Jim Collins Returns With More On Leadership

Author: Dave Crisp

8 Jan

It’s been nine years since Collins’ excellent book on leadership, Good to Great. That followed the successful “Built to Last” that he said he should have written to second, dealing as it did with the strength provided by values that arise from great leadership. Now it’s Great by Choice with Morten T. Hansen of Berkeley – on organization strategy more than leadership.

This book is going to be far more controversial since he hasn’t fully updated his list of successful companies despite the surface reversals of organizations that exemplified success or lack of it in Good to Great. IBM, for instance, doesn’t look so superior to Apple as it did in 2002, in fact, almost the reverse. if you ignore the likelihood that IBM will sustain well and Apple may not find more fad items to keep ahead with.

Some reviewers find the reversal of fortunes casts overpowering doubt on the new book’s conclusions. Logically it should cast just as much in retrospect over Good to Great. If the top companies then didn’t last sufficiently perhaps that theory was flawed, too. We all praised it immensely and most reviewers haven’t mentioned this and likely won’t want to admit they were wrong before. They’ll merely slam the new work.

We put too much emphasis on short term results. Both books build on so much common logic I can accept circumstances change and shift companies’ fortunes up and down without invalidating the general principles. In fact, this up and down seesawing reinforces many of the points in both – not surprising since many conclusions are the same and lead to similar strategic advice. The subtitle, “Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck–Why Some Thrive Despite Them All,” certainly recognizes forces beyond anyone’s control have to be understood. Neither fully answers the question Collins admitted ducking in Good to Great: can individuals develop the skills they suggested? In this one he notes we can at least apply effective strategies if not change our own behavior or predict exactly how we will impact.

The first part of the book usefully debunks common myths about leadership and strategy. They find successful companies, hence their leaders, are no more or less risk-takers that average and no more or less visionary. So does that invalidate Good to Great? Not likely. Leaders still make the decisions that work and it still takes a certain type of leader to be humble enough to recognize luck’s role.

He finds successful companies are not so much less innovative as they tend to press forward fewer innovations than less successful companies, which means they may have as many ideas, but develop them more carefully. The same with speed as agility – they move more slowly on average, starting small and building carefully and solidly before picking up speed, which may end up being faster in the long run. That’s definitely different from the ‘speedy’ advice usually given that motivates so many CEOs to push ‘flavor of the month’ as fast as they can. This struck a note when I read the title of the ING Direct CEO’s newest book mentioned in my last post – Rock, Then Roll – start solidly, then and only then build speed is how it hit me. Collins and Hansen go further with related suggestions.

Following up they find successful companies tend to start with less radical change to meet changing circumstances – quite the opposite, they may dig in and stick to proven values. By doing these things they generate more luck – which fits with the concept that luck occurs when preparation meets opportunity. Each new changed environment generates about as many opportunities as it shuts down old paradigms. Yes, you have to operate differently day-to-day, but if your overall strategies and values are sound, they should work in both up and down circumstances. something that certainly revealed weaknesses in a great many organizations. As they say, it’s what you do with the luck you get since everyone is exposed to the forces of luck. Whether you feel it’s good or bad often depends on how prepared you are. Great by Choice definitely emphasizes such choices and more.

One thing that stands out for me is that the advice really hasn’t changed from the earlier books despite the impact of the continuing recessionary economics we face. Their new message – those who develop effective leadership cultures and behaviors will thrive and sustain themselves through difficult luck and times when those occur. Whether we carp over their particular examples, this makes a lot of sense as we look across the economy generally. Some operators always emerge stronger rather than weaker because they were better prepared and positioned themselves for down as well as up times.

Bookmark and share this post

More »

0 Comments

Filed under: 3 Strategic - Thinking, Books, Business/Strategy, Leaders of the Future, Learning Organization

How Do We Find What’s Useful in Management Literature?

Author: Dave Crisp

6 May

So, yes, I scanned Steve Denning’s latest couple of books and the list he emailed in response to my previous post. The books are generally about the value of story-telling as a skill of leadership, to make a huge simplification perhaps. It’s an area I have hesitated to critique though that’s probably worth doing in future posts. Suffice it to say I think it’s a useful, perhaps even critical skill, but hardly the complete answer to what makes organizations and teams effective. The challenge is to get a complete picture without making it so complex executives despair of ever mastering the skills.

It was great to hear from Bob Sutton about my previous post as well. He seemed just as puzzled about why Denning trashed his work as promoting “Dilbert-style Management.” My take on it is that we bloggers tend to go looking for straw men to tear down and Denning picked something from the Internet, took a quick look at Sutton’s book perhaps and leapt to misinterpret things as limited in such a way that Denning could make points he wanted to emphasize. (Somewhat the way I’ve probably done with his work above.)

Leaders in general tend to be guilty of this, I think. Everyone is incredibly busy. There’s mountains of information. It’s hard to pick out what’s valuable when we have so little time to give to it, so we try to categorize people and ideas and then find what’s wrong so as to get a handle on what would be better. By not stepping back and putting the pieces in context of a larger picture we’re all failing to deliver useful advice. It isn’t just ‘delighting the customer’ or ‘ending command and control leadership’ or any one focus that will take us to the next level. We all know it, but we fail to keep that front and center.

The scary fact is we expect all things from our leaders and no one can be all things to any individual, let alone to an entire team or organization. Or can they? It depends on the definition of ‘all things.’ Perhaps there’s a realistic one we can shoot for – not one person being all things, but one person facilitating and helping build and coordinate ‘all things’ from ‘all contributions’ from staff.

A first key is leaders have to be continual learners, willing to listen, ask sensible, real questions they don’t know the answers to (not just rhetorical ones) and apply positive people skills with an aim of achieving the organizations goals – including delighting the customer, but also sustainability, productivity and more for multiple stakeholders – way more stakeholders today than ever before, so way more goals to coordinate. Painting a vision, whether using story-telling as a key tool or finding other ways to engage people in a larger purpose is a critical kick-off point, but making people feel secure enough to contribute novel, potentially risky ideas and implement them with some judicious trial and error without fear of reprisals is also critical.

I often liken leadership to juggling many balls at once. It is the coordination and balance the leader brings to the challenges that seem to make it work overall. To do that they have to be adept at as many of the component parts as possible and willing to let others fill in without micromanaging them so that the whole becomes greater than any one individual.

This is what we miss in so many of our efforts to say, ‘no, no, no, you’re missing the point’ in our blogging and development programs. It isn’t missing the point as much as missing how all the points fit together – the most important piece of the puzzle – the ultimate picture. The leader doesn’t have to be the top expert in any one area, but in how others get involved and how they’re managed so the whole pattern works.

Meanwhile, Google recently revealed its very interesting work on identifying ‘the 8 keys to leadership.’ Beyond being ‘one more getting into the act’ of laying out ‘what’s most important’ is Google’s huge ability to justify their findings with statistics worthy of the best engineers. I’m going to focus on that and what it tells us beyond what Google learned in upcoming posts, but you can get the background here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/business/13hire.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

Bookmark and share this post

More »

0 Comments

Filed under: Books, Business/Strategy, Coaching Others, How Simplicity Works, Human Resources (HR), Leaders of the Future

Management Guru’s Are Fallible

Author: Dave Crisp

30 Apr

Extending the last topic a bit further, Steve Denning’s rant against Bob Sutton’s efforts to develop “good bosses” seems to me about setting up a straw man so he can knock it down in favor of his own approach – to emphasize what he calls in his latest book “Radical Management.” I guess why this rankles so much is that what we don’t need right now is two progressive guru’s poking each others’ theories in the eye. We need synergy, not competition.

We’re all struggling toward something new in management and trying to figure out what’s wrong with the old and why it so persistently hangs on when there is so much evidence around us of better approaches. The challenge is the new methods are complex where the old was relatively much simpler – just line up a group and make them run as fast as possible in the same direction – the old, military-like ‘command and control’ style in which a single general knows what needs to be done and hammers everyone into going along on pain of punishment.

Reading Denning’s other stuff, including his own synopsis of his book, (it’s also covered in several Amazon reviews and in his own video on that page as well) it certainly appears he’s on the right track with much of what he recommends that he feels is ‘radical.’ (I’m not sure just how radical when we can see evolution toward it occurring all around us and practical examples in Toyota, Southwest Air and the other significant models we all continually point out.)

He rails away at ‘traditional management’ (ie: command and control) as so many of us do now, but what I fail to understand is why he doesn’t come at this from what it takes to become a non-traditional manager rather than just what’s wrong. He points at it indirectly in what he writes, describing conditions he hopes for, like ‘self-directed teams,’ but then slams Sutton as just one example of the great many authors he insists are pushing in the wrong direction by trying to reform old style managers.

Perhaps his point is we can’t easily reform traditional managers and so have to somehow blow up their style and the old system entirely and radically reinvent management. Beyond suggesting a need for self-directed teams he doesn’t seem to put forward a way to get there. While such teams are one way of improving things (but just one of many ways) they don’t appear magically by themselves. They need specific management style just as much as any other teams (just a very different type) and they rarely last quite the way he seems to think they would unless someone is consistently nurturing them.

I suppose I’ll have to read or at least skim his book to find out if there are any substantive recommendations for HOW to get where he’d like to go. That’s the true question. We now generally know where management needs to go, but we don’t know how to get there and make it stick, how to build the culture habits we need to really move organizations forward. Reading about his work, I’m impressed by what seem to be valid observations and examples of how much better “radical management” works, but frustrated by the lack of help figuring out how to motivate progress toward it.

As he points out, there are some 11,000 or more business books per year published and no one can hope to read all. So what motivates me to read one that seems to contain such obvious flaws? I’m sort of annoyed with myself for letting the need to investigate a negative motivate me more than looking for a book that might take me toward a positive answer. But then we often find ideas by contrast. by clearly understanding what’s wrong in something else. Certainly hope to report that’s what happens in future revelations on this work.

Bookmark and share this post

More »

0 Comments

Filed under: 3 Strategic - Thinking, Books, Coaching Others, Coaching over Command Leadership, Fix The Jerks, Human Resources (HR), Leaders of the Future

Is Leadership Talent Overrated ?

Author: Dave Crisp

13 Mar

When you consider the book Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin (mentioned in an earlier post) there are many interesting implications for leadership and development of leaders. We do very little training of leaders. At best most companies might manage the equivalent of a couple of days in-house or a week-long seminar at various institutions, some better than others. That’s once or twice in a typical career, hardly continuous learning.

Often what’s taught in such programs is more supervisory basics – how to discipline, how to give and follow up an assignment. That’s hardly advanced leadership. In fact, the concepts of the boss setting fixed goals, following up and disciplining shortfalls, if over-used, are certain to detract from the deeper objectives of leadership, which would have to include coaching and encouraging employees to take initiative, risk trying their own new ideas and driving further than the coach/leader expects.

So if training isn’t extensive, how do our leaders get the 10,000 hours of concentrated practice needed to develop true skill at this highly complex task. The answer seems to be that in most cases (82% as we’ve pointed out from one study previously) they don’t. They remain at a ‘starter’ level of leadership skill that in turn extinguishes employee engagement with a few months.

The best practice organizations in leadership development utilize a range of tactics. They train, they ensure coaching and mentoring (whether internally or externally provided), they send people on developmental visits, they rotate people from assignment to assignment designed to fill in gaps in their experience and background. They try to ensure these on-the-job projects and roles are increasingly challenging and they try to support learning continuously.

If the best we can expect is about half a manager’s time dedicated to new or ‘leadership’ tasks versus routine stuff, it would take about ten years to get 10,000 experience on those skills. That’s probably pretty optimistic since most people won’t be continuously challenged, but will be marking time at least some of those years. Moreover they may not have support or guidance steadily to push progress.

However, we know that, given the right background, some individuals can learn at highly accelerated rates in jobs they’re ‘not quite ready for,’ that challenge them enormously in ways they haven’t experienced before, but find an ability to live up to. The person who suddenly finds themselves in charge in a crisis and excels is a well-known phenomenon. That way you pack 10,000 hours into a much shorter duration.

The problem is we can’t always engineer that sort of exceptional learning experience. As with so many events in life, it’s only if the individual decides for themselves they want to try and exerts immense effort that this can work. You could throw lots of people into challenges that seem over their heads only to find that they are in fact swamped and you’ve hurt that individual’s chances. Some would do better in the next challenge, but there is no guarantee of that and mean time, you’ve created a bad result for the organization as well.

From a Complexity Science view your best bet is to assume it may take at least ten years to hone leaders skills and set them on a path with continuous learning challenges, support and varied experiences, watching all the time for those who seem to have the potential to make a significant learning jump in a very large challenge. Complexity Science, however, doesn’t suggest the success rate will be 100%. More likely fewer than half would survive a ‘big jump’ in responsibility. The Science shows situations advance through continual trial and error with the emphasis on a few succeeding while many fail. So it’s probably better to encourage a great many managers to try small jumps, take relatively small risks and see who emerges with greatest effectiveness. At least then you have a learning culture that supports the bigger jumps when they occur.

If the penalties for small failures are negligible you can move those who don’t do as well to a new learning experience quickly and keep them growing. The more you can engineer this right across the board in your organization, the more effective leaders will begin to emerge along the way. And these will be true leaders who can take the organization far into the future faster, exactly the type we need for the continuous innovation companies today need to survive and thrive.

Bookmark and share this post

More »

0 Comments

Filed under: 5 Habits - Action, Books, Coaching Others, Human Resources (HR), Leaders of the Future, Learning Organization

The Rational Optimist

Author: Dave Crisp

28 Feb

Just when you think it’s all bad news, a writer comes along with a fundamentally optimistic view. That’s certainly true of a new book, The Rational Optimist, by Matt Ridley. In fact, it’s so optimistic, you are bound to find something unbelievable about it, but it makes you question the prevailing pessimism and perhaps rightly so. He even argues we don’t have a global warming crisis and that we can overcome our energy shortages, though he’s slightly less optimistic about water shortages.

What he argues basically is what I’ve been harping on – that we can solve pretty much any of the problems facing us with ingenuity if we build our capacity to innovate in all our organizations. He makes his arguments in context of a very interesting survey of history in which he insists the urge to trade, to do business with each other, leads to each of us specializing in some skill set we can get exceptionally good at. therefore producing far more than if each of us tried to produce all the things we individually need. By becoming specialized we can ‘over-produce’ beyond what we each need and thus trade the surpluses among ourselves so we all have more of everything. It’s fascinating to view the history of the world in this light (and I have to agree generally with his conclusions).

Overall it’s a great, positive message for those who choose to work in commercial endeavors. Of course, not surprisingly my copy was a gift from a Canadian mutual fund company, Vertex One, that stands to gain if we believe the future is literally worth investing in. Good marketing (the second year in a row they’ve chosen a book that is definitely worth not only reading, but thinking about). On a cautionary note, this isn’t a fund recommendation, but for disclosure, it is one I hold a small stake in. It definitely promotes the concept that business can have a significant role in saving the world, perhaps not a surprise from a West coast company.

Of course, we can never be sure of the future, but Ridley’s makes a good point that throughout our spectacular rise to technological superiority of today, there have always been pessimists predicting we would run out of the ability to improve things. Every generation has predicted we’d run out of food, etc., but so far we haven’t. so far.

What we can’t disagree with is his conclusion that we better continue to innovate at a rapid pace or we most certainly will be faced with problems the globe can’t overcome. Innovation has become the prime strategic imperative and we know that a unique sort of leadership and human resources environment is required to support that. In one sense, we’ve set ourselves on a treadmill and have to keep it going at least until we find population numbers decreasing significantly (hopefully not due to catastrophe). His view of ‘evolution’ is most interesting, too, arguing we’re the only species to have ‘evolved’ through social re-structuring, education and development. It’s a powerful conclusion, but just how true or how much we can count on this continuing remains to be seen.

Suffice it to say, I enjoyed the new insights and would recommend this for many college curricula.

Bookmark and share this post

More »

2 Comments

Filed under: 3 Strategic - Thinking, All That We Know, Books, Current Affairs, How Simplicity Works, Leaders of the Future, Learning Organization

Dealing With Leaders’ All Too Human Side

Author: Dave Crisp

23 Jan

In the last post I commented on conclusions from the book Kluge by Gary Marcus, about the odd ways human beings think due to the history of how our brains evolved. The word kluge describes a haphazard assembly of ‘stuff’ that is put together the way is it because it works, it solves some immediate problem and then further developments tend to institutionalize the earlier, odd, less than fully logical set up.

We needed instant emotional reactions to help us deal with predators and other dangers in our early evolution, but later needed more logical thinking to get beyond that stage. Nevertheless, while instant emotional ‘conclusions’ don’t help as much as logic in today’s world, the latter has never developed enough to fully balance or overcome emotion. So often we make decisions based on emotion and rationalize them afterward rather than logic first even when that would be better.

Marcus makes a solid case that our thinking tends to be biased consistently to see things as we want to see them and to be overly optimistic at times about our own powers of observation and thinking in ways that facilitate conclusions we hope for. We think we’re worth more or otherwise over-estimate our contributions when we’re actually fairly average, for instance, so everyone, including CEOs who more or less have the power to leverage better rewards for themselves, routinely expect larger than average pay increases even in tough economic times when they’re laying off others to save money.

A recent study of executives showed they know managers are generally better at technical skills than people skills like dealing with conflict, coaching and developing others, which consistently rank lowest for the very large majority of executives. People skills are where emotions get in the way of logic. So one might think that’s good news – they see the problem, which is usually the first step to improving. But you’d be wrong. It’s not that they realize THEY are short of people skills themselves! Executives see that OTHER managers are weak, but Korn Ferry’s extensive studies estimate 82% of executives need to improve in people skills. Since they don’t know this, only 15% actually said they felt these were areas where THEY needed help. While they could correctly identify such needs in general (probably areas they think others need to improve at), they were woefully off on where they themselves fit.

So what does Marcus recommend we do with this sort of information? First, make it widely known. Help people see these sorts of limitations apply so widely we ought to assume some apply to ourselves at least to some extent and work on doing something about it. In other words, reflect. Pay attention to research and knowledge that’s developing in the field of human thinking and behavior and take into account that your own decisions and habits may need to become more logical and careful. Pay attention to whether you’re about to make a decision that others will recognize as illogical. Get others’ input, work as teams, but not just with senior members, add diversity of thought and viewpoints. And, for Boards of Directors, do all you can to ensure individuals aren’t deciding their own pay and perks or granting their top teams compensation that will inevitably put upward pressure on their own.

Pay is just one easy example of where these flaws become highly visible. Early, well-known research shows everyone would like 20% more money, but that pay increases, no matter how good, become taken for granted in a year or so and 20% more again becomes the new objective. This is just as true if you make $2 million a year as $20,000. For instance, it’s also been shown that when CEOs order studies of the best place to relocate head offices, they almost inevitably concluded it should be closer to wherever the CEO lives. More research shows more pay doesn’t equate to more long run happiness above a fairly moderate pay level. How many other corporate decisions are being made the same way, based on how one or two people FEEL? And, of course, it isn’t just CEOs deciding in their own favor, but all of us tending to. They just happen to be somewhat more visible. Are we smart enough to find ways to balance these all too human pressures?

Bookmark and share this post

More »

0 Comments

Filed under: 4 Honest - Finding Reality, All That We Know, Books, Coaching Yourself, Fix The Jerks, Leaders of the Future

Psychological Research Pushes Leadership Knowledge

Author: Dave Crisp

15 Jan

The pace of research and innovation continues to accelerate in every area and nowhere is this truer than in management where business professors and consulting houses compete with each other to deliver insights at a furious pace. Of course, not all of it is highly reliable, nor can it be taken at face value without looking for confirming studies just as in hard sciences where we expect findings to be replicated before they are fully trusted. With the rapid pace, however, confirmation isn’t usually long in coming.

What can be so new? New opportunities, input from the Internet and far more instant sharing of information place us still at the early stages of finding out what human kind can do. Are we going to be burned out by it, overwhelmed or outpaced by our own technology? Will machines start to ‘think’ faster than we can on topics we traditionally excelled at? Would that be a blessing?

In this hustle a number of fierce debates rage about the meaning of some of the things we find. A very interesting, relatively new book, Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind, by professor Gary Marcus, raises some fascinating questions that can be applied to how leaders think. Along the lines of Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink, Marcus points out we are subject to many automatic reactions to information and situations due mostly to the way in which our brains evolved, with more or less instantaneous emotional reactions to events not entirely balanced by higher level logic functions.

The book is an easy and well-balanced assessment of the good and bad resulting from this uneven power of two styles of ‘thinking.’ Others argue our brains are still actually evolving as opposed to discovering what can be done with the mental machinery we’ve inherited.

Reading this could be depressing. Human thinking clearly is limited, often flawed and subject to so many competing interpretations one wonders if we can trust conclusions any of us reach. On the other hand, clearly our thinking ability is what got us to the level we’ve reached and what keeps us learning day by day. and both types of brain activity contribute – both logic and emotional reactions, something machines aren’t going to be able to attain and blend quite so easily.

How we balance our thinking modes is so idiosyncratic it’s questionable whether we’ll ever fully understand the way the human brain ‘thinks.’ Yet the patterns Marcus points to emerge consistently. For instance, our tendency to see things primarily as they affect us has clear implications for leaders’ behavior. At an event a few weeks ago I was struck again, listening to a CEO, how even the best individuals in that role for any length of time develop a distinct way of looking at the world that those not in the role don’t relate to in quite the same way. In this case, this verifiably good copy of the type spent much of his presentation focused on pay and perks. specifically those for CEOs and senior executives .and the difficulty that new regulations pose for making changes (read ‘increases’), something he feels VPs of HR definitely need to work on.

The discussion was unquestionably relevant to how leadership works and fascinating. It took me back to the days when I expected to be fired for continued failure in one very important part of my job – getting the CEO more compensation. It occurred to me to wonder how much of the accusation that HR doesn’t understand business revolves around not properly understanding the importance of higher pay in the front office and for line managers in general. The book is certainly enlightening about how completely we have to expect this and what, if anything, we can do about it.

Bookmark and share this post

More »

0 Comments

Filed under: 4 Honest - Finding Reality, Books, Coaching Issues, Fix The Jerks, Human Resources (HR), Leaders of the Future

Strategic Madness; Can HR See It Coming?

Author: Dave Crisp

4 Sep

From the last post, one might ask why a Board of Directors would support Bill Agee as CEO of MK (a massive construction company) for nearly seven years until he ended his reign having to wear a bullet proof vest on his increasingly rare visits to the office for fear of employees. and executives all knew his young wife often convinced him to change business decisions (in that case, why not hire her)? The answer seems easy. He took over when they were in deep financial trouble in 1988 and by 1990 he made them highly profitable and eliminated all debt. Huh? How do the two fit? In case you think I’m making this up, check out Steve Miller’s new book, The Turnaround Kid. It’s a relatively common occurrence.

After a brief glow of success it was to be all downhill. How long does it take to notice and despair? Apparently four years. That seems excessively long given the average tenure of CEOs is said to be 2.6 years. It shows what an initial appearance of success buys in terms of protecting someone.

Isn’t this exactly what we see everywhere in organizations. Bad judgment and behavior in some areas are overlooked because of results. Decisions come slowly. Didn’t it occur to Agee’s Board to ask executives who worried about what was driving the turnaround. In hindsight it turned out he got them into new projects (and cash flow) that the company wasn’t competent to handle. By the end of six years this was obvious. Share prices dropped from $21 to $6. and ruined retirement funds for employees whose funds had been switched into company stock. The “street” figured out what was going on before the Board was driven to act.

Are we condemned to this scale of trial and error at the top of organizations? If so, isn’t this simply repeated all the way down through the hierarchy as each boss copies and gives in to the style of those above?

The answer that an increasing number of successful companies use is to ‘fail early. and small.’ Google is an example where the co-founders continually emphasize just that. In retrospect Bill Gates fortunes grew because he tried at least four operating systems simultaneously until Windows unexpectedly (unexpected by him) took off. This willingness to try and fail, to admit error and move on caused Google to drop its Wave program after only one year, yet they praise and give awards to individuals whose spectacular failures open doors to other efforts.

I often counsel would be job-changers to consider waiting out a bad boss if the company has a history of moving people frequently. But I ask them only to ‘consider’ since no one can predict whether any given boss’ boss will recognize the need to make a change. And I have to admit fewer make changes than should by far.

The clearest signals? Low engagement of a manager’s staff, few ideas bubbling up (because the manager isn’t listening and encouraging) and ego – slightly out of line manager behaviors to aggrandize their status – persistent desire for bigger offices, better furniture, cars, etc., and things like blaming staff for whatever goes wrong. Interestingly many of the clearest signs are quite apparent to HR first. Among the latter, we all have a healthy interest in improving our lot, but the ego-fixated go after them by hook or by crook, demanding all manner of perks and raises others don’t have. Boards in particular seem to write this stuff off as ‘normal’ when in fact they should be seen as signals of becoming out of touch.

These are often much earlier signs than the failure of strategies that take years to pay off. or not. While not absolutely definitive, such signals should be a clear trigger for deep reviews of the origins of an executive’s apparent ‘results.’ As leading indicators some of this stuff could pay off big time in actual dollars. At the very least they indicate the need for some serious coaching and retraining.

Bookmark and share this post

More »

0 Comments

Filed under: 3 Strategic - Thinking, Books, Business/Strategy, Fix The Jerks, Leaders of the Future

The Biggest Problem For HR Strategy

Author: Dave Crisp

28 Aug

Over the last years and months I’ve come to believe the biggest problem with HR Strategy and getting results is individual leaders. We know in all companies there are pockets of satisfied, highly motivated, engaged employees who turn out superb work. We also know those are mostly the exceptions. Results and motivation are lost because the good work in one area is cancelled out or sidetracked by what’s going wrong in others. Only a handful of companies have spread engagement thoroughly across their organizations.

We further know that it’s the leader of each unit who makes this happen or not. So I’ve been pursuing the question ‘what’s the problem, why is it so hard to develop enough positive leaders to establish a culture (a set of typical habits) of supportive, innovative leadership across an entire organization?’ We know exactly what behaviors are actually necessary to achieve this and they are things anyone can do, any day, anywhere, if they simply keep them in mind and do them. These can work almost literally by rote if need be. And if you get someone behaving a certain way, their thinking usually changes to match according to psychologists. So why can’t we get leaders giving positive reinforcement, asking for feedback, supporting trial and error and so forth – the keys to great results?

The answer seems to be that we all too easily fall back into ‘natural’ ways of behaving toward others. We find it hard to empathize in most situations (some are far better than others) and without that guide to how another person might feel, we do what first comes to mind – which often means we immediately critique what’s wrong, follow our own instincts without reference to others opinions, etc.

Reading the 2008 autobiography of a US turnaround specialist (The Turnaround Kid by Steve Miller) gives some insight into these problems. He helped Lee Iacocca save Chrysler and then wrote a particularly damning condemnation of Iacocca’s leadership behavior, which he repeats in the book – lack of listening, favoritism, ego-generated strategy blindness and more.

A couple of assignments later he turned around massive construction company, MK, where he followed fired CEO Bill Agee. Bill ‘managed’ MK for his last two years from his Pebble Beach, California mansion, requiring Boise, Idaho head office execs to fly down for ‘instructions.’ Visiting Boise he was known to wear a bullet proof vest for fear of employees and his execs learned to wait a day before implementing his orders because his much younger, controversial wife from a scandal-rocked former work liaison would often convince him to change decisions. Really. You can’t make this stuff up. It’s all on record. But people still hire Bill for management advice. Really.

Miller, a self-styled sensitive manager, despite being a hard-nosed, typical CFO-type by style and training was able to do the right things – most of the time. He did remarkable jobs in numerous situations, including Chrysler and MK, of motivating and aligning large numbers of employees and unions to accept cuts and bankers to take lower rates on loans.

Surprisingly, even he stumbled later when he took on saving Delphi, the near-bankrupt auto parts spin-off of GM, where he promptly put his feet straight into his mouth. He insulted unions and even landscape staff as greedy for accepting on-par pay with the rest of the automotive industry. At the same time he was proposing cuts for them and increases in the C-suite. That’s a far cry from earlier massaging of pay cuts by empathetically pointing out everyone was in the same boat and awarding himself a $1 a year salary. Most recently he’s back (just this summer) to save AIG. It remains to be seen which approach he will take, but the bigger question is how can even a person who knows how to behave effectively suddenly do the reverse and create major problems? Was it just perception or a major glitch? At least we can be sure he has noticed and will rethink.

I’m not sure I have answers, but for HR and organization effectiveness this may be the biggest question of all.

Bookmark and share this post

More »

0 Comments

Filed under: 4 Honest - Finding Reality, Books, Coaching Yourself, Fix The Jerks, Leaders of the Future

Napoleon’s Glance

Author: Dave Crisp

23 Feb

Strategically it sometimes pays to step back from daily routine and read or experience something different… but not necessarily too different – the busman’s holiday they call it – as when you work for a charity, gaining pleasure and learning from doing more of what you do at work. Reading for pleasure, I stumbled on a book by William Duggan, associate professor of management at Columbia Business School, an expert on strategic thinking and author of three books in the field – The Art of What Works (2001), Napoleon’s Glance (2004) and Strategic Intuition (2007). The gist: Napoleon and other amazing leaders followed a route to highly effective strategy that is very, very different from what is normally thought of as strategic planning or strategic thinking.

The principles apply directly to HR strategy. Oddly, just recently, one of the many HR/Learning & Development blogs out there published “Four tips for Effective Leadership,” namely: Be counterintuitive, live comfortably in gray areas, learn by doing and exercise soft skills – exactly what Duggan points to with his great strategists. Strategy isn’t arrived at by ‘planning’ in the sense of laying out exact steps and stages with time lines and benchmarks. Napoleon and the others ‘put their teams in motion,’ ‘looked for small battles they could win decisively,’ ‘stuck to the course with firm resolution,’ and learned to evolve strategies as they went rather than work them out in detail beforehand.

Reading these, I realized that, yes, most successes I ran into along the way evolved ‘in the midst of action’ (a phrase I also recognized from a Zen master talking about finding your way calmly ‘in the midst of action’). Does this apply to HR? My former company got into elearning early and heavily, with great results, because we were asked to look at ‘expert systems’ that the CEO saw at a conference (a different computer technology) and we jumped to use the budget and just get going, without being in the least sure where we were headed, but seeing some possibilities in using technical systems to leverage more people learning more things.

If we’d waited for our IT process that called for developing a technical plan in detail, with projected costs three to five years out, we’d never have gotten off the ground. Yet planning is valuable. In the words of Eisenhower, the top allied General of WWII, “Plans are nothing, planning is everything.” The difference, in other words, is active versus passive. Get going, planning as you go, through the unexpected twists and uncertainties – don’t wait for “a plan” designed to resolve something you think may happen – it won’t.

Bookmark and share this post