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!
The Project Management Discipline of Strategy Execution
Filed under: Leadership, Organizational Transformation, Project Management, Strategy
A number of months ago, I wrote about the benefit of applying professional project management practices to help improve strategy execution (Struggling with Strategy? Think Project Management). While many view strategy as something that is transformational (and it often is), the fact is that an organization moves from where it is today to where it has decided to go one project at a time…like a football team marching down the field on a long-drive.
In the June, 2008 Harvard Business Review, in an article entitled The Secrets to Successful Strategy Execution, Gary Neilson, Karla Martin and Elizabeth Powers add considerably to the body of knowledge on strategy execution, with this excellent article, backed by a considerable amount of research gained in surveys of over 1,000 organizations. Their findings seem to support their thesis that: "enterprises fail at execution because they go straight to structural reorganization and neglect the most powerful drivers of effectiveness—decision rights and information flows."
A few key findings covered in the article:
- Employees at three out of five companies rated their organization weak at execution. (Asked: Are Important strategic and operational decisions quickly translated into action?)
- The number one rated trait (by a landslide) that makes organizations effective at implementing strategy: Everyone has a good idea of the decisions and actions for which one is responsible.
- Of the top eight traits (17 were identified), five were tied to having effective and timely information flows and three were related to decision rights.
- Structure as an effective trait for driving strategy execution did not hit the list until number 13, with a relatively low strength index rating.
Fascinating. It's important to see a large body of research dedicated to the execution issue and it is a great learning experience to see how valuable information flows and decision rights are to successful strategy execution.
Additional Thoughts on Strategy Execution:
Structural changes, properly implemented at the right time and for the right reasons can go a long way towards addressing and improving the information flow, decision rights and collaboration issues that are so critical to strategy execution. Don't write off structure as a powerful tool in strategy execution, however as the authors highlight, don't jump to structure as the solution. It's one part of many pieces to the solution.
Back to my strategy execution as project management thesis, the best performing project teams are characterized by clear structure, unambiguous roles, detailed communication plans and clear accountability for decisions and results. Top notch Project Managers ride herd on these issues, seeking out points of confusion or gaps in information flows and fixing them in process.
The fact that the authors are able to cite as a research finding that 3 out of 5 surveyed managers believe that their organizations do not quickly translate strategic priorities into action tells me that most of those organizations have not adopted a robust project management discipline for strategy execution. And while strategy is arguably more complicated than creating a new product or constructing a building, it is very possible to structure and manage your execution program using the same approaches.
The bottom-line (for now):
Strategy execution is where value is created. The best plans are worthless unless they are backed by a group of people that understand their roles and accountabilities and that have the information they need when they need for rapid decision-making. Execution never takes place in a straight line and without setbacks. In fact, the setbacks are powerful learning experiences that a good team will leverage as it adapts and responds to internal and external factors.
A large part of the solution in my opinion is treating execution like a high-order program comprised of a series of projects to be managed. Ask a good Project Manager how to successfully pull of an execution program and I suspect they won't need to interview 1,000 companies.
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