Art Petty on Management

Art Petty on Management Has Changed and Moved

I don't like to do things small or simple, so in what I sincerely hope is the absolute last time I put myself and you through this, I have moved and changed the name of my blog. 

You will now find me at www.artpetty.com and the new name of the blog is Management Excellence.

As I'm writing this and realizing that most people that have moved blogs have basically had to start over from zero to build traffic, this seems like taking two steps in the wrong direction.  However, sometimes you have to step back to grow, and I've got some compelling reasons for making the move, including:

• Integrating my former corporate web site and my blog under one content management system.

• Creating a simpler url (artpetty.com...12 characters versus the almost 40 for this site).

• Gaining the tools and the control through a hosted blog so that I can easily add planned podcasts, webcasts, forums and other tools that I will roll out this year.

• Aligning my blog's name: Management Excellence with my personal mission to promote high performance, great leadership and the pursuit of excellence in business.  

All of the posts and hopefully, all of the comments have been moved to the new site, so 14 months,  160 plus essays and a tremendous number of thoughtful comments on best practices in leadership and strategy, project management, product management and marketing and sales, all remain part of the library. 

For those of you that subscribe via your favorite Reader or happen across this post via Search, please take the opportunity to visit the new Management Excellence site and click on the site's feed.  And don't forget to check out some of the new tools, including the live polls, free down-loadable tools and links and references to many other great resources.

Thanks so much for reading and referencing Art Petty on Management, and I hope to earn your confidence many times over in my new home at the Management Excellence blog!

The Leadership Art (and Importance) of Encouraging Constructive Dissent

I hear frequently from leaders that wish their employees would disagree with them more often when discussing complex issues. 

“I’ve told everyone over and over again that they should be comfortable disagreeing with me, but other than some polite alternatives, no one seems to have the courage to speak up,”  indicated one frustrated executive that I talked with recently.

“We all know that when the discussion ends we’re going to do it her way, so why bother wasting our time debating,” said one of the employees of the frustrated executive.

In this situation, the executive was sending mixed signals.  While her employees acknowledged that she verbally encouraged constructive debate, no one seemed to believe that she truly meant it.   One of her employees indicated that the message never matched the body language—“she never looks like she truly wants anyone to disagree,” he said. 

In the article Reaching Your Potential, by Robert S. Kaplan, in the July-August, 2008 Harvard Business Review, Prof. Kaplan cites a scenario where a CEO was frustrated that none of his three top reports raised their concerns over a prospective hire, in spite of the fact that two of them had serious reservations.  The candidate was hired and the concerns only came to light once he began to struggle.  The executives had concluded, “the CEOs mind was made up and that speaking up was unwise.”

Professor Kaplan observes that: “Otherwise overconfident executives sometimes overestimate the career risk of speaking up and meaningfully underestimate the risk of staying silent.”  He adds: “I have seldom seen people hurt their careers by speaking up and appropriately articulating a well-thought out contrary position.  However, I have seen many bitter and confused people who stalled their careers by playing it safe.”

Leader, Heal Thyself!

In both examples above (and in most examples that I've observed), the leaders clearly failed to create the working environment that allowed and even encouraged constructive dissent. While the employees can be faulted for not acting in the best interests of their firm, there was something in the environment that triggered their survival instinct and indicated that it was safer to stay silent than to speak up.  The leader invariable controls the “something” and needs to focus on reshaping the environment to open up the communication flow. 

• How severe is the problem?  The leader should ask his or her reports about their comfort and discomfort in providing feedback. What are the barriers?  What behaviors is the leader displaying that shut down constructive dissent?  If the personal interviews go nowhere or if there is no 360-degree feedback system in place, try a simple, anonymous survey. 

• Leader, learn to manage your body language.  We all learn somewhere in our travels that if you combine a verbal message with seemingly conflicting non-verbal cues, the non-verbal wins out every time.

• Recognize that giving in to alternative viewpoints (from your own) does not mean that you are weak or ineffective.  To the contrary, it’s your job to hire smart people with different ways of looking at the world and solving problems.  The greatest leaders have great advisors.  Give your people a chance to play that role.

• If you are like many of the leaders that I know, you will allow a group to run in their own direction even though you had a different idea of where they should go.  You will also come to the uncomfortable conclusion that they were right and you were wrong.   Your confidence in calling this out will reinforce the notion that you encourage well-thought out dissent. 

The Bottom-Line for Now:

This topic goes to the heart of creating an effective feedback culture—one where everyone is comfortable tackling the tough topics and highlighting when the Emperor has no clothes.  The discomfort of a team in expressing alternative viewpoints with a leader is one sign that all is not right with the feedback culture.  In many cases, some simple behavioral adjustments and appropriate reinforcement on the part of the leader can open the spigot to some great ideas from some smart people.  Remember, the contest is in the market for the hearts, minds and dollars of your customers, it’s not in your team meetings to show that you’re the smartest. 

How comfortable are your associates in disagreeing with you?

 

Living, Learning and Leading in an Increasingly Virtual World

Somewhere between the world I grew up in and the world that we are living in today, everything about working, leading and learning began to change.  It’s increasingly a virtual world, and everything about communicating, interacting and developing relationships feels a bit different than it used to.  While many/most of us are compliant with the changes in communications (telex to fax to e-mail to IM, web conferencing etc.), I wonder how many of us are truly working to become competent at living and working in this world. 

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reminded of the changes in how we live, learn, earn and engage, and I’m working hard to adapt. 

• A valued colleague sends me a note expressing frustration over the challenges of leading remotely.  I can’t believe I haven’t spent more time on this valuable topic.  Stay tuned.

• I delivered a webinar and I realized that I have to get better at communicating without interaction.  I’ve set a schedule to begin doing some of these blog posts as podcasts as a means of increasing my comfort and competence communicating to an invisible audience.

• I signed up to teach an on-line course expressly for the purpose of discovering what it means to “teach” on-line.

• My kids don’t use their phones for talking.  If I want to reach them, I send a text message and get a response practically before I’m done typing.  (I saw this coming a few years ago when I asked my youngest son why he never calls friends on the phone.  He looked at me kind of funny and said, “Why would I want to talk with one person when I can be on-line with all of my friends at the same time.”)

• An article at Fast Company indicates that in the next few years, technology will obliterate the need to travel.  (Hmmm, I'm suspicious of the word obliterate.)

• I am busy working on an on-line content strategy to augment my own face-to-face seminar/workshop activities. 

The common thread in all of these items is the shift in how we work, lead and learn.  Like it or not, the world is becoming more and more virtual everyday, and those of us that are old enough to remember life before fax machines and e-mail will be well-served to quit fighting the trend and start learning how to become competent and comfortable communicating to no-one and everyone at the same time. 

It was just a few years ago that I received my first request to fund an employee’s pursuit of an on-line degree.  I am a staunch advocate of the importance of the face-to-face network developed at school, especially for MBA students, and while I approved the request, I recall challenging the value.  Since that time, I know of dozens of professionals that have had great experiences earning degrees on-line.  I still question whether there is any chance that you can develop a close network in that manner, but hey, this is the era of Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn, where it is seemingly more about contacts than close relationships.  (I’m still suspicious of that premise.)

One of the critical leadership skills of our time is developing comfort and competence at leading distributed teams.  There are still some firms that insist on their managers and leaders being housed within a line of sight, but they are showing their lack of understanding of how the world is changing.  The literature on leading remotely seems to offer superficial guidance from people adapting old models to new situations.  I suspect that as time moves on, the profession of leadership will evolve to take into account the very distinct skills and approaches needed to lead effectively while never coming into personal contact.  (As a side note, I deal with many people on the receiving side of remote leadership.  At best, the leader to employee relationships they describe are superficial.  We haven’t figured this one out yet. )

The Bottom-Line for Now:

The difference between compliance with new technologies and new styles of communicating and competence at leveraging these tools and styles for results is significant.  Deriving value from virtual leader/employee relationships or on-line learning is a very different task for all parties involved than it was in the almost bygone era of face-to-face.  It’s time to quit fighting the changes and learn how to master the new opportunities to engage.  I still struggle to see how these new methods will replicate the richness of face-to-face communication, but that’s my problem to deal with as the world keeps changing.  In the meantime, if you are looking for me, don’t call…I’m busy learning how to communicate all over again.