Leading the Driven Individual
Filed under: Innovation, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Management Education, Organizational Transformation, Performance, Product Management, Professional Growth, Project Management, Talent Management
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.
Leading in the Trenches-Recovering from Trickle Down Project Management Chaos
Filed under: Leadership, Making Decisions, Management Excellence Tips for Tough Times, Middle Management, Performance, Product Management, Project Management
Quite a while ago, I wrote a piece entitled, “Too Many Projects Chasing Too Few Resources,” where I exhorted executives and organizations to adopt a rigorous project filtering process and to discover the power of the word, “No,” when it comes to project selection.
Project inflation…the spread of too many projects and the heaping of them upon the tormented and torn few is a formula for disaster. Unfortunately, work force reductions and pressures to reduce costs, improve processes and to innovate all fuel project inflation.
A colleague described the scenario in her firm as follows: “It seems like we are reacting in knee-jerk fashion to what’s going on in the economy and our industry by saying “Yes” to anything and everything that looks like it might cut costs or improve operating efficiencies. I get that, but we’re literally accepting and launching every project that comes along and we have even fewer resources to execute these projects than we did a year ago.”
Yep, the projects always trickle down from somewhere up there in the rarefied air where things look and sound good in theory. Conscientious project managers always raise the resource issue and according to my colleague, that discussion often ends up with a reprioritization of existing in-process projects (moving the deck chairs) or the OK to outsource to fill the gaps.
These short-sighted solutions of course are another step towards chaos:
- Frequent reprioritization drives project team performance and morale into the porcelain bowl.
- Adding contract workers (outsourcing) can be fine, but it increases communications and administrative complexity exponentially.
- Project inflation overstresses the project management resources and often breeds a wickedly complex matrix of project responsibilities for the people doing the work.
- Fueling recovery, renewing our firms and strengthening our ability as a firm to compete are critical goals right now, and developing project selection discipline is an absolutely critical ingredient in achieving those goals.
As a starting point for gaining control of the chaos, consider these Project Filtering suggestions from my earlier post:
Ask and Answer:
- Why are we doing this project? What are the assumptions that made it seem like a good idea before and are they still valid?
- Is it a must-do or compliance initiative?
- Is it strategic? If yes, you should bounce it up against the current-state strategy and determine whether it is still relevant today. If not, kill it.
- Is it an operational improvement? If yes, can you connect the operational improvements to something that impacts strategy and customers…even through one or two degrees of separation? If you cannot connect it to something that allows you to serve customers (internal or external) more effectively, consider killing it.
- Do we have the right balance of strategic and operational initiatives?
- Are we evaluating projects based on a combination of objectively developed financial and non-financial criteria? Does our evaluation approach allow for reasonable comparison AND selection of alternatives?
The Bottom-Line:
Stop the torrent of trickle-down projects that dilute the effectiveness of your resources to something approaching gridlock. Adopt a strategic project selection and portfolio management process or prepare to run in place while the world passes you by.
Leading in the Trenches: How Well Do You Know Your Customers?
Filed under: Customer Service, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Leading Change, Making Decisions, Management Education, Marketing, Organizational Transformation, Performance, Product Management, Professional Growth, Quality Systems Management, Strategy, voice of the customer
Note from Art: Leadership is about driving the right results in the right way. We often focus on the interpersonal dynamics of leadership and the characteristics and behaviors of effective leaders. And while those issues are critically important to a firm’s success, so is ensuring that everyone is focused on the activities that create value. This inaugural “Leading in the Trenches” post will introduce an on-going series focused on applying effective leadership practices to improving critical organizational practices.
Enjoy!
The word “Customer” takes on a larger than life meaning inside most firms. It’s bandied about in meetings in slightly reverent tones. “Oh, the Customer raised this issue. This must be important.”
It’s used as an argument stopper by those that claim to speak with the Voice of the Customer. “If that’s what the customers want, we’ll have to give it to them.”
Sometimes, it almost seems like the customer is the enemy. “They don’t understand our product. If they would simply attend training, we wouldn’t have to keep simplifying our user interface.”
And at high levels, THE Customer is the reason for new strategies, directions and programs. Listen to a CEO spout a new direction or shift a paradigm and the name of THE Customer will be invoked somewhere.
Spend some time listening to all of the things done in the name of the customer, and you would be correct if you asked yourself and everyone around you, “who is this customer, anyways?”
I do this with clients (notice the subtle word shift!) and the answers are fascinating.
Them: “Well you know, people who buy are products.”
Me: “Who?”
Them: “You know, consumers.”
Me: “Which ones?”
Them: “The ones with money.”
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OK, that’s a bit of an extreme case, but it happened. More often than not, I’ll receive a description of a general class of individuals surrounded by demographic and geographic information. When I probe for a detailed understanding of who these people are, why they buy and what key problems they are solving with our offerings the answers begin to resemble the narrative above.
The Issue:
If you don’t know your customers at a sufficient level of detail, including their hopes, dreams and emotions, everything you are doing includes a high degree of guesswork and randomness. Your messaging likely includes a great deal of blah blah about your firm. Promotional activities are fired from a shotgun, and while they occasionally hit something, there is no viable, sustainable marketing system in place.
Sales efforts are grossly sub-optimized and new product and service development efforts are at best hunches.
Yikes!
It’s time to Grok Your Customers:
The authors of Tuned-In (one of my three most referenced marketing books along with Duct Tape Marketing and Crossing the Chasm) talk in detail about the need to understand individual buyer personas at a deep level. They invoke the term “Grok” popularized by Robert Heinlein in his science fiction classic, Stranger in a Strange Land, and encourage firms to “grok their customers.”
While I don’t encourage the method used in Heinlein’s book…final grokking (if memory serves) occurred once someone died and their remains were made into a nice soup and consumed, if you were able to effectively “grok your customer,” you would come to understand him as well as or better than he understands himself.
The essence of this is of course, you want to understand the customer at an emotional level and use this knowledge to create and deliver messages, products and experiences that address core emotional needs and that fix vexing problems.
John Jantsch, author of Duct Tape Marketing, talks about defining an ideal customer…one that values what you offer, is profitable for you, and values you and the experience so much that he/she will readily refer you. In order to reach the point where your focus is solely on people that value what you do (the ultimate, well-qualified target audience), you’ve got to put effort into pushing beyond the demographics of a class of customers into learning through observation and interview.
Knowing Your Customers is an Issue for Large and Small Alike
In a recent article (somewhere) on the on-going makeover and turn-around program at Starbucks, it was reported that Howard Schultz bowed to internal team pressure to begin forming a detailed understanding of customer personas…a shift away from the traditional Starbucks focus on creating a culture around their mantra of “rewarding everyday moments.” Accordingly, it is reported that you can hardly walk through Starbucks headquarters without tripping over cutouts of the core customer personas…all named and labeled with demographic and psychographic attributes. Instead of building a culture for an amorphous audience of coffee drinkers, they can focus on defining their stores, products and services for very specific consumers that value what they have to offer.
The Bottom Line:
Quit talking about customers as an amorphous glob of individuals that you bill. Start understanding who your profitable customers are and importantly, start learning about the real problems that you solve.
Remember, Peter Revson of Revlon cosmetics didn’t sell make-up, he sold hope. And the person buying a drill at the home store doesn’t need a drill, he needs a hole.
Quit guessing about your customers and start observing, listening and revisiting on all levels how you are engaging with these people that value what you do for them.
Management Excellence Audio Interview: The CEO Perspective on Product Management
Filed under: Career, Fresh Voices, Leadership, Life and Business, Management Education, Marketing Yourself, Middle Management, Organizational Transformation, Product Management, Surviving Lousy Leaders, Talent Management, management excellence audio interviews
Notes from Art: I recently mentioned that I would be kicking off the Management Excellence Audio Interview Series, and I’m thrilled to be doing it today with Mike Mulcahy, a technology industry executive that has served as a CEO, a Founder of his own start-up and a Business Unit Leader inside one of the world’s largest organizations. Oh, and Mike just happens to be one of the best sales professionals that I’ve had the privilege of knowing.
Mike is also one of those all-too-rare top executives that consistently champions the cause of product management inside his organizations. I know this first-hand, because it was Mike that provided me with an early opportunity to build a product management organization from the ground up.
We recently reconnected and Mike highlighted his on-going challenges in supporting the development of great product management and great product managers on his teams. I invited him to share his thoughts and perspectives with the community in this inaugural interview program, and he graciously agreed.
A few last comments and then on to the interview.
- The audio recording tools that I used are new to me and there are some sound quality issues. Bear with me as I improve those in future interviews. Fortunately, the issues in this one are that Mike is very audible, and I’m a bit quieter. At least we got that part right!
- I took the opportunity to poll the very active pm community out on twitter (#prodmgmt) and asked what they wanted to hear from the CEO. I received some phenomenal questions and based on the volume was only able to tackle a few here during the interview. I’ve included the full listing of the questions below…and encourage all interested parties to share their thoughts on these important issues. They are great content for future posts and interviews as well.
- Last and not least, Mike has graciously volunteered to field specific questions about the audio interview here on the blog via the comments. Ask away.
With no further adieu, here’s Mike Mulcahy for 17 minutes offering his very experienced perspectives on product management.
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Summary List of Questions from Product Managers for “the CEO” Via Twitter (#prodmgmt)
Note: some great content for comments, questions and follow-on posts. Thanks!
- What is the most compelling problem the CEO faces that he believe a pm can help solve?
- How does the ceo believe he best connects with the pm team?
- Does the CEO see prod mgmt becoming commoditized?
- What metrics does he use to determine if PM is performing well?
- Does he trust PM to stop development on a dead product?
- His view on relationships between pm and company/depts.
- What are the driving metrics he seeks from product mgmt?
- How does he encourage continuous learning from product management?
- What is product management’ss role w. development if the company is using agile?
- Do you view product management as product focused or more product marketing?
- Is product management really the Voice of the Customer?
- Does product management have a seat at the leadership table?
- I am interested to know how he feels about compensation based on product revenue.
- What innovation initiatives/practices do they have in place? What is the role of PM in them?
- How important is domain vs functional pm expertise?
- How has he positioned the PM function in his org? i.e. VP level, stand-alone or within marketing or development?
- Does PM own the product /line of business at a P& L level?
Management Excellence News, Updates & Coming Attractions
Filed under: Career, Current Affairs, Innovation, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Leading the Generations, Life and Business, Management Education, Middle Management, Product Management, Professional Growth, Project Management, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
Note from Art: While I’m remarkably sensitive to not creating an infomercial out of my blog, I am involved in a number of exciting activities that I’ve shared with some of you personally. Here’s a bit broader update and a call for speakers and interview subjects.
-Coming Soon: The Management Excellence Interview Series
I truly enjoy some of the blogs that push the envelope on mixing media to provide audio and video posts, podcasts and events, and I’m moving in that direction as well. I experimented earlier this year with some podcasts and got tired of talking with myself and haven’t come back to that medium yet.
That’s changing over the next few weeks as I embark on what I hope will be a regular feature here at Management Excellence in the form of brief audio interviews with some fascinating professionals.
I’m on tap to record the first one on Monday (for posting later that week) with Mike Mulcahy, a scrappy, no-nonsense executive that has held the hot seat in large and small organizations, and has some great insights on “The CEO’s Perspective on Product Management.”
As an aside, I conducted yet another experiment on Twitter yesterday and asked the product management community #prodmgmt what they want to hear from Mike. Their list of great questions might just help define the outline for a book! If you’re not using Twitter to tap into the many great minds out there, you are missing a great opportunity.
I am interested in building on my list of interview subjects and would love to chat with executives and professionals that have something to say about leadership, strategy, sales and marketing and performance excellence and any of the other topics that I cover here at Management Excellence. Drop me a note and I will get in touch with you.
-Where Distance Learning Meets Professional Mentoring to Support Professional Growth
During the past few years, I challenged myself to do something way out of my comfort zone and that is to learn to teach on-line. I’m a huge advocate of face to face learning, but the world is changing. I now teach distance classes here in my community and actually managed to gain permission from DePaul to teach an elective MBA course (Project Management) in a hybrid fashion…one week face to face and the next on-line. The experience has been fascinating and enlightening for me and the students have voted with stellar reviews.
It’s time for the next step.
I am putting the finishing touches on my initial distance learning meets professional mentoring programs and will launch a new website for this in September.
The first program is focused on early career professionals, and is entitled: “Considering Leadership: What to Do and How to Prepare,” and will be quickly followed with, “Congratulations You’re a First-Time Leader, What Next?” (There are another 6 on tap for more experienced professionals and audiences in product and project management, marketing and on topics ranging from leadership to strategy and execution to developing executive presence.)
What I’m excited about is that the programs are designed to offer a blend of distance learning with personal mentoring time (telephone or skype) to deliver complete schedule flexibility while integrating person to person involvement. I’ve designed the lessons to communicate core concepts and tools in short audio and video segments, supported by synced slides, and then the pdf Action Guide documents for each lesson outline the very important developmental exercises.
I engage with the participants in up-front and back-end personal calls, as well as via live teleseminars during the program. Of course, they get unlimited e-mail access to me. Programs will run 45 to 60 days and will be priced extremely aggressively to allow individuals as well as corporations to get involved.
I’m working hard to help fill some gaps in the market with these programs. People need schedule flexibility and affordability, and they need tools and programs that don’t just talk but that challenge and guide them on taking action. After all, you can no longer count on your company to support your own development and there’s little else in the market that blends flexibility with affordability with pragmatism and quality.
Step one is a quality check and I’ll be putting several early career professionals through the “Considering Program” prior to launch. More soon.
-News Sound Bites:
Practical Lessons in Leadership will be used as a text at yet another school…this time for a program on Creative Leadership at McHenry Community College here in Illinois. I’ve been invited to guest speak and I can’t wait. Nothing beats walking into a classroom and seeing your book in front of everyone with post-its sticking out and pages bent. Prior talks and Q/A sessions in these settings have been great! That’s what it was meant for!
-Speaking of Guest Speakers: I am teaching Business Plan Development at DePaul University on Monday nights this fall and would love to hear from any Chicago-area professionals with experience in venture financing and business planning interested in a guest speaking opportunity. I can talk with you about specifics. Drop me an e-mail and I’ll get in touch with you.
-More Speaking:
Creating a High Performance Culture on a Foundation of Leadership Excellence is one of my keynote topics and I’m looking forward to delivering it at a CEO Conference at the Sawmill Cree Resort in Huron, OH on September 1.
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That’s it for now, although there is some “Marketing” news in the works, but more about that later. Back to more Management Excellence content with a new Leadership Caffeine post on Monday!
Enjoy your weekend!
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