Leadership Caffeine-Quit Sending Mixed Signals

May 16, 2011 By 5 Comments

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.

 

Filed Under: Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Performance Tagged With: , , ,

Leadership Caffeine: Motivate with Context

April 25, 2011 By 13 Comments

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?

Filed Under: Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Performance, Strategy, Surviving Lousy Leaders Tagged With: , , , ,

Leadership Caffeine: 5 Ideas for Creating a Tenacious Culture

March 21, 2011 By 17 Comments

Tenacity is one of those common attributes of most successful people. It’s often one of the key missing ingredients of chronic underachievers.

Truly tenacious people grab hold of an idea or a cause and refuse to let go until they’ve succeeded, or, until someone finds them passed out in a pool of their own sweat. Of course, what the external observer probably doesn’t know is the tenacious individual hasn’t given up.  He or she is just bowing to nature’s demands and refueling and rethinking while floating in said pool of sweat.

70-Percenters Lack Tenacity:

We all know the types…good talkers, quick to jump on an idea and really good at seeing things through all the way to about the 70-percent phase. After that, nothing.

I’ve known 70-percenters who are truly smart and genuinely nice people. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, they have no idea how to finish.

Advice: provide feedback, coaching and a reasonable number of opportunities for redemption. If 70% doesn’t consistently become 100%, fire the 70-percenter. Yeah, it sounds harsh. Try and build a winning team or organization around chronic under-achievers and let me know  how that works out.

You Cannot Talk Someone into Being Tenacious:

You cannot teach people how to become tenacious through textbooks, lectures or sermons. And you cannot teach people how to be tenacious by talking or browbeating them into it.  Ask any parent who has ever struggled with a child not interested in putting in the extra effort required to master a difficult task or challenging subject.

The same goes for your employees.

Leaders Can Model Behaviors that Cultivate Tenacity:

Tenacity is all heart. Or at least it’s one of those attributes we ascribe to the heart.  It’s the childhood story of, “The Little Engine that Could,” translated into action.

You cannot teach someone to be tenacious in traditional ways, but as parents, teachers and leaders, we can absolutely model the behaviors that cultivate tenacity.

I’m convinced I learned the importance of tenacity from observing my parents in all manner of circumstances. There was no problem they couldn’t overcome. There were setbacks and disappointments, but these were always met with a firm resolve to try again, by applying new ideas and approaches.

As leaders, we are teachers and our own behaviors serve as guides to right and wrong, and acceptable and unacceptable.

5 Ideas for Cultivating Tenacity on Your Team:

1. Hire and promote for tenacity. Proper behavioral interviewing will help you readily identify those with stick-to-itiveness and those who fold like lawn chairs when the going gets tough.

2. Fire 70-Percenters. I don’t care how smart they are, you need people and teams that are committed to turning ideas into actions that solve problems and create value.

3. Quit letting people and teams off the hook. It amazes me how often leaders let people off the hook for the wrong reasons. Project setbacks, technical challenges, resource issues or political roadblocks are not reasons to give up. Leader, this is where you earn your keep, both from an accountability perspective, and from living up to your obligation to help people and teams navigate the vexing roadblocks.

4. Don’t let them off the hook, part 2-accountability is key. Effort is essential but results count. Ensure transparency on team and individual activities and outcomes.  We don’t get free passes and gold stars for trying hard and failing.  While initiatives will end and failing is part of learning, the stopping point or the directional shift must be based on good objective decision-making, not on someone’s or some team’s predilection to throw in the towel. Apply your rules of accountability fairly, visibly and evenly.

5. Capture the successes and create and celebrate heroes and legends. The great successes against overwhelming odds are the stories that begin to define your culture.  New employees look to these stories to understand how success is defined and existing employees point with pride to remarkable accomplishments.  Success becomes the bar by which all initiatives are measured and if you’ve done your job right on the hiring front, the good people on your team understand that achieving success requires focus, discipline and yes, most all, tenacity.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

I love tenacious people and tenacious teams. While I don’t advocate the endless pursuit of failed initiatives (see my Decision Making Series), I do look for people and teams that have that extra store of energy and performance gear that drives projects to closure, turns ideas into actions and failures into opportunities.  If you are building for success, hire for tenacity and reinforce the behaviors that create winners.

Filed Under: Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Performance Tagged With: , , , ,

Leadership Caffeine-Stuck in a Rut? Try These Ideas On for Size

October 25, 2010 By 6 Comments

coffee cupsNote from Art: application of the ideas in this post has been known to stimulate creativity in some office environments. In a limited number of cases, use of these ideas or concepts has caused distress mostly due to failure to properly follow instructions or, because grumpy bosses just didn’t get it. Use at your own risk. Effects can be habit forming.  Test on a small sample before applying to a larger area. And under penalty of law, do not tear the label off of your office furniture.

There’s a bad case of the “serious” malady running through our society right now, and for just a moment, we all deserve to unclench our jaws, breathe and even form that rare but powerful facial expression, the smile.

Consider this my attempt (albeit a weak one, I’m certain) to take a little of the seriousness out of your day while offering ideas that might just have something to them. Or, they might not, but, I’ll leave that for you to judge.

I spend a great deal of time talking with you about driving change. We’re forever prattling on about developing leaders, developing ourselves, developing strategies that hunt and generally living at the intersection of Noble and Pursuit.  To heck with that (for today).

Let’s focus on where the rubber meets the road or our posteriors meet our desk chairs and contribute some ideas that will help us energize our teams, create a bit more personal energy and maybe, just maybe, send us back tomorrow towards Noble and Pursuit reinvigorated in pursuit of our journeys.

7 Ideas of Varying Quietly to Mix Things Up and Energize Yourself and Your Team:

1. Day filled with meetings? Show up early and remove the chairs from the conference room. Don’t spend anytime explaining why you did this. Conduct your meetings with a renewed sense of energy and enjoy the benefits of oxygen flowing freely to the brains in the room. And the looks on the faces of people as they enter the room are priceless.

2. Need a personal change. Take advice from one of my good friends and mix things up. Drive your spouse’s car to work (for the thrill seeker, do this without telling him/her), park somewhere far away from your usual spot and walk to your desk a different way. Continue your “day of different” by changing as many parts of your normal routine as possible.  Remember to order something completely different for lunch.

3. Turn on your senses. Feeling like you’re just moving blindly through your days. When you get to work, try and remember and write down 10 items or landmarks that you pass every day during your commute. Add 2 items per day for a week to this list.

4. Turn on your senses, part 2. Without cheating, write down your company’s mission, vision and values statements. At last count, only 4 people in the western hemisphere were capable of completing this exercise accurately. Do this for several days and once you get them, start working them into office conversations. Observe how your co-workers react.

5. Cancel 50% of your meetings and try to fill the time with things you’ve been meaning to do. See if anything dire happens by not attending those meetings.

6. Plan ahead to become social anthropologists. Schedule customer visits and instead of a talking head trip, try to work it out with your customer where you will be able to see and hear from the people that use your offerings in their natural setting. Fire up those powers of observation and look/listen for problems and ideas.  Compare notes with team members when you get back and vote on the top three items to pursue.

7. If all else fails, take a lesson from George Castanza and mentally declare it opposite day. This famous character on the sitcom Seinfeld discovered that he had remarkable fortune only when he would do the exact opposite of what his gut told him was the right thing to do.

While this one may prove a bit risky, start small. Change up your lunch choice.  When people ask for decisions, suggest that they make them on their own. If you would normally chair an ops meeting, delegate it to someone else. Skip the brainstorming session and let your team run through it. If you think that social media is a waste of time, ask a group to come up with ideas for using it to compete. If you are used to asking the boss for permission for everything, skip this a few times and just do the work.

(Dedicated Seinfeld viewers may recall that George also found another way to dramatically increase his IQ. He gave up amorous activities. I’m not ready to suggest that one for you at this time, but if you fail to find something creative from this listing, it’s next up in the batter’s box.)

The Bottom-Line for Now:

One of my favorite signs in a great bakery in Mt. Prospect, IL reads, “Life is short, eat dessert first.” While we are all part of some form of regimen in our work and in our lives, there are ample opportunities to mix things up, get the oxygen and blood flowing and add some creativity and fun into our days. If you don’t like my ideas above, generate your own. Just make certain to share them here with our readers!

Filed Under: "To Do" List, Career, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Management Innovation, Performance, Professional Growth Tagged With: , , , , ,

The Feedback on Feedback

September 21, 2010 By 11 Comments

feedbackNote from Art: at the end of this note, I indicate the release of my new Building Better Leaders on-line program to help professionals at all levels improve their feedback skills.  The timing of this launch and the close relationship to the content in this post is entirely not coincidental.

Over the past several years beginning with the work for Practical Lessons in Leadership with my co-author, Rich Petro, I’ve made a professional hobby out of exploring the fascinating and very real fear that so many people have for delivering constructive feedback.

One of my favorite interviews for the book was with a retired CEO who when I posed the question on whether he had any regrets, without hesitating, responded: “I really regret that I never learned how to have the tough discussions with the people that worked for me.”  He quickly added, “To this day, I wonder how much money that I cost my companies.”

While many readers may be quick to conclude that this gentleman made it to CEO without mastering the fine art of feedback, my pushback is that good enough isn’t good enough, especially when you are talking about a skill set in the C-Suite that can dramatically impact the organization’s working environment and ultimately its performance.

As I’ve moved several years beyond the work for the book, I continue to poll and survey various professional groups. And while my informal approach to research on this topic would not qualify as a well designed study, I’m pretty comfortable extrapolating the results to the broader population. By the way, my informal sample size is approaching 2,000 people from all types of organizations and at all levels of leadership.

My Feedback on Feedback:

  • A majority of respondents indicate never receiving any formal training on feedback.
  • A majority of experienced managers answering my anonymous surveys describe delivering negative feedback as one of their major weaknesses.
  • Most leaders are not evaluated on their feedback skills and effectiveness.
  • A majority of respondents indicate that they frequently delay delivering tough feedback. The exception is for situations where safety or security are involved.
  • A majority of respondents indicate that they feel better about delivering constructive feedback if they deliver praise at the same time.  (Note: this sugarcoating or sandwiching is one of my pet peeves.  For anyone interested, check out my post: “Why I Hate the Sandwich Technique for Delivering Feedback.”
  • And in a carry over from the earliest surveys on this topic, a gross majority of respondents indicate that they wish that their managers were better at delivering feedback.

I’ve expanded my inquiries on feedback to the world of informal leaders (Project Managers in particular), and the feedback on feedback here is equally challenging.  These professionals are definitely not trained on feedback, and they clearly recognize the impact that their lack of comfort with this tool has on their ability to deal with troubled project teams.

And finally, with a keen eye and ear for the “F” issue inside organizations, when I am called upon to help struggling firms and teams with strategy or other performance issues, it is a safe bet that the feedback culture is unhealthy. Discussions may be collegial, but they don’t focus on the real performance issues of people and teams.

Why Do We Fear Feedback?

Marshall Goldsmith offers up a great perspective (I paraphrase): There’s only two things wrong with providing successful people with feedback. They don’t want to hear it from us and we don’t want to give it to them.

It’s a human thing.  We fear negative reactions. We are overly concerned that people won’t like us if we criticize them.  My CEO example described earlier was worried that he would create a negative working environment, and he didn’t want to damage whatever team and one on one credibility existed in that environment.

The fears are all understandable.  I suspect that everyone one of us can empathize with the source of those fears.  We just need to move beyond them.

The Power of Feedback:

There are no silver bullets in leadership, but feedback comes darned close. Used properly, this is the leader’s most powerful tool for promoting and strengthening positive behavior and for identifying and improving less than desirable behaviors.

High quality professionals…the type you want to surround yourself with, want and appreciate effective feedback.  For teams and individuals that perform at acceptable levels, feedback can help them move from good to great.

Feedback as Ken Blanchard says, “Is the Breakfast of Champions.”

Conquering the Fear and Cultivating Your Feedback Skills:

My own experience training hundreds on this topic has shown that once people understand the power of this leadership tool, mastering it includes:

  • Learning to construct complete, behaviorally-focused and business-oriented feedback messages.
  • Learning to deliver these messages in a frank, respectful and effective (concise, timely, brief) manner.
  • Understanding how to manage even the toughest of discussions.
  • Setting the stage for active coaching and more feedback on the behaviors in question.
  • Practicing using a “system” that incorporates all of the above. Practice, and more practice, and then some more.  Of course, the gross majority of the practice is in a live fire setting.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

This most difficult of human interactions in the workplace is also one of the most important.  The fear, much like the fear of public speaking is mostly in our minds, and with some deliberate practice, all of us are capable of improving our skills, and as a result, improving our performance, the performance of our teams and of our organizations.

It’s time to move beyond the fear.

—

I’m excited to offer my own easy method for people to begin moving beyond the fear of feedback, in a new short and remarkably cost-effective on-line program called simply, “How to Deliver Feedback,” at my Building Better Leaders site. For less than the cost of a cup of coffee per day, leaders, informal leaders and professionals at all levels gain access to 5 lessons on feedback, all supported by action guides, recommended workplace developmental actions, and practice forms and cases.  The “Back to School” pricing on this program is $55.  It will go up on October 20th.  And for anyone desiring mentoring support, I am happy to offer that for an additional fee.

I hope to see you and your team members in the program!

Filed Under: "To Do" List, Career, Leadership, Performance, Professional Growth, Project Management Tagged With: , , , ,
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