Category Archives: Leadership Development

If You Want a Different Outcome You Need To Do the Hard Stuff

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You Gotta Do the Hard StuffSubmitted by Janice Giannini.

I recently read the Middle Market Growth’s special report titled Future of Work 2021. The report addressed post-pandemic realities across several dimensions: the future of work, productivity, strategies for managing a mobile workforce, technology game-changers, the future of logistics, a focus on mentally healthy employees, and technology and ERP systems.

A section entitled “Focus on Mentally Healthy Employees” addressed the transitions to work from home or hybrid model from the traditional in-office model. The narrative in the report focuses on what the company needs to do. I think this section is missing a big point here. The employees, who always depended on someone else to manage their time and life, now regulate their own lives in this new model.

Many people, not all, may not recognize this or have the skills or desire to do so. It’s the hard stuff of life. And many people try to avoid the challenging and uncomfortable aspects of life.

The ones who succeed in life (based on their definition of success) are the folks who step up, identify the hard stuff, face it and do something about it.

If the industry thinks that employers can improve employees’ health by themselves, it will never happen.

People may be tired of hearing the word accountability. Personal accountability is what will get them through this and enable them to thrive in the future.

Mahatma Gandhi’s quote, “I suppose leadership at one time meant muscles; but today it means getting along with people” has never been more true. In order to get along with people, you need to know yourself and be personally accountable.

Leadership Under Fire

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For many corporate leaders, the last 18 months have been an exercise in living through stress. The situation concerning the pandemic changes day-to-day, and business needs must adjust on a dime. The uncertainty of it all adds to the pressure. Overall, it has been an actual test of leadership.

Demanding situations and crises faced by business leaders over their careers can define who they are– as a leader and person. It is common for leaders to react poorly in high-stress situations. Research shows that 53% percent become more closed-minded and controlling instead of open and curious. Another 43% become angrier and more heated.

Since no one works in isolation, these behaviors negatively impact direct reports and teams. When leaders react poorly, it affects morale and team performance, leading to mistakes and missed deadlines, resulting in lost customers.

Effective leaders, even when under stress, maintain poise under pressure and can adapt to various situations. Here are a few tricks leaders use to deal with stress.

  • Stay calm. See the situation as a challenge, not a crisis.
  • Focus on the goal. Roll with the situation and seek the best practical path under the new circumstances.
  • Have a positive mental attitude. Demonstrate realistic optimism. Acknowledge that sometimes things go wrong. Whenever that occurs, expect to deal with setbacks and benefit from lessons learned.
  • Step back. Manage stress by temporarily removing yourself, physically or mentally, from the situation.
  • Prepare for the unexpected. Rather than worrying about what might happen, be prepared for it.

Emotions Are a Leadership Asset but a Management Liability?

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Really?
Yep.

For certain aspects of a business, managing using emotions can be detrimental compared with a more disciplined approach. Regarding business decisions related to the overall vision, mission, and goals, relying on data, facts, logic, reasoning, and experience can be a sound way to go. Facts, metrics, and data can be illuminating as they guide strategic business decisions to align goals, objectives, and initiatives. Many employees have come to rely on and respect leaders who set the tone for the company and make decisions from a well-rounded, analytical point of view.

That said, business managers can fall into the trap of getting so busy watching the numbers that they ignore the warning cues from social awareness, resulting in increased employee disgruntlement. Or they may become so remote and distanced that conflicts go on unresolved. Without incorporating emotional intelligence elements such as empathy and compassion, managers can experience unhappy employees, team conflict, and lower productivity.

On the other extreme, managers viewed as overly emotional can set off red flags in others. Not seen as stable, they get described with words like arbitrary, capricious, or inconsistent. People fear what they may do next. It does not inspire confidence in their decision-making.

Leading with appropriate emotions enables leaders to better connect with all levels of employees. Consciously incorporating emotions in a manager’s leadership style can provide the understanding that strengthens teams and improves productivity and morale. An emotionally intelligent leader knows how to drive a successful business while minimizing overall stress. Through motivating employees and helping them see opportunity, they navigate their way through challenges.

A person who regularly incorporates emotional intelligence is usually better able to comprehend sticky situations and resolve conflicts. Typically, they understand their team(s) and are more easily able to guide them in the right direction- turning objectives into reality. Leading using emotional intelligence encourages employees to achieve their full potential. It can reduce employee turnover.

When leading a team, acknowledge that emotions play a critical part in keeping everyone productive and cohesive. As a leader, choose the level of emotion that positively impacts the overall long-term health of the organization or company.

Why Leadership is So Important in Today’s World

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Personally and professionally, we have probably gone through such disruption in so many aspects of our lives, that very little is left unchanged.

Now, as we are figuring out this new reality, people are looking to find something they can grab hold of to get a sense of stability.

We know that during times of change or uncertainty, people usually gravitate towards structure.

With almost every institution we know rocked, the most stable thing may well be the leaders we have in our lives. That’s why I think leadership is so critical.

Today, be the leader that your colleagues need!

Leadership Cloud

Are You Engaging?

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Are You Engaging?

I know that is an unusual question to begin a business column. But in this case I am not referring to purely your personal style. I am referring to how well you engage everyone who works in your organization.

Employee engagement doesn’t have to be relegated to some soft-headed, everybody-feelgood-and-sing-Kumbaya moments. It can deliver pragmatic outcomes that most execs would die for.

Ben Zander, conductor of Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, speaks about the word symphony, which is derived from Greek συµφωνία, meaning agreement or concord of sound. He refers to it as sounding together.
Think about it. This means there is no more of the normal BS and distraction associated with “them and us” or “we and they” or “my area and your area.” It is just “us.”

Sounding together is a very powerful notion because without it, regardless of the talent of the players involved, the result is cacophony.

Scary Statistics

This lack of sounding together may result in American businesses only operating at one-third of their true capacity due to employee disengagement occurring within the workplace.

Gallup and Harris polls involving more than 10,000 employees across various industries indicate some potentially frightening findings. When reviewing the following points, consider the impact and implications on your organization’s top- and bottom-line financial performance, your ability to manage the business, your ability to achieve positive customer loyalty metrics and market share growth, and your ability to optimize the employee strengths in your organization:

  • Only 15% of the employees could identify the company’s most important goals.
  • 51% were unsure of how they were expected to help the company achieve goals.
  • Only 49% of all available work time is dedicated to companies’ most important goals.
  • 53% of American employees are unhappy with their jobs.
  • Only 29% of employees indicated they are fully engaged in their work.
  • 55% of employees described symptoms that point out they are disengaged from their
    work.
  • 16% of those surveyed indicated they are actively disengaged from their work.

 

Employee_EngagementLook closely. Only 29% of employees are truly engaged! That is the group that believes in the company and wants to make things better.  They clearly understand the business and how their work fits into the big picture. These employees are respectful of (and helpful to) team members and others, find opportunities to stay current in their field of expertise, and are willing to go the extra mile.

In contrast, disengaged employees are not risk takers nor committed to the company. They lack a sense of achievement in their work and advancement in their role is not important—they are just doing enough to keep their job. Actively disengaged employees are unhappy at work and act out the unhappiness. They like to be part of the problem and find it almost impossible to become part of the solution.

They spread discontent and consistently fall short of meeting performance expectations. Disengaged employees cause a significant loss in effectiveness and productivity. For example, if you have 1,000 employees with an average salary/benefits of $35,000, that adds up to $35 million per year. If your firm’s number falls somewhere between 33% and 71% for those that are not delivering a full hour of work for a full hour of pay, you are squandering somewhere between $10 million and $20.5 million in wages every year. That number does not even take into consideration how the behavior of those employees may have negatively affected the servicing of internal and external customers.

Without a doubt, every organization wants high performers who are talented, understand the business model and goals, perform above expectations, and model behaviors that influence others. These performers maximize
resources through creative insights—far greater than others—and produce high levels of results.

Low-performing employees who are actively disengaged abuse systems, disrupt interactions, and often become an obstacle to organizational effectiveness.  I believe an engaged workplace culture can be created and sustained when you consciously attract, hire, support, and develop people who look forward to using their collective talents, attitudes, habits, skills, and knowledge to benefit your internal and external customers.
This involves everything from setting clear direction and living your espoused values to invigorating organizational capability and capacity because you have truly mobilized individual commitment. For it to be real, it must be something that is as natural a part of your operation as breathing is to a human being.

So let me ask you again:

Are you engaging?

Measuring Up

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In previous columns, I have touched on the need to manage change and transitions, own your customers’ experience, prioritize and publish a list of corporate goals and objectives, truly engage your people, and view your organization’s economic playing field differently. This column brings them together.

Origins of The Baldridge Award

Baldridge AwardBack in the 1980s, when Malcolm Baldrige was US Secretary of Commerce under President Reagan, he was an advocate of quality management as a key to US prosperity and sustainability. He was concerned that we were
losing ground in the international fight for quality and performance excellence and believed it would have a negative impact on the US economy. After he passed away from a rodeo accident in 1987, Congress established the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award.

The Baldrige Award promotes awareness of performance excellence as an increasingly important element in competitiveness. Just as important though, is that these successful performance strategies and benefits are readily available for organizations that want to replicate them. The content areas and criteria are wide-ranging and deeply probing.

Management Measurements

There are seven areas of measurement and assessment: leadership, strategic planning, focus on customers and markets, measurement, analysis and knowledge management, staff focus, process management and organizational performance results.

An award-winning organization must have a role-model organizational management system that ensures continuous improvement in the delivery of products and/or services, demonstrates efficient and effective operations, and provides a way of engaging and responding to customers and other stakeholders.  Since the award is not given for specific products or services, it can be used as a road map for almost any organization that wants to move forward.

It can serve you well to know how you are doing in these seven areas. I routinely see people, at almost every level, suffering from misinformation or no information at all about what the real situation is. It doesn’t matter whether I am talking to a mega-organization or a relatively small firm; the one piece of wisdom I share is:

“It is usually not what we don’t know that kills us. It is what we think we know that we don’t that kills us.”

Given today’s economic turmoil, you need to deal with the real stuff in as close to real time as you can. The most effective executives want to know up front what’s working well in their businesses and what isn’t, so they can make maximum use of their time to organize resources, respond appropriately, and build a forward-thinking error-prevention strategy.

When your company car is careening down a steep mountain road in the rain without brakes is not the time to discover that someone had great intentions but didn’t get around to managing the preventative maintenance
program well. It’s important to remember the simple adages from Drucker and others that I have shared before.

“What gets measured gets done. What gets measured and paid attention to gets done faster. What gets measured, paid attention to, and rewarded, gets done repeatedly.”

Peter Drucker

Peter Drucker

Questions for You and Your Team

I’ll leave you with questions to collectively answer when you meet with your top team:

  • What are we measuring and tracking these days?
  • What exactly has to work well for us to deliver products/services that attract customers and keep them coming back for more at a reasonable profit or ROI?
  • Are we accurately tracking the right amount of the right things?
  • Are we (people, processes, systems) working well together horizontally and vertically?
  • How sure are we that we really know which parts are working together and which aren’t?
  • Are we tuned into how our people would answer these questions?

This article is republished from American Executive Magazine

We Don’t Read Minds

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As I coach executive teams around the world, one area that creates significant improvement is developing a better understanding of the nuances of goal achievement. Corporate CEOs are usually not in the dark about the potential power of goals, but many fail to truly capitalize on them.

I usually see the wheels fall off the truck in three areas. I’ll address one shortcoming in this article: not publicizing a list of corporate goals and objectives in priority order.

Without a publicist like this, people at every level of the organization are forced to guess at the most important criteria for making decisions.  I believe that when executives don’t want to commit to a prioritized list, it is the
equivalent of playing “stump the chump” with their people. I’ll provide an example to illustrate.  Let’s say there was an organization that had only two goals. One was to provide outstanding customer service; the other was to maximize profitability. The ranking of these two goals was never communicated to the people in the organization.

A customer calls in at 4:50 on a Friday afternoon requesting a special shipment. What response will the customer hear on the phone?  If maximizing profitability is perceived to be number one by the person handling the call, the customer will hear, “We’ll get right on it first thing Monday morning.”

If providing outstanding customer service is perceived to be number one, the customer will hear, “We’ll do whatever it takes to make it happen, and it will be on your dock when you open Monday morning.”  Now, assume that the request or shipment is not handled until Monday morning, and the GM gets an angry call from that customer.  The GM rips into the person who decided not to ship the order, and says, “I don’t know
what you were thinking—without customers, we don’t have a business. Don’t let that ever happen again!” The person apologizes profusely and swears it won’t re-occur.

Angry Boss CC

The phone rings on Friday at 4:50 just four days later. This time, everything is shipped out and arrives first thing Monday morning. On Thursday morning, the GM receives the overtime and expense report for the previous week.  Furious, the GM rips into the person again:  “We aren’t running a not-for-profit here! If we  don’t control our costs, we won’t have a business.What part of that don’t you understand?”  The person apologizes profusely and swears that they will try to do better the next time.

During seminars, when I ask, “What do you think will happen the next time the phone rings Friday at 4:50?” Many people laugh and say, “They won’t answer it.”

While that answer is humorous, my experience suggests an alternative does probably occur—because I have dealt with the aftermath.  At 4:52 on the third Friday, the person who answered the phone takes off for the office of the GM and says, “What do you want me to do about this situation?”

The GM makes a decision and doesn’t think twice about it. After a while, though, the GM gets frustrated and says to me during a meeting, “You know, it drives me crazy that no one will make a decision around here. What ever happened to people being willing to take responsibility and make a simple decision?” Keep in mind that this story only revolved around two goals. Imagine the confusion and inefficiencies when there are five, or 10, or more goals being worked on simultaneously in an organization.

Before I agree to help any organization improve its decision making abilities, I ask a simple question: do you publicize a list of goals in priority order? When they say they don’t, I know where I have to begin.

The Upside of Upside Down

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Whether they refer to them as raving fans, zealots for their business, loyal customers, or long-term clients, most executives today are trying to ensure their companies get and keep profitable customers. 

I often talk with executives about their current organizational structure and how personal and organizational power and communication flows within their organization.

Communication Flow Direction: Three Examples

Most likely, your org chart looks something like Figure 1. In this configuration, the perception of power by all concerned flows from high at the executive level down to low at the individual contributor level. It tends to follow the overall level of authority granted to those levels.

Power-Communication Flow

More often than not, it also reflects the overall direction of communication within your organization, with much more coming from the top down than from the bottom up.

When I ask where customers appear on the chart, many times, the answer is below the pyramid (Figure 2). Why is that so potentially devastating? Because it can lead to people paying more attention to internal politics than to the needs of customers.

Here is a real-life example from several years ago that shows how things, however well-intentioned, can run amok.

A food service company that was running deli-style restaurants in office buildings would typically staff them with two to four people because that level was considered productive and profitable. The food service president expected a report to be on his desk each business day by 2:00 pm. In an effort to not disappoint the boss, accounting staffers developed the habit of calling each restaurant between 11:30 am and 1:00 pm to get the final numbers from the day before.

The accounting department never thought about the fact that they were taking what limited staff the location had away from serving customers to feed the corporate monster’s need for data. Indeed, the accounting staffers did
not see store-operation employees as their customer and were disconnected from the real business the  company was in.

What makes this story even more pathetic is that their customers probably thought that they were paying a premium to receive fast, convenient service. Let’s face it, we don’t go into an establishment like that for a gourmet dining experience—we just want to grab something quickly and run back to our desks.

The deli staff, who are paid minimum wage, are unlikely candidates to say to callers from the main office who are working on a report for the president, “Tell the president that he’ll have to wait, I’ve got to make a bologna sandwich right now.” The fear of losing their jobs was too great, and so customers waited and fumed until the daily phone call was finished.

When we flip the pyramid over (Figure 3), it puts the customers on top of the hierarchy and creates a service delivery model that makes it easy to see who everyone on the company is really working for.

Here’s how things should be set up:

  • The individual contributor is focused on doing what it takes to attract loyal customers.
  • The supervisor/team leader helps keep the organization out of the way of the individual
    contributor.
  • The middle manager keeps the organization out of the way of the supervisors who are
    trying to help the individual contributors.
  • The executive team is there to ensure the organization keeps out of the way of the
    middle managers who are helping the supervisors help the individual contributors,
    all in an effort to attract and keep loyal customers.

Here’s an acid test. Ask yourself and your managers,

“Unless something is mandated by law or regulation, if our customers wouldn’t gladly pay for something we are doing, why are we doing it, and how can we eliminate it?”

Turnaround Thinking

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A recent presentation I attended triggered this thought:

How would we be operating our enterprise if we were going through a turnaround right now?

More Urgency, Less Pain

That led me to think about achieving transformation by thinking differently—without going through the massive pain and suffering a turnaround typically involves.

The causes of corporate decline include external factors such as negative changes in demand, increased competition, and changes in the cost structure or cost of goods due to rising commodity prices. Internal causes are typically issues such as poor management decisions, organizational inertia, inadequate financial controls, or ineffective marketing and sales efforts.

Applying Turnaround Thinking to Your Strategy

  • Turnaround_StrategyCan we mobilize ourselves to take advantage of the positive aspects this level of intensity and scrutiny brings?
  • Do we have to feel extreme stress and anxiety before we can move forward?
  • Do we have to rely on our own past experience because we haven’t made time to tap into the collective wisdom of our organization?

I certainly hope not.

When Kenneth Chenault was appointed a division president for American Express in 1993, he called his top team together and asked a question I still consider profound.

“Ladies and gentlemen, what kind of company could put us out of business, and what do
we have to do to become that company?”

That simple question, it seems, led to the reinvention of American Express Travel from top to bottom, with dramatic financial results. I believe the power was in the question as much as in the answers it spawned.

Think Fast

When I think of organizational transformation, I consider a broad range of subjects, including brand image and the customer loyalty it fosters. Think of this: if you were starting your business today but were allowed to know what you currently know, is your current brand image the image you would set out to create? If not, what changes would you want to make? Which of those changes are necessary and which are merely desirable?

When applying financial metrics such as assets, liabilities, retained earnings, working capital, EBITDA, and ratios appropriate to your segment, you can see indicators of performance as the guideposts they are. What needs to be done in the short and intermediate term? Where are your high-cost processes that add little customer value? Where are your slow processes that get in the way of satisfying your customers?

If you were starting your business today but were allowed to know what you currently know, is your current brand image the image you would set out to create? If not, what changes would you want to make?

When I think organizational issues, I think about the role senior executives play in shaping organizational culture. Is the behavior of the senior team indicative of what the organization is trying to achieve in the way it is trying to achieve it? Ask yourself, “Would the organization be better or worse if everyone behaved and operated exactly like the senior leadership?”

If your answer is that you’re not sure, you need to look at whether or not the organization is consistently supporting and rewarding the behaviors needed while extinguishing the undesirable behaviors.

Here are a few more questions to ask yourself:

  • Question IconDoes your structure totally support your strategy, with all people and processes in
    alignment?
  • Does your leadership consistently promote and reward a culture that engages and
    excites people toward achieving organizational targets in a way that makes them
    want to come to work every day?
  • If most of the people in your company hit the lottery with a huge win, would they
    come to work the following day?

If you thought “Who are you kidding?” after that last question, you need to take a long
hard look at how you are managing your human assets. Your future may depend on it.