If you’ve lived through a successful migration of a business from a legacy market to a new world, you know that it’s a sometimes messy, often emotionally turbo-charged experience. Here are 8 leadership behaviors that are guaranteed to create “tripping points” for any organization or team striving to breakaway from the past:
Chances are your organization has plans to “change” and as part of your strategy, you have the challenge to identify and capitalize on new sources of growth. Those concepts make for pretty slides and create head-nodding executive and boardroom presentations. Actually doing the work is as I’m sure you know, far from simple. Here are some thoughts on the challenges to move into new growth categories while fighting the gravitational pull of the past:
Good ideas and good strategies are plentiful. The weight of the research on why strategies fail points at the execution side much more so than the idea side of the equation. In a career hanging around mostly technology organizations, the limiting factor has NEVER been on the idea front. It’s been on the management side and the ability of management to produce what I describe as the Rock Star Effect.
For leaders at all levels, there’s much to gain from James D. Murphy’s excellent book, Courage to Execute: What Elite U.S. Military Units Can Teach Business About Leadership and Team Performance. Of the many quotable and thought-provoking items in the book, one that jumps out at me is Mr. Murphy’s perspective on courage. His words: “…but remember, courage is not bravado. Courage is the confidence to act that comes from preparation.”
It’s the lack of confidence to act that I observe as a derailment factor for so many teams from senior levels to functional or project groups. Here are 5 ideas to help cultivate the confidence to act on your team:
While it’s reasonable to think that a group of intelligent, accomplished professionals…all peers, with deep individual expertise in their functional areas might be the stuff of a management dream team, reality suggests that we shouldn’t count on it. Here are two key challenges that must be overcome and 5 ideas to help jump-start senior management team performance:
Most senior management groups are teams in name only, but not in performance. Sadly, the costs to the organization of this failure to coalesce at the senior management level are heavy. Great functional performers are not automatically great team players, and the hard work of moving from a team by name to a team in performance is just that, hard work. In part 1, we kick off our series on creating high performance senior management teams with a look at some of the key conditions for successful teams and an exploration of the 4 key areas senior management teams fail and flail when it comes to pursuing high performance.
In an article in the Sunday Chicago Tribune, Edward Lampert, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Sears Holding Corp offers, “We don’t have a sales problem. What we have is a profit problem, and that’s what we’re intending to address.” Mr. Lampert, I respectfully suggest that you have a lot of problems in your shrinking, unidentifiable former retail empire. However, characterizing the situation as a profit problem is off the mark.
It’s all too easy to let ourselves off the hook for the performance of our teams and team members. Here are 9 sets of truly stark-naked, challenging questions that every manager must hold himself or herself accountable to asking and answering:
Of the eight valuable leadership lessons shared in the HBR article, “Ferguson’s Forumla” (subscription or $), number 2, “Dare to Rebuild Your Team” is critically important and often bypassed in the workplace due to friction, tentativeness on the part of managers and HR groups and lack of vision and courage on the part of managers. Sadly, in too many cases, we allow a number of challenging but controllable impediments to get in our way of doing the right thing. These 4 are…
There’s no formula, no strategy, no approach to building a great business that allows you to short circuit the need for great people. If you’re facing this issue, here are a few thoughts to help you get this equation for success right:
