Regenerate!

Business leadership is all about making decisions. Decision making can not be easily taught in leadership courses, however good they are. See what is happening here.

A CEO is meeting his management team. The subject is review of some proposals for additional investments in manufacturing operations.

Head of Manufacturing (HOM): These investments will increase the capacity of  the production line. We have bottlenecks.

Head of  Sales (HOS): Yea.. we lost some sales recently due to supply constraints.

Head of Quality (HOQ): Rejections is another problem. This adds to the pressure.

HOM; But the rejections are within the budget.

CEO: What does finance say? What is the payback?

Head of Finance (HOF): Based on the trends on sales lost over last three months. Full payback from these incremental investment will take place over 18-24 months. That is why I have forwarded budget papers. We will need raise additional term loan, but our bankers have agreed.

CEO:  Then what is the hitch? Go ahead…we need sales.

We had a coaching session two days after the above meeting. The CEO told me about this decision. The conversation went as given below.

Coach (I): But we recently discussed that our cash generation is low and resorting to additional financing will increase the interest burden.

CEO:  But we have already invested so much in our manufacturing. This incremental investment will help….

Coach: That’s a classic case of historical costs or existing investments influencing decisions which have to work in future. Have the bottlenecks been analyzed? Various reports show that on-time material availability performance has not been good enough. What about in-process rejections? Last month’s reports stated that the in-process rejections were well above 10%.  This is like 10% of the capacity is wasted. Could any of these be causing problems? Are you expecting further growth in demand? What happens if the product mix has to change?

CEO: Yea. I recall that there have been several order cancellations due changes in demands.

CEO: I see…it is better to go to the root of the problem. Our bankers had told me privately that though they would be happy to provide line of funding, in our interest we should generate more cash out of operations and retire some old loans which have adding to the interest burden. I will get this sorted out.

There are some issues here:

-Historical bias: The tendency to justify sinking more money because you have already done so.

-Functional bias: Each functional head defines problems narrowly (wrongly). Every functional head has undergone many leadership courses but the thinking has not changed.

-Financing bias: It seems that a good payback and availability of finance is all this needed to justify any decision.

-Tendency to throw money at the problem instead looking for root causes.

Learning Leadership’s executive coaching programs help  management teams to examine business processes and root causes. Various workouts help them understanding problems in term of business processes. When executives do these workouts periodically, they get better in applying various principles.

More and more senior corporate executives are undergoing Learning Leadership programs. Every program involves a set of well structured workouts.

A senior executive said that “The workouts seemed to be simple at first. But as I started putting down my answers, I realized that I need to think more. They turned out to be more difficult than I thought.”

That is true. Most executives say that. The Learning Leadership workouts seem to be simple because they avoid jargon and the questions are straightforward. But the questions also make one think about fundamental aspects of the way one interacts, deals with values and feelings, handles work processes, and many more aspects of work & life.

By doing workouts one ’sees’ and ‘examines’ what one has thought. This makes one think deeper. That’s why the workouts seem difficult.

The Learning Leadership’s executive coach can also ’see’ and ‘examine’ one’s thinking. The coach can then ask more questions or suggest different approaches to thinking. This is really invaluable but requires further efforts.

There is one more reason why the seemingly easy workouts turn out to be difficult -one is required to come up specific action items (own agenda) to deal with the situations captured in the workouts. Change is possible only through actions. Bringing about change is leadership, is it not? Learning Leadership is not easy, but it is worthwhile.

Your executive coach is there to see you through.

Sign up now if you haven’t done it yet and see for yourself the how much you learn and directly use it when you lead.

“We are the best brand in this vertical for delivery of enterprise  computing and we have a global delivery model -this is what our VP told the that big prospective client. I was required to attend our presentation” Mitchell said sounding unhappy.  John nodded as he pressed the cappuccino button for her.

“Do you know what is so special about our brand?”

John looked bank. He said,” Mitchell, this is a typical elevator pitch”

“Is the elevator pitch valid only for the duration of the transit? I constantly get clients’ reminders for pending work and for fixing errors. It is very frustrating. I do not know what a brand means and I no longer wish to know”

It is just as well that the coffee machine capers are not heard in the elevators. For the VP has perhaps no clue to what a brand really stands for. His brand is the market leader so it has to be the best as far as he is concerned.

There are not many companies who can afford to be smug about their market leadership. There are none.

It takes a while to think and act on what a brand really means and how to get there.

Branding is what your customers think about you  and what they think about your market offerings in simple words (great \ so so \ mediocre \ very reliable  and  meticulous \etc). It is obvious that, what customers think flows directly from your offerings and their delivery processes and other customer touching processes.

If these processes are not lead by effective leaders and are not geared to fulfil your promises to customers, your brand value will start slipping and your people will not stand behind your brand.

Coffee machine capers are more potent than elevator pitches. Pay heed.

Learning Leadership offers e-learning and e-coaching services that help in dealing with above issues. Its Regenerative Leadership  model covers business process improvement competencies. On-site or face-to-face engagements are also available in the US and in India.

Leadership is not just about vision, values, and communication. Important though these are,  great leaders do much more -create brands, create great products, and achieve process breakthroughs. Here is an example. The Tata Swach. Design Directions, our associates, provided industrial design to Tata Chemicals for Swatch -water purifier based on nano technology and rice husk.

I work with Design Directions on several projects involving branding, user interface design, industrial design, and product design.  You get a lot with us… Leadership Learning, process breakthroughs, product, UI, and communication design!

Read on for more details….

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.

I conducted a workshop Leadership -How Regenerate and Rejuvenate Your Business at the Renal Unit of K.E.M. Hospital, Pune, India on Nov. 16, 2009. The renal unit’s team had identified the need for delivering better services to patients by upgrading their staff’s leadership skills, improving inter-relationships  amongst the staff and team spirit.

The workshop consisted of selected workouts from Leaning Leadership’s various programs. Doctors, counselors, and other staff of the renal unit participated in this workshop. The participants liked the broad and in depth coverage of leadership principles and workouts that were directly relevant for their work situations.

This workshop once again showed the applicability of Learning Leadership’s learning methods to various sectors and to people with diverse backgrounds.

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.

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.

Recently, I was speaking to my client who was evaluating options for design services -he was planning their annual report. During the conversation, he mentioned the words ’selection process’ several times and alluded to the difficulty in making all design houses and agencies to agree to a common method of evaluation. He thought that designers’ individuality and ego were the culprits.

I asked him some questions (his answers in brackets)

-how often do you need to use this method? (once a year; I am doing it for the first time)

-when was this process established?(I decided on this process last week)  how many times has it been used? (never)

-do you expect repeatable output (design) of the process ?  (how can design be repeatable? -he was sensible!)

-is the process of actual design defined? standardized? (no, no)

I told him that the word ‘process’ is causing confusion. In the strictest sense of the word a process and other processes connected with it must be standardized to produce repeatable outcome.

For something like ‘design’, you may have a general sequence of steps with workarounds or iterations. That can hardly be called a process with strict norms. Such kind of work often requires that someone takes a call without waiting for all information and standardization.

Indeed, such situations can also arise in deciding on features of a new product.

A leader’s role is to take a call and not hide behind questionable processes.

Hemant