Leadership Systems

By David Lennard

I think that at one time or another, all of us have thought “this would be a great place to work if it wasn’t for the other people here.”  Organizations live or die on how well people work together.

In Jeffery Pfeffer’s book, “Managing with Power,” he states the following:

“Interdependence is the reason nothing comes out quite the way one wants it to.   Any event that depends on more than a single causal agent is an outcome based on interdependent agents … interdependence exist whenever one actor does not entirely control all of the conditions necessary for the achievement of an action or for obtaining the outcome desired from the action.”

Our success at work is largely based on how well we influence people to support the things that we need to accomplish.  People that directly report to you need to be influenced just as much as those that don’t, even if you can “order” them to perform certain functions.

The challenge for everyone is to think long term.  Building long term relationships will benefit the career and personal experience at work of both you and the people around you.

This becomes increasing more difficult in tough times when companies have downsized and there are fewer people to do the work and just as much or more pressure to get things done.  In addition the incentives like promotions and raises are scarcer.  There now is more competition than ever and the temptation is not to do something that helps another person get promoted.

Most of us spend our work lives within one particular industry or trade.  Generally these are smaller communities then you sometimes realize.  Within the life science industry, for example, it is common to meet a new person and quickly find a few people who you both have worked with or know.  Understand that your reputation and integrity will follow you from job to job.

But in the end, it’s still about looking at yourself in the mirror and examining your behavior and treatment of others and deciding if this is the person you want to be.

By Donna Butchko

Here’s a scenario we are all watching in the news these days:  “Congratulations, you’ve just been elected president.  Now how are you going to work well with all the other people that wanted the job that you got?”  While it is interesting, and possibly even important, it’s a scenario that doesn’t personally touch many of us.  But how about this one:  “Congratulations, you got the promotion.  Now how are you going to work well with all the other people that wanted the job that you got, some of whom now report directly to you?”  While perhaps less historically important, it is more personally relevant for most of us.  At some point in your career, you will find yourself in this situation.  Here are three simple tips to help you through this potentially challenging transition.

1.  Find out Who.  For an internal promotion, your new boss was probably part of the decision making process.  If possible, find out who was your competition for the position.  This information can help you to identify who might be resentful of you in your new role.  These people may require special efforts to deal effectively with the transition to you as their new boss.  If you know who they are, you can plan for this.  Also, you should be mindful of the possibility that other people in the group may have had preconceived notions that someone else would have been a better choice than you.  An exercise like a New Manager Assimilation(1), to get people to voice their concerns, is frequently helpful here.

2.  Talk to them.  Don’t assume that everyone that tried for your new job is upset that you got it instead of them.  People sometimes apply for jobs for different reasons, including increasing their visibility with others in the organization – even when they know they are not yet ready for the next level.  Some people apply for a promotion that they don’t want now to avoid being pigeonholed as not being interested in advancement.  Talk with everyone on your staff about their career goals, both short term and long term.  From now on your success is tied to each other, so start to work together as soon as you can.

3.  Engage them.  Are there parts of your job that you can give to the people that didn’t get the job?  Not the parts that you don’t want to do, but the parts that they can benefit from learning.  See if there’s an opportunity for you to help them to grow, while staying in their old job.  This should be mutually beneficial, meaning that they are doing things that you don’t benefit by doing yourself, and that present them with learning opportunities.  You may not be able to do this on your first day, but as you become familiar with the various parts of your job and your people, look for opportunities to move things down your organization.  If you can keep your good people growing in their jobs, you can help to keep them from leaving you for a new job with new opportunities.

These three steps will not guarantee your success, but they will get you started on the right path.  As a leader, the better you know your staff, the more effectively you will be able to lead them.  No leader gets there alone, and you need to show your team members that you are aware of that.

(1) For more information on New Manager Assimilation, contact me (610-247-5830).

By David Lennard

‘Don’t shoot the messenger’ is a time-honored prayer that most of us have uttered at one point or another.  Real leadership is understanding reality and dealing with it.  I was lucky that the first vice president I worked for held the belief that if you were just going to agree with him, then he did not need you in the meeting.

I have also worked for organizations that held the opposite view.  They view team players as doing what they are told and keeping their mouths shut.  If you did not agree with them then you weren’t a team player and out you went.    Or worse, you stayed but with no power or involvement. 

The key is how you communicate issues and what your goal of that communication is. Many people who enjoy being “Devil’s Advocate” do so to demonstrate why things won’t work and how smart they are for knowing that.  Communication that highlights issues should almost always contain a potential solution or a strategy to find a solution.  Some of the most difficult people I have worked with truly cared about doing the right thing and cared about what was best for the company.  Many were just unskilled at communicating that information.  If you don’t say things that people are willing to consider then you’re not communicating.

Early in your career you tend to view things as either right or wrong with very little in between.  As you move up in the organization and begin to experience pressures from both above and below you, many more gray areas come into play.  As your career grows, the interdependence of people and actions becomes a much bigger part of decision making.

Real leadership means you need to be comfortable with (or at least tolerant of) people disagreeing with you.  If you push to understand their issues in depth then many times the issue becomes one of mutual understanding and agreement.  In communicating issues to management, think about what is important for them.  Low level technical issues for an engineer translate to time and cost to their management and lost sales and revenue to the company.  In communicating these types of issues it’s important to have solutions and information that speaks to these perspectives.

Even if you’re not sure they won’t shoot the messenger, ignoring real issues is rarely a winning strategy. 

Organizational politics for this question is defined by people doing what is best for them and not the company (or the company’s good is clearly secondary).

By Donna Butchko

There comes a time in every leader’s life when they have to deliver bad news to their people, especially lately.  It’s part of the job that no one enjoys, but it is a critical role to a successful leader.  Here are four simple rules to keep in mind when you find yourself in this position.

Rule 1:  Talk to them.  Most people’s natural tendency is to avoid telling people things they don’t want to hear; this includes giving your department/team/company bad news.  This is probably the worst mistake you can make.  You hired intelligent people and, rest assured, they can tell when things are not going well.  Whether it’s the relatively minor message, “The company’s not doing well, so they’ve cut our budget and we won’t be able to accomplish all the things we had planned to.”  Or the much more painful message, “The company’s not doing well and there are going to be some reductions in staffing levels” (or whatever terms your company uses for people losing their jobs).  When times are bad you need to double the amount of communication you do (not hide in your office like you might want to).

If you don’t talk to them, the rumor mill will fill in the gap, and that will be much worse.  While it’s true that the news may be bad, people will assume it is horrible if you don’t tell them otherwise.  This will make it almost impossible for them to concentrate on their work, which has the potential to turn a bad situation into something much worse.  One of the most important tasks of a leader is to communicate, and this is most difficult and most critical during bad times. 

Rule 2:  Be honest.  This means both be honest with your people, but also be true to your position in the company.  This can be a tough one, especially when you know things that you cannot tell your people.  When it comes to headcount reductions you might not know what the future holds for your department.  Sometimes the department manager is not part of that conversation (which can be a warning to you – but that’s not today’s topic).  You know that cuts are coming, but you don’t know how they are going to affect your team.  It’s better to say that than to say nothing.  “We’ve seen the stock market and we all know that it’s hurting the company.  At this time I don’t know how that’s going to impact our work group.”  And make sure and do Rule 4 – don’t end there.  Being honest with them will help them to trust you and to relax somewhat, and will keep the whispered speculation down to a minimum.  It also will make it easier for them to include you in their speculation, which will enable you to quash rumors that you know to be untrue before they spread. 

But what do you do when you are part of the decision making process, and you know exactly who is going to lose their job, but you’ve been told not to tell anyone yet?  You have an ethical obligation to abide by that decision, even if you don’t agree with it.  This is what it means to be part of management.  However, you still have to communicate with your people – this is your moral obligation.  Again, be honest about what you cannot tell them.  They are grown-ups and will understand.  “We’ve seen the stock market and we all know that it’s hurting us.  At this time I cannot tell you how that’s going to impact our work group, but I will share information as soon as I am able to.”  They may try to pump you for information one-on-one later, but at least they will be talking with you.  Also, make sure you know what you can and cannot tell them.  Don’t assume that everything is secret.  It will hurt your credibility if they hear that another department was told the cuts will be 10% and you didn’t give them any numbers.  Again, pieces of information will fuel the rumor mill, and you will not be included if you hid information that other managers shared. 

The third part of being honest is not to make promises that you might not be able to keep.  Don’t tell them not to worry if there is any chance that this might impact them in any way, including a co-worker getting cut and everyone having to pick up his portion of the work.  For many people, this is something worth worrying about.  So if there is any chance that anyone in the group might be cut, reassigned, or just have to do more with less, do NOT tell people not to worry.  When the truth is revealed you will lose credibility.  Don’t promise people that everything will be OK, because OK means different things to different people.  If these cuts are only going to hit Sales, and your Marketing department is safe for now, (and you have been cleared to tell everyone that), then say that and only that.  You don’t know what the future holds, and they will remember what you tell them today as binding.

Rule 3:  Listen to them.  In order for any communication to be effective, it needs to be two way.  During tough times it is not enough to talk at your people, don’t focus on giving the company line – that’s only part of what you need to do.  Listen and find out what their concerns are, and be sure your response addresses their concerns. 

Don’t confuse the corporate “truth” with an individual’s reality.  Everyone sees the truth through their own perceptions, and their perception defines reality for them.  For example, it’s a truth that the factory burned down.  For one person the reality of that is that they will lose their job.  For another person reality is that they have unlimited overtime to rebuild the factory.  Only by listening can you give your people a message that addresses both the truth of a situation and their individual reality.  And when times are hard, that’s what they are looking for from their leader.

Rule 4:  Tell them what to do now.  This sounds a little odd, but it means don’t leave them at “Yes, the news is bad.”  Even if the future is completely out of their control, give them an action plan.  Frequently, the best plan is “What we all need to do right now is not let this distract us from our work and do the very best job we possibly can.  Then even if they decide to eliminate our entire department (which I doubt), it will be a very hard decision for them to make.  We don’t want our work now to make it easy for them to decide that our department is the place to make cuts.”  Might this make it seem like you are not in control of the situation?  You’re not.  The leadership challenge is to be honest and inspiring at the same time.  This is what Tom Peters calls the “paradox of the AND”, you need to deliver the bad news and be honest with them and give them hope for the future.  This is the leader’s job.

So, sometimes the news is bad, and you don’t know what to tell them, and you want to hide in your office until it’s all over.  This is when you need to double or triple your communication efforts.  It doesn’t mean that you have to have three times more meetings.  Get out of your office and talk to people.  Be there, be visible and listen.  Hear what their concerns are and communicate as much as you can about those issues.  Their concerns might not be the same as yours or what your management thinks they are.  Be the leader that your people need you to be.

By David Lennard

There are very few people who, when asked, will say that they aren’t very busy at work.  Once, I was significantly overloaded with assignments and went to my boss to ask what I should work on.  She said “You’re a professional, just get it all done.”  That is not the right answer.

It is management’s job to set priorities.  It is management’s job to make the tough decisions about what is to be done.  One thing I have always found astonishing about some companies is their belief that you should work a 60 hour week even though they are only going to pay you for 40 hours.  If I wanted to do volunteer work, I would pick a non-profit organization instead of a corporation making a billion dollars a year in profit. Yes, there are special circumstances that demand you put in extra hours as required but it should be a special circumstance, not a weekly expectation.    

The problem with companies or management abusing people in terms of demands is that in the long term it is wildly unproductive.  The more overloaded people are, the poorer becomes both the quality of their work and their attitude.  People have become very smart in understanding that it is easy to say the right things and then do nothing.

I worked for one of the largest corporations on earth.  We were preparing for a major downsizing and one of the tenets going into it was we will do less things with less people.  That was during the rational part of planning for the downsizing when we understood that if you cut the work force by 25%, there were 25% less resources available to do the work.  That rational thought lasted for about two weeks.  Every time someone pushed back saying, “We need to stop doing this report,” or, “I can’t do this now,” the response was almost universally, “I can’t make the decision to stop doing it because my boss might want it (or her boss might want it).”

A study done in 2004 of high tech workers showed that each employee spent only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off do something else. What’s more, each 11-minute project was itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading a Web page or working on a spreadsheet. And each time a worker was distracted from a task, it would take, on average, 25 minutes to return to that task. To perform an office job today it seems your attention must skip like a stone across water all day long, touching down only periodically.

Imagine creating a work place that could reduce the distractions and not increase them.  It can be done, but it takes guts to make hard decisions about what people need to focus on.  And it takes strong, mature senior level commitment not to allow the personal whims of managers to dictate what should be done in the possible event that someday, some time, someone asks about it.

Good management and leadership focus on doing what is important, but knowing what to do is never easy.  Many times an outsider to the company will ask questions that can trigger a reexamination of what is being done without all of the baggage.  For all of us, it can become very difficult to be able to step back and be objective about certain situations.  Just think about your average workday and try to imagine getting rid of all of the waste of time activities you do just in case someone might want something.  That just freed up between 2 and 4 hours a day.

By Donna Butchko

Between work and home these days, everyone has a plate overflowing with opportunities.  Regardless of how good we are (or think we are) at multitasking, we can only do one thing first.  So we constantly make priority decisions.  These decisions are based on a number of factors:  what is the deadline for this task, which task is most important, which task is most urgent, how much time do I have right now?  The weighting of these factors changes with almost every priority decision.  Should I make coffee or the kids’ breakfast first?  Coffee – I can’t face other people until I have my coffee (more important).  Should I start the toast or the eggs first?  Toast – it takes longer (deadline).  Should I check my email or my voice mail first?  Depends on your personal sense of the priority of these two items – if it’s important it must be in writing, so it’s email.  Or perhaps you feel that anything urgent will be a phone call, so you check voice mail first.  Or my boss always uses ______ so that’s what I always check first.  Fortunately, most of these priority setting decisions are made almost without thinking about them.

Sometimes the priorities are not so obvious.  I only have an hour.  Should I work on the quarterly report or the strategic plan?  The easy answer is the quarterly report.  It has the first deadline, and I know exactly what goes into it.  The strategic plan is harder, will take much longer, and I’m not completely sure what I’m going to put in it.  During calm times this is a completely acceptable answer.  During times of change, this answer can get you in long-term trouble or not help you to get out of the trouble you are currently in.  The quarterly report is a look backwards, the strategic plan looks forward.  Whether you are trying to change a company or just a work team, the rearview mirror provides little guidance for making progress.  And now more than ever, that guidance is critical for you and the people following you.

Everyone else is also making their priority setting decisions thousands of time throughout the day.  This is one of the first areas that you need to impact in order to make a change.  Yesterday’s obvious first priority might not be the best choice today for the new direction.  As a leader, you can’t afford to make everyone’s priority decisions for them.  In fact, you wouldn’t want to, so you need to provide clear direction setting to help them to change their old patterns of making decisions.  This is one of the hardest things to change.  To go back to our first paragraph example, I just got a new toaster and now the toast is faster than the eggs.  How long are we eating cold toast before I successfully change my decision making paradigm?  Like any habit, it doesn’t change easily.

During times of change, it’s up to you to provide clear guidance on how the priorities have changed, what is most urgent, and what is most important.  Without clear guidance from you, people will do what they’ve always done and you’ll get the results you’ve always gotten.  Your company (or department or team) won’t change.  You may need to be more active in reviewing decisions and providing guidance on when a different choice would have been better.  As an example, you’ve decided to implement Lean Manufacturing principles to eliminate waste from your process.  You might say, “I know we’ve always run by the metrics, and that in the past the monthly output report was critical, but now that we are trying to run Lean I would have preferred you to have worked on the implementation and am willing to get a delayed report if we can show Lean progress instead.”  If in the past you lived and died by your monthly output report, people are going to need to hear this new message a number of times before they believe it.  As long as people stay focused on the monthly output report they will continue to prioritize achieving the monthly output – even at the expense of the Lean (or other change) initiative they’ve been hearing so much talk about. 

As always, if you want to know what’s really important to someone, don’t look at the posters on the walls, or even listen to what they say, instead watch how they spend their time.  That shows what they value most.  Throughout the day everyone is going to make countless decisions on what to work on.  If there is no clear message from above, people will either revert back to past practices, or will avoid the decision completely and not make progress on anything.  They’ll still be very busy, but if you hear someone say “I’ve alphabetized the library so there won’t be any waste when people need a resource as we implement Lean” that’s a good clue that they don’t really know what to work on.  Odds are that alphabetizing the library was probably not tops on your list of items needed to facilitate the success of Lean.

Since there’s never enough time to do everything that we want to in a day, priorities are critical.  If you see your people setting priorities that aren’t aligned with the things most important to you, ask yourself what message you are sending.  Not only the words you say, but even more importantly how you spend your time and what you ask people for.  If they heard you say “Nothing’s more important than Lean, and where’s this month’s output report?” the message is ‘business as usual.’  Change starts by saying the right things, but it doesn’t become real until you do the right things, and get everyone to follow your lead.  Setting priorities differently is one of the most critical ways to do that.

For this month’s survey question, one of our readers has asked how people handle saying “No” to things at work. Once your plate is full, and the next opportunity comes along, what do you say when you know that someone else would be better suited for that opportunity – either because they have a better skill set or because you just don’t have the time to do it justice? And there’s a second part of this question. What about when you want to say Yes, but can’t. All the opportunities are interesting to you. How do you determine which ones to say No to? Or, as our reader put it, “When my boss asks, ‘What will you stop doing?’ how do I choose which of my cherished projects to drop?” Please take the survey, and post your more detailed responses to this question here.

Thank you!

Some may ask why our Leadership Focus this month is on meetings. Surely that’s a management skill, and not a leadership issue. I beg to differ. Ask anyone how much time they spend in meetings, and you’ll see what a great leadership opportunity is being presented. Your meeting skills determine how much value comes out of all that time spent in meetings. Good leadership should enable people to spend their time doing the things that add value. And meetings should add value.

One reason to improve your meeting skills is obvious: To make sure that you accomplish the goals of the meeting. The other is less obvious: Meetings are a great leadership opportunity. And I’m talking about much more than just the skills and outcomes of leading the meeting. Meetings are a great opportunity to establish and reinforce your organization’s culture.

Your culture is already being illustrated in your meetings, whether you are aware of it or not. Many years ago I worked with an organization that had a very hierarchical culture. This was illustrated in their meetings either by not starting the meeting until the senior-most invitee arrived (regardless of the time); or by starting the meeting all over again once the senior-most person arrived, including re-discussing anything already discussed. That clearly let junior team members know where they stood.

Meetings can reinforce people’s sense of belonging and their commitment, or they can remind them that the organization doesn’t care about them or their ideas. What message do your meetings send? Is it a one-person show, where the boss gets to expound on his theory of everything for the benefit of “all the little people”? Or do people have enough information ahead of time to arrive prepared to engage in a real discussion and debate about the merits of an issue?

Is it more of a free-form discussion, where everyone throws in their two cents on a variety of topics with no discernable outcome? A sign that you’ve just been to one of those meetings is when, on the way out, the meeting leader says something like “I think we raised a lot of good issues today.” If the purpose of the meeting was beyond brainstorming, you probably didn’t achieve it. This can be a sign of a culture of busy-ness. There’s always a lot of activity, but no real progress towards the goals.

Want to create a culture that accepts missed deadlines? Routinely have meetings that do not start or stop on time. It sends the message that time doesn’t matter, and that message will be reflected in lots of ways.

If you can, go to someone else’s meeting, preferably one where you have no knowledge whatsoever on the topic. Watch how the meeting happens, and determine what kind of corporate culture is being created or confirmed. Is that the culture you want for your company? If not, start to change your meetings. Culture setting through meetings is low hanging fruit, and yet so rarely picked, or picked up on.