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!

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. 

 

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.

Drive Out Fear in Your Organization's Leadership Approaches

Students of the late W. Edwards Deming, the quality guru and management consultant will quickly recognize the phrase, “Drive Out Fear” as number 8 of his 14 points for achieving quality excellence.   Dr. Deming penned his points during a period in the twentieth century when the approach to leading in business was highly autocratic; a style that he believed inhibited organizational advancement around quality.  While prevailing leadership styles may have moderated a bit from the “command and control” approach so common a few decades ago, there is ample evidence that “fear” is still used liberally by organizations and small-minded managers to assert control and to drive compliance.

A few examples of Management by Fear:

• There’s the manager that frequently and publicly drops hints in departmental meetings about the likelihood of layoffs and the expectation that he will have to let go 2 out of 10 on his team.   

• One of my favorites: the General Manager who gets visibly angry every time one of his key subordinates submits a vacation request form.  According to one of his workers, “He clearly does not believe in vacations, and let’s us know that it will hurt our future opportunities if we insist on take time off from work.”

• I blogged earlier this year about the manager who railed at his employees: “The only way you will be on my team is if you are married to the job.”  This same dipstick indicated what commitment means to him with: “The only way you will see me in a family vacation picture is with a blackberry stuck to my ear.” 

• A colleague described the manager who expects 100% support of her ideas and policies.  Dissenters have an interesting habit of either being fired or relegated to corporate Siberia working alone on or on projects that no one else would touch.

• One of my personal favorites is the manager that expects his co-workers to join him for drinks in the evening and rewards those who attend with the choice assignments and rides herd on those that refuse to worship his seat at the bar.

• An adult student in one of my recent management classes indicated that it was common for employees to be publicly humiliated by the screaming, cursing, belittling boss that just so happened to be one of the children of the founder. 

Type the phrase “Workplace Bullying” into your favorite search engine, and you will be rewarded with a bevy of articles describing the growing awareness of this destructive behavior and its consequences for individuals, teams and organizations.  Many of these articles describe the problem as “epidemic” and a number of organizations are responding with training programs on “bullying” similar to those on sexual harassment.

Fear is a tool that leaders have used to rule and subjugate throughout all of recorded history.  Those with power use fear to gain compliance, to protect their position or to achieve their ends.  Instead of the local warlord or playground thug, today’s corporate bully is likely a well-dressed, articulate professional that puts on a good face for the higher-ups and a completely different face for direct reports.

Suggestions for Smoking Out the Bullies in Your Organization:

• Make it a clear and visible practice to spend time talking with the team members of your direct reports.  While your intent should not be to spy on the managers that work for you, if you establish a decent rapport with the broader team members, you will be more apt to pick upon the signs that indicate a bully is at work. 

• Create on-going review programs and survey process that gauge manager performance, work-environment satisfaction and that provide people with an opportunity to safely highlight concerns. 

• Ensure that everyone understands that you have a zero-tolerance policy for bullying.  Live up to this policy when the occasion arises or it will be meaningless.

• Be aware that most bullying is done quietly.  While it’s easy to recognize the boss that dresses down employees in public, you have to work harder to identify the quiet assassins in your workplace.

• Make certain that your own behaviors don’t rationalize bullying to the bullies.  In many instances, the leaders frustrated with examples of heavy-handedness are themselves highly autocratic leaders that exhibit behavior that borders on bullying. 

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Spend some time to determine whether “fear” is a factor in your organization.  If people are in fear for their jobs or living in fear of falling under the wrath of a bully boss, they will not create, innovate or even execute their basic job functions in a quality manner.  While today’s corporate bully is not shaking down the other kids for lunch money, he or she is shaking them down and stripping away their self-esteem, their drive and their desire to help the organization succeed.  It’s time to hit back.

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?

What to Do With a Lousy Boss

More often than not during a workshop, someone will raise their hand and ask, "All of this stuff about being a good leader is nice, but what do I do about my lousy boss?"  Being fairly fast on my feet, I resort to the facilitator's fail-safe of "asking the audience" before offering my own suggestions on this dicey issue.  Not surprisingly, there are few satisfying answers (that don't include jail-time for you as a possible outcome) to this dilemma shared by so many. 

Generally, the complaints fall into one of the following categories:

Doesn't support me

Offers plenty of criticism

Criticizes/berates in public

Contradicts himself/herself

Micromanages and then criticizes me for not making decisions

Takes credit and dispenses blame

Loves his ideas...won't listen to our suggestions

And so on...

The fact is that as the subordinate you don't have many good options unless you have grounds for complaint based on harassment, discrimination or other legal concerns.  For sake of discussion, let's limit the complaint list to the interactions and issues highlighted above.

What's An Emotionally Abused Employee to Do?

The responses back from other workshop participants fall into similar categories and reflect the limited number of options that the victimized employee truly has in this situation.  (My value-add in italics.)

Approach the manager and provide feedback on the disturbing behaviors.

I like this one, because it reflects that someone is thinking about applying the workshop content to a real situation.  Some well-intentioned managers are not aware of all of their bad habits, and the properly constructed feedback conversation can be a valuable coaching tip for the manager.  Less enlightened managers will respond with anger and/or retribution.  My advice...read the situation, read the manager and it might be worth a carefully constructed conversation to raise the topic.  If the manager views you as wanting to help him/her improve results/performance, you may pull this off.  If you start softly and the conversation quickly deteriorates, bail out.

Take your complaint(s) to HR

HR professionals everywhere may rankle, but I hate this suggestion.  Setting up HR to be the father and mother confessor and creating the expectation that HR can fix all of these issues is poor practice in my opinion.  I've worked with a few deft HR professionals that can help individuals and teams navigate this type of a situation, but they are in the minority. 

Leapfrog your boss

This is another risky proposition, and people employing it need to keep in mind that in a "he said/she said" debate between you and your boss, you lose. 

Approach the boss en masse

This, "safety in numbers" strategy has a high failure rate, because when push comes to shove everyone is more concerned about their job than trying to get the boss to change.  If you are leading this charge, be prepared to go it alone.

Transfer within the company

If you like and are committed to the organization, a transfer can be one way to potentially escape a lousy boss.  Follow your firm's posting rules, don't do anything behind your manager's back and hope that he/she doesn't make the process more difficult for you.  Also, if you apply for and don't get a job in another department, remember that you still have to work for the lousy boss. 

Leave the organization

This is often the path that good people take, and it certainly solves the immediate problem.  If you do not believe that you can escape the clutches of this lousy manager and if you are not committed to your organization for your near-future growth, exiting stage right is great.  However, look before you leap.  Choosing a job just to escape a boss is an emotionally charged situation that can have you making a bad and potentially career damaging choice.

The Bottom-line for Now:

I suspect like most of the workshop participants seeking wisdom from their peers, that you might leave this post feeling like you didn't find the answer you were looking for.  My polite rebuttal is that the easy answer you are seeking doesn't exist.  Most of us have worked for leaders that we've not respected and have probably tried some or all of the above approaches along with a "Wait and See" tactic.  Choosing your approach depends a lot upon your situation.  How badly do you need the job?  How comfortable are you in dealing with potential repercussions?  Is your organization's culture tolerant of aberrant leader behavior or are those types eventually flushed out and eliminated?

My guidance is to take personal stock of your situation, recognize the risks that you are taking in pursuing any line of action (or the psychic damage in doing nothing), prepare and act.  I offer polite, constructive feedback (I coach upwards) and if that doesn't work, transfer or leave.  Life is short and you should not let your career or your self-esteem be held hostage by some chuckle head of a leader.