Sep 1, 2021 | Collaboration, Governance
Trust in our institutions is generally accepted as being on a slippery slide to zilch. I am certainly one who has loudly carried that message.
It is easy to say, but what are the essential elements of trust amongst a group?
If you look up the wisdom of Dr. Google, you will see a library of articles, posts and opinion that varies in the words used, but when boiled down, are saying pretty much the same 7 things.
Trust that others have your back. When things go wrong, you will not be left to carry the burden yourself.
Trust in common values and objectives. This implies that the values and objectives are an outcome of the group, rather than having them imposed on the group. Objectives and values can be superficially common, as in a group put together for some specific task. However, those objectives and values will not necessarily be shared, which comes from the interactions of the group with each other over time.
Trust that we will keep each other’s confidences. Inability to keep confidences indicates a lack of integrity, poison to any level of trust.
Trust in our willingness to learn from each other. This is a two way street, and is not driven by artificial hierarchy such as position on the organisation chart.
Trust that people will do as they say they will do. No further explanation required.
Trust that we are free to express our views and ideas. Often, we refer to ‘psychological safety’ as if it were a fence constructed in some way to keep the nasties out. However, it is a fence only in our individual and collective minds, but is critical to building relationships.
Trust that we are able to be critical without being personal. We need to be able to be tough on our friends, without damaging the foundations of friendship and respect. Commonly I refer to this as ‘transparency’. It is not inconsistent with the requirement to be sure that confidences will be kept, it is more a foundation that enables those critical confidences to be shared and kept. Nothing is as corrosive as uncertainty, whether it be about your performance of a task, or how long it will take for the taxi to get to you.
In an HBR article from February 2019, the authors cited three elements a leader must have to hold the trust of those for whom he/she is responsible:
Positive relationships. Meaning a leader must demonstrate empathy, balance results with concern for people, resolve conflict as it occurs, and deliver honest and helpful feedback.
Good judgement and Expertise. People being led will be willingly led, as distinct from managed by someone who demonstrates good and consistent judgement in decision making, seeks and absorbs the opinions of others, and has the expertise relevant to the task.
Consistency. This is simply walking the talk, following through, setting a good example, and being prepared to do what is necessary.
To my mind, the 7 elements cited above contain these three, with a perspective that is a bit closer to the sorts of situations individuals find themselves in over the course of time. They are more specific, less generic than the three cited in the HBR article.
I recently heard a definition of the point at which you have a ‘group’ that is more than an assembly of people looking to achieve a defined outcome, which I like:
“A group is when you do not need to look around to know everyone is doing the right thing, but you do look around to see that everyone is OK’
Cartoon header courtesy www.gapinvoid.com
Jul 16, 2021 | Change, Collaboration, Operations
Nothing these days is done in one place, by one person, beginning to end. There is always a process in place, a chain of events that has to all work together in a co-ordinated manner to optimise the outcome.
We all know that old cliché, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
This is how it is with any process; it is limited in output by its weakest link.
Therefore, rather than spending resources in vain attempts to boost process performance by doubling down on the obvious bits that work well, find the weak link, fix it, then move on.
Eli Goldratt, the brain behind the Theory of Constraints, wrote a book called “The Goal” to articulate his theories in simple form. Boiled down in the book is a story of reverse engineering the process chain in a mythical factory. The management identifies the weakest link, works with it until it is no longer the weakest link, then moves on to the next identified target, now the weakest link in an improved process chain. This is an ongoing process of continuous improvement.
As Aiden Kavanagh, one of the best ‘Lean Thinking’ implementers I have seen in my travels put it succinctly in a comment on a previous post: ‘Tune the system to the pace of the bottle neck and make sure everything else has capacity to make sure the bottle neck never stops’
Is this how your improvement initiatives work, or are you continually making investments in new shiny things that always seem unable to deliver the promised outcomes?
Header photo courtesy of Daniel Stojanovic
Jun 28, 2021 | Collaboration, Marketing, Sales
In many major companies, there has been a number of new positions created in the last decade to try and accommodate the changes in the strategic and competitive environment.
Among them has been the ‘Chief Revenue Officer’ (CRO)
In some cases, this reflects the need for increased collaboration and sometimes convergence of marketing and sales. In others, it is just the fashion, the latest management fad.
This seems to be particularly the case in businesses where another of those-acronym driven fads has evolved, ABM, (Account Based Marketing)
The barriers to the integration of Marketing and Sales are high, and deeply set into the functional status quo of most organisations, and highly resistant to change. However, the emergence of digital tools has accelerated the trend, and the recent Covid challenges have been a catalyst for further and quicker evolution than would otherwise have been the case.
For years I have been advocating ‘Alignment’ of marketing and sales to the needs of specific customers, and the ways to achieve that outcome.
Removing the Marketing and Sales labels has proved to be useful to the integration. The emerging combined function recognises that the responsibility of each is simply Revenue Generation, or ‘RevGen’
The first substantial consulting assignment I had 25 years ago introduced my client, a domestically owned multinational supplier of ingredients to the food industry, to Strategic Key Account Management. (SKAM)
We went through a process of identifying the specific needs of key customers, and tailored our marketing and sales effort, to the expressed and often jointly uncovered needs of customers, with whom we engaged in the process.
Those workshops and subsequent implementation efforts are as relevant now as they were 25 years ago, probably more so. It is now just a component of Revenue Generation, a descriptor of the best way to make profits by delivering value to customers.
The core assumption of SKAM is that that only by doing one or more of the following, could we be successful.
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- Assisting our customers to increase their sales,
- Actively reducing their costs,
- Increasing their productivity.
We set ourselves the task of identifying how we could achieve at least one of those three things, preferably two, and focussed our efforts on delivering those outcomes.
Predictably, it was a successful initiative, customers loved the collaboration. Inventory levels reduced, as customer service levels and responsiveness increased, generating increased trading profits.
Perhaps it was too successful, as the business was then sold by its parent company, at a very high multiple to a multinational competitor.
Jan 19, 2021 | Collaboration, Governance, Leadership
As we come to grips with remote working, we will also have to come to grips with the central challenge, of how do you create the sense of community and teamwork that requires face to face but is not as present in remote work.
More particularly, remote working groups that have a changing membership, often a rapidly changing membership.
Great sporting teams win because they have the right blend of talent to get the job done, then they practise and practice, and practice. What happens when the membership is not stable, when practice is not possible, simply because you cannot predict what it is that you need to be practising, and with whom.
Google has spent years and millions of dollars examining the characteristics that make groups successful. The starting point is that no Google employee is short of intelligence, otherwise, you simply do not work there, but some groups are extremely effective, and others are failures, when on paper, the group members appear remarkably similar.
They called it ‘Project Aristotle‘.
Google, if it has what we might call a core competence, it would be finding patterns in data. They have large data sets of the teams in their business, their makeup, demographically, ethnographically, education, experience, and so on, but they could find no correlation between all these variables, and the quality of the team output. It seemed almost random.
The problem was to identify how individual intelligence translated into group intelligence.
We seem to accept that teams that were working well are more productive, creative, and harmonious than those that do not, but we do not really recognise the drivers of those outcomes.
Eventually, an unexpected pattern emerged, that discriminated between high performing teams, and the others. The pattern had two characteristics of the interactions that occurred in the teams, that explained the performance differences.
Those behavioural patterns are:
Equality of conversational turn-taking.
When everyone in the team has the opportunity to speak, and is encouraged to take it, and the result is that team members hold the floor for roughly the same amount of time, the team works. It does not mean that everyone takes turns, it does mean that the culture and often unspoken norms of the group are that everyone is respected, and has value to be added to the conversation, and is therefore listened to equally.
Ostentatious listening.
Just speaking in roughly the same amount is not enough. Others in the group must be overtly and ostentatiously listening, taking in what is being said, and giving it the attention and thought it deserves. This particularly applies to the team leader.
Together, these two behavioural norms together create what risks becoming a cliché: ‘Psychological Safety’.
This is the willingness of team members to speak their mind, express opinions, and ideas, knowing that they will not be judged, that the group welcomes the views, even when they are against the ‘run of play’ or the expected. Psychological safety is the single greatest correlate with a group’s success. When team members have that safety, it unlocks their best ideas, their ability to collaborate meaningfully, and innovate creatively.
Contributing to the success of a team, on top of the two core drivers that deliver psychological safety, and contributing to them in meaningful ways, are 4 supporting behaviours.
- Team members get things done on time, and meet their obligations, in a manner that enables the team to perform its tasks to at least the standard they expect.
- Structure and clarity. Individual’s in the team have clear roles, plans and goals, and the decision-making processes the team uses are clear. When an individual’s goals and plans are aligned with those of the team, the impact is magnified.
- The work being done by the team is important to team members.
- Team members believe their work matters, and that it will create positive change.
Taking up the hard-won lessons from Google seems to make great sense to me.
How well do your processes to manage and leverage the intellectual capital, represented by your employees, work in the evolving working environments inspired by ‘The Bug?
Header credit: My thanks again to Scott Adams and his mate Dilbert.
Jan 15, 2021 | Collaboration, Innovation
Today, January 15, 2021 is the 20th anniversary of the launching of Wikipedia.
It would be easy to pass it over, but few innovations amongst the millions over the past 20 years, would have had such an impact on so many people as Wikipedia.
The evolution of Wikipedia has democratised knowledge in a manner only approached by one other innovation in history I can think of: the printing press.
I can remember being envious of those kids at school who had Britannica on their bookshelves. It was way too expensive for my parents to buy, and besides, it was out of date the day the latest version was published.
The creation of Wikipedia came out of the fertile, original mind of Jimmy Wales.
Working in finance, Wales played around with early web portals and video games, recognising the power of the net to connect people. In the mid-nineties, he was fascinated by the idea of a web-based encyclopedia, replacing the hugely expensive monolithic offerings then available. In 2000 with a couple of friends, and funding from his modest success with the web portals, he founded Nupedia, which aimed at consolidating articles written by experts voluntarily, and peer reviewed, with advertising as the revenue generator needed to make a profit.
It bombed.
The academic status quo standards for peer review almost ensured that submitting an article for the review was akin to waiting for feedback on an academic paper submitted for review, a lengthy and undefined time, with no chance of a no revision acceptance.
In early January 2001, as an experiment, Wales and co-founders Ben Kovitz and Larry Sanger created a ‘wiki’, at that time a new technology, that aimed at removing the academic barrier by opening articles to anyone to review and edit in real time.
The academics involved with Nupedia would have nothing to do with it, but such was the response, that a week later, on the 15th, the Wiki, by then named Wikipedia, was launched on a separate domain.
The idea of an open source, editable encyclopedia had its challenges, some of which remain today. However, the original vision of Wales and Sanger to ‘Imagine a world where every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge‘ has been largely realised.
Wikipedia continues to evolve, managed by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organisation founded for that purpose by Wales in 2003. Wales remains a critical voice in its management.
Can you imagine the last year, disconnected, without Wikipedia as a source?
Happy 20th Wikipedia.
Jul 24, 2020 | Collaboration, Lean
An application of Occam’s Razor to all the fluff and consulting clichés around lean thinking and implementation, brings lean back to its simplest form possible.
It has only 2 elements.
Learn to see waste.
Once you teach yourself to observe the waste in a process, you see it everywhere, from the big things in your work life, to the simple things. Ever lose your car keys at home? It takes some time and frustration as you try and remember where you left them? Waste. Put a hook, or bowl, or have specific place that you deliberately put your keys in every time you walk in the door, and you will not lose them again. After a short time, it becomes an automatic action. Fail to do it one day, and the frustration at the wasted time and effort in finding them comes home big time.
Eliminate waste by continuous improvement.
Once seen, take some action that reduces the waste. In the keys example above, it may be that you try the hook, but from time to time, you come into the house with armfuls of shopping. It is hard to reach a hook with an armful of shopping, so you adjust by putting a bowl on the hall table specifically for the keys, which is waist height, so more accessible. In time, it may be that one set of keys near the front door adds extra walking when you need to go out the back door, so you add a specific back door key to a bowl next to the back door.
Continuous improvement, to everything you do.
Incrementally improving a range of these small things, bit by bit, creates momentum and delivers compounding results.
Everyone knows about the race to the South Pole between Scott and Amundsen. They also know that Amundsen won the race, and lived to talk about it, while Scott and all his party perished. What few know is the manner in which the two parties attacked the challenge. There were significant differences in the logistic tactics used by each party, and many played a role in the eventual outcome, but one is not always quoted in the literature, which may have played a key, but little understood role. ‘Continuous compounding’
Amundsen broke camp each day early, and was travelling by dawn, and every day, he covered 15 nautical miles (28km) sleet, blizzard, or sunshine. At that point he made camp, even if it was still early in the day, preserving the stamina of his men and dogs. This created a rhythm that converted to momentum, every day getting closer to the goal, to win the race and return safely.
Scott did neither.
By contrast he made a choice each day, to hunker down in bad weather, or at the other extreme, travel 30 miles, or more, creating no cadence or momentum to the task of achieving the twin goals. There are many other ‘lean’ lessons in the race that are relevant. For example, Amundsen used dogs, which could eat the abundant penguin and seal meat collected on the way. Scott used ponies, which required much more looking after as they sweat with effort, and eat only the grain that had to be hauled.
Little things removed, add up very quickly to big things, and when combined with organisational cadence, create momentum.
How long would it take for you to change a tyre on your car? 20 minutes? an hour? 2 hours after waiting for the NRMA to turn up?
The F1 record for four tyres is 1.8 seconds. Over the course of a race, often won or lost by hundredths of seconds, a few tenths several times during the race can mean the difference between a podium, and a straggler. All the F1 titleholders have done is remove waste, and work as a team, with a few tools to automate the repetitive actions.
‘Lean thinking’ has been turned into a complex toolbox by many, requiring expensive services to implement. However, in its most basic form, it is really just critical thinking, common sense, and simplicity.
Header photo credit: Tim Chong
