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!

Improve Strategy and Execution Planning with Project Management Practices

I’ve danced with this topic before (Struggling with Strategy? Think Project Management), and the more experience that I gain helping clients improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their strategic planning and execution program development activities through project management practices, the more sold I am on the approach.

In my experience, many of the biggest gaffes in strategy and execution planning processes occur because the common-sense steps of the Project Manager are ignored, often because a functional leader or worse yet, an executive is charged with running the project. 

Just a few areas where I’ve observed complete strategy project derailment because good project management practices were ignored:

• The meetings grind down in a never-ending sea of fact-finding, debate and then more debate.

• Instead of focusing on strategic issues, the discussions quickly shift to short-term operational issues.

• Tools are misapplied.

• The deliverables are a powerpoint deck and a bunch of disgruntled participants that realize that they will never get the time that they just wasted back again.

• Insular groups that practice strategic planning like it is a combination of Voodoo and a secret language, complete with a secret handshake for entry into meetings. 

• Ideas are generated, but there is no mechanism to turn them into actions.

• Actions take place but there are no mechanisms to evaluate relative success and gain lessons learned

• A strategy is created but the organization’s employees are not tuned in to the strategy well-enough to understand how to connect their priorities to the strategic objectives of the firm.

• The Voice of the Customer is never heard.

And so on…

Enter the Project Manager armed with skills required to improve the odds of success.  I encourage management teams to treat a strategic planning cycle as a series of projects, and to engage a senior-level project manager to run the process.

Suggestions to Improve Strategy and Execution Program Effectiveness include:

• Creation of a Charter and the assignment of an executive sponsor that is responsible for the success of the initiative.

• Identification of core Strategy Team members, and their responsibilities/accountabilities in the process.

• Development of a clear scope document that defines priorities and deliverables.

• Communication of the Charter and Scope materials by the Executive Sponsor and Project Manager to the broader organization to promote understanding and to gain support for involvement in data gathering and brainstorming as well as future sessions on execution.

• Project Manager working with the core strategy team to define up-front data needs, to help identify the project’s work breakdown structure and to coordinate scheduling and resources for upfront data gathering.

• On-going monitoring of work teams that are handling early phase data gathering, market assessments, customer interviews and competitor analysis.

• Monitoring and control of the project to ensure that it moves relatively smoothly through the phases from definition to data gathering, assessment, options identification, options analysis, options selection and execution program definition.

• Once options are identified and selected, these define logical projects, and the Project Manager and PM team are already in-place to hit the ground running in helping to move ideas into actions.

The Bottom-line for Now

The application of professional project management practices to the strategic planning and execution program development cycles of an organization can eliminate many of the common pitfalls that derail these programs. 

While the Project Manager cannot guarantee that the insights and actions developed during strategy are the right ones, he/she can take away the organizational-risk that so often rears its head to doom the best intended initiatives.  Instead of shooting yourself in both feet while running a footrace, let the Project Manager shoulder the weapon and leave you free to run fast and hard towards creating value for your customers and stakeholders. 

“If I had asked customers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Students of business history might recognize the quote above as coming from Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motor Company and one of the early management innovators.  Mr. Ford’s quote raises a profound issue of when and how to listen to customers, or perhaps the more challenging flip side: when not to listen to customers.

The notion of not asking customers what they want and responding directly to their needs may seem like heresy to those individuals and organizations consumed with improving customer satisfaction and creating customer loyalty.  In fact, you should always listen and importantly, observe.  The real art in this process is understanding what customers really need, what problems they really would like to solve and what approaches and experiences that you can create that can surprise and delight them.

Harvard Professor, Clayton Christensen, seized upon this issue in his Innovator’s Dilemma/Innovator’s Solution books, where he suggests that a well-intentioned business may do everything right by listening and responding to customer requests, and ultimately fail as disruptive offerings upset the status quo.  

In my own work in the technology space over the past two decades, it is easy to look back at product development cycles driven by a never-ending desire to cram in customer-driven features, without a good understanding of why those features were needed and whether they were solving key problems or attacking symptoms.  It always felt like we were doing the right thing, but in hindsight, it was blind marketing. As Product Management systems improved and requirements development received more scrutiny, this situation improved.  Nonetheless, it is hard to see how the forest is changing when you are staring so intently at the trees. 

Christensen’s classic scenario is the company that dutifully enhances its offerings based on client input, ultimately creating bloated offerings with capabilities far exceeding what might be required of many or any buyers.  In the interim, a disruptive offering…something perhaps with fewer features and priced much lower (not always the case) can easily swoop in and…well, disrupt the market.  In essence, the well-managed, well-intentioned company created a vacuum that was filled by someone who understood the essence of the client’s problems…not just the features they were asking for.  (Think “Faster Horses” versus a new mode of transportation.)

The authors of the recent book, Tuned In, tackle this important topic by suggesting that a firm focus on developing Resonators, products or services that practically sell themselves.  Their six step process for creating a resonator and for Tuning In is in my opinion, a framework for avoiding the Innovator’s Dilemma that Christensen warns us about.

The design firm Ideo in their famous Deep Dive segment on ABC News showcase a process for design innovation that is what you might imagine a sociological dig would look like, as they follow and observe the various “buyers” of shopping carts in pursuit of understanding how this classic device could be grossly improved to better solve real problems.  While there is a fair amount of criticism of the “made for TV” nature of this episode, it offers some classic lessons in looking and observing to identify significant and perhaps even disruptive improvements.  Just asking a store manager or a customer about what they would like to see improved in their shopping cart may be insufficient for identifying what a shopping cart might actually be able to do.  Think cell phones and the iphone. 

The Bottom Line for Now:

My message here is intended as a cautionary tale.  It is good and right and noble to pursue increasing levels of customer satisfaction in your framework for operational excellence.  However, it is also easy to be misled by false signals, and sometimes those signals come from your customers.  Remember, they know you in a narrow context, so when they engage with you to talk about improving the Widgets that you make, they are thinking about you only as the Widget Company and as users of your widgets.  Their context is to give you ideas to improve your widgets. Just remember that it is quite possible that they don’t need a better widget or a faster horse. 

You need to build the institutional intelligence, the systems and of course the talent that truly focuses on understanding the unstated needs of buyers.  Of course, once you understand this, the real work of meeting and exceeding those needs as an organization begins. 

Common Sense and the Role of Leadership in Project Management Success

Dr. James T. Brown, PMP, offers a number of interesting observations about achieving the right balance between methodology and pragmatism in his PM World Today Viewpoints article, entitled: Why Your Project Management Methodology Doesn’t Matter Much.  His central thesis is: “It is not the methodology that is the primary factor of success.  It is the leadership!”

Dr. Brown encourages clients to focus on to beware that, “too much methodology can contribute to project failure.”  He suggests: “Strong leadership is striking a balance between people dependency and process dependency with respect to the given methodology.”

Art’s Comments:

Dr. Brown is right to caution about the over-reliance on methodology as a guarantee of success.  In particular, I’ve worked around early-career Project Managers that with the best of intentions have ridden the methodology horse all the way to project failure.  By the same token, I’ve worked in client organizations where the leadership was either too cavalier about supporting the methodology or falsely assumed that they once the chosen methodology was in place, their job was complete. 

An organization’s leaders must be actively involved in supporting project success, and part of their role is serving as the gatekeeper on when methodology can be sacrificed on the altar of project progress.  Project Managers must be astute enough to recognize the early warning signs of methodology overload and engage their project teams, sponsors and senior leadership on the issues so that changes to the process can be properly vetted and concluded.

“One Size Does Not Fit All”

I love Dr. Brown’s phrase: “Project Management is simply Structured, Organized, Common Sense.”  He suggests that if requirements are relatively fluid and the project contains high uncertainty, then is common sense to choose an iterative method.  Alternatively, mission-critical projects demand a strict development methodology to minimize risk and optimize chances for success. 

Art’s Comments:

Leadership plays a critical role in assessing the importance of a project to a firm’s goals or strategies.  Those projects deemed mission critical merit strict (but not unyielding) adherence to a defined methodology.  An established software firm with many products may be able to relax time constraints on smaller or lower priority projects without suffering significant repercussions.  Alternatively, an early-stage firm dependent upon a new release to satisfy early adopter clients can ill afford to deviate from a methodology that will ensure an on-time release in line with customer requirements.  Methodology and reasons for violating or adapting the methodology should be considered in the initial project planning and prioritization phases and communicated to all stakeholders.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

As organizations grow increasingly dependent upon project execution and professional project management practices to drive strategy execution, a firm’s leaders have to be smart enough and engaged enough to recognize an imbalance between process and people.  Methodologies are guidelines to be strictly or liberally adhered to depending upon circumstances.  Good leadership in this sense means tuning in to project activities at a level sufficient to ensure that the right approaches are being applied for the right reasons.  While your methodology might have its champions, don’t lose track of the fact that the methodology must enable success, not fight it.

HR Has Yet to Establish Credibility As Weapon in War for Talent

The August, 2008 Issue of the McKinsey Quarterly Chart Focus Newsletter includes an interesting article highlighting the expanding perception gap between HR Professionals and Line Managers over HR’s role in Talent Management. 

The article: Realigning the HR Function to Manage Talent, identifies three major challenges in the continuing war for talent:

1. Minimal collaboration and talent sharing among business units
2. Ineffective line management
3. Confusion about the role of HR. 

Additionally, the article offers up the latest survey results on what McKinsey describes as the declining influence of the human-resources function. Line Managers significantly differ with their HR counterparts over:

•  HR’s capabilities to develop talent strategies aligned with business objectives (33 percentage point gap)

• HR’s accountability for success or failure of talent-management initiatives (28 point gap)

•  Whether Talent Management is the responsibility of HR (22 point gap). 

None of the gaps are favorable towards HR.

Art’s Quick-Take:

I’ve observed a few great HR leaders that really understand that they are key enablers of a firm’s talent management success and key participants in the strategy process.  However, many others and many HR departments remain pigeonholed as compliance police and benefits administrators.  An enlightened management team and CEO recognize the strategic value of HR.  They also recognize that talent development and management is the responsibility of all of a firm’s leaders and not just HR.

As an aside, there are no excuses for the perception gaps highlighted above.  Twenty lashes for the leadership groups that allow those gaps to emerge and sustain.

One suggestion if you are a manager or leader in a firm with a generally tactical HR function: ask for help.  You might be surprised how anxious your HR professionals are to engage in something outside the normal bounds of compliance or benefits.

While not quick to throw stones as my own functional counterparts (sales and marketing) have plenty of their own challenges, it is time for HR to stand-up and be counted on as a key enabler of strategy. They can start by helping their firm institutionalize talent identification, recruitment, retention and development.

Do Your Employees Truly Believe That They Can Make A Difference?

I am busy preparing for my fall MBA teaching assignments and I tripped across an interesting survey about employees and change (circa 2006) in the excellent text: Managing for Quality and Performance Excellence by Evans and Lindsay. (Note, contrary to my comments regarding some other management texts that I’ve run across, this one has a great deal to offer both the student and the instructor.)

The survey of Fortune 500 employees offered an interesting insight into what your employees might really be thinking while you as a leader are delivering yet again, another of your famous “take risks, innovate, create and you are empowered” pep talks.  The survey results said that 79% of respondents understood that they were accountable for “taking initiative and bringing about change,”40% of the respondents indicated: “they do not believe that they can make a personal contribution.” 

While employees are often appropriately cynical about the disingenuous cheerleading of many leaders, if you’ve got 4 out of 10 members of your firm “not believing” that they can make a personal difference in the firm’s success, you’ve got a crisis on your hands! 

I’ve written in prior posts that a leader should strive to ensure that everyone in a firm can pass the “Walk in the Door” test.  Simply stated, everyone in the organization must be able to connect their priorities to a firm’s key objectives and strategies when they walk in or log on to begin their day’s work.  Easy to write, hard to realize, but definitely not impossible to achieve.  However, if 4 out of 10 employees don’t buy in to the belief that they can and will make a difference to a firm’s performance, my speculation is that “To Do” lists are filled with Urgent but Unimportant tasks that fill time and ultimately come to represent a person’s corporate existence. 

Leadership Root Causes of the 40% Malaise Organization:

1. Leaders lack credibility to help bring about change.  People have heard the same pitches over and over again, but have not seen leaders step up and remove impediments or make the process and structural changes needed to allow people to create.
2. The leaders talk change, but the bureaucratic procedures and silo politics serve to flush any hope for change down the drain.
3. Leaders have failed to create proper awareness of a galvanizing vision and supporting strategy.  Vision and strategy are likely abstract concepts to most employees in a 40% Malaise Organization. 
4. Communication is likely stilted and tough discussions avoided, or worse, discouraged or even punished.
5. Systems and processes fight change and directly contradict the lofty exhortations of the leaders.
6. Accountability for results is fuzzy.  Malaise prospers and spreads in environment where accountability is kept in the closet, like mildew in a damp basement.

The Cure(s): Apply Some Good Leadership Common Sense Quickly:

• It’s hard to resist the “fire the leaders” that got you here in the first place.  If you are the new leader at the top of your organization or team, give this one some strong consideration.  Otherwise, keep reading.

• Quit talking and start listening and acting.  The problem and the solutions are in your court.  Seek to understand the level and depth of the malaise and why your associates believe that they cannot make a difference.  What are the impediments?  What systems, processes or behaviors confounding attempts at change and creativity?  What management practices have ripped the heart out of any desire for people to solve the big problems?

• Provide people with context for the firm’s situation and build widespread awareness of a clear vision for the future.  Ask everyone how to realize the vision and begin involving a broad swath of the population in defining strategies and actions.  Create and publicize victories for teams and individuals as small changes take root and big changes begin to develop.

• Open communication channels, encourage and reward individuals willing to identify problems and solutions to tough issues.  Hold your leadership team accountable to listening to ideas and acting on removing impediments.  Eliminate the leaders that are more concerned with politics than results and replace them with leaders that understand what it takes to help a culture evolve at light-speed.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Every leader should spend a few minutes at night staring at the ceiling and pondering whether his or her employees are truly engaged in helping the business advance.  If your perception is that the answer is "Yes," ask yourself how you can truly be certain.  A company marches forward on attitude, and if the attitude is that “my input doesn’t matter,” you’re in deep trouble.  It’s time to quit talking and start asking, listening and acting.  How engaged are your employees?

Constancy of Purpose In Pursuit of Success

Deming’s first of his 14 Points for Management reads: Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive and to stay in business, and to provide jobs.

The phrase, “Constancy of Purpose” strikes me as perhaps the best way I’ve heard to describe that intangible but palpable drive that propels the most effective individuals and the most successful organizations. 

Instead of being singularly focused in pursuit of our goals, most professionals that I know struggle to find even a shred of time to work on the most important priorities.  It’s not that they don’t have the time, but rather, they allow the noise in the environment to keep them from focusing. 

Other individuals fail to recognize their true priorities, or at least they fail to understand how to connect their priorities to the firm’s priorities, and as a result, they work on what they want to, or they do little or nothing at all.  This is as much a leadership failure as it is the failure of the individual.

I marvel at top executives that talk about “empowered employees” and hold round-tables and town-hall meetings in an effort to create the illusion of focus and connectedness, but that fail to figure out how to light the fuse that creates the constancy of purpose in the minds and hearts of every single individual in the organization.  These leaders understand that they are supposed to do something, and as a result, they drive a lot of activities but don’t necessarily create a constancy of purpose in the organization. In military parlance, they are “all action and no vector.”

Organizations and individuals march forward when they have a clear goal and sight and are driven by some deep collective conviction that when successful, the world will be a better place, that they will be better professionals and that their positions and as a result, their families will be secure.  The earlier that a leader understands that creating “constancy of purpose” is a core task, the faster they are on their way to truly fulfilling their obligation and responsibility as a leader.

Creating Constancy of Purpose on Your Team:

• Don’t assume that everyone around or under you understands why they are there and what their priorities are.  It is up to you as leader to provide this critical context.

• Constantly focus on connecting your team’s output and activities to the organization’s big picture.

• In the absence of a broad organization “constancy of purpose” (most environments), it is up to you as leader to manufacture one for your team.  Better yet, engage your team in creating their own overarching purpose.  Just remember that you still need to plug it into the organization’s pursuit of success, however success is defined.

• The best ideas often reside in the minds of the quietest people.  Create opportunities for the silent but brilliant individuals to contribute.  

• Everyone drifts from the true north of their priorities—you need to allow an appropriate amount of drift for individuals and teams and no when and how to help them reorient.

• If you are at the top of the food chain, you do own mission, vision and values, and they need to be much more than posters on the wall in conference rooms and lobbies.  You cannot spend enough time thinking about and working on making the mission, vision and values come alive for the organization.  It’s not a campaign or a one-off meeting…your goal is to make these often trivial and trivialized words serve as the rallying cry and standards for performance and behavior.

The Bottom Line for Now:

Leadership is profession and leading is a true privilege.  This most difficult of all human endeavors—leading, motivating and guiding teams to achieve can be done by seeking compliance or providing inspiration.  I’ll place my bet on the leader that fuels the collective and individual passions of a firm’s employees.  What’s your firm's Constancy of Purpose?

Inspirational Leadership: The Victim of the Balanced Scorecard?

Note from Art: Today's post is by Guest Blogger, Amy Meyer, a veteran technology marketing and product/project management professional, and an all around talented leader and wonderful person.  I hope that this post helps launch Amy's blogging career.  She has a lot to say worth listening to. (More Bio/Contact Info at end of post.)

My name is Amy Meyer and I have had the pleasure of working for and with Art for many years.  I look back on this time with gratitude, for the experience has rewarded me with life-long insights into how a company can achieve and maintain excellence.  But I can also tell you that this is truly a double-edged sword.  The experience has also made me less tolerant of poor leadership and as Art continually shares, there are plenty of examples from which to draw.

Today I’d like to cover what I believe to be a disturbing management trend.  In today’s world of the Balanced Scorecard, companies have never focused so much energy on alignment of results with strategy.  I applaud the approach.  In fact I recommend it.  But sadly it seems that for some organizations, results have become the sole focal point—the only thing that matters.  What they are losing touch with is the fact that results are driven, at least in most companies, by living, breathing human beings. 

It’s time these companies face the facts.  You can’t get results by placing a scorecard in front of a talented individual and say “Get this done or you won’t get a raise next year”, and then walk away.  This approach only works if your goal is to drive up your attrition rates and lose your best and brightest.

A balanced scorecard is not a replacement for leadership.  To blow your scorecards out of the water, you need to nurture those people who make the magic happen.  This requires more than management—it requires inspirational leadership.  It is great to have smart people as colleagues and friends, because they can help you out if you ever need to write a guest blog!  In this case I asked some of my most respected how they would define an inspirational leader.  Here’s what they had to say.

An Inspirational Leader is Someone Who...   

• Includes you in deciding the team’s direction rather than telling you what direction to go

• Picks up the shovel and digs with you rather than standing above you telling you to dig faster

• Makes other people feel important and appreciated, helps people believe in themselves

• Sets the pace, leading by example rather than decree

• Only assumes credit for providing his or her team the opportunity to succeed

• Motivates through personal performance examples and exemplifies the skills that he\she possesses through knowledge transfer and demonstration

• Knows when and how to encourage individual talents and maintains team integrity while respecting every individual

• Takes time to understand team members, creating bi-directional relationships that ensures the team that he/she has their best interests in mind

• Is proactive rather than reactive—two steps ahead, instead of one step behind

• Creates excitement in the workplace

• Builds efficient teams by trusting the occupational strengths of his or her subordinates and recognizes individual talents that balance one another

• Builds team morale by recognizing work-related achievements

• Provides opportunities for development on enjoyable and challenging projects rather than artificially inseminating the team with mandatory bonding events

• Sets a credible and ethical example to follow, has integrity

• Displays exceptional communication behavior, both as a speaker and listener, using well-educated inference as necessary

• Can either make or break a company

It’s time to wake up.  Scorecards are measurements.  To achieve and exceed your corporate goals requires the inspiration of confident leaders.  So, how are you doing?  Are you providing your team the support they need to achieve the results the organization requires?  Why don’t you ask them what you could change to make them more successful!  Being an inspirational leader requires a thick skin.  Have the courage and the self-confidence to learn from the team you serve.

--

Amy Meyer is a veteran technology professional with a broad spectrum of experience including strategic marketing, product and project management, software development and IT management.  Amy is currently focusing her efforts and research on the topic of enhancing technology project success through investment in talented individuals and collaboration with cross-functional stakeholders.  If you share Amy's passion for the topic, feel free to contact her via e-mail at amy.meyer@charter.net

From Imperial Court to Learning Organization

Today’s post was stimulated by a great article in the July/August 2008 Harvard Business Review, The Competitive Imperative of Learning, where Professor Amy Edmonson of Harvard Business School outlines the differences between organizations that focus on execution as efficiency—doing things better and faster than your competition versus execution as learning—focusing on learning and adapting faster.

In brief, Professor Edmonson compares and contrasts the approaches used in the traditional industrial age model of motivation and performance evaluation processes versus those required for today’s knowledge-worker dominated organizations.  The approaches required for success in the two models are dramatically different.

In the Execution as Efficiency model, Professor Edmonson indicates that leaders provide answers, employees follow directions and optimal work processes are designed and set up in advance.  In the Execution as Learning model, leaders set direction and articulate the mission, employees discover the answers and work processes are highly fluid, adapting at the speed of organizational learning.

Practical Applications: A lot of Executive Talk, but...

When it comes to driving change, words and actions must match. Few organizations are immune to the massive forces constantly reshaping the world around us, and few organizations can afford to live solely by the Execution as Efficiency model.  We live and work in a world increasingly dominated by knowledge workers, and while one part of an organization may be dominated by an efficiency orientation, other areas, marketing, sales, research and development, must move towards a learning approach or face dire consequences in the marketplace. 

In my own experience working with organizations that have grown up with an emphasis on efficiency but are talking about the need to become more flexible and adaptable, it is often the people doing the talking that are serving as the barriers to change by failing to revamp outmoded systems and processes.

Five Barriers that Get In the Way of Developing a Learning Organization:

1. The Imperial CEO and Royal Executives: A class system that puts undue weight on the import of executives.  Instead of the executives serving the organization, it seems like the organization exists to serve the executives.
2. Strategy by Edict and Set According to the Calendar: Every year at about the same time, the organization stops and waits while the royal court sits behind closed doors working out the new organizational structure and lofty statements that provide the masses inspiration to work hard until they receive fresh inspiration next year.
3. Strategy by Default: “We have a strategy, and it’s to sell more,” is a commonly heard phrase in this tuned-out environment.   Another is, “Strategy is for the big boys, and we’re too small to worry about anything other than doing our jobs.”
4. People as Expenses: the words coming from the mouths of executives might be saying “People are our most important asset,” but the systems supporting the identification, development and retention of talent are saying, “People are our biggest cost.”
5. The Functional Structure: specialization works in some areas, but in general, the silo structure of many/most orientations is the greatest impediment to shared learning.  While the phrase, “we’re all in sales” is commonly shouted by salespeople frustrated with the lack of organizational support, the fact is that, “marketing is truly too important to be left to just the marketing department.” 

What to Do If Your Organization Needs to Learn:

• Take the royalty out of the royal court.  This culture shift has to start at the top—the non-CEO Chairman of the Board and the other independent board members have to step up and overthrow the caste system and monarchy that pervades so many executive environments.

• Recognize and act on strategy as a process that involves everyone.  (I’ve posted on this one seemingly a thousand times, so I’ll spare you the details and direct you to the Strategy category on this blog.)

• A robust execution process with plenty of accountability and constant evaluation of performance and consideration of lessons learned is the fastest way to pump up organizational learning.

• Make the identification, development and retention of talent the job of every manager or supervisor in the organization.  Challenge HR to create systems to support these activities and start living up to the notion that people are your greatest assets.

• Break down the walls by at least moving towards a strong matrix or a project environment for major initiatives.  Cease and desist with throwing initiatives over silo walls, and build a project culture with the charter to execute and to educate the organization on lessons learned.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

It’s time to quit talking about becoming a learning organization and start knocking down the time worn conventions, institutions and processes that stand in your organization's way.  In an ideal world, this change starts at the top with an insightful leader or leadership team that understand what it takes to move from an efficiency orientation to a learning focus.  In reality, a lot of this change will need to be driven by leaders in the middle that clearly see what is happening in the external environment as well as what it takes to win in that environment.  If necessary, let the royals executives posture and play while you go about the business of changing the business one initiative at a time.

Ironically, Mid-Level Managers May Save Your Business

Ever since terms like reengineering, right sizing and downsizing became part of the corporate lexicon; midlevel managers have been taking it on the chin.  This once populous class has been synergized and right-sized almost to extinction.  Those that remain often struggle with spans of control as wide as the Golden Gate Bridge and limited authority that is constantly challenged from above and below.  I find it just a bit ironic (and appropriate) that this much-abused class of leader may just hold the key to surviving and prospering in tough times.

In a great article in the July 7. 2008 Wall Street Journal, entitled: In Search of Growth Leaders, authors Carr, Liedtka, Rosen and Wiltbank offer the results of their multi-year study of the role that midlevel managers play in fueling organic growth.  Their conclusion: "most companies have managers who can turbo charge results.  The trick is finding—and nurturing—them.  Read the article for some great insights on finding and developing these critical midlevel leaders. (And read my post: Management By Jane: Leading Effectively from the Middle for some additional thoughts.)

The Power of Great Managers in the Middle:

• Appropriately trained and armed, midlevel managers are directly focusing on strategy execution—they lead the teams that do the work that drives performance. If your organization is failing to execute on strategic objectives, look to the middle, not to place blame, but to identify what you can do better to help your managers succeed.

• As the article authors highlight, a tremendous amount of innovation comes from the middle.  In my own experience, the managers that fuel innovation are the ones that are relentless about creating the right conditions for their associates to succeed.   Breaking down barriers and taking the heat for bending the rules are common and comfortable tasks of the innovative midlevel manager.

• The most important talent scouts and developers are often found in the middle of organizations.  The savvy manager recognizes the import of identifying and developing emerging leaders, competent role players and potentially brilliant individual contributors. While top management might want the organization to become good at this talent scouting and development, like strategy execution, the majority of the heavy lifting takes place in the middle.

Five Ideas to Strengthen Your Support and Success In the Middle:

1. Change your perspective on the midlevel management layer.  Instead of looking
at the organization chart and seeing cost to be minimized or taken out, look at this group as resources to enable strategy execution, fuel innovation and scout and develop talent.  Quit broadening spans of control to the point of ridiculousness, and begin setting goals around strategy, innovation and development, and suddenly the cost perspective starts melting away.

2. Involve midlevel managers in strategy formulation...not just in rubber-stamping the strategy formulated by executives.  Remember, the people in the middle likely understand your customers and your organization's capabilities at a much more detailed level than those of you with V's or C's in your title.

3. Create systems to help midlevel managers experiment with and implement new ideas.  Provide key managers and manager groups with executive sponsors charged with cutting through corporate clutter to help get things done.

4. Reward successes, provide visibility and learn from misfires.  Easy words to write and speak, but realizing this environment takes discipline. 

5. Recognize the fact that new classes of virtual leaders...Project Managers and Product Managers have emerged over the past two decades to replace the former middle level.  These critical positions often carry tremendous responsibility burdens with little real authority across functional boundaries.  If these positions exist in your organizations, strive to create the sponsors, systems and infrastructure to allow them to perform.

6. As an executive, get over yourself.  No one said that you are required to have all of the answers.  It's a sign of strength, not weakness if you are emotionally secure and intelligent enough to recognize that your strength comes from your ability to get the best from willing contributors. Take the time to invest in reinventing your leadership style.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

The article referenced above is must reading for every executive looking to solve the challenges of how to fuel organic growth.  Innovation doesn't occur on command, and while good accidents happen (e.g. think 3M and Post-Its), hope as we all know is a lousy strategy. 

I teach, train and support midlevel managers in all forms of organizations and by and large, I find them generally miserable about their tasks and their ability to positively impact their organization.  The majority of their frustration stems from working for leaders that succeed in stifling the conditions required for innovation and execution to flourish.  The opportunity is in the middle...not the problem.  For the source of the problem, take a long, hard look in the mirror.