The First Work Week of January, 2009: Once Again Into the Storm

January 4, 2009 By 1 Comment

Welcome to the first work week of 2009.  There are no more opportunities to hide behind a social calendar filled to the brim with diversions and distractions.  It’s time to face the worst economy of our lives head on with a steely resolve to overcome and succeed.

I don’t know too many people that are sad to see 2008 in the rear view mirror.  I also don’t know too many people that expect this new year to be a day at the beach.  Let’s face it, even if we don’t get clubbed over the head with more systemic shocks, it’s likely that we are still peering down into the abyss that is this economy.  We may bottom out this year…but it feels like the unwinding has a long way to go.

The good news is that the secret is out.  Things stink.  There’s no more wondering about a recession.  You can let the worry of things getting bad quit renting space in your mind. Frankly, none of us have time to preoccupy on the fear of bad news.  We’re in the storm and we need all of our faculties to focus on putting one foot in front of the other in order to keep moving.

I scan the popular business press for content for this blog, my MBA classes and my workshops.  I’m always looking for material that showcases organizations and individuals that have adapted their thinking and their approaches to find opportunities in spite of the prevailing headwinds.  There is very little of this content to be had.

Apparently, the world’s population would rather read endless stories of hardship, failure, layoffs, and other content that preys on our fears.  Quit reading and listening to this crap…it is wasting your time, draining your energy and keeping you from focusing on the challenges in front of you.  Instead, focus your attention on creating the positive story in your work environment.  Set a goal on creating successes by better understanding and serving internal and external customers.

Make your department, team, organization the model case study for future MBA students on how you rethought traditional approaches to value creation, management and operations and came out the other end a market leader.  Surviving and prospering in this environment is the Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG).  While your competitors are retrenching and retreating,  we all want to read about you innovating and succeeding.  Your success….even your small victories will remind us that good things are possible in the worst of circumstances.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

A model worth referencing in these times is the conduct of the British people during the Blitz in World War II.  Armed with a fearless leader in Churchill and a resolve characterized by the phrase, “Keep a stiff upper lip,” the people went about the business of survival, rebuilding, helping and ultimately winning, all the while bombs were dropping randomly on their homes and businesses.

Well, the economic bombs are dropping and the damage is spreading.  Great.  Now keep a stiff upper lip and help clean up and rebuild.  Hiding isn’t going to accomplish anything.

Have a good first working week of the year and as you generate some small victories, remember to share your stories.  Maybe we can turn the tide in the popular press and focus on what’s working and what people are doing right.  Success is contagious.

Filed Under: Crisis Leadership Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Has Your Management Team Decided to Be Successful Yet?

October 7, 2008 By 1 Comment

It is always great fun to work with management groups interested in growing their businesses, pursuing a new and bold vision or embarking upon new strategic directions.  More often than not, these groups have enjoyed success, established themselves and their firm in a favorable position and have a common excitement about what the future might hold.  They also talk about the fact that change will be necessary for growth, and it is usually about this point that the wheels start wobbling.

For some reason, teams that heretofore were successful often struggle at the point in time where they recognize that the business must change, and that means that they must change along with it.  We all know that the talents and skills that help launch a successful start-up may not be the same talents and skills needed to reach $10 million in annual revenue.  And a $40 million dollar company is much different than a $10 million or the start-up from whence it came.  And so on. 

As alluring as a grand new vision or compelling growth plan for the future might be, everyone on a management team knows that pulling this off will require significant change to what has often been a comfortable situation.  The reactions are fascinating.  People quickly anchor in some form of defensive or offensive behavior. 

  • The passive-aggressive type nods her head in the meeting and proceeds to resist change in her everyday actions and decisions. 
  • The doom-sayer plays on the very real fear that teams have of not only not succeeding, but of potentially taking steps in the wrong direction.
  •  The cultural cheerleader frets about the loss of “what made us great”. 
  • The anti-establishment type highlights the burden that the new bureaucracy will impose on the organization. 

Often, the net result is paralysis while the Chief Executive processes on the seemingly real and genuine fears of his or her top lieutenants. This period of paralysis over change is what I refer to as the point in time where the management team has not decided to be successful.  It doesn’t’ mean they want to be unsuccessful, they just haven’t decided that they want to succeed by the new definition.  Prior to this point, success was clear.  Hit our numbers, do our jobs, satisfy our customers and repeat.  Going forward, deciding to be successful means all of those plus creating needed infrastructure, engaging new talent, inviting new faces to the table and much more. 

There is no doubt that the issue of taking a good thing and trying to make it better, bigger and stronger is a complex and emotional one for many humans.  There are scores of books written on the topic of leading change in business. (Some of the best come from John Kotter.)  My issue is simple, and it is generally targeted at the top executive (or executives plural).  There is a time for debate, there is a time to let people vent and posture, and there is soon after, a time to move forward.  This point in time reflects the “decision to succeed” and is manifested by a new set of behaviors:

  • Discussions begin to address tough topics with a focus on fixing or improving, not placing blame.
  • The “We Can’t” or the “We’ve Never” discussions turn into “Why Can’t We” and “What If” discussions that result in ideas, actions and experiments.
  • Dialogue down the organization ladder and across silos starts to take on the tone and feeling of action and forward movement.
  • Problems shift to resource issues, project priority calls and the need to create new processes and approaches for decision making.
  • Talent identification, leadership development and succession planning take on a new urgency and are called out as key priorities.

The Bottom Line for Now

The point in time when a firm decides to succeed on an agenda of change is the beginning of a great and challenging experience for everyone involved.  We work to live, but it is much more fun to live and work and grow and strive with a team that decided to be a success.  Unfortunately, many teams never move out of the abyss of “not deciding to succeed” and they decline until a crisis shocks the system or they eventually disappear from the landscape.   If your firm has not yet decided to be successful, you owe it to yourself and the firm to help move that decision along.  It’s really quite simple.  Management Team: please quit standing in the way of your own success and get on with it. 

Filed Under: Leadership, Leading Change Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Back to School!

August 25, 2008 By 6 Comments

We delivered our oldest son to college on Friday and our high school senior survived (barely) the annual “first day of school picture” in our backyard this morning.  I am busy preparing class  materials for my Fall MBA courses and it feels like summer is officially over regardless of what the meteorological calendar says.

I love “Back to School” time every year.  There’s a palpable level of excitement in the air tinged with just a bit of sadness about the end of vacations, beach reading and weekend barbecues.  It’s also a time where education is (or should be) the focal point in many households as students and parents get ready for homework, tests and projects.  And while we all know that education and learning have no season, our reliance in the U.S. Midwest on an arcane but not unpleasant long summer break (versus year-around school interspersed with shorter breaks in many other regions), makes the return to school all the more dramatic. 

One of the things we often lose as busy working adults is that sense of excitement about learning.  It’s easy to let years and even decades slip by and focus on everything but our own self-development.  Sure, we attend mandated training in our company and possibly even the periodic seminar to earn the Continuing Education Units (CEUs) mandated by our professional certifying organizations.  Unfortunately, neither of those formats creates the exhilarating sense of learning and discovery that we may have had at some time earlier in our lives, but lost along the way to becoming responsible adults.

As a hiring manager for many years and now as a leadership development trainer and consultant, I’ve talked with hundreds of people about their continuing education, and I am always surprised when people struggle to describe anything substantive in this area.  Somewhere earlier in my school career, I remember an educator banging the drum repeatedly that “learning is a life-long process,” and I believed him. 

It’s my observation that the most capable and most successful individuals are constantly seeking knowledge, relentlessly working to expand their skills and often driven by some inner-sense of the need to learn through exposure to new ideas.  If you fit this description, quit reading and get back to what you were doing.  If you have to go back decades to recall the last course you took or the last time you read a book that wasn’t on the fiction best-seller list (nothing wrong with fiction best sellers, but diversity is good), here’s a list of activities to help you rekindle your love of learning and your pursuit of knowledge:

  • Join a local book club (contact your library for ideas) and gain from the perspectives of others and the rigor of having to stay on task with your reading assignments.
  • Start and lead a book club at your place of work—you might even get the company to pay for the books!
  • Spend some time researching the state of the art in education and certifications for your profession.  If you end up feeling hopelessly outdated, it’s time to take the next step and choose a workshop, a certification program or even another degree program.
  • If you hate the idea of physically attending class, investigate on-line opportunities.  The number of programs delivered on-line is growing daily and the flexibility is great for busy people.
  • Consider a program outside your core field of expertise.  In the Chicago-area, Northwestern, University of Chicago and DePaul all have some remarkable humanities and literature programs that are designed for and filled with doctors, lawyers, teachers and professionals from every other possible vocation.  If you don’t want the rigor of a degree investigate certificate options or possibly even just auditing a course.  Individuals that I know that have gone through these courses credit them for helping open their eyes to a whole world of ideas that they didn’t know existed.
  • More reading.  Put down the trade journals for a while and pursue something in the history or biography sections.  It’s remarkable what we learn from studying what others have already gone through.
  • Executive Education can be exhilarating.  I go to Kellogg to recharge and I always leave a program with ideas to help improve my performance and my business.  Exec Ed is big business and big $, but many companies support the initiative.
  • Take advantage of tuition reimbursement dollars from your company.  Most organizations never spend what they’ve budgeted in this area.  You can help solve this problem.
  • Seek out a mentor.  Depending upon where you are at in your career, this can be an enlightening experience. If you are beyond the “seeking” phase, consider becoming a mentor.
  • Teach a class.  A wise person indicated that if you want to learn about something, sign up to teach a class about it. 
  • Volunteer to lead an initiative in the community.  Some of the best leaders and project managers that I know are found on the teams and programs in schools and churches.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

The brain is a lot like the body…use it and it stays fit and ready for action.  Allow it to atrophy and everything becomes a struggle.  You have a remarkable capacity to learn.  Whether you use it or not is up to you. 

The concept of the Learning Organization is well established and widely acknowledged as a requirement for realizing and sustaining success.  Senge described the need to not only create organizations that learn and adapt, but to realize those that become generative and to create their own futures.  Your ability to consistently add value to your organization is in large part related to your active pursuit of new ideas and new ways of looking at the world. 

What’s on your mind today?

Filed Under: Professional Growth Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Constancy of Purpose In Pursuit of Success

July 31, 2008 By 2 Comments

Deming’s first of his 14 Points for Management reads: Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive and to stay in business, and to provide jobs.

The phrase, “Constancy of Purpose” strikes me as perhaps the best way I’ve heard to describe that intangible but palpable drive that propels the most effective individuals and the most successful organizations. 

Instead of being singularly focused in pursuit of our goals, most professionals that I know struggle to find even a shred of time to work on the most important priorities.  It’s not that they don’t have the time, but rather, they allow the noise in the environment to keep them from focusing. 

Other individuals fail to recognize their true priorities, or at least they fail to understand how to connect their priorities to the firm’s priorities, and as a result, they work on what they want to, or they do little or nothing at all.  This is as much a leadership failure as it is the failure of the individual.

I marvel at top executives that talk about “empowered employees” and hold round-tables and town-hall meetings in an effort to create the illusion of focus and connectedness, but that fail to figure out how to light the fuse that creates the constancy of purpose in the minds and hearts of every single individual in the organization.  These leaders understand that they are supposed to do something, and as a result, they drive a lot of activities but don’t necessarily create a constancy of purpose in the organization. In military parlance, they are “all action and no vector.”

Organizations and individuals march forward when they have a clear goal and sight and are driven by some deep collective conviction that when successful, the world will be a better place, that they will be better professionals and that their positions and as a result, their families will be secure.  The earlier that a leader understands that creating “constancy of purpose” is a core task, the faster they are on their way to truly fulfilling their obligation and responsibility as a leader.

Creating Constancy of Purpose on Your Team:

  • Don’t assume that everyone around or under you understands why they are there and what their priorities are.  It is up to you as leader to provide this critical context.
  • Constantly focus on connecting your team’s output and activities to the organization’s big picture.
  • In the absence of a broad organization “constancy of purpose” (most environments), it is up to you as leader to manufacture one for your team.  Better yet, engage your team in creating their own overarching purpose.  Just remember that you still need to plug it into the organization’s pursuit of success, however success is defined.
  • The best ideas often reside in the minds of the quietest people.  Create opportunities for the silent but brilliant individuals to contribute.  
  • Everyone drifts from the true north of their priorities—you need to allow an appropriate amount of drift for individuals and teams and no when and how to help them reorient.
  • If you are at the top of the food chain, you do own mission, vision and values, and they need to be much more than posters on the wall in conference rooms and lobbies.  You cannot spend enough time thinking about and working on making the mission, vision and values come alive for the organization.  It’s not a campaign or a one-off meeting…your goal is to make these often trivial and trivialized words serve as the rallying cry and standards for performance and behavior.

The Bottom Line for Now:

Leadership is profession and leading is a true privilege.  This most difficult of all human endeavors—leading, motivating and guiding teams to achieve can be done by seeking compliance or providing inspiration.  I’ll place my bet on the leader that fuels the collective and individual passions of a firm’s employees.  What’s your firm’s Constancy of Purpose?

Filed Under: Leadership, Leading Change, Strategy, Surviving Lousy Leaders Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Capturing Talent and Creating Great Customer Experiences: They Go Together

July 18, 2008 By Leave a Comment

The Poor Interviewing Habits of Many Managers

You would think that we would have this problem crossed off the list by now.  I wonder how organizations and leaders in good faith can let managers recruit talent without teaching them HOW to interview and holding them accountable for executing this task effectively. 

Most organizations offer some cursory training in the compliance and legal issues of interviewing, but I’m hearing from too many job seekers with hilarious (sad, but true) examples of miserable interviews.  Consider the slob that took two smoke breaks while interviewing a talented professional.  In-between breaks, his focus was on convincing the individual that he should come to work for the firm, even though they could not pay him what he was making now.  Great recruiting!  Impressive.  This person has no business interviewing. 

Questions to consider:

  • Are the interviewing skills of your managers helping or hindering when it comes to recruiting talent?
  • Do you know what your managers are saying in interviews?
  •  What’s your organizational batting average on landing the top recruits (and then keeping them)?

Great Marketing: Building Value with The Complete Customer Experience. 

I received my new 24” Apple iMac yesterday and once again, marveled at how hard this company works at creating an incredible experience for the customer.  The unpack to on-the-internet time is about 4 minutes, but the experience transcends the simplicity of set-up.  My wife helped me with the unpacking she marveled at the detail and quality of the packaging materials.  “It feels like we are unwrapping something very special,” was her comment.

It’s hard not to be awestruck by the beautiful design and the spectacular display on your desk, and I’m going on five years with our stable of Macs growing as our two sons head to college.  The products always work and it’s still exciting to use one. 

Questions to Consider:

  • Are your customers saying the same things about your offerings?
  • Are your employees obsessed with creating great customer experiences?

The Bottom-Line: Talent Fuels Performance:

There’s no way that an organization that accommodates sloppy interviewing habits is landing and retaining the best and brightest.  As a business leader, you want your customers to constantly be surprised and delighted.  A manager that takes mid-interview smoke breaks and badgers a talented candidate about salary expectations is someone that I want working for my competitor. 

My suggestions:

  • HR, get it in gear as the trustee of talent and create systems and tools to ensure best interviewing practices are developed and reinforced. 
  • Leadership Team: It’s not all HR’s job.  Set high standards and demand excellence at all levels in the hiring process. 
  • Managers at all levels: evaluate the interviewing habits and track records of your managers and supervisors. 

There are no excuses for getting this wrong and just one reason for getting it right: success. 

Filed Under: Leadership Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
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