Thoughts on Your Personal and Professional Success in the New Year
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Leading Change, Leading the Generations, Management Education, Performance, Professional Growth
Hang out with really smart people and teams and some great lessons can’t help but rub off on you.
I was truly gifted in 2011 to gain access to and work with and support some remarkable professionals across a number of different market segments…from high tech to professional services to manufacturing, and I learned something with every engagement and encounter.
Here are Six Lessons Learned that Can Help Us All in the New Year:
1. It’s Critical to Think Deeply About Your Business: Strategy still counts. The strongest teams/firms I observed are the ones who took the time to step-back and evaluate their situation and rethink their futures. And then back all of that lofty thinking with action, learning and adaptation.
Call it what you want…I call it strategy work…and done right…asking and answering tough questions and then backing the ideas with key hypotheses and experiments is the corporate equivalent of a continuous fitness program.
2. Operational Myopia Guarantees Mediocrity (or worse): Conversely, the firms and teams mired in the muck struggled to get beyond the endless operational discussions and move towards the tough questions that help assess the current state and begin to identify options for the future. Yeah, everyone needs to make sales in the here and now. We all know that. Adding in the work of thinking about and adapting your business in pursuit of better serving customers, finding new customers, extending into larger growth areas or more attractive categories takes that extra level of discipline that separates the big winners from everyone else.
3. Leadership Counts. More than ever…and not just at the top. High performance firms have an unrelenting focus on developing people who can think critically, lead others to challenge convention and stimulate people to provide their best results. And given the past decade or so of leadership failures, people are quick to sniff out and mentally discard the disingenuous leaders. If you are leading others, you need to bring your “A” game, and the game isn’t about you…it’s about everyone else and what you can do for them!
4. Behold The Rise of the Integrator Leader: individual contributors who embrace the role of integrator…bringing together disparate groups and resources to solve problems are the future formal leaders in organizations. We are all well served to view our own roles through the filter of the new integrator leader. Build your network(s) internally and externally and learn to connect networks in pursuit of solving problems.
5. Diversity is a Strategic Asset to Build Competitive Advantage: While we predictably and annoyingly gravitate to those who act, think (and yes, look) like us, the true opportunity for greatness is in bringing together people of disparate backgrounds, ethnicities and ages and setting them loose to change something significant. The best leaders get this. The rest are still mired in the misguided thinking from another century.
6. If You’re Not Learning, You are Failing. Learning is more important than ever. The top performing professionals are learning everyday in the workplace (through experimentation), are pushing themselves personally to continue to grow in their respective fields, are filling classrooms and demanding more from an old and mostly broken educational system, and leveraging technology and unparalleled access to information to expand their thinking. There are no time-outs allowed when it comes to gaining and applying new knowledge.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
The short form:
Strategy isn’t a four letter word. We all need to find ways to break out of the day-to-day crunch to assess and learn and plan. Leadership skills are more critical than ever…and the best and most powerful leaders might not have people reporting to them. Diversity isn’t just an H.R. initiative, and if you aren’t learning every single day, you’re moving backwards at an accelerating pace.
May 2012 be a year of learning, growth and professional success.
Art’s Weekly Leadership Message: Step Up to Cure Effective Dialogue Deficit Disorder
The medical community and drug companies have their ED malady and cure, but too many management and project teams suffer from their own form of ED…with two more D’s…EDDD… Effective Dialogue Deficit Disorder.
It’s not that people aren’t talking. There’s no deficit of hot air swirling around most meeting rooms. The issue is all about the quality of the dialogue.
Consider:
- All the firms who use last year’s operating plan and budgets as the basis for next year’s plan, without vetting and refreshing on what’s really happening in their markets and with their customers and within their own businesses. The future is difficult enough to predict in the best of circumstances. It’s laughably impossible to do it by focusing on the images in the rear-view mirror.
- Strategy meetings where the swirling discussions include opinions, facts, emotions, ideas and yes some political posturing, all without order, direction or purpose. Kudos for getting people together for the right reasons. Now, focus on managing the discussion flow to ensure purpose and progress.
- Performance evaluation processes that don’t connect to professional development steps. Your job is to connect evaluation to forward progress and development. You’re not a movie critic…you’re responsible for helping someone create the next scene in their own professional movie.
- Project Teams that develop detailed risk assessments at the onset of their initiatives, and fail to constantly refresh and update on the risk plan. The pesky thing about dealing with risk is that it is annoyingly unpredictable in many circumstances. Vigilance and review beats static advance planning here everyday.
- Ideation or brainstorming sessions that develop long lists of ideas that are forgotten as soon as the flipcharts come down. Ideas are truly horrible things to waste.
5 Ideas to Help Cure Effective Dialogue Deficit Disorder:
1. Don’t preoccupy on the past. Use past results to assess where YOU failed to anticipate and execute, and then focus on asking the hard questions about what’s changing with markets, customers and competitors. Build your plan around what you should be doing to succeed in the emerging world, not on what you did last year.
2. Change your discussion approach. Learn and apply the process of parallel thinking and discussion to eliminate the swirl and sort facts from emotions, opinions and ideas. De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats is a great place to start.
3. Learn to feedforward. Every opportunity to offer “feedback” on prior performance should be better viewed as an opportunity for what Marshall Goldsmith describes as “feedforward.” Again, cut out the rear-view mirror stuff and help people design their way forward.
4. If is was important enough to “assess” and develop a document, it’s very likely important enough to revisit and rethink. Don’t ask people and teams to just comply with a step or process (i.e. create a risk assessment). Instead, encourage frequent return trips to check assumptions and incorporate new learnings.
5. Never waste ideas! Don’t ask people to exercise their creative capabilities and then lose the precious output. Build an idea inventory and reference it frequently.
The Key Point:
Teach your teams to engage with purpose. Plan and manage your discussions to include reflection, assessment, direction and action. Every discussion is an opportunity to design something going forward. Throw in a consistent serving of accountability and you are on your way to building high performance into your working environment.
–
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. 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.
Leadership Caffeine-Always Lead with Context
Filed under: Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Management Education, Performance, Talent Management
Overheard from various managers:
“I know it doesn’t make any sense, but corporate wants it done this way.”
“You don’t need to worry about the Why…just do your job.”
“Because I said so.”
Chances are you’ve heard one of those statements or some variant of them at some time during your professional life. They are obnoxious, offensive and importantly, they take a perfectly good opportunity to get the best effort out of someone and stomp all over it and then flush it down the toilet.
The empty orders above are utterances without context.
Context in this case is that not-so-secret ingredient that helps people understand the idea or issue and how it connects to something important in the workplace. Context provides the basis for understanding and assessing a situation or a request to do something. It has the equivalent workplace outcome of adding yeast to the process of making bread. Without it, everything is flat.
People and teams do their best work when they understand how their efforts fit into the bigger picture of the organization. It’s unfortunate that in the hectic pace of business, too many managers fail to leverage the catalytic power of context, and instead, end up issuing empty orders to their compliant but not fully engaged employees.
The Three Levels of Context in the Workplace:
1. Big Picture…What We’re All About Context (Organizational Context). This is “reason for being” context and it provides that sense of belonging to something meaningful and purposeful.
Inherent in this type of foundational context is a directional component as well. Mission, Vision and Values are powerful context builders here. Unfortunately, these important concepts are often reduced to meaningless jumbles of framed artwork hanging on conference room walls. Instead, Mission, Vision and Values should be used to offer critical foundational understanding of the purpose and general direction of the organization.
Your Actions:
- Periodically talk to team members about Mission, Vision and Values. Ensure that new employees understand the relevance of these elements to the broader work and functioning of the organization.
- Use the values to define acceptable and unacceptable behaviors.
- Teach people and teams to leverage values in decision-making.
- Engage senior leaders in the discussions and politely challenge them to make Mission, Vision and Values relevant in the context of the firm’s current situation.
2. What We’re Doing to Win with Customers and Beat Competitors (Strategic Context). Whereas foundational context (Mission, Vision and Values) provide a sense of belonging and general purpose and direction, strategic context gives people the high level understanding of the importance of their actions and how and where they fit in support of helping the firm win customers and beat competitors.
I’ve never understood why so many senior leaders fail to provide adequate strategic context to their broader organizations. One leader kept his firm’s strategy securely locked in a drawer, lest anyone leak it to competitors. Another rationalized that the big picture thinking was for senior leaders only. Both grossly misunderstand how important this context is to helping the organization move forward.
Actions:
- Talk strategy frequently. Don’t kick off projects, discuss results, set goals or talk about improvements, cost cuts or just about anything, without anchoring the discussion in strategy.
- Invite front-line professionals (sales, customer service) to talk with your team frequently about marketplace realities and issues.
- Ensure that all goals discussions are in the context of strategy, and always, always, always link scorecard and other discussions about business performance to strategy.
- Ask for input. The broader topics of strategy and execution should be bi-directional, with employees offering ideas for improvements and feedback on what’s working and what’s not.
3. “Me” Context. We all want to understand how we as individuals fit into the picture. We also want to understand at least in general where we might be going as the team or organization succeeds.
“Me” Context provides us with purpose and with a sense of belonging. “I count, and my work here contributes to helping move the team forward and ultimately to helping us win with customers and beat competitors.”
The absence of “Me Context” results in a kind of out of body experience at work, where people go through the motions, but don’t truly engage with their full force and power.
Actions:
- Always frame positions and job descriptions in terms of how the role is expected to contribute to the firm’s/team’s success.
- Ensure that goals discussions are anchored in Strategic Context.
- Deliver behaviorally-focused constructive and positive feedback often and always link it to the business.
- As identified above, ask for input. Your act of asking and listening…and then acting reinforces the connection that people have with their organizations and teams.
- Don’t ignore professional development and advancement. A surprisingly large number of organizations that I encounter don’t have anything formal in place for developmental activities and discussions. The absence of this system is not an excuse for you. Help people grow and they will pay you back many times over.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
One of your core tasks as a leader is to foster an environment where people have the tools and resources to do their best work in support of the firm. Context helps create the effective working environment. Consider this as critical context for your own role.
Leadership Caffeine-Quit Sending Mixed Signals
Filed under: Dealing with Difficult People, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leadership Skills, Middle Management, Performance
How consistent are you in your approaches to dealing with people and problems?
Is this You?
Is there an early warning system in place in your office that tracks your every move from the car through the parking lot and into the office?
“DefCon 9, she spilled her coffee reaching for her employee badge and she just made the security guard cry as a result. Approach with extreme caution.”
Or,
“All clear…he’s smiling and humming on the way in, and he’s carrying a box of donuts. It might be a good morning to ask for more resources.”
Do people approach you with fear about concerns, not knowing whether you will erupt like Mount Vesuvius or offer a conciliatory tone and encourage you to pull up a chair and talk things through?
Are you actively encourage innovation and risk taking on one day, and summarily executing the failed experimenters and their messages the next day?
Do you preach about transparency and your open door policy and then glower at people when they interrupt you after a week’s worth of closed door meetings.
While my slightly tongue in cheek examples are modified for public consumption, the inconsistent managers behind them are very real. It gets worse. A valued colleague is losing good employees at a fairly rapid clip as his direct boss wreaks havoc with her daily Jekyll/Hyde swings in dealing with people and issues. They’ve been reduced to nominating one person every morning to make a potential kamikaze run into her office. If the sacrificial lamb returns, everyone sighs and work proceeds. If not, people hunker down and head the opposite direction every time the boss is in sight.
The Subtle Power of Consistency as a Leader:
- How you respond to people and to situations (victories, losses, mistakes etc.) goes a long way to forming the working environment on your team.
- Set clear standards for performance and respond to successes and failures in a consistent manner, and you reinforce a culture of accountability.
- Encourage your team members to experiment in pursuit of innovation, and then support them when some experiments inevitably fail, and you will strengthen the innovation culture on your team.
- How you engage with people on daily basis helps create a rhythm in the workplace. If life’s annoyances drive you to adopt the Jekyll/Hyde behavior of the manager above, your team will struggle to do much more than survive.
Six Ideas for Improving Your Consistency:
1. Prepare your attitude every day before you walk in the door. One client uses an approach of sitting in his car for a few minutes mentally running through how he will deal with people from the moment he steps out of the car until he climbs back in at night.
2. Stop and think before reacting. Ask yourself, “will my do match my tell?”
3. Ask your team members to volunteer when your approach or your decision is dissonant. While you reserve the right to change your mind, this system will allow you to think through the situation and minimize the more random weather shifts.
4. Keep a Decision-Journal and revisit earlier decisions and the rationale behind them before you reverse course.
5. Strive to eliminate any double standards in your management approach. Giving one person a break and then preaching the need for results to everyone else is confusing (and annoying) to the people around you. Accountability and fairness are only achievable through a single standard.
6. If you feel your blood boiling on a topic, for a lot of good reasons, disengage, get control and think through the proper response to the situation.
Thoughts for People Dealing with an Inconsistent Manager:
One of the fatal flaws of these types of posts is the offending or offensive manager typically won’t have the emotional intelligence to read this, much less recognize himself or herself. If you’ve exhausted all noble and direct attempts at dealing with this manager (truly exhausted those attempts), try printing this out and placing it on his/her chair with a note: “You can help us all by paying attention to this post,” or, “This is you and you are driving us crazy.” Sometimes the indirect and metaphorical clubbing over the head wakes people up. Sometimes…but not most of the time.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
While working for an inconsistent boss is wholly unpleasant, at the end of the day, the only one you can control is yourself. If you are reading this, it’s either been placed on your chair or, you are one of those good people interested in improving your performance and growing as a leader.
Pay attention to your consistency, ask for feedback and encourage your team members to help you help them on this issue. Your consistency is an indicator of your professional and personal maturity and a powerful force in building a high performance environment. Work is difficult enough without people having to spend time which one of your personalities is going to show up every day.
Leadership Caffeine: Motivate with Context
Filed under: Innovation, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Management Education, Middle Management, Organizational Transformation, Performance, Strategy, Surviving Lousy Leaders, Talent Management
Overheard:
Why are we doing this project?
I don’t know who is making these priority calls. They don’t make any sense.
We’re so far removed from the customer, no one notices what we do.
During my review, I was encouraged to innovate more. I don’t know what that means.
Context and the “Walk In the Door” Test:
In workshop settings, I frequently poll participants on what I call, “The Walk In the Door Test.” It goes something like this: “When you walk in the door in the morning, can you connect your priorities to the strategic priorities of your firm (or business unit)?”
I’m never surprised, but always disappointed that only about half of the participants admit they CAN connect their priorities to the important issues of their firm. The rest are honest (and frustrated) enough to admit in public, that they struggle with understanding the context for their work.
A few weeks ago, a corporate trainer indicated to me: “I’m not certain what the managers want their people to get out of the program, but I’m going to train them anyways.” Too bad for the participants.
Beware Context Deficit Disorder:
The employees quoted above, the disconnected and under-informed trainer and my honest survey respondents all share one thing in common…they all suffer from Context Deficit Disorder (CDD).
Too many mediocre managers and lousy leaders send their teams into battle on a daily basis armed with nothing more than a “go get ‘em,” and a metaphorical slap on the back. There’s no connection between the work and the key objectives of the firm or the pursuit of creating value for customers.
Think of the many mediocre (or worse) customer experiences you encounter in a typical week. There’s the inattentive server, the cashier who never makes eye contact, the grumpy phone support personnel or, my favorite, the guard dog receptionist you came up against at the doctor’s office. They all lack proper context for their work. (We’ll leave the doctor who rushes through your examination seemingly on a mission to set a new land-speed record for spending as little time as possible with patients, for another topic on another day!
These individuals lack context for the importance of their work and the impact they have on people who vote with their dollars and feet. I’ll dump the blame squarely on the shoulders of the managers who allow their people to engage with others without providing clarity for their mission and building in accountability for carrying it out in good form.
Forget the Posters and Cheerleading and Instead, Provide Clear Context:
We waste fortunes inside our organizations on misguided programs and oddball incentives, seeking ways to motivate and inspire people to work hard, innovate, create, care and to live up to their potential, when the real solution is literally on the tip of our tongues.
People do their best work when they understand how their work fits into the bigger picture. This is the critical context that fuels revolutions, promotes perseverance and encourages creativity. People working for a cause are exponentially more powerful than people working for a paycheck. Management by paycheck is little more than motivating people at the end of a gun barrel. Alternatively, management by context creates a sense of purpose that is essential for tapping into people’s extra stores of energy and their best creativity.
Of course, context comes in many sizes and shapes. I don’t necessarily expect the front-line cashier to be familiar with the nuances of the firm’s strategies, however, I do expect this individual to have an absolutely clear understanding of how customers help the business go and grow. Alternatively, the project manager leading a major new development initiative must understand how the project fits into the firm’s future plans to open new markets, capture more customers and beat competitors.
While the level and detail of context may vary by position and mission, it must be present for everyone all of the time.
5 Ideas for Curing Context Deficit Disorder
1. Establish connectivity. Never ask someone to do something with out linking the request to a clear business rationale.
2. Create forums to improve understanding. Provide opportunities for the people doing the work to ask questions about the value of the work.
3. Create forums to improve understanding, part 2. Don’t keep the strategic issues locked in a drawer. Share liberally on the big picture issues in your market and with your customers and involve people in translating high-level goals into meaningful and connected front-line activities. Help your people improve their “Walk in the Door Test” results!
4. Make metrics meaningful. If you are going to the trouble of developing scorecards and other systems of measurement, make certain you both share and explain the metrics to the people being measured.
5. Provide opportunities for the people doing the work to share ideas for improvement. And then let them implement these ideas.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
This topic reminds me of the old story about the workers moving a pile of rocks. When asked what he is doing, the first worker indicates, “I’m moving this pile of rocks from here to there.” The second one is asked the same question and responds, “I’m helping to build a cathedral.” I certainly know which one I want on my team. Do your employees and team members see the future cathedrals in their work at your organization?
-
Podcast
-
Available Now!
-
Practical Lessons
-
e-book
e-book-Leadership and the Project Manager - Developing the Skills that Fuel High Performance
