Leadership Caffeine-Don’t Wait for the Title to Start Leading

Note from Art: this is a reminder to senior leaders to encourage and provide informal leadership opportunities to team members, and a wake-up call for those hoping to one day be the afore-mentioned senior leaders.

The time to start leading is now, long before anyone has bestowed the title of leader on you.

Much like the famous trio of Scarecrow, Lion and Tin Woodman of Oz-fame, they didn’t really need the Wizard to bestow a brain, courage or a heart, and you don’t need someone to anoint you as a leader before you can start learning and practicing.

The great news is that today’s organizations are filled with opportunities for you to easily and informally develop both your leadership and your followership skills.

Increasingly, the nature of work is project-driven, and it’s a safe bet that much of your time will be spent juggling the demands of multiple project teams simultaneously. It’s also a safe bet that somewhere in those various projects are wonderful opportunities to step-up and help lead problem-solving, trouble-shooting or improvement initiatives.  Choose tasks that seem challenging and will push you to stretch your skills.

Closer to home, your own manager is likely juggling multiple balls while spinning a fair number of plates.  I can assure you that he or she would love to share some of the fun with a team member.  Sit down and talk with your manager.  Share your interest in trying leadership on for size and indicate that you relish the opportunity to gain experience in this area while helping to solve problems.

If the workplace doesn’t seem conducive to stretching your leadership wings, there are ample opportunities in your community in the schools, in churches and in volunteer roles at one of the many non-profits in your area.  Volunteer to lead a fund-raiser or event, and you’ll get a great taste of the challenges and rewards of leading.

Six Ideas for Developing as a Leader Without the Title:

• Opportunities are all around you…be creative and find challenges that push you outside of your comfort zone.

• Work on becoming a great follower.  Great followership is an outstanding training ground for developing as an effective leader.

• Don’t get caught up in the so-called trappings of leadership.  Believe me, there is nothing glamorous about the role.  It’s hard work with little instantaneous gratification. On the other hand, the long-term psychic rewards are priceless.

• Study the habits and approaches of leaders that you admire and strive to apply those lessons in your activities.

• Ask for feedback on your performance and listen to it.

• Seek out an informal mentor to bounce issues and ideas off of during your leadership experiments.  This might be your manager, a peer or someone else that you admire in your organization.  Share your lessons learned…and offer your ideas to solving problems.  Mentors are not there to solve your problems or even give specific directions…but a good one will nudge you in the right direction if he/she sees that you are truly striving to solve the problem on your own.

The Bottom-Line for Now

By pursuing informal leadership experiences, you will learn whether you truly enjoy the role or are much happier as a valued individual contributor.  This is great insight to develop and one that will pay dividends in the form of proper future career decisions.

You don’t need a title to start leading.  You do need to screw up some courage and seek out and grab one of the many informal challenges that surround you.  You’ll be glad that you did.

Leadership Caffeine: Is Your Self-Confidence In Danger of Burning Out of Control?

Self-confidence is rocket fuel for leaders. Used carefully and ignited under the proper conditions, it propels you and those around you to remarkable heights.

However, beware the narrow tolerance ranges of your own self-confidence. Too little and you act and are perceived as weak. Too much and self-confidence becomes that most destructive of all leadership attributes, hubris.

Self-Confidence & the Early Career Leader:

In my experience, early career and first-time leaders tend to lack self-confidence, generally because they’ve not walked down the path and experienced the many pitfalls and challenges of the leader. Leadership self-confidence is born of experience, and not bestowed by title.

Some early leaders compensate with a command and control style, much like the parent who responds to her child with the self-serving and wholly ineffective explanation of “Because I said so,” to the teenager looking for some rational reason as to why he should change his behavior. I’ll let those of you that have parenting experience highlight why this approach is doomed to failure.

With coaching and some reasonable degree of self-awareness, early career leaders tend to grow out their ineffective ways, both gaining in self-confidence and recognizing the less than effective outcomes of demanding without explaining. However, with the passing of time and some early successes, a new potential problem emerges.

Experience and Success Can Turn Self-Confidence to Hubris.  Watch Out!

Borrowing from the excellent, but short read, “How the Mighty Fall,” by Jim Collins, he offers that, “dating back to ancient Greece, the concept of hubris is defined as excessive pride that brings down a hero, or alternatively, …outrageous arrogance that inflicts suffering upon the innocent.”

Perhaps it’s human nature, but as we gain experience and enjoy some victories, it is easy to start believing that we can do no wrong. This false and dangerous belief is often reinforced by the distorted reactions on our own performance that we receive from those who report to us.

It’s amazing how quick people are to tell us that we are brilliant when we’re in charge.

When self-confidence moves out of tolerance towards hubris and arrogance, the fuel that propelled teams and organizations begins to burn in the working environment, distorting reality and destroying objectivity.

The hubris of leaders is the accelerant that once ignited leads to the collapse of careers and companies.

How to Keep Your Self Confidence Within Tolerance:

• Remind yourself daily of your role as a leader. You are there to support, provide help, guidance, coaching and to create an environment for others to succeed in their roles.

• More on your role: repeat and live Deming’s 8^th point: Drive out fear, Create trust and Create a Climate for Innovation.

• Focus your calendar time on tasks that support the prosecution of your role.

• Remind yourself that “it’s not about you.”

• Quit asking people how you are doing and don’t pay attention to their unsolicited praise. Instead, ask people what you can do to help them succeed.

The Bottom Line:

It’s dangerously easy to start believing that “you” are the reason for success. Once you buy into that temptation, you’re headed for a dangerous fall. Keep your edge sharp by focusing on what you can do to help others succeed…not on what they can do to once again prove how great of a leader you are.

At the end of the day, you need enough self-confidence to know that the only way to create and sustain success is to choose carefully, support relentlessly and then place your trust in others.

A Fresh Voice on a Popular Topic: “Things I Wish I Knew When I Became a Leader”

Note from Art: My recent post, “Things I Wish Someone Would Have Told Me When I Became a Leader,” seemed to strike a familiar chord for many.  I’m thrilled that it struck a chord for someone that I’ve invited to guest post for quite awhile and until now, couldn’t quite convince to put pen to paper.  A good colleague and friend, Joe Zurawski, joins us today with his thoughts on early leadership missteps and lessons learned the hard way.

I’ve known Joe for a dozen years over several organizations now, and he’s come a million miles from the first-time leader described in this post.  Joe is a first-rate leader and mentor as well as an outstanding technology and business strategist with a great marketing mind.  He’s the complete package.  I’m hoping we can pry some more outstanding content out of Joe now that he’s come clean and shared his early leadership missteps and lessons learned.  Joe’s contact and bio info are at the end of the post.

What I wish I would have known when I took my first leadership position-Joe Zurawski

“STOP ACTING LIKE A CONSULTANT AND START LEADING!”

That’s what “Bob” shouted at me at an after work social function after a few beverages. I was stunned; I thought I had been doing a great job being a leader for our newly formed business unit. What was he talking about? Uh, I think there is something somebody should have told me about how to lead when I took this position….

The instance above was shortly after I met Art and we had many conversations on what I needed to do to grow into my leadership position (Art was in a different group at time and became my leadership mentor).

Here’s the situation: After earning my MBA, I joined a large management consulting firm during the heyday of process reengineering in the mid-90’s. The one skill everyone learned was team/group facilitation.

I became very experienced at leading a group through a change process: you served things up in a certain order, let the group digest the concepts and help them see the changes they need to make. The idea was they would take more ownership of the solution because they were the ones that eventually came up with it. Hey, there’s nothing to managing and leading!

After leaving consulting and joining an electronics hardware manufacturing company, a new President formed business units for the first time and I was offered the leadership position for the OEM unit. I was the acting general manager and responsible for leading this team, with direct responsibility for marketing and product management, and indirect responsibility for engineering, finance, quality, and manufacturing.

As a team, we needed to form a strategy, set-up our P&L’s, and create an operating cadence with quarterly reports to the President and senior staff. “Should be just like running an engagement”, I thought, “just lay it out there and they’ll run with it.”

And that’s exactly where the problems started: I acted like a facilitator. My “leadership” style was to ask a lot of questions of the group and assume they would develop the answers. Except they didn’t.

The team had no idea what I was doing or attempting to do. We didn’t make progress and our team meetings were starting to get contentious. Uh, this never happened before and I don’t know what to do!

Bob’s “start leading” comment, and his follow on “tell us where we need to go and what we need to do” really hit home. After sharing the experience with Art and with the company President, they helped me come around to what leadership really means.

Here are the things I wish I would have known in that first leadership role:

• Leadership means leading. It seems obvious, but it wasn’t at the time. The team wanted someone to tell them where we needed to go and how we were going to get there, not someone to serve up abstract questions to provoke “deep thoughts”. Set a clear path, layout clear tasks, and constantly tie it to the end goal.

• Don’t expect that everyone on your team speaks your language. I was using words and talking about things in a context completely foreign to what they had previously experienced. I was talking “consultant speak.” I had to learn to bridge the gap and approach things from their perspective.

• You are not “one of the guys” any more. I wanted to be liked and didn’t want to come in and be some outside tough guy that doesn’t listen. I wanted us to be a harmonious team that had fun together. The reality is I was now “management” and was treated as such. You don’t have to be mean or evil to lead, but don’t expect to have several new best friends either.

• It’s OK to seek help when things go awry. While I have as much pride as anyone, I knew things were going poorly and I really didn’t see where to go. Having a supportive, but not intrusive, President, and an outside-the-company mentor like Art, were both very helpful to vent, gain perspective on what the team was seeing in me, and what I needed to do differently.

The final point:

Learning to lead with no up-front guidance was difficult for me. While we eventually came around and had solid results, it was a longer and more difficult path than was necessary.

If you are headed for a leadership role, do yourself a favor and do some homework (like reading Art’s book), adjust your style and monitor how people are reacting to you.  And don’t forget to ask for feedback from your boss, from your team members and from peers.  Last and not least, it is a great help to have a mentor/friend lined up to keep you on track.

About Joe Zurawski: Joe is a strategy and innovation executive  with a career that has spanned strategy development and execution, whole lifecycle product innovation and management, demand generation marketing, and global alliances.  He has worked in electronics companies (including Motorola), software (Firstlogic/Business Objects, SPSS), and spent several years in management consulting at Ernst & Young. You can reach Joe at jzurawsk@chicagobooth.edu.

Strategic Awareness: The Second Leg of the Emerging Leader’s Three Legged Stool

One of the things that I truly love about this time we are living and working through is the front-row seats that we all have to some fascinating experiments in strategy. Things happen so quickly and with such widespread coverage in today’s world, that it often looks and feels like a strategist’s living laboratory on Miracle Gro.

A quick scan of the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) on my remarkable e-book reader, Kindle, indicates that Google Plans to Launch an Operating System for PCs and that Kodak’s CEO is Betting Big on Printers. Take a second and comprehend the strategy issues and implications of that last sentence. At least two out of three are staggering (Kindle and Google) and one is either the last gasp of a dying giant or a brilliant move to disrupt an entrenched industry.

There’s more:

As a consumer, I’m in the process of switching phone service providers for two of my family members and the one that I’m moving to cannot get the newest iphone in under a week. Sold out.

Just yesterday, my oldest son approached me about a new application for the iPhone that converts it to a true navigation device like those we buy in our cars from Garmin and Tom Tom and others. Hmmm, wonder how that meeting is going inside those device makers.

We live in an era where the platform is King. Think iTunes and the remarkable and industry-disrupting ecosystem that has sprung up around it. Consider Twitter and how it has revolutionized interactions and network building and how it supported a near-revolution in Iran.

The Three Legged Stool of the Emerging Leader/Senior Contributor:

I make no secret about my belief that emerging leaders…the executives and senior contributors of tomorrow must develop remarkable competence in three areas: leadership, strategy and communication.

Effective communication skills can be taught and with practice mastered. Learning to lead is difficult, and experience is the only teacher, but individuals armed with good philosophical underpinnings and supported by good mentoring and feedback can develop and improve their leadership skills.

The remaining leg: developing a sense of strategy and ultimately developing the ability to see and pursue strategic vectors is the most difficult to cultivate. It’s abstract, it’s creative, it’s often risky and there is little in the way of developmental support for emerging strategists.

Business schools tend to treat strategy as history lessons (cases) or as a sterile simulation game. Both are interesting and even fun, but of little use in my opinion in fostering the type of thinking, experimentation and action that leads to winning strategies.

The strategy events and processes inside corporations are often so dysfunctional and poorly managed that an invitation to be involved can seem like a ticket to the county lock-up. The best outcome is getting out.

Guidance for the Emerging Leader on Developing a Sense of Strategy:

While I’ll stop short of offering a “how to” prescription on developing as a strategist, there are certainly some actions and steps that an individual can take to increase their strategic awareness.

• Study and monitor the many strategic experiments occurring in real-time right in front of you. Is the Kindle the spark that rewrites the publishing business, like iTunes was to the music business? Can a floundering old giant regain its footing on a technology that consumes resources in the electronic and green era? Is Google’s move to an operating system brilliance, arrogance or just plain futile in a Microsoft dominated world? And for that matter, can Microsoft…the strategy giant of two decades ago reinvent itself?

• Think about your business and your products in the context of the most compelling and uncertain experiments occurring in front of you. Do you have a mini-platform option in your industry? If you truly understood your customers needs, what business and products would you create from scratch?

• Quit thinking about your competitors from a mimicking mind-set. In fact, quit preoccupying on their every move. It’s healthy to monitor but it’s better and even to battle, but save some gray matter for rethinking the business in a manner that ensures your competitor is obsolete.

• Beware the Innovator’s Dilemma. If you don’t know what that is, read the book!

• In addition to Innovator’s Dilemma, read: Tuned-In and Inside the Tornado and Crossing the Chasm. You could do much, much worse than base your strategic thinking on the principles espoused in these great works.

• Get involved in shaping, executing and monitoring strategy in your area of influence.

• Ask questions of those around you to better understand your firm’s situation in the marketplace and its strategic objectives.

• Work hard to ensure that your activities connect to the firm’s core strategies.

The Bottom-Line:

The world and the workplace are filled with people going through the motions, taking orders and executing and acting without really thinking. Strategists on the other hand are constantly striving to connect ideas and patterns to needs and value creating activities. Great leaders have a strong sense of strategy. Take responsibility for developing your sense of strategy and for supporting that development in others. You might just find that life and work are a lot more fun and rewarding this way.

The Challenge and Opportunity of the Product Manager

Note from Art: this post came about through my on-going research with a colleague into best organizational practices in product management and product manager career development.  For additional information on this topic, check out my recent podcast interview with Michael Ray Hopkin at The Product Management Pulse and stay tuned for future posts.  

Product Managers face significant organizational challenges in their quest to expand their roles and increase their value-creating contributions to their firms.  

Through a recent and on-going series of interviews with senior executives as well as product managers across a variety of technology and manufacturing organizations, it is becoming clear that more and more organizations recognize the potential for product management to create tremendous value.  It is also clear that enlightened executives increasingly recognize that the professionals that work in product management roles are a ready-made source of high potential contributors and emerging leaders.  

Consider:

• The Product Manager has the difficult and unenviable challenge of leading and influencing others across the organization without formal authority. The nature of the role requires the development of the lateral influence skills so critical to driving cooperation and execution inside organizations. 

• Product Managers are charged with shaping market and offering strategies and are critical links to the Voice of the Customer.  The best product managers learn to interpret and translate this sometimes confusing “voice” into offerings that solve problems and create value for stakeholders.  

• All too often, product managers and product management organizations struggle to transcend the persona of taskmasters and move beyond the never-ending, highly tactical activities.  Organizations that treat this function tactically are wasting remarkable opportunities to create value.

• The role of product manager is a remarkable training grounds for a firm’s future leaders.  These professionals see the organization from all perspectives; survive and prosper on their abilities to educate, motivate and inspire action and are at the epicenter of driving strategy and execution. 

It’s encouraging to see that some senior leaders and leadership teams are beginning to “get it” when it comes to expanding the involvement, accountability and authority of product management teams and professionals. However, from the school of “be careful what you ask for,” product  managers also need to step up their game several levels in order to fulfill their expanding missions. 

Part of the feedback that my colleague, Joe Zurawski, and I are hearing from executives is that that the core functional skills that product managers have honed over time must be augmented by the development and expansion of a set of senior leadership skills that will allow for increased contribution.  

Senior executives are looking for their emerging senior contributors in product management to bring more advanced skills to the party, in the areas of: Leadership, Strategic Thinking, Executive Presence and Process Optimization.

Core functional/vocational skills are critical, but not enough to allow well-intentioned product management professionals to expand their contributions.  Nor is the “make it so” mandate from senior management that has decided it is time for this function and these professionals to provide more. 

To survive and prosper as senior contributors and emerging executives, product managers must:

1.  Strengthen lateral influence skills (the ability to lead and motivate without authority and across the organization).

2.  Develop the ability to recognize emerging patterns in the marketplace and translate that recognition into ideas (strategy & strategic thinking skills)

3.  Improve their ability to articulate and command credibility with senior executives (executive presence).

4.  Work relentlessly to improve execution and continuous improvement around value creation activities across the organization (process optimization).

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Developing the abilities and skills in those areas is no small task.  A deliberate focus by executives and their high potential product managers on developing skills and gaining experience in those four areas is essential.

All parties must engage in a focused development initiative that emphasizes exposure to diverse situations and ever-increasing levels of ambiguity and challenge.  Education and training are a part of the process, but mentoring and coaching should earn the lion’s share of focus.  Only through deliberate and focused action will organizations derive top value from their high potential product management assets. 

Anything less is a formula for same-old, same-old. In this economy, no one can afford to stand pat on the bad old practices of the recent past.  

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