SparkPilot blog

I receive daily emails from the Frances Hesselbein Leadership Institute and they sent this quote out late December.  I have been thinking about it quite a lot.

The criterion for measuring the success of our leaders should be how well they serve everyone that has a vested interest in the success of the enterprise.

Bill George

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My Thoughts

• We are being measured, whether we want to be measured or not.  Are we helping set how we believe we should be measured?
• How well are we serving those with a vested interest?  Who has a vested interest?  I can think of a number of people in large corporations that have forgotten that we are here to serve….
• We are here to ensure success.  Not to stroke your ego Mr. Colleague / Boss /  ……………………………..  <- place for you to add title / name

If you don’t know Bill George, here is a link to his bio.

I recently received a call from an ex-colleague, whom with I hadn’t spoken with in almost a year.  She wanted to talk about an open position on my team, which surprised me because she did not have the skills that we were looking for.  However, she wanted to talk about someone else who she knew had applied for the position and was hoping to get an offer, let’s call him Joe.  I was floored when she then started to tell me that Joe was part of her brood and she just wanted to make sure that this was the right thing for him.  This went on for quite a while with me scheming about I could get off the call ASAP.   Then she started to tell me that I needed to treat him right or the Mama Bear in her would come out.  Wow!  At first, I was ready to hangup but then I realized that she did not mean this as threat and it was just her expressing her concern.  Nice but…………..

This made me think back about a similar situation a couple of years back where a where Jane, was irritating her workmates.  They felt that she was constantly trying to tell them what to do.  In their opinion, it was always about what she wanted to do and she would not respect their opinions.  Jane was not happy either and spoke to me about it.  Here is where we landed.  She was a single mother of three and therefore at home she had to be “the strong one”.  This meant that she was so used to issuing instructions to her kids and not listening their responses. It was the only way that she was able to keep control of them. When questioned by the kids, her response was:  “because I say so”.  In the work environment, she often saw questions from her colleagues as personal attacks and that they did not listen to her.  During our discussions, she realized that listening was very different from them doing what she said.  She also realized that she just wanted to be heard but her home role had skewed what she wanted and she was expecting her colleagues to do what she said.  She changed her expectations and things flourished from then on.

So, based on these two situations, I might be coming across as anti-Mother Hen.  This is not true, all I ask is that the Mother Hen identify first whether the person/people that they are communicating with recognize them in the role of Mother Hen.

Let’s contrast these two environments

Home

• It is the parent that generally provides the leadership and guidance.
• The parent role equals total authority and the de facto leader so it acceptable to make unilateral decisions that affect them.
• Because I say so, can be an age appropriate response, especially in a crisis or where confusion prevails.
• We are parents by birth.
• Parents define the acceptable behavior boundaries in the home.

Work

• The leadership and guidance could be anyone, peer, manager….
• Our colleagues choose to follow our leadership or not.  It is their choice not ours.
• We are appointed to our roles, either because that is our role or because someone else says that we have the qualifications.  Generally the role is formal.  i.e. engineer, nurse, manager?  I don’t think the mother hen role exists.
• A formal span of control exists.  Do you have the authority to make decisions on their behalf?
• Laws, corporates guidance, people’s culture and their expectations of us define the acceptable behavior boundaries in the office.

So before you assume the Mother Hen role outside the home, please think of the following:

• That person that you mothering / herding, did they ask you to mother or herd them?
• The person that you are interacting with, do they recognize the Mother Hen role in the office?  Do they see you as the Mother Hen?  And more importantly, how do they judge you as the Mother Hen?
• Is it appropriate for you to play this role now with me?
• Know your limits and the person’s boundaries and do not overstep them and just to make sure, ask.

How to drive change in a predictable and reproducible manner has been a topic of discussion with three of my mentees.  Why predictable and reproducible?  The answer is simple, when you shock people, they tend to stop and evaluate what is going on before moving forward.  So if our behavior is predictable, then we will not shock them.  As leaders, we are expected to reproduce results consistently and being able to do it once, just makes us lucky.

Experience has taught me that I can greatly increase the chances of success by reducing the number of variables or unknowns.  As a result, I use a pragmatic approach with as little process as possible and keep things simple, thereby making things easy to explain and easy to understand.  For more mature or process heavy personalities or organizations, this approach might not be acceptable.

This approach works as long as the plan takes into consideration the unique situational requirements and evaluates progress / results on a regular basis.   This means that you only need to change where needed and not reinvent the wheel every time.

So, to the plan.  There are four key areas of the plan.  The first is Awareness followed by a Planning phase before the Execution phase.  A much forgotten phase is Monitoring or measuring the progress, or destruction.  Here is a visual representation which hopefully makes things clearer.

Awareness

In this phase we need to become aware of the problem or issue.  If is it is a behavioral issue, someone might provide us with feedback.  If it is a business opportunity, this might be a customer or prospect sharing with us their business challenge.

Recognizing this phase:

• Becoming aware of a situation that we were previously unaware of.  The Ah Ha moment.
• Finding out that there are different perspectives to the one that we have.  Most often we personalize this and say that person has a different opinion.

Manager’s Note:

• If you need to provide someone with behavioral feedback, it is important to focus on the behavior and not your judgement.
• This phase can be traumatic, be patient with your people and help them through it.

Risks:

• Often we tend to ignore or deny the incoming data / perspective because the situation does not match our preconceived idea or notion of how we want it to be.  Ignorance is bliss, or is it?
• This phase can be traumatic and depending on the implications or if the situation it may have an emotional on us.

Plan

If we don’t know where we are going, how are we going to get there?  In some cases we also need to take a look at where we are and then determine the gap between where we are and where we want to go before we start down the road.  I am not advocating analysis paralysis but at lest know what you are going to do.  A very important element of this phase is what are measurements are we going to use to determine if our execution phase is working or not.  The monitoring phase will help you determine if the plan is working or not.

Recognizing this phase:

• Deciding what to do and what not to do.
• Providing clarity around where we are going or what we need to do.
• When people ask what needs to be done.

Manager’s Note:

• clarity, clarity, clarity
• Sometimes you need to place a bet and make a move rather standing still and looking around.
• Continue to gather feedback.
• Being in a management position, does not always give you the right to dictate the plan.
• Ensure that the plan is being communicated in a manner that people understand it.
• It is OK for the plan to be different to how you would do it.  Diversity is great!!

Risks:

• Not doing anything because waiting for the data. (analysis paralysis)
• Omitting this step.  If you don’t plan, the execution phase will be delayed while people work out what they need to do.
• Not using data to define the path forward.  Be careful about perceptions because they depend on the person and the filters that person uses.
• Bad or no communication does not make it a bad plan.  In some cases, the plan may lay out the lesser of two evils and therefore it will be unpopular.

Execution

This phase is all about delivering the results as defined by in the plan.  If you, or the people executing the plan, are not clear about what needs to be done, go back to planning.

Recognizing this phase:

• There is work that needs to be done.
• The plan is defined and now needs to be executed.

Manager’s Note:

• Do not get in the way of the execution.
• Being critical of the execution.

Risks:

• Losing focus
• The execution elements where not simplified or fragmented enough to be executed because they are still too large or complicated.

Monitor

This often overlooked phase is key because it provides us with the safety net for the planning and execution phases by monitoring  how the execution phase is really addressing the need.

Recognizing this phase:

• The execution is in full swing.
• People are providing feedback on the progress, or lack thereof.
• Not knowing if are making progress or not, it’s time to monitor.

Manager’s Note:

• Monitoring is not a step that people like.  In most cases, they do not like to be measured.
• Feedback is a form of measurement, it is just subjective.

Risks:

• In most cases, we are not very good monitoring ourselves.
• Skipping this step means that you never know how you are progressing.
• Not having milestones or metrics means that progress is subjective.
• Not having a baseline before you started executing means that you do not know if your are having a positive or negative impact.

Leadership becomes necessary to business and communities when have tough challenges to tackle, when they have to change theirs ways in order to thrive or survive, when continuing to operate according to current structures, procedures and processes no longer will suffice.

-Ronald Heifetz-

Wow, here is quite an entertaining yet educational video titled Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy.

Enjoy

I arrived early at a restaurant for a meeting and overheard a discussion while waiting for the others to arrive.   Here is an excerpt from their conversation that resonated with me.

They don’t get it!  They are oblivious to the fact that no one trusts their team. I mean they claim to be transparent but when we need information from them, need have to search for it ourselves.  I think it is short sighted on their behalf when they watch me search, even if we ask them for help and they don’t help.  Then when we find the information that we need, they claim that they are being transparent with us.  Yeah right!!

I discussed this behavior with a colleague and he was familiar with the behavior that was being discussed above.  He labeled it as “discovery driven disclosure”.  He also mentioned that he had experience with behavior in the past and it had been really difficult to partner with that team because  their behavior undermined trust.  As a result, the teams spent a lot of time questioning each other and not so much time collaborating which impacted their ability to successfully deliver a solution.

The comments and followup discussion got me thinking about Trust.

Trust is the basis of all relationships, both personal and professional. We all establish trust with others in our own manner.  We also have our own starting expectations for others when it comes to us trusting them.  Some of us will trust others with little evidence, giving them the benefit and assuming positive intent. Others expect the trust to be earned and start off with a much lower level of trust.

Building on this starting point for trust, let’s look at some of the other elements that influence how we establish trust.  The first one, is how the role that we perform affects the trust level. We all tend to trust people that have “earned” a higher standing.   For example, we expect the chef at a fine restaurant will use fresh ingredients and work in a pristine kitchen when they prepare our food. If that chef is from a Michelin 3 star rated restaurant, then the expectations will be even higher.

The final and most important  element is the impact of our actions.  Therefore we need to be conscious of the impact of our actions or inactions on our trust level.   Be careful of disingenuous behavior, disrespecting others, selfish behavior and of course lack of disclosure or transparency because these behaviors will impact our trust level negatively..

Pulling it together

To help illustrate how all of these areas relate to each other and how they impact the level of trust, here is a formula to help quantify the trust level.

a – Starting Expectations

b – Role

c – Actions

To use the formula, each of these variables needs to be assigned a number of between 0 and 5, with 5 being the highest rating.  Now just rate each of the elements and then total up the numbers.  This will provide you with a qualitative trust rating.  Having some of your customers, partners or employees provide you with their ratings, can be an eye-opening experience.

Regarding the evaluation of the total value.  This will be unique to you and you will need to determine what numbers you are comfortable with.  For me personally, the number needs to be above 10.  I also use the formula by assuming positive intent and therefore if I have not seen any actions or behaviors, I assign either a 4 or 5 and then evaluate again when I have more data.  Using the graphic below, the red area is the high risk area while the green is the safer area, naturally with the ideal being a perfect score.

I finish this post with a quote a Robin Sharma book:  Leadership Wisdom from the Monk who sold his Ferrari.

Being open and truthful also means that you take care of the little issues and skirmishes that come up every day before they escalate into full-blown wars.

Press Release title:  Hewitt Associates, The RBL Group and FORTUNE Announce Global Top Companies for Leaders

Here are some excerpts from the press release that caught my eye:

“even during the economic downturn, Global Top Companies remained committed to building leadership capability within their organizations. In other words, tighter budgets and fewer resources forced these organizations to think and act smarter and more creatively about what really mattered when it came to leadership — but they didn’t lose focus.”

“Strong leadership is a critical element in helping global companies successfully compete, yet many organizations lack the know-how and infrastructure to create a robust pipeline of leaders for future success. Simply put, they lack the discipline to build leaders”

Here are some of the key elements of the companies that leverage Leadership:

• Leadership remains a critical priority — in good or bad economic times
• Succession planning is deliberate and consistent
• Leaders clearly understand what is expected of them as leaders
• Developing the next generation of leaders is a priority (formal program in place)

According to the panel, the Top Companies for Leaders are:

1. IBM
2. The Procter & Gamble Company
3. General Mills, Inc.
4. McKinsey & Company
5. ICICI Bank Ltd.
6. McDonald’s Corporation
7. General Electric Company
8. Titan Cement Company S.A.
9. China Mobile Communications Corporation – Shanghai Ltd.
10. Hindustan Unilever
11. Natura Cosmeticos S.A.
12. Colgate Palmolive
13. TNT N.V.
14. Deere & Company
15. Whirlpool Corporation
16. 3M Company
17. Cargill, Incorporated
18. Olam International
19. Eli Lilly and Company
20. PepsiCo, Inc.
21. American Express Company
22. Lockheed Martin Corporation
23. Intel Corporation
24. Infosys Technology
25. FedEx Corporation

The full press release can be found here:  http://www.hewittassociates.com/Intl/NA/en-US/AboutHewitt/Newsroom/PressReleaseDetail.aspx?cid=7609

I was asked recently what traits I look for to determine if someone is ready to move into a leadership role, either as a manager or as a thought leader.  This is easy if I have worked with the person because they will display the majority of these traits in their daily actions.

In addition to this post on Leadership, here are some of the traits that I looks for:

• Consistently demonstrates core values
  • Respect for others
  • Strong work ethic
  • Honesty & Integrity
  • Self motivation
• Discipline excellence
  • Deep discipline knowledge
  • Ability to mentor & coach others
  • Results focus
• Leadership
  • Desire to lead
  • Consistently demonstrates accountability
  • Mobilizes others to action
  • Credibility
• Soft skills
  • Communicates clearly and effectively
  • Self aware
  • Selfless
  • Responds well to feedback
  • Cares for others
    • Helps develops others
    • Demonstrates empathy

And the final item that I look for is:

Are others willing to follow that person’s lead?

A thought provoking question for when you have some quiet time………

Are Leaders there for their Followers?

or

Are Followers there for their Leader?

Business has changed:  We have moved from business to business (B2B) and business to consumer (B2C) to Consumer to Consumer(C2C) model.  20 years ago C2C was pretty much limited to a swap meets.

I believe that the face of management has also changed.  There is a move from the pure hierarchical model where top-down rules to a more social form of leadership where the followers get to choose who they want to follow.

To me, there is a new social era of management where leadership plays a much larger role than before.  This is especially important when working with Millennials.

Here are some  key elements:

• put your followers first
  • if you put yourself first, they will follow your lead
• listen to your followers
  • feedback from your followers is important – listen to it!
• grow your followers
  • provide feedback consistantly
• trust your followers
• share information with your followers
• step out of the way and allow your followers to step into the vacuum – enabling you to move into something else

I came across this blog post yesterday; it is by F. John Reh and titled Hire Talent, Not Just Skills – http://management.about.com/b/2009/07/06/hire-talent-not-just-skills.htm.

It got me thinking about how hiring the right person can solve both the short term and also the long term challenges that the business is facing.  Even the most talented candidate will require time to acclimatize before they can work on meeting the business needs.

However even with someone with immense talent, in addition to time, it takes an investment from the manager to provide the candidate with regular coaching sessions and also ensure that the opportunities are provided for the candidate.

I have seen managers totally ignore this responsibility and as a result not only does the company lose because it takes longer for their investment in the talented candidate to mature.  The candidate also loses because their career does not progress as they expected, which often creates a negative perception about that company.

The candidate is not without responsibility in this equation.  The candidate needs to evaluate both the managers and the company culture on growth.  After the candidate has joined, they now need to manage their growth and totally embrace the opportunities presented.

Feedback delivered in an open and respectful manner is definitely a gift.  Assuming that the receiver of the feedback was ready for the feedback, they have now learned some vital information about themselves or their behavior.  Unfortunately in many cases, the creation of the awareness is where it stops.

What separates the winners from the mice, is how they use this new found awareness to their advantage.  The chances of success are greatly increased with help, so enlist the help of the person that provided the feedback.  Get them to define the behavior exactly and also what they believe is the desired behavior.

In many cases it also helps to identify a role model and learn from them.  In the ideal case, enlist the role model to act as a coach or mentor.  Do not forget to enlist the help of peers or direct reports and practice, practice, practice.

If yo do not have clarifying questions, just respond with a “Thank You”.  If you have questions, ask them but do not defend the behavior.  Someone is sharing feedback with you and therefore thank them for that.  If you disagree with the feedback, you need to stay in control and decide how you would like to file it.  Just say “Thank You”.

So what is this leadership thing all about?  Henry Kissinger had this to say:  ““The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.”

Here is my definition:  “a Leader must provide their Followers what they Need in any given Situation”

This might be stating the obvious but leaders exist for their people.  Followers decide for themselves who they want to follow and therefore it is up to us convince our followers to follow our lead.

Now lets look at needs, I chose this term because, to me, it is indicative of what our people need and not their wants.  We all want a salary of $3 Million per month but realistically we only need enough of a salary to allow us to pay for our basic needs.  e.g. food and shelter.

Leadership is situational and in many situations it does not require the same person to always be the leader. In most cases, all it requires is someone that is credible to them to meet the followers needs (leadership)  in that situation.  Be aware that not all situations require a leader.

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.

impact of change on us

Based on my experience of dealing with people across the globe, I believe that change always has an impact us.  The actual change event can be fairly small, the impact on us manifests itself as stress. In the change-stress-distress graphic, the black circle is the actual change.  The perceived impact of the change will cause stress, which is shown in green.  The stress level is still fine because it has not crossed our tolerance level, shown in red.  This is key because when the stress expands to more than our tolerance level, the stress becomes distress.

when the stress becomes distress

.

As you can see in the graphic on the left, all that is visible is the red, which means distress.  For people in this situation, it is now a rescue situation where the first priority is to rescue the person from the distressful situation.

..

.Unfortunately just because the person is no longer in distress, it does not mean that we can work on the change yet.  Looking at stress graphic on the right, we still cannot see the change and therefore we cannot work on the change.  We still need to get the stress under control and only then can the change be addressed.

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.