Leadership Caffeine-4 Big Reasons to Kill Your Weekly Status Meeting

March 12, 2012 By 12 Comments

image of a coffee cupFew events do more to suck the life and energy out of a team than the boss’s weekly status meeting. If you are the boss, it’s time to exorcise these from your operating routine.

These forced marches around the table offering up banal or purely self-aggrandizing updates are energy and time sinks and serve no purpose other than compensating for the boss’s inability to figure out what’s going on in some form other than holding court.

In addition to draining the lifeblood from your team, here are 4 additional reasons to consider killing the weekly status meeting:

1. Value of Time. Time is precious, and the hour wasted listening to silo-talk is an hour (times the number of participants) you’ll never get back. Use technology to communicate status…use meetings to ideate, innovate and focus on solving problems.

2. The Pain Goes Away When You Stop. The slow, plodding round-table status update is INCREDIBLY painful for everyone involved. If you’ve hired properly, everyone in that meeting wants to be sprinting through their work days and you’ve reduced the pace to a crawl for what seems like an eternity. I guarantee you the only two things on anyone’s mind is, “So and so is full of it with that update,” and “When the #4%@ is the pain going to end?

3. Holding Court Ain’t Leading. If you require your team to convene simply to understand what is going on, you missed the memo on how to engage with your team members in the ordinary course of business. Try getting out from behind your desk and into the workplace more to learn what’s really happening.

4. Your People Shouldn’t Need this Meeting to Work Together. If your team and functional leaders aren’t talking to each other outside of this meeting, you’re failing as a leader. Set expectations for information sharing and collaboration in the workforce and hold people accountable for actually doing it.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

I’m all for connecting and collecting in groups for the right reasons. The boss’s status meeting is rarely the right reason. Build a culture of meeting by exception or, better yet, create a culture where people meet spontaneously when the stakes are ideas, innovation and solving problems that impact customers. If the meeting is simply for you to hold court and catch up, it’s wrong.

–

Don’t miss the next Leadership Caffeine-Newsletter! Register here.

Art Petty is a Chicago-based management consultant focusing on strategy and leadership development. Art regularly speaks on innovation in management and leadership, and his work is reflected in two books, including the recent, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development.  Art publishes regularly at The Management Excellence blog at http://artpetty.com

Prior to his solo career, Art spent 20+ years leading marketing sales and business units in systems and software organizations around the globe. You can follow Art on twitter: @artpetty and he can be reached via e-mail at art.petty@artpetty.com

 

Filed Under: Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Performance Tagged With: , ,

Leadership Caffeine: 8 Ideas for Navigating Your Leadership Mistakes

March 5, 2012 By 4 Comments

image of a coffee cupNewsflash: all good leaders make mistakes. A great number of them. Everyday. After all, there are people involved, and this would be really easy without the people. Fortunately, people are all that we have.

The true test of your leadership character isn’t measured by the number of mistakes you make, but rather, by what you do moving forward once a mistake is recognized.  You have a few choices: ignore it, deflect it or tackle it head-on in front of everyone and kick it in the teeth. With all due respect to my dental friends, I opt for the latter.

8 Ideas for Navigating Your Leadership Mistakes:

1. Admit the mistake. Quickly. While speed kills in most situations, it’s your friend here. Get out in front of the mistake immediately.

2. Resist your natural reflex urge to make excuses. Blaming the weather, competitors, the market, sunspots, lack of resources or anyone else on your team is only going to exponentially compound the damage to your leadership credibility.

3. Describe the architecture of your strategic mistakes and missteps. These are learning opportunities for everyone…not just for you. What were your assumptions? What data did you rely upon? How did you frame the issue? This re-evaluation is mental fitness for strengthening future decision-making.

4. Apologize. Too many leaders equate an apology with a sign of weakness. To the contrary, it takes genuine strength to look at an employee in the eyes and admit you were wrong and apologize. (Note the two parts…an admission and the act of apologizing!)

5. Don’t wallow in your mistakes. If you’ve executed on numbers 1-4 above, everyone else is moving on and so should you. Translation: once you’ve processed on the issue and captured the lesson learned, let it go!

6. Accept that you can’t fix people…but you can fix talent selection mistakes. Talent selection mistakes are some of the toughest leaders face. We all make them…but the best leaders strive to minimize these issues on both sides of the decision. Improving your pre-hire assessment skills is critical. And so is recognizing and dealing with a selection mistake quickly, fairly and with full transparency. This is too important to do anything less.

7. Seek out and stomp out chronic mistakes. The chronic ones tend to be communication, interpersonal or commitment blunders. From our annoying quirks…looking at our e-mail during a team member’s status meeting to giving short shrift to someone who is obviously seeking help, or, worse yet, committing do doing something and then failing to do it, those are visible, measureable and curable. The key to success: you’ve got to want to learn about these habits and you have to be willing to hold yourself accountable to improving.

8. Accept the implications of your mistakes. If you can’t handle the accountability heat, get out of the leadership kitchen. It’s part of the job.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Good leaders make new mistakes all of the time. It’s the old ones that they face-up to, address and learn from that prepare them for those yet to come.

–

Don’t miss the next Leadership Caffeine-Newsletter! Register here.

Art Petty is a Chicago-based management consultant focusing on strategy and leadership development. Art regularly speaks on innovation in management and leadership, and his work is reflected in two books, including the recent, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development.  Art publishes regularly at The Management Excellence blog at http://artpetty.com

Prior to his solo career, Art spent 20+ years leading marketing sales and business units in systems and software organizations around the globe. You can follow Art on twitter: @artpetty and he can be reached via e-mail at art.petty@artpetty.com

 

 

Filed Under: Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Values Tagged With: , ,

Leadership Caffeine-12 Shots of Leadership Espresso

February 27, 2012 By 11 Comments

image of a coffee cupSometimes the best leadership guidance comes in short, strong bursts flavored with a few blunt reminders.  Warning: consume too many of these at one time and your team members will thank you, productivity will go up and work might become a lot more enjoyable.

12 Shots of Leadership Espresso to Help You Get it Right:

1. Lighten up a bit. Will it kill you to smile a little more this week? While Clinton might have been office the last time you smiled in the workplace, it will put you in a better mood and keep your team guessing. Do it a few days in a row and your team members might even smile back.

2. Stifle your inner and outer critic. Everyone knows you are world-class critic. Start paying attention to what’s working and dispense a little positive feedback. Heck, go crazy and dispense a lot of positive feedback from now until you retire.

3. Review this. People really do care about their performance reviews. The most commen lament I hear is not, “gee, I had a bad review,” it’s “gee, I haven’t had a review since Clinton was in office.”  

4. Get out of the way and let the ideas flow. Worried about a lack of ideas coming from brainstorming meetings? Newsflash: you need to stay out of them…you’re the boss and you’re the problem.

5. Get out of the way, part II. Give people room to run and they will typically run faster and further than you ever imagined. Seriously. No one loves a micro-managing control freak as a boss.

6. Expect more and you might just get it. While giving your people room to run, remember to set your expectations high, share your expectations and provide support. Prepare to be surprised.

7. How sustainable is your environment? Repeat after me: “I am responsible for creating an effective workplace environment.” If you don’t know what an effective workplace environment is, your first assignment is to figure it out. Your second assignment is to make it happen.

8. It pays to be paranoid. Everyone’s watching you. Seriously. If they are laughing or crying, something’s wrong with you. (Your leadership that is.)

9. Talk softly and back it up. Speaking of “everyone’s watching,” does your do match your tell? If not, don’t expect to be taken seriously.

10. Let someone else build the frames.  Do you know that the way you “frame” issues biases the team towards an approach. Try shutting up more and let others around you think through the issues and options first.

11. It’s not polite to point, unless… . When things go horribly wrong, your best option is to point your finger….squarely at yourself. Anything else is unacceptable.

12. Sometimes it’s OK to point! When things go wonderfully right, your only option is to point your finger at everyone around you. Anything else is unacceptable.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Get the small stuff right regularly and the big things will be a little easier to navigate.

–

Don’t miss the next Leadership Caffeine-Newsletter! Register here.

Art Petty is a Chicago-based management consultant focusing on strategy and leadership development. Art regularly speaks on innovation in management and leadership, and his work is reflected in two books, including the recent, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development.  Art publishes regularly at The Management Excellence blog at http://artpetty.com

Prior to his solo career, Art spent 20+ years leading marketing sales and business units in systems and software organizations around the globe. You can follow Art on twitter: @artpetty and he can be reached via e-mail at art.petty@artpetty.com

Filed Under: Leadership, Leadership Caffeine Tagged With: , ,

Leadership Caffeine-What Do You Do with a Team that has Failed?

February 20, 2012 By Leave a Comment

image of a coffee cupWe’re often too quick as leaders to throw in the towel on teams that have whiffed. That’s a mistake that may be more costly to performance and morale than the initial and temporary failure.

My quick answer to the question in the post title is: absent any visible, destructive behavior that may have contributed to the team’s missteps, the point in time when it becomes clear that a team has failed is the right time to double-down with a fresh challenge. Preferably one of those big and ugly challenges.

We all know that success most often occurs after a series of failures, yet this same stubborn tenacity to overcome setbacks that is so widely celebrated in our culture and with our heroes, is too often ignored in corporate team settings. After all, it’s not comfortable for executives or sponsors to spend much time associated with teams that have failed.

Team Longevity and Success:

There are well-documented criteria (Hackman, Thompson et. al.) for creating team success: a clear and guiding purpose, clear membership, enabling structures, the right kind of leadership AND team longevity.

Perhaps I’m biased by the technical product development and IT projects I’ve hung around most of my career, but typically the projects are difficult and often, the team members are being asked to do something that’s not been done before…at least in their organization.  The need for team learning coupled with the socialization dynamics present in every (new) team environment, demand a commitment to longevity as one of the key enabling factors for success.

Beware the Mirages:

We’re quick to attribute team failures to external factors (fundamental attribution error) or, to see Lencioni’s 5 dysfunctions in almost every struggling team environment. Just be aware, that you may very well be seeing a mirage…something you think you should see but that isn’t really present.

Building trust, developing comfort with conflict, committing to the effort, accepting accountability and focusing on results are all important, and realizing the team culture to foster those behaviors takes time.

It takes courage for a leader or sponsor to stand up and defend a failed team. That shielding effort expends political capital and if the outcomes continue to be poor, the capital is squandered.  Leaders and sponsors coping with struggling teams are well-advised to look for the following attitudes and behaviors as they assess whether to take a stand or fold the team.

5 Signs that Your Failed Team Merits More Time

1. An absence of finger-pointing and excuse-making. In my experience, there’s a direct inverse correlation with finger-pointing and the potential for team success.

2. Genuine group and authentic distress at the failure. While a judgement call, it’s not that hard for a leader to distinguish between embarrassment or fear or repercussions type distress versus genuine “We failed and it bugs the crap out of me/us,” distress.

3. An emerging Apollo 13 mentality… “failure is not an option.” A sense of emergency, an intense focus on the goals of the initiative and extraordinary efforts to innovate are healthy signs that the team merits more time.

4. External validation that the initiative is (still) highly relevant. There’s a tendency for firms and teams to irrationally pursue failed objectives. Avoiding this sunk cost/escalation of commitment trap is difficult and important. The assumptions of and need for the project from an external customer or market perspective must still be valid before offering more time to the failed team.

5. A hunger for insights and knowledge from outside the team.  Instead of turning inward and developing a bunker mentality, the team recognizes the need for help and pursues it.  I’m particularly convinced of a team’s legitimacy, when they seek outside critical feedback on technical and performance issues.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Sometimes, good performance is just a bit further down the road. Don’t discount how critical it is to give good people time to gel on big projects.

–

Don’t miss the next Leadership Caffeine-Newsletter! Register here.

Art Petty is a Chicago-based management consultant focusing on strategy and leadership development. Art regularly speaks on innovation in management and leadership, and his work is reflected in two books, including the recent, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development.  Art publishes regularly at The Management Excellence blog at http://artpetty.com

Prior to his solo career, Art spent 20+ years leading marketing sales and business units in systems and software organizations around the globe. You can follow Art on twitter: @artpetty and he can be reached via e-mail at art.petty@artpetty.com

Filed Under: Crisis Leadership, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Performance, Project Management Tagged With: , , , ,

Leadership Caffeine-Get Invested in Developing Your New Leaders

February 13, 2012 By 4 Comments

image of a coffee cupI’ve yet to run a workshop or program on leadership where anything approaching a majority of the participants describe their initial days of their initial role as a team leader, supervisor or manager as a period when they received much if any support and coaching from their own direct manager.

Most describe this particularly precarious professional time as more like a “hit and run,” or, at least “promote and run,” where their manager anoints them as in charge of some group and disappears like a Cheshire Cat, grin and all, only to resurface around performance review time. Sadly, the flameout rate for first-time leaders is high, and the fallout on those being led equally high.

Experienced Leaders Often Perpetuate the Sink or Swim Approach:

Unfortunately, many experienced leaders (those promoting the first-timers) will under the cone of silence and with just a bit of truth serum, admit to perpetuating the same promote and run approach they received during their own careers.  “I know it’s wrong, but I’m too busy,” described one. “I promoted her because I knew she was up to the job and because I needed someone to carry that load while I dealt with mine,” offered another. And, “I survived and if he’s as good as I think he is, he’ll survive as well,” added one experienced leader.

The slight pang of guilt I feel every time I write about this topic tells me I might have committed this act of leadership treachery at some point during my journey as well. Ouch.

While few of us have time to handhold…and that’s not healthy for anyone anyways, we all have an obligation to ourselves, our firms and those we’ve put into roles of responsibility to do a better job with this important development task.

8 Things You Can Do to Start Supporting Your First-Time Leaders More Effectively:

1. Provide clear context for the role. Help the individual understand your view and the organization’s view on and expectations for their team and their role. Ideally, make certain the new supervisor can see clearly how his/her role and team plug into the firm’s strategic goals.We do our best work when we have context for its’ importance. Your first-timer will draw upon this context to motivate his/her team.

2. Establish clear accountability for outcomes. The new leader is typically overwhelmed with the people complexities of leading and it’s easy to lose track of what needs to be done to help the rest of the organization. By clearly communicating how the new leader’s performance and team performance will be evaluated, you remove much of the ambiguity from the situation.

3. Scheduling planned time to connect and a “911″ protocol for crises with the new leader. The planned time provides an anchor for regular updates and having a clear “911 protocol” assures the new leader that you are there in a pinch. (And yes, those momentary crises are great teaching opportunities.)

4. Resist telling and focus on teaching. Use questions to teach. Your best friend may in response to, “What should I do?” is, “What do you think you should do?” Too many senior managers fall back on telling their first-timers what to do. That’s not teaching.

5. Choose a variety of settings/situations to observe and then provide coaching feedback. Hey, this is your job and your diligence here will absolutely pay dividends. You get to see the new leader in action and the new leader gains valuable insights and performance suggestions.

6. Resist the urge to flame the new leader for mistakes. Your post-mistake coaching opportunity must focus on, “What did you learn?” and “How would you do this differently?”

7. Provide ample positive feedback (when it’s earned, of course). Confidence is one of the missing components of first-time leaders, so celebrate the small victories.

8. If things are going well, ratchet up the challenges.  We learn by exposure to new and more complicated situations. As the new leader develops confidence for current tasks, establish a challenge in a new and more complicated area and keep pushing him/her out of the proverbial comfort zone.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

A first-time leader is a horrible thing to waste. You’re already invested in the promotion, now get involved in creating the success.

–

Don’t miss the next Leadership Caffeine-Newsletter! Register here.

Art Petty is a Chicago-based management consultant focusing on strategy and leadership development. Art regularly speaks on innovation in management and leadership, and his work is reflected in two books, including the recent, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development. Art publishes regularly at The Management Excellence blog at http://artpetty.com

Prior to his solo career, Art spent 20+ years leading marketing sales and business units in systems and software organizations around the globe. You can follow Art on twitter: @artpetty and he can be reached via e-mail at art.petty@artpetty.com

Filed Under: Leadership, Leadership Caffeine Tagged With: , ,
« Previous Page
Next Page »