Leading in the Matrix-7 Ideas to Cultivate the Right Skills

April 11, 2012 By 5 Comments

The sub-topic in a recent research release by Global Consulting Firm, Hay Group, suggests the skills needed in effectively leading in matrixed environments (empathy, conflict management, influence and self-awareness) for those below senior management “proved to be scarce across Hay Group’s database.”

While the primary topic of the research release, “Women Poised to Lead in Matrix Work Environments” is provocative enough for me to have invited an executive from Hay Group to an upcoming episode of The Leadership Caffeine Podcast, it’s this secondary issue that truly lights my fuse and should light yours as well. (And OK, raise your hand if you didn’t intuitively suspect there was a gender difference for the above described attributes.)

If speed, adaptability, learning…and the need to innovate are more than buzzwords and corporate clichés, but in fact are the requirements for success in this fast-moving world, then building cultures, teams and people capable of succeeding in the matrix must be a priority.

This type of “stuff” tends to get lumped into the squishy, touchy-feely bucket by many leaders. That’s too bad, because the need for people who display those skills is critical, and the opportunities for those who cultivate and apply them, nearly endless. 

7 Ideas to Promote Better Matrix Leadership Skills Across the Organization:

1. Build a common vocabulary for the matrix leadership skills. Terms like emotional and social intelligence, empathy and influence are not foreign to most of us, but our definitions and understanding of them are often very different. Ensure that you identify and describe the behaviors that reflect those skills as well.

2. Don’t immediately relegate this cultural change issue of strengthening matrix leadership skills to an HR or Training task. Those groups are enablers and even stakeholders, but the CEO must be the Executive Sponsor and Champion of this culture change, and there’s much more to effecting culture change than simply creating a program or initiative in HR or Training.

3. Senior Executives need to model the behaviors. If Hay’s research applies and if your firm happens to be mostly male at the top, these behaviors/skills may not be on display. We love to mirror those in authority, and if “the do doesn’t match the tell,” talk of a culture change will be just that…followed by laughter and sarcasm.

4. Start small by working with the “integrators” in your organization. Consider working with groups of professionals who serve as integrators…those who primarily work across boundaries and who have the ability to influence broader groups. A great starting point…focus on training and coaching your project managers and work with them to bring approaches, tools and even accountability to their project groups.

5. Land and expand. Leverage the results of smaller and early initiatives to create awareness of and promote good matrix leadership behaviors by building tools (training, coaching models and accountability tools) to support strengthening of this cultural change. Move from the integrators to the managers, supervisors and team leaders.

6. Create heroes and heroic stories out of successful teams and individuals. Nothing supports a culture like heroic successes. Bring visibility to project teams and leaders who create value. This is a powerful means of building institutional memory.

7. Accept that what gets measured gets done. Find ways to assess performance and growth in matrix leadership skills. Expect to experiment here…but get started and keep improving.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

The whole premise here is that speed, adaptability, the ability to motivate, inspire and succeed in an ever-changing and complex matrix environment is more and more the way firms and people work and succeed. If the premise holds, then it’s up to us as senior leaders to support the movement away from 19th century management approaches to something that looks and feels right for this squishy, ever-changing world we live and work in.

Oh, and by the way…for those of you waiting for your organizations to support your development here, cut it out. You own your own development. Strengthening your ability to lead in the matrix is a great place to start.

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

Art Petty is a Chicago-based management consultant focusing on strategy and leadership development. Art regularly speaks on innovation in management and leadership, and his work is reflected in two books, including the recent, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development. (download a free excerpt at Art’s facebook page.)

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

Prior to his solo career, Art spent 20+ years leading marketing sales and business units in systems and software organizations around the globe. You can follow Art on twitter: @artpetty and he can be reached via e-mail at art.petty@artpetty.com

Filed Under: Leadership, Leading Change, Performance, Project Management Tagged With: , ,

Leaders, Principles and the Pursuit of High Performance Teams

March 28, 2012 By 2 Comments

“In high-performance teams, the leaders managed the principles and the principles managed the teams.” –Carl Larson and Frank LaFasto via Jim Highsmith in Agile Project Management-Creating Innovative Products.

Larson and LaFasto in their assessment of high performance teams offer us a profoundly powerful and simple to comprehend answer to the question of how to support the emergence of effective teams: clear, strong, actionable, livable principles beget an environment for effective collaboration and innovation.

Every high performance team I’ve experienced as a participant, a sponsor or an outside advisor, was governed by an overarching set of principles or values that formed and framed the culture. And while good words alone don’t create success, the combination of the leaders and participants living and acting according to those words everyday made things work.

On successful teams, the team leaders…and ultimately the participants eat and drink the principles for breakfast, communicate them constantly and most importantly, they live them in how they collaborate, problem-solve and challenge themselves and their team members forward in pursuit of success.

And since as we all know, even the best of teams face dark days when nothing goes right, the guiding principles serve as bedrock for self-reflection and guidance for navigating the way forward.

There’s a cautionary tale here. As Highsmith warns us, “Grand principles that generate no action are mere vapor.”  When engaging with an organization for the first time, I make it a habit to understand a firm’s values, and all too often, what I find are nice words…unarguable in their intent, that serve only to occupy space on a wall in a conference room. It’s a wholesale failure on the part of the leadership of an organization, when the guiding principles aren’t a visible part of everyday life.

Teams are a fact of life. We execute strategy via projects. We innovate on teams. We develop new products, improve processes and search for ways to better serve our customers via projects and teams. We darned well better figure out how to succeed at this more often than not. Right now, in too many organizations, “not” is winning.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

This intangible, sticky, squishy topic of operationalizing guiding principles or values doesn’t lend itself well to a prescriptive list of steps-to-success. The onus is on you as a team leader, project leader, functional leader, informal leader or organizational leader to ensure that your best efforts are supported by meaningful, actionable guiding principles. If you can’t articulate what those principles are and what they mean for behavior, accountability and performance, then it’s time to take a step back and tackle this issue. The effort will pay dividends going forward. Larson and LaFasto are right…leaders should manage the principles and the principles will manage the team.

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

Art Petty is a Chicago-based management consultant focusing on strategy and leadership development. Art regularly speaks on innovation in management and leadership, and his work is reflected in two books, including the recent, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development.  Art publishes regularly at The Management Excellence blog at http://artpetty.com

Prior to his solo career, Art spent 20+ years leading marketing sales and business units in systems and software organizations around the globe. You can follow Art on twitter: @artpetty and he can be reached via e-mail at art.petty@artpetty.com

 

 

Filed Under: Leadership, Performance, Project Management, Strategy, Values Tagged With: , , ,

Energy, Engagment and Some Science to Support High Performance Team Development

March 21, 2012 By 2 Comments

As a lifelong team participant and now devotee of leveraging the power of teams, I was fascinated and excited to see the article, “The New Science of Building Great Teams,” in the April, 2012 issue  of Harvard Business Review. (Subscription required for the full article…or check out the related HBR Blog Content for free.)

I suspect we are all for adding some science to the sticky, squishy and often problematic issue of how to get people to not only play nice together in the sandbox, but how to do so at a sustained high-level of performance.

While not to trivialize the findings of this extensive, sensor based, sociometric study, the authors engage in what seems to be a a great deal of razzle dazzle to conclude that levels of energy, engagement and exploration are the keys to assessing whether a team will perform at a high level or not. Raise your hand if you didn’t know that…and then excuse yourself from class.

Perhaps their most telling statement is: “A skeptic would argue that the points about energy, engagement and exploration are blindingly obvious.”  OK, I admit to feeling like I needed sunglasses at that less than startling conclusion.

In fairness, the authors continue beyond blindingly obvious with: “But the data from our research improve on conventional wisdom. They add an unprecedented level of precision to our observations, quantify the key dynamics and make them measurable to an extraordinary degree.”

OK. Again, I suspect we all can use some science and more precision in our work herding cats in pursuit of high performance.

A few additional points to ponder from the article:

  • 35% of the variation in a team’s performance can be accounted for by the number of face-to-face exchanges among team members.
  • In a typical high performance team, members are listening or speaking to the whole group only about half the time…the other half being one-on-one conversations.
  • Social time is critical to team performance… “often accounting for more than 50% of positive changes in communication patterns.”

In an important statement (which admittedly gives me cause to pause), the authors offer: “Without the data there’s simply no way to understand which dynamics drive successful teams.”

Excitement but Healthy Cynicism:

Who among us doesn’t want some help in building high performance teams? This study is fascinating for its potential, yet a bit frustrating in the “blindingly obvious” outcomes. The key it seems (and as the authors suggest) is to look deeper into the study outcomes for the insights that will lead to new approaches to building and managing. I’m interested and I suspect every student and practitioner of management is interested as well.

A quarter century of living on and with teams tells me that the dynamics change for every situation. I’m a bit uncomfortable imposing data and potentially inferring causation from correlation on something as complex as human interaction in varied situations. It might be easier to predict the weather accurately and consistently. Nonetheless, I’m hopeful we’ll gain some insights that can be applied in the workplace from projects like this one.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

I’m cheering for the authors of this type of research so don’t misconstrue my intent in the post. You’re getting my blink reaction. I need to read this article a few times to gain more insight beyond the “blindingly obvious” indication that the level (and quality) of energy, engagement and exploration relate to a team’s success. In particular, we all need to look for ideas and tools we can use from big, data-driven studies like the one behind this article.

For the moment, the best outcome for me is a firm, data-driven reminder that energy, engagement and exploration are critical. Now, how do we do a better job promoting the right kind of all three for that critical new innovation project? And that ERP implementation? And the new product development project? And the web site relaunch? And the sales force restructuring. And the… .

 

Filed Under: Decision-Making, Leadership, Leading Change, Performance, Project Management Tagged With: ,

Leadership Caffeine-What Do You Do with a Team that has Failed?

February 20, 2012 By Leave a Comment

image of a coffee cupWe’re often too quick as leaders to throw in the towel on teams that have whiffed. That’s a mistake that may be more costly to performance and morale than the initial and temporary failure.

My quick answer to the question in the post title is: absent any visible, destructive behavior that may have contributed to the team’s missteps, the point in time when it becomes clear that a team has failed is the right time to double-down with a fresh challenge. Preferably one of those big and ugly challenges.

We all know that success most often occurs after a series of failures, yet this same stubborn tenacity to overcome setbacks that is so widely celebrated in our culture and with our heroes, is too often ignored in corporate team settings. After all, it’s not comfortable for executives or sponsors to spend much time associated with teams that have failed.

Team Longevity and Success:

There are well-documented criteria (Hackman, Thompson et. al.) for creating team success: a clear and guiding purpose, clear membership, enabling structures, the right kind of leadership AND team longevity.

Perhaps I’m biased by the technical product development and IT projects I’ve hung around most of my career, but typically the projects are difficult and often, the team members are being asked to do something that’s not been done before…at least in their organization.  The need for team learning coupled with the socialization dynamics present in every (new) team environment, demand a commitment to longevity as one of the key enabling factors for success.

Beware the Mirages:

We’re quick to attribute team failures to external factors (fundamental attribution error) or, to see Lencioni’s 5 dysfunctions in almost every struggling team environment. Just be aware, that you may very well be seeing a mirage…something you think you should see but that isn’t really present.

Building trust, developing comfort with conflict, committing to the effort, accepting accountability and focusing on results are all important, and realizing the team culture to foster those behaviors takes time.

It takes courage for a leader or sponsor to stand up and defend a failed team. That shielding effort expends political capital and if the outcomes continue to be poor, the capital is squandered.  Leaders and sponsors coping with struggling teams are well-advised to look for the following attitudes and behaviors as they assess whether to take a stand or fold the team.

5 Signs that Your Failed Team Merits More Time

1. An absence of finger-pointing and excuse-making. In my experience, there’s a direct inverse correlation with finger-pointing and the potential for team success.

2. Genuine group and authentic distress at the failure. While a judgement call, it’s not that hard for a leader to distinguish between embarrassment or fear or repercussions type distress versus genuine “We failed and it bugs the crap out of me/us,” distress.

3. An emerging Apollo 13 mentality… “failure is not an option.” A sense of emergency, an intense focus on the goals of the initiative and extraordinary efforts to innovate are healthy signs that the team merits more time.

4. External validation that the initiative is (still) highly relevant. There’s a tendency for firms and teams to irrationally pursue failed objectives. Avoiding this sunk cost/escalation of commitment trap is difficult and important. The assumptions of and need for the project from an external customer or market perspective must still be valid before offering more time to the failed team.

5. A hunger for insights and knowledge from outside the team.  Instead of turning inward and developing a bunker mentality, the team recognizes the need for help and pursues it.  I’m particularly convinced of a team’s legitimacy, when they seek outside critical feedback on technical and performance issues.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Sometimes, good performance is just a bit further down the road. Don’t discount how critical it is to give good people time to gel on big projects.

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

Art Petty is a Chicago-based management consultant focusing on strategy and leadership development. Art regularly speaks on innovation in management and leadership, and his work is reflected in two books, including the recent, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development.  Art publishes regularly at The Management Excellence blog at http://artpetty.com

Prior to his solo career, Art spent 20+ years leading marketing sales and business units in systems and software organizations around the globe. You can follow Art on twitter: @artpetty and he can be reached via e-mail at art.petty@artpetty.com

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

Strategy-Towards Hypotheses, Experiments, Involvement & Learning

January 25, 2012 By 6 Comments

Few would argue that a nimble, quick-to-learn and quick-to-adapt organization is a bad thing. Given the rate of change in our world, those characteristics are increasingly table-stakes for survival and success.

Why then has the approach to strategy and the notion of “strategic planning” in so many organizations remained mired in a 1960’s kind of static, top-down event-focused model?

Many firms practice a style of strategic planning that might have worked in a different time and place, but today, fast-to-try, fast-to- fail and fast-to-learn are essential for survival and success.

Give Me an Epiphany, Darn-It!

Rarely does just the act of thinking through circumstances, opportunities and strategies yield the epiphany that allows a firm to carve out a competitive advantage.

In my experience, the management teams who have pursued the “strategy as event’ approach with the annual or semi-annual meeting(s) serving as the time to talk strategy and decide, are often frustrated with the time investment and disappointing outcomes. Few epiphanies…a lot of time…a lot of bickering and ambiguous outcomes with no clear next steps. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?

Hypotheses and Informed Experiments, Please!

The best outcome of the front end of any strategy process is one or more (a limited number, please) of ideas…hypotheses, that can quickly be turned into and managed as experiments.

True value in the form of learning accrues to the organization from working through the strategic experiment, assessing outcomes and refining the ideas. Because these workplace and marketplace experiments require people to implement, manage, and assess them, the act of engaging the employee population creates understanding, involvement, excitement and importantly idea sharing.  

It Feels So Good When We Stop!

I’ve worked with teams who were accustomed to and frustrated by the “event” orientation of planning. When refocused on assessment, analysis and importantly, hypothesis generation, the unreasonable expectation of finding the magical answer was replaced by high quality dialogue around generating ideas for better serving customers and beating competitors. After a series of these discussions over time, and with some focused facilitation, the teams were able to zero in on one or two strategic hypotheses to invest in and learn from.

The Project Management Art of Building out Strategic Experiments:

While I frequently reference this phase as the Execution phase, I prefer Experiment…both because it doesn’t sound so fatal…and it implies Doing, Measuring, Learning and Refining (DMLR).  In my estimation, its in the DMLR cycle where the real work…and the real “Ah Ha” moments of strategy occur.

Six Ideas for Implementing an Effective Doing, Learning, Measuring, Refining Program:

1. Treat each strategic experiment like a project. Assign a Project Manager and use Best Practices PM to charter, scope, engage stakeholders, define the work, assess the risks, plan and estimate the work, implement the work, monitor and communicate. Yeah, that’s a mouthful. Your Project Manager in this case is priceless.

2. Ensure that there’s a strong sponsor in place for every experiment. Yes, best practices project management again. If this is important enough to be betting your strategic future on, it’s important enough to provide a Supportive Sponsor with heft and teeth.

3. Explain, Engage and Listen! People work in compliance under orders, they work with their hearts and minds when they are part of something big. Getting them involved is good. Arming them with context on why, and what and importance is critical. Listening to their feedback is priceless. Since many strategic initiatives involve doing new things or doing things differently, this holistic approach to engagement is essential.

4. Create Learning and Sharing Forums with Teeth. It’s good to pre and post-mortems…it’s better to create ample opportunities for idea sharing, lessons learned and adjustments to experiments on the move. Hey, I’m probably violating several tenets of The Scientific Method with the adjustment statement, but timeliness is critical and your Project Manager will help you manage changes in the plan.

By the way, by this time, you may want to give your PM a big fat raise!

5. The Truth is Always in the Field…Sometimes You Just Have to Look Carefully. The best strategic experiments involve customers and partners. Invite them in…make them part of the process and of course observe and listen carefully. And then act.

6. Do Something with the Outcomes-Plan to Change or Move Forward. After a period of time and armed with the insights and feedback of employees, customers and partners, there’s a vetting and decision-making process that those in charge have to prosecute. From kill to change to go to what’s next, you and your team are on the hook for returning to the process and assessing and deciding.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

There are at least two “dirty little secrets” in what I’ve described above. It’s a nefarious plan for involving the broader organization in strategy and execution, and it not so secretly “operationalizes” the work of strategy. While there’s no magic and I would be misleading if I didn’t highlight that the process is filled with bumps, hiccups and debates it’s darned powerful if and when managed properly.

Filed Under: Leadership, Leading Change, Project Management, Strategy Tagged With: , , , ,
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