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!

Managing Resistance to Change

At the risk of showing my inner-nerd, one of the more memorable sayings from the Star Trek series of shows (post Kirk & Crew) is: “Resistance is Futile.”  This of course was the mantra of the Borg, a race of part-human, part machines that sought to assimilate all life-forms into their collective.  Of course, their fatal weakness was that they were only able to operate as a collective…and lacked the many characteristics that ultimately serve as advantages and that make us distinct as humans.  (OK, I suspect that I’ve gone beyond showing my true nature and nerdiness.)

Resistance to Change in corporate life is a very real force, and of course, the bane of existence of the many advocates of change challenging you to put aside your fears and embrace the new way of doing things. 

H. James Harrington, writing in Quality Digest in an article entitled: Managing Resistance to Change—How to handle the inevitable, offers some insights and perspectives on dealing with this very powerful and limiting force in pursuit of a shift away from an organization’s status quo.  He writes:

“Sponsors who drive change tend to think of resistance as an inexplicable but avoidable force that affects people. When resistance occurs, they believe it’s actually a result of somebody’s failure. Typical responses are, "What’s wrong with that person? What’s wrong with that group? Why won’t they support our change effort? There must be something wrong with those people." In fact, such a perspective is a major barrier to successful change.”

Most so-called change agents when faced with resistance will adopt the universal tool for breaking through…the organizational sledgehammer.  Instead of finesse and psychology, resistance is often met with arguing, imploring, and something a bit more insidious…political approaches to gain compliance or eliminate the roadblocks.  Alternatively, Harrington offers: “Expect resistance and manage it, either through a preventive or healing approach.” 

His fine and short article reflects a “seek first to understand and then be understood” philosophy to dealing with this inevitable characteristic of organizational life.  Check out the rest of the article for his prescriptive guidance on dealing with resistance.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Resistance to your agenda for change might seem futile to you.  After all, who can argue with the expected benefits that you’ve so eloquently and logically outlined.  As Harrington indicates, you are going to pay for resistance up-front by dealing with it, or your going to pay during the life of the initiative.  Some resistance can be overcome through training and education and the rest will only be solved with accountability measures.  Proper investment up-front will hopefully minimize the cost and pain as the initiative unfolds.

Change or Die

Perhaps it is human nature, but we tend to eschew change either in our personal habits or in business settings until we are faced with mortality. 

In organizations, most significant change occurs during times of crisis when the threat of extinction sufficiently motivates individuals and groups to consider changing long-standing ways of doing things.   The crisis brings into stark focus the fact that it is easier and less costly to accept or embrace change than it is to suddenly become extinct.  Unfortunately, by the time this clarity is achieved at the top leadership levels, it is often too late.

As difficult as it is to follow the news everyday, we are living and working through a period of time when the extinction of firms and industries is taking place in front of us, like some business simulation game gone horribly wrong.  The game unfolds like this: focus only on short-term results, add in a measure of personal greed, consistently make the wrong decisions and act shocked as the results spiral out of control to the final act….a low probability of success, last ditch effort gambit (or bailout).

For some, the distance from the top of the Mount Olympus to the graveyards and swamps below is fast and furious.  The suddenness and rapidity of the fall is shocking, but perhaps easier to digest than those firms that have systematically planned their own demise step-by-step as they move from Masters of the Universe to what will soon be footnotes in our history books and business texts. 

As in life, there are no guarantees of survival…there is no prescriptive formula that says “if you do X then you survive and prosper,” but there are methods to improve your odds. 

How to Improve Your Odds of Survival

• Senior leaders must embrace the fact that survival and prosperity occur only at the pleasure of customers.  Instead of giving lip service to the importance of customers, you need to develop systems to constantly seek out, understand and translate into actions the Voice of the Customer.  This is remarkably difficult to do in practice and requires for many an impossible shift in culture and values.  Nonetheless, you must change or die.

• Senior leaders must embrace the fact that without motivated, dedicated employees they have nothing.  There can be no doubt that satisfied, engaged, respected, informed employees are essential for survival and success.  Why then are our systems and our managers and leaders so often at odds with what it takes to create an environment where employees will gladly give their best.   The poor leadership habits that are vestiges of another era must change or you will die.

• Call it total quality, performance excellence or whatever you want, but you must embed the notion of high performance and all that it takes to achieve it into the DNA of your organization’s culture.  Success can breed success or it can give birth to complacency.  An unyielding focus from the firm’s leaders on creating a high performance culture is required.  This means that the fire-fighting mentality must stop, clear performance/quality priorities  established and the systems developed to allow these to succeed and for people to learn in the process.  You must change to create a learning organization or you will die.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Change or die.  It’s that simple.

Does Your Dashboard of Performance Measurements Include a Warning Light?

Count me as one of the last idealists.  Or perhaps the last of the naïve idealists.  In a world filled with Quality Management Systems and Performance Measurement techniques backed by legions of people trained to implement and sustain quality performance, it seems reasonable to me that organizations are capable of not only keep themselves from imploding, but that they are armed to the teeth with tools to ensure prosperity beyond the wildest dreams of  Dr. Deming. 

As an aside, Dr. Deming once famously indicated that it was his hope that his legacy was to keep U.S. companies from committing suicide.  Perhaps it is good that he is not here to see the firms elbowing each other out of the way in an attempt to get to the front of the line on the edge of the cliff.

• The U.S. auto companies are almost finished carrying out their joint suicide pact in a world where the rules for success as an automobile company are on display for everyone to see. 

• Motorola, an icon of U.S. electronics has systematically destroyed itself by flailing and flailing in the mobile device (read: cellphone) world, and stands a reasonable chance of failing to survive without drastic action.   (See my earlier post on the Dollar Bill Auction to get a feeling for Motorola’s problems.)  The fact that Motorola is a Baldrige winner, one of the founding fathers of Six Sigma and an organization staffed with brilliant engineers, yet it cannot seem to engineer success is both puzzling and frustrating.

• Earlier this week, Boeing indicated that they would again delay the launch of its now several years late and much hyped 787 Dreamliner.  The article indicated that the latest problem had to do with quality issues related to a new type of fastener required for the high tech and lightweight materials being used in the plane.  The advance sale of 900 of these puppies at $178 million a piece and the expected 20% fuel consumption savings has customers hopping mad over this latest in a series of seemingly endless project management and supply chain problems. 

• Financial services, banking, investment banking.  Ugh.  These icons of risk management succeeding in maximizing risk beyond their wildest expectations.

How does this happen in a world filled with balanced scorecards and legions of certified quality professionals constantly measuring, monitoring and striving to improve performance?  I suspect that my own answer is that while we have ample tools available for our use in building, the one tool that we haven’t yet mastered is staring back at us in the mirror.

In discussions and lectures with the up and coming generation of leaders, there is widespread cynicism over the intentions and the capabilities of many of their firm’s senior leaders.  There is little faith expressed that their leaders understand their firm’s key drivers and little confidence that the leaders are taking actions and measuring performance based on anything other than preconceived notions of what they think is right.  Fewer organizations than you might think are doing anything to engender employee satisfaction…which is ironic given the mountains of data that indicate that employee satisfaction flows through to customer satisfaction and strong financial performance.

This current generation of senior leaders is failing, and the very imbalanced scorecard is visible all around us.  The business cycle is one thing, but our problems go way beyond the business cycle to our preconceived notions of how to lead, how to run businesses, how to fuel innovation and how to create an environment where talent and calculated risk-taking are carefully cultivated. 

Many organizations are hives of activity with no vector and the output is chaotic. Firms and top leaders need to quit guessing and start using the tools available to identify key business drivers and to measure and monitor the efforts and outcomes of focusing on those drivers. 

The Bottom-Line for Now:

There’s nothing like a good old-fashioned crisis to engender creativity.  Well, we have one.  In spite of the difficulties, it’s a great opportunity for organizations and leaders to quit paying lip-service to cliché’s like customer-satisfaction, performance excellence and quality.  It’s a big world with a growing population and while the forecast is stormy now, the seas will eventually calm and the sun will shine.  It will be interesting to see who has the courage and fortitude to do the things necessary to make it through the storm.  Even money that we find a whole new generation of leaders in the process. 

 

In Search of a Quantifiable Return on Leadership Development

Every few months, I run head-on into a discussion with someone (usually a prospective client) about how to value the return from investments in leadership development.  The question is not asked as a means of qualifying my services, but rather as a genuine practitioner-to-practitioner inquiry, not dissimilar to what two MDs might talk about with respect to the latest treatment results for an experimental drug program.  The person asking knows as well as I do that Return on Leadership Development continues to be an elusive issue that no one has substantively put to rest, and that our best answers are no stronger than impassioned, qualitative opinions. 

The venerable consulting firm, McKinsey & Company in their latest issue of The McKinsey Quarterly (2008, Number 4) offers some exciting results showing: “the relationship between financial performance as measured by profit per employee and ten dimensions of global management talent.”  Their findings: “Companies scoring in the top third of the survey (when all ten dimensions were combined” earned significantly higher profit per employee than those in the bottom third."

The McKinsey results showed strong correlations in three specific areas:

• The creation of globally consistent talent evaluation processes

• The management of cultural diversity

• The mobility of global leaders.

McKinsey indicated that the firms scoring top-third in any of these three areas had a 70% chance of scoring in top-third for financial performance.  Alternatively, companies scoring poorly on these practices had a strong chance of ending up in the bottom third for financial performance.

This is exciting information for anyone and everyone interested in gauging the impact of leadership development initiatives on corporate performance, however, before we consider this case closed, it is important to note McKinsey’s own comment that, "the study results do not show any true evidence of causality, but rather that the results, strengthen our belief that these are important areas on which businesses and HR leaders should focus their attention.”  It always comes down to belief.  Welcome to my conversations, McKinsey.

Should it Be Return on Expectations?

Another interesting thought comes from Professor Albert Vicere who describes his experience facilitating a group of executives through a discussion on how to calculate a return on leadership development:

“Discussion on how to calculate a return on leadership development and learning investments were frustrating until we saw the light, stopped talking about return on investment (ROI), and began talking about return on expectations (ROE).  Participants agreed that due to all sorts of complications we may never be able to calculate a clear financial return on learning initiatives, but if we’re clear on what we’re trying to accomplish through leadership development and learning and if we measure our results against those expectations, we may have the data we need to prove the value of our investments.”

OK, at least this group is giving us a reason to accept that valuing leadership development is a tough task. It is good to know that a bunch of smart people sat around thinking about this dilemma and the best that they could come up with was looking at from a different perspective.  They may be right, and the careful expectation setting and measurement around very specific leadership development initiatives may just yield the elusive data that we’ve been seeking.

Is it time to sharpen Occam’s Razor?

More often than not,the rough translation of  Occam’s Razor: “All things being equal, the simplest solution is the best,” proves true.  My non-statistically significant, can’t prove causality hunch is that effective leadership development practices are part of a whole system and that attempting to value them independent of the other components, while intellectually stimulating, is essentially valueless.  This is perhaps like attempting to value the worth of having a healthy heart in a cancer ravaged body or a healthy body carrying an artery-clogged heart.  No matter how you look at it, the body and organizations function as complex systems and a problem in any one part can adversely impact issues across the entire system. 

Aren't These The True Measures of Leadership Development's Value:

•    Quality
•    Financial health and performance (company and versus industry)
•    Innovation
•    Ability to Execute on Strategy
•    Employee Satisfaction
•    Customer Satisfaction
•    Growth versus industry participants
•    Retention and advancement of the right people and elimination of others
•    Fulfillment of mission
•    Growing contribution to community and society

The Bottom-Line for Now

If these items are generally accepted and desirable outcomes of a well-functioning organization, then executives looking at their talent development programs should quit focusing on the search for discrete ROI measures, and instead focus on identifying those practices that are likely to contribute the most to the above.  We may not prove causality, but just like McKinsey, it is my belief that focusing on becoming great at the right few talent and leadership development practices will yield higher performance than not focusing on these issues.  My vote says focus on: individual development planning, feedback and widespread involvement in strategy creation and execution, and the results will come and the other leadership development pieces will naturally fall into place.  Oh, and the decision on how to invest in development activities is a management team decision, not just an HR call.  Leadership Development is everyone’s business.

Surviving and Prospering Under a Weak Leader

It’s not secret that complaining about the boss is part of the culture of many teams and organizations.  The person in charge is an easy target and a certain amount of healthy griping about the boss may be cathartic for his or her subordinates.  It creates a common bond on teams where any form of bonding can help strengthen relationships and possibly performance.

When working with clients in consulting environments or working with teams in workshops, I tend to tune out background boss chatter until the tone and content of the conversation crosses what I call the Performance Line.  This line is crossed when it becomes clear to me that the performance of an individual or a team is being held hostage by a weak leader. 

In my recent post, Weak Leadership at the Top Derails the Pursuit of Performance Excellence, I characterize the problem as follows: Instead of overwhelming their associates with strict orders in pursuit of rigid targets, they (weak leaders) default on their responsibility to set direction in a poorly constructed attempt to create an environment of empowerment. The results of this approach include endless discussions without resultant actions and massive frustration of well-intended personnel that want to move projects and ideas forward. 

If you are working for someone that resembles this description, it can be a truly debilitating experience, especially if your nature is to drive and to innovate and experiment in pursuit of success.  Working for a weak leader can make you feel like you are running the Boston Marathon with your feet permanently encased in concrete.

I’ve worked with teams to identify ideas to help people break out of the concrete shoes created by a weak leader.  Here are some of the suggestions that they’ve come up with as they’ve talked through this dilemma.  Perhaps one or more of these will work for you.

Five Non-confrontational Suggestions for Coping and Even Prospering Under a Well-Meaning but Weak Leader

1. Make the leader the hero.  Not all weak leaders are bad people, and sometimes a dose of self-confidence is just what the doctor ordered.  Talk with this individual, paint a picture of how things will be different when the initiative in question is successful.  Show that you and your team have done a good job isolating and planning for the risks, and tie the expected outcomes back to organizational objectives or in the case of nonprofits, organizational missions. 

2.  Build Coalitions Across Your Peer Group.  A weak leader tends to create a vacuum of decision-making.  This vacuum can be filled by the leader’s subordinates aligned around the common need for action.  This is not a confrontational coalition, but rather a working coalition that moves things forward in spite of the leader. 

3.  Recognize the Psychology of the Weak Leader and Use Judo on It.  The weak leader syndrome is frequently a function of a lack of self-confidence, fear of having to say no to a subordinate and upsetting them, and perhaps fear of team mistakes shining directly on the leader.  This same person has a need to succeed, a desire to be liked and wants to feel that he or she has a voice in the direction.  Leverage this leader as you would a counselor.  Ask for help in framing solutions (even if it has already been framed), and make the leader very genuinely feel like an advisor and coach.  Make it comfortable for him or her to give feedback, and encourage this at every opportunity.  Involve the leader in brainstorming or in status reviews and do an extraordinary job of highlighting progress and or problems and how they are being handled. 

4.  Coach the Leader.  In spite of the lofty position, top leaders are often hungry for feedback and interested in receiving coaching from people that they trust.  Create opportunities for discussions that are not all about you.  If the leader provides an opening (many will), ask a few open ended questions about how things are going, what it’s like to deal with the Board etc., and shut up and let him or her talk.  It is amazing how lonely it can be at the top, and this act of listening can do a great deal of good in gaining the trust of a leader.

5.  Learn to Understand the Priorities of the Leader.  Applying several of the approaches above will help you understand the leader’s individual priorities (personal and professional).  This knowledge is priceless if you and your peers use it to help the leader meet his or her targets. 

The Bottom-Line for Now

Learning to manage your team leader takes time and requires extraordinary care and handling.  Being indecisive and failing to set direction are big shortcomings for a leader, but leaders that carry these attributes are all too common. You and your peers can either let the water-cooler complaints dominate the daily agenda or you can do something about it.  Teams and individuals that have leveraged some or all of the suggestions above have reported some nice successes.  No complete cures, but some nice successes and sustained progress in the right direction.  When your feet are cast in concrete, progress of any kind is good.

Weak Leadership at the Top Derails The Pursuit of Performance Excellence

While some top executives err on the side of asserting a dictatorial style of leadership that poisons the working environment and stifles independent action, in my experience, many more struggle with just the opposite.  Instead of overwhelming their associates with strict orders in pursuit of rigid targets, they default on their responsibility to set direction in a poorly constructed attempt to create an environment of empowerment. The results of this approach include endless discussions without resultant actions and massive frustration of well-intended personnel that want to move projects and ideas forward.

This laissez-faire top leadership style is particularly problematic when teams are facing vexing problems: a new strategy vector, the need to change imposed by external forces or a new operating initiative (e.g. a quality program).  At the point in time where resolve is required to step off the cliff in pursuit of the new initiative, this leader steps back and waits for the group to agree to jump. And waits, and waits, and then waits some more, while the group endlessly debates what it means to jump.  Committees are born, research initiatives established, and political agendas developed and asserted.  And still, the top leader waits, fearful that asserting authority will undermine the independent thinking and free spirited structure of the team.  What a disaster.

Don’t misinterpret my tone as an indictment of empowerment and the need for self-directed work teams at the senior level.  I believe that the best performing teams have a wide berth when it comes to identifying problems and developing and implementing solutions.  However, this type of effective team culture comes as a result of a conscious decision to empower.  Inherent in this conscious decision is the understanding of all parties that there is accountability for making progress and for ultimately improving the organization.  This is very different from the form of leadership where the lack of a decision and lack of responsibility for action is the permanent outcome.

I cannot speak with certainty about why some top leaders suffer from a chronically weak leadership and decision-making style, however, I suspect that it has a lot to do with a concern for upsetting people and a general discomfort with giving feedback.  Top leaders are most definitely not immune from the same challenges that everyone else faces when it comes to conducting tough discussions with others.  Top leaders want to be liked, they want to be respected and they want their direct reports to feel good about what they are doing, where they are working and who they are working for.   All of these provide good reasons for not upsetting the apple-cart in the mind of the top leader.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

There are no magical cures for the top leader that lacks the resolve to assert direction, require action or give feedback to under-performing teams or individuals.  Coaching can help if the individual recognizes his or her shortcomings and truly wants to change.  And while some top executives are willing to go down this path, too many are beyond the point where they think that they need to improve.  After all, they are in charge.

Next: How to survive if you work for a weak leader.

Leadership Development: "This is Squishy Feely" Stuff

The “Squishy Feely” statement was on a recent comment card for a workshop that I conducted.  The follow on note to that very technical phrase was, “We’re not going to do this.” 

The “stuff” and the “this” that this individual was referencing included things like:

• Providing growth opportunities for the firm’s associates by structuring assignments for developmental purposes.

• Working to identify the firm’s high potential talent and ensure that these individuals are gaining the experience and exposure that they need to develop into leaders in the near future.

• Increasing mentoring, coaching and improving feedback practices.  A survey of the firm’s associates indicated that this is generally absent from the environment.

• Involving people outside of the senior staff in providing input for strategy assessment and formulation.  It is presently a closed-door process.

• Taking time as a senior team to identify the attributes of future leaders and to begin forming a practical leadership competency model.

And a few other “Squishy Feely” things like the above.

It’s not uncommon to run into resistance from the senior members of an organization that has just recognized that it might be good to professionalize and improve talent development and acquisition processes.  I can even understand the “Squishy Feely” comment coming from a grizzled functional veteran that grew up in a world where the topic of talent identification, development and retention was not as front and center as it increasingly is today.  However the statement: “We’re not going to do this,” is impossible to fathom.   It’s a lot like saying, “It’s good to be ignorant.”  Or, “It’s OK not to breathe.”

Without launching into a diatribe on the need for organizations to become great at identifying, developing and retaining talent (I’ve co-authored a book and composed about 130 blog posts on this topic), I will instead encourage the professional dealing with the subject of leadership development to recognize the reality of the resistance that they face.    Ignorance and apathy are powerful adversaries and their cousin, fear of change, is perhaps even stronger. 

If you are leading or involved in driving the topic of leadership/talent development in your organization or with your team, it pays to understand what you are up against and to steel yourself for the resistance.  If you are doing this at the senior level, expect a marathon, not a sprint and take heart in the small, incremental victories. 

My post of a few months ago, Teaching a Senior Leadership Team to Dance with Leadership Development, includes what I believe are some useful tips for anyone involved with this issue at the top levels.  In it, I propose 8 Steps to Mastering the Leadership Development Dance, and frankly, upon further review and after considering the “Squishy Feely” comment, I stand behind the steps.  I am hopeful that they also have something for the mid-level manager seeking to strengthen practices at his or her level as well.)

The Bottom-Line for Now:

I can’t imagine not doing everything possible to arm myself and my company with the best possible talent at every level of the organization.  The day that the “We’re not going to do this” types retire or are otherwise invited to do something else is a victory for the rest of the organization.  Some will see the light…others will go on happy in their ignorance and narrowly focused on their minute to minute mission.  If you are about creating the future, don’t let the resisters slow you down. 

Has Your Management Team Decided to Be Successful Yet?

It is always great fun to work with management groups interested in growing their businesses, pursuing a new and bold vision or embarking upon new strategic directions.  More often than not, these groups have enjoyed success, established themselves and their firm in a favorable position and have a common excitement about what the future might hold.  They also talk about the fact that change will be necessary for growth, and it is usually about this point that the wheels start wobbling.

For some reason, teams that heretofore were successful often struggle at the point in time where they recognize that the business must change, and that means that they must change along with it.  We all know that the talents and skills that help launch a successful start-up may not be the same talents and skills needed to reach $10 million in annual revenue.  And a $40 million dollar company is much different than a $10 million or the start-up from whence it came.  And so on. 

As alluring as a grand new vision or compelling growth plan for the future might be, everyone on a management team knows that pulling this off will require significant change to what has often been a comfortable situation.  The reactions are fascinating.  People quickly anchor in some form of defensive or offensive behavior. 

• The passive-aggressive type nods her head in the meeting and proceeds to resist change in her everyday actions and decisions. 

• The doom-sayer plays on the very real fear that teams have of not only not succeeding, but of potentially taking steps in the wrong direction.

•  The cultural cheerleader frets about the loss of “what made us great”. 

• The anti-establishment type highlights the burden that the new bureaucracy will impose on the organization. 

Often, the net result is paralysis while the Chief Executive processes on the seemingly real and genuine fears of his or her top lieutenants. This period of paralysis over change is what I refer to as the point in time where the management team has not decided to be successful.  It doesn’t’ mean they want to be unsuccessful, they just haven’t decided that they want to succeed by the new definition.  Prior to this point, success was clear.  Hit our numbers, do our jobs, satisfy our customers and repeat.  Going forward, deciding to be successful means all of those plus creating needed infrastructure, engaging new talent, inviting new faces to the table and much more. 

There is no doubt that the issue of taking a good thing and trying to make it better, bigger and stronger is a complex and emotional one for many humans.  There are scores of books written on the topic of leading change in business. (Some of the best come from John Kotter.)  My issue is simple, and it is generally targeted at the top executive (or executives plural).  There is a time for debate, there is a time to let people vent and posture, and there is soon after, a time to move forward.  This point in time reflects the “decision to succeed” and is manifested by a new set of behaviors:

• Discussions begin to address tough topics with a focus on fixing or improving, not placing blame.

• The “We Can’t” or the “We’ve Never” discussions turn into “Why Can’t We” and “What If” discussions that result in ideas, actions and experiments.

• Dialogue down the organization ladder and across silos starts to take on the tone and feeling of action and forward movement.

• Problems shift to resource issues, project priority calls and the need to create new processes and approaches for decision making.

• Talent identification, leadership development and succession planning take on a new urgency and are called out as key priorities.

The Bottom Line for Now

The point in time when a firm decides to succeed on an agenda of change is the beginning of a great and challenging experience for everyone involved.  We work to live, but it is much more fun to live and work and grow and strive with a team that decided to be a success.  Unfortunately, many teams never move out of the abyss of “not deciding to succeed” and they decline until a crisis shocks the system or they eventually disappear from the landscape.   If your firm has not yet decided to be successful, you owe it to yourself and the firm to help move that decision along.  It’s really quite simple.  Management Team: please quit standing in the way of your own success and get on with it. 

Good People or Good Ideas? The Importance of the Working Environment

Ed Catmul, cofounder of Pixar and president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios offers his perspective on the people versus ideas question in a powerful and practical leadership article entitled: How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity, in the September, 2008 issue of the Harvard Business Review.

Mr. Catmul is quick to offer his selection of “people” over ideas, a choice that almost might seem counter intuitive for the leader of an organization that clearly wins or loses on big ideas.  While acknowledging that great creativity is essential starting with the “High Concept” (the high-level idea for a new production) and continuing through thousands of steps to completing the project, he submits that it is the working environment that allows this creativity to emerge and evolve rapidly and effectively.  (As an aside, his description of moving from the “high concept” to the finished product as “an archaeological dig where you don’t know what you’re looking for or whether you will even find anything,” wonderfully describes the reality of the creative process in so many functions and industries.  As leaders, we are well served to remember that creativity doesn’t happen on command and rarely on schedule.”

Your Priority as a Leader: Create the Right Working Environment

Catmul’s thesis: getting talented people to work together requires a working environment that nurtures trusting and respectful relationships and unleashes everyone’s creativity, is valid for leaders at all levels and all situations.  The concept of creating the effective working environment is so important to me that it earned a full chapter in my portion of my book with Rich Petro, Practical Lessons in Leadership.  It is also the essence of my description of “The Leader’s Charter” which starts out with the words…”The true role of a leader is to create an environment that… .” 

Mr. Catmull offers that while “most executives at least pay lip service to the notion that they need to get good people and should set their standards high, how many understand the importance of creating an environment that supports great people and encourages them to support one another so the whole is far greater than the sum of the parts.” 

This great article goes on to tie in Pixar’s three key operating principles as powerful components of their effective working environment:

• Everyone must have the freedom to communicate with anyone (my phrase: an effective feedback culture)

• It must be safe for everyone to offer ideas (feedback culture again)

• Stay close to innovations in the academic community (my interpretation: foster a learning organization). 

Pixar’s operating principles emphasizing open communications, mutual respect and the development of trust are bolstered by a refreshing attitude towards risk:

"Management’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the capability to recover when failures occur." 

And on pursuing a compelling vision:

"We as executives have to resist our natural tendency to avoid or minimize risks, which is of course much easier said than done."

The Bottom-Line for Now:

After many years of leading and now several years of working with aspiring and experienced leaders in all manner of industries and cultures, I remain convinced that most individuals lack proper context for their role as leaders.  The great leaders at all levels understand that they have a unique responsibility and unique power to adapt and form their working environment to the unique circumstances at a point in time.  Less effective leaders allow the environment to form around the wrong issues including ego (theirs) and petty politics.  The lessons of Pixar are hard-won and the outcomes visible to all.  You would be well served to listen, learn and apply some of Mr. Catmul’s wisdom to your environment.