New Leader Tuesday-Beware Under or Over Managing

May 22, 2012 By Leave a Comment

New Leader Tuesday at Management Excellence

New Leader Tuesday focuses specifically on the topics that all of us face as we take on this most difficult of all business challenges…leading others. In addition to this regular blog feature, I’m launching the New Leader e-newsletter.  If you are a new leader or, if you are responsible for new leader development on your team, the content is designed to help support your efforts.

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The first year of your first job responsible for others (supervisor, lead, manager) is the early-awkward phase. Your technical or functional expertise and someone’s perception of your potential for leadership got you here. Your as of yet undeveloped or at least under-developed communication and coordination skills are what will carry you forward.

Making the transition to leadership is like suddenly shifting your dominant side from right handed to left handed for all of your major activities. Doable with practice, but darned awkward along the way. You’ll make mistakes…that’s expected. The goal here is to minimize the serious mistakes while accelerating your learning and acclimation.  

A common challenge for early leaders is to gauge how much to manage. Too much and you are micro-managing or even worse, doing your old job through others. The outcome is resentment and frustration over you as a leader, and an unhealthy working environment. No one does their best work for a micro-manager.

The other side of this early leader trap is under-managing. Sensitive to how much you and everyone else hate being micro-managed, and sensitive to not wanting to upset the group dynamics, your brain tells you to step back and let things go. Your brain is wrong. You falsely believe that your hands-off style will be appreciated and admired. Quit thinking about that “Boss of the Year” coffee cup…it’s not coming your way anytime soon with this style.

5 Suggestions for Getting the Management Volume “Just Right”

1. Attitude is Everything. Approach your new role with the Zen form of “Beginner’s Mind,” which embraces an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions.  Your enthusiasm, optimism and desire to support others is a great foundation for building a healthy working culture. And let’s face it, you might be a technical expert, but you are definitely not a management expert. Instead of masking your journey of discovery, embrace it…everyone knows that you are new to this role.

2. Answer the “Why?” Your team members need clear context for their work and everyone needs to understand what’s expected of them. I beat this drum a great deal. People (you included) do their best work when they have context for its connection to a bigger picture. For help on this, see my post: Gaining Critical Context for Your Team’s Mission.

3. Learn and repeat often: “How can I help?” As people grow comfortable with you, they’ll have no trouble sharing where the obstacles and barriers are. Help knock those down and you’ll be doing your job.

4. Emphasize Teaching, Not Telling. Your gut will be saying, “tell.” Your gut is wrong. Telling gets the task done, teaching creates sustainable improvement in team and individual performance.

5. Step-In As Needed, but Step Carefully. Things will go wrong and you will have to step in and pitch in…and yes, direct. When you get involved, don’t condescend or accuse. If someone dropped the ball, deal with it in private after the crisis has passed. Never waste a good crisis or problem…they are outstanding opportunities to teach and as a result, strengthen your leadership credibility.

Moving Forward:

When you signed on for the role of leader, everything about how your success will be measured, changed.  Your job is to get the team to the destination, and that doesn’t always involve leading from the front. Learn to modulate your management intensity to the situation. Too much or too little will poison the environment. It’s critical to get it just right. Not easy, but critical.

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

For more ideas on professional development-one sound bite at a time, check our Art’s latest collection: Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development. 

Download a free excerpt of Leadership Caffeine (the book) at Art’s facebook page.

New to leading or responsible for first time leader’s on your team? Subscribe to Art’ New Leader’s e-News.

To talk about a workshop or speaking need, contact Art at via e-mail at art.petty@artpetty.com

Filed Under: Career, Leadership, New Leader Tuesday Tagged With: , ,

Just One Thing: Services ARE Performances

May 20, 2012 By 6 Comments

Just One Thing

The “Just One Thing” Series offers ideas for professional and business improvement in small, digestible pieces, one at a time.

From the book: Management Lessons from Mayo Clinic:

“Services are performances. From the customers’ perspective, the people performing the service are the company. A careless bank teller is a careless bank. An arrogant waiter is an arrogant restaurant.”

Few things evoke as much negative emotion in otherwise kind and gentle souls as a bad experience as a customer. Focus in your mind on your last really bad customer service experience and you can sense the tension in your neck growing along with the rise in blood pressure. That bad experience becomes “the company” for us.

The Aetna Rep who yelled at me for seeking clarity on how a claim was handled is the face of this firm to me.   (I escalated that one and was correct.)

As managers and leaders and individual contributors who serve external and internal customers, we intuitively know that every encounter we have…or our people have, is an opportunity to represent the organization. Why then are good customer experiences the minority and great customer experiences a rarity? The fault is ours…for poor hiring, for failing to establish and reinforce values, for lack of accountability…and for generally not giving a shit enough to make sure our organizations are properly represented by people who care and who serve.

The phone representative who agreed with me that Frontier Communications was pretty screwed up, is the face of Frontier to me.

All of the strategy plans, reorganizations and training sessions in the world won’t make up for the failure to respect and serve and honor the customer. It’s arrogant and deceitful to believe you as a leader are representing the interests of your stakeholders if you fail to create remarkable customer experiences through your team members.

Poor customer service is an outcome of a series of flawed and sometimes fatal decisions by people not invested in a cause beyond biding their time and collecting a check.

The battle axe of a grumpy, rude receptionist at the local Doctor’s office is the face of that practice.   

We are all of us at times consumers of healthcare services. These purchases find us at our most vulnerable, our most frightened and even our most ignorant. We are placing ourselves and our family members in the hands of strangers…shedding our clothes and dignity and hoping our trust is not misplaced. While there are some institutions that get this right more than they get it wrong, few that I’ve encountered do it on the scale of Mayo Clinic. I’ve no doubt from my time there that it starts with careful hiring for the right values…and comes from an unyielding commitment on the part of everyone in that institution to reinforce the core values.

Mayo is remarkable in part, because they recognize that every encounter is the face of Mayo. From the workers in the cafeteria to the receptionists greeting and serving patients to the nurses, doctors and administration, the performances are choreographed to serve customers.

What do your team’s performances say about you as a leader and about your firm?

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

For more ideas on professional development-one sound bite at a time, check our Art’s latest collection: Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development. 

Download a free excerpt of Leadership Caffeine (the book) at Art’s facebook page.

New to leading or responsible for first time leader’s on your team? Subscribe to Art’ New Leader’s e-News.

To talk about a workshop or speaking need, contact Art at via e-mail at art.petty@artpetty.com

Filed Under: Just One Thing, Leadership, Performance Tagged With: , ,

New Leader Tuesday-Gaining Critical Context for Your Team’s Mission

May 15, 2012 By 1 Comment

Note from Art: I’ve long wanted to establish a consistent blog feature focused on helping first-time leaders navigate this challenging career stage, and here it is. New Leader Tuesday will focus specifically on the topics that all of us face as we take on this most difficult of all business challenges…leading others. In addition to this regular blog feature, I’m launching the New Leader e-newsletter and have some more programs slated to announce in the near future. Join us here at the blog for New Leader Tuesday, and register for the subscriber only-content via our newsletter. (We never share your e-mail information.)

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Many first-time leaders are given the equivalent of “battlefield” promotions with no more context than, “You’ve done a great job, you’re in charge.”  If you end up on the receiving side of this “Go get ‘em Tiger,” philosophy of leadership development, it’s important for you to quickly gain context for your team’s role and accountabilities.

If no one volunteers this information, it’s up to you to piece together the information and then arm your team with it. Leading is one heck of a lot easier if everyone understands the mission!

Katie (real person, different name) ended up in one of these “Hey, you’re smart, you’re in charge,” promotions with little guidance and absolutely no context for accountabilities. Here’s how she handled it:

We move at hyper-speed in this business. We all understand our day-to-day jobs, but once I was placed in a lead role, I wanted to gain a better picture of how our performance was measured, how we fit into the bigger picture of the firm’s goals and even what my direct manager’s goals were, so that I could align the team and give feedback around these measures.

Through a series of interviews with my manager (when I could catch her), and my peers…and my internal customers, I was able to piece together a better understanding of how we fit into the picture and what people required and expected of us. I built a crude scorecard to use with the team and when my manager and her manager saw what I was doing, they actually jumped in and helped me improve the scorecard. It’s now a standard tool used with similar teams in our different locations. It keeps us all focused on the work that matters, and it keeps us striving for improvement.  And all I did was start asking the right questions.

Katie did more than ask the right questions, and it appears that her manager had good insight in tapping this smart and aggressive person on the shoulder to lead. She used some of the questions outlined in Practical Lessons in Leadership to help her get going.

Key Questions For Katie’s Direct Manager:

  • What are our firm’s key strategies and goals?
  • What are your goals?
  • How does my team impact the company goals and your personal goals?
  • What are we accountable for? How are you measuring us?
  • What is your perception of how well this team has been executing in recent quarters?
  • How will I be evaluated as the manager?
  • What latitude do I have to make changes on the team to better align with the goals.
  • What time constraints am I operating under?

Key Questions For Katie’s Cross Functional Peers (Internal Customers):

  • In your experience working with my team, what works? What is broken?
  • What do you wish we would do better? (Prioritize)
  • Are we aligned on the firm’s goals?
  • What are your team’s goals and how do we impact your achievement? (Here are my team’s goals…let’s compare and contrast.)
  • How do our combined activities impact our other internal/external customers?
  • Do we have formal communication between our two teams to ensure that we get and stay on the same page?
  • Are there shared measures of performance that might help us monitor our work together?

The Bottom-Line for Now:

For any leader, mastering the art of asking good questions is a critical success skill. In Katie’s case and in the case of any new front-line leader, gaining context for your team’s mission, accountabilities and key measures is important. Sharing this information with your team and creating tools to measure and monitor performance around these key issues is critical. Be politely relentless in seeking answers to these highly relevant questions.

We’ll cover questions for market-facing teams and external customers in a follow-on post.

 

 

 

 

Filed Under: New Leader Tuesday, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,

Leadership Caffeine-7 Suggestions to Strengthen Your Group’s Performance

May 7, 2012 By 5 Comments

image of a coffee cupPerformance counts. Efforts are nice, but ultimately, you are evaluated on the results of your team, not the amount of work you put into achieving your results.

The pursuit of performance is something that is too easily lost in some of the kinder, gentler content that is found in the leadership literature today. My advice: don’t forget for a second that you’ll only be successful if the team you are leading is successful.

In contemplating the “set context and communicate expectations to promote performance” theme for this post, I drew a portion of the content below from my book with Rich Petro, Practical Lessons in Leadership. Our focus in the original section was on building the operationally excellent team. While you may use different labels, the concepts will support your efforts to promote high performance.

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Operational excellence starts with you setting the expectation that your team will perform at a level necessary to achieve or exceed objectives.  In seeking to establish standards of performance and behavior, your very public and very frequent statements of expectations are some of the most powerful tools at your disposal. Your ability to grasp your true priorities in support of your firm’s goals, provides the ability for you to articulate these priorities and objectives to your team and begin setting the expectation for success.

Everyone on the operationally excellent team must understand their responsibility for execution around key objectives, and be aware that their performance and progress are both important and are being watched.  The operationally excellent team always knows the objectives, where they stand in relation to achieving them, and what they are going to do to get there. 

7 Suggestions to Promote High Performance on Your Team:

 1. Communicate expectations for achievement of operating objectives from day one of your leadership role.  There should be no ambiguity about your intentions and your expectations for performance, progress reporting and ultimately, achievement.  Remember to link yourself as ultimately responsible for the outcomes of the team and to let them understand your role to both coach and support the team and individual efforts.

2. Kick-off all operations oriented meetings with a review of the key business objectives and progress towards those objectives.  Conclude every session with a reminder of the objectives—especially near term deliverables.  This is equally important for individual review sessions as it is for group situations.

 3. Praise, celebrate and reward milestone achievement and positive progress frequently and liberally.

 4. Acknowledge roadblocks, misfires and general problems quickly and calmly.  Your appropriate reaction to these occurrences will contribute to building an effective working environment where people can honestly and openly deal with the negative as well as the positive.

 5. Foster a culture that treats problems as opportunity for creativity and innovation. More than lip-service is required here. Let teams experiment and implement new ideas to fix or improve and challenge them to keep improving.

6. Seek out and deal with poor performers promptly and fairly.  As the saying goes, one bad apple can ruin the whole bushel, and the same is true with teams. Your handling of poor performers (professionally and timely of course) sends a powerful message to your team.  You build accountability into the culture by reinforcing that a mistake is a learning experience, repeated mistakes are a developmental or training opportunities and chronic poor performance is a reason for reassignment or dismissal.

 7. Set and share expectations for your own performance and be open about your progress and your own misfires.  The team needs to see that you practice what you preach.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Great performance is a function of many factors. While the formula may vary a bit from team to team, alignment on goals, a culture of accountability, clear expectations and constant assessment of performance versus expectations are core to the recipe for success everywhere.

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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. (download a free excerpt at Art’s facebook page.)

Art publishes regularly at The Management Excellence blog at http://artpetty.com/blog/

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: , , ,

Don’t Get Blindsided by Organizational Politics

April 30, 2012 By 2 Comments

Some people take pride in being deaf and blind to organizational politics. A good friend and now out-of-work colleague confesses that he didn’t see his termination coming. He offered:

“I didn’t want to play the games.”

He now knows that is approach was naïve. By ignoring the internal power dynamics in his organization, he allowed himself to be marginalized and then eliminated.

“My reviews were fine, but I ignored the shifting structure and ended up on the wrong side of someone I had shown no tolerance for during my time at the firm.”

For all of us, ignoring this very real human behavior that manifests itself as organizational politics, is a sure-fire way to end up at best on the fringe of irrelevance, and at worst, to end up outside, wondering what happened.  

Some have power, some aspire to power (or control) and others will stop at nothing to gain power.  Certainly, intentions and approaches vary. There are good people who aspire to more responsibility and to gain the opportunity to make a bigger impact. And there are others who view this as a game to win or lose. The rest tend to be passive observers along for the ride, hoping (a bad strategy all of the time) to be left alone.

“My work speaks for itself.”

Nice thought. No it doesn’t. You have to speak for yourself and, you need others willing to speak for you. Lacking both, you end up isolated and in danger.

7 Ideas for Playing Politics without Sacrificing Your Integrity

1. Build bridges across the organization. Every day. There’s nothing wrong, dirty or evil with networking, supporting others and building productive relationships with those in peer and superior roles in other parts of the organization. In fact, it’s decent, logical and shows you in good form.

2. Don’t fear new opportunities. Even if you are comfortable in your current role, if someone offers you a new opportunity, it’s because they believe you are up to the task. A good many professionals suffer from a bad case of lack of confidence when it comes to taking on something new, something different and something that involves doing more. Say “no” too many times, and the offers will dry up, and you’ll be headed for the margin of irrelevance.

3. Over-deliver, every single day.  Your results do count and word does spread.

4. Learn your boss’s agenda, and support it. Today’s boss is tomorrow’s sponsor, reference or adversary.

5. Speaking of the boss, steer clear of boss bashing. Keep your feelings to yourself, and beware the groups who thrive on breaking bad over the boss. Your words can and will be used against you.

6. Same rule as #5, different audience. Steer clear of colleague bashing sessions.

7. Attach yourself to individuals who aspire to do more in support of the firm. While these individuals might be more aggressive than you in pushing an agenda, your affiliation with people you respect and who are motivated to do good for the firm is a sincere and genuine form of playing politics.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Choosing to ignore the internal power dynamics in your organization should come with a warning label. “Ignoring reality may prove harmful or fatal to your employment.”

Instead of taking comfort in a naive pride in your ability to “avoid the games,” participate in a manner that allows you to retain your integrity. Keep your eyes and ears open and choose your steps deliberately, all the while maintaining your integrity.

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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. (download a free excerpt at Art’s facebook page.)

Art publishes regularly at The Management Excellence blog at http://artpetty.com/blog/

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: Career, Professional Growth, Values Tagged With: , , ,
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