The Pain Of Mourning Alone…

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It’s the death you mourn alone that hurts the most.

 

I have to warn you up front: this one is going to read more like a philosophy statement and less like a statement on leadership or strategy than my usual posts. I hope you’ll understand.

A year or so ago, I had a conversation with a crusty, tough, absolutely stoic executive. He had completed countless restructurings, fired and hired multitudes of people, and extracted value from untold situations that others might not have been able to find. He had been through many tough times as an individual and as a professional, and I had never seen him respond with any emotion, much less sadness.

And then he told me about the death of his dog, and he crumbled. He told me what a mess he was at the death of his longtime companion, how he had been reduced to tears at even the thought of losing his pup. It was enough to make me go home and contemplate…

Without resorting to psychoanalysis of this particular case, let me just put it this way: It’s plausible to say that the most acute pain one can feel is the pain of mourning alone, the pain of not having others to share grief with. It’s the pain that nobody else can understand, because they never experienced the subjective joy that has been lost.

But why write about this on the blog of a strategy consulting firm? Good question. I’ll give you two examples of why this lonesome mourning is relevant to top-level strategists and executives. First though, let me let you in on a secret:  Senior executives have to deal with many lonely circumstances.  Understanding that executives mourn completely alone on some topics is tantamount to understanding their role in the world; to those below, the CEO looks like he has it all, but you may not know what he’s dealing with behind the scenes.

What?  No way.  You’d take a half-mil a year to be lonely any time, am I right? Well, sure.

Maybe.

But suppose that behind the scenes, your board or your CEO is actively working toward removing you from your position in the firm; while you’re conducting your day-to-day duties both pleasant and not, you know there’s a target on your back, and no one else does. Maybe some of you would be perfectly comfortable with having to glad-hand and present to the crowd of employees while knowing that your board or CEO is in the process of seeking your silent ouster, but some of you would not.  Either way, the emotional work required to maintain “state” duties while being silently attacked is an example of the emotional work of mourning in solitude.  That is, it’s a pain unlike any other, and part of it is that you’re experiencing that pain alone. The more you as the executive like your role and your team, the harder it will be for you to go through this alone.

In addition, the (solitary) pain for you increases the more ham-handed your board or CEO is in seeking your exit.  Having witnessed about a half-dozen botched senior executive firings from various points of view, I can tell you that there are both dignified and undignified ways to achieve a desired departure.

Which brings me to my second point.

Strategy involves big decisions including big resource moves, and sometimes, these kinds of decisions do involve putting people on islands and forcing them to deal with their plights alone.  It may be the sales leader who’s losing a territory, the executive who faces reassignment or termination, or the machine operator who now has to go from running a beloved machine to managing inventory.

All of these persons could–not necessarily will but could–have to go through their own personal mourning periods, alone, and you as a leader can recognize their losses and respect their dignity or dismiss them with no concern. Choose dignity. You never know when your executive decision has just murdered the pet of some otherwise stoic and crusty-tough player on your team, so it might be best for us to think about that when we foist change on our organizations.

This is not to say, “Don’t change.”  It’s to say, “Don’t be a jerk about it,” because you don’t know what others are going through, and—for you yourself as well as for anyone affected by your decisions—it’s the death you mourn alone that hurts the most.

 

 

What Is A Leader, Really?

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In a world dominated by prescriptions and pithy sayings about how to be a good leader, sometimes you only need to act to be a leader.

 

What is a good model of leadership?  Quick, tell me. Strengths based? Fear based? Skill based? Self leadership? Team leadership?  Enterprise leadership? Level 5 leadership?

I’m reminded today that sometimes, the key to leadership is not to find your leadership “model” but instead to simply practice leadership. In other words, I can describe to you what a level 5 leader is, but I can’t really teach you how to become one; you have to act on that yourself.

For the record, “level 5 leaders” come in a few different flavors.  I’ve always been partial to the John Maxwell definition:  People follow you because of who you are and what you represent.

After countless discussions with hundreds of people in management, rank and file, and executive roles, I can boil leadership down to one thing:  Action.  Leaders take action.  Now, they might take action to prevent someone else from making a mistake, but such an action is still action. Sales leaders find ways to sell. HR leaders find ways to enable organizational effectiveness. Research leaders drive action toward breakthroughs.  Action is the common thread.

But what often passes for action is actually position.  Calling a meeting is certainly an action, but it isn’t capital “A” Action; it’s merely an act of position or power.  Leadership, like the prime mover on a locomotive, is about action that compels others to action.

So what brings this to mind?

For years, I have been fascinated by a couple of guys who call themselves Team Hoyt.  Dick and Rick Hoyt have completed more than 1,100 endurance races together since 1977, including dozens of marathons and 6 Ironman distance triathlons.

The catch?

Rick is a quadriplegic with cerebral palsy and Dick is his dad.   One day, Rick told his dad that he wanted to run a race, and Dick obliged, pushing Rick for 5 miles to come in second to last.  Rick told Dick he enjoyed racing, and the rest is history. Here is your link, see for yourself.

What model of leadership do Dick and Rick Hoyt represent?  I’d argue it’s one of action.  Personally, and as a father, I get breathless watching this father’s dedication to his son’s enjoyment.

Dick took Rick’s motivation and made it his own.  He became the engine for decades of amazing feats.  He is the model of action that I think many leaders miss out on, carrying someone less capable but feeding off of the act of service and the enjoyment it brings.

In our own lives, we may read all the books we want on leadership and take all the advice we can get on the topic, and I’m all for that. But we may also make all the excuses possible about how our team wasn’t skilled enough or we missed out on the right hire. We might also just be frustrated with our organizations, but none of that will get you anywhere.

We talk about servant leaders, but we rarely talk about servant competitors.  Dick Hoyt is one, and you and I can be, too. Just find the inspiration you can find, and use it to put yourself in action.

I Am Legend, But I Shouldn’t Be

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As change agents, we must not become what we hate.

 

Vampires.

They were everywhere.

In Richard Matheson’s classic book I Am Legend, the protagonist, Robert Neville, is the sole survivor of a pandemic that has left the rest of the human population converted to vampires.  Those who know the book and not the movies (especially the Will Smith version) know that the vampires could still talk and interact.  They could, eventually, be coherent individuals–still infected with a terrible disease that prevented them from being in the sun.

Neville, the last uninfected person standing, goes about his nights barricaded from the night stalking vampires–studying their evolution and weaknesses. And he goes about his days hunting them down and killing them while they sleep.  He drives stakes into their hearts with aplomb.

Every night, the vampires stand at his barricaded door…calling his name.

Eventually, Neville is captured.  He recognizes, after his capture, that the society of vampires that has formed now views him as the monster.  He has become the stuff of legends… the boogeyman who kills “good” vampires in their sleep.

I am legend.

The insight

What happens when the radical change agent goes too far?

What happens when noble goals like turning around a company or re-invigorating a culture get personal?

I’ve seen (and been) in situations where the radical change agents, focused on protecting or implementing the “good society” of their dreams or experience, get off track. It gets personal.  Everybody around them becomes a vampire to slay.

Their vampires might be in the form of people who represent the “old” culture of a company.

Or, their vampires might be in the form of people who simply won’t do things the way the change agent wants them done.

The change agent–a new executive or consultant, usually–wants a new culture or a new way of doing thigns. So, he or she goes about studying the vampires.  He identifies weaknesses, patterns, and ways of disposing of them.

He becomes a drop dead vampire killer.

But something happens on the way.

On the way, the notion of a “good society” gets left behind.  Killing vampires becomes the end in itself.

Where do you see this transference of a noble goal for a personal one?

Well, in companies that have gone through significant turmoil, vampire killers look like cost cutters.  They get so good at their craft that they take their eyes off the reason for cutting costs in the first place. As times improve, they kill the company’s mojo.

In companies that emerged from periods of zero financial discipline, the killers look like the spreadsheet artists. They work to the right of the decimal and find a way to control every “vampire,” but they lose sight of why.  Discipline becomes an end in itself.

In companies with highly innovative pasts facing uncertain futures, the vampire killers often look like old line leaders who “protect” their innovative heritage at the cost of the future of the company.  They kill off the vampires that look like spreadsheet jockeys. They resist any change whatsoever, even when it’s fully in line with the “good society.”  They are vampire killers.

The lesson

The lesson, then, I suppose is this:  Check your premises.

If you lash out at the old guard (or secretly harbor the desire to terminate them) because, well, you have power and they are the old guard, you might be on your way to becoming a legend.

If you destroy anyone who represents the “other” just because they are other, then you might be on your way to legendary status.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, if you find yourself killing vampires just because somebody else said to–with no connection to the good society–then you are simply a legend enabler.  Lots of people pursue agendas triangulated solely from their impressions of what some other vampire killer wants.

Life is too short to only slay vampires.  Don’t become a legend.  Don’t let it be personal. Have a purpose beyond the practice.

Robert Neville started out by killing vampires to eradicate a disease.  He then grew to hate vampires, and became their killer for sport.  Even when the vampires in his story had a point, he still killed them.  He became a legend because he lost sight of his goals.

He became the vampire.

As change agents, we must not become what we hate.

The Most Important Distinction A CEO Makes

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As CEO, be explicit about the state of conflict you face, and only go to war when it’s fully warranted.

 

“The board looks at us like we are the Navy Seals,” the executive told me. “We agree on a number and go get it—year in and year out—and we need someone on the team to soften that view.”

The exec was looking for a “softener” in the form of a person who could put a strategic wrapper around what amounted to a reputation for being single-minded financial performers. The Navy Seals comparison might have even been a little strong since the half-dozen or so Navy Seals I know would say that frogmen rarely just “follow orders.”  That’s what the Marines do, and they do it well, but it’s not as sexy to compare yourself to leathernecks.

But I digress. The gist is that the “person” the executive was looking for would be sorely misplaced. Let me tell you why.

Wartime vs. Peacetime

When it comes to C-level executives, there really are two different leadership mindsets: wartime and peacetime. This is covered very well by author, venture capitalist, and former CEO Ben Horowitz on his blog, here. I’m going to take a slightly different angle than Ben and say that a great executive can dial up both mindsets, but he or she has to be explicit about it. Specifically, in wartime, there is no tomorrow, and in peacetime, it’s all about tomorrow.

I write a lot about respect and healthy strategic outlooks for high-performing organizations, but I don’t spend a lot of time on financial and value-based performance. Why?  Because it’s a prerequisite; If you don’t create value or enable it as an executive, you’re probably not going to cut it. As I wrote nearly a year ago: Performance is the prerequisite. The latest management article on how mindfulness unlocks your team’s performance is all nice, but financial performance is where the median CEO is going to be evaluated. So, balancing performance needs and organizational “health” is, fundamentally, what value-based strategy is all about. In the purest sense, and in the short term, performance and health can be highly conflicting, and that is why executives—really leaders of any stripe—need to manage the balance, which is where the wartime/peacetime mindset conflict comes into play.

A wartime mindset means that decisions get made, by me, every day. It means I don’t have time for debate and discussion, that emotion and, yes, intensity are a part of the puzzle. In wartime, there is no comfort in comfort—it’s win or else. You fight through injury.  You forego pleasantries. Wartime mindsets are most appropriate in business during times of economic crisis, customer crisis, or product transition/launch/retirement, during deals, and, most importantly, during times of competitive attack. As Horowitz puts it, during times of existential threat.

In wartime, a leader makes an objective or else. Take that hill!  Hold that beach!  Cut 50 FTE!  Close that deal!  They are all the same. Mind if I curse? Was I rude? Oh, you didn’t like that I threw that document on the table? It bothers you to have to work past 7?  Comes with the territory. It takes a strong stomach. Suck it up. It’s wartime.

A peacetime mindset is one of building. It means that studies can be done. It means that I might defer a decision for a year (or more in some companies) because…bluntly…I don’t have to make it. It’s where investment and improvement come into play. It’s the mindset that focuses on people’s careers, the future of the company, and the weaknesses that need to be addressed (but not until the next employee conference). As Horowitz puts it, it’s the time to “focus on expanding the market and reinforcing the company’s strengths.”

It is a mistake to think of wartime as better than peacetime. They are different, and executives must understand the difference. Some will be much better leaders in peacetime than in wartime, although that’s beside the point.

What’s important is that great companies are built  with a peacetime mindset and sustained with a wartime mindset.

And so, the most important distinction

Executives, especially CEOs, must be explicit about the state of war a company is in; that distinction drives all others. Why must the CEO be explicit?  Because it’s not always obvious to others in the organization. To use the U.S. military’s old DEFense CONdition ratings:  When the CEO is at DEFCON 1 (signaling nuclear war) and the organization is at DEFCON 5 (signaling peacetime), things get discombobulated.

A CEO might be at war based on things the CEO and only the CEO knows, while the rest of the organization might be at peace because, well, things seem to be going well. This is a recipe for disaster as the CEO continually churns through people, disregards ideas,  and thinks short term without real rhyme or reason. If you operate as if it’s wartime and everyone thinks it’s peacetime, you will demoralize your people. CEOs who have overweening focus on the short term (layoffs, cost cutting, and general pressure) while extolling their company’s strong financial performance year in and year out run into this problem. They create cognitive dissonance in the organization.

A CEO might be at peace in an organization that knows it’s at war, and then the opposite thing happens: the CEO is fiddling with transformation or branding while the customer base is burning. If you operate as a peacetime CEO and everyone thinks it’s wartime, you will lose credibility quickly. There’s a reason we still talk about Nero: a CEO who fails to acknowledge that there are existential threats will lose his or her organization.

That is why leaders, CEOs and others, need to be clear on how they view their worlds. They need to be clear that DEFCON 1 behavior (slashing product lines and replacing people) is only warranted by DEFCON 1 threats, so they need to get people on the same page. Everyone also needs to be clear when DEFCON 5 behavior (delaying decision on a project viewed as critical by others or by a faction within the company) is warranted as well.

This is the most important distinction a CEO will make in the day-to-day operation of a company:  Wartime or peacetime.

A cautionary note on “artificial” wartime

Yeah, but we want a team of warriors, you say. So you continually keep the pressure on through artificial means—even lying to people about the true state of things to make them seem more dire—in order to ensure that people keep an edge or a warrior mindset.

I get it. It’s sexy, like saying you’re a Navy Seal. But it’s also dangerous.

From analyses on the topic of combat fatigue, it’s a known fact that normal people cannot sustain a wartime mindset for an extended period of time. Those who are in active, continuous combat for more than a month generally start to lose effectiveness. Those who are in active continuous combat for more than a couple of months typically become psychiatric casualties. This is true in actual combat, and I’d propose that it’s true in figurative combat.

Dave Grossman, a researcher on the science of combat and killing, outlines from an earlier study that after the beaches of Normandy in World War II, 98% of soldiers who survived constant combat for 60 days had become psychiatric casualties. The other 2%?  They were characterized as “aggressive psychopathic personalities.”

Let that sink in for a second.

The negatives of manufacturing a wartime mindset for your organization are legion. Not only do you (1) place focus on survival vs. building as outlined above, you (2) create an environment in which normal people struggle to thrive for any extended period of time and (3) facilitate the rise of psychopathic personalities who actually can handle the sustained pressure.

It makes no difference whether the artificial pressure is placed by the CEO herself or by some proxy, another C-Level executive or consultant tasked with “cracking the whip” so that the CEO can be the good cop.

So, be explicit about the DEFCON you face, and only go to war when it’s fully warranted. Again, this is the most important distinction you will make as CEO.

While executives (like the one in my opening story) may recognize that their boards see them as mercenaries who propagate a state of war because they act like it, they can’t solve that by adding peaceniks to the team; the peaceniks won’t be heard if the entire organization is charged for combat or thinks the C-level executives only expect combat mentalities. Culture, as I’ve written before here, will crush even the best change agents. The executives have to acknowledge—themselves—a credible state of war or peace within the organization and actually live it out.

And if they can’t change?  Well…

5 Ways To Be More Strategic This Year

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In strategy, it’s sometimes the little things that make you better. Here are 5 for the new year.

 

It’s the new year.  2016.  And, of course with the new year comes a boatload of resolutions.  Perhaps you want to lose weight, exercise more, leave the iPhone at home one day a week, go to church, play more, or spend more time with your kids.  Resolutions of this sort come with a goal (pounds, hours, days, instances, etc.).  But, how do you resolve to do something more abstract or squishy?  How do you resolve to be a better person?  How do you resolve to love your partner more?

Appropriate to this post, how do you resolve to be more strategic?  Let me take that one and develop it in a way that almost anyone can use.

On being “Strategic”

At its core, strategy is about perceiving, processing, and acting.  There’s not much more.  We conjure images of egghead strategists and eccentric chess grandmasters, often to create an aura around strategy. But, in reality three things define you as a strategist: perceiving, processing, and acting.

Perceiving means watching and listening. It means having the gumption to stop and understand.  It means collecting data. It means having that moment of humility when you realize that you don’t know it all.

Processing means taking the time to assess position.  It means drawing conclusions about what you know and don’t know.  It mans being analytical, but in a way that ensures positive feedback loops toward the other two foundations of strategy (that would be perceiving and acting for those reading this before their first cup of coffee) Processing tells us whether it’s time to perceive more or to act more.

Acting means moving…hopefully forward (and, knowing that sometimes forward is backwards…or sideways…but I digress)  We tend to think of strategy as planning; but it’s not. Not exactly. No great strategist omits action from his or her repertoire.

Yes, strategy is that simple… And it is magnificently complex once you dig into the myriad ways of perceiving, processing, and acting.

5 ways to be more strategic in 2016

So, you are sitting here, at the start of 2016, wondering how you can be a more strategic businessperson.  Let me offer you 5 little ways to do it. These are relevant for the entry level analyst and for the CEO.  I’d bet that it’s a rare executive who does all 5 to start the year, so I hope there is something here for everyone.

You want to be more strategic?  Then do these 5 things:

  • Talk to 5 customers – That’s right, talk to 5 customers. But, I’m going to offer you a twist…You have to talk to them when there’s no deal on the line.  Try talking to customers just to perceive and not to talk about your own value proposition or features or benefits.  Go ahead, have a cup of coffee with 5 of your customers…just because.  Ask questions.  Try not to look too smart.  You might learn something about what they need.
  • Talk to 5 competitors – This one is a bit more dicey, but in the same vein as the first one.  Find a way to learn and share with market participants in your sector. You might (and I’ll emphasize might) uncover ways of growing the market.  Treat competitors as competitors. But, try–just for a bit–to treat the game as one that involves a growing pool of opportunity vs. merely a zero sum scoreboard.  You might surprise yourself.
  • Talk to 5 employees – This one sounds simple.  It isn’t.  Too many people say “I talk to employees all day long…” but what they mean is that they talk at employees all day long.  They go to meetings, they issue perspectives and orders.  What they don’t do is seek to understand.  The more senior you are, the more isolated you get. Employee interactions start to look more like town halls and focus groups vs. human interactions. Taking time to ask questions and listen of individual employees is challenging.  Your employees may not trust you enough to be honest…but they just might.
  • Outline the three risks you must manage in 2016 – Go ahead, make the list right now.  Refine it as you talk to employees, competitors, and customers.  Have a key person who isn’t happy?  That’s a risk to manage.  Have a key customer who may defect?  Write it down.  Learn something from your conversations in the market?  Refine your view of risks.
  • Outline the three major moves you can make in 2016 – This is where perceiving and processing start to move to action.  Take a moment, today, to define how you, individually, can make game changing moves.  If this is about business strategy, perhaps we are talking about a product introduction or an acquisition of a fellow market participant.  If this is about your individual career, perhaps we are talking about education or community service, or other enhancements to you as an individual.  Write them down.  Have a point of view on major moves.  Avoid “business as usual” where you wake up and suddenly it’s August and you haven’t done a thing that looks strategic.

There you have it.  5 little ways to be more strategic in 2016.  I figure that for the average manager or executive, the things I’ve listed above amount to 20 hours of conversation and contemplation. It amounts to upping your game on perceiving by listening to individuals you may only talk at.  It amounts to upping your game on processing by understanding risks and opportunities explicitly.  And, it amounts to upping your game on acting by taking a moment, now, to confirm the big moves you might make.

Ask yourself…is being a more strategic in 2016 worth 20 hours of time? Let me know in the comments below.

Here’s to a great 2016!

 

You Have Voted

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When it comes to strategy, leadership, and life, you vote more often than you think you do.

 

Choices are everywhere.  You make them from the moment you wake up in the morning to the moment you fall fast asleep at night.

This is an article about choices…Votes, if you will.

When it comes to your life as a professional, you vote all day every day. No, it’s true. You vote for lunch (you know…”What do you want for lunch?” “Salad.” Easy, right?). You vote for when the next meeting will happen.  You may even be in a position to vote for what direction your company will go.

All of these are moments when you cast a vote.

But what about all the votes you make that you don’t even know about? The seemingly little votes that are actually huge?  You may know them as votes for poor sales strategy or a bad leader or a toxic company culture, but whatever the case, you are likely making them because you are staying put and shutting up.

One of the aspects I absolutely loved about the large professional services firm that I spent a good portion of my career within was a concept called the obligation to dissent.

The obligation to dissent was the notion that all people, whether the least tenured or the most, had the obligation to put their dissenting point of view on the table during any interaction.

Disagree with the path a strategy is taking?  Put a competing point of view out there. Think someone isn’t living up to the values espoused by the firm?  Say so. You had an obligation.  Voting “present” was not expected of you.

So how does this apply to you, today, as a professional?

I’ll give you one hint, and I ask that you act on it—here it is: Ask a question.

Yep, that’s all.

Ask a question.

You see a strategy that is poorly structured or conceived?  Ask “What about this better structured alternative?”

You see a leader who is behaving in a way that does not reflect the values of the company?  Ask “is this how you expect me to act with my people?”

You see people complaining about the status quo?  Ask “so what are we going to do about it?”

You might be listened to, and you might just retain a little bit of your own self respect.  In fact, the way people around you react to your placing a thoughtful, constructive question on the table will tell you plenty about where you stand.  Try it out.

Legendary rock band Rush has a classic track out there called Freewill, and it contains this doozy of a lyric:

“If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”

So, yes, you bear the blame for choices (or “votes”) you didn’t make. You work for an unethical leader?  Well, you voted for him, so stop complaining. You are executing a strategy that might be termed “crappy?”  Well, you voted for it. You live within a corporate culture that is toxic?  You got it:  All on you, my friend.

Some might say I’m blaming the victim here. They will say that I’m ignoring the personal situations of people who stay with bad leaders, companies, spouses, what have you.  To them I’ll say this:  You have a choice to be constructive or destructive. Endorsing a bad leader, environment, family situation, or whatever is destructive to you and to the people who are the victims of your tacit consent.

The sincerest form of constructive behavior, whether it be in forming global corporate strategies or simply deciding how to live your life, is to name the issues and work on them diligently.  If you are one who is content to run out the clock on your career by passively voting for a world you wouldn’t intentionally subject others to, just remember…

You have voted.

Google’s Team Traits and Your Executives

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On elite teams, it’s about honor, not safety

 

Google is an interesting company to say the least.

In the midst of a behemoth company that has a very thin historical record to draw from (seriously, the company is essentially 15 years old as a player on the global stage) lies a fascinating combination of entrepreneurship, hard-core, old-school competitive behavior, and analysis of people issues.

It’s that last thing that has me questioning whether Google has gotten something wrong.  A month or so ago, Google explained the traits that make its best teams click, and here’s an article that hits on the topic; it’s a quick read. The list is a little bit ho-hum for any active observer or participant in strategic management culture development—that is, clarity, purpose, dependability—except for one piece: Psychological safety.

Psychological safety. It sounds like the latest in a long line of management theory gobbledygook, but it’s not. Google (and any number of academic papers out there, and a TED talk here) basically says that people tend to stay and produce better when they believe their teams are safe places for intellectual exchange.

I have no problem with that notion—not one. In fact, it makes good sense. If I’m being listened to on my team and not belittled for the things I don’t know, I will like it better.  Makes good sense, right?

But as a practitioner who has worked at and continues to work at the top levels of organizations, I think Google’s prescription is only half right, which means partially wrong.  And the part that Google gets wrong is the part that matters to the strong functioning of the highest parts of complex organizations—the elite parts, if you will.

The higher you go, the less “psychological safety” matters…

 

Here’s the rub: In the run-of-the-mill team, psychological safety matters.  As you go higher in the organization, people worry less about “safety.”  Safety isn’t a big issue to the average executive, or at least, it shouldn’t be; an executive who is worried about safety probably is not confident enough to be in the role.

But what does matter? Honor.

In other words, this difference in perspective between that of a mid-level team member and that of an executive team member is like the difference between a weekend rock climber and a global mountaineer.  The weekend climber is signing up for an experience for which safety is key to the integrity of the experience, and death isn’t part of the deal.

The mountaineer, on the other hand, is signing up for a gig that involves making choices that could very well end in his or her death, and bad choices aren’t even necessary for the gig to end in death.  The most elite mountaineers in the world run into bad luck now and then, and death is actually a very real part of the integrity of the experience.

Thus, such is the difference between low-level and elite teams when it comes to “psychological safety.”  Low-level teams sign up for gigs that involve performance, but not necessarily at the peril of their careers if they are wrong about something. So, a safe environment for sharing encourages risk taking and less selfish political posturing, and these are important things.

Elite teams, however, with their high-stakes choices and high-level visibility, are inherently less “safe.” A career-limiting move is always possible for executives who are actually trying to get things done; safety might matter, but what really matters for these executives is that they are part of organizations—as part of the executive team or as a CEO with a board–that will act honorably on commitments and policies when things go poorly or opinions differ.

Honor, as in fulfilling agreements and obligations—that is, fair dealing in the face of adversity.

To extend the mountaineer example, a mountaineer’s mindset is to weigh risks in light of the physics of a situation.  Gravity pulls down, certain rocks have certain levels of traction, equipment holds certain loads, and muscles and bones perform in certain ways.  You want your mountaineers (and executives) to think this way.

Now imagine that the mountaineer makes a choice, but then in the middle of acting, the physics change.  Gravity suddenly pulls sideways, not down. That carabiner now only holds half a ton, not 2 tons.  The honor of the situation is compromised, and the mountaineer is doomed.

Think about the roots of effective elite team functioning as being similar to establishing the direction of gravity or the load rating of a carabiner. A fall is a fall, but a fall in which the carabiner breaks far short of its load rating and gravity dashes the climber into the rock wall at a diagonal is an entirely different matter: it can be deadly.

On an executive team, gravity is all about how things fall when there is a slip. Usually, gravity is set by policy and values, but it can also be set by the caprice of a specific executive.  There is no honor when elite leaders change the direction of gravity mid-course, unaccountably and, potentially, only for individual members of the team.

What this looks like in real life

 

Okay, so perhaps there is some interesting imagery around the mountaineer vs. the rock climber, but what does executive dishonor look like in real life?  I’ll list a few tactics, and perhaps you can take it from there.

The most common tactic is scapegoating.  It’s used by the most insecure leaders and is one of the more dishonorable moves, and it goes like this:  An executive team outlines a high-risk move for one individual to take.  The team agrees to it, and the stakes are known; that is, gravity is established for the team. Then, the individual takes the risk, and the individual takes the fall, and gravity has no effect on the rest of the team or the leader. This happens a dozen times a day in business culture.

A second tactic is the bait and switch. Gravity is established as one direction in order to elicit a decision, but it is then switched to another direction after the decision is made.  It’s a corrupt influencing tactic in any context, but is one that some executives resort to. A good example of this on a poorly functioning elite team is when the leader establishes implicit cover for a decision and then pulls the cover back after the decision is made.  It’s “I’ve got your back” writ small.  Usually, a bait-and-switch move at elite levels starts with “we agree” and ends up as “you agree.” “We agree” to spend millions of dollars on a change program slowly transforms to “you agreed” to spend the money. Gravity is switched, and only one team member falls.

Bait and switch tactics are common in recruiting and hiring—almost to the point of being the expectation vs. the exception. Some recruiters and executives will entice top talent with the promise of milk and honey—an aggressive agenda (or promise) focused on change and growth–only to reduce the talent to a real life of drudgery, order taking, and politics once the job starts. Executives who do this are typically small minded and posturing…not strategic and expansive.

The final tactic is the non-obligation move.  This one is really a test of values, and it encompasses all of the rest of honor as far as I can see: it’s the question of how organizations honor the gravity that has already been  established even when they don’t have to.  A good example of this is when executives allow ambiguity to overwhelm organizations during “good” times because they individually don’t “have” to clarify things.  All is well. The health of the organization suffers.  To paraphrase clergyman Eugene Peterson: Often the values of an organization can be measured by what its leaders do when they don’t have to do anything. Non-obligation moves are prevalent at all levels of organizations.

How to watch out for it

 

Do your due diligence, and ask around. Specifically, ask how organizations or individual teams honor their commitments to individuals over both the short and the long terms. Ask what would happen if an individual executive took a reasonable risk but failed.  Ask what the implicit contract will look like. Ask whether policies exist for tough circumstances (and whether they have been followed in the past when the circumstances arose).

In other words, be diligent.

Even more direct, and once you are actually in or around an elite team, observe.  As with all people and things, you will know (dis)honorable people by their fruit.  Watch for the hallmarks of dishonorable bureaucracies everywhere:  CYA as a course of business.  If senior executives constantly confirm their commitments and expectations, and reconfirm them in writing, but they don’t act without reciprocal confirmation, they are operating in a dishonorable senior culture. When senior executives constantly exchange explicit contracts—or say that they should have after getting burned—you can bet that the culture is one that is based on contracts and not honor.  An elite team should have the honor necessary not to have its individuals constantly protecting themselves from shifts in gravity.

So what?

 

This topic should be dear to any executive, particularly to those who want to either join or build cultures of honor.  I care deeply about this after having witnessed dozens of senior management teams, including a handful that could be categorized clearly as dishonorable.  The dishonorable ones have invariably struggled to attract and retain talent, and as a result, they have struggled to form and enact any semblance of a strategic approach to growth and improvement.

If you are reading this and are a part of a mid-management level team, you probably get the notion of psychological safety implicitly: Teams are effective when people feel like they can share without repercussions for them personally. Google at least got this right.

The danger lies at the elite levels, where the safety to share shouldn’t really matter; if a person is on an elite team and won’t share perspective, they aren’t elite in the first place and should be removed; at the elite level, honor matters, and even a choice well made can still result in removal from the team.  The world is a tricky place, but what matters to honorable executives is that they will be treated honorably in return, and Google may have gotten that wrong.

Elite executives don’t mind taking big risks, but they do mind when gravity can’t be estimated. Thus, the call to action on this one is simply this: Watch out.  It only takes an instance or two of dishonorable behavior to label an organization and its leaders as either actively or passively dishonorable. If you’re in a situation like this, know what you are getting, and if you’re contemplating going there, weigh your options closely: There are other fish in the sea.

In sum, if you are an executive leading an elite team, the answer is short:  Establish gravity and honor commitments.  Dishonorable executives are well known and can have long lives, but they have short reputations

On elite teams, it’s about honor, not safety. Now, go figure out which way is up.

As Yahoo’s Case Shows…Somebody is Always Watching

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Somebody, somewhere is doing the analysis…

 

Yahoo made a big splash by hiring Marissa Mayer as its CEO.  The bloom has come off the rose a bit.  As is sometimes the case with CEOs who are celebrities or otherwise insulated from common criticism, Mayer has been defended heartily for a few years for her decisions and record.

But the criticisms are accelerating.  More and more people are calling out the transparency of the empress’ clothing.  To wit, fund manager Eric Jackson, in a scathing 99 slide document released recently, outlined all the reasons that Yahoo’s supposed turnaround is no such thing.  He goes from comparable analysis to comparable analysis, then to a breakdown of the business, itself, then to a breakdown of other shareholders’ proposed plans…

…and then to an excoriation of the Mayer “strategy” overall, from the hire to the actual execution of change within Mayer’s tenure.  And, it’s a bloodbath.

This slide says it all:

What shareholders got instead…

When a “transformative” CEO’s tenure can be summed up as diametrically opposed to the “story” that got her hired, you know one thing:  The CEO hasn’t delivered.

Now, the Mayer story is getting a lot of play because of the potential severance package she stands to receive if Yahoo’s board actually fires her (valued at up to $110 million by some estimates).  That’s all fine…A deal is a deal.  But what is interesting here is that Yahoo has gone years with Mayer as its CEO, running a play that is clearly not what was advertised.  Just look at the slide above.

So, what’s the point?

The point in this case is less about Yahoo and more about the perils of “story” sales from executives.  Yahoo, in fact, is one tough turnaround situation.  As Jackson outlines, remove the Alibaba stock holding and what you’ve got is a very, very sick business.

What about “story” sales?  Well, no matter how good the story, somebody is watching the results.  Your CEO may “say” that new products are going to drive the company to new heights, but at some point that check has to be cashed.  Did they deliver on new product sales?  Did the video match the audio?

Have you been sold a bill of goods?

It’s an important question for shareholders everywhere. But, more importantly, it’s an important vignette for executives everywhere.

When it comes to highly visible executive roles, a story can only go so far.  At some point, the numbers will tell.  At some point, the power of personality and persuasion will cross the threshold of shareholders’ own financial interests.  Lincoln said it:  You can’t fool all the people, all the time.

At some point it becomes clear that somebody is watching.  And when that is clear, you no longer own the “story,” dear CEO.

The Yahoo case shows this in spades.

 

When the Core Cracks

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How’s your team doing…Really?

In the world of Collegiate football, we saw an interesting lesson on team yesterday.  It goes to the notion of “Core Cracking” first put forth by longtime NBA coach Pat Riley years ago…Namely that when the core of your team cracks, you are in trouble.

The Story:

The defending national champion and erstwhile Big 10 juggernaut Ohio State Buckeyes endured their first regular season conference defeat in years yesterday.  The Buckeyes fell to the Michigan State Spartans 17 – 14 on a last minute field goal.  Close game, worthy opponent (well, worthy to all but the most insufferable Buckeyes), tough loss, great team.  Not much to argue there.

However, after the game, the team’s core cracked.  Elite Ohio State running back Ezekiel Elliot attacked his coaches’ play calling acumen in the press and announced his intention to leave the school for the professional ranks.

“Honestly, this is my last game in the Shoe, I mean, there’s no chance of me coming back next year.”

and

“I deserve more than [12] carries. I really do. I can’t speak for the playcaller. I don’t know what was going on.”

That was followed quickly by the announcement (on Twitter, of all places) of last year’s hero quarterback, Cardale Jones, that he would not return to Ohio State.

https://twitter.com/CJ12_/status/668222222906040321/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

This has resulted in some amusing posts and analysis, like this doozy from Lost Lettermen:

But, there’s more to this story.

A quick analysis

I’m not one to elevate 18 – 22 year old young men in entertainment industries to hero status.  Full stop.  That’s why you rarely see me leverage college sports in discussing leadership and strategy.  Young people are…young.  It’s clear that Elliot and Jones were both very disappointed in a tough loss; and they put their disappointment on display in some very public ways.

But…

They also displayed a very important leading indicator of a team core that has cracked.  They brought things out of the locker room that would have best been handled inside it.

They also betrayed a more selfish focus in a very public forum than one would necessarily expect from team sport athletes and entertainers.  They showed, in moments of honesty, that it was time to move on.

To be clear, that’s fully okay.  It’s also not a team mentality.

Applications for us all

Any one of us is at any point a team member or leader. That applies to family and it applies to work.  We lead or are part of teams.

But a team isn’t just a group of people doing their jobs.  It’s a group of people doing a job.  Note the difference.

When you cultivate a group of people who focus on doing their jobs, and who focus on the paycheck that job gets them, you have only cultivated a means to an outcome.  A team, with all its implications of loyalty, leverage, and performance, is far, far more than that.

The Ohio State University has had an outstanding football program for a long time, and is really more the object of this post and not the subject.  The subject is team.  If you have a team, it has a core.  If that core cracks, you no longer have a team.

When your most senior leaders repeatedly reference their own self interests, their own careers, and their own intentions more often than those of the overall organization…Well…

Dear Strategist: Euthanize Your Gerbils

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When it comes to strategy…  The first thing we do, let’s kill all the gerbils.

On the heels of an article I wrote a couple of weeks ago titled “Being Strategic Means Naming Your Elephants,” I thought it useful to go to the other end of the spectrum…

Do you ever find yourself focused on the wrong things?

It’s ok… Admit it.

Sometimes we all get focused on things that don’t really matter to our missions.  They come in the form of shiny objects or minor brush fires that we chase to either develop or quash.

An old colleague of mine once referred to such things as “gerbils.” Gerbils are small, hairy, cute, hungry, and long-tailed. In other words, gerbils are a waste of time.

And we need to euthanize as many of them as we can.

First, a little background from my own professional life

As someone who has historically kept a very full calendar, and who continues to do so today, I have an interesting means of testing where I spend my time…  I can simply look at my calendar.

A couple of years ago, while serving as an executive in a diversified firm, I did such an analysis of my time. I was able to pull my calendared time into a spreadsheet, categorize it, and look at the results. For the record–or perhaps the hall of shame in some people’s books–the analysis covered 1,943 work hours over the course of 272 days. That’s an average of 7.14 hours a day, including weekends…about 50 hours scheduled per week.

I found that a significant minority of my time was being spent on activities for a function that was outside of my own organization’s mission.  It was remarkable to see that being “helpful” and focusing on what was at any moment labeled “important” in the micro led to what an objective observer might call a dilution of mission through allocation of time available in the macro.

To be clear, I found the split of time rewarding because I was able to get things done. I was able to help people.  I was running to fire, helping where the help was needed most.

And I was probably wrong.

I shared the analysis with other key executives and with my team and quickly explained what I saw as “wrong” with my time allocation.  I then set about to do more of the things that were important to my own mission, and to do less of (or delegate) those things that were not important.

I guess you could say I set out to euthanize the gerbils in my own agenda.

But teams and corporations have gerbils, too…and that’s where this gets juicy.

Gerbils in your company

Gerbils, like the unnamed elephants that I mentioned in my previous animal-analogy post, suck the life out of your agenda.  They tend to come in the form of executive flights of fancy or risk-averse “toe in the water” efforts.  They, by definition, are:

  • Small – They generally don’t “move the needle” for the agenda they embed within.
  • Hairy – They come with risks or needs for attention that are completely out-sized to their impact.
  • Cute – For some reason, they tend to captivate attention…examples are new products that have no market or initiatives that are vain pursuits.
  • Hungry – They eat a lot of resources to execute, and those resources have a much higher return on investment when deployed elsewhere.
  • Long-tailed – This is where the gerbil analogy really takes flight–your gerbils have long tails…they last a long time…they are persistent.

With that description, are you seeing any gerbils in your company’s corporate agenda?  Perhaps it’s a new product that’s eating up time and money that should be used to grow the company elsewhere.  Maybe it’s a cautious deployment of resources in a sub-scale manner against an opportunity that management just isn’t sure about.  Maybe it’s an initiative focused on engaging employees that the employees already view as a cynical ploy.  Maybe in your company it’s the kabuki theater of strategic planning itself that is a gerbil.

You get it?  Small, Hairy, Cute, Hungry, Long-tailed…akin to worthless.

In the midst of a strategy development discussion, a leadership team of one mid-sized company found 130 strategic initiatives to place on its agenda.

130!

It’s a rare management team that can generate much less manage 130 truly strategic initiatives.

Time to kill some gerbils.

But how?

Some of your are sitting and thinking, “Yep, I see the gerbils in my company’s agenda,” but you may be missing the point:  Gerbils exist at all levels of abstraction.  For a corporate leadership team, a gerbil could be a sub-scale acquisition millions of dollars in size but made for looks, not impact.  For a business unit leader, gerbils might be a product launch hundreds of thousands of dollars in size that is already DOA.  For an individual, it might be the waste of time on Facebook or useless blogs (not this one, others…).

Gerbils are everywhere, which is why I started with the personal anecdote.  If you can become better at finding the gerbils in your own agenda, you can get better at finding them in your company’s agenda.

All this means is that one person’s elephant is another person’s gerbil.  A circumspect leadership culture acknowledges this.  They also realize when they need help. A healthy fact base (like my calendar exercise above) can give them a start.  When it comes to corporate agendas, sometimes they simply need an outsider to help structure and organize the discussion. Sometimes they need outsiders to bring the fact base to bear.

Your mileage may vary.

In our practice at WGP, we have engaged with clients looking for structural support on their corporate and business unit agendas.  In this type of engagement, we play a challenging and facilitative role for management.  We have also engaged deeply with corporate teams and business unit teams who need a more intense and full understanding of facts and options.

In any event, a great strategist focuses on naming elephants and murdering gerbils.

May you have success in doing the same.

I would love to have your thoughts on this topic in the reply section below.