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?”
Leadership Caffeine: For Better Results, Quit Telling and Start Letting Go
Filed under: Leadership Caffeine, Leadership Skills, Performance
The odd quirk that seems to bedevil so many who occupy roles of responsibility for others is their overwhelming urge to tell other people what to do. While a certain amount of “telling” is OK, particularly during crises and anything involving safety or security, for the most part, your communication efforts should focus on listening and asking.
Starting this year, shift the focus to you and your role and your daily habits, and for everyone’s sake, quit telling people how to do their jobs. No one loves a micro-manager, and trust me, this includes those being micro-managed and those above you looking for talented leaders to promote into positions of increasing responsibility.
When You Talk, Make Certain It Counts:
Yes, you certainly owe guidance, encouragement, constructive and positive feedback and help with direction setting and development planning. You also are responsible in many instances for teaching…directly and indirectly. However, the talking stops…or at least the telling stops when it comes to people doing their daily jobs.
Change Your Thinking on the Capabilities of Your Team:
We all know that you think they won’t get it right or that your involvement will ensure optimum results. We’ve all also heard you complain about how frustrated you are that you have to be involved with every little detail and how little time you have for other elements of your job.
Overheard:
Nothing gets done right if I’m not involved.
I can’t trust them to do the work without checking the quality.
Or my (least) favorite:
If my team substituted brains for gunpowder, they wouldn’t have a firecracker between them.
While your own phrases might be different (and much softer), if the sentiments about your team are similar, it’s time to take a close look in the mirror and then to shift the focus of your micro-managing to the person staring back at you. (Of course, if the sentiments are genuine, you need a new team, and no amount of micro-managing the wrong people will solve the problem.)
Nine Ideas for Letting Go to Promote Better Results:
1. Provide direction not instructions. There’s a profound difference.
2. Ask for input on performance targets and work to understand and resolve differences between your views and theirs.
3. Deliberately reduce your direct contact time with your team members. Yes, call this MBNWASM (Management by Not Walking Around So Much.) Give people some room. Everyone will benefit.
4. Recognize that you’ve conditioned everyone to wait for your commands, and that you will need to encourage them to take initiative on their own. This takes some time to sink in for people who have been on auto-pilot for a long time.
5. When the inevitable happens and someone mucks up, count to 10,000 and then have the following discussion: “What did you learn?” “How will you improve next time?” And then say, “Good, go do it.” And shut up.
6. During trouble-shooting situations, talk last. Ask questions, solicit input and if required, offer ideas, but don’t strong-arm people into doing it your way.
7. Start asking people what they need from you in terms of support and resources to help them execute their jobs. And then do something with the input!
8. Try rotating responsibility between team members for elements of operations and quality meetings. You can approve the agenda, but teach others how to lead sessions like this and watch the value of the events go up tremendously.
9. Spend more time figuring out how to help your boss. Seriously.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Just like “telling ain’t teaching,” it’s not managing either. Your primary job is to develop others capable of free thought and independent action in pursuit of supporting firm/team goals. While you might perceive they’re not up to it, more often than not, it’s you that’s the problem. Starting this year, fix the problem!
Note: because most chronic micro-managers spend little time reading about professional development, this post might make a nice print-out and leave-behind! I’ll let you decide whether it’s an anonymous leave-behind.
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Art Petty is a developer of leaders and a strategy consultant. Art frequently speaks on leadership and management, and his work is reflected in two books (Practical Lessons in Leadership and Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development) and over 1-million words published at The Management Excellence blog. You can reach Art via e-mail to learn more about his leadership development, speaking and management consulting services.
Thoughts on Your Personal and Professional Success in the New Year
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Leading Change, Leading the Generations, Management Education, Performance, Professional Growth
Hang out with really smart people and teams and some great lessons can’t help but rub off on you.
I was truly gifted in 2011 to gain access to and work with and support some remarkable professionals across a number of different market segments…from high tech to professional services to manufacturing, and I learned something with every engagement and encounter.
Here are Six Lessons Learned that Can Help Us All in the New Year:
1. It’s Critical to Think Deeply About Your Business: Strategy still counts. The strongest teams/firms I observed are the ones who took the time to step-back and evaluate their situation and rethink their futures. And then back all of that lofty thinking with action, learning and adaptation.
Call it what you want…I call it strategy work…and done right…asking and answering tough questions and then backing the ideas with key hypotheses and experiments is the corporate equivalent of a continuous fitness program.
2. Operational Myopia Guarantees Mediocrity (or worse): Conversely, the firms and teams mired in the muck struggled to get beyond the endless operational discussions and move towards the tough questions that help assess the current state and begin to identify options for the future. Yeah, everyone needs to make sales in the here and now. We all know that. Adding in the work of thinking about and adapting your business in pursuit of better serving customers, finding new customers, extending into larger growth areas or more attractive categories takes that extra level of discipline that separates the big winners from everyone else.
3. Leadership Counts. More than ever…and not just at the top. High performance firms have an unrelenting focus on developing people who can think critically, lead others to challenge convention and stimulate people to provide their best results. And given the past decade or so of leadership failures, people are quick to sniff out and mentally discard the disingenuous leaders. If you are leading others, you need to bring your “A” game, and the game isn’t about you…it’s about everyone else and what you can do for them!
4. Behold The Rise of the Integrator Leader: individual contributors who embrace the role of integrator…bringing together disparate groups and resources to solve problems are the future formal leaders in organizations. We are all well served to view our own roles through the filter of the new integrator leader. Build your network(s) internally and externally and learn to connect networks in pursuit of solving problems.
5. Diversity is a Strategic Asset to Build Competitive Advantage: While we predictably and annoyingly gravitate to those who act, think (and yes, look) like us, the true opportunity for greatness is in bringing together people of disparate backgrounds, ethnicities and ages and setting them loose to change something significant. The best leaders get this. The rest are still mired in the misguided thinking from another century.
6. If You’re Not Learning, You are Failing. Learning is more important than ever. The top performing professionals are learning everyday in the workplace (through experimentation), are pushing themselves personally to continue to grow in their respective fields, are filling classrooms and demanding more from an old and mostly broken educational system, and leveraging technology and unparalleled access to information to expand their thinking. There are no time-outs allowed when it comes to gaining and applying new knowledge.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
The short form:
Strategy isn’t a four letter word. We all need to find ways to break out of the day-to-day crunch to assess and learn and plan. Leadership skills are more critical than ever…and the best and most powerful leaders might not have people reporting to them. Diversity isn’t just an H.R. initiative, and if you aren’t learning every single day, you’re moving backwards at an accelerating pace.
May 2012 be a year of learning, growth and professional success.
Leadership Caffeine: The Critical Importance of Cultivating your Cultural Intelligence
Filed under: Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leadership Skills
Note from Art: this is the first of a planned series of Leadership Caffeine posts encouraging you to focus on developing the leadership and professional skills required for success in the emerging world.
Consider the case of “Raj”
“Raj” is a citizen of India working on an H1-B visa in the Midwestern U.S., for a global software firm based out of Germany. He leads a software development team comprised of a dozen team members spread across three continents. Only two members of the team report to him, and the balance are on-loan from other teams and managers.
Now, consider the case of “Dorothy”
“Dorothy” is an African-American manager in a U.S.-based health insurance provider. Her team is comprised of individuals across a variety of different ethnicities, including Mexican-American, Arab-American, Euro-American and Asian-American.
The Challenges are Obvious, but the Benefits from Getting it Right are Profound:
What’s remarkable about these two cases is not the complexity of the leadership challenges, but rather, the sheer raw potential to form something unique based on the cultural diversity built into these teams.
The benefits of successfully leveraging culturally diverse team members are many, including perhaps the most powerful of all: the potential to gain the unique insights of people who hold distinctly different world-views.
From ideation to problem-solving, opportunity identification and design, there are remarkable opportunities inherent in effectively tapping into the unique views of people from different cultures.
First, The Challenges:
On the surface, Raj’s situation is more complicated. He’s dealing across nations, time-zones and cultures with a virtual team who will likely never be in the same room together. His challenges to establish rapport, build credibility as a leader and get people working together where needed and in spite of distinct cultural differences and world-views, are complicated indeed.
However, don’t discount the complexity of Dorothy’s situation. While she has the benefit of being able to engage with her team in person, she is working in an environment where embracing and leveraging diversity is still relatively new.
Contrary to the myth, the U.S. is neither a melting pot, nor is it an environment where stereotypes have been wiped out and prejudices dissolved and left for the history books. The statistics on diversity in the workforce, the court cases on discrimination and the statistics by ethnic group indicate otherwise. And while many people of the ethnicities identified are second or third generation Americans, they still grow up in many cases in their own culture with their own unique way of viewing the world, inter-relating, deciding and working. There’s nothing easy here for Dorothy.
Cultivate Your Cultural Intelligence to Tap Into the Potential from Diversity:
Whether your situation/opportunity is about coping with and leveraging diversity across borders or in the office, your success and effectiveness as a leader requires active cultivation of your Cultural Intelligence (CQ) “muscles.” Dr. David Livermore, writing in his excellent book, The Cultural Intelligence Difference, suggests that there are four components to our Cultural IQ:
- CQ Drive-your motivation…your interest and confidence in functioning effectively in culturally diverse situations.
- CQ Knowledge…your pursuit of knowledge about how cultures are similar and different.
- CQ Strategy…how you make sense of culturally diverse experiences.
- CQ Action-your capability to adapt your behavior appropriately for different cultures.
While we’ll expand upon each of these and what Livermore and others have to say about strengthening your CQ in upcoming posts, your assignment for now is to ask and answer the following CQ Jump-Start questions:
1. Do I actively seek out culturally diverse situations…from food to travel to literature to group and social situations? Not surprisingly, many individuals gravitate towards the familiar and away from the foreign. Developing CQ requires the opposite behavior.
2. Am I knowledgeable about and comfortable relating to others from different cultures? My educated guess is that most Americans if given truth serum would offer “No” in response to this question.
3. Am I able to effectively engage with others from different cultures in pursuit of business objectives? If you were suddenly required to offer constructive feedback to a team in Japan or, to negotiate with a prospective supplier in Germany, how prepared are you to do this competently? Here’s a hint…neither of those situations is like others you’ve dealt with in your dealings with U.S. based teams or firms.
4. Do I have an understanding of the cultural world-view and dimensions of those of different ethnicities on my team? If you think it doesn’t matter, you’ve missed the point here. From family upbringing to religious training to views on power and even traditional cultural views on gender roles, these all are part of people’s make-up. Ignore them at your own peril.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Diversity isn’t just an HR initiative…it’s a critical part of your organization’s fabric and future. Leveraging it requires leaders to actively engage and focus on strengthening personal and team CQ. Your knowledge of and your abilities to gain from cultural and ethnic diversity is one of the critical leadership skills of our times. And much like that exercise program you’ve been putting off, this one only offers benefits if you put the effort into the program. It’s time to dive in. Your success and the future success of your firm may just depend upon it.
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Want More? Check out Art Petty’s latest book, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development. Created for fast-moving and highly motivated professionals and leaders, Leadership Caffeine offers more than 80 short, idea-packed essays for the critical leadership and professional development situations in your life. (All royalties on purchases through 12/2 will see the royalties donated to a local food pantry. See original promo note for specifics.)
Join the many groups and management teams and meeting/conference organizers who have adopted Leadership Caffeine as a discussion and development tool. The collection makes a great gift for the newly promoted leader or for your team during the holidays.
- Single and Kindle copies on Amazon.
- Group and Volume orders, visit Marathon Books for the best service.
About Art Petty:
Art Petty is a Leadership & Career Coach and Strategy Consultant, helping motivated professionals of all levels achieve their potential. In addition to working with highly motivated professionals, Art frequently works with project teams in pursuit of high performance. Contact Art via e-mail to discuss a coaching, workshop or speaking engagement or to inquire about being a guest on The Leadership Caffeine podcast.
Leadership Caffeine: “You Have No Business Leading Others”
Filed under: Leadership Caffeine, Leadership Skills, Talent Management
In setting and adopting strategy, it’s critically important to decide what you are not going to do. The same goes for promoting people into roles where they are responsible for others. It’s OK to say, “No” to those who aren’t right for the role.
Leading others is not an inalienable right that comes with seniority or through mastery of a technical discipline. It’s too bad that a good number of senior leaders struggle to offer a clear “No” to those seeking the role.
While I’m a staunch defender of the premise that leaders are mostly made not born, there are some people who have no more business responsible for others than I do conducting brain surgery.
Sorry folks, not everyone can learn to lead. This doesn’t mean that leadership misfits don’t end up in roles responsible for others, but that doesn’t make it right.
One way to stop the perpetuation of lousy leaders and lousy leadership practices is to quit passing the problem forward. While that’s contrary to what we see in many of our schools and certainly from our politicians who like to kick the problems down the road, it’s an opportunity for you to take a principled stand for all of the right reasons.
3 Core Questions to Answer Before Promoting Anyone to a Leadership Position:
1. What are the individual’s true intentions? Much like a father questioning his daughter’s new date, experienced leaders must work with their team members to properly assess motivations. If pay, title or an office with a door are the unspoken objectives, the individual should be shown the door, at least as it pertains to a role leading others.
While most people won’t outwardly describe less than honorable intentions, some careful observation and interaction via low-risk developmental assignments spread over time, will provide you with ample insights to make a good decision.
2. How well does the candidate self-manage? If the individual showcases an ego as big as Indiana and a desire to prove that he is the smartest person in every room he occupies, the obvious lack of both emotional and social intelligence, is not only a leading indicator of poor fit, it’s a big, bright flashing red flag. Instead of putting on your dark glasses to shield your eyes from the light, it’s time to slow down or stop and face reality.
3. What is it about prior performance (anywhere in life) that offers clues to future performance in a leadership role? While people can and do change, I want to see at a minimum, examples of leadership…even if the circumstances were informal. Eagle Scout? Student Council President? Volunteer Manager? Military leadership?! Examples of where the individual rallied people to troubleshoot and solve problems? Life crises that taught important leadership skills?
The Bottom-Line for Now:
When we sign on to support the development of new leaders in our organizations, we are signing on for a full contact activity. The output is a direct reflection on us, and given the importance of this activity, it behooves all of us to take time and deliberately and carefully assess our leadership candidates.
I’m all for giving deserving people a chance, however, the key word is, “deserving.” Convince me through your actions that your intentions are honorable, and I’m willing to move to the next step. Prove to me that you can manage the person looking back at you in the mirror and your chances of gaining my support are increasing. And show me through examples that you have context for the role and I’m motivated to support you. Fail any one of those three, and you’re out, at least as it comes to leading.
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Want More? Check out Art Petty’s latest book, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development. Created for fast-moving and highly motivated professionals and leaders, Leadership Caffeine offers more than 80 short, idea-packed essays for the critical leadership and professional development situations in your life.
Join the many groups and management teams and meeting/conference organizers who have adopted Leadership Caffeine as a discussion and development tool. The collection makes a great gift for the newly promoted leader or for your team during the holidays.
- Single and Kindle copies on Amazon.
- Group and Volume orders, visit Marathon Books for the best service.
About Art Petty:
Art Petty is a Leadership & Career Coach and Strategy Consultant, helping motivated professionals of all levels achieve their potential. In addition to working with highly motivated professionals, Art frequently works with project teams in pursuit of high performance. Contact Art via e-mail to discuss a coaching, workshop or speaking engagement or to inquire about being a guest on The Leadership Caffeine podcast.
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