Leadership Caffeine-Learning to Lead in the Project-Focused World
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Management Education, Performance, Project Management, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
The rise of “the project” as an important means of competing and creating value has profound implications for those in leadership roles. Unfortunately, in many cases, the evolution in leadership practices has not kept pace with the needs of project teams or the needs of organizations struggling to develop competence at executing on projects.
Our traditional models of leadership emphasize the development of skills and practices that focus on individuals and teams generally operating under the umbrella of a single functional leader. However, firms moving towards a project-focused culture tend to start by overlaying a matrix form project management structure on top of the traditional functional orientation. This new and non-traditional environment offers a host of new problems and challenges for leaders used to being masters of their own domains.
As a sidebar, while the project management discipline is well established and the role of the formal project manager is growing in importance and popularity, both my own anecdotal evidence and the many reports and studies on project performance indicate that we’ve not yet cracked the code on managing projects for success. In my work as a consultant and as a project management educator at the graduate level, I have few qualms in suggesting that the majority of the organizations that attempt what I’ve described above…imposing a matrix format on a functional orientation, struggle and flounder with their projects. Leadership or the lack of appropriate leadership support is a key issue in project failure.
8 Suggestions for Leading and Succeeding Inside the Project Matrix
- First, recognize that the rules of the game have changed. Your mission is no longer about optimizing results within your functional boundaries. Your emphasis is on providing resources and support for teams that aren’t yours.
- You enhance your position by supplying the strongest possible talent for work on project teams, not by hoarding this talent for your own purposes. Pony up.
- Your talent development efforts must now incorporate the development of skills and experience working within the matrix. Translation: you need to help teach and develop individuals that are comfortable and competent working on multiple initiatives for multiple teams.
- From time to time, complex project challenges will require your functional area’s direct support for resolution. This is a time for you and your colleagues to shine. Run, don’t walk and offer your help.
- Be aware of fluctuations and perturbations in the matrix. The brunt of the stress and complexity falls on the people doing the work. Communication, problem-solving, negotiation and prioritization are all complex in a matrix environment, and you can help by stepping in and facilitating solution development. Your efforts to reduce stress and complexity will pay off in the form of increased team performance and improved project execution.
- Hug a project manager today. OK, maybe not literally, but it’s a great practice to reach out and cultivate a relationship with your firm’s project managers. These busy individuals are at the epicenter of a firm’s key initiatives and have a unique view on the challenges, opportunities and the organization’s talent pool. Plus, develop a good reputation for supporting the project managers and this will pay dividends when you are looking for support for initiatives that impact your area of responsibility.
- Leverage the emerging project environment to expand your reach and grow your career. Top management is looking for leaders that understand how to help make things happen in an increasingly complex and hostile global marketplace. Your active involvement and contribution to project team success will highlight that you’ve moved beyond yesterday’s approaches to leading.
- Master the role of project sponsor. If you are at the level where you are eligible to serve as a project sponsor, sign-on and do everything possible to help the project succeed. Don’t make the common mistake of viewing this role as a token or honorary position. Good sponsors work hard to support their project teams. And don’t forget the Kevlar vest for others outside your project team that will have plenty of reason to take aim should things go wrong. This is the time when great sponsors shine.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Never turn down an opportunity to enhance your leadership skills. The increasingly important project-orientation of organizations offers a myriad of opportunities for you to develop new skills and try on new approaches. You can remain stubborn and insist on leading from a functional view-point, but in this case, your view might just be from the back of the unemployment line. It’s time to enter the matrix.
Leadership Caffeine: Teach, Don’t Tell
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leadership Skills, Performance, Talent Management, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
I discovered a long time ago that I was much more effective as a leader and as a father (a much harder job to get right!) if I adopted an approach that emphasized teaching over telling.
While there are circumstances where telling is appropriate…the battlefield, the operating room, perhaps the football field and a few others that I’m sure that I would think of if given enough time, most people prefer to learn, not to carry out orders.
Learning engages the senses, opens the mind, creates new neural connections and challenges us to push beyond our routine thoughts and actions.
Good leaders develop an approach that incorporates teaching while emphasizing performance. The two are not only, not mutually exclusive, they are complementary.
Consider:
- The sales manager that observes and coaches her sales representatives will win out every year over the manager that berates poor performers and then demands performance at the end of a metaphorical gun barrel.
- The CEO that consistently and respectfully asks tough strategic and execution questions is teaching his team members how to focus on the important issues of value creation and performance.
- The shop floor supervisor that asks for input on solving quality problems is teaching people that their ideas count when it comes to making improvements.
- The journeyman carpenter that teaches by showing and then leaving the apprentice alone to try the same task, is inspiring by showing confidence and encouraging independent effort.
5 Rules for Teaching Leaders to Live By:
- Recognize that the additional time investment that you make in teaching will come back to you in dividends many times over.
- Resist the urge to bark an order even if you know exactly what needs to be done.
- Use questions as powerful teaching tools.
- If you must “Tell,” provide an explanation. Proper context for a “do this” ensures that some learning takes place.
- Mistakes are teachable moments. Resist the urge to pounce and strive to help all parties extract the lessons.
And as a parent, try doubling or tripling the amount of time that you spend teaching and please resist the urge to pull out the infamous, “Because I said so.”
The Bottom-Line for Now:
The old model of command and control leadership falls on rebellious and increasingly deaf ears in a workplace of boomers reinventing themselves, millennials finding their way and all of us striving to deal with the new complexity that is our world. It’s time to step up and teach.
I am reminded of a comment attributed to the late and great jazz trumpeter and band leader, Maynard Ferguson, who devoted an incredible amount of time to teaching and inspiring aspiring band students around the country. While I’m certain that I’m grossly paraphrasing his comment, it went something like, Why would you do anything else, when you can teach? His band members of course referred to him as The Boss.
It’s time to quit telling and start teaching. Why not start today?
Leadership Caffeine: It’s Vuja De All Over Again
Filed under: Innovation, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leadership Skills, Performance, Professional Growth, Talent Management, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
With apologies to Yogi Berra for borrowing and twisting his classic phrase, a little Vuja De in your daily leadership life might just be the prescription to turbocharge team and individual performance.
I’m re-reading Tom Kelley’s outstanding book, “The Ten Faces of Innovation,” based on his experience with design firm IDEO, and came across his wonderful use of the term, Vuja De (the opposite of that feeling we call Déjà vu) in the chapter on acting as an anthropologist to observe people’s true behavior.
With attribution for the concept ascribed to the late comedian George Carlin, “Vuja De is a sense of seeing something for the first time, even if you have actually witnessed it many times before.” Kelly goes on to describe how anthropologists develop the ability to see what’s always been there but has gone unnoticed—what others have failed to see or comprehend because they stopped looking too soon.”
In my experience, too many leaders give up on the power of observation once they’ve formed initial impressions. They stop looking for opportunities and start managing based on perceptions and all of the inherent biases that go into forming these perceptions.
Stop looking too soon, and you’re liable to miss some remarkable opportunities.
It’s time to walk into your workplace with a freshly scrubbed mind in search of new opportunities and insights. While it is admittedly difficult to flush personal experience and opinions from our minds, imagine the power of walking into your office today without all of the perceptions, preconceived notions and outright biases that govern your behavior towards others.
If you were seeing your team members for the first time, you would not have the bias baggage that weighs us down as we come to know people. You would have a fresh start, and you would not assume that Bob was a lousy negotiator or that Mary was the rising star or that Sam’s tattoos reflect values that you don’t support. Instead of the negatives and the biases guiding your decisions and interactions, you would look for the talents and importantly, the opportunities.
12 Questions to Ask Yourself as a Leadership Anthropologist:
- How do people interact?
- What obstacles do they have to navigate around to get work done?
- How comfortable are they being creative?
- How do they deal with each other when it comes to performance on teams?
- How do people deal with their bosses?
- Where do ideas come from?
- How do new ideas turn into solutions?
- Who is respected and not respected on the team? Why or why not?
- What motivates people?
- What activities suck the life out of people?
- What work goes on that seems to contribute to nothing?
- How many things are done because “they’ve always been done.”
The Bottom-Line for Now:
From an article in Fast Company, “So if you want to find untapped innovation opportunities, watch the world around you with “fresh eyes.” Go for a sense of Vuja de, and then ask yourself why things are the way they are.”
As a leader, you can practice this same “innovator’s secret,” and periodically challenge yourself to step back and assess why things are the way they are on your team. And again, I don’t doubt the difficulty of this assignment, however, the alternative is for you to continue leading from a shrinking and grossly biased view of your workplace and the people around you.
Remember, it’s your job to create success, not manage to minimize failure. Just for today, quit talking too much, start asking, listening and importantly, start observing. What you see might just surprise you.
The New Employer-Employee Loyalty Prescription
Filed under: Career, Current Affairs, Leadership, Life and Business, Making Decisions, Professional Growth, Social Commentary, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
Note from Art: this post is the outcome of some great discussions in MBA and undergraduate class settings on the emerging U.S. and global workplace. I’ve offered blog commentary recently on the issue of the false promise of , “The Disposable Worker,” as well as the theme of self-responsibility. This post extends those discussions to the more fundamental relationship between workers and their firms. I may not win many friends here, but hope to stimulate some critical thinking.
The term and concept of “loyalty” is one that is frequently bandied about in phrases that sound much like, “there is no longer any loyalty to workers,” and “few workers admit any feelings of loyalty to their employers.” The term is also used to contrast today’s transactional workplace relationships with the supposed near utopian state of yesteryear, when our parents and grandparents started at one company early in their lives and ended up retiring from that company 40 years later.
The concept of “loyalty” in the workplace is in need of a makeover, complete with a new definition and fresh examples of what constitute reasonable and professional levels of loyalty for and from all parties.
A Prescription for a New Approach to Loyalty in the Workplace:
Let’s start by extracting the implied promise of “time of employment” as a component of the concept of workplace loyalty. Given the complexity and accelerating pace of the world of business, no one has any idea on how long any business model or business will sustain or survive. Acquisitions, disruptive global competition and the pace of technological change all guarantee that the long-term view for every firm is part mirage. Your firm may be acquired or rendered obsolete. In some cases, the firm will morph and the skills that were required yesterday are different than the skills needed right now and for the next few tomorrows.
As individuals responsible for our own careers, we should eradicate the expectation of a long-term relationship with a firm from our minds. The firm is on trial in the global marketplace every day, month, quarter and year, and as highlighted above, there are a myriad of opportunities where the jury of the marketplace may return an unfavorable verdict.
Freshly armed with a strong and clear perspective on reality, both employees and employers must rethink their responsibilities, expectations and obligations to and for each other.
Employers and Leaders:
- Owe employees a healthy workplace, free from hostility and harassment. Ideally, this workplace is grounded in clear, meaningful values and dedicated to the ethical pursuit of business.
- Owe employees clear context on ever-shifting strategic priorities. This includes the proverbial “heads up” as conditions demand that the firm change, merge or cease to exist.
- Are accountable to employees for fostering an environment that promotes the creative daily execution of core tasks…and that encourages experimentation and innovation as a normal way of conducting business and striving to improve performance.
- Are responsible for discovering, developing and deploying the talent necessary for the organization to survive, sustain and prosper.
- Are not responsible for the career planning and on going developmental support of all employees. Individuals own their careers, not the firm. Of course, the values of a firm may very well support the individual pursuit of career and skills enhancement through education assistance and training. This is a “values” call, not an implied obligation on the part of the firm.
- Are free to choose what they deem as the best choice for engaging and retaining the top talent needed to win. Some firms may consciously choose to extend more than other firms in terms of benefits, structure and even a culture of retention. This is a strategic choice that may prove beneficial for some firms. Regardless, the promise of on-going employment should not obfuscate the reality that the firm must serve customers, compete and create value to sustain. If any of those fail, people go away.
Individuals (Employees):
- Owe their firms their absolute best efforts on daily basis. Anything less is a breach of the basis for the relationship.
- Own their own careers and are wholly responsible for ensuring that their skills remain current and that they are progressing towards a goal of their choosing.
- May very well choose the leaders and firms that treat them the best and that support their efforts. Loyalty and commitment are very powerful when the relationship is based on respect, trust and a feeling of belonging.
- Operate free in the knowledge that they can come and go at their own will or the will of the organization.
The Bottom Line for Now
It’s essential that all parties are clear that their alliance is temporary ranging from days to years and that the basis for the relationship is to realize value creation for stakeholders. And yes, employees are critical stakeholders. While my prescription may sound transactional…and indeed it is in part, the beauty is that if the leaders and employees are good at running their business, their relationship stands a chance of sustaining.
Much like a professional sports team, the firm is a collection of individuals at a point in time, brought together to purse a goal. After that, the analogy breaks down, as there is no system of playoffs and a dedicated championship every year. The real world of business is much more complicated than the world of sports. The rules are constantly being redefined on the fly and the competitors are different every day. While a recession clearly highlights the plight of individuals and challenges the approaches of firms, a realignment of expectations around loyalty is in everyone’s best interests. Be loyal to yourself, your family and to your momentary employer. Just don’t expect much from the last party in that equation and you won’t be surprised.
Leadership Caffeine: Be Careful How You Value Your Time-15 Minutes Can Make a Big Difference
Filed under: Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leadership Skills, Life and Business, Professional Growth, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
As leaders, we all know that it’s the little things that count. A word of encouragement might just be rocket fuel for one person while a constructive suggestion serves as the same for another. Alternatively, ignoring or paying superficial attention to a topic that an employee deems important is a guaranteed way to demoralize and deflate a person.
It’s never the volume of time that you put into supporting someone, but the fact that you put in enough time to show that the person counts. Sometimes, all it takes is your decision to use fifteen minutes to make or break a relationship and impact a person’s life.
I’ve long believed that some of the key leadership missteps are caused by poor decisions on how to use time. As people move up the ladder as leaders, their sense of the value of their time as well as the quantity of available time changes dramatically. To many leaders, time is constantly in short supply and the value of their attention is at a premium. Don’t bother them with trifling issues, because they are busy people.
Be careful how you evaluate issues and conclude that they are not important enough to earn their way on to your schedule.
A Cautionary Tale:
A colleague of mine lamented his own misuse of time recently. A good employee was facing some tough personal challenges along with a professional choice to move into a new role. This move had been delayed by a few months due to work and personal factors, and now the employee was staring at the need to make a decision. The passage of time had blurred some of her enthusiasm for the role and she requested fifteen minutes of my colleague’s time to reset on the role and next steps. She had communicated that it was possible that she didn’t want to proceed.
Instead of engaging in the discussion, my colleague dismissed the request to talk and told the employee to think carefully about the role and to let him know if she was going to proceed. While he wasn’t face-to-face with the individual after indicating that there would be no more talking about the job and next steps, he realized that he had made a mistake just by the sound of the person audibly deflating on the other end of the phone.
The employee quit the next morning.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
In hindsight, my colleague reflected that his primary reason for pushing off the conversation was that he sensed it would be filled with all sorts of personal baggage. He could tell that there were issues other than the position at play, and he decided that he didn’t want to play life counselor. In his time since the incident, he now understands that he completely whiffed on handling the situation.
It would be nice to never have to deal with personal baggage, but on the other hand, every one of us brings our own personal baggage along with us to work everyday. It’s who we are, and we don’t check that bag at the front-desk on the way into the office and then pick it up again on the way out.
While there are lines that are easily crossed where the leader should advise the worker on sources for help, those personal/professional conflicts that swirl in people’s minds at the point of a decision are fair game and worth investing your valuable time in as you plow through your day. And remember, as a leader, your time is much more valuable to others than it is to you. (Yeah, I know this seems counter-intuitive, but it’s true.)
Spend the extra fifteen minutes today to help someone sort something out. You’ll both be glad that you did.
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