Management Excellence News, Updates & Coming Attractions

Note from Art: While I’m remarkably sensitive to not creating an infomercial out of my blog, I am involved in a number of exciting activities that I’ve shared with some of you personally.  Here’s a bit broader update and a call for speakers and interview subjects.

-Coming Soon: The Management Excellence Interview Series

I truly enjoy some of the blogs that push the envelope on mixing media to provide audio and video posts, podcasts and events, and I’m moving in that direction as well. I experimented earlier this year with some podcasts and got tired of talking with myself and haven’t come back to that medium yet.

That’s changing over the next few weeks as I embark on what I hope will be a regular feature here at Management Excellence in the form of brief audio interviews with some fascinating professionals.

I’m on tap to record the first one on Monday (for posting later that week) with Mike Mulcahy, a scrappy, no-nonsense executive that has held the hot seat in large and small organizations, and has some great insights on “The CEO’s Perspective on Product Management.”

As an aside, I conducted yet another experiment on Twitter yesterday and asked the product management community #prodmgmt what they want to hear from Mike. Their list of great questions might just help define the outline for a book! If you’re not using Twitter to tap into the many great minds out there, you are missing a great opportunity.

I am interested in building on my list of interview subjects and would love to chat with executives and professionals that have something to say about leadership, strategy, sales and marketing and performance excellence and any of the other topics that I cover here at Management Excellence.  Drop me a note and I will get in touch with you.

-Where Distance Learning Meets Professional Mentoring to Support Professional Growth

During the past few years, I challenged myself to do something way out of my comfort zone and that is to learn to teach on-line. I’m a huge advocate of face to face learning, but the world is changing.  I now teach distance classes here in my community and actually managed to gain permission from DePaul to teach an elective MBA course (Project Management) in a hybrid fashion…one week face to face and the next on-line. The experience has been fascinating and enlightening for me and the students have voted with stellar reviews.

It’s time for the next step.

I am putting the finishing touches on my initial distance learning meets professional mentoring programs and will launch a new website for this in September.

The first program is focused on early career professionals, and is entitled: “Considering Leadership: What to Do and How to Prepare,” and will be quickly followed with, “Congratulations You’re a First-Time Leader, What Next?” (There are another 6 on tap for more experienced professionals and audiences in product and project management, marketing and on topics ranging from leadership to strategy and execution to developing executive presence.)

What I’m excited about is that the programs are designed to offer a blend of distance learning with personal mentoring time (telephone or skype) to deliver complete schedule flexibility while integrating person to person involvement. I’ve designed the lessons to communicate core concepts and tools in short audio and video segments, supported by synced slides, and then the pdf Action Guide documents for each lesson outline the very important developmental exercises.

I engage with the participants in up-front and back-end personal calls, as well as via live teleseminars during the program. Of course, they get unlimited e-mail access to me. Programs will run 45 to 60 days and will be priced extremely aggressively to allow individuals as well as corporations to get involved.

I’m working hard to help fill some gaps in the market with these programs. People need schedule flexibility and affordability, and they need tools and programs that don’t just talk but that challenge and guide them on taking action. After all, you can no longer count on your company to support your own development and there’s little else in the market that blends flexibility with affordability with pragmatism and quality.

Step one is a quality check and I’ll be putting several early career professionals through the “Considering Program” prior to launch. More soon.

-News Sound Bites:

Practical Lessons in Leadership will be used as a text at yet another school…this time for a program on Creative Leadership at McHenry Community College here in Illinois. I’ve been invited to guest speak and I can’t wait. Nothing beats walking into a classroom and seeing your book in front of everyone with post-its sticking out and pages bent. Prior talks and Q/A sessions in these settings have been great! That’s what it was meant for!

-Speaking of Guest Speakers: I am teaching Business Plan Development at DePaul University on Monday nights this fall and would love to hear from any Chicago-area professionals with experience in venture financing and business planning interested in a guest speaking opportunity. I can talk with you about specifics. Drop me an e-mail and I’ll get in touch with you.

-More Speaking:

Creating a High Performance Culture on a Foundation of Leadership Excellence is one of my keynote topics and I’m looking forward to delivering it at a CEO Conference at the Sawmill Cree Resort in Huron, OH on September 1.

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That’s it for now, although there is some “Marketing” news in the works, but more about that later. Back to more Management Excellence content with a new Leadership Caffeine post on Monday!

Enjoy your weekend!

A Follow-Up to My “Evil Leaders” post: Your Firm’s Values Have No Teeth

My recent post, “Why Do Evil Leaders Flourish in Some Organizations” struck a chord or at least a nerve for many, as the many insightful comments quickly outstripped the value of the original post.  Thanks to all that jumped in and shared on this topic.

On the heels of what turned out to be a deluge of good thoughts on why some leaders and some people get away with less than agreeable (to the rest of us) behaviors in the workplace, I keep coming back to the topic of Values as a core issue.

Some people watch birds and some watch people, and in one of my odd quirks, I watch values.  Rather, I have made it a habit to ask people about their firm’s values and the role that those values play in defining acceptable and unacceptable behavior inside organizations.

The results of my informal polling as well as my formal surveying (as part of culture assessments) indicates that for many organizations, values exist as nice statements in a frame with little meaning or use in day-to-day business dealings.  Based on my own travels, firms where values are both clear and they are connected in people’s minds to acceptable and unacceptable forms of behavior are the minority.

In a fascinating article on the aberrant cultures in many law firms (please withhold your chuckles), author David Maister offers the following regarding values:

“The single biggest source of trust in an organization occurs when everyone can be depended upon to act in accordance with a commonly held, strictly observed set of principles. Examples of such principles are “Our clients’ interests always come first; if we serve our clients well, our own success will follow” and “We have no room for those who put their personal interests ahead of the interests of the firm and its clients.” (Both of these, by the way, are from Goldman Sachs.)

It is important to note that commercial benefits do not come simply from believing in or encouraging these principles but from actually achieving an organization where partner behavior is always consistent with them. When this is the case, less time is wasted in internal negotiations and posturing, strategies are implemented, and true teamwork results.”

And the payoff:

“Law firms appear unable to achieve this level of ideological consistency. They will buy into principles—firms can have very high ideals as long as they remain ideals—but they have difficulty with the concept of enforcement. Firms are seemingly willing to adopt strategies and statements of values and mission, but are usually unwilling to specify what the penalty would be for noncompliance. Not surprisingly, that rarely results in effective implementation.”

Mr. Maister sums up very eloquently the contradiction between having principles and enforcing principles in law firms.  Unfortunately, this is the same contradiction that exists in many and perhaps most organizations. The values have no teeth.

Can We Change?

A good friend of mine read the “Evil Leaders” post the other day and offered the depressing comment that sounded something like this: “Doesn’t it ever bother you that you write and teach all of these good things about leadership and values and at the end of the day, none of it makes a difference and human nature will still allow the dysfunctional or evil leaders to flourish.”

If this were an audio blog, the sound you hear would be a man screaming.

While I’ll grudgingly allow that changing human nature may be outside of scope, I have complete faith that the right behaviors can be encouraged and the wrong behaviors discouraged by putting teeth into a firm’s values.  Of course, first, someone has to send the firm’s leaders the memos that values count.

One of my readers and a good colleague from a former life is responsible for my values-obsession.  We taught a workshop to our first-time supervisors and leaders on how to leverage the values as a powerful leadership tool.  It was fascinating to watch the lights come on as these early-career leaders understood the power of values in dealing with topics like recruiting, managing conflict, encouraging development and driving innovation. 

If just one of those leaders from that first group carries that philosophy forward to her future teams and organizations, and ensures that the values have meaning and teeth, we will have made a difference.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

In case you are like my friend and just a bit cynical on our ability to change, consider the power of the still-forming backlash to the excesses and abuses of leadership and the complete lack of values and character that have combined to create the mess that we all find ourselves swimming in today.  My money is on a surge in the value of Values.  

What about you?  Without looking at the frame on the wall in the conference room, what are your firm’s values?  When was the last time you actually thought about actively applying those values to your tough decisions?

It’s not too late to start.

 

Why Do Evil Leaders Flourish Inside Some Organizations?

It’s always been a mystery to me why so many arguably evil managers and leaders not only last but seem to thrive inside certain organizations. 

You know the type.  Hey, maybe you are one.  If so, chime in.  I’ve never actually heard from an evil leader that was willing to talk openly about why he is the way he is. 

Evil leaders tend to fit one or more of these profiles:

• The dictator
• The assassin
• The two-faced politician (is that redundant?)
• The warlord
• The megalomaniac
• The evil genius
• The double agent

While this might sound like the cast of a great new movie, I know a few people that would agree that it looks a lot like a quorum at their senior management meeting.

Is it our nature to gravitate towards evil leadership in our pursuit of power and wealth? 

I sure hope not, because I’m missing that gene.

I’ve worked in and with organizations that seem to cultivate and reward more than their fair share of villains, thugs and hoodlums masquerading as leaders.  My observations as to why some environments seem to produce a bumper crop of these dysfunctional characters include:

• No visible sign of values in action—the sign might be on the wall outlining the values, but other than that, nothing.  No teeth and no meaning behind those words.

• Some leaders just like to be surrounded by enforcers.  One leader I encountered as a consulted tolerated a truly heinous individual because in his words, “I like to have a pitbull in the office looking out for my interests.”

• Some senior leaders enjoy the conflict.  It is entertaining and it fits their Darwinian view of the world.

• Some leaders are sensory deprived—they are so preoccupied with their own issues they are truly blind to the carnage going on around them.  While they hear isolated reports, they are not perceptive enough to see the patterns.

The Cures:

• If you have the chance, fire an evil leader or even a future evil leader.  I actually enjoy this.  Ooops, is that a sign that I might be moving to the dark side?

• Regardless of where you fit in the food chain, establish, promote and reward those that show character and reinforce proper values.  Fire the others.  Yep, still enjoyable.

• If you are in charge or starting up, establish clear, meaningful values from day one and build your culture and team around those values.  Abstinence from evil leaders is still the best bet.

• Help the evil leader unmask himself or herself.  This is not for the faint of heart or light of bank account, since you are in essence playing their game but often without the power. 

• Find a new job and company, but remember to do a great job culture sensing before you sign up.  You would hate to move from one evil den to another. 

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If you have a good evil leader story, the readers would love to hear it.  Unlike most stories, we like these to end poorly for these people.  It just makes us feel like the good people have a chance. 

 

 

Fresh Voices in Management Excellence: Greg Strouse and His Stories, Advice and Opinions on Working, Managing and Surviving the Corporate World

Note from Art, in proof that great minds think alike, I woke up, crafted today’s post and then read Greg’s latest only to see that he had referenced me.  While this may look like a well-orchestrated mutual admiration campaign, I can assure you that it was purely coincidental.  Don’t let his questionable taste in liking my blog detract from his remarkable writing!

Searching through the sea of business and leadership blogs has become a bit like a treasure hunt. I enjoy searching for great voices that have not yet jumped out of the search engines and on to everyone’s screen.  Given the umpteen gazillion blogs in the world, it’s not surprising that there are some remarkable voices laboring away in the background.  

One of those that deserves to be front and center is Greg Strouse’s Tales from an XOD, Stories, Advice and Opinions on Working, Managing and Surviving the Corporate World.

A little background.  Greg uses the term XOD as short for Executive on Demand, which is how he characterizes his professional self.  I met Greg on the phone a couple of years ago when he started his blog and was impressed.  He’s a great, straight-shooting, creative and super-experienced professional with an easy to read, entertaining and wisdom packed approach to writing. 

For some reason I lost track of Greg and his blog for a period of time, and it was my good fortune to reconnect with him recently.  I went through a year’s worth of his weekly posts and kicked myself for missing out on these.  Frankly, I’m just a bit jealous that he’s a better writer than I am and clearly a lot funnier as well!

I encourage you to take some time to check out Greg’s work at Tales from an XOD and make certain to subscribe.  We’ll all be wiser and feel a bit better about the world in the process. 

Some of my favorite, recent posts from Greg:

“You’re Kidding Me, Right,” where he engages with an airline representative on the use of his middle name in a scene that could easily have been written into a Seinfeld script and then follows it up with another brilliant example from yet another inept airline.

“Death to Smoochy,” tackles the topic of the current “economic conditions” with another fascinating discussion with his bank and some timely suggestions for businesses that are sleepwalking through this time. 

“Logo Your Way to Success,“ where Greg suggests (tongue in cheek) that perhaps the Detroit Lions might reverse their winless ways by changing their logo.

“Don’t Know Everything” and “Hey Do You Still Make that Killer Meatloaf” offer up some great advice for leaders, owners and entrepreneurs.

OK, I could keep going on here, but I will leave the joy of discovery to you.  I find it hard to quit reading Greg’s posts, both for the wit and for the great lessons, quotes and examples.  I hope that you enjoy his work as much as I do, and don’t forget to take the time to let me…and more importantly, let Greg know what you think.

Leadership Caffeine for the New Week: The Words You Heard At Graduation Still Apply

Followers of this blog know that we celebrated a milestone in our home this past week as our youngest son graduated from high school.  It’s an exciting and frightening experience for the child as he reaches the end of a long road with good friends and looks forward to a new and uncharted path through college.

 What he doesn’t perhaps know is that is only the first of many likely experiences of becoming part of something and then moving on and leaving good colleagues behind. 

For parents, it is a bittersweet milestone.  Both my wife and I had great high school experiences and in fact, that is where we met.  Our son had a great experience as well in a wonderful community and environment.  And while we are excited for him, it was difficult to not feel a bit nostalgic as we sat and watched the graduation ceremony and applauded as one by one the friends of his childhood shook hands with administrators, grabbed their diplomas and walked off into the future.

High School graduation speeches are mostly predictable and that is OK.  The valedictorian and salutatorian offer their respective perspectives on what the experience has meant for everyone, and they offer their thoughts and encouragement for their classmates on the upcoming adventure.  The Principal and the School Board President offer perspectives from years of watching students move through and then out into the world, and then someone ties it all off with the final words of encouragement, everyone throws their caps in the air and it is done.

I’m not certain whether the soon to be graduates sitting in the chairs and looking forward to graduation parties and getting ready for college actually hear the words or grasp the true meaning of the well-intended advice.  The parents certainly do. 

From the Principal on Things to Appreciate As You Move Forward in Life:

• The value of a friend rises as you grow older.   You will meet many people in your life, but you will only make a few good friends.  Keep and treasure those friendships as they will give you support and importantly in your future, they will be the link to your past.

• Appreciate your parents, because you never know when they will be gone for good.

• The lessons of success through hard work and dedication were taught and learned by many of you.  Remember them and they will serve you well. 

From the Student Speakers:

• Your experiences here have helped shape you.  Take them forward and build on them in your life.
  

• No matter where you go or what you do, you share a unique bond with your classmates.  It is now part of you. 
  

• Remember that you’ve set high standards in academics and in athletics here and it is your responsibility to carry those standards forward and live up to or exceed them.
  

• This has been just one important step in preparing you for life.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

While the same words in some form are echoed at thousands of ceremonies around the country in May and June, there is a good deal of wisdom, hope and encouragement in the forward looking and the retrospective comments.

Even if you’ve long since moved beyond your own high school graduation, it is helpful to be reminded of the words that launched us from childhood into adulthood.  The context has changed, but the advice still holds: 

• Keep looking forward and keep reaching with the same spirit that you had in your youth. 

• Don’t forget how you got to where you are today.  You had a lot of help along the way.  It’s time to give some back.

 

 

 

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