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Guiding Principles are any principles or precepts that guide an organization throughout its life in all circumstances, irrespective of changes in its goals, strategies, type of work, or the top management. – The Business Dictionary
Core Values, Guiding Principles or Social Contracts… what matters most is not the name you give them, but rather how you live them in & outside of your business. The latest News International Phone Hacking Scandal is one example of guiding principles gone wrong, or the lack of them all-together. Core values as well, but the fact that a lack of guiding principles led to the closure of the News of the World after 168 years in print was only the first significant effect of the scandal. With all of the current ongoing investigations, including possible criminal charges, just goes to show once again why lived guiding principles are key to long term success.
Core Values
Core values are a value system of a set of consistent ethic values (more specifically the personal and cultural values) and measures (evidence of how you live them) used for the purpose of ethical, ideological integrity or moral code. They apply to us in the sense that they are a personal value system that is held by and applied to an individual, and or a community/group/society. They are rules that govern our ethical standards as we actively apply in relation to our behavior, our interactions with our colleagues and clients as we go about “the business” of executing our responsibilities. Our work place values work best when they are aligned with our personal value set outside of work.
Guiding Principles
Guiding principles can be seen as guidelines that drive our behavior or mindset when executing the strategic and operational plans that lead to an organizations success. When we think about words or phrases such as scalability, recurring revenue, business partnership, productivity, profitability or challenging the status quo, we’re addressing the mindsets we want behind the development and subsequent execution of strategic and operational plans. Guiding principles are how you execute upon your established ethics.
Social Contract
It was the lack of a social contract (as well as ethics & guiding principles) that led to the 2008–2010 global financial crisis! Wikipedia refers to the political context of a social contract as an intellectual device intended to explain the appropriate relationship between individuals and their governments, but I’d like to simply refer to it as a “device intended to govern appropriate relationships between individuals”.
In the Work Place
Core values establish your ethics in how an individual or a collective interacts with others, guiding principles establish the strategic & operational mindsets, and social contracts govern (establish expectations for) relationships. You can’t say that anyone is more important than the other! They are all a required eco-system for long term success. How you balance the three will either help you move forward faster or slower.
That said, it’s guiding principles (mind-set) that most influences the value creation of the products & services you develop in addressing your customer’s needs.
How do you see core values, guiding principles & social contracts at work in your organization?
“I think there’s a feeling that people need to sharpen their thinking skills, whether it’s questioning assumptions, or looking at problems from multiple points of view.” – David A. Garvin of the Harvard Business School
This post was inspired by John Baldoni’s HBR article “How Leaders Should Think Critically“.
Question assumptions
Critical thinkers are inquisitive and look to find the what and the why behind every proposition.
This is where a 5 why’s approach can help you get to what’s not exposed to the naked eye or first impressions. When faced with a situation, before taking action, ask yourself “why” at least 3-5 times for the circumstance to exist.
In doing this, you’ll break through the emotional & subjective baggage we all have and that typically skews the required objective perspective that provides for the best decisions.
Adopt different perspectives
Take advantage of the genders and cultures represented in today’s diverse management landscape. In todays workforce we have the privilege, as well as the challenge, of actively co-existing with 3 generations (X, Y & Z). Put aside your personal bias & gut instinct for now.. ask questions.. get varying perspectives.. understand your subjects own biases & viewpoints.. understand their background, history & experience. Having all of these facts & opinions on-board, it’s now time to engage your gut instinct, intuition & practical experience to make a more balanced and effective decision.
See potential
Assumption-busting and harnessing multiple perspectives are deductive skills. Critical thinkers should also have a creative bent that allows them to see opportunities where others see obstacles. For every challenge you see or are presented with, ask yourself how you can address this challenge by “turning it around”. Example; economical conditions are a challenge that many might feel are out of their control, yet what can you do proactively to minimize an eventual impact on your business?
Change your invoicing model to pre-paid, partially pre-paid or scaled in conjunction with deliverables? Offer a discount for 30 day payment terms instead of your typical 60 or 90? There’s no such thing as “eliminating” your challenges, but you can surely address them in order to diminish the possibility of their more destructive or disruptive impact.
Manage ambiguity
The speed of business, intertwined as it is with global factors and complex supply chains, dictates that you will never know all the variables. Here’s the most complicated part for most of us; You need to get comfortable with operating in an environment where change is constant and rapid decisions are required.
WOW.. that’s a powerful sentence!?! Getting comfortable with ambiguity is a gradual process and you should proceed with caution as to what degree you’re comfortable with. Gradually expand those boundaries and this will become easier for you. Caution; too much ambiguity isn’t healthy so make sure you have reasonable limits and that you monitor the speed at with the ambiguity increases. Some call this managing chaos and it’s really down to each individual to determine their comfort level.
If you too believe that we live in a world of growing uncertainty, in which we will need sharp critical thinkers who can quickly size up the situation, realize the potential where others may not, and immediately seize opportunities through prompt decision-making, then what are the tools that you’ve got on-board to ensure that you can make this happen?
How can you be absolutely sure that your team has the skills on-board and the greatest opportunity to “get the right work done”?
Getting things done isn’t about time management.. but rather about how you manage yourself and your choices, within the time you have available to you. – David Allen
Managing Workflow, Projects & Priorities
That’s what time management is really about to begin with. you have a limited resource (time) and an over abundance of activities / requests to attend to. It’s about capturing things we collect and create, deciding what (if anything) we want to do about them, organizing the results of that knowledge work into a trusted system we can review appropriately, and making intuitive strategic and tactical choices about what to do at any point in time from our options.
Stay Focused on What’s Important
Urgent tasks include things like:
- That frantic e-mail that needs a response RIGHT NOW
- A sudden request that seems like it’ll only take two minutes but often ends up taking an hour
- A report you’ve got to write up before a meeting
More often than not, “urgent” is:
- Putting out fires
- Busywork
- Tasks that you’d rather do first because they’re less intimidating than your current project list
- Usually short-term
Important work is:
- Moves you and your business toward your goals
- Doesn’t give you that same shot of adrenaline that the urgent requests do
- Can involve thinking out long-term goals, being honest about where you are and where you want to be
- Can be plain hard work that feels boring and tedious
Effective To-Do Lists
Break it down! Then break it down some more. Don’t confuse to-do’s with goals or projects. A to-do is a single, specific action that will move a project toward completion. It’s just one step. For example, “Plan the committee lunch” is a project. “E-mail Karen to get catering contact” is a to-do. In this case, the action of e-mailing Karen is a simple, two-minute undertaking—something small and innocuous that you can do without thinking. The lunch plans won’t be complete after you’ve fi nished this to-do, but you’ll be much closer than you were while you were ignoring the “Plan the committee lunch” project. After it’s done?
Add the next step to your list. Breaking down your task to the smallest possible action forces you to think through each step up front. With the thinking out of the way, it’s easy to dash off that e-mail, make that call, or file that report, and move your work along with much less resistance.
Use specific action verbs and include details; “Call Dr. M. at 555-4567 for a cleaning any time before 11 AM on January 17, 18, or 19” is an example of a specific, detailed to-do
Self-Imposed Deadlines
- Start your day as early as possible
- Tackle similar small tasks back-to-back
- Break a large project into a sequence of tasks, progressing from longer to shorter
In an early blog post I covered this topic of effective Work Sprints & Daily Planning.
Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time
- PHYSICAL ENERGY
- EMOTIONAL ENERGY
- MENTAL ENERGY
- SPIRITUAL ENERGY
How can your company’s organizational health help you? What are the workflow & organizational effectiveness practices that need to be in place in order for you to maximize your energy?
Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey?
- Make appointments to deal with “Monkeys”
- Specify level of initiative
- Agree on a status update
- Examine your own motives
- Develop employee’s skills
- Foster trust
Anything you need to get done that requires concentration & a focused effort.. block your calendar in order to get it done.. because we never end-up “finding” time to do what’s most important. You have to make time.
Let’s be honest.. the advent of Open Space Offices had more to do with economics than productivity. That said, other than death & taxes, every challenge has a (or various) solution(s).
The current work environment provided by most employers who support an Open Space layout is highly unproductive for getting work done at work. Interruptions & easy distractions are only a few inconvenient truths of why an open space working environment can become highly unproductive. That’s what I call “Open Space Syndrome”.
Open spaces are economical solutions for housing employees, and in the right configuration can still gain effective transversal (cross functional area) awareness without compromising the concentration required to deliver effective results.
Here are some solutions I’ve found to help open spaces become more productive.
Focus Time
If you have to do work that requires focus & concentration, find a quite & unused space in or around your office building. The secluded corner table of the coffee shop downstairs, the park bench across the street, the conference room that’s not in use, the library down the street or even the office cafeteria during off-peak hours. These are all spaces that you can move to in order to get important work done.
The pre-requisit is that your management team has realized the benefit of fitting out the office with laptop computers connected to docking stations or keyboard, mouse & screens. Given the increased computing power of portable computers and the flexibility of cloud computing based storage solutions, Desktop computers are dinosaurs / anchors that just don’t cut it anymore.
Visual Hints
Have you ever seen an “on-air” sign in a radio or television station? Do you remember the last time you walked into a bank, took a number & headed to the information desk? Those are only a few practical reminders of things you can do in your open space office environment in order to get more work done. If you’re part of a work team, agree amongst yourselves a rotating “customer service” schedule to take questions and issues from other departments & functional areas. Make it visibly clear who’s “on-call” by placing a bright tennis ball on the screen of the person providing Customer Service.. or get even more creative and make-up a sign to hang somewhere visible.
Another effective tip is to put headphones on, even if you don’t want to listen to music, so that people will assume that you’re taking an online course, speaking on Skype or indeed focused on a task whilst listening to music.
Semi-Open Spaces
Glass partitioning works best to provide an open-plan feel and still be conducive to “noise” cancelation. Glass partitioning also provides the added benefit have creating more “white-board” space to draw up brilliant half-baked ideas & capture spur of the moment brainstorms.
In an earlier article this year, I highlighted how the MCI Group has developed a really inspiring open-plan workspace in their Zurich offices.
The above are only a few effective solutions & I’d like to hear yours. If you’re working in an open space & have found handy tricks to maximize your productive moments in-spite of the challenges, I’d love to hear / read your experiences.
In a recent McKinsey Quarterly survey of 2,207 executives, only 28 percent said that the quality of strategic decisions in their companies was generally good, 60 percent thought that bad decisions were about as frequent as good ones, and the remaining 12 percent thought good decisions were altogether infrequent.
In another independent survey only 33% of senior executives believe that strategy creation is a collective / collaborative effort below their C-Suite layer. Maybe that’s why +53% of staff are unable to explain their companies strategy?
Lacking VISION
What’s wrong with this picture? There isn’t one.. and that’s the problem!
There is no clearly articulated vision or painted picture that we can follow, aspire to, or leverage when carrying out our daily routines. Imagine more than half of your team not knowing where you’re trying to drive your company, why or how?
How successful do you think you’ll be as an organization?
In this modern age, I’m still baffled every time I find lacking clarity of vision to be the main driver behind failure to execute.
The Power of Vision
To succeed in business it is necessary to make others see things as you see them (John H. Patterson), how else do you expect other to achieve the results you require? Vision gives you the impulse to make the picture your own (Robert Collier), and that’s how you get people to buy-in & go beyond themselves to achieve the results your company needs.
Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare (Japanese proverb) or Vision without action is merely a dream.. Action without vision just passes the time.. Vision with action can change the world! (Joel A. Barker)
Take your pick, but the message is simple, people can’t manage what they can’t measure and they can’t achieve what they can’t see or dream. Leave “vision” to their own interpretation, and yours will never be achieved.
Leadership by Example
Vision is as simple as 1-2-3.. it’s all about telling a story with a beginning, middle & end. What’s the end-game you want to achieve? My good friend Sebastien Tondeur of MCI Group does this amazing well using The BackPocket COO’s painted picture framework. You can find the Painted Picture in the S.M.A.R.T.E.R. Strategies section of this blog. It’s a highly practical & immediately applicable way to get everyone on the same page with your strategic vision.
Process & Workflow
Every activity is part of a process and workflow.. and every activity is directly affected by behavioral additions (preferences). Preferably simple, more complex if absolutely necessary, the critical component is to have documented, communicated & easily accessible processes & workflows for the most relevant aspects of your business.
Managing Workflow, Projects & Priorities is the execution (getting things done) aspect a solid vision. Tell me what you want as an outcome, point me in the right direction, give me the appropriate process & tools to work with, and then sit back and enjoy the experience of my delivering on your communicated vision.
Transparency in Communication
A senior executive once told me that they couldn’t share their company strategy because they were afraid it would fall into the wrong hands. In return, I asked them to use that same logic in trying to understand why their team didn’t trust them as evidenced by a +50 staff turn-over in the last 3 years.
Keeping secrets doesn’t work! You have employees that want to be inspired by a message and then work their buts off to achieve it. You don’t have a circus act full of mind readers who need to look into a crystal ball to understand what it is that you want to achieve.
Talk to your employees on a regular basis, paint them a picture of what you want, use regular pulse checks to fill-in the blanks, and when all is done.. you’ll have a masterpiece that you all put together as a team. Did you ever do “painting by numbers” as a kid? that’s what this is.. give them the vision.. the metrics (numbers) & then let them loose with their crayons.
If you haven’t noticed lately, it’s a new age for Customer Service.. where “complaints management” alone just won’t cut it. It’s a Customer Experience Economy, competition is fierce and you just can’t afford to become the next “United Breaks Guitars” viral video.
Imagine a little “hick-up” in your customer service.. and the next thing you know your now poor brand reputation is being circulated and further ridiculed by 10,468,616 people. Can you afford that type of humiliation targeting your brand?
What’s your SHOUT Score?
Before getting down to some fundamental Customer Service basics, the context of this post is the danger represented by the “social media reach” or “influence” consumers have these days.
I’m hoping, especially if you’re in the e-commerce sector, that before you even start a traditional Customer Issue Resolution process your systems are giving you a “social media influence” pulse-check. In essence, if this person remains upset, how loud can their voice reach? What’s their “SHOUT Index”?
In social media circles most people are aware of the KLOUT Score (The Standard for Influence). The “SHOUT Index” is a similar formula I use to gauge how much pain an upset customer can create for me.
For example;
- Quick Google search.. and where does this person rank?
- How many on-line profiles (including YouTube) do they have.. personal & professional?
- How many people are they connected to?
- If they have a Twitter account, how frequently do they tweet & how many people are following them?
- etc..
Basically you want to know how much negative impact this person can have when unsatisfied so that you can escalate / prioritize their situation accordingly. It’s no longer just about the level of pain or inconvenience someone is suffering, but as well how much pain they can create for your brand in return.
Beyond the fix
One of the most difficult things to teach call center & customer support reps is how to go “beyond the fix”, but it’s accomplished when you focus on the real pain that’s been caused to your customer, and how can you fairly make the appropriate reparations.
It starts with “listening” and letting the customer voice their situation, perspective and the impact that it’s had (having) on them. It’s then moves to acknowledgement of the situation and validation of the individual making the complaint. Note that we have not yet established where the blame or responsibility lies.. in the early stages we should simply be absorbing the information available to us so that we can take the appropriate measures.
This step of going “beyond the fix” and allowing the customer to be heard is enough to defuse more than 80% of the hostility of the complaints being lodged.
The fix
Hopefully during this time you’ve registered enough details about the person making the complaint, the situation / circumstances surrounding the complaint and the pain felt by the customer so that you can continue with “your (example) process”.
In Summary
Yes, it’s all about building a “Customer Care” culture formed by ingrained habits practiced over & over again instead of becoming expert fire fighters. It’s about empowering Customer Service agents, with a budget if necessary, to learn from experience.. theirs and others.. and then apply logic in parallel of a proven process. Most importantly, it’s about understanding the SHOUT Index of the client on the other side of the complaint.
There’s 6.92 billion people on the planet at the moment, and +2 billion of them are online! “I’m mad as hell & I’m going to do something about this” carries a whole new set of implications in a connected world these days.
How are you increasing the risk of becoming the next “United Breaks Guitars” viral video?
“It’s time for your Mid-Year Review; Half the year is already over – will you be able to look back with no regrets? Learn the top 3 things you must do NOW to make sure you finish the year strong.”
That was the opening line from Verne Harnish’s weekly newsletter that caught my eye, and whilst he’s better known as The Growth Guy, the greatest lesson he’s taught me since we first met in 2006 is the importance of “rhythm”. I’ve since found that the better you get at finding what works for you and repeating it in certain rhythmic patterns, the greater your likelihood for success.
First some numbers to digest
My friends at 3S provided some interesting statistics from a recent survey they conducted in 305 mid-sized Iberian firms, including international companies with a local presence. Their results didn’t surprise me, since these are the very same trends witnessed in my work with start-up, small, medium & fast-growth companies, as well as the larger Fortune 500 corporations all across the planet.
- 86% of the 305 Sr. Executives agreed that their greatest challenge was to mobilize the entire company toward adapting to the continuous change of their markets
- 41% believed their strategic decisions wouldn’t have an important impact on their company’s success
- Only 23% blamed the current economic climate as the cause which limits their executive capacity
When you delve deeper into the “why” behind these alarming figures, you come to identify the root of the problem as being lacking of engagement from middle management, including the masses who have to buy-into and successfully execute the proposed strategies.
Question; If someone sets you out into the vast open sea without teaching you how to navigate a boat or give you the proper instruments, realtime updated progress data & weather reports.. where do you think you’ll end up?
Worst; If you’re set on a journey but no one can clearly articulates where the finish line is & what it looks like.. where do you think you’ll end up?
That’s why almost 90% of effective strategies on paper, never make it to successful conclusion, they lack S.M.A.R.T.E.R. expected outcomes.
The top 3 things you must do NOW to make sure you finish strong
1. Engage your Middle Management & their (staff) viewpoints into your mid-year review
2. Review the year-to-date
- What’s working? (you’ll want to do more of that)
- What’s NOT working? (you’ll want to do less of or even stop doing that)
- How are we tracking toward our year-end objectives? (what does success look like)
- Are they still realistic, relevant & what are we going to do about that? (pivot now)
- What are the Dangers ahead? (we’ll want to address these by creating opportunities)
- What are the Opportunities ahead? (what’s within our reach to influence our outcome)
- What are our Strengths? (what are we really good at that will accelerate pace toward success)
3. Communicate, update & pulse-check your plan past the finish line
- Think short cycles (days, weeks & months)
- Repeat this exercise quarterly (15th day of the last month of a quarter)
- Lead by example with Vision, a lot of energy (personality & perseverance), passion & courage
- Thirst for learning; learn from every failure to immediately communicate, apply & benefit from it
S.M.A.R.T.E.R. & Transparent Engagement is key
One of the greatest and most consistently identified problem slowing the success of most companies is employee understanding of how their day-to-day activities influence over-all company results. 53% of employees surveyed were unable to explain in depth their company’s strategy!
This is all stuff that’s within your reach! There is no room for excuses, take advantage of your mid-year review and get all of your team on the same page, or die a slow & painful death.
There is little difference in people, but that little difference makes a big difference.. and it’s called attitude. Positive or negative.. it’s your choice.
Likewise, there seems to be little difference in days, but that little difference can make a huge difference.. and it’s called exhilaration (from effort). If I’m feeling confident, positive & absolutely over the moon today, and it’s because I got a ton of work done that I had been delayed in completing.
I often find that my passion for my work, & life in general, leads me to over-commit. Don’t get me wrong.. I’ve learned long ago what to say NO to.. it’s just that I still get too many new ideas and commit to myself & others to get them done.
Feeling drained; down & out
When I know I haven’t done everything I should have, could have, wanted to.. more often than not the next day (if not that very same day) my energy goes down.
Suddenly I feel overwhelmed, my wife says I’ve been procrastinating and I feel lousy because I know that I could have done better.. given it 150% effort instead of 70 or 80%.
When I’ve let somebody down, when I’ve over-committed and under-delivered, it feels like a knock-out blow. I’m disoriented, it hurts and all I want to do is to pick myself off the ground and get back into the fight.
All I want is one more chance to prove myself worthy.
How to Commit Less & Deliver More
- Moderate your passion when you feel the need to commit.. think twice.. now give yourself a 20% (minimum) buffer to your original estimation
- Get everything, all of the things you want to do or have committed to do, out of your head and onto paper. You’ll probably be surprised at how much you’ve committed to
- Prioritize on a scale of 1-3
- 1 – must do (within the next 5 days)
- 2 – would like to do (within the next 10 days)
- 3 – how the hell did I get stuck with that? (trash-it & uncommit from it)
- Block your calendar accordingly to get these things done
On Top of the World
That’s the sense of exhilaration.. that’s that guy at the top of the stairs leading to the Philadelphia Art Museum.
He’s a guy that got famously in-over-his-head, but he also refused to quit.
He’s an example of someone who was hungry to win, but didn’t promise a victory. He committed to less but still strived to deliver more than anyone expected!
Rocky Balboa once turned to his son & said; “The world ain’t all sunshine & rainbows. It’s a very mean and nasty place, and it don’t care how tough you are.. it will beat you to your knees and leave you there permanently if you let it. You, me or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life can. But in the end it ain’t about how hard you hit, it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take, get back up, and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done!”
Yo Adrian.. Here’s to hoping you commit less & deliver more this week!
Everyone who thinks they can multitask… raise your hands. Now, everyone who thinks they can produce the same qualitative output whether multitasking or focusing on just one specific task keep your hands raised.
With exception to the ladies who are still convinced they can multitask and get effective work done, the room should now have their hands down.
Science & Biology; Pro-Multitasking (2 tasks)
I recently found a scientific article from April of last year entitled Multitasking Splits the Brain that states; “Neuroscientists Etienne Koechlin and Sylvain Charron of the French biomedical research agency INSERM in Paris turned to functional magnetic resonance imaging, which measures changes in brain activity. They monitored 16 women and 16 men, aged 19 to 32, as they performed a complicated letter-matching task.
As the team expected, working on a single letter-matching task at a time activated both sides of the volunteers’ brains, setting off the anterior-to-posterior chain of command to get the job done. But as soon as the volunteers took on the second task, their brains split the labor: activity in the left side of the prefrontal cortex corresponded to one task while the right side took over the other task. Each side of the brain worked independently, pursuing its own goal and monetary reward, the team reports in tomorrow’s issue of Science.
Koechlin says the results suggest that the brain can’t efficiently juggle more than two tasks because it has only two hemispheres available for task management. Indeed, when the team asked another 16 volunteers to match letters of the same color while completing the same two letter-matching tasks the first group tackled, the triple-task jugglers consistently forgot one of their tasks. They also made three times as many errors as they did while dual-tasking.”
“In terms of everyday behavior, you can cook and talk on the phone at the same time,” Koechlin explains. “The problem arises when you pursue three goals at the same time. Your prefrontal cortex will always discard one.”
Science & Biology; Contra Multitasking
We can get a better qualitative perspective from a more recent article entitled Media multitasking is really multi-distraction; “Multitaskers who think they can successfully divide their attention between the program on their television set and the information on their computer screen proved to be driven to distraction by the two devices, according to a new study of media multitasking by Boston College researchers.
What’s more, the subjects were not even aware of their own actions. On average, participants in the study thought they might have looked back and forth between the two devices about 15 times per half hour. In reality, they were looking nearly 10 times as often. And even if quick “glances” less than 1.5 seconds are removed from the equation, people were still switching over 70 times per half hour.
Understanding the physical behavior of multi-media multitaskers raises questions about the level of comprehension among people who switch their eyes between the devices, specifically the impact on productivity or on children doing their homework.”
Conclusions
While the last article focused on “media multitasking”, it’s the science of what’s going that should help us understand why multitasking just doesn’t work when you require a high degree of qualitative outcome. As a complementary post, please see “Multitasking is a Myth” – why your team isn’t delivering results, as that what we’re seeing every day in the workplace. Multitasking negatively affects quality, employee motivation & costs (your bottom line).
There are many forms of leadership “how to” but far too few successful leadership shared experiences. Personally, I’ve learned more about leadership from failure and shared experiences than I have from books. That is why I love to share!
Here’s a dose of what’s inspired me today.. I hope it inspires you in-turn.
“All the knowledge in the world did not prevent the collapse of the global financial system three years ago or stop institutions like Lehman Brothers … from failing” say Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka, professors from Harvard Business School and Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo. With today’s rapid change, increasing complexity, and high levels of uncertainty and ambiguity, knowledge is not enough and many leaders are finding it difficult to reinvent their organisations quickly enough to adjust.
For leaders to cope in today’s fast paced and ever changing world they need to help their teams and organisations to convert knowledge to ‘practical wisdom’.
I’ve listed below the highlights & inspirations from this brief 10m Harvard Business video of Professors Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka talking about Wise Leadership.
Highlights
- Values & moral purpose based.. both economical & societal
- Idealistic pragmatism; stretching your moral purpose intent on reaching what appears to be impossible
- When profit is a result instead of a goal, you undoubtedly provide a common good
- John Chambers (CEO @ Cisco) role in promoting “leading from the middle” by fostering teamwork & collaboration.. connecting communities of distributed leaders.. creating a distributed idea engine where leadership develops organically & unfeathered by a central command.
- Judgement over Decision; Decision is the simple act of information processing, whereas Judgement equals sensing the context behind phenomena which is often invisible. Far too often we think all we need to do is make decisions.. but had we applied judgement first, how would we have made different decisions?
- Practical pursuit of the ideal; phronesis is the ancient Greek word for wisdom or intelligence. Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka state it when defining Wise Leaders through “the habit of making the right decisions and taking the right actions in context (judgement) along with the relentless pursuit of excellence for the common good.
- The value of engagement & apprenticeship; how are you increasing engagement & fostering apprenticeship in your organization?
The Six Roles of Wise Leaders (summary by Leanne Ansell-McBride)
1. Philosopher; Wise leaders practice moral discernment and can assess and judge goodness in every situation and build this capability in others.
2. Master Craftsman; Wise leaders grasp the essence of an issue and are able to act decisively.
3. Idealist; Wise leaders create environments which breakdown hierarchical barriers and enable senior executives and employees to learn from each other.
4. Story Teller; Wise leaders use stories and metaphors to convert the essence of their actual experiences into tacit knowledge for individuals and groups.
5. Politician; Wise leaders exercise political power, understand the viewpoints and emotions of others and leverage these to achieve success.
6. Teacher; Most importantly, wise leaders foster distributed leadership by sharing their knowledge and wisdom. They show a balance between self confidence and humility and are comfortable sharing powerful, personal lessons of failure. They encourage teams to work together to review successes and failures, and learn from work. They allow others to shadow them to “learn about practical wisdom by observing an exemplar’s behaviour” say Nonaka and Takeuchi and they use “formal system[s] of apprenticeship, which allow mentors to share experiences, contexts, and time”.
How wise is your leadership? What can you learn from this BIG idea?
This year, the traditional Entrepreneurs’ Day and the innovation summit HiT Barcelona have been transformed into “bizbarcelona“, a macro event that brings together internationalization, financing, enterprise creation, business growth and the energy of more than 12,000 entrepreneurs.
I had the privilege to once again be invited back to speak, and I shared an updated vision of the 7 Leadership Development Keys for Guaranteeing a Scalable Business.
It was wonderful to see you all in attendance, and as promised to the audience in attendance, below please find a copy of my slide stack.
Talk less.. listen more!
This Dilbert strip couldn’t have come at a more appropriate time! Just this past Tuesday I had been privileged to be asked to help mentor entrepreneurs in IBM’s SmartCamp (Barcelona edition).
Imagine that you’re in a room.. and for the next 90 minutes you have seasoned veterans & highly networked serial entrepreneurs / venture capitalists (just to mention two) all focused on helping you achieve your dream. How often does that happen?
We had just seen the 6 minute pitches (presentations) from 5 companies the hour before, & now we were geared up to help them fine-tune their presentations (how they pitch their business), their business models for success, provide valuable connections / introductions and resources, etc..
Pretty amazing opportunity no?
Now imagine an entrepreneur that walks into the room & bla bla bla bla bla.. answering the questions they formulate in their own heads instead of listening to our questions, challenges & advice. Being defensive about their position instead of trying to learn from the contribution on offer, etc.. Actually, sadly we chuckled as some of them left the room, we were sure they were convinced that “we just didn’t get it”. Good luck with that one!
Once in a life-time opportunities
They don’t come along very often! Biggest lesson I’ve ever learned is to sit at the end of my bed each morning (just after I wake up) for 5-10 minutes & get-in-touch with how I’m feeling.. what kind of day I want ahead of me.. what will success look like at the end of the day. This is how you increase the probability of “luck”.. you prepare yourself for it.
Who’s going to come into my world today? What can I learn from them.. or the experience of being in their presence? What can I learn about myself? What should I continue to pursue? What attitudes are serving me best? What should I be conscious of and make a concerted effort to change?
These are just a sampling of the mental exercises I go through before getting up and kicking off my day. 5-10 minutes is all it takes & it can make a world of difference in determining success or failure. How many of you reach for your smartphone (email) & spend the rest of the day reacting to life?
Business & Personal
Another facet of this exercise is to focus on how you’re feeling. Are you stressed, anxious & overwhelmed? All things that will only get worse if you don’t acknowledge, embrace & mediate them. On these days it’s about taking it one step at a time. Break up your day into blocks or even 30-60 minutes segments (baby steps). What’s the most important thing to get out of these segments? Focus on that.. and get the most value out of your opportunities.
Feeling stressed? I can see it in your face.. I can feel it in your energy! Take a step back.. put a brave smile on your face.. it’s not my fault.. and help me to help YOU. Opportunity is knocking on your door, but you just seem to focused on everything else to open yourself up for the solution your looking for.. and let it powerfully move you forward.
It’s happening everyday..
IBM SmartCamp wasn’t unique in this fashion.. I & my colleagues have been to many other similar events trying to mentor & foster entrepreneurship & growth. Unfortunately we’ve seen this all too often!
We also see it everyday when we’re active in our businesses.. we’re able to see the bigger picture.. we have experience to contribute.. yet those that need to listen most, listen least. Use an opening statement to sit back & listen. Even if the advice or sharing isn’t useful.. the worst that can happen is that by asking additional questions.. you might come to an even stronger conclusion that you’re on the right track.. or find a tip / clue that leads to a subtle change in your thinking.. which in turn projects / accelerates your dreams powerfully forward.
Final piece of advice
The next time you’re in a room with more than 200 years of cumulative international experience & over 10.000 highly influential 1st & 2nd degree contacts (at minimum) just waiting to understand how to help you achieve success.. “talk less.. & listen more!”
“To sustain high performance, organizations must build the capacity to learn and keep changing over time.”
What does a healthy organization look like in your mind? Employees finding meaning through their work? Customers finding transforming experiences through their interactions with you? Investors & shareholders making a difference through their investments?
That’s what it should look like, and in a small percentage of organizations it does. So what’s missing in your organizations’ health?
The following 9m20s McKinsey Quarterly interview of Scott Keller & Colin Price, authors of Beyond Performance; How Great Organizations Build Ultimate Competitive Advantage, discusses different recipes for organizational health.. bringing up a lot of the building blocks that far too many organizations seem to still get wrong.
I kept hearing the word “leadership”.. and the varying aspects of leadership repeated throughout the discussion.
1. Performance starts when you set a powerful Vision
Leaders need to set and effectively communicate the strategy required to achieve the big goal they’re going for that can be measured in financial terms. Effective leaders need to understand strategically where their organization is going, and they need to master how to make necessary the adjustments in a timely fashion in order to out perform their competitors in the future.
A leadership team needs to figure out an effective way to divide amongst itself key responsibilities of Market Focus, Impeccable Execution and creating Knowledge Core.
2. Organizational Health & Continuos Improvement
Leaders need to focus on what will keep an organization fit in order to continue to perform in the future. Leaders need to proactively align people toward where the organization wants to go. Leaders need to facilitate how efficiently their organization executes against their strategy, as well as concern themselves with how to continually renew along the way.
There are differing receipies for success, and results prove that awards & incentives alone are less powerful then previously thought. What culture are you building to drive a successful outcome? What are the drivers & motivators you need across your enterprise?
Start by confronting your reality! How ready is your organization to get “from here to there”? Inventory your organizational talent, skill & will. Inventory your organizations’ role modeling, communication & story telling capabilities, along with the incentives & processes in place to take full advantage of your available talent & skill pool. Now socially architect what should be changing in each of these arenas and determine the respective timeframes required for change.
The hardest part is moving to action.. more than just a weekend retreat or worn off initiatives.. actively integrate an organizational health perspective into all aspects of the business.
3. Adapting to new eras of competition
Companies must adopt a continuous flux of transformation, managing to continuously improve their “performance” over time to better adapt to their new environments as new eras of competition arise. Your leadership capacity or leadership engine is what drives the ability to mix & match, and blend the necessary recipes that will bring an organization the success it requires to maintain its competitive advantage. Identify the necessary ingredients that will work best to achieve the outcome you require, and get to work!.
Direction & Delegation
In summary, all of the above is about direction & delegation. An effective leader needs to set the direction that he wants his team to strive for and lead by example in order to inspire them along the journey. An effective leader needs to delegate so they can rise above the day-to-day tactics, assuming a powerful “balcony position” where they have clear sight of the horizon ahead of them in order to successfully navigate their ship to the next port.
During my weekend reading, I came across 3 wonderful & inspiring messages from Joe Stump in his recent interview on Capture The Flag that will surely help any internet / technology entrepreneur rethink (or solidify) their current perceptions of where they’re headed & why.
Whether an internet entrepreneur, corporate executive, engineering team leader or budding engineering team lead.. I highly recommend you invest the next 10 minutes to review these three brief video interviews. Based on experience, I can guarantee you that your 10 minute investment will save you hundreds of painful hours fighting fires & trying to figure this stuff out (in practice) later.
How to Lead an Engineering Team
Whilst I don’t prescribe to the initial “hard-ass” approach, I believe this is mitigated through his comment “the ability to say NO, explain why & stop yourself from over committing.. It’s the “explain why” which is the trick that too many engineering resources still haven’t been able to figure out to effectively execute in their dialogue with “the business”. I also love his simplistic breakdown of the purpose for engineering.. “engineers manufacture features & code“. That’s it at the end of the day!
How to Hire Top Engineering Talent
Great insight on how Google & Facebook (can afford to) pay below market.. & how it’s more about giving / selling to engineers the opportunity to do things that are technically complex. That would be called Engineering Self Actualization in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs.
How CTO Improves Public Speaking and Presentation Skills
Not just for Technology Start-ups.. when your company starts to take off and everyone wants to get your viewpoint on “your space” & “your journey”.. these are very valid & concise tips!
Lastly, love his great insight on 1.5 to 1.8b people on the internet vs. 5.8b mobile subscribers.. and how this 4b gap will quickly be made up within the next 2 years. How is your business plan addressing this trend?
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