July Leadership Development Round Table Challenge
It’s time for the July Leadership Development Round Table Challenge!
You may recall from last month’s inaugural event, this is where we put forth a vexing situation and a number of regular contributors plus one guest take the opportunity to share their best thoughts on how to handle it… in 200 words or less. You vote with your comments and with your actual vote, and after one week of fierce but professional debate, a winner is announced.
This was great fun for all parties involved last month and it’s nice to get everyone involved in solving what are most definitely real-world challenges. We appreciate your active contributions and votes!
This month’s contributors:
1. Dan McCarthy, from Great Leadership
2. Art Petty, from Management Excellence
3. Mary Jo Asmus, from Aspire-CS Note from Art: as of this writing, Mary Jo is still without power from the storms that hit the Midwest this week. She encouraged us to proceed on schedule sans her post.
4. Steve Roesler, from All Things Workplace
5. Jennifer Miller, from The People Equation
6. Scott Eblin, from The Next Level
and our esteemed Roundtable Guest this month is:
7. Sharlyn Lauby, from HR Bartender
OK, it’s time for the case. Fair warning, I’m the host this month, and it was my job to write the case. While a bit longish, I erred on the side of wanting to paint a picture for you to work with. It’s a real situation that is looking for a real solution. With no further adieu, here’s the July Challenge:
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The Set-Up:
A case in a widely read publication once used the label, “Brilliant Problem-Child” (BPC) to describe the high-potential/high-performance employee who manages to tick everyone off while stomping on toes in pursuit of results. Certainly, our culture is filled with descriptions of leaders who are “less than nice” in the workplace, however, the situation gets complicated if your name isn’t Steve Jobs or Larry Ellison and if you’re operating somewhere in the middle layers of an organization.
Just about everyone knows or has worked around someone like our character, Joe, below, and if you’ve been Joe’s manager, you’ve dealt with the dilemma of “What price, brilliance?” From “results at any cost,” to “why can’t we all get along?” there are a myriad of approaches with varying costs to teams, environment and careers.
Here’s a chance to help Joe’s manager, Pat, (finally) get this one right.
The Situation:
Pat Paulsen, the Director of Product Management for Apex Inc., sat for a few moments and stared out the window after the project team left her office. She was disappointed that her employee, Joe, was once again, the topic of discussion and complaint.
Apparently, Joe had yet again stomped on some toes and bruised some egos on the project team. He had shared his disdain for what he viewed as a slow and overly bureaucratic process to gain approval for the feature specifications for the next version of Apex’s flagship product. When the project team resisted his efforts to ram through the specifications, Joe had used his considerable pull with the overseas head of engineering to bypass the team completely. His response to the protests from team members was, “I’ll get this done with or without you.”
Joe:
Joe was a widely acknowledged brilliant product manager who had worked hard since the business unit’s inception 7 years ago to translate customer needs into product ideas and programs that solved problems and kept competitors off-balance and chasing Apex.
Additionally, customers and industry partners respected Joe’s industry knowledge and his zeal for supplying them with products that helped them run their businesses more effectively. They even overlooked his propensity to tell them how to run parts of their business, because he was most often right. “One partner summed it up best, “Joe has a horrible bedside manner, but he knows his stuff.”
Pat and Joe
Pat, as Joe’s manager, had been on the receiving end of a number of these types of complaints over the years. The conversations typically started with, “I know Joe is brilliant, but… .” The group that just left her office didn’t include any references to “brilliant” this time.
Pat genuinely believed that she had gone beyond the call of duty trying to remedy the problem and support Joe’s development. In addition to documenting, discussing and offering ample feedback and guidance over the past few years, Pat had invested in Joe attending several workshops on improving interpersonal skills. And just last year, Pat, with her superior’s blessing, had invested in sending Joe off to the prestigious Institute for Leadership Excellence, for some focused and very expensive coaching.
Perhaps the most perplexing part of the situation was that Joe seemed to genuinely take the feedback and coaching to heart. He worked hard on modifying his behavior after receiving feedback, but eventually he would become frustrated when project team members or groups ignored his guidance or moved too slowly on an issue that he viewed as critical.
The Environment:
The values at Apex were clearly posted in every conference room and they clearly implored people to “Break Down Walls,” “Challenge the Status Quo” and “Serve Customers First.” Taken literally, Joe’s behavior matched those values perfectly. He did do great things for the firm, and he was a thorn in everyone’s side in the process.
The success of the business unit over the past few years (much of which was due to Joe’s products), had led to a significant shift in the internal culture, from one fueled by entrepreneurial zeal to one that was building processes and relying more on teams. It was clearly a different environment and one where Joe’s approach was increasingly in conflict with the emerging culture.
What Next?
Pat shuddered to think what life would be like without Joe’s knowledge and expertise helping the company specify and launch great products. She pushed the momentary vision of him wearing a competitor’s badge at the upcoming industry trade show out of her mind.
Pat had no doubt about Joe’s brilliance, but it was clear that his approach engaging with others had more than worn thin. She sighed and pondered what to do next.
Help Pat. What should Pat do given the history and circumstances described in the case?
Advice from the Roundtable Members:
-From Art Petty, Management Excellence (note: as host, I’m honor-bound to write my answer before reading the answers from other members…thus my being first in the line-up. All other posts added in the order received):
Pat is in a pickle, and her options are not great. Joe is unlikely to change his spots with more coaching and counseling, and the”or else” discussion will begin moving Joe out the door. Leaders often have to make hard, unpopular calls, and this certainly feels like one of those.
The values describe an aggressive culture, and given the growth (on the back of Joe’s products), new people and new processes and teams are forming and feeling their way forward. While Joe seems to introduce significant task conflict and creative tension, it does not appear that his behavior is unethical, immoral or toxic. It does create task stress, which can contribute to improved performance.
Strengthen the team…provide coaching and training on team dynamics, conflict resolution and managing challenging team members. No one should have to walk on eggshells around Joe, and individuals and groups must be comfortable conducting robust dialogue with him and each other. If his behavior crosses the line from task to personal and the toxicity goes up, I would advise Pat to move him out. For now, I’m not willing to suggest she trade a visionary with an unquestioned ability to create value.
Leadership is often lonely.
-From Jennifer V. Miller, The People Equation
It’s time for Pat to level with Joe and let him know that if he doesn’t curb his atrocious bedside manner, he’ll be discovering his brilliance somewhere outside of Apex Inc. Allowing this behavior to continue tells other employees: “It’s ok to act like a jerk as long as you’re brilliant”. Lots of really smart people don’t leave bodies in ditches, so the “we tolerate it because he’s brilliant” argument doesn’t cut it.
Joe’s been acting this way for seven years, so he’ll push back, offering evidence of all his accomplishments. Pat should meet with Human Resources to review the existing documentation and develop a plan for the conversation with Joe.
The overall message should be: “Joe, we appreciate your efforts on behalf of Apex. Business conditions have changed and we now need team players, not hard-charging mavericks. Your behavior must change, or you will be fired.”
After that, it’s up to Joe to determine if he wants to change. He’s increasingly becoming a square peg in a round hole. Not only is Joe’s behavior damaging to other employees, it’s most likely stressful for him to continually be told to “change”. He may decide that it’s best to move on.
-From Sharlyn Lauby, H.R. Bartender
The thing that stood out to me was the environment. The scenario paints a disconnect between the stated company values and the actual internal culture. At some point, the company will have to reconcile this. That’s another post.
I’ve seen this situation many times. A person has creativity and produces at a high level but leaves body bags all along the way. Hopefully, Pat is able to recognize the good things Joe has done for the company while at the same time realize it might be time for him to move on.
If Pat continues with the status quo, there are two possible repercussions. (1) the remaining team members become completely disengaged creating an “us versus them” environment. (2) Pat’s credibility goes down the tubes because she failed to deal with the situation.
Pat needs to explore a way to have Joe exit the team in a positive way, allowing him to keep his dignity. At the same time, she needs to set new expectations for the remaining team members who will still be accountable for delivering results.
-From Dan McCarthy, Great Leadership
Joe is doing exactly what he was hired to do and you’ve allowed him to do. In fact, up until recently, it sounds like Joe’s values were a perfect match for your company culture.
Oh sure, you’ve spent a bundle on executive coaches and fancy charm schools, and for a while, he may have been ready and able to change. However, when push came to shove, you continued to let him get away with it because he got the results you craved. To make matters worse, it sounds like you’ve been so dependent on Joe that you’ve ignored the development of the rest of the team.
Managing an employee like Joe is like having a drinking or gambling problem – we deny there’s a problem until it’s a crisis.
It’s time to sit with Joe and spell out your behavioral expectations. More importantly, it’s time to lay out the consequences – this has been what’s missing in order for him to change.
If he does not change, then you need to follow-up on those consequences. I’m betting he will once he sees you’re serious. That’s when you earn your stripes as a leader!
-From Scott Eblin, The Next Level
In considering Pat’s dilemma about Joe, two quotations come to mind. The first is from the former French president and general Charles deGaulle. “The cemeteries, he said, are full of indispensable men.” Pat is feeling trapped because she’s allowed herself to believe that Joe is indispensable. She will eventually have to deal with his behavior in a definitive way. It’s just a question of whether it’s sooner or later. Either way, she needs to start working on building the company’s talent pipeline now so that when Joe leaves she’s not left with a gaping talent hole in the organization.
That leads to the second quotation. Paraphrasing Karl Marx (yes, that Karl Marx), the good of the many outweigh the good of the few. As talented as they are, people like Joe ultimately stifle their organizations because the really good people leave because they don’t want to work with a pain in the butt. If Pat lets this play out much longer, she’s going to be left with a lot of mediocre people and Joe. Not a great competitive situation to be in. She might have one more “You’ve got to change or else,” conversation with Joe, but she has to be prepared to let him go.
-From Steve Roesler, All Things Workplace
Indeed, we’ve probably all dealt with high-performing/low-collaboration types. The last client situation with which I was involved saw the real-life “Pat” character follow the same steps described ( I was “Joe’s” coach). After being involved with a number of these, here are my thoughts. 200 words probably won’t do it justice.
- Joe works for a profit-making company that rewards revenue generation and will go out of business without it. (Note the Apex well-publicized values). So, the question to ask is, “While this huge pain in the butt is ringing up business, what behaviors can we all learn to live with?”
- Pat has introduced developmental activities to impact Joe’s behavior. In fact, Joe has actually exhibited desired behaviors. It seems that the smell of victory puts him into high gear and, like a profit magnet, he goes for the gold.
- Bypassing people and procedures is normally a no-no. But look at the bestselling books that tell you to be a Maverick or use the Fire-Ready-Aim approach to business. If you’re a high achiever, what are you supposed to believe?
One last possibility: team meeting with Joe to let it all hang out. Could it hurt?
It’s Your Turn…What Say You?
Vote in the poll below for your favorite answer, and please share your own professional perspectives with a comment.
7 Ideas to Stimulate Experimentation in Your Organization
Filed under: Leadership, Leading Change, Management Innovation, Performance
Dan Ariely offers an interesting piece in the April, 2010 Harvard Business Review on “Why Businesses Don’t Experiment.” In this brief essay (only available for a fee as of this writing), he offers two main reasons for the lack of experimentation:
“…experiments require short-term losses for long-term gains. Companies and people are notoriously bad at making those trade-offs.”
“Second, there’s the false sense of security that heeding experts provides. When we pay consultants, we get an answer from them and not a list of experiments to conduct. We tend to value answers over questions.”
I’ve certainly observed the impediments to experimentation that Ariely highlights and a good many more. In some organizations, there are so many systemic and cultural disincentives to experimentation that it’s a wonder that executives and employees are able to decide what to have for lunch today that was different from yesterday.
In spite of the natural inertia towards the sure thing or the shortcut (external advice in lieu of more risky and time-consuming experimentation), I’ll offer my few cents worth on why and how you and your firm can use experimentation as a means of building value and confounding competitors.
Why Experimentation is Healthy for Your Business
- Great strategies don’t spontaneously generate, take root and grow on their own, based on the magical beans provided through a consultant’s input. Value creating ideas and approaches are most often the output of enlightened trial and error…and sometimes unenlightened trial or just plain fortunate errors.
- If your firm and your teams are not experimenting, your firm is slowly choking off the supply of future innovation. Most often, the deteriorating quality of ideas that turn into valuable offerings is met with what Jim Collins describes as the “Undisciplined Pursuit of More.” This flailing about is an attempt to rapidly make up for the dearth of good ideas created by a rigid culture and leadership. Instead of a pipeline of ideas, firms grasp at straws and all ideas can be rationalized as potentially good.
- Teams that fail together in pursuit of experimentation stand a better chance of succeeding in the end. While that might seem like a “call to failure,” it is intended as a call to learning.
- Facilitating a culture of experimentation is a great way of facilitating a culture change away from command and control leadership, particularly if experimenters are given the opportunity to own ideas. It’s a great sign when a firm embraces reality that top leaders aren’t there because they have the best ideas.
Rethink Everything to Stimulate Experimentation
The obvious areas for experimenting include your products and services and tweaking with various elements of your marketing mix. Before you go too far down the experimentation path however, remember that your business is a system and virtually every part of how and what you do is worth rethinking.
Other opportunities for experimentation include: organizational structure, project approach, strategy formation and execution, talent development, cross-functional collaboration, promotional approaches, engaging with customers, thought-leadership strategies and so many others that don’t involve impacting your product.
7 Ideas to Stimulate Experimentation in Your Organization:
1. Build the expectation into your culture that experimentation is part of the job. Think 3M, Google and others that expect their employees to spend some significant amount of their time on items unrelated to their core job or their current task list. Part of successfully pulling this off is genuinely providing the time and supporting resources.
2. Create systems for experimenters to turn ideas into processes, offerings and approaches. This of course requires you to ensure that the decision-making process is uncomplicated or made less complicated and that when the time is right, there is money and support available for next steps.
3. Put your top leaders on the hook for fostering innovation by monitoring over time how their efforts contribute to innovations that make money, cut costs or differentiate.
4. Quit emulating your competitors. Too many firms suffer from competitor envy and move through time monitoring and reacting. I’m all for a healthy amount of monitoring and improving upon or outflanking, but the cases of pure raw emulation that I’ve seen are remarkably counterproductive and unprofitable.
5. Embrace social media! If you are blocking access to social media, wake-up and recognize that there has never been a more fertile source of innovation than the discussions being shared and ideas emerging on Twitter and via blogs. And the ability to research, experiment and gain insights from specific audiences in near real-time fashion is unparalleled. It’s time to knock down the social media firewall and free your people to think and engage!
6. Recognize that for some offerings and processes, the best approach to innovation might come through external collaboration efforts. Your partners in the value chain are looking for opportunities to experiment as well, and these types of collaborative relationships can be fertile grounds for experimentation and innovation. Having said that, be aware that making these work is a nontrivial task.
7. Build a new hero class in your culture, where experimenters and experiments that yield successful outcomes are celebrated and become part of the folklore of the firm. Be careful not to trivialize this issue with dumb employee or team of the month awards. Use some finesse and create heroes. And find ways to remind people that everyone is invited into that club…all they need to do is earn their way in on their own or as part of a team.
The Bottom-Line for Now
When walking into a client organization, one of the areas that I assess is how rich or poor the culture is when it comes to experimentation. Healthy cultures and winning organizations encourage experimentation and the opposite generally holds true.
And when seeking to facilitate a culture change, remember that these things don’t happen as a result of an executive order, they happen over time with tons of support, reinforcement and a constant refueling of the pioneer spirit.
Now, ask yourself: what are your people doing today that may just build a new future for your organization?
Develop Culture Sensing Skills and Take the Blinders Off Of Your Career
Filed under: "To Do" List, Career, Leadership, Product Management, Professional Growth, Project Management
Note from Art: at least part of this post was prompted by some truly brilliant product managers interacting on twitter. The true-life career horror story is all my own!
One of my greatest career misfires was accepting a role in a firm where I had failed to properly assess the culture. I was blinded by the allure of this successful and global firm and by the sharp people that I met during the interview process.
Had I interviewed from the perspective of assessing the firm’s culture, I suspect that I would have realized that this was a highly political environment with a command and control leadership style that was counter to my own style and preference.
It took 18 months to unwind that mistake.
Fast forward a few years to where I am active as an educator, trainer, consultant and coach, and I rarely miss an opportunity in a program on leadership, product or project management to describe the importance of developing effective culture-sensing skills.
Top Sales Professionals Get Culture Sensing!
Interestingly, some of the best pros at sensing an organization’s culture are top sales performers and lateral leaders like product and project managers will be well-served to learn from their sales counterparts. Yeah, I know. product and project managers learning from salespeople?! It’s like cats and dogs living together. However, it can happen!
Think about it. Great salespeople are expert at quickly assessing a prospect’s business issues as well as understanding an organization’s approach to decision-making. A sales pro wants to know who makes the final decision, who owns the budget, who the stakeholders are and what the dynamics are that will allow an opportunity to move from interest to close. The faster that he/she can understand how things happen inside an organization, the easier it is to plot a strategy.
Pay Attention: Your Culture-Sensing Skills Will Serve You Well!
I can think of few skills more important for product and project managers and other lateral leaders to develop than culture sensing. All of the expertise in the world in the science of project management or in the understanding of a proper product management framework is for naught if the individual fails to take into account and leverage cultural idiosyncrasies to achieve results and drive improvements.
While the topic of organizational culture is big and broad, my emphasis is on the practical aspects of understanding a culture. From the perspective of someone new joining an organization, here’s just a few of the key cultural attributes or dimensions that they need to understand:
15 (or so) Powerful Culture-Sensing Questions You Need to Ask and Answer:
- What is the organization proud of? Who are the heroes and what are the heroic stories?
- How do people feel about the teams that they are part of?
- How does work get done?
- How are decisions made?
- Is individualism rewarded and encouraged or is the team, silo or unit at the top of the food chain?
- Am I working in a culture rich in values or bereft of any?
- How does innovation take place?
- How do people talk about the leadership?
- Is the spirit one of “can-do” or can’t do because”?
- What is the fighting style? Can people disagree vehemently on an issue and then go to lunch, or are grudges long and deep?
- Is there dissonance between stated goals and priorities and where the focus is placed?
- What’s the accountability culture like?
- What type of individuals prosper and what type struggle?
- What role do customers and what power does Voice of Customer play in the working environment?
- Can people talk about tough topics openly, up and down the ladder?
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All of these and the many more that I could keep listing speak to various cultural dimensions that a lateral leader such as a product or project manager must understand to effectively execute on their roles.
Common misfires occur when individuals attempt to impose their own vocational dogma on a group that could care less what the PMBOK says or whether best practices in product management support the idea. The effective lateral leader doesn’t compromise his/her knowledge or best practices, but rather, learns to play and operate within the cultural dimensions to achieve the right outcomes.
As an executive, I never appreciated it when we were in project meltdown and I was confronted with a project manager highlighting how mucked up our processes were and how if only the team had listened to her guidance we would not be in this situation.
The same goes for Product Managers that I’ve known that would regale me with tales of tragedy and travesty at the hands of evil developers or manipulative salespeople as their excuses for why an offering had flopped or a customer had rejected the latest release.
While those examples underscore a number of shortcomings of the individuals, they also tell me that there was little understanding on their part of how to work within or to subtly and diligently help the culture evolve.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
My Product Manager friends have quite a bit more to say about what they are describing as the “anthropology of product management” and the importance of culture sensing. I’ve only scratched the surface of this topic, and suspect I’ll be back with more.
For now, my suggested take-away is for you to think consciously about understanding the environment you are working and operating in and leverage this knowledge to help drive performance improvement.
And for the large number of job seekers in the market, remember to apply these same questions to the firms that you are evaluating as part of your next step. A job is good, but 18 months was a long-time to reflect on my need to do a better job culture-sensing.
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?
Tuning In to Leadership (and much more) With A Great New Book
One of the highlights of the past few months has been the opportunity to gain some early insight into the forthcoming new book, Tuned In, by Phil Myers, Craig Stull and David Meerman Scott.
I'm excited about this book on a number of levels. In a pre-release article about the book, Phil, Craig and David make a promise to readers that they will show us an approach to finding "overlooked marketplace problems that, if solved, bring in customers who willingly buy your products and services without being coerced."
From my discussions with Phil and from reading the article and advance materials, I am confident that this promise will be more than kept, offering some much needed guidance for executives and marketers looking to create offerings that resonate with buyers. After 22 years leading high tech marketing teams, I couldn't help but ask myself, "Where was this book was all those years when I needed it?" Well, it's here now, or at least almost here, and marketers everywhere will be well served to read and apply the well-researched and well-developed ideas and approaches in this fascinating and practical new book.
Tuned In presents a six-step process for creating a resonator: "a product or service that so perfectly solves problems for buyers that it sells itself." The examples, approaches and ideas for realizing resonators and for supporting the creation of an organizational culture that institutionalizes the requisite thinking and processes are the heart of the work. The steps: find unresolved problems, understand buyer personas, quantify the impact, create breakthrough experiences, articulate powerful ideas and establish authentic connections offer powerful and practical guidance for marketers and executives everywhere.
Valuable Guidance for Leaders in Tuned In:
We all read and relate to ideas through the filters of our own experiences, and as I've immersed myself in writing, speaking, training and teaching on all things leadership during the past few years, I've started to view the world through the eyes of how great leaders at all levels transform organizations. The Tuned In tagline reads: "Uncover the extraordinary opportunities that lead to business breakthroughs," The breakthrough for me personally from this book is the perhaps unintended but powerful framework that emerges for creating and sustaining the leadership culture necessary to realize a Tuned In organization.
During the research for my book, Practical Lessons in Leadership, my co-author, Rich Petro, and I came away from hundreds of hours of interviews with the perspective that most leaders do not operate with a holistic view of what leadership is supposed to deliver to an organization. Tuned In helps solve that problem by offering clear context for the role and priorities of leaders at all levels as they pursue creating breakthrough experiences for their customers.
The Top Priorities of a Tuned In Leader:
- Creating the environment (atmosphere) necessary for individuals and teams to be comfortable and confident to take the risks and pursue the actions needed to identify and realize offerings that resonate.
- Bringing together individuals and teams with the talents, skills attitudes and sense of adventure needed to succeed as a business that is constantly searching for unresolved problems and applying the discipline needed to turn those into resonators.
- Ensuring that expectations and performance are defined, communicated and measured against customer and market standards, not just internal or competitor standards. Inherent in this activity is establishing a new way of measuring performance that aligns with the Tuned In Process.
- Developing his or her leadership credibility by ensuring that words and actions match and ensuring that associates receive the mentoring, feedback and developmental opportunities needed to grow and to pursue new and greater tasks.
- Constantly searching for, identifying and supporting the development of formal and informal leaders.
- Fostering an environment that encourages action-focused debate at all levels, across all functions up and down the leadership chain.
Armed with these priorities, Tuned In leaders, from the CEO to the front-line managers have a clear view of how they should invest their time and focus their energy. These items define the job descriptions of leaders at all levels and help guide the development of To-Do lists across the organization. There is no wiggle room for misalignment on these activities as an organization seeks to create offerings that resonate and surprise and delight buyers with great experiences.
The Bottom Line for Now:
Phil, Craig and David in Tuned In offer a pragmatic and effective approach for creating and sustaining success, regardless of the size or style of organization. Building on their framework, a Tuned In approach to leadership will help institutionalize the approaches and practices that they advocate.
You can and should read the book for the practical and actionable framework on creating value, but the richest veins of gold here for me are the ideas that the authors prompt for reshaping and invigorating our leadership habits.
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Join me for a webinar on Tuned In Leadership this Friday, June 13th at 10:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. PDT
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