Leadership Caffeine: Speed Kills-10 Situations to Call a Timeout
Filed under: Leadership Caffeine, Performance, Project Management, Strategy
Note from Art: after a brief hiatus from the weekly Leadership Caffeine columns to launch my book/collection: Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development, they’re back. The Weekly Leadership message posts will now publish every Sunday.
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We’re so focused on speed in our organization, that we’ve become remarkably competent at creating problems faster.
Somewhere on the way to this world we now live and work in, “speed” became a proxy for success. Speed is undoubtedly important, but beware relying on it as the sole indicator of effectiveness. It’s a cruel tyrant, demanding fealty from followers, while discouraging critical and deep thinking and focusing solely on time-to-response as a metric of success.
The pressure to move fast here is tremendous. Everyone’s running in circles as fast as they can.
Speed, unchecked increases sloppiness. The leader who demands speed at the expense of thought and thoroughness is teaching his team members to act now and worry about cleaning up later. This works in triage and firefighting and other activities where instincts and actions are essential for survival, but it doesn’t play well for most teams and organizations in the business world.
Instead of taking the time to diagnose our situation, our strategy session focused on creating a huge laundry list of things to do. The leaders felt like it was a success because we had identified the work and assigned names and dates to it. No one knows what the strategy is though.
Don’t misread my intent here. Speed is critically important in many of our corporate endeavors. The world we live in demands attention to the clock. However, speed without thought breeds activity without vector and that is chaos.
During coaching sessions or workshops where people get a few moments to slow down and think, the number one excuse for not doing the things everyone knows are right is…you guessed it…no time.
At Least 10 Situations When it is Essential to Defy the Need for Speed and Call Timeout:
1. Any situation that involves the development of a team member. Few of us take enough time to support development, provide feedback and determine and act on developmental plans. Call regular time-outs for everyone on your team to deal with this.
2. When someone looks at you and says, “This is important.” A peer was famous for offering, “That’s an important topic and we should talk about it at the right time.” It was never the right time.
3. When you’re making lists of things to do. When you’ve just completed creating a laundry list of new “strategic” initiatives or projects, and no one has talked about what you’re NOT going to do, it’s time say, “time-out.”
4. When the prescription shows up before the diagnosis. Whenever you are talking about strategic plans, new directions and new investments, and the team hasn’t taken the time to properly diagnose and understand the situation, it’s time to pause. Speed loves a rush to judgement…a ready, shoot, aim approach, but nothing is a substitute for a proper situation diagnosis prior to acting. If this is abstract, simply ask and work with your team to answer, “What’s going on here?”
5. When you’re the Executive Sponsor on a project and you don’t know how things are going.
6. When the sky falls regularly. You’re overdue for a time out when you find yourself and your team members caught in an endless loop of responding to the latest competitive announcement by dropping everything to prop up the sky that’s about to fall. This is indicative of a lack of strategy, a lack of spine or some great manipulation by others in the firm. Regardless, fix it.
7. When a situation has been framed either as a positive or a negative, it’s time to call time and look at through a neutral filter.
8. As soon as someone says, “With a little more time and money, we can do this.” That’s code for the Sunk Cost effect decision trap..aka Escalation of Commitment. Sunk costs should stay sunk!
9. Any time you hear words like, “this can’t fail.”
10. Anytime you see a revenue projection that looks oddly like a hockey stick.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Blind pursuit of speed is part of the formula for disaster. Focus on creating healthy speed by minimizing the daily issue churn and resultant rework. Take the time to think through your diagnoses and prescriptions for the big issues. Flag potential decision-making traps and recognize that for some issues (people), speed is typically note part of the right answer.
Work hard, run fast and strive to win, but take the blindfold off first.
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About Art Petty:
Art Petty is a Leadership & Career Coach and Strategy Consultant, helping motivated professionals of all levels achieve their potential. In addition to working with highly motivated professionals, Art frequently works with project teams in pursuit of high performance. Art’s second book (an edited, annotated collection of the most popular leadership essays), Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development, was released at the end of September in 2011.
Contact Art via e-mail to discuss a coaching, workshop or speaking engagement.
Leadership Caffeine: Frame Carefully to Improve Discussion Quality
Filed under: "To Do" List, Decision-Making, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine
Decisions propel people, teams and organizations forward. Get more right than wrong…especially the big ones, and the only thing standing in the way of success is the critical issue of execution. And of course, most decisions start with a discussion.
One of your important jobs as a leader is to ensure that your team is engaging in the right discussions prior to offering a solution. Paying attention to how an issue is framed is an important part of monitoring discussion quality.
Framing-Beware of Splinters:
One of the constant contributors to less than ideal discussion processes comes from how leaders or team members frame a situation. Whether it’s described as a positive or a negative…a crisis or an opportunity…and the assumptions that are made, all serve as part of the frame for a situation. Framing drives the discussion and importantly, it steers and biases solution set development.
If the boss describes a situation as a problem in need of immediate repair, the discussion and solution set will focus on fire-drill type repairs. That’s OK if it’s a fire drill, but perhaps there are bigger issues that might be solved by reframing the situation as an opportunity to solve a systemic problem.
Management teams frame their strategic environment by assessing the current state and making assumption about the future. Consider:
Americans don’t care about quality..they are focused on style and will buy a new car every two to three years and, the threat from foreign automobile manufacturers is relatively small. (GM in the 1970’s)
Our biggest threat will be from a well-armed nation-state. (The U.S. Government up until 9/11, as they used the framing of the Cold War to drive thinking and preparation.)
Managers bias a decision discussion as soon as they open their mouths and offer their characterization of an issue and/or their perceived best solution. Again, that might be appropriate in some circumstances, but in others, it will preclude alternative idea development.
One of the most common issues many firms struggle with today is how to determine the role of social media in their business. I’ve participated in a number of these discussion with clients, and observed repeatedly that the managers and teams who view social media as a threat (a waste of time and a potential liability) develop restrictive policies, while those who see it as an opportunity (new way to engage clients and promote) develop policies that encourage experimentation.
Frames are powerful…and we offer them without thinking about the impact they have on others we’re looking to for input. However, with a bit of discretion and some deliberate practice developing good framing habits, managers can improve discussion quality surrounding decisions almost immediately.
Six Ideas for Improving Discussion Quality through Better Framing:
1. Manager Hold Back: ask others for their description of a problem/situation before you offer your perspective.
2. Frame like Switzerland: offer only neutral descriptions…neither positive or negative, and see how the discussion develops.
3. Develop Dueling Frames: for every situation, encourage team members to develop two completely different description (frames) of a situation. For the serious issues, frame the situation as both a crisis for one discussion and an opportunity for the other.
4. Prior Planning Prevents Poor Framing: teach your teams to frame first before solving. Their discussions should lead off with a description of the issue (the frame) and people should be encouraged to challenge these frames for validity.
5. Stop, Look and Clarify the Frame! Many discussions take on a life of their own and the frame gets lost in the emotions and politics. Regularly stop discussions to reaffirm or challenge the original frame.
6. Beware of Perfect Frames: things aren’t always neat and clean, especially when talking about strategic options in this fast-changing world. If your assumptions begin to sound GMish and too overwhelmingly supportive of your direction or investment, it’s time to look harder at your situation.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
For relatively little effort, you can achieve significant improvement in discussion clarity and decision quality. Starting today, watch how you and others frame issues and encourage everyone to put the time in early in the discussion to ensure good solution set development. Measure twice, cut once.
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About Art Petty:
Art Petty is a Leadership & Career Coach helping motivated professionals of all levels achieve their potential. In addition to working with highly motivated professionals, Art frequently works with project teams in pursuit of high performance. Art’s second book, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development, will be published in September of 2011.
Contact Art via e-mail to discuss a coaching, workshop or speaking engagement. Check out Art’s on-line “Professional Development Sprints,” designed for the busy professional.
10 of My Favorite Dumb Ass Management Mistakes
Filed under: Career, Decision-Making, Leadership, Marketing, Performance, Strategy, Surviving Lousy Leaders
Note 1 from Art: this one is rated something or another for strong language and emotional intensity.
Note 2: In the spirit of my post, “At Least 20 Things to Stop Doing as a Leader,” which has grown well north of 50 thanks to a deluge of reader comments, I’m back with a list of some insanely stupid and all-too-common management mistakes. These focus more on the decisions, actions or inactions that contribute to creating even bigger problems. While I’ve remained on the positive side of the law here (felons, you’ve had your day!), some of these mistakes are truly criminal. Please feel free to chime in with your additions.
1. Locking the corporate strategy in a drawer. Hey, I’m all for security, but this wasn’t just protecting important documents. This executive didn’t bother to share the strategy with employees either. It was a secret.
2. Not rolling out the sales compensation plan until late March. The sales team was on a calendar year. Hmmm, what did everyone do for Q1?
3. This one is epidemic…sucking the value out of an acquired company by folding, spindling, mutilating, disrespecting, vanquishing and otherwise conquering and plundering the target. We’ve got a mountain of evidence of this, and still, dumb a@@ executives focus on the deal (the easy part) and forget the real work of properly and positively managing the new relative. Welcome to the family! Now bend over and cough.
4. Looking for cause in the effect. This is a daily occurrence in many businesses, where managers run around trying to explain the drivers behind company, competitor and market outcomes. “Hey, our competitor keeps putting up great numbers. They’ve gone to a formal dress code at the office. It must be the clothes.” OK, that’s a little far-fetched, but I double-dog dare you to find a few instances of misguided cause and effect in your workplace today.
5. Losing sight of the core issues in the heat of argument. The decision making process is complex. Add in a group of high powered and big ego managers and you’re certain to be pressured into a dumb a** decision. My favorite evil tactic, “Take of your (insert function) hat and put on your business hat.” You might as well have a lobotomy prior to making that decision, because that’s what your evil counterpart is essentially asking you to do.
6. Letting marketing define its own key performance indicators. Hey, I’m a lifetime marketer, and I still rankle at this one. If the marketing activities don’t specifically connect to the key levers that move the business forward, they are interesting to some but useless to many.
7. Sliding down the slippery slope of consensus decision-making. Everybody doesn’t get a vote unless we’re talking about ordering pizza. We’ve all seen the cartoon that indicates in a series of panels what various functions wanted in a new product development effort. The Rube Goldberg outcome looks nothing like what the customer wanted. Start looking for the moves away from smart and good in the consensus-based decisions on your teams. It should frighten you.
8. “It’s sunk cost. We can’t worry about what we’ve spent, we need to keep moving forward.” Ha! This rationale has derailed careers and destabilized nations. For the love of all this is good in humanity, quit burning money when all the signs say “Stop!”
9. Daily occurrence in this economy: failing to acquire the right talent because of cost controls. Yeah, let’s fix this one once we’re making money! (For 20 bonus points, identify the insane and inane thought processes that went into that last statement.)
10. Annual occurrence: putting a group of managers in a room one time per year and expecting that out of the collective group grope, market winning strategies will emerge. “Hey, great meeting. See you next year.” We’ll maybe…unless our competitors leave us for global road kill.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
The common denominator in all ten of those very real mistakes is that they are controllable. We can decide to not make these mistakes. The sales comp plan can hit the street with the new year. We don’t have to throw good money after bad, and we don’t have to engage in practices like the annual strategy planning retreat (it’s a process!) that are just stupid. If you can’t go out and get the talent that you need now with what’s walking around on the street, you’re either not trying hard enough or you need to find some other people to work for.
Instead of thinking deep thoughts about making good decisions as part of your New Year’s Resolutions, why not resolve to simply not make the same bad old decisions over and over again. Now that would be progress.
Team Conflict? As Long as It’s Not Personal, Run With It
Filed under: Decision-Making, Leadership, Performance, Professional Growth, Project Management
I’m leery of happy teams. Don’t get me wrong. I like positive situations and working with happy people, however, in my experience, the happy teams are the ones that produce mediocre results or, they don’t produce at all.
Give me a group of people that show up to do battle on the issues versus the team that strives for peace and harmony, any day.
Just as “being liked” isn’t required to be effective as a leader, neither is maintaining peace and harmony on the team required for success. What is required is the ability to push the envelope on creativity, talk openly and freely about problems and shortcomings, and to cry foul when someone violates the group’s norms for performance, behavior and accountability.
For many people, conflict in the team environment feels wrong. It’s uncomfortable. Conflict breeds personal stress and group tension, and sometimes creates a hue and cry for “getting along.” While an aversion to conflict is understandable if it is personal in nature, task and process conflict are important factors in propelling high-performance teams forward.
5 Reasons a Dose of Conflict Might Be Healthy For Your Team:
1. Elephants aren’t allowed to hide in the room. The big issues and tough topics are uncovered quickly and dispatched without worrying about personal interests and political boundaries.
2. Social loafing is squashed. Hanging out and working at less than full tilt becomes painfully obvious in environments where the group is challenging itself to move together through the jungle. People pull their weight or they are left behind.
3. Decisions are held to a higher standard. While the potential pitfalls of group decision-making are well known, teams that challenge themselves and each other in pursuit of achievement tend to have higher standards for the quality of their decisions. Instead of a rush-to-decide or a drive-to-consensus culture found on more collegial teams, task-focused groups search for answers that pass the filters for both quality and speed. In my experience, they challenge assumptions, seek the right or at least better data and assess risks and implications much more effectively than the “let’s all get along” teams.
4. Leadership skills are challenged and strengthened. High task conflict teams are leadership laboratories. One of the “elephants in the room” of my argument here is that leading these teams is not for the faint of heart. Team leaders must learn to manage the flow and energy of the conflict to ensure that it doesn’t move into personal territory. They also need to be adept at helping maneuver the team from the heat of robust dialogue to a decision and implementation. These are clearly non-trivial leadership challenges and remarkable learning opportunities for all involved.
5. Standards for performance are enhanced. Participants refuse to settle for anything other than success, and success is often defined as either exceeding or obliterating targets or, innovating in some meaningful fashion. The task conflict pushes people higher and harder. Along the way, these high performance teams raise the bar for everyone in the organization.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
I suspect that I’m skating on the thin-ice of a great number of people that find conflict distressing and destructive. Keep in mind that my context is task or process conflict, and not anything personal in nature. It takes an emotionally intelligent group to pull this off and not let good and tough discussion over the right issues reduce to squabbling and paralysis. It’s hard work to find and foster this type of a team and environment. But who said that producing high performance was easy work? It’s most definitely not.
6 Steps for Avoiding Groupthink on Your Team
Filed under: Decision-Making, Leadership, Performance, Project Management, Strategy
Groupthink is one of the nefarious decision-making missteps of teams, and a trap that many smart people and groups have fallen victim to throughout history.
From the classic example cited in nearly every discussion on decision-making, the Kennedy administration’s Bay of Pigs fiasco, to Ford’s launch of the Edsel, to Neviille Chamberlin’s inner circle that believed peace with Hitler was at hand, Groupthink has earned a prominent place in our culture.
And while you might not be planning an invasion or negotiation with evil dictators or planning on launching an ugly automobile, chances are that Groupthink has shown up from time to time in your professional world.
Groupthink at Work in the Workplace:
The essence of this decision-making trap is the irrational pursuit of consensus above all other priorities. Along the way, those that study group dynamics have identified a number of technical characteristics of Groupthink, including:suppression of reality testing, censorship of doubts, ignoring outside information, overconfidence and an emerging attitude of invulnerability. While some of these terms have a distinct technical ring to them, they are descriptive enough to suggest a closed, insular and out-of-touch with reality team culture.
I see Groupthink at work regularly on management teams that have convinced themselves that their strategy is the only way forward. They spend months defining a universe that fits their collective frame of reference, and then they build plans to operate in that universe. While the plans are often elegant, the team’s construct on the external world and clients becomes as much fiction as fact, guaranteeing failure. After a long period of time invested in framing this strategy, Groupthink’s cousin, Escalation of Commitment, joins the party and together, they work to block out evidence to the contrary and prevent the team from recognizing the need to restart.
Functional groups are prone to a kind of Groupthink, when the organization’s culture and structure emphasizes rigid boundaries and strong penalties for stepping on turf and toes that are not your own. The isolated group begins to define the internal and external world from its own viewpoint, and almost as a survival strategy, it shuts out external opinion and blocks ideas that are potentially threatening to their view and their silo boundaries.
And perhaps more commonplace, project groups of all types work to believe that achieving consensus is the only way to move forward on an issue. Often, if you peel a layer back on the push towards consensus, it’s driven in large part out of an irrational concern for the feelings of others. “We want people to feel invested,” or, “I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes.” If this were the holiday season, I would offer a distinct, “Humbug!” The pursuit of consensus gives rise to the tyranny of mediocrity. Or worse.
6 Steps to Avoid Groupthink on Teams:
1. Anticipate Groupthink in your Risk Plan. While it might sound like planning to fail, ignoring the potential for Groupthink is a failure to plan for a very real risk. And like any risk plan, there must be processes for monitoring and mitigating emerging Groupthink.
2. Size counts. Limit the typical team size to less than 10 and ensure that there are well-defined boundaries for inclusion. Porous team boundaries and widespread casual involvement on teams breeds dysfunction, including pressure towards consensus for the wrong reasons.
3. Invite external perspectives at various stages of the process. Of course, you’ve got to have the procedures in place to both protect external viewpoints and to find ways to incorporate them into the group’s thinking and plans.
4. Lengthen the discussion phase…use structured discussion to focus on vetting the issues. Delay a rush to judgment. I encourage groups to incorporate non-typical discussion processes such as Six Hats Thinking to dramatically improve discussion quality.
5. Develop a second solution. I referenced this approach in Practical Lessons in Leadership. Challenge your team to assume that management will reject their first solution. Develop an alternative and very different second solution and be prepared to defend it.
6. Invite the Devil’s Advocate to the party. While a designated Devil’s Advocate is a contrived role and everyone knows it, at least someone will be throwing rocks at the groups beautiful picture. Rules on respecting and vetting the DA’s perspective are critical to benefitting from this approach.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Forewarned is forearmed. Decision-making is tough enough, and it grows in complexity when there are groups involved. Don’t naively assume that your group of smart people is immune to the many pitfalls and missteps that dot the path towards a decision. Groupthink is like the common cold, and while there may not be a cure, there sure are some preventative measures that can help keep it at bay.
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