The June Leadership Development Roundtable Challenge

June 15, 2011 By 2 Comments

If you like a good leadership challenge, take a few moments and click over to Dan McCarthy’s Great Leadership blog and check out the first in a new monthly program: The Leadership Development Roundtable Challenge.

This new program, conceived by Dan and wildly supported by a number of leadership writers and coaches (likely because Dan was doing all the heavy lifting to get it started!), presents a vexing leadership dilemma for a group of regulars and a guest to solve in 200-words or less.

Readers have two opportunities to participate. Dan has nefariously included a polling tool, so you get to vote for your favorite answer, leaving the rest of the contributors to sulk a bit and sharpen our skills for next month’s challenge. You also can share your own and likely much better ideas by responding with your own answer to the challenge.

Great fun, something to help sharpen our collective leadership problem-solving skills and participatory democracy all at the same time!

The Challenge will rotate every month, and I have the honor and challenge of hosting and creating the “vexing dilemma” for next month’s episode.

Check it out, cast your vote and share your informed opinion about how you might handle this Leadership Challenge!

(And for those of you wondering why I have a funny hat as a graphic, that’s the Deerslayer style worn by Sherlock Holmes as he chased down villains and solved his own vexing problems!)

 

Filed Under: Decision-Making, Leadership Tagged With: , ,

Leading the Driven Individual

January 15, 2010 By 10 Comments

The Driven Individual's DestinationNote from Art: My use of the “Driven Individual” term here encompasses the big-thinkers and game changers that I’ve had the privilege of supporting over my career.  I get that there are other types of Driven Individuals…those that will seize a task and not let go until it has been wrestled to the ground.  The latter group represents a subject for another day.

A great deal of popular leadership writing (mine included) focuses on the common issues and challenges with “typical employees.” Now before you grab a pitchfork and light the torches and start marching on this blog for my use of the term “typical,” don’t misconstrue my meaning.

Yes, I know that no one is “typical” and that we all have strengths and weaknesses and that it is grossly unfair to provide such a crass label to the masses of good quality employees laboring away and earning “strongly exceeds” on our grade-inflated performance evaluations.  (I can hear the pitchforks clanking again on that last shot!)

Nonetheless, it was the best label I could come up with on short notice and only a few sips into my first cup of coffee, to differentiate from the subject of today’s post: The Driven Individual (DI). This is the “atypical, super-motivated, cannot do enough, has limitless energy and enthusiasm and offers capabilities that have no visible boundaries,” type of employee.

While one might consider the DI to be a leader’s dream, the reality is that these wonderful individuals offer a unique set of challenges that require special care and feeding. My perspectives are based on personal experience working with some brilliant but challenging DI’s and reflect both the good outcomes and some spectacular misfires on my part.

Understanding and Leading the Driven Individual:

Recognize that these individuals don’t think about problems like the rest of us.  What we view as a set of tasks or a discrete goal, the DI views as an opportunity to change the world.  DI’s in my experience are often “systems” thinkers, looking at the big picture and offering ideas that may be transformational.

A simple example might be an engineer or product manager that sees an opening for a new product.  The product idea might be innovative, but the DI is constitutionally and genetically wired to attempt to rethink how the offering can redistribute the wealth of an entire industry. The iPod was a cool innovation beyond the Walkman.  The iPod plus iTunes reset the profit pattern of an entire market and changed the world.  You bet that there were a bunch of DI’s and one obvious one (Steve Jobs) behind that.

Another example is the individual that looks at the way certain tasks are executed in an organization and sees an opportunity to streamline, eliminate waste and improve coordination.  This Deming-like thinker gets the fact that “the system” is the tool for success of failure and is always looking at problems and processes from that perspective.

And one other core observation of my own in working around DI’s is their reaction to failure. I’ve yet to meet one of these characters that didn’t respond by licking wounds for a day or so and then coming back stronger…either for the project that failed or on a new idea.  They don’t need false motivation from you, they need recovery time and space.

Leadership Guidance

-Let DI’s run, but make certain that you stay engaged enough to keep them from pursuing too many revolutionary activities at one time. Some of these characters love to catalyze revolutions but lose interest for the long fight.  Left unchecked, their passion and exuberance and brilliance can lead to too many great projects chasing too few resources.

-Don’t ask the types of DIs that I’m describing in this post serve as project managers. I’ve made this mistake and I’ve yet to succeed with this configuration. The minutiae of execution detail acts like a leash on creativity and energy.  On the other hand, this same DI that might not be a great project leader is most definitely the heart and soul of the project, so they must remain involved as architect, champion and visionary.

-Don’t ever micromanage a DI.  Frankly, don’t ever micromanage anyone, especially a DI.

-Watch out! DIs I’ve known have tended to have little regard for social niceties and are prone to stepping on toes or entire bodies. The goal is the thing for these DIs and if they have to throw a few body blocks along the way, that is fine.  If you have this form of DI on your team, you’ve got a non-trivial leadership challenge in front of you.

The cultural pressure from the rest of the team may ultimately demand that you act to remove this “social misfit,” while your tendency will be to rationalize the behavior as the price to pay for their brilliance.  Coaching, constant feedback and more coaching can help minimize the body count, but won’t completely eliminate the issue.  Get this right and your DI will do great things for you and others will recognize how they benefit as well.  Manage this wrong by either allowing reckless, free reign or worse yet, attempt to neutralize the DI and you will fail.

-Don’t let DIs sit idle or you will bore them into looking elsewhere, including your competitors, for their next challenge. Remember, these individuals are thinking three chess moves ahead of the rest of us, and as they mentally wind down on one issue, there needs to be a new one ready to take its place.

-Be careful: some DIs enjoy visibility and others run from it. Don’t misfire by either ignoring this for those that like the accolades or over-using it for those that would rather have a root canal without drugs than have to stand up at a company meeting.

The Bottom Line for Now:

I’ve barely scratched the surface of this topic, but need to stop somewhere.  I love the challenge of working around and providing the environment for Driven Individuals to succeed.  Get this right and fortunes are made.  Get it wrong, and you’ll wreak havoc on the workplace.   The stakes are big, and the Driven Individual will challenge you to earn your keep.

Filed Under: Leadership, Performance, Product Management, Professional Growth, Project Management Tagged With: , , , , , ,

New Leader Identification: Exploration Before Promotion!

August 28, 2009 By 7 Comments

I talk with a great number of leaders at various levels and stages of their careers about their own experiences in “becoming a leader,” and I’m constantly fascinated by their start-up stories.

Fascinated, that is, the way many drive past a car wreck. Shocked and curious at the same time.

Many describe their initial promotion into a formal supervisory role as one of “time, place, and opportunity.” Someone left or was fired and the manager needed help and offered a battlefield promotion.

An overwhelming majority of this “Opportunistic” crowd, describe their first leadership experience as horrendous. Several used the term “nightmare” to communicate the essence of that experience.

Another group I call the “Fast Trackers.” These individuals indicate actively pursuing promotion into a leadership role in the drive to increase earnings and gain entrance to the “fast track” in their organizations.

A follow-on question for this speedy group highlights that many of the individuals report working in environments where the “system” required you to lead others and manage budgets in order to earn higher job grades and compensation.

Similar to the “Opportunistic” group, the reflections of the “Fast Trackers” on that early experience are often less than happy.

“We Select Randomly and Try to Train Our Way Out of the Problem!”

Most report getting some training as part of the promotion, but few describe being part of anything formal or informal that helped them (and their managers) assess whether leadership was a good fit.

Talk about a breakdown in the quality system! It’s no secret that the costs are high when we put the wrong people in roles that they are ill suited for…especially leadership roles. Everyone suffers, including the errant leader, the team being poorly led, the manager that mishandled this promotion, internal and external customers and the broader organization.

And yet, we do this over and over again.

Training after promotion is no substitution and no cure-all for poor selection!

Exploration Before Promotion-A Real World Example:

A simple solution is for the manager to ensure that he/she is looking for and talking to prospective first-time leaders about the role, and importantly, providing them low-risk opportunities to try it on for size before buying.

One of my favorite examples comes from the world of software development, where people tend to become software developers because they are creative and want to ply their creative talents in this exciting and ever-changing medium.

Leading others is rarely (if ever) the motivation for becoming a software developer, and as a consequence, large technical teams struggle to develop leadership bench strength. It’s common for an experienced developer to find himself/herself thrust into a management role, more out seniority than anything that resembles desire or capability. The consequences are often as expected.

This Manager Gets It!

One creative Group Director recognized this as one of her core challenges and set about actively identifying those on her team that seemed to do well in helping groups solve problems and identify and implement improvements. She talked with these individuals about career aspirations, raised the “L” word, and for those interested, she collaborated in designing some informal opportunities to get a feel for the work and role of a leader.

What I loved about her approach was how she started small and based on observation and expressions of continued interest from the aspiring professional, she would ratchet up the informal leadership challenges to provide more experience and exposure and more time for observation and coaching. 

Her stepped approach might include having the individual help organize the department’s quarterly meeting and then later chair a problem-solving team. Again, if the results were positive and interest remained, she would provide a capstone challenge such as leading a strategic development team as an informal leader (project manager).

At the end of this period of leadership exploration, and based on feedback from many parties, she would work with the aspiring leader on creating a forward looking development plan, schedule formal training and begin the movement into the first official leadership role.

Of course, at that point, her job as a mentor and coach was just starting, but that’s a topic for another post.

The Bottom Line:

The manager in that very real anecdote understood the benefits of getting leadership identification right and the costs of mucking it up. She created and managed that program without the benefit of a formal company-mentoring program, and she didn’t use training as the crutch of the lazy manager. The idea of promoting first and training later was not something this manager would ever consider.

Exploration before promotion. Try it and let’s break the back of our propensity to make the same leadership identification and development mistakes over and over again.

Filed Under: "To Do" List, Career, Leadership, Performance, Professional Growth Tagged With: , , , , , ,