Over time we witness people who can create results far beyond average. I think it’s helpful to remind ourselves of how they create success and to look for teachable points of view.
In each of the two cases below, I’m not sure that the success achieved by Jack Welch and Bill Gates is generalizable to your organization, but to me, it makes sense to study these teachable points of view.
Why is customer focus not working for leaders?
This is certainly going to be controversial, but I’ll try to make the point I believe may help leadership understand that in times where ‘customer-focused reality’ is central to almost everything we do…that you must be careful with CFR. You can view the complexity of the CFR environment graphic at: http://www.leadu.com/090905.htm
In short, here are the points I want to make.
Wrong Customer
If we target the wrong customer because of keeping our focus on the customer, they’ll lead us off-track.
Often, I see leaders choosing to focus on a particular customer because of some advantage or angle that promotes fast-growth or big margins. Following the wrong customer because they fuel the engine, or provide large investments can come back to haunt us in the long run.
Here's a statement I see quite a bit lately:
'...we need to complexify our interiority as much as our exteriority if we’re
going to pull through...'
This postulate assumes that we can and quite honestly, we can’t.
Here’s why.
Our biological schema is not geared to unlimited, it is geared through
limitations (Blink, Gladwell) and thin-slicing a perceived reality from which to
“decomplexify” the “search space” of computation (What is Thought?, Baum).
Leadership & Free Will
I don't feel I could write a more controversial topic, but just this morning I was watching a nicotine path commercial (designed to help people quit smoking). I thought to myself, that because of a psychological belief system that is being perpetuated by the general scientific community based on blank slate beliefs: beliefs that tell us anyone can be anything they want to be; capitalism is a vehicle that in a lot of cases exists to create harmful products.
Let me give you an example:
When managers are asked to list the Top Ten Motivators for their employees the list looks like:
1 - Salary
2 - Bonuses
3 - Vacation
4 - Retirement
5 - Other Benefits & Perks
--------- the money line ----------
6 - Interesting work
7 - Involved in decisions
8 - Feedback
9 - Training
10 - Respect
Note:
Managers rank money items as their employees' Top Five Motivators. When
employees are asked to rank their own Top Ten Motivators the list looks like:
1 - Interesting work
2 - Involved in decisions
3 - Feedback
4 - Training
5 - Respect
--------- the money line ----------
6 - Salary
7 - Bonuses
8 - Vacation
9 - Retirement
10 - Other Benefits & Perks
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Actually, there is a reason for this. If you've ever been a manager, you will identify with my answer. What you hear from employees is that they are always concerned about money. In my 25 years in working with people, I NEVER had someone come up and ask me for more interesting work, without it being attached to money issues.
Money is essential a hygiene factor (Herzberg), but there never seems to be enough of it to go around, at least in my organizational experience.
So, what's a manager or leader to do?
I want to apologize to the person who contributed significantly to this material and I can’t remember who and where I got this from, but it’s an excellent summary of decision-making models to which I’ve adapted many of my own ideas including the authoritarian, or what some now call the ‘visionary’ model of decision-making.
The interesting aspect of these models is that all of them are appropriate at certain times and in certain situations. It’s clear to me, after reviewing my own decision-making models, that leaders prefer some over others. We often don’t take the time to evaluate what decision model we are using and whether or not, it’s best suited to the context, or conditions.
Here are some brief ideas about decision-making models.
Authoritarian Model: Information and authority reside with the authority in charge, either by proxy or by ownership. This decision-making model has been found through research to be the most effective model in regards to creating positive climate—much to the surprise of most I’m sure. [Leadership That Gets Results, Goleman, HBR 2000]
Method: Actively seeks contributions from others, considers the feedback and ideas, then makes a decision that binds the groups actions.
Concerns: The vision may be the wrong vision and the authoritarian leader may thin-slice reality and not get sufficient feedback.
Believe nothing just because a so-called wise person said it.
Believe nothing just because a belief is generally held.
Believe nothing just because it is said in ancient books.
Believe nothing just because it is said to be of divine origin.
Believe nothing just because someone else believes it.
Believe only what you your self test and judge to be true.~Buddha - Hindu Prince Gautama Siddharta
As you might imagine I have mixed emotions when I read this particular piece from the Buddha. In some ways, I think or feel at a variety of levels that this may be pretty good advice. However, when I run it back through Argyris’ Model of giving advice, it may not meet all the tests. [ http://www.leaducom/news/archive/05/071505.htm ]
If you contrast this information with the information from Blink and ‘thin-slicing’, one has to concern him or herself as a leader with how adept anyone is in terms of sense-making. I would suggest that the world may be overly complex, complete with too many choices, too many alternatives and essentially too many different ways things may work to use only our own self-testing and judgment.
In reality, I suspect in many ways that all this self-testing and judging is getting us in a whole lot of trouble we don’t even realize. 25,000 year-old genetics don’t help either. We were made to manage the four Fs: feed, fight, flee and pro-create. And our system manages those aspects pretty darned well in my view, at least until we realize that half the world must have ED, based on all these commercials. Jocularity aside, I believe we need to take another step with belief and that is to test our own beliefs in view of our judgments.
Here’s a second installment on the role of feedback in leadership.
First off, let me thank those like Susanne Cook-Greuter and other careful researchers for continually supplying important considerations to leadership from their models. Something about the Leadership Development Profile modeled after SCG’s Harvard Research is powerful in helping us as leaders to get a fix on something as nebulous as feedback. For more info on Susanne’s models and LDP: http://www.harthillusa.com
I won’t quote the model directly, but instead paraphrase it for my leadercast today.
Ego complexity can be identified along a continuum of feedback, something like this:
I’m sure my continuum can be criticized or improved, and let me just make my point.
As leaders we’ll become known for our successful decisions, as well as the decisions we make that created failure. In some cultures, we’ll even have the opportunity to develop a reputation for how resilient we are in the face of failure. However, those cultures are still pretty scarce. Leadership lives and dies, metaphorically by its decision making.
One of the most important decisions leadership makes is related to what gets purchased. Whether it’s a new physical building, a new consulting intervention, a coaching program, or even the nuts and bolts of day to day business, what we decide to buy and why we decide to buy is a critically important leadership competency. I’ve researched the criteria of many different purchasing systems and have created the following questions for leadership to think and feel their way through when contemplating a leadership purchasing decision.
These questions are not the end-all to purchasing, but they will give you some ways to evaluate your purchasing decisions in considering how and what to buy. I would suggest that these criteria would be a good idea in getting information from vendors. Getting them to answer or help you answer the questions should stimulate a lot of valuable interactions.
Enjoy the summer,
From the desk of Mike R. Jay, Master Business Coach
Founder, http://www.leadershipuniversity.com
I apologize for not knowing the source of this story. If you know who to attribute it to, send me a note and I’ll update the attribution.
First the story:
The daughter of a very wise chef complained to her father about her life and how things have been so hard for her. She did not know how she was going to make it and she wanted to give up. She was tired of fighting and struggling. It seemed that just as one problem was solved another arose.
Her father took her to the kitchen, filled three pots with water and placed the fire on high. Soon the three pots came to a boil. In one he placed carrots, in the other he placed eggs, and in the last he placed ground coffee beans. He let them sit and boil, without saying a word.
…In half an hour he walked over to the stove and turned down the fire. He pulled the carrots out and placed them in the bowl. He pulled the eggs out and placed them in the bowl. Then he ladled the coffee out and placed it in a bowl.
Turning to his daughter he asked. "Darling what do you see."
Smartly, she replied. "Carrots, eggs, and coffee."
He brought her closer and asked her to feel the carrots. She did and noted that they were soft. He then asked her to take an egg and break it. After pulling off the shell, she observed the hard-boiled egg.
Finally, he asked her to sip the coffee. Her face frowned from the strength of the coffee.
Humbly, she asked. "What does it mean Father?"
He explained. "Each of them faced the same adversity, 212 degrees of boiling water. However each reacted differently."
"The carrot went in strong, hard, and unrelenting. But after going through boiling water, it softened and became weak."
"The egg was fragile. A thin outer shell protected a liquid center.
But after sitting through the boiling water, its inside became hardened."
"The coffee beans are unique however. After they were in the boiling water, they became stronger and richer."
"Which are you," he asked his daughter. "When adversity knocks on your door, how do you respond? Are you a carrot, an egg, or a coffee bean?
"Are you the carrot that seems hard, but with the smallest amount of pain, adversity, or heat you wilt and become soft with no strength?
"Are you the egg, which starts off with a malleable heart? A fluid spirit. But after a death, a breakup, a divorce, a layoff, a bad marketing experience you became hardened and stiff. Your shell looks the same, but you are so bitter and tough with a stiff spirit and heart, internally.
"Or are you like the coffee bean? The bean does not get its peak and robust flavor until it reaches 212 degrees Fahrenheit when the water gets the hottest. When things are at their worst, you get better. When people talk the most about you, your praise increase. When the hour is the darkest, trials are their greatest, your worship elevates to another level
Source Unknown
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