Leading the Unleadable

by Alan Willett

  Project review meetings. Do the meetings focus on reinforcing your expectations of excellence? Or does the focus neglect nine of your ten items and just focus on one specific trouble area? For example, if quality is your number one priority, but all the questions you ask about are schedule, you are undermining your number one priority.

  Weekly (or even daily) status meetings. Are the meetings repetitious and dull? Do the topics have a rotation to ensure that all areas of expectations are addressed periodically?

  How meetings are run. Are the meetings run in the way you want projects to run? Do they start on time and end on time? Are people treated in the way you expect clients and other stakeholders to be treated?

  How bad news is received. If bad news is always received with anger, it is likely you will not be told bad news as soon as you should be.

  Formal reward and recognition. What happens when fire starters are rewarded for their heroic firefighting? What criteria are your formal rewards and recognitions based on? Do you find ways to be able to thoughtfully represent the values you want emulated? If your number one value is teamwork, are teams or individuals more likely recognized?

  The training budget. What does your training budget and process say about your expectations of excellence in regard to the skills you want your group to have? What roadblocks, such as an insufficient budget for classes and too many levels of approvals, have you put in the way of training?

  How easy or hard it is to get the resources you need to do the job. How hard is it for people to get the tools or other resources needed to do their jobs or improve the performance of the jobs they are doing? In some organizations the process for getting new tools or other resources is a complete mystery. If the process is a mystery, it’s less likely anyone will ever ask. This may save expenses, but it is very costly in productivity.

  Project postmortems. Too many organizations call project postmortems “write-only documents”; that is, someone writes them, but no one reads them. How project postmortems are done and how the results are used can be a key definer of an organizational culture.

  Yearly performance reviews. Sometimes these are key drivers to how people think about their jobs. Sometimes they are just an annual annoying check-box event that leaders and team members get through as quickly as possible. Yearly performance reviews can be dangerous when given specific results are tied to large bonuses. These are too often tied to one measure at the exclusion of others, which in turn drives the leadership behavior in the wrong direction. How do they work in your organization?

  You most likely can make the list longer. The point is if you take the effort to define what good is for your organization, if you define your expectations of excellence, the interactions that happen daily and throughout the year should also reflect those expectations.

  This chapter focuses on a few of the key interactions that drive the creation and nurturing of a strong organizational culture.

  The Rock and Roll Rhythm That Drives Organizations

  Like it or not, meetings set the tone for an organization. If they drone, they can drain the energy from an otherwise good organization. In contrast, if meetings pulse with energy, the potential for greatness grows.

  A key part of exceptional leadership is knowing this, taking ownership of it, and working to constantly refresh and improve the drumbeat that drives organizations. Take a moment and consider the following questions.

  • How many meetings per month do your regularly attend?

  • How many times do you leave meetings feeling energized?

  • How often do you feel like you lost a bit of your life and want that time back?

  I have conducted surveys similar to this in many organizations, and the percentage of meetings that are labeled as energy draining is depressingly large.

  It is not because people do not know how to run meetings. I was once asked to come to an organization to teach a class on how to run meetings. I asked the group of thirty leaders to break into groups of six and provide me with their top recommendations on how to run great meetings. As expected, the leaders did an excellent job and provided the well-known list of best practices for running great meetings.

  They knew how. The question was, “Why didn’t they do that?” There were many answers, but the solution was simply that they needed to go beyond the basic best practices of sending out agendas, making sure each agenda has a purpose, starting on time, ending on time, etc. They needed to become masters of the rhythm that drove their organization. What follows are the keys to mastering your ability to drive the organizational rock and roll rhythm you desire.

  Take Ownership of the Meetings You Own or Run

  This may seem obvious, but it is too often not. I once conducted a survey of all meeting attendees on the value of a weekly two-hour meeting that twenty people attended. The survey came back with 100 percent of the people saying the meeting had no value to them, including the chair of the meeting. It turned out they all inherited this meeting from previous leadership and it kept going for two years with no value. It was immediately cancelled.

  This may seem like an outlier, but it is not. Many of the people who talk to me about poor meetings are those who own them. They seem to have forgotten they can and should take control.

  Introduce Variety into Your Meetings

  Vary the rhythm. Many weekly meetings are the same every week. Unless your desired outcome is boredom, vary it. Rotate agenda items. Consider different styles for the weeks. A steady purpose is important, but you can achieve the purpose in many ways. Many leaders doing this build a list of potential meeting topics and styles for those topics. Before each standing meeting they pick which ones are most important to set the pace for that day, that week.

  Consider the Types of “Feelings” You Want Your Meetings to Produce

  Do you want your meeting to have a calming effect? Are you looking for the meeting to produce clear action and commitment to those actions for the upcoming week? Do you want to set the stage for breakthrough thinking? Having the forethought to consider this before your meetings and achieving what you set out to represent a truly exceptional difference between good management and great leadership.

  Conduct Anonymous Surveys

  Periodically, conduct an anonymous survey with questions similar to those provided at the beginning of this section. Find out what people really think.

  Work to become a master facilitator. Once you achieve that, keep working toward better. The difference it makes for setting the organizational culture is critical.

  Recognize Results, Not Sweat

  Fighting fires is admirable, unless you created the fire in the first place. Too often, teams are rewarded for fighting fires that they started. Consider this organization, in which two teams were doing very similar work and leadership wanted to build a culture of delivering great products on time with high quality.

  The Firefighting Red Team had followed the old culture of hurrying up and getting their product into the test phase. The test phase was taking a long time because there were so many defects to find. They released to customers, and the customers were calling leadership team members to get the problems addressed and fixed faster.

  The Red Team project leader was often before the organizational leadership, giving status updates on how his team members were fixing the problems and the actions they were taking to recover the schedule. The Red Team was working significant extra hours finding and fixing defects. All the Red Team members were extraordinarily proud of how responsive they were. They went in to work early and they left late. They complained about dealing with customer phone calls on weekends, but they complained with pride.

  It was obvious to all that the Red Team was working exceptionally hard to delight the customers. You could see the sweat.

  Meanwhile, the Green Team project leader encouraged her team members to work differently. They did prototypes they reviewed with customers. They did detailed designs that they inspected in detail for correctness. Team
members diligently discussed and reviewed each other’s work to ensure the highest quality. Testing of the product found no defects, nor did the customer. This customer also called the organizational leadership. Unlike the other customers, this customer called just once, and it was to say thank you.

  The Green Team project leader was only occasionally in front of the organizational leadership team. Her reports were often succinct, with the basic message that everything was on track to an early, successful delivery. The Green Team delivered on time, with extra content, no customer problems, and lots of customer delight.

  There were only occasional late nights and weekends. Team members were proactive in talking with the customer about possible issues. They were responsive, but it was not visible unless you watched closely. There was no sweat.

  Consider that you are the leader of this organization that had the Red Team, the Green Team, and various other projects. Be aware that there are many project leaders and many team members who are watching your leadership for what defines success in this organization.

  As the leader, these are the critical questions that you would face in this situation.

  1. Does the Green Team or the Red Team leader have the most name and face recognition among your leadership team? Consider also the overall organization.

  2. Which team leader and which team are most likely to be publicly recognized and perhaps rewarded?

  3. Which team leader is likely to be promoted?

  Unfortunately, in too many organizations the Firefighting Red Team is rewarded and publicly recognized for its great effort, for its sweat. For example, in one organization after the product finally was released to the field, months late, the Red Team was given a big thank-you-for-the-extra-effort party. The Green Team wasn’t invited. The Green Team leader in that example soon left to join an organization that recognized her abilities. Meanwhile, the Red Team leader was promoted and encouraged firefighting (and thus, albeit indirectly, fire starting) in all the leaders who reported to him.

  In the more rare elite organizations, they reward the results, not the sweat. In those organizations, they hold up the Green Team results as the exemplar that they are shooting for. They hold lessons-learned sessions where the Green Team project leader and key team members present a “how we did it.” The Green Team project leader is promoted. The results here are more teams that follow the exemplar model of high-quality, on-time results that delight the customer consistently.

  Leaders will continue to practice those behaviors for which they are promoted.

  These actions are critical leadership moments that have a great effect on the long-term future of the organization. Consider the organization you want. The key challenge for busy leaders is to be able to see past the sweat and be able to recognize the results.

  Use Skills Gaps as Opportunities to Grow the Culture You Need

  There are times when you put up the high bar of your expectations of excellence and people simply cannot reach it. The way to keep the bar high is to give people the skills they need to reach it.

  First, determine if it is a problem of talent. For talent, I am not referring to skill, but the ability to learn, the ability to excel in the domain the employees have chosen. If you are engaged in improving your organizational culture and find a gap with individuals who were successful before, it is almost certainly not a talent problem.

  If it is not a talent problem, it is more likely either a skill or attitude problem. Note, however, that sometimes an attitude problem is masking a skill shortfall because many people are afraid of saying “I don’t know how to do that.” If it appears to be an attitude problem and you cannot tell if it is a skill shortfall, follow the actions discussed in Part 2 of this book. Often, this will resolve the situation with either an “Okay, I will do this” or the individual being removed from the organization. Sometimes, it results in the confession, “I don’t know how to do this”—which brings us back to this section.

  In my experience, most of the time it is not an attitude problem or a talent problem. It is simply that people in the organization have not been asked to do work in the way leadership is now urging.

  For example, when TopShelf managers put forth their updated expectations of excellence, they really were asking people to work differently. Their first expectation of “delight the customer” was not new. Everyone knew that was the top priority before, and it remained the top goal. That goal was at least partially successful because customers did love the features of the product, even if they didn’t like the quality issues or the lack of predictability on commitments made.

  TopShelf was now also asking for things that the members of the TopShelf division had not done before. They had not made sufficiently detailed plans to be able to make accurate commitments before. This called for a set of planning methods that no one had undertaken before. Also, the majority of members had only done work where testing was the sole way to develop a product. TopShelf was again asking for new methods to be applied.

  To be successful in getting your organization to be successful at meeting your expectations of excellence, you must provide the opportunity of time and resources to learn new skills. This includes various shapes of training and the opportunity to fail—and learn from that failure.

  The following are five ways to build skills in your organization to meet the high bar you are setting.

  1. Training

  Gathering the team and having everyone learn the basics of a planning methodology is often an excellent place to start in skill building. When planning for a training budget and selecting who to give the training to, stay focused on your key purpose. It is not simply acquiring, for example, a course on planning; rather, focus on your culture and the specific success you desire.

  2. Coaching

  Coaching moves the action from the classroom to the actual work. When organizations are working to acquire new skills, an expert who has achieved the results you are looking for in multiple organizations is the expert you are looking for. The coach needs to be with the people learning the new skills. The more often the coach is there for critical events to provide strong detailed guidance, the more rapid the improvement will be.

  The best experts customize all the coaching to be focused on achieving the results within your specific organizational culture. It should not be focused on achieving fidelity to a specific methodology. Too often, leaders are successful in fidelity to a methodology and completely miss the value the project is supposed to be providing.

  3. Mentoring

  While coaching can be quite labor intensive for the coach, mentoring is where an expert provides occasional guidance. Mentoring is often more focused not on acquiring specific skills but on helping leaders better execute those skills to create the environment, and the culture, they desire. In the TopShelf example, the leadership team had an expert mentor providing the leadership team itself guidance. They also had an expert coach provide foundational training followed by on-the-spot coaching for major events.

  4. Clear Role Modeling

  TopShelf leaders had to face themselves in the mirror when looking at the organizational performance. As stated before, because all the teams were delivering late, that pointed to the leadership. When the leaders looked closely at the problem, with the mentor’s objective help, they saw that they were asking for the wrong thing.

  They also saw that they were role modeling the wrong thing. They were consistently late to meetings that they had arranged with their project leaders. They often showed up unprepared and sometimes even asked “Why am I here?” when they had asked for the meeting in the first place.

  TopShelf leaders knew that to have their teams perform to their expectations of excellence, they would also have to change.

  5. The High Bar, Mistakes, and Learning

  The final critical enabler to learning is this trifecta of values. As stated before, if you want learning to occur, you must hold up the high bar of your expectations. This must not relent even when t
eams are falling short. Do not reward the sweat. Reward the results.

  Do not punish falling short. There will be shortfalls, but from each shortfall there will be learning—because you will always encourage learning with key questions about how the individuals and teams will improve with the next iteration.

  Gather the Great from the Shrapnel of Failure

  Failure hurts.

  Let us have no illusions or platitudes around it. If we strive to be exceptional leaders, we will engage in bold projects, and bold projects are not safe. They have risks. There will be failures and they will hurt.

  Further, as leaders we will strive to mentor, coach, prod, and encourage those who follow us to excel at the expectations of excellence we have established. Some will fail. It will hurt.

  I have not met any leaders who haven’t had large, public failures and have not experienced the pain of frustration and sometimes embarrassment of that failure burn through them.

  The key action of exceptional leadership when confronted with failure is to gather the great from the shrapnel of failure. The challenge is to use the experience as a learning opportunity for yourself and the whole organization.

  Consider the case of a failed project I witnessed, which I call the “Case of the Team Divided.” The project team was about 100 people in a very large high-technology company of over 50,000 employees. The team started well with great energy. The team was rich with cultural diversity, and included many of the brightest people in the company. The leadership had given this team the task of building a new paradigm of technology to base future products on.