Steve Jobs Leadership?

Author: Dave Crisp

29 Jan

One might think this question absurd in light of his company’s financial results over the last few years or you might write off his success to pure luck. I’m not sure either fits. His style is nothing if not controversial, but just maybe it can be explained with current theories of leadership success.

I used to puzzle over an expression I haven’t heard in a while – “the exception proves the rule.” How can we say this, I always wondered, when an exception by definition would seem to defy the rule. Later I read that the old meaning of “prove” was “test” as in “proving grounds.” So an exception tests the rule. and certainly if you find the rule still applies, it adds to the proof that the rule makes sense.

One can write off any success to luck and it’s always a key factor, but Jobs clearly was successful several times and clearly followed rules of his own, whether they seemed understandable to us or not, so it’s unlikely to have been pure randomness. The core question remains – was that good leadership. and, if so what does that mean to my leadership theory or the many others that would seem to say his style is unlikely to succeed (and certainly wasn’t pleasant for employees)?

In the wake of Jobs passing I put off drawing conclusions because I felt I was missing something. In the interim I’ve read two Jobs biographies, a number of reviews and a good many articles because I think it is important to answer such puzzles. Ultimately I’ve come to conclusions.

My leadership theory says three relevant things. First, luck is always a factor, but you increase your chances of success if you (second) include five key elements in your leadership style – balancing positive with honest, and strategies with habit-building or implementation skills (those are the five in italics). And you improve your odds further if you either develop great strengths in all five areas (rare) or develop them in some areas and find partners to assist you in the areas where you lack strengths.

Jobs is a very, very extreme case of this, but it worked, albeit in a rather odd way he certainly never planned out. I conclude he wasn’t a great leader by himself nor by knowing how, just through sheer determination and somehow sensing the need for the five elements in strength and finding ways to supplement what he didn’t have.

What he did bring to the party was mostly a rather strange twist on emotional intelligence abilities – those being the positive/honest dimension in my model. His staff used to say he could create a ‘reality distortion field’ in any lengthy conversation or presentation. He was amazing at presenting his arguments in such a way that people walked away totally pumped, completely positive he would succeed, wanting to participate. They ‘drank the cool-aid’ as some would say, time after time – and so did analysts at conferences and trade shows. He even pushed Apple to design top notch presentation software as a key priority, many say, in order to use it to further this over-the-top skill of his.

One reason he was forced to this super-positivity was because he constantly went over the top on the other end of the EI or EQ spectrum. He aimed to be so brutally honest that it was extremely painful to work with him. He would rip people to shreds the second they failed to deliver to his image of what he expected, often highly unrealistic expectations. The latter is typical of great leaders who ‘get away with it’ – to push for results that seem to almost everyone else beyond the realm of what’s even possible – but it’s also typical of wild visionaries whose whacky dreams fail miserably. Jobs stumbled into a very extreme balance, but balance nonetheless, by accident I think.

On another key axis – IQ, the ability to generate workable ideas and implement them, I think Jobs was much less adept, but no less extreme, perhaps even weaker would not be too strong. The defining feature that made his initial fortune through the Mac for instance was the concept of the computer ‘mouse’ with its ability to point, click and activate menus, commands, highlights and more. He didn’t invent this, but saw it at the Xerox PARC labs and recognized – that was his skill in the strategy area – recognized that it had world-class appeal and function. It did, but he couldn’t build it or implement it himself, lacking all the skills needed to do so.

Through his belief that one truly good employee could deliver fifty times the actual implementation of a poor one, he triaged through computer geniuses, insulting and humiliating many in the interests of finding a few who would buy into his reality distortions and deliver fabulous technical machines in a fraction of the time everyone imagined was necessary. It seems certain he was never happy with the results or the speed, but settled for the best he could get by cracking his whip and driving toward the idea he’d spotted that would appeal to consumers.

His strength in the strategies (or ideas) area was to spot and in the implantation area was to drive others since he had absolutely no skills there himself except to see when something wasn’t yet good enough to appeal, wasn’t simple enough to be mass marketed to non-technical individuals. In that respect you have to say his inability to do any of the technical stuff himself was actually an asset – he would simply keep pushing until something worked simply enough even for him.

So in a very odd way, Jobs does in fact fit my theory of leadership, albeit in a way I never imagined and would never recommend. He found a peculiar balance of the key elements, requiring that to balance them he had to be beyond optimistic on the other to balance brutal on the other and capable of identifying the one core idea that was better than every other on one end and driving the associates he could bamboozle into joining to produce it ever more simply, quickly and cheaply on the other.

But it didn’t always work. In several tries – with his Lisa computer, NEXT and in film animation he nearly bankrupted himself or the company because a reliable overall balance never really there. Nevertheless he believed in his own distortion field to the point of nearly losing his house investing in a new idea before it caught on barely in time and took off.

I’m far more interested in tamer applications of my model, ones that anyone can learn and succeed with, but there’s no doubt in my mind that this exception does ‘prove the rule.’ It also could have been disastrous had luck not clicked at the moments it did for Jobs because there was absolutely NO balance in the third dimension – how fast you go. As with riding a bicycle (an example of balancing several skills that I often liken to leadership), if you don’t go fast enough or if you go too fast the balance is in danger of being lost. Jobs risked going far too fast for safety, but that was simply another of his personality quirks and unlike many, many other entrepreneurs he got away with it big time. At the end of the day, it appears he was driven somewhat like Alexander the Great, by believing he might die young and so had to achieve greatness in the short time he had. and, like Alexander, the prophecy seemed to come true unfortunately, just when Jobs had matured more toward the point of planning the balance instead of crashing into it and nearly wrecking everyone along his way. We can thank his indomitable impetuousness for speeding us along the digital path, but we should be glad we weren’t part of the painful process.

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Entrepreneurship versus Leadership

Author: Dave Crisp

22 Jan

In the usual cacophony of competing claims about these issues it’s great to read a piece that is simple, concise and clear. Coaches Rich Russakoff and Mary Goodman nailed it in an article for CBS Money Sense (link below).

Entrepreneurs, they say, are ‘lone wolf’ visionaries who make grand, risky promises they often can’t keep, thus letting people down as many or more times than they hit it big. Leaders, on the other hand (effective ones at least) work through and as part of teams. The good ones are ‘humble’ as Jim Collins observed because they recognize everyone contributes and they are just one among many. Although they may be ‘lead dog,’ a dog is still one of the dogs.

From this succinct description, you can draw a number of observations. Who wants to be a dog if you can be a wolf? Just in that seemingly silly comparison alone is captured a key reason why we revere the knight on the white horse CEO who is expected to ride in and fix everything – knights, like wolves, are seen as lone operators. Isn’t it odd how we create these metaphors, ignoring that wolves typically hunt in packs? No matter, it’s that image of greater aggressiveness and ‘doing exactly what you want without limitations of cooperating with others’ that we focus on. In reality knights needed elaborate teams to make them successful, dress them and get them on their horses, too, yet we bypass that in our thinking.

The only thing I disagreed with in this article is the characterization of Steve Jobs as one of the rare people who could meld both entrepreneurship and leadership successfully. Without beating this too hard, if you read some of the biographical material about Jobs, you soon see a pretty pure entrepreneur. Ultimately he returned to Apple, the company he founded, where he had to be fired previously due to his lack of cooperation, let alone effective leadership. Was he a better leader on his return or had he simply learned finally to let others handle such ‘details’ while he continued to drive the entrepreneurial promises of tinier, consumer-friendly machines to be delivered on deadlines no one else thought possible? Being first in the market is definitely an entrepreneur’s

dream and promise they may not be able to keep, not necessarily a leadership vision. Luckily Jobs later tenure at Apple was heading an already seasoned team.

So should we be duped by Jobs spectacular success into honoring entrepreneurship over leadership? Or does it have to be one or the other?

In my own career I once led a startup where we attempted to build a leadership team to support and further the entrepreneurial vision and style of one individual who had a gift for deal-making. It would have worked well even after we discovered he’d lied to us about the profitability of many new, large clients we were setting up with. Within a year or so of learning the truth we could have made them profitable, but in his drive to be the lone wolf, mister entrepreneur kept reporting to the CEO above us that our operation would lose money because ‘those guys in the lead’ had allowed non-profitable clients to be taken on. Get the picture? It didn’t matter we were his colleagues and, so he kept assuring us, friends. He was willing to shaft us so he could be seen as the honest one when the CEO asked him how things were going. It didn’t matter we took on those clients because of his wild lies to us about big profits, nor could he trust that we’d catch up and fix things so they worked. Ultimately we couldn’t survive in a turbulent environment. Talk about the frog and the scorpion.

Personally I’d rather seek effective leaders in the top spot who have the courage and risk-taking ability to promote the ideas of subordinates who have an entrepreneurial streak than try to work with an entrepreneur in the top spot who can countermand the common sense solutions his leadership team attempts to put in place. But you see the conundrum. Whichever is the top boss needs a team that includes the other skill set. It is indeed rare to find any one person with both although I do agree with Russakoff and Goodman when they include Kelleher of Southwest Air and Walton of Walmart.

It seems futile to spend much time looking for the extremely rare combination in one person. Better to spend it building succession plans that put the right mix together, with the right person at the top. and, ideally, a team of people who understand their strengths and weaknesses and how to help everyone function productively together. As always we will never be perfect, so erring one way or the other is the norm and not fatal as long as one can recognize and fix mistakes.

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Job Security is a Two-way Commitment

Author: Dave Crisp

23 Oct

While it’s true that organizations benefit from creating an environment in which jobs are relatively more secure than in other organizations, the story doesn’t end there. To achieve maximum security an employee has to be flexible and prepared to transfer to other roles or departments where their services are needed in the event of a downturn.

The two elements fit nicely together. Transferrable, prepared employees are the most valuable to any business. They don’t have to be jacks-of-all-trades, but they will be looking at what else they could be doing that the company needs and what skills they need to develop to do that. Good bosses will be identifying such employees routinely as those who could take on more or different roles and encouraging them to prepare, to try them out through cross-department projects and assignments.

Clearly this breaks down if any element, the employee, the boss or the organization, refuses to participate in such a program. But that’s how some companies come to have great reputations for protecting, nurturing and promoting their employees and some employees come to have great reputations for being ready to take on tasks the company needs.

All this is even more important as the pace of change and innovation continue to accelerate. Yes, it’s still possible to find organizations that don’t change. much. But even government, which used to be counted on never to change much at all is faced with having to keep up with changing expectations of the public for new and better services. Just take a look at how many things can now be done via the Internet and are often done better, faster, cheaper and with fewer staff. Imagine what happens to staff numbers in particular departments.

A close relation worked for many years in the cataloguing section of the National Library. In time his personal interests motivated him to study data base management and move to the computer systems site of the department where he survived quite nicely through a number of downsizings. Cataloguing just isn’t done by hand much any longer.

Not everyone has to move into IT for safety. In fact, IT can have considerable turnover as well when new systems and approaches are introduced, so it would be foolish to assume it always represents a safe haven. The plan for individuals needs to be that they keep an eye open for other things they could do and request opportunities to learn and take on some of those types of work so they’re ready when things change.

Everyone, in other words, should participate in the on-going growth and change that every organization must foster in order to ensure it survives and thrives. Not paying attention may leave you high and dry when change overtakes your type of work. Are you ready?

That goes for HR as well. The move toward measuring results and managing HR by measurement, for instance, seems to be catching many HR professionals flat-footed. When a shift in employment numbers comes within HR, it won’t wash to say, “I don’t know much about computers, I joined HR to work with people.” There’s nothing wrong with doing both and nothing stopping anyone from becoming more computer literate as systems become easier to use and understand.

These are skills you can work on even at home or in spare time in various ways. Everyone benefits as more and more HR managers develop a more sophisticated understanding of what capabilities exist for enhancing current HR practices even if many of those individuals are never called upon to actually tap a keystroke on any program. In fact, if you aspire to be the boss in an HR function, at least understanding such capabilities is quickly becoming an absolute necessity. Yet how many HR people do you talk to who have “learning more about systems” on their development plan?

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Job Security, The Trickiest HR Requirement

Author: Dave Crisp

16 Oct

Like most aspects of HR and leadership, job security involves paradoxes. It’s rarely discussed as an essential for positive engagement especially today when so many companies have had to lay people off. It’s an elephant in almost every room. An effective leadership team has to come to terms with how to handle it.

Promising iron-clad job security for life is clearly not what’s required or advisable for good employee relations. There will always be exceptions – an odd specialty department that’s no longer needed or, in the minds of some employees, even if you fire someone for cause or poor performance, the perception can be that you violated your promise. A real danger of making any formal commitment to security is the possibility it will create an entitlement mind-set in at least some areas of the company. It can be tricky to find a balance.

At Hbc, where turbulence and regular layoffs for ‘re-organization’ were commonplace, I was shocked to hear a senior director in one function suddenly accuse the CEO of being unconscionable for laying of half a dozen in the director’s division while he’d said nothing throughout much larger layoffs elsewhere in the company. Apparently it was OK everywhere else, but ‘not in my backyard.’

Some companies are fortunate never to have had to do any significant layoffs. RIM fit in that category until recently and earlier this year achieved #1 spot on a survey of “most attractive companies to work for” by Randstad Canada who collected 7000 opinions. Almost certainly that result was in before the layoffs. It will be interesting to see what happens in future years, since job security had to have been a pretty firm expectation of anyone signing on with them before recent events. People make assumptions. That’s in fact how job security is mostly evaluated in North America and helps explain the very high ratings obtained routinely by companies like P&G and even governments (during recessions). Of course it doesn’t earn such ratings by itself, but is a key ingredient.

Engagement requires employees to be satisfied with a number of factors, but disengagement can often result from a poor record in just one and that includes job security. But it’s a relative concept thankfully. Most people understand nothing is or can be 100% guaranteed. They make their analysis based on track record mostly and on the messages given out by employees of the firm – so employee culture, perceptions and what they tell others is likewise very important and can be managed in this respect through honesty and clarity as with so many other elements. People judge which companies are most likely to provide security largely by track record, often the recent record, though big splashes that got lots of publicity hang around a long time.

The key is don’t foolishly promise complete job security, but rather promise and demonstrate that leadership operates prudently. Don’t over-hire in good times (since they won’t last). Try for steady growth rather than spurts of uncontrolled hiring binges. Above all encourage and support cross-training so when tough times arrive, you can shift people to needed areas from those being reduced so as to minimize outright terminations. People understand if you’ve done the best you can and treated those who absolutely cannot be placed to fair severance arrangements, job search support and more. You can afford to be a bit more generous than average if you’ve minimized the numbers you have to let go. For others, it’s a vicious downhill spiral – the more they fire, the more it costs, the more they try to shortchange departing employees and blacken their reputation for future hiring. As with all other areas of HR, trying for balance is best. and most easily explained to those who need explanations if they are to be dissuaded from bad-mouthing how they were handled. Unfortunate, but often inevitable, this area, too, fits into a strategic approach to how we lead.

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Brad Pitt, Management Guru?

Author: Dave Crisp

18 Sep

Anyone interested in modern leadership has to see Moneyball. Unveiled at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) earlier this fall, Pitt, it’s producer and star, was quoted by CBC news as saying "It’s a story about our values: how we value other people, what we value as success, what we value as failure."

Those comments, which he’s consistently made about the movie stand in some contrast to reviews of the book on which it’s based, Moneyball, by baseball aficionado, Michael Lewis. Reviewers tend to emphasize what also shows up a lot in the film – the statistical method called sabermetric s that a number of teams now use to analyze players’ skills in contrast to the old baseball scouts’ methods of assessing talent on factors they developed in their association with the game - some might call it instinct.

The real story here is a version of successfully blending “high tech/high touch.” Today we have massively higher powered tools for recruiting. It’s easy to calculate statistics, although not many people picked out the most helpful ones in baseball that would lead to assembling the full skill set for a winning team. The main protagonist, Billy Beane, did, and took the Oakland A’s all the way to ultimate victory despite being unable to afford the salaries of any great star players that the other teams constantly bid into the stratosphere.

The high touch part gets somewhat shorter shrift in reviews, typical of how we evaluate the role of HR versus finance in organizations. Of course, it’s always harder to explain, to point to and demonstrate, but teamwork is the essential ingredient and that, in turn, is based on trust, respect, engagement of everyone in the team goals and learning to work together smoothly to achieve the overall result. It’s a bit oversimplified to say that if you sprinkle a few extremely highly paid prima donnas in among your core players, you immediately set the stage for jealousies, for attempts to show “I’m better than he is,” rather than for everyone to work closely in collaboration, setting up and supporting success by their teammates instead of worrying about how big their own next contract will be.

The same points have been made in hockey – that Wayne Gretzky, for instance, got vast numbers of points for ‘assists’ (for helping other players score) and that was a significant part of what made him the greatest player of the time. You can be a superstar and be a team player, too. It’s just that very few superstars work that way. and we need to develop more of this in every organization.

Plexus Institute (the Complexity Science group) has turned more and more toward these questions and just sent out a newsletter headlining a lead story with some excellent points called Superstars or Super Collaborators. After pointing to similar “moneyball” approaches now used for building winning soccer teams, author Prucia Buscell makes the outstanding point at the end that perhaps the best solution isn’t “either/or” but “both/and.” Just posing the question that way is a major contribution to the evolving discussion, highlighting as it does the central question. Can we do without either when our organizations need both to succeed at the top of their industries?

There will undoubtedly be more to say when we’ve all actually seen the movie. I for one will be looking most closely at how Pitt handles the team collaboration questions. A key criteria, as I understood it from earlier descriptions, was that the lack of superstars helped when they tried to bring the team together to function smoothly and support each other. In retrospect, though, you have to conclude that if you can being a team of superstars or one with at least some superstars to function well, you should have an advantage. as long as, by selecting those, you don’t depend so excessively on them that you forgo assembling all the varied, diverse skills a complete team needs. As we’ve discussed before, diversity is more challenging to manage, but ultimately far more rewarding in results.

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Everyone is Forging Toward Better Leadership

Author: Dave Crisp

9 Apr

More and more observers are challenging accepted concepts in leadership development. A recent example is a piece in Harvard Business Review’s blogs by Herminia Ibarra, Cora Chaired Professor of Leadership and Learning, Professor of Organizational Behavior, and Faculty Director of the INSEAD Leadership Initiative .

Dr. Ibarra argues leadership isn’t a set of personal skills to be improved like a golf swing, but dependent on relationships you build across situations, a much more complex, far-reaching evolution. This in part depends on skills you learn to apply daily, but also depends on the cooperation and skills of others you team with – mutual adaptation. She points out we tend to train by helping people understand how they relate to others with tools like Myers Briggs or DiSC profiles or by “discovering our strengths” and concentrating on where we fit best, but in most leadership situations it takes more than just our efforts.

What she doesn’t say is we don’t always have the luxury of finding exactly the right fit or even the right team members. Sometimes we have to learn to lead in situations where we need to flex, especially toward the objective of bringing together people who have skills we don’t, who can contribute, who we coordinate and encourage, but who aren’t as easy to work with as we’d prefer.

Where she seems headed in her thinking is that we have to develop skills of opening up our thinking to include those who are unlike ourselves, who approach situations differently, yet productively in ways we can’t always fathom. We have to continually struggle to learn to coordinate the efforts of those we don’t understand and to appreciate what they can contribute.

Most often true leadership challenges call for everyone in the situation to learn, to change and evolve continually from where they are presently. If the situation is so thoroughly understood and routine that ‘leadership’ simply means pushing more widgets out the door the way we always have, it really isn’t leadership in today’s sense of the word. Good management, yes; leadership, no.

To get to something new and innovative, we have to push our point of view, but be prepared to leap on and incorporate a whole lot of other people’s creative ideas. You can’t do that if your mode of managing is only demanding and pushing for your way, insisting people listen to your ideas because you are the boss. True, you might luck out and find someone strong who pushes back. that you can’t fire. that you eventually listen to. But a surer way of achieving the result is to actively press your views and strongly encourage others to press theirs, too. At some point you will jointly have to toss the coin to do it your way or their way. Hopefully by then you have a better understanding of the options and the risks. and have honed them both so you can choose the most probable route to success.

Not always being right, in fact sometimes being shown up as downright wrong, is not a pleasant experience we would normally chose if we were in control. and most bosses don’t. to their detriment. It is, however, essential to developing great relationships with innovative people you want to contribute ideas continually. Ideally we develop those relationships in which both can be vigorously honest and free to be right sometimes, wrong others and work through both without damaging their links. Dr. Ibarra describes it in somewhat less painful words, but learning is continually challenging. We need to acknowledge that.

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Better Leadership Takes Different Thinking

Author: Dave Crisp

2 Apr

We know we need to change how we think about leaders and leadership, but to change a model 100,000 years old takes some creative thinking and some time to evolve to an easily grasped picture of what might succeed better. That’s one reason the continuing debate is taking so long.

Harvard Business Review over a few weeks last year ran a series on what a new leadership model might look like. Some great ideas emerged in a formative state, raising tantalizing possibilities, but with no absolute answers.

Harry Spence, Lecturer on Education, Harvard Kennedy School, put together a fairly short, theoretical, but insightful piece in the series. He points to the pain of reflecting on own ‘nonconscious’ processes and the lack of sense of immediate gain from doing so as the key factors preventing leaders from making more progress. This thinking, he points out is proceeding fast and furiously among consultants and professors, with leaders staying on the sidelines.

He raises some interesting questions. Why do so many leaders need to ‘self-aggrandize’ their self-images? Why do they not see this leads unconsciously or not to undermining contributions many terrific staff members could make, thus destroying commitment and engagement? Why is this self-reflection so hard, especially when there is so much lip service paid to the need for just such reflection if leaders are to improve?

If as leaders, we are really rallying ourselves and our teams toward larger issues, toward objectives far out in an unpredictable future, why are we so reluctant to question ourselves? Is it because it takes a huge amount of energy to drive a team forward? Leaders need tremendous self-confidence to face the daunting challenges and bear responsibility for the risks innovation will require.

One likely explanation is that reflecting, which really amounts to doubting oneself, is diametrically opposed to the unrelenting forward drive leaders need to exert to get results. Most people don’t seem constitutionally built to drive hard, yet question themselves. It just seems too contradictory. Yet nearly every consultant/professor/writer today points toward the need to be able to do just that. One clear example is the universally praised book by Jim Collins, Good to Great, in which one of his six keys to leadership is the ability to maintain what he calls “a powerful psychological duality” that he refers to as the Stockdale paradox – the ability to face “brutal” facts, yet never lose faith.

Ironically, the most “brutal” fact of all is often that we ourselves can be and will inevitably be wrong quite often. while our subordinates will be right. If that doesn’t set up a clear “psychological duality” I can’t imagine a more challenging one. The risk of one’s poor leadership ending in poor results years down the road, which most CEOs have to face, pales beside the potentially humiliating immediacy of having admit you’re wrong in front of subordinates day by day. so instead many leaders strive to be or at least appear to be right all the time – fatal. Are the worst leaders simply defined by being fearless on future outcomes, but gutless on day-to-day image issues?

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WikiLeaks About YOUR Business?

Author: Dave Crisp

9 Feb

Now that WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange is preparing to go after a business in addition to his government targets, perhaps that casts some light on what he or the justice system should or shouldn’t do.

Shares of the suspected target, Bank of America, tumbled 3.5% or $4 billion worth in a few hours. Of course, that’s the stock market for you and presumably some seemingly savvy investors would then take advantage of buying low and help stabilize the price almost as soon as it was perceived to be dropping. After all no one actually knew at that point (and still don’t) whether Assange’s claims to have damning evidence of downright illegal dealing actually were being made about this particular bank or not. Only by putting together information he dropped in earlier interviews was any connection guessed.

Whatever the outcome of this event, a few things seem clear. Assange has found a new use of the Internet and hacking (which he was convicted of earlier in life). Many people seem OK that he’s revealed classified documents from governments. Whether they seem as willing to stand by now that he’s moving on to business is an unknown. The debate will no doubt rage extensively.

What his move toward business revelations raises is the question of what would have been the right approach if this isn’t. If you or I had evidence of illegal activity of a business or an individual, the more accepted course of action would be to present it to legal authorities, the police or SEC, and expect them to deal with it.

Innocent until proven guilty clearly falls into a gray zone if such information is simply published. No matter how clearly damning the ‘evidence’ might be, there are rules about whether it is validated, admitted into judicial process and more. Simply dumping into the public domain may be a journalistic scoop approach applicable to public figures, institutions and public information, but when it is classified or proprietary material, however obtained, one would expect going through proper authorities first might be more appropriate. Would that be any less public? Perhaps initially, but certainly not as soon as charges are laid. and that, too, removes much of the right to presumption of innocence unless convicted.

What’s also clear is there are very few true secrets one can or should depend on staying secret no matter what line of work or social endeavor you’re in. In one sense it’s great if we operate all the time as if anyone should be able to know what we’re saying or doing. Companies with rules against negative, behind-the-back gossip, for instance, clearly are straying into questions of confidentiality of individual conversations, hearsay and innuendo.

On the other hand, if a manager has a clear discussion with an employee about short-comings, isn’t gossiping behind their back, and puts this on record as a warning or developmental advice and that sort of personal information is made public by something like WikiLeaks, I think both we and law enforcement would take a pretty dim view of that. It seems likely we’d conclude the information would be damaging to all concerned. The employee’s reputation and future job prospects would suffer and so would the ability of managers to act properly in evaluating work in the future, thus damaging the ability of employees to improve. Some might argue pure verbal discussions should suffice, but we all know that until something is in writing it is often ignored.

It’s not like any of this is completely new. It’s probably more that a single individual with no grounding or connection to established process, like editorial over-sight, for instance, has been able to rock some very large boats single-handedly in a dramatic way. Like so many new initiatives fuelled by wide open Internet and technology, this simply raises old questions in new ways and suggests that we’re all going to be extremely busy trying to figure out what’s best and what policies are needed to ensure that. If it’s all right for Wikileaks to leak your information, how can you ensure your employees don’t routinely use conduits like that to reveal what they cannot themselves? Interesting?

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How Many People Can You Know Well?

Author: Dave Crisp

21 Nov

Among the growing group of us who battle away at changing how HR is approached in organizations, David Creelman is a staunch thinker who scouts up some of the most thought-provoking pieces. His latest reported interview is with Bill Conaty (former top HR for GE) about his latest book (with another GE grad, Ram Charan) called The Talent Masters.

David has an unerring way of zeroing in on the most interesting or controversial points, in this case Conaty’s assertion that he and CEO, Jack Welch, knew their top 600 managers “intimately.” That last word means know considerably more than their names when you see them. In a work sense it certainly includes knowing their career aspirations, strengths and developmental needs. It should include having enough of a relationship to understand their growth trajectory, not just enough to pigeon-hole them in a convenient category like ‘will never make senior management’ as many top teams tend to do.

Creelman challenges Conaty about 600 being a very large number, almost unbelievable, and Conaty grumps that’s what everyone says, but it’s absolutely true. I believe him and so does Creelman.

What do we make of this? I can’t make the same claim from my days at Hudson’s Bay. My excuse could be there was substantial turnover. I might have tried for that number in the 17 years I was there (Welch was at GE for 20), but I’d have been starting over with about 20% to 30% of them annually versus GE’s reported turnover at the time of well under 10%. As it was I have to admit I didn’t try hard for a large number in part because I believed I’d never manage. I probably settled at 150 or so.

We can all make excuses. GE’s territory is far-flung geographically, so distance is poor excuse. They operate quite decentralized, so their need to know people at each is greater, so perhaps they’re more motivated, but surely there were at least 600 critical people mostly centralized at Hbc if one considers who should have been in the grooming lineup for senior jobs. 600 is certainly a number to make you review your own situation.

I suspect several key supports at GE were so taken for granted they fall below the radar. It surely helps if top team members routinely share information about people and solicit input from their reports and key contacts. And if they take those discussions seriously when promoting people, so the best are selected after assessment by several people rather than what many companies depend on – the CEO making the choices from among a cadre so small you’d almost call them cronies. If the CEO tries to know more, the team will, too. If the CEO makes all decisions on thin information, in an offhand ‘time-saving’ way, among people he or she happens to know, the team won’t bother with more. But if the CEO regularly wants to hear to others’ opinions, they will bring them forward. Discussions will be on-going and growing in depth and detail.

Of course the over-riding protest is usually ‘takes too much time.’ But really, if the business depends more on people than anything else and the four pillars of success are understanding your people, your customers, your financials and your process/products/services, shouldn’t we spend a quarter of our time – more than one day per week just on the people proposition? Of course many bosses find it easier to give all their time to technical and financial questions. Customers to some degree and people to a much larger one tend to get only whatever time is left over, which is usually none since ‘work expands to fill the time allotted’ and if you prefer other work, there’s definitely plenty to expand. A CEO who claims no time for people assessment and ‘intimacy’ is really saying he or she doesn’t have time to be CEO, which is why some smart owners hire a CEO as soon as they can so they can concentrate on the parts of the business they enjoy. None of this helps HR, though, unless we convince the business community of these facts and get more willing participation from more CEOs.

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Filed under: 1 Balance - Judgment, Communicating Effectively, Human Resources (HR), Leaders of the Future, Learning Organization

Who Trusts Whom?

Author: Dave Crisp

25 Jul

A number of topics reminded me in recent weeks of the Proust quotation: The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. This applies, for one, to the usual way we look at trust in organizations..

One of the measures relevant to engaging employees is always whether they trust management. But isn’t it even more relevant to ask whether management trusts employees.

That is – to ask whether leaders believe employees have the capacity to contribute meaningfully. A great many managers treat employees as cogs in the machine. They don’t want or expect employees to bring their brains to work, just their hands as has often been observed. Follow orders, produce what’s asked of you when we ask. Shift to the new strategy when we tell you to. All formulas for disengagement on a massive scale.

Effective leaders take calculated risks. And one major area of risk is trusting employees to come up with useful ideas and then supporting and helping troubleshoot with them through the inevitable organizational hurdles – no budget, tried that before, not workable for any number of reasons.

Now it’s likely the manager isn’t going to fully understand or see the idea in the same light of certainty as the employee. In fact, highly effective leaders often spend lots of energy encouraging employees to try ideas that neither of them is completely certain about. If either was completely certain it wouldn’t be a very creative, novel, untested idea with the potential to dramatically improve things, but just a moderate extension of what’s already known to work.

It takes courage to encourage (notice the similarity of words) a subordinate to take a risk that may reflect badly on both of you at some point. That’s why it’s so important in companies to establish a culture in which ideas, pilots, trial and error and reasonable mistakes are supported and promoted. That way managers feel supported in supporting their employees’ ideas in turn.

So when we look at trust, it’s important to see that it works both ways and, as with all strategies, starts from the top. If top managers don’t support risk-taking and trial and error and don’t trust employees to be testing things that seems a bit outside the box, how can we expect employees to blindly trust managers? This becomes increasingly true day by day as we evolve into an era in which every organization’s survival depends on continual creativity and improvement – so much so that no single senior executive or executive team can possibly come up with, let alone test, enough ideas to sustain competitiveness into the unpredictable future we all face.

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Filed under: 1 Balance - Judgment, 4 Honest - Finding Reality, Fix The Jerks, Leaders of the Future

Archive for the ‘1 Balance – Judgment’ Category

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Who Trusts Whom?

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