We must overcome the notion that we must be regular… it robs you of the chance to be extraordinary and leads you to the mediocre. -Uta Hagen A respected leader in my company passed away and left Uta Hagen’s quote behind. It got me thinking about a few questions about …
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Thoughts on Leadership
We must overcome the notion that we must be regular… it robs you of the chance to be extraordinary and leads you to the mediocre.
-Uta Hagen
A respected leader in my company passed away and left Uta Hagen’s quote behind. It got me thinking about a few questions about my own leadership: What does it mean to be extraordinary today? In what way does an extraordinary leader differ from the mediocre leader? I think the difference deals with people – being an extraordinary leader isn’t about output or ingenuity or even originality, although those may be the symptoms. It isn’t about a balance between people and process, although an extraordinary leader will probably be perceived as striking such a balance. I think a good or even great leader is a profitable leader for their company, but an extraordinary or legendary leader is morally profitable for those they are leading.
The 80 (or so) years we have here have to be about more than a bottom line. It has to be about personal, human connection and companionship. How invested are you in your wife, your kids, your employees, your boss? Have you taken any of those people for granted. Are you leading with compassion for people’s lives and their feelings? His passing was a good reminder to stop, look someone in the eye, and truly care about what they have to say. It is about connection – everything else seems to fall in place when you have that.
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Sly Sammy
The other day, I sat down for a frank and honest discussion with one of my peers – the only one of my peers that does the exact same job as I do. Our discussion revolved a lot around the topic of performance management and what we are diagnosing to be our own management downfalls. I think that in many corporate environments, this would be a fairly difficult discussion to have, but in the corporate culture we work in, such discussions are pretty well par for the course.
One of the key topics that cropped up was how to tell if an employee is working for you or working for you. The difference is actually pretty subtle both in speech and in practice. If an employee is working for you then that employee is out there trying to get it done because they respect their boss and want to achieve their boss’s and their common goal; however, if an employee is working for you, this would imply that they are working for you and only you. Meaning, if you aren’t there then they don’t have anyone to work for, including themselves.
How do you tell the difference? Both situations could look exactly the same when you are at work leading the employee. The answer: peer review. Your team must be accountable not only to your view of their performance, but also to the collective viewpoint of your peers. This creates a couple of beneficial angles for you as a leader:
1. You get top performance regardless of who is in the building.
2. It completely dissolves the question of whether or not an employee is great for their boss but not great overall.
It may seem like a small point in the overall scheme of things, but consider an example:
Sly Sammy. Sammy works for manager A for two years. In those two years, manager A learns how to lead Sammy so that Sammy can perform at a satisfactory level – not great or outstanding, but simply average performance. Manager A is satisfied with Sammy’s performance because training someone new for Sammy’s position would result in poor performance for that new employee while they are learning. Manager A’s department is currently not performing as well as he would like, so he is not in a position to oust a veteran player on his team. A few changes happen in the company requiring that leaders at Sammy’s level move to new positions, as a result, Sammy under Manager B. Sammy, having only performed at an average level in the past, is now paired with a manager that is in a better position to move talent around and expects significantly more from Sammy. Unfortunately, Sammy struggles to adapt to his new position, but he continues to work very hard only when his boss is in the building. Manager B works very hard to get Sammy up to speed, but every time Sammy doesn’t understand a concept, he claims he was never taught. As a result, Manager B spends a large portion of his time teaching and reteaching Sammy to ensure he is trained properly. Sammy improves marginally before he has to change bosses again to Manager C. Manager C is much like manager B; however, during the move, Sammy goes back to saying he hasn’t learned basic concepts, and Manager C goes through the motions of teaching basic concepts to Sammy. Sammy is now 8 months in position, still learning basic concepts (which is a beneficial position for Sammy, because this extends the period of time in which he is not accountable for his performance because he is “learning”).
Let’s sidebar for a moment on accountability. Accountability is difficult, if not impossible, to teach. One either has it, or they don’t, and it is a skill that is normally instilled during childhood. Those who are unaccountable are generally victims of circumstance – things happen to them that are out of their control, they do not see their contribution to being unprepared for these events, nor will they see the end result and the punishment as fair outcomes. Sammy is unaccountable – he does not see his goal as being the best at his position, but his goal is to survive in the company and avoid situations that are not in his control. He will never take risks in order to better himself, and he generally works in a very defensive mode, strategizing his boss’s perception instead of allowing his performance to create its own perception.
But what if Manager A, B, and C all got together to discuss Sammy’s performance? Because Manager C is his direct supervisor, he is given the most weight in the discussion, but the corporate culture is set up to ensure that Manager C listens intently and completely to the opinions of Manager A and B. Manager A would openly admit that it wasn’t strategically viable for him to manage Sammy out at the time, and Manager B would talk about Sammy’s actions while working for him, which will sound startlingly familiar to Manager C. The end result of collaborative reasoning in management is that Manager C doesn’t have to spend the 3 months Manager B spent learning that Sammy wasn’t accountable when no one was looking, Manager C would know what to look for from the first day.
We are all susceptible to manipulation. As a leader, you want to trust your employees and your team, and the longer you manage, the more that this becomes a key factor in whether or not you are happy in your job. The truth is that not everyone is trustworthy, and regularly assessing your relationship with your employees is a large part of having a team you trust. Keep business as business, allow your peers to openly share their opinions on your employees – this doesn’t mean don’t stand up for your team when your peers are off base, but ensure that you have a good system of checks and balances set up against your own human nature to think that most people have good intentions.
Additional Resources:
http://ezinearticles.com/?Leadership-Through-Accountability—The-5-Essentials&id=2195094
http://www.cmoe.com/blog/establishing-accountability-through-effective-leadership.htm
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15 Tips for New Managers,
15 Tips for New Managers,
(a reminder for the rest of us)
When first starting out in management, it seems like there are pitfalls everywhere in your interaction with everyone and everything around you. It doesn’t take long to figure out that these roadblocks can bring your productivity to a screeching halt. I have compiled a list of 15 tips to help smooth out the potholes:
1. Greet everyone every morning.
Let’s be very careful how we define productivity. Happy, appreciated, and noticed workers are productive workers. Yes, it may take you longer to get to your email in the morning, but the feeling of your boss really taking interest in your day isn’t really replaceable and you only have once chance to greet everyone as you are walking in the door. After that, you are just finding them when you need something.
2. Set hours for yourself.
Be accountable to your own hours. If you are working more hours than your peers to get the same result, then that may be what you need to do, but you must have some control over the hours you are working. You will find that you are more productive in the time between when you come in and leave if you know when you
must leave. It is ok to work the most hours in the office, so long as you have planned the hours you are working in conjunction with the rest of your life.
3. Be honest.
Everyone knows you are lying. They may not be in a position to call you on it, but they know. If you are asked a direct question, give a direct answer. If you are not at liberty to fully answer the question, then simply say that. Be honest about your employee’s performance, require that they be honest about their own performance, be honest about your performance, and expect others to be honest about your performance as well. Don’t be afraid to say you were wrong – expect the same from your employees, and create an environment to make it comfortable for them.
4. Don’t preach to the choir.
Some of the times when your employees will frustrate you the most will be the times when they aren’t around to confront directly. Avoid covering that issue with the other employees as if they were guilty of the same frustrating crime. This accomplishes nothing other than to use up the time of your employees who are at work performing, and it may accomplish angering them that you can’t control yourself.
5. Document meticulously.
Especially when you are first starting out and don’t understand or see the patterns around poor performance, documenting employee performance issues is key. If you are telling someone something twice, it should be on paper or captured electronically somewhere. You do not know how people will perform in the future, and most of your documentation will ultimately end in a shredder a year or so later, but you will be glad you have every piece you aren’t shredding.
6. Pick an organization system and stick to it.
Whether it is Getting Things Done, Franklin, or some other system, you need a way to feel that you have captured all of the information floating around in your world. You need a way to feel like it is safely filed. This may not seem dire when you are walking into an empty office and a clean desk, but a good system of organization at work is the only way to keep it this way.
7. Age isn’t irrelevant, but it is not important.
You may have people working for you that are older or much younger. You need to understand that many people of some generations will require a similar communication style while many people of another generation will need a wholly different kind of communication. Once you master what kind of communication each generation needs to feel respected, age doesn’t factor into leadership very much.
8. Get dirty, it’s fun!
Understand that your employees need to see you get your hands dirty, this is why shows like Undercover Boss exist – people want to see the guy at the top know what it’s like to get their hands dirty. Plan time for this activity in your calendar. If you work in a factory, work on the line next to your hardest worker. If you work in retail, get in and unload a truck. The payoff in productivity over time is much more than the hour you spent working. Most of all, we all need to feel like we have some tangible control, and working at the ground level is a great way to turn some cranks and get exactly the result you were trying to achieve.
9. Be available.
If someone comes to you with a problem, you have time. If someone wants to talk about their frustrating day, you have time. Even if you are a whip-cracking, no non-sense manager, if someone has the guts, confidence, and trust to come to you to discuss an issue that is important to them, then you need to be listening.
10. If you don’t trust someone, learn some more about them.
Trust is really a matter of perspective. Different job roles have different priorities that may or may not conflict with your own job priorities. If you understand better where someone is coming from in terms of what their job duties and responsibilities really are, then trusting them is really a matter of understanding how your actions/words will be perceived from their job perspective. If their job is to document breach of confidentiality and you need someone to talk to about a mistake you may have made, why put them in that position? It isn’t that you can’t trust them, but you have to understand they are accountable for doing their job well.
11. Know one personal thing about everyone.
John loves dogs and owns a golden retriever. Susie loves Japanese anime. It doesn’t matter what you know, it just matters that it is important to your employee. This seems like social interaction 101, but when you have twenty projects to delegate, making time for this is something you have to consciously accomplish.
12. Prioritize everything logically, but put a lot of weight on what your boss wants done.
If you don’t understand this one, read it again.
13. Never compare your job to your employee’s job.
You understand their job better than they understand yours, it’s your job to know their job. In most cases, they have no responsibility to know the ins and outs of your job. So naturally they are going to round off your job responsibilities as being fairly easy. “Step on up and give it a shot, kid,” right? Well, that isn’t going to happen. They aren’t going to get a first hand look at everything you do, so don’t open the door to this conversation. Your jobs are apples and oranges, if you need to blow off steam about how much you have to do, then do so with a peer. They will better understand and sympathize with your plight.
14. Compromise, but hold people accountable to the terms.
Being a hard-ass doesn’t get you very far – not even on TV. Understand that things get in the way, so work out new time-lines, but you don’t get to move them twice. If your employees are constantly blowing time-lines, look at whether you are being reasonable, and if you are then look at if they are ultimately being held accountable.
15. Recognize in groups, coach individually.
I had a great mentor starting out, and this was easily one of the best lessons she had to teach. Everyone in a group is probably not responsible for something going wrong, even though some of them may be. Group meetings should be positive to talk about wins, challenges, and hurdles – but keep it positive and focused on what people are doing well. Individual conversations away from a group are where you can dig into mistakes and have coaching sessions. No one likes being coached for something they didn’t do, and undoubtedly you will be coaching at least some people for a crime they didn’t commit when you opt to do group coachings. Keep it positive.
There are plenty of other great tips out there for managers just starting out, feel free to leave them in the comments.
Additional Resources:
http://www.yourofficecoach.com/Topics/tips_for_new_managers.htm
http://management.about.com/od/begintomanage/tp/newmgrmistake.htm
http://www.allbusiness.com/education-training/employee-training-assistance/11813201-1.html
http://alignment.wordpress.com/2010/08/22/7-tips-for-new-managers/
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Even in Business, Death and Taxes are Certain
Your employees will leave you. If they don’t, then they will retire or promote. Between voluntary exit, promotion, and retirement is termination. The final option is that you leave. These are certainties, and they are non-negotiable, the same as paying taxes on your business income or the lease on your storefront. Thankfully, however, as long as you are in business and doing business, the birth of new employees and leaders is also fairly certain. So what is your plan for the exodus of your employees? Are you controlling the influx of new employees versus the parting of your veterans?
Most larger organizations utilize what is called Succession Planning, or the process of developing and nurturing new talent to replace either under-performing talent currently in position or talent that is likely to leave the company or promote to other positions. Thus, often the top of one person’s succession plan is the bottom of another person’s succession plan all the way up the corporate ladder. As pleasant as that sounds in sterile business terms, discussions around succession planning can be difficult – like discussing the unavoidable death of a living person. But as in nature, corporations need death to propagate new life in the company, so succession planning is also about birth. The key is to find a logical and sterile way to organize that information so that leaders can discuss it calmly and rationally with their main focus on the business reasons for moving their talent.
Understanding performance as a predictable pattern
People make mistakes – managers, employees, and CEOs make mistakes. Some of those people learn from their mistakes and go on to make entirely different mistakes, learning from that mistake, make another and another until they have made most of the available mistakes and thereafter they significantly reduce the number of mistakes they make until they change job roles. This is a good kind of learning as it is non-repetitive and productive over time. Others make the same mistakes over and over again – they struggle to learn why they made the mistake for the fourth time because they were uninterested or unable to learn their error the first time. From a management perspective, there are really only 2 options available – the person can’t learn the job or they don’t care to. Any other list of explanations will eventually boil down to one of those two causes. It is at this point that we have to assess whether they were given the right job to begin with or if they care about the job they are in.
People are more predictable than we like to believe. Employees in the pattern of repeating mistakes will continue to repeat their mistake until something changes – either they must be inspired to care or they need to be shown a new way to learn the task they are trying to complete. The reverse is also true – an employee who shows a pattern of strong performance will likely continue their pattern under the same set of variables in which they have been performing well in the past. Whether these methods are successful in breaking or encouraging the employee of their performance pattern or not, recognizing these patterns is the basis for comprehensive succession planning.
Mapping out succession planning
There are many ways to visually represent and document succession planning sessions, but there is one that (at least for me) seems to make the most sense:
- Open a new spreadsheet
- List the employee or hiring candidate’s names down the left side of the spreadsheet, leaving a header at the top
- Along the top, list the months starting with the month you are currently in and ending however many months in advance you wish to plan
- Below each month and to the right of each name, decide, based on current performance, what that employee’s position will likely be (if any position at all), then move on to the next month, and so on. If you see that employee being in their same position for the indefinite future, you can drag their position to the end of the spreadsheet
- Skip down a couple of cells and create a new list of employees – this list will be your bench. In their cells you can list any development activities you have going on by month up to the month that you see them stepping into a bigger role, at which point their cell will reflect that new role.
- Keep your bench in the lower part of the spreadsheet until the promotion actually takes place.
After you have done this for all employees on your talent plan, you will be able to visually see the months where employees will no longer be in their current role. Those months are your deadlines for having your bench of up and comers ready to step up through your day-to-day development.
This is not a document to be set in stone
This is not meant to be your commandment from God as to the direction your company. It is a flexible document that shows what the plan is at the time it is presented. Eve may come to you in January and tell you that she does not believe her particular skill set allows her to be a priest after all, and as a result, you may have to reconfigure Adam to back-fill John. But fairly regularly, you need to update this plan if only to capture all of your objective thoughts around your team’s performance. Best is to have a legal pad near by when completing this document, because a lot of other ideas will surface around development opportunities or new talent that you need to meet with to discuss their opportunities.
So what’s so hard about that?
It seems fairly straight-forward on paper, but when you figure in employee relationships and your own time invested in your team’s performance, there are a lot of emotions tied up in succession planning. Ultimately though, what I find that most people struggle with is that they feel that they are giving up on the talent who doesn’t appear on the grid in 3 months and (for newer leaders) they have to come to terms with the fact that they are represented, or not represented, on someone else’s talent plan.
Ultimately, coming to terms with your own vulnerability and the fact that everyone is replaceable is something we all have to do at work. Even if you own your own business, someone else will take over your lease when you leave. It will happen. Refer back to the options at the top of this article. But in regards to the emotions around giving up on an employee you have invested time and energy into training, keep in mind that planning is just that – it is a plan. It changes if the employee performance changes. You are much better off having a definitive time-line to attempt to teach the necessary skills than to have their performance trail off into infinity because now you are accountable for teaching those skills to them on a schedule, which is fairer to your employees. Most importantly, when your boss asks you what the plan is for your team, you can define whether you are ahead or behind in the development that you are trying to accomplish.
Additional Resources:
http://www.adventureassoc.com/solutions/leadership-succession-planning.html
http://www.ameinfo.com/59276.html
http://www.greatleadershipbydan.com/2009/06/how-to-fix-succession-planning.html
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A Proof Your Manager Shouldn’t Work With You
Think about every manager you have ever had. Which ones did you like? What were the attributes that made them a “good” manager versus a “bad” manager. Maybe they cared more about your feelings? Or they delegated in a way that seemed more “fair?” Or maybe they seemingly didn’t delegate at all, so they “did their share.” For most of us, when considering whether someone is or was a good manager delegating to us, it is very hard to consider performance as an attribute of good [...] Continue Reading…
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Humphry’s at the Bay
When was the last time you went out for a show – let’s say a concert? Ok, so when was the last time you saw one with the San Diego Bay in the background? Better yet, when was the last time you saw a concert from a kayak on the San Diego Bay?
Enter Humphrey’s Half Moon Inn. At first glance there isn’t a whole lot to get the average San Diegan out to Humphrey’s, but step inside and there is more than meets the eye. Their bar is a small lounge, but there are massive windows so that you [...] Continue Reading…
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Managing your day with a Post-It
Mark McGuiness over at The 99 Percent has an interesting take on how to manage your to-do lists (and your sanity) through restricting the physical size of your day planner. Essentially, Mark claims that what can be written on a post-it by the average person is about equal to the amount of tasks that someone can get done during the day anyhow. So to control job-related stress, keep your daily to-do list on a post-it, and when that is filled up, nothing else can be added to the day’s list.
Check out the full article here…
Controlling your own expectations of [...] Continue Reading…
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San Diego One-Stop Comedy Shop
Can you buy laughs? At the La Jolla comedy store, yes you can, but laughs aren’t cheap. However, if you are in the mood for a guaranteed great night out, check out this La Jolla venue for both local and national comics. In the 5 or 6 times we have visited the Comedy Store, we have seen writers for Rodney Dangerfield as well as Rosanne (twice actually), we have seen comics at the comedy store and then gone home top find them appearing prime time on Comedy Central. And being honest, there were a couple of those that we [...] Continue Reading…
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(a reminder for the rest of us)