Mar 20, 2011 | Leadership, Management, Personal Rant
An often heard claim, but leaders mean it, managers just mouth it.
Creating and nurturing a process of performance assessment should be a focal task of a leader, as it puts money in the bank over time. However, it is hard, confronting, and time consuming work, generally without a short term pay-off, and is virtually impossible to measure via the financial reports, still the default measurement for most.
There are a lot of frameworks out there, and lots of consultants ready to take your money to tell you how to do it, but without a determination to ensure future performance by investing in the capabilities of your employees, outsiders cannot really help.
However, two frameworks that may get you thinking.
The first is an essay by Marty Cagan, a successful venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. Venture capitalists invest in ideas and people to deliver future returns, so being successful, Marty probably knows a thing or two about capability assessment.
The second approaches the challenge in a highly prescriptive manner, but curiously, if you look behind the avalanche of words, you see a similar approach to Marty’s, an analysis of the requirements to generate the required outcomes, analysis of the individual, and description of the gap. It is the Integrated Leadership System (ILS) that has evolved to provide a performance and assessment management framework for the Australian federal Public Service.
Between these two, there is enough to get a conversation started about the best way for your organisation to manage its “Greatest Asset” and hopefully lay the foundations for a system that reflects your needs and environment.
Mar 9, 2011 | Communication, Leadership, Management
There is a big difference between these two states, and they can have a powerful impact on the way organisations react to the decision maker.
Someone who is seen as decisive, but as yet undecided will be have the respect of others, who will usually assist in the process of coming to a decision in a positive manner.
By contrast, someone who is seen as indecisive, will be ignored, and work-arounds will be used to get things done, and at some time, if it is a personal trait, it needs to be removed from behavior patterns, or the individual will be removed.
Mar 8, 2011 | Leadership, Management, Personal Rant
If Australia’s management has been slow to pick up on the need for intensive and innovative energy management programs, is it little wonder, with the litany of indecision, populism, back-stabbing, and just plain lies eminating from Canberra.
The Howard government announced an ETS in 2008, then lost the election, putting the Rudd government in power, espousing a view about the “greatest moral challenge of our time” and delivering a white paper that outlined their CPRS to be implemented in 2010.
Then we had the spectacle of a legislative program being pushed prior to any chance of certainty that may have come out of the Copenhagen group hug, which then failed to deliver on expectations.
Meanwhile, the Liberals had rolled Malcolm Turnbull, a climate change believer who had negotiated a bi-partisan approach to carbon pollution reduction, (illogically to be implemented before Copenhagen)by one vote and taken its bat and ball back to the corner labeled “skeptics”. A bit later, Rudd as PM was convinced by a cabal including his deputy to backpedal on their carbon scheme, and was subsequently rolled.
Now we have a renewal of the Labor Party “determination” to bring in a scheme being championed by said deputy as PM after an unequivacal promise prior to the last election that it would not happen.
Monty Python would shake its head at this lot, which is just what business leaders have done. In the face of the total shambles and indecision, they have moved very cautiously, as outlined in this Business Spectator/Accenture CEO Pulse survey, but nowhere near fast enough to come anywhere near being able to deliver the bi-partisan commitment to a 5% reduction on 2000 emissions by 2020.
From whichever political and climate change perspective you view this debacle of the last 14 years since the Kyoto protocol adopted by the UN in December 1997 it cannot engender any confidence that our “leaders” will actually provide the one thing that business really needs, certainty of the regulatory framework within which they must work and invest for the future.
Mar 7, 2011 | Management, Operations
Throughout my experience one factor continues to be a foundation for success in pretty much everything I see. Keeping “it” simple, or “KISS” reduces complication and the potential for misunderstanding, turf protection, and unintended consequences, and is far better than mastering the detail. Avoid the detail in the first place, recognising the truth in Einsteins quip that “not all that can be counted, counts”.
IBM appears to be celebrating achieving a mastery of the detail, and I suspect geeks are seriously excited, but any encouragement to foster an environment that complicates, simply because we can, appears pretty dumb to me, as articulating detail is way different to understanding the drivers of the detail, and the shadowy links visible only human imagination can uncover.
Mar 6, 2011 | Leadership, Management, Personal Rant
All sorts of changes are occurring in our working lives, but one that has huge potential to add to the economy, but is actively ignored, is the large pool of over 50’s (of which I am one) who are working at far less than their potential, and willingness to contribute.
This huge group are usually less than fully employed as a result of things beyond their control, often having been loyal and productive employees for many years find themselves on the scrap-heap after a merger, rationalisation of activities, or business failure, and sometimes simply personal chemistry, and they struggle to gain further employment.
Too old, too experienced or over-qualified. How can you have to much experience or qualification, and age is irrelevant? it is attitude that matters!!!!
Employers, often 15 or 20 years younger see them as a risk, particularly the airhead 30 year olds who seem to inhabit HR departments, and market based recruiters. They see the experienced over 50’s as too set in their ways, lacking in energy, just looking for a sinecure before retirement, or just easily bored by a job they may have done successfully in the past. Sometimes this may be true, but consider the other side, the experience, networks, work ethic and embedded knowledge that they can bring.
The waste represented by this “semi-grey” cohort of keen, experienced, but grossly under employed people is disgraceful. It should be an issue in any electoral conversation, and it never is. However, you can benefit when hiring if you view potential employee risk assessment just a little differently.
Mar 1, 2011 | Leadership, Management, Personal Rant
Writing position descriptions for employees takes up a lot of management time, just another job that has to be done by a date.
If this is the case in your business, you have missed the point, as it is people that make a business, not the other way around.
To me it is pretty clear that in culture of success, a place where people want to work, there is robust leadership in place that achieves a few key outcomes in relation to their most important asset, their employees:
- Roles are very clear. Each person understands what they need to do, how what they do contributes to the overall outcomes as well as their own, and the rules and behaviors that are in place.
- Trust and autonomy. People want to work on things that make a difference, and they want the autonomy to go about it, within the rules, but in their own way being measured by the outcomes, and trusted to do the right thing.
- Accountability and due process. With clarity of role definition comes accountability for outcomes whilst what I call “Due Process” is in place. Due process is simply the process of encouraging and enabling debate on an issue, so that irrespective of the final position, all parties who will have to live with the decision have had a chance to have their views heard and considered.
- Praise. Everyone looks for praise when they do something right that is out of the ordinary. In an environment that delivers praise when appropriate, it is also easier to deliver advice, admonishment, and change tactics on areas that are not so good.
