Mentoring Questions

Why is mentoring rare? Perhaps because it’s seen as having fewer immediate payoffs than the focused coaching that we expect every manager to do.

Last month’s newsletter about leader development drew interesting comments. We noted that today’s employees respond less well to orders from command-and-control leaders. They need to be “engaged” at work, not “bossed.” Yet many companies still seek for and promote charismatic, command-and-control style managers. They continue to look for “magic bullet” or “white knight” managers who in theory solve every problem single-handedly.

The puzzle is that to develop leaders effectively we need to build on strengths, but only about one in five who are promoted seem to have strengths in areas that produce effective, development-style leadership. Most are great individual contributors, but have difficulty developing people or dealing with conflict or challenges from them. Of developmental challenges, mentoring is perhaps the most misunderstood and distant, yet it is relatively straight forward in essence.

Mentoring Seen As Much Needed

Of the top ten influences leaders cite as most helpful in their own development, coaching, mentoring and frank discussions rate very highly. A number of readers specifically mentioned the need for mentors. Since so few existing managers are naturally good at these skills, what can we do? The key is to make the skills easy for individual contributors to become good at. If we can make it clear what they need to actually DO, many will do it.

The skills turn out to be fairly straight forward. Every leader, as much as possible, needs to be encouraged to mentor and coach others. Coaching is becoming better understood and is the easier task. Just five key questions make one effective at it: What is it you want to achieve? What would have to happen for that to occur? What would need to be different from current circumstances? What could you start with to make that happen? And when can we get back together to see if that worked?

Effective coaching simply means asking the person you are coaching these questions at each meeting. It can be handled quite informally as long as you follow this flow of inquiry. You can brainstorm with them if they seem stuck, but essentially we need to encourage employees regularly to solve their own issues. After all, isn’t that what we hired them to do? If we thought they could not achieve goals without specific instruction from us, we definitely hired the wrong people.

Every leader can practice asking these questions when managing people instead of issuing orders. If they have done the up-front job required in most companies – that is: helping their people develop mutually understood objectives and goals at the outset, then there should not be a direct need to issue orders.

If the employee knows what the goals are they should be able to answer these questions. For a manager, putting the questions forth in a supportive, earnestly helpful manner should “engage” employees to the maximum in their work. Of course, many command-and-control managers ask only rhetorically, using the question as a pretext to begin telling the employee what to do. That defeats the purpose. But if a manager truly practices these questions in every reasonably possible situation they will become adept at coaching.

Mentoring Is A Bigger Challenge

What we call mentoring is a bigger challenge. It usually means that a manager other than one’s immediate boss takes an interest in a less defined form of coaching. This can range from using the same coaching questions above to simply trading ideas. It includes giving the employee a wider perspective, a context in which to see their present work as part of a larger career path and a wider company goal than simply today’s tasks.

It is a purely voluntary discussion, unlike direct boss-employee, which must happen to get work done. Therefore good will and openness is needed on both sides to make mentoring work. That occurs more rarely in most companies because the underlying culture of guiding others is often missing.

Effective mentors can come from within or outside one’s present employer. They keep confidential the discussions that occur. They seek to broaden an employee’s outlook, to show other career paths, to suggest committees, assignments, alternative courses of action and different views of situations than the employee or even their boss might take. Their primary effect is to give employees confidence that someone believes they have potential bigger than their present job and suggest how that potential could be put to use sooner rather than later.

Nothing stops a boss from mentoring their own people, but that can be confusing for both. When an employee’s potential could take them away from their present duties, that can be difficult for a boss to genuinely recommend, whereas an outside manager would have fewer qualms about suggesting it. Direct bosses are usually best to stick to coaching on more immediate goals except for occasional career discussions, but the overall effects are similar. Both methods encourage employees to try new approaches, to build confidence and to think longer term and more broadly than they otherwise might.

Both mentoring and coaching flourish better in environments where they are explicitly supported by strategy and intentions of senior management… in short by the “culture” of the company. The two sets of skills are similar, except that a mentor has less of a stake in getting the immediate work done and so can spend more time asking the employee to think broadly about what they might contribute over the longer term rather than immediately.

Getting managers into coaching mode sets up a much greater likelihood that they will also mentor staff beyond their own reports when they notice potential. Once a manager learns to coach, they tend to apply those skills in many situations because they are so much more effective in the long run than command-and-control. As they develop confidence in coaching, they naturally tend toward mentoring as well.

At the same time people comfortable with coaching tend to look to others for input for themselves as well. They are more likely to be seen by their own senior managers as more “coach-able” or “mentor-able.” That makes it more worthwhile for those senior managers to invest the time and effort to coach and mentor, so the overall environment grows more friendly toward these processes over time.

Building A Culture Over Time

Positive cultures can actually develop fairly quickly if there is a concerted effort to engage more managers in applying coaching. The steps for this are clear, and their use is relatively easy to measure by asking in employee surveys. We can also see where managers fall short in this area by identifying where attitude problems, absenteeism and poor productivity occur.

Strategies encouraging coaching and mentoring along with positive examples from senior managers go a long way to installing the right culture sooner rather than later. We know from much research that these are the most powerful influences we can put in place to improve company results. They take no more, in fact almost certainly less, time than command-and-control leadership with its error-prone results. This is why the most successful larger companies today would not think of targeting any other style. Once under way the effects are self-reinforcing and will spread widely barring the hiring of new senior management with destructive command-and-control attitudes. All it takes is some basic training and the right strategies, backed by people who consistently apply and support them.

More In Depth Resources

Mentoring is a widely discussed topic. Not all of the information is useful, as usual. For a sense of the breadth, this site lists some good articles, mostly available online: http://www.mentors.ca/mentorpapers.html. As always I find that keeping the basics such as the above in mind makes it easier to assess, interpret and apply such readings.

©Dave Crisp 2006

Developing Leaders

It takes leaders to develop leaders!

The great challenge facing organizations today is how to cope with changing demands, both immediate and distant. The human abilities for effective progress amid rapid change are known collectively as leadership. Leaders are distinguished most of all by personal judgment rather than obedience to orders. The ability to balance competing demands and opportunities forms the cornerstone of their ability to take people and organizations into a better future.

Very few organizations are set up to develop leaders, but the need is growing rapidly due to constant change as well as the continuing loss of experienced staff from the workforce.

For centuries, organizations have followed the hierarchical, top-down command style of Roman legions and large-scale religious and political institutions. They have looked for single individuals with nearly miraculous powers to command compliance through a hierarchy of discipline, commitment and unquestioning obedience. It barely needs pointing out that this model has run its course. Today all of us expect to have input.

With computers, Internet and a greater understanding of the science of Complexity we are finally beginning to see the next evolution of human leadership skill developing. Everyone at every level needs to be “engaged,” not “ordered.” Individuals have too many choices to submit willingly with blind loyalty or obedience to rules or charismatic, single leaders. We are taught to question and seek options that make sense for us as well as the organizations we work for.

As we teach each new generation of workers even more thoroughly than the preceding ones that they should be exercising judgment and not just following orders, we have a growing need to develop leaders who can work in this environment and maximize the efforts of these “volunteers” as opposed to yesterday’s “conscripts.” We also have the material to work with – emerging managers who expect to exercise judgment just as seasoned leaders should. The challenge is to help them develop. Even the U.S. Army is learning to change its command style to give field leaders more autonomy, loosely following a General’s “command intent” rather than rigid “orders of the day.”

Unfortunately there is little effort to consciously develop this style of leadership. We will remain stuck in a transition period with a shortage of leaders until we begin to learn the new pattern required.

So How Do Effective Leaders Develop?

In studies of effective leaders, they themselves identify the experiences they needed to help them develop the necessary skills. Listing these in order with most important first, they look like the following (from the Corporate Leadership Council’s “Voice of the Leader” report):
1. Senior Authority On The Job
2. Individual Development Plan
3. Peer Discussion
4. Executive Coaching
5. Mentoring
6. Feedback
7, 8, 9, 10. Lesser “on the job” leader roles
11. Courses – people (#1), tech, business…

In other words, the most important learning experience you can have is being given a senior job and having to do it. You learn fast or fail. Beyond that, to succeed it helps to have someone work with you to plan, identify and develop skills you’re missing, a chance to talk to peers who are struggling with the same sort of transition, some direct coaching, some general mentoring and lots of feedback on how you’re doing.

After these key elements, leaders said the greatest growth came from rotating through lesser “leader” roles in organizations to get an overview rather than simply experience in one function. Although the list goes on much further, it is only when we get to #11 that we begin to see leaders giving credit to formal training, beginning first and foremost with how to handle people. Specific technical and business skills rate still further down the list.

Leadership is a specialized skill. It is not something you pick up in school along with advanced technical and business skills. It needs to be developed on its own, in practice.

Dr. Bob Eichinger, now a consultant in leadership competencies who has co-authored books and taught in prestigious programs on the subject, has developed a list of 67 competencies for leaders. Ironically, he points out that the majority of leaders have virtually exclusively skills for individual achievement at work – integrity, intelligence, perseverance, technical skill, good boss relationships and so forth. Fewer than one third have developed people skills such as how to coach and grow others, deal constructively with conflict, confront people and problems, even how to develop themselves personally.

The fact that leadership is almost entirely about motivating, developing and engaging other people to participate fully in organization strategies means the majority of people in leadership roles today are not very well equipped to truly lead. This fascinating paradox explains much of the shortage.

At the same conference recently where I heard Eichinger talk about what leaders need to learn, consultant Marcus Buckingham very ably and humorously made his key point: it’s very hard to teach people how to improve in their weak areas. In his words: “don’t try to teach the pig to sing – it just wastes your time and annoys the pig.” That leaves an interesting puzzle. If the majority of leaders don’t handle people well enough and we can’t teach them to develop these weak skills, how can we produce the number of leaders we’re going to need to meet growing demand?

The answer lies in creating a climate of development and coaching. In that environment, today’s leaders can learn along with those they assist. From personal experience I can say that no one learns as much as the coach him- or herself from a coaching encounter.

If there is a single company culture standard that it would pay to introduce in every organization, it would be that every leader should coach in every interaction with others. The time commitment to do this has proven to pay off handsomely in saved time later and dramatically improved business results. Moreover, we can “teach” not through formal courses, but by exposure to varied roles with support from bosses who genuinely try to coach and mentor. You don’t have to have exceptional people skills to coach, you simply need to follow a few key coaching steps that anyone can apply. We may not be able to teach everyone to lead, but we can put them in the right jobs, with the right coaching and development plans so that they can learn for themselves.

Other Interesting, Similar Articles

Once again I was surprised to find some excellent resources appearing in government sources… HERE. Although Ray Blunt, who authored many of these articles, seems reluctant to apply them to business, I have no hesitation. The keys to developing leaders effectively are the same in all sorts and sizes of organizations. He reflects on these for government, but the ideas are equally applicable.

At a recent presentation to a group of post-degree college students studying to enter the human resource field, I was asked a popular question – what are the differences between public and private sector. Of course there are many, but one challenge remains paramount in both – how to motivate people to give their best at work and continually strive to make a difference.

The public sector is hampered by its sheer size. At the conference mentioned above, Marta Perez who’s taken over HR for the US Federal Government gave a striking presentation on the challenges and what they’re doing. As the world’s largest business with a $4 trillion budget you can understand the bureaucracy that’s developed, yet they’re proceeding, albeit slowly, to do the same things as private industry – develop measures of effectiveness and leaders who can be held accountable for programs (1000 programs in HR alone – of which initial studies show 24% were “ineffective” – so now they know clearly what to fix!).

The only real difference in the public sector is that the length of time it takes to achieve results can be much greater. Coupled with typically lower salaries, it is correspondingly harder to keep people motivated and believing in progress. Nevertheless, it’s still possible with the right leadership. Marta personally stood out as a great example of that in her efforts to develop others. It takes leaders to develop leaders as Ray Blunt says very clearly. Effective leaders coach!

Bringing It All Together

A reader requested more information about marketing, especially for small to mid-sized businesses. Since starting my own consulting business after many years with a large corporation, my views on marketing haven’t changed much at all.

What works or what limits marketing for any size business is very much the same. In short, you have to “bring it all together” with a very clear focus while still making the offer reasonably comprehensive if you hope to have customers recognize the value you add. It’s challenging and somewhat contradictory as you seek to find the right balance – too little or too much.

Information Can Be Overwhelming

You can’t “sell” a product easily these days. Consumers are way too sophisticated. They will “buy” what they believe in. They don’t even have to work hard at comparison shopping because a vast number of competing products provide a constant information flow about virtually any purchase a customer is considering. Think of buying anything and you’ll suddenly notice competing products everywhere.

Some people call ours an “attention economy.” They insist the most important commodity to get from customers is a few moments of attention among a multitude vendors pumping out information about every imaginable product and service. Andy Warhol’s famous comment that everyone would someday enjoy “their 15 minutes of fame” was made more than forty years ago. Even his follow up MTV show of that name aired briefly twenty years ago.

I recently noticed a used book from 1971 that commented, “the informational [sic] explosion is straining our capacity to cope.” That was before hundreds of TV channels and the Internet. Today a single TV news item may be composed of half a dozen shots of no more than 3 or 4 seconds each – far closer to 15 seconds than 15 minutes. How do we cope? Everyone just shouting louder for attention isn’t working any more.

The Focus Economy

I believe the better term today would be “The Focus Economy.” The chief struggle for both buyers and sellers is to get a clear focus. The most successful speakers, businesses and non-profit organizations in my experience are those that have a very clear, very focused offer.

If you put forward a half dozen or more wide-ranging types of products, a consumer is likely to by-pass you and buy from a specialist. And why not? A specialist is likely to have greater expertise in the one product they want. Even department stores today focus their range of merchandise. They put more emphasis on clothing, for instance, or home goods.

The broadly assorted shopping mall of smaller stores is being outdistanced by vast “destination stores” in “power centers.” That’s not to say the old approach completely dies. TV didn’t fully replace radio, which didn’t replace movies, which didn’t replace stage, but each successive technology cuts into the market share of previous ones and gives the public options they instantly add to their patterns of buying.

We still try to perceive a focus for a department store versus a power center stores or radio versus TV. Each has its niche that we turn to for specific needs. Though some technologies seem as if they would be fully replaced by better ones – records by audio tape, then by CD’s, expanding toward DVD’s to add video, iPods, TV cell phones, satellite radio and so forth – we continue to see older formats living alongside newer ones for some consumers beyond what you might expect. Niches can keep products alive that would otherwise die off.

Differentiation Stems From Diversity

The key to marketing today is understanding what the customer’s focus is likely to be. What exact purpose will be served by your product? Then you can in turn focus on being the best and perhaps the only one offering exactly that. “Differentiation” has become the by-word for marketing perhaps more than any other single concept.

Not surprisingly this reflects the growing diversity of people throughout our societies. As consumers have grown to expect choices, they’ve gotten used to sifting through many options before zeroing in on what will fit them exactly.

Unfortunately from as early as four or five years of age, “buyers” now begin to suffer “consumer anxiety,” wondering if they can keep up with the wonderful products their peers are getting all around them. This reflects a difficulty we share as individuals – trying to decide the focus for what we want. The danger of choosing one thing is that you may find another tomorrow (owned by a friend perhaps) that is far better.

The fact that we’re finally recognizing we’re all different – usually in more ways than we can see or imagine – doesn’t prevent us feeling we should have at least as good or better “stuff” than everyone else… or feel the humiliation of poor purchasing. The challenge is that while we want our “stuff” to suit us uniquely, we want it to be seen as desirable to others as well, to be recognized as top quality.

In a real sense this applies to pretty much every product and service. Offering public speaking presentations, for instance, I know the buyer wants to be sure that his or her whole audience will acknowledge the presentation purchased is among the best that could have been had, even though that audience is filled with diverse needs. So they look for someone who is funny, entertaining, emotionally fulfilling, inspirational and educational all in one easily listened to package that fits the exact amount of time they need to fill – from ten minutes to three or four hours. Can any one speaker do all that?

Solving The Puzzle

For us as marketers the idea of focus while meeting diverse needs poses a difficult puzzle. What core offer will we present to the public? I’m not specifically a stand-up comic or a professional entertainer (apart from fitting in humorous stories and a bit of juggling as illustrations) nor do I specialize in especially touching stories, though there are overtones. I certainly strive to inspire people to new action, but others have written in more educational depth and perhaps even more eloquently about each element of what I suggest.

What I strive for most is for people to take away and apply a clear and above all complete picture of the elements they need to succeed and how best to balance them. Most other presenters focus on one or two elements when there are actually five critical ones. Leave one out and you’ll flounder eventually. The one thing I emphasize most is not forgetting any one of the critical elements. This way you don’t need a special personality to succeed, you simply do these five things consistently.

I tailor this focus to the audience’s particular issues or problems, but the five elements stay the same. When talking about marketing, for instance, I target “bringing it all together” to the kind of elements needed for specific products, but use similar types of humor, emotion, entertainment that illustrate the core ideas in most of my presentations. Don’t hire me if you need a topical, political comic with the humor specifically tailored to today’s events. I talk about creating the environment for high performance tailored to your challenges and what helps or gets in the way of that. The blending of humor and entertainment is provided around that focus.

The goal is this: make it clear and easy for buyers to see what they’re purchasing – no hidden surprises – and to understand where your product fits in their market, who’s buying it for what purposes so they find themselves satisfied. Blend in enough of the added ingredients the public now expects in all situations to stay in the game (in a speaker’s presentation: humor, emotion, entertainment), but keep the focus on your primary offer so that they know where you fit among the vast array of choices and what the specific benefit is for the buyer – in my case five key elements for being more effective and successful.

Make sure the elements blend and balance, with no conflicts or flaws to trip up your customer… and you’ll find yourself with growing demand. Steady practice will make it flow!

Other Marketing Hints

Marketing advice can be a mixed bag at best. It’s best to narrow the focus to the type of marketing you want to do if you can: online versus viral versus direct mail, etc., if you’re interested in specifics. For general articles I like this site: http://www.proven-small-business-marketing-solutions.com/marketing-strategy-focus.html http://tinyurl.com/z928l and in particular might suggest starting with the article entitled: Marketing Strategy – Shift The Focus.

For Sales and Marketing for small businesses, this site is gaining interest in the Toronto area, but there will be many local ones you may be able to find via Google search for your area: HERE, but there will be many local ones you may be able to find via Google search for your area. Be careful though, many such sites are more interested in having you buy their service than anything else.

Too Many Great Ideas?

Can you have too many great ideas? In some cases the answer seems a definite yes. But great ideas help keep us moving forward in every situation. Knowing how to manage them well is the real challenge.

Overwhelming Our Capacity

We’ve all been in organizations where ideas were tossed out by the dozen. Each seems more creative than the last. Things go wrong when people attempt to pursue too many at once without enough time between them. In my last corporate role we undertook more than 110 reorganizations and four mergers in the 14 years I managed human resources — almost one great new strategic idea a month — and those are only the ones that went ahead. Because some affected only one or two departments, they didn’t all overlap, but we inevitably found many changes overtaking previous ideas before the prior ones were complete.

For example, when we worked to implement just one small, challenging change in customer service (mentioning the customer’s name when handing back their credit card), we found a pretty good benchmark for how long change can take to reach all the way to the front line. It took more than 10 years for that behavior to become reasonably consistent.

To some that immediately seems like an excessive delay, but let’s take a minute to understand it. When we first announced the requirement, many staff were hesitant. You can’t just give out an order and threaten to fire them all if they don’t comply. You first need to convince your mid-management leaders to train, encourage and model the behavior themselves. You also get resistance from then on at every stage. People come up with logical counter-arguments. In this case, “we’ll mess up the name and annoy our customers; we’ll embarrass ourselves; we won’t be able to read the name (credit cards fade), some people will object and we’ll offend them, etc., etc.” All may be reasonable conclusions that take time to assess, disprove and counter.

After overcoming initial objections, people begin to learn, but that too requires more time. Meanwhile leaders and priorities change. Most senior leaders assume that the new practices are by now well established. But revolving managers and new additions may not even know of it. It isn’t reinforced and staff soon notice that and cease doing it. If it was a valuable, important strategy, its absence will be noted at some stage and reinforcement will begin again. So goes the learning curve, including backsliding and plateaus periodically. In a very large organization 10 years can actually go by fairly quickly while this seesaw process is operating.

In his excellent book “Winning,” former CEO of GE, Jack Welch observes that effective strategy should last twenty years or more. We see management teams go off site annually and come back with a “new” vision and set of strategies. This approach isn’t effective. In most cases these won’t be “new,” but simply rehashed versions of previous work. Re-dedication is fine — very appropriate actually — but to pretend the ideas are new is dangerous and a waste of time.

What Is New Then?

The old saying, “there’s nothing new under the sun,” has some truth to it when applied to high-level strategy. What’s always new though is how a strategy applies to your specific situation. Inevitably your circumstances are unique. The staff you need to train or draw into the strategy are all unique individuals, working in a unique culture, facing new, unique competition and so forth. The overall combination of circumstances will be different from anything encountered before, often in rather subtle ways. New methods for promoting the strategies you need will be required.

This is why, in books like Larry Bossidy’s “Execution,” there is growing emphasis today on the critical importance of the implementation stage with new, or more properly, re-dedicated ideas. The same is true for individuals. If you do an in-depth review of your personal strategies, you will likely find your general direction and goals haven’t changed much. Most experts suggest you review these for 20 minutes every five to six months. Studies show this increases your mental and physical health and your dedication to achieving your goals. However, the more important challenge, which you will need to do consistently pursue throughout the five months between these short reviews, is focusing in on the new ideas you should try to generate for how to approach them better. The overall goal being to take more effective action day by day.

Setting strategies or goals is critical. Coming up with great ideas for putting them into action is even more important. This requires digging carefully into the reasons why you haven’t made progress on a particular goal you said was important. Thomas Edison said, “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” For all the great ideas generated, most aren’t successful the first time they are tried. It takes considerable thought and effort to follow through to completion. Many companies and individuals never achieve that because they think once they thought up the original idea, they’re finished. If anything the ideas required to succeed in the follow-through are more important than the original strategic ideas themselves.

But I Don’t Have Ten Years

But you do. Unless you’re 100 years old, you almost certainly can count on ten years ahead. What else will you do with that time if not continue working on your most important goals? Keep working and you’ll make progress. Progress feels good. It’s the basis of happiness.

You have the ability to bring greater consistency, honesty, customer service and a positive work environment to everything you do. Those fundamental strategies won’t change no matter what role or business you’re in.

We imagine we won’t be happy unless we can get to our final goals in one jump. Fortunately that’s not true. Along the way we’ll achieve so many other side goals that we hadn’t anticipated, we’ll find we’re even more pleased with the overall result when we get there. Our lives are continuous. Every bit of progress counts. It isn’t necessary and usually isn’t possible to achieve our final goals within a year or two. Imagine if it were. What would we do then?

Companies have a harder time. Because executives commonly change jobs every one to three years, they feel the need to prove themselves with visible successes within these short time frames. It isn’t just the short term results demanded by shareholders that creates problems for companies. It’s the short-term results executives attempt to achieve for themselves. That’s why many of the most successful companies have had CEOs who have remained in place for longer periods. Consistency of focus and action leads to the greatest successes.

All but the most unhealthy companies and individuals have 10 years ahead of them. We need to think in terms of big ideas that last 10 years or more and then focus on smaller ideas that help us achieve those overall goals most effectively. Ideas aren’t the problem. How we handle them doesn’t need to be either.

Ideas and Information

Occasionally it’s nice to stop worrying about information overload and how to keep up and simply enjoy with amazement and interest the flood of new ideas that continually wash over us. The past month illustrates the startling mix we’re exposed to. I’ve added links at the end for those who might want to explore any of these further.

Daily Activity Links In New Insights

We may not pay attention immediately, but ideas can seep into our consciousness and link up when least expected. At a recent presentation, I introduced my primary principle –that balance is essential to leadership and success in everything we do – both physical and mental. I always point out that effective balance is not static. For instance, it’s easier to stay balanced on a bicycle when it’s moving.

For speeches I keep my eyes open for interesting illustrations of key ideas and mention them when I think to. An example of something I’d read in passing popped to mind. An experiment compared physical balance while walking for both elderly and young subjects. They were fitted with shoe insoles that held three slightly vibrating pads under the balls and heels of each foot. Walking balance for elderly subjects significantly improved with the insoles (for young subjects less so as they were already quite steady).

It seems we slowly lose ability in our feet to feel feedback from the surfaces we walk on. The mildly vibrating pads stimulate sensitivity and make it possible for the elderly to once again walk more steadily. (Good to know for those of us not getting younger.)

And there’s a second idea, linked to the importance of balance: lack of ability to absorb feedback seriously affects balance and overall performance. In this case the slight vibration or movement helps physical balance – the main reason I’d mentioned it initially – but it does so through feedback, which happens to be another of the five key skills I point to in developing leadership or any kind of effectiveness.

The secondary point is perhaps even more powerful. Paying attention to feedback is an area where many senior leaders start to fail just as the elderly slowly lose physical ability in their feet. Executives not only begin to believe they’re right on most things (and so discount feedback from others), but subordinates begin to fear telling the boss what’s wrong. Employees actively withhold information for fear of being the messenger who gets shot. Slowly, but surely executives get cut off from critical information unless they actively seek it out and make it OK for people to be honest.

Once again I was struck by just how pervasive the five principles are in every activity we undertake, mental, physical or emotional. Finding balance depends on feedback, on habits we build of staying positive and open in spite of how challenging the feedback may be… and on our ability to see new connections – ideas that hold amazing new possibilities instead of seeing only difficulties.

We gain by appreciating that we can never know exactly how new ideas will suddenly appear, but they most surely will.

New Ideas Grow in Every Area

The Toronto Complexity “Fractal,” our Complexity idea group, organized a startling visit to the new downtown MaRS research facility built on the grounds of Toronto General Hospital (part of the University Health Network). It will eventually include three linked high-rise research facilities that connect underground via the corner subway station diagonally across to the University of Toronto’s two new buildings for Pharmacy/Research and Molecular Cell Research (next to their Medical Sciences complex). Across the street to the north is the Frederick Banting building (inventor of insulin), due to be revitalized for more research. Altogether these are surrounded by six hospital and rehab facilities within a couple of square blocks, all participating in or conducting research.

The MaRS building was envisioned only a couple of years ago by some major Toronto business people who formed a private non-profit organization rather than wade through government and university red tape. It already, before being completed, houses some 35 major research operations, including most of the major drug companies who have researchers working in side-by-side labs along with two major hospital research units that have half a dozen or more floors each, all in specially equipped labs. The floors and pipe channels are specially reinforced and constructed so that labs can be rented by organizations in single, double or larger units to purse all sorts of research in a spot where scientists and technologists can rub shoulders at lunch in the food court while having their patents filed at law firms who’ve rented space in the building.

Most similar research facilities in the US and elsewhere are located in far-flung suburbs, often a considerable distance from the universities, lawyers or companies they share interests with. This development is a spectacular attempt to put everyone in contact as much as it is to provide modern facilities. Both in private sector cooperation and as a public/private partnership in funding and payback it’s also a great experiment.

If Canada is to excel and re-develop its place as a world-influencing power in our information driven societies, it can only be through the growth and development of ideas and our ability to advance causes at every level. We’ve long been a politically thoughtful force far beyond our economic size through the UN, through our stands on world issues and as an example of a society that continues to work well while increasingly diversifying. There’s a sense we’d begun to lose some of our influence of late. It’s a busy world intellectually. We have to share ideas and expand on them to keep ahead. Each and every contributor makes a difference at whatever level.

Every Idea Counts

As an update for those who’ve been following the saga of my article rebutting Fast Company’s attack on HR managers, here’s a related update. The current version is now posted elsewhere on my web site: here. I’ve sent it to a couple of HR organizations and will do a shorter version for others, but first I sent it to FC to see if they’d publish it. I got a refusal in about 10 days from author, deputy editor Keith Hammonds in which he said it was too late (?!), but ended by saying he hoped we’d meet someday to continue the debate in person. What a great idea!

After talking it over with some senior HR people at the big annual HR conference here a couple of weeks ago I emailed Keith to say people here would love to see such a debate in public at a venue like next year’s conference. He immediately accepted. We’re in the process of requesting time on next year’s agenda for a super-session (3000 people attended this year). Win, lose or draw, think of the potential for ideas that can spill out from this.

There’s only one way to develop ideas to solve problems – face them, pursue them, rattle them, and seek out people with interesting similar or opposing views willing to do the same! Who knows what we have yet to learn?

URL’s for Information

Rather than just one article on balance for the elderly, one can see how quickly, via Google, it and other media spread the information: http://tinyurl.com/azsq5. The research itself appeared in Lancet about two years ago. In the case of MaRS there are articles from the hospital view: http://tinyurl.com/9utns as well as about the organization itself: http://www.marsdd.com/. While we each make the contributions we can it’s great to know that others are banding together to do the same.

©Dave Crisp 2006

Building Skills

In a fast-changing world, we’re faced with the new tasks and challenges daily. In the race to keep ahead we constantly need new skills. Jack Welch’s words about learning faster as the only competitive advantage keep ringing in my ears. Just how fast can anyone learn?

I frequently tell audiences two things: “anything you do only once won’t be done perfectly” and “you can learn 90% of anything in 10% of the time it takes to learn the whole thing (and 90% is usually sufficient).” Both these are helpful hints. It takes a certain amount of repetition, trial and error to develop a new, smooth habit or, in other words, to build a new skill. I’ve noticed this in my own challenges all too often. At the same time, the learning process actually takes place faster than you expect.

The good news is that repetition both increases effectiveness and causes a new behavior to become comfortable. As well, small errors you make along the way to perfecting the skill may present new, creative possibilities that you can choose to pursue later. Only by trying new activities and risking mistakes can we forge ahead. With good books and Internet information at our fingertips, we can learn what the best practitioners do and copy their best practices to shorten the learning curve. It’s our own repetitive practice that cements what we read into reliable routine.

Difficulties may arise from things you don’t fully anticipate. For example with the HR article I’ve been promising to publish, I realized Fast Company magazine might not be interested in publishing it if I post it first on my own site. So I’ve decided to see if they’re interested first since their publication would give it wider circulation. For anyone keenly interested, I’m happy to send you a draft copy by e-mail. Just let me know at by email. You can see the address (and click it to open) at the very bottom of this page. (Please don’t pass on the article or publish it… yet.)

Similarly, an audience last week asked for a list of useful books for the five elements of leadership I speak about. Posting this on my web site has been one of those new learning challenges. I’ve linked PDF files before, but haven’t repeated the process often enough, as I soon discovered when I tried it this time. Fortunately, when we’re stuck, the best resource is often a good adviser who already knows what they’re doing. I’m lucky to have good web consultant, although it will be faster when I fully learn to do it myself.

Asking for direct advice is another of the many ways to shorten the learning process. It’s important to request the person to teach you rather than just do it for you. This is one version of the skill of seeking feedback that is very helpful. When you start a new job people often tell you to feel free to ask questions. Yet I’ve been in new positions where asking a question drew a quizzical look if not an outright sneer. It’s important never to let such behavior deter you. Learning is paramount. Nothing must stand in its way.

The book list, by the way, is now posted and the URL is given at the end of this article.

New Skills Are Needed In Every Area

Today learning itself has become a habit/skill because we have to learn in so many new situations almost every day. We used to joke that adults would ask their kids to program the VCR. Now even our grandmothers can handle this.

Computers are also becoming routine along with voicemail, cell phones, MP3 players and more. After several people recommended it, I’ve just installed a program called Dragon Naturally Speaking version 8. It allows you to speak quite naturally into a headset microphone and see the words typed immediately. When I tried this kind of voice recognition a couple of years ago, it wasn’t very effective and the learning curve caused me to give up. This version works astonishingly well and is fairly inexpensive. The learning curve was approximately 20 minutes. Now I’m using it for e-mail as well as writing articles like this one and feeling less stress as a result. I’m not sure it’s faster, but I can relax more and think about the words without coordinating typing at the same time. It’s about 99% accurate though it still mangles the odd word, sometimes inexplicably.

All of us can recall times when such technology was science fiction. Now however we’re just absorbing it automatically. Yet some basic skills that most take for granted are missing from some individual’s repertoires. I was shocked to encounter a theater ticket taker recently who asked for the time, but couldn’t read the dial on my watch when I held it up. She had to ask again because she was unable to read the hour and second hands and she said she only understands digital.

From her reaction I could tell people had offered to teach her before and she wanted to avoid that. I suppose it was to avoid looking foolish. We all reach a point where it’s hard to go back and learn things that others seem to know from a younger age. Fortunately as part of the rapid learning habits we’re all developing, this is less of a problem for most people. We’re used to feeling out of our depth at times. Thankfully the old fear of asking a dumb question is fading.

I felt so badly for this young woman that I was tempted to try and convince her to try. However it’s still important to give people space. For those close to us sometimes the most important thing we can do is give them a model of someone who’s willing to learn anything any time. The same is true in the workplace. If the boss can model a willingness to learn from anyone and everyone, his or her staff will soon emulate that. Before long you develop a “learning organization” — something many companies are desperate to achieve.

Everyone of us, at every level, has the ability to help others and our organizations build Jack Welch’s dream of rapid learning. It truly is the competitive advantage today.

The book list referred to above is attached to the short article on this page: this page if you click here.

©Dave Crisp 2006

Extending Balance Into Action

Last month’s rant about how to respond to attacks, whether personal or professional, drew interesting as well as sympathetic responses. Those who scanned the Fast Company article attacking human resources could see why it upset HR people. As noted, an attack provides value in the form of a boot in the pants for us to respond effectively. (My rebuttal is almost done and I’ll link it in next time.)

Previously the focus was on re-establishing a sense of balance in three stages: first realizing there’s no value in lashing out unprepared, second assessing good and bad – examining the facts whether in your favor or not – as clearly as you can, and third settling in your own mind that now is the time to fight back, however long it may take.

Once you’ve committed yourself mentally, you’re beginning to draw your own positive belief in yourself into action. At this stage, with balance and time to think, you can begin to assess how you can be positive in your rebuttal unlike your attacker.

Keith Hammonds’ tirade about HR begins and ends with the ultimate insult. It dismisses HR and everyone in it as useless, a waste of time. He’s in the business of using inflammatory opinions to stimulate interest. The flood of email he got was predictable – incensed HR people versus those who like to complain about it and were happy to see our ox gored one more time.

Surely there’s something more useful. Why, for instance, would a U.S. retail company pay as much as $1.3 million a year to their top HR executive if HR were useless? More powerfully, why on average are top companies in the S&P 500 stock index worth four times the actual dollar value of all their concrete assets? The extra is pure intellectual capital. Clearly the value people in organizations can add is higher than the value-add of any other component. And virtually every company maintains an HR department to assist. Why?

Keith missed his own point. On one hand he insists HR represents a huge opportunity missed. That’s the opposite of useless. If it were truly valueless, there’s no opportunity available to be missed – just eliminate it. You can’t have it both ways. He’s right on the first count. Many companies do miss the value, so the key question is: since it does have value, how can we go about improving it? His suggestions were weak. Yet it’s clear that some companies, though not the majority, have figured out how to access the potential. Isn’t it more important to light a better candle than curse the darkness?

Getting things in perspective and back in balance follows predictable stages. Seeing the key factual flaw in your critic’s argument comes first. Then you look for the positives that will eventually give your arguments much more strength.

Marshalling The Facts

Worst among his flaws, Keith blatantly encourages the dismissive attitude many CEO’s and other business “leaders” take toward HR (and by extension the shameful lack of nurturing they provide their people). The better course is to wake up those executives to demand more effectiveness and results from their HR operations and their internal leadership.

Keith’s failure is damaging. Frothy criticism is always widely read. The positive side is belated, buried and largely ignored. As with most flaming critics, he builds on widespread myths without always identifying them. HR is a puzzle to many people, especially busy line executives. It’s easy to feel our only recourse is to “hire the best talent,” give them all the attention and rewards and let those individuals prosper and call every shot while the rest of the team is supposed to blindly follow.

However hiring the best talent is risky. The failure rate of ringers brought in from outside is very high, especially without proper HR systems. Invaluable elements such as effective orientation or, to use one of the new jargon terms Keith hates, proper “on-boarding” is rare. Simply throwing people into jobs and offering monetary rewards such as big individual bonuses backfires as often as it succeeds in my experience.

Companies frequently decide to reward the wrong things. Put the emphasis on sales increases alone, for instance, and you can find people fudging their numbers, bamboozling customers and stepping on their colleagues to make a quick buck. This isn’t an HR flaw, but a failure of leadership in the organization to recognize the consequences of their first, perhaps poorly thought-out ideas. I’ve lost the argument on this one many times. It isn’t for lack of research in HR showing what works and what doesn’t. You can’t lay the full blame on HR when evidence is ignored at the executive table.

If you don’t put equal value how people are managed as you do on sales, you’re missing an even larger opportunity than rewarding individual sales people.

Turning The Tables

Once you see how invalid your critic’s arguments are and take time to pick holes in them, you feel far stronger. Anger dissipates in favor of the potential fun and humor you will find in destroying those points.

More importantly you begin to see, as in this case, that if you make the proper arguments, you can actually gain majority support over your nemesis. In this situation, to ignore HR or suggest it’s useless, is to ignore not only the people who valiantly struggle to make it worth something, but far worse. It is to ignore the legitimate interests of all people in every organization who aren’t today seen as super-stars or prima dona’s. They’re not the only ones who count. Dismissing HR is a major step to dismissing the value of people in general, to accepting the myth that only born leaders can lead.

The truth is… every individual in any organization can be highly effective. People join organizations to excel, not just make a living. To downplay the work of the one department charged with finding the best systems to encourage, train and enable every individual to do this is to do a huge disservice to every single person in every organization. Surely we can do better. If we can show how, we bring a very big team to our side of the argument – pretty much everyone in every organization.

Learning Creates Value

“…the ability to learn and to put that learning into action rapidly is the only competitive advantage.” – Jack Welch (from his excellent book winning – with interesting editorial and reader reviews HERE.)

Welch is right in every sense, whether you apply his comment to ideas, individuals, teams or entire organizations. Whether you learn by reading, talking to experts or simply mulling over the implications of the challenge you face, your learning is what creates value.

If it takes an intractable critic to stimulate that mulling and learning process, so be it. The end result reinforces the old saying, “Anything that doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.” Then the rebuttal becomes a positive exercise in furthering knowledge for everyone. The real question is whether you move the situation forward. Eventually winning the argument is incidental… though enjoyable nonetheless.

Bad Bosses? Small Organizations? (2)

Statistics show almost 99% of the 2.4 million businesses in Canada have fewer than 100 employees, most of those having little or no formal human resources (HR) management other than technical or records management carried on by a payroll or finance manager who’s been stuck with the responsibility. The largest segment, with fewer than 25 employees, have essentially no HR advisors at all.

Few individuals would start a business without outside advice for legal issues, record-keeping, bookkeeping, payroll and other financial tracking among the very first things they set up and seek assistance with. When it comes to HR with its complex legislation and often difficult challenges of managing, disciplining, performance monitoring, measurement, motivation and many other “routine” HR tasks, the vast majority seek no formal guidance or support whatsoever. Far later in business development, when they run into a problem with someone, they ask around, mull things over, try to ignore it, quash it or hope they pick a logical course of action.

Some legal advisors can provide technical answers about what’s in HR legislation, but usually not much guidance about how to actually speak with an employee who’s having a problem. Managers tend to rely on how they were treated in the past, judging whether that was good or bad as a guide to handling others the same way or differently.

This can actually work – up to a point – depending on how much time senior managers are able to give to thinking through such matters and whether their past experiences have given them ideas needed to “do HR” more or less effectively.

20 of 21 “Bad” Bosses?

Sadly, one only has to read news items such as the recent survey about bosses conducted by Monster.ca to see that many managers aren’t perceived to be highly effective. On a scale of -50 to +50, the average Canadian boss rated -2.5 or just below “fair.” The highest average achieved on any scale was about 7.0. This is not surprising when they go on to identify 21 types of bosses, with only one deemed “great” while the others all have serious flaws that make them variations of awful. The best thing, we can hope, is that employees only have to deal with those 20 bad types of bosses occasionally during any given work day.

Nor is the situation much better in large companies, even those with large, effective HR departments. That’s because any one boss usually impacts fewer than 100 employees directly and rarely if ever seeks any HR advice, while trying madly to understand budgets, financials, sales, marketing and a host of other important business matters. Most bosses in big companies are managing HR very similarly to small organizations – by the seat of their pants.

Since we’ve all been managed at some time or another, we have models to go by, but are rarely aware of what our employees think of our approaches. So called “360-feedback” can help, but it’s mostly a one-time event at best. Many studies show it can go often seriously wrong if not handled very carefully, triggering witch hunts, retaliation or at least worse behavior than before.

When Do You Need HR?

Most organizations think about this as they begin to grow to over 30 to 60 employees. Below that level, a small group of like-minded managers typically operate the organization as a team, following whatever process they’ve evolved and become comfortable with during the early growth period. True employees, as opposed to the manager team members are handled as extended team members, informed, guided and evaluated by the core team managers directly. Everyone knows everyone. Everyone is involved in and aware of the day-to-day work fairly directly and know who’s pulling their weight or not. As long as at least one of the senior team is HR issue-friendly, and is supported by the others, this can create a great work environment.

Should every business rush out and hire a full time HR manager? No, it may not be cost effective. Even in large organizations the average ratio of HR is about 1 for each 120 employees. Unlike bookkeeping tasks which must be carried out daily, true HR challenges requiring expert advice arise only rarely, so a single reasonably effective HR manager with assistance with basic paperwork, payroll, etc., can often supply full basic support to organizations from 40 to 200 or more depending on the complexity of daily issues. This individual can find consultants and should be able to learn to use them for rarer, more challenging matters.

Most very small organizations need significantly less than half a day a week of input from an HR manager/advisor on a somewhat irregular, as needed basis. Even for many small or mid-size organizations of 20 or more employees having a senior HR advisor/specialist individual or an expert consulting group on retainer (typically for about $1000 to $2500 per month or even less) is a great investment, even if they add an internal HR manager who’s competent day-to-day, but who can’t be an expert in everything. This approach works well when both parties do some upfront work to understand each other and make sure some basic procedures are in place. Fortunately we’re starting to see more HR consulting operations offering this sort of support.

What’s “Good HR” and a “Good Boss?”

The biggest challenge for HR to work well in any organization is still the internal bosses. If they have a hard time accepting input or improving inflexible approaches to management, no amount of support, advice, coaching, counseling or whatever one offers, will help much. No HR manager, external or internal, can do a line manager’s job of leading and managing. Those who try are doomed to fail as surely as the managers they advise. Every leader, HR or line manager, will be most effective using a coaching-leadership style. Organizations need to develop a culture that emphasizes a coaching approach to solving problems and managing people, with everyone participating in coaching each other over time.

The secret of handling people effectively is to understand you cannot command them. You can lead. You can get their assistance by building their willing interest in doing better, but you have to approach them as individuals with their own styles who can be helped to do better not ordered, threatened, blatantly bribed or goaded into it.

An instructive read is the Monster.ca article on the 21 types of bosses, which you can read: HERE, with the great boss as #21 – a coach, a leader, a strategist, a support, an example, a motivator… in short, not a “boss” at all in any usual sense of giving orders, but someone in a role of helping employees become the best they can be while keeping a steady, positive environment operating smoothly. Is this someone who has miraculous, super-human powers? Not at all. I’ve seen thousands of highly effective bosses and, as you know, I believe and present the five basic keys that make this possible for anyone to achieve day-in, day-out.

“To succeed, actions must benefit both organization and individual in balance; deviate at your peril.” Dave Crisp