Regenerate!

The chances are that you never come back to it. That’s your fear, so you try to attend to every mail and every call in real time. You stay late and carry your blackberry and your laptop around. (Why do you need both?)

Deep down somewhere, you know that you are not the boss. Those mails, calls, and now sms or tweets are setting your agenda. But at other times you let your designation fool you.

This is not another piece on time management, it is about you taking a lead.

If think reading mail or responding to calls and messages is work, think again.

Let us be ruthless about what qualifies as work:  Work of value happens when you execute a repeatable process generating a result that is of value (expressed in money terms or through ready acceptance for subsequent value generation) for someone inside or outside the organization. OK, there is more. If you do a one time activity that clearly supports the above kind process then that too is work of value-though indirect.

Work of value happens only through processes and projects.

Now, if you examine what you call as work with help above filters, you may have horror on hand. Much of what passes as work is nothing but reminders, repetitions, repairs, and rework.

One CEO whom I was coaching, told me to reschedule our coaching session due to year end sales pressure. I said, ‘Fine. But what is your Head of Sales doing and why do sales need last minute pushing?” “Oh you know how it is..” The CEO was repeating the work that his head of sales was doing. The head of sales was doing a good turn to the organization. He was repeating what his sales executive was doing or supposed to be doing.

I was walking on a shop floor and I could not spot some supervisors. I peeped in the production manager’s cabin. He was away in stores, I was told. ‘Oh there were errors in the parts received..and the supervisors were busy in the quality department for getting clearances”, I learned from him later.

“We have decided to leverage our factory space and the idle machining capacity by taking up job work” another CEO who was heading a machinery business told me. They had a good product portfolio. “But how did you reach this conclusion? Is that your strategy?”, I asked. “That was not our strategy (till yesterday) but it has become necessary” , was his answer. So they were undoing and trying to repair their own strategy. Their machinery portfolio was crying for attention while they had a good customer base.

Think carefully before you brag or wallow about your work or overwork. You may horror on hand!

If something like the above happens with you or around you, you need to take lead and improvise on you leadership skills and build a good agenda. You can do with some coaching too. You can make a big difference.

“My people work really hard. Many of my top managers stay up late and then take their laptops home. But somehow we are not turning out any superlative performance. Our customers think we are ok type. Our employees…the other day I overheard one of our bright team leaders say -Oh! forget what the client says. Listen to your boss..  I was shocked.  I do not understand…”

Somewhere deep in her mind the CEO knows something is not right. Many things may not be right. But there is always the next meeting, the next budget, the next forecast, the next report, and the explanations to be given.

Why do your top managers have to slog? Why do your brightest people appear to have given in?

There are more than one factors behind all this. But I think there is one factor which is almost always there. And one can always get down to doing something about it.

This factor is your business processes.

Now when was the last time you used this phrase? During the ISO 9001 or CMM audit? While pitching for a deal? Or while waxing eloquent on the “learning process”?

What if you take this ‘processes’ thing more seriously and actual start getting a fix on them by

-defining some key business processes e.g. client acquisition, order fulfillment, recruitment (call it talent acquisition if you feel better that way), complaint resolution, product creation etc. Your gut feeling will tell you which are the top two or three vital processes for you as of now.

-fixing some process performance parameters, guess current values, and fix a goal

-appointing some as process leaders and form a team of players

-give them powers and resources to run and to improve processes

-ask your top managers and experts to step back and provide support when needed or take direct process responsibility as process leaders

-review process performance and improvement actions in routine management reviews (you can leave out many other review points)

It is not easy.  But if you stick to it you will be amazed to find performance going up and yes, good (talented) people and not so good people will get marked. Many borderline cases will improve and you will know what to do with the remaining minority.

Process management provides your leaders powerful levers to for shifting gears for future. It makes them leaders.

“When Ajit joined our team there was a great hope. After all, he not only had top rated education but he had also worked at the market leader in our industry. I was very proud to net him. But six months have passed and I no more enjoy meeting him”

CEOs go through such disappointments.

Here are some thoughts before you go for your next prize catch:

-Agreed, Ajit came from the same industry. But working with the market leader can be quite different than working for a company which is trying to come up with better offerings. Being a market leader means that the way things are compared by customers has been set already. On the other hand, at a company offering some thing new, you have to change customers’ benchmarks. Your star recruit may not have done this before.

-Ajit’s excellent education: Great. But your company has been built around people with education from different kind of institutions. You culture is that of looking around and learning by trying things out. Ajit is not used to that. He tends to take many things for granted. That would be a cause of some friction between Ajeet and your other people.  And Ajeet being perceived as a new star would have increased the distance further.

It does not mean that a CEO should only recruit ‘our types’. Quite the opposite. People ‘not like us’ can be a good addition if what they bring adds to the business.One should know what it is.

But how does one find this about new comers when one does not know own people well enough -going by those botched up cases of promoting the favorites?

First thing to do is raise your own capability of developing people -you will start understanding people much better. A good resource for this can be Learning Leadership -it is flexible, accessible, and affordable.

The second thing to do is to prepare yourself well before you start looking for new people. If you do the first one well you will have much to build on for this.

What to do about Ajit who is unfortunately so off-color now?

Perhaps a short assignment to investigate competitive landscape to come up with some ground up thinking might bring him out of his shell? Perhaps.

Any more guesses?

Sounds familiar. The signs were all there.

She would come up to you and make some good suggestions. You would say ‘great’ and give her a know-all look and an indulgent smile. She would speak with conviction in meetings.  But she would not get a clear mandate from you. At the times of important decisions, she would observe you silently but relentlessly. You would of course indulge her once in a while.

Then one day she quits and you say ‘Oh!I was going to promote her.’ You even make an offer to her. But she has a better opportunity and she has made up her mind.

Sounds familiar. But preventing this takes much more.
-Do you promote people for performance (you can see that) or for potential (not obvious)? One needs to be clear on what additional competencies are needed to perform the next job. Your people too need to be clear about what do they need to learn for their advancement. Read this career planning.
-Do you have an ongoing mechanism for finding out the leadership potential of your people? And for ‘improving’ their potential? For knowing more about a tried leadership development process available, register at Learning Leadership and join the free program Leadership -learning, coaching, and developing.

If you do not a have a confident YES as an answer to each of the questions the above familiar incident might also be a recurrent one.  It is difficult to handle talented people as compared to the mediocre. The mediocre would be happy to plod around.

The talented people must be engaged with twin challenges of learning new skills and taking on more responsibilities. They also need to be coached well.

Learning Leadership brings such leadership coaching to your people through the internet.

There is no suitable way of making this expression applicable to both the genders. My apologies to talented women executives.  CEOs have their favorites. It is only human to take a liking to someone and develop some trust and comfort with the chosen few. CEO’s have good reasons for this.

The least a CEO, could do is to invest something in your favorite executives. A CEO could for example-

-send them to a Management Development or Executive Education program of a reputed institute and hope that this helps them to develop to those leadership skills needed to shoulder more responsibilities

-send them to an outdoor adventure learning program and hope that they pick up team building and communication skills etc.

-send them on another posting to add to their experience and hope that they pick the skills needed for the higher position

-send them on paid vacation and hope that this motivates them to learn those skills by themselves

-make them understudy of an existing senior person and hope that the current manager is indeed a role model

CEOs try above or variants of the above techniques. But not many give a thought to coaching a person in real work situations, partly because there is not much awareness and partly because executive coaching tends to be very expensive and impractical given the need for physical meetings.

But the fact remains that putting an executive through paces of systematic leadership thinking applied to work situations and with support by an experienced business leader as a coach can be very effective.

In workout based coaching programs, executive need to put in hard thinking about their responsibilities and the coach gives further impetus to their thinking through comments. All this provides opportunity for improvisation and evidence for learning.

You can take a look at Learning Leadership.

The web based workouts and coaching offer a very efficient, affordable, and flexible method for result oriented leadership development.

Give it a try.

You are a CEO and you are weighing options for filling up the position of the Operations Head, which has fallen vacant because the previous occupant left his job. The previous occupant could not cope with the job pressure.

You have a couple of successful project leaders.  Should you chose one of them or should you look beyond?

The usual tendency is to reward good performers by a promotion. That would seem fair. But it is better to ask yourselves some questions. Here are they and some thoughts too.

What are the additional skills that the Operations Head needs to have over above what a competent project leader needs to have?

I think that the foremost skill a good operations head must have is the ability to assess, select, and develop competent project leaders. A strong project leader may be good in use of project management tools and may also be resourceful in solving day to day problems. The operations head, on the other hand, needs to be skilled in dealing with longer term needs like developing more versatile pool of resources, establishing ealry warning systems, cost management etc.

Another critical skill that an operations head needs to have is the ability to influence things horizontally. Even a good project leader may not have been tested on this.

One more skill that project leaders may not get tested on is the ability to diagnose (processes) and take preventive actions.

Why did the previous head fail to meet job pressures?

It is likely that the previous occupant of this post lacked the above skills. It is also possible that your operations group lacks some capabilities that are needed to meet client needs. It is possible that the previous head did not have the diagnostic skills to spot the deficiencies and skills to build new capabilities in your team.

It is very risky to choose someone for promotion on the basis of success in previous job. The risks go beyond immediate failures. Sometimes hardworking people overcome their lack of above skills by resorting to working extra hard (but still in their old areas of comfort), making their people to work unreasonably harder, and other such heroic methods. These can be damaging -talented people may leave, your organization may become more susceptible to shocks.

What is the way out?

1. For every important leadership position, identify differentiating skills needed at that level compared to lower levels. See e.g. Career Planning. Use these to evaluate candidates.

2. Establish ongoing leadership development programs. These programs will not only develop people but they will also provide you with more informed answers when you evaluate people for promotions.

Leadership is often described in terms of vision, inspiration, courage, passion, dynamism, motivation, change & transformation, mobilization etc. While all these are important outcomes or facets of leadership they do not offer many clues about how to get there if one wants to develop leadership skills.

When I think about leadership, I can think about feeling responsible and doing something about it. If I think of leadership in the context of organizations I can say that to improve leadership skills one needs to get better at a range of competencies.

A leader should be able to grasp and face reality in all its complexities. The reality must cover ‘own and internal’ reality. The leader should be able to both handle and harness emotions well. He \ she should be able to identify and implement values.  The leader should be able to generate and harness small and big ideas, generate excitement and develop them into overarching vision. The leader should be able to connect with the organization’s goals and generate breakthroughs in projects and processes. He \ she should be able to learn quickly and teach for developing people. The leader should be able to develop an agenda covering all above and should be able to communicate it simply and directly.

At different points of an executive’s career and depending on the organization’s situation the emphasis would shift, but I have come to believe that above competencies remain core.

Having defined the competencies in these specific terms it easier to think about ways of getting there.

There are many facets of leadership -vision, values, transformation, and others. Leadership competencies include ability to understand reality, ability to see the larger picture, ability to marshal resources, passion for developing people, and more.

But if I am asked,  “what is a leader’s ‘output’” or “what is the ‘outcome’ of leadership?”, I will say that on a day-today basis the outcome of ‘good’ leadership is inspiring people to accomplish something, making a routine job worthwhile.

And what is ‘inspiration’? It is feeling which gives that booster dose of energy. If the primary outcome of good leadership is inspiration, can there be able leadership without good emotional capabilities?

Emotional capability is that X-factor behind successful leadership. Emotional capability is not just emotional intelligence.

Without the ability to understand emotions, without the ability to deal with them, and without the ability to harness them, much of a leader’s thinking will remain just thinking and every action will need exercise of formal authority. No matter, what position a leader occupies there are many crucial aspects that are beyond his formal powers. He or she must have that X-factor.

Given the way in which people get their education and ‘training’ on the job, most have learned and have come to believe that emotions are bad, particularly in business or in serious work. This becomes a major factor that hinders capable people from realising full potential -theirs’ and others’.

Development of this X-factor, therefore, is one of the cornerstones of developing leadership skills.

I conducted a workshop “Leadership -How to Regenerate & Rejuvenate Your Business?” at the Indian Merchants’ Chamber, Mumbai on August 1, 2009. It was a day full of interactions with senior level participants from industries like financial services, logistics services, mineral trading, manufacturing, and others.

There was a huge interest in the emotional aspects of leadership, something that never fails to surprise me. Display of emotions is considered a taboo at work -this was apparent when one of the participant made distinction between being passionate and being emotional. But how does one reconcile this with the fact that great leaders are passionate about their work and that passion, excitement, pride and other similar feelings are central to leadership? What happens when you equate display of emotions with emotions themselves?and end up in suppressing them? Participants said that the workshop showed them the ways of dealing with emotions and using their emotional abilities as strength.

On another plane, thinking about their own work processes helped them apply various leadership principles to day-to-day work. How to leverage work related values was also tried by them. All this work led to their own agendas.

When their attention was turned to ideas that would make big difference to their businesses, the “creative tension” in the air was palpable. Various workouts help them draw ideas from ground realities and yet use imagination to question the status quo.

For me the big take-away from the workshop is to learn in what ways leadership principles work across a diverse range of industries. Another take-away was when you provide means of focusing on various aspect of work, how almost everyone can come up with good solid thinking and tangible actions for improving things. It just shows that all of us have huge untapped potential.

It is our right and obligation to discover our potential. It was very satisfying to me that I could be of help in this.

On last Saturday night we were watching the ICC T20 on TV, when the subject of Symonds, an Australian player, being sent back because of his act of indiscipline. Someone commented that Australia should not have sent Symonds back since he was a match winner. Symonds was dropped for not turning up for practice. There were other instances of his behavior attracting disciplinary actions.

Taking calls on matters related to the values -whether that means stopping shipments of suspect quality of goods, letting a successful sales person go because he overpromised or refused to collaborate on prospects handled by others, not allowing accountants to suppress facts in financial statements, etc. -is the toughest leadership challenge.

Some people argue that performance is all that matters. Extra-ordinarily talented people at times transgress the boundaries of acceptable behavior. They also make a huge difference to outcomes when they participate. But to say that such behavior is necessary for excellent performances is not correct.

CEOs would not hesitate in acting on issues like fraud or dishonesty but many of them may be tempted to take decisions like the above for short term gains. Such compromises damage the working environment in many ways. They send wrong signals. Other employees may be tempted to reach simialr compromises to boost their performance figures. They can demoralise talnted and conscientious people, who are the backbone of any organisation. They can damage team spirit. Compromises like these lead to suppression of other problem signals creating a severe handicap for the top leaders, since no body will talk openly about them.

Some precautions are necesary though. There must be thorough understanding amongst all concerned about what is on and what is not on. There should be fairness and uniformity in taking these calls. Otherwise it will lead to arbitrariness and egoistic behavior by leaders and will cause more damage.