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.
Feb 28, 2011 | Leadership, Management, Personal Rant
When I gave up smoking some 25 years ago, I did it “cold turkey” albeit after a lot of practice.
It was not easy, but probably not as hard as the industry supplying stop smoking aids would now have you believe.
The single strategy, which I applied with considerable focus was not that I had “given up” smoking, implying some sort of deprivation, but that I had “taken up” non smoking, a far more positive mind set.
The wider implication of this personal experience, is simply that focusing on what you will do, by when, and measuring the outcome, rather than on what you won’t do, is a far more effective way of getting results.
This is equally valid weather it is a personal task of losing a bit of weight (I will go to the gym Monday, Wednesday, Friday before work) or managing the strategic implementation of a major corporation.
Willpower is a bit like a muscle, the more exercise it gets, the better it works.
Feb 22, 2011 | Management, Operations, Strategy
Boeing, for a while after it took over McDonnell-Douglas, “owned” the commercial airliner business, with only the Airbus consortium as competition in the large end of the business, although there are others in the small commuter end.
However, the 787 “Dreamliner” being 3 years late, and billions over budget, has seen a number of early adopter airlines move to the big new Airbus A380. In the case of Qantas, this decision took them from a one supplier airline, Boeing, to a two supplier airline, a huge decision in the long term context of the life of an airliner model, the 747 introduced commercially in 1970, and still going pretty strongly, delivering sales of spares, upgrades, training, and maintenance to Boeing.
Outsourcing, or “off-shoring” as it is in some cases often delivers a short term boost to a balance sheet, but the long term cost can be huge if it is not done well, and few do it well. Boeing appear to have stuffed it up with the 787, and will be paying the bill for many years.
I keep banging on about the phantom benefits of outsourcing, and the contrarian option of developing lean disciplines internally to retain and develop the capabilities to compete in the long term, and the very early appearance of a trend for bringing Intellectual Capital sensitive development “home”. The apparent challenges facing Boeing in the delivery of the 787 will provide lots of fodder for the argument.
Feb 20, 2011 | Alliance management, Collaboration, Social Media
Things have changed, the tools of web 2.0 make collaboration, at least theoretically, really easy, so why it is so hard to get done?
Outside the web, where Wikipedia, Linux, Ideo and a few others have rewritten the rules, and boomed as a result, the output from new collaboration tools appears far more limited. Most businesses I deal with are struggling with co-ordinating a video conference, and that is about the end of the tools that they are using.
In a fundamental way, they need to consider the architecture of their collaborative efforts. What works for a co-located team, even if it has a few “fly-ins” will not work for a truly distributed team, or one that is working on a complex development, even when co-located. It seems a few rusted on practices need to be revisited:
- Responsibility for the outcome should be clear, along with budgets and timelines. It is the group that holds responsibility collectively, not individuals, and individual performance is measured by their contribution to the groups achievement of the outcome.
- The “how to” get the job done is left to the team.
- The team should be able to co-opt and manage outside skills as necessary to get the job done with relative freedom.
Feb 17, 2011 | Leadership, Management
This is a story of 2 bosses.
One bloke I worked for over a considerable period in two different corporations never told me exactly what to do. We agreed outcomes and the resources to achieve them, project time frames and milestones, and he was always willing to discuss, encourage, provide council, and play devils advocate, but never directed, but through the conversations, always knew exactly what was going on, and was engaged in the process. This left me with the responsibility for the outcome, and a personal commitment to achieve it.
The second bloke wanted to micro manage activity, providing a continuous stream of “advice” that were in fact instructions, which left me with no feeling of personal responsibility. I had the authority to get stuff done, but little engagement with the outcome beyond staying out of trouble, until we parted in mutual frustration.
This recognition of the differences between authority and responsibility is more than a matter of style, it is the core of leadership, and success.
Feb 8, 2011 | Change, Innovation, Management, Strategy
When one of the giants of industry, in this case, General Electric, takes a position on a topic, and supports that position not just with money and commitment, but sets out to persuade anyone who will listen to adjust their own perspective for everyone’s good, we should all listen.
GE undertook a business transformation driven by the 6 sigma developments of Motorola, and made 6 sigma the management fad of the 90’s, and more recently has embraced an enterprise wide search for “eco-friendly” products and services, termed “ecomagination” which has spawned new business that turned over $US 5 Billion in 2010. They have now turned their attention to the innovation process, publicly embracing an open model across their business units, and have just published a credible survey they have termed the “Innovation Barometer” , which sets out to interpret the views of 1000 very senior executives across 12 countries about the way they see the innovation process evolving. There are some standout conclusions.
- Successful innovation will come from a whole of society benefit, not just a bottom line benefit for the innovator.
- The role of SME’s will increase substantially
- So called “green” innovation will play a pivotal role
- Collaboration across enterprise, geographic, scientific and cultural barriers will become pre-eminent.
Our Prime Minister prattled on last week picking up some of these themes, but failed in my view to provide what every innovation thinker knows is fundamental to success, an objective, (perhaps a BHAG) best exampled by JFK’s 1961 national BHAG of reaching the moon by 1969, providing a driving vision of the end point.
