Leadership Caffeine: The Noble Pursuit of Power and Influence
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leadership Skills, Life and Business, Management Education, Product Management, Professional Growth, Project Management, Surviving Lousy Leaders, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
Note from Art: no ethics or morals were harmed in the making of this post.
Power and influence are not dirty words. Both are components of every organization’s environment and both must be carefully cultivated to succeed as a formal or informal leader.
Power and influence provide the motive power behind organizations and initiatives and the lubrication that keeps the parts and people from binding and grinding and self-destructing.
Nothing happens without the application of power and influence wielded by those that have carefully cultivated these qualities. And while the notion of someone actively pursuing power might seem reprehensible or dirty or immoral to some, I’m not sure why.
Frequently Overheard:
“I don’t want to play the games.”
“I’m sick and tired of politics”
And the always colorful and image evoking, “He must have pictures…”
We’ve all heard those statements and perhaps nodded in agreement. Yet the presence of humans in the working environment guarantees that there will be those that are more effective at connecting, engaging, motivating, and ultimately getting things done through others. And these aren’t necessarily the smartest people or the hardest workers, but they are more than likely the smartest workers.
Intelligence is More than I.Q.
Those that cultivate power and influence work hard on managing themselves. They are emotionally intelligent. These power-pursuers also are innately aware of the impact that they have on others, and they draw upon well-honed skills to manage external perceptions and to adapt to changing situations. They are socially intelligent.
Personal Branding & Building Respectful Relationships:
Those with power and influence have carefully thought through their own personal brand and value proposition, and work hard reinforcing this brand through their actions and behaviors. Their focus is on getting work done through others and asserting their agenda, and to do that, they must forge respectful relationships, build strong social networks and guiding coalitions and they must support others more often than they ask for support.
And my informal observation on those that successfully cultivate organizational power and influence is that they are masters at managing upwards. This is different than sucking up. It’s understanding your boss’s agenda and priorities and helping her succeed, and it’s leveraging those priorities to grow visibility, get involved with key projects and to curry support.
Backroom Dealers and Dirty Politicians Need Not Apply:
While the bad eggs in the corporate world grab the headlines and the cool orange prison garb that’s been so executive fashionable for the past decade, the gross majority of people in organizations do not resemble those characters.
I’ve worked in and around companies with hundreds to hundreds of thousands of employees and while there have been some blog post worthy lousy leaders, they are the exception not the rule.
From top executives to truly powerful individual contributors that serve as influencers on key strategic choices and projects to those leading from the middle, there are great collectors and noble users of powers almost everywhere.
The abusers and the abusive exist and their tactics are reprehensible. I don’t have an easy answer if you are victimized by one of those creatures, other than to indicate that if you improve your cultivation of power and influence, you will be better able to deal with or avoid the situation and person the next time.
6 Reasons Why Pursuing Power and Influence is a Good Career Move:
1. Productivity. Those with power and influence get more done. You can print this and put it on a bumper sticker!
2. It’s honest, hard work. The pursuit of power and influence in an organization involves figuring out how to stand out from the crowd. This is generally best accomplished by some combination of darned hard work, great ideas, building good social networks and helping your boss succeed. Nothing wrong with those pursuits!
3, It’s about supporting your brand authenticity. The act of pursuing power is in large part a personal branding activity. You have to decide what you stand for and you need to communicate and substantiate your value proposition through your actions. Professionals should take responsibility for their personal branding, and the pursuit of power and influence requires that you live up to your stated value proposition. People are generally not naïve and can smell a hollow value proposition and an inauthentic leader a few miles away.
4. You cultivate critical growth skills. Gaining power and influence requires great people skills…great social intelligence. Part of cultivating great people skills involves understanding how you are perceived by those around you, and this means that you must be alert and open to feedback and to making the effort to improve based on the feedback. This growing power and influence stuff is honest, hard work!
5. You create a multiplier effect. As you cultivate power, you have the ability to extend your good across the organization. It’s easy to talk about how you wish things would work. Those with power and influence are able to define how things truly work and extend their vision across teams and entire organizations.
6. You create demand for you. Your senior leaders want to see people with ambition, commitment and an interest in doing more. As long as your approach to growth doesn’t involve stepping on the heads and hands of those that you are scrambling over, we really like aggressive people that are willing to help in the good fight.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
The pursuit of power and influence is noble. Given the choice between an individual self-confident enough to cultivate power and one not interested in “playing the game,” I know where I’m going every time. The real “game” is about winning by serving customers and stakeholders and legally beating the snot out of competitors.
What’s your strategy to grow your power?
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Coming Tuesday: the latest episode of the Management Excellence Book Series, featuring a podcast interview with Jocelyn Davis, co-author of Strategic Speed. Also, in case you missed it, check out the prior episode with Bob Sutton, author of Good Boss, Bad Boss.
Team Conflict? As Long as It’s Not Personal, Run With It
Filed under: Innovation, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Making Decisions, Management Education, Performance, Professional Growth, Project Management
I’m leery of happy teams. Don’t get me wrong. I like positive situations and working with happy people, however, in my experience, the happy teams are the ones that produce mediocre results or, they don’t produce at all.
Give me a group of people that show up to do battle on the issues versus the team that strives for peace and harmony, any day.
Just as “being liked” isn’t required to be effective as a leader, neither is maintaining peace and harmony on the team required for success. What is required is the ability to push the envelope on creativity, talk openly and freely about problems and shortcomings, and to cry foul when someone violates the group’s norms for performance, behavior and accountability.
For many people, conflict in the team environment feels wrong. It’s uncomfortable. Conflict breeds personal stress and group tension, and sometimes creates a hue and cry for “getting along.” While an aversion to conflict is understandable if it is personal in nature, task and process conflict are important factors in propelling high-performance teams forward.
5 Reasons a Dose of Conflict Might Be Healthy For Your Team:
1. Elephants aren’t allowed to hide in the room. The big issues and tough topics are uncovered quickly and dispatched without worrying about personal interests and political boundaries.
2. Social loafing is squashed. Hanging out and working at less than full tilt becomes painfully obvious in environments where the group is challenging itself to move together through the jungle. People pull their weight or they are left behind.
3. Decisions are held to a higher standard. While the potential pitfalls of group decision-making are well known, teams that challenge themselves and each other in pursuit of achievement tend to have higher standards for the quality of their decisions. Instead of a rush-to-decide or a drive-to-consensus culture found on more collegial teams, task-focused groups search for answers that pass the filters for both quality and speed. In my experience, they challenge assumptions, seek the right or at least better data and assess risks and implications much more effectively than the “let’s all get along” teams.
4. Leadership skills are challenged and strengthened. High task conflict teams are leadership laboratories. One of the “elephants in the room” of my argument here is that leading these teams is not for the faint of heart. Team leaders must learn to manage the flow and energy of the conflict to ensure that it doesn’t move into personal territory. They also need to be adept at helping maneuver the team from the heat of robust dialogue to a decision and implementation. These are clearly non-trivial leadership challenges and remarkable learning opportunities for all involved.
5. Standards for performance are enhanced. Participants refuse to settle for anything other than success, and success is often defined as either exceeding or obliterating targets or, innovating in some meaningful fashion. The task conflict pushes people higher and harder. Along the way, these high performance teams raise the bar for everyone in the organization.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
I suspect that I’m skating on the thin-ice of a great number of people that find conflict distressing and destructive. Keep in mind that my context is task or process conflict, and not anything personal in nature. It takes an emotionally intelligent group to pull this off and not let good and tough discussion over the right issues reduce to squabbling and paralysis. It’s hard work to find and foster this type of a team and environment. But who said that producing high performance was easy work? It’s most definitely not.
6 Steps for Avoiding Groupthink on Your Team
Filed under: Leadership, Leadership Skills, Making Decisions, Management Education, Performance, Project Management, Strategy
Groupthink is one of the nefarious decision-making missteps of teams, and a trap that many smart people and groups have fallen victim to throughout history.
From the classic example cited in nearly every discussion on decision-making, the Kennedy administration’s Bay of Pigs fiasco, to Ford’s launch of the Edsel, to Neviille Chamberlin’s inner circle that believed peace with Hitler was at hand, Groupthink has earned a prominent place in our culture.
And while you might not be planning an invasion or negotiation with evil dictators or planning on launching an ugly automobile, chances are that Groupthink has show up from time to time in your professional world.
Groupthink at Work in the Workplace:
The essence of this decision-making trap is the irrational pursuit of consensus above all other priorities. Along the way, those that study group dynamics have identified a number of technical characteristics of Groupthink, including:suppression of reality testing, censorship of doubts, ignoring outside information, overconfidence and an emerging attitude of invulnerability. While some of these terms have a distinct technical ring to them, they are descriptive enough to suggest a closed, insular and out-of-touch with reality team culture.
I see Groupthink at work regularly on management teams that have convinced themselves that their strategy is the only way forward. They spend months defining a universe that fits their collective frame of reference, and then they build plans to operate in that universe. While the plans are often elegant, the team’s construct on the external world and clients becomes as much fiction as fact, guaranteeing failure. After a long period of time invested in framing this strategy, Groupthink’s cousin, Escalation of Commitment, joins the party and together, they work to block out evidence to the contrary and prevent the team from recognizing the need to restart.
Functional groups are prone to a kind of Groupthink, when the organization’s culture and structure emphasizes rigid boundaries and strong penalties for stepping on turf and toes that are not your own. The isolated group begins to define the internal and external world from its own viewpoint, and almost as a survival strategy, it shuts out external opinion and blocks ideas that are potentially threatening to their view and their silo boundaries.
And perhaps more commonplace, project groups of all types work to believe that achieving consensus is the only way to move forward on an issue. Often, if you peel a layer back on the push towards consensus, it’s driven in large part out of an irrational concern for the feelings of others. “We want people to feel invested,” or, “I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes.” If this were the holiday season, I would offer a distinct, “Humbug!” The pursuit of consensus gives rise to the tyranny of mediocrity. Or worse.
6 Steps to Avoid Groupthink on Teams:
1. Anticipate Groupthink in your Risk Plan. While it might sound like planning to fail, ignoring the potential for Groupthink is a failure to plan for a very real risk. And like any risk plan, there must be processes for monitoring and mitigating emerging Groupthink.
2. Size counts. Limit the typical team size to less than 10 and ensure that there are well-defined boundaries for inclusion. Porous team boundaries and widespread casual involvement on teams breeds dysfunction, including pressure towards consensus for the wrong reasons.
3. Invite external perspectives at various stages of the process. Of course, you’ve got to have the procedures in place to both protect external viewpoints and to find ways to incorporate them into the group’s thinking and plans.
4. Lengthen the discussion phase…use structured discussion to focus on vetting the issues. Delay a rush to judgment. I encourage groups to incorporate non-typical discussion processes such as Six Hats Thinking to dramatically improve discussion quality.
5. Develop a second solution. I referenced this approach in Practical Lessons in Leadership. Challenge your team to assume that management will reject their first solution. Develop an alternative and very different second solution and be prepared to defend it.
6. Invite the Devil’s Advocate to the party. While a designated Devil’s Advocate is a contrived role and everyone knows it, at least someone will be throwing rocks at the groups beautiful picture. Rules on respecting and vetting the DA’s perspective are critical to benefitting from this approach.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Forewarned is forearmed. Decision-making is tough enough, and it grows in complexity when there are groups involved. Don’t naively assume that your group of smart people is immune to the many pitfalls and missteps that dot the path towards a decision. Groupthink is like the common cold, and while there may not be a cure, there sure are some preventative measures that can help keep it at bay.
The Problem(s) with Teams
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Management Education, Middle Management, Performance, Professional Growth, Project Management, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
It’s increasingly likely that you will spend a good deal of your professional time working on temporary teams. It’s also likely that you will experience a fair amount of frustration and even team failure along the way.
Most organizations have yet to meet a problem (or opportunity) that they won’t throw a team at to solve. Let’s face it, it’s tempting to assume that a group of motivated, diverse individuals will trump the lone soldier when it comes to creativity, problem-solving and planning.
Or, at least it’s comfortable to think so.
Harvard Professor, J. Richard Hackman, author of the outstanding book, Leading Teams, and Professor Leigh Thompson at Kellogg (Northwestern) and author of another outstanding book, Making the Team, offer their separate but similar insights on the world of teams and teaming. We are well served to consider their findings.
Professor Hackman in an interview in Harvard Business Review: “I have no question that when you have a team, the possibility exists that it will generate magic, producing something extraordinary… But don’t count on it.”
and
“Research consistently shows that teams underperform, despite all the extra resources they have. That’s because problems with coordination and motivation typically chip away at the benefits of collaboration.”
In a similar vein, Professor Thompson offers in her book, Making the Team, “Teams are not always the answer- teams may provide insight, creativity, and knowledge in a way that a person working independently cannot but teamwork may also lead to confusion, delay, and poor decision-making.”
Fallacies and Challenges to Conventional Thinking About Teams:
Professor Hackman identifies some common fallacies, including:
- More inclusion is better. Art’s comments: Increased group size adds new complexities and the common practice of including people due to ego or politics breeds a whole set of dysfunctional issues.
- Harmony is required for high team performance. Art’s comments: There’s certainly a natural desire for people to work in an environment where the tension is low. This is another area where research contradicts traditional thinking. Teams with some tension may very well out-perform the more collegial groups.
- Having a deviant in the group is bad. Art’s comments: Interesting word choice. This deviant…the person capable of standing up against the group-think of teams is similar to the character referenced in my post, Help Wanted-Leaders with Moral Courage, and similar to the Heretic referenced by management blogger (No Smoke and Mirrors) and frequent commenter at this site, Mark Allen Roberts. The potential for massive decision-making errors in group settings is countered by ensuring someone is confident enough to challenge the conventional thinking at the right time.
- Long-standing teams lose their edge as members grow to accept the shortcomings and foibles of others. Art’s comments: the research conducted by Hackman and others indicates just the opposite. Long-standing teams offer the potential for significantly improved quality and performance.
Professor Thompson challenges conventional thinking about teams with the following:
- Conflict among team members is not always a bad thing-it may be necessary for effective decision making as it can foment accuracy, insight, understanding, trust and innovation.
- Strong leadership is not always necessary for strong teams-a leader has two main functions: structure the team environment and coach the team members.
- Good teams can still fail under the wrong circumstances. To be successful in the long run, teams need ongoing resources and support.
And finally, a comment from Professor Thompson on that classic of all techniques to straighten out the dysfunctional team, the Retreat.
- Retreats will not fix all conflicts between team members unless they address the structural and design problems that plague the team on a day-to-day basis in the work environment.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
It’s relatively easy to generate a saccharine-sweet list of things that we need to do to create effective teams. We’ll get to the list of best practices right after we spend some time thinking about the pitfalls and obstacles that make effective team development a tough job.
There’s no doubt in my mind that it is increasingly critical for us to learn how to perform well on teams and how to create high performing teams. It’s also important to recognize that for some issues, the reflex action to “put a team on it,” may be wrong. Thanks to Professors Hackman and Thompson, you’ve got some research-backed food for thought as you consider how to improve team performance.
I’ll be back soon with some thoughts on the decision-making pitfalls of groups. Yes, it turns out that we’ve got a lot of problems in this area as well.
Hey, this would be easy if it weren’t for the people…
Leadership Caffeine-5 Ideas for Improving Your Ability to Engage as a Leader
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leadership Skills, Making Decisions, Management Education, Organizational Transformation, Performance, Project Management, Talent Management, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
Some leaders move through their days like a flat rock skipping over the surface of a pond. They are focused on personal efficiency and speed, and the faster they move and the more decisions that they make, the better they believe they are doing as leaders.
Their days are blurs of decisions, quick meetings, hurried hallway exchanges and even more hurried text and e-mail messages, often created while they are present but not engaged in the event or conversation of the moment.
These transactional leaders define victory in the form of quantity, not quality. They take pride in keeping things moving and they truly believe they are helping others navigate through their own busy days.
There are undoubtedly environments and situations where transactional leadership is essential. For example, the operating room, fighting a fire and the battlefield are all settings where this type of leadership can mean the difference between life and death. However, even in these extreme cases, people have typically worked and succeeded and failed and learned together, and there are deep bonds that enable a second-to-second type of environment to work effectively.
Transactional Leadership is Costly:
The cost of leading from a purely transactional approach is the loss of ability to engage and truly understand people, situations and complex problems. There’s no depth to the exchanges, and relationships are superficial at best
Transactional leaders exhaust and frustrate their employees, engendering animosity or at least an overarching sense of malaise in the workplace. Many front-line and first-time leaders fall into this convenient style-trap simply because they don’t know any better.
If improving performance, fostering a culture of learning and innovation and developing the confidence to tackle the tough topics are all important for your firm, it’s time to engage more and transact less.
5 Ideas for Improving Your Engagement Effectiveness:
1. Stop and focus. While it may seem unnatural, you need to force yourself to stop what you are doing and focus all of your energy and attention on the individual(s) in front of you. One former transactional manager described the process of literally having to take a second or two to clear her mind, orient herself in the present and focus exclusively on the current situation. She found it particularly helpful to make certain that any of her electronic distractions were on silent and upside down, or better yet, out of site.
2. Ask clarifying questions & teach, don’t tell. Instead of jumping to solutions, force yourself to ask questions to understand the broader context of the issue at hand. While it might be easy for you to offer a solution after a few minutes of discussion, you are better served to help people arrive at a conclusion. Leaders that engage understand the importance of this approach as a teaching tool.
3. Take time to follow-up. The issue exchange is not the end of transaction, but the beginning of a long-term relationship. Reach out to someone that offered good ideas or showed initiative and say thanks and offer encouragement.
4. Recognize the great battles raging inside of everyone. With thanks to Tom Peters for reminding us all of this, remember that everyone (and this means you too!) has a great battle raging inside. This may be personal, professional or spiritual, but it is a mostly silent battle that is THE priority of the individual in front of you. Look for signs, provide relief if you sense that is needed or just quietly respect the battle in the professional and courteous manner that you deal with the individual.
5. Change your definition of leadership success. Instead of focusing on valuing your ability to make snap decisions as fast as issues are presented, it’s time to completely rethink your definition of success. True success as a leader occurs over time in the form of professional development for others, great and sustained results for the organization, innovation, and building an environment where people thrive.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
There are always opportunities for you to improve your effectiveness at engaging with your team members and colleagues. While you may sense that you are slowing down, sometimes, you need to slow down to allow everyone else to speed up.
Quit transacting and start engaging!
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