Art of Managing-Kick Mediocrity to the Curb in Pursuit of Extraordinary

May 6, 2013 by 6 Comments

ArtofManagingMediocre is on display daily in too many areas of our society and in too many of our businesses. From the boss who just doesn’t care to our government seemingly barely functioning to the miserable help-lines of too many firms to the slow gait…the shuffle of retail workers at organizations that definitely don’t care, ordinary and average are epidemic.

Mediocrity has a way of numbing our senses and taking the fight out of us. It impacts everyone at all levels of leadership and all employee groups. Individually and collectively, we reduce our standards to the lowest accepted level and then shuffle along dispensing the ordinary until something shocks our system. Often, the shock comes too late.

As a manager, you play a critical part in either perpetuating mediocrity or helping your team break free in pursuit of extraordinary. The latter is a lot more fun and rewarding for all involved.

8 Ideas to Kick Mediocrity to the Curb in Pursuit of Extraordinary:

1. Start with the belief that your attitude and your actions will make a difference. In a world where mediocre is the norm, your extraordinary effort to help, serve, lead, please, thank, teach, manage, fix and engage will all be noticed. Not by everyone, but by many of us.

2. If your team works on the phone, teach them to lead with their smiles. Customers hear smiles over the phone and that helps us forget that we just navigated a 42-step phone-tree and a 36-minute wait seeking someone who could explain how to work a feature on the device in our hand that has more technology than the entire Apollo program which sent humans to the moon and successfully retrieved all of them.

3. If your team works in front of customers teach them to lead with direct eye contact and a smile. I don’t care if you are the manager at XYZ Big Box or the Shift Supervisor at the Driver’s License Bureau, the only downside of your employees smiling and making eye contact will be the fainting and momentary loss of equilibrium of your customers. They’ll recover and you’ll have changed the world in your own small way. (Note: in some cultures, direct eye contact is frowned upon. Let’s assume a U.S. based business.)

4. Extraordinary starts with the behaviors you model you set as a manager. Define “extraordinary” in your environment and then teach and model the behaviors. If you don’t, who will?

5. Set expectations for performance that is extraordinary.  Create a culture that enforces accountability for the right results and reward those who deliver.

6. Remember, extraordinary isn’t just for external customers. Model extraordinary across employee groups and watch it grow.

7. Eliminate those who don’t really care. Not everyone will respond to your guidance and teaching. Not everyone aspires to extraordinary. Encourage those who are comfortable with mediocrity to practice this approach by working for your competitors.

8. Make hiring for extraordinary a religion. Not everyone is suited to extraordinary in every environment. Your challenge is to identify those underlying values and behaviors that are so critical to transcending mediocrity in your world and then recruit and hire for those items. Few of us would pass Southwest Airlines’ rigorous filters for fun and love of people and Zappos is so committed to getting just the right people, the firm offers new employees a cash incentive to leave once they’ve completed the firm’s training program. In Zappos’ case, it’s cheaper and more productive to pay someone who isn’t feeling the firm’s definition of “extraordinary” to leave than to retain them and have them poison the well.)

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Kicking mediocrity to the curb doesn’t require expensive consultants, confusing restructuring or an epiphany around strategy. It’s common sense coupled with a strong sense of personal accountability to teach, model and reward the behaviors that promote extraordinary in your organization.

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More Professional Development Reads from Art Petty:book cover: shows title Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development by Art Petty. Includes image of a coffee cup.

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

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

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

An ideal book for anyone starting out in leadership: Practical Lessons in Leadership by Art Petty and Rich Petro.

 

 

Filed Under: Art of Managing, Leading Change, Management Innovation, Performance, Values Tagged With: , ,

New Leader Tuesday: Dealing with the Personal Problems of Your Team Members

April 30, 2013 by Leave a Comment

newleadertuesdaygraphicBe kind, for everyone you meet is waging a great battle. -unknown

One of the occupational challenges of your role as a manager or supervisor is learning how to navigate the personal issues of your team members that seep (or rush) into the workplace.

While many of your coworkers will do a good job maintaining a separation of professional and personal issues, some people seek out sympathetic listeners anywhere they can find them, and you as boss are fair game.  That’s OK, to a point.

Displaying empathy shows that you care. Ensuring that people who are struggling have access to the right help through counseling or the firm’s private support line are all part of your responsibilities as a manager and to maintaining your membership in good standing in the human race. Providing a break for someone to see a doctor, lawyer, counselor is fine as well.

However, beware those individuals who use their personal problems as recurring excuses for chronic poor performance. While they are in the gross minority, it’s a safe bet that you will encounter people who attempt to manipulate you by using their personal issues as a lever.

Your early exceptions and acceptance of misfires and mistakes are capable of snowballing into a different standard for Bob due to his impending divorce or for Mary because of the stress of her son’s arrest, or for Alex because of his mother’s illness.

Over time, performance issues will become blurred by the personal challenges, and your continued accommodation will turn someone’s problem into one that’s now yours.  Not only will you have an employee who is in essence gaming the system, you will have everyone else watching and judging how you handle this situation. Your own credibility as a manager is at stake.

5 Ideas for Navigating the Sticky Personal Problems of Your Employees:

1. Displaying empathy is admirable and encouraged. If someone approaches you with an issue, listen and show genuine understanding and concern.

 2. Don’t practice counseling, law or medicine (or any other profession) without a license! Direct people to company resources (if available) or, encourage them to seek appropriate outside help.

 3. We all need a break once in awhile. Provide reasonable flexibility for people to gain outside help or to attend outside appointments. Encourage the use of vacation and personal days as appropriate.  Beware of this moving from exception to norm, however.

4. Warning! Don’t let personal problems become excuses for sub-par performance. If you see a pattern of poor performance or chronic tardiness developing, don’t hesitate to tackle this issue. Keep it focused on the business and don’t allow the conversation around performance to be redirected back to the personal issues.  Empathy is good. You also have a business to run.

5. Don’t become part of the problem by making excuses for the individual. Everyone is watching. Create one double-standard and your credibility is shot.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Navigating this particularly sticky obstacle requires you to apply the same balanced, fair approach consistently across all team members in all circumstances involving personal issues. Your entire team is watching and judging.

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More Professional Development Reads from Art Petty:book cover: shows title Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development by Art Petty. Includes image of a coffee cup.

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

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

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

An ideal book for anyone starting out in leadership: Practical Lessons in Leadership by Art Petty and Rich Petro.

 

 

Filed Under: Decision-Making, Leadership, New Leader Tuesday, Performance, Values Tagged With: , ,

New Leader Tuesday-7 Ideas to Strengthen Accountability on Your Team

April 9, 2013 by Leave a Comment

newleadertuesdaygraphicAccountability. Tattoo it on your forearm. Imprint it on your brain. Repeat it three times every morning. And then assert it all day long.

Peel away the layers and issues surrounding poor performing teams and you will find accountability missing from the environment. Every time.

Conversely, examine the culture of teams or functional groups that regularly hit it out of the park, and you will find accountability for actions, efforts and outcomes present as part of the collective and individual member consciousness.

Accountability starts and ends with you as leader. As a teacher. As an enforcer. As the judge and jury

7 Ideas for Creating an Accountable Culture on Your Team:

1. Model the behavior. Your “do must match your tell.” Forget to hold yourself accountable to commitments or actions, and you’ve created fertile ground for others to follow suit.

2. Clearly define and describe the end destination. Set clear group and individual expectations for results. While seemingly obvious, many in leadership roles fail to establish clarity around goals and targets. Leaders might be pointing people in a direction,  but if they are not adequately ensuring that everyone understands the end destination, the team and members will end up somewhere. Somewhere is never the right destination.

3. Melt the participation trophies. Effort is nice, but results count.

4. Socialize accountability. Share individual and group targets, progress and results in every operations meeting and frequently in one-on-one and team encounters. Accountability is your mantra.

5. Deal with lack of accountability fairly, openly and expeditiously.  We all know that “stuff happens” in the workplace to occasionally derail our progress towards our goals. A project team might uncover an unexpected technical difficulty or, an individual performer might run into an issue that needs outside input. When the best laid plans meet Murphy and his darned law, seek clarity, expect an action plan and reset the timing and target as needed. If this becomes a chronic issue with a  team or individual, look deeper.

6. No “Jordan Rules.” Don’t create double standards for performance. The world of sports is famous for suggesting that star performers are treated one way by officials, while the rest of the players operate under a more stringent set of rules. We do the same in the workplace with our star performers or our chronic under-performers. Both extremes are wrong. One set of rules, please.

7. Success begets opportunity and more success. Reward high performance with more responsibility and greater accountability. Great performers love to  deliver great results…it’s their nature. Feed this machine and offer those who live and model accountability and achievement more opportunities to deliver.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Establishing, ensuring and living accountability is an  inviolable rule of leadership and management success. There’s no gray area here.

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More Professional Development Reads from Art Petty:book cover: shows title Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development by Art Petty. Includes image of a coffee cup.

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

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

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

An ideal book for anyone starting out in leadership: Practical Lessons in Leadership by Art Petty and Rich Petro.

 

 

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

Art of Managing: Beware the Pursuit of False Precision in Planning

March 24, 2013 by 3 Comments

Diagram with a question mark in the center and why, where, when, how, what, who surroundingIn preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” -Dwight Eisenhower

Chance are, you’ve seen this movie before. It’s the one where you or your team are on the hook for distilling the chaos and complexity of the market and the ambiguities and risks surrounding emerging opportunities, competitors and disruptive technologies, into a nice, neat multi-year forecast.

Sadly, for all of the effort that goes into cramming the complexities of the markets and human behavior into a few flipping cells on a spreadsheet, the output often isn’t worth a damn. 

The future has an annoying habit of ignoring our efforts to corral it in the form of plans.  Especially when it comes to financial forecasts.

My issue isn’t with the work of planning. It’s with the literal reliance on the output that so many managers and corporate bean-counters impose upon their teams.

The Positives-What the Act of Planning Does for Us:

  • It forces us to look at ourselves and our offerings and ideas in the mirror. There’s something particularly shocking about the image of a naked plan in bright fluorescent lighting in front of a full-length mirror. You’ll see flaws that demand attention!
  • It challenges us to ask and answer: “Why do we think we can succeed with this plan?” That’s a healthy discussion.
  • Good planning is an exercise in not only predicting risks, but in preparing for the risks we can’t envision. Luck will happen…good and bad. It’s what we do with it that counts.
  • Planning forces us to bring forth the assumptions and thus our biases that push us in one direction versus another.
  • Planning sets the stage for future learning.
  • Planning opens the door to innovation.

At Least 4 Reasons to Beware the False Pursuit of Precision in Planning:

1. The Crystal Ball is Notoriously Unreliable. In spite of all of the benefits of the work of planning, one of them is not a set of numbers that magically corrals the future and forces it to cooperate accordingly. The forecast output of planning serves as a guideline and a measuring stick, but not an absolute.

2. You Potentially Introduce Less Than Desirable Behaviors into Your Team’s Efforts. Unnatural reliance on the output of planning biases behaviors in pursuit of numbers or goals that weren’t predictable in the first place.  I see it in sales forecasting and multi-year business plans. I love SAS founder Jim Goodnight’s response to the issue of public firms (SAS is private) predicting quarterly earnings during an interview aired on 60 Minutes a number of years ago: “There’s no possible way I can tell you what my earnings are going to be to the penny each quarter. There’s only one way to get there to the penny. You have to cook the books.”

3. We Lose Track of the Details and Assumptions Surrounding the Numbers. Too many senior managers base success…relative success or failure and all its’ attendant implications on the numbers output of planning, forgetting the assumptions, risks, expectations for learning and uncertainties that went into the numbers. That’s a superficial way to deal with your people and your firm.

4. Competitor and Customer Behaviors and Market Forces Defy Financial Smoothing. Human and group behavior in the face of changing circumstances is difficult to corral into a cell on a spreadsheet. Sorry, we’re complex and we don’t give a damn about your forecast.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

I’m not excusing us from the act of planning. Nor am I suggesting that we simply let the future unfold without forecasting. On the contrary, as a good manager, you must understand your costs, your revenue model and how you make money. And you’re on the hook for growing and strengthening over time.

However, instead of relying on what is most often an unnatural level of precision around an unpredictable set of numbers, build the systems and processes to incorporate learning, constantly refresh forecasts and push the planning forward.

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More Professional Development Reads from Art Petty:

Don’t miss the next Leadership Caffeine-Newsletter! Register herebook cover: shows title Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development by Art Petty. Includes image of a coffee cup.

For more ideas on professional development-one sound bite at a time, check out Art’s latest book: 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’s New Leader’s e-News.

An ideal book for anyone starting out in leadership: Practical Lessons in Leadership by Art Petty and Rich Petro.

Need help with Feedback? Art’s new online program: Learning to Master Feedback

 Note: for volume orders of one or both books, drop Art a note for pricing information.

Filed Under: Art of Managing, Decision-Making, Performance Tagged With: , , ,

Leadership Caffeine: 4 Common Project Leadership Mistakes to Avoid

March 18, 2013 by 4 Comments

 image of a coffee cup“This would be easy if it weren’t for the people.”  -Project Manager

I’ve been invited to deliver a talk to a group of project management professionals ostensibly around the issue of dealing with difficult people on project teams. The challenge with this topic is that one could mistakenly assume that there may well be some heretofore undiscovered leadership approaches that can take the “difficult” out of these characters who frequent our project teams in so many unique forms.

Newsflash: there is no known cure for the human personality.

Thankfully.

We are complicated, confounding and wonderfully different people. The team or project leader’s responsibility is not to find a way to squash the variance in personalities, but rather to foster the right environment for people who are different, to come together and perform.

Here are a few key mistakes to avoid as you seek to align your collection of challenging personalities around your project and pursue great performance.

4 Key Project Leadership Mistakes to Avoid:

1. Just because you or your boss say it’s important doesn’t make it so. Having a “clear and compelling purpose” is critical to fostering team motivation and performance. Don’t assume that just because management has bestowed the mantle of “critical” on an initiative that your team members agree. It’s essential for you to work with the group and with the members on an individual basis to build understanding, answer questions and promote the idea of a compelling purpose. Sell the importance of the initiative with passion and integrity. Fail to do this effectively and those team members who who remain doubtful end up creating tension and contributing to performance challenges.

2. Don’t assume your team knows how to talk with each other. I see more performance loss on teams in the churn that surrounds most meetings and conversations than anywhere else. Good team leaders are effective facilitators. Great team leaders help their teams design productive conversations using a technique like DeBono’s Six Thinking Hats to help their teams focus together on one issue at a time (risks, ideas, needed information, assumptions etc). And great teams quickly learn that the time spent designing solutions while talking is much better spent than the typical time spent in arguing positions.

3. In the spirit of number 2, don’t assume that your team knows how to decide together. Much like the performance degradation that occurs from poor quality discussion practices, teams are prone to making big mistakes when it comes to deciding on core issues. While no one sets out to make a bad decision, the decision traps that bedevil us as individuals are amplified in group settings, where power distance, structure, personality, personal biases and so many other pitfalls are poised to derail otherwise well-intended professionals. Effective team leaders teach teams to frame decisions, leverage outside viewpoints, seek critical information and to evaluate risks in a manner that is clinical, objective and comprehensive.

4. Don’t skip the feedback. Of all of the performance tools in our  leadership toolkit, feedback is perhaps the most powerful. It is also the most abused, misused and ignored. Delivering feedback on performance requires the leader to have the courage to tackle a difficult topic with a group and/or with individuals, and we tend to avoid this perceived form of confrontation. That’s a huge mistake. Keep the feedback business focused and behavioral. Tackle it without indicting the team. Tie it to the business…ensure that it is behavioral and dispense it early and often. And of course, don’t forget ample helpings of any well-earned positive feedback.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

There are few things in life or business more challenging than attempting to promote group performance. And there’s no post, article or even book that contains all of the right answers. There are however, some critical habits that you as a lifetime student of human and group behavior can promote as a means of quieting the dysfunction and harnessing the talent in front of you. Great teams don’t occur by accident or luck. They are the outcome of deliberate hard work.

Additional Reading:

I highly recommend the work of the (recently) late J. Richard Hackman…I like his book, “Leading Teams,” and fortunately, he left us with another 9 or so books and many great articles.

Leigh Thompson’s “Making the Team,” 4th edition is the best $100+ you’ll ever spend if building teams is your primary job.

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More Professional Development Reads from Art Petty:

Don’t miss the next Leadership Caffeine-Newsletter! Register herebook cover: shows title Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development by Art Petty. Includes image of a coffee cup.

For more ideas on professional development-one sound bite at a time, check out Art’s latest book: 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’s New Leader’s e-News.

An ideal book for anyone starting out in leadership: Practical Lessons in Leadership by Art Petty and Rich Petro.

Need help with Feedback? Art’s new online program: Learning to Master Feedback

 Note: for volume orders of one or both books, drop Art a note for pricing information.

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