A few years ago, I did a project with a company that was a joint venture between a British Company, an American Company, and a Canadian one.  It was in the Utility sector, so you would assume that very similar parent companies, from very similar countries would have no problem integrating their cultures.  This was an excellent example of why one should never assume.

The United States and Canada are both former colonies of the UK, and all three countries share a language (with respect to the one-third of Canadians who are French speakers).  How different could they be?

On Managing Conflict:

• Americans argue hard for their viewpoint, and ultimately get along at the end of the day
• The British are much more reserved and polite, but will express dissent.
• Canadians avoid conflict at all costs – often to their detriment

On Working Hours:

• Americans work 12 hours a day, and rarely take more than a few days off in a row
• The British work hard on a daily basis.  They also have 8 weeks vacation (holiday) per year, and take a minimum of two weeks off at a time.
• Canadians are about half way in between the two, unless there’s a hockey game on TV, in which case they go home early.

On Dealing with Governments (we were constantly moving people between the three countries)

• The American Government was a nightmare to work with.  They constantly change immigration rules, and won’t provide any reasons or justifications for doing so.
• The British Government was consistent, although highly bureaucratic and cumbersome in its process.
• The Canadian Government was consistent with its expressed goal of making it easy for skilled people to enter and work in that country.

On Language

• Americans speak “Microsoft English” – the easiest and most identifiable form of the language.
• The British contingent from England spelled some things differently, but otherwise communicated well.  The Scottish contingent constantly baffled all the rest of us with their use of the language.
• The Canadians sounded like the Americans; spelled like the British; and threw in some French spellings just to throw everyone else off.

On the Metric System

• The United States is the only country in the world that still uses the outdated and cumbersome Imperial Measurement system.
• The British were very frustrated when they hopped in their Audis and BMWs that the speed limit was 65mph, rather than 110 kph.
• The Canadians were baffled that 32 degrees was miserably cold, rather than miserably hot.

On “Entitlement Mentality”

• Americans don’t feel much entitlement, but rather feel the individual is responsible for his/her own circumstances.
• The British have some Entitlement Mentality – particularly when it came to the private American health care system. (“I have to pay for this!?!?”)
• The Canadians had a bad case of entitlement mentality.  Perhaps it was because most of the people working there had been government employees before the utility was privatized.

In the end, we managed to make this company work, but don’t ever underestimate cross-cultural issues even in seemingly similar cultures.

Firing people is really under rated as a motivation tool – hear me out.

It’s not about punishment and intimidation – those things only work for short periods of time.  AND — as soon as you turn your back, people go back to what they were doing before.  It’s also not very nice.

Rather – by removing a consistent poor performer, you do that person’s peers (the rest of your team) a tremendous service.  If there are six people working on a team, and I am consistently not pulling my weight, then the impact of my non-performance is far more tangible on my peers than it would be to my boss.

This lesson was delivered home to me back when I had a real job as a manager – one that required me to occasionally fire people.  One member of our team constantly called in sick on short notice – a behavior that significantly, and negatively impacted his co-workers.  A bunch of us ended up working late because this person had called in sick, and we decided to go for a beer after work.\

We walked in to a local pub about 9pm, and saw our absent co-worker dancing on top of speaker.  It was quite obvious he’d been there for some time.  Apparently this fellow wasn’t very smart either – he chose to go partying at a place a block from work.

It was an easy decision to fire him, but what happened next surprised me.  Several of his peers thanked me getting rid of the guy, and one even challenged me on what took me so long!

I’m not suggesting you fire the bottom 10% of performers every month.  I am suggesting you provide crystal-clear expectations, do everything you can to help people be successful, and when the occasional person chooses to consistently betray his team and not perform, that you do not hesitate to remove that person.

Channel your “inner-Trump”.  Your team will thank you for it.

I often wonder when I see two people walking down the street side by side, talking on their mobile phones whether they are talking to each other.  It seems quite possible to me that the cell-phone has become such an extension of our bodies, that this somehow feels more natural to talk to each other through technology than it does face to face.

Or maybe people simply feel they can get in some exercise, have a visit with a walking companion and return some telephone calls all at the same time.  Now that’s multi-tasking!

It’s also horribly inefficient, and incredibly rude, but we seem to conveniently overlook these things.  Somewhere along the line we decided that an iPhone can override a few million years of evolution that up until a few years ago had still only minimally developed our ability to do more than one thing at once.

It’s kind of a rush to try, though, isn’t it?  It feels really good to be driving down the road, talking on the phone, listening to the radio, and screaming at the guy in the Audi that just cut you off.

Or the guy I heard in the men’s room returning a telephone call from the toilet.  Just for fun, I went and flushed all the vacant toilets, and did some fake vomiting so the sound effects would be complete for whomever he was conversing with.

The “Multitasking Rush” is, in short, the same euphoria one gets when using drugs.  Far be it from me to lecture people about how they get their kicks, but I would suggest that Multitasking, like all other recreational drugs should be used carefully and sparingly.

Many moons ago, I was an Operations Manager for a big, global company.  My part of the empire was very small, but I was still subject to much of the silliness that comes with being part of a huge organization.

You could have said that the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing, but that would have been overly-kind.  There were departments at global headquarters that out and out competed with each other.  The loss-control guys would send out a memo, only to be contradicted by the HR group.  Of course, none of them did this knowingly – they were simply so big, that they had no idea what the other support group was doing.

This is what happens when companies face operational issues, and rather than invest in frontline managers to teach them to deal with the complexities of the business, they suck control of everything short of turning the key in the front door back far away from the core business.

The result:  total and complete misalignment.  Frontline managers and the employees doing the actual work that makes money are being continually pulled in all directions, and end up flying like a moth to the brightest light depending on which support department issued an email directive that day.

I made the decision to leave this organization, about a year before my ultimate departure.  I still loved the business, I just didn’t like working for a large, bureaucratic company that had centralized all control and decision-making.

I can honestly say, I was at my most effective in this last year.  I still wanted the business to be successful, and I cared deeply about the people I worked with.  What made me (and my operation) effective and successful in this last year is that I stopped listening to head office.  I did what I thought was in the best interests of the business, and largely ignored my instructions from head office.

The result?  They didn’t notice I was not complying with the multiple and competing directives.  They did notice our numbers were in the top ten percent in the company.

Remember you heard it here first – the fastest way to aligning your business, and ultimately generating better results is to ignore your head office.  Of course, it could also be the most direct route to getting fired, too.

Let’s be careful out there.

This week we’re talking about Imposters here at Wily Manager, so I thought I’d do a bit of research on great imposters of note to see if there was anything instructional for the occasional manager that finds herself with a case of Imposter Syndrome.

As I researched famous imposters, there were four names that kept coming up:

• Charles Ponzi (after which any crooked finance scheme since has been named).
• Frank Abagnale Jr. (the guy portrayed by Leo Dicaprio in Catch me if You Can)
• Milli Vanilli (the duo who won a Grammy in the 90s, only to be discovered later as lip-syncers
• George Bush Jr.  (The 43^rd President of the United States)

Most of the managers I’ve talked to who suspect they have a case of Imposter Syndrome are worried because they don’t do stand-up presentations very well.  Or maybe they’re put in charge of a department where they don’t have the technical expertise.

When you compare these managerial challenges to the accomplishments of the list above, you don’t have anything to worry about.  You’re not even in the same league as these guys.  So don’t flatter yourself!

Based on the infamous list above, an imposter is someone who goes out of his way to deceive people; a person who pretends to be someone he is not, and does so with flash.  True imposters have an over-abundance of self-confidence – something most managers with Imposter Syndrome do not.

So… if you’re going to be an imposter, do it with some flair.  Can you take down a whole country’s economy?  Can you start a war?  Can you separate old age pensioners from their life’s savings?  Can you disgrace an entire industry?

If not, you probably don’t have what it takes to be an imposter, so you’ll have to try to find some other way allow your insecurities to manifest themselves.

If it’s any comfort be aware that everyone has some insecurity.  Many years ago when Johnny Carson was the host of the Tonight Show, a heart monitor was put on him to test his anxiety level right before the show started.

As it turns out, even the mighty Carson suffered some anxiety and self-doubt:  his heart rate doubled right before the curtain came up.

If Johnny Carson can be a bit nervous, surely you can too.  And don’t call me Shirley.

It’s that time of year again.  Yep, that right, it’s the time of year when everyone reflects on the year in review, and makes silly predictions for the upcoming year.  This happens mostly because people don’t want to do any real work or thinking in the last two weeks of the year.  Not to be outdone, we offer here:

• A Wily Manager Review of 2011
• How and why we started Wily Manager
• Trends we see in 2012
• Wily Manager in 2012
• A special offer – If you couldn’t care less about the other stuff, you’ll want to scroll to the bottom of the page for this.

Wily Manager in 2011

We’ve been dabbling at our web and media presence for a couple of years, but it really came together in 2011:

• 7000+ people a month listening to the 75+ podcasts posted on iTunes.  Please comment – particularly if you have nice things to say.
• 6000+ visits to the Wily Manager website a month.  We very much appreciate your feedback here as well.
• We launched our YouTube Channel
• Visitors from 60+ countries around the world visit our website, and download the podcast.  Special thanks go out to those from our top five audience countries:
  • USA
  • India
  • UK
  • Canada
  • Australia & New Zealand (Extra special thanks here – because the number of audience members is far higher than the population of these two beautiful South Pacific Paradises should warrant.)
• We got busted this year.  Yep… we got our first call from a lawyer concerned about some of the information on our site.  It’s an indicator that we’re attracting attention – even if it is sometimes from unwanted places.

How We Started

In working with our clients, we found the following things:

• In most organizations managers are left to sink or swim on their own.
• Most managers feel like babysitters many days.
• We see many of the same issues again and again in different organizations.
• Managers are under significant time constraints.

So we thought we’d put something together to address these conditions:

• Something that is informative, but fun
• Something that is easy to use and understand.  We love Harvard Business School’s website, and encourage you to visit it.  When you want something quick and easy, then Wily Manager is the place to be.
• Something that removes complexity from managers’ daily lives.
• Something that uses different media that could really work for many managers

Hence, Wily Manager was born.

Trends we see in 2012

The content police say we have to provide something in the way of original content.  As such, here are the trends we see for 2012.

1. Managers will continue to feel like babysitters.  Call it the burden of leadership, but managers will continue to be both rewarded and frustrated by the ongoing care and feeding of those that report through to them.  The secret is to manage and lead differently to make this easier.
2. Everyone will be an “International” Manager.  Even if you don’t manage across borders, it is likely that your team will have one or more members that come from another culture.  As such, we are all “International” managers now.
3. Demographic issues will continue to plague UK, Canada, Australia, and even the US.  In these countries, the baby boom phenomena means that the majority of the workforce is over 50 or under 30.  This presents it’s own unique leadership challenges, and it’s a condition that’s not going away anytime soon.
4. More conservative risk management.  We thought we were through the economic mess – but guess what?  It’s back, and even if it’s not as bad as people think it might be, there is very little change you will be awash in resources (capital, human or other) this coming year.
5. Mayan apocalypse prophecies.  This is the year it all ends – on the winter solstice of 2012.  OK… maybe you don’t buy in to 2012 thing, but you should be ready for whatever unpredictable events are in store for us.  You can’t plan for every contingency, but you can continually improve to be better, cheaper, faster and more agile.  If you do these things well, you’ll be ready for anything… even the Mayan apocalypse.

Wily Manager in 2012

• We want to add more virtual tools to the ones we already have:
  • FastStart
  • Leadership Boot Camp
  • Conflict Dynamics Profile

We would also greatly value your feedback as to what types of tools are going to be the most useful to you.

• Increased interaction amongst our members.  Thank you to all those who reach out to us by email, or on iTunes, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Linked-In or on the Wily Manager website.  We will work in 2012 to encourage further interaction with us, but also to facilitate interaction amongst Wily Manager members.  We want to create an online community of managers.
• A tropical retreat.  Yep… we’re going tropical.  Details will follow, but we encourage you to join us in November of 2012 for a Wily Manager in person week-long meeting hosted by Jed & Bob.

A Special Offer

We want to get our numbers up for the end of the year, so between now and December 31^st, we’re offering the following deal:

Wily Manager Annual Memberships are 50% off (or $49) for the balance of 2011.  Become a Member now for half price.

• Access to the web tools we mention during our podcasts
• Full length versions of podcasts and accompanying podcast notes
• Seamless navigation around the 800+ pages of content
• Access to all topic-bundles

All the best for the holidays, and see you all in 2012.

Jed & Bob

There are certain things I trust.  I trust the sun to rise in the morning.  I trust the lady who does my dry cleaning to always wish me a “more-nice day”.  I trust that Justin Beiber is past his 15 minutes.  I also trust that the word “trust” is a loaded word.

Often, people think that the only way to lose or violate trust is to do something very clearly wrong or dishonest.  It is actually much easier than that to destroy trust.  Trust is quite simply, managing expectations in others, and then delivering on those expectations.

This is how it goes horribly wrong for politicians – large segments of the population demand that politicians lie to them during a campaign.  Any political candidate that dare speak an uncomfortable truth, will be marginalized immediately.  Then once elected, the disconnect between the expectations that have been set, and those that are delivered becomes patently obvious, and the public feels betrayed.

Just so you don’t end up being viewed like a politician, here are five ways to quickly destroy trust:

Say one thing and do another.  Much like the politician above, this is the fastest way to ensure that no one will trust you.

Try to please all the people all the time. Life is a series of trade-offs – particularly for people in positions of leadership.  As a leader, there should be some contingent of your followers that should be marginally pissed-off at all times – because it is impossible to keep everybody happy.

Pander to your audience. Targeting whomever you are communicating to is a good idea.  However, if you find yourself targeting to such a degree that your message is fundamentally different amongst different stakeholders, you’re going to alienate someone (if not everyone).

Fail to tackle difficult issues. Every leader bears the burden of dealing with difficult issues.  They will not magically disappear or solve themselves – in fact, an issue ignored is most often one that grows out of control.

Under-value giving credit, and over-value assigning blame.  Leaders need to be humble – give away credit when things go well, and step up and accept more than your share of blame when things go poorly.  You gain a whole bunch of trust by doing so.

Performance metrics often provide an excellent illustration of how a really good idea can be made difficult and useless by poor implementation.  It’s a lot like watching your favourite sports franchise consistently snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory.

Usually it goes down like this:  someone in some position of authority will read the first fifteen pages of a book about measurement.  Without reading the following 250 pages, he concludes that his organization needs to get everyone on the measurement bandwagon.  Then he strikes a committee, or hires a consultant to go forth and make this happen.

Fast forward in time six months, and a significant portion of everyone’s work week becomes dedicated to counting the number of paper clips they have consumed since last week, and calculating the annual impact of that paper clip consumption.  They then have a meeting to discuss how to reduce paper clip consumption, thereby reducing annual operating costs by $48.50, or roughly 1/100^th the cost of the first meeting about paper clip consumption.

OK… that might be a bit harsh.  But here are some actual examples of performance metrics gone horribly wrong:

• The technology company that measured sales success exclusively on dollar volume at the end of each quarter.  THE RESULT:  A whole bunch of clients went somewhere else because they were tired of being sold things they really didn’t need.
• The grocery retailer that measured check-stand effectiveness by calculating the frequency of cashiers using customers’ names.  THE RESULT:  the customers went to stores where they measure how much time was spent waiting in line – something the customer actually cares about.
• The restaurant owner that attempted to reduce cost by reducing the number of paper napkins provided to each customer.  THE RESULT:  I don’t know… probably sticky fingers and dirty tables – this one just seemed really silly to me
• The lumber manufacturer that measured how much fibre it recovered from each log, as opposed to how much money they made on different dimensions of lumber.  THE RESULT:  Very few wood-chips, but a yard full of garden stakes that no one would buy (and a whole bunch of trees unnecessarily harvested)

Some people will tell you all that matters at the end of the day is how much money you make.  Not true – if you focus exclusively on this, you are in a never-ending cycle of sub-optimized decisions that forbid any long term success.  Most obviously, if you ignore safety while focusing exclusively on how much money is make, it is only a matter of time before you injure or kill someone, which beside being ethically reprehensible, is very expensive.

Here’s the bottom line about measurement:  The great thing about measuring performance is that people will adjust their behaviors to affect the outcome of the measure.  Unfortunately, the really scary thing about measuring performance is that people will adjust their behaviors to affect the outcome of the measure.

So measurement (like other recreational drugs) should be used cautiously and in moderation.  Second, you should never have only one number you are tracking.  And finally, you need to understand why numbers are trending the way they are, as opposed to (over)reacting to one data point.

Let’s be careful out there.

When I first started researching the Elevator Pitch for publishing this week, I was amazed to find out it was a whole industry.  People take this stuff seriously – there are even whole companies dedicated to help people and organizations perfect their Elevator Speech.  Then I came across this one:

“We add value to our customers by maximizing the value of human capital to leverage their assets to change their paradigms in order to transform their business.”

Wow… that is just exquisite bullsh!t.  If I were playing Buzzword Bingo, I would have won the grand prize with that single sentence.

I suppose a certain amount of BS jargon is inevitable in a knowledge-based economy.  It not as easy to describe what we do, as when we were all making something tangible.  So, as a public service to Wily Manager readers, I’d like to deconstruct this sentence.  For the record, the irony of a having guy who makes a living chatting with his buddy about how managers should manage comment on this, is not lost on me.

We add value to our customers. This means you may or may not serve any useful purpose, so you have to make sure everyone thinks you “add value” by stating it explicitly.  It’s quite possible that no one is more amazed than you that you’re getting paid to do whatever it is you do to “add value”.

Maximizing the Value of Human Capital.  This necessarily means that most of the people you work with hate you.  You’re either involved in reducing headcount, or annoying the crap out of people to get them to do more with less resources.

To Change Their Paradigms. Really?  I didn’t know anyone still used the word “Paradigms” anymore.  What this probably means is that you stand up in front of groups of employees and rant at them like one of those ethically-challenged Sunday morning televangelists who asks for money to refuel his personal challenger jet.  You have about the same level of credibility, too.

To Transform Their Business.  A transformation is when a caterpillar becomes a butterfly.  In the business world transformation means that you’ll recommend and initiate a corporate reorganization that will result in the good people quitting to go work somewhere else, and the poor performers promoted three levels past their threshold of competence.  Then when it goes horribly wrong, you arrange to hire back the good people as consultants at three times what they were getting paid previously.

You should be able to describe what your business does in concise terms – just make sure it doesn’t set off the BS meter ever time you open your mouth.

In the past fifteen years, I’ve been in and out of dozens of organizations, all of which had some process for conducting Performance Reviews.  Of all of them, only one organization did them consistently, and did them well.  The rest of them conducted performance reviews that ranged between ineffective, and highly offensive.

This got me to thinking what all these organizations have in common when it comes to Performance Reviews, so here are the top five (of several dozen) reasons why Performance Reviews usually suck:

1)   Everybody wants more feedback – as long as it’s good. Yep… as much as your Gen Y types tell you they crave feedback, they really only want it if it confirms their worldview that they are beyond fantastic.  Any suggestions for improvement are usually met with a thud.  It is only the most elite of corporate cultures that have overcome this aspect of human nature.  These organizations train and encourage people to constantly seek out feedback that will make them better – which sometimes requires facing up to the fact you don’t do some things well.

2)   Performance Reviews are non-specific. They often contain broad sweeping statements about someone being “good with customers”, or “needing improvement on follow through”.  These observations are about as useful as a chocolate teapot.  If it’s not specific, don’t bother.  Bring data or specific behavioral observations.

3)   People are too polite.  Most supervisors hate performance reviews more than the employees.  So they try to get through them as quickly as possible, without hurting anyone’s feelings.  Great organizations, and great leaders use performance appraisals as catalyst for improvement.  This actually requires giving people feedback on how they can improve – rather than just trying to keep the peace.

4)   Performance reviews are structured too much like report cards. If the performance review is simply “the year in review” without any mention of the future, or developmental opportunities, then it is a waste of time.  Even more of a waste of time is a 4 or 5 point rating system that employees are graded on with little thought or explanation.  No wonder people hate them.

5)   They are disconnected with what people do every day. The big problem with performance reviews is that they are designed by HR people, or external consultants who have absolutely no idea what people in a particular role do everyday.  Hence people are assessed on things they rarely or never do, and the bulk of their efforts are not captured by the criteria or format used.

Employees don’t have any accountability for the Performance Review process.  OK… I said five reasons, so this one is a bonus.  In most organizations, the employee merely shows up for a performance review meeting, having lent no thought or effort to outcome.  Great organizations and great managers insist that employees complete some form of self-assessment in advance of the meeting so that the success of the process is shared.

Mick Jagger was right – you can’t always get what you want.

One of the dynamics that managers face is weighing off short-term objectives against longer term ones.  This sometimes results in seemingly poor decisions being made.

Often, I get to hear people in organizations complain about the seemingly silly decisions that are made.  It is so clear to them, that by investing $100,000, you can recover a $1m.  They’ve done the cost benefit analysis, and the answer is clear.  The only problem is that they haven’t figured whether there is $100,000 to spend in the first place.

Think of it like this:  If you replace the windows in house with better insulated ones, install high efficiency furnaces and air conditioners, and put new insulation in your attic, you will undoubtedly save thousands over the lifetime of those renovations.  However, you may not have the $25,000 required now to do those modifications.  Further, you may not be sure you’ll be in the house long enough to recover the investment.

It is the same for organizations.

Don’t get me wrong – I’ve seen lots of examples of corporate stupidity, too.  My favorite one is the company that decreed in blood that all travel occurring within an operating division must be by surface, and that air travel was restricted to those going across operating divisions.  This made a lot of sense in Northern California, where the decree was issued.  It didn’t make a lot of sense in British Columbia (about twice the size of Texas, and full of mountains).  It turns out to drive from one side of this division to another was a four or five day exercise.  Surely a plane ticket would be cheaper?  Nope – the policy stands.  Truly stupid.

The dynamic of measuring the short term and long term costs and benefits is not easy.  Leaders need to do the math and figure out the right thing to do.  But sometimes, the right thing to do is deferred to what can be done.

You might not get what want, but rather “get what you need”.  Thanks Mick.

The fun part about our job is being exposed to a number of different industries and organizations.  One of my favorite things to say is, “I’ve worked in Nuclear Power Stations, and in grocery stores, and 90% of the management issues are the same.”  I usually get significant pushback from the Nuclear Engineers on this one, but it’s true.

Often the response I get from this statement is a question about the most common thread that weaves organizations and their performance together.  The answer, quite simply, is “Focus”.  The great performing organizations define and continually refine the limited number of things they need to do well, and then execute those things.

The reason people lose focus is because they get so busy managing tasks, they forget to look up every now and then and make sure they are doing the right things.  Or, as I like to say, “They are so busy doing their jobs, they forget to do their jobs.”

As a busy manager, the next time you feel more overwhelmed with work than the bartender on the Kennedy Compound, spend a couple of minutes to review what your top 3 to 7 objectives for the year are.  What are you doing to achieve those objectives this week?  Better yet, review your top objectives every day before you start diving into tasks.

If you find yourself involved in meetings and activities that have nothing to do with those 3 to 7 objectives, then you need to question what you’re doing.  Worse yet, if find yourself with 25 or 30 objectives, you need to go back to drawing board, and transform your laundry list into a more manageable, critical action list.

Achieving focus is conceptually very easy, but requires a lot of discipline to do well.

“A bias for action” – this has become a buzz-phrase I’ve noticed lately, and it makes my skin crawl the same way as when some one uses the word “irregardless”.  This is the curse of several years of studying English at University.

I’ll be the first guy to encourage people to actually get things done, but if I’m going to have a bias for something, I’d prefer it be a bias for thinking.  Simply put, any action you take that is not preceded by some thinking is a waste of time that will ultimately cost you much more time in the long run.

In many situations, the thinking involved need be brief.  Unless you’re planning a moon landing, the amount of time writing and refining plans quickly hits diminishing returns.  To spend even a few minutes thinking about something, and perhaps handwriting one page on what you are trying to achieve, the benefits, risks, and involvement required from others will save you a huge amount of time in the long run.

Here are some of my favorite business moments that demonstrated a bias for action, and an absence of thinking:

New Coke:  Turns out people liked the old coke better, and the company spent millions to undo their action

Moving Jay Leno from the Tonight Show:  NBC had a problem as to what to do with Conan O’Brien, but didn’t think too long about any of these decisions.  Oh well… what’s $40 million between friends?

Ford Motor Company and the Pinto:  It seems it was cheaper to pay wrongful death suits than it was to recall the exploding Pinto.  Apparently the guys running Ford at the time had the Wizard of Oz trifecta:  No brains, no heart, no courage.

US IRS and tax evaders: The US Revenue Service has decided recently to go after tax evaders in Canada and the UK.  Newsflash: people looking to evade taxes don’t move to higher tax jurisdictions that have comprehensive tax treaties with the United States.  If any thought had been put into this, they would realize the housewife who moved to Canada as a child probably isn’t as promising a source of revenue as the corporate executive that moved to Grand Cayman.

Think, then act.  You’d be surprised how well it works.

There is so much stuff out there telling managers what they should do to be more effective, and how they can be better leaders of their people.  This week, I thought I’d take a different approach, and suggest to managers how they might make sure that none of their people care.

It seems that many leaders will read an article or attend a seminar and them come back to the office and do the same thing they were doing before.  They then find themselves stressed-out and miserable, as they can never seem to get a grip on their jobs or on leading their people.  It seems something is lost in the transfer between reading or hearing something, and applying it to our own circumstances.

As for the people those managers are leading: they all start out with a different level of giving a crap, and they are then pushed towards the mean (or average) of “giving-a-crap-edness” of the culture around them.  The great managers push that average line up, and inspire people to come along for the ride.  Bad leaders, push the line down, and tacitly encourage people to give a crap about far fewer things, and at far lower a level.

So here are some things bad leaders do to ensure no one cares:

1. Enable unnecessary bureaucracy. This is why many public sector organizations suffer with poor morale.
2. Not dealing with performance issues.  I’m not going to work all that hard for you if I know my peer is doing nothing, and not getting called on it.
3. Not administering consequences.  People need to know that both good and poor performance will be recognized and “rewarded” as such.
4. Micro-managing.  If you are going to redo all my work anyway, I’m not going to put much effort into it.
5. Playing favorites.  OK… maybe a meritocracy only exists in a University Professor’s textbook, but you’ve got to at least try to give the appearance of fairness.
6. Reinforce a blame culture. People’s best work comes from taking risks, which they will not do, if they get crucified every time a small error is made.

There are lots of other ones, too, but leaders should start with these ones, and determine to what degree they do these things.  The further away you are from these things, the more likely you are to be pushing that mean line of discretionary effort upwards.

Last time I wrote about measurement in the workplace, I got quite a bit of hate mail.  I could tell you the exact quantity and relative quality of that hate mail, but suffice it to say, that people seem to have very definite ideas about how things ought to be measured (or not measured) in their workplace.

So I’ve beefed up my security detail, and put on my protective cup, and I’ll tackle business metrics again – this time for service oriented businesses.

Let me describe the two opposite ends of the continuum on this silly debate.  Way over on the far left hand side, are those people who say, “I’m a lawyer (graphic designer, LR negotiator, marketing specialist, etc.), you can’t measure what I do.”  Sorry – I can, and I will.

On the extreme right hand side of the scale are those people (mostly consultants, who’ve never actually worked in any of these jobs), who say, “Measuring service businesses is exactly the same as measuring production-based businesses.”  You should throw such people out of your office quickly, before any more of their ignorance wears off on your people.

As with many things, the truth lies somewhere between these extremes — in the less comfortable grey area.  You can and should measure service business functions, but it often much harder than simply counting widgets.

In some cases, there are very repeatable and transactional things that occur within a service function, that should be counted like widgets.  If you work as a recruiter, you should be prepared to disclose how many resumes were screened, how many people were shortlisted, how many interviewed, and your time to fill the position.

You should also have a quality ranking as to how well those positions were filled that will only become clear after some time has passed.  For example, how many of your new recruits quit or are terminated within the first 18 months is a quality indicator of the recruiting process.  So are the upward mobility of new hires, and their scores on performance appraisals, in the first couple of years after they come onboard

That wasn’t so hard, was it?

So rather than fire-bombing my office, perhaps you could measure the effectiveness of your current measurements – but we’ll leave that for another day.

I was out for lunch recently on a weekend with an old family friend.  Our lunch, on a beautiful autumn afternoon, overlooking the ocean was repeatedly interrupted by a Blackberry – and not the thorny cane-fruit type.  I finally asked if my friend’s wife was eleven months pregnant, and if he was waiting on the call to rush to the hospital.

“No”, he replied without looking up.  “We’re well beyond our child-rearing days”.

Apparently, my attempt to diffuse the situation with some sarcastic humor had failed.

Some people find themselves in jobs where they really are on call over a weekend.  For the vast majority, however, they voluntarily place themselves on constant standby regardless of their position.  They then have the nerve to whine about not getting any time to themselves.

Suck it up, Princess, you’re doing it to yourself.

My friend above is a public school teacher.  I have great respect for the work that teachers do, but I’ve got to think that one of the perks of the job has got to be the fact that outside of the occasional basketball game, you are largely left alone on the weekends.  Does a public school teacher really need to be monitoring email messages on a Saturday afternoon?

The honest answer is “No”.  People, like my friend, end up doing so for a variety of reasons.  First, it makes us feel important if we believe we are indispensible.  Second is the addictive nature of being continually connected – what if we are the last ones on the block to know that the Joneses are having ice-cream with their apple pie for desert tonight?  Third, it fits right in with what we’ve always been taught to do – not to hold your attention on anyone or anything for more than 30 seconds.

The myth of work-life balance is not that it doesn’t exist, but rather that most people do not allow it to exist.  It is true that organizations need to reduce explicit and tacit pressure for employees to be connected at all times, but employees have some accountability here too.

The reality is that people love to complain that they work long hours, and never get a break, when in fact a large portion of the dysfunctional behavior is entirely self-imposed.  If you want work-life balance, then turn off your phone, and be completely present with whomever or whatever you are dealing with at that moment.  Unless you’re on call for the next space shuttle launch, nobody is going to notice anyway.

So if I read all the management literature correctly, then to improve employee morale, I should hire a concierge, allow people to bring their pets to work, and every day at 3.00pm we should join hands in a circle and sing campfire songs.  Personally, I can’t think of anything that would make me start looking for alternative employment faster.

So what does impact morale, and should managers care?

First of all, they should care – just not about concierges and employee sing-alongs.  Morale is a key driver of attendance and retention both of which have a clear and immediate impact on costs.  Morale also creates and maintains employee discretionary effort — which has a clear and immediate impact on productivity, quality and safety.  Besides all of that, it’s just way more fun to work at a place where people are engaged.

There are several ways for leaders to impact morale.  Perhaps one of the most important is a consistent, fair, and well thought out progressive discipline process.  Yep, that’s right… I’m suggesting that progressive discipline and higher employee morale are highly correlated.  Here’s why:

When one member of a team consistently doesn’t pull his weight, it is rarely the boss that feels the impact of this.  Most often it is that laggard’s peers.  By addressing one person’s poor performance, others are both relieved and validated.  They are relieved that the discipline will either lead to the person beginning to pull their weight, or that the person will be replaced by someone who will.  They are validated by the demonstration that their effort is superior to that of the person receiving the discipline.

The most highly effective workplaces have predictable and clear consequences for both good and poor performance, so it is not good enough for a leader simply to focus on discipline.  However, many managers put off uncomfortable discussions about poor performance using the excuse that any intervention will harm morale.  In fact, the opposite it true.

Oh No.  Now you’ve got to go do it.

Go ahead… discipline someone for poor performance, and improve your team’s morale.

Mistakes are remarkably underrated, and very few organizations are actually good at making them.  When it comes to making mistakes, there are typically two types of organizations:

1. Those with little or no tolerance for mistakes, so in order to avoid making them, they either don’t make decisions, or they analyze decisions to such a degree that they become paralyzed.  I would include most public sector organizations and big utilities in this category.
2. Those organizations where mistakes get made, and the most important thing is to assign blame.  Of course, people in such organizations would not self-identify as being blame-seekers, but it is often cloaked in “holding people accountable”.  Accountability is about people delivering on pre-agreed upon requirements.  Making mistakes is about taking risks and doing something new

There is a third type of organization that encourages people to take risks in certain areas of the business.  Many times those risks do not pan out, but from the ashes of failure a phoenix of innovation and performance rises.  This type of organization is exceptionally rare.  The best examples are well known:  Apple, Virgin.  There are others as well, but they are as difficult to find as a trace of dignity in a reality TV star.

I always know I’m in a well run and innovative business when I hear, “Here’s a stupid idea”.  A high level of confidence is required is say such a thing, and a high level of trust in your peers to take such risks.  So revel in your mistakes, and do so knowing you are in good company.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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:

1. Did we have what the customer wanted on the shelf when s/he wanted it?
2. 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?

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.

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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:

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.

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.

I worked with a client, who confided in me that he was about to quit his job in a senior leadership role within the organization.  Mike was really smart, and hard working, but had a bit of a blind-spot when it came to political considerations within the workplace.  He always insisted that he didn’t play politics.  What he failed to realize is that you can’t choose whether to play workplace politics or not.  You play, or you get played.

Mike and I role-played his resignation conversation a bit, and it became clear to me very early that this was going to be a disaster of epic proportions.  Mike was determined to teach his boss, and the organization a lesson on his way out.  No one was safe – his boss, his peers, and his direct reports were all targets of his wrath.

In completely unrelated news, Mike was a smoker.  Putting the addictive nature of tobacco use aside, people smoke because the short-term consequences of smoking are immediate, certain and generally positive.  How else can you look cool, get a nicotine high and relax yourself?  It feels good.  The longer-term death and illness are problems for another day.

Mike’s choice in how he chose to leave the organization was parallel reasoning, and equally as stupid.  He had watched too many crap-TV shows that erroneously illustrate people quitting their jobs by sticking it to their boss and the organization, feeling a huge sense of relief and a temporary euphoria before moving on to bigger and better things.

The reality of a grand-mal resignation is more like the eventual cancer and emphysema that smokers get.  It feels good for a few minutes, but ultimately sabotages the quitter’s longer-term career prospects.

Before Mike chose to light his future with the glow of the bridges he’d burned behind him, he may have wanted to consider how and when he might run into some of these people again.

Mike didn’t know which one of the peers he burned on his way out might be a hiring manager at another organization five years from now.  He also had no way to know that the boss he called everything short of illegitimate would also be submitting his notice shortly because he was taking on a new role at the same firm Mike was moving to.

Oh, that’s going to be awkward.  But they never talk about that on the sitcoms.

How did this happen?  When you were a teenager, you were very clearly smarter than your parents.  Then you went on, and got yourself a whole bunch of education, worked hard, and are now leading a team of people.  Half of them are old enough to be your parents.

Managing your mom?  You didn’t sign up for this.

Oh to be a Baby Boomer — The single most important demographic cohort in the history of the planet.  The baby boomers have absolutely dominated the workplace since the 1960s, and are only slowly giving up their grip now.  If you were born after about 1965, then it is a good news/bad news story for you.

The bad news is the Boomers racked up your “societal credit card debt”, that will take several generations to pay off.  The good news is they’ve already cured erectile dysfunction, and they are bound and determined to stay youthful forever, which bodes well for all those that follow.

In the workplace, this has a number of ramifications.  If you’ve got a boomer working for you, you might have to put up with the occasional tardy arrival, if you are to believe the Cialis commercials.  It also means when you start talking about ISPs, ASPs and HTML, their eyes will glaze over faster than Paris Hilton’s would on Jeopardy.

Keep in mind that there is something to be learned from this generation.  Yes they were financially reckless with your future, and made the planet into an environmental disaster, but that doesn’t mean they don’t know a thing or two about whatever business you are in.

The Boomers have seen several business cycles come and go, and will tell you (with certain credibility) that they’ve seen it all previously.  Everything in business comes full circle – just the details are marginally different.  If you listen carefully to the Boomers working for you, you just might get a jump on whatever is going to happen next.

They can’t manage email to save their life, and they think microwaves and fax machines are high tech, but if you discount their input and feedback, it is at your peril.

Several years ago, I became involved in a finance audit with a public sector client.  These things are about as much fun as a boot in the butt with a frozen mukluk in any organization, but public sector organizations are even worse because of their inherent risk aversion.

It turns out the finance clerks were spending a ridiculous amount of time processing expense accounts for the considerable number of employees that were constantly travelling for business purposes.

Without doing the necessary internal investigating first, I got the bright idea to check with the relevant tax authorities as to whether we could simply offer people a per diem and dispense with all the $10 lunch receipts that were clogging up the system.

The federal tax agency did indeed have a provision for this that I thought would solve a considerable problem, and make everyone’s lives easier.

I was incredibly wrong.  I hadn’t been this wrong since I predicted Whitney Houston’s big comeback.

After lobbying hard inside the Finance group for such a change to be implemented, I was told in no uncertain terms, that we couldn’t do this because the people who didn’t spend the entire amount would pocket the difference, and that would be unacceptable.  Never mind that the amount was only about $50/day for a person on the road to pay for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Further, this policy could not be adopted because two senior managers had been caught abusing their expense accounts while travelling for business.

The VP of Finance initiated a root cause analysis of this problem, and concluded they did not have adequate control measures, and poor policy on expenses accounts.

He got it wrong.  He was treating a symptom of a much greater problem.  The root cause of his problem was a corporate culture with zero accountability.  Had a similar expense account abuse taken place in the private sector, the offending employees would have been terminated with cause, and common sense on a per diem expense policy would have prevailed.

Instead the VP of Finance chose to treat a symptom of a far larger problem by adding more bureaucracy.  He also chose to disregard the thousands of hours of labor required to process lunch receipts.  It’s a good thing he didn’t have the burden of worrying about shareholder value.

So instead of addressing the root cause, the Finance Department spent months rewriting the expense account policies, and ultimately came up with a completely ridiculous 75 page document that all employees with expense accounts were expected to adhere to.

Another genius example of your tax dollars hard at work.

You’re out on a limb when you ask for a raise.  It’s kind of like being a teenager again, and asking someone out on a date for the first time.  The stakes are high – if you’re successful, you’ll feel good, and look like a hero to your peers.  If you’re not successful, you’ll look and feel like an idiot.

The reactions to success and rejection are similar too.  If you get the raise (or the date), you become the cock of the walk.  If you get rejected, you try to keep it quiet, or if asked, you say you really didn’t want it anyway.

The outcome of a raise request is highly personal – people equate it with their personal value.  It’s a bad idea to attach your perception of personal value to someone else’s assessment of you.  It is a good idea, however to attach your professional value to the goals of the organization.

Several years ago I did quite a bit of work with a company that conducted employee satisfaction surveys.  In addition to many questions about their leadership and work environment, we asked employees about compensation.  We discovered that there is almost no way that compensation can be a driver of employee satisfaction.

People are either neutral or dissatisfied with their compensation level.  No one is ever actually satisfied with the money they make, presumably because more is always better.

People become dissatisfied with their compensation for a variety of reasons, but one of the most prevalent is because they find out someone else is making more than them.  This judgmental itch often extends beyond our immediate peers, causing anger because of how much the CEO makes, or others far removed from our own circle.

There seems to be a disproportionate amount of anger addressed at CEOs and politicians; while we have a collective blind spot for sports and movie stars.  The CEOs have successfully equated their action and leadership with value for the organization (or they bribed the Board of Directors), and politicians, for the most part are underpaid.

If we should be angry at anything, it should probably be at overpaid movie stars who have done little else than won the genetic lottery for meeting our narrowly defined societal version of what is good looking.  However, many movie stars have a good argument that if a movie is going to make $300 million dollars, then $20 million for a pretty face has certainly contributed to its success.

And that’s the lesson for the rest of us.  We should spent no time being angry or bitter about what other people are getting paid, and channeling our energy into clearly demonstrating the value that we add to our organizations.

Either that, or ask the boss’s daughter out on a date.

OK… so I know I’m supposed to treat these ones differently.  They’ve never received anything but continually positive feedback, and their Mum’s and Dad’s loved them so much, they got a cake and a parade every time they didn’t wet the bed.

Unfortunately, some one has to break the news to the more entitled of this generation that:

Life is Just Not Fair.

If you are living and working in a society of more than one, sooner or later someone who is not as smart as you, not as hardworking as you, and maybe not even as good looking as you, is going to get something that you feel entitled to.  It’s horribly unfair.

It’s called “life”.

Prince Charles got himself into trouble a few years ago because he suggested that maybe it wasn’t the best idea to tell everyone they could do or be anything they wanted to.  On the surface, it is highly offensive to have a guy that was born into fame and riches lecturing people to accept their lot in life and make the best of it.  On reflection however, he is the perfect person to say so:  he never had a choice as to his vocation or ambition.  It was pre-determined for him, and few sane people would want to trade places with him.

In reality, people of all generations should try to reach beyond their grasp.  The folly is when achieving things beyond your humble origins becomes an entitlement, rather than a bonus.  There are lots of smart people out there who have worked very hard to exceed their natural circumstances, who only do marginally better than their parents or peers did.  Those that have risen above tremendous adversity go on to get their own television networks (good for you, Oprah), or have movies of the week made about their story are the exception, not the rule.

The rest of us need to be content with what fate conspires to deliver to us for our efforts.

I have a creepy feeling about a whole generation of trophy-kids entering the workplace, when their parents and society have failed to expose them to unbridled competition or at least some understanding of the harsh reality of life.  Far too many parents would storm into the principal’s office when Susie didn’t get an “A” in chemistry.

What’s going to happen when Susie’s dad wants to storm into the boss’s office when Susie gets fired?

OK… maybe they are created equal, but after their first day of work, they are no longer on an equal footing.

So before the letters start, let me be clear that I would never suggest inequality due to gender, race, sexual orientation or any of the other usual culprits.  I am a firm believer that once you take the time to get to know a person, there are so many other reasons to dislike them, that normally defined prejudices need not apply.

But I read in the business press that I need to install a hot tub in every other office at work to make sure that no one quits.  Here’s the thing:  I desperately want a few of them to quit.  I don’t exactly have grounds to fire them, but I know that if a vacancy comes up, I can do better.  So the last thing I want to do is make it too comfortable for them… then they’ll never quit.

The HR people hate this part: some people are simply more valuable to organizations than others.  It doesn’t mean that we don’t value all people, nor does it mean that we don’t treat all people with respect.  It does mean that we will work harder to keep some people on board than others.

Many of the employee retention programs out there are horribly misguided in this regard.  They are well intentioned in so far as wanting to create a positive working environment, but these programs miss the mark by not identifying and targeting those employees that we especially want to keep.

Yes, I know it’s problematic to only put the hot tubs in some offices, but not others.  However, the very best employee retention tactic is investing in, and developing high quality leadership within an organization.  Most people that leave a company actually “quit their boss”, rather than resign from the organization.

Interestingly, a high quality leader can also raise the performance of that employee I talked about earlier that I would rather part company with.  If the employee can’t be saved, then a high quality leader will steward the employee’s departure out of the organization in a professional and respectful manner.

The bottom line is that if organizations are serious about retaining high quality employees, they should save the investment in air-hockey tables, hot tubs, and concierge services, and funnel those resources into the attraction and development of high quality leadership throughout the organization.

You’ll get better returns, retain more high quality employees, and won’t have water damage from the steam of the hot tub.

Here’s an extreme example of the power of leading versus lagging indicators: plane crashes.  Every now and then, a plane might just fall out of the sky with no advance warning, but most often the cause was entirely predictable, and could have been caught by some leading indicator of trouble.  The tragic lagging indicator is when a plane hurls into the side of a mountain.

Now, to be fair, the airline industry has an outstanding safety record, and their ability to catch problems before they turn into catastrophe is something many other industries would be well-advised to study.

However, a recent news article by the Detroit Free Press got me to thinking about leading indicators of airline disaster.  The article was about an Air Traffic Controller who was caught watching a movie (Cleaner, starring Samuel L. Jackson, if it matters), rather than tending to the airplanes he was supposed to be watching.  I am going to go out on the limb here and say that the number and amount of movies watched while on duty by Air Traffic Controllers is a pretty clear leading indicator of plane crashes.

Once this was made public, the United States Federal Aviation Authority naturally took steps to suspend the Controller in question and his boss (even though they should have fired them both), and has launched an investigation.  And the pundits have all started to weigh in on the impact of goofing off at work.

In November of 2010, Salary.com did a survey that revealed that 36% of us waste two or more hours at work every day.  If you think your organization has any significant number of people making up that 36%, then it should be a pretty clear leading indicator of your pending implosion as a viable organization.

But back to the Air Traffic Controllers.

Jonathan Spira, an analyst that has studied goofing off at work (sounds like a fun job) said about this situation: “Clearly, if someone is watching a movie, they are bored, tired, distracted or somehow unable to perform his job.”

What Mr. Spira missed is that the person goofing off might just be an idiot who needs a kick in the ass.  Such as is the case with this Air Traffic Controller.  If this problem is widespread (which the US FAA is investigating currently), then I am going to suggest another leading indicator for airline safety:

The number of Air Traffic Controllers disciplined or fired is a leading indicator of improved air traffic safety.

Who says Ronald Reagan is dead?

Now if you really want to know what happens in the control tower, click on this week’s video clip, below:

 

Have you been down to your local blacksmith’s lately?  Unless you’re reading this post through a hole in the space-time continuum, you probably haven’t.  Actually, blacksmiths still exist, but they are now a rare, highly-specialized group of skilled workers.

Compare this to the 15^th through 19^th centuries, when a blacksmith was one of the focal points of every community.  As our societies and technologies evolved, the skills of the blacksmith became less and less pervasive.

Now compare this to the wordsmith.  I couldn’t find any significant history on the wordsmith, so I’ll make something up, and then go post it on Wikipedia.  The wordsmith was also around in the 15^th through 19^th centuries, although they kept a low profile.  This is because as children, future wordsmiths were routinely beat up by future blacksmiths

This may explain why so many wordsmiths are able to rear their ugly heads (and ply their treacherous trade) today.  With the diminishing number of future blacksmiths, future wordsmiths don’t receive near as many beatings as they should to discourage them.

You probably know a wordsmith – although they set-up shoppe in the most unlikely places.  The wordsmith is the one who ensures that any meeting that could have been done in 30 minutes, goes for at least two-hours.  These are the people who will argue incessantly about subject-verb inversion, and how it may affect the organization’s vision statement.

If you find yourself organizing or facilitating the articulation of organizational goals, strategies, mission or vision statements, you need to root out the wordsmiths early.  Send them on a business trip, or tell them there’s a newspaper somewhere that needs to have a letter written to the editor because the sentence structure of a headline was inappropriate.

The bottom line is that missions, visions, goals and strategies are all useless documents, unless they move people to action of some sort.  If the wordsmith gets her way, these documents will all be grammatically and politically correct, but so general and generic to the point of being useless.

So… if you have any of these documents, that sit high on a shelf for 11 months of the year, until the dust is blown off them for the next planning cycle, you can blame the wordsmith.  To address this problem, you have two options:

1. Distract the wordsmith long enough to rewrite the documents in a concise and meaningful way.
2. Hire a blacksmith to take out the wordsmith.

Well, that’s kind of harsh – even if it is true for many leaders.  How did it come to this?  How did you manage your career so you could end up mediating between two employees who are applying death-threats to each other because one used the other’s Arthur Fonzarelli commemorative coffee mug, and never washed it?

None of us stood up in the first grade and announced to the world that we wanted to be a middle manager.  Yet, there are far more middle managers than there are police officers, fire-fighters and ballerinas combined.  And here you are a generation later with the title, “Manager” which entitles you to:

• 10% more pay than the two idiots arguing over the coffee mug
• longer working hours
• hypertension.

I remember being the manager of a supermarket, where I’d have to mediate such disputes as who had to check through the groceries.  Yep, that’s right – we had hired over 100 people into the job description, “cashier”, and I was constantly involved in battles over who had to check.  Weren’t we paying all of you to perform that function?

Or another employee who made a career out of torturing other people with comments such as:

• “I think you’ve put on weight”
• “You’ll probably be bald in another couple of years”
• “Why do you think it is that people don’t like you”

Of course, he always phrased these in such a way that he couldn’t be taken to task for harassment, but that didn’t stop the line-up of complaints about his behaviour.

I finally developed a coping strategy for these petty complaints that made me tremendously unpopular with everyone, but I enjoyed my job much more, and had way more time on my hands.  Unless I deemed the complaint to be something that would effect the viability of the business, or lead to an unacceptable amount of risk, I would tell people, “You need to sort this out on your own, because if you try to involve me, I guarantee no one is going to like the result”.

A threat?  Probably.

A survival strategy?  Definitely.

I’ve spoken in this space before about “the burden of leadership” that some managers have thought is a bit harsh.  I won’t back away from those comments, but I will say that petty complaints and conflicts are not part of any manager’s job – it’s a baby-sitter’s job.

The Manager’s job is often a thankless one, but it doesn’t have to be trivial, unless you allow it to be so.  This aspect of the manager’s job is timeless.

Part of my job is to read the latest management books, and scan the media for important literature that could be of some use to managers.  Some stuff is certainly better written than others, but lately I’m getting downright cranky with some of the “wisdom” the alleged management gurus and pumping out to maintain their publishing revenue.  As a result, this week we’ll address some of these guru-myths.

Myth #1:  You need to treat everybody the same.

Treating everybody the same is a management slogan that gets trotted out as good leadership behaviour when exactly the opposite is true.  People are individuals and need to be treated as such.  Here’s something else the management gurus won’t tell you – sometimes, some of your people will desperately need a kick in the ass.

The reason management gurus won’t tell you this, is because they don’t know.  They don’t know, because they’ve never actually been a manager.  Yes, they may have sold enough books to own their very own Caribbean island, but many of them have never actually had direct reports.

I won’t disagree that people should be always treated with equal amounts of respect.  But respect necessarily means that a good leader will deal with a poor performing team member (sometimes via that kick in the ass, mentioned above) out of respect for the higher performing team members.

Myth #2:  Managers need to delegate everything

Another guru-myth is that every manager needs to, “delegate, delegate, delegate!” There is no doubt that effective delegation can help a leader push some teams to outstanding performance.  But there are other teams, where relentless delegation can be a catastrophic mistake.

In teams with members that are lower skilled for the tasks they are performing, the last thing you want to do is delegate.  These people need to be carefully directed and managed – some people might even call it micro-managing.  Delegating too much, too soon is probably a larger management issue than failing to delegate.

Myth #3:  Training solves all performance problems

More than once we’ve gotten a call from someone who asks us to come in and do some change management training with his people.  Our very first question is, “why do you think they need training?”

Sometimes, they do.  In other cases, people are fully capable of making the change being asked of them, they just don’t want to do so.  (See:  ass-kicking, above)

Myth #4:  People don’t resist change.  You just need to give them all the information

This myth is particularly offensive.  People DO resist change even when they know the benefits, and have all the information required.  Case in point:  the metric system.  It’s vastly superior, and far easier to understand.  Nearly 7 billion people use it every day, yet the few who still choose not to use it hang on to the old imperial system like Linus protects his blanket.

I could go on and on, but I’m working on a change-management training course for managers who want to better delegate to the people they want to treat all the same.

Well, that title should upset a few people – particularly the folks in finance that love their spreadsheets more than they do their children.  Don’t get me wrong… I like the idea of measuring things so you know where you stand.  My problem is the way in which some organizations execute their metrics.

Performance metrics often provide an excellent illustration of how a really good idea can be made difficult and useless by poor implementation.  It’s a lot like watching your favourite sports franchise consistently snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory.

Usually it goes down like this:  someone in some position of authority will read the first fifteen pages of a book about measurement.  Without reading the following 250 pages, he concludes that his organization needs to get everyone on the measurement bandwagon.  Then he strikes a committee, or hires a consultant to go forth and make this happen.

Fast forward in time six months, and a significant portion of everyone’s work week becomes dedicated to counting the number of paper clips they have consumed since last week, and calculating the annual impact of that paper clip consumption.  They then have a meeting to discuss how to reduce paper clip consumption, thereby reducing annual operating costs by $48.50, or roughly 1/100^th the cost of the first meeting about paper clip consumption.

OK… that might be a bit harsh.  But here are some actual examples of performance metrics gone horribly wrong:

• The technology company that measured sales success exclusively on dollar volume at the end of each quarter.  THE RESULT:  A whole bunch of clients went somewhere else because they were tired of being sold things they really didn’t need.
• The grocery retailer that measured check-stand effectiveness by calculating the frequency of cashiers using customers’ names.  THE RESULT:  the customers went to stores where they measure how much time was spent waiting in line – something the customer actually cares about.
• The restaurant owner that attempted to reduce cost by reducing the number of paper napkins provided to each customer.  THE RESULT:  I don’t know… probably sticky fingers and dirty tables – this one just seemed really silly to me
• The lumber manufacturer that measured how much fibre it recovered from each log, as opposed to how much money they made on different dimensions of lumber.  THE RESULT:  Very few wood-chips, but a yard full of garden stakes that no one would buy (and a whole bunch of trees unnecessarily harvested)

Some people will tell you all that matters at the end of the day is how much money you make.  Not true – if you focus exclusively on this, you are in a never-ending cycle of sub-optimized decisions that forbid any long term success.  Most obviously, if you ignore safety while focusing exclusively on how much money is make, it is only a matter of time before you injure or kill someone, which beside being ethically reprehensible, is very expensive.

Here’s the bottom line about measurement:  The great thing about measuring performance is that people will adjust their behaviours to affect the outcome of the measure.  Unfortunately, the really scary thing about measuring performance is that people will adjust their behaviours to affect the outcome of the measure.

So measurement (like other recreational drugs) should be used cautiously and in moderation.  Second, you should never have only one number you are tracking.  And finally, you need to understand why numbers are trending the way they are, as opposed to (over)reacting to one data point.

Let’s be careful out there.

Part of what makes my job so much fun is being exposed to a variety of organizations in a wide variety of industries.  The culture of these organizations vary widely, and is probably best manifested in how people make decisions.  In some places, people gather as much information as they can, they discuss possible courses of action, and then they pull the trigger on a decision.

Other organizations have rambling, unfocused discussions, refer things to subcommittees, defer decisions seemingly indefinitely, and then wonder why their organizations consistently fail.

People can argue whether the greater evil is in making decisions to quickly or too slowly, and you can probably guess which side of equation I will argue for with the following list:

Things that delay decisions:

1. Needing perfect information before committing.  It would be nice if you had all the available information at your disposal, but by the time you gather and process all that data, it’s possible your decision won’t matter anymore.
2. Being too risk adverse. When people are deathly afraid of making a mistake, they will hesitate to make decisions.  What is not part of their calculations is that their delay carries a certain amount of risk too.
3. Trying to keep everybody happy all the time.  Making decisions usually means having to make trade-offs of some sort.  By saying yes to one course of action, you are saying no to another, and in the process, you are going to upset someone.  This is a key reason why the public sector often fails to make timely, quality decisions.
4. A top-heavy or micro-managed business.  In this case, only one person, or a small number of people are permitted to make any decisions, and as such become a bottleneck.  Organizations that push decision making down the hierarchy to the most appropriate level are much more agile, and ultimately perform much better.
5. Poor decision-making process. Sometimes, people fail to recognize a decision point when it appears in front of them.  If they don’t recognize the fork in the road, they certainly won’t know which turn to take.
6. Fear: Contrary to popular belief, it is sometimes better to make the wrong decision today, realize it tomorrow and then correct your course of action, than it is to delay a decision for weeks or months.

Now I’m really having a hard time deciding which video clip to include this week.  One of the candidates is a Monty Python bit (People’s front of Judea) that contains foul language that might offend some.  The other is a clip of George W. Bush talking about being a decision-maker, that may offend some American viewers.

I could ask everyone to weigh-in, and then make my decision, or I could just flip a coin, but I can’t decide which decision making process is better.

Here’s a quiz:  In my organization HR is/are:

a)    A highly professional service provider that partners with managers to maximize shareholder value through effective people management practice.

b)   The people who organize our Christmas parties and picnics

c)    Where people who couldn’t make it in the core business go to be marginalized to the point where they do a minimum of damage.

OK – maybe HR’s an easy target in many organizations, but if beating up HR is a fun way to relieve some tension mid-day at the water cooler, you really won’t like what comes next:

If your HR group truly sucks, then your organization most likely sucks, too.

Yep, that’s right.  I’m suggesting there is a direct correlation between highly effective HR, and a highly effective organization.  Furthermore, I’d suggest that organizational managers get the HR departments they deserve.  If your HR group is solely administrative in nature, and generally not very high performing, then that is exactly the quality of service you as a manager, or an organization has asked for.

You may like or hate Jack Welch, but it would pretty hard to argue that GE wasn’t a high performing organization when he was running it.  Just about any time you heard Welch speak, he would talk about what he was doing, and he’d also talk about Bill Conaty – his HR guy.  For GE, the HR portfolio was extremely important.  Some other Jack Welch quotes about HR:

“A high quality senior HR person is as critical as the CFO”

HR should “get out of the picnic business”

And his advice to HR people:  “Don’t be a victim”

Every organization has its version of the “People are our most important asset” speech, but Welch actually lived it.  People will jump all over this, because Welch had an impressive record of firing people.  But valuing people necessarily means that you remove barriers to a team’s success, and sometimes this means removing people.

The strongest organizations I have worked with have highly-competent, business-focused HR people.  They also insist that every manager in the company is an HR manager.  HR is not something that is delegated to a central group – it is actively managed by every leader, every day.  The HR group’s role in these high-performing organizations is to set organizational leaders up to be outstanding managers of the human asset.

Picnics and Christmas parties need to be assigned elsewhere – perhaps the marketing department isn’t busy.

The first day on a new job is a harrowing experience.  It creates impressions on all those you work with, and sets the stage for your success (or failure) with that employer.

Probably my most memorable first day on the job was literally my first day on the job – any job.  I was fifteen years old, and I got a job bagging groceries at the local supermarket.  Ron Grant was the manager on duty, and he met me at the door.  Ron was never one to smile much, but he was a good guy, and he knew his job very well.

What he didn’t do as well, was to remember people’s names.  From my first day onwards, my name was always “Brad” – the curse of having a last name that is many others’ first name.  In the months to come, I’d hear him paging Brad time after time, and then wonder why Brad (whoever that was) never answered.

Ron toured me through the whole store, stopping along the way to introduce me to everyone on staff that we met, and to point out the things I might need to know for my new career wrapping groceries.  He also doled out advice that was very useful and well intentioned, but easily could have been included in the best-seller, “Sh*t My Dad Says.”  Needless to say, I learned some new words and expressions that day, that came in very handy when I recycled them back at high school.

I learned in the months and years to come, that Ron oriented me to my new workplace completely of his own initiative.  The organization really had no process for bringing people on besides the requisite signing of the official paperwork.

At the end of this orientation, he returned me to the front of the store, where I’d spend the next several years bagging groceries.

“Any questions?” asked Ron.

“Nope… I’m ready to go.” I replied.

“Great”, he said, as I turned to get started.  “Hey Brad,”

“Yep?”

“Your fly’s open”, he said without cracking a smile.

Presumably, he’d noticed this before he’d toured me through the whole place, but had waited until now to share this news with me.  It’s been a while since I’ve been teenage boy, but I’m assuming at the time I would have had checklist of basic hygiene items – such as making sure one’s zipper was properly secured.  Apparently, first day job jitters successfully eclipsed basic personal maintenance items.

Walking around in a public place with your fly open — I suppose that’s one way to make a first impression on when starting a new job.

I know it may be hard to believe (because I seem so delightful in these pages), but I can sometimes be difficult to get along with.  I get particularly cranky when I’m working with a group that loves to have meetings.  They have no idea why they have meetings, there are no outcomes, and no decisions are made, so it must be that there is some addictive quality in the coffee served at meetings.

Humourist Dave Barry once said that organizations have meetings because they are unable to masterbate.  I prefer to look at it this way: there is an inverse correlation between the number and quality of meetings in an organization, and their overall success.  In other words, I am suggesting that the fewer meetings that occur, the more successful the organization will be.

I know this is an argument I will lose in most companies, so as a service to Wily Manager readers, I’ll suggest ways to pass the time in one of your infinite number of meetings:

• Buzzword Bingo – this is where you try to stay awake by identifying business catch phrases.  You need to be discrete, though.  You don’t want to carry in a BINGO marker, or jump out of your chair, screaming “BINGO” when the Director of IT utters the words “low-hanging fruit”.  Download the Wily Manager Buzzword Bingo card here.
• Meeting value calculator – it’s kind of like a telethon, where you keep adding up the total amount of shareholder value that is being sucked away.  You can run the calculations privately, or put up a display board with changeable numbers that can be updated as the meeting goes on.  It’s a bit like the national debt clock in Times Square.
• Count the Meetings. Often you may be in a room and witnessing 12 individual meetings happening in rapid succession, as each person updates the boss with information that is completely irrelevant to everyone else in the room.
• Count the Meetings (variation). In particularly undisciplined organizations, meetings will degenerate into multiple and simultaneous conversations.  In this case there can be several separate meetings occurring at once, but they are much harder to count that the first variation of this game.
• Spot the Participant Type: In this game, you tag each participant with the label most appropriate to them.  Here are some thought starters:
  • The Jeopardy game show contestant:  this is a person constantly asking rhetorical questions, and communicates through Socratic code:  “Do I like the idea of being in this meeting room for 8 hours?  No, I don’t”
  • Caffeine-Deprived: Spot the people in the room struggling just to maintain a minimum level of consciousness, so as not to appear asleep.  Often identified by periodic head-bobbing, however the really good ones have perfected sleeping with the eyes open, while nodding every few moments to give the illusion of awareness
  • The Rambler – A solution to this problem is like Book III of Gulliver’s Travels where an empty sheep’s bladder tied to stick is used to gently hit the Rambler in the head to keep him on track.
  • The Evangelist – everything is a matter of life or death.  If the colour of the toilet-paper is changed, it will negatively impact our very way of life.
  • The thinker – they doodle, don’t look they’re paying attention, and then once per meeting the amaze everyone with their ability to put the entire issue into context.  Be nice to them, they could be your next boss.

Finally, it seems that meetings and death are closely related.  Even before Patrick Lencioni wrote Death By Meeting, I had a dream that I had died, and arrived in purgatory, and it was a meeting that never ended.  I was desperate that someone would pray for my soul, until I realized all of them were too busy in meetings as well.  I woke up realizing a violent death wasn’t as bad as it sounded – at least after a grizzly death, someone would pray for me.

“Tell me about your strengths and weaknesses”

If that is the opening line at an employment interview, you may want to run away so fast that there is a “you-shaped” hole in the door.  If you hear those words come out of your own mouth as a hiring manager, you need to do some work to up your game for this important managerial function.

Let’s examine why this is a useless question that shows a startling lack of imagination:

• First of all, this is a question that invites insincere answers.  You might as well ask, “could you dust off some lies and embellishments, and trot them out now?”

• Second, you are not really testing the validity of the match between the competencies required for a position, and the profile of a candidate.  Your questions need to be far more specific than this.

• Third, this question invites the most rehearsed, least spontaneous answers.  It is possible as the hiring manager, you hear something in the syndicated response that you can follow up on, but that would be pure good luck.

I know that many managers and recruiters will disagree with my viewpoint on this, so to encourage you to abandon this useless question, here are some typical responses, and the literal translation.  You can cut and paste these ones into your interview notes, and spare the candidate the pain of the question:

What are your strengths?

• I’m a hard worker. I don’t have any other interests or hobbies, and like to spend upwards to 80 hours a week at the office.
• I’m a people person. I really like people, and even the few I don’t like I will treat with mock civility.
• I’m detail oriented. I’d much rather lose myself in a spreadsheet than deal with people.

What are your weaknesses?

• I’m a perfectionist. Not only am I perfect, but I demand the same of everyone around me.  I’m a delight at the water-cooler.
• I’m impatient. If my paycheque is an hour late, I will launch a class-action suit on behalf of everyone who works here.
• I work too hard. I’m not quite sure what I’m doing, so I’ll compensate by being in the office at 6am, and not leave until 9pm.  I’ll probably be on stress leave before the end of my first month.

In an interview, either as the hiring manager, or the candidate, you want some indication that the person you are dealing with is semi-intelligent.  You also hope that you are portraying yourself similarly.  Otherwise, you might as well audition for a reality-based TV show with the other mentally impaired contestants.

I had trouble choosing just one video clip this week, so I gave up, and embedded both of them.

When asked about manager stress, I am reminded of when I did my very first gig as a Management Consultant.  The company I worked for paired me up with one of the wise old owls, whose job it was to show me the ropes, and make sure I didn’t say anything too stupid so as to jeopardize the relationship with the client.

His first bit of advice to me was, “never care more than the client.”  It was incredibly cynical, and incredibly valuable.  I am careful where, and to whom I repeat this advice, but many of the leaders suffering from manager stress I’ve coached over the years should heed this adage.

You can never be the only one who cares about something.  In fact, a key survival skill as a leader in the modern organization is to selectively not give a crap about a whole bunch of stuff.

I am reminded of a public sector client I once had who lamented to me that if they only had more resources, they could get so much more done.  I think she was genuinely shocked when I broke the ugly truth to her that she would never, ever have all the resources she wanted.  It never happens in the private sector, or the public sector – nor should it.

One of the key functions of a manager is to allocate the scarce resources of time, money and talent appropriately.  What separates great managers from the average and poor is their ability to manage the conversion of these resources to maximize the output of their group.

A great way to make yourself absolutely crazy as a manager in any organization is to try to get everything done that the company wants, as well as everything you want to do.  You need to draw your own line in the sand, and figure out what you need to do to be successful, and forget about much of the other stuff.  A great way to accelerate your journey to stress-leave, and make everyone around you hate your guts is to try to be all things to all people.

Of course, doing the above means you will spend a lot of time saying “no” to people, and risk not having anyone like you.  It’s called the burden of leadership, and it’s what you signed-on for once you gave up your individual contributor’s role.

So, to recap:

1)   Selectively don’t give a crap.

2)   You’re never going to have enough resources

3)   Don’t do much of the stuff you think you should be doing

4)   Don’t even attempt to keep everyone happy

5)   Your career as an organizational leader will result in you being in a constant state of marginal “pissed-off’edness”

Wow… that’s quite a bit different than the stuff they taught us in Business School.  But then again, how many Biz School Profs have ever had any success in running an actual business?

Some of us love British humour, others not so much. Either way, there is always something to be learned. Earlier this week, Jeff Haden at BNET found some Python video clips with some instructional advice for managers. Happy viewing:

http://www.bnet.com/blog/small-biz-advice/the-monty-python-guide-to-being-a-better-boss

If you’re a regular visitor to this site, you’ll know we like The Office, Seinfeld, Saturday Night Live, and 30 Rock.  With only a few other exceptions, broadcast television is an incredible waste of time, and like other recreational drugs, should be used only occasionally and sparingly.

Interestingly, life on the corporate food-chain is not unlike a poorly written sitcom.  Perhaps that is why so many of them are set in the workplace.  Both the workplace and the crappy sitcoms have protagonists, antagonists, and usually some version of the mentally unbalanced.  Bad writing and poor acting are part of both as well.  Perhaps the only significant difference is that on a sitcom, big problems can neatly be wrapped up in 22 minutes, so there’s time to sell soap and give you a preview to next week’s silliness.

I decided to do some research for this post, so I sat for an evening to watch some sitcoms to make sure I hadn’t misplaced my contempt, and to bring myself up to date on some of the blubber being offered up on TV.

Apparently prime-time comedy is getting worse.  It is also apparent that one doesn’t need an abundance of talent to write this stuff, so Wily Manager proudly presents:

Manager in the Middle

Manager in the Middle is an innovative new sitcom from the people who bring you the Wily Manager weekly podcasts.  The primary character (yet to be named, pending focus group results) is a smart, but cheeky manager constantly being offset by his sadistic immediate supervisor.

The supervisor, Cruela (played by Jane Lynch) loves to pit one manager off against another believing this “healthy” competition will better help her run her business.  Our protagonist is also matrix-managed by a kind, cautious human-resource manager who always knows the right thing to do, but is unwilling to make a decision, and is incredibly conflict-adverse.

Our hero (played by Frankie Muniz (he’s all grown up now)) has four peer managers who all report to Cruella.  Rounding out the cast is:

• Vlad: The hard-working, smart, reliable foreigner who is easily pushed around for fear of losing his work visa (played by Fez from That 70s Show)
• Dianne: The single mom who is just trying to make it through the day, but is in constant conflict with Cruela, as she struggles to make it to the daycare on time to pick up her two kids.  Cruela would like to fire her for not working insane hours, but unfortunately (for Cruela) the work she does is outstanding.
• Don: The smarmy, but oddly likeable young single guy who doesn’t know near as much as he thinks he does.  He also loves to take credit for other people’s work.
• Vera: The jaded, cynical, sharp-tongued middle aged woman who has over ten years until retirement, but can tell you how many days are left in her working career.

Join us in the first episode when Cruela asks her team to stay late to meet a useless last minute request that everyone knows will go nowhere… and hilarity ensues.

Think we could get Fox to air it after Glee?

OK… we’ll start this week by talking in code.  Even though the inappropriate word above is now widely used on network television, and even Bill Cosby has uttered it from his lips, I’m pretty sure if I repeat the word several times in one post, a number of firewalls will catch it, and I won’t be able to spread the gospel this week.

For our purposes, the code word will be “O-ring”.

I was once told that in this world there are two types of people:  Idiots and O-rings.  Your label is determined by your behaviour, and everyone has acted as both an idiot and an O-ring at various points in their lives.  Some particularly talented people have managed to be both simultaneously, earning the title “idiot-hole”.

When asked if I thought I was an idiot or an O-ring, I struggled for which term I found less offensive, and more importantly what sort of behaviour qualifies one for membership in each category.  The definition of “idiot” is reasonably clear.  Anytime you’ve made an unbelievably stupid choice, you qualify as an idiot.  In my case, I was clearly an idiot when I agreed to sit through a “short video presentation”  (with a complementary cocktail) when I was on vacation in Mexico many years ago.

The definition of O-ring is somewhat more illusive.  I canvassed a number of people to try to determine exactly what would qualify someone to be labeled an O-ring.  As it turns out whenever someone else does something we don’t like, they are an O-ring.  Case in point: traffic.  Of all the people driving within a 100km radius of your vehicle, there is you, and all the other O-rings on the road.

This revelation naturally led me to examine my own behaviour when I was an Operations Manager with many direct reports.  I arrived at the unmistakable conclusion that I was a tremendous O-ring.  I’m not talking about an occasional O-ring maneuver, but rather a full-time job of simply being an O-ring.  My entire work world was an infinite series of actions and decisions that at other people didn’t like.  If I could go back in time, I’d change my title to AC (O-ring in charge).

So, is it possible to be a manager without being an O-ring?  Probably not.  Would you want to be a manager that’s not an O-ring?  Only if you want to be an idiot.

This week we talk about how improving your ability to communicate constructively, you might avoid being labeled an O-ring.

“My goal now:  to be the all-being ruler of time, space and dimension….  And then, I want to go to Europe.” – Steve Martin

For the low price of about $5000, you can spend the weekend with some screaming hucksters (who you would run far away from in a normal social setting), who will guide you to the perfect collection of personal and professional goals that will change your life, and provide the happiness that has always alluded you.  Your registration also includes a coffee mug, and a handsome leather portfolio for all your hand written notes.

It seems that the SMART acronym (Specific, Measureable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-phased) is not the stuff of which great goals are based.  You can also dispense with BHAGs (Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals) made famous by Jim Collins.  Nope, the only way to achieve greatness is to pay your $5000, and lose a weekend of your time.

I’m thinking about advertising on the same forum a one-hour seminar on how to avoid rip-offs, but only charging $2500.  I would assume I would be marketing to the same clientele.

Don’t get me wrong – I think goals are important.  However, I don’t believe their commodification is necessary.  You can write your goals in whatever format you wish on the back of a napkin, and get everything out of it your would by paying your $5000.  The reason most goals fail to be achieved is because people lack the discipline to follow up on their goals – not because of how they are written.

I do believe everyone should have goals, and I do believe you should write them down.  The SMART acronym can help you write higher quality goals, and Jim Collin’s idea of BHAGs can help you to write something inspired.  If you don’t buy into either of these, write them as you see fit – just write them.

In January of 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded on take-off killing all seven crew, and grounding the American space program for two years.  Of the exhaustive investigations that took place (that led to a significant number of changes for NASA, and how they conducted their business), perhaps the most important change was that for the first time, talking about changing corporate culture was fair game.

The engineers and investigators determined the technical causes of the explosion, but when they dug deeper to understand why those technical issues were not addressed in advance, they ended up in the uncomfortable place of changing corporate culture.  It turns out NASA had a culture whereby many qualified people knew there was a significant risk of disaster, but none chose to voice those concerns, even if they would have been listened to.

I call this an “uncomfortable” conclusion because highly technical people in any organization want to discuss things they can see, touch and/or count.  Changing corporate culture is something that nebulous and messy.  It’s difficult to define, impossible to measure, and probably the most important element of performance in an organization — as NASA found out the hard way.

So how do you go about changing corporate culture?

You don’t.

Much like Jerry Seinfeld dominated television with a show about nothing, organizations need to get about doing what they do.  I was recently in the NBC store in New York, more than a decade after Seinfeld left the air, and discovered that a significant portion of the wares were dedicated to Seinfeld’s “nothing”.  The Soup Nazi, Vandalay Industries, and Kramer’s hair all testify to the enduring quality of Seinfeld’s “nothing”.

Changing corporate culture is a lot like the show about nothing.  What people do, how they interact with each other, how they manage conflict, what gets rewarded, who gets promoted, how success is measured and a score of other things all add up to your corporate culture.

The silliest thing you can do is to declare a change in corporate culture to some virtue you read about at some other company.  The culture you have now is a product of the things above.  If you want to change your corporate culture, you need to address those things.

And don’t think it will happen in a hurry.  It will be a decade more before Seinfeld is replaced at the NBC store.

In many organizations, Annual Performance Reviews are about as popular as Ike at the Tina Turner Fan Club meeting.  They are done sporadically, if at all, and they typically have very little impact on organizational performance.

The last big multi-national corporate organization I worked for as an employee had a fascinating “system” for the annual performance review.  I would suggest it’s very typical to what is seen in other companies, so in the interests of demystifying the whole process, here is a list of definitions and translations to sort out some of the vernacular that accompanies the annual performance review:

Annual: In the case of the annual performance review, “annual” means maybe once every 18 to 24 months, or maybe never at all.

Performance Review Meeting: This is where both manager and employee avoid eye contact and share some awkward small talk before the boss launches into his/her diatribe of the last year in review.  Similar to a bad sitcom in format.

Coaching: This is the organizational equivalent of Batman.  You might see it late at night after a signal (usually a corporate memo) has been flashed, but if you see it at all, it will be in a poor light, and you’ll never be sure if it happened or not.

Developmental Opportunities: These are the things you will get fired for, if you don’t fix them.  If there were no employment laws, they would revert to what they used to be called: threats.

Pay for Performance: Managers who get along well with people, take the amount of discretionary salary dollars they have, and divide by the number of direct reports they have.  Managers who don’t care how well they get along with people give it to the people they like the most.  In the rarest of cases, there is a good measurement system in place that everyone understands, and it truly is pay for performance.  It is about as common as spotting a unicorn at the fall carnival.

Performance Appraisal Documents: This is a template that bears little resemblance to your actual job, written by someone in HR who has never worked in the core business.

Performance Review Meeting Preparation: This describes the immediate 30 seconds prior to the meeting starting

The Sandwich Method of Feedback: This is where poorly trained managers slip some “constructive” feedback in between two compliments.  For example, “Nice shoes; you’ve got some significant improvement to make on your analytical skills, but I like your socks.  Also known as the “Sh*t Filled Twinkie” method.

Performance Management Philosophy: This is the same affliction that causes writers of annual reports to declare, “Employees are our most important asset” without the implied disclaimer, “unless they cost us money, or otherwise inconvenience us.”

Seek the Employees View: This is the final 30 seconds of the meeting where the employee is expected to thank the supervisor for the constructive feedback, and declare his/her intentions to act on it.  Only trouble-makers would disagree with the feedback.  Under no circumstances should an employee ever speak his mind here.

I hope this translation helps.  For ideas on how to cope with, and ultimately succeed at your Annual Performance Review, download this week’s podcast.

Back when I was in University, I elevated procrastination to an elegant form of art.  Around the time every semester when I was supposed to be producing term papers, I would find just about any excuse not to do them.  I would do the requisite scheduling of time to get them done, and lock myself in either the school library or my bedroom so something would get done.

As it turns out, I would have been better off going to the pub (where at least I would have had some fun) because those long lock-down periods produced either:
a)    a thorough reading of the complete poetry works of Ezra Pound (more fun than managerial economics) when I was locked in the library

b)   the cleanest bedroom ever, if I was relegated to home.

Luckily, twenty-five years later I’m starting to understand procrastination for what it is: a total and complete lack of discipline.  Dr. Piers Steel recently wrote a book called The Procrastination Equation to help further understanding of this systemic problem.  According to Steel, procrastination affects 95% of the population (I assume the other 5% are buddhist monks who spent upwards of 20 hours per day in meditation).

Dr. Steel spent about 10 years researching procrastination for his book.  He probably could have gotten the research done in five years, if he was more disciplined, but I’m sure his room was as clean as mine was as a university student.  Interestingly, he tags coffee shops as a huge enabler of procrastination.  Add to this ubiquitous internet, television, video games and other people, and it’s remarkable we don’t all live in a catatonic state that Captain Christopher Pike found himself in in the original Star Trek series.

On this week’s podcast, Jed and I talk about why you might find yourself procrastinating, and what you might do about it.  Here’s a hint:  Nike had it right – Just Do It.

I’ve also pasted in a video clip below that’s a bit longer than normal.  It will be perfect if you’re putting something off, and you want a 3-minute reprieve from actually doing something.  We know we have a loyal following at Wily Manager, and if we can’t help you with your challenges, we’d like to enable you having fun while you wallow in them.

Now… I better get back to my writing – before I head over to the coffee shop.

Larry was my boss back when I had a real job – the kind of job where you show up every day (in body, at least), work as part of a cog in a huge corporate wheel, and try to attach meaning to mundane tasks.

The world was black and white for Larry:  if he thought you were a hard worker, he could be charming and funny.  If he didn’t like the way you worked, your life at work quickly descended into a living hell.  In the core skills and talents of the business we were in, there was probably no one stronger than Larry.

Larry did many things right as a leader;  he was not burdened by the need to have people like him, he got lots done, he was an excellent teacher, and he consistently produced the desired results.

As you can imagine, he also did a number of things wrong.  His treatment of people he didn’t like would clearly fall under the definition of harassment if it happened today.  I still remember the day when he repeatedly shouted at one of his direct reports (in front of many others), “You’re stupid!  You’re a stupid, stupid man!”

No one knows how many potentially good people he chased out of the business because his first impression of them wasn’t good.  And his volatile demeanor often took a minor incident and exaggerated it into a major crisis that required more time and energy by all involved to finally get resolved.

The company did invest in Larry by sending him off to corporate charm school, where he learned to soften his feedback:

“Not to criticize, but you’re stupid”

When I went on to leadership roles, Larry was a role model for me – both for what he did well, and by serving as a warning beacon for things he didn’t get right.  Here are some lessons I learned from Larry, that still guide me today:

• If you want a lot of friends, or have a high need for the approval of others, you need to stay in an individual contributor’s role.
• You always need to treat people with respect.  It doesn’t mean, however, that you don’t hold them accountable.
• You need to be absolutely clear about your expectations, and then dole out both positive and negative consequences when things go right/wrong.  Leaders who think they can over-acknowledge good performance, and not deal with poor performance, are weak and will fail.
• What you do is far more powerful than what you say.
• Leadership is hard work

Larry retired many years ago, yet his impact on me (and a great many others) is still felt.  I’m sure if I asked Larry, he would have absolutely no idea how profound his influence was on me or anyone else.

So one final lesson from Larry: As a leader, you have a significant impact on people’s lives… perhaps for decades to come.

“Selling” is not a bad word – it is an essential business skill.  It’s easy to see how some people would think that influencing others is somehow underhanded or unethical:

“Yep… this one’s got really low miles.  Only driven to church on Sunday by a little old lady from Pasadena”

In reality, many great ideas die an agonizing death because they have not been properly sold.  There also seems to be an inverse correlation between our technical ability, and our willingness to sell.  In other words, probably the more technically skilled you are in your area, the less likely you are to want to sell your idea.  (With all due respect to the Engineers out there.)

Here’s an ugly truth:  marketing is everything.  Think of the examples in consumer goods:

• 8-tracks were far superior in quality to cassettes or records.
• BetaMax was most certainly better than VHS
• Apple’s Mac has long been superior to any PC.

So if these are any indication, great products and great ideas require great marketing if they are to be adopted.

So what do you do?

First – you have to value the idea of selling your ideas.  You need to tell a story about how your idea is going to enhance pleasure, or reduce pain.

Second – Put together a marketing plan.  Depending on what you’re doing, it might only be half a page long, but have some idea about what story you are going to tell, to whom, and via what media.

Third – Check out our podcast this week to hear more about Influencing Others

Finally – remember that we are all “in sales”.  If you live in a society of more than one person, you will be constantly trying to lobby people to your way of thinking about one thing or another.  The sooner we all get comfortable with this reality, the sooner the good ideas will at least seem to “sell themselves”.

Every few years I’ll do a job or a project for a governmental organization.  Given that I spend about 90% of my time dealing with private sector organizations, I always have to recalibrate when I enter a public sector organization.  Most often in government, I experience generally hard-working people frustrated by a bureaucracy resulting in precious little actually being accomplished.

The public sector usually attracts people who are generally risk averse, and as a result, the idea of taking action without perfect information, or allowing oneself to make mistakes and then swiftly correcting them is a hard sell.  I seem to spend a ridiculous amount of time just urging people to hurry up and move to action.

In some cases, my problem in private sector organizations is exactly the opposite.  Getting people to slow down for just an hour or two to evaluate and document their performance is often branded as heresy.  In the case of doing some form of “look-back” after a project or initiative, public sector organizations tend to do a much better job.

There are probably a variety of reasons for this, not the least of which is that public spending is subject to much closer scrutiny, and by a wider variety of interest groups.  Nevertheless, private sector organizations would be well advised to take a look at how their cousins in the public sector evaluate and document lessons learned from projects and initiatives.

Most often, the reason given for failing to do a post mortem is, “we don’t have time, besides… everything went well.”  When things go very well on a project or initiative is the most important time to do a post mortem.  Do you know why things went better than expected?  Can you repeat that performance again, or was it just good luck?

To spend an hour or two properly debriefing a project or initiative may be the best investment an organization can make.

It all starts off with noble intentions and great expectations.  Organizations invest thousands to send a manager off to some Leadership Development Training, with high hopes of getting a return on their investment, and of seeing some measurable change in managerial performance.

The normal result is a large invoice for the training and related costs, and a new PowerPoint slide hung on the wall, with some convoluted model or diagram that’s supposed to change our lives, and solve all organizational ills.

How do managers and organizations get is so wrong?

They have the right idea, but they make the same mistake that any of us that has ever been on a diet before has made.  We think that some temporary action, and new package on an old bit of knowledge will make a difference.  Here’s a blinding flash of the obvious:  if you want to lose weight, eat more veggies, eat less of everything else, and try to exercise more.  Most importantly, make these changes habits rather than a temporary intervention.

Organizational and Leadership Development is no different.  Figure out what behaviours you want your managers to display, and take action to make those behaviours into habits.  This is incredibly easy conceptually, but much harder in practice.  You need to look at your reward systems, development systems and processes.  Part of your answer may include training, but only then as part of the solution.

We did some work with PepsiCo, who are generally well recognized as very competent at Leadership Development Activity.  Their development model calls for 10% Leadership Training, with the balance of development activities taking other forms such as coaching, job-shadowing, special assignments, and secondments.

Don’t get me wrong – I absolutely believe that quality leadership is the stargate to better production, increased quality, improved safety, and better cost control.  I just think that organizations that attempt to bridge their leadership quality gaps via training are taking the easy way out, and burning shareholder money to boot.

Just like most of us don’t need another diet book, but rather the discipline to use one of the 44 we already own, leaders don’t need another day in a classroom – they need help making habits out of the things they learned last time.

As a society, we’ve decided that many behaviours that were acceptable only a few decades ago, are now completely out of the question.  A careful viewing of any episode of Mad Men will confirm how much has changed in a relatively short time.  Gone are the days of getting completely plastered at lunch, and then driving back to the office to finish up your day.  Same goes for smoking, recreational drug use, gambling, gluttony, and virtually all other forms of excessive, self-destructive behaviour.

There is one glaring exception: workoholism.  I am often bombarded on Monday mornings with tales of alleged heroism about how someone successfully avoided their family all weekend, so they could work right through to finish some insignificant office project.  The same people will drone on about how they get to the office before 7.00am, and work past 6.00pm on a regular basis.

Here’s a newsflash: this is something to be embarrassed about, not something one brags about. Not many people entertain people at the water cooler boasting about their other self destructive vices:

“I spent the weekend gambling away my kids’ tuition money!”

“I ate 12 boxes of Krispy-Kreme’s in one sitting on Saturday.  Then I purged, and did it again.”

“I’m pretty sure my eating disorder is serious enough now to warrant medical attention”

All of these sound as ridiculous to me as, “I work 80 hours per week on a regular basis”.  Congratulations – you’re completely dysfunctional, and probably need to see a mental health professional – top speed.

Workoholism is the working professional’s last and only chance to be a martyr.  These martyrs think the tales of their self-perceived heroics will place them in higher standing amongst their peers and boss.  It doesn’t – the only thing your organization cares about is what you get done.  Think of how many times in your working life you’ve seen the obsessively hard worker be passed over by someone else, who works significantly less, but gets way more done.

There are only two situations that I could envision someone working an 80 hour week:

1)   The exceptional project, event or occurrence that will quickly pass to return to a more reasonable way of working, or

2)   You are a farmer – in which case you have my gratitude and respect.

The rest of you need to wake up and realize this self-destructive behaviour for what it is.  For thoughts on how to get out of workoholic trap, visit our site this week, where we talk about the 80/20 rule, and how to apply it.

We’ve heard many managers compare their jobs to that of baby-sitter.  The only difference being when the kids upset you, you can send them to their room, and the snacks and TV-watching options are better for the baby-sitter.

It is true that managers of people get dragged into all kinds of trivia, and much of it should be ignored.  There seems to be no more emotional issue than that of the office layout.  Several years ago, people were mourning the loss of office walls, as many organizations transitioned to cube-farms.  Now people fight over the size and location of their workstation.

Unfortunately, most managers have very little time/patience/control over the office configuration, so the best they might be able to do is offer some advice to disgruntled cube-dwellers as to how to cope with the physical office reality.  Here are some ideas:

Define Your Office Boundaries. This worked for Les Nessman at WKRP, and it can work for you.  Don’t acknowledge anyone unless they knock at your pretend door, and certainly don’t put up with people walking through your pretend walls.  You might even want to suspend wall paintings from the ceiling to line up with your pretend walls.

Engage in Closed Office Behaviour.  Make loud personal telephone calls.  If you feel the need for a nap, close your pretend door and sleep like you would at home (unless you sleep in the nude).  Need to pick your nose?  You’re in the privacy of your own office – go for it.  If someone tries to talk to you through a pretend wall, look towards the pretend door, and shout, “I can’t hear you.  Would you like to come in here?”

There’s No Place Like Home. Most people spend more conscious hours in their workplace than they do in their homes.  You need to make the place comfortable.  Buy a portable fridge to put under your desk, as well as some small kitchen appliances (start with a toaster, blender, and espresso machine).  You probably don’t control much in your work-place, so make your 8 X 8 part of the empire a castle.

Of course with this new-found freedom, you will also have to respect and ignore others engaging in the same behaviour if the illusion is to be complete.  Here’s a YouTube clip on office layout that outlines the perils of being too interested in what’s happening one row over on the cubefarm.

How do you tell someone they smell? Or that they need to stop handing out religious pamphlets at work?  Maybe an employee dresses inappropriately at work.  Perhaps an employee’s spouse calls the workplace several times per day.  What about your assistant’s drinking problem?

You could do what some managers do:  ignore the behaviour and hope it goes away.  Now, hope rarely works as a strategy to solve a problem, but let’s give it a try and see what happens:

They Smell:  If you don’t act they’ll keep smelling.  If you’re in a retail business, you’ll almost certainly lose customers.  If the aroma is only affecting co-workers who have brought the problem to your attention, they will know for sure that you don’t care and/or that you lack the courage to deal with a relatively simple problem.

An employee is pushing an opinion or unwanted material on co-workers.  This one is a bit more tricky  — you need to balance an individual’s right to speak freely with his coworker’s right to not be harassed at work.  This one is a level of degrees, but suffice it to say that if you’ve received complaints, the behaviour is probably already perceived as being too aggressive.

An employee is dressed inappropriately.  When I was in university, I worked for a retailer who had a strict dress code.  This included a ban on earrings for male employees.  This was fine until one of the senior executive’s sons showed up with an earring, and the facility manager would not address it for fear of reprisal.  Now, there are a whole bunch of things wrong with this scenario, but needless to say, when the manager displayed his cowardice in this regard, he had a facility full of male employees wearing earrings out of protest within a month.  Rightly or wrongly, the dress code fell apart, and the manager lost all credibility.

In these, and in perhaps most cases, it can look (at least at the outset) that it is easier to NOT engage in these difficult conversations.  In the short term, it probably is easier.  Longer term, you create all kinds of problems for yourself as a manager if you don’t tackle difficult conversations.  You erode trust, you lose credibility, and frankly you’re not doing your job as a leader.  Consider this one of the “burdens of leadership”.

If you want help with this difficult part of the job, listen to our podcast, and visit our page on Difficult Conversations.

“If a bulletin came out from head office saying that all managers had to wear a dress, he’d be the first guy in line down at the ladies-wear store” — Rick

Rick was a facility manager I interacted with many years ago who was an excellent upward manager.  He also disdained boot-licking as is evidenced in the quote above.  Most managers understand the importance of leading and managing well the people that report to them.  Unlike Rick however, these same managers have a huge blind spot when it comes to managing their bosses.

Rick was a good manager.  He knew his business very well, and he was very even-handed in how he managed people.  In some cases, he knew the business better than his bosses, and didn’t hesitate to tell them so:

“I’m not sure who came up with this idea, but they’ve never actually worked in this industry before.  I guess I’ll have to read them their fortune, and let them know it will never fly”.

Rick had no problem saying “no” to his bosses.  In many cases his boss would thank him for pointing out some of the ridiculous things that somehow made their way out of head office.  So how did he do this, and not get himself fired?

First – he picked his battles well.  The bigger the organization, the more people there are far away from the perverbial coal-face to think up stupid ideas.  You can’t possibly fight all the stupidity, so you need to choose wisely.

Second – he knew what he was talking about.  He didn’t offer platitudes and opinions when he opposed his boss.  He brought data and evidence.  It’s hard to argue with someone who has done his homework

Third – he offered good feedback to his boss as much or more as he offered constructive criticism.  He nurtured a “no BS” relationship with his boss, and constantly improved his credibility.  When it came time to challenge his boss, his credibility account was built up enough that even when his boss disagreed, he would still listen.

Give it a try – or you could just be an unbelievable brown noser.  Apparently that can work too:

Because I am a freak of nature, I can’t remember what happened yesterday afternoon, but I do remember the name of Marsha Brady’s first boyfriend (Harvey).  For the uninitiated, Marsha Brady was the stuck-up, know-it-all character from the early 70s sitcom, The Brady Bunch.

This, along with Gilligan’s Island, Mr. Rogers, The Electric Company (incredibly starring Morgan Freeman, and Rita Moreno), The Partridge Family and Sesame Street, formed the basis of some fundamental lessons that guide me in business and in life to this day.

Here’s what I know:

Gilligan’s Island: In a survival situation, where life and death are at stake, people will still revert back to comfortable roles.  Gilligan was always an idiot, Mary-Ann bakes Coconut Cream Pies (when she wasn’t busy getting baked herself – google Dawn Wells), and Ginger could easily manipulate anyone with a Y chromosome to get her own way.

Mr. Rogers: Most importantly, he liked me just the way I am, but also, interestingly the only civil servant (the mail man) had a two-decade old problem balancing his meds.

The Electric Company: Who knew reading could be so much fun?  And… always treat those around you with respect.  You never know when one of your co-workers is going to win an Oscar, Grammy, or Tony award (see the stars listed above).

The Partridge Family: Sometimes you can fake it till you make it.  For evidence ask Susan Dey to sing, or watch Danny Bonaduce strum a bass guitar.  For those who don’t know – The Partridge Family managed to knock the Beatles off the number 1 Billboard Chart, even though they were lip-syncing to the work of studio musicians.

Sesame Street: I’m not sure about this one – even as a five-year-old, I had a hard time accepting life-advice from a six-foot tall, ambiguously gay canary.  Perhaps the lesson from Sesame Street is that it is always, all about marketing.

Enjoy

If the last meeting you went to sucked badly, you are in good company.  A survey of over 1000 North American managers indicated that on average they spend about 17 hours per week in meetings.  Of that considerable portion of their work-week, they deemed that one-third of that time was wasted.

The economic implications of this are staggering.  If you multiply 6 hours times the hourly rate of those managers times the number of managers in the economy, you begin to see a number with a whole bunch of zeros behind it.  Even in your own organization this calculation could easily total in the millions of dollars every year.

More selfishly, ask yourself what you would do if you had an extra six hours every week.  Could you work more reasonable hours?  Perhaps you could get to those things you know are important but are constantly displaced by the urgent.

This got us to ask the question, “if meetings are systemically bad, and they cost that much what can be done?”

First of all, do not accept that meetings have to be bad.  We all seem resigned that we have to write-off a significant portion of our week to something we know is useless.  Demand more of yourself, and of your organization.

Second – be part of the solution.  This is your problem to solve.  Even if you do not chair the meeting, you can raise questions as to how effective they are.  Your complacency will get you into more pointless meetings.

Third – insist on a structure.  The engineers and accountants always get a bad rap for being anal retentive.  While you may want to avoid such people at cocktail parties, invite them to help fix your meetings.  A bit of discipline will exponentially improve the value of your meetings.

Finally – figure out what meetings are costing you.  What is the cost to the organization by the time they pay a fully burdened labour cost.  What is the cost to you if meetings are causing you to work longer hours and give up your leisure time.  Profit-driven organizations are usually good a containing costs when they have to.  Get them to contain the cost of their meetings.

Then you’ll have more time to read our blog, and download YouTube clips.  Here’s one from John Cleese – for those who love British humour.

Do you have a job description?  Have you seen it since you were hired into your current position?  Does it bear any resemblance to what you actually do every day?  If you answered “Yes” to any of these questions (much less all 3 of them), you are in the minority.  Most organizations either don’t have job descriptions, or have ones that are useless.

There is a good argument to be made that job descriptions are a relic from a time gone by, and that many jobs defy a linear description that is normally seen on a job description.  I would argue that the majority of jobs can, and should have job descriptions, but not in the way they are normally done.

If your job description articulates in painstaking detail the activities that you will undertake on a “normal” day, then it officially sucks.  Sorry to be the one to bring it up but:

a)    Nobody cares how busy you are.

b)   Nobody cares what you do.

Of course there are some highly bureaucratic organizations (often governmental organizations) where they do care about these things, but they are the minority.

Well run organizations care what you get done.  What did you produce?  What are your results?  How much value did you create?  A good job description will articulate these things – not how many paper clips you will use to file a report.

So I’m drawing a line in the sand today – Job Descriptions are dead.  Throw them away.  In their place, we will create POSTION OUTCOMES DESCRIPTIONS (PODs).   This is not a directive to the HR people out there – they are usually the last to come on board with such changes.  This is to every person who wants to make a difference.   A well-written POD will facilitate you making a difference at your job.

Write yours today, and get your boss to sign-off on it.  Then, when the crap-tasks start sliding across your desk, you have some mechanism by which to question it.  In your old Job Description, the crap-task would have fallen under “other duties as assigned”.

Now do you see why you need to do this?  There are lots of tools on the Wily Manager website to help you with this.  Join the revolution – and let us know how you’re making out.

Many moons ago, I was a teenage university student, paying my tuition by working the graveyard shift at a grocery store.  One of the prime motivators of continuing to study hard year after year was so that I wouldn’t have to continue to work the graveyard shift at a grocery store.

Now that a few decades have elapsed, I have come to realize and appreciate the true value of this experience.  When we have assisted clients to implement high performance teams, I am often asked if I have ever been on one of those very special teams.  Then I tell the story about being on night-crew during university….

Interestingly, people are always trying to draw the connection between high-performing individuals and high performance teams.  When I tell people the link is not as strong as they might like to think, I am often greeted with confusion.

Here’s an ugly little truth:  Your star employees are often high-maintenance, and may do more long term damage than good.  Everyone knows the employee who can crank out the results, but leaves a wake of broken relationships and collateral damage behind.  She may produce a superior level of output for some period of time, but may adversely affect the output of others.

High Performance Teams exist where the interactions between team members are exceptionally functional.  A High Performance Team quite likely doesn’t have any stars, but rather group of competent performers who have found their groove in working together.   The success of your organization depends upon the number and quality of these B-players.

Back in the 1980s, in the middle of the night at a high-volume grocery retailer, our little team had no stars.  It was a group of guys who liked working together, had a very clear idea of what they were supposed to be doing, and relentless peer pressure to get things done properly.  Our output was almost double that of any comparable crew – and we had way more fun too.

The prescription for a High Performance Team is easy to understand.  Filling that prescription is much more difficult.

Every now and then Jed or I will be sitting across the table from someone who will confide in us that he really wants to be promoted into the next job.  Sometimes, he may not know what that next job is, but he really wants it.  “How do I get ahead?”, he may ask of us.  This got me to thinking:

Boot-licking – Constant, shameless, thorough and quality bootlicking.

Eliminate the competition by quietly and carefully sabotaging their every move.  If you think they might be higher in the standings than you for the next role — take them out.

Sewering Your Boss –  Maybe if you make her look stupid enough, they’ll fire her, and put you in her role.

Constantly Champion Your Own Virtues – If people don’t know how wonderful you are, it’s about time you told them.  Don’t be afraid to repeat, ad nauseam.

Sorry – I seem to have lost my inner-monologue.

It’s frightening how many people think that one or more of the above will work.  We see it time and time again, even if people don’t fully admit to employing some or all of these techniques.

There is no doubt that occasionally a boot-licker will slip between the cracks and have some success for a limited period of time.  Maybe even a year or two.  However, there is always a reckoning.  This is not to say that the most qualified person always gets the job – organizational politics are a fact of life that people need to accept.  I don’t know of any organizations that are pure meritocracies.

But people who attempt to prosper by insincere means most often meet their demise with the same level of intensity as they played the game.  What comes around goes around – even though it may take longer than many of us might like.

So how do you get ahead in your career?  Start by not being an idiot.  If you can’t manage that, you’re not going to get ahead anyway, so you might as well cut your losses now.  (Oops – there’s my inner-monologue again).

If you want some other ideas, download our latest podcast on How to Get Ahead – Wily Manager Style.

In the meantime… let’s be careful out there.

OK – we’ve all done it.  Decided to do something ourselves because its easier and faster than holding the appropriate person to account.  Maybe you’ve even done it with your children.  Micro-managing – the gift that keeps on destroying.

Every manager has been warned against this, so let’s look at why it happens, given the most common excuses most managers give for doing so:

It’s faster to do it myself.  It probably is faster… the first time.  But if you look at the amount of time it will take you to teach or correct someone else in the execution of a task, versus the amount of time it will take you to do it on an ongoing basis, the answer is clear.

I can do it better. You probably can… for a while.  However, if you insist on doing every individual task yourself, you will become quickly overwhelmed, and will end up doing some (high) proportion of those tasks poorly.

My people aren’t capable. If this is the case for any amount of time, you are clearly not doing your job as a manager.  It is your job to develop people.  Occasionally you truly don’t have the right talent, in which case you have to make changes to your talent bench.

I need to keep close to the details. Actually, you probably don’t.  As a manager, it is not your job to be expert at everything.  It’s your job to create experts, and be able to ask some semi-intelligent questions of them.

If I don’t do all these tasks, I won’t be useful anymore. Listen to yourself.  If you’re that insecure in your role as a leader, you need to examine whether you should be in a management role at all.

The bottom line is that micro-managers sap the productivity out of organizations by failing to capture the discretionary effort of their employees.  They don’t develop people, which is a primary function of a leader.  They also limit their own career mobility by trying to make themselves indispensible in the role they are in.

Micro-management is a self-destructive behaviour, and a great way to get fired.  Then you’ll have lot’s of time.

Apparently the most recent flavour of the month is the Results-Oriented Work Environment or ROWE for those who prefer to only work with acronyms.  It a great name because how could anyone not want a more results-oriented work place?  Some of its detractors call it something different – anarchy.  I would probably call it self-employment.

ROWE, in its most current incarnation, was pioneered at Best Buy, and is in use at other high profile companies such as IBM and Netflix.  The theory is a simple one:  employees set their own time, schedules, and work methods, and are instead measured on the output of what they produce.  In theory, it sounds like an excellent idea, and in certain cases it could probably work very well.

I can think of a two situations where it really wouldn’t work:

1. It can’t work where there’s a high degree of inter-dependence with other stakeholders.  As a refugee of the Retail Food Industry, I can say without reservation that it would be a disaster if employees wrote their own schedule.  As great as it would be for the bulk of employees to work banker’s hours, it would get pretty frustrating for customers who predominantly shop at nights and on weekends.
2. It can’t work in situations where it is difficult to measure the output of employee effort.  If there is any degree of variation in work processes, then the measurement thereby becomes very difficult.  For example, any profession with case-work (lawyers, social workers, insurance etc.) are inherently difficult to measure.  Some cases may be easily wrapped up in a few minutes, while others may require weeks of research and follow up.

I know we’re all supposed to buy-in to the myth that any and all things are measurable, but the luxury of believing that falls only to academics who have never had to actually measure anything.  Ask a professor how to measure teaching effectiveness, and watch her face as she looks like your dog when you pretend to throw the ball and then hide it behind your back.

The second group of people who insist that all things are measureable are management consultants – who, (for the low cost of $5000/day plus expenses) are more than willing to help you measure everything in your business.  Unlike the professors, these folks don’t believe it, but they make good money convincing organizations to try it.

Should you try to better focus your organization on results?  Yes – that’s your job as a manager.

Should you impose measurement systems on everything?  Maybe – it depends on your business, and how meaningful you can make your metrics.  Where possible, you should measure and evaluate people mostly on their output.

Should you set people loose and tell them as long as they produce X widgets in a given week, they can do whatever they want?  I think that’s a recipe for disaster for employee morale, risk management, and true accountability.

Of course, that’s just my opinion, I could be wrong (with thanks to Dennis Miller).

I’m not really sure when it happened.  Sometime over the last few years it has become socially acceptable to have a potty-mouth at the office.  Most often I am invited into workplaces for short periods of time – usually a few months – so I normally don’t know anyone when I first show up, and have to take some time to get to know people.

I find it incredible that people who don’t know me are quite willing to use exceptionally foul language in our very first meeting.  I should clarify two things:

1)   I’m not there to fire them, or otherwise torture them… which may be construed as just-cause for an expletive or two.

2)   I’m not offended by any of this, and use my own fair-share of foul words in more familiar company.

I just find it curious that people think words your mother always told you she didn’t want to hear are now common-place in work settings.  In my experience, this transcends just about all demographic groups.  It is not just younger people, nor is it just men.  I have witnessed this in large cities, and small ones, in a wide variety of industries.  I think it’s safe to say this has become a societal thing.

So… what is to be done?  Probably nothing.  But I would caution anyone who cares that first impressions are very powerful, and if you litter your first impression with language that would make a lumberjack blush, then you will inevitably come across as insensitive and less intelligent.

As a general rule of thumb, it might be good to know someone’s last name, before asking them (in so many words) if they like sex and travel.  Likewise, don’t assume that you’re not offending anyone, just because everyone else seems to be swearing.  It’s amazing that many offices insist on no fragrances or smelly foods for fear of upsetting someone, but have no similar guidelines for certain forms of noise pollution.

Until you know who you’re talking to, you might want to channel Bill Cosby more so than Eddie Murphy.  In the mean time… check out this clip for how one office handled it.

In professional sports, considerable resources are spent scouting new prospects and eventually landing them in the organization.  Those that manage professional sports know that you truly do “win it in the draft”, and they take their recruiting process seriously enough to make it a key source of competitive advantage.

With very few exceptions, other businesses do not do nearly as well.  Many (perhaps most) organizations manage the recruiting process about as well as George Bush manages the English language.  It might be entertaining, but only for the same reason you would slow down to look at an accident scene on the side of the highway.

It seems that many organizations of all shapes and sizes improvise their way through this important process.  What makes this most surprising is that every time an organization goes to the market to hire, they put themselves at considerable risk: risk to reputation, as well as legal risk if they mismanage the recruiting process badly enough.

A meaningful discussion of this important subject would take much more space than I have here, but here are five ideas to improve the recruiting process in any organization:

1. Take it seriously — it’s very expensive to get it wrong.  The Journal of Compensation and Benefits estimates the cost of turnover at 1.5 to 2.5 the annual salary of the position.  So when your new recruit doesn’t work out, and leaves after three months, there is a real cost to the organization.
2. Know what you’re recruiting for.  If there isn’t a comprehensive job description, you need to write one – before you even place an ad.  You need to know what results the position should be achieving, and what competencies are required to do the job well.
3. Separate your needs from your wants. I recently read a job advertisement in the paper for a public sector organization that wanted 20 years of experience, and multiple university degrees for a job they were only willing to pay $45k per year.  That person does not exist.  Decide what your “minimum price of entry” requirements are, and categorize everything else as a “want”.  In other words, it would be a bonus if the person had that experience or competency.
4. Get rid of bad recruiters or hiring managers. Anyone who seems to power trip or get perverse pleasure out of making candidates squirm should be removed from the process.  If you find yourself with such a recruiter or an HR person – fire her.  If it is a hiring manager, insulate them from the process, and seriously consider firing him/her, too.
5. Make the match. Remember you are being evaluated every bit as much as you are evaluating the client.  Allow the candidate to ask questions; Tell people what to expect; follow up with everyone; always check references.

As best I can tell, most organizations recruit poorly not because they don’t know what to do, but rather because they choose not to do it.  This is at your peril.

By the way – Jed and I have done a podcast and a topic bundle on effective interviewing.  Hopefully you find it useful.

A 2009 Swedish study tracking 3,122 men for ten years found that those with bad bosses suffered 20 to 40 percent more heart attacks than those with good bosses.

Wow – glad I’m not Swedish.  I’m actually looking for the complementary study that shows how bad employees shorten a supervisor’s lifespan.  Maybe Hell really is other people.

So – is there any truth to the above study, or is it more silliness cranked out by academics looking to dabble in the real world by grabbing a headline?  I’m sure the research would speak for itself, but what is instructional about its findings?

No one would dispute that stress will kill you, but how does a bad boss equate to stress?  The obvious thing to do here is to list off all the poor qualities of a bad boss, and draw a parallel between their bad behaviour and their employees’ stress.  In reality, stress merely exists, and our reaction to it makes it unhealthy.

So I am willing to believe that a bad boss will kill me, but only if I give him/her enough control over me that I react poorly to the stress they are generating.  I can’t control their behaviour, but I most certainly can control my own behaviour, and my reaction to theirs.

Or I could move to Sweden.  I hear it’s nice.

At the risk of coming across like The Cranky Middle-Manager, I have a couple of grievances to air on how people interact with each other in the workplace.  It seems that people claiming that they work in a “toxic environment” is all the rage as of late.  In a minimum of cases, this may be truth, but in far more circumstances, it seems as though anytime someone doesn’t smile at you at the water cooler, you’re entitled to claim a horrible work situation.

The truth is that anytime you are in a workplace of more than one person, there are going to be disagreements and compromises.  And contrary to much of the hype you read in the popular media, sometimes work will be a drag.  To quote Jed’s dad, “If it was supposed to be fun, they wouldn’t call it work.”

I believe the root cause of this problem, is most people’s incompetence in dealing with conflict.  Many people believe that conflict is bad, when in fact it is neither good nor bad, but merely exists.  People’s response to conflict can make the situation bad.

Some people respond to conflict by becoming aggressive and overbearing.  Others choose to avoid conflict like it was a toilet seat at the bus station.  Both responses are destructive and will not improve or resolve whatever situation has caused the conflict to emerge.

Interestingly, in my experience I see the most common response to conflict to be one of either avoiding or yielding.  Both are poor responses to conflict in almost all cases.  If you are inclined to respond to conflict in this way, it is time to grow a pair and act like an adult.  Issues need to be confronted and dealt with.

It doesn’t mean you are always going to get your way, but at the very least you will have some confidence that you have attempted to constructively resolve workplace conflict, rather than letting it get pushed underground to fester.

I found this clip on YouTube that is a hilarious/sad commentary on many workplaces.  Happy Viewing.

Other than questioning someone’s parentage, is there a faster way to insult someone than calling him an introvert?  Isn’t introversion something that we need to cure people of by sending them to the Dale Carnegie Course?

Many organizations have invested in some form of psychometric instrument that indicates whether people have a preference for introverted or extroverted behaviour, but that hasn’t stopped the vast majority of people from throwing around these terms without actually having a clue as to what they mean.

People hear “extrovert”, and they think: outgoing, friendly, social, capable, productive, normal.

People hear “introvert”, and they think: shy, withdrawn, anti-social, illusive, dysfunctional, wall-flower.

The problem with these descriptions is that neither is particularly accurate, and it infers that people are capable of only one set of behaviours exclusively.  There is also a connotation that Extroverts will excel in business to a much higher degree than Introverts.

In Good to Great, Jim Collins reveals the qualities that his research has shown as effective in running great organizations.  Interestingly, many of the qualities of “Level Five Leadership”, are found more naturally in people with Introverted preferences.

You might also be surprised who may be a closet-introvert:  High-profile leaders, television personalities, sports stars, maybe even one of your friends, neighbours, or family are introverted.  They’re everywhere, so beware – you never know when they’ll want to slink into the back corner of a meeting room, and silently wish everyone would stop talking at once.  Or perhaps pray that someone will listen to them for 20 seconds before interrupting them.  Worse yet, they may think about something before responding to a question creating that awkward few seconds silence.

So you may be wondering where I fit on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Grid.

As someone who spends a lot of time talking to groups of people, and a person who worked in television (for a short and spectacularly unsuccessful period of time), I am rarely accused of being an Introvert.

I prefer to label myself as a Recovering-Extrovert.  We might need to create a new scale for measurement.

Far smarter people than me have written about what is required for effective leadership, but this week I have been reflecting upon the most necessary ingredient:  courage.

I have had the pleasure of interacting with many leaders of varying quality over many years, and all of them have at least a few obvious strengths, but the common denominator in the truly outstanding leaders, are those who handle awkward, difficult or downright scary situations head-on.  They don’t always get it right the first time, but the outstanding leader does not back down because she fears reprisal from her boss, peers, direct reports or some other stakeholder.

It is amazing how many people have a strong need to liked by those who report through to them.  The relationship between a boss and his/her employees should always be respectful, but it does not need to be friendly.  Many leaders hate to deliver bad news, or say “no” to people.  Other leaders won’t deal with performance issues because it might involve a difficult conversation, or let an employee who should have been fired years ago get away with perpetual sub-par performance.

This is exquisite BS.

It is a form of dishonesty, and certainly demonstrates a lack of integrity when leaders fail to engage in difficult conversations.  Progressive organizations have figured this out, and gotten rid of managers who are afraid to get rid of people.

The right thing to do is rarely the easy thing to do, but it is the burden of leadership.  If you are too chicken$hit to do the right thing, then you should either grow a pair, or wait to be fired.  The choice is yours

There’s lots of media coverage this week of smart phones – iPhone for the continuing saga of the iPhone 4, and Blackberry for the UAE’s refusal to use them based on security concerns.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should come-clean now on the fact that I came late to the smart phone party.  I had a perfectly good cell phone, and no one was able to convince me that a smart phone would make my life any easier.  In fact – quite the opposite:

“You need a smart phone so you can get your email anywhere, and always be connected.  The only thing I don’t like is that my phone reception is not very good.”

Sorry – that’s at least two strikes against the smart phone

1)   I don’t want to always be connected.  In fact I look to actively be disconnected

2)   Why would I buy a phone with the limiting function being the telephone itself?  It might make a mean frappuccino, but I would prefer it to make phone calls.

I finally relented and bought an iPhone because it effectively condensed four devices I regularly carried on business trips into one (phone, iPod, Palm Pilot & GPS).  The bonus feature was that as a middle-aged white guy, I instantly felt cooler with a gadget from Apple.

So once I had the new smart phone was I perpetually connected, as I feared?  No.

Not because the technology limited me in any way from staying connected, but because I often either ignored it or turned it off.  I am able to do so because I’m not part of a big corporate food-chain where I would be lead to believe that my very existence on the planet is contingent upon me being absolutely indispensible to my employer.

As a contractor of services, I am generally exempt from things like anxiety about job security (because I don’t have any).  But it got me thinking about why people feel they need to be connected all the time.  It is nothing more than illusions of grandeur if you think that no one else can do what you do.  If you are one of the few that has made yourself indispensible then your business is not sustainable, and we should probably fire you anyway.

Either way, if you’re one of those managers that is constantly connected to your workplace, you should work to wean yourself off this addiction.  Work, like all other recreational drugs, should be used only in moderation.

Some kids grow up wanting to be a fire-fighter, a police officer, teacher or doctor.  I wanted to be Mr. Rogers.  No eight-year-old will tell you she wants to be a manager when she grows up (and if she does, get her into therapy top speed).  Yet there are more managers than there are fire-fighters, police officers, teachers and doctors combined by a factor of ten or more.

So how does this happen?

If management were a profession like others, someone would go to school to study the vocation of management, apprentice for some period of time, and then be deemed fully capable of executing as a manager.  MBA schools have failed to do this effectively, and the vast majority of companies develop their managers in a haphazard fashion.

Most people end up as managers by going into to some line of work for which they show some aptitude, and then are promoted to oversee others doing similar work.  Somewhere along the line, they might take a course or two, and some companies may even send their high potential new managers to business school.

Most organizations make the critical mistake of assuming that because someone is a proficient practitioner of a certain trade that she will be a good manager.  Organizations need to change their focus away from the technical aspects of a particular function (or group of functions), and instead focus on what skills a manager will need to be successful in that environment.

If more than half that list of competencies is focused on technical aspects of the industry or job, then it has been done wrong.

Don’t get me wrong:  I’m not a big fan of pulling people with no industry experience, and placing them in key management positions.  I don’t think this approach has worked very often.  If organizations are serious about having great management, then they need to select people for management positions with the core competencies required to manage in that environment, and then continually develop them.

Either that, or select tall guys with brown hair, who wear blue shirts.  That works too.

One of my favourite work assignments was a project based in Philadelphia that was a joint venture between an American Company and a British one.  One would think the similarities between these two countries would keep cross-cultural issues to a minimum, but as anyone who has worked in both countries will tell you, the differences are more than merely adjusting to funny accents.

One of the first wrinkles that needed to ironed out was the fact that Americans take about 3 weeks vacation a year in increments of no longer than 5 days, and their British counterparts have two or three times that holiday entitlement.

While the Brits would jet off to Southern Europe for 3 weeks at a time during the summer, the Americans would be at the office working the same excessive hours as always.  Interestingly, the productivity of the two groups was about the same.

This got me to thinking about how we work in North America, and how much of the time we are pretending to work.  Lots of people will take offence to the notion that they are not really working, but in reality the bulk of the work at many organizations takes place in just a few weeks per year.

January through May are good production months, except for a few days around Easter and Spring Break.  June through August, many people are not at work at all, and those that are working show up, but really have one eye to the outdoors and their next BBQ.  September and October are usually about budgeting and planning, and while some will argue they are critical to the business, it distracts from the actual running of the business, and often adds far less value than it costs in time and effort.  Finally November and December work gets done, but with the distractions of Christmas and (for the Americans) Thanksgiving.

So as a manager, how do you reconcile that the few people that do show up in July and August are probably just pretending to work?  You don’t.  It’s part of the deal, and most organizations don’t fall apart as a result.  The real question to ask is whether the work being done the rest of the year, when the entire staff complement is in place and working at capacity has any value.

Anyway, I better take a quick lap around the office floor (holding a piece of paper, and walking quickly) so as to maintain the appearance of work, before someone figures out I’m part of the masses pretending to work during the summer months.

In most corners of the world, South Africa is currently the center of the universe, and bars and restaurants on six continents (and perhaps a research station on the seventh), are packed with crazed fans cheering for the team or nation of their choice.  Even in North America, where Football (not Gridiron) rarely attracts any attention, people are paying attention to the World Cup.

Some time in July, there will be a new world Football champion, and the sport will then fade into relative obscurity for the next four years.  This is because Soccer doesn’t matter… at least to people in the United States.  The Canadians have a marginally more international view of the world, but they are largely stuck with the baggage their big-brother to the South leaves them with.

Business in North America is largely conducted the same way.  It stands to reason that when the world’s largest single economy by a wide margin is located on the North American continent that people would not be compelled to look beyond their own neighborhood.

However, the times are changing.  Much like the disintegration of the Roman Empire, the economic dispersion precedes the rest of the empire, and businesses in North America would be well advised to look abroad – not only for market opportunities, but for management help as well.

This may seem like heresy to many Americans and Canadians, but there are European, Asian, and South American organizations that are exceptionally well run – they may even do some things better than their North American peers.

Health care industries are an excellent example.  Both the United States and Canada have incredibly dysfunctional health care systems.  If you don’t believe me, look at any global ranking, and see where these two countries place.  In most northern European countries all their citizens have access to care (unlike the United States), and they have a mixture of public and private care that ensures the rationing of care is kept to a minimum (unlike Canada).

If Governments and businesses in North America could see past their own myopia to other parts of the world, a great number of business and social problems could be addressed.

Tell me I’m wrong….

Something happens in an airport or on an airplane every few months that makes us collectively lose our minds.  In the past year, restrictions have been put on air travelers that are only slightly less obtrusive than being bound in straight-jacket while in transit.

At any given time there are literally hundreds of thousands of people in the air.  Of all of those people, some tiny fraction of one percent want to do harm.  Regardless of how small that deviant population is, all air travelers are subject to slow, invasive, and somewhat ineffective security measures.

Many workplaces manage their employees the same way.  They put restrictive policies in place to thwart the occasional employee that may abuse a corporate directive.  One example was a client of ours who had a proposal to put people on a per diem expense when they were travelling, and thus eliminating the need for the collection and auditing of hundreds of $10 lunch receipts.

Ultimately the proposal was turned down because there was some history of one or two employees abusing their expense accounts.  Rather than properly discipline the offending employees, it was decided to stack policy on top of policy to eliminate any chance anyone could abuse their expense account.

In the process, they created an abundance of unnecessary work for countless employees, cost the shareholders more in compliance-related costs, damaged any atmosphere of trust in the organization, and ultimately didn’t stop dishonest employees from taking advantage of the situation.  Not a very smart decision.

In the airports, we don’t have much choice; in the workplace we do.  Managers need to be accountable for managing.  If an employee behaves poorly, then address the behavior – don’t write a policy.  In the example above, the offending employees should have been fired.  They then could have instituted an expense allowance that is easier to administer and saves everyone time and money.

I can already hear the HR and Finance people objecting, but at some point pragmatic common sense must prevail.

Poor Tony Hayward – he just wants his life back.  OK – that’s officially the stupidest comment of the year, but he’s apologized now, so it should all be OK.  Like most important life-lessons (whether it be business or personal), the fundamentals were taught to us in Kindergarten, we’ve just chosen to forget, or not apply them.

I was watching Disney/Pixar’s A Bug’s Life with my son the other day, when Hopper (the chief antagonist, and all-around bad ass) reminded Princess Atta that the number one rule of leadership is that “Everything is Your Fault”.  Apparently Mr. Hayward hasn’t watched any children’s programming lately, or he might have gotten some of this right.

If it’s any consolation, BP is not the only company to have reacted to a bad situation by making it exponentially worse.  Just a few months ago, we were watching Toyota come unglued like an Egyptian mummy in a swimming pool.  It seems that every organization to have screwed up (or just had plain bad luck) seems to go into ass-covering mode with the exception of Tylenol in the 1980s, and Maple Leaf foods just two years ago.

The big difference:  both the Tylenol and Maple Leaf disasters killed people, but instead of hiding behind their lawyers, the leaders of these companies made themselves front and centre, and took responsibility for the (in)actions of their organizations.

So what can the middle manager or front level supervisor learn from all the silliness?

First… go rent A Bug’s Life, and listen to Kevin Spacey’s line about leadership responsibility over and over again.  When you think you’ve learned it, go listen to it a bunch more times so that when the excrement hits the rotating air-circulation device, you won’t try to cover your ass, but rather step up and take your lumps.

Second… manage your little empire proactively.  In areas that could get you into big trouble (health & safety, violence in the workplace, harassment, discrimination, etc.) don’t ever settle for less than outstanding performance.  Executives at BP will not only oversee the loss of billions of dollars/pounds of shareholder value, but they may be held personally liable for sloppy process.  It’s not out of the question that one or more of them end up in jail/gaol.

Third… understand that taking responsibility is the burden of leadership.  This is what we pay you to do.  It’s what you signed up for in the first place.  If you’re unable to get your head around this, you should get yourself reassigned as an individual contributor.  Yep… that right:  If you “want your life back”, you should think about that before disaster strikes.

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.

Tell me your experiences – both good and bad – with command and control as a management style.

The thing that impresses me most about Henry is his ability to upset people. You will be at least mildly annoyed with Mintzberg if any of the following apply to you:

• You are a manager
• You have a business degree
• You use email
• You pay attention when Jack Welsh, or any other celebrity manager speaks
• You believe that management is a profession
• You think management can be taught

You should read this book simply because Mintzberg is very much a contrarian, and whether you agree with him or not, it is good to consider his arguments.  ‘Managing’ is easy to read (especially given it is written by an academic), and it raises fundamental questions that any leader of people should be asking. 

For normal students of management practice, you may find this book a series of punches in the face; my favorite one being on the limitations of email.  I have regularly made the point that email is an extremely limited media, and should be minimized by leaders wherever possible.

The response I get most often if the same look your dog gives you when you pretend to throw the ball, but then hide it behind your back.  “How could anyone possibly manage without email?”

I welcome your feedback on email, or about this book.

If you are disinclined to read the whole book, the book summary may be worth a look.

So… following a title like the above, I should probably fully disclose before going any further:  I have worked in HR, and have done a fair bit of consulting work with HR Business Areas.

Unlike the title may imply, I have met a number of smart, hardworking people in HR.  Like any other category of people, there are good, bad and ugly performers in HR.

So why would I suggest that HR probably sucks in your organization?

In many cases, it is because organizations don’t really know what it is that they should be asking HR to do for them, and HR professionals are notoriously poor at “selling” their wares.  Many companies want HR to administer the payroll, and arrange the Christmas party.  They then staff the HR group with people who are capable of doing those tasks, but do not have the experience or training to make a more strategic contribution to the business.

So, what should we look for in our HR department?

1. “People Persons” are often the last people you should have in HR.  A good HR person knows that her job is to generate returns for shareholders.  The respectful treatment of people is a prerequisite to consistently generating those returns, but many “people persons” forget that some of their people may regularly need a kick in the ass.
2. Your HR people need to have business training. I’m not suggesting you insist every one of them go out and get an MBA, but they need to have some understanding of the business you are in, and how it works.
3. You need high potential, high achievers in HR.  I have worked with more than one organization that has used HR as a ghetto for people who could not make it in the operating part of the business.  These organizations have taken the easy way out, and put these poor performers where they perceive they can do the least amount of damage – in HR.  This is the opposite of what should be happening – your highest potential leaders should be cycled through HR.
4. HR people need have well developed skills in sales and influencing.  The best managed companies know that the management of the Human Resource is NOT the responsibility of HR, but rather of every leader in the organization.  HR’s job is to influence those managers to do it well.  An HR professional, without the ability to influence organizational leaders is about as useful as a chocolate teapot.

Of course, I could go on and on, but I better get back to work before I get caught, and someone wants to send me to work in the HR group.  So now that I’ve offended every person who has ever known anyone in HR, I’d love to hear what you think about the HR group in your organization:  Are they good?  Are they bad?  Are they the highest potential employees?

It has been said that populations get the governments they deserve.  In organizations, we end up with the HR departments we deserve.

One of the hot topics in Leadership Development is something called Strengths Only Leadership … or some variation thereof.

Personally, “Strengths Only” development planning makes me cringe.  Too often I’ve seen it used as an excuse for not working on a weakness that if improved, even just to the point of being “good enough”, would accelerate performance.

In choosing development focus areas the mistake is made when leaders start the process by analyzing their own strengths and weaknesses.  This is the wrong place to begin!  Rather you should start by analyzing the key competencies required of your current job or desired future role.

Some of your weaknesses (or strengths) may be immaterial to the current role you have or the future role you want.  Spending valuable development efforts on strengths (or weaknesses) could be a waste of time if they don’t directly apply to the job you have or the job you want.

I’m aligned with developing strengths; it should definitely be part of your development planning.  But start with key competencies required first … then don’t be a fool and ignore weaknesses that might derail your performance.

Understand what’s important first … then answer the question  …

“To build a strength or fix a weakness?”

Jed

So it’s time to select who will participate in your Accelerated Development Program and your thinking about your team and who might be the best of the best to put forward, who deserves the opportunity.  You start looking through your teams performance reviews and 360 results, you start planning for the talent review meetings …  HOLD ON!  I love the enthusiasm you have for developing people but I need to ask you to back it up.

Contrary to common practice, do not start with a process aimed at identifying the high potential talent in your organization.  Start by determining the leadership requirements that exist for the organization; start with the identifying your Business Requirements.

• What competencies (knowledge, skills, abilities and behaviors) are going to be required in order to successfully execute your strategy over the next 3–5  years?
• Where is your bench weaker/stronger?
• Where is the company growth going to come from that will require new leadership?
• Where are the likely future vacancies going to be?

When you are considering who will be selected to participate in your Accelerated Development Program ….. start with an organizational assessment rather than a talent assessment.

If you’re like most companies there is a limited amount of resources of time and money that you can spend on Accelerated Development Programs.  In a larger organization leveraging traditional identification process will still likely lead to a large number of candidates who are labeled as High Potential.  Don’t misunderstand, everyone should have development plans and be supported in their development, however the truth of the matter is that organizations should be proactive in allocating additional development resources against those individuals who are most likely to meet the leadership requirements of the organization.  You need to make sure you are getting the biggest benefit from your development efforts.

Leverage your organizational analysis in determining some of the criteria for selection.  If your bench strength is weak in the sales department and really strong in operations then concentrate your selection to the program by choosing individuals interested in building a career in sales.  YES, even at the expense of not including a high potential individual from Operations.  If your business requirements for leadership are heavily weighted in a specific geography you may consider not including some individuals that have indicate that they are not willing to relocate, in favour of some who are.  The goal of accelerated development programs is to accelerate the development of selected individuals to meet the needs of the business.  Don’t invest more money and time where it’s not needed at the expense of where it is needed.

There hasn’t been a fall from grace like this since the OJ trial.  Ok… maybe this recent Tiger Woods thing, or the fact that people set the expectations for Barack Obama way too high could be close seconds, but the fact that Toyota isn’t absolutely perfect seems to be disturbing a lot of people.

Toyota is a well run company – despite their recent setbacks.  What separates well run organizations from those not so well run is the ability to respond to challenges, not the absence of any troubles.

I have no doubt the marketing people at Toyota are freaking out, but they do have some credibility they can spend on this issue.  What they shouldn’t do, is announce to the world there isn’t really a problem, and carry on with business as usual.  This is the corporate equivalent of OJ going out on his own to look for the “real” killer.

Toyota needs to step-up, acknowledge what went wrong, tell everyone how they intend to fix it, and then get back to completely dominating the global automobile industry.  Too much spin, and they’ll lose even more credibility.

And while we’re talking about supposedly world class companies, can we have a reality check?  I have studied and held up organizations like Southwest Airlines, General Electric, and Disney myself as examples for managers to look to.  In many cases I would stand by this advice.  However, we need to realize that even the best run entities are not going to do everything right all the time.  In fact, it is probably closer to the truth that these companies really only do things right marginally more than every other organization out there.

Don’t get me wrong… much like I find President Obama to be an impressive guy, watching people’s unrealistic expectations of him be constantly deflated, people need to look to the Toyotas of the world in the proper context.  They are not perfect, and they will make mistakes.  They also can’t be all things to all people.

I bought Southwest Airlines stock about 8 years ago, because they were such an impressive company.  So impressive, that I would lose my shirt if I sold those same stocks today.  I also bought Southwest stock before ever flying with them.  I have no doubt they serve their niche well – I’m just clearly not one of their target customers: “What do you mean you won’t assign me a seat?”

Leaders in big organizations and small should watch Toyota very carefully in the coming weeks and months.  They will either come through this stronger than ever, or crash and burn horribly.  Either way it will be instructive.

How do you think this will end?  Will Toyota recover like Tylenol did after the poisonings, or will Mr. Toyota end up driving down an LA freeway with a gun to his head?

What a debacle.

Of course, the whole situation becomes exaggerated when you add in multi-million dollar severance packages, and inflated celebrity egos.  But when you look at the situation purely from a management perspective what is to be learned? 

Here’s what we know:

• NBC didn’t want O’Brien to leave, so they made a deal with Leno to retain O’Brien
• NBC didn’t want to offend Leno to a point that he might shop his talent elsewhere
• As a result, they shuffled all the deck chairs, and when it was clear it wasn’t working, they again tried to split the difference and come out with a compromise that would placate all concerned.  Wrong again.

What Jeff Zucker and the kids at NBC management failed to realize is that sometimes you don’t get to pick a good option.  Sometimes, as managers, we are called upon to determine which option sucks the least.  

Back in 1993, NBC had a similar management choice to make when replacing Johnny Carson.  Their managerial decision making at the time caused them to lose David Letterman to CBS, which likely guided their decisions a decade later.  In retrospect, say “no” to O’Brien, and potentially losing him, as they lost Letterman, may very well have been the option that sucked the least. 

There are thousands of managers out there right now facing decisions where there may not be a best option.  These decisions won’t make the news, and there probably won’t be a $45m severance expense, but making difficult decisions is a burden of leadership. 

So do the right thing… if you can’t figure out an option that will work best, determine the one that will suck the least, and get on with it. 

Either that, or follow the example of Jimmy Fallon, and just stay quiet and below the radar until the whole thing blows over.

Beep-Beep

There is much to be learned from cartoons – they often reflect or satirize our society in very clever ways. 

Jed spent over 15 years with a Fortune 100 company in positions in Sales, Operations and Human Resources.  During that time, he learned first hand how world-class organizations manage their businesses and lead their people.  I also spent over 10 years working with a large multi-national, before transitioning to Management Consulting about 15 years ago.  Throughout both these careers I have learned from what companies do well, and often what they don’t do well.

So… what does working with and advising companies have to do with Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner?

Jed and I were chatting about one of our client organizations one day when one of us made the comment that it seemed as though many of the leaders we were coaching were constantly fighting a seemingly futile battle, and were actually making things harder for themselves.  “It’s like the Coyote, finding increasingly complicated and convoluted ways to try to catch the Road Runner”.

We pursued the metaphor further and wondered about what kind of arrangement Wile E. Coyote has with ACME Inc.  He apparently has an unlimited account with which to purchase rocket launchers, catapults, explosives and all the various accessories.  It would seem that ACME carries everything a Coyote could ever want.  Then we asked if ACME might carry Canned Road Runner.   Even with a healthy respect for “love of the hunt”, surely the Coyote should have settled for canned roadrunner by now. 

The people who run modern organizations are not so different from the Coyote.   I have worked in grocery stores and nuclear power plants, and the businesses are conceptually very easy.  Layers of managers, and well intentioned others then set out to diffuse energy away from the core business drivers and to a litany of “flavor of the month” projects and initiatives that no human could ever keep straight.

This happens to smart and hard-working leaders that are trying to do their best to satisfy all the various stakeholders they work with.  Often times external consultants and Human Resource professionals make it that much more difficult by adding more dimensions to a manager’s workday.  What modern organizational leaders need to do is to put down the proverbial rocket launcher, and move one aisle over at the ACME store, and buy some canned roadrunner.

What Jed and I want to offer here is a number of cans of different types of roadrunner to suite your taste.  Different businesses have different issues at different times in their life cycles, but there are many similarities.  Likewise, managers in different parts of the same business may have different requirements that cannot be met by the normal approach to organizational development.

Each “can” that we offer gives easy to understand and actionable advice for whatever concerns leaders most.  In a few minutes you can understand core concepts and tools, and put them to work right away in your business.  There are easy to understand explanations that are augmented by podcasts for each specific topic area.  Each “can” contains examples, checklists, evaluations and sometimes case studies to make a manager competent in the subject area quickly.

For leaders that want more detailed information than what we provide, there is a resources section for each topic area that will direct you to some books, articles or other resources that Jed and I have found useful during our careers.

We don’t claim to have all the answers to every one of your problems, but many of the most common managerial challenges that we’ve come across are addressed here.

Don’t be the Coyote…be a Wily Manager.

Why we like this book:

Jim Collins always writes his books based on quality research as opposed to the cheerleading that we see in many management books. He also has a very conversational tone, which makes it very easy to read and retain his key ideas. How the Mighty Fall is not a book about the Global Financial Collapse, although its timing was almost perfect, and the lessons to be learned from the book and the research certainly may have helped some of the organizations. Probably those who need to read this book most are those that are running companies (or departments within companies) that are doing particularly well. As Collins points out, organizations that convince themselves they are doing very well often self-delude themselves into ignoring blind spots that become all too evident after the fact.

We think this is an easy, informative read, and worth the time to do so. What about you – what do you think?

Jed & Bob