Team Conflict? As Long as It’s Not Personal, Run With It
Filed under: Innovation, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Making Decisions, Management Education, Performance, Professional Growth, Project Management
I’m leery of happy teams. Don’t get me wrong. I like positive situations and working with happy people, however, in my experience, the happy teams are the ones that produce mediocre results or, they don’t produce at all.
Give me a group of people that show up to do battle on the issues versus the team that strives for peace and harmony, any day.
Just as “being liked” isn’t required to be effective as a leader, neither is maintaining peace and harmony on the team required for success. What is required is the ability to push the envelope on creativity, talk openly and freely about problems and shortcomings, and to cry foul when someone violates the group’s norms for performance, behavior and accountability.
For many people, conflict in the team environment feels wrong. It’s uncomfortable. Conflict breeds personal stress and group tension, and sometimes creates a hue and cry for “getting along.” While an aversion to conflict is understandable if it is personal in nature, task and process conflict are important factors in propelling high-performance teams forward.
5 Reasons a Dose of Conflict Might Be Healthy For Your Team:
1. Elephants aren’t allowed to hide in the room. The big issues and tough topics are uncovered quickly and dispatched without worrying about personal interests and political boundaries.
2. Social loafing is squashed. Hanging out and working at less than full tilt becomes painfully obvious in environments where the group is challenging itself to move together through the jungle. People pull their weight or they are left behind.
3. Decisions are held to a higher standard. While the potential pitfalls of group decision-making are well known, teams that challenge themselves and each other in pursuit of achievement tend to have higher standards for the quality of their decisions. Instead of a rush-to-decide or a drive-to-consensus culture found on more collegial teams, task-focused groups search for answers that pass the filters for both quality and speed. In my experience, they challenge assumptions, seek the right or at least better data and assess risks and implications much more effectively than the “let’s all get along” teams.
4. Leadership skills are challenged and strengthened. High task conflict teams are leadership laboratories. One of the “elephants in the room” of my argument here is that leading these teams is not for the faint of heart. Team leaders must learn to manage the flow and energy of the conflict to ensure that it doesn’t move into personal territory. They also need to be adept at helping maneuver the team from the heat of robust dialogue to a decision and implementation. These are clearly non-trivial leadership challenges and remarkable learning opportunities for all involved.
5. Standards for performance are enhanced. Participants refuse to settle for anything other than success, and success is often defined as either exceeding or obliterating targets or, innovating in some meaningful fashion. The task conflict pushes people higher and harder. Along the way, these high performance teams raise the bar for everyone in the organization.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
I suspect that I’m skating on the thin-ice of a great number of people that find conflict distressing and destructive. Keep in mind that my context is task or process conflict, and not anything personal in nature. It takes an emotionally intelligent group to pull this off and not let good and tough discussion over the right issues reduce to squabbling and paralysis. It’s hard work to find and foster this type of a team and environment. But who said that producing high performance was easy work? It’s most definitely not.
Leadership Caffeine-5 Ideas for Improving Your Ability to Engage as a Leader
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leadership Skills, Making Decisions, Management Education, Organizational Transformation, Performance, Project Management, Talent Management, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
Some leaders move through their days like a flat rock skipping over the surface of a pond. They are focused on personal efficiency and speed, and the faster they move and the more decisions that they make, the better they believe they are doing as leaders.
Their days are blurs of decisions, quick meetings, hurried hallway exchanges and even more hurried text and e-mail messages, often created while they are present but not engaged in the event or conversation of the moment.
These transactional leaders define victory in the form of quantity, not quality. They take pride in keeping things moving and they truly believe they are helping others navigate through their own busy days.
There are undoubtedly environments and situations where transactional leadership is essential. For example, the operating room, fighting a fire and the battlefield are all settings where this type of leadership can mean the difference between life and death. However, even in these extreme cases, people have typically worked and succeeded and failed and learned together, and there are deep bonds that enable a second-to-second type of environment to work effectively.
Transactional Leadership is Costly:
The cost of leading from a purely transactional approach is the loss of ability to engage and truly understand people, situations and complex problems. There’s no depth to the exchanges, and relationships are superficial at best
Transactional leaders exhaust and frustrate their employees, engendering animosity or at least an overarching sense of malaise in the workplace. Many front-line and first-time leaders fall into this convenient style-trap simply because they don’t know any better.
If improving performance, fostering a culture of learning and innovation and developing the confidence to tackle the tough topics are all important for your firm, it’s time to engage more and transact less.
5 Ideas for Improving Your Engagement Effectiveness:
1. Stop and focus. While it may seem unnatural, you need to force yourself to stop what you are doing and focus all of your energy and attention on the individual(s) in front of you. One former transactional manager described the process of literally having to take a second or two to clear her mind, orient herself in the present and focus exclusively on the current situation. She found it particularly helpful to make certain that any of her electronic distractions were on silent and upside down, or better yet, out of site.
2. Ask clarifying questions & teach, don’t tell. Instead of jumping to solutions, force yourself to ask questions to understand the broader context of the issue at hand. While it might be easy for you to offer a solution after a few minutes of discussion, you are better served to help people arrive at a conclusion. Leaders that engage understand the importance of this approach as a teaching tool.
3. Take time to follow-up. The issue exchange is not the end of transaction, but the beginning of a long-term relationship. Reach out to someone that offered good ideas or showed initiative and say thanks and offer encouragement.
4. Recognize the great battles raging inside of everyone. With thanks to Tom Peters for reminding us all of this, remember that everyone (and this means you too!) has a great battle raging inside. This may be personal, professional or spiritual, but it is a mostly silent battle that is THE priority of the individual in front of you. Look for signs, provide relief if you sense that is needed or just quietly respect the battle in the professional and courteous manner that you deal with the individual.
5. Change your definition of leadership success. Instead of focusing on valuing your ability to make snap decisions as fast as issues are presented, it’s time to completely rethink your definition of success. True success as a leader occurs over time in the form of professional development for others, great and sustained results for the organization, innovation, and building an environment where people thrive.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
There are always opportunities for you to improve your effectiveness at engaging with your team members and colleagues. While you may sense that you are slowing down, sometimes, you need to slow down to allow everyone else to speed up.
Quit transacting and start engaging!
Leadership Caffeine: Learning to Adjust Your Altitude
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leadership Skills, Management Education, Product Management, Professional Growth, Project Management, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
While the phrase is most commonly referenced as attitude adjustment, I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that one of the abilities that leaders must develop to be effective is the ability to adjust their altitudes.
Good leaders learn to scale institutional and intellectual heights with ease and comfort, quickly adapting to the audience and situation.
Examples of Frequent and Successful Altitude Adjusters:
- There’s the CEO that’s built a career around being a brilliant strategist and an even better operator. Watch him work a factory floor and you’ll see him descend from the lofty level of the boardroom to the critical issues of people and process. He’s equally comfortable in the rarefied air of strategy and vision and market forces or as an observer and student on the shop floor where true value is being created.
- The small business owner that serves customers all day long and drives home with an emerging vision for how her business must change in order to grow.
- The college professor that translates the philosophical foundations and theories of her specialty into practical, relevant concepts and tools that clarify, stimulate interest and offer some form of sustaining value. This professor offers knowledge and insight designed for use.
- The Product Manager that is able to move seamlessly from detailed requirements discussions with engineers in the morning to a concise strategy discussion and competitive analysis with executives in the afternoon.
- The Project Manager that pivots on one foot to resolve a team dispute and then pivots back to the work of helping his team learn to make better decisions.
Regardless of the specifics, these effective formal and informal leaders move seamlessly from the detailed to the general, from the tactical to strategic and from the confusing and complex to the simple and straightforward as easily as you are reading this post. Whether this is an innate ability for some or a learned skill for others, those that practice adjusting their altitudes are significantly more effective than others stuck at one level.
Of course, those that are effectively stuck at one level are requiring everyone else to adapt, and that takes energy and breeds stress and strife. These less than effective leaders require both the proverbial attitude adjustment as well as some solid lessons in learning to adjust their altitude.
5 Suggestions for Learning to More Effectively Adjust Your Altitude:
1. Seek first to understand and then be understood. I love that saying for its wisdom. I observe many leaders that engage with their team members on issues for just a few moments and then cut them off mid-stream, with an opinion, a decision or an order. Teach yourself to clamp your jaw shut and listen and process on all of the verbal and non-verbal cues that are so generously placed in front of you. The time you invest in focusing and listening and then thinking about the issue being presented will give you time to adjust your altitude to the right level.
2. Plan your message. Knowledge workers and individual contributors should redouble their efforts to plan the messages for exchanges with executives. While you may be personally fascinated by the details of your project or product, it is critical to recognize that those in executive roles want you to give them the time…not to tell them how to build the watch. For unscheduled, hallway or elevator exchanges, condition yourself to move into time-teller mode, again resisting the urge to showcase your in-depth command of every detail. Your overall work and results will showcase whether you have command of the details.
3. Recognize that context is key to motivating action. Assume that no one else has thought through the issue in as much depth as you have. Management teams that vigorously debate strategy for weeks and then become satisfied on a direction and choices must recognize that no one else in the organization has any context for either the direction or the choices. This common communication gap is actually more like a grand canyon of misunderstanding, both in expanse and in height and depth.
4. Learn to see patterns in problems. In your daily work life, develop the habit of identifying recurring problems and patterns and then suggesting and implementing ideas that eliminate these problems and improve organizational practices.
5. View your role and tasks in the context of a long value chain. Instead of thinking about what you do as discrete and separate from people in other groups, recognize that your work impacts the performance of others along the chain. Seek to understand how and why others depend upon you and better yet, develop an approach that emphasizes constantly measuring your own performance against how well you are meeting the needs of others that come after you in the organizational value chain.
The Bottom Line for Now:
For your own professional development, challenge yourself to understand issues from all levels. The best leaders and the best employees connect their work to creating value for customers or solving vexing internal issues. These effective professionals learn to scale heights from idea to implementation, from problem to improvement and from understanding to new direction. They strive to become effective communicators at all levels and they constantly focus on understanding what is reality to individuals at all layers of the organization.
While the vertical metaphor of altitude may grossly simplify what is really going on here, it’s simple and comprehensible enough to grasp and apply. For today and everyday, make certain that you are challenging yourself to adjust your altitude. You might just find a lot more enjoyment and success in your work, in the process of scaling the issues.
7 Ideas to Stimulate Experimentation in Your Organization
Filed under: Innovation, Leadership, Leading Change, Management Education, Management Innovation, Organizational Transformation, Performance
Dan Ariely offers an interesting piece in the April, 2010 Harvard Business Review on “Why Businesses Don’t Experiment.” In this brief essay (only available for a fee as of this writing), he offers two main reasons for the lack of experimentation:
“…experiments require short-term losses for long-term gains. Companies and people are notoriously bad at making those trade-offs.”
“Second, there’s the false sense of security that heeding experts provides. When we pay consultants, we get an answer from them and not a list of experiments to conduct. We tend to value answers over questions.”
I’ve certainly observed the impediments to experimentation that Ariely highlights and a good many more. In some organizations, there are so many systemic and cultural disincentives to experimentation that it’s a wonder that executives and employees are able to decide what to have for lunch today that was different from yesterday.
In spite of the natural inertia towards the sure thing or the shortcut (external advice in lieu of more risky and time-consuming experimentation), I’ll offer my few cents worth on why and how you and your firm can use experimentation as a means of building value and confounding competitors.
Why Experimentation is Healthy for Your Business
- Great strategies don’t spontaneously generate, take root and grow on their own, based on the magical beans provided through a consultant’s input. Value creating ideas and approaches are most often the output of enlightened trial and error…and sometimes unenlightened trial or just plain fortunate errors.
- If your firm and your teams are not experimenting, your firm is slowly choking off the supply of future innovation. Most often, the deteriorating quality of ideas that turn into valuable offerings is met with what Jim Collins describes as the “Undisciplined Pursuit of More.” This flailing about is an attempt to rapidly make up for the dearth of good ideas created by a rigid culture and leadership. Instead of a pipeline of ideas, firms grasp at straws and all ideas can be rationalized as potentially good.
- Teams that fail together in pursuit of experimentation stand a better chance of succeeding in the end. While that might seem like a “call to failure,” it is intended as a call to learning.
- Facilitating a culture of experimentation is a great way of facilitating a culture change away from command and control leadership, particularly if experimenters are given the opportunity to own ideas. It’s a great sign when a firm embraces reality that top leaders aren’t there because they have the best ideas.
Rethink Everything to Stimulate Experimentation
The obvious areas for experimenting include your products and services and tweaking with various elements of your marketing mix. Before you go too far down the experimentation path however, remember that your business is a system and virtually every part of how and what you do is worth rethinking.
Other opportunities for experimentation include: organizational structure, project approach, strategy formation and execution, talent development, cross-functional collaboration, promotional approaches, engaging with customers, thought-leadership strategies and so many others that don’t involve impacting your product.
7 Ideas to Stimulate Experimentation in Your Organization:
1. Build the expectation into your culture that experimentation is part of the job. Think 3M, Google and others that expect their employees to spend some significant amount of their time on items unrelated to their core job or their current task list. Part of successfully pulling this off is genuinely providing the time and supporting resources.
2. Create systems for experimenters to turn ideas into processes, offerings and approaches. This of course requires you to ensure that the decision-making process is uncomplicated or made less complicated and that when the time is right, there is money and support available for next steps.
3. Put your top leaders on the hook for fostering innovation by monitoring over time how their efforts contribute to innovations that make money, cut costs or differentiate.
4. Quit emulating your competitors. Too many firms suffer from competitor envy and move through time monitoring and reacting. I’m all for a healthy amount of monitoring and improving upon or outflanking, but the cases of pure raw emulation that I’ve seen are remarkably counterproductive and unprofitable.
5. Embrace social media! If you are blocking access to social media, wake-up and recognize that there has never been a more fertile source of innovation than the discussions being shared and ideas emerging on Twitter and via blogs. And the ability to research, experiment and gain insights from specific audiences in near real-time fashion is unparalleled. It’s time to knock down the social media firewall and free your people to think and engage!
6. Recognize that for some offerings and processes, the best approach to innovation might come through external collaboration efforts. Your partners in the value chain are looking for opportunities to experiment as well, and these types of collaborative relationships can be fertile grounds for experimentation and innovation. Having said that, be aware that making these work is a nontrivial task.
7. Build a new hero class in your culture, where experimenters and experiments that yield successful outcomes are celebrated and become part of the folklore of the firm. Be careful not to trivialize this issue with dumb employee or team of the month awards. Use some finesse and create heroes. And find ways to remind people that everyone is invited into that club…all they need to do is earn their way in on their own or as part of a team.
The Bottom-Line for Now
When walking into a client organization, one of the areas that I assess is how rich or poor the culture is when it comes to experimentation. Healthy cultures and winning organizations encourage experimentation and the opposite generally holds true.
And when seeking to facilitate a culture change, remember that these things don’t happen as a result of an executive order, they happen over time with tons of support, reinforcement and a constant refueling of the pioneer spirit.
Now, ask yourself: what are your people doing today that may just build a new future for your organization?
Leadership Caffeine: Teach, Don’t Tell
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leadership Skills, Performance, Talent Management, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
I discovered a long time ago that I was much more effective as a leader and as a father (a much harder job to get right!) if I adopted an approach that emphasized teaching over telling.
While there are circumstances where telling is appropriate…the battlefield, the operating room, perhaps the football field and a few others that I’m sure that I would think of if given enough time, most people prefer to learn, not to carry out orders.
Learning engages the senses, opens the mind, creates new neural connections and challenges us to push beyond our routine thoughts and actions.
Good leaders develop an approach that incorporates teaching while emphasizing performance. The two are not only, not mutually exclusive, they are complementary.
Consider:
- The sales manager that observes and coaches her sales representatives will win out every year over the manager that berates poor performers and then demands performance at the end of a metaphorical gun barrel.
- The CEO that consistently and respectfully asks tough strategic and execution questions is teaching his team members how to focus on the important issues of value creation and performance.
- The shop floor supervisor that asks for input on solving quality problems is teaching people that their ideas count when it comes to making improvements.
- The journeyman carpenter that teaches by showing and then leaving the apprentice alone to try the same task, is inspiring by showing confidence and encouraging independent effort.
5 Rules for Teaching Leaders to Live By:
- Recognize that the additional time investment that you make in teaching will come back to you in dividends many times over.
- Resist the urge to bark an order even if you know exactly what needs to be done.
- Use questions as powerful teaching tools.
- If you must “Tell,” provide an explanation. Proper context for a “do this” ensures that some learning takes place.
- Mistakes are teachable moments. Resist the urge to pounce and strive to help all parties extract the lessons.
And as a parent, try doubling or tripling the amount of time that you spend teaching and please resist the urge to pull out the infamous, “Because I said so.”
The Bottom-Line for Now:
The old model of command and control leadership falls on rebellious and increasingly deaf ears in a workplace of boomers reinventing themselves, millennials finding their way and all of us striving to deal with the new complexity that is our world. It’s time to step up and teach.
I am reminded of a comment attributed to the late and great jazz trumpeter and band leader, Maynard Ferguson, who devoted an incredible amount of time to teaching and inspiring aspiring band students around the country. While I’m certain that I’m grossly paraphrasing his comment, it went something like, Why would you do anything else, when you can teach? His band members of course referred to him as The Boss.
It’s time to quit telling and start teaching. Why not start today?
My Book
The desktop reference to leadership success whether you are starting out or starting over.
Art Petty
Welcome to Management Excellence where the focus is on building better leaders and creating high performance organizations.Building Better Leaders
Art Petty's Building Better Leaders programs in Leadership, Management and Developing as a Senior Contributor offer powerful and practical guidance for motivated professionals.
All programs available on-site in group format and select programs available in a distance learning PLUS personalized mentoring format.
Visit Building Better Leaders to find a program to help you or your team move forward. And don't forget to subscribe to the Building Better Leaders Leadership Tip of the Day.
Management Excellence Tools
Download the Management Excellence Guide to Effective Trade Show Marketing. What's Your Strategy & Execution (STREX) Quotient? Download and use the survey to help you gauge your organization's Strategy & Execution effectiveness and identify areas for improvement.e-book-Leadership and the Project Manager - Developing the Skills that Fuel High Performance Download the pdf or go to the e-book pages on this site and contribute to the conversation
Blog Subscriptions
Connect With Me On
E-Newsletter Mailing List
Join my e-newsletter mailing list and receive the latest in best-practices content for leadership, sales & marketing and strategy.