Coming Soon: A Saturday Serial & A View from the Millennial Perspective

February 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Note from Art: Coming attractions and new features.  Why? Because I cannot stand running in place.

The Power of a Story and a New Saturday Serial:

One of the lessons Rich and I learned in writing Practical Lessons in Leadership, was the power of stories for making points and stimulating good quality leadership discussion.

After writing the narrative for the book, we thought it would be nice to give the leadership content some additional context, and we formed a fictional company, Apex Integrated Technologies, Inc., complete with characters, strategic and operational issues and a lot of people challenges. In other words, it’s just like every other business in the world.

Our intent for including these stories in Practical Lessons was to provide fodder for discussion around the core chapter content. A mini-fable introduces each chapter and the discussions questions tie things together at the end. We also crafted our own perspectives on the questions and situations and make those available as a free download from my website.

According to feedback from readers…particularly companies and managers who have adopted Practical Lessons in Leadership as a tool for their book clubs and leadership development activities, the story approach works. The cases and questions add a richness and an element of reality to the practical leadership content found in the chapter.

It’s time for me to extend this idea to the blog.

The idea of leadership or management fable isn’t new…Lencioni, Goldratt and many others have popularized the approach in book form.  My approach will be a bit different, blending an old publishing technique (the serial story) with the simplicity of hitting the submit button on my blog. Think Dickens and Little Nell meet modern publishing techniques!

This forthcoming Saturday series will explore current and vexing leadership issues from the perspectives of a variety of characters working in different but connected (competitors, partners, suppliers, customers) organizations in a mythical business ecosystem. And yes, each episode will end with some key questions about how to deal with the situation. You as readers are the consultants, advisors and coaches we will be looking to for your best guidance.

Life is a series of experiments, and I personally like the feel of this one. While I can write nearly endless posts about the issues of leadership and management, I’m always on the lookout for new ways to make the topics interesting, relevant and engaging. And yes, this is a nice convergence of my passion for management and leadership writing and my desire to write fiction. I’ll be learning how to write narrative on your time here. Thanks for you help!  I’ll see you soon with this new Saturday Management Serial.

Coming Attraction #2: The True View from the Millennial Perspective:

At last count, there are at least 476,890 articles about managing, coping with and surviving the younger generation in the workforce, all written by people over 40.  I own a few of those articles. (Note: I made the number of articles up, however it feels about right.)

It’s time to shift things around a bit and gain some insights from individuals looking at the word from their own early career eyes, and describing what they are seeing and experiencing. I have a suspicion we will all learn something in the process.

I’m working with a young and capable professional who is busy attempting to navigate his way through the world, and who has some thoughts to share on what it’s like to be living what all the 40 plus pundits are writing about. He’ll lead us off on this mid-week series, and I’m anxious to recruit a few additional “columnists” to help us all learn and grow. It seems like a ripe time to start a healthy dialogue across the generations on this important topic.

Coming really soon!

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As always, your ideas and input are welcomed. Thanks for reading and tolerating my experiments in management and leadership writing!

Filed Under: "To Do" List, Career, Leadership, Leading Change, Performance, Professional Growth, Strategy, Surviving Lousy Leaders Tagged With: , , , ,

How to Handle a Feedback Attack from Your Boss

January 26, 2011 By 20 Comments

In spite of the best efforts of those of us that write and coach on leadership and feedback, there are still too many managers that wouldn’t know how to construct an effective feedback discussion if their leadership lives depended on it.

The tales that particularly bother me are the ones where the hard working employee is on the receiving end of a long laundry list of vague criticisms lacking supporting examples, and with expiration dates of many, many months ago.

These unfortunate feedback discussions are all about ego on the part of the giver and are perceived as a sneak attack by the receiver. The giver walks away feeling like he executed on his management tasks, and the receiver walks away feeling like he was executed. People appropriately describe feeling angry, confused, frustrated and depressed after one or more feedback attacks.

While there’s no doubt this is a tough situation for the receiver, there are a number of strategies that can take the sting out of the attack and potentially help build or repair your relationship with your boss in the process.

Fair warning! There are no guarantees in life or in attempting to rehabilitate a Feedback Attacker from a position of weakeness. Nonetheless, you owe it to yourself, your boss and your career to try.

8 Strategies for Successfully Managing  A Feedback Attack

1. Resist the Urge to Counter-Attack-It’s normal for you to feel the range of emotions, including outrage and anger or extreme disappointment during a full-scale feedback attack.  Earlier in my career, I would respond to a frontal assault with equal energy, and more than a couple of these discussions dissolved into something that I’m not proud of.

My hard-earned guidance is to recognize the situation for what it is, tell your mind and body to relax, and focus all of your energy on active listening. Your calm demeanor and attentiveness alone are enough to take a bit of wind out of the sails of some Feedback Attackers. And most important of all, you need your wits about you, you need good notes and you need a clear mind to look for the good.

2. Recognize the Situation as a Process, Not an Event-The Feedback Attacker created an event, but you need to manage this as a multi-step process. You’ve already lost the skirmish and now you need to be able to walk away with good intel and all of your body parts, not to mention your job, still intact.

3. Don’t Confuse the Messenger’s Style and Incompetence with the Message-This is my nice way of offering that sometimes there are nuggets of gold buried deep inside the heaping piles of feedback dung surrounding you. It is your job to put on the gloves and dig through the piles for anything of value.

4. Ask Questions, But Be Careful-Good, active listening involves you asking clarifying questions and ultimately, restating the answers in your own words and seeking confirmation. My caution on this one is that most Feedback Attackers are on pretty thin ice with their evidence. They don’t have reasonable answers or specifics for your good and appropriate questions, and if you persist in pushing on the questions, you will leave them no choice but to assert ego and position. It’s easy to perceive and to mistake when a feedback receiver has shifted from the conversation at hand to building evidence for HR. It’s not time to go there yet.

5. Seek First to Understand-Don’t leave the conversation without summarizing and restating the Attacker’s concerns. Forget for a moment that in your mind it is unfounded. You must understand the concerns, no matter how vague.

6. Manage the Go-Forward Process-Most Feedback Attackers not only cannot substantiate their issues, they have no idea how to guide you on improving. It is essential that you seek agreement to come back to your boss with your thoughts on making and monitoring your improvement progress.   Indicate your interest in sitting down to discuss progress and to ask questions on a regular basis going forward. And then do it!  Along the way, you will show your interest in listening and improving, you will show your respect and you will be actively crafting your next review in real time with mutually developed evidence.

7. Work Harder at Managing Your Boss-The feedback process is often massacred by inexperienced and/or insecure managers that truly don’t know what to do. You can respond with outrage and risk becoming a victim or, you can suck it up and work harder at understanding the issues, challenges and priorities of your boss, and then helping him or her with those priorities. Your active interest and visible support for your boss may eliminate the chances of future feedback attacks. In fact, you might just forge a good working relationship along the way.

And finally:

8. Don’t Fool Yourself By Being a Fool-If the boss is truly a Grade-A jerk and your attempts at building a bridge are met with more dynamite, you are not going to win. You can HOPE (a bad strategy) that he/she will go somewhere else, but you’ve got to face reality. You may need to vote yourself off the island.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Feedback Attackers are petty tyrants and inexperienced leaders seeking to establish authority through control. While fighting back might feel right in the moment, it’s never the right thing to do. Don’t ignore the attack…it is very real and that attitude from your boss is a warning sign. Instead, politely and professionally grab control of the process and genuinely work to improve and to communicate. You might just be helping someone grow up as a leader while you are protecting and enhancing your job.

Filed Under: "To Do" List, Career, Leadership, Professional Growth, Surviving Lousy Leaders Tagged With: , , ,

Leadership Caffeine: How to Cope With Organizational Alchemists

January 3, 2011 By 4 Comments

The modern-day practice of alchemy is only metaphorically about the search for a method to turn lead into gold.

Instead of the medieval pursuit by alchemists of a magical chemical conversion process to change one element into another, modern practitioners are focused on the magical and easy transformation of people and organizations from one level of performance to another.

Modern day, organizational alchemists are looking for great results but aren’t interested in participating in the hard work required to produce these results.

Organizational Alchemists at Work in the Modern World:

While the vocation of Alchemist is long dead, you see current practitioners at work every day.  These include:

  • Executives who talk endlessly about the need for change, yet, never put any effort into the hard work of enabling change.
  • Executives who turn their quarterly prognostications into actual numbers, offering up this weak proof that their Alchemist’s Ways work. Jim Goodnight, CEO of privately-held (by him) software firm, SAS Institute, offered  in an interview aired on 60-Minutes a number of years ago: There’s only one way that I know of to accurately hit the quarterly numbers, and that is to cook the books. Dr. Deming shared a similar perspective.

Others:

  • Leaders who use leadership training programs as easy substitutes for the hard work of developing others on their teams.
  • Firms and executives who delegate the identification of value-creating and differentiating strategies to consultants, and ignore the hard-won experience and knowledge of their own employees.
  • Management teams that talk about being market-driven and customer-focused, without actually translating those nice words into anything meaningful in terms of processes and performance standards.
  • Leaders who expect employees to be creative on command.
  • Managers and leaders who refuse to say “No,” and consistently flood their employees with a dizzying and disorienting array of projects. Everything is a priority, but nothing gets done.

First, Recognize that Alchemy Doesn’t Work:

Have you heard this before? “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth working hard for.” This goes for creating hit products, improving sales performance, developing people, improving customer service, creating high performance teams and every other single activity worth doing and worth improving in your organization. There are no shortcuts.

11 Questions to Help Keep the Alchemists In Check (or at least make them squirm):

1. How do you envision this helping us?

2. Why is this a good strategic direction?

3. What do you mean by customer-focused? And the logical follow-on: What we will look like when we’re customer focused?

4. Similar theme as the customer questions: What do you mean by market-driven?

5. If we’re going to invest our hard earned money in this training program, what are we going to do differently after the program to apply the lessons learned?

6. How are you and the other executives going to help us knock down some of the impediments to progress that we all see and know but don’t talk about?

7. What does that feedback mean? Specifically, what behavior do you want me to change?

8. How many customers did we talk to in the making of this strategy?

9. Why do you trust outside advisors more than the people that work here?

10. Which project do you want us to drop to take on your new top priority?

11. What’s your part in our team’s success?

The Bottom-line for Now:

Here’s to a year of less crap, fewer alchemists and a heck of a lot more focus and progress on the hard work of sustaining, developing and improving.

If you’re in a leadership role, ask and answer the above questions yourself before opening your mouth and exposing your Alchemist’s Ways to your team members.

If you work for an Alchemist, recognize that the above questions won’t magically transform this person. Use the questions carefully. Teach the questions to your team members and politely, firmly and consistently seek answers.

Yours in hard work,

Art

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Art develops and delivers powerful and pragmatic workshops and programs on leadership, professional development and building high performance teams. Contact Art to discuss your needs for a program or keynote.

Filed Under: Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Performance, Professional Growth, Surviving Lousy Leaders Tagged With: , , ,

Smiles, Sales and Leadership

December 20, 2010 By 12 Comments

The smile may be the single most powerful sales tool ever.

I enjoy observing how the help in stores engage with their customers. What you see and hear speaks volumes about the leaders they work for.

Want to know how people feel about their jobs and their bosses? It’s on their faces. Employees mirror the treatment they receive from their leaders. While this theme begs some additional reading in the emerging field of social neuroscience (Goleman et. al), it really comes down to common sense.

My Experience in the Big Box: Welcome to Zombieland!

Walk into some big box stores and spend a few minutes observing people. The cashiers don’t make eye contact with their customers and a smile is a rare sighting. The few available floor clerks seem to head the other way when a customer with a puzzled look on his face enters the area.  You get the impression that some transformation has taken place, sucking the joy of life out of the employees.

Seriously, for people to be so socially cold, they truly must hate their work, their boss or whatever fate brought them there.  Evidence wasn’t far away during a recent, rare visit, as I was able to observe someone in a suit (probably corporate) dressing down a small team of employees (in front of customers) for clearly not following some arcane procedure somewhere. The employees were staring at their shoes, while this creepy, arrogant little reject from leader school attempted to showcase his authority.

I couldn’t wait to get of out that store, and I wondered why it was that compelled me to walk through the doors in the first place. The bosses own responsibility for creating that hell-like, night of the living dead atmosphere.

A Little Honey, A Little Vinegar on Main Street

Once I recovered from the big box experience, I continued my holiday rounds on our community’s Main Street, where I experienced both the good and the bad from small business leadership.

I visited one of my wife’s favorite shops and shop owners, where I was greeted with a handshake and personally walked through the process of selecting items that I have no qualifications to select. I spent at least twice as much as I intended and left feeling great.

The treatment was fantastic, and it appeared to be the de facto standard for everyone who walked in the door. The employees dealt with customers in the same happy, respectful and helpful fashion as their boss, and the cash register was clearly ringing.

Now,  I needed one more item, and this great shop owner sent me down the block to another Main street merchant, where once again, I was back in retail leadership hell.

I walked into the brightly colored store (good) and observed the owner and an employee huddled over something that must have been really important. I said “hello” and received two clearly annoyed stares followed by a curt and unsmiling greeting.  Intrigued, I mentioned the shop owner that had sent me this way, and this time was met with silence. I milled around a little, found what I was looking for, and decided that the lack of interest on their part was mutual. I set the item down, went home and ordered it on-line.  No smile, no interest, no sale.

As an aside, all of you sales and marketing pros, contemplate what just happened in this last incident. A customer with need and money (highly qualified), was sent to the store (a referral) by a store owner (high credibility, high probability of making a purchase) , and all of that hard work was flushed down the toilet of indifference. Repeat that a few times over every month and one might bet (hope) this store is no longer around next year. A qualified lead and a valued referral…all retail road kill due to indifference.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

The greatest selling technique ever, might just be direct eye contact and a smile. Leaders, send someone out to shop in your stores or visit your place of business and observe how employees are dealing with customers.  The results might truly frighten you. And then do something about it!

And leaders, in what parallel universe do you come from where “not giving a crap” about your customers is a good plan? I don’t care if you’re the general manager of a Big Box or, the owner of a small retailer, know that one of the unarguable rules of the universe is that happy employees make happy customers.

Give your employees a reason to smile, and they’ll make you smile at the top and bottom lines.

Filed Under: Career, Leadership, Performance, Surviving Lousy Leaders Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Management Excellence Book Review: Management? It’s Not What You Think

December 11, 2010 By Leave a Comment

I confess to having a proclivity for essay collections when it comes to reading about management. Essays move along quickly and they offer the reader the opportunity to capture quick sound bites over breakfast, on the train or in other ideal reading rooms.  Also, there’s the reality that many management books struggle to adequately fill the space between the book-covers, offering up their best in the introduction, the first chapter and the wrap-up chapter.

Irreverent, Funny and Pointed with a Point:

I enjoyed the often irreverent, frequently amusing and always thought-provoking collection of essays in: Management? It’s Not What You Think, by Henry Mintzberg, Bruce Ahlstrand and Joseph Lampelis.

Like watching the popular show, The Office, reading many of these essays induces a cringe factor. The situations are a bit too close to reality for our own comfort, and we can see and hear ourselves and others in similar situations.

I laughed out loud while reading, Accenture’s Next Champion of Waffle Words, which unabashedly tackles the issue of our abuse of the language with business-speak…meaningless jargon wrapped in layers of B.S.

Other essays that induced laughter and agreement included: PowerPoint is Evil, Maxims In Need of a Makeover, and A Long Overdue Letter to the Board. Oh to meet a senior executive capable of writing that letter!

Mintzberg is known for his discomfort with contemporary MBA education (a view that I share), and his essay, Managers, not MBAs, strikes a blow for experience and immersion in the business over the stripes that we confer in the classroom.

Some Important Ideas Between the Covers:

And while there’s a decidedly irreverent tone concerning the traditional practice of management and leadership, the editors and authors serve up some important and thought-provoking ideas.

In the essay, Change Management, the author skewers the “dubious consulting industry and profession claiming to provide change management services.” The author offers, “Change can’t be managed. Change can be ignored, resisted, responded to, capitalized upon and created. But it can’t be managed and made to march to some orderly step-by-step process.”

Mintzberg’s essay, “Managing Quietly,” is a fitting capstone, based on the premise, “Quiet management is about thoughtfulness rooted in experience,” and, “…the best managing of all may well be the silent.”

The book is organized in 9 sections (including that ever-valuable, Introduction section) ranging from Misleading Management to Management of Meaning, Myths of Managing, Maxims of Managing, Managing Modestly and several others.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

If this were a movie review, I would be more positive than negative.

This collection of management essays is ideal for anyone on your list that is a thoughtful practitioner and student of the craft of management. The reader will enjoy the lighter moments as well as the irreverent pokes at much of what passes for contemporary management thinking and practice.

I’m not certain that there’s content in Management? It’s Not What you Think!, that will alter anyone’s view or drive new actions and cure old ills, but for those looking for reassurance that we’re all living and working in a universe that parallels “The Office” a bit too closely, this is entertaining and stimulating.

Filed Under: Career, Decision-Making, Leadership, Leading Change, Performance, Professional Growth, Strategy, Surviving Lousy Leaders Tagged With: , , ,
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