Leadership Caffeine-Give Your People Room to Run
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Management Education, Middle Management, Not-For-Profit Leadership, Surviving Lousy Leaders, Talent Management, Values, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
Overheard: “If I don’t stay on top of my people, nothing gets done.”
If lousy leadership were a crime, the owner of the quote above might just merit a short stretch of quality alone-time to reflect on the implications of his statement. There are so many things truly wrong with the style of leadership that the statement connotes, that I’m not certain where to start.
I regularly run into examples of leaders operating on the frontlines and even the top-lines that equate leading with policing and oversight. In sessions where I poll on the behaviors of great and lousy leaders, the horror stories of micro-managing bosses and inspector and critic style managers are so plentiful that it’s often difficult to rein in the discussions.
The perception that being boss involves constant policing has not yet been bred out of our culture.
There are certainly core issues that demand oversight. Issues of ethics, legal compliance, and discrimination all merit constant vigilance. And maintaining appropriate operational control is absolutely a leader’s responsibility. However, there’s a line that is crossed when the boss extends intense vigilance to the day-to-day and sometimes minute-to-minute work effort of team members. Move too close to this line or, cross it, and you guarantee a tense working atmosphere, a loss of initiative and a deficit of creativity. What should be a creative and productive experience becomes more like a prison experience.
Gaining compliance is not leading. Any two-bit despot can gain compliance by inducing fear through excessive oversight.
In conversations with individuals describing leaders that they admire, commonly referenced behaviors are they exact opposite of the overbearing and over-the-shoulder manager:
Doesn’t micromanage me
Let’s me do my job
Asks me how she can help
Sets clear expectations and then lets me go
Doesn’t jump all over me when I make a mistake…but rather, he asks me what I learned.
We need more leaders that generate those types of comments from their team members.
11 Reminders that Your Job as a Leader is About Building, Not Guarding:
1. Focus on the working environment! You own the responsibility to create and sustain a positive working environment. You cannot do that by micro-managing.
2. Create the right type of oversight by creating a culture of accountability for the values and norms in that environment.
3. You are a teacher. Teach and train. And then teach some more.
4. You are a coach. Observe and provide timely constructive AND positive feedback. Everyday.
5. Be approachable, but don’t spend all of your own time approaching. Give your team room to run.
6. Create context, not confusion. Clarify and communicate. Create context for key organization strategies and goals.
7. Expectations and accountability drive performance. Set clear and challenging expectations for individual and team performance. This is not micro-managing, it is good management.
8. Remember, you’re there to help, don’t hinder. Knock down obstacles and free your people to run.
9. Defend, don’t distract. Learn to shield team members from distractions. Keep your people free to run, part 2.
10. Stay out of the way. You are a distraction most of the time. See the prior item.
11. Assert only when you need to. Don’t assert often. If you have to assert often, review the prior 11 items.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
We’re all responsible for developing the next generation of leaders. Let’s get this right and help educate and train the micro-managing boss out of existence.
Leadership Caffeine: Quit Managing Reduced Expectations
Filed under: Career, Crisis Leadership, Current Affairs, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leading Change, Life and Business, Making Decisions, Management Education, Management Innovation, Organizational Transformation, Professional Growth
Note from Art: Sometimes we all need a kick in the seat of the pants.
A great friend and talented product manager once offered in a moment of frustration that he viewed his principal job as one of “managing reduced expectations.”
This brilliant, but depressing turn of words reflected bigger business problems, including a logjam in development that effectively precluded us from doing anything to enhance the competitiveness of our products in a timeframe shorter than something that you might find on a geologic time-scale. .
The “managing reduced expectations” theme seems to be prevalent in our society right now, and it is a dangerous mind-set. Spiraling debt, a never-ending string of mortgage defaults, long-lingering unemployment, embattled and embittered government, corruption, a seeming shift of the balance of economic and productive power away from North America, and a potentially unsolvable morass in Afghanistan are all contributors to this collective mood referenced in the media and heard on the street daily. Throw in a good old-fashioned ecological disaster and some remarkable leadership letdowns at BP (unconscionable) and HP (Huh? We all thought that this guy was brilliant!) and the process of managing reduced expectations is now epidemic.
It’s remarkably easy to let the broader environmental factors and forces dictate our personal emotions and before we know it, an attitude of blind resignation sets in and dominates our thinking and our actions.
Just a few phrases that I’ve heard recently:
“We see a huge opportunity for our new product, but corporate is telling us that we can’t invest in the brainpower that we need to take advantage of the opportunity.”
“Times are tough and we’re not going to pursue this project this year.”
“We’re not running leadership training anymore. We killed that in this year’s budget planning.”
What the Hell Are You Thinking?
Sorry for the strong title on this section, but again, “What the hell?”
You’re telling me that you are going to take it lying down while your future is decided by someone wielding the expense-cutting sword to hit arbitrary targets?
You’re not pursuing a project that will define your future and perhaps change the course of your firm, because no one is working hard enough to cull the portfolio or find the money.
And you gave up developing your people because why?
The Bottom-Line for Now:
In the imitable words of the character, Red Foreman, on The 70’s Show: “Dumb Asses.”
It’s time to quit managing reduced expectations. There’s a big, troubled world out there filled with emerging markets and emerging consumers hungry for basics and then eventually luxuries. Of course, to seize opportunities here and abroad, you’ve got to jettison old ways, take risks that might have seemed incomprehensible yesterday, and work unceasingly on surrounding yourself with people that can-do and don’t take no for dumb-ass reasons.
Redouble your efforts to invest in key future projects. Sacrifice sacred cows in company-wide barbecues to fund critical new investments. Streamline decision-making processes. Jettison your 1970’s era management structure and approach. Fight hard to hire the right talent and for crying out loud, redouble your efforts to develop the talent that you need to survive, sustain and grow.
Long ago, Deming called for a Transformation in management practices and thinking. It hasn’t happened yet. Now would be a good time.
As a starter, why not try reinventing yourself instead of taking it and letting the era roll you over. The change starts with you on your team. Start managing towards high-expectations and find every way possible to reinforce this behavior, reward successes and build enthusiasm.
The alternative is that your career and your firm will be locked in irons. Let’s not create a “lost era” here in America. It’s completely unacceptable.
Leadership Caffeine: 4 Signs that Your Leadership Approach is Working
Filed under: Crisis Leadership, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Management Education, Middle Management, Organizational Transformation, Performance, Talent Management
Most leaders struggle to understand whether they are helping or hindering the cause. Except of course for those leaders/narcissists who believe that their every utterance is sheer genius wrapped in pure motivational gold.
The feedback from your manager, while important, tends to be based on either numbers or fairly casual observation. And feedback from your team members is welcomed, but you never really know for sure whether it’s the unvarnished type.
The “Am I Helping?” issue is particularly important when a troubled team or organization gains a fresh leader. I’ve lived this situation a number of times and I’ve spoken with leaders familiar with navigating the throes of turnarounds and significant change initiatives about how they measure their own effectiveness. Most agree that while the indicators of progress and personal leadership effectiveness aren’t posted on the wall every day, the signs are present in the workplace for everyone to read.
Whether overtly or through their interpersonal and working dynamics, it turns out that your team members make it pretty clear whether you are helping, hindering or just taking up space, time and valuable oxygen. However, it’s up to you as the leader to learn to read these important but often subtle signs and to adjust accordingly.
4 Signs that Your Leadership Approach is Working:
1. Conversation Quality Improves: most troubled teams or organizations struggle to create high-quality conversations that focus on facts, tough issues and ideas and options. Often, the dialogue reflects denial or it unduly preoccupies on the negatives in the situation. The effective leader helps conversations move in the right direction by creating an environment of transparency and candor. Easy words, but a difficult task that takes time and a nearly constant care and feeding by the leader.
2. Idea Flow Increases: an important by-product of improved conversation quality is the increased flow of ideas for fixing today’s problems and forging the future. Troubled teams led by lousy leaders are conditioned to focus on what’s right in front of them and to ignore the bigger picture. Alternatively, effective leaders recognize that the one and only way to create the future is to leverage the collective grey-matter of the team. These leaders look for the flow ideas to start as a trickle and they know that things are working when the trickle turns into a torrent of innovation and value-creation.
3. Collaboration Returns: troubled teams struggle to work together and often fail to translate squabbling into anything resembling constructive output. Groups on the mend tend to rediscover the fun and power of working together, and what was just recently a “No Collaboration Zone” begins to look and act like an environment that recognizes that people are interdependent upon one another.
4. Pride Returns and Quality Breaks Out All Over: the shift from an unhealthy environment where people do what they are told to a situation where personal pride drives individual and group accountability for quality is a powerful sign that a leader’s approach is fostering the right results. Effective execution becomes important to the group and the pursuit of high-performance moves from lofty words to tangible goals. This tends to be a longer-range lagging indicator than several of the others and as it kicks in, the leader must recognize that his/her job is to increasingly emphasize knocking down obstacles and supporting the emergence of new leaders in the workplace.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Effective leaders understand that the measures described above are important outcomes of a great deal of hard work and not just accidents. Effective leaders gauge their own progress by the visibility and trends of these measures more than by the traditional measures of performance or the often slightly (or majorly) biased input of managers and team members. Get these right and top and bottom-line improvements flow.
While there are no gauges to precisely indicate the barometric pressure changes created by your approach to leading, awareness of and sensitivity to these measures is an important starting point.
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Leadership Caffeine: 6 Ideas to Improve Team Performance Today
Filed under: Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Management Education, Middle Management, Performance, Professional Growth, Values, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
The world of work has increasingly become the world of teams and group activities, and to quote Richard Hackman, author of, Leading Teams-Setting the Stage for Great Performance,
“I have no question that when you have a team, the possibility exists that it will generate magic, producing something extraordinary… But don’t count on it.”
If your organization is like most, you’re leaving money on the table in terms of team productivity and performance. Social and interpersonal factors, motivation issues, lack of group cohesion and the general up-front churn that teams display as they form, are just a few of the areas where you can pick up immediate productivity improvements with a little bit of smart leadership.
As an aside, many senior project managers and executive sponsors provide this type of leadership for major project initiatives. The focus in this post is on the gross majority of group, team or committee activities that fly below the radar of formal project management leadership and executive sponsorship. These are often manager-led initiatives or cross-functional groups coming together to tackle a problem.
6 Ideas to Improve Team Performance Today:
1. Control Your Urge to Put a Team On It-use groups carefully and sparingly and avoid the reflex action to set up a work group, committee or project team for every issue that comes your way. Carefully assess whether a group effort truly stands the best chance of success. There are many situations where the right individual can work with stakeholders and across functions and accomplish the goals or solve the problem more efficiently and effectively than a team.
2. If You Must Set Up a Team…Please Ensure that Goals Are Clear and Compelling: unclear goals promote “churn and flail,” and mundane tasks drive lackadaisical performance. As the responsible organizational leader (not necessarily the work team leader), you must ensure that the goal of the initiative is crystal clear and linked to a key business imperative. Vague goals and unclear context are productivity and morale killers.
3. Starting Today, Rethink the Approach to Choosing Team Leaders. Instead of seniority or rank, work-team leadership must be based on a single criterion: “Who is the person best suited to help us succeed with the task at hand?” Depending upon the nature of the task, an individual with good facilitation skills, or a person that works well across functions might be better suited than a functional manager or the most senior person on the group.
4. Define the Group’s Values Up-Front. Don’t make a career out of this, but definitely don’t skip describing and memorializing the required group behaviors for discussion, debate, attendance, participation and work-completion.
5. Use Simple Assignments to Save Time. Every meeting must have a note-taker (scribe), a timekeeper and a traffic cop. The traffic cop enforces the rules in play (e.g. brainstorming) and helps the team stay on topic and work towards an outcome.
6. Assign a Coach. If the group is expected to work together for more than a few days, it is helpful to ask for an objective 3rd party set of eyes to assess team processes and interpersonal dynamics. You don’t need to spend money to bring in an outside resource with a fancy certification. One organization used representatives from HR (a great way to help get this group engaged with the business of business) and another identified and specified a coaching role and rotated the responsibility between individuals. The coach is not part of the working team, but rather an occasional and objective observer that reports back to the designated team leader on group dynamics and group processes.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
We are well served to identify continuous improvement opportunities for our collaborative endeavors. I’ve watched great process companies with legions of people wearing colored belts forget about some of the simple suggestions above that can save money and time, spur performance and add to task enjoyment and morale. Today is a great day to help your teams and groups boost their performance!
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!
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