At Least 3 Reasons We’re Still Raving About Lousy Leaders

November 16, 2010 By 4 Comments

Businessman meditatingNote from Art: As I approach my 500th post here at Management Excellence in the next few weeks (that’s in the neighborhood of half-a-million words on management and leadership) my writing mood is shifting to one of, “let’s get this leadership thing right people.”  The blueprint for effective leadership is not carefully guarded like the secret formula to Coca Cola. It’s on display for all of us to see and to apply. Why then are there so many exceptions?  Read on for my wildly speculative and hopefully provocative thoughts.

Spend any amount of time reading or engaging with the many remarkable individuals that write, speak, teach and coach leaders, and you’re to be excused if you quickly conclude that we’re all in violent agreement with each other.

The principles behind what a reasonable person would agree represents effective leadership are practically universal truths that support an unarguable argument.

I’ll wager a month’s worth of coffee that if you asked everyone that you know to generate a list on what makes an effective leader, the output would be nearly identical. While preferences in styles might vary, (and there would certainly be differences across cultures,) core attributes and behaviors generally remain constant. The only differences will likely be due to memory lapses such as, “Oh, I forgot that one, but you’re right,” versus true differences of opinion.

So if this construct of an effective leader is so readily apparent, why is there a nearly endless supply of disgruntled workers capable of describing lousy leader horror stories to anyone that will listen? Importantly, why doesn’t this intuitive and common understanding of what an effective leader acts like manifest itself with more frequency in our workplaces?

3 Reasons Why We’re Still Raving About Lousy Leaders:

1. As humans and workers, perhaps we’re happy being miserable. While I would be saddened to adopt this viewpoint, it’s easy to see that “the boss” gives us something to work for and rail against and his/her actions and utterances serve as a source of bonding with peers.

Is it possible that we could work for someone with the presence of Washington or the authenticity of Lincoln or Gandhi and be unhappy? You bet! OK, that’s a bit sad, but there’s at least a kernel of truth in there somewhere.

Possible conclusion: we need to accept our own propensity to enjoy our misery. While it’s not as bad as being chased down by a sabre tooth tiger or consumed by the last remaining group of cannibals on the planet, the boss being a jerk gives us something to occupy our minds and mouths.

2. Humans are inherently preoccupied with their own survival and leading effectively requires one to sublimate that core drive. Hmmmm.  Some good psychobabble here, but it’s worth thinking about.  Good campfire fodder when the talk on “are we alone in the universe” runs out.

Possible conclusion: We’re screwed and all of this noble talk is wasting time that could be better spent lamenting our plight and beefing about the boss.

3. Perhaps the predominant management system in use in most of society is horribly flawed in terms of values, motivations, expectations and enabling structures.  OK, I’m warming to this more than the “evil” or “predominantly miserable” theories expressed earlier.

Maybe, just maybe, we’ve not licked this management thing yet. Deming did us a great service in crying B.S. on the Deadly Diseases that he viewed in most organizations. And while his 1980’s view to the purity of the models adopted by Japanese companies may be a bit naïve, listen to the Great Doctor describe these 5 and tell me if they’re fixed in your organization yet. At least a cup of coffee that the real answer is no.

Possible conclusion: Fix the flipping management system. It’s time to move beyond the practices of the industrial revolution and build success, effective leadership and enabling systems into our approach. Oh yeah, and that values part is the foundation to build upon!

The Bottom-Line for Now:

I’ll opt for the fact that it’s time to move management forward and build the new systems around the emerging realities. If innovation, creativity, speed, ability to execute and adaptability are all table-stakes attributes of the new winning organization, then it’s time to move management forward and create systems that breed leaders at all levels and for all types of situations. Note to top leaders: ignore the need to breed and build people that will help you navigate this strange, fast and foreign new world at your own peril. It starts with you at the top creating the right foundation. And hint: the foundation is built upon meaningful, actionable values.

Your thoughts?

Filed Under: Leadership, Management Innovation, Performance, Surviving Lousy Leaders, Values Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

In Pursuit of Management Innovation in Marketing

October 20, 2010 By 3 Comments

Retro TV CommercialNote from Art: my view to marketing comes from 2+ decades in B2B technology firms large and small, foreign and domestic, as well as 4-years working with small to mid sized manufacturing and service businesses. While your own environment may be different than the one I still see in these firms, I‘ll wager lunch that there are more similarities than differences.

The practice of management has evolved at a snail’s pace over the past 50 years, and one of the core tools of management and a key issue for any organization, marketing, has lagged just slightly behind.

While the tools and technologies available to plan and promote are truly remarkable and changing daily, the treatment of the marketing function and the marketing processes remains in many organizations mired somewhere in a time when Darrin Stephens and Larry Tate were pitching advertising campaigns on Bewitched. (If you’re not familiar with this classic prime-time 60’s and 70’s show, a more current example of that era is Mad Men.)

9 Common Management Mistakes with Marketing:

1. Marketing is late to the game. Formalizing the marketing function and roles in start-ups often occurs once people recognize a problem with a the either engineering or sales-driven approaches that seem right one day and overwhelmingly wrong the next.

2. CEOs and top executives don’t know what to expect from marketing. Their view stops at the necessary but not the only marketing tasks of promotion (generating leads), managing events, creating sales tools and managing the web site and perhaps press releases. The executive view of Marketing is stuck in an “old rules” world.

3. No one knows how to measure marketing’s effectiveness, so the metrics are mostly created by marketers.  This is much like a sales rep defining her own comp package and quota. The numbers will be very, very good, relatively speaking.  They may not reflect anything to do with reality, but they will be good.

4. Marketing efforts are much more like World War II B52 Carpet Bombing than they are precision targeting.  Too many marketers fail to understand buyer personas and the results resemble flailing with the outcomes failing.

5. Some marketers have a warped view of their role..sometimes bordering on elitist. Yes, marketing is important. In particular the firm’s responsibility for MARKETING (all caps) in supporting Drucker’s purpose of an enterprise: “To acquire and keep customers,” is huge. However, this is not owned by a function. MARKETING is an enterprise function, not a siloed issue carried out by the chosen few.

6. The marketing systems are discrete and separate from the enterprise system. The most obvious example is the lack of connectivity in most firms between the lead pipeline (and refinery) and the sales pipeline. I rarely find firms that connect the two. This would be like trying to produce gasoline from crude oil, without having any idea what your source and supply of crude was at any point in time.

7. The role of strategic marketing is often absent. While I don’t want to add more fuel to any “marketing is more important than…” arguments, there most definitely must be someone somewhere looking out for core issues of market strategy, voice of customer translation, competitor monitoring, strategies for achieving meaningful differentiation and so forth.  The failure for anyone to clearly own these creates a great deal of strategic and operational drift in organizations.

8. Marketing is often run at the top by someone that came up through the pure marketing ranks…or, it is subservient to a sales professional. Both are wrong.

9. The deployment of product management often creates a separate, disconnected marketing role.

7 Suggestions for Strengthening Marketing In Your Firm:

1. Top management must broaden the view on the role of marketing and increase expectations and accountability.  It’s much, much more than leads, tweets and shows.

2. Cultivate marketing talent carefully. It’s critical to have functional experts…relentless promoters, great communications and event management specialists, and it’s critical to have broad-thinkers and experienced business people guiding and leading them.  Promoting from within is fine, but make certain that yesterday’s marcom superstars receive broad exposure to the firm through job rotation, mentoring and management development training before placing them in positions of marketing leadership.

3. Know thy personas! If the people driving promotions and visibility aren’t remarkably familiar with the hopes, dreams, problems, desires, issues and lives of the targeted customers, then money will be wasted.

4. Challenge sales and marketing to connect core systems and measures. Both roles and functions own the business pipeline at different stages. Make certain that systems, measures and accountabilities are clear and in some cases, shared.

5. Don’t relegate strategic marketing activities (as I described earlier) to committees or worse yet, to that growing list of “nice to get to when we have time.” Someone with strong business experience and presence outside of a functional silo must watch and act and engage in the core issues of strategic marketing.

6. Be careful with the implementation of product management. This powerful and critical role is easily and often misplaced and misdirected, creating islands or pockets of marketing expertise disconnected from the marketing system.

7. Don’t become enamored with the new tools. They are tools, not silver bullets. On the other hand, don’t ignore them either.  They merit extensive experimentation.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

I love everything about serving well understood customers, creating meaningful differentiation, building value and visibility for my firms and frankly, I love crushing competitors or at least rendering them irrelevant. An effective, talented and broad thinking group of business professionals effectively wielding the tools of marketing will make this good work happen a lot faster and a great deal more effectively than most traditional deployments of marketing.

Is it time for an organization-wide marketing tune-up?

Filed Under: Leadership, Management Innovation, Marketing, Performance, Product Management Tagged With: , , ,

Rethinking Talent, Leadership and the Organization

April 21, 2010 By 9 Comments

New IdeasNote from Art: This post is intended to push you in the direction of thinking about “what if?” and “why not?” and “how?”  If you’re not thinking about possibilities and new approaches, you’re not really thinking.

Anyone involved in leadership and responsible for the development of leaders should read the recent BusinessWeek article, “Can GE Still Manage?” The article offers a fascinating look into GE’s traditional leadership and high-potential development practices, and raises an interesting question of whether these practices still hunt in a very different world than when they were conceived.

As someone that grew up in business during the era of Jack Welch and the emergence of GE’s Crotonville programs as perhaps the pinnacle of talent and leadership development programs, it’s interesting and a bit alarming to suddenly wonder whether the approach of convening for weeks at a time with other high-potential leaders and learning, debating, and engaging together, might just be passé in many ways.

While I’m not qualified to critique GE’s approach, the article certainly begs all of us to be thinking about or rethinking everything that we take for granted in how we find and cultivate talent and how we deploy our resources.

Questions that Must Be Asked and That Might Be Uncomfortable:

  • What are the skill sets required for success tomorrow?
  • What do we keep and what do we jettison from 20th-Century talent and leadership thinking and systems?
  • How can individuals that don’t know a tweet from a twit possibly comprehend the macro shifts occurring in how information flows, how opinions are formed and how people connect?  Whether the individual applications live or die is largely irrelevant…the seismic shift has already happened and many are still waiting to read about in the newspaper.  The point is that you need to be immersed in it to even begin to understand what is going on.
  • Most of the contemporary leadership writing and content focuses on universal leadership truths…those skills and activities that effective leaders have understood for literally thousands of years.  GE’s approach to cultivating leadership talent may be the modern representation of how to best develop around the universal truths.  It may just not be enough any longer. What’s next?
  • Is the best way to cultivate talent, simply (ha!) to hire smart, diverse (gender, ethnicity and skills/aptitudes) individuals and give them the freedom to create.  Has Google’s model replaced GE’s?

Organization and Management Speculation? In Search of Tomorrow’s Enterprise and Talent:

OK, while I’m speculating on innovations in talent development, let’s begin rethinking our traditional management systems.  Some potentially not too-far-fetched thoughts:

  • It’s not too hard to imagine that tomorrow’s enterprise must be mostly all-different than yesterday’s.  Everything that we do must enable interaction, communication, learning, knowledge sharing, idea generation and simplified paths from idea to implementation.  Today’s management systems and organizational structures often confound those objectives.
  • Every employee is a brand builder for himself/herself and for the firm. Every employee has a distinct voice inside and outside of the firm…and the boundaries are increasingly blurred between personal and professional.
  • Functionally, everything changes. Just to pick on a few, classically trained and focused marketers are museum-pieces.  IT organizations that aren’t ahead of the power curve on figuring out how to leverage the new media and technologies will be blown up and reinvented or outsourced.  HR organizations that fail to enable talent development in support of strategy as their prime directive will join their obsolete IT counterparts.
  • The role of a leader becomes fluid, with a person assuming this for one initiative and acting as follower for others. The skill sets for business and career success are increasingly oriented towards coalition building, project management and learning that begets actions.
  • Some form of Collins’ Level 5 and a Servant Leader emerges to head organizations…or larger parts of organizations.  Humility…not to be confused with weakness, plus fierce resolve are the core criteria for top leaders.
  • It appropriately will become increasingly difficult to draw an organization chart.  Given the fluidity and constantly shifting nature of the organization, the traditional boxes and lines approach to showing hierarchy and responsibility will die.

The Bottom Line for Now:

While perhaps I’ve pushed the envelope on creativity and speculation, the excellent GE article referenced above was the catalyst here. There is much of human nature that appears to remain constant over time, however,  our tools change constantly.  Finding ways to use new tools to create, connect and compete requires a good healthy rethinking of everything.   This is truly exciting.

Filed Under: Leadership, Management Innovation Tagged With: , , ,

That Seismic Shift You Are About To Hear is Management Revolution

March 20, 2009 By 6 Comments

Author’s Note: This post moves from fun to management revolution in a hurry.  Hold on!

One of the things that I absolutely love about this time that we are living through is the constant and accelerating rewriting of the rules.  How much fun is it to be engaged in a set of activities where what used to define success now defines failure and where your experience may be your own worst enemy?  Someone should charge admission to this surreal game we are living!

It’s like playing my favorite board game, Monopoly, where the long-established rules of buy, build, rent and bankrupt your opponent shift ahead of your turn.  Thought that Boardwalk was a good investment?  Not anymore…by the time you land on it, it’s been sold off to a foreign player to raise funds to support infrastructure.  Driving the car around the board.  Sorry, your car company went bankrupt and unless you can bail it out, you’ll need to walk. Draw a Chance card and expect to advance to the nearest railroad?  Forget it.  The government now owns 80% of this industry and they can’t get the trains running.  Bankrupt your partner.  Heck no, that would be anti-competitive, so your partner just pulled off an interest free loan under the “too big to fail” act. (Hey Parker Bros, I’ve got dibs on the new “Ever Shifting Rules” version of your board game.)

One of my favorite business writers, Gary Hamel is back this week with his very relevant message that it is high time that we reinvented management and shed some of the late 19th century practices that persist.  His focus this week is: The Three Forces Disrupting Management. 

Hamel’s Three Discontinuities:

1.  A wildly accelerating pace of change, an onslaught of new, ultra low-cost competitors, the commoditization of knowledge, rapidly increasing customer power and an ever-lengthening menu of social demands.

2.  The invention of new, Web-based collaboration tools

3.  The mash-up of new expectations that Generation Facebook will bring to work in the years ahead.

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Yep.  In this case, we didn’t need one of the world’s foremost management writers and thinkers to tell us what those of us running businesses have been painfully aware of for the past few years. Things are changing in front of us, even if our approaches are not changing to embrace and leverage the new dynamics.

Something’s gone horribly wrong with our pre-established convictions and our comfortable understanding of the old rules.  There was no memo.  The new rules are not written in stone anywhere, and in fact they are changing so quickly, that by the time you understand and write them down, they’ve changed yet again.  Heck, a good number of firms and leaders never optimized under the old rules, and now look at what they are facing!

I work constantly with professionals and teams desperately trying to break free of the shackles of the old rules, the archaic premises and obsolete leadership practices that govern so many businesses. A good number of professionals get the fact that the game has shifted, yet organizations and leaders tend to hang onto the old premises.  The obsolete and dangerous practices that still predominate, include:

  • Rigid hierarchical leadership-it’s time to end the royal leadership model
  • Silo structures-maybe the single most value destroying approach to organization
  • Dysfunctional matrix approaches dominated by functional interests
  • Ad hoc leadership identification and development practices (if any)
  • Farenheit 451 type thinking about access to the internet and adoption of new methods of working and communicating
  • Traditional strategic planning models that fail to take into account systems, constant change, the need to adapt, the difference between adapting and proacting etc.
  • 1950’s HR practices (in many cases) that emphasize compliance and fail to focus on enabling performance
  • An accountability paradox…those in charge are the least accountable

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The Bottom Line:

Instead of a more traditional passing of the baton from one generation of business leaders to the next, I get the feeling that this period will be characterized by social and cultural revolution in business.  It’s needed and in my opinion, appropriate.  

The current situation will see record numbers of firms fail, and in many cases, they should and must.  This painful cleansing will be just that a cleansing.  The only way it doesn’t create a better landscape is if we through our governmental institutions destroy the ability to regenerate.  That is an unfortunate but real possibility. 

Jefferson’s perspective on the appropriateness and need for the French revolution shocked many of his contemporaries.  I am right there with him.  Forward progress will require significant business casualties and some shocking restructuring of what we view as conventional approaches to business.

I like Hamel’s thinking on management innovation and even revolution.  I do think that his message is too soft.  It’s time to rise up against the tyranny of hubris and the post Civil War management approaches that many leaders still cling to as their hold on power. There are many great people inside of even the most dysfunctional organizations that have some valid ideas on embracing the new rules.  If you are a leader, its time to listen or beware the march of time and the villagers lighting torches!

 

Filed Under: Crisis Leadership, Leadership, Leading Change, Management Innovation, Surviving Lousy Leaders Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Pain and Promise of Collaborative Management on Display at Cisco

December 9, 2008 By 1 Comment

Author and consultant Gary Hamel writes in the preface to his latest book, The Future of Management, that, “Management is out of date.  Like the combustion engine, it’s a technology that has largely stopped evolving and that’s not good.”

Hamel challenges leaders and managers to eliminate the toxic effects of legacy management practices and innovate in ways that create “organizations that are capable of spontaneous renewal” and “companies that actually deserve the passion and creativity of the folks who work there, and naturally elicit the very best that people have to give.”

Noble thoughts that I agree with and that I espouse at every available opportunity.  Unfortunately, many firms and many top leaders are still stuck in the Managers Manager and Workers Work era that Frederick Taylor ushered in over 100 years ago.   The number of teams and ideas that I see held hostage to adjudication by these out-of-date, out-of-touch and hopefully, out-of-time command and control leaders is shocking.  Please, set your people free.

One organization and leader that has gained a great deal of coverage for ushering in new approaches to managing is Cisco Systems and its CEO, John Chambers.  The interview with Chambers, “Cisco Sees the Future” in the November, 2008 issue of Harvard Business Review is must-read material for anyone interested in the cutting edge of management innovation as well as some profound thoughts on identifying and exploiting market transitions and disruptions.

Cisco has effectively flattened its organization and now operates with a small executive team and manages its priorities by cross-functional, collaborative councils and boards. Chambers indicates that the impact is: “This companywide council-based leadership model has allowed us to move from taking only one or two cross-functional priorities a year in the past to addressing 22 this year.” He goes on to add, “We think this is what organizations of the future will look like and that this 21st century leadership style will be a major competitive advantage for us over the next decade.”

At this point, I’ll stop quoting the article…it’s worth taking a look at on your own.  However, what I found most interesting aside from the insights into the structure, management and results of the many cross functional teams, was the fortitude that Cisco and Chambers showed in adopting this new management model.  You get the impression that the gains did not come without considerable pain.  Over 20% of the executives washed out of the new collaborative model, and in essence, the entire culture had to change. Chambers even confesses to the challenges that he had in changing his own style from one of command and control, provide the answers and direct the troops to one of letting teams solve problems and then execute.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Seven years in the making, the results of this new management model at Cisco are encouraging.  Of course, time will tell if Cisco has truly changed, as well as defined and implemented what can truly be called a management innovation.

I suspect that Chambers and Cisco are closer to right than wrong on their approach.  It’s an exciting time to be leading as the pendulum seems to be swinging away from a style of leading and working that minimized the value of the individual to one that emphasizes empowerment, creativity and the freedom for groups and individuals to think and act.   It’s hard to imagine a future where this formula does not produce winners.  Of course, the proof as they say is in the pudding.

Filed Under: Decision-Making, Leadership, Leading Change, Management Innovation, Project Management Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,
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