Take Responsibility for Your Own Development
In my not inconsiderable experience, too many people in business are in search of the proverbial silver bullet.
Unfortunately, there are no true silver bullets.
There are no quick fixes for any of: revenue shortfalls, product development problems, morale issues or disruptive competitors that have inconveniently changed the worth of your entire value proposition. The same holds true for your own professional development.
I’ve yet to figure out how to learn to lead without leading…and making mistakes. Can’t do it.
There are no courses or books that substitute for experience, although there are plenty to help you as you are gaining experience. Strategy doesn’t show up in a crystal ball, great execution doesn’t happen by accident and head-turning results that propel careers aren’t based on good luck.
If you are fortunate, some of your professional development will occur as a result of the feedback and guidance from an effective leader or mentor. For most however, it’s all up to you. You need to put the time in, read the books, apply the lessons, experiment, learn, fail, unlearn, relearn and then try some more.
At the end of the day, the reward and the rewards that you derive from your career are a function of what you put into it. The next time you attend a training class and say, “I’ve heard all of this before,” stop and recognize that it’s not hearing it that counts. It’s what you do with it.
Want to Lead? Answer These Questions! #6 of 7
Note: the Seven Key Questions for Ambitious, Aspiring Leaders, are presented in the book, Practical Lessons in Leadership by Art Petty and Rich Petro. I’ll explore each question here at Building Better Leaders through individual “Leadership Tip of the Day” posts, offering ideas for investigation and discussion.
The first five questions in this series challenged you to think through issues that are both philosophical and powerfully practical:
- Why do you want to lead?
- Do you understand the true role of a leader?
- Do you understand that the skills that made you successful as an individual contributor are not the skills that will carry you forward?
- Are you prepared to give up your domain expertise as your foundation for results?
- What do you believe are the skills and personality traits that you need to succeed as a leader?
If you’ve made it through the investigation of questions 1-5, it’s time for you to consider your new world of accountability.
Number 6. Do you understand that you will be responsible for the output of your team members, and that you will be judged on this output?
One of the transition challenges that many first-time leaders face is recognizing and accepting the new found accountability for the results of others. You can look left and right, but at the end of the day, you need only look in the mirror to find the person responsible for the output of your team. This issue underscores your need to focus on talent selection and development, creating the effective working environment and doing everything in your power to knock down obstacles so that others can plow ahead on their endeavors. You’ve moved from a “me-centric” role to one that is completely “you-centric.”
Consider your responsibility and new-found accountability very carefully and remember that you will now live by the Coach’s Credo: “If we succeed, it’s because of the team and if we fail, it’s because of me.”
Leadership Caffeine for the Week of March 30, 2009
Filed under: "To Do" List, Career, Leadership Caffeine, Performance, Professional Growth, Project Management, Surviving Lousy Leaders
A healthy spring snowstorm blanketed the northwest suburbs of Chicago overnight, making the morning cup of coffee particularly relevant as a source of both warmth and energy.
I’m back with a fresh pound of my favorite fair trade Mexican Roast from a great local roaster aptly named Conscious Cup. My first contribution to stimulating the economy today is to let you know that these great people ship.
My second contribution is to encourage a renewed sense of personal professional accountability. Yep, I’m striking a blow against Boss-Blame…that world class sport that so many engage in as part of rationalizing why their own results might just be falling short of something resembling excellence.
Quit Grousing…It’s Wasted Energy!
It’s common for me to hear quite a bit of grousing about the people we work for from attendees at workshops, at client sites or in classes. And while I don’t doubt that there’s a fair amount of truth in much of the talk about lousy managers and do-nothing exec teams, I truly don’t care and neither should you.
Do not let the chucklehead that you work for hold you back! Do not blame the management team for your inability to hit your targets, develop professionally or create a high performance team. The only one in charge of you is you.
I’ve long since concluded that in spite of our best intentions we have a low probability of fixing most of the bad bosses. Our best bet and your best bet is to develop a multi-pronged approach to the situation.
Suggestions for Overcoming Bad Boss Syndrome:
1. Mitigation. Sometimes “Bad Boss” syndrome can be mitigated by changing your own behavior. I’ve observed many situations where the boss has issues and the individuals that report to him or her have no qualms publicly depicting their lack of respect. While that might in some perverted way feel good, it is wrong.
Try using judo on the situation and increase your efforts to be respectful and helpful and to portray a genuine sense of empathy for the burdens that this individuals bears as a leader and as a person. Hey, no guarantees here, but you’ll be the better person for trying, and it might be you some latitude in the workplace.
2. Partnering. I work with many different project teams in IT and new product development, and I can predict with near certainty the top reasons that will surface in the post-mortem on failed projects. You know the issues as well, and yes, most of them have to do with people and leadership. (An oft-quoted E&Y study indicates that 80% of the reasons associated with poor project performance are tied to people.)
Work on a few project teams, and you can predict the problems like clockwork. Estimates will be off…people sandbag or play politics. The matrix gets in the way…people have multiple priorities and are not linked to one team. The sponsor spends her time jetting around Asia and is never present at critical times to do what a sponsor is supposed to do. And so on.
What is stopping you from working with your peers to focus your collective energies on eradicating the mostly controllable and predictable problems that bedevil so many teams? Nothing! If the project manager lacks the leadership savvy to broker resolutions and build a performance culture, jump in along with your peers and help out. Have an ineffective sponsor? Either educate him or her on the role or seek out a new one. There are few problems that arise that are dependent upon those upstream.
3. Your Personal Pursuit of Excellence:
In the final leg of my bad-boss mitigation & you must develop your own sense of accountability rant, this is for all of you first-time or mid-level leaders that are not getting the support and coaching that you genuinely should receive. Get over it, and make certain that you go to extraordinary lengths to give to your colleagues in spades what you are not receiving from your manager.
Boss not talked to you about career development? Well, you are in charge of your own career, and oh by the way, nothing is precluding you from working with your team members on their own personal development plans.
Don’t get much feedback on your performance? That’s unfortunate, but it is not an excuse for you not recognizing that feedback is your most powerful performance tool and practicing it constantly.
Does the boss work hard to protect turf and strengthen silo walls? Don’t fall into that shortsighted trap. Become a network broker across organizational boundaries. Learn and apply the art of lateral leadership and diplomacy.
The bottom-line
Just as it is common in life for people to hitch their sense of well-being and happiness to the actions and opinions of others, it is common for people to wallow in business misery because of the shortcomings of our leaders. It’s time to unhitch that wagon and take responsibility for your own business happiness and health. Get started this week!
The Leader’s Challenge: Recognizing the Need for Change
Jack Welch, in his 2005 book, Winning, offers the following thoughts on change:
“For more than a decade, there has been a whole industry devoted to the topic (change), all of it selling pretty much the same line: change or die. Well…it’s true.”
Mr. Welch also offers up the following advice in his usual, blunt style: "You have to change, preferably before you have to."
I bring these quotes up because the other day I was asked to put together my thoughts for a talk at a gathering of community leaders in business, education and government on "How organizations can improve at recognizing the need to change." The talk itself encompasses the full continuum of change issues, but my part is specifically focused around recognition.
I like this topic and think I it is brutally important to leaders and organizations regardless of whether they operate in the public or private sector. I believe that it is important for organizations to develop competence at translating marketplace and macro-environmental changes into appropriate changes to better serve stakeholders. No easy task, especially considering the "noise" that we all face in this era of accelerating change, time compression and growing complexity.
I also think that improving an organization's ability to recognize the need for change, requires an organization to improve in a number of areas that are essential for survival and success, namely leadership, strategy and execution.
First, A Few Thoughts On The Topic of Change:
- Change is a profound issue for most organizations, and a profoundly personal issue for people inside of organizations.
- Most people are not wired to seek out change. When talking about improving our ability to recognize the need for change, we are engaging in a tug-of-war with our nature.
- Leaders have the toughest job when it comes to change. First, they have to ask and answer: "How should we change?" and then they have to succeed by gaining commitment from their organization on: "We should change."
- It's easy to overload on change. There are ample opportunities for organizations to flail at the changing forces in our environments, never certain which ones are material or immaterial.
Organizations and People Have a Change IQ (Change Quotient)
It's hard to consider helping an organization improve their ability to recognize the need to change without taking into account that everyone and every organization has some predisposition towards the issue. While there are a variety of perspectives on the topic of Change Quotient, a search will show common agreement on at least 3 components:
1. The ability to recognize the need for change: high change quotient leaders recognize the need to change before it is too late.
2. Understanding and mastering the change process: high change quotient leaders develop organizational competence at translating the need to change into actions that create value.
3. Emotional comfort with change: high change quotient leaders develop an inherent comfort with change based on their relative intelligence in components 1 and 2 above.
A number of practitioners offers assessments or audits to rate individuals and organizations on the three broad areas of Change IQ, I'll attempt a simple and practical audit for just #1, the ability to recognize the need for change.
Rating Your Organizations Change Recognition Quotient:
1. We have a current, clearly defined strategy.
2. Our employees would describe themselves as extremely comfortable in offering new ideas to our executives.
3. Our leaders (at all levels) are accountable for providing feedback on what they are learning about our
business and our customers.
4. Strategy meetings include individuals from all levels of the organization.
5. Someone or some group is responsible for external monitoring and report-back (market forces, trends, new advancements).
6. During the past year we have acted on something we learned externally by taking action to create a new
(program, product, service etc.).
7. We have an excellent understanding of how our customer's expectations for our offerings are changing.
8. Our offerings resonate with our customers so well that they practically sell themselves.
9. Strategy review and planning occurs multiple times per year.
10. We regularly engage in scenario discussions, where we imagine the impact of trends and forces on our business and on our customers.
11. Our employees would describe our approach to change as proactive.
12. We frequently have animated discussions on future directions.
13. New ideas come from people at all levels of the organization.
While I have yet to thrift these questions down and attach a scale, I would submit that a "strongly agree" answer to most of them would indicate a high Change Recognition Quotient score and a "strongly disagree" the opposite. (I would love any input from readers on fine tuning the questions to create a viable Change Recognition Quotient survey.)
How Do We Improve Our Ability to Recognize the Need to Change?
I offer a number of "Best Practice" ideas for raising the effectiveness of an organization at recognizing the need for change. These include:
Change your strategy habits. Strategy is not an event, but a process and an effective strategy program incorporates ideas and insights from the broader organization (not just leaders). Additionally, traditional tools (SWOT, Porters Forces etc.) often fall short in providing the level of depth you might need on change issues. Consider scenario planning, even at a basic level (best case, worst case, continuation of current state) as a tool to inspire lateral thinking about your business and how forces might impact you.
Change your strategy communication habits. Everyone in an organization must pass the "Walk In the Door" test, which simply means that as a person shows up to work, they understand very clearly how their priorities tie into the organization's strategic priorities.
Get your organization talking candidly. Whether you call it robust dialogue or candid conversations, everyone at every level of an organization must be comfortable in providing ideas and insights on tough issues without fear of reprisal. Many cultures are not like this, and moving from a less than candid or a collegial environment to one where the tough issues are fair game for everyone, is a significant leadership challenge.
Create forums for ideas and insights to be exchanged. Make certain that the dialogue of the organization is about the marketplace, about customers and that it includes a lot of "What if?" and "Why don't we?" types of discussions.
Get leadership on the same page regarding their role in facilitating dialogue. If you are at the top of the leadership chain, this is your job. Your leaders must understand the importance of identifying the right change opportunities, and they need to carry this message and requisite behaviors to their reports and teams.
Establish accountability for turning insights into actions. Ultimately, you need to do something that creates value for your customers through change, so teams have to learn when to stop talking and start acting. As a leader, you must encourage your organization to develop the protocols for implementing ideas and then reinforce both the victories and the losses as part of the learning process.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
If you are intent on maintaining and developing an organization that contributes to society, grows and runs profitably, the need for or possibility of change is omnipresent. The good news is that as a leader there are many ways for institutionalizing the recognition for the need to change. The better news is that improving in this area requires you to improve in the ways that your organization fundamentally creates value. I prefer to turn "Change or Die" into "Change and Prosper."
In Search of the High Performance Project Team
I recently conducted a leadership workshop for a group of technical professionals at an industry conference, and as always, I walked away from the session with a couple of insights gained from the input of the participants. One that surprised me was that after talking about characteristics of high performance project teams, I asked for a show of hands from anyone that had been a member of this type of team. Only 5 out of 58 raised their hands. Even discounting for the people that don’t tend to respond to "showing of hands" requests, anything even close to the 10% range here seems abysmal.
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