One answer seems to be that we find ‘nice guys’ not very leader-like, so we hesitate to emulate them. Instances to explore this question come to light constantly. A high profile example arrived in a newsletter pointing to an interview in Forbes of ING Direct CEO Arkadi Kuhlmann who has just written his second book of leadership wisdom called Rock, Then Roll: The Secrets of Culture-Driven Leadership, which Forbes says “gathers nuggets of information distributed to ING Direct’s employees over Kuhlmann’s ten years with ING Direct,” the second of his books to do so.

Mr. Kuhlman is a fabulous Canadian success story not many know much about. An RBC VP at age 33 he took on the challenge of developing online banking for Dutch-owned bank and financial company ING and made the new venture amazingly successful, both in the Canada and the US and several other countries internationally. I happen to know what an uphill battle he must have had within ING from recent coaching with another Canadian sub of theirs which found them almost impossible to deal with – never allowing the sub to make decisions and delaying giving permission needed to operate, exactly opposite to Mr. Kuhlman’s style.

As a result of these different approaches to leadership ING overall needed a $13 billion bail-out from the Dutch government, while one way to pay it back has been to sell Mr. Kuhlman and his super-successful ING Direct to Capital One for $9 billion. Those numbers make the value of effective leadership pretty clear. If you’re wondering whether ING head office will be reading Mr. Kuhlman’s books, I can guess almost certainly they will pay no attention to them despite his success versus their failure.

Mr. Kuhlman, before anything else, promotes an empowerment culture and what he calls ‘culture-driven leadership.’ That means creating a culture in which everyone potentially leads and no one waits on the CEO or anyone else to lay out orders. It is also a great affirmation of the principle that an excellent leader can carve out a highly effective culture in his or her segment of a company that otherwise is downright hostile to it. But will an old-line bank move from command and control culture to this? Not likely in our lifetimes.

The only hesitation I have recommending Kuhlman’s books is he hands out 302 leadership messages in them and another 46 since that latest one. From his interview I think the themes are likely pretty clear, but none of us is capable of digesting, let alone putting into practice, 348 bits of advice, especially when you recognize they fit a particular set of circumstances that you may never encounter again. Inspirational undoubtedly, but workable?

Oddly, a more usable description of similar, but literally on-the-ground ‘nice guy’ leadership is an analysis of Denver Bronco’s quarterback Tim Tebow’s style (also in Forbes). The highly religious Mr. Tebow has become quite controversial as a result of his very public devotional behavior on the field, but he’s simply one more unique individual with unique style. It’s hard to argue with his practical success as a leader, which Kevin Kruse (author of the recent book, We: How to Increase Performance and Profits Through Full Engagement helps us get a handle on.

Without much of a stretch it seems clear these are examples of similar approaches especially in intent, albeit in very different situations where specific details inevitably have to vary. I tend to like Kruse’s descriptions better because they get at more directly what I believe are the five key core concepts without confusing them with too many specific examples – being positive with everyone, but dealing honestly with challenges, bringing the unique pieces together in balance (together meaning ‘we’ over ‘me’ just as Kuhlman insists in his culture-driven model), keeping focused on delivering results. Both promote starting small and persisting to build momentum. and both provide excellent, but very different examples of all this working effectively. Surface differences, similar principles.

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A number of years ago this tended to mean one or two workers working the majority of their time from home or another off-site location (car, hotel room, temporary office). Sorting out best principles evolved so now many organizations have explicit guidelines for this.

In a real sense, a leader might be in charge of a number of employees working remotely, which by definition was a virtual team, but the emphasis tended to be on rules for the employees. Measurement systems that a leader might use to judge productivity tended to be secondary, but important. It was assumed leaders would keep in touch frequently as most seemed a bit skeptical anyway and could be counted on to want to keep close tabs on workers.

As time passed technology made most of us capable of working remotely at least part time with few special arrangements. It also enabled more people to tie into virtual meetings via various types of collaboration programs and online tools. The emphasis shifted away from remote workers as special cases that had to be monitored to an assumption that entire teams might be assembled from workers who are located somewhere other than where the leader is or teams in one location being led by a leader located somewhere else. Technology enabled ‘somewhere else’ to mean literally anywhere on the planet, so rules about attending weekly in-office meetings often no longer fit.

The literature filled with new concerns such as people working at home on off hours. Some unions are even bargaining for on-call premiums for anyone who carries a company cell phone especially since these are now small computers with email and more. But beyond that leadership questions have been multiplying for more complex situations.

Some excellent guides exist now for leaders of true virtual teams such as Jon Wagner’s 3^rd edition, just published with Russ Milland, “The Building Effective Virtual and Remote Teams Handbook” (note: although I haven’t met Jon as far as I recall, he’s a fellow member of Strategic Capability Network). How should leaders behave differently (or should they) if they rarely meet team members and conduct full group meetings and routine one-on-ones via technology? These guys have experience and have studied what works best, but can busy managers really implement 160+ pages of advice?

Other ways of looking at similar concerns and some of the newer evolving technologies and methods that one could consider are captured by Kyle Lagunas, the HR Analyst at Software Advice in a recent article. In his blog post, he discusses the challenges of managing with an “open door” or a version of the much recommended “managing by walking around” when dealing with virtual teams.

Suffice it to say the complete solution almost certainly hasn’t been written yet, nor have all the questions been discovered. It would be nice to think office politics can be overcome with effective processes, clearly set out, but human nature being what it is what happens when a group of employees conspire to rid themselves of an unwanted virtual leader or when individuals plot to become the favorite or divert the project or more? With a growing emphasis discussed in earlier HR Strategy posts about the need for managers to learn to confront each other and argue constructively to get disagreements out in the open, the chances for misunderstandings, shunning of people we don’t find congenial or cooperative and all those other natural, but naturally disruptive behaviors would seem to find greater latitude to cause trouble or at least tremendous inefficiency and ineffectiveness.

Maybe we need a few realistic novels or screenplays about the pitfalls, dangers and solutions as well as sound advice that not everyone will have the time or skill to implement. I’m sure there’s also a huge opportunity for some comedy in all this – “The (Virtual) Office” perhaps.

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In short, CFO magazine published this report a week or so ago that makes one a bit dizzy. It aims to summarize a presentation given by the CEO of Taleo (the Talent Management software company) at a US Conference Board event on Human Capital Metrics. The report seems to be an effort to pull out the highlights, which include a blast at companies using too many contract workers (getting less engaged employees) and the need to localize HR programs when operating globally rather than ‘drop in an American or Australian solution consultant’ into China, for instance. In the latter case, the reason pulled out by the reporter is ‘you need a local person who speaks the language and understands the cost structure.’ Admittedly these are among the reasons for wanting local help, but surely from an HR view, there are quite a few others – understand the culture, the local HR regulations, what motivates local people and more. By this time you can see a mish mash of partial ideas and wording shaping up.

From here we launch into a clip of comments about the need to use social media better, emphasizing that referrals result in employees who typically stay longer.

So far I’m following the reporter, a little buzzed by the quick shifts, but still puzzling about the title ‘HR under microscope’ and waiting for the major criticism. I’m guessing the headline is due to an editor creating something to sell. But no, there’s more.

An interesting segue takes us through an interesting comment that HR can’t be more than an administrative function if it runs on a staffing ratio of 1 HR pro to 350 employees when (in the CEO’s reported opinion) it started at more like 1:60.

Then the blast arrives. Asking reasonably whether HR at these large ratios can be expected to know more about talent than the manager of 10 people, it concludes: “Yet in exit interviews, employees say the number one reason why they leave is that they [don't like] their manager. It doesn’t make sense. We have to drive the HR professional into making more strategic decisions.” Wouldn’t logic suggest from this we need to convince senior management teams to make more strategic decisions about how to staff HR?

Wow. I’m not sure what the point is here, but given that it made it into the tag line for the article, I’m sure it must seem important. Let’s see – HR doesn’t have the resources to get properly close to talent issues, so it falls to managers who are doing a lousy job. In some way that doesn’t make sense so we have to drive – great concept there: “drive” HR professionals to make more strategic decisions. Would that be strategic decisions to hire themselves more staff? Is that their fault? Or is it that perhaps they really could create a better environment at their 350:1 skinny department ratios if they just tried harder? Or am I being paranoid?

All this ignores analyses from years back that HR staff ratios vary greatly due to the structure of the organization as well as sheer volume decisions (you typically need more HR per employee if you have 600 units spread geographically than if you have all, say, 25,000 employees under one roof like a big plant). But of course what really catches everyone is the facile move to turn this into blame for HR’s lack of strategic decision-making. Get the whip, let’s drive ‘em. By this point I’m not sure exactly who said what, but the result certainly seems to have ended up twisted in a familiar way. Sorry we can’t score one for CFO Magazine’s effort to make an ally of HR and mitigate inter-departmental silos. Except for the punch lines it sounded for a minute there like we were on the right track.

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It got me to questioning the use of the term Talent Management itself. I have always taken it to be an umbrella that takes in finding, recruiting, orienting, developing, managing and tracking performance and then moving people up through effective succession planning all the way through their careers. That definitely calls for integration of many HR functions and beyond since line managers have to be central in many of the pieces – from supportive coaching on the development side to career planning conversations with individuals. They are definitely needed for effective succession planning discussions among groups of managers so everyone agrees on how to rotate people through progressively challenging assignments across different divisions to season their leadership knowledge and skills.

So I’m all for adding “Integrated” to make the point since, as i4CP notes, HR is splintered and hasn’t made nearly as much progress as it should have in most companies at breaking down the silos that would allow true integration of these operations.

We need this now, but at a job search presentation I gave recently an audience member came up afterward to ask about my use of the word “talent” in the phrase, “Sell your talent, not your skills.” Her understanding was talent meant born-in skills. Mine (and the source I’d quoted) mean something more like “your global skill set viewed by what it can achieve rather than the individual skills: your overall ‘talent’ for. whatever”. In other words, I sell my ability (or talent) to get upset groups of people cooperating together for common solutions, not the separate component skills like conflict management, consensus-building, etc. – a ‘sell results’ view rather than a nuts and bolts view of what I do.

This definitely highlights a difficulty with the generic term ‘talent.’ Some senior executives still take this to mean the handful of ‘highly talented’ individuals they depend on to drive the business – the so-called A-players. This can mean programs set up for the rare few who show really outstanding performance or qualities. In fact Talent Management as it needs to be practiced for bigger impact on organizational results requires that the program take in far more people – including pretty much everyone in any sort of leadership role in the organization. I mentioned a book a couple of months back (Talent is Overrated) about the folly of thinking people are ‘born with talent’ or that if they haven’t got it, you can’t build it. Geoff Colvin in his excellent book debunks that neatly by showing even the most ‘talented’ musicians, for instance, get there by endless practice at their chosen field. Malcolm Gladwell gets at the same points in his book Outliers.

So while Talent Management is a term that’s grown rapidly in popularity, it probably has for the wrong reasons – because for many it calls forth the mental image of the sole super-contributor, the knight on a white horse – exactly the picture of leadership that is now outmoded and that is holding back results for so many organizations. Instead they need the up-and-coming, innovative, learners who are keen to try new ideas – guided by some seasoned veterans who can help them manage risk (ie: avoid pitfalls the younger set haven’t experienced), but still forge ahead with continual improvement. That’s a very different need from the all-knowing, all-powerful ‘talented few’ that many still hope for and imagine exist.

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I happened across one of those ‘what are pay rates these days’ sites, of which there are a number including the big job boards. To test it out I looked up what I might have expected to make if I took a job near my favorite Florida vacation spot. Don’t ask why I’d be thinking of that in mid-summer. If it had been winter, an obvious reason.

That got me looking at my old ‘competitors’ – the CFOs – and at different regions. The short story is:

Median Salaries:

	Florida	New York City
CHRO	$208,000	$252,000
CFO	$343,000	$395,000

While there is slightly more convergence in New York where the median CHRO salary is just under two thirds of the CFO, Florida hasn’t moved up as much, although when I was in the job 10 years ago most CHROs were making less than half in many cases.

One can’t judge too much from these data, which can’t be trusted to be highly accurate statistically and will certainly have lots of variation company to company, by size, industry and more, but assuming they were collected more or less the same way by a common survey method, the variances a distinct and sizable enough to draw the obvious conclusion.

What this confirms is the slowness of progress even in big companies toward recognizing the value, choosing the right people and paying competitively for the best CHRO candidates, as well as the candidates themselves accepting less than the competitive rate. One can argue that CFOs or both are overpaid or CHROs are underpaid, but either way we can see that the established faith Boards of Directors have in the importance of financial issues over people issues is still alive and well.

I didn’t try, but almost certainly would find roughly the same ratios in Canadian statistics. Of course there will be exceptions, but chances are we’re closer to the Florida situation than New York where competitive pressures are bound to be more strongly pushing organizations, especially the bigger global ones, to the logical conclusion that HR is increasingly important.

It’s a small measure, perhaps not especially significant to people outside HR, that we still haven’t dragged most companies into the twenty-first century understanding of the value of effective HR practices and strategies.

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The changes we’ve been predicting seem to be taking solid root even sooner than anyone guessed. The recession is behind us if not entirely ‘over.’ Worries that it could recur are escalating demands in organizations to become more innovative, to get out ahead and examples abound of companies moving in that direction and those who are thought to have procrastinated.

RIM has come in for its share of criticism although it seems likely they have great momentum, with lots of corporate operations solidly hooked in and email remaining the mainline app for business executives. Still their efforts at smartphones seem to lag the leaders who are innovating at a furious pace to keep up and try to outdo the iPhone and iPad.

The research group at i4CP notes major investments in innovation divisions by diverse, major companies including Verizon, Cisco and even Campbell Soup. They note 70% of companies now show up as making this a priority and high performing companies do so at more than double the pace of weaker ones.

Of course innovation is squarely about having the right people. i4CP insists companies and HR departments are missing lots of opportunities to hire more innovative players, which is undoubtedly true. But beyond that we know leaders hire ‘in their own image’ so if you haven’t got innovation developing in the culture at the top, you likely have leaders in place up and down the line who aren’t out there choosing the most innovative people for their teams. We’ve all run into managers who are reluctant to hire people better or with better ideas than they have themselves. And when someone does have a great idea, some leaders either steal credit or quash it before it can make them look bad. It’s human nature. of the wrong sort. It can also be human nature to encourage your staff, support their efforts to get pilots going and praise them to all who will listen as a way of encouraging novel approaches throughout the organization.

I was really pleased to read in the latest Retail Council of Canada’s Canadian Retailer magazine that my former HR team at Hbc went on to put into practice an idea we started talking about before I left some 9 years ago. They are selling elearning and other HR assistance to smaller companies. Given the huge changes occurring there and the inevitable impact on jobs, especially in support areas, that’s not only a wise move for the company, but for the individuals involved as well. Innovation isn’t only about tech, but about systems and processes throughout every operation.

Meanwhile, news-wise, Rupert Murdoch certainly personifies the limitations and potential for trouble for the old line ‘I’m the boss’ command and control leaders. Was there innovation going on that was unsanctioned? Maybe, but if so, it clearly demonstrates a lack of connectedness at the top, a lack of risk awareness, which has to be part of effective innovation. Not every idea will survive to morph into effective practice and not every idea should. What’s clear is that an insular CEO once again, like many of the financial melt down leaders, thought little about their overall operations, but only about what was might be good short term for themselves. Somewhere along the line they stopped being learning leaders, exploring new options sensibly with lots of support and participation, listening to their teams, and became too focused either on what personally rewarded those at the top.

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Most of it is focuses on customers, great, speedy service, prompt delivery, excellent selection of inventory, even good manners and ‘keeping up with the times (fashion).’ I particularly like ‘be attentive and courteous to the humblest customer.’

But there’s one glaring sentence that screeches like a metal ruler on a chalk board because it absolutely does not apply today as written. It reads:

"You should have perfect control over all your staff, and firmness enough to have all your instructions faithfully carried out."

Today when junior to mid-managers are probably being put in charge of business segments larger than the entire T. Eaton Company of that era, you simply can not have ‘perfect control over all your staff.’ If you try, you end up, just as Timothy Eaton states – having ‘all your instructions faithfully carried out.’

With today’s complexity of business and the constantly growing need for innovation, you can’t settle for ‘having your instructions carried out.’ You personally cannot know all the challenges or how to resolve them. You cannot direct every move. By the time you’ve personally recognized the need for an improvement, thought up a way to do it and sent out new orders that will be imperfectly understood and applied, you will be well behind your competitors and your quality will look weak. Just look at the companies that operate at a slower pace of change and see what happens to them.

No matter how mechanical your systems, like Toyota’s assembly lines, you need constant input from every level to keep up and keep ahead with improvements. And, like Toyota, if you start pushing and dictating change from the top instead of sticking to the winning formula of having staff discover and invent the changes, your product evolution and quality is bound to suffer significantly. and it’s difficult to get back to that ideal state no matter how successful you were previously with it.

Control and faithful obedience to instructions? Try engaging and coaching everyone at every level to be better than you, better than they were yesterday and better than they think they can be, to exercise prudent initiative and not wait for instructions.. Of all the areas of advice in Mr. Eaton’s speech, this one and only this one stands out as dramatically and fundamentally different. Too bad may managers still haven’t been given the training or even gotten the message about what a complete difference this is. 

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Essentially I’ve come to envision HR strategy as three legs of a stool, weakness in any one of which causes collapse or at least rickety performance. The first two are easy to describe, but not as easy to deliver. First, the “keep me out of jail” role that senior executives require of HR. It is tough to be expert in the myriad of legislative requirements – safety and health (now increasingly including mental health, harassment and less tangible ‘stress’ issues), union rules, employment standards governing so many aspects including lay-offs and other terminations that are also subject to fuzzy common law principles that take, in some cases, years to fully understand. Tied to this are now complicated rules and practices related to Sarbanes Oxley-type governance as well as standard ethics and lately other newer stakeholder and sustainability issues, some of which have been clear for decades while some evolve monthly. Altogether this is a vast area from within which any element may suddenly rear up and bite. Most of us try to keep up.

The second leg of the stool is increasingly recognized as important and poorly developed – measurement – entailing a far more expanded role for systems, databases, data management and technology and specialized positions inside and outside HR that can crunch numbers. Clearly these entail legislative and ethical requirements as well, but the emphasis is more and more on HR departments being able, working with IT and finance, to quantify and track vast amounts of information in measurable ways. We’ve been aware of this growing need for years. ‘You can’t manage what you can’t measure’ has been ignored by too many HR departments for far too long, but having said that, smaller departments will never be able to crunch the complex data true measurement requires – data senior executives would like to have before authorizing expenditures we need in HR. Fortunately the key is to follow what the advanced companies and researchers are discovering, adapt those principles and measure only what you need in order to reassure yourselves and your executives to emulate the best practices. Google’s HR teams and many business school research findings point the way, but we need to develop the skills. Legs one and two require HR department expertise above all.

The third leg is the ‘meat’ of HR strategy as most people think of it, both HR and line executives – what is now called Talent Management – developing leaders and other managers more effectively and moving them up and throughout the organization to maximize effectiveness of everyone and produce great results. This is where the majority of my thinking time goes because the other two are simpler – matters of ‘best information available’ and keeping up with evolving understanding of requirements.

The paradox is leg number three cannot be resolved by HR alone, nor even HR primarily. It doesn’t depend on expert knowledge as much as great common sense and empathetic understanding of people on the part of a large majority of executives in all functions. HR is powerless to fix itself to satisfy this requirement. They can lead, but it will take team effort and development across entire organizations.

Talent Management is the great puzzle because it depends on very simple stuff – things which the majority of key executives of an organization have to embrace wholeheartedly to make them work. And most don’t. yet. (Studies show only about 20% do and that isn’t critical mass in most organizations.)

This isn’t a matter of executives knowing that firing people without notice or severance in insulting ways will result in massive fines and payouts. Nor is it a matter of ever putting numbers on the screen to show them that spending on a benefit program will save millions in Workers Comp costs or absentee reduction or increased productivity. These are complicated to accumulate sufficient facts to prove, but the processes are, at their roots, mechanical and known.

By contrast, getting senior executives to understand they need to thank people every day and walk the talk to engage them. and meet regularly to seriously discuss giving up their best managers to let them move to other departments and learn to grow into well-rounded replacements for. themselves – those are not so complicated, but they are exceptionally hard to sell if the senior executives in question don’t view the world and people in the most positive, productive ways already. Their world views of these are likely fashioned early, from personal experience, biases learned from family and the school of hard knocks, and are not easy to identify and even harder to modify even if the executives in question wish to do so. We seriously need to find easier ways to get this across.

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Such paradoxes aren’t just important for tactical application to day-to-day. They are critical to how managers establish the environment for greatest engagement and innovation. They say the devil is in the details and nowhere is this more evident than in this sort of puzzle.

Early on I read a lots of philosophy as a hobby (looking for answers to life problems of the time). I settled on Zen, which seemed to offer the most value. Through understanding that life is made up of paradoxes, of which this is just one example. It focuses on how to handle them, though not in the easiest format. I concluded you should simply accept both parts of the paradox and work with them equally, seeking a solution that acknowledged both – in this case ‘you should micromanage, but not micromanage.’

Either/or is fatal. Finding a resolution to a paradox is different from finding a single solution to a problem because the paradox never goes away or is fully ‘settled,’ but a ‘resolution’ is a working solution for most cases nonetheless. This almost always involves understanding the dilemma that’s posed and a balance of what is in play, using common sense even when the alternatives seem initially at odds.

In this case, yes, it is important for managers to follow up often. But you can do so without what’s usually meant by micromanaging or nagging. There are dozens of excuses to bump into employees in the course of a day or two. It’s logical to ask how things are going. If you also ask how they are (meaning personally) you establish some rapport generally, so ‘how are you doing’ and ‘how’s it going’ gets you into ‘how’s that project coming along?’ Sometimes you need to mention which one, but very often it will be obvious when you ask how things are going that you mean ‘that’ project, the one you’re regularly worrying about.

Employees will recognize what you’re asking about nine times out of ten, but won’t resent it if it’s done casually in the context of asking rather than instructing them on how to do it or when, or formally reminding them of their responsibilities and deadlines. In fact, they’ll appreciate that you trust them enough not to ask those detailed questions, but at the same time you achieve the objective mentioned in the bnet article – making sure the project stays close to top of mind with the employee.

So it’s a fine line, or one might say, a balance between following up a lot, but not nagging or micromanaging by repeatedly telling employees the steps they need to follow.

This works with bosses, too, and line managers where you can’t ‘tell’ them anyway. Things can be overlooked if there aren’t reminders. Sometimes just your presence reminds line managers to think about the HR aspects of their current challenges, but doesn’t require you to formally remind them at all.

This week’s Canadian HR Reporter reports on a recent study by HRPA and Knightsbridge about how HR people can show they ‘understand the business.’ One key to that is this sort of approach. You understand that supervisors and front line managers have to work at things in their own way. You don’t try to tell them too much in detail or enforce the letter of HR programs, but you DO keep reminding them gently that the HR objectives (of engagement, fairness, honesty, etc.) are there and need to be worked into daily routines until they become habitual for everyone. A single lapse doesn’t get you into ‘instruction’ mode, but if you’re there, paying attention, managers will notice you noticing and slowly, but surely try to adapt toward something better in future. Bashing at details probably isn’t ‘business friendly,’ but being a reminder of the value of working toward principles certainly is.

Often it isn’t the behavior, like continual reminders, but HOW it’s delivered. That, too, is a habit worth developing.

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Sound familiar? It’s a conversation I hear repeated everywhere I go in one form or another. Is this an HR strategy issue?

With a capable operator like Google (plus hundreds of others) proving leadership is by far the biggest key to productivity and both organization and team results, you bet. And if we take their “8″ keys to effective leadership, which they proved leaders could be coached to apply, the answer to whether anyone can become a leader is yes. So the question becomes how?

If you analyze Google’s list of 8 skill sets, the one they define as most important really encompasses most of the others. To coach well absolutely requires that you empower those you coach, care about their health, well-being, careers and more – an all around, whole-human-being orientation. It requires you to be results-oriented, to push, but know when to step back and find a balance, to be a good communicator in both directions, but especially listening. And clearly you need a clear vision of the desired result and technical skills that allow you to help, even though as a coach rather than teacher your skills don’t have to be better than your protege.

A coach, by definition, cares about, pays attention to and works with the people in their care. No one would dream of saying ‘he served the CEO, but no one else’ about an effective coach. A coach fundamentally understands the work their proteges do is more important in the long run than what they can accomplish alone in their limited time. They put coaching either first or at least very high on their priority list. They don’t complain about the time it takes. The role of a coach is to extend the productivity of their team and each of its members to that together they accomplish more than any one, including the leader, could do alone, so the time is more than worth it in the end. Coaching is the primary work of an effective leader. That seems totally obvious from Google’s numbers-driven research.

So, as I write this, I think, “perhaps one key strategic step we could take is to label every leader Coach first.” Executive Coach, Media Team, for instance? Senior Vice President Coach, HR. Perhaps that hard working individual who currently holds that position wouldn’t have wanted that role. at first. Perhaps they’d say, ‘not me, I’m not good with people, I don’t want to have to work with them like that.’ But chances are, to get promotions and more money, most budding executives would take a shot at improving their abilities, would be interested in taking training, would welcome being evaluated and coached themselves on these critical skills. if they wanted careers in leadership roles.

Final observations: Since it’s a well-accepted fact that leaders tend to hire and promote those they see as most like themselves whether they set out to or not, if we can make coaching the primary factor in every leader’s profile all our leaders would strive to hire those who can coach best instead of the rather non-people-skill mix we see today. We would never get to 100% and might not want that anyway. Diversity is helpful, but we need to reverse the current preponderance of command-and-control leaders. If coaching eventually becomes the primary criterion instead of some of the other questionable grounds managers have for ruling people in or out of positions that would be a benefit, too. This sounds like strategic talent management to me.

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Probably not even though they also showed conclusively at least some individuals can learn and develop the 8 skills sufficiently in a short time to improve results and become promotable when their prior performance was dismal.

We can thank Google for proving definitively what leadership experts have been pressing all along, even though Google thinks it has only proven these work at Google. In fact their ‘discovery,’ though done at Google, for Google, matches exactly what we’ve all been saying. Due to their size, success and ability to undertake such expensive statistical research this should be the ultimate proof acceptable to CEOs and senior executives everywhere.

Don’t hold your breath though. The biggest hurdles will likely continue to be claims that it takes too much time to coach or, a variation of the same, that it distracts executives from their ‘real’ work. These have been consistent objections as far back as anyone can recall. ‘Yes, we could be better leaders,’ the story goes, ‘but we have more important things to do. and it’s a minor benefit anyway.’ Fairly explicit in Google’s findings is proof these are also false. Improved leadership has the greatest impact on results of any factor you can manage.

Google defused objections among their own managers by showing in concrete numbers that these skills form the most important keys to productivity of a manager’s team. That ought to be enough at least for large organizations where teams are the origin of almost all results, but in small and medium enterprises we can bet many owner-operators will argue, like French king, Louis XIV, “the [company], it is I.” And some will be right. In the view of many owners, employees, even managers, are simply there to carry out orders. The fact they don’t effectively means they should be fired, not coached.

What these weak leaders really mean is: I don’t know how to coach, I’ve gotten by without doing it all this time so why should I try now? The answer to that also lies in Google’s findings – that those who do try to improve their team members, who coach, who push productivity in positive ways and show interest in their employees produce results that are many times greater than those who don’t.

Here are the newly re-proven arguments in case you’re trying to convince people – Why employ leaders, or why be a leader, who works at a third or less of the results a half decent coach-style boss can produce? Hire a third fewer people and achieve the same results! Given that payroll is the biggest expense by far in most organizations that should be incentive enough.

Or even more critical, create leaders and teams who innovate, who find and exploit new ideas before your competitors do. or you’ll be out of business. Google knows they’ve got tons of money now to afford less than highly productive leaders, but innovation is their life blood as it is in more and more organizations. Except of course if you are government. In that case, just do it for yourself, to save your own sanity by making your team productive and garnering the respect you deserve if you do it. That works in all organizations. Even if your own boss is a jerk you can excel in ways that make you more confident, more able to succeed in other endeavors as opportunities arise (and they certainly will) and in self-respect.

Given these facts and options, the remaining hurdle is that most leaders (82% by some measures) don’t have these skills, but most don’t notice or admit it. What this makes essential is that we each take a look at ourselves against Google’s 8 skills and decide just how well we stack up. That’s the next post.

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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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Unfortunately the popular media seem to revel in incivility because, apparently, it sells. It certainly must draw major attention and sell advertising if we can judge by which shows survive the ratings battles. One only has to take a glance at Jersey Shores, the many ‘Real Housewives’ and dozens of others including some very popular blogs and even other supposed ‘reality’ game shows like The Amazing Race, to see the tendency to the worst sort of behavior to draw audiences. The first two are more blatant, but the ‘Race’ weekly shows team members berating each other for various shortcomings only partially balanced by later comments about how much they value and support each other.

Where do we stand really? It’s a puzzle because we are doing whatever we can to promote safe, stress- and harassment-free workplaces, yet we apparently enjoy seeing people verbally lash out at each other. We’d like to see greater civility in public discussion, but we not-so-secretly revel in ‘the other side’ getting slammed, often completely unfairly or out of proportion to what they’ve done, in the press. While we Canadians can feel somewhat smug that our level of public discourse hasn’t descended as far as some, we have to admit we are boosting the ratings of offending TV nearly as much as our neighbors.

It’s not news that human beings have contradictory feelings and thoughts. Perhaps we should just be thankful these cathartic ‘un-reality’ shows give us a chance to get our fill of incivility indirectly. On the other hand, there’s some reasonably reliable evidence that watching violence encourages viewers to act violently. Should we not be concerned this applies to violent discourse as much as actual behavior? That would make an interesting study, one I’m sure some college will undertake shortly.

In the mean time, I’m all for holding managers and workers to higher standards than we see outside of organizations. Realistically, though, I’m not sure we can do that as easily if we don’t at least try to address some of these problems in wider public behavior. Certainly schools, hospitals and other public institutions have been working away at the problem, but politics, the press and other media seem immune. Can we not develop the communication skills to have rigorous disagreements without insults to each other and to our intelligence?

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Undoubtedly we’ve all been moved to similar antics in situations. I recall writing “Phooey Ptui” when giving up on a high school physics exam in a peak of frustration. It didn’t help my mark any and I’ve always suspected Mr. Jansen of having less than a stellar sense of humor, but perhaps he just wanted to coach me about losing my cool.

The problem is, as a small number of my teachers demonstrated, when you’re taking out frustration on people below you, not those above, no one is in a position to call you to account unless you step over an invisible line of sexism, racism or harassment of other discernable forms. Call your employee a “b-tch” or the like and you may or may not get hauled up on a carpet somewhere, deservedly, though many don’t. Remarks about people’s work, work ethic or intelligence frequently pass without penalty.

Later in life as a teacher and even later as a manager, it seemed amusing to refer to someone as ‘one brick short of a load’ or any number of other disparaging phrases we hear. Of course, WE would never say that to someone’s face (or where they might hear about it). But some do.

Humor, including banter and snide characterizations, can ease tension at work or anywhere else if handled appropriately, which is to say at least such barbs must be private in some sense. But when they become public daily comments about subordinates, company departments or even customers, their usefulness as stress relievers ends and these are now impulsive evaluations that often substitute for taking corrective action the perpetrator should be seriously considering instead of settling for an easy snipe.

Strangely many executives don’t make the connection. They slide into a habit of commenting negatively on all sorts of people and behavior with such offhand remarks, but don’t act. Venting this way is harmful to everyone who has to hear it and most of all to the executives themselves who should be working on ways to solve the problem rather than simply sidestepping. A habit like this slowly spreads across entire cultures because it means managers lower down don’t get backed to take effective action and they, too, fall into the ‘drive by shooting’ style of evaluation.

We actually need to encourage recognition of impulsive motivations, but see them as a signal that we need to come up with a better idea not a snide comment. Necessity is the mother of invention. The need to blow off steam can be turned to innovation. something companies desperately need all the time. If we’re angry at customers. why and what can we do about it? Same with other departments, co-workers, suppliers, etc., etc. Work is full of frustrations. We call it work for a reason. We need to work at it, but the goal should always be improvement.

Similarly in management we need to be aware of what frustrates employees (not just our behaviors, but those, too). If customers and employees are beginning to resent each other, there are major strategic issues at stake. We can’t simply suggest these are things we should tolerate. They’re signals, loud and clear.

Maybe we should change HR to the Human Signals Department and start picking up on these offhand signals.

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But are we understanding ‘raw courage’ fully with this ‘over the top’ message? Is it all about just pushing ahead ourselves and shouldering all the responsibility of sending the troops out to do our bidding?

I’ve written a few times now about Proust’s ‘seeing the world through new eyes’ and Einstein’s ‘need for a different level of thinking than the one that created the problem.’ Here’s one more. By promoting this ‘manly courage’ model in which the sole hero on a white charger rides in with the answers, the media are overlooking the many other ways to solve a problem, including many that are just coming to be understood – like crowd-sourcing, for instance (asking a great many people to make their best guess or toss in their best ideas or pool their thinking in various ways).

As we enter an era in which no one person can come up with all the necessary ideas to survive and thrive in any particular enterprise, we have to shift to a leadership style that calls forth the best ideas from everyone and is willing to try them out – to risk – to put faith in others instead of shouldering all the responsibility oneself.

Maybe the level of courage we need today in leaders isn’t so much the individual hero who risks everything he or she owns in one shot and leads their troops into a new strategy, but the “humble” hero (to borrow a word from Jim Collins’ excellent leadership strategy book, Good to Great) who has the courage to ask for help and will back ideas from subordinates who seem to have a handle on what could work. It takes no less courage to shoulder the responsibility when a subordinate’s idea goes wrong than to face the firing squad when it’s your own failure.

Why do we persist in these military analogies if not for media hype about the rawness of courage required of great CEOs and leaders? In fact, it’s the day to day small decisions to encourage an employee with a potential solution and make it clear you’ll take the blame if need be. Of course, we want those to be carefully thought out, but the risk ultimately isn’t really different.

Are we just missing choosing the ‘lower level’ of risk-thinking because we revere the ‘higher level’ so much that we can’t be seen to do less? Does it have to be our idea for us to feel we’re seen as risk-takers. I fear that’s exactly what stops many bosses from taking risks on subordinates ideas. It doesn’t feel like a risk if you think you can off-load the blame on someone else. Who said ‘no guts, no glory?’ And did they mean there are no ‘guts’ involved in supporting your team’s ideas as if they were your own, without them having to in fact be your own?

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