Executive Behaviors, Your Boss Has No Clothes and Revolution from the Bottom

June 9, 2009 By 4 Comments

Gary Hamel offers a post well worth reading on “Why Success Often Sows the Seeds of Failure,” in his Management 2.0 blog at the Wall Street Journal.  He takes some tough and well-earned shots at the narrow-minded thinking of executives that foments the eventual demise of formerly good organizations.

In my opinion, the habits and traps that bedevil formerly successful companies also exist in those less-than successful organizations.   Regardless of starting point, the tendencies and habits of ineffective executive leadership are not hard to see.  In theory, they shouldn’t be hard to call out and change.  However, we don’t.  Why not?

A few of Hamel’s observations:

Hamel: “Years of continuous improvement produce an ultra-efficient business system—one that’s highly optimized, and also highly inflexible. Successful businesses are usually good at doing one thing, and one thing only. Over-specialization kills adaptability.”

Art’s Comment: Motorola (Cellular) is my poster child for this one.  This early adopter and advocate of Six Sigma become great at providing playgrounds for legions of engineers to create a smorgasbord of products that no one wanted or wants.  Processes were golden, but no one had a clue about the customer or what competitors were doing. 

They hit a low when the new CEO brought in to turn-around the Cell division (success doubtful) gave a phone to his wife and after trying to use it she gave it back, indicating (paraphrase) “If I have to use a manual to figure out how to use the phone it is too complicated.”

Hamel: “Long-tenured executives develop a deep base of industry experience and find it hard to question cherished beliefs. In successful companies, managers usually have a fine-grained view of “how the industry works,” and tend to discount data that would challenge their assumptions. Over time, mental models become hard-wired.”

Art’s Comment: I’ll pick on the hiring authorities for this one.  Many boards and management teams demand that hires walk in the door with such precise level of industry and sometimes technology knowledge, that they guarantee Hamel’s hard wiring.  Entire industry trade talent over time and ensure that the same bad-old ideas and ingrained biases of the industry remain in place, stifling creativity. 

Hamel: “Caretaker executives who’ve never been entrepreneurs and have never built something out of nothing are prone to view success as an entitlement, rather than the result of innovation, gut-wrenching decisions and perseverance. Isolated from the bleeding edge of change by subservient minions, they start believing their own speeches.”

Art’s Comment: Wow!  That’s a lot to take in in one sentence.  Amen to the need for executives to be faced with the challenges to build and innovate and to feel the pressure of Hamel’s self-described gut-wrenching decisions.  Nothing like a good dose of real-world accountability to knock some hubris out of the leader.

It seems like the auto companies, especially GM, missed this memo.

Why Can’t We Tell the Emperor About the Lack of Clothes?

It’s easy and fun to pick on the people in charge. They are big, easy targets with plenty of faults to single out.  The bad habits, poor attitudes and ego issues that Hamel points out are painfully easy for all of us to see.  Yet time and again we allow ourselves to be blinded and made deaf and mute by the light and actions coming out of the executive suite.

Perhaps part of the cure for what ails us is for people to screw up the courage to talk about problems and pursue actions to fix them.  Maybe the revolution doesn’t start in the executive suite

My friend and a sage leadership advisor, Wally Bock, writes frequently at his Three Star Leadership blog about the power and importance of the Supervisory-class of leaders—those front-line leaders and the import that they play to a firm’s success.  Maybe we need to retool top leadership by modeling the right behaviors from the bottom of the pyramid. 

A few of these “Right Behaviors” include:

  • Frank discussions about what’s working and what’s not
  • Environments where challenging the status quo is appreciated and encouraged
  • Hiring practices that don’t involve cloning and that do allow for creativity in bringing on-board unique skill sets and talents.
  • Development practices that include “Charan’s” apprentice model so that upcoming leaders can face the gut wrenching decisions and grow in the process.

Last and not least: making it a core value and behavior inside a firm to cry “Foul” when the leaders up above pontificate while walking sans clothing through the business day.

What’s to stop us from starting to get this right?

 

 

 

Filed Under: Crisis Leadership, Decision-Making, Leadership, Management Innovation, Performance, Surviving Lousy Leaders, Values Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Weak Leadership at the Top Derails The Pursuit of Performance Excellence

October 20, 2008 By 2 Comments

While some top executives err on the side of asserting a dictatorial style of leadership that poisons the working environment and stifles independent action, in my experience, many more struggle with just the opposite.  Instead of overwhelming their associates with strict orders in pursuit of rigid targets, they default on their responsibility to set direction in a poorly constructed attempt to create an environment of empowerment. The results of this approach include endless discussions without resultant actions and massive frustration of well-intended personnel that want to move projects and ideas forward.

This laissez-faire top leadership style is particularly problematic when teams are facing vexing problems: a new strategy vector, the need to change imposed by external forces or a new operating initiative (e.g. a quality program).  At the point in time where resolve is required to step off the cliff in pursuit of the new initiative, this leader steps back and waits for the group to agree to jump. And waits, and waits, and then waits some more, while the group endlessly debates what it means to jump.  Committees are born, research initiatives established, and political agendas developed and asserted.  And still, the top leader waits, fearful that asserting authority will undermine the independent thinking and free spirited structure of the team.  What a disaster.

Don’t misinterpret my tone as an indictment of empowerment and the need for self-directed work teams at the senior level. I believe that the best performing teams have a wide berth when it comes to identifying problems and developing and implementing solutions.  However, this type of effective team culture comes as a result of a conscious decision to empower.  Inherent in this conscious decision is the understanding of all parties that there is accountability for making progress and for ultimately improving the organization.  This is very different from the form of leadership where the lack of a decision and lack of responsibility for action is the permanent outcome.

I cannot speak with certainty about why some top leaders suffer from a chronically weak leadership and decision-making style, however, I suspect that it has a lot to do with a concern for upsetting people and a general discomfort with giving feedback.  Top leaders are most definitely not immune from the same challenges that everyone else faces when it comes to conducting tough discussions with others. Top leaders want to be liked, they want to be respected and they want their direct reports to feel good about what they are doing, where they are working and who they are working for.   All of these provide good reasons for not upsetting the apple-cart in the mind of the top leader.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

There are no magical cures for the top leader that lacks the resolve to assert direction, require action or give feedback to under-performing teams or individuals.  Coaching can help if the individual recognizes his or her shortcomings and truly wants to change.  And while some top executives are willing to go down this path, too many are beyond the point where they think that they need to improve.  After all, they are in charge.

Next: How to survive if you work for a weak leader.

Filed Under: Decision-Making, Leadership, Leading Change, Surviving Lousy Leaders Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Career Growth and the Product Manager

September 26, 2008 By Leave a Comment

I wear my respect on my shirt-sleeve for the many dedicated Product Management professionals that hold down what I believe is one of the most difficult and one of the most critical roles in today’s fast moving technology and B2B organizations.   (See my post: In Support of the Product Manager as MVP) The individuals in these positions have a tremendous responsibility to provide guidance to the organization, often with little formal authority to translate this guidance into action.

While admittedly biased based on my own PM and PM leadership experience, I firmly believe that these talented and well-rounded business professionals are potentially some of the most valuable assets in an organization’s talent pool.   Of course, realizing value from this talent requires a proactive approach to helping Product Managers develop some of the “softer” skills that we all know are important, but that we as leaders often overlook in our preoccupation with the day to day crises that can rule our lives.

Here’s my short-list of the skills that Product Managers cum Executives must focus on if they want to crack the ranks of senior leadership.  Given the fact that Product Managers are some of the only individuals that see the firm from the outside-in and inside-out, it is well worth it for Product Managers and their managers to steer development, and yes, training efforts towards these areas.

  • Leadership: This is perhaps the stickiest or squishiest of all skill sets and yet developing context for the true role of a leader, understanding what it takes to build credibility and engender trust as a leader are critical lessons on the road to success.  Instead of generic leadership training, focus on an approach that emphasizes the development of key leadership skills and the application of these skills in a series of diverse leadership situations.  Ideally, any leadership development program for Product Managers will emphasize developing the skills and gaining experience for leading as an informal leader, leading horizontally and managing upwards.  (OK, again, I’m biased, but a manager armed with my book, Practical Lessons in Leadership and committed to creating a robust developmental program for their Product Managers is miles ahead of the manager sending their PM to some of the generic leadership training in the marketplace.)
  • Strategic thinking.  Like leaders, strategists aren’t born and in most cases, they are made.  Few positions in a firm have the potential to contribute more to strategic thinking and strategy process creation and sustainability, than that of the Product Manager. I was fortunate enough to enjoy early career mentors that challenged me to constantly think outside of my product, outside of my company and to look at the big picture, tune in to my various audiences and to develop and test strategic hypotheses while growing the business.  That is a very different way of thinking versus “what are the top 10 features that I can jam into my next release?”  Too many Product Managers don’t learn to look beyond their narrow scope (product, market segment) and all too many don’t grasp the importance of their role as a strategist in the overall firm’s plans.  Challenge yourself or your Product Managers to take an active role in educating the firm on the market and customer situation and proposing ideas to leverage the situation for growth.
  • Communications Skills and Mastering the Art of Diplomacy.  Great Product Managers learn to speak the language of executives and they recognize that every encounter regardless of who they are meeting with, is an opportunity to build trust by understanding needs, creating shared perspectives and creating reasons for people and teams to move forward. The recent HBO miniseries, John Adams, based on David McCullough’s biography of the same name, shows the mercurial and aggressive Adams nearly destroying any chance to earn France’s support for the revolution, as he demands action and nearly destroys the hard-won credibility that Franklin had earned in several years of creating an understanding and developing shared-reasons to fight the British. The days of command and control leadership in the corporate world are generally over.  Developing a communication style that creates interest and fosters respect is essential for success.  Diplomatic skills to manage upwards, to manage across and to manage the generations and the various cultures via distributed teams are skills that will carry the Product Manager way beyond their mid-level role.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Rather than coming across as picking on Product Managers for being deficient in leadership, strategic and communication/diplomatic skills, it is my intent to encourage them to proactively develop these skills.  It is remarkably easy to get caught up in the pursuit of day to day business and forget that everyday is a chance to advance your career.  If you are fortunate enough to have a great mentor, that is good.  If not, it’s incumbent upon you to take the initiative to create the experiences necessary for you to develop and fine tune these critical skills.  Your future depends upon it.

Filed Under: Product Management Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

From Imperial Court to Learning Organization

July 21, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Today’s post was stimulated by a great article in the July/August 2008 Harvard Business Review, The Competitive Imperative of Learning, where Professor Amy Edmonson of Harvard Business School outlines the differences between organizations that focus on execution as efficiency—doing things better and faster than your competition versus execution as learning—focusing on learning and adapting faster.

In brief, Professor Edmonson compares and contrasts the approaches used in the traditional industrial age model of motivation and performance evaluation processes versus those required for today’s knowledge-worker dominated organizations.  The approaches required for success in the two models are dramatically different.

In the Execution as Efficiency model, Professor Edmonson indicates that leaders provide answers, employees follow directions and optimal work processes are designed and set up in advance.  In the Execution as Learning model, leaders set direction and articulate the mission, employees discover the answers and work processes are highly fluid, adapting at the speed of organizational learning.

Practical Applications: A lot of Executive Talk, but…

When it comes to driving change, words and actions must match. Few organizations are immune to the massive forces constantly reshaping the world around us, and few organizations can afford to live solely by the Execution as Efficiency model.  We live and work in a world increasingly dominated by knowledge workers, and while one part of an organization may be dominated by an efficiency orientation, other areas, marketing, sales, research and development, must move towards a learning approach or face dire consequences in the marketplace. 

In my own experience working with organizations that have grown up with an emphasis on efficiency but are talking about the need to become more flexible and adaptable, it is often the people doing the talking that are serving as the barriers to change by failing to revamp outmoded systems and processes.

Five Barriers that Get In the Way of Developing a Learning Organization:

  1. The Imperial CEO and Royal Executives: A class system that puts undue weight on the import of executives.  Instead of the executives serving the organization, it seems like the organization exists to serve the executives.
  2. Strategy by Edict and Set According to the Calendar: Every year at about the same time, the organization stops and waits while the royal court sits behind closed doors working out the new organizational structure and lofty statements that provide the masses inspiration to work hard until they receive fresh inspiration next year.
  3. Strategy by Default: “We have a strategy, and it’s to sell more,” is a commonly heard phrase in this tuned-out environment.   Another is, “Strategy is for the big boys, and we’re too small to worry about anything other than doing our jobs.”
  4. People as Expenses: the words coming from the mouths of executives might be saying “People are our most important asset,” but the systems supporting the identification, development and retention of talent are saying, “People are our biggest cost.”
  5. The Functional Structure: specialization works in some areas, but in general, the silo structure of many/most orientations is the greatest impediment to shared learning.  While the phrase, “we’re all in sales” is commonly shouted by salespeople frustrated with the lack of organizational support, the fact is that, “marketing is truly too important to be left to just the marketing department.” 

What to Do If Your Organization Needs to Learn:

  • Take the royalty out of the royal court.  This culture shift has to start at the top—the non-CEO Chairman of the Board and the other independent board members have to step up and overthrow the caste system and monarchy that pervades so many executive environments.
  • Recognize and act on strategy as a process that involves everyone.  (I’ve posted on this one seemingly a thousand times, so I’ll spare you the details and direct you to the Strategy category on this blog.)
  • A robust execution process with plenty of accountability and constant evaluation of performance and consideration of lessons learned is the fastest way to pump up organizational learning.
  • Make the identification, development and retention of talent the job of every manager or supervisor in the organization.  Challenge HR to create systems to support these activities and start living up to the notion that people are your greatest assets.
  • Break down the walls by at least moving towards a strong matrix or a project environment for major initiatives.  Cease and desist with throwing initiatives over silo walls, and build a project culture with the charter to execute and to educate the organization on lessons learned.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

It’s time to quit talking about becoming a learning organization and start knocking down the time worn conventions, institutions and processes that stand in your organization’s way.  In an ideal world, this change starts at the top with an insightful leader or leadership team that understand what it takes to move from an efficiency orientation to a learning focus.  In reality, a lot of this change will need to be driven by leaders in the middle that clearly see what is happening in the external environment as well as what it takes to win in that environment.  If necessary, let the royals executives posture and play while you go about the business of changing the business one initiative at a time.

Filed Under: Leadership, Leading Change, Project Management, Strategy Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Seven Suggestions to Consider When Creating A New Market

May 26, 2008 By Leave a Comment

If you've ever worked in an organization or on a team that got caught up in the quest to create a new market you know that the experience is all consuming and exhilarating.

While the all-new pure white-space scenario is elusive, a fair number of organizations leverage their deep knowledge of a specific segment, a group of customers or a set of customer challenges to create new offerings that don't fit traditional market definitions or boundaries.  The combination of blazing a new trail and believing that what you have created and what you are espousing will help reshape and transform for the better how something gets done is intoxicating. 

I met the other day with a CEO living through this very situation right now, and from listening to her very real challenges and reflecting on my own experiences on one of these market-creating odysseys, I offer a number of leadership and management suggestions that might prove helpful on your own journey of market creation. 

7 Issues that Should Keep You Awake at Night on Your Way to Creating a Market:

1.  You have to surround yourself with flexible, free-thinking and adaptable people.  Hiring the former BIG CO executive who hasn't lived through what it means to swim without a life raft may not be the best plan in the early phases.  You don't have time to wean people off of big company practices…bring in the professionals that have already been through this process somewhere else.

2.  Listen to yourself and your people talk and read your own propaganda.  If everything that comes out of your mouth is about how great your new product is at the feature/function/capability level, you've got a problem.  If the answer to every business question is something about the unique capabilities and elegant architecture of your revolutionary product, you've got a problem.  If your web site is nothing but more of the above, the problem is real.  The prospective clients that you are seeking as early adopters are motivated by a bigger vision, not by the elegance of your technology.

3.  Markets don't emerge on anyone's schedule.   If you are banking on going from nowhere to critical mass on a short-horizon, you and your investors are likely to be disappointed.  While everyone in awhile markets emerge at remarkable speed, most of them take years and often never emerge.  If your market's emergence is dependent upon people and institutions changing long-standing practices and overcoming deeply embedded approaches, you better be planning for a marathon, not a sprint.    

4.  Back to the message coming from you and your web site.  Like it or not, you are evangelist and educator all at the same time.  If all you do is shout product, you will not appeal to either the hearts or brains of your prospective customers.  Make sure that your people, your web content and the preponderance of your conversation is educational and informative and not pure product propaganda. 

5.  Traditional marketing tactics don't work when you are creating a market.  Give it up and shoot your marketing head if he/she is suggesting advertising, trade shows and direct mail as primary vehicles.  (OK, this one will generate some controversy.  Sorry, I believe that the world has changed and people gather their information and assign trust in very different ways than they used to.  Before flaming me on this topic, read David Meerman Scott's: The New Rules of Marketing and P.R.  and then let's start the debate.)

6.  Traditional selling tactics don't work when you are creating a market.  See also the marketing comment above.  Transactional salespeople and sales approaches need not apply.  Your early focus is on market visionaries willing to take a risk to realize something profound for their business.  Match the value creation resource with the task to fuel the vision.

7.  Map the Influencers and figure out how to appeal to their fundamental need.  Don't know what that is.  It's simple.  Market influencers gain influence by having radical opinions on what's right, what's wrong and what organizations need to do about what's right and what's wrong.  Paint your vision for them, encourage them to develop their own vision and provide them with a soapbox to tell the world.  A good influencer will never back you or your product overtly, but if they see the opportunity to enhance their position by grabbing on to the issues that you are dealing with, they help educate the market.  This type of influence is not purchased with a subscription to an analyst firm or via press releases, it is gained through personal relationships and involving the right individuals in your strategic market and client discussions. 

The bottom-line for now:

The above 7-suggestions barely scratch the surface of what it takes to succeed in helping an organization create, define and profit from a new market.  However, they are important issues that I often do not hear the leaders of these exciting firms thinking and talking about.  Creating a market is a non-routine project, and as a result, non-routine thinking is required every step of the way.  Leave the traditional tactics at home, spend some time thinking beyond the moment and trust your gut that this is really challenging.  Remember, if you are right, you want to harvest what you spent so much time, money and gray matter pioneering.  If not you, the companies right behind you will be happy to benefit from your efforts.

Filed Under: Leadership, Marketing, Strategy Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Next Page »