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: , , , , , , ,

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: , , , , , , , , , ,

Great Things Happen When Confidence and Capitalism Collide

July 29, 2008 By 1 Comment

In this time of bad financial news, high energy costs, record deficits and global turmoil, it’s exciting to meet people that see opportunities in the headlines.  I had the great fortune to meet someone recently that has the right attitude about making lemonade out of the bumper crop of lemons we are experiencing this year. 

This individual has a self-stated mission of seeing the U.S. energy independent from foreign oil  producers, and has the confidence, resources and conviction needed to just possibly pull it off (or at least make a big difference).  He’s investing heavily in all-things renewable, and he has no qualms about the fact that he will make a lot of money along the way to helping us become energy independent.  Mission, vision and a tidy profit all at the same time.  Ayn Rand would be proud.

There are more than a few leadership lessons that I take away from meeting and listening to someone very confidently talking about knocking down regulatory walls at the same time he is helping solve huge engineering and infrastructure challenges.  What might appear as insurmountable barriers to many are just problems to be solved and opportunities waiting to be realized.   It would be easy to listen to this type of talk and think of the top 100 reasons that come to mind why it will never work.  The hard job is to jump over to his side of the fence and see the only logical outcome: success!

Corporate offices are filled with Devil’s Advocates, Naysayers and Professional Critics.  These are the people that take someone’s seed of a vision and work hard to ensure that it is crushed into oblivion to serve as more grist for the big corporate mill.  Some of the best-educated, smartest people you will ever meet fill these roles.  They are so smart, that they easily see everything that can go wrong in pursuit of a vision.  My advice: do yourself a favor and fire these people and replace them with individuals that are excited by the vision and singularly focused on helping realize it.  You’ll be happy you did.

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

In Search of the High Performance Project Team

May 18, 2008 By Leave a Comment

I recently conducted a leadership workshop for a group of technical professionals at an industry conference, and as always, I walked away from the session with a couple of insights gained from the input of the participants.  One that surprised me was that after talking about characteristics of high performance project teams, I asked for a show of hands from anyone that had been a member of this type of team.  Only 5 out of 58 raised their hands.  Even discounting for the people that don’t tend to respond to "showing of hands" requests, anything even close to the 10% range here seems abysmal.

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Filed Under: Leadership, Project Management Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Are You a Strategy-Fueled Leader? (Part Two)

February 3, 2008 By 2 Comments

In an earlier post (Is Your Organization Strategy-Fueled or Strategy-Starved?), I introduced a set of simple diagnostic questions to help gauge a firm’s relative maturity around leadership and strategy. In my own experience with this informal tool, most executives and managers end up self-rating their organizations closer to Strategy-Starved than Strategy-Fueled.  Classic symptoms include lack of shared view on strategy, weak or non-existent strategy creation and refresh processes, and an organizational preoccupation with the urgent unimportant at the expense of tackling the big issues confronting the firm.

Alternatively, organizations with healthy internal strategy processes and a clear orientation on market and competitor forces tend to be led by individuals that share the characteristics and approaches of what I describe as the Strategy-Fueled Leader.  Understanding the philosophical underpinnings and key motivations of this powerful leader will help you in adapting and developing your own Strategy-Fueled leadership style. 

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