Leadership Caffeine for the Week of March 30, 2009
Filed under: Career, Leadership Caffeine, Leadership Skills, Life and Business, Middle Management, Performance, Professional Growth, Project Management, Surviving Lousy Leaders, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
A healthy spring snowstorm blanketed the northwest suburbs of Chicago overnight, making the morning cup of coffee particularly relevant as a source of both warmth and energy.
I’m back with a fresh pound of my favorite fair trade Mexican Roast from a great local roaster aptly named Conscious Cup. My first contribution to stimulating the economy today is to let you know that these great people ship.
My second contribution is to encourage a renewed sense of personal professional accountability. Yep, I’m striking a blow against Boss-Blame…that world class sport that so many engage in as part of rationalizing why their own results might just be falling short of something resembling excellence.
Quit Grousing…It’s Wasted Energy!
It’s common for me to hear quite a bit of grousing about the people we work for from attendees at workshops, at client sites or in classes. And while I don’t doubt that there’s a fair amount of truth in much of the talk about lousy managers and do-nothing exec teams, I truly don’t care and neither should you.
Do not let the chucklehead that you work for hold you back! Do not blame the management team for your inability to hit your targets, develop professionally or create a high performance team. The only one in charge of you is you.
I’ve long since concluded that in spite of our best intentions we have a low probability of fixing most of the bad bosses. Our best bet and your best bet is to develop a multi-pronged approach to the situation.
Suggestions for Overcoming Bad Boss Syndrome:
1. Mitigation. Sometimes “Bad Boss” syndrome can be mitigated by changing your own behavior. I’ve observed many situations where the boss has issues and the individuals that report to him or her have no qualms publicly depicting their lack of respect. While that might in some perverted way feel good, it is wrong.
Try using judo on the situation and increase your efforts to be respectful and helpful and to portray a genuine sense of empathy for the burdens that this individuals bears as a leader and as a person. Hey, no guarantees here, but you’ll be the better person for trying, and it might be you some latitude in the workplace.
2. Partnering. I work with many different project teams in IT and new product development, and I can predict with near certainty the top reasons that will surface in the post-mortem on failed projects. You know the issues as well, and yes, most of them have to do with people and leadership. (An oft-quoted E&Y study indicates that 80% of the reasons associated with poor project performance are tied to people.)
Work on a few project teams, and you can predict the problems like clockwork. Estimates will be off…people sandbag or play politics. The matrix gets in the way…people have multiple priorities and are not linked to one team. The sponsor spends her time jetting around Asia and is never present at critical times to do what a sponsor is supposed to do. And so on.
What is stopping you from working with your peers to focus your collective energies on eradicating the mostly controllable and predictable problems that bedevil so many teams? Nothing! If the project manager lacks the leadership savvy to broker resolutions and build a performance culture, jump in along with your peers and help out. Have an ineffective sponsor? Either educate him or her on the role or seek out a new one. There are few problems that arise that are dependent upon those upstream.
3. Your Personal Pursuit of Excellence:
In the final leg of my bad-boss mitigation & you must develop your own sense of accountability rant, this is for all of you first-time or mid-level leaders that are not getting the support and coaching that you genuinely should receive. Get over it, and make certain that you go to extraordinary lengths to give to your colleagues in spades what you are not receiving from your manager.
Boss not talked to you about career development? Well, you are in charge of your own career, and oh by the way, nothing is precluding you from working with your team members on their own personal development plans.
Don’t get much feedback on your performance? That’s unfortunate, but it is not an excuse for you not recognizing that feedback is your most powerful performance tool and practicing it constantly.
Does the boss work hard to protect turf and strengthen silo walls? Don’t fall into that shortsighted trap. Become a network broker across organizational boundaries. Learn and apply the art of lateral leadership and diplomacy.
The bottom-line
Just as it is common in life for people to hitch their sense of well-being and happiness to the actions and opinions of others, it is common for people to wallow in business misery because of the shortcomings of our leaders. It’s time to unhitch that wagon and take responsibility for your own business happiness and health. Get started this week!
Values in Action-Helping Your Son or Daughter Choose a College
Filed under: Customer Service, Leadership, Performance, Social Commentary, voice of the customer
For anyone who has lived through the process of supporting their son or daughter in the search for a college, it is a truly exciting, perplexing and tiring endeavor. It’s also an opportunity to watch values in action at the various institutions as well as with your own child as they wrestle with what is to them a monumental choice.
First, a word about my son. I have no qualms highlighting my parental pride as I’ve watched him arm-wrestle peer pressure to the ground during this process. Many of his friends are escaping across state lines to “Party U” and their exuberance over staying together and their encouragement for him to join the herd has reached the point where it now annoys him.
This is a great test of character and while he has excellent grades and good test scores and has some options, he is looking at this decision from a very mature perspective. Oh, and just to add some real-world context for his decision, like most of us, he faces some parameters that complicate the decision-making process.
The Parameters:
- In the absence of a clear-cut academic or professional goal, we will support him for in-state tuition, or he can take it upon himself to make up the difference between in-state and out-of-state tuition. He is also welcome to move out of state, work for a year and gain residency before starting college.
- If he chooses to complete his general education requirements at the community college, and if he has a clear academic and professional goal at the end of two years, we will support him for the institution of his choice.
- He must work during vacations to contribute to his books and living expenses.
- Four years only and Mom and Dad are done.
He’s in the process of working through the choices, and is considering two very different institutions and the community college route. We are trying hard to not hinder or complicate the process for him. If asked, we offer our thoughts, mostly in the form of questions. We’ve also suggested various frameworks for decision-making, but we are trying hard to not influence his choice. I know what I would do given the opportunity, but the extra 30 years of life experience tends to help simplify the choices. To an 18 hear-old, it seems like the weight of the world is on your shoulders. Stay tuned.
The Values and Performance Commitment of the Institutions:
I have a hard time not letting my sensitivity to values and my quest for performance excellence interfere with my opinion about different academic institutions. In the case of universities, I believe that you learn a lot by how the organizations conduct themselves during student open house events.
The formula is pretty much the same everywhere you go. The visiting parents and prospective students meet in a big auditorium, watch a video or two, listen to the Director of Admissions and hear from a panel of over-achieving students. After a general session, you break out into a College Fair, take a campus tour that ends up with a visit to a typical dorm room (yikes!).
At noon, you grab a quick lunch and then hustle across campus to hear from the academic area that your son or daughter is most interested in. You ask questions, walk around a bit more, and cap off the visit by buying a t-shirt at the bookstore and then embarking on the long trip home.
The formula is OK, and you can learn a lot if you pay attention, ask questions and immerse yourself in the experience. If your son or daughter has strong interests in a particular area of study, these are great opportunities to compare schools. However, for the undecided masses, after you do this three or four times, they all tend to blend together.
Finding Gold in the Corn:
While all of the institutions that we’ve looked at have some great positives to offer, one stands out head and shoulders above the rest. Surprisingly (to me), it is Western Illinois University. This relatively small (by state school standards) institution in the middle of who knows where, IL, definitely has it going on.
Attend an open house at WIU, and you’ll meet and hear from University President, Al Goldfarb and the top executives. Most other organizations roll out the Director of Admissions, but at WIU, the entire management team thinks enough of you to attend, talk and mingle. Mr. Goldfarb stresses values, treats and talks to the students and parents like they are customers and goes so far to offer his personal e-mail address and an invitation to use it.
While one might be able to dismiss the President’s good sounding rhetoric, as you meet and talk with the executives of the institution, you hear the same messages about values and personal care and students as customers over and over again. The cynic in me thinks, “Hmmm, OK, Al runs a tight ship and has his managers singing out of the same song book.”
Start meeting with the instructors and administrators, and the same encouraging messages come through. People talk like they believe this stuff.
Fast forward a few months and bump into a group of purple-clad people in the airport and introduce yourself to realize that you are meeting Al’s entire management group on their way to California. Try as I might to penetrate their P.R. message defense, I can’t. These people are genuine in how they view the world. They are like the old Avis commercial…”They Try Harder,” because they have to.
Our oldest son decided to attend WIU a few years ago, and as we mingled in a room of hundreds at the new student orientation session the Summer before he started I was shocked when one of the university employees walked up to me, looked at my name badge and said, “Mr. Petty, you must be “son’s” father.”
It turns out this was his counselor. Talk about an impression. My memory is fuzzy, but I believe that I went through four years at a remarkable institution, the University of Illinois, and never met a counselor, much less someone that knew my Dad’s name.
At every turn, we’ve been impressed with this lesser known school in the cornfields of Macomb, IL. The other very good institutions just seem to fail in comparison. The passion, the customer-focus and the strong sense of values-based management come through loud and clear at WIU and are missing in the presentations of the other programs. At WIU, you begin to establish context for the people behind the bricks and mortar and at least for a parent, this is palpable.
Our youngest son may or may not attend WIU, the choice is his, but I do know a group of people focused on performance excellence when I see it. Kudos to the team at Western Illinois University. He could do much, much worse.
Leadership Lessons from the Road
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Making Decisions, Management Education, Project Management, Talent Management
One of the great things about leading workshops with talented professionals is how much I learn about the very real challenges that people face in trying to get work done inside their organizations.
I had the great privilege of facilitating a workshop called Leader Mastery for Technical Professionals at The Data Warehouse Institute’s World Conference in Las Vegas this past week. Kudos to the team at TDWI for producing an outstanding educational conference and for their usual flawless arrangements.
A special thanks to the group of great professionals that had the courage at a technically focused conference to attend a day-long session on a topic that would have many heading in the opposite direction. This group was engaged, hungry for knowledge to improve their performance and excited about sharing ideas, challenges and best practices with each other. The pleasure was all mine!
After spending a day together helping this group develop a better context for what it means to lead and the principles and practices that will support their development as effective leaders, a number of themes about their challenges emerged from the discussions. These include:
- Gaining more context for their firm’s strategies as a means of better linking team goals and priorities to the organization’s priorities.
- Dealing with the very real challenges of building high performance teams across cultures, geographies and time-zones.
- Leading teams that increasingly include external contractors that don’t necessarily have the same level of commitment and share the same level of accountability.
- Improving mastery of soft skills that promote performance including: coaching and feedback, talent development and decision-making.
- Gaining better support from HR to facilitate talent development and team strengthening versus the still all-too-common policing that seems to emanate from this functional area.
- Breaking the vicious cycle of promoting the best technical contributors into a nightmare as they try and build bench strength.
- Finding ways to work effectively and collaboratively in matrix environments.
My message in these sessions is always that effective leadership and effective leadership development practices serve as the foundation of organizational performance excellence. What I hear consistently as I run these programs as well as when I engage with MBA students is an intense desire on the part of the individuals to contribute at a higher level.
I also hear significant frustration at the ridiculous cultural, managerial and procedural impediments that they face when trying to innovate and drive change. These people want to create and belong to high performance teams and organizations. Most confess that all too often, this is not the case.
My bottom-line for this quick post from the road is for senior leadership to focus on breaking down barriers that inhibit performance and seek ways to set your talent free.
Now more than ever, you and your organization require all hands to be contributing, innovating and seeking ways to create value. It’s time to get out of your executive meetings, clear your agendas, start asking questions, listen carefully and then do something. You are wasting remarkable opportunities to improve, and that’s not a winning approach in this market.
The Counterintuitive Nature of Management Excellence
Filed under: Crisis Leadership, Current Affairs, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Leading Change, Life and Business, Marketing, Organizational Transformation, Product Management, Project Management
I suspect that most readers will agree that examples of management excellence, high performance and great leadership are not the topics dominating the news in this emerging “we’ve never seen anything like this before” economy. Instead, we are fed a constant stream of downward revisions, requests for bailout and examples of management failure of “someone should go to jail” Whole sectors are crashing, great old brands are on the brink of fading into the history books and recently great businesses are floundering.
Contrast this current phase with the other extreme of recent memory, the dotcom bubble of the late 90’s, when the laws of physics were upturned, profits didn’t count, and it was all about clicks and eyeballs. Everyone knew someone that was a gazillionaire and massive amounts of paper wealth came into existence overnight. And then disappeared. A few firms like Amazon, eBay and Google ultimately emerged from the carnage following the bust, to play major roles in a changed world. Ironically, this changed world looked more like what we knew than what had been professed by temporary pundits feasting on the momentary gullibility of the masses.
The point. It’s easy to ride with the herd in boom and bust periods. It takes no management skill whatsoever to spend a fortune building up clicks and it definitely takes no skill to slash budgets, cut headcount, freeze programs and hunker down and wait out the storm.
It does take remarkable management courage and skill to run against the crowd and conventional wisdom by investing in strategic initiatives and talent during tough times and resisting the temptation to chase mythical fortunes during boom times. Leveraging adversity to stimulate creativity and rethink business models, refocus on customers and look everywhere for innovation that will create value is counter-intuitive to the “flight” response that so many firms are exhibiting. This counter-intuitive nature is also the hallmark of great management and great managers.
Deming dared to call U.S. manufacturing on the carpet and predict their ultimate suicide if they ignored quality during a time when quality got in the way of volume and profits. Drucker spent a lifetime teaching managers the rules of management excellence. Based on recent news, most of us forgot to listen.
You face the choice everyday to stay with the herd or dare to do something different in pursuit of management excellence. In case you are looking for some thought-starters on counter-intuitive ideas, consider these:
- Resist the temptation during tough times to make all of the “hard calls” by yourself. Talk with and involve your employees in decision-making and idea generation. They are just as concerned as you are about their survival and they want to help.
- Don’t shred your strategic plan because “everything has changed.” It’s great to challenge your assumptions or as Ayn Rand often said, “Check your premises.” There may be new or more opportunity than you imagined, and the plan may need revision, but don’t scuttle it based on fear.
- Invest in your talent now. While you may be culling the herd of poor performers, you should also be investing in building the leadership and strategic thinking skills of your workforce. If this ends, they will propel you to new heights, and if this economic environment lingers, they will save your skin. Either way, you need to invest.
- Your customers are as perplexed and worried as you. It’s time to seek nontraditional relationships with key customers and partners. These relationships include joint-strategic planning, joint brainstorming and true partnering solutions that transcend the traditional press-release relationship.
- Take a sledgehammer to internal silo walls. The dysfunction inherent in most sales and marketing or marketing and engineering relationships is significant enough to sink your ship.
The bottom-line for now:
It’s an outstanding time for great leaders to stand up and be heard, and it is an outstanding time to focus on excellence in management. It starts by checking your conventional wisdom at the door. Go visit a customer, ask questions and listen. Do the same with your employees. And then do something that creates value versus something that reduces your chances of creating value. Your actions may just start a revolution.
Sustaining Performance Excellence in Business and in Life
Filed under: Leadership, Organizational Transformation, Quality Systems Management
It genuinely bothers me when organizations spend years and untold dollars reinventing themselves and succeeding with a quality framework (i.e. Baldrige or Six Sigma) only to show up in the business press as an organization fighting for survival.
It’s like the obese person with one foot in the grave suddenly committing to health on America’s Biggest Loser and at the end of the program, successfully completing a marathon. For a moment, life is good and our belief in our capacity to do anything that we set our mind to, restored. Certainly the experience and lessons-learned during the successful journey to improve have changed this individual’s life for the better. And then, we glance at the tabloid cover in the grocery store checkout line to see a picture of this fat then fit and now fat again individual working out with a box of Krispy Kremes.
I wrote a related post a few days ago with the harsh title of Change or Die, and upon second thought, the title should have been: Change & Sustain or Die. Organizations and people are fairly adept at changing for a moment at the end of a gun barrel, but they are not so good at sustaining the change when the barrel is no longer pointing their way.
- There’s the former Baldrige winner that lost their CEO in an untimely passing. The new leader took a cost cutting mentality and ended up cutting out programs and people critical to the organization’s focus on performance excellence. The ensuing performance included a stint in bankruptcy. That’s a bad case of the Baldrige Blues.
- Motorola is given large credit for helping create the Six Sigma Quality framework. Their focus on process improvement and their Baldrige award are legendary and define the culture. The company is fighting for survival, mired down in completely forgetting the Voice of the Customer in pursuit of endless elegant iterations of cell phones that no one wants. Their imbalanced scorecard had them losing $12 for every device they sold last quarter and burning through billions with a “b” in cash over the last year.
- Ford. Enough said.
- GM, don’t get me started.
It’s not like Toyota withheld key information about the legendary Toyota Production System and the many other business practices that they learned by applying Deming’s principles, studying the writings of Henry Ford and the unique innovations in the operations of early supermarkets in the U.S.
- Circuit City. See ya. (OK, this one is unfair…they never achieved any form of recognizable Performance Excellence.)
The Bottom-Line For Now on Sustaining Performance Excellence
Leadership is always an issue when it comes to performance, and in my opinion, it is THE issue when it comes to sustaining excellence. The various Quality frameworks offer essential directions for the never-ending journey in pursuit of creating value and continuously improving, but the secrete is that there is no final destination.
Achieving milestones and winning awards helps reinforce the progress on the journey, but leaders at all levels have to foster a culture that is perpetually dissatisfied. The fact is that the market never sleeps, customer issues/needs change constantly and there are always competitors interested in taking your share of the customer’s budget.
An MBA student reminded me the other night of Andy Grove’s (Intel) classic book and philosophy: Only the Paranoid Survive. Perhaps we should work on a Balanced Scorecard measure for Paranoia. Actually, that raises an interesting question. What do your metrics and measures and scorecards truly tell you about whether you are continuing the upward climb or falling backwards, potentially into oblivion?
Hey leaders, wake up. Someone’s going to have you for lunch while you are busy basking in the glow of your latest quality award. And speaking of lunch, do you know how long it will take you to work off that piece of carrot cake? Just say no to the dessert and get to the gym tonight. You’re looking a little pudgy.
Another related post: Does Your Dashboard of Performance Measures Include a Warning Light?
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