SparkPilot blog

I’ll never forget when a mentor asked me:

Are you a good leader?

Duh, all of the reasons why people wanted to be in my org went through my mind. She knew that my organizations had exceeded expectations the last three years……then a nagging feeling took hold of me. I asked why she was asking this question? She asked another question:

How many of the people reporting to me today, could deliver the results in two years?

Again that avoidance thing rushed forward to protect my fragile ego…I tried to avoid answering the question by debating the number years. She wouldn’t have it! I tried to protect myself knowing full well that she was about to crush my ego and educate me! Here is what she had to say:

Good for me that the teams were delivering above expectations but I was still a key ingredient of the recipe. Because I wasn’t growing leaders to replace me, or grow leaders to export; this all all about me and my ego. I making sure that I was an integral ingredient of the recipe, thereby making sure that I was needed.

Ouch!! Since then, I now operate in a manner to try to put myself out of a job. It is waaaayyyy more difficult than it sounds and I continue to struggle with it, to get more interesting posts to read, we recommend to check the new peloton compatible shoes review. All of this being said, I can now say that I have managed to help a number of people to grow into roles where they are now working on this same challenge.

How many leaders have you helped create?

Crisis situations tend to be great breeding grounds for confusion and chaos. The good news is that it is fairly easy to stop this natural state. A Leader and a sound and tested crisis management plan.

In this post, I share a simple high-level methodology to handle a number of crisis situations. The model is pretty simple and consists of breaking the situation up into phases with distinct goals for each phase. In the real world, it is pretty common to have to go back to phases that were already completed as more information is found or especially when there are multiple issues. For each phase, there are two themes. Issue(s) and communication.

1. Identify

This is the first phase and marks the start of the crisis management effort. The first step is to do a quick triage and to determine what additional skills are needed. This initial scoping will enable the Incident Commander to determine who needs to be engaged to help isolate the issue further.

Now because the issue has been identified, it is easy to notify customers that there is a known issue and that the team is engaged.

2. Isolate

Based on experience, this is the step that requires the highest level of discipline because of the common behavior for folks to try and solve the issue(s) instead of trying to isolate the issue. It is important to isolate the issue to lay the groundwork in order to stop this issue from occurring in the future.

In this phase, the team needs to isolate the issue(s) down to the granular component(s) that is/are causing the issue(s). As more information is gathered, it enables the Incident Commander to engage or release the appropriate Subject Matter Experts (SME) on the team.

When it comes to customer communication, I prefer to communicate the actual current state until the issue(s) are isolated, even if it is not possible to provide an estimate on when the situation will be resolved. Therefore, when entering into the Isolate phase, I like to notify the customers that the team is engaged and starting to isolate the issue(s). As progress is made, provide progress updates to customers. However when progress is slow, switch to timed update methodology and provide customers with updates on a predetermined interval. There are pros & cons to each of these approaches and therefore you will need to select the mechanism that suits your business needs the best.

3. Restore

Now comes the steps to mitigate or restore the situation to “normal”. The million $ questions is what is normal? The definition of “normal” is best defined before the crisis and I prefer a checklist that can be used to determine if the situation has returned back to a fully functioning state.

Back to the customer communication, with the checklist, you can communicate to the customers that you are on step 3 of 9 or whatever the counts are. To get the durations of each step, this information should be collected during the test runs or other similar crisis situations.

4. Repair

This step is where the issue is repaired should the root cause not be addressed in the Restore step. This step also covers the elimination of any mitigations performed and returning the state to the fully operational state.

Remember that some customers would like to know when this step has been completed.

5. Eliminate

The Best Customer Impacting Incident is the One that didn’t happen!! Therefore, in order to make this statement come true, it means that the team needs to learn as much as possible from all crisis situations and apply these lessons learned to any possible future states. So, it is important to analyze the situation and to define action items with clear owners for each action item. This step will eventually ensure that the situation is eliminated. I prefer to use a formal retrospective review of the crisis situation. This process is very similar to the typical ITIL post mortem but is more collaborative and integrates much better in an agile or continuous operational state.  I will be publishing a blog post on a very effective retrospective technique within the next month or so.

Ideally the information gleaned from the retrospective can be used to formulate a customer communication. Unfortunately, this is not always possible; provide customers with some type of report so that they do not have to speculate and operate in the dark. Then continue to perform the due diligence in the background. This enables a data-driven followup with customers, should it be needed.

Leadership always matters and in a crisis situation, leadership matters even more! When running a service, one of the most critical times is when the service fails and someone will need to step up and take the lead. Without someone taking the reigns, I have seen a mariad of situations arise and as such I am sharing a very high-level definition of the key focus areas for crisis leadership role often called an Incident Commander or Crisis Manager.

Assemble the team

The very first responsibility of this role, is to assemble the team with the skills needed to restore the service ASAP. Then if the problem shifts or there are multiple issues, it might be necessary to adjust the composition of the team to ensure that the skills needed are available. Sometimes in a long running situation it might also be necessary to perform shift changes including the Incident Commander.

Communicate, communicate, Communicate

A service without customers will not last for long and as such it is imperative that the situation be communicated in a clear and concise manner on a regular and predictable rhythm. My preferred communication rhythm is either 15 minutes or 30 minutes and needs to be defined as part of the Standard Operational Procedure (SOP).

Maintain Focus

Ensure that the team maintains the necessary focus needed to restore the service. It is my experience that engineers who don’t know what to do after 5 minutes of thought time will still not know what to do after 25 minutes of thought. Bring in another engineer who is able to operate more effectively under pressure. As such, I would suggest that the Incident Commander operate according to a predefined process to handle the situation where slow or no progress is being made. This enables the Incident Commander to engage other engineers to help expedite things as part of the SOP and not making it personal. This is one of the most difficult tasks an employee can be asked to perform because most folks do not want to wake up others in the middle of the night.

Quality

Do a job right or don’t bother! This is really easy to say yet extremely difficult to adhere to in a crisis situation. It boils down to Leadership and someone flying this flag. In most cases people will follow the lead.

Urgency

The best idea tomorrow really doesn’t help us solve today’s crisis situation. I am big fan of using countdown timers to create the stimuli needed to engage additional team members or escalate to executives.

Budgeting………… over the years, I have seen budgeting become this massive effort instead of it being the simple step of applying financial quantification to an annual execution plan.  So let’s go and look at the various opportunities for simplifying the process.

Opportunity I

Please do not merge the annual planning with budgeting process.  People, they are separate efforts.  Annual planning should be done after the strategic multi-year planning process.  Then the annual plan should be used as input to the budgeting exercise where the financial constraints are applied to the annual goals.  The trade-offs are then made based on the strategic goals.

When the financial planning is merged with the annual planning, people tend to become overwhelmed and/or decisions tend to be boil down to cost management instead of annual execution of the strategic plan.

And, let’s face it, the accountants already control too much of our life already.  Please don’t allow them to dictate how we do our jobs.

Opportunity II

This is one that I have seen happen more times than I can count and is a pet peeve of the budgeting effort.  When creating the budget, it is good practice to use the expenditure numbers from the previous years.  You do have that data don’t you?  So let’s look at this scenario.

We outsourced some work to a company and when we started, they only need to provide us with 10 folks.  If we assume that they charged us $20 per head per month, it would be a total cost $200 per month.  Then after five months we doubled the headcount to 20 folks, we would now be paying them a total of $400 per month.

So for the visual folks, here is what our expenditure looks like.

OK, so this is exactly like we thought it would be, a step up as we spent the money.  The numbers are in the table below, totally up to $1,000.

Now assuming that we would want to continue the service, how much should we budget for?

Well the simple answer is, that spent $1000 this year and therefore the budget should be the same because we have a flat budget.  Then there are other that are asking about the duration of the project etc.  So here are some more assumptions that for the purpose of this scenario, I will define but as management, you really should be making these bets.

• We will continue with the contract because they are delivering.
• There will be growth; you need to decide how you want to forecast it…….
• Assume no attrition

Of all of these questions, the biggest challenge will be how aggressive do we want to be be on the growth and how do we want to allocate it.  For the purpose of this example, I am going with 100% growth allocated across the four quarters.  This means that we will grow 25% of this years allocation every quarter.  Now the graph looks like this.

Again, no big surprises because it simply shows the continued expenditure and also the 25% growth every quarter.  Please note that they add up to $3,900 and therefore this will need to be the budget for the following year.  If you are being held to a flat budget, then you will need to prioritize and decide where to cut, this contract or elsewhere.

Opportunity III

Doing the budgeting exercise without supplier or partner involvement.  In this scenario, the person doing the budget takes a guess, or maybe looks at a couple of websites to get an idea of the possible costs.  In many cases this is done because the person doing the budget does not know what the actual annual plan is and the idea is to get enough $ before embarking on the project.

Some other reasons why the budget can increase:

• Off shore exchange rate
• Up-leveling of the skills of the out sourced staff
• Increased scope
• increased coverage
• Increased rates

In my experience, I have yet to have a supplier or partner account manager push back when I tell them I am working on budgets and need to understand what to budget for the following year.  Naturally I give them a month or two notice so that they can get things sorted out on their side.  This is especially key when dealing with off shore facilities because of the exchange rate fluctuations.

A while back, I lost a good friend and last week, I realized that some of my behavior must have been so irritating for him.  For those that do not know me, I am a results orientated person, often referred to a Type A.  My friend, let’s call him Curly, had his healthy streak of Type A but he was a Collaborator at his core.  He was at his happiest when he got to work with others creating something, especially to improve the life of others.

Me, I tend towards having frank and direct discussions, which for the most part works, because when I misstep, I am able to notice and recover the situation.  The fact that I only became aware of this behavior this weekend, is totally embarrassing to me.  Hopefully this post will help others learn through my mistakes.

So, the behavior

I tend to make statements or suggestions that certain very collaborative personalities, such as Curly, can easily construe as instructions.  OK, in some cases, they were instructions.  Well intended but instructions never the less.  Intent does not equal impact. While he never said anything about my behavior, I remember one occasion, it was obvious that I had made him angry but then, being the great collaborative person that he was, he smoothed over the situation, cracked a joke and we moved on.

We never revisited the event and I remained blissfully ignorant………..until this weekend when someone else educated me.

Now I wonder, how many other people had this same reaction to my “instructions”….if you did?

A couple of years back I had the privilege of having breakfast with a very successful top-tier VC.  We met for breakfast at an upscale hotel in downtown San Francisco.  He is an avid skier and in incredible shape; therefore I was expecting to see a selection of health food on his plate.  To my surprise, he was having  fried eggs and bacon for breakfast. I could not resist and asked him about his choice of breakfast.  He laughed and explained that it was one of  his indulgences and it also served as a reminder for him.  My quizzical expression said it all and he started to explain.

The chicken was involved in the creation of the egg but the pig was committed to the creation of the bacon.  The pig died to produce the bacon while the chicken lived another day to lay more eggs.

He quickly acknowledged that when you have a pig, you need to investigate all options.  For example with a pig you have two options:  cut it up, smoke it and sell it as bacon or put lipstick and a dress on it and market it as Miss Piggy.  Either way you can make money, it just depends on that the market wants.

Needless to say I longer look at egg and bacon the same.

Lesson Learned:

• I now ask my myself:  Am I committed or involved?
• There are always options and as long as as there is a market, it is possible to make it work.

Way, way back I was promoted to my first management position.  The conversation with my boss went something along the following lines.

Boss: It sounds like you were expecting the promotion?

Me: Yep, I worked my butt for this .  (rather smugly) (Looking back I was an arrogant little sh1t)

Boss: So you see this promotion as a reward?

Me:  Oh yes! (laughing)

Boss: I see it differently.  The promotion is not a reward for your hard work!  That is why I gave you a bonus.  I promoted you because the department needs someone who to lead the team and offload the day-to-day management tasks from me.  This promotion means that I need you to step up into this new role and perform.  It will be a stretch for you and you have a lot to learn but I think that you can do it.

Me: What do I need to learn?

Boss:  You will need to learn management skills, improve your project management skills to handle multiple simultaneous projects and people.  And of course budgeting too.

Me: No problem!  I will prove that I am worth the investment.

Boss:  I am investing in you and you are a high risk investment at that!  You have great technical skills but now you need to learn the additional skills to perform as a manager.  Basically you only have 25% of the skills to needed to perform as a manager!  I am prepared to take the risk for a limited time and you need to demonstrate progress week by week.  I can only give around 6 months to get up to speed and deliver.

Me:  No problem

—————————————————-

Wow, boy was that a boatload of work!  I learned a multitude of extremely valuable lessons from that promotion and the ensuing years of work.  Here are the top lessons that I learned in the those six months.

• People are promoted into positions to meet the needs of the business.

• The learning phase never ends but there is a limited amount of time that the business can wait for you to learn and gather the skills needed to perform at the level needed.

Way back when I was young and ready to take on the world, I had the privilege to be assigned to one of the top computer consultants in South Africa.  Leon had a reputation of being really tough and I had no idea exactly how tough.  that being said, I learned from him that any other single person.  Thanks Leon!

On my second day in the department, I was summoned to meet with him  to discuss my computer knowledge.  I walked into this meeting with all of the arrogance that a living person could muster.  Over the next 2 hours, Leon proceeded to educate me, in the nicest possible manner and by the end of the meeting, I was no longer under the impression that I had a great understanding of computers.  I understood that I had a boatload to learn and I left that meeting with a long list of areas that I had to go and study.

Right at the end of the meeting Leon shared with something that I have never forgotten.  The three stages of competence:

• Stage I- You know very little and you know it
• Stage II- You have a pretty good understanding, however you unaware of how more there is to learn
• Stage III- You have a pretty good understanding, yet you know that there is much more to learn

He emphasized that we go through these stages with everything that is new to us.  Therefore just because you are in Stage III in one area, you can be Stages I or II in other areas.  The dangerous level is the 2nd stage because we are oblivious about the damage that we inflict because we do not know what our limits are.  His key message to me was to get through the 2nd stage as quickly as possible.

Lesson Learned:  Get through Stage 2 as quickly as possible!

I had the privilege of attending a talk by Dr Tom Sant,  author of  “The Language of Success” and “Persuasive Business Proposals” today and he shared a real nugget.  It is actually a feature built into Microsoft Word, though I was totally oblivious to it.  The feature  evaluates the document and creates a report on the readability of the document.

The first trick is to enable this feature:

• Open up Microsoft Word
• Open Options – in Office 12 click on Office button and click on the Word Button
• Click on the Proofing option from the menu on the left.

• As indicated by the A – Ensure that the “Show readability statistics” checkbox is checked.
• As indicated by the B – Ensure that these boxes NOT checked
• Now execute the Spell checker as normal
• Handle the notifications regarding spelling or grammar warnings.
• At the end of the check a popup will be displayed similar to the following:

Check the Averages

• Words per sentence should be 15 to 17
• Characters per word – for best readability this should be less than 6

Check the Readability

• Passive Sentences should be less than 10%
• Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level should less than 10

So as you can see, the first paragraph of this blog post does not rate very high for readability.  It must be the names of Tom’s books.

Considering the recession that we find ourselves in, I guess it is not surprising that I find myself having many discussions about how to handle the situation where cuts needs to be made.  Unfortunately, I have watched many leaders take an overly optimistic view and totally underestimate the dip of the market and then over estimate their available resources to weather the storm.  For startups with limited resources, this can be fatal.

In this graphic, I have used the blue line to denote the revenue coming into a company.  The red line denotes the expense reductions that the company is making with the exact points of reduction marked with the A, B, C and D markers.  The area marked in green between the two lines is the bad zone for companies without sufficient reserves to weather the downturn.  Unfortunately, I have also seen  the plug getting pulled because of insufficient funds.

Although this approach is fairly common, it tends to have a rather disastrous affect on the people in the company.  The people are under continuous threat of additional cuts and therefore some of them resort to some rather significant self preservation behaviors.  In these circumstances, the teamwork takes a backseat and as such the productivity also take a massive hit.  In addition, talent retention is an issue and in most cases the best people walk first, because they can, leaving the lower caliber folks behind.

This graph shows a totally different behavior and the blue line shows the incoming revenue while the green line shows expenditure.  In this case the expenditure has been drastically reduced when the incoming revenue has declined.  In this graph, I have created the impression that there is very little between the incoming revenue and the expenditure but there are some very successful companies that follow this model but have a much healthier buffer between the the incoming revenue and the expenditure.  In this case, cuts in expenditure are made at points A and B and these cuts do mean job cuts.  Nothing should be spared from the cuts.  e.g. it is far better to sacrifice the free sodas instead of your office mate.

The purple area is where the company is doubling down and investing for the market upturn.  This investment, provides the company with a head start on their competitors.  This approach has some significant benefits because the people trust the management more because they are actively managing the situation.  In addition because a strategy is being followed, it creates an open environment that is predictable for the employees and leads to much less fear and uncertainty.  I have found this approach to be much more acceptable to the high performers and therefore allows you keep the staff that you want to keep.

Let’s call this executive Steve, he is a  senior level executive, in his early 60’s.  He is very well respected by the people in his organization in a large part due to his extremely calm demeanor.

Steve’s directs are all VP’s in the company and they had been struggling with an issue for close on 7 weeks and were all frustrated.  To make matters worse, these execs had allowed the issue  to impact their interpersonal relationships with some of them having their little versions of the “cold war”.

So during a meeting in the boardroom, Steve watched with mounting displeasure as his directs expressed their frustration at not being able to solve the problem.  Each of them proceeded to provide excuses or point at some or other reason why they could not address the issue on hand.  Steve demonstrated his patience and calmness again by allowing each of them to express their opinions. He then asked them how they were working together on addressing the issue.  Again they behaved in like ducks with watertight backs.  Steve then asked them about what they would do if they were in his shoes?  Again they had many words and Steve slowly stood up.  Some of his directs paid attention but others did not.

However, when Steve slammed his hands down on the table, the loud clap drowning out the expletive that he had just uttered.  All of his directs stared at Steve, dumbfounded, and then he said something:  “If I wanted to hear reasons why this cannot be done, I would have asked my teenage son!  I am paying you significantly more to solve problems.  So why don’t you stop behaving like teenagers and act like the professionals that I am paying you to be!”

Needless to say, his directs had a solution ready for him four hours later.

So the Lesson that I Learned from this, has changed how I approach things.  Now, when I am moaning or bitching about something, I simply ask myself:  ” am I behaving like a teenager?”  If the answer is yes, then I modify my behavior and to ensure that I am adding value.

I was watching the Tour of California this morning in the company of Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwin, the best cycling commentators in the world.  They mentioned that Lance Armstrong analyzes his time-trial performances and makes changes to his training regime to ensure that he meets his season goals.  This got me thinking about the parallels between world-class competitive cycling and business.  The stage was the time-trial  to Solvang and was won by Levi in style with him crossing the line with three fingers extended, indicating his pursuit of his third win.  Go Levi!!  Here are my thoughts:

• focus on the goals – set the goal(s) and stay focused on achieving the goal(s).  Successful sportsmen are great examples of this behavior and I find that this is a challenge for people in business.  Set the goal and evaluate your efforts to ensure that they are contributing to the goal.  Do not forget that it also takes sacrifices and it is not only what you do but also what you do not do.  For us in the business world, it mainly manifests itself with spending too much time on tasks that do not contribute to achieving the goals.  A good example is the water cooler talk.
• preparation – During the post stage interview, Levi spoke about his experience of riding the stage in training and knowing how his body responds at the various points of the stage.  This is no different to us in the business because we also need to come to the table prepared.  For us it might mean doing our research, gathering data or something like socializing an idea to gather feedback from our colleagues.
• confidence in your own abilities – you just have to believe in yourself!  Belief in yourself is key and it is contagious because everyone likes winners.  Just be careful of coming across as arrogant!
• learning from feedback – top sportsmen are used to getting feedback from their coaches and management.  In the business world, I have seen this improve over the years with feedback from managers and peers now becoming more and more prevalent.  The key for us in the business world is to adjust our behavior based on that feedback.
• self awareness – The ability to evaluate your behavior and performance objectively is key.  No matter what your chosen profession is, this step is required to get to the top.  It takes regular introspection and self evaluation, which for me is a less than pleasant experience.  A trick here is to do postmortems as part of the process, thereby depersonalizing the experience and making it less of an attack on our egos.

I had a manager that always told me -  “always assume positive intent”.   Normally this was when we were discussing an issue that was controversial or emotionally charged.

Implementing this lesson in my day-to-day dealings, I find that as long as I approach the situation with an “assume positive intent” mindset, I am generally able to overcome most challenges much quicker and with far less conflict.