Tag Archive for: management

5 Experiences You Need

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My career has been shaped by 5 core experience types. Perhaps those just starting out can get something out of these reflections.

I’m fortunate to have held many jobs over my lifetime (actually, growing up, I was “encouraged” to earn money). Fact is, things like shoes and gas cost money. I’ve held the following jobs in my short life (things that the Social Security Administration would know I’ve done…):

Farm worker (corn picker, potato grader, possibly not-so-legal farm truck driver)

Lawn mower

Roadside watermelon salesman

Retail sales associate

Ice delivery boy

Bouncer

Waiter

Dishwasher

Material handler

Loan processor

Investment analyst

Professional athlete

Production planner

Financial advisor

Cold caller

Tutor

Writer

Venture capital analyst

Management consultant

Corporate strategist

It’s a lot.

Now, before you say what a friend of mine said last weekend—”You sure have kicked around a lot in your career,” you must understand that necessity is the mother of work. I grew up with a healthy ambition to play sports coupled with limited sources of funds. The seasonal reality of the sports I played meant that I would cycle through work and sports in a periodic manner—finding a new job every few months through high school and during the summers in college to keep money in my pockets.

I’m blessed because of it; it gave me perspective. So I figured I’d share a reflection on what I think are the best experiences I’ve had from that long litany. I don’t mean the best in terms of my resume—I mean the best in terms of roles that taught me how to want to be a better professional.

I’d argue that these are 5 experiences that you need in order to grow as an effective but empathetic professional.  This is all, of course, one man’s perspective.  They are:

1. Sales. Any kind of sales

You haven’t really lived until you’ve cold called. As a relative introvert (when it comes to work style), I absolutely hated the notion of reaching out to people by phone or door to door, but  I also got a lot out of having had to do so. Once you have called on people and endured a healthy, consistent stream of rejection, you learn that being an A student really isn’t worth much in the real world. The real world is messy.

It’s also healthy to have had to sell things that are easy to sell. I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to sell watermelons roadside during part of one summer in my teen years. It was a product that sold itself (although it never hurt to break open a melon and give people a taste).

As you get older and/or as selling gets more intricate and complex, the experience you gain from selling early on—the experience of influencing and dealing—becomes valuable in every environment. I’ve never seen a truly effective CEO who had no sales in his DNA. Do it. Sell something.

2. Personal service of any kind

Waiting tables is an example of a formative experience that anyone should have. When you provide a service in real time that people will reflect on, assess, and compensate in real time, you become attuned to other people in ways that I’m not sure you can find elsewhere.

There are all kinds of personal service jobs that fit here, ranging from the elite (concierge) to the important but more menial (shining shoes). What they have in common is the need to live up to another person’s standard at least once in your life. The value of that empathy, even if it’s merely learned and not intrinsic, is exceptional.

3. Work with a deadline

Having to work until the wee hours or through significant pain to deliver on a deadline is a formative experience. Learning to manage around deadlines as a writer, analyst, consultant, or delivery boy means learning how to assess a situation in terms of resource needs, capacity, timing, and costs.

Deadline work also teaches you to manage pain. Nothing taught me that better than football games. When you play ball, the game kicks off not matter what state your body is in, so you get ready, and you deal with the pain.  I always appreciated what I recall famous football coach Bobby Bowden once said about an injured player of his:

“He’ll be in pain, but we have a ballgame, and pain don’t matter.”

Deadlines can be tough.  Learning to answer the call regardless of pain is valuable.

I’m learning as I age that there are generational differences with respect to deadlines. I’d go so far as to say that there are some age cohorts in the workforce (ahem…millennials) who have, as a stereotype, significantly less appreciation for the urgency and precision that deadlines can demand. When those people mix with others that are more delivery oriented…they lose. Understanding what deadlines are and how to commit to and manage around them comes from critical experience.

4. Work that requires you to write

I first became a published author when I wrote an article entitled “Venture Capital in the Not-So-New Economy” while moonlighting for a consulting firm in 2001. I was volunteered to write a series of blogs (under deadline, surprisingly enough) for BusinessWeek Online while in graduate school, and now I write for fun. I have always found the absolutely necessary habit of stopping, structuring, and thinking when writing to be instrumental to my later career. Clarity of thought is a rare thing—I always strive for it, and sometimes I achieve it. Writing as a job and as a hobby is a fantastic developmental pursuit.

5. Work where there is no safety net

I still have in my file cabinet (somewhere) a two-year contract with the NFL’s San Francisco 49ers. There is likely no more pure meritocracy in the for-profit world than an NFL roster. You either produce, or you are cut. You tend to know where you stand right away, and  I certainly did—I lasted a few preseason games, and I was cut. I “failed.”

But that failure has made the rest of my career a cakewalk.

I spent more than 7 years as a client service staffer (that is, on the tip of the spear) at the world’s most renowned professional services firm. That firm is known as much for its brand and talent as for its “up or out” career development policy. There was, once again, a distinct feel that you either perform or you will be cut. While the environment was more humane than the NFL, this model was high pressure. It was a social contract understood by all. It made you sharp, and it created focus.

Once you’ve worked without a safety net woven out of bureaucracy, cronies, and obfuscation, you realize and recognize more and more of the bad behaviors that come from rent seekers and moochers. You also notice the really bad ones—the ones who tell everyone else that it’s a meritocracy while really just politically and financially feathering their nests. Their safety nets start to entangle their morals.

I’ve had the joy of diversity in the work that I’ve done. I’m so thankful that my life circumstances have afforded me the opportunity to work everywhere from a tractor to a delivery truck to a storeroom to a boardroom. I’m truly lucky.

I hope my perspective can be of help to you.

Always Do It Again Like the First Time…

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Is the secret to life and professionalism finding the ability to lead, love, and perform with the fervor you once had?

Remember the first time you had to really perform in a meeting? Or the first time you had to give a subordinate a performance review? Or maybe the first time you were responsible for the sales call?

How about the first time you said “I love you” to a significant other and meant it?

Maybe you remember the first time you tried really hard to master a sport, or an art, or a language. You found a link between passion and performance. You went through pain or anguish or nervous uncertainty to get there.

Maybe these things don’t resonate for you, but still, there’s a first time for everything. And for those things we very much want to do well on, we do the work, we deliver with feeling. We, in short, find a way. The first time is hard won.

Unfortunately, for a lot of the things I just listed, there’s also a one hundredth time. For some performances, there is a ten thousandth time.

The Professional’s Call

This weekend, I had the opportunity to witness the performance of a virtuoso jazz musician in an intimate setting. I was able to see and hear the music flow from someplace within him that I couldn’t see. As is sometimes the case when we witness amazing talent in action, I struggled to understand how perfect the performance seemed, even when almost all of it was improvised (it was, after all, jazz).

During an intermission, the musician–acting as our host–told those of us in the audience an interesting anecdote about the great performer Burt Bacharach.

Bacharach is known for his performance of the song Alfie, a somber, meaningful song about life. Here it is:

Through some mental math, our host related that Bacharach, over his career, has likely performed Alfie more than 10,000 times. That’s 10,000 instances of a performer’s finding the same passion and emotion in an activity that he had the very first time. Our host explained that being able to perform every time with the passion of the first is, in a lot of ways, a secret to life.

A Lesson for Life and Work

The anecdote is a profound illustration of what it means to be a professional. It’s also, I think, a profound illustration of what it means to maintain curiosity, wonder, and passion within a world of banality and repetition.

Think about it. Can you imagine being able to experience the joy and wonder you felt during your first kiss during the goodnight kiss on your 30th anniversary? Can you imagine being able to say “I love you” today to your spouse with the same trepidation and sense of the future you had the first time?

What a rush!

A friend and mentor of mine once related to me that she knew she was doing well as a professional when she no longer felt nervous walking into meetings with senior executives; the act of leading meetings had become a rote exercise. I respect this point of view. I’ve lived through the maturation that she mentioned, and I’ve delivered the same insight to others. But while the maturity of professionalism is important, so is the passion.

I’ve witnessed countless professionals “going through the motions.”  They do endless meetings with no soul and no passion for vision or values. They work to their incentives like coin-operated machines. They look elsewhere for their passion and in the meantime demolish the hopes of their audiences. Except that their audiences are the people in their organizations or, in the worst cases, their potential business partners and customers.

We professionals, like the performers we really all are, must remember to go back to the passion (if not the nerves) of the first time if we are to deliver our own virtuosic performance on the hundredth or the thousandth time. If we seek to move others, we have to break out of the professional monotony that comes to us and deliver with feeling, and this matters whether you are a jazz pianist or a financial analyst.

Find an insight. Find something new in every repetition. Rediscover the first time you did it. Find the passion that comes with the first time—the hard-won first time—every time, and I do think that you’ll find at least one secret to life.

The Last and Largest Burden of Leadership Communication

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If you are the leader, it’s your responsibility to ensure understanding.

I had an amusing reminder of a critical communication concept a few months ago.  It was one of those wake up calls that starts softly and ended with a laugh; but it had a serious lesson.

The situation was this:  In working through a strategic planning exercise with a client, I took the time to outline a concept in the strategy labelled, simply:

“Change Leadership”

The concept, which I had not yet outlined in detail, was (in my mind) to pull in all of the tools, approaches, management behaviors, and other actions required to ensure that the strategies being outlined had a chance of permeating the business.  It was, admittedly, a bit of jargon used as a placeholder for a critical set of leadership elements.   I knew all this, of course; because I had written it!

The rub, as I found out, was that the concept of “Change Leadership,” a noun whose full outline I was intent on conveying at some later date; was possibly going to be interpreted by leaders in the organization as a verb; as in “this is where we change leadership.”

As in “this is where leaders get fired.”

For those of you who may not know, consulting with a top team and having them believe that you’ve outlined the conceptual means of their demise may come with some difficulties!!!

Luckily, this misunderstanding was more of a comic moment than a serious one–a leader on the client’s executive team mentioned it in passing. But, it brings up an important, timeless issue…One of clarity in communication and understanding.

George Bernard Shaw once said that “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”

There’s a lesson in there for those of us who spend our time leading others through concepts.  (Hint, that’s pretty much any executive leader.)

In my case, I thought I had outlined a work stream for change management; but somebody read what I wrote and thought I might want to fire management.

Your cases may vary:

You think you’ve given sufficient direction and clarity; but others have no idea what you are talking about.

You are getting exasperated at having to repeat yourself on all the “easy” stuff; but others think you just aren’t communicating and that it isn’t at all very easy.

You, in short, may be missing a significant part of communication:  The moment where you check for understanding, and adjust your delivery for clarity.

It happens to us all.

Unfortunately, many of us have a tendency to blame the victim.  We use phrases like “he just doesn’t get it,” or “she’s a poor listener” to cover for our own inadequacies as a leader and communicator.

Be sure to take the time to understand whether those around you understand.  If you are the leader, it’s on you, not them.

It’s one of those peculiar burdens that comes with being a leader.

It could save you from some scary circumstances.

Please share your thoughts and experiences with leadership mis-communication and misunderstanding. 

6 Challenges Today’s Executives Face

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Periodically, I’ll post on some of the implicit but common executive challenges I observe while carrying out my practice.  This is one of those posts…

The context of this post is simple:  I have the opportunity to work across numerous executive teams and within institutions of various sizes.  In nearly every case, individual leaders consume themselves with how different their organizations or their problems are.  I figured I’d take a moment to reflect on some of the common themes that I see leaders dealing with.  Perhaps it will strike you in a way that’s helpful.

So, here are six challenges that executives I’ve worked with face–whether they know it or not–and an accompanying quick note on ideas to overcome each of them.

The Six Challenges

1. Ego Depletion

The Challenge: We have only a limited capacity to make considered, controlled decisions.  But, many of us (you and me) have an unlimited number of decisions we could make in a given day.  Executives have a relentless access to decisions. The pace of information flow these days enables it.  If you are like me, you probably get up and check email sometime in the morning, starting the flow of decisions you must make.  You also (possibly) check email at the end of the day, and fire off a few more decisions or opinions.  In between, you’ve probably had to make decisions all day.  Such is life, but if you think about your ability to make decisions in a given day as finite, you’ll understand the concept of Ego Depletion.  You may laugh and say you know people whose egos never deplete, but still.

Ways to Overcome it:  This one is easy and hard at the same time.  Delegate choices.  Be deliberate about the scope of decisions you’ll take.  Keep your focus on the major things in your professional (and personal) life.  Know what matters to you (and, hopefully, it’s not everything).  Also, and most critically, realize that your capacity to ponder and decide on minutiae may be exceptional, but that you–as executive–can deplete the capacities of the people around you.  Yes, you can exhaust your subordinate’s ability to make good decisions simply by placing too much focus on things that may not matter much.

2. Separating Signal and Noise 

The Challenge: We face a tremendous amount of information flow that amounts to noise in our daily professional lives. By noise I mean, literally, junk that has no meaning or implication for work or play.  Examples that executives face include internal rumors, short term changes in customer behavior, and macro-level news that people will view as significant, but whose impact is negligible on daily business.  The challenge arises when executives feel the need to justify a response or reaction to the noise.  One of my favorite momentary pastimes is to flick the “Stocks” app on my iPhone a few times a day and get a look at the headlines for the S&P 500.  Without fail, the headlines attempt to explain a 0.50% change in the market index.  It’s linked to jobs, or Greece, or some other secular trend.  It would be amusing if you didn’t actually think about the people spending their lives conjuring such headlines.  Folks, sometimes it’s just noise.  Know the difference.

Ways to Overcome it:  I’m a fan of the old Army saying “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, and three times is enemy action.”  It’s okay to level yourself out and wait out the first bit of information as potential noise.  Practically speaking, when presented with challenging but not-yet-significant information, be willing to ask “what would make this information more than just noise?”  Know when enough is enough.

3. Making Talent Mobility an Advantage

The Challenge: In the immortal words of Billy Joel:  We Didn’t Start the Fire.  Talent mobility is not really new anymore; but the amount of information that talented people have at their fingertips has changed drastically.  What this means is that the most driven, talented individuals–usually the ones who actually know their value in the marketplace–are much more likely to vote with their feet.  This challenge is common, but it’s increasing as talented people have more and more access to inside information on both their own company and companies they might consider joining.  The implication of this challenge is that some employers will suffer mightily from adverse selection as their best employees decide to ply their trades elsewhere.  The current generation of 50 something’s may cling to the notion of loyalty as something an employer gets value from, but younger workers are starting to know better. Your cost of talent is high if you can’t engage people and propagate vision. It is infinite if you are dishonest and people catch on.

Ways to Overcome it:  In reality, talent mobility is only a challenge to companies and leaders who place limited focus on engaging and exciting people.  Companies who have great places to work will get richer because they will have a lower cost of talent.  Companies who can no longer hide their really bad workplaces will get poorer and engage in more mercenary practices to attract talented people.  Propagate a vision, engage people, know what they think.  Most of all, seek understanding. Listen.

4. Avoiding A False Sense of Disruption

The Challenge: Make no mistake some sectors are being disrupted mightily, and the challenge for executives is how to move faster.  Still, there is an unhealthy proportion of executives out there who, like Don Quixote, are out tilting at windmills when it comes to disruption.  They are looking for a disruptive fight at the expense of handling daily business.  So much ink is drained on the topic of disruption, innovation, and creativity that the average executive sees it as a panacea; when in reality–and in the average business–there is far more value in having a healthy business with solid people, processes, performance, and prospects.  True disruptive innovation takes a long time in MOST sectors.

Ways to Overcome it:  First of all, you need to know what disruption really is.  Are you truly changing the basis of competition, or are you simply selling that notion.  When it comes to disruption, be careful not to assume your sector is different in terms of the pace of change without testing the notion.  Know that investments in disruptive business models and technologies are important, and needed; but be sure to pursue them as a piece (often a small but focused piece) of a healthy business portfolio.  Saying that you are going to make a business healthy by creating the next better mousetrap ignores the history of disruption.  Avoid the false security it provides.

5. Avoiding Tyrannical Short-Termism

The Challenge: Short-termism is the opposite challenge from the “False Sense of Disruption” outlined above.  Because I see many different companies in operation, I see both of these faces show themselves. Sometimes they show themselves within the same company.  The challenge here is that executives, faced with near term earnings targets and expectations; actually underinvest in capital assets and innovative improvements to process, product, or people engagement.  They lack an emphasis on longer term, disruptive, or even incremental business model or product improvements because they can’t afford them. In reality, they can’t afford not to have them in the portfolio.

Ways to Overcome it:  A balanced portfolio is the key here.  The average executive gets this notion; but the average executive also needs someone to keep him or her honest when it comes to rationalization of investment levels in new or interesting businesses.  Typically, this challenge rears its head at the margin.  It’s in questions like “Do we really need to have that many sales people pushing our new product?” or “Does that expensive training program really need to be held this year?” Keep people close who can argue for the balanced portfolio.  Oh, and listen to them.

6. Making Strategy Flexible

The Challenge: I am approached monthly by companies that desire a way to think about strategy differently.  They want a strategy.  The biggest challenge of strategy formulation, however, is breaking through the mindset that a “strategy” is a set thing.  Set piece battles are getting increasingly rare in business (they will exist as long as privileged assets exist, but that’s a different post).  The proverbial strategy in a booklet gathering dust on the shelf is proverbial because it has happened far too often. Usually, this occurs when a strategy is built to placate senior management or a board vs. to truly inform the approach to business.  This is a continuing challenge for executives.  Strategy is not deterministic.  It is subject to random changes. It is subject to competitive moves.  It has to be adaptive.  Executives face the challenge of making it so.

Ways to Overcome it:  Strategy is a living thing.  The first way to overcome this challenge is to embrace the adage that “no plan survives contact with the enemy.”  In business it’s perhaps more polite to say “no plan survives implementation intact.”  Strategic plans are no different, so start with that in mind. Understand the boundaries within which a given strategy remains intact, and the triggers that would make a refreshed or different approach appropriate.  This is a big challenge, and one I have spent a lot of time on in the past several years.

There you have it.  Six challenges that I see as pivotal for current executives.  If I’d had more time and a better text editor, I might have made this shorter, but I hope you get the gist.

I’d love to have your thoughts.

When Jazz is Your Leadership Style…Leave the Symphony!

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If you lead like a jazz artist, then trying to conform to a leadership culture that runs like a symphony might not be the best thing for you or the organization.

I was reminded last night of a fantastically prescient article written by John Clarkeson, former CEO and Chairman of The Boston Consulting Group.  It might be useful to you.

Here’s the link.

Written in 1990 and entitled Jazz vs. Symphony, the article starts with an ominous set of questions…

Is there a leadership crisis? Are we really lacking executives to lead our organizations into the twenty-first century? Or are the specifications for the job changing: should we reexamine what kinds of leaders our organizations need?

Clarkeson then goes on to compare, with compelling anecdote and imagery, the leadership styles of the past (the symphony conductor) with what he poses as the leadership style of the future (the jazz ensemble leader).

He states–in 1990 no less–that the accelerating pace of change will make room for creative leaders who don’t have all the answers and who understand the quirks, nits, and foibles of their teams without demanding that their team be functional robots.

His outline of the “Jazzy” leader and their impact on teams is excellent.  He writes:

Leaders will be in the flow, not remote. Teamwork and cooperation will increase at the expense of individual competition. Cooperative support will moderate anxiety and encourage risk-taking. Talented people will be attracted by the ability to see and influence the whole process, to learn from other knowledgeable people, and by the opportunity to create and grow.

More importantly, he gets at what leaders really must do in order to embrace the Jazz metaphor.

Leadership will flow to those whose vision can inspire the members of the team to put their best abilities at the service of the team. These leaders will create rather than demand loyalty; the best people will want to work with them. They will communicate effectively with a variety of people, and use the conflict among diverse points of view to reach new insights. They will exert influence by the values they choose to reinforce. They will make leaders of their team members.

Note those concepts:

“Leadership will flow to those whose vision can inspire…”   It doesn’t flow to those who see it as a matter of position.

“Leaders will create rather than demand loyalty…”  Loyalty is a two way street.

“They will exert influence by the values they choose to reinforce.”  In other words, stated values flow less and less from a company and from textual artifacts and more and more from the actions of its leaders (even behind closed doors).

“They will make leaders of their team members.”  Leadership comes with an imperative to develop people as much as to direct them.

Clarkeson’s concepts hit home for me because they get at the most basic question of a person’s fit within a given organization’s leadership culture.  To be sure, 25 years after the publication of this delightful article, there are still a LOT of symphonies out there.

The imperative for you and for me is to know the difference between joining a symphony and joining a jazz ensemble.   Specifically, it gets at the question of whether one can be a Jazz musician in the symphony.

And, I’m not sure.

I suspect that Duke Ellington–the giant of jazz that Clarkeson cites–could have held his own riffing with any given philharmonic orchestra. But, I doubt he would have been special.  His lasting impact on music comes from his ability to adjust, cajole, entertain, grow, and create… Not to conform.

In Clarkeson’s words:

…he would offer up a scrap of an idea, suggest in general what he wanted, and then rely on his players to take cues from each other and to fill in their parts as they thought best.

His players were good but not without equal. He knew their quirks, their gifts, their problems, and he encouraged them to learn to do things they didn’t think they could do. Some players came and went, but many stayed for years. They developed through their membership in the group, and they learned from each other. Most of all, their capacity for innovation grew as they built on their cumulative experience.

I suspect that the moment a hypothetical symphony conductor attempted to stuff Duke in a chair and cut off his avenues of creation, he would have voted with his feet.

There, my friends, is the message.  If you and I aspire to play in a symphony, so be it.  Find a symphony.  Many, many leadership cultures still look to a single conductor for “truth” and bear the scars of such approaches in terms of wasted talent and difficulty adapting to change.

If we, instead, hope to play in a jazz ensemble; then let’s find one.

I suspect there is great pain and frustration awaiting a person with a jazz philosophy who chooses to play in the symphony.  In fact, I’ll bet that when such a thing happens…It’s all about the money.

Perhaps we should reflect on two implications of Clarkeson’s article for us as individuals:

First, the article was written 25 years ago, and there are still plenty of symphony conductors out there in leadership. Change toward a jazz style is slow and you likely won’t make it happen unless you are the key leader.

Second, which follows from the first: When jazz is your thing…leave the symphony behind.

Just for fun, and in case you never had a sense of what jazz can do; I’ll leave you with a short Duke Ellington piece.

 

The Pornographication of Motivation and Values

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Distilling motivation to dollars, penalties, or positive thinking may leave something out…

A day or so ago, I came across a post via my LinkedIn feed.  It has now disappeared, probably to protect someone’s sense of career risk.  But…

The post, entitled “Stop Living Your Life Like a Motivational Poster,”  is about how the whole motivational poster and quote industry is dangerous because it leaves out essence and authenticity while peddling positivity and motivation.  The author states:

I truly believe that to keep ignoring every emotion that does not fall into the positive category is at best unhealthy , and at worse can lead to feelings of inadequacy- that your [sic] somehow strange, not good enough, not strong and self controlled enough to ‘think yourself positive’

The post touched off a minor candle fire of discussion on LinkedIn.  And, there’s something hiding in that post for those of us working to perfect (if “perfect” is a possibility) strategic leadership.

Namely, that something is about how the insidious drive to simplify, distill, and extract the essence of motivation can leave out critical context to the detriment of individuals and organizations.

That context might just be how challenging the circumstances were for a leader whose wisdom gets distilled into a motivational witticism.   Mohandas Gandhi’s “Be the change you wish to see in the world” quote is used incessantly by folks who probably don’t understand the massive hardship Gandhi went through to have the credibility to deliver it.

Perhaps more importantly, however, the context can be the values and constructive intent that get left to the side of a motivational incentive.

But, why the link to pornography? 

So, I roped you in with a reference to porn, and now I need to make the link.  To do so, I’ll use a quotation (irony, yes, I know) from Pope John Paul II. He said:

There is no dignity when the human dimension is eliminated from the person. In short, the problem with pornography is not that it shows too much of the person, but that it shows far too little.

Did you get that?  The problem isn’t that pornography reveals too much of the context, but that it reveals too little. Removing the context removes the dignity.

That’s what you and I as strategic thinkers and leaders need to reflect on when it comes to motivating others.  Are we distilling motivational text, structures, and systems down to quotes, numbers, and dollar amounts that remove the context (and the dignity)?

In short, are we making fundamental values a transactional thing that can be priced away?

Three areas where this may matter to you and me:

While the habit of distilling away contextual values in pursuit of efficiency and impact is something to watch out for in all parts of life, I’ll reflect on three areas here that matter.

1.  Motivating your organization:

There’s a very large market for organizational motivation diagnostics and techniques.

This market will only grow as Millennials become more and more disconnected from the values and realities of the older generations who (in many cases) manage them.  If men and women are from Mars and Venus, Millenials and Baby Boomers are from different galaxies.

Practitioners refer to this area of organizational practice as “engagement,” but reality is that this is all about motivation toward the goals of the organization as a whole. Like the article I linked in the opening of this post, “engagement” techniques and programs all too often fall into the trap of trying to distill a multi-faceted, highly personalized issue down to a few pithy drivers.

This is a noble act, to be sure; because engagement does matter.  Still, these programs turn on the distiller and invariably come up with programs that get at only one or two of the fundamental things that people think about when they think about engagement.

In your organization, one person is most engaged when thinking about building the value of the organization he works within.

The next thinks primarily about impact on the customer.

Another thinks it’s all about himself.

The next thinks its about doing good for society.

Still another thinks its about her working team.

Research shows that people split evenly on these 5 factors when selecting the one that motivates them.

When you look to engage your organization, or even your immediate team; you have to factor in this diversity of drivers.  Distilling down to a focus on team building activities or greater community involvement or quotes about whether it’s “good for the customer” will only touch the tip of the iceberg.

2.  Financial incentive structures 

There has been a decades long move toward greater tying of daily activity to monetary incentives.

This trend has slowed somewhat in recent years as so-called “pay for performance” or “penalty for performance” has time and again created unintended consequences and malicious gaming from the shop floor to the c-suite.

When we distill mission critical and values-driven activities like safety or quality monitoring down to financial incentives for attainment of certain standards, we introduce a very challenging set of defining moments for our people.

By defining moments, I mean a choice between two highly conflicting fundamental values.  Do I report that safety incident and take the hit on my bonus, or do I conceal it and get paid?  Do I report the customer complaint when my customer satisfaction rating is at the threshold of my bonus payment, or do I just forget I heard it?

These are fundamental contextual issues that get lost in the distillation of motivation to a single- or even multi-point-formula.

A great and commonly cited study that gets at this particular point involves a set of day care centers in Israel.  The study found that when there were no financial penalties (and therefore no economic incentives) for leaving children beyond the day care centers’ 4pm pickup time, parents rarely were significantly late.

However, once a financial penalty for late pickup was introduced, parents were late much more frequently.

The study shows the types of unintended consequences that can happen when a financial incentive is put in that allows people to replace a moral or ethical one.

People see the price of their ethical lapses, and can judge accordingly.

If I’m a parent operating under a social contract that says 4pm is the pickup time and leaving my child any later means a teacher has to work overtime because of my lateness, I take the moral impact into account.

If the social contract is changed to a financial one, then the price I pay for my lateness is clearly outlined and transactional. The day care center makes it easy for me to forget about ethics and just pay the fine.

This is all kind of cute when it comes to a day care center.  But, imagine what happens when you place a price on values driven behavior in a safety program, or customer service, or (shudder) healthcare programs.

Price is a clear motivator.  I’m a huge fan of price–except for when the cost of inaction is priceless.

3.  The continuing emergence of aggressive short-termism

The place where distillation of context is perhaps most dangerous is in the boardroom and c-suite.  The emergence of aggressive short-termism as a de facto course of management comes directly from the pornographication of motivation.

Boards, being limited in what they can measure when it comes to the health of an organization (though less limited than most boards realize), resort to distilled measures of current profitability and cash flow.  These measures, while absolutely critical to performance, are devoid of the context necessary for the long term stewardship of capital resources.

They are indicators of current vitality (just as a patient’s pulse rate is); but they leave out important contextual risk factors (like whether the patient is a smoker, obese or anorexic, and/or exercising regularly).

Once again, price matters.  When a senior executive can look at the price of his or her action in the short term and see the financial payoff, there becomes a transactional aspect of stewardship that boards must be vigilant about.  This is particularly key when vesting structures align such that executives’ short term actions are monetized at a much greater rate than actions that affect the long term.

So what? 

I co-opted the pseudo-term “Pornographication” because, first, I think it’s a pretty amusing term; and second, because I think it says something about what can happen to an activity (whether that be sex, love, or motivation) when essential contexts are removed and only a most basic “basis of arousal” is left for consumption.

As strategic leaders, board members, and managers; we must be careful to think through the contextual consequences of distilled incentives.  The value of an enterprise depends on considered choices about some things (like safety programs or long term investment) that can only by measured by conjecture.

Watch out for the oversimplification of complex motivational issues.

Context matters.

Avoid The Focus Group of One

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The broader your sphere of influence, the broader your sphere of listening has to be. Don’t let conviction get in the way of listening to others.

Mature professionals listen.

But, on the path to maturity, those same professionals learn to trust their gut, rely on convictions, and assert.

This is nothing new:  You become truly effective by moving from a regime of telling to a regime of asking.  In making this shift, you learn more, you lead more, and you do more.

But…

Many leaders who are very effective at listening to those around them make a mistake that only tends to come from the isolation that leadership brings.  They stop (or never start) listening to people who are two and three levels removed from them.

The lesson here is this:  As your sphere of influence expands, your sphere of listening must expand in kind. 

This concept is especially critical when you contemplate so-called transformational changes to your organization that can impact customers, employees, and other stakeholders.

Why?  Well, it stems from a phenomenon I’ll call the “Focus Group of One.”

A focus group is a gathering of a group of people, usually from a target demographic, intended to collect impressions about an issue, product, or strategy.

When you make assumptions about how your decisions will impact not simply those who meet with you regularly, but also those in the field, stores, plants, or factories; you can fall into the trap of using your own intuition and experience as a guide instead of collecting impressions that may differ from your own.

You use a focus group, it’s just a focus group comprised of your own experience over time–the many different “selves” from your experience–instead of a focus group of people facing the impact of your decisions here and now.

“When I was a salesperson, all I cared about was making my numbers; and I didn’t want the distraction” might be a refrain a CEO would make when deciding not to extend training to a portion of his sales force.

This can have negative consequences.

Why?  Here are a few ideas:

  • People are different – People have different wants and needs than you do, and you should beware making decisions based on what you want and need.
  • Experiences are different – People have different experiences in the field, plant, or line than a given executive might have had.  The mere fact that the executive is an executive may show that his or her experience was different (or coddled) and a bad reference case for making decisions today.
  • Your recollections change – You may forget what it was like in the field.  You may only remember the wins and forget the hard times. You also, given your experience, probably ended your time in the field pretty well.  There is a cognitive bias called peak-end bias that shows how our brains tend to remember the most intense part of an experience, and the way we left it.  We forget the run-of-the-mill times; and generally you as an executive are making decisions that affect the run of the mill.
  • You are muddled by your biases – Knowing the right thing to do and overcoming your incentives to do otherwise can be very, very challenging. If you face a defining moment that can have big impact on your organization, it might be best to listen to those impacted first.

So what?

To get out of the focus group of one, you can employ a few different methods:

Easiest is to just go and listen to folks.  That takes time, and in some organizations comes with a substantial hierarchy filter.

Next would be to listen to those closest to you on their impressions of the impact.  But, keep in mind they are biased as well.

Finally, and probably most effective, would be to send a few trusted agents into the field to gather real impressions of possible changes.  Reflect on them.  Then make the decision.

Don’t fall into the Focus Group of One trap.  Listen to those you lead.

Please share your thoughts and experiences on the impact of and how to avoid this trap.

Pardon the Manterruption

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Interrupting is just…plain…rude.

A couple of weeks ago at the SXSW conference, an interesting thing happened.

YOUR LINK IS HERE

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt and Aspen Institute CEO (and author) Walt Isaacson were called out for repeatedly interrupting Megan Smith, the U.S. government’s Chief Technology Officer.

The real stinger for Schmidt is that the person who did the calling out was none other than Google’s own Judith Williams, head of global diversity and talent programs and by some accounts head of Google’s “Unconscious Bias Program.”

From the article:

“The incident was a classic example of what Jessica Bennett, writing in Time magazine earlier this year, has dubbed ‘manterrupting’, or the ‘unnecessary interruption of a woman by a man’.”

While I doubt the real usefulness of the word “manterrupting” beyond being an interesting mashup–“interrupting” suffices nicely for all genders–I do think that there is a real lesson here in watching out for known biases.

Not to mention the lesson of watching out for simply rude behavior.  This is especially true for “smart” people or people who believe their position of power affords them the right to interrupt.

Most interruptors (like me at times) might say they do so out of excitement or passion or a “strong personality.”  (By the way, anyone who uses the term “strong personality” without their tongue firmly in cheek is probably somebody watch out for).

The truth is, it’s just rude and impatient.  And, it’s often just a blind spot for those of us who have or do suffer from the urge to interrupt.

The extent of such a blind spot can be shocking. For instance, after a frustrating set of interruptions, I once tested the mettle of a particularly egregious senior executive interruptor to see how far the arrogance of the interruption would extend.

While speaking, I grew to know the interruption was coming, so I chose–once–to just keep talking through it.

I made it about twice the length of this sentence while this person just kept talking before I, finally, relented. It seems that my upbringing wouldn’t allow me to sustain talking over someone for that long–even from the proverbial high ground.

Imagine a full 10 seconds of two grown people talking over one another, and you’ll get a sense of the ridiculousness of the situation. I’m sure the others in the room saw it.

Though I never tested it again, the person’s ability to interrupt and continue interrupting when room wasn’t ceded was a striking exercise of arrogance and impatience.

Don’t be that person!

On this Saturday morning, consider the need to let others speak.

Especially watch out for cultural or gender differences in assertiveness.

As I’ve posted previously (link here), this sensitivity can make your team better, not to mention make you (and me) a better person to work with.

To all those I’ve interrupted:  I’m sorry. I was rude.

Pardon the manterruption.

Coffee and a Do Not: Delegating Vision

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 The one leadership aspect that you cannot delegate is all too often the one that under-apprenticed leaders want to give away first.  

You see this situation play out all the time…

A person with good management skills flies up the corporate ladder because he can execute.

He can control, direct, and manage details with impunity; and that is a terribly valuable thing early in one’s career.

And then…he gets to a point and a position that requires him to do something very different.  He has to go from being “the guy” to being the guy behind the guy.  He goes from solving the problem to ensuring that the problem gets solved.

Through span of control, volume of work, or simply the sheer complexity the high performing manager has to make the leap to being an executive.  He has to be a leader.

And, wow, what a leap it is.

Why the leap from management to leadership is hard

The complication of the leap is that high performing managers, unlike executives, have the privilege of operating without having to have vision. Vision is provided to them in the form of budget directives, strategic plans, and senior management dialogues.

When our friendly manager makes the leap, he has to figure out how to “do” vision.

But, an odd thing happens to high performing managers promoted too fast…

…They suddenly realize that since vision is coming from no one else above them in the organization, they start to look for it from below them in the organization.

After all…it has to come from somewhere, right?

They feel the need to find things to manage, like budgets, or headcount, minute deal details, or–too often–how their subordinates do their jobs.  They are good at doing those things.

They ignore the need to provide vision because, well, they’ve never had to…and success has come on the merits of a strong management approach.

Thus, they “delegate vision” into the organization.

They say to their subordinates (sometimes explicitly, even!): “I don’t know where we are going. You show me and then I’ll know; but until then, here are some details I’ll dig into.”

The outcomes for our under-apprenticed “leader”

Three outcomes are possible for our manager. Two are good for the organization and one is bad…very bad…

First, if he is a good learner (which typically means good listener) and is able to absorb clues, training, and mentorship about what it is that leaders do vs. what managers do, he makes the leap.  He crafts his own vision. He learns to deliver that vision and to get out of the way.  This is a good outcome.

Second, if he isn’t a good learner but the organization is well governed, he “peters” out.  The Peter principle catches up to him. He has risen to the level of his incompetence, and in well-governed companies his sniff at an executive position is ended quickly, humanely, and soundly.  He returns to a solid management position.  This, likewise, is a good outcome.

Third, if the organization isn’t good at evaluating executive talent and/or acting on evaluations, he–shockingly–sticks.  In poorly governed companies–typically those centered on personality cults and favoritism or those with absentee hierarchies–high performing managers can populate executive positions (albeit ineffectively) for long periods of time.

The third scenario is a bad one:  The brutally bad reality of the manager sticking in such a position is that because he doesn’t know what it means to be an executive, he very often serves as an absolute antagonist to people with real executive talent.  They don’t “manage” like he does; and so they can’t be senior.  He blocks progression by the very virtue of his ignorance.

The more senior the high performing manager “sticks,” the more his foibles and contra-indicated style will metastasize in the organization.  It’s bad for the organization not only because the organization has a sub-optimal leader in an executive position; but also because latent executive talent votes with its feet.  It finds its place elsewhere. They know better.

So what? 

The leap between manager and executive is every bit as big as the leap between a high performing analyst with a spreadsheet and the manager of a pool of analysts.  The skillsets and mindsets are worlds apart.

The lessons of this particular “Coffee and a Do Not” are these:

First, executives should never, ever delegate vision.  Doing so is confusing to the organization and the result of it–a micromanaging executive–is actually a very strong indicator of a disengaged, demotivated organization.  (If you are interested, here’s a study from Stanford University that backs that assertion.)

Second, companies must have solid executive development, evaluation and coaching processes. People can learn. While executive talent is an intrinsic thing to some degree, executive behaviors are teachable. Ideally, high performing managers get to understand these things before they get their first bite at the executive apple.

Third, high performing managers and under-apprenticed executives need to develop themselves. If you are one of those lucky, high velocity, high performing managers who finds yourself in a senior executive role before really being apprenticed well enough…Go home at night and entertain the remote possibility that you might not be all that in your new role.  Be willing to listen…up and down in the organization.  Look for mentors.  Reflect.  Think.  Improve.

Delegation of leadership vision is an upside down, bizarre outcome of a leadership culture that under-prepares people for the next steps in their careers. This is a situation that individuals need to guard against and that companies need to watch out for.

Being a high performing manager and being an executive are very different things.

Executives need to be visionary.  No, not Steve Jobs visionary; but at least “next three years” visionary.

If this is your particular weakness, know this:  Trying to delegate vision will frustrate your organization, handicap its performance, and (assuming a well-governed company) shorten your tenure.

Do not delegate vision.

Finding the Yin and Yang of Leadership Culture

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All I ever needed to know about leadership culture came from two stickers on a desk 30+ years ago.

This is an article on reflection on and appreciation of the lessons one’s childhood can provide. As a parent, I’m fond of thinking about how kids see the world. As I’ve grown, I’ve realized many of the lessons I needed for later in life were right in front of me. It only took time to understand them.

First, some autobiography…

I had the great privilege to grow up around a couple of entrepreneurs.

No, let me rephrase that…

I had the great privilege to grow up around a couple of drop dead risk takers.

Few people get to do that.

That privilege came with the ups and the downs of business ownership in an era of significant change. I was immersed in both the elation of business success and the absolute devastation of bankruptcy.

My childhood included vacations in Aspen and L.A.–a real treat for a kid living on the Gulf Coast–followed by an extended stint living with relatives and years of palming a “free or reduced lunch” card to the lunch lady at my high school.

Such is life, and I’m a lot better for it.

Still, I learned about what risk is and isn’t; and about what accountability, likewise, is and isn’t.

The cool part, though, is what I learned by osmosis in those years of walking around smaller businesses and the people in them. In that environment I had free rein to explore all kinds of cool equipment, and to interact with all sorts of people.

One of the businesses was a private ambulance service, the other was a telephone answering service.

In one business, I got to play around in an old Cadillac ambulance like this one:


Yes, it was Ghostbusters style (or, for a more apt but obscure cinematic description of the operation as I remember it: Mother, Jugs & Speed).

Ours was blue.

I can still smell its interior and see the duct tape on one of the seats where the rotary-dialed radio telephone (yes, rotary) was installed.

In the other business, I was witness to the transition of telephone answering services from old-fashioned telephone switchboard operators–no kidding, like Lilly Tomlin’s “Ernestine” character–
to computerized switching. I spent so much time around those operators that I can still today recite some of the customers:

“M&M Patio, may I help you?”

Those operators doing their thing still ring through the ages for me. All this was in the time before voicemail largely displaced that particular profession.

Enjoying my free rein, I could play with old telephone equipment to my heart’s content, and I could explore the emergency medical equipment and tools in all directions.

I knew what an Ambu bag and mass trousers were before I could diagram a sentence.

I learned how to patch a switchboard at the same time I learned to ride a bike.

I had full access. In retrospect, it was a part of my childhood that was replete with lessons.

What I learned

Both businesses were 24x7x365, reactive operations. As the son of entrepreneurs running businesses of this sort, I grew to expect that mom worked the holidays.

More significant than that: I never, ever, witnessed an adult say “that’s not my job” or “I’m off today, somebody else will handle it” or “I’m calling in sick today.”

Never.

It was no big deal…we knew why.

Accountability.

Ownership.

Risk taking.

That simple reality alone has had a profound impact on my life and work, not to mention on the (low) level of my appreciation for paycheck players and iron bureaucrats of all sorts.

The entrepreneur’s life wasn’t easy, but it was colorful.

To this day, I’ll take colorful over easy anytime.

But, I digress.

It was about the people…

The part that was most interesting is what I took away from the people; and that’s what this article is about. 24X7 professional operations of these sorts have a lot of downtime for the people in them.

To wit, I can remember building model airplanes with one of the EMTs, learning how to properly wash a car and change out spark plugs from another; and getting to know all sorts of people who worked in the business–old, young, men, women, black, white, creole, Asian, serious, funny, mean, nice and all points in between on each.

Such personalities and the inherent downtime of the operations mixed to produce some amusement and some lessons for a kid like me wandering around the operation.

Which brings me to this:

How I found the Yin and Yang of leadership culture in the bunk room of an ambulance service

In the sleeping quarters for the overnight ambulance crews–replete with bed frames hammered together with pine 2x4s and framing nails–was a steel desk. I’d be willing to bet it had been picked up at an army surplus auction back in the 1970s.

At some point, a person had used a cool-for-that-time-period Dymo label maker, one like the one in the picture here, to leave behind some wisdom on its right side pull-out writing surface.

That person, likely bored beyond comprehension and enjoying a moment toying around with the label maker; pressed out a phrase.

It read:

It’s the basic definition of accountability. The Yang of leadership culture.

Probably thinking it was a good phrase to live by (or just a way of ribbing other crew members), the person peeled and stuck the phrase to the writing surface of the desk.

At some point later, a second person took the same labeller and pressed out Phrase 2. It read:

Phrase 2 was stuck just below Phrase 1… as a sort of quasi-professional, realpolitik-driven retort to the self righteousness of Phrase 1. The Yin of leadership culture.

I suppose I discovered the two stickers when I was 8 or 9 years old. I have never spoken or written of them until I decided to write this short article.

Probably half of that is because of the language they are written with isn’t all that polite; and half is because it has taken me a long time to really grasp the significance of their brutal and ironic simplicity.

The significance of the Yin and Yang…

Now, language aside–and, yes, I spent all of my childhood around a crew that could curse the paint off the walls–these two phrases encompass two very different and very relevant sides of leadership culture.

One one side are the people who take responsibility. On the other side are those who duck responsibility.

The dark and the light.

The Yin and the Yang.

You have, in the form of two very basic phrases, the foundations of organizational and leadership culture.

Just as the Tao I’ve used in the opening image for this post implies that light and dark reinforce one another, and to a small degree reside within one another; these two sides of leadership culture reinforce and infiltrate one another.

In most organizations, there is a competitive equilibrium between the accountable set and the avoidant set. The accountable ones find positions and actions that are profitable, and the avoidant ones do the same.

It is in the behaviors that we, the leaders, reward that we determine which set gets to be dominant.

Which animals do you feed, and which do you slaughter?

I’ve seen organizations feed both sides. Based on that, I’d choose accountable.

Why this matters

I hope you’ll take away two things from this story:

First, this matters because great leaders give credit and take responsibility.

Do you find yourself in a culture where people do that? Or, at least, do you find that accountable people are rewarded more than avoidant ones?

Or, do you find yourself in a culture where people give responsibility and take credit? They lay off risk and lay on the stories of their successes.

It’s a simple assessment. Are the most accountable people in your organizations also the ones most likely to be “slaughtered” when the fan stops spinning?

It’s an existential question for individuals and for organizations.

Second, I hope you’ll see that this story matters because your organization and community is training its next generation of leaders.

No, it’s not doing so through your training programs.

It’s doing so through the equivalent of a label maker and a desktop.

The informal culture wins the day. The behaviors that get fed day in and day out are the ones that grow.

It really doesn’t matter what speeches, brochures, or PowerPoint documents you distribute.

The reason I went into detail on the autobiographical vignette is that I was made a better professional and leader by the diverse and sometimes “not-fit-for-kids” environments that I was able to explore and experience.

The diversity of experience I was blessed with has made me better.

I’m sure, somewhere out there, there are kids (and young professionals) who still get those types of experiences; and I hope all of us as parents and leaders will encourage them.

In the meantime, the rest of us can learn by osmosis from this particular Yin and Yang of leadership culture.

Feed the accountable ones.

Please share your thoughts on this article below…