It’s Time to Burn the Old Script Used by New CEOs
Filed under: Leadership, Leading Change, Management Education, Organizational Transformation, Social Commentary
Now playing (again and again) at a theater or office near you:
New CEO or Top Leader Arrives, and…
- The Royal Audiences begin, where a tone of “I’m here to save you” is unspoken but clearly articulated by the new CEO.
- Change is the underlying theme in her words, yet the reason for change is not clear, and exactly what will change is left to the imagination of the populace.
- Some old faces disappear to be replaced quickly by faces familiar to the new CEO. The henchmen have arrived. A few of the former team join the squad and their other face becomes visible to all.
- The inquisitions begin…where people are lined up in front of note-taking head-nodders and the formerly good employee is reduced to an apologist for past transgressions imagined through the very filtered view in the rear-view mirror. There’s always at least one inquisitor jester that turns the victim’s discomfort into humor for the inquisitors.
- Fear grows like a quiet cancer in the workplace. Employees respond just as they always do to fear. Innovation ceases, infighting increases and good people update their CVs.
- The trumpets blare and the announcement of a new strategic evaluation is made. The court is convening to rethink everything. The doors shut, and occasionally open to allow a select few into the hallowed rooms.
- Fear grows and some people scurry to leave and some scurry desperately to survive.
- Very quietly, more faces disappear along with their institutional knowledge, leaving a mild tinge of bitterness in the workplace environment after having invested blood, sweat and time, just to see it be summarily devalued. Those that remain feel cast adrift.
- The trumpets blare once again and the new strategy is handed down to cheering throngs, none of whom are cheering for the new strategy, but rather for the fact that they might have a chance to keep their jobs.
- A large number of trivial change initiatives are embraced with false enthusiasm.
And the leader looks down upon the populace and smiles, secure in her knowledge that she has saved the kingdom from itself.
Over time, this new leader becomes the old leader, a new normal is established and due mostly to the hard work of the employees, some things change and life goes on until it’s time to start the process all over again.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Sadly, this script is still visible and in wide use. I’m watching the movie from one degree of separation at an organization right now. There’s no sign of real leadership and all signs indicate the script will play out as anticipated.
It’s time to burn this script and start over.
Teaching a Senior Team To Dance With Leadership Development
I am encouraged by the number and the quality of the discussions that I am having with top executives about “how” to create a more effective leadership development culture. Moving beyond the “why” to the “how” is definitely progress in the right direction.
There are a number of common themes and pain points that I hear and observe in organizations seeking to improve in this area:
- A recognition on the part of top management that realizing sustained growth over a period of time will require a consistent infusion of new talent, especially in leadership.
- The recognition that current ad hoc and silo approaches to leadership development have not worked, and in some cases have resulted in misfires, misplacements and damage to the business.
- Frustration on the part of the CEO over the lack of results on this topic from his or her senior leadership team. (Note: this is often representative of a bigger communication, collaboration, team, trust issue than just leadership development.)
- Lack of clarity on how to get started on improving leadership development effectiveness.
My Suggestions: The First Eight Steps to Mastering the Leadership Development Dance:
1. Moving from poor to good or great at leadership development will take time and attention. Be realistic in setting your expectations, as this is an evolutionary process. If necessary, consider qualified outside counsel to help you structure your program and to help keep the team on track.
2. Leadership development is the CEO’s priority…but everyone’s job. Identify leadership development as a strategic priority with your leadership team and develop your collective thoughts on this topic just as you would a potential new product development or a prospective acquisition. It is imperative that the senior leadership team view this effort not as a task to be completed, but as an on-going process for all leaders at all levels.
3. Ensure that accountability for leadership development is spread across the leadership team…not just deposited in HR’s lap. (Ram Charan, writing in Leaders at All Levels, suggests making HR the Trustee of leadership development, not the sole responsible party. I like Ram’s approach and his book is filled with great ideas for any leadership team moving down this path.) Accountability means ensuring that your senior leaders are aligned around leadership development objectives with clear performance metrics and compensation incentives.
4. Establish a baseline for current practices. A good adviser will be able to help you identify and evaluate your current performance against key best practices. The best practices are intuitive and focus on evaluating the existence and maturity of activities for identifying talent, providing developmental opportunities, evaluating progress and performance, delivering timely, candid feedback etc. This baseline will help you monitor and reevaluate your organization’s progress over time.
5. Establish your collective (not silo or functional) criteria for the type of leaders and the type of talent you expect to need in the future. Easy to write…but a thought-provoking and challenging assignment. Note: you will need to re-evaluate your criteria over time based on changing forces and strategies.
6. Based on your criteria, the leadership team will need to parse through all available talent to assess needs, gaps and the depth and breadth of the current talent pool. Again, easy to describe, but a challenging task to complete.
7. Create developmental assignments for existing high-potential talent and begin the process of filling gaps through external recruiting. Ensure that the senior leaders understand and act on their role as mentors, coaches and shepherds of the talent development process.
8. Constantly evaluate progress and performance and constantly reassess the performance of your high potential individuals. You will need to redefine your criteria for evaluating progress based on how individuals perform in various roles, and you should definitely re-evaluate your talent pool based on the results. A high potential at one level may struggle at another, and vice versa.
The Bottom-line for Now
With the intent of being redundant the steps above are easy to write and very challenging to implement. There is no silver bullet for creating an effective leadership culture, but there is a straightforward formula: focus, time and discipline. And of course, practice, practice and more practice. How well does your senior team dance when it comes to leadership development?
Seven Suggestions to Consider When Creating A New Market
Filed under: Leadership, Marketing, Organizational Transformation, Sales, Strategy
If you've ever worked in an organization or on a team that got caught up in the quest to create a new market you know that the experience is all consuming and exhilarating.
While the all-new pure white-space scenario is elusive, a fair number of organizations leverage their deep knowledge of a specific segment, a group of customers or a set of customer challenges to create new offerings that don't fit traditional market definitions or boundaries. The combination of blazing a new trail and believing that what you have created and what you are espousing will help reshape and transform for the better how something gets done is intoxicating.
I met the other day with a CEO living through this very situation right now, and from listening to her very real challenges and reflecting on my own experiences on one of these market-creating odysseys, I offer a number of leadership and management suggestions that might prove helpful on your own journey of market creation.
7 Issues that Should Keep You Awake at Night on Your Way to Creating a Market:
1. You have to surround yourself with flexible, free-thinking and adaptable people. Hiring the former BIG CO executive who hasn't lived through what it means to swim without a life raft may not be the best plan in the early phases. You don't have time to wean people off of big company practices…bring in the professionals that have already been through this process somewhere else.
2. Listen to yourself and your people talk and read your own propaganda. If everything that comes out of your mouth is about how great your new product is at the feature/function/capability level, you've got a problem. If the answer to every business question is something about the unique capabilities and elegant architecture of your revolutionary product, you've got a problem. If your web site is nothing but more of the above, the problem is real. The prospective clients that you are seeking as early adopters are motivated by a bigger vision, not by the elegance of your technology.
3. Markets don't emerge on anyone's schedule. If you are banking on going from nowhere to critical mass on a short-horizon, you and your investors are likely to be disappointed. While everyone in awhile markets emerge at remarkable speed, most of them take years and often never emerge. If your market's emergence is dependent upon people and institutions changing long-standing practices and overcoming deeply embedded approaches, you better be planning for a marathon, not a sprint.
4. Back to the message coming from you and your web site. Like it or not, you are evangelist and educator all at the same time. If all you do is shout product, you will not appeal to either the hearts or brains of your prospective customers. Make sure that your people, your web content and the preponderance of your conversation is educational and informative and not pure product propaganda.
5. Traditional marketing tactics don't work when you are creating a market. Give it up and shoot your marketing head if he/she is suggesting advertising, trade shows and direct mail as primary vehicles. (OK, this one will generate some controversy. Sorry, I believe that the world has changed and people gather their information and assign trust in very different ways than they used to. Before flaming me on this topic, read David Meerman Scott's: The New Rules of Marketing and P.R. and then let's start the debate.)
6. Traditional selling tactics don't work when you are creating a market. See also the marketing comment above. Transactional salespeople and sales approaches need not apply. Your early focus is on market visionaries willing to take a risk to realize something profound for their business. Match the value creation resource with the task to fuel the vision.
7. Map the Influencers and figure out how to appeal to their fundamental need. Don't know what that is. It's simple. Market influencers gain influence by having radical opinions on what's right, what's wrong and what organizations need to do about what's right and what's wrong. Paint your vision for them, encourage them to develop their own vision and provide them with a soapbox to tell the world. A good influencer will never back you or your product overtly, but if they see the opportunity to enhance their position by grabbing on to the issues that you are dealing with, they help educate the market. This type of influence is not purchased with a subscription to an analyst firm or via press releases, it is gained through personal relationships and involving the right individuals in your strategic market and client discussions.
The bottom-line for now:
The above 7-suggestions barely scratch the surface of what it takes to succeed in helping an organization create, define and profit from a new market. However, they are important issues that I often do not hear the leaders of these exciting firms thinking and talking about. Creating a market is a non-routine project, and as a result, non-routine thinking is required every step of the way. Leave the traditional tactics at home, spend some time thinking beyond the moment and trust your gut that this is really challenging. Remember, if you are right, you want to harvest what you spent so much time, money and gray matter pioneering. If not you, the companies right behind you will be happy to benefit from your efforts.
In Search of the High Performance Project Team
Filed under: Leadership, Organizational Transformation, Project Management
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.
Leadership and the Winning Environment
I never get tired of hearing stories from leaders about their winning teams in business or in high school athletics. These stories are usually told by the leader or coach with parental pride about the remarkable success of a group of people that have figured out if they work together and in support of each other, great things can happen.
More often than not, the leaders or coaches of these teams are quick to dismiss their own role in the success, quickly pointing to the individuals and their work habits, dedication and coordination. While humility is admirable, the leaders that put together groups that regularly achieve and exceed goals deserve credit for helping create the environment where winning becomes a habit. (See also, The Seven Leadership Levers that Shape the Working Environment.)
From selecting and supporting the right people to caring enough to provide the tools, mentoring and constructive feedback, this leader, whether CEO, Shift Supervisor or High School Tennis Coach, is truly responsible for creating an environment that breeds success. Success as we know, tends to breed more success. It’s a wonderful, vicious cycle.
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