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!

Back to School!

We delivered our oldest son to college on Friday and our high school senior survived (barely) the annual “first day of school picture” in our backyard this morning.  I am busy preparing class  materials for my Fall MBA courses and it feels like summer is officially over regardless of what the meteorological calendar says.

I love “Back to School” time every year.  There’s a palpable level of excitement in the air tinged with just a bit of sadness about the end of vacations, beach reading and weekend barbecues.  It’s also a time where education is (or should be) the focal point in many households as students and parents get ready for homework, tests and projects.  And while we all know that education and learning have no season, our reliance in the U.S. Midwest on an arcane but not unpleasant long summer break (versus year-around school interspersed with shorter breaks in many other regions), makes the return to school all the more dramatic. 

One of the things we often lose as busy working adults is that sense of excitement about learning.  It’s easy to let years and even decades slip by and focus on everything but our own self-development.  Sure, we attend mandated training in our company and possibly even the periodic seminar to earn the Continuing Education Units (CEUs) mandated by our professional certifying organizations.  Unfortunately, neither of those formats creates the exhilarating sense of learning and discovery that we may have had at some time earlier in our lives, but lost along the way to becoming responsible adults.

As a hiring manager for many years and now as a leadership development trainer and consultant, I’ve talked with hundreds of people about their continuing education, and I am always surprised when people struggle to describe anything substantive in this area.  Somewhere earlier in my school career, I remember an educator banging the drum repeatedly that “learning is a life-long process,” and I believed him. 

It’s my observation that the most capable and most successful individuals are constantly seeking knowledge, relentlessly working to expand their skills and often driven by some inner-sense of the need to learn through exposure to new ideas.  If you fit this description, quit reading and get back to what you were doing.  If you have to go back decades to recall the last course you took or the last time you read a book that wasn’t on the fiction best-seller list (nothing wrong with fiction best sellers, but diversity is good), here’s a list of activities to help you rekindle your love of learning and your pursuit of knowledge:

• Join a local book club (contact your library for ideas) and gain from the perspectives of others and the rigor of having to stay on task with your reading assignments.

• Start and lead a book club at your place of work—you might even get the company to pay for the books!

• Spend some time researching the state of the art in education and certifications for your profession.  If you end up feeling hopelessly outdated, it’s time to take the next step and choose a workshop, a certification program or even another degree program.

• If you hate the idea of physically attending class, investigate on-line opportunities.  The number of programs delivered on-line is growing daily and the flexibility is great for busy people.

• Consider a program outside your core field of expertise.  In the Chicago-area, Northwestern, University of Chicago and DePaul all have some remarkable humanities and literature programs that are designed for and filled with doctors, lawyers, teachers and professionals from every other possible vocation.  If you don’t want the rigor of a degree investigate certificate options or possibly even just auditing a course.  Individuals that I know that have gone through these courses credit them for helping open their eyes to a whole world of ideas that they didn’t know existed.

• More reading.  Put down the trade journals for a while and pursue something in the history or biography sections.  It’s remarkable what we learn from studying what others have already gone through.

• Executive Education can be exhilarating.  I go to Kellogg to recharge and I always leave a program with ideas to help improve my performance and my business.  Exec Ed is big business and big $, but many companies support the initiative.

• Take advantage of tuition reimbursement dollars from your company.  Most organizations never spend what they’ve budgeted in this area.  You can help solve this problem.

• Seek out a mentor.  Depending upon where you are at in your career, this can be an enlightening experience. If you are beyond the “seeking” phase, consider becoming a mentor.

• Teach a class.  A wise person indicated that if you want to learn about something, sign up to teach a class about it. 

• Volunteer to lead an initiative in the community.  Some of the best leaders and project managers that I know are found on the teams and programs in schools and churches.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

The brain is a lot like the body…use it and it stays fit and ready for action.  Allow it to atrophy and everything becomes a struggle.  You have a remarkable capacity to learn.  Whether you use it or not is up to you. 

The concept of the Learning Organization is well established and widely acknowledged as a requirement for realizing and sustaining success.  Senge described the need to not only create organizations that learn and adapt, but to realize those that become generative and to create their own futures.  Your ability to consistently add value to your organization is in large part related to your active pursuit of new ideas and new ways of looking at the world. 

What’s on your mind today?

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?

 

Strengthen Your Team By Seeking People Who Believe that They Can Grow

In this must-read article: “If You’re Open to Growth, You Tend to Grow,” by Janet Rae-Dupree, Stanford Psychologist Carol Dweck  summarizes decades of research into how people think about intelligence and talent with the following:

“Those who believe that they were born with all the smarts and gifts they’re every going to have approach life with a fixed mind-set.  Those who believe that their own abilities can expand over time, however, live with a growth mind-set.”

Dweck goes on to indicate: “People who believe in the power of talent tend not to fulfill their potential because they’re so concerned with looking smart and not making mistakes. But people who believe that talent can be developed are the ones who really push, stretch, confront their own mistakes and learn from them.”

The article continues with some great examples and worthwhile advice for any leader or recruiter charged with building or strengthening a team. 

Rethink How and Where You Look for Talent:

The greatest personal/professional successes that I’ve witnessed over my career have come from individuals with an unyielding thirst for knowledge and personal development. While many of these individuals were gifted with natural abilities, their innate sense of adventure and experimentation and their attitude that failure puts you one step closer to success, combined to help these individuals create great careers.

Interestingly, many of the successes that I recall were with individuals working in lower-level jobs due to lack of formal credentials.  The secretary that developed into a remarkable marketing professional; the customer service rep that became a consistent top-seller and ultimately a successful sales executive and the technician that developed into a great product manager, are just a few of the examples of people that were driven by a growth mind-set.  Of course, it didn’t hurt that these professionals benefitted from a supervisor or manager along the way that took the time to get to know them and recognize their potential for growth. It took an enlightened observer to see the talent and the hunger in these individuals

Don’t Let the Pedigree Be the Only Determinant:

I can think of numerous examples of situations where clearly brilliant individuals failed miserably because they were afraid that if they slipped up, the world might question their brilliance.  Instead of helping the business, these individuals spent most of their time making certain that everyone around them understood how smart they were.  And while the academic credentials were visible, if you looked beneath the ivy, there was no innate drive to succeed; no focus on innovating and no interest even to learn by trying and failing. 

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Look back on your own recent string of hires and promotions, and if your batting average is lower than you would like it to be, consider Ms. Dweck’s advice: “look for both talent and a growth mind-set in prospective hires—people with a passion for learning who thrive on challenge and change.  And remember to open your eyes and look around you for talent in unexpected places.  Your greatest future success stories might be closer than they appear.