Leading the Driven Individual
Filed under: Innovation, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Management Education, Organizational Transformation, Performance, Product Management, Professional Growth, Project Management, Talent Management
Note from Art: My use of the “Driven Individual” term here encompasses the big-thinkers and game changers that I’ve had the privilege of supporting over my career. I get that there are other types of Driven Individuals…those that will seize a task and not let go until it has been wrestled to the ground. The latter group represents a subject for another day.
A great deal of popular leadership writing (mine included) focuses on the common issues and challenges with “typical employees.” Now before you grab a pitchfork and light the torches and start marching on this blog for my use of the term “typical,” don’t misconstrue my meaning.
Yes, I know that no one is “typical” and that we all have strengths and weaknesses and that it is grossly unfair to provide such a crass label to the masses of good quality employees laboring away and earning “strongly exceeds” on our grade-inflated performance evaluations. (I can hear the pitchforks clanking again on that last shot!)
Nonetheless, it was the best label I could come up with on short notice and only a few sips into my first cup of coffee, to differentiate from the subject of today’s post: The Driven Individual (DI). This is the “atypical, super-motivated, cannot do enough, has limitless energy and enthusiasm and offers capabilities that have no visible boundaries,” type of employee.
While one might consider the DI to be a leader’s dream, the reality is that these wonderful individuals offer a unique set of challenges that require special care and feeding. My perspectives are based on personal experience working with some brilliant but challenging DI’s and reflect both the good outcomes and some spectacular misfires on my part.
Understanding and Leading the Driven Individual:
Recognize that these individuals don’t think about problems like the rest of us. What we view as a set of tasks or a discrete goal, the DI views as an opportunity to change the world. DI’s in my experience are often “systems” thinkers, looking at the big picture and offering ideas that may be transformational.
A simple example might be an engineer or product manager that sees an opening for a new product. The product idea might be innovative, but the DI is constitutionally and genetically wired to attempt to rethink how the offering can redistribute the wealth of an entire industry. The iPod was a cool innovation beyond the Walkman. The iPod plus iTunes reset the profit pattern of an entire market and changed the world. You bet that there were a bunch of DI’s and one obvious one (Steve Jobs) behind that.
Another example is the individual that looks at the way certain tasks are executed in an organization and sees an opportunity to streamline, eliminate waste and improve coordination. This Deming-like thinker gets the fact that “the system” is the tool for success of failure and is always looking at problems and processes from that perspective.
And one other core observation of my own in working around DI’s is their reaction to failure. I’ve yet to meet one of these characters that didn’t respond by licking wounds for a day or so and then coming back stronger…either for the project that failed or on a new idea. They don’t need false motivation from you, they need recovery time and space.
Leadership Guidance
-Let DI’s run, but make certain that you stay engaged enough to keep them from pursuing too many revolutionary activities at one time. Some of these characters love to catalyze revolutions but lose interest for the long fight. Left unchecked, their passion and exuberance and brilliance can lead to too many great projects chasing too few resources.
-Don’t ask the types of DIs that I’m describing in this post serve as project managers. I’ve made this mistake and I’ve yet to succeed with this configuration. The minutiae of execution detail acts like a leash on creativity and energy. On the other hand, this same DI that might not be a great project leader is most definitely the heart and soul of the project, so they must remain involved as architect, champion and visionary.
-Don’t ever micromanage a DI. Frankly, don’t ever micromanage anyone, especially a DI.
-Watch out! DIs I’ve known have tended to have little regard for social niceties and are prone to stepping on toes or entire bodies. The goal is the thing for these DIs and if they have to throw a few body blocks along the way, that is fine. If you have this form of DI on your team, you’ve got a non-trivial leadership challenge in front of you.
The cultural pressure from the rest of the team may ultimately demand that you act to remove this “social misfit,” while your tendency will be to rationalize the behavior as the price to pay for their brilliance. Coaching, constant feedback and more coaching can help minimize the body count, but won’t completely eliminate the issue. Get this right and your DI will do great things for you and others will recognize how they benefit as well. Manage this wrong by either allowing reckless, free reign or worse yet, attempt to neutralize the DI and you will fail.
-Don’t let DIs sit idle or you will bore them into looking elsewhere, including your competitors, for their next challenge. Remember, these individuals are thinking three chess moves ahead of the rest of us, and as they mentally wind down on one issue, there needs to be a new one ready to take its place.
-Be careful: some DIs enjoy visibility and others run from it. Don’t misfire by either ignoring this for those that like the accolades or over-using it for those that would rather have a root canal without drugs than have to stand up at a company meeting.
The Bottom Line for Now:
I’ve barely scratched the surface of this topic, but need to stop somewhere. I love the challenge of working around and providing the environment for Driven Individuals to succeed. Get this right and fortunes are made. Get it wrong, and you’ll wreak havoc on the workplace. The stakes are big, and the Driven Individual will challenge you to earn your keep.
Leader, What Are You Doing to Improve Your Value Creation?
Filed under: Leadership, Leadership Skills, Leading Change, Management Education, Management Innovation, Organizational Transformation
How much value are you creating as a leader?
How much more value can you create?
How are you supporting the ability of your customers (employees) to create value? Where should you improve to strengthen your value creation?
What are your core processes as a leader?
How much waste do you generate through your leadership activities?
Borrowing from the principles espoused in “Lean” these are just a few of the key questions that every leader should ask himself/herself as part of their own personal development initiatives. Unfortunately, in my experience, few if any of these questions are asked or answered either by individuals or their direct leaders. This has to change.
In a world that is begging for radical reinvention of business and leadership practices, the organizations and individuals that are diligent in pursuit of the answers to these and related questions will make it through the storm.
Leadership should be one of the principal value creation components of the management system, yet poor leadership practices often result in increased complexity, added waste and blocked attempts to streamline processes and make improvements that would otherwise benefit the organization and its customers.
One of the key reasons that leaders and leadership practices often fail to create value (or to create more value) is the lack of a common operational and actionable definition for the role of a leader. Another cause is the lack of top management commitment to ensuring that leaders are accountable for ever-increasing contributions to the firm’s value creation mission. I’ll focus on the former in today’s post.
During the course of my career, I’ve developed and leveraged something that I describe as The Leader’s Charter, to help develop other leaders as well as to remind me of my True North as a leader. It reads as follows:
The Leader’s Charter:
Your primary role as a leader is to create an environment that:
•facilitates high individual and team performance against company and industry standards…
•supports innovation in processes, programs and approaches…
•encourages collaboration where necessary for objective achievement…
•promotes the development of your associates in roles that leverage their talents and interests and challenge them to new and greater accomplishments.
As I sit here and think about the Charter’s application and relevance for helping leaders in context of the questions at the top of the post and in light of the world situation, I suspect that it is time for another update. The next update must add specificity to the people development issues covered in the current version, while incorporating all of the primary “value creation” processes that a leader controls and impacts.
I don’t intend on wordsmithing the 2009 version of The Leader’s Charter here in this post, but I will take a stab at identifying a broader universe of areas that leaders must be held accountable for in their roles. I would love your inputs, additions and constructive suggestions via comments or by e-mail.
The Value Creation Processes/Activities of a Leader
- Developing others through coaching, feedback and by encouraging and supporting the pursuit of developmental (stretch) activities.
- Creating a working environment that draws out the collective knowledge and skills of team members in pursuit of solving customer problems.
- Ensuring that the standards for accountability, values, general behavior and communication are understood and adhered to by all participants.
- Clarifying and communicating a Vision that anchors organizational goals and aspirations and gives context to team and individual activities.
- Creating forums to gain ideas and insights into customer issues as part of strategy formulation. Involving everyone in capturing and translating the Voice of the Customer into strategies and actions.
- Ensuring that individuals and teams have the resources they need to carry out their tasks.
- Ensuring that teams and individuals gain access to skills development and educational opportunities.
- Eliminating fear from the workplace (Deming) and replacing it with a focus on customers and improvements.
- Determining what measures contribute to improving understanding and continuous improvement and implementing the systems to monitor and act on these measures.
- Look at the workplace as a system and support the continuous improvement of the entire system. (genesis: Deming.)
It would be easy to keep adding to this list with a series of increasingly granular tasks. My focus is on making this granular enough to be actionable and high-level enough to not be prescriptive.
Let me know your thoughts on other ways/areas that leaders must focus on to create value in their roles and for their organizations.
Sixty Years of Deming and American Managers Forgot to Pay Attention
Filed under: Crisis Leadership, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Leading Change, Marketing, Organizational Transformation, Product Management, Surviving Lousy Leaders
Note from Art: this distinctly non-holiday post couldn’t wait for a better time. There’s no time like the present for leaders and managers to be thinking deeply about their businesses and the road ahead.
Dr. Deming once stated that he hoped one of his life’s accomplishments was to keep American companies from committing suicide. The public spectacle of Detroit and Wall Street committing suicide in the same quarter would indicate that he failed in his mission.
The site of these firms begging in the streets for alms from taxpayers is nauseating. T
Deming spoke, taught and wrote about what we should be doing. He was clear in his belief that the U.S. was the “single most under-developed country in the world,” principally due to our philosophically bankrupt leadership and business management approaches.
He talked to many of the leaders in the U.S. auto industry. He described a theory of management that if adhered to, would cure U.S. firms of the “Deadly Diseases” of traditional U.S. management practices. These were the very diseases that got automakers and so many other firms in such big trouble to begin with. Short-term thinking, ego, false leadership models, lack of constancy of purpose and so many others that are in plain sight for all to see and fix.
From the ashes of World War II, Japanese leaders and managers worked to develop a new style of management. This tiny country (in land mass) with no natural resource other than a motivated workforce and leaders and managers relentless in pursuit of quality and collective prosperity, rose in a few short decades from laughingstock to the world’s second largest economy. Peel back the layers of Japanese success and you will find Deming at the center.
Deming’s Theory of Profound Knowledge and 14 points offered (and still do) keys to many of the answers. They are not prescriptive, but rather they combine to create a philosophical approach to running a business, that if adhered to, will stand a chance of succeeding for customers, workers and partners on a global stage.
We now face the daunting task of regenerating our economy. All of us that work, manage and lead have an opportunity to contribute. While our ashes are paper and not buildings like Japan in 1950, the situation is just as dire.
One reader mentioned in an earlier post of mine that it was interesting how Deming was rolled out when things got bad. My perspective: it’s interesting how we paid him lip-service when we should have worked to understand, adapt and apply his principles.
Dr. Deming saw that much of American industry had sown the seeds of its own demise in flawed management practices, even when times and numbers looked good. If you are looking for ideas during this time of trouble, Deming’s philosophy of management is a good place to start.
*Suggested reading: Out of the Crisis, W. Edwards Deming
Your “Weekend Reading List” from Management Excellence
Filed under: Crisis Leadership, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Management Education, Professional Growth
Weekend Reading Suggestions to Recharge and Refresh
Beginning with this post, I intend to make “Your Weekend Reading List” a regular Friday feature. Most professionals that I know are too busy to carve out quality reading time during the week, and many have confided that they wish they would be more diligent about reading on the weekend. While I won’t be there to help you pick up the book or click on the link, I can at least try and remove the “I’m not sure what to read” excuse from your arsenal.
In what I promise will be (maybe) my last attempt to nag your conscience about this topic, I view reading as critical for self-development as well as for recharging your intellectual batteries. And I don’t suggest limiting your selections to those items in the business section of the magazine rack or the bookshelf. As evidenced by my Recommendations List at Management Excellence, I encourage leaders and business professionals to read histories, biographies, books on physics and the classics. Sneaking in an occasional mystery is also a good way to stimulate your divergent thinking skills!
OK, enough preaching and on to this weekend’s suggestions. I’ll keep it short and this week, I’ll stay business focused.
The December 6 Issue of the Leadership Carnival at Great Leadership
The carnivals bring together some of the best minds and leading bloggers in management and human resources to cover a wide range of topics. Instead of seeking out the best posts of leading consultants and bloggers, they are here under one umbrella for easy reading. This is scheduled to go live on the 6th, so be sure to check it out.
Article: Where GM Went Wrong at Fortune.com
Like traffic slowing to pass a wreck, it’s almost impossible to not look on in both horror and fascination as this company which once was Master of the Universe now teeters on the brink of oblivion. (Did you know that GM’s market cap is just over $1 billion and Toyota’s is some 160X greater. How did this happen?)
Senior Editor, Alex Taylor III, covered GM for the past few decades and shares his fascinating insights into the culture, the leaders over time and the slow and methodical unraveling of this insular and grossly misguided company. As we all face the reality of letting GM go or propping the firm up with our tax dollars, Taylor’s lengthy article (8 pages) is must reading.
Article: Big Blue’s Big Plan at Fortune.com
OK, this is a good issue of Fortune. The sub-header, “IBM is drooling over the coming infrastructure boom.” and IBM CEO Palmisano’s opening statement of, “We’ve been given this on a silver platter,” give you some clues to how IBM is looking at the global recession from a glass half-full perspective. Another must-read article I guarantee will get you thinking about how you and your firm can find opportunity in chaos. Pass this link along to your associates and fire up the divergent thinking!
Book: Winning, by Jack Welch with Suzy Welch
I’ve had this one in inventory for a couple of years and recently cracked the cover and remembered why I like Welch so much. He cuts through the baloney and mysticism of topics like leadership, mission, vision, values and strategic planning, offering the reader practical, common-sense perspectives on driving results. While his day at GE is over, like Drucker, the guidance is timeless. In my opinion, the world would be better off with a few more like Welch in command today.
Book I’m Reading: Thinking About Quality, Progress, Wisdom and the Deming Philosophy, by Lloyd Dobyns and Clare Crawford-Mason.
Fresh from a great session teaching Quality Management to MBA students at DePaul University in Chicago, I’ve rediscovered my thirst for knowledge about Deming, his life and his philosophies. This man gets too little credit for shaping the post World War II business world, and his “Theory of Profound Knowledge” is appropriate reading for these difficult times.
I just started this one from the hosts of the TV special, “If Japan Can, Why Can’t We,” that launched Deming into mainstream America 40 years after he had established himself as a near-god in Japan and other countries. (I highly recommend the video…you can click on this YouTube link to the Deming special or search for Deming on the site to see the original program yourself.) My early feedback on this 1994 (but timeless) book is, great! I’ll keep you posted with a full review after I complete my “weekend reading.”
Now Grab a Cup of Coffee, Find a Comfortable Spot and Enjoy Your Reading Time!
The Counterintuitive Nature of Management Excellence
Filed under: Crisis Leadership, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Leading Change, Life and Business, Marketing, Organizational Transformation, Product Management, Project Management
I suspect that most readers will agree that examples of management excellence, high performance and great leadership are not the topics dominating the news in this emerging “we’ve never seen anything like this before” economy. Instead, we are fed a constant stream of downward revisions, requests for bailout and examples of management failure of “someone should go to jail” Whole sectors are crashing, great old brands are on the brink of fading into the history books and recently great businesses are floundering.
Contrast this current phase with the other extreme of recent memory, the dotcom bubble of the late 90’s, when the laws of physics were upturned, profits didn’t count, and it was all about clicks and eyeballs. Everyone knew someone that was a gazillionaire and massive amounts of paper wealth came into existence overnight. And then disappeared. A few firms like Amazon, eBay and Google ultimately emerged from the carnage following the bust, to play major roles in a changed world. Ironically, this changed world looked more like what we knew than what had been professed by temporary pundits feasting on the momentary gullibility of the masses.
The point. It’s easy to ride with the herd in boom and bust periods. It takes no management skill whatsoever to spend a fortune building up clicks and it definitely takes no skill to slash budgets, cut headcount, freeze programs and hunker down and wait out the storm.
It does take remarkable management courage and skill to run against the crowd and conventional wisdom by investing in strategic initiatives and talent during tough times and resisting the temptation to chase mythical fortunes during boom times. Leveraging adversity to stimulate creativity and rethink business models, refocus on customers and look everywhere for innovation that will create value is counter-intuitive to the “flight” response that so many firms are exhibiting. This counter-intuitive nature is also the hallmark of great management and great managers.
Deming dared to call U.S. manufacturing on the carpet and predict their ultimate suicide if they ignored quality during a time when quality got in the way of volume and profits. Drucker spent a lifetime teaching managers the rules of management excellence. Based on recent news, most of us forgot to listen.
You face the choice everyday to stay with the herd or dare to do something different in pursuit of management excellence. In case you are looking for some thought-starters on counter-intuitive ideas, consider these:
- Resist the temptation during tough times to make all of the “hard calls” by yourself. Talk with and involve your employees in decision-making and idea generation. They are just as concerned as you are about their survival and they want to help.
- Don’t shred your strategic plan because “everything has changed.” It’s great to challenge your assumptions or as Ayn Rand often said, “Check your premises.” There may be new or more opportunity than you imagined, and the plan may need revision, but don’t scuttle it based on fear.
- Invest in your talent now. While you may be culling the herd of poor performers, you should also be investing in building the leadership and strategic thinking skills of your workforce. If this ends, they will propel you to new heights, and if this economic environment lingers, they will save your skin. Either way, you need to invest.
- Your customers are as perplexed and worried as you. It’s time to seek nontraditional relationships with key customers and partners. These relationships include joint-strategic planning, joint brainstorming and true partnering solutions that transcend the traditional press-release relationship.
- Take a sledgehammer to internal silo walls. The dysfunction inherent in most sales and marketing or marketing and engineering relationships is significant enough to sink your ship.
The bottom-line for now:
It’s an outstanding time for great leaders to stand up and be heard, and it is an outstanding time to focus on excellence in management. It starts by checking your conventional wisdom at the door. Go visit a customer, ask questions and listen. Do the same with your employees. And then do something that creates value versus something that reduces your chances of creating value. Your actions may just start a revolution.
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