Leadership Caffeine: Developing as a Senior Contributor
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leadership Skills, Management Education, Professional Growth, Quality Systems Management, Talent Management, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
I regularly use the label “Senior Contributor” (SC) to reference a state of management maturity that tends to exist somewhere between upper mid-level management or senior knowledge worker and the executive layer. While the hierarchical comparison may be imperfect, it’s an easy way for people to understand my intent with the phrase.
The SC is a professional (manager or individual contributor) on the brink of executive qualifications and someone that has displayed effective formal and informal leadership skills, value-creating critical and strategic thinking abilities, credible executive presence and a strong operating and quality orientation.
The SC is an individual that whether by design or accident has consistently been challenged to deal with complex and ambiguous business situations and has proven capable of rallying efforts, forming high performance teams, and facilitating results that create value for customers, improve operations and thump competitors.
This is one super contributor!
Sound like a mythical super-hero that was graced with unique powers beyond those of us mere mortals, and that dons his/her mask and cape to fight bad business in the dark of night? While you’ve got to be sharp to be a SC, you most definitely don’t need to be from a planet with a red sun or to have encountered a radioactive spider to lay claim to your own mask and cape. However, you do have to deliberately focus on developing and honing your skills to gain membership into this league of outstanding professionals.
Senior Contributors are Made, Not Born:
I’ve yet to meet an SC that wasn’t personally and professionally driven to learn, grow, overcome weaknesses, develop talents and place himself/herself in challenging situations as part of the development process. While some people have natural gifts that lend themselves to certain situations, membership in this league is open to anyone willing to put the effort forth. However, not everyone has the Intestinal Fortitude (IF) to succeed.
7 Suggestions for Developing as a Senior Contributor:
1. Look in the mirror and recognize that this battle to develop and excel is all up to you. Your firm doesn’t owe you this and cannot train you on it, and you certainly won’t achieve the level of SC through seniority and marking time.
2. Face your fears. Given my description of the SC above, almost everyone will have to face and overcome some areas of discomfort. Typically, the development of advanced communication and presentation skills (and the confidence behind the skills) is the most frightening area for people to face. Ironically, these may be the easiest to learn, practice and refine. Others like critical and strategic thinking capabilities require a conscious effort to rewire long-standing ways of thinking and acting. Easy to describe, but truly difficult to achieve.
3. Learn to adjust your altitude. SCs are capable of scaling heights from the big picture of market and industry forces and changing customer attitudes and perceptions to the nuances of process and operating improvements. As part of the “rewiring” or better yet, new wiring, emerging SCs must focus on connecting tasks to strategies and market forces and vice-versa. Take some mental Dramamine, because the altitude adjustments will be fast and furious.
4. Quit looking for silver bullets. There is no training course that once completed will bestow upon you the certificate of Senior Contributor. There are many, many, many resources, experiences and opportunities to gain insights and hone skills, but there is no silver bullet, so quit looking for it.
5. Great managers and mentors are priceless. A good manager and/or a good mentor can help you along the way. A manager that is committed to supporting the development of her people understands how important it is to challenge and coach team members. A mentor offers the perspective and context of experience and can serve as a valuable navigator. For those of you that lack one or both (a good manager and a mentor), the bad manager can serve as inspiration. I long ago developed a mental list of “things never to do,” when it was my day to lead.
6. Use your time wisely. Read, read and then read some more. From Harvard Business Review to Fast Company to historical biographies, you cannot spend enough time soaking up the teachings of successful people and people that have experienced and persevered through remarkable hardship. Make certain that most of your reading takes place away from the business bookshelf and tends towards history, biography and even literature.
7. Adopt a personal quality improvement program. Just as Franklin and Jefferson diligently recorded their decisions and their daily progress and activities, find a way to begin recording your own actions. Set goals, monitor and measure progress and strive to improve.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
As a senior executive, you want high performers and SCs driving my organization. What are you doing to foster an environment of constant learning and continuous challenge to support the emergence of SCs?
As an aspiring professional, responsible for forging your own brand in a complex world over a career that will easily span 50 years in many cases, what are you doing to step it up? Turn off the television, back away from the urgent unimportant, learn to overcome your own natural resistance, and get on with the good and hard work of developing yourself!
Getting Out of Your Own Way
Filed under: Career, Life and Business, Performance, Professional Growth, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
Almost without exception, the primary reason for sub-optimizing in your career and in life can be seen every morning staring back at you in the mirror.
Notice that it’s not your boss, your spouse or significant other or your parents or friends. It’s you.
We tend to be beings with a collection of habits, excuses, hang-ups and self-limiting thoughts that manage to conveniently jump out in front to slow us down anytime we’re thinking of making a change for the better in our lives and careers.
- “It’s too hard, why bother.”
- “The boss won’t let me…”
- “I’ll do it later.”
- “Tomorrow.”
I’ve observed the tendencies of deny, delay and rationalize in some otherwise very capable professionals and students, and have often wondered what they would be capable of becoming if they simply decided to get out of their own way.
What’s lacking or what’s wrong with someone that chooses to sub-optimize instead of self-optimize. And whether you want to admit it, it is a choice.
Low self-esteem? Lack of self-confidence? Some would indicate laziness, but in my own unqualified psychological opinion, there’s often a root cause of what we observe and describe as laziness. There’s something more going on beneath the surface.
How Do We Get Out of Our Own Way?
Even top performers dabble in malaise from time-to-time, but these individuals seem to have techniques for both recognizing and pulling out of even momentary downward descents from the rarefied air of high performance.
One high performer that I know described her approach as follows: “When I feel myself slipping mentally and approaching a point of tolerating mediocrity, a little alarm goes off in my mind that shouts: Wake Up! I remind myself how important that it is to me and to the people around me that I succeed at this task and I get mad at myself for slowing and I work harder.”
Another individual refuels by connecting with other high performers. “I have a group of people that I truly admire for their nearly limitless energy and enthusiasm for their work. If I feel myself moving toward not caring, I set up a lunch or coffee with one or more of them and just soak up their enthusiasm.”
Your Mom was right. It pays to keep good company.
Other Approaches:
- “I avoid associating with the naysayers and complainers. They revel in doing nothing but complaining and it is easy to get caught up in this mental performance trap.” Yep, Mom was definitely right.
- “I pray.”
- “I seek inspiration in my favorite biographies and books.”
- “I redefine my short-term goals to make them more digestible. After a few quick victories, I return to my focus on the bigger picture.”
- “I call my coach.”
- “I work harder.”
The Bottom-Line for Now:
You know whether you are going through the motions or putting your all into the tasks at hand. Overcoming the inertia of “going through the motions” requires an extraordinary expenditure of personal energy, but the psychic rewards make it worth the effort. Success starts with recognition followed by a bit of anger at yourself, followed by action.
As Peter Drucker once indicated, “Actions in the present are the one and only way to create the future.”
Now shove yourself out of your way and get going!
Leadership Caffeine for the Week of March 8, 2009
Filed under: Crisis Leadership, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leading Change, Management Excellence Tips for Tough Times, Organizational Transformation, Performance, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
Welcome back for this week’s double-shot of leadership motivation. The gray and wet Midwestern weekend is giving way to a promising new week and it’s time to get going.
I’m brewing a pot of New Mexico’s award winning Pinon Coffee, courtesy of my sister-in law as just the cure for too much exposure to Sunday morning news shows.
Can I pour you a cup?
I’m taking my leadership cues this week from Michael Beers, a Harvard Professor with a forthcoming book: High Commitment, High Performance: How to Build a Resilient Organization for Sustained Advantage.
While I’m not certain that a Harvard Professor is the first one that I seek out to help me lead my way out of a crisis, I like what he has to say. Mr. Beer’s focus is on building high performance teams and organizations on the back of what he describes as high commitment leaders.
His Thoughts and My Comments:
-Prof. Beer:
“CEOs of High Commitment, High Performance (HCHP) companies think very differently about their employees. They see them as an asset and care about them as people. Consequently, they manage the downturn very differently.”
-Art’s Comment:
This fits nicely with last week’s post on Goleman’s research into social neuroscience (Smile, Your Mirror Neurons are Firing Everyone Up.) In essence: the most effective leaders care about and pay attention to their employees.
-Prof. Beer:
“We’ve realized that the leader can be a limiting factor in a journey to transform an organization into a HCHP organization.”
-Art’s Comment:
Didn’t need too much expensive research to figure this one out. Your leadership style and effectiveness are the governors on your team’s performance. It’s you, not them. What are you doing this week to help not hinder?
-Prof. Beer:
“These CEO’s (HCHP) operate from deep beliefs and values. Their purpose is to leave a legacy of a great firm.”
-Art’s Comment:
Even if you’re not working for such an enlightened CEO, nothing is stopping you from operating and leading with your own deep, core beliefs and values and making certain that these come through in your dealings with your team.
-Prof Beer:
“The journey to HCHP is not a straight line up. At various stages of the journey the company will face a crisis in performance. How that crisis is dealt with will determine the organization’s future HCHP trajectory.
Will the company liquidate its investment in high commitment culture and the talented people it took years to develop and impregnate with the company’s DNA? Or will the HCHP organization be able to negotiate the crisis without liquidating its social and human capital? These moments of truth define the organization’s future much more powerfully than speeches, appeals for better teamwork, and mission or value statements.”
The Bottom-line:
You have and will continue to face “moments of truth” in the days and weeks ahead. Instead of reacting, seize the remarkable opportunities in this environment to turn yourself into a High Commitment, High Performance Leader. The formula is simple, although executing on it is not.
- Stay confident and upbeat, but skip the false enthusiasm. No one will buy a Pollyannaish view of the world, but no one needs to see the boss sulking.
- Stay in front of your team members with company news and issues. Don’t hide from bad news. If there is a round of layoffs, double your visibility and outreach.
- Remember Beer’s advice that how you deal with the crisis now will determine your future trajectory. Provide challenging opportunities for your top talent. This is a target-rich environment for apprentice opportunities for your up and coming leaders.
- Set goals focused on helping clients and companies and work relentlessly on achieving those goals. Provide constant feedback on progress; celebrate victories and leverage mistakes to strengthen team and individual learning.
- Work darn hard. Get out of your comfortable desk chair and get out on the floor or into the market. Better yet, get out and help your customers win.
–
OK, pour yourself just one more cup, jot down some action items and then get to work. You can’t fix anything by staring at the screen!
For additional reading:
Uncompromising Leadership in Tough Times by Michael Beer in the Harvard Business School Working Knowledge newsletter.
The Counterintuitive Nature of Management Excellence
Filed under: Crisis Leadership, Current Affairs, 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.
In Search of the High Performance Team
A special note: today is Veterans Day
While we may struggle in business to consistently produce high-performance teams, our soldiers in service of our country live this on a regular basis. Thanks to those who have served, those who are serving and to all who have sacrificed. Our gratitude has no end.
In Search of the High Performance Team
I regularly poll my seminar participants and MBA students on their team-focused experiences in the workplace and I am consistently surprised when very few report ever being part of something that they would classify as a “high performance” team.
The results of my unscientific polling are all the more surprising given that we live during a time when involvement in short-term projects with individuals across functions is a part of the regular work experience of most professionals.
The business literature is filled with articles and interviews from leaders and pundits on topics tied to innovation, business execution and team heroics. Of course, the same companies tend to be the focal point of these articles. It seems like we cannot get enough of the stories of heroics pulled off in companies like Apple, Ideo Google and the few others that seem to make the short-list for the popular business press. It’s curious that those companies got the memo on creating high-performance teams and the rest of us are relegated to reading about their successes.
When I ask about involvement on high-performance teams, there is invariably someone in the audience sharp enough to ask me what I mean. Admittedly, my definition is one of those kind of squishy, you’ll know it when you experience it answers. It’s also a multi-part answer that goes something like this:
- A high-performance team is a group of people that have figured out how to work together to knock down and succeed in pursuit of audacious goals. They’ve learned to leverage their respective strengths, compensate for weaknesses and tap into the power that a group of people uniquely focused on a goal are able to generate.
- High-performance teams thrive on challenges, revel only momentarily in successes and mostly seek the next big challenge. They tend to be paranoid about becoming overconfident and in general, they don’t seek significant public recognition.
- The working environment on this team is comfortable for collaboration, encouraging of disparate opinions and singularly focused on turning ideas into actions. High-performance teams are
self-policing. Values and accountabilities are clear and there is an explicit expectation that membership requires honoring the values. Membership on this team is a true privilege.
- The leader on a high-performance team recognizes that his or her role is teach, to knock down obstacles and to constantly focus on creating the environment that allows others to succeed at high-levels. This leader may be tough, but this leader tends to be quiet, letting actions talk. You generally won’t find this leader to be loud and boisterous, although they may be a great cheerleader as well as a stern disciplinarian behind team walls.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Effective leadership is a pre-requisite for the creation of a high-performance team. Perhaps if more leaders focused on their responsibility to empower others, I would see some more hands raised when I ask about whether your employees have been part of a high-performance team. It’s not too late to start working on this.
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