Make Meaning as a Leader

Guy Kawasaki’s “Make Meaning” encouragement for entrepreneurs described in his book, The Art of the Start, and here by Guy himself in this brief video clip, has always resonated with me as a rallying cry for leaders hoping in their own way to make a difference.

Kawasaki suggests that the most successful start-ups aren’t preoccupied on making money, but rather they are focused on changing the world in some unique way…fundamentally on making the world a better place.  While he describes his belief as perhaps naïve and romantic, in my opinion, the most successful firms and leaders incorporate a hefty dose of big dreaming as rocket fuel for their efforts.

Dream big and the nature of work changes to the art and thrill of creation. Fail to identify a dream to chase and work becomes a series of endless tasks without meaning.

The best leaders that I know are driven by an internal belief and desire to create something good and significant through their leadership efforts. They are egotistical enough to understand that they want to pursue greatness in some terms, and they are humble enough to know that none of this is about them, but rather it is for and with and by others that this something can be achieved.

They also are confident enough to recognize that the big dream might just be in the mind of a soft-spoken team member or in the collective consciousness of a team that has long wrestled with serving customers.  Their job is not fundamentally to create the dream, but rather to extract and form it and make it tangible. Their job is to give meaning to a dream.

Kawasaki offers three suggestions for “making meaning” on a societal scale as an entrepreneur:

• Increase the quality of life
• Right a wrong
• Prevent the end of something good

While the scale may shrink a bit depending upon your leadership view, you will be well served to operate with a “make meaning” mindset and to help your team frame and chase a dream.  The alternative is that all of this is just work.

The Three C’s and One D of Great Hiring According to Small Business Owners

Experienced small business owners and managers understand the critical importance of making great hires.  The right people propel your business and the wrong ones cost you precious time and money. The wrong hires ring up expensive opportunity costs by making less than optimal decisions, inappropriately leading or misleading your teams and not helping you create value and gain a competitive advantage.

There’s an entire industry and ample science and psychology behind the various tools and approaches for assessing personalities, gauging intelligence and conducting interviews that systematically uncover the real individual.  That’s all good and important…especially the behavioral interviewing part, however, most small and mid-sized business owners and managers that I know, make key hiring decisions more on gut feeling than on the output of rigorous assessment practices and tools. And while some have finely tuned “hiring guts,” a good number of owners and managers lament the bad calls and the lack of access to help.

I spoke to a number of owners running visibly successful firms and asked for their insights on hiring talent on their teams.  The roll-up of their advice is as follows (I paraphrase):

-Understand the nature of the position and your expectations for the individual in that position today and five years from now. Hire people that have the intelligence, acumen and drive to both grow the role and grow with the role.

-A caveat to the first point: don’t be cheap now or you’ll pay for it later.  Invest in the right talent today, even if it means paying more than you had hoped for.  The right person will pay dividends almost immediately and long into the future.

And importantly, hire for the 3 C’s and 1 D: Character, Critical Thinking Skills, Communication Capabilities and Decision Making Acumen.

-Character: look for evidence through behavioral interviewing and reference checking of core values, handling of ethical dilemmas and commitment to the development and support of others.  It’s not hard to discern someone that’s in it for themselves and “win at any costs” versus someone with a more externally oriented focus.  One business owner likes to evaluate people by how they compete as part of athletic teams.  He’s been known to invite a potential male hires to his weekly basketball game at the Y.

-Critical Thinking Skills: truth be told, the phrase is mine and not one used directly by the business owners that I spoke with, but the meaning is the same.  People are looking for individuals that see big pictures or that recognize patterns from the noise in the environment.  They make sense out of chaos and are capable of forming plans to exploit the chaos to their firm’s advantage. These are the people that dream up new products, come up with new ways of marketing and selling or see opportunities for gaining efficiencies through improved processes. It sounds lofty, but it can be as simple as the example below.

One manager describes looking for any signs that the individual attacks problems with non-traditional solutions. “I would rather hear a potential sales rep tell me how she landed the deal by investing a business day observing the customer’s team and then tailoring the proposed solution based on what she learned, versus a rep that plays only by the price book.  The latter are a dime a dozen.”

-Communication Capabilities: One comment: “I hire people that build credibility every time they open their mouths. I want to be impressed by what they ask and how they answer.  It shows me how they think, it provides insight into their character and it tells me whether they have the gray matter that I need to grow my business.”

Another indicated, “I hire great communicators and it starts with how well they listen. If someone proves to me that they are a good listener and that they understand that when someone else is talking, their only job is to understand the real intent of the person talking,” I want to hire that person.

Still another offered that she looks carefully beyond the resume and how an individual expresses himself/herself in writing. “I want to understand the complete communicator, and too often, we forget to look at how an individual presents himself in writing.  This is an important indicator of intelligence for me.”

-Decision Making Acumen: Again, my phrase, but consistent agreement.  One individual summed it up best: “I look for the individual’s examples of tough decisions.  What were the stakes? How did she assess risk?  How did she gather her data?  Who’s opinion did she seek?  How fast did she act?”

Another commented: “It’s important for me to understand how people deal with bad decisions. Some are convinced that they can fix anything and will continue to pursue a clearly bad course of action.  Others understand that accepting a bad decision and learning from it is the right next step.  If I can find good examples of how someone handled genuine mistakes, I gain great insight into an individual’s approach to business and leadership.”

The Bottom-Line for Now:

You can do much worse than improving your ability to gauge the 3 C’s and a D.  Character, communications capabilities, critical thinking skills and decision making acumen are the raw materials required for individual and organizational success.  Here’s to your hiring health!

Leading the Driven Individual

Note from Art: My use of the “Driven Individual” term here encompasses the big-thinkers and game changers that I’ve had the privilege of supporting over my career.  I get that there are other types of Driven Individuals…those that will seize a task and not let go until it has been wrestled to the ground.  The latter group represents a subject for another day.

A great deal of popular leadership writing (mine included) focuses on the common issues and challenges with “typical employees.” Now before you grab a pitchfork and light the torches and start marching on this blog for my use of the term “typical,” don’t misconstrue my meaning.

Yes, I know that no one is “typical” and that we all have strengths and weaknesses and that it is grossly unfair to provide such a crass label to the masses of good quality employees laboring away and earning “strongly exceeds” on our grade-inflated performance evaluations.  (I can hear the pitchforks clanking again on that last shot!)

Nonetheless, it was the best label I could come up with on short notice and only a few sips into my first cup of coffee, to differentiate from the subject of today’s post: The Driven Individual (DI). This is the “atypical, super-motivated, cannot do enough, has limitless energy and enthusiasm and offers capabilities that have no visible boundaries,” type of employee.

While one might consider the DI to be a leader’s dream, the reality is that these wonderful individuals offer a unique set of challenges that require special care and feeding. My perspectives are based on personal experience working with some brilliant but challenging DI’s and reflect both the good outcomes and some spectacular misfires on my part.

Understanding and Leading the Driven Individual:

Recognize that these individuals don’t think about problems like the rest of us.  What we view as a set of tasks or a discrete goal, the DI views as an opportunity to change the world.  DI’s in my experience are often “systems” thinkers, looking at the big picture and offering ideas that may be transformational.

A simple example might be an engineer or product manager that sees an opening for a new product.  The product idea might be innovative, but the DI is constitutionally and genetically wired to attempt to rethink how the offering can redistribute the wealth of an entire industry. The iPod was a cool innovation beyond the Walkman.  The iPod plus iTunes reset the profit pattern of an entire market and changed the world.  You bet that there were a bunch of DI’s and one obvious one (Steve Jobs) behind that.

Another example is the individual that looks at the way certain tasks are executed in an organization and sees an opportunity to streamline, eliminate waste and improve coordination.  This Deming-like thinker gets the fact that “the system” is the tool for success of failure and is always looking at problems and processes from that perspective.

And one other core observation of my own in working around DI’s is their reaction to failure. I’ve yet to meet one of these characters that didn’t respond by licking wounds for a day or so and then coming back stronger…either for the project that failed or on a new idea.  They don’t need false motivation from you, they need recovery time and space.

Leadership Guidance

-Let DI’s run, but make certain that you stay engaged enough to keep them from pursuing too many revolutionary activities at one time. Some of these characters love to catalyze revolutions but lose interest for the long fight.  Left unchecked, their passion and exuberance and brilliance can lead to too many great projects chasing too few resources.

-Don’t ask the types of DIs that I’m describing in this post serve as project managers. I’ve made this mistake and I’ve yet to succeed with this configuration. The minutiae of execution detail acts like a leash on creativity and energy.  On the other hand, this same DI that might not be a great project leader is most definitely the heart and soul of the project, so they must remain involved as architect, champion and visionary.

-Don’t ever micromanage a DI.  Frankly, don’t ever micromanage anyone, especially a DI.

-Watch out! DIs I’ve known have tended to have little regard for social niceties and are prone to stepping on toes or entire bodies. The goal is the thing for these DIs and if they have to throw a few body blocks along the way, that is fine.  If you have this form of DI on your team, you’ve got a non-trivial leadership challenge in front of you.

The cultural pressure from the rest of the team may ultimately demand that you act to remove this “social misfit,” while your tendency will be to rationalize the behavior as the price to pay for their brilliance.  Coaching, constant feedback and more coaching can help minimize the body count, but won’t completely eliminate the issue.  Get this right and your DI will do great things for you and others will recognize how they benefit as well.  Manage this wrong by either allowing reckless, free reign or worse yet, attempt to neutralize the DI and you will fail.

-Don’t let DIs sit idle or you will bore them into looking elsewhere, including your competitors, for their next challenge. Remember, these individuals are thinking three chess moves ahead of the rest of us, and as they mentally wind down on one issue, there needs to be a new one ready to take its place.

-Be careful: some DIs enjoy visibility and others run from it. Don’t misfire by either ignoring this for those that like the accolades or over-using it for those that would rather have a root canal without drugs than have to stand up at a company meeting.

The Bottom Line for Now:

I’ve barely scratched the surface of this topic, but need to stop somewhere.  I love the challenge of working around and providing the environment for Driven Individuals to succeed.  Get this right and fortunes are made.  Get it wrong, and you’ll wreak havoc on the workplace.   The stakes are big, and the Driven Individual will challenge you to earn your keep.

Leadership Caffeine-Develop a Big Picture View or Risk Becoming a Carp

Far too many leaders that I encounter lack awareness of the broader forces swirling around their firms, their customers and those shape-shifting clusters that we describe as industries.

Given the hurricane like market and societal forces buffeting our globe today, a strategy of boarding up the windows and hunkering down is tantamount to committing corporate suicide. Yet, mostly by the sin of omission, this is exactly what I’m observing inside too many organizations.

I cannot rationalize why some firms lack the systems and cultural elements that encourage environmental scanning, assessment and action formulation, but I can empathize just a bit.

The world is a complex place and increasingly, planning and managing businesses for value creation has become a “Wicked Problem” where the volume of contradictory and conflicting information is overwhelming.  Ignoring this complexity and focusing on controllable issues and digestible problems is an understandable human response.  In many cases, taking an Occam’s Razor approach is much better than falling victim to the malady of complexity induced organizational paralysis.  However, in cases where a firm marches along oblivious and/or unresponsive to the swirling forces constantly reshaping the world it is a wholesale failure of leadership.

There are no miracle cures or silver bullets for making sense out of the chaos, other than the hard work of paying attention, assessing and either reacting or pro-acting as the occasion merits.

Building a learning culture is essential to survival, not just success. For real-time examples of firms that don’t and did not get it, pick up any newspaper.  And while the smaller firms in our economy don’t grab the headlines, the failures and the failing are epidemic here as well.  At least part of this epidemic stems from a failure of top leaders to comprehend the destructive power of the broader market forces until right after these force have flattened their firms.

How the Lowly Carp Fits Into this Story:

The physicist and author, Dr. Michio Kaku uses the following personal anecdote to challenge people to think beyond the confines of their current four dimensions into the possibilities of a much more complex and much larger universe:

“When I was a child, I used to visit the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco. I would spend hours fascinated by the carp, who lived in a very shallow pond just inches beneath the lily pads, just beneath my fingers, totally oblivious to the universe above them.

I would ask myself a question only a child could ask: what would it be like to be a carp? What a strange world it would be! I imagined that the pond would be an entire universe, one that is two-dimensional in space. The carp would only be able to swim forwards and backwards, and left and right. But I imagined that the concept of “up”, beyond the lily pads, would be totally alien to them. Any carp scientist daring to talk about “hyperspace”, i.e. the third dimension “above” the pond, would immediately be labeled a crank.

Today, many physicists believe that we are the carp swimming in our tiny pond, blissfully unaware of invisible, unseen universes hovering just above us in hyperspace. We spend our life in three spatial dimensions, confident that what we can see with our telescopes is all there is, ignorant of the possibility of 10 dimensional hyperspace.”

–

While fascinated by the opportunities and possibilities of 10-dimensional hyperspace, the comparison in this post is to those that operate in the confines of their firms and traditional industry boundaries, without sticking their heads out of the pond to observe the broader world and the impact that it is having on their personal pond.

9 Suggestions for Not Becoming A Carp (Or Improving Your Team’s External Awareness and Chances of Survival):

• Establish the audacious goal of creating a cultural evolution to increase your team’s/firm’s external awareness AND ability to act.  Many of the following support this goal.

• Let people know that it is their job to monitor…customers, competitors and partners.  Reinforce this by creating systems to do something with the lessons learned and insights.

• Create forums to discuss the external world and ensure that these forums don’t succumb to the powerful gravitational pull of internal stuff.

• Challenge business units and leaders to define “learning” strategies. Challenge IT to create systems that enable collection, translation and dissemination.

• Ask and require answers to the question: “What does this mean for us? Our customers? Our future?

• Connect external factors and internal hypotheses to improvement and innovation actions and then measure and report the results of these efforts.

• Run strategy reviews with an emphasis on connecting what’s happening externally to how resources are being used/invested internally.  If there is no connection, blow up the project.

• Recognize the need to use the tools of management…especially structure as a means to create value out of changing forces.  While your current processes and culture might not support responding to change by building the product that will cannibalize your business, a dedicated project team, a spin-out or an acquired firm might enjoy a higher probability of success.

• Seek out varied perspectives. Constantly. Remember, asking another carp in the pond about the world outside the pond will only get you another perspective from the pond.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

This topic invariably invites debate and a fair amount of criticism, especially from top leaders that feel that my observations are an indictment of their efforts.  And while I am most definitely offering criticism, my primary purpose is to encourage you as a leader to live up to your billing as a sentient being.  While a carp may perceive the outcome of an environmental change, you alone plus your team members are capable of assessing and taking action to survive and ideally prosper.

Vow not to become a carp this year or any year.

Leadership Caffeine: Five Simple Suggestions for Minimizing Management Myopia

Participate in or monitor enough management team conversations and you will invariably conclude that it’s darned hard for these teams to spend quality time discussing external issues.

The gravitational pull of internal “stuff” is overwhelming and resists all attempts to move the conversation to topics outside of the firm’s four walls, preferring instead to keep managers focused on the nuances of their own operations.  The result is a self-fulfilling management myopia where the view on the world is grossly limited to the immediate surroundings…and ranges as far as the eyes can see outside conference room windows.

Myopic firms miss market moves and focus incorrectly on improving yesterday’s systems and products and services while customers are looking and moving forward in search of new solutions to emerging vexing problems.

Overcoming this myopia requires extraordinary effort on the part of key leaders to train and enable their teams to move outside of the four walls and to build a more comprehensive market view that is constantly in the process of being refreshed.

5 Simple Suggestions for Minimizing Management Myopia:

1.  Start by scheduling regular forums where the only items discussed are external in nature. Create a series of core questions that challenge team members to show up prepared to talk about what’s going on with customers, competitors and other industry ecosystem players.  Resist the urge in these forums to move towards actions and internal items with one exception.

2. The one exception to the “no internal discussion rule,” is to teach your team members to end their discussions of external forces/factors/changes with “What this means for our firm is… .” Capture these notes.

3.  Charge team members with the task of monitoring specific competitors and industry participants and providing regular updates to the group as well as instantaneous updates as conditions change.  Remember, that the insights must always be accompanied by, “What this means for our firm is…” statements.   Rotate assignments periodically to keep people fresh.

4.  Interview customers. Regularly.  It’s interesting to sit around and speculate on what customers are doing or thinking, but it’s much more compelling and actionable to truly understand what’s on their minds.  Again, create a simple customer survey script and charge your key managers and contributors with keeping tabs on specific customers.  I’ve done this with development resources, product managers and of course executive managers, and it gets people on your team connected to someone in the market.  Bring the findings into your “external forums” and share.

5.  If your team is internally focused such as IT or an internal support group, make certain to forge relationships with external facing colleagues and departments.  Invite members of these groups to join your meetings and to share updates on current market issues.  Pay attention for opportunities to better tune your function’s activities and priorities to issues and opportunities that your external facing colleagues see in the market.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Inevitably the best outcome of good external awareness is the reflection of insights in program, product and service improvements that create value for customers and profitable growth for your firm.  You will need to develop a good mechanism for translating external awareness into internal execution, however, that’s a post for another day.

For now, set a goal to increase your team’s external IQ and try the suggestions here on for size.  And be certain to double-back and share with us your own suggestions.  After all, your input is part of my program to stay externally aware!

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