served to identify continuous improvement opportunities for our collaborative endeavors. I’ve watched great process companies with legions of people wearing colored belts forget about some of the simple suggestions above that can save money and time, spur performance and add to task enjoyment and morale. Today is a great day to help your teams and groups boost their performance!
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