Ron’s Short Review: “There are tribes everywhere. Every one of these tribes is yearning for leadership.” A real appeal to be a leader and influencer. Powerfully written.
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I recently spent a day with Fritz Seyferth, one of my consulting colleagues. Fritz has a unique background and style that makes him one of the most effective Leadership, Team Building and Culture building consultants I know. Check out his “Foundation of Winning”.
One of the principles that Fritz emphasizes in his consulting work is the importance of boundaries. Boundaries help set and define the culture. Boundaries actually demand more creativity and innovation to keep organizations moving forward. Boundaries are very important and useful for the health and growth of an organization (and individual). But, aren’t boundaries restrictive and inhibiting?
As usual I often learn more from observing my grandchildren then they ever learn from me. Both sets of grandchildren have fenced in back yards. In the back yard fences keep them safe, secure and contained. And in fact, the “boundaries” of play and activity tend to stay inside a parameter that is even within and smaller than the space defined by the fence.
As I observe some corporate cultures I notice that when leaders erect “fences” employees seldom even test the boundaries. In fact I often hear of hidden or invisible rules that keep people away from the fences.
“Oh, we’re not allowed to do that.”
“That would never be acceptable to our boss.”
“There are consequences for going there.”
The playing field actually becomes smaller than the playing surface.
Front yards however are defined by boundaries. There are no fences and the boundaries have to be clearly pointed out and defined to the children.
“That’s the neighbor’s yard.”
“Don’t go into the street.”
“You’re not allowed to go past the corner.”
However, boundaries are almost continually tested and reset. Unlike the backyard the entire world is beyond the front yard boundaries. If we don’t test and continually expand the boundaries of the front yard, we will never explore the world or discover what’s possible.
I’m beginning to think that we should be very clear in our businesses what is a back yard fence and what is a front yard boundary. I work with companies in the pharmaceutical, food and automotive industries among others. Drug and food safety better be a back yard fence. Manufacturing quality better be a back yard fence. There should be severe and immediate consequences for climbing over the fence.
However, when we’re exploring the world in front of us we better be thinking more of boundaries. If people violate our boundaries here we want to know why. We need to have the conversation about why someone stepped out and tried something new and radical. Should that be acceptable? Have things changed? Did they discover a new environment with new opportunities? We certainly should not simply abandon our boundaries. But, innovation happens at the boundaries. New ideas come in from the boundaries. Opportunities are seen from the boundaries.
I think it’s important for you and your company to discuss what is a back yard fence verses what should be a front yard boundaries. There are actually dire consequences if we confuse or don’t distinguish the two. Leaving back yard quality and safety to a boundary discussion will kill a company. Fencing in the front yard will arrest our growth and development keep us from exploring what the world has to offer.
Image Source: Garrett Coakley, Creative Commons
One of my clients (thanks Mindy) recently introduced me to a book called The Primes: How Any Group Can Solve Any Problem
What do the words pesticide, homicide, fungicide have in common? They (and many others) all end in “cide.” The – cide ending originates from the Latin word caedere meaning to kill. It concerns death, destruction, extermination and deliberate killing. There is even a public execution connotation to the word meaning “to put to death.”
In our corporate world we’ve mistakenly come to believe that when we decide, we’re making a decision about what “to do.” But when we decide what to do, we never decide what to stop. It’s a little bit like the overwhelming morass that our governments have gotten into; every year our legislatures add more and more laws to the books, they just never kill any and so our laws and regulations have become so voluminous we can hardly act freely any more. In our corporate life when we continually decide what to do and seldom decide what to stop doing we spread our precious resources thinner and thinner.
See if you can make this shift with your team. When faced with a decision, spend more time figuring out which alternative you are going to kill. Figure out the consequences of killing that particular option. You’ll notice some deep seated attachment and engagement that you never uncovered when you were decide which alternative to “do.” There will be many people in your organization that may have spent many years honing their skills performing the alternative that you’re about to kill. How do you think they’ll react? They’ll do everything they can to preserve their job and skill set. They’ll do it overtly. They’ll do it covertly. But this is exactly what happens when you decide what to “do” versus what to kill. While the priorities have shifted to the more important task that you decided to “do”, nobody told the people doing the other alternative to stop or shift their resources to the higher priority item or to cut their project to the bare essentials. Thus, we are constantly looking for resources to accomplish all of the high priority items and we create work forces that feel overwhelmed and over extended.
Instead, try deciding. Try deciding what to kill. Try dealing with the fall out and consequences of telling people that we’re no longer doing that activity or project. Help them get reassigned, retrained, more engaged in the activities that you’re not killing.
Maybe you’re very good at prioritizing your work. However, when you prioritize your list of 30 activities rather than deciding which ones to kill, you will still have a huge amount of resources working on priorities 16-30. If you will decide, you’ll notice that you have more than enough resources to accomplish the top 15 priorities.
Start de-ciding! You’ll find yourself and your company suddenly much more productive.
Image Source: Azhar Khan, Creative Commons
My recent blog on Getting Past Failure reminded of me an experience I had with a client years ago.
I was working with a new president of a major company. He had taken over an organization that had just seemed to be stagnant for many years. His first instinct was to spend time out in the field riding with his sales representatives to find out what their daily experiences were like. He was looking at the organization from the ground up. His early impressions were that the organization was simply hesitant to make any decisive moves. He thought there were sales to be made and market share gains to be had but the entire organization was simply too cautious, afraid to make any major mistakes and not even willing to ask customers for a commitment.
At the same time, I had seen a National Geographic special that had followed a pride of lions. The lead female is the hunter for the pride. She will decide which prey to attack and direct the hunting party how to help her gain an advantage over the targeted animal. But she is the one who makes the kill. As she was in hot pursuit of her targeted zebra she rapidly moved in to make the kill and leaped for the attack just as the zebra came to a fallen log. The zebra jumped over the log and at the same time kicked hard at the attacking lion and caught her right in the side of the head. This kick sent the lion tumbling through the brush and the kill was lost. For the next several weeks the routine seemed to be exactly the same as it had always been but just as the lioness came to the moment of kill, she shied away. She was obviously afraid of being kicked in the head. Over the coming weeks as the pride became more and more hungry, younger females and even a few of the younger males began to challenge her dominance and position as the lead hunter. Rebellion was increasing when she finally regained her confidence or more likely overcame her own fear and finally made another kill. She and the pride quickly returned to their normal and successful routine.
The company above had experienced some of their own “kicks in the head.” They had received a regulatory citation about some of their sales practices. They had experienced some product failures as well as some competitor products gaining great advantage over their own. And they had experienced their own leadership failing to help them out of this funk. They were acting like the lioness who had been kicked in the head.
As the new president began to instill a level of confidence in their sales ability, in the quality of their products and in their strategic plan for being successful in the market place (through a combination of face-to-face meetings as well as large scale meetings) you could see the “pride” begin to return. Sales began to climb (even with no change to the product mix or market conditions) and by the time they launched a new product the following year (that product became the largest selling product in its category) the team was pumped up and ready to go. He had helped them recover from their kick in the head. In overcoming fear, the new president was able to lead his team to success.
Where have you and your team been kicked in the head? Things happen beyond our control. I’ve mentioned before a great book titled The Road Less Traveled, Timeless Edition: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth
Image Source: Amy, Creative Commons
A while back (June of 2010 actually) I wrote my first blog on Patience. Good patience is one of those elements that can help build great teams or more importantly, lack of good patience can quickly break down a team. In that first blog on patience, I referred to a client who would lose his patience when he didn’t see sufficient progress as critical deadlines approached. I’m convinced there is one key part of that statement that must not be overlooked – “As critical deadlines approached.”
Coming out of engineering school, I spent the first decade of my career immersed in project management for several large projects. That decade left me with a couple of very deeply held beliefs:
1. You can only make up about 10% of a remaining schedule.
2. Projects schedules are lost at the beginning, not at the end of the schedule.
I do not consider these belief’s as hard and fast rules but more solid “rule-of-thumb” concepts. After closely tracking many major projects from engineering to construction to software design and development, I became convinced that you could only make up about 10% of the remainder of any schedule. In other words, if you are tackling a project that will take about four weeks of effort (20 working days) you will run into difficulties if you let the first two days slip by without accomplishing the first stages of the project. It seems so innocent, “The project is not due until next month and it won’t make much difference if I don’t get started until the end of the week or first thing next week.” Wrong! While it’s likely that you will in fact complete the project on time, you’ll not fully appreciate how much those first lost days will add to the stress, overworked, overwhelming feeling of not having enough time to accomplish everything as the weeks move along and all of your other projects get layered on top of these “delayed” projects.
Which leads me to my second belief: projects schedules are lost at the beginning, not at the end of the schedule. It’s not what you accomplish or don’t accomplish during that last week of a four week schedule that makes the difference between success and failure (or stress vs an orderly pace), it’s what you did or didn’t do during that first week of the four week schedule that makes the difference. Unfortunately, we’ve forgotten all about what we put off during that first week and therefore don’t associate with that feeling of being overwhelmed and overworked during the last week of the project.
Patience doesn’t happen by reacting calmly to missed deadlines. Patience is induced by setting aggressive early checkpoints on projects so that they experience an orderly pace as the deadline approaches.
Patience:
• Don’t forget your own learning curve (from the first blog). Leaders must work harder than they expect to help people understand new expectations, learn new processes, and have a vision of the new normal.
• Patience is improved and put to better use when there is more discipline at the beginning of a project instead of trying to handle the pressure better at the end of a project.
Ron’s Short Review: Goleman continues to reinforce that it’s our emotional intelligence that actually makes a difference.
Ron’s Short Review: Great book on the dynamics of team, decision making and mass movement.
Image Source: Jack Snell, Creative Commons
In my last post, I talk about getting the wrong person off the bus. In this post I want to share three patterns that I have seen through the years.
Self-Selection
One is the story in the previous People on the Bus post when a person for various reasons decides to self-select out. They quit, they retire, they take another job but it’s their decision. And then as soon as it happens, you immediately experience the relief and freshness in the organization that feels like everyone exhaling a deep breath and then saying, “let’s get to work” with a renewed energy.
Still in Place 1.0 to 2.0
Every organization I’m working with is going through some sort of transformation. Things in this world are changing rapidly and it requires continued renewal and reinvention to keep up with the changes. It’s very easy to keep dancing to the tune that got you here. Although I see this in many cases of varying degrees, I’m thinking of one individual who has been very successful in his career for nearly thirty years. He has run large chunks of an organization, has been rewarded with bonus, salary and promotions through a steady career of successes. However, while he is currently responsible for over one hundred people, technology advancements in recent years have rendered what they do redundant. The entire organization needs to stop what they’ve been doing for the last couple of decades and begin doing things differently to continue to add value to the company. He’s in charge of the transformation. But, he doesn’t know what to do. He’s also afraid that he won’t be valued in the new environment. He’s spent thirty years honing skills that have been rewarded and now he’s getting the message that those skills are no longer valued. If he actually transforms his organization into what they need to be, there won’t be a need for his job (how he’s done it for the last many years). He can’t (or is not willing) to reinvent himself therefore he is not transforming his organization. Something will break soon. The company can no longer afford to have this large group of people producing daily work that is no longer of value.
But what about the leaders in this situation you might ask? Why is his boss allowing this to go on? This gets tough. Here is a guy who has performed well for three decades. He may know more about the job (as it used to be) than anyone else. As recently as two years ago he had received nothing but the highest annual evaluations and a steady string of promotions. And, he’s a great guy! “What am I supposed to do, fire him?”, asks the boss. Maybe.
It has become obvious that he is now the wrong person on the bus. We don’t want to just put him off the bus standing by the curb. And we certainly don’t want to throw him under the bus. But we do need to get him on a different bus or maybe in a different seat on the bus if he wants to go to the new destination where the bus is now headed. Leaving him where he is will become increasingly detrimental to himself, his team and the company.
Steady but Slow Improvement
A third thing that makes it difficult to get the wrong people off the bus is that they actually get better. Slowly.
Realistic time frames can be one of the most effective ways for dealing with getting the wrong people off the bus. In most cases the leaders (and even the individual themselves) know what the new behavior and approach needs to be and how it should work. And in many cases, the leader does a really good job of identifying the six (or 5 or 8 or 10) changes that need to take place in order for the person to be successful and valued on the new bus ride. The problem happens when after setting these new behaviors and competencies as goals for individual growth; the person only gets better at one or maybe two of the areas of required growth. During their performance review a year later they’ve improved performance on one of the areas but still need improvement in the other five. Then another year later they’ve improved a little bit on another area of the list but only marginally. However, because she see’s improvement the leader is reluctant to take the steps to get them off the bus. But a year or more has gone by and they haven’t moved on from behavior 1.0 to rev 2.0. In the meantime things are changing so rapidly that they really need to be transforming from 2.0 to 3.0. What I have experienced is that it takes nearly six months of consistent new behavior to develop some level of competency and acceptance and another six months of consistent behavior for it to sink in as second nature. But, if a person is still working on a new behavior in a year without essentially conquering it, it’s not likely that they will accomplish the needed goal in a reasonable time frame. It’s now time to help them onto another bus.
Image Source: MD111, Creative Commons
I was reminded the other day that when I was in kindergarten, I invited a friend to come home with me on the bus. Now, we didn’t make official arrangements like checking with parents or getting permission, I just asked this friend to get on my bus as we were headed home after school. As an adult I can now imagine the turmoil that must have ensued when this five year old girl ended up on the wrong bus.
Jim Collins in his book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t
Jim Collins focuses on getting the right people on the bus but I think the harder part of leadership is getting the wrong people off the bus. My young friend and I were unaware of the great disturbance we had caused by enjoying our ride home and looking forward to playing together. It was the adults, the supervisors, the leaders that could easily see the chaos caused by our decision and their efforts were focused on getting the wrong person off this bus and back on the right bus.
Today when I was with a client, I was notified that a person in the company had decided to resign. While no one was really rejoicing, it was very obvious that there was a relief in the room and a sense of “finally, we can move on” because this had been one of those people who were on the wrong bus. Now, before you jump to conclusions I want you to know that he was a fine human being, with a long track record of great success in a highly visible (and paid) leadership position. This was not some sloth who everyone knew should depart. It’s just that the school bus was on a new route and he hadn’t adapted to the new route and scenery. He remained stuck in doing things the way they had always been done. He had not re-invented himself (new word for change) along with the company and the team as they were re-inventing themselves to cope with the new realities.
In my next post, I’ll talk about three patterns that I see of the wrong person on the bus.
Ron’s Short Review: I’m not sure we’ll see another Lincoln but building a team out of rivals is very powerful and we’re all trying to build teams out of people with very diverse points of view. Or at least we should be.
Ron’s Short Review: The Heath brothers write great books on story telling and how it can move us and our colleagues, clients, or customers.
Ron’s Short Review: Collaboration is the gold of the future.