Leaders, Principles and the Pursuit of High Performance Teams

March 28, 2012 By 2 Comments

“In high-performance teams, the leaders managed the principles and the principles managed the teams.” –Carl Larson and Frank LaFasto via Jim Highsmith in Agile Project Management-Creating Innovative Products.

Larson and LaFasto in their assessment of high performance teams offer us a profoundly powerful and simple to comprehend answer to the question of how to support the emergence of effective teams: clear, strong, actionable, livable principles beget an environment for effective collaboration and innovation.

Every high performance team I’ve experienced as a participant, a sponsor or an outside advisor, was governed by an overarching set of principles or values that formed and framed the culture. And while good words alone don’t create success, the combination of the leaders and participants living and acting according to those words everyday made things work.

On successful teams, the team leaders…and ultimately the participants eat and drink the principles for breakfast, communicate them constantly and most importantly, they live them in how they collaborate, problem-solve and challenge themselves and their team members forward in pursuit of success.

And since as we all know, even the best of teams face dark days when nothing goes right, the guiding principles serve as bedrock for self-reflection and guidance for navigating the way forward.

There’s a cautionary tale here. As Highsmith warns us, “Grand principles that generate no action are mere vapor.”  When engaging with an organization for the first time, I make it a habit to understand a firm’s values, and all too often, what I find are nice words…unarguable in their intent, that serve only to occupy space on a wall in a conference room. It’s a wholesale failure on the part of the leadership of an organization, when the guiding principles aren’t a visible part of everyday life.

Teams are a fact of life. We execute strategy via projects. We innovate on teams. We develop new products, improve processes and search for ways to better serve our customers via projects and teams. We darned well better figure out how to succeed at this more often than not. Right now, in too many organizations, “not” is winning.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

This intangible, sticky, squishy topic of operationalizing guiding principles or values doesn’t lend itself well to a prescriptive list of steps-to-success. The onus is on you as a team leader, project leader, functional leader, informal leader or organizational leader to ensure that your best efforts are supported by meaningful, actionable guiding principles. If you can’t articulate what those principles are and what they mean for behavior, accountability and performance, then it’s time to take a step back and tackle this issue. The effort will pay dividends going forward. Larson and LaFasto are right…leaders should manage the principles and the principles will manage the team.

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Don’t miss the next Leadership Caffeine-Newsletter! Register here.

Art Petty is a Chicago-based management consultant focusing on strategy and leadership development. Art regularly speaks on innovation in management and leadership, and his work is reflected in two books, including the recent, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development.  Art publishes regularly at The Management Excellence blog at http://artpetty.com

Prior to his solo career, Art spent 20+ years leading marketing sales and business units in systems and software organizations around the globe. You can follow Art on twitter: @artpetty and he can be reached via e-mail at art.petty@artpetty.com

 

 

Filed Under: Leadership, Performance, Project Management, Strategy, Values Tagged With: , , ,

Leadership Caffeine-What Do You Do with a Team that has Failed?

February 20, 2012 By Leave a Comment

image of a coffee cupWe’re often too quick as leaders to throw in the towel on teams that have whiffed. That’s a mistake that may be more costly to performance and morale than the initial and temporary failure.

My quick answer to the question in the post title is: absent any visible, destructive behavior that may have contributed to the team’s missteps, the point in time when it becomes clear that a team has failed is the right time to double-down with a fresh challenge. Preferably one of those big and ugly challenges.

We all know that success most often occurs after a series of failures, yet this same stubborn tenacity to overcome setbacks that is so widely celebrated in our culture and with our heroes, is too often ignored in corporate team settings. After all, it’s not comfortable for executives or sponsors to spend much time associated with teams that have failed.

Team Longevity and Success:

There are well-documented criteria (Hackman, Thompson et. al.) for creating team success: a clear and guiding purpose, clear membership, enabling structures, the right kind of leadership AND team longevity.

Perhaps I’m biased by the technical product development and IT projects I’ve hung around most of my career, but typically the projects are difficult and often, the team members are being asked to do something that’s not been done before…at least in their organization.  The need for team learning coupled with the socialization dynamics present in every (new) team environment, demand a commitment to longevity as one of the key enabling factors for success.

Beware the Mirages:

We’re quick to attribute team failures to external factors (fundamental attribution error) or, to see Lencioni’s 5 dysfunctions in almost every struggling team environment. Just be aware, that you may very well be seeing a mirage…something you think you should see but that isn’t really present.

Building trust, developing comfort with conflict, committing to the effort, accepting accountability and focusing on results are all important, and realizing the team culture to foster those behaviors takes time.

It takes courage for a leader or sponsor to stand up and defend a failed team. That shielding effort expends political capital and if the outcomes continue to be poor, the capital is squandered.  Leaders and sponsors coping with struggling teams are well-advised to look for the following attitudes and behaviors as they assess whether to take a stand or fold the team.

5 Signs that Your Failed Team Merits More Time

1. An absence of finger-pointing and excuse-making. In my experience, there’s a direct inverse correlation with finger-pointing and the potential for team success.

2. Genuine group and authentic distress at the failure. While a judgement call, it’s not that hard for a leader to distinguish between embarrassment or fear or repercussions type distress versus genuine “We failed and it bugs the crap out of me/us,” distress.

3. An emerging Apollo 13 mentality… “failure is not an option.” A sense of emergency, an intense focus on the goals of the initiative and extraordinary efforts to innovate are healthy signs that the team merits more time.

4. External validation that the initiative is (still) highly relevant. There’s a tendency for firms and teams to irrationally pursue failed objectives. Avoiding this sunk cost/escalation of commitment trap is difficult and important. The assumptions of and need for the project from an external customer or market perspective must still be valid before offering more time to the failed team.

5. A hunger for insights and knowledge from outside the team.  Instead of turning inward and developing a bunker mentality, the team recognizes the need for help and pursues it.  I’m particularly convinced of a team’s legitimacy, when they seek outside critical feedback on technical and performance issues.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Sometimes, good performance is just a bit further down the road. Don’t discount how critical it is to give good people time to gel on big projects.

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Don’t miss the next Leadership Caffeine-Newsletter! Register here.

Art Petty is a Chicago-based management consultant focusing on strategy and leadership development. Art regularly speaks on innovation in management and leadership, and his work is reflected in two books, including the recent, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development.  Art publishes regularly at The Management Excellence blog at http://artpetty.com

Prior to his solo career, Art spent 20+ years leading marketing sales and business units in systems and software organizations around the globe. You can follow Art on twitter: @artpetty and he can be reached via e-mail at art.petty@artpetty.com

Filed Under: Crisis Leadership, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Performance, Project Management Tagged With: , , , ,

Strategy-Towards Hypotheses, Experiments, Involvement & Learning

January 25, 2012 By 6 Comments

Few would argue that a nimble, quick-to-learn and quick-to-adapt organization is a bad thing. Given the rate of change in our world, those characteristics are increasingly table-stakes for survival and success.

Why then has the approach to strategy and the notion of “strategic planning” in so many organizations remained mired in a 1960’s kind of static, top-down event-focused model?

Many firms practice a style of strategic planning that might have worked in a different time and place, but today, fast-to-try, fast-to- fail and fast-to-learn are essential for survival and success.

Give Me an Epiphany, Darn-It!

Rarely does just the act of thinking through circumstances, opportunities and strategies yield the epiphany that allows a firm to carve out a competitive advantage.

In my experience, the management teams who have pursued the “strategy as event’ approach with the annual or semi-annual meeting(s) serving as the time to talk strategy and decide, are often frustrated with the time investment and disappointing outcomes. Few epiphanies…a lot of time…a lot of bickering and ambiguous outcomes with no clear next steps. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?

Hypotheses and Informed Experiments, Please!

The best outcome of the front end of any strategy process is one or more (a limited number, please) of ideas…hypotheses, that can quickly be turned into and managed as experiments.

True value in the form of learning accrues to the organization from working through the strategic experiment, assessing outcomes and refining the ideas. Because these workplace and marketplace experiments require people to implement, manage, and assess them, the act of engaging the employee population creates understanding, involvement, excitement and importantly idea sharing.  

It Feels So Good When We Stop!

I’ve worked with teams who were accustomed to and frustrated by the “event” orientation of planning. When refocused on assessment, analysis and importantly, hypothesis generation, the unreasonable expectation of finding the magical answer was replaced by high quality dialogue around generating ideas for better serving customers and beating competitors. After a series of these discussions over time, and with some focused facilitation, the teams were able to zero in on one or two strategic hypotheses to invest in and learn from.

The Project Management Art of Building out Strategic Experiments:

While I frequently reference this phase as the Execution phase, I prefer Experiment…both because it doesn’t sound so fatal…and it implies Doing, Measuring, Learning and Refining (DMLR).  In my estimation, its in the DMLR cycle where the real work…and the real “Ah Ha” moments of strategy occur.

Six Ideas for Implementing an Effective Doing, Learning, Measuring, Refining Program:

1. Treat each strategic experiment like a project. Assign a Project Manager and use Best Practices PM to charter, scope, engage stakeholders, define the work, assess the risks, plan and estimate the work, implement the work, monitor and communicate. Yeah, that’s a mouthful. Your Project Manager in this case is priceless.

2. Ensure that there’s a strong sponsor in place for every experiment. Yes, best practices project management again. If this is important enough to be betting your strategic future on, it’s important enough to provide a Supportive Sponsor with heft and teeth.

3. Explain, Engage and Listen! People work in compliance under orders, they work with their hearts and minds when they are part of something big. Getting them involved is good. Arming them with context on why, and what and importance is critical. Listening to their feedback is priceless. Since many strategic initiatives involve doing new things or doing things differently, this holistic approach to engagement is essential.

4. Create Learning and Sharing Forums with Teeth. It’s good to pre and post-mortems…it’s better to create ample opportunities for idea sharing, lessons learned and adjustments to experiments on the move. Hey, I’m probably violating several tenets of The Scientific Method with the adjustment statement, but timeliness is critical and your Project Manager will help you manage changes in the plan.

By the way, by this time, you may want to give your PM a big fat raise!

5. The Truth is Always in the Field…Sometimes You Just Have to Look Carefully. The best strategic experiments involve customers and partners. Invite them in…make them part of the process and of course observe and listen carefully. And then act.

6. Do Something with the Outcomes-Plan to Change or Move Forward. After a period of time and armed with the insights and feedback of employees, customers and partners, there’s a vetting and decision-making process that those in charge have to prosecute. From kill to change to go to what’s next, you and your team are on the hook for returning to the process and assessing and deciding.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

There are at least two “dirty little secrets” in what I’ve described above. It’s a nefarious plan for involving the broader organization in strategy and execution, and it not so secretly “operationalizes” the work of strategy. While there’s no magic and I would be misleading if I didn’t highlight that the process is filled with bumps, hiccups and debates it’s darned powerful if and when managed properly.

Filed Under: Leadership, Leading Change, Project Management, Strategy Tagged With: , , , ,

Leadership Caffeine: Supporting the Rise of the Informal Leader

March 28, 2011 By 14 Comments

Want to know where to find your best and brightest emerging leaders? Here’s a hint, you’ll have to use your peripheral vision to see them, because they are moving sideways at a high rate of speed.

The Rise of the Informal Leader:

While it’s unlikely that hierarchical leadership will disappear anytime soon from our long-standing organizational models, it is my opinion that we’ve entered an era characterized by the rise of the informal leader.

The ever-shrinking middle layer of management has been replaced by a variety of different individuals fulfilling roles as project and product and team leaders. Their titles say, “manager,” but the real meaning is something like, “tons of responsibility and no authority.”

These Informal Leaders are the ones busy getting work done through and with others by marshaling resources, building coalitions and cutting through the organizational crap that slows many functional leaders to a “protect my turf” crawl.

Informal Leaders are often on a mission to change the world and improve their organizations for the better.  They are organizational and initiative focused zealots with the passion and confidence necessary for success.

Existing leaders will be well served to cultivate an Informal Leader culture and class to cope with the prevailing market forces. The need for speed, flexibility and adaptability have never been greater, and the better your people are at traversing functional boundaries to “get stuff done,” the better your odds of success.

And for those seeking to strengthen and grow your careers, instead of looking up the organizational ladder, it’s time to rethink your view of success and start looking sideways as the best way to make a difference.

7 Ideas for Cultivating Informal Leaders in Your Organization:

1. Give your people room to run beyond your boundaries. Hell, encourage them to run. Don’t create artificial silo or turf barriers for your people. You will succeed if your people are encouraged to create value and build coalitions across the organization.

2. Use your functional power to broker alliances with peers that pave the way for people and teams to tackle the big issues of the day. Actively encourage teams to work to solve problems across boundaries and you will be supporting the development of an Informal Leader culture.  Those with passion and skills will take the opportunity to grab these initiatives.

3. If your culture is already project centric, recognize that great project management has two components: the tools of the trade and the socio-cultural (people) issues. You can be mechanically sound and still fail. Invest in strengthening people skills to improve your chances of success.  Don’t assume that people know how to collaborate.  I see far too many cross-functional initiatives reduced to “debating societies” to be comfortable assuming that people truly get how to collaborate for results.  Provide resources and coaching to teach teams and Informal Leaders how to succeed.

4. Change at the top to promote growth across the organization. Current leaders need to learn what it means to effectively sponsor working teams.  Those at the top of the ladder (yeah, there is still hierarchy) need to consistently model the right behaviors for cross-functional and Informal Leader success.

5. Design developmental assignments to push people into informal leadership roles. Ensure that assignments challenge individuals to quickly form relationships and guide groups towards problem resolution.  Ensure an ample flow of feedback from participants and stakeholders, and provide a reasonable blend of skills development in areas such as: communication, negotiation, critical thinking and facilitation.

6. Engage Informal Leaders in the strategy processes of the firm. Too often, the people driving progress are simply “receivers” of direction. This devalues their understanding of talent, organizational capabilities and their tremendous insights and lessons learned along the way.

7. Create diversity in your upcoming Informal Leader ranks.  Far too many organizations create “project managers” out of just their technical professionals. While cautious to generalize, many of these same organizations end up with a project management culture that is mechanically excellent but truly weak on the soft, people side of the equation.  Draw from and build informal leaders in all areas of the organization.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

The issue of building a powerful Informal Leader culture transcends the topic of project management. This is neither a functional nor a vocational issue as much as it is about building an environment that works effectively in this challenging and ever-changing world.

I see successes all of the time, although they tend to emerge due to the tenacity of one or more passionate individuals, rather than through a deliberate development process. The challenge now is to find ways to deliberately develop an Informal Leader class and quit relying on its emergence by accident.

Filed Under: "To Do" List, Career, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leading Change, Performance, Product Management, Project Management Tagged With: , , , , ,

Management Excellence Toolkit-Part 4: Improve Your Estimating and Forecasting Effectiveness

March 16, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Note from Art: Your decisions define you as a leader and a manager, yet we spend very little time in our busy lives finding ways to improve our abilities in this area. This Management Excellence Toolkit Series will help you recognize the challenges and pitfalls of individual and group decision-making and offer ideas on improving performance for you and your co-workers.

Part 1 of this series emphasized the importance of developing, updating and referencing a Decision Journal. Part 2, focused on understanding how we make decisions and how various traps and biases often derail us. In Part 3, we tackled the power and importance of framing situations properly to improve your odds of success. Part 4 focuses on improving estimating and forecasting accuracy by strengthening management and leadership practices.

Let’s kick this one off with the conclusion: poor management and leadership practices make a tough job tougher by introducing pressures and biases that directly impact estimating and forecasting activities.

If these environmentally imposed biases weren’t enough, human nature gets a vote as well. Studies in the field of decision-making have shown, “we are systematically over-confident in our own abilities.”

Consider the unscientific annual BusinessWeek poll results: “90% of managers believe they are in the top 10% of all performers in their firm.”

Another annual survey is taken for incoming freshmen at Harvard, where 75% of the students believe they will end up in the top 15% of their class.

I’m all for optimism.  It’s most definitely a beneficial human characteristic and possibly a good defense mechanism for the trials and tribulations of survival.  However, it can lead us astray, sometimes in life or death situations.

The Thin Air of Life or Death Decisions:

Professor Michael Roberto in his excellent material on critical decision making uses the Everest tragedies of 1996 to showcase a myriad of decision-making errors that started with an over-confidence bias and literally cascaded downhill into a disaster from there.  (Roberto’s content in this segment is based on Jon Krakauer’s article/book, Into Thin Air.)

As a backdrop, several of the expedition leaders in 1996 had only experienced the relatively calm conditions of the past few years on Everest. The leaders had not experienced the worst of the worst on Everest, and we’re lulled into a false sense of security by these conditions and their own recent successes in reaching the summit (a recency effect bias!).

One of the expedition leaders, Scott Fischer, was quoted as saying, “We’ve got the Big E completely figured out, we’ve got it totally wired. These days, I’m telling you, we’ve built a yellow brick road to the summit.”

Another leader, Rob Hall, responding to a worried climber, offered: “It’s worked 39 times so far, pal, and a few of the blokes who summitted with me were nearly as pathetic as you.”

Both Fischer and Hall along with six of their expedition members perished under brutal conditions made worse by a nearly unbelievable string of bad decisions, not the least of which was over-confidence.

Our Own Mountains to Climb:

While most of us are not planning on climbing Everest anytime soon, we have our own metaphorical mountains to conquer in the form of projects, budgets, campaigns and business plans.  And unfortunately, we’re every bit as susceptible to the many decision-making traps, including estimating and forecasting errors, that can lead to disaster in life or death circumstances.

Consider:

If the management culture is one that values strict adherence to schedules and reinforces this perspective by punishing those who miss schedules, people and teams naturally add significant padding to their estimates.

For complex projects involving multiple work groups, this padding practice across all of the teams adds up to significantly longer project estimates. And let’s face it, work expands to fill the time allocated for it. The cost, time-to-market (or implementation) implications are huge!

Alternatively, I’ve observed over-zealous executive teams declare a time-to-market mandate without consideration of the project complexities. The pressure on the project teams results in estimates executives “want to hear,” but that have no basis in the reality of the work. As time and cost estimates are missed, the environment tends to deteriorate into one of finger-pointing, excuse-making and general dysfunction

Fear Impacts Estimates:

While fear pushes project estimates out into the future, this same environment likely results in ultra-conservative sales forecasts on one hand and unrealistic cost estimates on the other.

For anyone accountable for revenue and/or expense numbers, you tend to take your cue on these numbers from environmental pressures.  I’ve observed managers who felt pressure to inflate revenue forecasts out of fear of being viewed as naysayers and poor team players, while at the same time, deflate expense numbers out of fear of being viewed as not having control over costs.

Fear in the workplace creates estimating and forecasting gamesmanship.

Prior Performance May Be a Poor Predictor:

Much like the recency effect displayed by the Everest expedition leaders, we open additional trap doors for our estimating and forecasting approaches by relying too much on prior performance in spite of changing conditions. The past is interesting, but in times of significant change or distress, it is a lousy predictor of future performance.

Data, Bloody Data:

We live in data-filled world and it’s common to hear management talk about the importance of making data-driven decisions. I’m all for it. After all, that’s why your firm spent countless dollars and suffered through nearly endless schedule delays and cost over-runs to implement the latest business intelligence tools. However, even the best system and the cleanest data cannot compensate for our propensity as humans to seek out information that confirms our opinion and discount or discard information that doesn’t.  This confirming evidence trap is a frequent contributor to estimating and forecasting errors.

Six Ideas for Minimizing Estimating and Forecasting Errors:

1. Commit to improving management practices that impact estimating. If you are struggling to gain reliable project or business estimates, chances are there are systemic problems created by poor management practices. To the extent possible, you need to cultivate an estimating and forecasting culture free from fear of reprisal and low in gamesmanship.  This includes eliminating practices that encourage over-confidence or extreme prudence. It also includes minimizing fear as a factor that unduly influences estimate development.  The best project managers and project sponsors work hard to create a safe environment for estimate development, often serving as buffers between their working teams and the pressures coming from top management.

2. Beware the group effect. Groups tend to be over-confident, and have been shown to take larger risks and offer more aggressive estimates than individuals working on their own.

3. Seek broader data sets and encourage the introduction of information that challenges existing confirming evidence.

4. Ask for objective, 3rd party review of estimates and the assumptions underlying the estimates. High performance project teams use this approach as a safety check against groupthink and over-confidence or over-prudence. A knowledgeable but uninvolved third party can ask tough questions, challenge assumptions and indicate when estimates just don’t make sense.

5. Build time for learning into estimating activities. Recognize the weakness of estimating new projects or programs based on prior results. And if you are doing something “new” and outside of the experience band of your firm, it’s critical to build learning time into the process.

6. Commit to monitoring estimating performance over a period of time. Build in the process of documenting estimate assumptions, reviewing results and identifying what worked and what failed. For many teams and firms, this is a distinct process change that requires a genuine interest in improving estimating performance.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Just about every firm and team struggles somewhere with estimating and forecasting.  The root causes of these problems are found both in human nature…our propensity towards over-confidence, and in our managerial practices and the impact of these practices on the decision-making environment. Forewarned is forearmed on the human nature issue. As for the management practices, these truly are controllable by you.

Filed Under: "To Do" List, Decision-Making, Leadership, Performance, Project Management Tagged With: , , , ,
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