Leadership Caffeine: Speed Kills-10 Situations to Call a Timeout
Filed under: Leadership Caffeine, Performance, Project Management, Strategy
Note from Art: after a brief hiatus from the weekly Leadership Caffeine columns to launch my book/collection: Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development, they’re back. The Weekly Leadership message posts will now publish every Sunday.
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We’re so focused on speed in our organization, that we’ve become remarkably competent at creating problems faster.
Somewhere on the way to this world we now live and work in, “speed” became a proxy for success. Speed is undoubtedly important, but beware relying on it as the sole indicator of effectiveness. It’s a cruel tyrant, demanding fealty from followers, while discouraging critical and deep thinking and focusing solely on time-to-response as a metric of success.
The pressure to move fast here is tremendous. Everyone’s running in circles as fast as they can.
Speed, unchecked increases sloppiness. The leader who demands speed at the expense of thought and thoroughness is teaching his team members to act now and worry about cleaning up later. This works in triage and firefighting and other activities where instincts and actions are essential for survival, but it doesn’t play well for most teams and organizations in the business world.
Instead of taking the time to diagnose our situation, our strategy session focused on creating a huge laundry list of things to do. The leaders felt like it was a success because we had identified the work and assigned names and dates to it. No one knows what the strategy is though.
Don’t misread my intent here. Speed is critically important in many of our corporate endeavors. The world we live in demands attention to the clock. However, speed without thought breeds activity without vector and that is chaos.
During coaching sessions or workshops where people get a few moments to slow down and think, the number one excuse for not doing the things everyone knows are right is…you guessed it…no time.
At Least 10 Situations When it is Essential to Defy the Need for Speed and Call Timeout:
1. Any situation that involves the development of a team member. Few of us take enough time to support development, provide feedback and determine and act on developmental plans. Call regular time-outs for everyone on your team to deal with this.
2. When someone looks at you and says, “This is important.” A peer was famous for offering, “That’s an important topic and we should talk about it at the right time.” It was never the right time.
3. When you’re making lists of things to do. When you’ve just completed creating a laundry list of new “strategic” initiatives or projects, and no one has talked about what you’re NOT going to do, it’s time say, “time-out.”
4. When the prescription shows up before the diagnosis. Whenever you are talking about strategic plans, new directions and new investments, and the team hasn’t taken the time to properly diagnose and understand the situation, it’s time to pause. Speed loves a rush to judgement…a ready, shoot, aim approach, but nothing is a substitute for a proper situation diagnosis prior to acting. If this is abstract, simply ask and work with your team to answer, “What’s going on here?”
5. When you’re the Executive Sponsor on a project and you don’t know how things are going.
6. When the sky falls regularly. You’re overdue for a time out when you find yourself and your team members caught in an endless loop of responding to the latest competitive announcement by dropping everything to prop up the sky that’s about to fall. This is indicative of a lack of strategy, a lack of spine or some great manipulation by others in the firm. Regardless, fix it.
7. When a situation has been framed either as a positive or a negative, it’s time to call time and look at through a neutral filter.
8. As soon as someone says, “With a little more time and money, we can do this.” That’s code for the Sunk Cost effect decision trap..aka Escalation of Commitment. Sunk costs should stay sunk!
9. Any time you hear words like, “this can’t fail.”
10. Anytime you see a revenue projection that looks oddly like a hockey stick.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Blind pursuit of speed is part of the formula for disaster. Focus on creating healthy speed by minimizing the daily issue churn and resultant rework. Take the time to think through your diagnoses and prescriptions for the big issues. Flag potential decision-making traps and recognize that for some issues (people), speed is typically note part of the right answer.
Work hard, run fast and strive to win, but take the blindfold off first.
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JUST RELEASED! Check Out Art’s New Book: Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development
Want More: Sign up for the new, Leadership Caffeine e-Newsletter. (publishing in October) I’ll guard your e-mail address with ferocity, while sharing ideas to energize and inspire.
About Art Petty:
Art Petty is a Leadership & Career Coach and Strategy Consultant, helping motivated professionals of all levels achieve their potential. In addition to working with highly motivated professionals, Art frequently works with project teams in pursuit of high performance. Art’s second book (an edited, annotated collection of the most popular leadership essays), Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development, was released at the end of September in 2011.
Contact Art via e-mail to discuss a coaching, workshop or speaking engagement.
Art’s Weekly Leadership Message-Hey Boss: Less Talking, More Listening
It’s amazing what you hear if you exert a little self-control, clamp your jaw shut and focus on trying to understand what your employees and team members are trying to tell you.
You learn about what’s working, what’s not, where you need to step up and offer help, where you need to step in and deliver feedback and so much more.
For some, the elevation to the lofty role of boss, team leader, supervisor or manager of some sort, seems to carry with it an implied obligation to talk more than anyone else in the room. One person expressed it to me as follows: “It’s my job to make sure things get done, so meetings are my opportunity to tell people what to do.” Yeesh.
Being the boss does not carry with it the requirement that you occupy all available airtime during group and one-on-one meetings. To the contrary, success in this role is more a function of how well you listen and then act on or apply what you heard.
For those still in their formative stage of learning to lead or in a need of a tune-up of your boss skills, know that your willingness to pay attention…to actively listen and engage with someone or some group is one of your best ways to show respect to employees and team members.
Your active listening is best broken by the artful use of asking questions to ensure that you understand the messages of your team members.
And yes, you’ve got an implicit responsibility to teach others, however, as the old saying goes, “telling ain’t teaching.”
You teach by the example you set, by the respect you show to everyone and by your willingness to support people in their effort to figure out how to do their jobs the best way possible. Oddly for some, you have to let go of your own prior technical competence and let people flail, fail and learn. Of course, some thoughtful and timely feedback along the way is always appropriate.
The Weekly Leadership Message:
Vow this week to listen more, talk less, and use the time you do spend talking to teach and encourage.
Resist sharing your opinions and encourage others to offer theirs. Even if you know the answer you are better off having others find and form the answer on their own. And don’t be surprised when the answers they start coming up with are better than yours. That’s a sign that you are on the right track.
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Want More: Sign up for the new, Leadership Caffeine e-Newsletter. I’ll guard your e-mail address with ferocity, while sharing ideas to energize and inspire.
About Art Petty:
Art Petty is a Leadership & Career Coach helping motivated professionals of all levels achieve their potential. In addition to working with highly motivated professionals, Art frequently works with project teams in pursuit of high performance.
Art’s second book, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development, will be announced during the last week of September, 2011. Initial copies are now available on Amazon.com and via the author for team/group orders.
Contact Art via e-mail to discuss a coaching, workshop or speaking engagement.
Leadership Caffeine: How to Cope With Organizational Alchemists
Filed under: Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leadership Skills, Management Education, Middle Management, Performance, Professional Growth, Surviving Lousy Leaders
The modern-day practice of alchemy is only metaphorically about the search for a method to turn lead into gold.
Instead of the medieval pursuit by alchemists of a magical chemical conversion process to change one element into another, modern practitioners are focused on the magical and easy transformation of people and organizations from one level of performance to another.
Modern day, organizational alchemists are looking for great results but aren’t interested in participating in the hard work required to produce these results.
Organizational Alchemists at Work in the Modern World:
While the vocation of Alchemist is long dead, you see current practitioners at work every day. These include:
- Executives who talk endlessly about the need for change, yet, never put any effort into the hard work of enabling change.
- Executives who turn their quarterly prognostications into actual numbers, offering up this weak proof that their Alchemist’s Ways work. Jim Goodnight, CEO of privately-held (by him) software firm, SAS Institute, offered in an interview aired on 60-Minutes a number of years ago: There’s only one way that I know of to accurately hit the quarterly numbers, and that is to cook the books. Dr. Deming shared a similar perspective.
Others:
- Leaders who use leadership training programs as easy substitutes for the hard work of developing others on their teams.
- Firms and executives who delegate the identification of value-creating and differentiating strategies to consultants, and ignore the hard-won experience and knowledge of their own employees.
- Management teams that talk about being market-driven and customer-focused, without actually translating those nice words into anything meaningful in terms of processes and performance standards.
- Leaders who expect employees to be creative on command.
- Managers and leaders who refuse to say “No,” and consistently flood their employees with a dizzying and disorienting array of projects. Everything is a priority, but nothing gets done.
First, Recognize that Alchemy Doesn’t Work:
Have you heard this before? “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth working hard for.” This goes for creating hit products, improving sales performance, developing people, improving customer service, creating high performance teams and every other single activity worth doing and worth improving in your organization. There are no shortcuts.
11 Questions to Help Keep the Alchemists In Check (or at least make them squirm):
1. How do you envision this helping us?
2. Why is this a good strategic direction?
3. What do you mean by customer-focused? And the logical follow-on: What we will look like when we’re customer focused?
4. Similar theme as the customer questions: What do you mean by market-driven?
5. If we’re going to invest our hard earned money in this training program, what are we going to do differently after the program to apply the lessons learned?
6. How are you and the other executives going to help us knock down some of the impediments to progress that we all see and know but don’t talk about?
7. What does that feedback mean? Specifically, what behavior do you want me to change?
8. How many customers did we talk to in the making of this strategy?
9. Why do you trust outside advisors more than the people that work here?
10. Which project do you want us to drop to take on your new top priority?
11. What’s your part in our team’s success?
The Bottom-line for Now:
Here’s to a year of less crap, fewer alchemists and a heck of a lot more focus and progress on the hard work of sustaining, developing and improving.
If you’re in a leadership role, ask and answer the above questions yourself before opening your mouth and exposing your Alchemist’s Ways to your team members.
If you work for an Alchemist, recognize that the above questions won’t magically transform this person. Use the questions carefully. Teach the questions to your team members and politely, firmly and consistently seek answers.
Yours in hard work,
Art
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Art develops and delivers powerful and pragmatic workshops and programs on leadership, professional development and building high performance teams. Contact Art to discuss your needs for a program or keynote.
Leadership Caffeine: For a Change, Look At What’s Working
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leadership Skills, Management Education, Middle Management, Performance, Professional Growth, Talent Management, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
Consider these frequently overheard refrains from two different leaders:
Leader 1: “That’s great! Congratulations! How do we do more of that?”
Leader 2: “That’s broken and we need to fix it right away.”
We have all met both of these characters. One sees opportunity and achievement and building blocks everywhere she looks and the other sees flaws and problems that need fixing.
And while you are free to accuse me of making a hasty generalization here, my “blink” assessment of the two is that I want to hire or work for Leader #1
Don’t get me wrong. I like the attitude of Leader #2 if we’re talking about toilets, sump pumps and just about anything else that is found in the plumbing family. Otherwise, #1 is my choice for manager or project leader.
I’m not certain why some people are pre-disposed to see beauty and what’s right in people and things, and why others see gaps and flaws when looking at the same objects. In the world of leadership, I do worry that some of this reflects bad habits carried forward from early, unsupervised and un-coached first-time leadership roles. More than a few first-time leaders are thrown or drafted into their position with no more idea of what to do than you or I might have if we were asked to perform surgery today, and the instinct to tell, order or criticize is part of a survival strategy. Left untreated, this early style easily becomes dominant.
And yes, you continuous improvement disciples might appropriately chastise me for discrediting the person that’s looking for things to continuously improve. My focus here is on the impact that these two different leaders have on the people around them. #1 fuels performance by encouraging people to build on successes and #2 flummoxes people by going for the negatives or the gaps. #1’s style not only doesn’t preclude continuous improvement, I believe it fuels it by reinforcing the notion of doing more of “what’s working.”
I’ve worked for both of these characters at different points during my career, and now when I see them regularly in my client assignments, I’m never surprised to observe that the results are always the same:
- #1’s teams are productive and creative, and good people migrate towards this leader.
- #2’s teams are often efficient but lifeless. Good people seek to escape and those that don’t mind the constant “here’s what’s wrong” view of the world linger on, comfortable in the fact that someone will tell them what to fix.
5 Ideas For Changing Your Leadership View from What’s Wrong to What’s Right:
1. Project post-mortems or activity debriefs are a great place to start. Instead of the typical, “let’s assess what we did wrong and how we can improve next time,” try: “what did we do right and how can we do more of it next time?” I guarantee that those are two very different conversations.
2. Set a goal every day to offer one piece of behavioral, business-focused positive feedback every hour. Keep tally of how well you do. And remember, the feedback has to be genuine, and specific and behavioral enough that someone will understand what to keep doing or to do more of. A classic example is, “nice presentation.” It’s fine to hear that, but what did you do that was nice? A more specific example might be, “during your presentation, you really engaged the audience. Your eye-contact was excellent, your body posture was open and inviting, and best of all, your constant smile warmed everyone up.”
3. Bite your tongue and hold-off every time you are tempted to criticize. While I don’t want you to short-circuit your use of constructive feedback, I do want you to quit telling everyone what’s wrong, what’s not working and what needs to be fixed. Replace statements with questions and then shut up and listen!
4. Try adjusting your altitude just a bit and looking at the big picture of what your team does effectively. Let them know how impressed you are by their work and their outcomes.
5. Let your team members find the areas that need to be improved upon, and then encourage them to take ownership of those ideas. Take it a step further and help knock down some obstacles so that they succeed with their improvement initiatives.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Don’t think for a second that I’m asking you to walk around and avoid dealing with problems. I am however encouraging you to adjust your focus a bit and start looking at what’s right, what’s working and what you need to do more of, rather than what’s wrong. If you already do this, do more of it. And if you’re reading this saying, “that’s not me,” it can’t hurt to try the above suggestions, can it?
Here’s to building on strengths and successes. And here’s to plumbers everywhere that keep the water flowing!
The January Leadership Development Carnival-Best of 2009
Filed under: Fresh Voices, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Leading Change, Life and Business, Management Education, Performance, Professional Growth, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
Dan McCarthy, the proprietor of the well-named and always excellent Great Leadership Blog, is out with The January Leadership Development Carnival-The Best of 2009 Edition. I am honored to be in some great company with Dan and many, many of my absolute favorite thinkers and writers, and I encourage you to click over and spend some quality time soaking up the energy and great ideas.
Thanks Dan for the inclusion and for your hard work in pulling this great feature together!
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Podcast
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Available Now!
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Practical Lessons
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e-book
e-book-Leadership and the Project Manager - Developing the Skills that Fuel High Performance
