Blog Posts — Page 10

When Command and Control Works

It seems to me that Command and Control as a management style has gotten a bum rap. You’ve heard the disparaging remarks, “She’s a complete command and control style manager” – implying there is something wrong with that.

I think such comments display a startling lack of understanding of what leaders are required to do in organizations. Command and control is a very useful managerial tool for certain situations.

People love to use fire-fighting as an analogy to describe modern management practice. I would challenge anyone to go find himself a Fire Chief and ask him/her if command and control is a bad idea.

When a building is burning and lives are at stake, the Fire Chief very much relies on command and control as the appropriate management tool for that situation. Can you imagine the fire department showing up at an emergency, and the Fire Chief requesting that everyone break up in study groups, to hold hands and sing camp songs?

“OK – everyone brainstorm ideas for how we should tackle this, and I’ll give a special prize to the group that comes up with the best idea. Make sure everyone participates equally, and remember that everyone’s feedback is valuable. This is an excellent opportunity to reinforce how much we value each other, and I’ll float between the groups to help facilitate.”

Glad it’s not my house on fire. I want the Fire Chief standing on top of chair barking out orders as fast as she can to get the situation under control. I also want the Firefighters to listen carefully to the orders being dispatched, and execute as they’re being instructed to do.

When they are back at the Firehall, and practicing for such emergencies, or doing community outreach, then the Fire Chief would be well advised to pull a different tool out of his box, and to engage his people in a more collaborative style.

The problem for people that disparage command and control is that they confuse this very important managerial style with a lack of respect. Lack of respect is never appropriate, but many times it is a leaders job to tell her direct reports in no uncertain terms what they are required to do. Setting clear expectations, holding people to account for those expectations, and administering the appropriate consequences are what we pay managers to do.

Command and control is one legitimate tool to get this done.

Socrates, Lincoln and ADD

One of the hazards of living in a society that doesn’t value anything remotely old, or any person over 25, is writing about people who lived in different centuries. I’m taking a bit of a risk here… by way of this first sentence, 50% of the reading audience has already ADD’d onto another subject.

You see, Socrates and Lincoln were masters of the art of asking questions. A key part of each of their distinct repertoires was to ask questions to guide and persuade people to their way of thinking. Undoubtedly, it was a special skill in their respective times. Now, it is probably an extinct form of communication.

The benefits of guiding conversation by questions are well documented and obvious. What is not as evident is why people don’t bother to use this powerful method of communication.

I’ll go out on the limb here, and suggest it’s because we don’t think we have time.

We live in an instant gratification culture with an overwhelming societal case of Attention Deficit Disorder – communal ADD.

In the course of investigating this phenomena, I turned to the ultimate authority on all things cultural: the TV. I watched a few unscripted TV shows (I won’t call them “Reality TV”, because Star Trek is closer to reality than any of these shows).

It seems effective communication requires us to:

a) Have all the answers, right away. If you don’t know the answer, make something up, and stick to your guns, lest you look weak.

b) If you don’t know the answer, shout louder than the other person to make your (incoherent) point. It doesn’t really matter what they are saying, or even if they are right. What is most important is that you win.

c) You are entitled to an opinion, even if you have absolutely no clue what is being discussed. You are not only entitled, you are obligated to weigh-in with your clueless drivel.

d) Everybody is exceptionally good looking. Ugly people make for bad TV, and are thus completely ignored even if they do have something intelligent to say.

I wonder what questions Socrates would ask about this?

The Art of Asking Good Questions

The art of asking good questions is a key leadership tool that has become more and more difficult to find in use. Join Jed & Bob this week, as they discuss why and how good questions can be effectively used as leadership tool.

Monday’s Tip: Use empowering questions. Empowering questions move people to positive action rather than disempowering questions that seek to assign blame or retribution.

Tuesday’s Tip: Realize that asking questions takes time. While it may be faster to simply tell people the way it is, using questions to guide them to your way of thinking produces a much higher degree of commitment.

Wednesday’s Tip: Use confirming and clarifying questions. Much can be learned by using probing questions to learn more about a situation, or to guide people to consider things they might otherwise not have.

Thursday’s Tip: Use Positive Understanding. When someone throws out an objection, use a question that focuses on the positive part of their statement. For example, if someone tells you they’d like to do something but that it won’t work, ask them a question about how and why they’d like to try it.

Friday’s Tip: Use action questions. “How soon can be get started?” “What can we do about that?” are both questions that move people to action. Use such questions to get things moving with people.

Weasels in the Workplace

There are lots of colloquialisms and metaphors used in business today that are “reaching” to say the least. Sports analogies are very tired, and if I hear one more person talk to me about “low-hanging fruit”, there will be a Bob-shaped hole in the nearest door.

However the word, “weasel” is perfect for the type of behavior it describes in the workplace. To that end, I’ve put together a list of the similarities between a weasel found in nature, and the weasel found in the workplace:

A weasel is a rodent. As such, they are a nuisance that needs to be weeded out and destroyed.
When a weasel is threatened it becomes extremely aggressive, and potentially dangerous.
They are small (in this case of the workplace weasel small-minded), but active predators.
According to Wikipedia, weasels in nature have a reputation for cleverness and guile… not unlike the workplace weasel.
Weasels are considered vermin because they stock poultry and rabbits used for commercial purposes. The workplace weasel also undermines commerce – usually by more insidious means than stocking poultry.
Weasels exist on all continents except Antarctica and Australia. If there are any Wily Manager followers at the research station at Antarctica, I’d love to know if there are any workplace weasels. I lived in Australia for a while, and while they may not have weasels, they have lots of other rodent vermin, which begs the question, “what do the Aussies call their workplace weasels? Actually, I was once told that the Australian equivalent of the office-weasel was called a Kiwi, but after I visited New Zealand, I had to dismiss that as sour grapes on the part of my Aussie-informant.
A group of weasels can be called a boogle, gang, pack, sneak, or confusion. The workplace weasel, when s/he finds a support group, could also be called “sneak” or “confusion” (but I also like boogle).

All these similarities got me to questioning whether weasel remedies would be similar between the natural and workplace varieties. Here, the parallels are a little more illusive, yet still instructive. For example, you can set traps for weasels. In nature, the bait is usually something to eat. With workplace weasels, it might be a rumored promotion, but sometimes they might respond to good catering.

Suddenly, the song “Pop Goes the Weasel” makes so much more sense to me now.

Personal Responsibility and the Fall of Society

The current silliness around the US Government’s debt ceiling is a classic case of individual members of government completely failing to take any responsibility. For those observers convinced that it’s one party’s fault or the other, you are blinded by partisanship, and not seeing the whole situation clearly.

Perhaps the idea of political parties has passed its “best-before” date.

Originally, the British Parliament (of which many other systems of government have been based upon including the American one), was set up so that a local riding would elect a member to represent it, and then the elected members would all get together, and deal with the business at hand – such as selecting the Prime Minister and other key ministers.

This devolved into parties as people became more apathetic about the political process. Political parties gave all elected official cover from any personal responsibility to their constituents. The current silliness in the United States over the debt ceiling is a prime example. Does any thinking person really believe this has anything to do with anything BUT politics? Any American, regardless of his political stripe, should be deeply offended by what is happening in Washington right now.

There is a whole lot of politicking, and not any responsibility being taken. American society has been living beyond its means since the end of the Second World War, and its like nobody got the memo on this until May. Now it’s a crisis, and no one wants to act

Bad news folks – if you take two or three minutes to add up the numbers, it is indisputable that there are substantial spending cuts required, and significant tax increases needed to fix the problem. Unfortunately, no one in Washington will take the responsibility of telling people a truth they don’t want to hear.

This is what we expect from politicians – as a society, we have completely abandon the idea of personal accountability.

By the way, this situation is not unique to the United States. Because I have lived in a few different countries, I seek out news from my former adopted homes, and am quite aware similar silliness is occurring in Australia, Canada, and the UK.

Only when people re-engage in the political process, will anything change. People lament it is the absence of the voter on election-day, but this is simplistic way of looking at the problem. The Australians have mandatory voting, and still get caught in political silliness. Only when we demand responsibility from our locally elected Members of Parliament, or Congress Members will anything change.

That is, unless the current political problem in the US doesn’t completely destroy the global economy, in which case you should look for a nice plot of land with a long growing season.

Awash in Data

Twenty or so years ago, organizations would hire guys like us to come in and help them define metrics and measures. Often times there were not adequate data collection and storage systems, so we ended up counting a lot of things manually, and then getting our crayons out to hand draw graphs to represent these indicators.

Skip ahead in time a couple of decades, and organizations are still hiring guys like us to help them with the measures and metrics, but now its usually because they have thousands upon thousands of data points, but no ability to turn this data into wisdom, and ultimately better business decisions.

Blame Microsoft. They made it easy to have powerful spreadsheets and databasing capability on every desktop relatively cheaply. Now the guy who runs the janitorial service at the office has a PC with more computing power than the Space Shuttle, and 500 indicators he’s tracking.

We also see it in any professional sport. Did you know that in games that take place on the road, in the Central Time Zone, on odd-numbered days, in the same month as the coach’s birthday, when the starting line-up all had chicken for the dinner the previous night, the team has posted a win 58% of the time?

Now that’s valuable data.

Professional Sports organizations are very fat with cash – they can afford to waste some on useless statistics. Your organization probably can’t.

You need to figure out what results your organization is trying to produce, and then determine the key drivers of those results. For many organizations, the goal is to make money while minimizing various forms of risk. What are the simple key drivers of these things?

When I worked in the Retail Food industry we were very good at making a really simple business far more complicated than it needed to be. It seems to me there are only two drivers of the business that impacted all of the other things we were tracking:

Did we have what the customer wanted on the shelf when s/he wanted it?
Once that customer had everything she wanted in the cart, did we make it as easy as possible for her to part with her money?

There were literally hundreds of other things we were tracking, and some of them were actually valuable; but only these two things really mattered. Only the two things above would impact all the important result indicators.

What are the key drivers in your business?

When Your Buddy Becomes Your Boss

I spent much of my early adult years working the graveyard shift in a grocery store to work my way through University. I’m not really sure why any thinking employer would leave four or five twenty-year-olds unattended in the middle of the night with several hundred thousand dollars worth of inventory, but they did. It’s a good thing we didn’t sell booze.

There was a camaraderie on the Night Crew that comes when a group of like-minded individuals works closely together. All was fine until one of the guys figured out he was in charge. I suspect the store manager worked night crew once himself, and knew it was a debacle, and figured out how to solve the problem: make someone accountable.

This was fine, except that because he was accountable, he, in turn, wanted all of us to be accountable. I didn’t want to be accountable, I wanted to be at home, in my bed, asleep. This guy took us to task on the length of our breaks, and how many bananas we consumed in the middle of the night without ringing them through the register.

In short, he did exactly what he should have, as our boss. The problem was, this guy was our buddy a short time ago, and all of sudden he was the boss. What happened to all those drunken stoopers where we’d backstab the management bozos? Now he was one of those management bozos.

In some cases, when two highly-professional people decide to make it work, a new boss and his/her former peers can make it work. Most of the time, however, you have to choose between being a buddy or being a boss.

If you are doing your job well as a manager, you’re not there to make friends. You’re there to do your job to the best of your ability, which occasionally may mean pissing off former peers.

The bottom line is if your friendships at work are really important to you, you may want to think long and hard about how badly you want that promotion to becoming the boss.

Gen X is a lot Like Jan Brady

This Generation X cohort is a real piece of work, isn’t it? Is it possible to have a whole generation stuck in a massive inferiority complex? It’s kind of like meeting a Canadian backpacking across Europe. Yeah we get it – those 500 Maple Leafs you’re wearing mean you come from Canada. The rest of us don’t really care that much, but you go ahead and dress up like a Mountie.

Gen X is not unlike when Jan Brady got completely bent out of shape because everything was “Marsha, Marsha, Marsha.” (You have to be a Gen Xer to get that reference). Grow up Jan, and stop being so annoying.

Actually all this generation talk is getting a bit boring.

In 1994, I suffered through a breakfast seminar where the guest speaker was telling us how this new generation of worker was completely different than anything that had every come before it. These Generation X types were not loyal to any employer, didn’t care too much about their jobs, and were just generally hard to get along with.

Remembering back on this particular breakfast seminar now, it was particularly offensive on at least three levels:

About 2500 years ago, some guy named “Socrates” made the same observation. I’m more familiar with the published works of Socrates than I am with the guest speaker (whose name I’ve forgotten) that morning, so I’m going to assume it wasn’t an original talk. Although the flashy Powerpoint slides were something that Socrates never pulled off.
Those entering the workforce in the early 1990s had just watched their parents be laid-off en masse after a lifetime of loyalty to their companies to take on a new role as an unemployed middle-aged former corporate drone with no real marketable skills. Add to this, the fact that Generation X – to date the most educated generation in history – walked into a job market with very few prospects, and you may begin to understand some of their crankiness.
These Gen Xers did finally manage to find jobs — though not the cool, self-fulfilling ones they were promised. Fast forward in time twenty years and these Gen Xers are now lamenting the fact that the generation that came after them has no loyalty to their organizations, and don’t care too much about their jobs. It really does come fully circle, doesn’t it?

We need to quit trying to rationalize and explain the fact it is each generations’ express mission to drive the generation immediately preceding it crazy. How else can you explain the music of the devil (also known as Jazz) that today’s older retirees used to make their parents foam at the mouth with anger.

Your job as a leader is to get other people to do what you want them to do, because they want to do it (with credit to Dwight Eisenhower). Spending a whole bunch of time trying to label and define different generations won’t help you with that.

Finally, just to prove there’s no hard feelings about the crack about Canadians above, this week’s video is dedicated to those viewing from Canada:

Your Mentor and Captain Marvel

What the hell is a mentor anyway? I hear the word, and I always think of Captain Marvel’s alter ego, Billy Batson, and his nameless Mentor. As best I can tell, Mentor’s job was to drive a Winnebago around the United States with no particular destination in mind, and to give clichéd advice to Billy, all while giving any casual observers the creepy feeling they might be witnesses some form of pedophilia in progress.

The Management Gurus will tell you that when mentoring works well, it is a relationship of high trust, where the Mentor knows and understands the technical, political and social ramifications of a particular organization, but does not have organizational power or control over a person. Some organizations even assign two people to each other for a mentor-mentee arrangement.

I don’t think this type of relationship is really possible in most organizations, and here’s why:

We fired most of the middle-managers that could have served in such a role several years ago. Now, outside of the occasional peer, there is no one to act in this capacity.
Mentoring relationships take time – years in some cases. Most people don’t stay in one job, or at one location that long anymore.
Workplaces are generally lower trust environments than they were a decade or two ago. Employees don’t trust the employer to act in their individual best interests, and employers see their people as disloyal.

Many organizations start these well-intentioned, but misguided attempts at mentorship programs. Mentoring relationships, by definition, must occur organically, so drawing up a schedule to pair one person with another is a waste of paper. Not to mention the awkward situation this puts the participants in:

“I’d like to introduce you to your new mentor! Now run along and share your deepest fears and aspirations with this person.”

So here’s my alternative: a personal Board of Directors. Don’t be put-off by how badly publically traded companies have bastardized this good idea. It is their implementation that is suspect, not the idea. There are a variety of aspects of your professional life (and maybe your personal life, too) that could benefit from the external feedback of a Board of Directors.

If you’ve found a great mentor, then that person, may provide adequate direction for all axes of your professional life. If you don’t have a mentoring relationship in place, you may want to consider a different person for each of the following areas:

Technical – how can you better execute the core skills of your job?
Political – how do you negotiate the politics?
Organizational/Social — who are the true leaders of the organization, and who defers to whom?
Networking – Who do you need to know? Who knows them?
Community involvement — What causes or initiatives should you be involved in.
Self-promotion – How do you raise your profile, without coming across as a bootlicker?

There are undoubtedly other categories unique to your situation too. Perhaps you have people who can serve in more than one role, or maybe you have someone for each different aspect.

Just make sure you use their real name, and don’t address them as “Political Director”, otherwise you may leave people with that creepy impression like Billy Batson and Mentor did.

Optimizing Your Business Process Can Be a Really Bad Idea

Before the industrial revolution, most of us were connected to the outputs of our labor. We were either farmers or craftsmen in cottage industries where we worked on something for some period of time, and then either harvested, used, or sold the output of all our hard work.

In the 21^st century the link between what we toil on daily, and the output of that toil is much more illusive – particularly so in information based jobs and industries. We behave like some really minor cog, in some great big organizational wheel always feeling at least slightly nervous that if we got hit by a truck, it might take some time before anyone noticed.

As a result, we become focused on a series of tasks, rather than how those tasks contribute to some greater goal. Several years ago I did a job at a sawmill. This was before the forest sector in North America got completely spanked, and prior to Americans and Canadians sparring each other, and failing to recognize the much greater threat was coming from outside NAFTA.

Turning a raw log into a two-by-four is a much more complicated process than you might think. There are lots of moving parts and many people involved before you can go down to the Home Depot and buy some boards to build that eyesore treehouse for the kids in your backyard. As a result, you’ve got several groups of people that optimize their little part of much larger process without ever putting their head up to see if what they’re doing makes any sense.

Raw logs are scanned by laser on their way into the mill to optimize the use of fibre, and reduce the amount of waste (also known as chips). The problem is as the timber got smaller and smaller over the course of many years, optimizing the amount of fibre meant that sawmills were producing a whole bunch of lumber with a dimension of 1” X 1” – about the size of a garden stake.

So you can imagine my surprise walking into the lumberyard of a sawmill, and learning that 80% of the space was taken up by garden stakes and bean poles. Somewhere I had missed the bulletin about the fall of society, and our return to an agrarian economy. Apparently, the larger lumber dimensions (like the wood you use to actually build things) were no longer required.

This is what happens when people optimize their little part of the business without any regard for the larger organizational goals. This sawmill was indeed maximizing the amount of fibre recovered from each log – they just weren’t producing anything that anyone needed or wanted.

It would be easy to think this is an isolated case, but there are examples everywhere of people optimizing a piece of the business to the sub-optimization of the whole enterprise. Ironically, this is often encouraged by well-meaning business improvement people, or high-paid consultants.

The bottom line is to draw a clear path between what each person does every day, and the higher-level goals of the organization. If this path of vision is obstructed, you may end up with a yard full of garden stakes.