THE ONLY LEADERSHIP ADVICE YOU WILL EVER NEED

 

 

 

The D in L.E.A.D.E.R.S: Development

“The Good Get Better, the Best Excel!”

How many of you went in to work this morning hoping that today everything would go perfectly? Your staff will be productive… there will be no errors, no complaints from the customers or the boss, and all work will be done on time on budget… there will not be a single personnel problem because the entire staff will be humming as a team. Such days are rare in any work environment, but they can and do happen. “Perfect days” happen when the team members are all working to achieve mutual goals and they are all excellent performers.

Most leaders have never experienced a perfect day. Indeed, many years ago, a cynical but probably all-too accurate friend of mine said that his definition of management was, “…one damn thing after another.” I laughed when I first heard that, but every time I have used that expression with groups over the years, I get this knowing nod that clearly suggests that there is painful truth in the comment. Being “In Charge” means being responsible for a sequence of challenges that need resolution. In short, each day is spent going from one problem to another.

What can we do to make the transition from the status quo of endless problems to the productive hum of perfect days? Some would say: nothing. There is no chance to be in the “perfect world” because life is tough and unfair, and every job involves reckoning with reality. Others, and I include myself in that group, believe that (although perfection is probably never achievable) striving for perfection is a rational goal. Unfortunately, most of us do not strive for perfection; instead we settle for goals well short of that. A discussion on “striving to be the best” is a subject for another day, when I address continuous improvement as a core value for all leaders. Today’s focus is on helping your staff constantly strive to be better.

Every leader must be committed to helping the associates to grow and improve. This requires a commitment not just to giving your staff the opportunity to achieve, but also to developing their capabilities. As leaders, we must commit a major part of our normal work day to helping our staff grow. We must teach, coach and support the growth of our associates. Anything less would be neglecting our core leadership responsibility. Development, the center word in our L.E.A.D.E.R.S. mnemonic, is the central concept in the journey towards being Leaders. Everything we discussed before builds up to Development; everything after follows on Development.

Developing staff is hard work. If you are developing staff, you are not going to go about your own work and enjoy a day of perfection. You are helping your staff to find mistakes, avoid mistakes or recover from mistakes. Your day can only get better, and come closer to that perfect day, if you are working with your staff to grow and improve. If you want a day where you can enjoy the pleasure of no problems, then you must invest in your staff so that they can develop their knowledge, skills and even attitudes that affect performance. Fail to invest in them and you will fail to reap the rewards of peak performance by your unit.

THE ONLY LEADERSHIP ADVICE YOU WILL EVER NEED!

The A in L.E.A.D.E.R.S.: ASSIGNMENT

“Square Pegs in Round Holes Never Fit!”

You will notice as we go through the seven steps in my the book, You’re In Charge…What Now? that there seems to be a sequential nature to these steps. Life, and certainly leadership, is not always linear or sequential, but there is some logic to thinking about the process in something of a sequential manner. There is little doubt in my mind that starting with the right mind set—Love—is an essential starting point. You probably agree that setting the expectations for the unit and the individual jobs is a logical first step in the journey toward having a productive work unit. The next step we outline, Assignment, is equally logical as the next step in our sequence. Once you decide what needs to be done (Expectations) as a unit leader, you obviously need to determine how it is going to get done and who is going to do it (Assignment).

Assignment is a critical to your goal of being a peak performance leader, because without the proper structure for doing a job and the proper assignment of staff to that job, there is not much that you will be able to accomplish regardless of your efforts and intentions. Your staff members must have the core characteristics that the job requires for success. No amount of training or leading on your part will be able to make a worker succeed in a job where he or she simply does not fit.

When you staff your team in the world of work, you must make clear decisions about what the job requires and what the person will need to do. Then you have to match that set of requirements with the right talent. Selecting the right people will at least give you a fair chance at achieving your goals. Without the right knowledge, skills, attitudes and work experience, your staff will undoubtedly fail.

Choosing the right people for the job is one of the toughest tasks you will be asked to execute as a leader. The recruitment, employment and placement of the right people is both an “art” and a “science.” There are many right and wrong ways to go about hiring your staff, but rest assured that success is not guaranteed on every hire. You will make mistakes (just as I have many times over the years) but you should try to learn from your wrong choices in order to improve your ability in hiring. Every wrong hire is far more expensive than the out-of-pocket costs associated with attracting and processing a new hire. The loss is even greater when you consider the cost of turnover when the hire fails.

The key to effective hiring is effective interviewing, and the key to effective interviews is to use your ears and brain, not your mouth and vocal chords. My most important advice to you for interviewing candidates is to listen to their answers, not your questions. You may ask the right question but still come away with a bad decision if you fail to listen carefully to the response. You must process the answer as a piece of information that you can use to evaluate the capabilities of the candidate. All of that said, interviewing takes practice and a solid understanding of human behavior. If you can get help in the form of formal training, take it. It will probably pay huge dividends for you.

THE ONLY LEADERSHIP ADVICE YOU WILL EVER NEED!

The E in L.E.A.D.E.R.S.: EXPECTATIONS

“Setting the Bar Sets the Tone”

Can you imagine playing the game of American football, without knowing the rules of the game? From the name, you would assume that the game is primarily about a ball that comes into contact with the foot. If you were sent out on the field without the rules and without ever having watched a game, your expectation might be that you were to kick the ball past all those people and take it to the other end of the field. Well, if you were in Europe, that might be the case, but the game would probably be soccer, which is actually called “football” in French, Spanish, Italian and German.

Sports are often used as metaphors for our experiences, and in this example the metaphor demonstrates that the name of the game can often be misleading. The only way to play the game properly is to know the rules, and to understand the expectations– which may be that you should somehow get the ball over the goal line, but not by kicking it. Unfortunately, all to often in the world of work, people are put into jobs and are given far too little guidance as to what the expectations are, hence they really do not know what or where the goal is. This is where every leader must start…You must define what the expectations are for the unit and for every job in the unit. Without expectations, how can your staff know when they have achieved success?

The importance of expectations seems obvious, yet far too many leaders do not focus enough attention on this crucial first step in leading. The key to setting expectations is that they must be clear and specific, so that every associate assigned to that job understands them and is held accountable for them. It is impossible to hold your associates accountable if they do not know what is expected of them; it is also impossible to hold them accountable if you have no way of objectively determining if the expectations were achieved. Every expectation must be measurable, which provides you and your unit with an objective assessment of success and failure.

Much has been written about goal setting, and even more has been written about how the goals get established. It is not our objective here to sell one process or another. There are those who believe that goals that are set mutually by the associate, and therefore “owned by the associate” are far better than those that are mandated by the boss. Others believe that clarity, understanding and acceptance of the expectations are the essential elements that make for effective goal setting. Whatever the management style or philosophy, it is clear that without expectations being set, your staff will flounder. In that situation, you and your unit’s performance will flounder as well. You must, in what ever way works for you and your associates, make certain that every job, and eventually every person in those jobs, clearly have expectations that guide the work.

THE ONLY LEADERSHIP ADVICE YOU WILL EVER NEED!

The L in L.E.A.D.E.R.S.: LOVE

“Friends Like but Leaders Love”

How many times have you heard aspiring managers say, “I want to be in management because I like people”? The simple truth is, someone who does not “like people” is better suited to being a recluse than to being a leader of others. On the other hand, I believe that liking people can also be a major impediment to being an effective leader.

I suspect that many of you are now questioning my logic, so let me make it even worse. I believe that it is just great for you to like your dearest friends, but you must not like your staff, you must love them. I have not chosen the word “love” to be inflammatory. I truly mean love, not like. The difference between what I mean, and what you may be thinking is the key.

When I say love, obviously I do not mean erotic love. Nor do I mean the kinds of love that you have for your spouse or significant other; nor do I mean what you feel for your family members. Indeed, those kinds of love are (generally) unconditional.

Some of you know that “Aloha” in Hawaiian means Hello; some know it means Goodbye; however, it actually means neither of those, it really means Love. The Hawaiian culture uses the word “Aloha” to mean a type of love that we can have–and I believe should have–for all of humanity. This Aloha is the love we feel for other humans because they are uniquely human and that they are the most important beings on the planet. This love of people as humans is what I want you to have for your staff. You should love your staff so much that you care for them simply because they are humans and you want the best for them. On a societal level, that may mean the joy of liberty, equality, justice and the pursuit of happiness. In your organization, it should mean that you want them to achieve excellence in their jobs so that your unit achieves peak performance. What is good for their success will also be good for the unit’s success.

As a leader, do not like your staff. That may seem radical, but it is an essential element of your ability to lead. Liking a staff member may cause you to ignore mistakes made; and by disliking a staff member, you may ignore the things that are done well. Liking or disliking can cause bias in your thinking, and as leaders we must always remain focused on helping our associates to leverage their strengths and improve their weaknesses. If we can not eliminate bias, we can not accomplish that critical goal.

THE ONLY LEADERSHIP ADVICE YOU WILL EVER NEED!

Today, we will begin the Leadership journey which is the basis of my book, You’re In Charge…What Now? I hope that you enjoy the journey.

The Seven Essential Steps to Leadership Success

In my book You’re In Charge…What Now? I use a mnemonic to describe the seven essential steps to leadership success. The mnemonic is “L.E.A.D.E.R.S” and each of these letters represents an essential step. While I have simplified the elements of leadership into seven words, the essence of my message is that being an effective, peak-performance leader is simple, but not easy.

The responsibility of being an effective leader is much more important than being an effective “manager”. Every effective manager leads first, and manages second. In my lexicon, there are two things the “person in charge of an organizational unit” does: the first is to lead the people; the second is to administer the processes that make up the work. I call this administrative activity the mechanics of managing…these are the activities of planning, organizing, controlling, report writing, etc., and of course the implementation of the technical work of the unit. These are critical activities and can never be ignored, but in my experience those managers who focus the preponderance of their time on the mechanics, ultimately do not succeed. They may achieve short term results, but they usually fail over time.

That which is done “to and for” the people makes a leader a long-term success, not what he or she does to administer the mechanics. Indeed, a manager with great leadership skills can sometimes be successful without being an effective administrator. I have worked for leaders like that, and they were great achievers.

On the other hand, I have worked for leaders who were great administrators but poor leaders, and they were ultimately failures. Simply put: administration may be a necessary condition, but it is not a sufficient condition, for success; whereas, leadership may be a necessary and sufficient condition for success.

My core premise is that if you are to be a successful leader, your success will be determined not by how great an administrator you are, but how great a leader you are day-in-and-day-out. When the staff you are “in charge of” believes that you are a great leader, and when you are doing the seven essential steps, you will be a peak-performance leader who tastes the joy of success.

The next seven issues of this Posting will be a journey through the mnemonic L.E.A.D.E.R.S.… Each letter represents the essence of a key principle for Peak Performance. We start our leadership principles with L for Love, followed by E for Expectations, A for Assignment, D for Development, E for Evaluation, R for Rewards, and S for Self. The words are important keys to remembering the concepts, but we will explore in much greater detail how those concepts make a Leader effective and capable of being great. We hope that by the time you have been introduced to the seven steps in L.E.A.D.E.R.S., that you will be convinced that leadership is really quite simple, but it will require all of your energy and focus to do well. In short, it’s simple, not easy

Welcome – THE ONLY LEADERSHIP ADVICE YOU WILL EVER NEED!

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I will be posting comments, articles and feedback to my readers and look forward to your comments and, in particular, your questions.

To start the Blog, I have decided to start with a series of ten articles which I have written as part of a Monthly Newsletter I write called the Czar Report. This Newsletter is available for subscription at my web site www.the-czar.com, so if you like what you see in these extracts from the Newsletter, I encourage you to sign up. If you do that, you will also start recieving a free, weekly newsletter.

Please enjoy:

THE LAW OF ADMINISTRIVIA – The Greatest Barrier to Leadership Success

One of the long-standing principles in economics is called Gresham’s law. It states that if two currencies are circulating in an economy—one a high-quality currency that everybody trusts and believes in; the other a poor-quality currency that everybody thinks has substantial risk—then “the bad currency will drive out the good currency.” This means that everybody will want to hoard the good currency and give the bad to other people whenever they can.

In leading, the same principle applies. I call it “The Law of Administrivia”. That Law postulates that… Required or less useful activity drives out desirable and useful activity. In other words, people will do the tasks that they think are easy, trivial, and required first, in order to get them out of the way. Then, with the time left over, they will do what is desirable or useful but not required. The amount of trivial administrative tasks (administrivia) tends to grow once the boss concludes you are able to handle what you have already been given to accomplish. Eventually you do less and less of what you want or need to do and much more of the administrative work. Worse still, since administrivia is usually easy work, while being a leader is hard work, you end up spending more time on the easy jobs. After a while, all that gets done is the required, the trivial, and maybe even the useless.

Of course, not all administrative work is meaningless or trivial. Indeed, much of the success in an organization rests on process and process controls. However, if they are the only activities a leader has time for, then they will ultimately hamper the leader’s effectiveness. Frequently, bosses forget how much time and energy real leadership really takes. Effective leaders use planning, organization and control as tools to handle the administrative work flow, thus allowing more time for the job of leading. If the administrivia consumes your day, then leadership will be driven out. If the administrative work is effective, then you will be free to lead.

Parts of the Law of Administrivia have been recognized for some time. Saul Gellerman wrote in 1968, “The simple fact is that most managerial jobs are already more than full-time jobs. The typical manager has more than enough to worry about. His typical solution is to arrange his problems in order of priority, deal with the ones he has time for, and just ignore the rest. In other words, that which is urgent gets done and that which is merely important frequently doesn’t.” What we are adding to this concept is that the “urgent” is often not essential to the mission, it is just easier to request or to accomplish.

Look at the activities that you engage in and determine if they are critical to your efforts to succeed. If your efforts to lead are frustrated because you are preoccupied with administrative tasks, then you need to find a way to break loose from the constraints of those activities. You will learn that if you do the leader work well, you will have plenty of time for administrative tasks. Free yourself from the shackles of administrivia with the realization that leader work is the only way to achieve your goals and objectives. It is the “good work.” You must fight the natural and destructive tendency to be ruled by “The Law of Administrivia.”

The Czar