Leadership Caffeine for the Week of March 16, 2009
Filed under: "To Do" List, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Values
I’m heading to Austin, Texas for the first few days this week, so in celebration of the forecasted 80 degree+ weather, I’ll be sipping on something cold and caffeinated by the time you read this post.
First, some weekly reminders;
- Remember, you set the tone for your entire team. Show up with a smile on your face. Ask people how their weekends were and muscle your calendar a bit to get in some more one on one time with your colleagues and teams.
- Focus your energy on finding and knocking down some barriers for your project teams. If you are a project sponsor, meet with the project manager, ask for an update and ask how you can help. Then do it!
- Make certain your team members are up to speed on the big issues. Share performance updates and review key priorities. Challenge your team members to evaluate their own priorities in the context of the organization and identify prospective activities or projets that don’t fit. Then kill the projects that don’t fit.
- Be on the lookout for positive and constructive feedback opportunities and engage. Be specific and reinforce or focus on observable behaviors. Remember to link the feedback to the business.
- Hey, it’s March already. It’s probably time to schedule your next professional development planning session with each individual team member.
The Bigger Picture: Are You Leveraging Your Firm’s Values as a Leadership Tool?
Many leaders and many firms miss the value of their values. Those noble thoughts outlined and framed on the conference room wall or embedded in Lucite on your desk, are actually worth much more than the paper or plastic they are printed on.
The theory is that the established values of the firm define standards of behavior and expectations for the day-to-day actions and decisions of employees. Mostly, they just sit there and look nice on the wall.
If you’ve ever had the occasion to work for or with a firm that takes values seriously, you know that these are powerful tools to lead by. (For a detailed post on this topic, see: Values-Based Leadership: More of What I Learned at Matsushita.)
- Use the values to explain the culture and expectations for citizenship and performance to prospective recruits and new hires.
- Leverage the values as a filter for decision-making on tough people issues. Jack Welch’s maxim was that you could be an A (top) player but if you didn’t fit the values of the corporation, there was no place at GE for you. It’s amazing how relevant the values become if your colleagues see you making the tough consistent calls in line with those values.
- If your firm doesn’t have a strong values-culture and values statements, create your own for your team. I did this through a “Charter” document that outlined the expectations for performance and involvement by all team members, and it served the same purpose as a statement of corporate values would have, only it was function specific (although holistic about engaging and working with other members of the organization). Hey, it filled a gap and was better than waiting for values statements to magically appear.
The Bottom-Line for the Week:
Engage, ask questions, find ways to help and then spend a few minutes thinking about how to apply your firm’s values to improving your leadership performance. People value your time and your attention, and they thrive on pursuing meaningful challenges in environments where the rules are clear and agreeable. Oh, and try and have some fun while you are at it. Life is short and the joy is in the journey.
-Art
Too Many Projects Chasing Too Few People-It’s Time to Learn to Say No!
Filed under: Decision-Making, Leadership, Performance, Product Management, Project Management, Strategy
One of the themes that I hear consistently in workshops and in discussions with the professionals in my MBA classes is frustration over the propensity of a firm’s leaders to never say “No” to a project.
Lacking a viable mechanism to compare, evaluate and select and reject projects, decisions are made based on politics, gut feel and the squeaky customer wheel.
The net result of this lack of discipline is that the people doing the work end up overloaded and overwhelmed. They operate in compliance mode, focusing on surviving until the next deadline and adding little creative value or innovation to their activities.
This is a perfect formula to waste money, squander creative energy and decimate morale. This “we never met a project we didn’t like” approach is also the antithesis of the formula for performance excellence.
The current economic pressures amplify the need to create better screening mechanisms and to truly manage your investment in projects with rigor and discipline. You need to deliver the right projects effectively, and you need to learn to say “No” to some that seemed like a good idea last year and many that will jump out at you during the next year.
Take a look at the portfolio of projects that you and your colleagues are engaged with today and make each of these projects earn their way back into the portfolio. It’s OK and even healthy to challenge yesterday’s priorities as they bury people in today’s work.
Use these filters:
- Why are we doing this project? What are the assumptions that made it seem like a good idea before and are they still valid?
- Is it a must-do or compliance initiative?
- Is it strategic? If yes, you should bounce it up against the current-state strategy and determine whether it is still relevant today. If not, kill it.
- Is it an operational improvement? If yes, can you connect the operational improvements to something that impacts strategy and customers…even through one or two degrees of separation? If you cannot connect it to something that allows you to serve customers (internal or external) more effectively, consider killing it.
- Do we have the right balance of strategic and operational initiatives?
- Are we evaluating projects based on a combination of objectively developed financial and non-financial criteria? Does our evaluation approach allow for reasonable comparison of alternatives?
If you struggle to answer these questions because your strategy is vague or out of date, you’ve got another problem that needs to be fixed. While some decry the usefulness of strategy in a time of crisis, I would argue that now more than ever is the time to create a robust, dynamic strategy and execution program. Instead of wandering aimlessly through the minefield of the economy, I want a team that is opportunistic, experimental and focused on finding and exploiting gaps and ignoring distractions. This is strategy.
The bottom-line:
Your organization executes strategy one project at a time. Too many leaders fail to support the creation of processes that effectively evaluate and manage the nearly endless list of options to work on. Start the process by refreshing on strategy and then work unceasingly to manage and cull the portfolio in support of the strategy. Learn to say, “No” and you’ll be shocked at how much great work your team will complete. You might even find them smiling as they work.
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