Leadership Caffeine-Give Your People Room to Run
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Management Education, Middle Management, Not-For-Profit Leadership, Surviving Lousy Leaders, Talent Management, Values, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
Overheard: “If I don’t stay on top of my people, nothing gets done.”
If lousy leadership were a crime, the owner of the quote above might just merit a short stretch of quality alone-time to reflect on the implications of his statement. There are so many things truly wrong with the style of leadership that the statement connotes, that I’m not certain where to start.
I regularly run into examples of leaders operating on the frontlines and even the top-lines that equate leading with policing and oversight. In sessions where I poll on the behaviors of great and lousy leaders, the horror stories of micro-managing bosses and inspector and critic style managers are so plentiful that it’s often difficult to rein in the discussions.
The perception that being boss involves constant policing has not yet been bred out of our culture.
There are certainly core issues that demand oversight. Issues of ethics, legal compliance, and discrimination all merit constant vigilance. And maintaining appropriate operational control is absolutely a leader’s responsibility. However, there’s a line that is crossed when the boss extends intense vigilance to the day-to-day and sometimes minute-to-minute work effort of team members. Move too close to this line or, cross it, and you guarantee a tense working atmosphere, a loss of initiative and a deficit of creativity. What should be a creative and productive experience becomes more like a prison experience.
Gaining compliance is not leading. Any two-bit despot can gain compliance by inducing fear through excessive oversight.
In conversations with individuals describing leaders that they admire, commonly referenced behaviors are they exact opposite of the overbearing and over-the-shoulder manager:
Doesn’t micromanage me
Let’s me do my job
Asks me how she can help
Sets clear expectations and then lets me go
Doesn’t jump all over me when I make a mistake…but rather, he asks me what I learned.
We need more leaders that generate those types of comments from their team members.
11 Reminders that Your Job as a Leader is About Building, Not Guarding:
1. Focus on the working environment! You own the responsibility to create and sustain a positive working environment. You cannot do that by micro-managing.
2. Create the right type of oversight by creating a culture of accountability for the values and norms in that environment.
3. You are a teacher. Teach and train. And then teach some more.
4. You are a coach. Observe and provide timely constructive AND positive feedback. Everyday.
5. Be approachable, but don’t spend all of your own time approaching. Give your team room to run.
6. Create context, not confusion. Clarify and communicate. Create context for key organization strategies and goals.
7. Expectations and accountability drive performance. Set clear and challenging expectations for individual and team performance. This is not micro-managing, it is good management.
8. Remember, you’re there to help, don’t hinder. Knock down obstacles and free your people to run.
9. Defend, don’t distract. Learn to shield team members from distractions. Keep your people free to run, part 2.
10. Stay out of the way. You are a distraction most of the time. See the prior item.
11. Assert only when you need to. Don’t assert often. If you have to assert often, review the prior 11 items.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
We’re all responsible for developing the next generation of leaders. Let’s get this right and help educate and train the micro-managing boss out of existence.
Management Excellence Book Series Kicks Off Featuring Good Boss, Bad Boss
Filed under: Career, Fresh Voices, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Life and Business, Management Education, Management Excellence Book Series, Middle Management, Professional Growth, Surviving Lousy Leaders, Talent Management, Values, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
For as long as I can remember, books have played a major role in my life.
I still recall the day my Mom took me to the Hild Library in Chicago for my first library card. And I remember distinctly the scene a few months later, when she engaged in a vigorous discussion with the library staff on my need for an Adult card. I had consumed everything worth consuming in the Children’s section and needed to move on. Mom prevailed, and the rest for me is reading history.
This preoccupation with reading continued through my summers as a child, including one memorable, slow, hot season reading the World Book from A to Z. While it wasn’t Britannica, it was what we had in our apartment in Chicago. And yes, I read more than the cool transparent overlays. I read the complete text. Every entry. It was a little like work, but I was on a mission. As a result, I have a remarkable store of trivial knowledge on everything that happened in the world up until 1973. Beyond that, I’m a bit fuzzy.
Fast forward a few decades, and books are still a major part of my life. I’ve authored one, I’m working on another and I consume content in history, business and science in an unquenchable thirst to learn more. Given this preoccupation with the written word, it’s fitting and about time that I extend my love of books and regard for the hard work of authors to a feature here on the blog. Thus, welcome to the first post and first interview for the Management Excellence Book Series.
About the Management Excellence Book Series:
First, I’m not a book critic, I’m a book lover. You’ll never find a negative review here, because, if I don’t like the book, I won’t write about it or interview the author. It is my intent to offer a resource with this series that extracts and shares insights and introduces you to new or time-tested great ideas.
I intend on using a mix of audio interviews (podcasts) and posts with transcribed interviews to share ideas and learn more from management book authors that have labored long and hard to help us learn and grow. My mission is to search for the pearls of wisdom, the fresh ideas or the classic ideas that help us all make a difference.
While my audio interview skills are clearly in need of practice, there’s no reason not to start. We are living in a period of time rich with the flow of information and ideas, and I’m excited to help all of us gain just a little bit more insight and context from great management thinkers for use in our professional and personal lives.
I look forward to sharing with you via the interviews. Enjoy!
Art Interviews Bob Sutton About Good Boss, Bad Boss
Art Petty Interviews Bob Sutton on Good Boss, Bad Boss [33:49m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
Art Petty Interviews Bob Sutton on Good Boss, Bad Boss [33:49m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | DownloadGood Boss, Bad Boss by Robert I. Sutton, Ph.D.
Just about everyone is familiar with Bob’s prior work, The No A**Hole Rule! Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One that Isn’t. That great read talked about what many of us have been thinking, and even made the “A” word acceptable business meeting and cocktail party discussion fodder (in the context of the book, of course!).
Bob is back with a tremendous new book, Good Boss, Bad Boss-How to Be the Best and Learn from the Worst, available for pre-order from major booksellers now, with a scheduled publication date of September 7th.
His emphasis in his latest work is on describing the good habits of great bosses, and once again, Bob is saying what many of us are thinking or, living through in our working lives. In this era of the seemingly “disposable worker,” and after a decade of corporate scandals and a great number of bosses doing the “perp walk,” Bob focuses squarely on what the best bosses do day-in and day-out. He contrasts the great habits of good bosses with the equivalent lousy habits and approaches of bad bosses, providing anecdotes and vignettes that we can relate to or anguish over. We all know a few of the bad bosses. Let’s hope that our good boss experiences outweigh those others.
I had the great fortune to connect with Bob recently on a phone call/interview, and our scheduled 10-15 minutes turned into 30 minutes of fascinating insights about the book, and about Bob’s work as a professor and consultant. He was a delight to interview and I sincerely believe that you will find his insights and anecdotes as fascinating as I did. Enjoy the interview and enjoy the book!
And finally, this section from the preface of his book sets the tone well:
“The best bosses don’t ride into town, save the day with a bold move or two, declare victory, and then rest on their laurels. There is no final victory. The main reward for success is usually that you get to keep doing a damn hard (but often satisfying) job for a while longer. Despite the horseshit spewed out by too many management gurus, there are no magic bullets, instant cures or easy shortcuts to becoming a great boss. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar. The best bosses succeed because they keep chipping away at a huge pile of dull, interesting, fun, rewarding, trivial, frustrating, and often ridiculous chores. …Devoting relentless attention to doing one good thing after another-however small-is the only path I know to becoming and remaining a great boss.“
Nine chapters of pure boss gold! Thanks, Bob!
Note from Art: Bob supplied me with a pre-release copy of his book for this interview.
Leadership Inspiration from the Howard Schultz HBR Interview
Filed under: Leadership, Leading Change, Making Decisions, Management Education, Organizational Transformation, Values
If you’re looking for a breath of fresh leadership air and some hope in this world after watching CEOs doing the Perp Walk or the Resignation Shuffle, read the interview, “We Had to Own the Mistakes” with Howard Schultz, Starbucks Chairman and CEO, in the July-August, 2010 issue of Harvard Business Review.
While Schultz is no stranger to our world as an iconic founder of one of the world’s most successful and formerly fastest growing firms, one might argue that he didn’t earn his leadership stripes until faced with the unexpected challenging of turning the firm around.
Love the coffee or not, it’s hard to leave the interview without a sense that Shultz has a firm handle on what it takes to lead successfully in this era of transparency and extreme employee distrust (well earned) of those in charge. I’ll let you read the interview, but I don’t mind pointing out the areas that particularly resonated with me, including:
- The frequent use of the phrase: “I am responsible,” in reference to the firm’s troubles following his departure from the CEO seat. (He remained the firm’s Chairman.)
- His refusal to throw the former management team under the bus for the firm’s troubles: “There was a different team here-very good people who deserve respect and not the burden of responsibility. I was chairman of the company, and I am culpable.” There he goes again with that responsibility thing! Did you hear that, Tony Hayward?
- The admission that organizational and leadership hubris created the problems. “We had never had much competition. Everything we did more or less worked, and that produced a level of hubris that caused us to overlook what was coming.”
- His view to leading the turnaround of the firm: “The challenge was how to preserve and enhance the integrity of the only assets we have as a company, our values, our culture and our guiding principles and the reservoir of trust with our people.” That statement takes my breath away.
And without stealing too much more thunder from a great and inspirational read, Schultz serves up example after example where he and the firm stood up and made the hard call in spite of overwhelming pressure. Decisions to maintain health care benefits, never sacrifice quality for cost savings, invest in retraining the staff and introduce new offerings when the pundits all said they were horrible mistakes, are a few of the examples of moral courage in action.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
I jumped off the Starbucks train a few years ago when the experience began to sour. Poor service, expensive prices and noisy, cramped stores that no longer facilitated work or networking plus coffee drinking, were enough to send me in search of some local roasters. After reading the interview, I may just have to learn that funny drink ordering language again and see if Howard’s refreshing leadership approach has filtered down to the store level.
Thanks Howard, for painting a picture of what good leadership sounds and acts like.
Leadership Caffeine: 6 Ideas to Improve Team Performance Today
Filed under: Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Management Education, Middle Management, Performance, Professional Growth, Values, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
The world of work has increasingly become the world of teams and group activities, and to quote Richard Hackman, author of, Leading Teams-Setting the Stage for Great Performance,
“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.”
If your organization is like most, you’re leaving money on the table in terms of team productivity and performance. Social and interpersonal factors, motivation issues, lack of group cohesion and the general up-front churn that teams display as they form, are just a few of the areas where you can pick up immediate productivity improvements with a little bit of smart leadership.
As an aside, many senior project managers and executive sponsors provide this type of leadership for major project initiatives. The focus in this post is on the gross majority of group, team or committee activities that fly below the radar of formal project management leadership and executive sponsorship. These are often manager-led initiatives or cross-functional groups coming together to tackle a problem.
6 Ideas to Improve Team Performance Today:
1. Control Your Urge to Put a Team On It-use groups carefully and sparingly and avoid the reflex action to set up a work group, committee or project team for every issue that comes your way. Carefully assess whether a group effort truly stands the best chance of success. There are many situations where the right individual can work with stakeholders and across functions and accomplish the goals or solve the problem more efficiently and effectively than a team.
2. If You Must Set Up a Team…Please Ensure that Goals Are Clear and Compelling: unclear goals promote “churn and flail,” and mundane tasks drive lackadaisical performance. As the responsible organizational leader (not necessarily the work team leader), you must ensure that the goal of the initiative is crystal clear and linked to a key business imperative. Vague goals and unclear context are productivity and morale killers.
3. Starting Today, Rethink the Approach to Choosing Team Leaders. Instead of seniority or rank, work-team leadership must be based on a single criterion: “Who is the person best suited to help us succeed with the task at hand?” Depending upon the nature of the task, an individual with good facilitation skills, or a person that works well across functions might be better suited than a functional manager or the most senior person on the group.
4. Define the Group’s Values Up-Front. Don’t make a career out of this, but definitely don’t skip describing and memorializing the required group behaviors for discussion, debate, attendance, participation and work-completion.
5. Use Simple Assignments to Save Time. Every meeting must have a note-taker (scribe), a timekeeper and a traffic cop. The traffic cop enforces the rules in play (e.g. brainstorming) and helps the team stay on topic and work towards an outcome.
6. Assign a Coach. If the group is expected to work together for more than a few days, it is helpful to ask for an objective 3rd party set of eyes to assess team processes and interpersonal dynamics. You don’t need to spend money to bring in an outside resource with a fancy certification. One organization used representatives from HR (a great way to help get this group engaged with the business of business) and another identified and specified a coaching role and rotated the responsibility between individuals. The coach is not part of the working team, but rather an occasional and objective observer that reports back to the designated team leader on group dynamics and group processes.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
We are well served to identify continuous improvement opportunities for our collaborative endeavors. I’ve watched great process companies with legions of people wearing colored belts forget about some of the simple suggestions above that can save money and time, spur performance and add to task enjoyment and morale. Today is a great day to help your teams and groups boost their performance!
Summer Shorts for June 18 from Management Excellence
Filed under: Career, Professional Growth, Strategy, Talent Management, Values, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
Resources, great reads and sound bites for your summer weekends
Blink and the week is gone. I’m still not clear how Friday happened so quickly again, but here we are, and here I am with a few suggestions for your weekend professional development time.
Values: These Posts go Great Together (If I do say so myself.)
I truly enjoyed reading Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s “Ten Essentials for Getting Value from Values.” If Ms. Kanter’s article is the main course, try my own recent, “Leading to the Values” as the appetizer. There’s never been a better time to work on making values and value-based leadership relevant in our organizations.
Leadership Fatigue and A Summer of Ideas:
OK, there’s a catch on these articles. The latest edition of the Management Excellence Newsletter was published earlier this week, and the only way to get , “Coping with Leadership Fatigue” and “A Summer of Ideas,” is to subscribe (sign-up form at Management Excellence or Building Better Leaders, far right column). I’ll be happy to monitor any new subscriptions and forward a copy. The newsletter is purely opt-in and all e-mail addresses are protected with my life! Expect a new issue of subscriber only content every 20 days.
My Can’t Wait to Read List:
My stack of great content that I cannot wait to read is growing, and it’s time to get on with it. The current list includes:
Inner Excellence-Achieve Extraordinary Business Success Through Mental Toughness, by Jim Murphy.
Strategic Speed-Mobilize People, Accelerate Execution by Jocelyn Davis, Henry Frechette and Edwin Boswell.
And
12 Steps to Power Presence: How to Exert Your Authority to Lead, by John Baldoni
What’s on your “Can’t wait to read list?”
Speaking of Reading, My Favorite Book Reviewer is Wally Bock
With the disclosure that I consider Wally a friend and valued colleague (a wonderful connection developed through social media), this polished and smart professional is the best book reviewer out there. He spends a disproportionate amount of my book budget with his compelling reviews. Check out the reviews and stay for the great blog.
This Week’s Daily Leadership Tips at Building Better Leaders:
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Enjoy your weekends. Back Monday with a fresh cup of Leadership Caffeine!
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