Tag Archive for: Leadership

I learned this from my worst bosses…

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Even the worst bosses teach you things.  Here are a few from my experience.

Have you ever had a bad boss?  I don’t mean somebody you just didn’t click with, I mean a really bad boss.  They didn’t have to be a bad person (though they might be).  They just might not have been competent bosses.

That ringing a bell yet?

The cool thing about a bad boss is that short exposure to one can actually make you a better leader.  Seeing what “bad” is is almost as valuable as seeing what “great” is when it comes to leadership. I’ve learned a few lessons from bad bosses.  Here are some that are the lessons that come to mind.

Never throw things.  I once had a boss whose tantrums were epic.  You just waited for something to hit the floor or wall.  I had another boss who already had a bad reputation and who “playfully” threw something at a person who asked him a question, only to be thought of as attacking the person physically.  In both cases the intimidation factor wasn’t good for team morale.  If you must express your displeasure physically, consider clenching your teeth or at least throwing things in the privacy of your home.

Never use physical means to stifle a conversation. I once had a boss who would raise his hand into people’s faces when he thought they should stop talking.  He might as well have just turned his back on them. Needless to say he was an ineffective leader.  If you must cause someone to stop talking, consider thoughtfully asking a question directed to another person in the room instead.

Never start a feedback conversation with a speech about why you are right. Feedback is about giving and taking.  I once had a boss who thought it smart to start any feedback conversation with a preface that sounded like “I have a lot of experience on these issues and you do not, so let me give you some feedback.”  Talk about killing the give and take…Consider offering the feedback and the rationale for it, instead of your resume.

Never go passive on topics of compensation or promotion. I once had a boss who was very busy.  They were too busy to discuss HR matters.  That led to very long times between discussions of critical compensation issues. If you want to lose your team, ignore them when they bring up comp issues.  It’s ok to say “no” to the discussion, but not to ignore it.

Never play games with your subordinates. I once had a boss whose go to question when a subordinate brought a problem to them was “what have you tried to do so far?”  That is a fine question; but it was used as a sort of lever to get to a “more work” answer vs. a “I’ll help you solve the problem” answer.  The subordinate could say “I’ve tried A, B, C, and D” and the boss would answer with “well, let’s not talk until you’ve tried X, Y, and Z as well.”  While this may sound helpful, it actually was utterly demoralizing because the staff new raising any issue only resulted in more work vs. possible solutions.  Consider offering feedback and support on what has been tried vs. just assigning more work.

Now, to be clear, these lessons are a bit nuanced.  I’m also in no way innocent of them. I’ve thrown things a time or two (no, I’m not proud of it). These are also items that are somewhere between great manager who does everything right and psychopath boss. If I’ve had a boss who slept with a subordinate and cheated financially, do I really need to list that as “what not to do?”

How about you?  Do you have any “bad boss” stories that come with lessons?  Consider sharing them. 

How to keep culture from crushing progress

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Big ideas aren’t enough to change things. You need powerful sponsorship.

This anecdote has played out more times than reruns of the original “Star Trek” series, so bear with me as I set it up.

The situation

Geoff Wilson

A highly motivated, energetic, experienced new hire is brought into the organization as an agent of change by the business unit’s president. The new hire is brought in because she thinks differently and has rich and relevant experience in organizations that look the way her new organization’s president and leadership team say they want the business unit to look over the long term. She is the poster child for effective organizational change leadership in appearance, word, and deed.

The new hire does what all highly motivated, experienced hires do: She gets to work. Carrying the president’s imprimatur by virtue of being hired, she starts propagating new ways of doing things—perhaps on processes like project management or in performance areas such as pricing or cost efficiency. She’s driven. She’s smart. She’s organized. She’s logical. She’s practical. She is, quite possibly, right.

The president of the company, sensing the strong glow of a great hire, lets her “do her thing” without guiding or intervening. After all, that’s what great leaders do: They let great people go “do their thing.” Right?

The organization’s leaders quickly sense a world of pain coming from changes to the ways things have always been done. The changes aren’t necessarily bad—just different.

Fast forward to a year later. Our motivated change agent is watching the clock. She’s waiting for 5:48 p.m. every day (that’s just late enough to not signal that she’s thrown in the towel). Her great ideas sit on white boards and in documents across the organization. But progress has been slow. She’s figured out that the organization really didn’t want all of her resume—just a few parts. Her job is easy. Her life is hard.

The leadership team, having figured out that she had no power in the first place, decided that the change agent’s recommendations, while smart, were too painful for them to implement. They have marginalized her through passive and deliberate pseudo-compliance and back-channel opting out. When one functional leader delays participation with good reason, the rest simply follow suit.

The president has entertained every grievance. By making backroom agreements on who needs to comply and who doesn’t, he has undermined the change agent—unintentionally, but still.

The organization likes her. But, hey, “Those great ideas could never work here.” And besides, the president sure didn’t seem to mind that key leaders opted out.

The president wonders why there hasn’t been more traction on his new hire’s ideas, but in reality, he just likes the fact that the business unit is performing well this year and that everyone will achieve nice bonuses.

The change agent polishes up her resume.

When our once-motivated, now-crushed change agent leaves for greener pastures, the organization gives itself a self-righteous pat on the back. See, they were right all along.

The change agent and the president (if he is a person of vision and integrity) wonder what happened.

Here’s what happened

First, the president quickly moved from a position of obvious sponsorship (he hired the change agent, after all) to a role of spectatorship. He removed the most important tool in his change agent’s toolkit: the lever of executive sponsorship.

Second, the change agent—armed with the confidence that her ideas would work and work well—fell into the trap of idealistic pursuit vs. practical and pragmatic progress.

Both have ignored the practical realities of power—call it influence, pull, or realpolitik. They misjudged the power of an organization’s culture to reject even the best ideas in favor of the status quo. They let the organization and its culture crush a valuable addition to its midst.

Don’t kid yourself: Culture is heavy. The weight of any organization’s culture will crush any change agent.

So what?

There’s no such thing as a “fire and forget” change agent. The agent—whether in the form of an initiative team or a seemingly heroic individual like our anecdotal new hire above—must have real power.

In any change program or worthwhile process, there comes a point in the organization’s journey where the broad population realizes that change is hard. They have an “Oh, shit” moment. At that moment, there must be enough momentum and felt need (or other sources of power) to move the change forward. Otherwise, change won’t happen.

In turnarounds, the momentum and felt need is easy. Either we perform or we’re gone. The change agent can drive change with that implication alone.

In improvement situations, the reality is far more nuanced. Going from good to better is hard. Really. How often do you see people who are in great shape make a New Year’s resolution to get in better shape? Not often. They make choices that diversify their focus vs. intensifying it. They want to spend more time with their kids, take up art, or shoot for that promotion at work. Their health is secondary because, well, they already have health.

That’s the problem with change in organizations performing “OK” or, especially, performing great but in an unhealthy manner (a diversified business with a few bright spots that carry the portfolio comes to mind). The organization—convinced it’s “doing alright”—sees the change as an annoyance. This is especially true in the absence of a transparent agenda. And that’s where power comes in.

Executive sponsors and change agents have to agree on the source of power that will ensure the change. And they must follow through on it!

The agenda must be explicit and have teeth. The change agent has to be able to walk into any room with the full blessing of power, and with a ready set of implications for non-participants and opt-outs. But the change agent should never have to articulate them!

For the other leaders in the organization, opting out must be a visible, deliberate action that is advertised to the highest levels of sponsorship. Opting out has to have consequences. Or else, why bother?

Practical points

Cognitive dissonance being what it is, human beings aren’t wired to admit that they individually are the problem. Chances are, you read the anecdote at the beginning of this article with a real notion of who the victim was, and the victim probably looked a lot like you. The reality is that all parties in the anecdote hold responsibility. So, here are some things to do about it:

  • Sponsoring executives have to stay engaged and deliver their positional and personal influence through their change agents. Tell the organization that the agent has power and why. Never, ever leave that communication to the change agent. Define—honestly—the agenda the agent is working to implement. And, for goodness’ sake, don’t undermine the change agent by entertaining back-channel grievances and allowing one-off deviations from the plan without explicit, advertised, and good reasons. Sponsor the right behaviors through influence or force.
  • Change agents need to clarify the source of their power. Can they state in a short sentence what would keep the organization from opting out? Are the power dynamics such that the change agent is set up to fail? Remember: Idealism is great, but not sufficient. Just going and doing a good job is not enough if the power structure isn’t in place.
  • Group or organizational leaders have to own and explain their priorities. To be sure, there are myriad good reasons—ranging from timing to talent—for opting out of change initiatives. Handled transparently, these reasons can be managed well. If handled passively or through backroom deals, however, opting out sends a signal to the rest of the organization (that doesn’t have such good reasons for it) that opting out will be tolerated and accepted. So, why bother?

If you deploy change agents, be sure to back them with enough power to make them effective. Practice sponsorship, not spectatorship. Define your agenda. Lead. Clear the way.

If you’re a change agent, be sure you have enough power through sponsorship to achieve what the organization expects you to achieve. If you don’t have it, get it. Can’t get it? Move on.

What do you think?

Stop waiting for Han Solo

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Relying on unidentified heroics is great for movies, but bad for business strategy.

This article contains a spoiler for the 1977 movie “Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope”. If you’ve never seen it, you’ve missed an important and largely wholesome artifact of modern popular culture, so please don’t read on until you watch it.

Geoff Wilson

Picture it. It’s a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. You’re Luke Skywalker. It’s the final battle of “Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope”. In your X-wing starfighter, you’re bearing down on the small exhaust port that is the Death Star’s only known weakness. Your strategy says a proton torpedo or two delivered into that port will be all she wrote for the evil Empire’s new toy.

But Darth Vader and two henchmen are closing in on you in their roaring, menacing TIE fighters. You only need a minute more to triumphantly blow apart the Death Star as per the battle’s strategy—but Vader is seconds from destroying you instead.

As he locks his TIE fighter’s weapons on you, Vader unleashes a sinister, foreshadowing boast in James Earl Jones’ deep voice:

“I have you now …”

And he does. All appears lost. Your strategy isn’t going to make it. But then, out of nowhere, Han Solo and the Millennium Falcon blast Vader and his entourage out of the picture and into outer space. Solo exclaims those classic words:

“You’re all clear, kid. Now let’s blow this thing and go home.”

You are. You do. And you all go. Everyone gets a medal (except Chewbacca). The galaxy is safe—for now.

Now, back to the real world.

Exhale …

I’ve got news for you: Han Solo won’t save your business (or life) strategy. So don’t plan like he will.

Business strategy, like an excellent motion picture, is a narrative acted out. It’s supported by facts and demonstrated through action. Any good narrative—and many sound business strategies—can use all manner of plot devices. Cliffhangers, climaxes, twists, bluffs, foreshadowing, flashbacks, and feints are all in bounds.

But the one plot device that should never penetrate the documented realm of any strategy is called deus ex machina. Literally translated as “god from the machine,” it is “… a plot device whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem is suddenly and abruptly resolved by the contrived and unexpected intervention of some new event, character, ability or object.”

You see? Han Solo shows up out of nowhere and saves the day.

Examples of deus ex machina in business strategy are legion. Any time you review (or, God forbid, develop) a strategy that goes from point A to point Z, but you can’t find the connecting points between, you’re seeing this problematic plot device.

You’re probably part of a company today that has at least one business unit that plans for growth to rescue margins, acquisition to rescue growth, new products to rescue customer loyalty, or an expert new hire (his or her initials: TBD) to drive a new level of performance and engagement. But its done without growth plans, without an acquisition map, without articulating which products will unveil the promised land, and without the budget, candidates, or even value proposition to fill the open spot.

People who operate like this are waiting for Han Solo. Don’t wait for Han Solo. It’s dangerous. Here’s why.

Most long-term business strategies start with goals given by senior management, boards, or CEOs without more than vague notions of how to achieve them. The best of those goals constitute true “commander’s intent,” with end states in mind bounded by sets of values—definitions of what you won’t resort to in pursuit of excellence. Others are simply budget targets. We hit “budget as strategy” in another post; they can and do coexist, but tenuously.

Let’s assume the commander’s intent is your starting point. A beautiful strategic objective is therefore put in place, with an understanding of what we won’t do to achieve it. Own a market segment, grow at top quartile rates, be excellent to your customers. Be the most aggressive and the most admired simultaneously. Have it all.

But what if the strategy drawn up to get there relies on too many unidentified elements to succeed? It lacks specificity and shape. It is written as though the answer is “Trust us, we’ll figure it out.” In short, it is amorphous–not simply flexible, but in reality unbounded. “Han Solo will rescue us.”

Amorphous strategy creates at least three hazards that are brutally deleterious to an organization, your standing as a leader, and your own decision making:

  1. Creates confusion where there should be cohesion. All things are possible as long as they are even obliquely oriented toward the end objective. A thousand flowers bloom and quickly die due to shallow roots. In the end, scope creeps toward what is nearby and comfortable. Incrementalism abounds because it’s the least confusing option.
  2. Makes you, as the strategic leader, look like a short-term thinker. It leads organizations to believe that leaders are solely focused on the near term. Because there is no connective tissue between now and the future state, long-term strategies are viewed as mere window dressing. They are something you put on PowerPoint slides and show off at conferences, but don’t really believe in. More of the same, piled high and deep. All the advanced degrees. You get the picture.
  3. Confounds good decision making. Because the means and methods are undefined, principled decisions are hard to come by. Anything and everything can be “on strategy” and the same can be “off strategy.” Pet projects, politics, and personal peccadilloes can grow to dominate decision making vs. principled protection of proper perspective.

So what?

What are you to do? Here are a few practical ideas:

Believe in belief* – Yes, that’s right. Have a point of view and share it. The fog of war is no excuse. Practice the art of saying “I don’t know, but my hypothesis is …” vs. just artfully dodging the issue. If your business (or life) strategy isn’t built on a set of beliefs about yourself, your organization, your competitors, and the world around you, then you are, my friend, a sucker. Always have a hypothesis about what the savior will be and how you cultivate it. Test the hypothesis frequently.

Apply your beliefs to “Step 2” – If you have a strategy that is big and audacious (including a strategy for your career), it’s not sufficient to plan for incremental moves. Think of strategy as the often-quoted three-step framework. Step 1 in many, if not most, strategies is “Do what we are doing, only better.” Step 3 is usually some variant of the Jack Welch theme: “Be number one or number two in our market segment.”

You have to know at least the silhouette of what Step 2 is—especially if Step 3 requires a step-change in performance. Who would you acquire? What kind of product would you need to bring to market? What customer would you have to reach? What does your footprint need to look like? What capabilities should you build now?

If you can’t bridge the gap between Step 1 and Step 3, even conceptually, then you are now in possession of a powerful insight about the objective itself.

Pack for the journey – I posted previously on the importance of answering the question “Have you packed for the journey?” If your strategy has a Step 1, 2, and 3, then ask yourself if you have resourced it and made the real risk/resourcing/return decisions necessary to go the distance. Many strategies founder on the rocks of stretched resources or capabilities—especially in today’s age of management by spreadsheet.

Pressure test the means – If you’re in a leadership or board position (or one that looks like it), be sure to ask about Step 2. Trust, but verify. A leader who demonstrates a grand strategy but cannot outline a practical step to get there is telling you something. Getting excited about an end objective is a good thing, but it shouldn’t crowd out sober assessment of the path to the objective.

You must ruthlessly eliminate the white knight, Prince Charming, Han Solo—pick your metaphor—from strategic planning. Using them as plot devices—or their relatives the unfunded mandate, growth by hockey stick, cost reduction by benchmark, and the unidentified acquisition—is strategy based on faith. It’s strategy by fairy tale.

A more direct appraisal is that it’s not strategy at all.

Han Solo doesn’t work on your team, so don’t plan as though he’ll save the day—or your strategy.

What do you think?

* I borrowed this adage as a direct homage to the late, legendary swimming coach Richard Quick. I’m glad to have known him. It was his motto, and it’s a good one.

The cure that kills

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Corporate change programs can be toxic treatments unless heavily dosed with honest communication.

Geoff Wilson

Early in my career, I had a conversation with a mid-level manager (let’s call him Carl) within a large company undergoing a tense operational change. Carl was responsible for multiple small sites in the organization’s footprint. He led tens of people. It wasn’t hundreds or thousands, but still significant.

I was a fledgling consultant to top management at Carl’s company. My team was focused on designing the approach to the company’s change. In my conversation with Carl, I asked how things were done and what would help with the change.

The conversation was productive, but then Carl paused. I now know it was the pause that comes before someone actually breaks through the facade of their professional life. At that point in my career, however, I just thought he was thinking.

Carl then laid it out there: “All these corporate programs—I can’t tell which way things are going or why we are doing what we are doing.” He paused again, and then unleashed the words that have stuck with me ever since: “It makes you feel like a beaten dog. You flinch every time the corporate hand comes toward you because you are more used to it beating you than it helping you.”

And there, my friends, was a life-changing moment. It was life changing for two reasons:

  • Carl was an honest guy. He was trying to comply with corporate mandates—and was getting crushed in the process. He lacked access to any rhyme or reason for the change.
  • I had a core belief (now solidified) that no senior executive walks into the office seeking to foist valueless initiatives on his or her people for the sheer joy of creating confusion and frustration. (Side note: After years as an advisor and executive, I’ve known one or two executives who propagate valueless initiatives for the sake of their own ego, but not as real sadists. The end result is the same, but the intent isn’t)

In Carl’s case, the two sides of the circuit—top management and line leaders—had strong values and desires to do great jobs. But they weren’t connecting. The missed connection was consequently crushing drive and initiative where it was needed most.

In other words, initiatives, mandates, and highly valuable corporate performance programs driven from the top looked—to those most needed to buy into them—more like beatings than opportunities. They were systemic “cures” handed down from corporate offices that could literally kill local energy and focus. The programs dulled the edge of the very people meant to be sharpened by them.

Not only that, but the entire situation very quickly made senior leaders look like the “doctors” in this post photo. Not folks you’d seek out for a cure, eh?

In the history of medical science, many so-called cures have proven lethal not only to diseases, but also to patients. The history of cancer chemotherapy is rife with such instances. Actress/playwright Anna Deavere Smith deftly illustrated this concept in her solo play “Let Me Down Easy” when she wrote that cancer therapy is “like taking a stick and beating a dog to get rid of fleas.”

Corporate change programs—especially the big ones—sometimes have the same feel: indiscriminate cure targeting incorrigible disease launched against unassuming patients. A stick swung against the body, and then again but in a different way. Again. And again. And again. Striking nerves and tissue they don’t intend to strike, but doing damage anyway.

It’s a way of targeting performance that is often effective but sometimes lethal. Corporate change programs, like a stick used to beat a dog or a powerful chemical used to decimate a disease, can be a cure that kills. But the analogies break down at that point.

Why? Because we as corporate leaders are able to package and prepare our patients for our cure in a way that no canine or cancer patient’s body can ever be readied. We can turn the stick into a staff, or the chemotherapy into a nourishing concoction.

How? We can use the power of “why.” We can communicate not only what’s coming, but why it’s happening. We can explain the meaning of the action and its upside for stakeholders. In the cases of the worst outcomes—change programs that have necessary but terminal impact on some individuals—we can quite literally let those afflicted down easy.

We just need to take the time to do it. And do it repeatedly. And then to do it again. But how? Simon Sinek’s TED talk that encapsulates the concept of “starting with the ‘why'” is a helpful guide. For leaders to inspire action and minimize confusion, angst, and ultimately departure, we should ensure that the “why” reaches everyone the change impacts.

Summarizing change in a change story is a great way to start. Delivering it personally is even more captivating. Living the change out visibly is the ultimate approach. But there’s a catch: If you as an executive leader don’t change at all OR you change too often—especially if your “why” keeps changing while the world around you isn’t—you’re just swinging the stick in a different way.

Being outstanding at operations one quarter, great at growth the next, and excellent at efficiency the following only serves to show that you’re untethered from principle. That, or your principles aren’t what you’re packaging into your “why” to begin with. Either way, you resort to more of the same—except now, instead of death by confusion and randomness, you’re propagating death by disingenuousness.

Don’t be untethered, and don’t be disingenuous. You have to have vision and integrity.

Change leaders of all stripes: Stop beating your dogs. Use the power of preparation and communication. Drive performance by leading with the “why.”

Prescribe a cure that cures by preparing people for the treatment.

What do you think?

Be who you are, especially in business

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Strategy must solve for the core before testing boundaries.

Geoff Wilson

Remember when Michael Jordan left basketball to be a professional baseball player? The topic was covered by an ESPN “30 for 30” documentary, “Jordan Rides the Bus“. It wasn’t a total disaster, but it does make you cringe to think about. The greatest basketball player of all time took significant time off from his main sport to play baseball. Jordan was basketball. Basketball was Jordan.

Google, a company that is fantastically sound in its core business of search-targeted advertising, has spent millions (perhaps billions) looking for the next big thing. Nevertheless, a huge portion of Google’s revenue and profit comes from its AdWords platform. AdWords is what Google “is.”

While my home state’s Birmingham Barons loved the spectacle that Jordan offered them by testing the baseball waters, and though Google has doubtless made many millionaires by dipping its toes into new venture areas, both of these anecdotes offer lessons for those of us who focus on strategy. Strategy, in so many ways, is about being who you are, first—then testing the boundaries.

I have the pleasure of serving many companies on strategic issues. I’ve now consulted with well over 50 companies at the top management level. Without a doubt, the biggest strategic blunder management teams commit is chasing shiny new things at the cost of their core business.

Loss of focus on the core is the critical risk for a business in transition. Companies have core assets. Those may be people, machinery, locations, patents, or products. A strategy that ignores the core is likely to fail.

Why? It comes down to risk. Let’s use Jordan as an example. When he played basketball in the 1992 Olympics for the United States’ famed “Dream Team,” he had to adapt to a new style of play. There were different rules, a differently shaped key on the court, and the 3-point line was at a different distance. He even had to watch out for being called for traveling, which is rarely enforced in the NBA. But it was the same ball. It was the same dribble, drive, shoot he’d mastered for years as a pro, and he was successful while the Dream Team dominated its way to a gold medal.

What about Jordan’s foray into baseball? Well, that was a different story. Baseball was, literally, a whole new ballgame. Different ball, different skill set, different rules, and different player mentality. It was a whole new world. Jordan hit for just a .200 average in the minor leagues. The whole scenario basically proved he was a fairly flexible athlete, but a very average baseball player.

See the issue? New ball, new rules, new skills, new mindset? Jordan tried to enter a change of pace that had too many degrees of uncertainty. Companies do this all the time. They seek to enter arenas with new technologies, new customers, new channels, or all three—and they commit resources that should probably be focused on their core businesses.

Combining the risky trifecta of new customers, technologies, and routes to market with your existing skills is a recipe for disaster. Doing it at the expense of your core business is just plain obtuse.

I once served a diversified firm whose explicit, vociferous strategic focus was on new product development within a very narrow set of businesses, but whose bread and butter was really in driving cost reduction within a vast core business that wasn’t pursuing a cost-leadership strategy. You get that? To be clear: Driving cost reduction as the key strategic move while not pursuing a cost-leadership strategy is, in itself, a strategic blunder.

Though this company’s new product-development areas were promising, they were also extremely long cycle. And they ate a tremendous amount of resources (as those things sometimes can). Still, management treated the core business as if it were on autopilot while suckling away at the cost-reduction teat without a discernible cost-leadership end point.

The issue with this is that strategies have to be focused against end games, and this particular company had a vast core whose strategic end game left the company itself out of the mix. It would not be a cost leader in its market, but was depending on cost reduction to ensure its financial performance. Meanwhile, new initiatives focused on new technologies, customers, and channels—not to mention new skills—were front and center, resourced heavily but not exclusively, and extremely long cycle to maturity.

The end result of such a quasi-strategic scheme is predictable: a stumbling core and an immature periphery. Why? Because the core business in such a scenario has such mass that a trip up in the core overwhelms any “big” wins in the new, new thing. The core would eventually trip, and the periphery would not be significant enough to save it. It’s the industrial equivalent of the savings and loan crisis: savings and loan institutions borrowed from depositors’ short-term funds and lent long term, automatically setting up a liquidity crisis somewhere down the line.

You have to focus on the core, no matter how ugly it is. The core is your short and intermediate term. You have to be who you are.

The lesson is this: Your core has to have a strategy, and that strategy must reflect who you are in terms of strengths, skills, and competences. You can (nay, must) look for the new, new thing—but you must do it with a core strategy that is effective, extensive, and sound.

Now, none of this matters if you are fat and happy. If you’re a multi-millionaire athlete who has millions upon millions of dollars in endorsements (like Jordan did), or if you’re a high-margin juggernaut like Google (excuse me, Alphabet, Inc.), you can afford to emabark on a diversion that is totally against your strengths.

But if you’re like most of the world, you have strengths, and you only have a finite amount of time to exploit them. You also have a finite amount of time and resources to commit outside your strengths. Be careful with those.

Be sure to form a strategy for who you are first, and then keep a little margin to test who you might be. It can be a liberating thing.

What do you think?

Trump: A demonstration of how executive mandates fail

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Your leadership mandate fails when people start to believe it has.

Geoff Wilson

“I did nothing wrong.” So many failed executives begin there to explain unsuccessful stints as leaders. But I’m here to tell you that it’s the appearance of failure that precedes executive failure, not actual failure.

President Trump’s former campaign chair Paul Manafort’s home was raided by the FBI this week in ongoing investigations of whether the Trump campaign had improper contacts with Russia. This follows months upon months of speculation about improprieties involving Russia.

The cynics and opposition already believe Trump is unethical. Trump’s defenders claim there isn’t evidence of the accused impropriety, and that extreme political attacks from the opposition are leading to mass insinuation regarding collusion with Russia.

But when the campaign chair is raided by the FBI, even the defenders have to pause and think. It looks like the apolitical investigators believe Trump’s closest advisors can’t be trusted to be forthcoming. And that is where an executive’s mandate gets crushed. Trump’s defenders will, perhaps rightly, say that no wrongdoing was done. And they miss the point. Because it’s the appearance of impropriety that destroys your mandate, eventually.

If you’re an executive, you don’t have to engage in acts of conspiracy to defraud your shareholders to be removed from office for conspiring to defraud your shareholders. And you don’t have to sleep with your subordinate to be removed for inappropriate workplace relationships. You just need enough people to believe that the accusations are possible.

If people believe an accusation is possible, you’ve already lost. And when numbers and facts start to back it up, it becomes easier to believe. How many times did you inappropriately round those numbers in that financial report? How often did you take overnight trips alone with that one subordinate? How many meetings did your organization have with Russian organizations. These elements of appearance quickly become perceived evidence of impropriety.

So what?

You want to keep your mandate? Appear and act like you should.

Here is one of the most useful aphorisms in life and work: We judge ourselves on our intentions, and we judge others on their actions. Remember that you’re being judged on your actions—even the appearance of your actions—no matter your intentions (or even the private facts).

What do you think?  

Why every company needs a code

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Successful strategy requires establishing a code—and living by it.  

“You’ve got to stand for something or you’ll fall for anything”

— Aaron Tippin

Geoff Wilson

You’re reading this because you like strategy, business, and leadership—or because somehow my not-so-vast marketing efforts fooled you into clicking something that you ultimately will or won’t like. Either way, I owe you a dose of content that is on topic. This one revolves around a simple question that very few companies think through in depth: What is our code?

By code, I mean a system of governance and a definition of what honorable behavior really is. Operating by a code cuts through the crap. It simplifies and distills to essence that which is too easy to complicate.

In building strategic plans, distilling the code is key. It generates the answers to who we are and who we hope to be. It’s necessary. “Market leadership through ethical cost leadership” is a code one can operate by. It establishes the ends, means, and methods.

Do you have a code?

For companies, codes are important for alignment and action. Companies that are unable to articulate codes, or that formulate codes that are at wild odds with personal codes, will struggle to succeed. How do I know? I’ve been in plenty of companies with codes that go something like this: “Grow revenue and grow earnings.” That’s it.

You might call this the “coin-operated code” because, just like a vending machine, you aren’t getting anything unless you put coins in. In reality, a code focused only on outcomes or money is no code at all. Executives who operate with no codes, or corrupt ones, get found out soon enough. A company that operates via a coin-operated code forgets its customers and invites attacks.

So, what’s a more holistic code? How do you know when you have one? I defined it a few paragraphs earlier: A complete code establishes the ends, means, and methods. And it does so in very simple terms.

A code I’ve worked to share in our organization, and that I believe strongly underpins the promise of WGP’s consulting practice, revolves around three things: We listen. We bring something new. We do real work. 

That’s it. That’s the “code of honor” I bandy about to our team, and one that I believe sets the stage for ultimate value.

We listen because we can’t be effective partners to our clients without understanding before being understood. We bring something new because without fresh insights, we are just a temp agency on steroids. We do real work because that’s how fact-based strategy is established (and because the world doesn’t need any more pontificating armchair consultants).

So, what’s your code?

As an aside: All of this is all secondary to and perhaps separate from personal values. Yet your corporate code has to align with personal values of the highest and best among you, or you’ll get the personal values of the lowest and least. And that’s the recipe for a code red.

I’ll just leave that for you to ponder.

What do you think? 

Take the right strategic steps to confront mistakes at minimal cost

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Facing our managerial miscues is painful. Properly rectifying missteps is paramount.

Geoff Wilson

“That’s too much savings!” The manager looked at the spreadsheet that showed he had been overspending by more than 50 percent on a particular service under a sweetheart deal he thought he had. He was clearly mortified by what the math displayed. “Too much savings” meant a long history of too much spending, and he was the one responsible.

The phrase resonates to this day. A team member of mine who was on the aforementioned project alongside me still occasionally drops me the question via text or email: “Are you still getting too much savings these days?” It’s a delightful “How ya doin’?” But that episode, while humorous to consider in isolation, actually illustrates a good lesson about confronting reality as business leaders.

At some point, we all must face the unpleasant fact that we’ve made mistakes. We’ve hired the wrong people, bought and sold at ill-timed prices, or invested in the wrong markets. It happens to every one of us who actually make decisions. We try to be perfect, but we’re simply not.

My overspending manager, however, compounded his imperfection by trying to sidestep the inevitable pain of confronting a mistake. He popped the infamous “too much savings” comment not to state that we were going to cut costs too far, but rather to convey “I can’t give this to my boss because it will show I’ve made a big mistake.”

And that’s the problem. Analyzing our decisions sometimes reveals that we’ve made bad ones. And correcting poor decisions often means facing the proverbial music—the dirge of our defeat. We must admit it and move forward. And that’s hard.

If we examine a bad investment we’ve made and choose not to write it off but to instead double down on it because, well, doing the right thing would be too painful, we’ve ultimately determined that doing the right thing is wrong because of the optics or our insecure need to save face. Such decisions may be human nature, but they’re also cowardly, selfish, and detrimental to personal and organizational growth.

If you find yourself in a situation where the answer is so right that it’s wrong, ask yourself why. The correct strategic shift often comes with a cost, but the price of inaction is typically not less than your own job.

After all, if you won’t make the right decision, the person who replaces you probably will. And he or she will look like a hero doing it.

What do you think?

Avoid the fifth stage of organizational (in)competence

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Arrogant incompetence is a barrier to learning and strategic execution.

Geoff Wilson

On some level, every strategic leader must have a healthy appreciation for social science and psychology. Success is elusive without it. But what happens when the best that psychology has to offer actually fails?

Picture it: You’re working to ensure that a key manager in your organization executes on a project that will deliver the five key customers you absolutely must have to make plan this year. You provide all the tools, resources, and feedback that a person in the role needs, but they just don’t get through. The manager, convinced of her correctness, takes the project off the deep end. It fails, and so does your plan.

Sound familiar? I’ll bet it does. But what happened? I’ll put it mildly: You probably never learned that there’s a fifth stage of competence. And it’s the most insidious one.

I’m a huge fan of the four stages of competence learning model. The gist of it is that we progress through four phases of capability with any skill. The stages are:

  1. Unconscious incompetence: We don’t know what we are bad at, or even why it’s important. We must recognize that we might have a gap.
  2. Conscious incompetence: We realize we are bad at a skill, and why it’s valuable to improve at it.
  3. Conscious competence: We learn a skill “with reps,” as it were. We concentrate on being good at the skill.
  4. Unconscious competence: The skill is second nature and embedded. We are free to learn other things.

Those stages are outstanding, but there’s another one. Let’s call it Stage Zero: Arrogant incompetence. This is the stage where the manager’s ego lets her think she has it together, without even needing to consider that she might be wrong.

Arrogant incompetence is the realm of people who can’t stand to be critiqued or judged. It afflicts entry-level hires and CEOs alike. You see it when the entry-level hire bristles at feedback—and when the CEO ignores sound advice. It festers in organizations that close ranks to outsiders when their performance is poor.

Arrogant incompetence destroys trust. It is the opposite of truth-seeking.

Why is this important to know? Well, you’re likely reading this because you have an interest in strategy, and strategy means putting people in position to affect change. If you place your bets on people who choose arrogance over inquiry, you’re taking chances on those least likely to accept feedback, seek progress, and positively impact your organization.

The fifth stage of incompetence is a barrier to the flexibility required in today’s strategic organization. Avoid it at all costs.

What do you think?  

Doing hard things means good things for business

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Managing core tasks is important but expected. Greatness lies in facing true challenge.

Geoff Wilson

We spend ample time in strategic discussions talking about challenges and how to overcome them. Challenges exist within the market, organization, product development, sales, and myriad other business strategy topics. The conversation then turns to incentives, and it all gets muddled.

Things get murky because we often confuse the incentive to overcome a challenge with the incentive to “look like you’re doing something.” And that’s where this conversation gets very personal.

I know people who have worked their entire lives on straight salary (or even hourly wages) who will risk their jobs in the name of doing the right thing or simply taking on a new challenge. That is hard.

I’ve also known individuals who have had tremendous financial incentives—amounting to multiples of their salaries—whose go-to moves were delaying and deferring decisions for the sake of prolonging their reign. That is easy. The difficulty lies in knowing both which person you are (a) led by and (b) modeling yourself after.

Most who know me know that I detest using chess as a metaphor for strategy. The game is too constrained. All the moves are mapped out. The board is obvious. Chess is tactics, not strategy, as I’ve previously written. However, the world of chess holds many valuable tools and ideas for strategy. One of those is the Elo rating system.

The Elo rating system was devised years ago to help predict player strength without requiring every player to play a series of matches against one another. The key to the Elo rating system is how strength points are traded. When a strongly rated player beats a weak player, the strong player gains minimal points, and the weak player loses minimal points. But when a weak player beats a strong player, the strong player loses many points while the weak player gains many. Accomplishment in the face of difficulty is highly rewarded, whereas flubbing the easy stuff is mightily punished.

This is your career in a nutshell. People are (or eventually will be) looking at the challenges you face and your relative performance on them. If you’re great at accomplishing things that should be easy for you, that’s fine and good. Now stop patting yourself on the back and find your next true challenge.

Few things are less compelling than a person who talks about their great work on low-difficulty endeavors. If you want to be great, do hard things well. This is true for yourself as an individual, and it is true for your business.

If you lead a business in a sector where table stakes include on-time product delivery, you deserve minimal credit for achieving on-time delivery—it’s merely expected of you and your business. Don’t bother to tout your “great” performance. Go find a way to deliver on time and redesign the product for future customer needs. You are fighting last year’s war. Move on to the next one.

If you’re a five-year professional who does a magnificent job of keeping a filing system in order, you (again) deserve little credit for getting it right. That’s expected of an experienced person. Find a more compelling challenge to solve.

As I noted in my example of executives seeking to extend their reigns, the chess world has struggled with the trend of highly rated players avoiding competitive play in order to protect their ratings. According to the previously linked Wikipedia entry, “…the rating system can discourage game activity for players who wish to protect their rating…”.

Knowing this, you want your reputation and rating to be fresh, so you have to think about your “masterful” self or organizational performance as having a rating that is in constant deflation since the last time you set the bar. And you have to evaluate your people in the same way. “Emeritus” is a title that should be awarded with grudging irregularity in today’s business world.

But here’s the real key to all of this: Be sure you don’t flub the easy stuff while you’re seeking that next big challenge. You must do both. Losing on product-delivery performance while you’re transforming your company is a classic “executive” example. Failing at basic time management while trying to do a bigger job is a classic “individual” example. They’re the kinds of things that get people fired.

Keep in mind, the more experienced you are—the higher your Elo rating—the less points you gain for doing things that inexperienced people do, too.

You want good things? Do hard things.

What do you think?