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.

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

Dilbert Management Style Revisited

Author: Dave Crisp

23 Apr

A title mentioning the Dilbert management style caught my eye recently. shared by Karl Moore on Mintzberg’s Coaching Ourselves blog. What a convoluted way some items have of catching our attention. At first I was outraged by blogger Steve Denning’s analysis of Bob Sutton’s work. If this sounds like name dropping, it is. Everyone’s getting in on act of critiquing what’s wrong with management and this only accelerates the confusion around the metaphorical, yet too real financial meltdown and the latest actual reactor meltdowns in Japan – stunning examples of bad management. Are commentators starting to stumble over each other so much we aren’t listening to each other’s key points and the proof?

We all know something’s wrong with management the way we’ve been doing it. and yet the tools we’d been using were great for getting us out of the industrial revolution into scientific management and through the amazing economic and technical progress that got us to computers, the Internet, incessant world-travel and fabulous education for vast numbers of people. The pace of learning and change has been frantic and appears not to be slowing in the least, as well it might not given how many of us are contributing. It’s a double-edged sword. Our prolific contributions are making it harder to pick out effective strategies, even though the sheer volume seems to focus now in one single direction.

With Steve Denning’s piece we’re faced with a puzzle. There are so many brilliant minds competing to dump their ideas on the Internet and into seminars and conferences on every imaginable subject, where can we find anyone stepping back and making sense of the whole thing. Boards and executives undoubtedly are paying attention to advice for better management, but the cacophony of comment and criticism has to be deafening and confusing.

It turns out, when I dug further into Denning’s work, that he’s a recognized advanced thinker in these areas, yet his premise that Sutton’s work is worthless is inane. Stanford’s Sutton is author of “The No Asshole Rule,” which I’ve mentioned positively before, and more recently “Good Boss, Bad Boss” and he went on to have the most popular blog post last year on HBR blogs – 12 Things Good Bosses Believe. Denning mistakenly trashes Sutton’s premise that managers should care about employees.

This alone is worth taking time to debunk because the tsunami of opinion is running totally in favor of Sutton’s view, not Denning’s. The fact a major management guru can bash this is news indeed. but it also shows the limits of individuals attempting to deal logically with the full subject of what needs to change in managing organizations.

Denning argues Sutton is pandering to an ineffective philosophy when he claims we ought to value employees and treat them decently, that this is a Dilbert approach where middle managers ‘do nothing but try to get by’ and mollify employees. This seems like a truly weird argument to me on all counts. I appreciate that creative minds make mistakes on the way to new insights, but Denning’s main point seems ridiculous as a standalone. The only thing that counts he insists is that every manager and employee strive to “delight the customer” and moving our focus off that to worry about employees is foolish.

Right off the top, why does this have to be a standalone objective? Why either/or? Have we not progressed past the simple view that we can focus on only one thing at a time? Why can’t we help delight customers by treating employees as we want them to treat customers – a truism that Sears Roebuck demonstrated as a measurable example of success some 20 years ago.

Pretty much everyone can surely relate. One personal example – on vacation visits to Florida my spouse absolutely insists on shopping at Publix over its main competitor there, Winn Dixie, and I agree. When you look at the stores, I’d guess Winn Dixie’s are a bit more modern and widely stocked where we go, aiming to ‘delight’ customers with product, but what distinguishes Publix is tough to copy or buy – they truly seem to treat staff decently, who in turn treat each other and customers like real individual people, from the managers to the checkout staff to the mentally challenged baggers they often employ. The difference is palpable and it more than makes up for lacking new, glitzy or massive stores. We just flat out feel better in their stores. They delight us.

What even a single example illustrates is that you can do both, that’s it’s not either/or. So where have we failed with Denning to get this very basic idea across? Why is there such a divide between effective, decent HR strategy and line-management thinking that even a guru misses it entirely? It’s surely not rocket science to suggest that customers are more likely to be ‘delighted’ shopping with happy, friendly people serving than with sour, grumpy workers who are treated badly by managers.

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Filed under: 3 Strategic - Thinking, All That We Know, Business/Strategy, Coaching Others, 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.

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

Mintzberg’s New Book “Managing”

Author: Dave Crisp

23 Nov

Wow. This is the next “Good to Great” – and only 7 years after that, not 20 as Collins’ book was after “In Search of Excellence.” Mintzberg once and for all establishes that management and leadership are immensely complex and have to be learned in the heat of practicing them, not from books or traditional courses. It’s one thing to say this to people and quite another to assemble a massive review, in very short, but dense form, proving it in the words and findings of a century of researchers.

I wrote the rest of this post to a friend, another keen observer, David Creelman of Creelman Research, who brought it to my attention. I realize this is actually a review:

Just finished Managing and have some thoughts it seems good to put down here. It’s an impressive assembly of far-reaching thinking. I think it will probably frustrate and confuse a lot of readers, which is too bad, but possibly an inevitable step in recognizing what really works. The management/leadership complex is just that – very, very complex without any clear single answers, very situational and requiring unique fit or adaptability to succeed at. I agree with the general premise, but would word it a bit differently. I would say not have said we are wrong to hold up leaders as worthy of examination and sometimes praise, but we are wrong to deify the idea of leader and leadership (and wrong to talk about it as a set of things that can be learned by the usual rote learning we get in schools). However, I believe that leaders do make a difference if they operate as Mintzberg outlines – constantly learning and reflecting and by trial and error efforts to improve things. I’m sure he would agree and wonder a bit why he didn’t make that more clear.

As I see it, organizations solidify the ossified structures they form in hopes of sustaining themselves as the original driving leader(s) move on. Theoretically the structure that worked should be able to adapt with new people coming into the slots and changing them to fit changing circumstances, but we haven’t paid nearly enough attention to that concept. We treat the structure almost as sacred once it’s in place (despite the tendency to constantly ‘re-organize’ to solve every problem, which really amounts to re-arranging the deck chairs – it doesn’t really change much – the power hierarchy is too attractive to those rising in it). To some extent the organization structure does ensure some continuity, but for how long if it doesn’t evolve?

It’s easy for those appointed to assume that they somehow inherit the stature of those who built the organization in the first place, not realizing it wasn’t a one-person show, but a cooperative effort that may be seen from outside to be one person. The fact that some initial leaders are strong-man types who create by force and maintain power by force leads to confusion as well. When we know that 90% plus of leaders believe they’re in the smartest 10%, it’s easy to see why they are so willing to try to impose their vision as Mintzberg points out is so common among those newly promoted. At that moment you’re at the peak of confidence in your infallibility; it’s just been proven, so why not impose it? Then it’s hard to back down and reveal your uncertainty as things begin not to work. You may not even realize it isn’t working and just apply more force to drive things the way you ‘see they will work if only everyone cooperates (with your vision).’

We need to help people see that maintaining and developing existing organizations is no less challenging, but very different from the initiating, entrepreneurial phase, that a different type of leader, adept with equally difficult, but different challenges, is needed – one who needs to manage and lead in a very different way, with more visible involvement of others typically, building a truly learning organization, which has to start with a learning leader.

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Filed under: 1 Balance - Judgment, All That We Know, Coaching Others, Coaching over Command Leadership, Fix The Jerks, Leaders of the Future, Learning Organization

Why Isolation from People Matters

Author: Dave Crisp

3 Nov

Auto Industry task force leader Steven Rattner’s comments about why Obama had to remove Rick Wagoner as head of GM have been widely reported. While it might seem more important that $100 million deals were approved based on PowerPoint slides instead of solid research, it’s interesting that another key example was how badly they were isolated from people, including their own employees.

Senior GM execs had a private elevator key that allowed them to get from their guarded top floor suite to their private garage without stopping at any other floors to let anyone on, Rattner notes as a typical example. Perhaps not quite as obviously dreadful as flying in private corporate jets to ask the President for bailout money, but maybe more significant. At least one can argue the economic value of a corporate plane – sort of.

Cutting oneself off from team members and from their casual input on a day-to-day basis, even as much as one might pick up in an elevator ride, is deadly to leadership. Worse, it reinforces your status as untouchable by rank and file. The message is clear – don’t tell us anything, we’re not interested. If relationships never develop on any sort of casual basis, people will hesitate and decide not to approach you about things they worry might be important, but not important enough to risk embarrassment if you turn away or get annoyed.

Not everyone fears speaking to a senior executive just because of their title, but many do. Seeing others engage in casual conversation helps everyone feel OK about it, too. Every leader has to constantly work toward encouraging all sorts of comments. It doesn’t just happen by accident that people keep their leaders up to date. So the private key isn’t just a symbol, but one more actual roadblock that only the worst sort of leaders set up.

Hannibal drank from puddles alongside his troops; Genghis Khan rode with them. No one doubted who was in charge, and you can bet they talked. If you’re afraid to talk to your boss about every day work stuff, you can bet most others including his or her highest lieutenants are, too – so nothing is getting through. Time to be dusting off the resume.

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Filed under: 2 Positive - Feelings, Coaching Others, Fix The Jerks, Leaders of the Future

Who Makes Bad Leaders?

Author: Dave Crisp

17 Aug

Or are leaders bad all on their own? Among recent blog posts one asked whether employees are setting bosses up for failure by expecting perfection on every issue. Can bosses actually succeed? Why does it seem so many are vilified? What can be done about it? It does sometimes seem as if bosses can never please employees. How much is up to the employee?

These are powerful, important questions that we’re finally beginning to see asked and answered more often. I like this practical answer at Chief Learning Officer magazine online. But it’s important to understand the role employees play and what anyone can do about it.

This came to mind again with a phone call from a colleague wanting to know what makes a good leader and venting about two hours they’d just spent listening to a manager gripe about their CEO in a small company. “The boss is selfish, lazy, uninterested in anyone’s ideas for improvements,” went the complaint, “My great talents aren’t being used; I’m only staying for the money.” Sound familiar? We’re told about half of all employees or more feel this way much of the time.

In varying degrees we hear this everywhere. I’ve quoted Bob Eichinger of Lominger/Korn Ferry before – that only about 18% of managers have the key people skills for leading and developing others, that these skills fall in the lowest 20% of skills among most managers. Yet, to answer my friend’s question about what leadership is, people skills ARE leadership, so the scarcity of them indicates exactly how scarce effective leadership is in organizations. If we could raise that just 10% or 15% across the board, results would skyrocket.

Once a company grows beyond about 25 to 50 employees in size, employees can no longer be simply extensions of the leaders abilities. Until then a really hardworking boss can probably get around and tell each employee exactly what to do and how every day. Above that size the futility of that should be obvious. Employees have to be empowered and entrusted to take initiative and do things the boss hasn’t specifically ordered or blessed, so the leader’s role becomes encouraging, stimulating creativity, coordinating and supporting initiative where it makes sense – a very different job than controlling every activity day by day.

We shouldn’t be vilifying weak leaders as much as asking ourselves how best to improve their skills and help them transition from command and control styles to coaching and developing. Companies, even many of the biggest and best funded, some of whom spend millions on leadership training, are doing a lousy job of this in the main. How else to account for the finding that 82% of leaders lack the most critical skills for their roles. Hopefully the blizzard of articles and books on what it takes to get results with people will start to make a dent in that gap.

Happiness is Multi-faceted

Author: Dave Crisp

11 Aug

This may be more than one post’s worth of ideas, but researching following the World Congress of Positive Psychology (mentioned in an earlier post) led to some great resources.

Perhaps the most important concept is that happiness isn’t a single thing. When thought of as if it were you tend to think of leisure and joyful moments, but it really runs much deeper. Todd Kashdan makes the point in his excellent brand new book Curious? that we might not even want to set happiness as the most important goal in life. That’s carried through in the very interesting Positive Psychology News Daily (PPND) web site authored by graduates of the first MA programs in the field.

In fact, the PPND site impressed me with several graphics or “image maps” that allow you to click on elements that make up, for instance, ‘a life well lived image map‘ and find the components to a ‘positive emotions image map‘ and other facets of living well. The concepts they capture reinforce Kashdan’s point that maybe we’re barking up the wrong tree trying to focus on happiness alone.

A similar point emerges from another new book, The Happiness Equation, by others of the Positive Psych movement. It gives brief information about 100 items that add to or subtract from happiness and well-being – quite a list, from which you can generate a score to assess how happy you are relative to others, but even more importantly you can see from that which factors are contributing or are missing that create a sense of a good life.

Once again one of the most impressive things about this is the vast amount of research and publication that’s been done in the few short years since this field of study emerged. It really puts in perspective the sort of counseling that goes with mild mood prescriptions to form what Jonathon Haidt and others have shown to be the best antidotes to depression and how closely some of these relate to the elements needed for people to be happy and engaged at work.

While it might seem that these are intensely personal concerns, the fact is that happy employees have consistently been shown to produce better results. It isn’t either/or, but both/and. We can do the right thing by helping people identify what would make them happier and simultaneously improve profits and market share. What a concept! Great to see it born out again and again in modern research.

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Filed under: 2 Positive - Feelings, Books, Coaching Others, Fix The Jerks, Learning Organization

Work-life Balance Getting Better?

Author: Dave Crisp

8 Feb

Just when you might be depressed by the thought that work pressure only goes up, up, up and things only get worse, recent reports note the opposite only a few months ago in mutually confirming studies.

While it remains to be seen whether the current economic crisis will reverse this again, it’s reassuring to know things can improve. In the UK concerns about work stress seemed to be reaching an all time high when I spoke to their national HR group a couple of years ago. Recently the same group noted cautiously that work hours are falling and that this seems to indicate that individuals are exerting more control.

At the same time, Queen’s University’s Industrial Relations Centre highlights an international study of nearly 10,000 executives from the Journal of Applied Psychology (2008, Vol 93, #4, pp.789-805) showing some male and female managers achieve better work-life balance and, moreover, those who do actually have higher career advancement potential.

Interestingly, an HBR book published last May, Total Leadership, by Stewart Friedman, founding Director of Wharton’s Leadership Program, reinforces this, arguing convincingly that leaders can only improve their work performance by simultaneously improving in four areas of life – work, community, family and self. The subtitle: “Be a better leader; have a better life!” Balance!! Need I say it again?

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Filed under: 1 Balance - Judgment, All That We Know, Business/Strategy, Coaching Others, Leaders of the Future

Great to see casual press pick up on HR skills

Author: Dave Crisp

23 Nov

Reading everything in sight as usual I happened to run across three articles on the same page of a store promotional publication no less on the subject of Human Resources (HR) and people skills. It’s great to s Nov/Dec 2008 Costco Connection for Canada ee to see such stuff making its way into mainstream press of any sort. The more people read and know about how to handle such things the better. It was just a bit of surprise to come across it where it was November’s Costco Connection for Canada (page 13 if you’re looking for it).

One article talks about how to retain staff, advice as it happens from a fellow speaker, sales guru Jeff Mowatt. To help employees stay engaged by finding the interesting parts of even a dull job, he likens this to the Japanese Tea Ceremony, where the details become interesting even in a supposedly mundane event. By so doing, you keep them excited about what they can do for the customer of the job even when many people would find the work by itself boring.

In another, another fellow speaker, Steven Little, encourages rewarding oneself for basic achievements that take work – in his case, a milkshake for getting himself to a distant speaking engagement. And then he proceeds to casually outline five keys to effective leadership in organizations as an added bonus.

Then Berlitz Canada offers advice on adding key skills that improve your thinking and career options simultaneously – no surprise this would be learning another language, a bit obvious, but nonetheless very true.

More and more we see popular press picking up bits that in years past would have appeared only in management magazines. Today every employee wants and needs to know about the skills involved not only in managing their own success, but what would help organizations they’re involved in, too. The great value of this is that it makes managing more transparent for everyone, demystifies it and shows the links between what’s good for the individual as well as the organization at the same time.

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Wise Words straight from a CEO

Author: Dave Crisp

3 Oct

A benefit of being invited to speak at events, albeit as a last minute fill-in, is you get to hear other presenters. At the Conference Board of Canada HR 2008 annual conference last week, it was a pleasure to hear Bill MacKinnon, CEO, KPMG Canada, discuss how he’s helped them embrace great leadership as a true objective throughout the organization. He keynoted the main conference theme – Influential Leadership – anchored to how this improves results.

He kicked off with the emphasis on why paying attention to leadership is becoming so much more important – because organizations, the challenges they face and the tasks of managing and leading them have become so much more complex. He proceeded to virtually itemize the same five key elements I build on.
Most striking of all, he very much emphasized the importance of leaders remaining “calm” (to use his term) in the face of the daily onslaught of challenges we now face. In other words, developing and maintaining the skills of balance in the midst of furious activity ended up being the point he stressed more than any other. I couldn’t agree more.

And balance, of course, involves including all the elements that must be balanced together so you don’t get blindsided by something you’ve forgotten about… like people’s attitudes and engagement, for instance, while you are nonetheless pushing for results. “Both/and” becomes a big challenge of complexity that many managers struggle with. Practice makes perfect. It was great to hear a CEO of a major organization put it in such a “must have, every day” light!

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