Blogstone

How to Handle a Growing Portfolio

Wed, 13 Jun 2012 09:29:11 -0400

At one time or another, most senior executives of large companies will face the challenge of leading a diverse (and expanded) set of business and/or functional units. The CFO will be asked to add IT and Procurement to her portfolio; the SVP of North American Sales will take on responsibility for South America as well. Several factors may precipitate these added responsibilities: changes to strategy or organization structure, a desire to round out the executive’s skill set, the departure of another senior leader. Often many of these dynamics come into play simultaneously.

And while it’s important to understand why the new responsibilities were added, the more critical questions the executive must face are questions of how:

How do I make time to lead/manage this new group?; and
How should I think of my new organization - as a team or as a group?

To address question #1, we often find that the best answer lies in re-thinking the leader’s operating system. It’s almost inevitable that additions to an executive’s portfolio will create additional time pressures. The increased responsibilities also typically come with a greater reporting burden to the executive’s boss. In other words, the leader’s already limited bandwidth will be limited further. Adding more work hours to the day is rarely possible (or healthy), so the opportunity lies in making better use of those hours.

From Brimstone’s perspective, there are typically five key processes that comprise an operating system – strategy development, operating reviews, budgeting, talent management, and leadership development – and each should be considered when trying to improve efficiency and free up executive bandwidth. But by whom and how? The leader may have some good ideas, and consultants can provide best practices, but we find that the best people to assess the current state and develop recommendations for improvement are the executive’s trusted advisors one or two layers down in the organization. These people typically know which processes are broken and which political realities need to be respected, plus they’ve established enough trust in the organization to uncover hidden opportunities and enough trust by the leader to speak candidly about what’s not working.

The process for improving the operating systems doesn’t need to be complicated – ask the trusted advisors to conduct a series of diagnostic interviews, synthesize the suggestions and build a new set of operating mechanisms that bring simplicity, consistency and rigor to the organizational calendar. The resulting operating system changes not only will free up some valuable time on the leader’s calendar, but also send a strong message to the organization that continuous improvement is a priority.

On question #2, it’s helpful to have a framework for assessing the new portfolio of responsibilities, and Brimstone Senior Partner Gordy Curphy recently published a book that offers one. In The Rocket Model: Practical Advice for Building High-Performing Teams, Curphy and co-author Robert Hogan posit that a team has five specific characteristics. Members of a team:

Work toward a common set of goals
Work jointly (the team members’ performance is interdependent)
Share common leadership
Share a common fate that depends on the performance of the team
See themselves as being part of a team with common goals and shared fates

After applying this framework to their new situation, many leaders discover that their new collection of direct reports is both a team and a group, depending on the issue at hand or the situation in which they find themselves. During periods of “business as usual,” for instance, a group formation tends to be common: every leader manages his/her own function, largely independently, reaching out to one or two other group members on an as-needed basis to ensure coordination and resolve conflicts. When major strategic changes are underway, on the other hand, the direct reports may need to operate as a team, meeting often, striving to make joint decisions, agreeing on common messages to the organization and common processes to follow. Talent development is another area in which the team approach often makes sense even if the functions don’t otherwise have common goals and shared fates.

Two things are critical here. First, soon after the organizational changes have been announced, the leader should engage her direct reports in a candid dialogue about the configuration. She should lay out the group/team framework, guide her direct reports through a conversation about various likely scenarios, and gain alignment on how they will operate in each. Second, the leader should consider seeking out ways for her direct reports to work as a team, especially if there aren’t many natural ones. Options include special projects that could benefit from a cross-functional approach or a consistent set of leader behaviors to emphasize across the organization. The goal here is not to force a team construct onto a group for the sake of teamwork, but rather to find productive ways for the direct reports to work as a team so that when the next fire drill occurs, they are accustomed to functioning in a more aligned fashion.

Memo from Montpelier (Part 2)

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 15:42:47 -0400

By Michael Hornsby

On March 21^st, I had the opportunity to spend a day with the Governor of Vermont, Peter Shumlin. (I gave a quick overview and observation from this visit in an earlier post.) During the course of my day in Montpelier, I asked a few questions about leadership, about the connections between public service and business, and about his learnings in his first year as Governor. You can read the full text of that interview here.

On re-reading the interview today, I was struck again by how the experiences and perspectives of the leader of a small state mirror those of so many of the successful business executives I have met and worked with: There is a palpable impatience with the pace of change; there is great ambition to get significant things done (which I think differs greatly from personal ambition); and perhaps most importantly, there is a compelling articulation of the challenges that the leader faces. Bob Weiler, Brimstone’s co-founder and managing partner, likes to say that “a great strategy is only possible when you have a great problem.” I think that many leaders struggle to clearly and powerfully articulate the challenge they face – perhaps in fear of dwelling on what’s wrong – and instead move to a solution too soon.

Governor Shumlin’s answers to one of my questions, where he lists the top three things he is addressing in office, may sound to some like a well-polished stump speech – but really it is a practiced, succinct and passionately articulated view of the challenges he is there to address. Furthermore, I think the Governor would agree with my assessment that it is the leader’s job to articulate the challenge, the smart-people-they-hire’s job to recommend solutions, and then the leader’s job again to make a decision on how to move forward.

One aside: During my interview with the Governor, several staff members popped in and out of the room, overhearing parts of our dialogue. When the conversation was finished, a couple of them came to me and said, “Can we see the answers to those questions? We never get to hear him talk about those things.”

So, leaders out there, two encouragements:

In a world where “bring me solutions, don’t bring me problems” has become associated with initiative, drive, results and high performance, dare to dwell on the problem – state it clearly, passionately and often, and then let the best people you know work out recommendations.
Share your leadership views with your staff, your team, the high potentials in your organization. They are curious about the self-reflection, the life lessons, the inspirations that made you the success you are.

Michael Hornsby is a Managing Director at Brimstone Consulting Group, a management consulting firm serving senior-level executives at Global 1000 companies.

Memo from Montpelier (Part 1)

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 11:47:00 -0400

By Michael Hornsby

Last week I had the opportunity to spend my Wednesday with Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin, a long-time friend who had invited me to tag along for “a day in the life of the state’s chief executive.” In the course of our time together, I had an opportunity to ask the Governor some questions about his leadership style, lessons learned, and role models – and I will post the full transcript soon. But I have a couple of immediate impressions that really struck me.

First was the governor’s high level of transparency – I was not excluded from a single conversation or event during the five hours I was with him in Montpelier. I was introduced in meetings as a friend, and business carried on. I understand the Governor is doing “the people’s work” and as I’m a Vermont resident, he is working for me, but there was a terrific atmosphere of trust, inclusion, openness, and collegiality. Not surprisingly, this transparency and inclusion is very much a hallmark of the Governor’s leadership style: he gave all three of his primary opponents prominent positions in his administration; his staff rave about working with him (“he tells it like it is,” “he includes us in everything,” “he’s so much fun”); and our time with officials and legislators was fun, friendly, casual and caring, but with a real sense of shared purpose and urgency.

Second, when I asked the Governor to share his greatest learning since taking office, he replied that “what paralyzes democracy is an unwillingness of politicians to be unpopular and take bold stands.” I immediately thought of all the business leaders I’ve met who said something very similar when describing the challenges associated with driving change in an organization – you have to be bold, decisive and willing to stick to your key convictions, especially when doing so is most likely to diminish your “approval ratings.” Before becoming Governor, Peter was a successful businessman who on two occasions led the State Senate while holding down his private-sector job (Vermont has a “part-time legislature”).

In my next post, I will share Gov. Shumlin’s perspective on how his business experience helped shape the leadership style he brings to public office…

Michael Hornsby is a Managing Director at Brimstone Consulting Group, a management consulting firm serving senior-level executives at Global 1000 companies.

Helping the Blind to See

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 16:24:00 -0400

Brimstone Senior Partner Allen Sockwell recently published an excellent white paper that summarizes the “Top Ten Leadership Blind Spots” he’s encountered in his years advising senior executives. His observations (and recommendations) cover several areas that are critical to leadership effectiveness: communication; hiring, developing and (when necessary) firing people; and enhancing team performance. Here’s a rundown of the key areas that Sockwell argues “create significant risk to both personal and organizational success”:

Under-communicating strategic direction and priorities
Poorly communicating expectations
Waiting for poor performance to improve – Hope is not a strategy
Buying into the myth of the “Irreplaceable Employee”
Investing too much time trying to coach radical change
Hiring for capability and nothing else
Accepting the current capabilities and limitations of your team
Acting as the sole integrator of team goals and performance
Believing all needed info flows up and down
Going quiet in times of change and uncertainty

Reading the entire article is a worthy investment of time, so we’ll refrain from providing a synopsis that might discourage anyone from clicking through. However, there are two complementary passages that we do want to highlight – one encouraging leaders to take action in the instance of an under-performing employee, and a second that cautions against action that requires too radical a change in that employee:

From Blind Spot #3, re under-performers: “Leaders often hope performance improves. Hope is not a strategy. It is often denial disguised…. Often [leaders] are perplexed about what the root performance issues are and how to address them. This confusion turns into inaction, allowing the underperformance and resulting operational impacts to continue…. These situations almost always get worse if left alone. They never get better on their own.”

And from Blind Spot #5: “…there is only so much you can do to create a sustainable change in their behavior. You can apply pressure to create a change in the short term, but once the pressure is gone, most people will snap back to the way they are used to interacting with the world…. 5⁰ to 10⁰ of change is doable, 90⁰ is unlikely and 180⁰ is impossible.”

In addition, in an effort to continue the dialogue that Sockwell started with this publication, we wanted to provide brief commentary on a couple of the blind spots.

8. Acting as the sole integrator of team goals and performance.

Here Sockwell describes a problem we often see among CEOs and other C-suite leaders – taking “a singular role in integrating outcomes across the functions.” These are executives who take a “hub-and-spoke” approach to leadership. While specific situations may call for this sort of centralized approach, it’s typically unworkable in this age of speed and complexity: no one leader has the capacity or the capabilities to make all the key decisions and coordinate all the key processes. Hub-and-spoke leaders invariably become organizational bottlenecks, slowing down decision-making and hampering collaboration.

For most hub-and-spoke leaders, it’s hard to admit that their approach isn’t working: once they have acknowledged the problem, however, it’s even more difficult to actually make the transition to what Sockwell describes as a “shared accountability” model (something we at Brimstone often refer to as a “shared leadership” approach). Part of the challenge is cultural and part is structural. The leader must transmit new messages early and often, and she must back up the messages with new collaborative behaviors. The leader also must candidly assess what specific roles she wants/needs to play in the new leadership model (based on her personal strengths and weaknesses and the internal and external realities facing the business) and what roles her team members then need to fill in, based on their individual capabilities and development needs. Finally, the leader must put in place a new set of operating mechanisms that support these new roles and facilitate the new approach to collaboration. Meetings, reports, and other forms of internal communication typically must change in order to promote the new approach.

9. Believing all needed info flows up and down.

Here Sockwell highlights an important phenomenon – information being “shaped and filtered” as it percolates up through the layers of an organization – and its all-too-likely consequence – namely, flawed decision-making. While we agree that this can be a problem at any level of the organization, it’s most prevalent at the top – with the CEO. As David Nadler points out in his Harvard Business Review article, “Confessions of a Trusted Counselor,” CEOs more so than other executives are “starved for unbiased information.” In the article, Stanley O’Neal, former CEO and Chairman of Merrill Lynch, frames the issue well: “Anytime you ask for information, people start to wonder why you’re asking for it, and they anticipate you. Just by asking, you influence the situation. The longer you’re in this role, the more isolated you can become.”

Sockwell offers several strong internal recommendations to combat this isolation, such as skip-level meetings and “walking around,” but CEOs typically need to take pursue external options. Board members and peers from other industries can serve as advisors. However, even these seemingly independent voices can bring personal biases to the relationship. For a more reliable and consistently impartial viewpoint, many CEOs turn to true outsiders for help. At Brimstone, we call this “Coaching for Perspective” (click here for a fuller description of the approach) – and a core objective of this work is helping the CEO to understand the realities inside her organization.

Signing Up Stakeholders

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 09:47:00 -0500

by Mike Krivan

I spent two days last month observing the workshop of a global trade association that is a long-time client and, more recently, a strategic partner. Leaders of nine project teams shared their findings and recommendations with the organization’s entire Executive Committee, receiving in return feedback on how to improve the project and speed implementation. The workshop marked the conclusion of the fifth iteration of this annual leadership development program: as the program matured, the client, like any good learning organization, had taken on full responsibility for refining and delivering the program for its people. Brimstone was effectively out of the picture. And while much of the process looked identical to the one we helped them to establish in 2007, there were aspects of the approach that were clearly innovations driven by past years’ experience and organizational culture.

One adaptation, in particular, struck me as both inventive and thoroughly practical… while robust tools and processes for stakeholder management had always been part of the program, these project teams had taken that focus on stakeholders to a new level. Team after team included a slide in their presentations identifying their key stakeholders and indicating where each stood on the team’s proposals. One playfully listed each key stakeholder with the word “approved” or “supported” digitally stamped over the name in red ink. Another handed out a simple one-page document that at first looked like a petition – beneath the statement “I have reviewed the proposal and support the project,” each stakeholder wrote his/her name and added his/her signature. It was a highly effective means of demonstrating that the recommendations had the full support of all key players in the organization.

At Brimstone, we’ve always believed in the power of signing one’s name to a piece of paper. Even more so than a handshake, a signature indicates agreement, buy-in and – most importantly – commitment to support an idea or initiative as it moves into implementation. A signature memorializes a decision and makes it much more difficult for someone to object down the road or claim they weren’t informed. When done well and consistently, stakeholder management is a critical aspect of any project team’s work because it generates better ideas, creates alignment across the affected parts of the organization, and lays the groundwork for swift, low-stress implementation. Asking stakeholders to literally sign off on the recommendations adds a new level of concreteness to this important work.

Mike Krivan is a Managing Director at Brimstone Consulting Group, a management consulting firm serving senior-level executives at Global 1000 companies.

Avoiding Wasted Years

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 14:56:00 -0500

In a recent Corner Office interview, Harlem Children’s Zone President and CEO Geoffrey Canada reflects on his early (and fruitless) struggle to persuade change-resisters to change:

“Convincing people to give your way a try will work if you neutralize — and sometimes you have to cauterize — the ones who really are against change. They’re the kind of person who, if you tell them it’s raining outside, they’ll fight you tooth and nail. You take them outside in the rain, and they’ll say, ‘But it wasn’t raining five seconds ago.’

“I spent a year trying to convince those people to change and give me a chance. Then I realized that was a wasted year. I’d have been much better just to simply say O.K., thank you, difference of opinion. Go do something else with your life. Let me work with this group of folks and move forward.”

Canada’s realization is one that many of our clients, especially those pursuing major transformations, eventually come to: Not everyone is going to make the journey with you. Some people don’t want to change; others simply can’t. And burning energy and resources on swaying those people is a wheel-spinning exercise, bound to tire the leader and divert her attention from what really matters – leading those who are ready and eager and able to change.

In Good to Great, Jim Collins makes a similar point in the chapter titled “First Who… Then What.” Early on, Collins explains that Level 5 Leaders, the ones heading good-to-great companies, determine who should be on the bus before deciding where to drive it. Later in the chapter, Collins documents a finding that Geoffrey Canada learned the hard way: “When you know you need to make a people change, act.” Don’t wait. Don’t waste a year. As Collins points out, not acting is unfair to the people who do want to join in the transformation, because they typically have to compensate for the intransigence of the resisters.

This is not to say that skeptics should be rooted out, rounded up and shown the door summarily: everyone should have the opportunity to share their concerns, express their doubts, and play devil’s advocate during times of change. However, there comes a time when people must set aside their fears and concerns and commit to change – a time when leaders need to decide who’s on the team and who needs to be cut. That time should be measured in weeks, not months or years.

The Power of Public Praise

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:39:00 -0500

by Bob Marcus

In the time crunch and pressure that surrounds most business leaders these days, it’s easy to understand why taking the time to publicly praise great performance gets put to the bottom of the to-do list. But in skipping over that activity, leaders miss out on one of the great levers of human nature.

I was reminded of this point (oddly enough) by “The Upside of a Demotion from Jack Welch,” a FINS interview with GE Chief Technology Officer Mark Little. One passage in particular caught my eye:

“When I was very young, we were at a management training session and I saw [Jack Welch] in a circle of 25 people. He saw a young guy across the way, he stopped the discussion and said, “Hey, I heard you did this, that’s the greatest thing,” and he went on for two minutes praising this kid, for what felt like an endless amount of time. And this kid’s face lit up like a beacon because he had the CEO of GE praising him.

Calling attention to a person’s good performance in a public, emphatic way is very meaningful thing. The other side was he could give a kick in the ass that could really be felt. He taught me that when you’re praising people, do it in a strong way and do it for [a] long time, and when you’re kicking someone in the ass, make it hard, but do it quick, do it infrequently.”

While his reputation for candor and “edge” is well known, Jack Welch also used public praise as a key tool to energize and teach. In my own work, I’ve repeatedly seen the transformative power that praise from a leader can have on individuals and teams when given publicly. It motivates both the person winning the praise and the listeners around them. Even more importantly, it has the power to instruct by highlighting behaviors, decisions and actions that are worthy of emulation.

My daughter’s second grade teacher is an amazing woman named Terry Hale, who is retiring this spring after 35 years of teaching. Terry is the very model of what you want an elementary school teacher to be – caring and patient, wise and energetic. And in an age when you watch some parents struggle to control their one child in a restaurant, she manages to keep 24 seven-year-olds focused, behaved and engaged all day in a busy classroom.

Praise is the most effective tool she uses. Instead of haranguing the kids to sit back down after an activity, Terry looks at one of the students who is already back at her desk and says something like, “I love the way Hannah is sitting at her desk, looking forward, hands on top and ready to learn.” Right away you can see the other kids look over at Hannah and find a way to match what she’s doing. You can almost hear the conversations in their heads – “Hey, Hannah got praised. I want some of that!”

Now I’m not trying to compare folks in corporations to seven-year-olds. (I’ll let you insert your own joke here.) But watching Terry Hale reminds me that the quick and predictable response to positive feedback that she elicits is driven by basic human nature.

So take the time to point out the good stuff you see happening in your organization. Call people out by name, do it publicly, and take your time in spelling out exactly why what they’re doing is worth emulation. It’s an incredibly effective way to teach, motivate and reward.

Bob Marcus is co-founder and Managing Partner at Brimstone Consulting Group, a management consulting firm serving senior-level executives at Global 1000 companies.

Wham, Bam, Thank You, Sam!

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 19:04:07 -0500

The arrival of the New Year marked the departure of Sam Palmisano from the top job at IBM. Not surprisingly, the man who ran the technology giant for the last decade, and who was CEO on the day it celebrated its 100th birthday and crossed the $100B revenue line, has been the subject of many profiles and paeans in the news media of late. Several publications (see here and here) honored Palmisano with a “Top Leader” designation; others highlighted specific aspects of his leadership, such as his four-question guiding framework (which, we have to say, seems a bit elementary for the maker of Watson, the super-computer). One writer posited that during Palmisano’s tenure, which saw the company exit the PC business and make more than 100 acquisitions in the services and software space, “IBM has been a textbook case of how to drive change in a big company.”

With that title in mind, we wanted to highlight a few elements of Palmisano’s approach to transformation that merit attention and praise:

Collaboration Inside and Out. In this interview clip, Palmisano says, “I listen to more points of view than I did 20 years ago because I understand that to solve problems … [you] need a lot of collaboration today, and that’s both internally and externally. To solve the problems of a Smarter Planet, you need to collaborate and all parties have to listen. You can’t have a dominant point of view because you won’t get to the right answers. The key is really to listen. So therefore for a person in my job, you need to become humble; you need to shut up. You literally need to be quiet in meetings… the hardest thing to change is not the business model – it’s people, and it starts with yourself.” In a 2004 HBR interview, “Leading Change When Business Is Good,” Palmisano describes one of his earliest efforts as CEO to put this theory into practice when he engaged the entire organization in an online dialogue about IBM’s values. The outcome of this initiative – a “re-boot” of the “Basic Beliefs” that had been established in 1914 – gave Palmisano a platform for aligning hundreds of thousands of employees scattered in 170 countries around the world. It also was the genesis of the company’s “Smarter Planet” campaign, as IBMers told their leaders that the company should be playing a larger role on the public stage.

Leadership Development Through Action. Palmisano has said that “To develop talent that can lead the enterprise generation after generation takes money, time and patience. And this is not just about people at the top – it’s about developing future leaders broadly and deeply throughout the organization.” He backed up that notion by empowering his SVP of HR Randy MacDonald to “reinvent the way [IBM] trained and developed talent,” according to this post from Brad Power on the HBR Blog Network. After determining that 80% of leadership development is driven by work experience, MacDonald and his team went about creating a “work-related development opportunity,” dubbed Global Enablement Teams, that matched leaders in mature markets with those from emerging markets. In this piece by Fortune editor Geoff Colvin, MacDonald says of himself and Palmisano, “We made a decision to walk out of the classroom and make sure most of the experiences were being made at the operational level.” The company now ranks No. 1 on the global list of Top Companies for Leaders.

Simplification to Drive Alignment. As IBM grew ever larger and more complex under his tenure, Palmisano recognized that he needed to simplify things in order to keep his vast organization aligned. When revamping the company’s values, for instance, he kept the number to three. Organizationally, according to MacDonald, Palmisano transformed IBM from 170 country “fiefdoms,” each with its own policies and procedures, to a “globally integrated enterprise with global standard processes.” Along the way, 8,000 HR software applications were taken down to under 1,000. In the realm of strategy, Palmisano in 2002 worked with the company’s leadership to draft a 2010 roadmap that clearly and succinctly charted IBM’s long-term priorities. “It tells our people, here are the growth plays and here is your role in it,” Palmisano explained in this Forbes interview. The document highlighted four big areas for growth – analytics, emerging growth markets, cloud and Smart Planet – and set targets for each (e.g., 20% of sales from emerging markets in 2010). The 2015 roadmap raises the bar even higher in these key areas. “If you keep things simple, you can have an impact and get 427,000 people to buy in an understand their role.”

Improving Performance Reviews

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 15:43:00 -0500

A few weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal reported on the growing popularity of sharing 360-degree feedback; now they’ve published an article about performance reviews trending in the other direction – at least that’s what the headline (“Performance Reviews Lose Steam”) suggests. In support of this thesis, author Rachel Emma Silverman highlights a Corporate Executive Board study that shows about 1% of companies are eliminating the review. One percent. In other words, don’t hold your breath waiting for an email from HR releasing you from your performance review responsibilities.

More compelling than the studies are the organizations described in the article that have retired traditional performance reviews in favor of “informal appraisal system(s)” that generate more frequent, open dialogue between supervisor and subordinate. In both examples, taken from companies with fewer than 500 employees, these feedback sessions were de-coupled from decisions about raises, promotions and bonuses in order to reduce the stress level of participants. According to company leaders, this de-coupling encouraged employees to speak more candidly and provide more constructive advice.

While we’re big fans of improving the quality and quantity of performance feedback, we also recognize that most organizations – especially large, complex ones – need the discipline and consistency that come with “traditional” reviews, for all the reasons outlined in the article. For most of our clients, they are a necessary evil – and will be for the foreseeable future.

That said there are ways to make performance reviews less “evil” and more productive. Here are three recommendations to consider:

Conduct reviews more frequently. Most companies mandate an annual performance review, but that shouldn’t restrain you from meeting with your direct reports more often. Try to schedule a 90-minute review each quarter; build these sessions into your annual operating cadence so the dates are clear at the start of the year. Speaking more frequently will allow you to stay more connected to the business and ensure more opportunities to provide constructive feedback.
Tie the conversations to short-term priorities. Make sure the dialogue is linked to the business priorities of each subordinate, not some one-size-fits-all/generic set of behaviors or practices. This emphasis on day-to-day operations will keep you more closely grounded in the realities of the business and allow you to focus your feedback on behaviors that are more likely to increase performance. The session should result in a shared commitment to actions that will take place and results that will be generated in the next operating period.
Require prompt follow-up. Feedback shared and agreements made during reviews typically have a shelf life of a week or less. It’s important that the key messages and commitments are captured immediately after the session – and revisited in the next one. Ask your subordinate to draft a memo within 48 hours of the meeting that summarizes “What I heard” and “What I commit to”. This will ensure that the person received the most important feedback and that you both have a record to review 90 days later.

When done well, each review session can be a teaching and learning experience that creates energy in both participants and produces stronger results – rather than a box-checking exercise that generates little more than anxiety.

Action > Words

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 13:41:00 -0500

In “Transparency Pays Off In 360-Degree Reviews,” the Wall Street Journal’s Joann Lublin reports on the increasingly common practice among businesspeople of sharing 360-degree feedback results with fellow staffers. Examples of this trend include executives who published their results company-wide on an internal website, an HR leader who shared some of his scores with 200 people on his first day with a new company, and a business unit president who communicated some of her shortcomings to her direct reports. And while these “case studies” yielded positive outcomes – heightened loyalty, swifter integration into a new organization, even a promotion – Lublin also is careful to point out the possible downsides to sharing – namely, loss of confidence among subordinates and power plays aimed at exploiting “revealed” weaknesses.

While Lublin’s observations about the possible benefits (and pitfalls) of publically sharing feedback are dead on, we have two gripes with the piece:

First, Lublin uses words like “reveal,” “expose,” and “divulge” to describe the act of sharing 360-degree feedback results with co-workers, as if the data these leaders are imparting are secrets. They’re not. While the actual survey results may be sequestered in a confidential personnel file, it is our experience that people in the organization see their colleagues’ weaknesses quite plainly – it’s common knowledge. (This is especially true of senior executives: inside organizations, we all closely observe how our leaders behave.) Typically the recipient of the feedback is the last to know, so there’s really not much to “reveal.” Don’t get us wrong – sharing three-sixty results can be an anxiety-inducing event, especially the first time you do it: just don’t expect your audience to be surprised by what they hear.

Second, while the act of publicly sharing feedback can yield rewards (by showing you to be a candid, genuine leader, for instance), the article’s opening paragraphs suggest that this action directly resulted in a promotion for Sanjeev Nikore, a senior executive at a global information-technology company. It didn’t. The real reason Mr. Nikore was elevated is revealed five paragraphs later, when the CEO of the company explains that “Sanjeev and several fellow executives landed bigger roles because they achieved stronger results after quickly heeding colleagues’ feedback on their leadership style.” In other words, the promotion resulted from listening to the feedback, changing behaviors accordingly, and delivering better business outcomes as a result – not from publicly sharing the feedback. The real rewards of feedback come when you choose to do something productive with it – when you eliminate a behavior that is hindering performance or accentuate one that is helpful but not employed enough. This is clearly an area of leadership where actions speak louder than words.

"… one of the marks of being a more mature boss is finding that perfect balance between clarity about..."

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 16:29:00 -0500

““… one of the marks of being a more mature boss is finding that perfect balance between clarity about goals and purpose, so that people aren’t wasting time trying to sense what’s in the ether, and not being so direct that you’ve cut off conversation prematurely and your voice is the only voice in the room. How do you get that magic right? I don’t know. But when it happens, that’s a great meeting.””

- Amy Schulman, Executive Vice President, General Counsel, and President of Nutrition at Pfizer, in this week’s Corner Office interview

Investing Time to Save It

Sat, 10 Dec 2011 10:40:34 -0500

We ran across this Harvard Business Review blog post – and while we agree with its observation (upon reaching the C-suite, executives typically do find “less, not more, control over their own schedules”), its primary recommendation (to “put in place [a] support structure that allows you to focus your energies” ) raises more questions than it answers. How do you decide where to focus your energies – and where to stop focusing them? What should your support structure look like? Who should be a part of it?

Our clients often ask us for help in regaining control over their calendars. Sometimes this calls for modest adjustments to the client’s time management; sometimes the recommended changes impact the entire organizational operating system. In any case, the process always begins with a candid assessment of how the client aspires to spend her time vs. how she actually spends it. Are her stated objectives receiving enough of her attention? Are low-priority activities eating up too much of her time? Are her goals and her realities out of alignment? Invariably the client finds that a significant gap exists between where she intends to spend her time and energy and the activities through which she actually spends it.

From this analysis, the leader must develop a plan of action – a set of changes to fix the imbalances. Many leaders can make significant progress by simply running each activity through the following screens:

Can the activity be delegated?
Can the activity be modified (shortened, reduced in frequency, made more effective, etc.)?
Can the activity be eliminated?

This isn’t rocket science, to be sure, but it’s challenging work that calls for difficult decisions that may have significant ripples out in the organization.

One recent client, after concluding that his new added responsibilities translated into 50% less time available to do his “day job,” decided to re-think his group’s entire operating system. He recognized that not only did he need to operate differently in order to take back some control over his calendar, but his organization needed to as well. His “support structure” for the initiative was a small team of key leaders who were enlisted to diagnose the situation, interviewing dozens of employees in search of both wasteful and highly productive practices. The team developed recommendations to improve operating reviews, strategy development and communication, performance management and leadership development. He’s currently in the midst of piloting some of these new approaches and determining which best leverage his time and help him achieve his goals.

In Work and Life: The End of the Zero-Sum Game, Friedman, Christensen and DeGroot recommend that leaders “continually experiment with how the work gets done” in pursuit of more balance. The examples above are simply different forms of that “experimentation.” The key point is: whether the scale of the change ends up being large or small, you need to invest some time now examining how work gets done in order to save time in the future.

One last note: though the HBR post suggests that executives should “Say goodbye to the two-week vacation with the family,” we disagree. In fact, we recommend that a sizeable block of “unplugged” time away from the office be one of the first things you schedule – right after Board meetings, key operating reviews, quarter closings and strategy off-sites – when you’re mapping out the year ahead. For most senior executives, accustomed to running on a high-stress gerbil wheel week after week, it takes days (not hours) to slow their heart rate and truly unwind. The period that follows is often the most productive time of the year for thinking big thoughts about trends, strategies and the long-term prospects for the business. Prioritizing vacation on your calendar will also give your employees the opportunity to plan their calendars accordingly – while sending a signal to your organization that taking time to re-charge is important. Consider the time away one of the dividends of regaining control of your calendar.

“Culture Has To Be Paramount”

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 16:33:00 -0500

Several of our clients this year have devoted significant time and energy to evaluating their organizational culture in order to determine which specific values and behaviors help them to achieve their business goals and which hinder their performance. For all, it’s been powerful and productive exercise. So when we read this New York Times interview with Robert L. Johnson, founder of Black Entertainment Television, we did a lot of head-nodding. Here’s Johnson’s take on culture:

“Culture is like a circle, and great companies won’t even tolerate a superstar going outside the circle. I can have the greatest sales guy in the world, or the greatest marketing manager. If they go outside the circle, they’ve got to leave because it is a direct threat to the cultural confidence you’re trying to build. And you can’t carry out a vision or go on a crusade without the total confidence of everybody who’s going on that mission with you.

“If you really want to build something that’s going to be around for a very long time and be stable and grow, culture has to be paramount. People have to know how your culture operates and works. And once they get it, they adopt it, and it becomes second nature to them that certain things are not done in this company. And that, to me, is one of the attributes of really great companies. The culture is almost like a religion. People buy into and they believe in it. And you can tolerate a little bit of heresy, but not a lot.

“… When the culture breaks down, it’s real hard to be innovative…. because you’ve got built-up barriers to interpersonal communications. And if you’ve built up barriers to interpersonal communications, you’ve certainly got barriers to new ideas because that old zero-sum-game mentality sets in, where somebody might think, “Well, if you guys are going to market it this way, my distribution chain is going to lose power. So I’ve got to protect my part of the company. And, by the way, I don’t like you anyway.” So innovation slows down, and changes don’t happen as rapidly as they should and you get that rigidity.”

While we agree that “going outside the circle” should have consequences (Johnson mentions his willingness to “tolerate a little bit of heresy”), the point we’d highlight concerns explicitness: employees can only operate “inside the circle” if they know its boundaries. Until the organization’s leaders clarify and communicate “how [the] culture operates and works,” until they draw the circle using bold, dark strokes, employees will be left interpreting observed behaviors and learning from those closest to them. And this is not the best way for culture to be transmitted, especially to new members of the organization.

We recommend that leaders take the time to codify cultural expectations, to evaluate current and potential new employees against those parameters, and, on a regular basis, evaluate the effectiveness of the culture through open dialogue and external benchmarks. As Johnson points out, for a company to achieve and sustain greatness, “culture has to be paramount.”

"… the big surprise [upon becoming CEO] is how difficult driving change is, and how important it is..."

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 14:18:00 -0500

“… the big surprise [upon becoming CEO] is how difficult driving change is, and how important it is when you’re making change to have involvement from all levels; to be selective about what you’re going to change first out of the gate; to not overwhelm the organization. But you need to set your goal and keep driving toward it. There’s going to be resistance, but keep your eye on the goal and be patient enough to be flexible.”

- Kathleen L. Flanagan, President and CEO of Abt Associates, in this week’s Corner Office interview

"Coaching done well may be the most effective intervention designed for human performance."

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 10:33:00 -0400

For those who consider themselves coaches, or who are considering hiring coaches for themselves or their employees, we recommend this New Yorker article by Atul Gawande (author of the also-excellent Checklist Manifesto). While Gawande reports on coaching practices in sports and music, his most compelling insights come from the worlds of medicine and education.

A practicing surgeon who worries that his performance has reached a plateau, Gawande makes the unorthodox choice to hire a coach, luring out of retirement the surgeon who trained him during his residency. The coach observes some of Gawande’s procedures and makes recommendations – about his decision-making, physical positioning, communication, etc. Gawande adjusts some of his long-held practices and procedures, and his complication rate – the key metric he hoped to address – goes down. Gawande’s personal example highlights two essential aspects of a productive coaching relationship:

A coach who observes the client and then engages him in a dialogue that contains specific, practical recommendations to improve performance
A client who identifies the performance measure he/she wants to improve and then tracks that metric over time to assess whether the agreed-upon changes are making an impact

Gawande also spends some time in a middle school in Virginia, where a coaching program has been implemented to help teachers improve their effectiveness in the classroom. In an effort to understand the art and science of coaching, Gawande shadows a pair of coaches as they observe, and then counsel, a veteran math teacher. So what did Gawande learn about good coaches?

They “speak with credibility, make a personal connection, and focus little on themselves.”
“They… parceled out their observations carefully. They had discomfiting information to convey, and they did it directly but respectfully.”
They “know how to break down performance into its critical individual components.”

We couldn’t agree more with Gawande’s findings. For more Brimstone perspective on executive coaching, check out our white paper, Coaching for Results.

With High-Potentials, Actions Speak Louder Than Words

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 10:42:29 -0400

A recent Towers Watson study found that 68% of companies in North America formally identify high-potential employees, and 28% actually tell the employees they’ve been labeled as such. Our reaction: “OK, but what are they doing about it?”

Developing the next generation of leaders is an area where actions speak louder than words. It’s one thing to be told by your boss or HR leader that you’ve been tagged as an up-and-comer; it’s a whole other – and much more powerful – thing to walk into the launch meeting of a leadership development program, look around the room, and realize that you’re among a select group of incredibly talented people. That you’ve been hand-picked to participate. That you’ve been entrusted by the executive team to help solve a big problem or capitalize on a big opportunity.

We’ve found that most high-potentials want (and need) three things:

Responsibility: Hi-pos crave new challenges, stretch assignments and expanded portfolios; they want to show they are capable of excelling at the next level
Recognition: Hi-pos want to know that they’re on the radar screen of the executive team, that their performance and potential are being tracked
Investment: Hi-pos want to receive benefits, such as external coaching, internal mentoring and specialized training, that demonstrate the company’s commitment to their long-term development

Challenges at the Starting Line: Considerations when assuming leadership of a large organization

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 12:10:00 -0400

Taking the helm of a large organization always presents major challenges, whether you’re an internal or external hire, a first-timer or a seasoned CEO. Identifying your specific challenges early and addressing them head-on are essential to short- and long-term success. Two recent articles highlight a few best practices for new leaders:

A recent Wall Street Journal profile describes Philips’ new CEO Frans van Houten displaying some of the leadership behaviors that we find most effective, namely:

Careful assessment of products and markets to identify the best growth opportunities and the mature/declining areas. Management guru Peter Drucker advocated that this sort of dispassionate evaluation be done by leaders on a consistent basis, regardless of whether the business is performing well or struggling; however, it’s especially important for a new leader to conduct such an evaluation right out of the gate. It signals to the organization that all options are on the table, and it gives the leader critical insight into the business’s health.
Encouraging local leaders to take initiative and try new things that leverage their local knowledge – without asking permission from corporate HQ first. CEOs, especially new ones, need to determine early in their tenures where to allocate their limited time in order to best leverage their skills, experience and passion. These high-value opportunities may be in specific product areas of geographical regions, but chances are – as is likely the case with van Houten – these specific opportunities are better driven by local leaders who have market-specific expertise. Further, encouraging initiative in this way demonstrates a level of trust in the organization and its leaders that typically positions the new leader for success.
Clear, swift decision-making with “clarity of 70% to 80% ”. Rapid decision-making with incomplete information is a leadership trait we find to be valuable in most situations, but especially early in a new leader’s tenure because it sets a new tone and pace for the organization. Taking too long to chart a new course and make difficult choices will bring the entire enterprise – which is waiting to form an opinion of the new leader and his/her approach – to a standstill.

A New York Times interview with Novartis CEO Joseph Jimenez includes this quote, in which he describes his early tenure as CEO:

“The first thing I have to do is to have people understand where I’m going to take the company. It has to be crystal clear, and everybody in the organization has to understand it, they have to have line of sight to that goal, and they have to understand how what they’re doing is going to help us move into the future.”

Jimenez goes on to describe his efforts to translate the complex business and his strategic vision for its future into a simple set of messages, to distill it to “its essence” – “so that the guy on the plant floor, who’s actually making the medicine, understands the priorities we have as a company.” In other words, to achieve alignment, it’s not enough to devise the right vision, to come up with the winning strategy; the leader must be able to communicate that plan – simply, clearly and consistently – so that every employee recognizes how he/she can contribute to its implementation. By creating this sense of ownership, the leader enables the organization to take collective action. In our work with CEOs, we’ve found that the most successful alignment processes are marked by open dialogue and a healthy dose of urgency.

"Tell me and I’ll forget, show me and I may remember, involve me and I’ll understand."

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 10:46:00 -0400

“Tell me and I’ll forget, show me and I may remember, involve me and I’ll understand.”

- Chinese Proverb