Tag: Leadership

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Behavior Empathy Leadership

Why an Open-Door Policy is Insufficient in Building Trust

Leaders who profess to having an open-door policy are often puzzled by the fact that very few team members tell them what’s really going on in the organization. They receive all the positive developments, even if they are a bit of a stretch, and none of the negatives. Even when asking specific questions that are intended to encourage participants to share risks and issues they are answered with a positive spin.

Another situation which we see frequently, and as advisors we experience this too, is when we ask for any comments or observations we are met with silence. Now, is that because no one has anything to say or because they don’t want to say it in our presence? If only the water cooler could share what it overhears.

Over the years we have had this conversation many times and the answer invariably rests on the leader’s behavior. To build an environment where people are free to share their ideas, opinions, and observations you have to make people feel safe.

Words and actions matter here. Saying you are open is not the same as acting open. If you meet disagreement with an explanation as to why the speaker is wrong, then you shut down future dialogue. If you interrogate and pepper managers with questions every time you meet to discuss an assignment or project, they’re not going to want to meet with you. If you’re more focused on your ego, being right, or not creating extra work for yourself you’re unlikely to develop an environment for safe dialogue.

“Emotional intelligence is not the opposite of intelligence; it is not the triumph of heart over head – it is the unique intersection of both. 

– David Caruso

Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is the basis for creating a safe environment for people to grow, develop, and excel.

EQ is a Superpower.

Research suggests that EQ alone explains 58% of a leader’s job performance and that 90% percent of top performers are high in EQ. Limeade, an employee experience software company, in their 2019 whitepaper “The Science of Care” noted that when employees feel safe, they are 10 times more likely to recommend their company as a great place to work and 9 times more likely to stay at their company for three or more years.

When conducting an executive search experiences, education, and capabilities begin to look similar across an array of candidates. What differentiates a successful candidate is their EQ and their ability to understand and relate to others and use that to improve outcomes, relationships, and develop others.

So, if you have an open-door policy and feel that you are still not receiving the feedback you would like then begin by focusing inward. Check your EQ.

Categories
Behavior Complexity Leadership

Avoiding Suddenly is really a Story of Fixing Gradually

Eddie Cantor coined the phrase “It takes 20 years to become an overnight success.” His public debut was in 1907, singing in a music hall. Cantor spent a decade touring, refining his craft, developing new material and finally made his Broadway debut in 1918. It wasn’t until 1927, after another decade, that he reached notoriety with Kid Boots in 1923.

Gradually to suddenly applies to successful outcomes as well as devastating outcomes. This is the because the power of compounding affects our upside just as much to as impacts our downside. Seth Godin refers to how incremental daily progress is what actually causes transformation. 

“Showing up, every single day, gaining in strength, organizing for the long haul, building connection, laying track — this subtle but difficult work is how culture changes.”

Seth Godin

The same is true for organizations. Some of the best, well known brands such as McDonald’s, Nike, and Starbucks all had their twenty years of success making.

Even looking at companies out there today; we can see them building their craft, refining their brand, and building customer loyalty. Peloton, the creator of the indoor, connected biking experience, is a great example. They are eight years into their journey and already have over 2.5M members and their members now regularly complete 1M workouts a day. They’re just getting started. For sure, Peloton has seen a bump in both members and workouts as a result of the lockdown(s) in the USA and UK but in April 2020, its debut ‘Live from Home’ ride broke the record for the largest live class. They had over 23,000 participants.

Peloton is looking to the future, aiming for 100 million subscribers, through broadening their product portfolio, expanding their geographic reach, and creating better experiences. People aren’t necessarily going back to the gym and Peloton may well provide an alternative to those looking for a competitive spin class experience at home. We are looking forward to following their success.

What Cantor and Peloton, and so many others, make so blatantly clear is the need for consistency and repetition. Whether it is singing a song or hosting an online class being consistent is really important. I’m sure Cantor sang to a crowd of a few on more than one occasion and Peloton had classes that were attended by only one or two participants. Consistency builds reputation, facilitates feedback, and allows you to refine your message and product. Repetition unlocks your value proposition and makes it available to everyone.

In the same way that gradually can lead to devastating consequences so too can it lead to success. The difference comes down to our values, beliefs, and attitudes. Or culture. It is up to you; success is within your reach. You too can become an overnight success!

Categories
Behavior Leadership People

How to Avoid Cultural Debt

In July 2020 we began a conversation about culture with an assertion that culture is the sum of all of the behaviors in your organization. We also noted that, in general, culture tends to modify our behaviors and yet individual behavior can also shape the culture of your organization. This is why culture is constantly evolving. Good leaders behave in a way that highlights and supports the culture of the organization. Conversely, toxic people diminish your culture.

Subsequently, we have talked with many of you about how individual behaviors influence culture and how culture modifies, or constrains, our behavior. Overwhelmingly, we agree that while culture typically helps to modify our behaviors we each have one or two examples of individuals who have shaped culture. Both positively and negatively.

Back in July we said that culture is often shaped by the worst behaviors that leadership is prepared to tolerate and our conclusion was that managing behaviors is preferable over managing people. 

Building on this point, tolerating poor behaviors actually contributes extensively to cultural debt in organizations. Cultural debt accrues when individuals undermine the values, attitude, and beliefs embedded in your organization. When leaders and employees don’t address these behaviors directly it acts as a tax, or interest payment, on the business. These taxes come due sometime in the future and are often the underlying reason for poor business outcomes. Other impacts can be seen in employee engagement, employee turnover, and business results. 

Allowing poor behavior to continue unchecked means that you may well experience “Hemingway’s Law of Motion: Gradually, then Suddenly”. In his 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway’s character Mike, when asked “how he went bankrupt, responds “Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly.”

The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought.

Rudiger Dornbusch

This is very much they way cultural debt operates. If we tolerate it and let it go unchecked we create this gradual grinding on the business and then one day we are surprised by the sudden impact of our culture.

All of a sudden, things seem to come to a head.

How to avoid “Suddenly”

  • Have a defined set of values, beliefs, and behaviors.
  • Communicate broadly and consistently connect actions and results to values, beliefs, and behaviors.
  • Immediately address behaviors that are inconsistent with the cultural expectations.

Of course, avoiding suddenly is really a story of fixing gradually. Having a standard by which to measure interactions is useful. Actually taking action when behaviors do not meet expectations is a more important action. Unfortunately, all to often, we see poor behaviors go unchecked and gradually becomes suddenly.

Categories
Behavior Leadership

Under the surface: Too Many meetings?

Last week we talked about how meetings are a proxy for the culture in your organization. In particular, we highlighted engagement, leadership, and accountability as well as the importance of these interactions for collaboration, connection, and relationship building.

One of the more interesting discussions that has emerged post our interviews is whether or not a meeting or interaction is real or fake. By this, it was suggested, that not all meetings are required. The argument for fake meetings is that: we all have too many meetings on our calendars, most of them are unproductive, and most of them don’t make good progress. So, they are probably fake, or not required.

“Fake meetings should be cancelled, if they are repetitive and routine, or you need to figure out how to make them real.” Was the assertion from one executive.

So how do we ascertain if a meeting is Real of Fake?

Scenario

Dave calls an hour-long project team meeting and adds people from a few other functions to cover all bases, just in case they are needed.  Dave, shares information and explains the importance of the project to everyone. The team members already involved in the project, nod every so often, while checking emails or preparing for their next meetings.  The people from the outside the team are not quite sure why they were included but they take notes to show how engaged they are while trying to stay awake.  The meeting concludes right on time and Dave adjourns smiling and noting that he always finishes right on time because of how much he values everyone’s time.

So, real of fake?  Here are a few questions to ask yourself about the above scenario, or a recent meeting you attended. Answer these questions at every interaction and you’ll begin to think about meetings in a different way: 

  1. Was there a clear agenda and goal for the meeting?
  2. How many people actually spoke during the meeting?
  3. How many people actually participated during the meeting in a discussion about problems needing resolution or was this an illusion of collaboration?
  4. Were there agreed upon actions and outcomes at the conclusion of the meeting?
  5. Could Dave have shared this information in an email or through a collaboration platform?

Our answer:  Fake meeting. 

Meetings can be incredibly productive and energizing or a seed that causes behavioral complexity. To make sure your interactions are in the former category and not the latter think about changing your approach to meetings. Reset the number, length, purpose, participation and outcome expectations, follow up actions, and accountability.

The following are “must haves” for meeting protocol and decision making. Together they have an exponential impact on results and a positive impact on engagement:

  1. Is the meeting truly necessary?
  2. Set very clear meeting purpose, expectations and decisions to be made at the meeting in the invite.  
  3. Create shorter interactions. (Think about a 50% reduction)
  4. Send agenda and materials in advance – ask for confirmation of review before invitees attend the meeting.  No review no attendance.
  5. Start and end on time, have a no exceptions policy, maybe?
  6. Include necessary individuals only.  The practice of “optional” invitees should be discouraged.
  7. Assign a point person to keep the agenda focused and on track.
  8. Engage all participants.
  9. Monologues should not be allowed.
  10. Action items and responsibilities should be discussed and agreed to before the meeting concludes and confirmed in writing after meeting.

A recent article in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) quoted an excerpt from the corporate blog of a senior executive in the pharmaceutical industry:

I believe that our abundance of meetings at our company is the Cultural Tax we pay for the inclusive, learning environment that we want to foster…and I’m ok with that. If the alternative to more meetings is more autocratic decision-making, less input from all levels throughout the organization, and fewer opportunities to ensure alignment and communication by personal interaction, then give me more meetings any time!

Our belief is that meetings can create engagement, leadership, and accountability as well facilitate collaboration, connection, and relationship building. A Cultural Tax is only created when interactions become burdensome, unproductive, and disengaging. The alternative is not autocracy. The alternative is diluted results, time consumption, and frustration. 

The answer is simply to design and conduct meetings in a thoughtful way that reaches the desired outcome.

Categories
Behavior Complexity Leadership

Under the surface: Meetings and Complexity

A Google search of ‘how to run an effective meeting’ returns 555M entries in about 0.64 seconds. Hopefully that is sufficient to persuade you that there isn’t a shortage of instruction on how to lead a productive meeting. There are reportedly about 11M meetings a day in the US yet Harvard Business Review in their “Stop the Meeting Madness” article said that 71% of executives interviewed said meetings are unproductive.

It was hardly a surprise therefore that during our research on the topic of Complexity versus Simplicity a consistent theme from every single one of our interviewees was related to “too many meetings” and “unproductive meetings”.

Why then, with so much instruction available and a clear understanding of what good looks like are we still creating interactions that are unproductive?

To be fair, most people don’t attend meetings with the intention of making them unproductive. We approach them optimistically, forgetting quickly about the last time we met and hoping that we will do better this time. Good intentions apparently aren’t sufficient.

What meetings say about your organization

Poor meeting outcomes are signs of three underlying issues:

  1. Lack of engagement – whether this is “it’s not my job to prepare the agenda” or “hey, they’re paying me to sit here” most staff are disengaged during a meeting and most likely before and after as well.
  2. Lack of leadership – leaders need to insist on the appropriate process: objectives, agenda, actions, etc. This of course means that when leaders hold meetings that they lead with the appropriate process too.
  3. Lack of accountability – if it’s OK to go from meeting to meeting with no real process or outcomes then there is clearly an accountability problem. If it’s culturally acceptable to have unproductive interactions quite often this is demonstrated in other parts of the organization.

The opposite of these signals is also true, in that where you have productive interactions, it is normally an indication of a positive culture with an engaged workforce, competent leaders, and acountability. Certainly, given the behavioral components of an effective meeting it isn’t unusual to find pockets of an organization where engagement, leadership, and accountability thrive. A lot comes down to the leadership style of an individual, department, or group.

Meetings continue to be an important way in which we collaborate, share ideas, and gain alignment. Moreover, they provide a human connection, a social connection and a place to further business and personal relationships. When conducted properly they are energizing. When we fail to bring the discipline, structure, and process to the interaction the result is fodder for the next Dilbert cartoon.

Categories
Complexity Governance Leadership

The Art and Science of Decision -making

Photo by Kyle Glenn

The cultural norm in business today is all about building consensus before making a decision. Sounds lovely but building consensus is an art and it frequently creates so much complexity. The simple reality is that the goal of decision making should be for leaders to review the facts and relevant opinions and then make a quick decision. The science of decision making. The truth is that good decision making is both an Art and a Science. You won’t really know what the right decision is until after you have actually made it. All you are doing is making a choice from a series of options. The hard part comes after your choice; making it work.  

Leaders are responsible for creating and sharing an organized decision-making process. That sounds somewhat formal, but it doesn’t mean that it has to be rigid, cumbersome, or time consuming. It is simply an understandable framework for the organization to establish the basic “rules of the road” when it comes to making decision. Decision rights, delegation of authority, and RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) Models are all considered as great tools to avoid chaos and confusion.

Having a decision-making process is crucial for all organizations. However, if it is too cumbersome and time consuming it will stall the organization. Too simple and you run the risk of making the wrong choice. In both cases the impact shows up in outcomes, engagement, and overall effectiveness.

Any decision-making process should include clear objectives about the situation and incorporate input, insights and knowledge from key stakeholders. In thinking about key stakeholders keep it simple by considering three groups of people; Who cares about the decision? Who has knowledge about the issues and alternatives? and who needs to agree to the decision?

These three groups of stakeholders not only help you make the right choice, but they also help in making sure that the decision is implemented. Their participation in the process engages their commitment to see it through, which is probably more important than the decision itself. As they say, an average choice well executed is often better than a good choice poorly executed. 

Making choices and executing them go hand in hand. What is important is the commitment to the decision. Commitment is different from consensus. Consensus is a general agreement, shared by all the stakeholders, about a decision. Commitment is a promise to make the decision a success. Commitment is saying, whether you agree with the choice or not, that you will personally do everything you can to make it a successful.

Engaging the three groups of stakeholders to gain commitment can be difficult. We use four exercises to help with the visualization and ownership of the decisions to be made. The first is to imagine and share as a team what success looks like for of each decision alternatives, post implementation.  Think in vivid color. Make it the art of the possible. The second is to think about the unintended consequences of the choice. What might be the second and third implications of making the decision. Consider the impact on customers, employees, standard operating procedures, technology, etc. A third exercise is to think about failure. How could this decision make things worse, what could go wrong, what would be the implications?  By articulating the failure scenario, we begin to understand potential risks, develop balance in the execution, and gain clarity on the path forward. Finally, we use an assumption-based exercise to help build commitment. Asking the question “What would need to be true in order for this choice to be a success?” This is a simple yet effective way to work through assumptions that stakeholders are making when considering the options in front of them.

Using our three stakeholder groups and four exercises can help to build commitment. Even when making unpopular decisions this method allows for due process; listening, inclusion and consideration of alternatives which leads to better choices and improved execution. Moreover, these techniques keep the decision-making process relatively simple and avoids a complex consensus driven approach. 

The final takeaway:  The cultural norm of today may be to gain consensus but that doesn’t equate to successful and actionable decision making.  What does? Commitment to support a decision once made, regardless of personal views and doing all that needs to be done as a team to implement that decision is the key to success.

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Categories
Behavior Complexity People Simplicity

How complexity gets in the way of leadership, culture and wellness.

Photo by Andreas Klassen

Modern management theory teaches us to create leadership positions with accountability for a broad scope of operations.  Basically, a hierarchy shaped like a pyramid with defined spans of control. “Successful” leaders are generally found to grow their scope of authority through internal and external advancement, growth of their business enterprise, both organic and through M&A. During this time their day to day becomes more complex. They have more touch points with subordinates, peers, senior leaders and external stakeholders. There are more moving pieces to manage, more issues to resolve, and more solutions to implement. Change is inevitable: market changes, customer needs change, and employee needs change. In addition, special projects, industry events, networking, and planning & reporting activities all draw on a leaders ability to be successful. 

Soon enough many reach burnout and stay in a position where they are ineffective. This has, since 1968, been referred to as “The Peter Principle”, an observation made by the Canadian educational scholar and sociologist, Dr. Laurence J. Peter, whereby employees are often promoted to their level of incompetency.

Complexity places pressure on three critical resources; time, energy, and capability. Time is finite for all of us and however much we attempt to do more with less there are only 24 hours in a day! Energy and capability differ from individual to individual but eventually it all catches up to us. 

What complexity does is prevent you from doing what good leaders should be doing. Leading through influence and trust, mentoring and developing teams and planning for the future both from a business and talent perspective. Good leaders don’t just get results, they develop the next generation of leadership. 

Complexity and leadership is partially what drives culture and behavior in your organization. Your words, actions, and behaviors show people what it’s really like to work at your organization. They show people who you really are, how to interact with you, and they mimic your behaviors.

The other impact is on the overall wellness of the leader, their direct reports, and their personal life. Complexity in the work place, being present with family, having ‘me’ time all draw down on the time, energy, and capability. This often leads to inner feelings of not being good enough, imposter syndrome, and lower self worth. Subordinates and family can become resentful, mistrusting, and resigned to your way of being. Resignations of staff, divorce, and estrangement are not uncommon and can often be attributed to an over aggressive work ethic caused by complexity.

For sure, there are hundreds of great leaders business across the globe, but there are thousands of mediocre ones and millions of future leaders.

Take a moment to think about the level of complexity that you deal with on a day to day basis and the impact it has on your being. In fact, I encourage you to take 30 minutes after reading this to ask yourself the following questions:

  • How many meetings do you attend a day?
  • Which of those meetings are really effective?
  • How much time do you spend informing others on status?
  • How would you describe your listening style, how would others describe it?
  • How much time did you spend yesterday on developing others?
  • When did you last spend time thinking and reflecting on your day?
  • How much time do you spend thinking about the future of the business?
  • Do you know who is looking for a job in your span of control?
  • How do you personally define success?
  • Where are you in that journey towards success?
  • What of all of your daily actions make you feel energized and fulfilled versus drained and discouraged?

Be honest with yourself. Write down your first thought, don’t over think it. When you look at your answers some things will become clear to you. Reflect on all your answers but pay particular attention to those answers which might require more consideration.

We’d love to hear from you. How much complexity is there in your organization and how does it impact you as a leader or as a future leader? For the courageous, send us the answers to your questions and we would be more than happy to be a sounding board for your reflections.