O'Brien on Leadership

Lost in the Air

2011-06-09T17:49:00.000-04:00

It's sometimes refreshing to know that nothing changes. Delta Airlines proved that this week when they managed to annoy most of the United States because of some confusion as to whether they were charging soldiers returning from the Mid-East for a fourth bag. Was no one available, with one phone call, to say ‘forget it, let them through?’ The answer is ‘No.’ Did they later fix it? Yes. But too late to relieve anyone of the perception that the airlines don’t have their act together. And why should they? They don’t.

A few months ago I had the ‘opportunity’ to spend some considerable time looking at the airline industry – up close and personal. During an 8 day period I flew on ten different occasions, logged nearly 30,000 miles and spent what seems like several months sitting around airport terminals watching the airlines – both in the US and abroad – carry out the business of air travel. This allowed me to update my perspectives, one formed by hundreds of other flights, thousands of hours in the air, and visits to perhaps 100 or more airports on scores of different airlines. Herewith some observations (which are – unremarkably – little changed from similar observations a number of years ago:

No one is thinking. I saw several different airlines – that now all charge for checking-in luggage – forced to deal with a crisis when there was simply not enough space in ‘carry-on’ storage bins to accommodate every passenger. This resulted in delays in boarding as well as then insisting that everyone left in the terminal check-in their luggage. What then followed were exercises in the arbitrary nature of petty power, as various people were allowed to board with some form of checked baggage and others were not. Tempers rose and passengers, nearly universally, became frustrated.

Take note: this is a crisis the airlines created. The reason people carry on luggage is two-fold: One - after nearly 60 years of jet-powered commercial aviation the airlines still do not know how to handle luggage quickly and courteously. No one really trusts the airlines to handle their luggage. Even the folks behind the counters don’t trust their own companies and repeatedly warn passengers to not check certain items. I repeatedly heard the comment ‘you better keep hold of that yourself’ or words to that effect. Then secondly, as if to see if it’s possible to make the situation worse, nearly all the airlines now charge for the ‘opportunity’ to check luggage, perhaps get it damaged, maybe lost, and certainly extend your stay in the airport at the other end when you arrive at your destination only to stand around and wait for your luggage to – finally – appear.

‘No one is thinking’ includes the engineers. I took one flight that lasted nearly 18 hours – by design. By the time we had been in the airplane for 12 hours, with another 6 hours of flight in front of us, nearly everyone, including the frazzled stewards and stewardesses, would have cheered if the airplane had been forced to land someplace. Does anyone think being in an airplane, in a tiny seat, eating lousy food, watching a 3 x 5 inch fuzzy TV screen, is a good idea? Here’s a hint: No.

To cap it off, we are now doing this with 400 of our newest friends. All of whom board and deplane through the same door. Yet we read about think-pieces for airplanes with 10,000 mile ranges (20+ hours in the air) and ever more passengers, and even airplanes that will have extreme width cabins, where we can put 20 seats across. Even more opportunities to sit in middle seats.

When was the last time senior executives AND senior engineers flew across the Atlantic – or worse the Pacific – sitting in coach? In a center seat? Try it sometime. Perhaps the airlines need to institute a new TV show: Undercover Passenger Boss, when various CEOs and Senior VPs of airlines as well as senior engineers of the major aircraft manufacturers have to sit in terminals and suffer through hours of waiting, only to be loaded like cattle only to sit in crowded seats and be fed bad food, while trying to listen and watch a move on that same 3 x 5 inch flat screen.

I would suggest that the above problems might best be addressed by including these issues in the next design effort: how do you build an airplane that can comfortably load and unload from both ends simultaneously? If it is a ‘wide-body’ with double aisles, why can’t it be loaded and unloaded with four ramps? (Two on each side.) Why do we still load and unload baggage by hand? Isn’t there a possible solution using containers and some sort of tram system to insert the containers? Yes, I am aware that each of these issues would have cost consequences, and yes I know that Denver International tried and failed to install a high-speed luggage handling system and failed. The Wright Brothers failed several times. Maybe this might be worth the second effort.

And how about a mechanism that can automatically clean the toilets? They already exist in some cities around the world. There is something particularly unpleasant with walking into chemical toilets after 15 hours of use by several hundred people. I was in the military for the better part of 3 decades – but at least I wasn’t a paying customer when I had to use those various latrines and chemical toilets.

I might be tempted to excuse these events except that I saw them repeatedly played out in a number of different airports in the US, Europe and the Mid-East. And I have seen them before, though it now seems to be that these have all become common occurrences.

What can I infer from this? Most of the airlines are run by people concerned with, well, actually, I’m not sure. Certainly not building anything approaching brand loyalty. In fact, from the comments I heard – repeatedly, frequently, loudly - there are any number of people on three separate continents who have developed ‘brand hatred,’ as in “I will NEVER fly on XXXX again.” I thought one of the goals of any enterprise, especially a commercial enterprise, was to build a following. From what I have seen over the last 20 years, no one any longer enjoys commercial air travel. Actually, that’s not accurate: everyone strongly dislikes it, at best, and many, very many, hate it. We do it because we must. But we will switch to anything else if given half a chance. I now find I will drive nearly anywhere within about a 6 hour ride rather than fly, because I can’t stand the process and the agony. Nearly everyone I know – young and old – feels the same way.

The US is about to invest tens of billions of dollars in high-speed rail. This is a mistake, as passenger rail services – worldwide – are big money losers. Nevertheless, people will use it and endorse it, as costly as it will be, just to avoid having to deal with airports and airlines. Does anyone in airlines leadership worry about the real signal being sent here? Here’s a note to anyone holding any airline stock: the next time a proxy card comes around, vote ‘none of the above’ for any senior leadership positions.

It is also worth noting that the folks who run most of the airlines don’t seem terribly interested in profits. The same airlines seem to always be hitting their profit marks and the same ones keep hovering at break even, with routine dips into red ink. Yet the ones that are losing money don’t change their bad habits, but plunge on, occasionally merging with some other poorly run airlines.

Add on top of this the security folks – both in the US and abroad. In what can only be called the most bizarre and obscure reasoning, they all continue to modify procedures to make the process of getting to the gate ever more unpleasant. It is nice to know, however, that they have started profiling: so far, the only people I have seen who have been put through the full body scans or given extra pat-downs have either been in-shape men and women, or the very elderly. If you are young and in shape you seem to be on everyone’s list. But, at least it’s a start?

The point in all this is that there is no real leadership anywhere near the decision-making taking place in the airline industry. The folks who occupy the senior seats in that industry could be out-led by Elmer Fudd. The industry will stumble along because we all need it. But it will do so in spite of, rather than because of their individual and collective efforts. If you have any say in the leadership of the airline industry, I encourage you to push for some real leadership. Give me a call, I’ll run an airline at half the price you are paying your current CEO and I’ll do it better, not that that would be too hard.

Seek Forgiveness or Beg Permission?

2011-03-19T08:54:00.000-04:00

I have a friend who is engaged in a very particular type of activity as part of the Intelligence Community. This activity requires, by definition, particular types of behavior. My friend, who is quite a capable individual, recently came up with a novel approach to performing his duties. Without giving away any details, suffice it to say that his boss balked. In short, his boss was afraid that HIS boss might object (without ever asking, just an apparent ‘gut’ response) and so told my friend to stop his operation.

What can we learn from this?

First, the simple truth is that many people in positions of authority are more afraid of loss then they are desirous of success. Thus, they spend a fair amount of time making sure nothing goes wrong rather than trying to make something go right. The end result is that they stifle the creativity of those who work for them.

Avoiding mistakes is always one way to go through life, but it hardly ever satisfies anyone. And the truth is that virtually any plan has risks, even doing nothing. If you are satisfied in a bureaucratic cubbyhole you can choose the path of inaction and remain comfortable. But in every other case, you will find you must act and let those around you act. That will mean risk and you, as a leader, must learn to embrace that risk. Are there ways to mitigate risk? Certainly, through the selection of good people and the development of a decent planning process. But there will always be risk – if you want out of your cubbyhole.

Second, people in leadership positions who are afraid of new ideas will also usually be afraid of creative, aggressive people. In extreme cases they will extend this to the point of convincing themselves that their subordinates are plotting against them, trying to usurp their power and take their position.

Good leaders on the other hand encourage their people to experiment, to try new ways of ‘doing business,’ and will ‘run interference’ from higher up to ensure they have the freedom to try. Good leaders know that in any decent organization the top leadership will look into the ranks and when they see that bright, talented and creative folks keep popping up out of one particular office, they will reward the middle manager who is producing all the new talent.

If you find yourself at first a bit put-off by one of your subordinates ideas, ask for a detailed explanation – not a bunch of briefing slides, an explanation, face to face. Then ask yourself why you are uncomfortable. If it is technology, that’s your problem and no one else’s. You need to get smarter on technology. It is also the reason you have other people working for you: you can’t know everything. If you trust your people at all, you should let them try it.

If you are uncomfortable because you think something is against the rules – real or implied (whether the law, corporate ethics, or simply the rules your boss came up with), you should investigate a little before you say no. Is it really against the rules? If not, then let them try. If it clearly is against the rules, tell your people. I think you will be amazed at how hard they will work to find a legal way to do things.

What if it is in a gray area, not clearly against the rules, but it looks like parts of it may be? If you have a large organization it will have a legal support office of some sort. Go sit down with someone – face to face, not by e-mail – and see what the legal office thinks.

The point here is that your job as boss is to make things happen. So, when someone comes to you with an idea, your job is to figure out how to say “CHARGE!” It is most definitely not to say “WHOA!”

Alternatively, you can go back to your cubbyhole.

Third, great successes usually come from doing things differently. Doing the same thing over and over again, without change, will eventually lead to stagnation and then failure. The competition will eventually ‘figure it out’ and you will lose whatever advantage you once held.

But you will never come up with all the possible ways of doing things differently. That is what all those folks do who work for you. Some of those ideas may be a bit ‘off the reservation.’ Don’t throw out the idea. Instead, take a close look. See if there isn’t some way to ‘tweak’ the idea so that is can be used. Remember, your job as boss is to help those who work for you do the real work of your organization – in a very real sense you work for them.

There is an old saw that it is better to seek forgiveness than to beg for permission. Real progress – in any field – comes from doing things differently. And every time you do something differently someone somewhere is going to cry ‘Foul.’ The fact is that you have all sorts of people you can use to make sure you don’t break the law, without stifling creativity. By stimulating that creativity – and by sending the clear signal to your people that you will support them – you are going to get people to open their minds and explore new and better ways to use your technology, use your assets, and develop new solutions. And then when some naysayer whines about your new project you will find yourself standing in front of your boss saying “look at what my folks have done” and handing him the prize. If you had asked before hand it is just as likely he would have said ‘no.’ But if you bring success, seeking a little forgiveness for stretching the rules will seem a worthwhile effort.

Or you can climb back into your cubbyhole. The choice is yours.

Fundamentals - Intellect Part 1

2011-03-12T10:29:00.000-05:00

There are many dreamers and visionaries, and there are many managers. But one of the key traits that set real leaders apart from both is that the real leader builds a ‘path’ between the vision and the real world. Between crafting a vision and identifying a goal on the one hand and actually moving towards the full realization of that vision, lays the process of making the vision into something more than ‘pie in the sky.’ The central trait in turning the vision into reality is intellect.

But, you will say that intellect is something that you are born with. While you can pursue education, read the great books and surround yourself with smart people, in the end you aren’t going to make yourself smarter. My answer to that is an unequivocal yes and no.

It is quite true that you are born with certain mental abilities (IQ, whatever – I don’t want to argue about how to measure intellect, there are many ways, you may pick your favorite), but the key question is whether you can improve those elements in your intellect that would allow you to develop clearer goals and visions, as well as the means to achieve them? And the answer to both those questions is yes.

Creating Visions and Goals

The first issue is simply this: how do you develop a new vision? This may sound like an order to ‘come up with a new idea’ as if they are found on the new idea trees in the town square. But, in fact, there are several fairly simple processes that can be used to come up with new goals.

1 – Pump Up the Standards

Perhaps the most obvious means to come up with a new vision is to simply add to the old one. This sounds terribly obvious, but there are a fair number of folks in the world who seem to forget it when placed in a position of having to develop new goals. Simply put, if the organization is running well, and there are few strains to the system, and the environment does not seem to be changing into a threatening one, you can keep the organization moving forward by simply expanding on the existing goals. In short, just ‘aim higher.’ For a company, increasing your market goals while improving quality and reducing costs all provide viable goals. Those same type of ‘marks’ can be used for nearly any organization: a football team can win the Super Bowl and when pre-season conditioning begins the goal is to not only win the Super Bowl, but to go undefeated; for the defensive line to give up fewer yards, and to produce more quarterback sacks. For the offense it can be to score more points with fewer turnovers and a more balanced attack. Each player’s performance can be similarly dissected.

Such an approach, whether in sports or in sales or service or engineering performance or in any other area, can provide meaningful challenges and meaningful motivations to the people of the organization, and provide the added benefit that they aren’t disruptive to the organization.

2 – ‘Steal It’

This may sound a bit odd, but it is in fact more than likely that you will ‘steal’ your goals and vision from someone else. Simply put, its all been done before. One of the greatest leaders of all time – Alexander the Great – based his specific vision of a world empire ruled through merit, a meritocracy, from the teachings of his tutor – Aristotle. (It does help to have one of the smartest men of all time as your tutor). As a leader you should be constantly trying to ‘improve your game,’ and one of the best ways to do that is to read what other leaders have done and said; autobiographies and biographies are fertile hunting ground and should be under constant search.

There is a nearly limitless stream of commentary on the internet, as well as a wide range of professional journals in every possible profession, and the availability of books via the internet or via a book store or ordered on line should allow you to find a range of authors that strike a cord with you and from which you can pull ideas. This will take time, it is the study of a lifetime, but it is also an incredibly rich study.

3 – Ask the Right Question: What If?

The easiest way to explain this is with a short story, told to me by one of my math professors many years ago about one of the great mathematicians of the 19th century, a Russian named Viktor Bunyakovski (1804 - 1889). Bunyakovski was a brilliant guy (he submitted three different doctoral dissertations at the university in Paris in 1825, and over the period of his life he submitted more than 150 papers on various mathematics proofs and issues in mechanics.) In fact, he became somewhat famous for his reputation for producing a steady stream of new ideas. When asked how he did it, he reportedly responded that he simply asked the question ‘What if this equation were changed?’ His most noted work – known as the Cauchy-Schwarz-Bunyakovski inequality for the three different mathematicians who independently developed it – was begun when he put a simple equation on the board and asked the question: ‘what if a times b didn’t equal b times a?’

The point isn’t to make everyone a fan of higher order mathematics. Rather, the issue is to ask you to take all those things that you have been told in your field that are so, and question them. Take a look around your industry or your field. Write down all the commonly accepted “truths,” those remarks that might begin “Everyone says…” or “You can’t…” or “We will never…” Now, ask yourself what would happen if any one of those could be proven wrong.

4 – Eureka!

Keep a note pad handy. Leave one in your car, another by your bed, another in your jacket pocket. When a stray thought that seems to fit strikes you, don’t hesitate – write it down. Keep these ‘manna from heaven’ in a convenient pile at your desk and flip through them from time to time. Many will mean nothing, but some will rise to the surface. When they do, you will know it.

5 – Engage Your Trusted Friends, Your Kitchen Cabinet

Finally, talk to friends, particularly friends who aren’t in your ‘business,’ your type of work. What do they think? How do they see your world? What do they think is missing? They have a fresh and very real perspective that you and the people at work do not. You need to plug into that perspective.

This is the first part of what I mean by intellect.

Next: How do you turn the vision into tasks?

President Washington

2011-02-20T22:32:00.002-05:00

George Washington, Father of Our Country, is often recognized as being central to our winning our independence, and his role as the first president – and first precedence setter – is also recognized – at least by historians. But, in large part he has fallen into a limbo of ancient symbol, but not a man who is respected as essential figure of our nation's finding, and arguably, as the single irreplaceable man of the last three centuries. And there is no place where this forgotten role is more pronounced then in his role as the President of the Constitutional Convention.

The fact is that leadership – that is, those positions where an individual has real authority over others – is often written about. But in most cases those who right about it have had little or no first-hand experience with actual leadership, that is they have rarely had authority over other, they have rarely held power. This lack of a frame of reference has led to there being little in the way of leadership discussions in which the debilitating nature of power is discussed, or to any discussion which reflects the real difficulties faced by those who have held power and managed to – somehow – behave in a truly superior, exemplary manner, one which can be used as a precedent for future generations, nor finally the very real difficulty of leading exceptional people, particularly when the direction chosen is truly uncharted territory.

It is in this final situation that our young nation found itself following our victory in Revolutionary War. We had our independence, but the Articles of Confederation left us with little in the way of an effective government and the need to form a new government was recognized by the leaders of the day. Central to the very idea that a new government could be formed was the notion that George Washington would be available in some way to lend his support to that new government. And Washington wrote and spoke of the need for a strong executive, one that had been avoided in the Articles of Confederation. In fact, it is fair to say that the Constitutional Convention that met in Philadelphia would probably not have met at all if the participants did not include Washington. And while one might have eventually met, it would have been far different in fact.

What exactly transpired at the convention on a day-to-day basis has never been known, as the members kept private most specific word-for-word, day-to-day discussions – intentionally. Madison provided daily notes on the proceedings, and many of the members provided summations after the fact, and these provide a great deal of insight into the vigorous debates by the members. What is of particular note is that Washington's words were only noted once, in reference to representation in Congress and how to assign Congressman by census – an important point but not earth shattering.

But what is missed by most historians is what is not there: the convention did not come apart at the seams. This seems, at this date more than 220 years later, as a foregone conclusion. These were some of the greatest men who ever lived, and the names are a list of some of the truly most exceptional political thinkers – and leaders – of any era: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton – the list goes on.

But I look at the list of figures from a different perspective. Having been in the position of leading groups of very bright and very talented people (not to imply that anyone has ever had any other group as bright and as talented as those at the Constitutional Convention), particularly when we had to institute real change – where success would be difficult to define but failure would be easily identified, I submit that that can be as difficult a leadership task as one can imagine.

All of the men at the Constitutional Convention were brilliant, opinionated, strong-willed, and dynamic figures. All had in one way or another demonstrated that they could lead. All had very real concerns about where the young nation was headed and very real concerns about the laws, the foundation, on which it was to be built. All were aware that they were charting a course into 'seas' that had, in the previous 2500 years failed to produce any nation that had lasted more than a few generations. We have heard that leading is sometimes like 'herding cats.' But Washington was not herding cats. He was, if anything herding a room full of tigers.

And from this came the single most remarkable political document ever drafted, the model for virtually every constitution drafted since, and the foundation of the greatest nation in history.

I cannot but wonder what would have happened if George Washington had not been sitting with them, listening, providing the firm hand and fatherly guidance, the stern face and, rarely, the sharp word in private, that would have been absolutely essential to bring these brilliant men together. Yet there is in that behavior the very thing that would have prevented any of these men from writing about it. There own dignity, and Washington's, and their respect for Washington, would have forbidden any recognition of it. It was enough for them all to simply remember that Washington had been there, that in the end they had performed well and received his approval.

Washington performed in three truly remarkable leadership rolls: as the General who brought victory over the British, as the President of the Constitutional Convention, and as the first – and most important – President of this nation. The first and third are, at least, remembered in passing, though we forget just how 'close run a thing' both the war and the first few decades really were. But we have all but forgotten his role as the man who presided over the Constitutional Convention, an act of leadership that I submit rivals the other two.

In our minds' eye we might see them, brilliant, pointed debate moving around the room, sometimes rancorous, sometimes threatening to stall on this or that point, whether from legal interpretation or regional predilection, but always moving forward, producing a document that would not only be approved by the separate states, but would also produce a nation that has survived longer then any other true democracy in history, and has proven that government of, by and for the people is possible. And at the head table sits Washington, the silent conductor of the convention.

February 22nd is the 279th anniversary of George Washington. Happy Birthday Mr. President.

Fundamentals - Goals and Vision Part 2

2011-02-07T16:58:00.000-05:00

In the previous article I said that every major company today faces failure of their vision in the long run. To understand the reason for that, let’s look at the start of a vision:

One of the great curiosities about vision is that, with very few exceptions, the great visions are almost always the “children” of older men. I have mentioned a few exceptions – Microsoft, Apple, Ford – but most of the great visions are from people in their 50’s.

Why? Because a vision must have substance before it can be accepted by anyone other than its creator. Because it takes time to integrate the various issues and possibilities until they come together and offer a new reality. What you will often find is that many of these visions are really the “children” of several parents. Thus, while the Wright Brothers saw the way to make powered, heavier than air flight, a host of people had spoken of the idea for, literally, centuries, and in their own time quite a few inventors, to include Cayley, Lilienthal, Langley, Chanute, and Maxim had pursued a host of engineering solutions to the problem. The Wright’s had the engineering vision to produce the solution, but, arguably, the vision of flight existed well before them and they adopted that great vision as theirs. The vision of flight had arguably been ‘maturing’ for thousands of years. (The legend of Daedalus and Icarus is 2500 years old.) In the case of McDonalds, how old was Ray Kroc when he bought the hamburger stand in 1961? -- 52 (Died in 1984 at 82)

And take a look at their competitor of the early 1960’s: Howard Johnson’s: Howard Johnson's had been started in 1925 in Massachusetts by Howard Johnson, and by the mid-1960s its sales exceeded Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald's combined. There would eventually be more than 1,000 Howard Johnson restaurants and 500 motor lodges. But, after Johnson's death in 1972, the company lost its raison d'etre. The restaurants became obsolete; the food quality deteriorated.

Meanwhile, Ray Kroc's obsession on Quality, Service, Cleanliness and Value — the fixed criteria of control of McDonald's--was gathering momentum. Kroc identified a real trend in the US, a nation where people wanted to eat out, not at home. He also saw an opportunity for change away from old restaurants and he created that new way to eat – the fast food restaurant where you ate with your hands, with inexpensive food, served quickly by friendly people.

Kroc gave people what he ‘knew’ they really wanted. He said, "The definition of salesmanship is the gentle art of letting the customer have it your way." He was McDonald’s real lead salesman and Public Relations officer, and was the chairman from 1968 until 1984.

Another Ray Kroc quote is instructive: "I was 52 years old. I had diabetes and incipient arthritis. I had lost my gall bladder and most of my thyroid gland in earlier campaigns, but I was convinced that the best was ahead of me." Obviously, as he paid $2.7 million to the McDonalds Brothers in 1961. Two years later he opened his 500th restaurant.

Now, Ray Kroc died in 1984, and while the company is still doing well in a number of countries, McDonald's being found in over 100 countries, arguably it has gone through a number of struggles. Part of that reason, I would suggest, is just what happened with Howard Johnson’s – the guy with the real vision is no longer there to keep the vision alive, to tweak it, to refresh it, to keep it fresh and real. They have had good managers and the company has a great deal of assets and an excellent market position. But, will it survive without a real vision? That will be dependent on the development and refinement of a new vision, one with real substance. (I would, by the way, recommend you read about Ray Kroc, because he was a fascinating guy who did address many of the issues we face today in business leadership or any leadership. I suggest you read an article about Kroc by the chef Jacques Pepin for Time Magazine, it’s a good place to start.)

To make that point again, take a look at how many aircraft production and aircraft engine production companies existed in the 1930’s and 1940’s. How many remain today? These were huge firms, but they lost their way when leadership changed.

There are a few exceptions to this, but they are remarkable mostly because there are so few. We all know that interesting statistic that there is only one company – GE – that has been on the DJIA since the average began. All those other ‘great companies’ have folded or been absorbed, etc.

While it is not my point to get into lectures on any specific corporation, take a look at the incredible history of Boeing, how the leadership was a very narrow group of folks up until the mid-1980’s, a vision passed from one long-time believer to another; and how they have had some hard times as they have adjusted their vision since the early 1990’s. Boeing recently regained its vision as a great maker of aircraft, and is doing very well. Their survival for the next 20 years or so seems certain.

A final point about visions: they must be narrowly focused. Ronald Reagan may have seen a future world without communism, with everyone free and living in some type of western style democracy, with a great deal of private enterprise, and reduced trade barriers and low taxes, etc., etc. But, what he talked about was freedom. Henry Ford talked about cars. Ford may have bought iron mines and steel smelters, but the point was cars. Microsoft writes software. Microsoft doesn’t compete with Intel and try to make ships, Intel doesn’t write software, Dell doesn’t make either software or chips. The vision is necked down because you can manage a narrow vision. If your company is trying to do 5 things at once, you will, almost to a certainty, do most of them poorly. Your core will probably continue to perform well, but the rest will not.

In conclusion, focus on your vision. Work on it, massage it, and remember to let it mature, like wine. Also, don’t be afraid to ‘steal’ your vision. Perhaps the greatest icon of leadership in the ancient world – Alexander the Great – ‘stole’ his vision of a world empire based with leadership based on merit from his tutor. That his tutor happened to Aristotle and encouraged him in this ‘theft’ was beneficial. For those of us who can’t have the benefit of one of the perhaps ten great minds of all time as a tutor and mentor, we can get around that by reading and listening; the ideas are out there already. “All” you need to do is find the right idea, the right goal and redirect it.

Fundamentals - Goals and Vision Part 1

2011-02-05T15:26:00.000-05:00

We have mentioned that the goal is the first and most important element of all leadership. The goal, which is really a restatement of the vision of the leader into a specific aim point, is central, and all else flows from the goal. And the goal, the specific ‘aim-point,’ is the child of the leader’s vision. The two – the vision and the goal – must be viewed as opposite sides of the same thing. Remember, we are not talking about insipid ‘vision’ statements that use obscure and high-sounding but meaningless terms that confuse the members of the organization and leave to everyone wondering what’s next. The vision is just that, the image of the organization – in the future - that the leader has created. The goal (or goals) is (are) a specific mark that the leader has developed that represents a concrete element of his vision.

All real leaders have a vision. The vision can be fairly simple, but it has to be significant, it must point to a new reality. This is the problem with the so-called mission and vision statements that everyone has drawn up: they are often either not a vision of a new reality, or they simply aren’t significant. Don’t misunderstand me: this isn’t easy.

What is Vision?

So, what do we mean when we call for vision? Simply, it is when someone “sees” a future, a real picture – inside his head – of how the world, or, at least his corner of it, should look. Now, we all have images in our heads of how we would like things to look, we see ourselves on a large sailboat or in a castle in the south of France, even in the White House. But, a real vision isn’t about us, it’s about a new world around us. It’s about a better way of living, whether it’s a new way for people to move around – think of Henry Ford and the idea that everyone is going to own automobiles, or the guys at both Apple and Microsoft and the idea that everyone will have a computer. They “see” a new reality, and then they go about creating it.

Now, what is interesting is that these visions are usually marked by one of two boundaries: either bounded in scope or in scale. By that I mean that, whether it was the automobile or the personal computer, or any other specific vision, the leader, the visionary, didn’t try to control the vision. Ford didn’t try to see, and hence form, the vision much beyond the idea that everyone owns a car. He didn’t attempt to formulate or influence the oil industry or the gasoline distribution infrastructure, he didn’t try to create an interstate freeway system, he didn’t try to form any of the secondary industries that were the offspring of the automobile (motels, fast-food restaurants, the suburbs, etc., etc.), and arguably his vision was adjusted when GM became the first car company to offer financing, thus ensuring a continuous flow of money and assuring long term flows of money. Certainly, as those industries developed he was aware, took note of and adjusted his vision. In a similar way, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and all those guys, did not try to drive a vision that included E-Bay or the internet or real estate on line or medical records being passed from hospital to hospital by computer and thus saving lives, or all of the ‘dot Coms.’ They have both adjusted their product lines as these various industries have developed, but they focused on their own specific vision, and let the rest of the new reality develop around them.

Which leads to the first rule of visions: they must be bounded by scope. Even in politics, the vision must have boundaries. President Reagan wanted to end communism, he also wanted to recast the economic dialogue in terms of supply side economics, and while the two are linked in many ways, he moved forward on both, but kept each separate. Trying to manage both as an integrated whole would not only have raised the level of complexity beyond all understanding, it would have placed both at risk.

The second rule of vision is that you must be bound by scale, or complexity. Now, what I mean by that is complexity down, not up. Don’t get too mired in detail. Vision requires that you have a long-term picture, and a faith, a confidence that smaller obstacles will be addressed in time, dealt with and passed. The small obstacles must be dealt with, the vision can be adjusted along the margins, but don’t let the problems of today change the essence of that vision.

But, let me repeat, the vision is bound down, not up. Not only will getting mired in the details kill the vision, but making the vision too small, too simple will make the vision unsustainable. To fly, to make airplanes that can carry people around the planet, or a host of other things, these are issues that can stir a heart. And, these become visions that people can easily adopt as their own and support. It is the lesser issues which, in the end, are sometimes the most difficult to promote, and which can require the most out of the leader. But, if the Wright Brothers tried to resolve the issue of eminent domain and road networks to support airports, as part of their quest for flight, they’d never have made it out of Ohio.

Let me give you a few more examples: Leading a platoon of riflemen into a fire-fight, at least in a democracy, can be, in a very real sense, easy. That is because we all know that the reason we are fighting is not to satisfy the whim of a dictator. The reason that a young Marine picks up his weapon and charges into the building full of bad-guys is that he truly believes that he is defending freedom and making the world safer for those he loves, as well as fighting for his buddies. If you want to talk about self-actualization, there it is. In fact, the average Marine rifleman joined the Marines for that very reason, irrespective of what recruiters or senior officers might say to him about health-care benefits or retirement or whatever. That young Marine is functioning at the very top end of Maslow’s hierarchy. As a result, he often needs little in the way of leadership, once he’s been trained and pointed in the right direction. And that is also why a young Marine or Soldier, after he gets out of the Marines or Army, always looks back on his time in the service with such a sense of longing: because he reached something that every member of mankind seeks his entire life—self-actualization. He peaked and he knows it, at least sub-consciously. He was working to achieve something great, something truly beyond himself. Wow! He is, in the strictest of senses, a lucky man.

Another example is a fighter pilot. He not only is defending freedom, he gets to do it while being revered as one of the most romantic figures of modern time, and he does it while getting to strap-on a $50 million dollar airplane and race around the sky. Again, Wow!

On the other hand, how do we motivate someone to help you make a better hamburger? Or, more difficult still, not to make a better hamburger - it’s not a gourmet restaurant - but how about making a McDonald’s cheeseburger? I suggest that the motivational issue there is as difficult as it gets.

Let’s take a look at that problem: by way of example, McDonalds is a great organization, and I love their food. As one gourmet chef recently said, there are some things he doesn’t try to do because he feels they have already been perfected, and pointed at McDonalds French Fries as an example of something that is about as good as it gets. I agree.

But, look at what McDonalds says about themselves: they want to be the best quick service restaurants in the world and the best employer in any community in which they operate. Those are OK visions, But… The fact is that, for the average worker, that is pretty difficult to get fired up about. One of them isn’t even about you, you’re not the employer, you’re the employee. And, as for being the best quick service restaurant, does that really motivate? So, I would suggest that, for starters, the folks like McDonalds, particularly now that they are well into a period of sustainment, sustaining market share, increasing here and there, but not being able to benefit emotionally from a period of explosive growth, are going to need to come up with a new vision if they are going to survive.

Let me repeat that: they need a new vision or they will – in the long run – fail. Not that they are alone in this regard; this is a problem faced by every major (and minor) company today – GE, Apple, AT&T, Exxon – you name it.

Fundamentals - Six Essential Elements

2010-12-20T14:29:00.000-05:00

The means to lead, to build followers, is to motivate them, to connect your goals to their goals, to - in the end – convince them to adopt your goal as their goal. But the question is How? What steps and tools are needed by any and every leader if he is to do just that? We will briefly discuss that below, but to begin, it is worth remembering that this is a learned process. There are any number of people who will tell you that leaders are born, not made, that this or that figure is or was a ‘natural leader.’ In fact, I would submit that, with the exception of those endowed with certain athletic skills – and therefore ‘fall’ into a narrowly defined leadership role in sports – there is no such thing as a natural leader.*

Those in the past born into royal families, or those today born into rich or politically powerful families, benefit from the reality of their position – if you are the prince you are de facto a leader; but whether good or bad, effective or ineffective remains to be seen. Those in rich or powerful families will certainly benefit from the education that their parents can provide them, as well as the position provided by their wealth. At the same time, the history of poor, even completely ineffective leaders - despite the fortunes of birth - is long and tortured. Whether it is the history of royal families that failed to develop competent leaders, or political families that withered or industrial families that ran out of business acumen, it is probable that more people fail with the benefit of a fortuitous birth then those who succeed. Nevertheless, they all may benefit from the experiences of growing up exposed to a wide range of leadership and leadership-related events from which they will develop their leadership skills. They may also benefit from developing, early in life, the confidence to act on their experience and intellect, when others of similar age, intellect and experience might not.

But, in the end, the underlying characteristics remain the same, whether or not they have been developed over long periods of time, with or without the benefit of a fortuitous birth. Whether a good and great leader or an evil one, there are certain traits that all had that aided them in building followers. Here they are:

The Goal

Intellect

Communication

Morals and Character

Decision-making

Charisma

Let’s examine each briefly. Each will be discussed in great detail in future articles.

The Goal

The Goal is the clear statement of where the organization is headed. It can be grand or simple, but to be successful it must first of all be clear. Two examples of well stated goals are: President Kennedy’s ‘We intend to put a man on the moon and return him safely to earth before the end of the decade,’ and General Marshall’s order to General Eisenhower ‘You will enter the continent of Europe and destroy Germany’s war-making capability.’

Both goals are clear, concise, leave little room for ambiguity and yet a wide range for exactly how each is accomplished. Note also that very large and very complex goals can be stated in a single, simple sentence.

Note also that there was no confusion with a ‘vision’ statement. Vision is a subset of the organization’s Goal and reflects more the ‘how’ of getting someplace then the actual goal. When the ‘how’ is simplified it usually results in confusing and conflicting statements. Thus the manic posting of Goals and Vision statements around countless thousands of organizations during the past several decades was usually counter-productive. The Goal is the concrete aim of the organization; the Vision becomes an emotional statement of the ethos and behavior of the organization as it strives to reach that goal. The two are inextricably wound together. If they are not, both will unravel with exceptional speed. But, in the end, the greatest clarity for the people of any organization is a clear and simply stated goal, tied to a comprehensive series of communications from the leadership that will lay out the precepts and ethos of the organization in a comprehensive manner. If that is done properly, the goal will remain clear, and the vision for the organization will become clear to every member of the organization in his own words. This is much more difficult then drafting a simplistic ‘vision’ statement that is usually both confusing and at cross-purposes to the goal.

We have all walked into some company and read a goal statement to the effect that XYZ Corporation will become the #1 Widget manufacturer world wide in 5 years. Then we read a vision statement that XYZ Corporation wants: ‘an empowered work force that is a positive force in its community, and the manufacturers of the finest widgets in the world.’ This leads to a simple question: what is the real goal? Being the manufacturer of the most widgets in the world may actually preclude XYZ from making the best (Rolls Royce and Mercedes-Maybach are never going to be the producers of the most vehicles in a year; Toyota, Honda or GM will never make the best cars on the road.) How is an empowered work force consistent with the goal? It may be, but it may not be. That would be a function of the specific manufacturing process, as well as the nature of widgets: Is it a very precise device that must be manufactured to very high tolerances, or it is a low rate of production device that is tailored for each consumer? Is it a service that is unique to each customer or a simple, low cost service provided to millions? Each of those would suggest different levels of empowerment in the work force. This is true in virtually every type of situation: a military force may be trained for both strict obedience and for innovation, improvisation and decision-making; knowing when one is required and not the other is a complex issue not easily communicated with two sentences posted on the wall.

Intellect

It isn’t necessary that every leader be an Einstein, but it important that the leader is smart enough to understand the ‘business’ they are in and the environment within which they are operating. This is true in even the simplest sense: sports figures who lead on the field always have a better understanding of the game they are playing – specifically and generally – then do their teammates.

And even though they may not have superb verbal communication skills, their ability to communicate with, and hence lead their teammates through other, non-verbal means is usually superb. Great sports figures often ‘see’ the game they are playing in a different way then their teammates, they have a deeper understanding of the game.

Communication

Communication is everything. Remember those words. If you can’t communicate your ideas you have no hope of succeeding in anything that takes more than one person acting alone. Whether you are trying to get a date for the prom, buy a car, manage a McDonalds or lead the invasion of Europe, if you cannot communicate effectively – accurately and in a timely manner – you will not succeed. The specifics of this skill will vary from job to job, from task to task, but the essence is the same: you must know how to communicate effectively.

Character and Moral Courage

You have to believe that your goal is worthy: if you don’t, no one else will. And you must have the intestinal fortitude, the ‘spine,’ to stand up and say so. For some, even some of history’s great leaders, this is something that they constantly worked on, they constantly ‘screwed themselves up’ before every appeal for support. But you must have this belief. If you don’t you will be found out and your goal will vanish.

Decision-Making

Mediocre leaders are separated from good and great leaders by their decision-making ability. No one is born with the ability to make good decisions. This is a purely learned skill. And the learning involves three pieces: actually making decisions, reviewing those decisions, and drawing conclusions from the review for use in future decisions. Many people have the first piece: experience in making decisions; few review their decisions; even fewer engage in detailed deconstruction to figure out what worked, what didn’t and why. The great leaders all do these three things.

Charisma

If we define a geek as someone who is interested in only one thing, joyously, fanatically interested in that one thing, then all great leaders are all geeks. The difference of course is what that one thing might be: Bobby Orr loves hockey, Michael Jordan loves basketball. One suspects they could sit and talk about their game from dawn to dusk without losing their energy about the game. That energy, that emotion, that passion is infectious. Great leaders all have passion for their ‘game,’ and they communicate their passion in everything they do. One might even say that the great leaders never work, because they are only doing what their passion calls them to do. For those people getting up in the morning and getting back ‘in the ring’ is the love of their life. When they communicate that to their followers - that is charisma.

* Great sports figures in fact are constant testimony to the idea that no one is simply born a great anything. Great sports figure - Bobby Orr, Michael Jordan, Manny Pacquiao, David Backham, and a hundred more – these are invariably the hardest working athletes in their sport. The great athletes don’t assume a natural ability and rest on it, the great athletes recognize a natural ability and then work twice as hard as everyone else to develop that ability. The same is true of other great performers: Perlman, Nureyev, Pavarotti, etc.

Fundamentals - How to Build Followers

2010-09-23T17:41:00.002-04:00

Earlier, we finished with a question: how do leaders ‘build’ followers? The answer is simple, in the sense of the vaudeville line that to make the statue of David all Michelangelo had to do was take a large block of marble and chip away everything that didn’t look like David.

Building followers is, in that sense, very ‘simple:’ it requires nothing more than convincing others to adopt your goals. As Ray Kroc said of leadership (and his hamburgers) the trick was ‘to convince others to have it my way.’ How you go about that convincing is the essence of leadership.

History is full of stories of leaders, but many of them provide little in the way of insight as to exactly what they did to build their followers. Motivating others is, much like carving marble, fairly easily stated: find out what gets someone energized, figure out how to relate that to your goal, and then communicate your goal and show how achieving your goal brings them to their goal as well. Eventually, your goal will become their goal. And at that point you will find leading those people is no longer required, they are, in a sense, on their own, self-motivated, self-actuated. Pretty Simple!

And as ‘simple’ as it is to so motivate just one person (if you have ever had to motivate someone you know hard it can be), how can you possibly motivate hundreds, even thousands of people, particularly when you often can’t even hope to come into direct contact with them all?

The answer, the one that virtually every great leader has come upon, is that you must create a goal that you can ‘sell’ to those you would make your followers. You must establish a goal and then find a small team, at first just one or two, later perhaps a dozen, and show them, in any way possible, that they should adopt your goal as their goal. You begin by connecting their own goals with your goal, and you end by ‘converting’ them, and your goal becomes their goal; you need to make them ‘believers.’ Very successful people invariably have a small group of assistants/followers that often come across as more committed then the boss to his goal. This is essential. Because their job is to spread the message. They have to ‘believe’ so that they can go out and recruit more followers.

But this all gets back to how do you actually motivate others? In a very real sense, you can only convince people one at a time. Leaders must learn to communicate in such a way that it come across that they are speaking to each person individually. That is a learned trait. It begins with the future leader learning to communicate, and connect, one-on-one. You often hear people, followers, say that ‘I felt like he was talking just to me’ or words to that effect. That effect is essential, particularly when you have moved beyond the first ten or twelve followers and find yourself speaking to, and trying to motivate, hundreds or thousands of people. But, to convince someone else to accept a new goal – your goal - as their goal, you still have to understand their motivations and then be able to connect achieving your goal with their motivations. And that begins by understanding the people to whom you are speaking. You must find common, underlying motivations and then develop your message so that it touches upon those basic, fundamental motivations.

But, to return to the beginning, building followers begins with an initial cadre, usually just one or two people, who are usually close associates and friends. These are people who you know well and with whom you already have rapport. In a very real sense, these are people who are already ‘on board;’ for example, your deputy. Your deputy, even before you tell him your specific goals, wants the organization to succeed. But you have the opportunity to spend considerable time with your deputy, explaining your goal and vision, receiving feedback and adjusting your ‘message’ and connecting with him so that your goal becomes his goal.

Make no mistake, you need to spend this time. You need to create ‘another you,’ someone else (and then two or three) who can provide insight and detailed guidance to support the goal even when you are not available. And despite an already existing rapport, making someone this committed a follower will take more time than you think. You need to be certain that the first few followers think as you think, speak as you speak.

And then you must spend the time to refine your message. Eventually, you must be able to connect your goal to the common threads, the everyday motivations of all the people who work for and with you, the rank and file, the citizenry. And to do that you must understand them. You must spend the time to understand those who work for you and those who you wish to lead. Once you understand them, connecting your goal to their goals will become ‘simple.’

Fundamentals of Leadership

2010-08-17T11:23:00.000-04:00

This is the first in a series of articles about the very basics of leadership. There are literally thousands of books on leadership, and untold numbers of articles on the subject – in magazines, on the net, in newspapers and letters. Each claims to have a special understanding on the subject. But from what I have seen few have talked to that which is in common among all leaders.

From the first time men banded together certain people have stepped forward and provided direction, guidance – Leadership – to the group. What was it that allowed these leaders to develop and sustain those followers? For no leader really acts alone. Rather, he takes those around him and turns them into his followers. What is the essence of that relationship? And once we have identified it, what can we learn from it? That is the purpose of the articles I will be posting over the course of the next year or so.

We will begin with a simple question: What is Leadership?

The question is simple enough, but in the real world the answer gets fuzzy, and quickly. In the simplest sense a leader is someone who guides. But, there are many types of guidance: the high-school kid stocking shelves in the supermarket gives us guidance to find the cereal, the cross-walk guard gives us guidance to slow our car, the accountant gives us guidance on how to fill out our tax return. No one would really consider these figures to be ‘leaders.’ Perhaps more to the point, our priest or minister or rabbi gives us guidance, both spiritual and practical, on how to live a better life. In most cases we may consider, to borrow a phrase from the good book, that he is the ‘shepherd to his flock,’ but still, we often forget religious figures when we try to quantify leadership.

This is unfortunate as there are a good number of exceptional leadership figures among religious communities just within the last 50 years. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rev Billy Graham, and Pope John Paul II to name just three men who had and still have huge impact on the course of our nation and the world. As I will discuss later, each of these men, in fact, embodied each of the traits that constitute the fundamentals of leadership.

Nevertheless, the distinction in the type of leadership leaves the question unanswered. Spiritual leadership may be at one and the same time the easiest and most difficult leadership problem; easiest in the sense that we are all searching for spiritual answers and are therefore receptive to well crafted messages; difficult in the sense that true spiritual answers have a difficult task fighting against the material world. That a spiritual leader has no reward to give you – at least in this world – presents an interesting challenge that we will discuss later.

But to return to the question at hand, what is leadership? Certainly the definition offered above doesn’t inform our search a great deal. So, we will refine the definition: Leadership is the ‘building’ of followers to achieve the goal (or goals) of the leader.

The reason I use the term ‘building,’ as will become more clear as we proceed, is that the leader is never finished with his followers, as if once they are ‘on his team’ he doesn’t need to commit any effort to keeping them as committed followers. To the contrary, history has shown that in every case the overwhelming percentage of followers need to be continually reenergized by the leader. Leaders who fail to do that quickly fail as leaders. This is true whether you are running a nation, a large corporation or a small auto-body shop with 4 employees.

But there is some objection to this definition of leadership. What about those jobs and careers where the followers – the workers – are already motivated? For example, policemen, firemen, soldiers and other military: even if their leadership is poor (or even absent or dead) they will continue to ‘execute the mission’ even at great risk to themselves.

What I have found is that in institutions of long duration, established to fulfill a clear need of some group (whether a town, a nation or some other group) derive their goals from the founders of the institution, and build ‘followership’ from the goals and values of the institution. Real leadership in these organizations is not only not usually present at the top of the organization, it’s not really needed. A police force can accomplish its mission and achieve its goal – a safe, secure and still free community – without any senior leadership figure. Instead, the goals are provided by the community and understood by the police officers before they even became policemen. The motivations are provided by the officers with little need for further reinforcement.

This is not to say that these organizations won’t benefit from good leadership at the top, it is only meant to say that the organizations will survive and might even thrive without senior leadership. This is because the senior leaders are not necessary to provide the clarity of goals or the intellect to achieve those goals nor are they necessary to build and maintain the motivation within the ‘rank and file.’ The goals are well known, the missions and tasks are clear, and the ‘followers’ are all motivated. All further leadership responsibilities can be met by middle and junior level leaders. This is true irrespective of the size of the institution, whether a small police force, a volunteer fire department in rural America, or the US Army. Thus we see in the military that the hard leadership challenges, and the best leaders, are found not among the generals and admirals, but among the Gunnery Sergeants and Sergeants First Class, the folks who have to train and motivate the troops to actually execute the mission.

We will return to the question of leadership in large, enduring institutions later in our discussion. But for now, let’s assume this definition of leadership:

Leadership is the ‘building’ of followers to achieve the goal (or goals) of the leader. Now the question is this: how do leaders build followers?

Focus

2010-07-13T06:55:00.002-04:00

You may have read an article the other day in which the Administrator of NASA said that the President had given him three tasks. In and of itself, giving an organization three tasks to achieve simultaneously is a risky thing, even if the three tasks are mutually supportive. The fact is that any organization, no matter how well led, will have a hard time focusing on three tasks at the same time. As a rule, a single goal is better then two, and two are better than three. Some few organizations can manage four goals simultaneously but they are rare, and exceptionally well led. Any organization with five or more goals might just as well not have any goals, and if it reaches any of them it is more through serendipity then the actions of the leadership.

But, in this particular case, the job given to the Administrator were so unrelated to what one normally considers to be the purview of NASA as to guarantee that those missions normally assigned to NASA – the US manned space program and exploration and exploitation of space – are certain to suffer. (Of course, the President’s Press Secretary has now informed the world that the Administrator was misinformed – so goes politics.)

The specific tasks given (or not, if the Press Secretary is to be believed) by the President are not bad: re-inspire children study science and math; expand NASA’s international relationships; and third, to reach out to the Muslim world.

The first is certainly something that the Department of Education should pursue, and from which the Department might receive public support from NASA and the various scientists and Astronauts. The second is again something that NASA might work as an adjunct to other US international relationships, via the State Department as well as DOD, and others. The third would appear to be something that is almost exclusively a State Department issue.

What is of issue here, apart from any political issues, is simply that it misdirects an organization. The NASA Administrator has been tasked to do three things that will necessarily consume significant portions of his time if he is to take seriously the directive of the President. Doing so precludes him from devoting the necessary leadership time to a series of pressing issues that NASA must deal with.

The lesson here is simple but painful. You as the leader have to show real discipline and provide real clarity. This is particularly true if you are leading a large organization with a wide range of subordinate offices or divisions. Whenever you speak you need to remember that when you speak you are giving strategic direction, and can easily whipsaw an organization from one set of goals to another. Your job is to provide focus and, within the context of a given division’s mission, a degree of stability that allows planning and effort.

A given set of goals may be near and dear to your heart. But you need to make sure that the words you are saying are related to the department you are addressing. Telling the general manager of your baseball team that cancer must be cured is at best confusing. If the general manager comes away from that meeting with a confused notion as to what his real job is – you are the one who got it wrong – not him.

New Leaders, particularly those with little leadership who are thrust into senior leadership position, will be tempted to get ‘everybody onto every bus’ and have everyone focused on ‘the big thing.’ That’s ok. But when the ‘Big Thing’ becomes 5 and then 10 and then 15 ‘Big Things’ the result is an unraveling of both the organization and ‘the Big Thing.’ It is both a common mistake and usually a disastrous one.

In most organizations, and particularly large one, there will always be those elements that aren’t contributing directly to this or that issue. That’s all right. Don’t attempt, like Cinderella’s Sisters, to make the shoe fit when it really can’t. In the original story Cinderella’s sisters actually maimed themselves, cutting their feet up with carving knives in failed efforts to make their feet fit the slipper. Don’t let your various departments do the same because they are responding to your poor direction.

Your job as leader is to provide focus for the entire organization, those one or two ‘Big Things’ that will define the organization. But you must also provide focus for those elements that don’t necessarily support those main goals.* In doing so, it is your job to provide clear goals that are consistent with the make-up of that particular agency. If you fail to do so you will at best generate controversy, and a good deal of discontent. And not a lot of progress.

* In some organizations these other offices or agencies have goals that are so different that they may warrant being separated from the others, either sold off or simply split into a separate company. Obviously, that is not possible in the Federal government.

A Lesson Learned

2010-06-29T13:20:00.000-04:00

There are a few things we can all learn from the recent firing of General McChrystal, some ‘truths’ about leaders and their interaction with their staffs and others.

First, a leader always needs to know what his central message is. So does his immediate staff. So, sell the message. Sure, you may like the old days when you were a: (fill in the blank) fighter pilot, punch-press operator, traveling salesman, etc. You aren’t any more. You’ve been promoted. Leadership, particularly senior leadership, is about communicating the goal, and the strategy to get there. That is your job. Your staff’s job is to facilitate that. Focus on the message.

Second, Don’t fall off message. If you are trying to keep a diverse group of folks together you can’t say disparaging things about them, no matter how far away you are, no matter how obscure the connection. In fact, you shouldn’t even say disparaging things in front of your staff or your personal secretary. Instead, always strive to be as professional as possible. Even if your strategic partner is a mess, don’t say it in public. If it needs to be discussed, discuss it with those who absolutely need to know, and no one else. Remember what your mother told you: if you can’t say something good about someone, don’t say anything. So, keep it professional and analytic.

Third, Expect the press to do their job. If a reporter is walking around your organization – factory floor, ship, whatever – don’t expect that any story that comes out will be sugarcoated because you gave him your time for a few days and a coffee mug with the corporate logo. Reporters are supposed to find stories. Expect them to do so.

Fourth, Look the part. You’ve all heard the line ‘don’t let ‘em see you sweat.’ Well, in fact the line should be ‘only let ‘em see what you want them to see.’ The simple truth is that great ideas can be undermined by the proponent, the leader, being seen as silly or cynical or a hypocrite, whether that is the truth or not.

Fifth, Your Staff Reflects You. Machiavelli (a hard but accurate observer of power and those who wield it) observed that a ‘Prince is known by his counselors.’ If you are a bright guy and you hire a jackass for a close assistant, maybe you aren’t so bright. Be careful whom you put on your staff; make certain you can trust them, and at the same time, always work to ‘raise their game.’ If you ‘let your hair down’ so will they; if you are sloppy, literally or intellectually, they will become sloppy as well. Pick the best staff you can, but always seek to improve your staff.

Sixth, Make sure every position is filled. No one starts the baseball season without a full bullpen. One of the glaring gaps in the article about Gen. McChrystal, and all the articles and discussions that followed, is that nation-building is not a mission of the military. It isn’t even a mission of the state department. Rather, if we are to be successful, it is a mission of the entire government. The glaring omission in all of the discussions about Gen. McChrystal and Afghanistan is that there is no mention of the lack of presence of all the other team members. Where are the people who might help Afghanistan with energy, agriculture, water and roads, sewerage treatment in the cities and towns? Are there people working on each of these? Yes. But at the senior staff level what you see is a large number of soldiers, a smaller number of retired soldiers, and a few career foreign service members. The senior staff needs to reflect the full breadth and depth of the problem in order to ensure that the planning and execution also reflect the full breadth and depth of the problem. That is as true in Afghanistan as it is in any other organization.

Last, a leader is always ‘on.’ Time and again in the article about Gen. McChrystal we are provided examples of the General making various gestures or comments to members of his staff. Certainly, some of the men who work for him are old friends. In most cases that behavior is only acceptable if it were just between the two men, or within a very small, intimate circle of friends. It is certainly not acceptable when the reporter was present or when they are outside the office or hotel room. The fact of the matter is that the leader – general, president, CEO, etc. – is always ‘on.’ Every word, every act, every facial expression will be read by someone, and passed along – for good or ill. If you are confident and upbeat all the time, that will come across. If you are convinced that you are in a hopeless position, that will come across. To say, ‘well, I was just sitting and thinking,’ or ‘I had a bad night’ is meaningless. The message is already ‘sent.’ The leader sends messages all day, every day.

You need to decide what messages you want to send and then live that every moment you are out of the house or on the phone. You must always be on.

Being Responsible

2010-06-24T15:48:00.002-04:00

Being in charge means being responsible.

While politicians routinely blame their predecessor for all sorts of things, the fact is that, at best such behavior is childish. While it is true that no matter how hard you try you can’t change everything immediately, the minute you take over, take ‘command,’ you are responsible. The bigger the organization you are in, the longer it will take for you to ‘turn it around.’ But no matter how large, you are the one who is responsible. Even in the case of a President taking over a country in a recession, once he is President he is immediately responsible for changing the trend lines. He cannot end the recession, but he can change how long we are in the recession and what the economy looks like when we recover.

More to the point, a leader is supposed to be concerned about the future, not the past. Looking for someone to blame after you take charge is childish enough and wastes energy; it’s unproductive. Looking for someone to blame after you have been in charge for more than 6 months is poor leadership.

Furthermore, despite the degree of difficulty facing you, no matter how bad the situation, you are immediately responsible for the leadership beneath you. If the head of this or that department that works for you is not competent, or is simply not doing their jobs, you need to have a process in place within days that will identify that fact, and then you are responsible for correcting it. If inspections and monitoring are not adequate, or you feel they are not adequate (the same thing, actually), then you need to act immediately to change them. You are NOW in charge. You need to make certain that you communicate your rules, your performance standards, down into the organization. You should be prepared to do that on the day you take charge. From that point on, the decision-making at every echelon in your organization is shaped by your policies and guidance.

Claiming that your predecessor is to blame months after taking office is nothing more than a dodge and a sign of poor leadership. Claiming that a poor decision made by one of your subordinates is the fault of your predecessor is an indication of no leadership whatsoever.

Despite the pleas of the preachers of ‘feel good’ leadership and the power of happy thoughts, the fact remains that Accepting Responsibility actually equates to Accepting Blame. It is rightly said that victory has a hundred fathers, but defeat is an orphan. Leading means being responsible. If responsibility was painless and without any negative ‘cost,’ leadership would be simple. But responsibility only is a burden because it means that you will have to accept the role of the leader when things don’t go right.

No matter what happens, when you have a marked success, there will be all sorts of people who will claim the accolades. When there is failure, they will all seek to deflect the fingers pointed at them. Good leaders don’t ‘deflect,’ they accept the blame and then move on to fix the problem, the process and the organization.

Accidents, Leadership and Oil Slicks

2010-05-26T07:19:00.000-04:00

The oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico continues to grow and move and the finger-pointing frenzy continues to build. So, what does the oil slick, and the disaster that cost 11 men their lives on the oil rig, have to do with leadership?

We still don’t know what happened on and under the rig. Certain items of information have surfaced: there was a methane bubble that was not controlled, the Blow Out Preventers (BOP) failed to work properly, certain other safety response plans failed, etc. However, we still don’t know what were the root causes of these and other elements of the incident. Several options come to mind: parts failing to operate at less then ‘spec’ (that is, a part that is rated at being able to handle X pounds per square inch (PSI) fails at less then X, or a circuit which is supposed to respond reliably within certain usage parameters nevertheless fails, etc.); there might have been procedural errors by the people on the rig; there might have been shortcuts taken by certain people on the rig in routine maintenance; there might even have been a criminal act, though for the purposes of this article I will assume there was no criminal act, no attempt to deliberately cripple the oil rig.

Apart from the last possibility – a criminal act – it is fair to say that someone did something wrong: made a device improperly, installed a device improperly, maintained a device improperly, monitored a device improperly, responded to the failure of the device improperly. More accurately, and making it more complex, it is likely that the incident is not the result of the failure of a single device or a single person, but of several devices and monitoring procedures, meaning that the sequence of events is going to be a complex inter-relationship of devices, installations, maintenance plans, monitoring plans, training plans, and response plans.

As the world of aviation has taught us, there is no such thing as an ‘accident.’ Deriving its language and methodology from military aviation crash investigations, such organizations as the National Traffic Safety Board (NTSB) do not use the word accident, they use the word ‘mishap.’ Mishaps don’t just happen, mishaps are the result of mistakes, omissions, and poor decisions. And, and this is the important point, mishaps can be prevented.

Mishaps are prevented when there is a confluence of several things:

- Training – people properly trained in the maintenance and operation of the systems involved, as well as in safety procedures in the event of a mishap. Training must be comprehensive and continual.

- Maintenance – equipment regularly inspected, maintained, repaired and replaced at rates well within the failure margins for each piece of gear and for the entire system. Preventative Maintenance, and corrosion control, must become the cornerstone of long-term, sustained operations.

- Parts Support – Parts support is the obverse of maintenance, making the requisite investment to insure that the right parts are used, and replaced, and refusing to cut corners to save pennies in the near term, when doing so may well cost a fortune in the long term.

- Leadership – Leadership provides the ‘thread’ that ties together training, maintenance and parts support. Sound leadership, with a focus on long-term success, will integrate these three components into the daily fabric of the organization, recognizing that the cost of preventing a mishap is never as large as the mishap.

The fact is that mishap free operations – in any industry – are not the result of ‘good luck’ any more than mishaps are the result of ‘bad luck.’ Leadership that is focused on sustained performance and long-term success will recognize that investing in their people and their equipment is essential to that success. Leadership that focuses on short-term success will often try to ‘squeeze’ both the people and the assets, skimping on such “costly” items as parts, maintenance and training. Eventually, the skimping catches up and they will end up paying more for results of the skimping then they would ever have spent on the maintenance.

Consequence Management, not Risk Management

Central to successful thinking in any type of long-term, mishap free operation is recognizing the difference between Risk Management and Consequence Management. Intellectually, Risk Management focuses on input, on minimizing the probability of given events (parts failure, systems failure, etc.), thereby ostensibly providing safe operations. On the other hand, Consequence Management focuses on the fall-out of such an event and then plans backwards to minimize both the likelihood of such an event occurring as well as constructing plans that will allow minimizing the consequences, the impact, if such an event takes place. Consequence management will also identify those activities that simply are too costly to deal with and should therefore be avoided, replaced with other activities that are more easily managed.

Consequence Management, therefore, if executed properly, allows for addressing a situation so as to maximize long-term benefits while ensuring a plan is in place that will reduce to a manageable level the effects of any mishap.

But Consequence Management, as with the maintenance, training and support programs that constitute the principle elements of any sound mishap prevention effort, requires one overriding element: good leadership. Consequence Management is simply another element of a comprehensive strategic plan, and the right leadership will provide sound Consequence Management because it will develop comprehensive strategic plans.

The oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico is not a failure of the technology of the offshore industry, nor is it a failure in the processes and training available to the workers in the offshore industry, nor is it an indictment of the people on that rig. In the end, the failure of the BOP and the resulting oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico was caused by a failure of leadership; truly fixing the problem will first require fixing that leadership. The lesson that any company can learn from that failure is that long-term growth requires leadership and planning, and every company, every organization needs to renew its commitment to developing that leadership and those plans today.

Why Does the US Military Produce Exceptional Leaders?

2010-05-16T09:53:00.000-04:00

(This is an amended version of an article I posted a couple of weeks ago, but which from which I inadvertently omitted two paragraphs.)

There have been any number of books and articles written over the past several decades about the US military and why it produces so many good leaders. Many wax lyrical about devotion to duty or the patriotic motivations of the people themselves or their exceptional skills or any other number of factors. While I think it is true that many of those characteristics are found in many people in our armed forces, I think most of these theses miss the mark. In fact, I would submit that the leadership skills that are produced in the US military (and in the armed forces of many nations around the world) can be replicated by any organization that commits itself to doing those few things that the armed forces have done regularly.

What are those few things?

1) Clear goal (mission) - Each of the services is provided an abundance of organizational clarity because the overarching goals are clear and, for the most part, fixed. When someone joins the Marines, they are going to defend the nation; they take an oath to in fact do just that. Everything that is done after that is tied directly to that overarching goal. Why do you keep the mess hall clean? To feed the troops so that they can be healthy and ready to respond to orders – in the defense of the nation. As the tasks increase in complexity this clarity allows the leadership to sort through a great deal of ambiguity quickly, and focus any organization, and the people within it, on the appropriate task. Additionally, it provides a foundation for which communication down through the ranks, a commonly held intellectual and emotional position shared by all that can be used to tie together any number of specific tasks, providing a clear and unbroken string that reaches from the very bottom of the organization to the very top.

a. Also to be considered is that the overarching goal, which acts as the glue that keeps so much together, is one that provides true self-actualization. Young soldiers and sailors may join for some adventure (or even just for a job) but they also have the real – and massive – benefit of being regarded both by their peers at home and themselves as doing something that is much bigger than simply their own lives. In the strictest sense they are self-actualizing while within the military. This not only helps everyone perform at the 'top of their game,' it also makes it easier for the leadership to extract higher performance from these people.

2) Opportunity to Lead - People in the military get a great many opportunities to lead (they can also avoid it if they want; people reading military resumes who have no military experience should make sure they have someone they trust who understands what is being said). From day one you are being placed in charge of people and tasks. You are not only given many opportunities to lead, you are given many opportunities to fail. This isn't said in a negative way; you will usually find that for the first few years in the military you will routinely be given tasks that exceed your capabilities. Your leadership will see how much you are capable of and will then routinely step in before things go 'terribly wrong.' In this way you not only learn quickly, you learn while continually expanding your capabilities. You also learn that 99% of all leadership requires team building, that you can't 'do it' alone and you can't even 'lead' alone, that having a well integrated team around you and above you that you plug into is as important as producing your own well integrated team. The result is a great deal more leadership experience in any given time frame then you will encounter in most other positions.

3) The Gunnery Sergeant (or Gunny or GYSGT) - For the first few jobs that an officer has in the military, as a division officer and as a junior department head, or as a platoon leader and then as a company commander, the real day-to-day running of the organization is not in your hands. Instead, the guy who really is 'in-charge' is the senior enlisted, the 'Chief' or the 'Gunny' or the 'First Sergeant.' Well beyond any soppy, nostalgic paean to senior NCOs (non-commissioned officers), the fact is that the Chief (Gunny, etc.) is there to teach 2nd Lt Jones how to lead. He does that both by leading the division/platoon and teaching by example, and by engaging in day-to-day mentoring of the young officer. This continues up through, at a minimum, the command of the company. In fact, in any number of larger units the senior NCO in the command acts as the right hand and trusted advisor of the commander. Seasoned battalion commanders and SEAL team commanders (who will have 15 years of experience in the military) rarely act without at least consulting closely with their most senior NCO. What makes this leadership construct particularly effective is that the lieutenant who is the titular senior to the NCO (but who had better listen when the NCO tells him something) is not competing with the NCO for either promotion or position. The NCO is interested in making the unit work and perform at its best, as is the lieutenant, both can be recognized for their performance, and it benefits both when the other succeeds. Further, the lieutenant, who enters the relationship with little to no leadership experience, will be recognized for being squared away when he listens to his nominal subordinate and 'does what he is told.' This built in 'humility school' helps to build leaders who place unit above self-aggrandizement and leads to improved unit performance.

4) Planning and Exercises – The military at every level produces plans – formal and informal; those plans are regularly reviewed by the next echelon, the plans are modified, and then the plans are exercised. Not only is there an opportunity to learn from those around you as you watch them plan, you will be given a good deal of guidance to make certain that your planning has addressed each major issue. Planning will also include detailed discussions on how to execute the plan itself. Further, once the plan is completed, the military engages in exercises. In fact, the military has a seemingly infinite array of exercises, including daily training plans (two aircraft in the same squadron practicing particular types of engagements or weapons deliveries, for example), unit level exercises (perhaps platoon or company sized maneuvers on the base training ranges), all the way up to theater level war games that involve sophisticated computer modeling, senior decision-maker gaming and discussions, and the movements of literally tens of thousands of personnel, hundreds of aircraft, and dozens of ships. The military plans, they analyze and critique the plans, and then they practice the plans.

5) Debriefs - The military loves to debrief. Every decision is reviewed; every action is deconstructed and reconstructed, and then discussed in detail. The bigger the exercise, the more effort is placed on this debriefing process. Debriefing is professional – that is, impersonal and analytic – but painful, whether you are a new F-15 pilot or a seasoned veteran with 25 years of service. Army division commanders (major generals in command of 12 – 15,000 personnel) routinely take a brigade or more of troops onto maneuvers against an 'OpFor' (Opposing Force) and get pushed around and get lots of troops 'killed' the first time they run through the training range. Then there is a detailed debrief, plans are adjusted and they are taught how to tighten up their plan and fight and win. Not only does it save soldiers lives when they reach the real combat zone, it makes every leader in that division – from Division Commander down to the Corporal who is leading a fire team - a better leader by forcing them to review their decisions and forcing them to determine why one course of action worked and another didn't, AND to understand which decisions worked and why and which decisions didn't work, and why not; this is true even when you 'win.' It is enlightening to learn that the decision you made had no positive impact on the success of your team even when you won. The first time someone experiences a debrief like this it can be eye-opening, but the results in improved decision-making and improved leadership are even more eye-opening.

6) Training ('schools' commands) - Everybody in the military trains and trains hard. They also train smart. With few exceptions every warfare specialty sends their best back to be an instructor. The guys who are teaching tactics to new F-15 and F-22 pilots are the pilots who have already completed several operational tours and are judged to be the cream of the crop. Instead of remaining in operational units the crème de la crème are sent to be instructors. In most cases the process of selecting officers for promotion has been developed to the point that it requires that anyone who wants to get promoted must spend time in the schools commands at some time in his career. This forces the best people back for at least one tour as a trainer some time in their careers. In short, the services invest in training, investing time not only in making junior officers better, but also at every step along the way demanding continual training and education as you are promoted. This is the 'simple' recognition that you need to invest in training and education if you want to make people the best they can be.

7) Education – The services also insist on and invest in education. Attendance at staff colleges and service war colleges, and have an advanced degree are now virtually required of nearly every senior officer. (Some few officers will reach the rank of colonel without these things, but that is a rare event, and definitely the exception, not the rule). Professional growth through study and earning a masters degree in a field of study directly related to your particular specialty is recognized as necessary to maintain high performance.

8) Communication – From the first day that you are placed in charge of anyone, you are required to communicate. The military has both a requirement to communicate and a process to support it. In most units (of any size) there is a daily muster in which the platoon leader or division officer stands in front of the troops and tells them what is going on today. This accomplishes a host of things: it demonstrates to one and all that the “Lieutenant” is in charge, that is, responsible; there is no dodging. The morning muster also establishes what is going on: ‘here are the special tasks for the day, and the people who need to execute those tasks are X, Y and Z,’ while providing the leader the daily opportunity to both communicate what the overall organization is doing, and, more importantly, how today’s tasks connect to the overall organization and long-term goal; and finally, getting up in front of the troops gives the new leader the opportunity to develop as a communicator.

It is worth noting that many other countries have similar processes and produce exceptional leadership; in fact, I would suggest that in some cases they produce officers as good or better then the US. I would single out the British and Australian forces for producing consistently excellent officers, but have also met many exceptional Japanese, Republic of Korea, Chilean and New Zealand officers and senior NCOs. I would suggest that our advantage over these officers rests more with differences in funding for new systems and technologies, as well as more money and time available for training and exercises results.

So, what does this mean if you are running a business, even a small business?

First, Make sure you have a real goal, one that is essentially fixed, a long-term goal that you can use to pull everything together. Take the time to understand how that goal connects to every task in the organization. I have been in some great organizations where the night watchman understands – and can explain – his role and how it connects to the overarching strategic goal. Work towards that standard.

Second, as you advance, take advantage of all the leadership experience you can get your hands on, and encourage your people to do the same. When you are in charge, give everyone opportunities to make decisions and to lead.

Third, find a mentor, or two or three, pick them based on leadership experience. Talk with them frequently and give them the details, make sure they understand what is going on so that they can provide real input. Insist on painful honesty, they aren't there to make you feel better. If you ask for advice, listen. If you ask the question: 'What would you do?' pay attention to the answer. If you want to do something else, you should be able to explain, in a logical manner, why you have chosen to do that something else rather than what your mentor suggested.

Fourth, Learn how to plan, then practice it – it's another art. Start small and then grow. There are any number of books on strategic planning that can help (many aren't very good, but they are better then nothing). Read several, and compare what they are saying. If you have the time and money, take a class in planning. Construct some plans with your staff or partners and then pull them apart. Play 'what if' and see how the plan responds to various developments, then adjust the plan and do it again.

Fifth, keep track of decisions and learn how to debrief. When you make a decision, right down a few notes, to include why you made the decision you made, and what information led to that specific decision. Write down some alternate decisions that were considered and rejected. Note why you rejected those decisions. After the decision plays out, revisit the decision-making process, to include both the decisions that were considered and rejected and the one that was selected. Try to determine as accurately as possible within your time and budget constraints what happened and why, and what role your decisions had in the outcome – if any.

Sixth, invest in training. This will be a major expense for many small businesses, one they can hardly afford. But as much as is possible, consider it. Balance making your business bigger with making it better.

Seventh, invest in education. This will be even more difficult for most businesses. Certainly for certain very large businesses they might be willing to do this, but most medium and small sized businesses will find this difficult if not impossible. If that is the case, at least give careful thought to particular educational standards you would like to have in your company and hire to that standard.

Eight, take the opportunity to communicate. Whether it is by walking around and talking at the coffee pot or holding daily or weekly meetings or whatever other means you choose, make certain not only that you and your leaders and managers are talking to their people, make certain that they do it regularly and frequently. Don’t let your ‘leaders’ hide in their offices, make them talk to their people. Not only will it ‘get the word out’ and produce a more tightly integrated organization, it will also serve to hone your junior leaders.

One final thought: the question of motivations is perhaps the most difficult question to ever answer. It is a subject that often comes up in combat zones, or more accurately, after you have left the combat zone and are looking 'back' at it. Young Marine PFCs* have often amazed me because they are, in fact, so motivated. They join the Marines ready to slay dragons. It is rarely as simple as young men filled with 'piss and vinegar' who want to prove they are tough, though there is obviously some of that, and that is the most visible facet of it. Instead, you bump into them by the score in any Army or Marine company, 20 year olds who are truly determined to change the world, and who believe they have both the skills and the opportunity to do so. They are operating at the very top of Maslow's hierarchy. It is a testimony to the skill of their drill instructors that the gung ho spirit that led these young men to enlist has been nurtured and fed and focused so that they get to their first unit and they are coiled steel, ready to spring.

That level of motivation reveals itself years later, when veterans will look back on their enlistment with a great deal of nostalgia, and why not: it is often true that never in the remainder of their lives will they ever operate at the very pinnacle of Maslow's hierarchy. They may have spent a solid year completely self-actualized, whereas most people will rarely spend more than a few weeks at a time at that level of motivation. No wonder they do incredible things in the military!

At the same time, this level of motivation makes leadership that much easier. Placed in charge of a 40 young, tough, well trained and very motivated Marines, and given a squared-away Gunnery Sergeant, the average Marine 2nd Lieutenant will often find his job a good deal easier than he might have expected. It may well be that motivating an 18 year-old kid to make every cheeseburger the same way, each time, day-after-day, is as difficult, as challenging a leadership problem as getting another 18 year-old kid to conduct a patrol through the streets of a small but violent town on the other side of the world. The 2nd Lieutenant's organization – the Marines – provides him with the training and skills and support and guidance to do his job. The question is whether your organization is providing your "2nd Lieutenant" with the equivalent training, skills, support and guidance?

* Private First Class

Out in Front

2010-05-15T12:08:00.000-04:00

Over the past year a number of celebrities have come under a great deal of scrutiny for repeated indiscretions. At the same time, there are some who probably feel that it isn’t fair when we – the public – both crave the most detailed knowledge of the daily activities of celebrities and then act shocked, even repulsed at times, when we learn that they have acted in some glaringly inappropriate way.

Welcome to one of the costs of being ‘out in front.’

Harry Truman was fond of using simple statements to make major points. One he was particularly fond of was ‘if you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.’ And the ‘bright lights’ of public scrutiny can certainly substitute for the heat of a kitchen.

This is why it is both amusing and disingenuous when actors or athletes, politicians or CEOs, and their followers and fans, whine and complain about news coverage and paparazzi and cable TV shows that spend hours discussing their latest faux pas.

This is as much a necessary part of their position as any other. I suppose that in a dictatorship one might think that the leaders could survive without public coverage (and very real, if sub rosa, scrutiny). Interestingly, 6000 years of history shows just the opposite: every leader since Gilgamesh and Ozymandias has been concerned about his public image. Consider how much time the dictators of the 20th century spent on crafting their images (Hitler, Stalin, Mao, etc.)

Being a Hollywood star or a professional athlete or a politician or a CEO means that people will look at you – a lot. Athletes might argue that their job is to perform on the field, not be role models, but that is sophistry. Athletes have been public role models, for good or ill, at least since the days of Plato – nearly 2500 years ago. And actors and actresses make their living because people want to watch them.

Of course, leading requires being out in front and that means scrutiny. It also means that in most cases you will be held to different standards then others. In the cases of those who can meaningfully impact our lives: politicians, senior bureaucrats, senior businessmen and the like - they should be held to higher standards. Further, to ensure that those entrusted with power to affect our futures – politicians and leading businessmen – continue to act for our own well-being and security, they must be held to a higher standard. We should keep them under close scrutiny, because it is our lives they are meddling with on a daily basis. And in the cases of those in public office, those being paid with money raised by taxes, we have the complete right to pry into their behavior to ensure they will not damage our lives.

In the case of those appointed by stockholders to run a company, those ‘paying the piper’ certainly have the right to ‘call the tune’ (and you can argue that they have a social responsibility to do so). Holding the leadership to different, and higher, standards is both appropriate and necessary. Occasionally, those standards will be to their – the leaders - benefit. At other times, they will not. Politicians and athletes and actors and actresses, CEOs and bank presidents (and even those people who are celebrities without reason) may not like that simple truth. And for them, there is one option; as President Truman would have said: ‘get out of the kitchen.’

Tiffany's and the Service Sector

2010-05-10T14:48:00.000-04:00

I was recently reminded that, despite what line of business you think you are in, you are also, perhaps predominantly, in the service sector. Everyone is – in one way or another - in the service sector, because everyone is in the business of taking care of their customers. I suppose there might be a true monopoly someplace on the planet that really and truly doesn’t and doesn’t need to care what anyone thinks about them. If so, they are a state run business in a dictatorship. But they certainly are keeping the dictator happy. And eventually the people will have enough and they – and the dictator – will be gone.

I was reminded about all this because I had cause to deal with a company that simply could not seem to get on the same page as their customer. The size of the deal should be irrelevant, though in this particular case the issue concerned transferring several tens of millions of dollars of raw material, and the potential for a long-term contract. Yet the company in question seemed to keep miss-stepping and ignoring the customer.

I compare this to a company that I have had the pleasure dealing with a few times over the course of my life: Tiffany’s. First, let me be clear, I am not a big customer; I have spent just a tiny amount in their store. But the fact is that each time I have bought something, and each time I have either visited a store or called them on the phone I have been treated like I was royalty. And the rules they follow can be applied anywhere (and should probably be applied everywhere).

First, everyone is polite to a fault. No matter what happens, no one raises his voice, no one gets short with a customer, no one gets upset. If there are problems, and certainly there must be, they deal with it out of sight and earshot of the customer. The personnel selection and training must be very good, not only to pick the right people, but also to train them and keep them motivated to maintain a positive attitude.

Second, everyone is knowledgeable. When you ask a question, you get an answer and it is right. Having run a number of fairly large organizations I can attest to how hard that is; that requires training and constant attention to detail by the middle managers. It is worth noting that I have never met anyone at Tiffany’s who is not bright and well informed.

Third, there is a real focus on you. This translates into real people on the phone, and once you get someone (which is nearly immediate, whether you are in a store or calling), you have to go quite a ways for them to turn you over to someone else; once you have a ‘rep,’ that rep is yours. This prevents you from having to tell your ‘story’ over and over again. Tell the salesman or saleswoman what you are looking for once and they have it. And then that person takes care of YOU.

I am sure there are folks who are reading this who will say “Yeah, but you paid for all that service.” Well, yes I did. And I also got exactly what I wanted each time I dealt with them. And I came away feeling great and thoroughly enjoyed spending my money. The real point is that I will gladly go back to Tiffany’s to buy things for my wife. In fact, I will probably go out of my way to deal with them, because I know I will get just what I want, when I want it. I paid a nice price for the jewelry I bought my wife, but they earned it, and they have earned my ‘loyalty’ as a customer. I don’t pretend to be like the Tsar, wealthy enough to have a ‘jeweler,’ but with Tiffany’s I can almost fantasize that I am so wealthy. Every company, every organization should be trying to make their customers feel that way, whether they are buying a used car, a load of sand or a fleet of airplanes: the feeling that ‘there is no one else on the whole planet that I would prefer to deal with.’ I encourage you to walk into a Tiffany’s and look around – you’ll learn a great deal about how you should function, no matter what you do.

Why Does the US Military Produce Good Leaders? *

2010-05-04T17:20:00.000-04:00

* And what does it mean for your organization?

What are those few things?

a. Also to be considered is that the overarching goal, which acts as the glue that keeps so much together, is one that provides true self-actualization. Young soldiers and sailors may join for some adventure (or even just for a job) but they also have the real – and massive – benefit of being regarded both by their peers at home and themselves as doing something that is much bigger than simply their own lives. In the strictest sense they are self-actualizing while within the military. This not only helps everyone perform at the ‘top of their game,’ it also makes it easier for the leadership to extract higher performance from these people.

2) Opportunity to Lead - People in the military get a great many opportunities to lead (they can also avoid it if they want; people reading military resumes who have no military experience should make sure they have someone they trust who understands what is being said). From day one you are being placed in charge of people and tasks. You are not only given many opportunities to lead, you are given many opportunities to fail. This isn’t said in a negative way; you will usually find that for the first few years in the military you will routinely be given tasks that exceed your capabilities. Your leadership will see how much you are capable of and will then routinely step in before things go ‘terribly wrong.’ In this way you not only learn quickly, you learn while continually expanding your capabilities. You also learn that 99% of all leadership requires team building, that you can’t ‘do it’ alone and you can’t even ‘lead’ alone, that having a well integrated team around you and above you that you plug into is as important as producing your own well integrated team. The result is a great deal more leadership experience in any given time frame then you will encounter in most other positions.

3) The Gunnery Sergeant (or Gunny or GYSGT) - For the first few jobs that an officer has in the military, as a division officer and as a junior department head, or as a platoon leader and then as a company commander, the real day-to-day running of the organization is not in your hands. Instead, the guy who really is ‘in-charge’ is the senior enlisted, the ‘Chief’ or the ‘Gunny’ or the ‘First Sergeant.’ Well beyond any soppy, nostalgic paean to senior NCOs (non-commissioned officers), the fact is that the Chief (Gunny, etc.) is there to teach 2nd Lt Jones how to lead. He does that both by leading the division/platoon and teaching by example, and by engaging in day-to-day mentoring of the young officer. This continues up through, at a minimum, the command of the company. In fact, in any number of larger units the senior NCO in the command acts as the right hand and trusted advisor of the commander. Seasoned battalion commanders and SEAL team commanders (who will have 15 years of experience in the military) rarely act without at least consulting closely with their most senior NCO. What makes this leadership construct particularly effective is that the lieutenant who is the titular senior to the NCO (but who had better listen when the NCO tells him something) is not competing with the NCO for either promotion or position. The NCO is interested in making the unit work and perform at its best, as is the lieutenant, both can be recognized for their performance, and it benefits both when the other succeeds. Further, the lieutenant, who enters the relationship with little to no leadership experience, will be recognized for being squared away when he listens to his nominal subordinate and ‘does what he is told.’ This built in ‘humility school’ helps to build leaders who place unit above self-aggrandizement and leads to improved unit performance.

5) Debriefs - The military loves to debrief. Every decision is reviewed; every action is deconstructed and reconstructed, and then discussed in detail. The bigger the exercise, the more effort is placed on this debriefing process. Debriefing is professional – that is, impersonal and analytic – but painful, whether you are a new F-15 pilot or a seasoned veteran with 25 years of service. Army division commanders (major generals in command of 12 – 15,000 personnel) routinely take a brigade or more of troops onto maneuvers against an ‘OpFor’ (Opposing Force) and get pushed around and get lots of troops ‘killed’ the first time they run through the training range. Then there is a detailed debrief, plans are adjusted and they are taught how to tighten up their plan and fight and win. Not only does it save soldiers lives when they reach the real combat zone, it makes every leader in that division – from Division Commander down to the Corporal who is leading a fire team - a better leader by forcing them to review their decisions and forcing them to determine why one course of action worked and another didn’t, AND to understand which decisions worked and why and which decisions didn’t work, and why not; this is true even when you ‘win.’ It is enlightening to learn that the decision you made had no positive impact on the success of your team even when you won. The first time someone experiences a debrief like this it can be eye-opening, but the results in improved decision-making and improved leadership are even more eye-opening.

6) Training (‘schools’ commands) - Everybody in the military trains and trains hard. They also train smart. With few exceptions every warfare specialty sends their best back to be an instructor. The guys who are teaching tactics to new F-15 and F-22 pilots are the pilots who have already completed several operational tours and are judged to be the cream of the crop. Instead of remaining in operational units the crème de la crème are sent to be instructors. In most cases the process of selecting officers for promotion has been developed to the point that it requires that anyone who wants to get promoted must spend time in the schools commands at some time in his career. This forces the best people back for at least one tour as a trainer some time in their careers. In short, the services invest in training, investing time not only in making junior officers better, but also at every step along the way demanding continual training and education as you are promoted. This is the ‘simple’ recognition that you need to invest in training and education if you want to make people the best they can be.

It is worth noting that many other countries have similar processes and produce exceptional leadership; in fact, I would suggest that in some cases they produce officers as good or better then the US. I would single out the British and Australian forces for producing consistently excellent officers, but have also met many exceptional Japanese, Republic of Korea, Chilean and New Zealand officers and senior NCOs. I would suggest that our advantage over these officers rests more differences in funding for new systems and technologies, as well as more money and time available for training and exercises results.

So, what does this mean if you are running a business, even a small business?

Third, find a mentor, or two or three, pick them based on leadership experience. Talk with them frequently and give them the details, make sure they understand what is going on so that they can provide real input. Insist on painful honesty, they aren’t there to make you feel better. If you ask for advice, listen. If you ask the question: ‘What would you do?’ pay attention to the answer. If you want to do something else, you should be able to explain, in a logical manner, why you have chosen to do that something else rather than what your mentor suggested.

Fourth, Learn how to plan, then practice it – it’s another art. Start small and then grow. There are any number of books on strategic planning that can help (many aren’t very good, but they are better then nothing). Read several, and compare what they are saying. If you have the time and money, take a class in planning. Construct some plans with your staff or partners and then pull them apart. Play ‘what if’ and see how the plan responds to various developments, then adjust the plan and do it again.

One final thought: the question of motivations is perhaps the most difficult question to ever answer. It is a subject that often comes up in combat zones, or more accurately, after you have left the combat zone and are looking ‘back’ at it. Young Marine PFCs** have often amazed me because they are, in fact, so motivated. They join the Marines ready to slay dragons. It is rarely as simple as young men filled with ‘piss and vinegar’ who want to prove they are tough, though there is obviously some of that, and that is the most visible facet of it. Instead, you bump into them by the score in any Army or Marine company, 20 year olds who are truly determined to change the world, and who believe they have both the skills and the opportunity to do so. They are operating at the very top of Maslow’s hierarchy. It is a testimony to the skill of their drill instructors that the gung ho spirit that led these young men to enlist has been nurtured and fed and focused so that they get to their first unit and they are coiled steel, ready to spring.

That level of motivation reveals itself years later, when veterans will look back on their enlistment with a great deal of nostalgia, and why not: it is often true that never in the remainder of their lives will they ever operate at the very pinnacle of Maslow’s hierarchy. They may have spent a solid year completely self-actualized, whereas most people will rarely spend more than a few weeks at a time at that level of motivation. No wonder they do incredible things in the military!

At the same time, this level of motivation makes leadership that much easier. Placed in charge of a 40 young, tough, well trained and very motivated Marines, and given a squared-away Gunnery Sergeant, the average Marine 2nd Lieutenant will often find his job a good deal easier than he might have expected. It may well be that motivating a 18 year-old kid to make every cheeseburger the same way, each time, is as difficult, as challenging a leadership problem as getting another 18 year-old kid to conduct a patrol through the streets of a small but violent town on the other side of the world. The 2nd Lieutenant’s organization – the Marines – provides him with the training and skills and support and guidance to do his job. The question is whether your organization is providing your “2nd Lieutenant” with the equivalent training, skills, support and guidance?

** Private First Class

First Time - Part 23: Recognizing Poor Leaders

2010-05-03T13:52:00.002-04:00

You have just been promoted. Congratulations. You now have a half dozen folks who work for you and each has 8 or 10 or more folks who work for them. The folks who work for you used to be your peers. No longer; you are now leading leaders.

So, how do you recognize the bad leader among them?

This is perhaps the most difficult thing you will do. It is difficult, subtle and time consuming. Begin by reconciling yourself to the fact that it means passing judgment on people who are your friends. Remember: you are not judging their morals, their intellect or even their ability to do most jobs; you are only judging their ability to lead. That may not help a great deal, but it is necessary that you remind yourself – and them when the time comes – that your job is to recognize and rate their leadership skill.

Recognizing leadership skills, and identifying effective and poor leaders is not intuitively obvious. It does not reduce to easy tests. Most organizations, even those noted for producing great leaders, routinely make mistakes in this regard. Poor leaders get promoted again and again. They wind up at the top of great organizations. Finding poor leaders is difficult. But it can be done.

How do you recognize a poor leader who works for you?

The problem is that poor leaders often perform well, advancing the organization and equally often advance some people – usually their favorites. Good leaders do the same things: they advance the organization toward the overarching goal, and they advance their people. The distinction is this: good leaders make everyone better, and better off, and they ID the people who will make up the next generation of leaders for the organization, setting up the organization for future success.

Poor leaders on the other hand leave ‘wreckage’ in their wake: often an organization that has been bled dry, people who have been used, poor morale, and a host of other problems, many of which only come to light once they have been promoted and moved on to other jobs.

But, trying to ‘measure’ if someone who works for you is doing a good job leading is not as simple as it might seem; there are few leaders who are talented in recognizing both exceptional leaders and poor leaders. Looking down is hard. (And looking up is almost as hard, but that is not the subject of today’s discussion. Suffice it so say that followers are often poor judges of the leadership capability of an individual. A good case study, well removed in time, is General George McClellan; his men worshipped him, and he had many valuable qualities, but he was a terrible commander in combat, a fact Lincoln recognized early. History is full of generals and presidents and prime ministers and kings who were loved but, were – overall – ineffective, even terrible leaders. Further, there are people who were (and are) great leaders, but the initial reception from the followers was negative. Only over time were they accepted by the followers).

So, the first hurdle to clear is that the leader is advancing the organization and moving forward towards the organization’s goal. Again, this isn’t intuitively obvious to the outside. If ‘Joe’ was placed in charge of a department that was a complete mess, it may take quite a while to fix, and it may ‘get worse’ for quite some time as ‘Joe’ goes about fixing it. So, the first thing in such a situation is to make sure there is an accurate assessment of the state of the department. Make certain you know what ‘Joe’ is going to do to fix the organization and you have some way to measure progress. If the organization was a complete mess when Joe arrived, is he making the expected progress in fixing the mess? Is there a clear plan, even when that clear plan calls for drastic and painful steps? Is ‘Joe’ taking those drastic steps and making them work?

If ‘Joe’ was put in charge of a failing division and told to fix it, and one year later it is still losing money but not as badly, the real question is what was the forecast? If you fully expected that 2 years would be required to turn the division around, then you need to measure ‘Joe’ against those expectations, and against any other economic downturn. If ‘Joe’ is keeping up with expectations and the plan, then his performance in that regard is fine, even if it is from an accounting perspective the worst in the organization. If you are given command of the worst ship in the fleet and you start to turn it around, it may still be the worst unit in the fleet a year later, but now it is on its way to being fixed, and your performance may be a mark of the best leadership available.

Conversely, even a poor leader, placed on top of a first-rate department, with a staff full of your best people, will likely shine for quite some time. So, you should also have an accurate assessment of the conditions of that department when the new leader took charge and if the performance doesn’t measure up – even though the department may remain far ahead of all the others – then you must consider that ‘poor’ performance when rating the leadership.

Understanding the condition and expected performance of each division within your organization is, therefore, essential for rating the leadership skills of each of your department heads. If someone is put in charge of the department with the most experienced team, with the latest tools and the most resources, they are probably going to do better then someone with an inexperienced team that has old tools and fewer resources. The only way to compensate for these differences is to develop an assessment of each department’s capabilities and a forecast of performance over the next 6, 12 and 18 months (or longer).

While this is happening, you also need to know whether the people are being taken care of, is ‘Joe’ advancing the people? Note, the people may not necessarily be happy; in fact, they may be very upset as ‘Joe’ introduces a series of changes to fix the organization, which may well include letting some people go and moving others. How well has this been communicated to them? Is ‘Joe’ keeping everyone informed? Do they understand the issues? Are they ‘getting onboard?’

Good leaders build teams and build long-term solutions that lead to achieving long-term goals. Is the team getting stronger? Are the people on the team improving? Are they moving toward Excellence? Is the team more tightly integrated behind the department’s and the parent organization’s goals? Are the good people being promoted and inspired and motivated, is retention on par with the rest of the organization, is morale improving along with productivity?

Accordingly, an accurate record of the people in each department is also a must, who they are, levels of experience, education and training, productivity, etc.

But, how do you learn all the above?

Some of this you can glean from the numbers, some of this you will only learn by walking the production floor or the motor pool, by walking around and talking to the ‘troops’ when they are having coffee or a pizza. The essentials however, rest on two key footings: the anticipated performance of the department versus its actual performance; and the morale, productivity, cohesion and growth of the people. Learning this requires that you not only use your own intellectual and analytic skills, but that you spend considerable time out of your office among the people who work for you, understanding the issues and the atmosphere within your entire organization.

So, now that you have identified a poor leader, what do you do?

First, remember what was said earlier: just because someone is not a good leader doesn’t mean they aren’t a good person; this should not be an ad hominem attack. But, if someone is a poor leader you owe it to everyone in the specific department, as well as to the entire organization, that they be moved from that post as soon as practical. The first mistake was in the assessment and selection process that put ‘Joe’ in that position in the first place, and the best thing for all concerned is to move ‘Joe’ out.

At the same time, select a replacement. Except in the rare case of extreme problems – criminal negligence or true incompetence – an immediate firing without a replacement can cause a great deal of turmoil in any organization and should be avoided if possible. Move as quickly as possible, but take enough time to make a reasonable selection, and name a replacement and change the leadership.

Second, communicate! Tell the folks in the department and tell the folks in your organization what you did and why. No matter what you do the word will get out, but it will usually get out without all the facts. Have an ‘all hands’ meeting or a ‘town hall’ and make sure everyone knows what happened and why and let them see that You made the decision, not some faceless ‘them,’ and they will know why you did it, rather then guessing and making up stories.

First Time - Part 22: No Whining, Just Solutions

2010-04-27T07:47:00.000-04:00

This is part 22 of in a series of short essays on fundamentals of leadership. While it is drafted for those who have just moved into their first leadership position, I hope there is a little something in here for the most practiced of leaders, a ‘getting back to basics’ that everyone needs every now and then.

We all have troubles, but no one really wants to hear about yours. That is an unpleasant reality.

If you are like me or most people I know, it grates on you when you hear some politician or purported leader stand up and talk about how tough things are and all the problems he has to deal with. The fact is that he was probably elected because he promised he would fix things. And the electorate knows much better then he just how tough things are. So, he should spend his time talking about fixing things not about how hard it is.

Well, it goes double for you. Your boss put you in the position you are in because he thought you could make things better. The boss (and the boss’s boss) already knows the issues and problems. In fact, they may know more about them then you do. And they certainly have more problems then you do, as they have all of your problems plus others from other departments. So, your whining usually doesn’t inform them in the least.

But whining does send a signal, one you never want associated with your name: that you complain.

On the other hand, having problems can be considered an opportunity.

A number of years ago a friend of mine became the captain of a ship, a ship that had some mechanical and maintenance ‘issues,’ but certainly not more then many other ships. It was in ‘average’ condition. The ship went into a shipyard for routine maintenance, but several weeks after arriving the workers in the yard went on strike. For those of you who are fortunate enough to have never been on a ship while it is in a shipyard, when a ship enters a shipyard for major work, the first thing that happens is that the ship appears to be attacked by army ants, who swarm aboard and disassemble seemingly everything, leaving the ship without water, electricity, lighting, heat, or air-conditioning, as well as often leaving gaping holes in the hull. In Ed’s case his ship was not only partially disassembled, it was now – due to the strike - apparently indefinitely stranded.

My friend could have whined. He didn’t. He also could have decided that he was just the same as everyone else and just sit and wait for a solution to appear, as if from the heavens. He didn’t do that either. Instead, he devised a plan to use his crew to perform the bulk of the work, and then asked the Navy to temporarily assign him a few key personnel with the necessary skills to complete all the work needed on the ship. He was able to show that he could complete the ship’s maintenance on time, and within budget, despite the shipyard strike. He offered a plan that actually got rid of a problem for the Navy. The Navy agreed and he actually brought the ship out of the yard ahead of schedule.

Other captains could have (and did) whine and complain; Ed didn’t. Instead, he made ‘lemonade from lemons.’

Everyone has problems; everyone has it hard. No one really wants to hear about the someone else’s problems. But everyone wants to hear about solutions. Whining solves nothing. But if you can come up with a solution to the problem you will get the kind of attention everyone wants. So, when you realize you have a real problem, take a few minutes (or hours, even days) and think about the problem and how you would fix it. Ask yourself this simple question: If I owned the whole company (or, if you work in the Police Department or the Fire Department, etc., If I were the Mayor), what would I want done? How would I like this solved? Bounce your ideas off a trusted friend or two, see what they think. Then, package it up, in a simple, clear, package – don’t worry about making it pretty – and go to the boss. Make sure your solution addresses the fundamentals: how long will it take, how much will it cost, and how many people do you need. And show how your solution leaves the whole organization better then it was before your problem arose.

If you have a halfway decent boss, he is going to be overjoyed with what you gave him.

So, remember: no whining, just solutions.

As the US Marines say: Stop Global Whining

First Time - Part 21: A Crisis

2010-04-23T15:19:00.000-04:00

This is part 21 of in a series of short essays on fundamentals of leadership. While it is drafted for those who have just moved into their first leadership position, I hope there is a little something in here for the most practiced of leaders, a ‘getting back to basics’ that everyone needs every now and then.

Something bad just happened. Even if you have planned for this type of event, it is almost a certainty that whatever has happened is not exactly what you planned for, and it is an even higher likelihood that ‘today is a bad day’ for X to happen.

So, What do you do?

First, remain calm. Take a deep breath and remember that few things are as bad as they first seem, and even if they are, yelling and rubbing your hands raw will only spread worry and angst among your people. You, as the leader, must remain calm and, just as important, you must appear calm.

Second, call everyone in and get the facts. That first report that you heard that got everyone spun up is probably not accurate. You will soon find out that reports – even from the most trusted sources – get garbled during a crisis. Take a few minutes and get the facts. If the event is short duration event at a specific site, go to the site. You have to trust your people, but if you really want to understand the situation you need to get to the site, see it, hear it, talk to the folks at the site.

Third, if there is a safety issue, act on that aspect of the crisis right away, even while you are collecting facts. If you think folks should move out of a building, for example, act on that now. You can always send them back in. Don’t let safety take a back seat. If anyone has been injured, make sure they get treatment – first aid/CPR – immediately, and then get them to a hospital or clinic. Once the situation has stabilized, you will need to follow-up with them and make certain they are OK and also notify their families. Also, make sure you can account for everyone, including any guests in your facility.

Fourth, once you have moved past the immediate uproar, consider pulling one of your smarter folks aside and have him start constructing a plan to get things back to normal.

Fifth, if you see something that you feel warrants immediate action – Act! It is impossible to recover those moments, and there are few bosses who will be upset if you act to try to reduce the ‘damage.’ On the other hand, standing around and waiting for guidance is a good way to send the signal that you aren’t needed. One simple rule is that in a crisis you should be thinking about not only your role, but also the role of your boss, if he were there. If he is not, act for him, then follow the next step.

Sixth, notify your boss about the situation, what you know so far, what you are doing about it, and any additional help you may need. If you have any ideas on how to ameliorate the problem (perhaps ideas that occurred to you in the planning we will discuss below), now is the time to offer them to your boss. A crisis is bad, but when someone comes to you with a crisis, but also with some ideas, the crisis can be a lot easier to deal with.

The above are all BFOs – Blinding Flashes of the Obvious. They are also the things people forget in the midst of any yelling. And the best means to handle crises is to prepare for them. Consider this: there are really just a few categories of disasters: short duration (natural - severe winter storm, a fire, or a flood - or man-made (large scale accident) - or professional (a poor decision by someone – in your organization or not – that means you can’t accomplish your mission on time); and long duration (a recession or a war, etc.)

In the case of natural disasters, most of these situations can be at least minimized with some fairly simple planning. Have you followed normal fire safety procedures and is the building at least up to ‘code?’ Do your people all know what they are supposed to do in case of a fire? Do you follow safety rules concerning storage of flammables, etc? Similar questions can be asked about flooding if your facility is near a river or in a floodplain, etc. Are you near an area that can be hit by a hurricane? Are you in an earthquake prone area? In each case you need to make sure that you have thought through the steps you will follow to minimize risk to your people and to minimize the impact on your operations in the event any of these things occur.

You also need to make sure that you have procedures in place to protect key items: intellectual property, key equipment, etc. For example, are your blueprints copied and the copies stored someplace other than in your facility, someplace safe in the event of some catastrophe? There are checklists that are available on the Internet to help you answer a wide range of questions and help you prepare for these kinds of crises. For simple operations these checklists, and a few hours spent on these questions on a quiet afternoon every quarter will provide an 80% solution. For more complex situations there are any number of consultants who can assist your organization in preparing a ‘continuity of operations’ plan.

That answers some of the ‘simple’ crises you may face. But what do you do when the crisis is complex and persistent, when for example your industry is hit with a severe economic contraction?

The answer again is planning. What to do when your industry (to take one case) is plunged into a depression? This kind of planning begins when you ask yourself a few ‘what ifs?’ Once simple approach to this planning is to set aside one afternoon a month for a ‘what if’ session. Tell your people a week ahead of time that ‘next Friday afternoon we are going to spend the last three hours of the day thinking about hurricane (or whatever) preparation. Come prepared to talk.’ When next Friday arrives, buy a few pizzas and have everyone meet and talk about what they think, their experiences, what they have learned. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Planning can be easy if you do it well ahead of time. Right down everyone’s thoughts and create a short point paper. You have the first plan. Keep doing this, once a month.

At the beginning of summer, spend one session on hurricanes, or tornados (whichever is more prevalent in your area). If you are in an area prone to earthquakes, talk about your procedures for earthquakes. Make sure you have a plan that includes taking care of your people and their families. If nothing else, you need to know what your organization can and can’t do. Before autumn arrives, take time to look at your winter storm response plan.

Once you have a few of these plans under your belt, move beyond the realm of nature and start to look at the issue of man-made disasters and crises. Again, whether it is physical, economic or technological, some simple ‘table-top’ exercises (a ‘table-top’ need be no more complex then simply a brain-storming session where you sit around with some other folks and ask ‘what if?’ then talk yourselves through what you need to do if the following things – X, Y, or Z – occur) can make a world of difference in how you respond during the first few hours and days of any crisis.

As an example, have a ‘brain-storming Friday’ during which the question to answer/crisis to address is: Imagine our #1 competitor just developed a new technology, system or process that allows them to do what we do, but at half the cost. How do we compete? This is a hard question do deal with. But one thing is certain, spending time thinking about it before it happens may well be the thing that prevents it from happening.

One final thing: once a crisis has begun, don’t assign blame – that will happen anyway – just let someone else do that. If a specific person failed to act properly, ask yourself what should have been done to prepare that person to act properly: what training or drills should they have received that would have prevented the problem? Crises are an opportunities to fix things and prepare for the future.

First Time - Part 20: Set the Example

2010-03-27T15:33:00.001-04:00

This is part 20 of in a series of short essays on fundamentals of leadership. While it is drafted for those who have just moved into their first leadership position, I hope there is a little something in here for the most practiced of leaders, a 'getting back to basics' that everyone needs every now and then.

Leading means setting a good example and you need to do it all day, every day. You need to set the example in big things and small things. You will find, however, that setting the example in the mundane, the routine, is nearly as important as the example you set in times of crisis – and often more difficult to manage, because that day-to-day example is going to set the tone of your entire organization.

There are some obvious examples (though even these are often ignored by people who claim to be leaders): praise in public, censure in private; always remain calm; thank those who work for you (and do the real work); etc. You can probably add three or four off the top of your head.

But there are some other 'simple' maxims that you as a leader need to remember.

Set the example in routine things. This can have a hundred shades of meaning, but for starters, consider this: work smart, not hard. If you are coming into work at 6 AM and leaving at 8 PM every day, and you are always exhausted, what 'signal' does that send to your people? Certainly, there are times when that can't be helped; everyone will know that. But, if you make it a habit of simply being in your office, when you clearly have other places to be, you also send a message that you really don't trust the folks under you to do their jobs when you aren't there.

We all have bad days. But you can't bring your bad days to work. No matter how you feel about what is going on, you need to be positive. Your attitude will be absorbed and replicated by everyone around you: if you are positive, no matter the situation, your people will be as well. If you are negative, they will be negative. This doesn't mean you need to be a grinning, hail fellow well met irrespective of the situation. But a 'we can overcome, despite any situation' very often becomes true simply because of the attitude of the leader. What is certain is that if you convey the perception that things are 'bad,' they will be.

Part and parcel with that positive attitude is conveying that you enjoy your job, that you enjoy working with your people, that you like the organization, the company. Again, the flip side is that you send the signal that you aren't having fun, that you 'don't enjoy it here.' Well, if you don't, why would anyone else? And if they don't enjoy it, not only will they not work hard and not try hard, they will leave when they get an opportunity. Conversely, people who enjoy their work, their team-mates, their environment are more likely to try hard to make certain it thrives. Your job is to engender that feeling. And it is often as simple as making it clear that you enjoy going to work on Monday morning, that you really want to meet with your people, that you enjoy talking to them and helping them succeed.

Be careful managing your time. Letting yourself be buried in paperwork or e-mails will not only send a poor signal to your people, it also leaves your trapped inside your office. So, eliminate the paperwork that isn't essential (and remember to push back with your boss if you think you can reduce paperwork flowing up); delegate paperwork that can be more easily completed by someone else; and manage your e-mail. Make sure that someone else also sees your business e-mails (and get your personal e-mails dumped into a personal folder). If not, then you will become both a bottleneck – all e-mails from above must pass through you, and if there is a task from the boss and you aren't at your desk it will be stopped until you get back to your desk – which can turn a routine task into a crisis. There are many "leaders" who place great stock in being 'on distro' from senior leadership and closely guard their e-mail prerogatives; this is a good thing if they want to be chained to their desk AND the e-mails being passed around contain information and comments that they shouldn't. So, tell your peers to clean up the e-mails, take out derogatory comments, and put others on distro for your e-mails.

Get out of the office. And make sure others see you doing it. If you work out, make sure you go during lunch. Encourage others. Go for a run (or walk if you don't run). Working out, keeping in shape isn't just beneficial for your body, it can help you clear your head, let you focus on something else so that you don't fixate on one problem. Things invariably looks different after some time out of the office. One thing is certain, telling everyone that they are encouraged to work out and that it is part of the corporate culture of fitness, then sitting behind your desk 12 hours per day and sending out tasks with answers due at 1 PM (making it impossible to leave the office for lunch or a run, etc.) sends a clear signal that the 'culture of fitness' is a line but isn't really meant to be believed.

You are probably a Type A, that is why you find yourself in a leadership position. If you aren't a Type A, all the pressure in the corporate environment will push you in that direction. There is nothing necessarily wrong with having a Type A personality, but you mustn't overdo it. More importantly, you want to make sure that you send the signal to your people to work smart, not hard. Send this signal early, and when you need your people to work smart AND hard they will.

Enjoy being in charge, you will find it can be the most rewarding experience of your life. And you will find that you can enjoy the ride even more if you set the example and let others enjoy their jobs – their ride – as well.

First Time - Part 19: Delegating

2010-03-22T09:36:00.000-04:00

This is part 19 of in a series of short essays on fundamentals of leadership. While it is drafted for those who have just moved into their first leadership position, I hope there is a little something in here for the most practiced of leaders, a ‘getting back to basics’ that everyone needs every now and then.

One of the interesting apparent contradictions in leadership is that effective leaders are those who learn how to delegate. It is fair to say that only those who are very good at delegating have any chance of becoming highly effective leaders.

Which leads to two simple questions: how do you learn to delegate? And what things should you never delegate?

Delegating, like most of leadership, is art-form, that is, you have to practice it ‘in the field.’ This is particularly true of delegating. You will only become good at delegating by doing it a great deal.

But, there are two fears associated with delegation: the first is simply that you are going to give the task to ‘Joe’ and he’s not going to do it right and you will be blamed. The second and more insidious is the opposite, that you will give the task to Joe and he will perform it so well that your boss will think he no longer needs you.

As for the first, the truth is you have to delegate. If you have five people who work for you, and they each are putting in just 30 real hours of work per week, that amounts to 150 hours of real work: you can’t do that yourself. You must delegate some work. Can you perform certain high priority tasks yourself instead of delegating? Certainly. But your job is to lead and manage, to provide oversight. If you have even a marginally competent boss, every time you keep a task for yourself will raise a question as to whether you really are ready to lead.

As for the second fear, that the boss will believe you are no longer needed because ‘Joe’ did such a great job, such a boss is not even marginally competent. You are in a lousy position and it has nothing to do with delegating or not delegating. So you should focus on becoming a better leader (maybe your boss’s boss will notice (the subject of a later discussion)) and on taking care of your people.

How and what do you delegate? A simple solution is to try to delegate everything. Is there someone who works for you who is qualified to address each task and is that task fairly within their job description? If so, delegate all those tasks. You will perform the role of ensuring that standards are met. And recognizing who actually performed the work.

This will not come easily in most cases. (There are some exceptions to this: a production line with clearly assigned jobs and standard tasks can be nearly self-tending. However, as soon as non-standard tasks are assigned, you will find yourself with the same problem of delegating tasks.) So, a simple way to mark how much to delegate is this: delegate until you get an uneasy feeling in your stomach, then delegate a bit more.

This will be a moving mark, and you will learn to delegate more as your experience grows. You will also be ‘bitten on the backside’ more then once, as you delegate some task to someone and then they fail to perform to the necessary standards and you miss a deadline. The lesson learned is not: blame ‘Joe.’ The lesson learned is that you either delegated to the wrong guy, or you didn’t provide the right guidance, training and oversight. You may not have delegated the necessary authority so that ‘Joe’ could actually carry out the assigned task. Those are all your shortcomings. Learn from the event and move on.

Delegating authority is a difficult thing to do; no one feels comfortable doing it at first. After all, you are letting someone speak for you. You are letting go of the thing – authority - that was just handed to you. But it is the only way to get things done. But you can’t delegate a task without delegating the authority to execute the task. Swallow hard, then delegate.

That being said, there is a limit to delegation. Beyond the obvious case where your boss pulls you aside and says ‘I need you personally to do this for me,’ the limit to delegation is simply put: ‘delegate tasks, delegate authority to carry out the tasks, but never delegate responsibility.’ When something goes wrong, when the job isn’t completed on time, when it’s not done properly, you shoulder the blame. You are still responsible for oversight.

The old saw that the leader takes blame but never credit is as true today as when it was first offered. So, delegate tasks and authorities, provide oversight and guidance, accept the blame for any shortcoming, and when there is success – and there will be – remember to praise those who really did the work. The rest will take care of itself – and your boss will notice and take care of you.

First Time - Part 18: Span of Control

2010-03-19T13:39:00.000-04:00

This is part 18 of in a series of short essays on fundamentals of leadership. While it is drafted for those who have just moved into their first leadership position, I hope there is a little something in here for the most practiced of leaders, a ‘getting back to basics’ that everyone needs every now and then.

Span of Control

There has been a great deal of talk over the past 15 to 20 years about flattened organizations and how modern systems and the internet let senior management make direct contact with the workforce, or with sales or whatever is applicable in your organization.

Let me be the first to say that I fully support any elimination of unnecessary middle management and stultifying bureaucracy. Of course, the operative word is ‘unnecessary.’ But the fact is that some middle management is necessary. And the reason for this is simple: human beings are incapable of controlling more than 6 or 8 people at a time.

The common wisdom is that the flatter an organization, the faster it can respond to changing conditions and changing customer preferences. Why this is so is fairly simple: the number of steps between the work-force and the decision-maker has been reduced. Information flows ‘up’ more quickly; the decision-maker is in closer contact with the ‘shop floor,’ hence has a better ‘feel’ for the situation; more rapid and accurate decisions are made; and the decisions are communicated more quickly to the ‘shop floor.’ There are fewer de facto powerless middle managers who can only slow down information and inhibit decision-making, thereby allowing more rapid response.

All of that is true. But it doesn’t change the fact that if a leader is directly managing more than a certain number of people he will be swamped with information flow – of all types – and be incapable of properly executing his functions.

Why this is so is fairly simple: we are a gregarious bunch but none of us mixes perfectly. If you have one person who works for you, the only relationship you have is the one between you and that person. If you have two people who work for you, you have four relationships to manage: the relationship between you and each separately, the relationship between the two of them, and their combined relationship with you. If you have three people working for you, that number jumps to 13. True, some of the relationships will, in fact be of no consequence. But, as a rule of thumb, you can assume that the minimum of meaningful relationships that you will manage is equal to your number of subordinates – squared. So, three people: nine important relationships; 4 = 16, 5 = 25. By the time you get to 10 you have 100 different relationships you need to manage. And while each will take a few minutes a week, some may well consume hours at a time.

Is it possible to have a host of people who are all remote from each other, none of them dealing with any of the others, allowing you to deal with each ‘one-on-one?’ Certainly. And in the rare cases where that exists I suppose one individual might be able to handle a whole host of people. But such circumstances are very rare.

And so, despite the fact that most leaders thoroughly enjoy mixing with ‘the troops,’ the fact is that no leader can actually manage more then a handful. History bears this out, not only in the major political and military leaders of the past, but also in virtually every leader of today. The average manager or leader today often has fooled himself into believing that he can manage 15 or more people reporting directly to him. But close observation reveals, in virtually every case, that what happens is something like this:

Of the 15 people who report to him, he routinely ignores the bulk of them. In fact, he is so oversaturated with input that he will focus on two or three subordinates who are involved in the work that he himself is particularly interested in. If he used to be with sales, he will focus on sales, if he was an engineer, he will focus on the engineers and system development; in the military the commander will spend all his time with his operations officer and one or two subordinate units, and never talk to the G1, G2, G4, G5, G6 or any of his other staff codes (and usually several subordinate units will also be ignored.) This will persist for some time and then, as if descending from the heavens the boss appears in this office or that office, appears to show great (often too great) interest for a certain period of time, provides guidance – often conflicting, then disappears, not to reappear again for who knows how long.

If this sounds like your boss, it is because his span of control is too great. Hopefully, it doesn’t sound like you.

As a leader you are responsible not simply for managing the ‘output,’ whatever it might be; you are responsible for your people. And that means you must know them, and understand them, and understand the issues and pressures they are facing. That includes all the various relationships that develop in any workforce. And that takes time. You must become involved if you want them to be the best they can be. And yet there is an obvious limit to how much time you can spend managing all these relationships.

So, how many people should work for you? The answer is not an easy one. It depends on the complexity of the tasks at hand and the degree to which the subordinates operate independently. A chief of surgery at a hospital may have a dozen surgeons ‘working’ for him, but in a very real sense, they don’t work for him, and his degree of control and oversight is less then it might at first appear. On a production line a foreman may have 10 or 12 people working for him and as long as the skill level is not too high, and he has the time to come to know everyone, this may be manageable. As the complexity increases, or as the turnover rate increases, it will become increasingly difficult to manage 12 people.

It is worth noting that the size of an infantry squad – around the world – is between 7 and 11 people, and has been for more than 2000 years. This has nothing to do with tradition and everything to effective leadership. That you can then move up through most armies in the world and find most commands trying to keep the number of subordinates reporting to any commander in the range of 5 people is a testimony to the lessons of effective leadership (it often is more than 5, but most people do try to keep that number in sight.) Simply put, the leadership becomes less effective as that number increases.

You will need to find your own way, and on your first job you will certainly simply be told what the answer is. But, be honest with yourself and recognize how hard it is to do your job and manage everyone and all the human relationships that are around you. Delegate when you can, take notes, and when you have the opportunity, don’t over extend yourself.

First Time - Part 17: Diversity

2010-03-16T08:10:00.003-04:00

This is part 17 of in a series of short essays on fundamentals of leadership. While it is drafted for those who have just moved into their first leadership position, I hope there is a little something in here for the most practiced of leaders, a ‘getting back to basics’ that everyone needs every now and then.

You’ve been told to put together a team of folks to do something, and you want to pick a good team. So let me say a few words about diversity. The truth is that the word is used a great deal but often with inconclusive or irrelevant results.

A number of years ago I found myself on a planning team for a major military operation. The general in charge of the planning team made a point of telling everyone that he wanted a diverse team, for all the politically correct reasons. He then assembled a group of perhaps a dozen officers: there were Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines; there were seven men and five women; there were several pilots; several infantry officers, a submariner, a logistician, etc.; there were several African-Americans, an Hispanic-American, two Asian-Americans. We were, from his perspective as diverse as he could get.

What I saw was 12 officers all with 13 to 18 years in the military, all graduates of one of the War Colleges (if memory serves, 8 were graduates of the Army War College, two were graduates of the Air Force War College, and two were graduates of the Naval War College); each had at least one year of duty on this staff. In short, stripping away the labels, we were all pretty much the same. And the planning proved it: we produced a bread and butter plan; it suited its purpose and was more than adequate. But it was hardly original. In short, there was no significant diversity among the team members, at least not diversity that mattered.

What had happened was the general who selected us had used superficial characteristics as marks of diversity.

After that, whenever I had a chance to weigh in on selection of teams where there was any desire for creativity or a new perspective, I offered this option: bring in two additional people: at least one ‘new guy,’ someone who has been in the organization for less than a year (in the military it can be very helpful to bring in an Ensign or 2nd Lieutenant and have him sit and listen and take notes). If the planning isn’t making sense to the ‘New Guy,’ and you can’t explain it to him, you have a problem. This is not to say that you should ‘dumb down’ plans so they are understandable to someone just off the street. On the contrary, no plan should ever be simply ‘dumbed down.’

If, on the other hand, if you can take a complex issue and a complex solution and develop an execution plan that can be explained so that a neophyte can clearly understand it, you probably have a plan that can be successfully executed.

The second person to bring is someone with a completely different background. Again, by way of example, I was involved with several teams that were designing satellites. One team was made up exclusively of engineers; one had a student of the arts on it. The team of engineers worked faster – they all thought alike. But the team with a couple of non-engineers was able to address issues from unusual perspectives. Innovation came from the ‘chemistry’ between engineers who ‘already knew the answers’ and liberal arts majors who kept asking: “why can’t we do XXX?” Because the engineers had to explain “why” so many times, we started to see instances where we had accepted certain positions as immutable truths when, in fact, they were nothing more than engineering conveniences. We would never have arrived at the conclusions we did if it had not been for the prodding and questioning from the non-engineers.

The point is this: there is some diversity that is relevant to the task at hand, and there is some that really isn’t. We should all be color-blind. It shouldn’t matter a tinker’s damn whether the parents of the guy sitting next to you are from China, India, Ireland, or Indiana. But, which team is likely to make a better city planning team, all other things being equal: a half dozen lawyers, or a carpenter, a lawyer, an architect, a chemist, a teacher and an electrical engineer?

In putting together any team, focus on the important characteristics, particularly the intellect and experience base and character of the possible candidates and leave the superficial to the politicians.

First time - Part 16: Firing

2010-03-12T12:29:00.000-05:00

This is part 16 of in a series of short essays on fundamentals of leadership. While it is drafted for those who have just moved into their first leadership position, I hope there is a little something in here for the most practiced of leaders, a ‘getting back to basics’ that everyone needs every now and then.

Firing someone (we can use nice words here: ‘let go,’ ‘terminate employment,’ ‘grant a leave of absence,’ but it all feels the same to the person being fired, and needs to be as seriously considered by you) is the opposite side of the coin from hiring people. While it is important to hire the right people, it is equally important to identify those who don’t fit in your organization and move them out. Before I go any further, it very important to remember that you are dealing with real human beings; letting someone go – firing – someone is never going to be easy and never will be pleasant. In all your dealing with people you should always be polite, but this is particularly true in the case of firing someone. Before you say or do anything, think about how you would feel if you were on the receiving end.

There are a number of tasks that you must never delegate, and firing someone is one of those tasks. If they work for you, you must tell them. In some cases you may have a superior who wants to shield you from the process and whatever backlash which may accompany the decision. You should politely resist this. As unpleasant as it will be, and it will be unpleasant, it is essential that you understand what is at stake, and the only way to do that is through first hand experience. If your boss wants to be in the room when you tell the person concerned, very well. But you should insist that you inform them.

Firing someone must rest on one of three clearly identified reasons:

1) Serious ethical and legal lapse; this is obvious and needs no further discussion. This is also the only case where you have any real chance of the event being anything other than unpleasant. And even in such cases it will probably still be unpleasant. In this situation it is best to simply state the obvious – the behavior was not and is not acceptable and the individual has been terminated.

2) Performance failure: Poor performance should be documented over time and clearly communicated to the individual involved. We discussed this last week and earlier: you need to both set standards and document with your people how well they are meeting the standards. Only when you have ensured that an individual has the proper training and proper tools to achieve his assigned tasks and, after discussion and counseling, should you consider firing someone for performance failure. It is worth noting that if you have ensured that someone has the aptitude, training and tools/assets to achieve assigned tasks, and he has been counseled – more than once – on failure to perform, firing them should not be a surprise.

In such a case, you should still take the time to explain to them why you are firing them. Include in this explanation any sense you may have of how they might improve in their next job and, in particular, what jobs might be better suited for them.

3) The final reason to fire someone is that they refuse to get ‘on the team.’ This can either be easy or traumatic, but is usually traumatic. Every manager has a worker who grouses continually but performs admirably; such people are rarely a concern and are not the object of this section. Rather, it is the individual who performs well, usually above the average, but not only doesn’t share the organizational goal, but is undermining it by his behavior; this is the individual we are concerned with here. This will require serious counseling and, in some cases, you may be able to ‘turn them around,’ and in today’s litigious climate, you will need to keep extensive documentation. But once you identify this behavior you need to act to end it.

Again, careful documentation and a clear explanation are both necessary and should be provided to the individual being fired.

In some cases you may want a witness, depending on the circumstances and the individual involved. You should at least consider having one and if you have any doubt talk it over with your peers or, if the company has one, the legal counsel.

Remember that no matter what you say, and how you say it, the person being fired will take it very personally. It is best to keep your explanation as narrowly focused as possible. This is not an indictment of the employee as a human being; you are not sitting in judgment of them, only of their specific performance. Even in the event of someone being fired because of an ethics issue, leave any comments between you and your shadow. Even if the situation involves some egregious ethical behavior, no matter how angry you may be, keep your comments brief, civil and to the point.

Finally, to restate the case, think about how you would feel if the tables were turned. In most cases people are let go because they simply don’t fit. When you talk with them, take some time to point out where they might fit. And be polite.

First Time - Part 15: Hiring

2010-03-08T14:24:00.000-05:00

This is part 15 of in a series of short essays on fundamentals of leadership. While it is drafted for those who have just moved into their first leadership position, I hope there is a little something in here for the most practiced of leaders, a ‘getting back to basics’ that everyone needs every now and then.

Hiring new people is, simply put, the most important single task facing any organization. It is not only the means by which the organization brings in new people, it can and should be a vital part in the development of junior leaders. The ability to select the right people to work for your organization is a key element of the leadership ‘tool-kit;’ it is not only an important and demanding skill, it is also the hallmark of every good leader. It is also a completely learned skill.

Most medium to large companies have a Human Resources department or a Personnel department (or something similar), a division with the responsibility of hiring and firing personnel, and to some extent managing their careers. In many cases they perform tasks that are required by law. In nearly every case they are a net drag on the organization.

This is not a condemnation of the people who work in ‘HR.’ They are fine people and they are certainly well intentioned. But the simple truth is that the people who are being hired don’t work for them; they work for you (and your peers). The person who is responsible for the selecting a newly hired individual should be the person for whom that new hire will work.

Is this always possible? No. The law often mandates certain behavior by various organizations, and this can make it difficult, and often impractical, for an organization to use this kind of decentralized hiring. And, in some large organizations there are extensive training programs that everyone enters. In such cases selection may be based purely on an entry test (or series of tests). However, if there is an interview process, every leader should make it a point to be placed on the interview panel at regular intervals. This ensures that, as much as possible, the perceptions and perspectives of those who actually execute the organization’s policies and lead its operations are driving the selection of the people entering the organization.

Returning to the subject, the people who actually do the work are the most important part of any organization. Their selection and their career management is the most important single element of organizational success and should be jealously protected by the leadership, by you. Delegating this responsibility to a department that has no direct responsibility for the result of their selections – no matter how well intentioned the HR people may be – is a path to mediocrity at best, and often is a key factor in the failure of an organization.*

Now, in most cases when you arrive at a new position, particularly as a first time manager/leader, you will probably find that you have little to no say in who works for you. That is to be expected, as you will still be under a good deal of scrutiny as your boss tries to get the measure of you. However, you should make a point of insisting that you have some role in the selection process, even if you need to hire or replace someone a soon as you get there. This is necessary both for the organization’s benefit as well as your own: you need to begin to acquire the skill of reading people and fitting them to the task at hand and you should start as soon as possible. If you have never hired anyone this before, seek the advice of your peers and your boss, but make it clear that it is going to be your choice – good or bad. Identify the skills and traits you need in the position and focus on them.

You will now find that you don’t have enough time to ‘do it right’ and interview dozens of people; you will need to make a choice from a relatively small pool because time is short. This puzzle – hiring new folks is the most important thing you do versus you don’t have enough time to interview all the people you would like so you can make the best decision – is one of the facts of leadership. As I will discuss in a future article, one of the other ‘learned’ skills of good leaders is picking good people and getting them to ‘fit’ into the organization. Nevertheless, spend as much time as you can clearly identifying the skills and traits needed for a particular position, and then carve out as much time as possible to review potential candidates.

Begin by reviewing resumes or applications, and ask for inputs from your peers and others you trust. You won’t hire anyone based on a resume, but you might be able to eliminate him from contention. Focus on the hard data for this initial ‘sorting,’ specific skills and experiences. After you have narrowed the field somewhat, rank them and then ask someone else to do the same. If you have differences in how you ranked them, discuss the differences and then reappraise your rankings. Once you are satisfied with your rankings, schedule interviews with the top 5 or 6 – because that is probably all you have time for. Resolve that you are going to pick the best candidate out of this group.

As for the interview, focus on the tasks of your organization and its goals. Explain to the applicants what your organization is trying to do and let them talk about how they see themselves in your organization. Let them do the bulk of the talking. Take notes, and when the interview is finished, spend a few minutes alone writing down your observations.

When all the interviews are completed, you need to review your observations and decide. If one candidate stands out above the others, you are fortunate. But, there is no magic and easy answer at this point. You will probably find that it is a ‘coin toss’ between two candidates, two people who have equal credentials and impressed you in the interview. At this point you simply have to choose one of them. This skill will improve with experience, as you will acquire the ability to see more and more differences between nearly identical candidates, but, even then, this can be a difficult choice. Good Luck!

* It is worth noting that elite organizations have rigorous selection processes that normally involve lengthy “interviews” that last months at a time and give the entire senior leadership the opportunity to evaluate potential members. A look at Special Forces units reveals that they have a demanding screening program followed by lengthy basic courses of instruction and even longer advanced training programs. During these periods each candidate is frequently examined by the leadership and the ones who don’t fit are weeded out. The same process takes place in internships and residency programs in medicine.

First Time - Part 14: Evaluations and the Like

2010-02-16T14:32:00.000-05:00

This is part 14 of in a series of short essays on fundamentals of leadership. While it is drafted for those who have just moved into their first leadership position, I hope there is a little something in here for the most practiced of leaders, a ‘getting back to basics’ that everyone needs every now and then.

Evaluating the people who work for you may be the most important thing you do as a boss. It not only affects the lives of those you work for, it also directly affects the organization you all work for. It is also probably the most difficult thing you will do. And you should, in fact, be doing it constantly: evaluating your people and providing them guidance, helping them to improve.

In most organizations – outside of manufacturing plants and sports teams – it is not intuitively obvious as to what standards an individual is being measured against. While there are some exceptions to that rule: sales personnel, manufacturing plants, sports teams, (and even in those cases it may not be as easy as it seams); it will be your job to either establish or clarify those standards.

You may be one of the lucky people to arrive at a job in which the previous occupants have established clear, sane and readily accepted standards for all to work towards and achieve. If so, congratulations, and you should thank your predecessor because such a situation is a rarity. (I have never arrived at a job in which there were any useful standards of performance.) It is more likely that you will find either old and outdated standards (that some believe they are still working towards), or no standards at all.

Your first task is to review the existing standards; they will at least provide a starting point from which you can deviate. Compare them to the goals as stated by your immediate boss and by the overall boss - the CEO, the Chairman, the Mayor or the Governor, the General, the Commissioner, etc. (If you notice a clear conflict between what your boss wants and what the overall boss wants, go talk to your boss right now; you need to clarify that situation immediately.) Now, restate these goals in terms of ‘what that means to my organization.’ What tasks are assigned to you, what are the timelines, what are the standards for acceptable actions or products?

This may seem easy, and in some cases it is. But in most cases, it will require numerous iterations. That’s all right. Draft a proposal and then talk it over with your boss and with your peers; include your personnel office (HR) and a smart guy from the legal office to give an unofficial review. Then incorporate their inputs. Now comes the hard part: tell the people who work for you.

They will certainly know you are working on new standards; you may well have talked with them already. But you need to get them ‘on-board.’ This is a dialogue and you need their input. If you are open and fair, they will quickly move past any fears that you are ‘after them’ and will contribute real substance. As the conversation moves forward they will be able to tell you where you are ‘pushing too far’ and where you aren’t pushing ‘far enough.’ Give people some room to show their creativity. In 9 cases out of 10 you will be pleasantly surprised by people’s desire to show how much they can do.

After a month or so as boss, spend a day reviewing and discussing the standards – tear them all apart and put them back together again – you really want this to be right – both assessments for job performance and bonuses, and what you are looking. It is particularly true that if you have a few people who work for you as supervisors of others, you and your supervisors need to be clear as to what standards you are looking for with regard to recommendations for new positions, promotions and bonuses.

Talk with your people – constantly. Performance reviews really aren’t a tool to fail people, they are a tool to make people better at their task. Don’t look at it as a grade you are giving ‘John Doe,’ look on it as the grade you are giving your whole organization, and yourself in particular. Think of it in these terms: if John is not performing up to the standards desired, there are only a few possibilities: 1) he is truly not capable; 2) it is impossible; 3) he is improperly trained; 4) he doesn’t care.

If it is #1, then the fault lies with you – John shouldn’t have been placed in that position and should be moved to someplace where he can be more productive. Don’t ask the master welder to do brain surgery or the brain surgeon to weld. If #2, either your standards are too high or you have not invested in the tools or assets that would make it impossible. (A stone mason, no matter how talented, will achieve little if his only tool is a tack-hammer). If #3 the fault also lies with you, your expectations don’t match your investment. Even if the cause is #4, the fault may lie with you: have you spent the necessary time to communicate the organization’s goals to John and have you tried to motivate him? It may be that John simply doesn’t care, and won’t no matter how hard you try. But you need to be able to prove that both to the organization if and when you get around to firing John, and to yourself, if you intend to keep looking at yourself in the mirror.

As you can see, the real issue with evaluations for performance and for bonuses and promotions really isn’t about the evaluations, it’s about you communicating with your people as to what you expect of them, setting and maintaining clear standards, and establishing and maintaining clear communications with your people. Work out standards: standards for performance, standards for consideration for this or that job, standards for bonuses. This won’t be easy; it will require constant effort and constant ‘tweaking.’ But it has to be done. Talk to your people. Every time you meet is a chance to evaluate their performance. And their performance is really a statement about your performance. If you are succeeding at your task of communicating and motivating – of leading – then they will also succeed. If you fail, you will notice it because they will fail.

Finally, avoid complicated forms and jargon and the like. Set clear standards, speak straight to people, and make your forms and paperwork as clear and as simple as you can. And keep things simple: there are a few people who can provide a performance assessment and a promotion recommendation and a bonus input all on the same page; they are rare and it is likely that even if they can, the guy reading it a day or week or month later won’t be able to accurately parse the document. So keep it simple.

And Communicate.

First Time - Part 13: The Debrief

2009-12-30T07:18:00.000-05:00

This is part 13 of in a series of short essays on fundamentals of leadership. While I wrote this for those who have just moved into their first leadership position, I hope there is a little something in here for the most practiced of leaders, a ‘getting back to basics’ that everyone needs every now and then.

I heard a great story a while ago from one of Vince Lombardi’s players about how demanding Lombardi was: the Packers had just won their first championship (1961) and in the first official team meeting after the game Lombardi gave them a short talk about preparing for next season, then proceeded to show the game-film from the championship game and started to comment – critique – the performances of this or that Green Bay player.

Lombardi had just put his finger on the most important single element of the pursuit of excellence: the ‘debrief.’

It may come in a half-dozen different ‘wrappers:’ Lessons Learned, After Action Report, Game Film, etc. But the process of coldly and clinically dissecting what you just did, identifying what worked AND why, what didn’t work AND why not, and then developing a follow-on, a change in course, a training plan, a way to take that knew knowledge and apply it to what you are doing – that process is the heart and soul of every pursuit of excellence since the first guy stared at the rock in his hand and decided it didn’t work as well as he had hoped.

If you have ever have observed an after-action report they are generally divided into two main groupings: really good or nearly worthless. And therein lies the real problem: putting together good after-action reports, good debriefs, is VERY hard. It takes a great deal of practice and the skill, once developed, requires constant effort to maintain. (Perhaps the best I have ever seen are from the instructors at the US Navy’s Top Gun (and the US Air Force’s Red Flag) aggressor squadrons. All the great boxing coaches are also excellent.)

But, as hard as they work at the entire debrief process, they have it ‘easy’ compared to many others: the debriefs that take place at Top Gun and Red Flag are of specific, short duration events. As an event expands in time from several hours to several days to several weeks to months or even years, and from dozens of people involved to hundreds to thousands, it becomes massively complex and dissecting it becomes ever more difficult.

The result is that, in most cases, real after action analysis and reporting never takes place. Try to find a detailed study by General Motors that discusses specific decisions that were made over the course of the last 25 years that led to the current situation.

Leadership in most corporations will respond that you can’t do this kind of thing, there would be legal repercussions, they don’t have the time or resources, and most unconvincingly of all: we know what really happened.

I have heard these responses before. Invariably, they are wrong on all counts. A review of the major decisions and their outcomes is a review of facts. If a law has or has not been broken or someone is liable for this or that action, the review won’t change that fact. Not reviewing what led you to your current situation will, however, protect the poor decision-maker. More importantly, it prevents everyone from clearly identifying what went wrong and why. And so, such organizations will, almost to a certainty, never achieve excellence.

For you, in your first leadership position, it is a skill that you should learn and nurture and spread. As you rise through the ranks of your organization you can spread this process, and you will be spreading one of the essential building-blocks of excellence.

So, what is a debrief? Simply put, it is an analytic review of what happened. And there are some rules for good debriefs (I’m using the term generically: it may be a single event – the welcoming ceremony for the visiting VIP that lasted 2 hours, or it may be the building of a nuclear reactor that took years, the essence is the same.) You will review the events – the what happened, then compare them to what was planned, then discuss the difference between the two and why there was a difference. As you step through this process you will start to recognize decision points, times when a decision either was made that led to specific results (good or bad), or could have been made and was not (and also led to specific results – good or bad).

And then the hard part starts. Because now you need to engage the brains of everyone involved and discern WHY this or that decision was made? What information did they have? What was the expected result? How did that compare to the actual result and what additional information would the decision-maker have needed to be able to see what the actual result would be?

Finally, what conclusions can you draw from this discussion? What additional information will you need for the next iteration? What additional preparation is needed? How do you ensure that you replicate the ‘goods’ and avoid the ‘bads’ that you just identified?

To assist in the debrief, take detailed notes on nearly everything. Practice taking notes; practice reconstructing events – it is a learned skill and one that you lose quickly when you don’t practice it. It will take time to get good at this, the first few times you do it you will probably be awful; it’s the cost of learning.

Remember the Number 1 Rule of debriefs: they must be impersonal. Debriefs are cold and factual, egos must be ‘left at the door.’ This includes everyone. If the Big Boss is there and he did something clearly wrong, it gets mentioned.*

What do you debrief? Nearly everything. While the common image of a debrief is pilots sitting around a ready-room after a mission discussing what happened, debriefs can – and should – be used for nearly any type of event, from a football game to a meeting with your investors, from a single discrete event to a multi-year construction program. Obviously, for long-duration events, you need to keep detailed notes and you should have regular meetings throughout the course of the project.

A debrief begins with the detailed description of what happened. Training yourself, and others, to observe and report accurately is neither simple nor quick. It will require a good deal of practice. But it is the foundation for the debrief. Whenever possible, take notes. If not possible, practice remembering key elements of any event. Focus on accuracy. (This also helps you in simply being a focused member of any team.)

Consider that most mundane of events, a meeting with some potential investors. You have been chosen to give the presentation. First, always try to bring at least one other person who can not only take notes, but is a good ‘observer of the human condition’ who can ‘read’ (think body language, tone, etc.) the investors and report accurately. Some of the things you may want to discuss when you and your team get back to the office would be:

What happened? = Sequence of events and outcomes

Overall impressions

Who should have been there? Who shouldn’t have been there?

What should have been said? What shouldn’t have been said?

Where should we have held the meeting?

What do we want to do for the next meeting?

Based on what we just learned, How do we change the presentation?

In the end, the key to any debrief is answering the question ‘Why?’ Why did you do ‘X?’ Why did the other guy do ‘Y?’ This will lead you to ask the important questions such as ‘What should I have done so that the other guy would have done ‘Z’ instead of ‘Y?’

More importantly, debriefs, reviews of what you have done, no matter how successful, allow you to understand the value of each decision in the entire process. This allows you to improve your planning, improve your decision-making and improve your execution.

* In the US military, during the debrief of any tactical aviation event (think of the movie Top Gun), no matter who is flying, if he did something wrong, it is pointed out. I have seen 2 and 3 star admirals and generals in debriefs and they are, for the purposes of the debrief, treated exactly the same as LT (jg) and 1stLT. Of course, I have seen one or two admirals who didn’t take it well – they are the exception to the rule. Nevertheless, if you know the boss has a delicate ego – treat it carefully.

First Time - Part 12: Holding Meetings

2009-12-24T08:24:00.000-05:00

You're the boss, which means you both hold meetings (you're in charge), and you go to meeting (you're one of the folks being 'talked at.') In both cases you have an opportunity to shape the meetings. And meetings can either be productive or a terrible waste of time and effort (and money). Consider the following:

There are five general types of meetings:

Information – This is the most basic of meetings. The daily meeting (discussed earlier) is a version of this meeting. Its purpose is to tell people something. This meeting can also be used as a means of large-scale communication. Leadership can use these meetings in a 'town hall' setting to answer questions and get the word out. As a rule, information meetings should be kept to about 30 minutes, though town halls may run to an hour; longer than that and you will start to lose people. Information meetings should avoid issues. When contentious issues come up that require specific debate, note it, move on, and then revisit the issue with the relevant parties. Use a later information meeting to keep everyone informed about that issue.

Lectures are not meetings; meeting share information, lectures allow an expert to teach. Don't confuse the two. If you have an expert that is going to give a lecture, don'tmake it part of the meeting; schedule a lecture.

Decision meetings. These are tightly focused meetings, and are normally short in duration and have a very limited audience. Hard decisions are rarely made with more than a few people in the meeting. Most senior leaders will make a decision with just their deputy or chief of staff, their senior officer for the relevant department, and perhaps a legal representative. In the military you will often find the commander, the deputy (or chief of staff), and the operations officer are the only ones in the room when decisions are made. The intelligence officer and the JAG (Judge Advocate General – the lawyer) may also be in the room. These meetings need to be kept to an absolute minimum number of attendees. Very few decision-makers are comfortable making decisions with lots of people around. (Dr. An Wang, founder of WANG, noted that no decisions are made if there are more than 8 people in the room. My experience has been that that is an accurate statement.)

Post Decision meetings. Many leaders will use a public meeting to 'stage' a decision. Having already decided what they are going to do, they then review the 'bidding' in a larger venue and 'make' the decision in front of everyone. This is properly speaking theater, but it can be very effective in done properly. If your boss is going to do that and you're running the meeting, you need to know so that you make sure the situation is 'teed up' and doesn't go astray. Remember, bosses do this to make sure that the word gets out and so that they can look in charge and communicate to the organization that they are in charge.

Planning meeting. Planning meetings are for planning teams, and really are group work sessions rather than meetings. If you are part of the planning team you should be there, if not, you should not be there unless they need your expertise. Planning meetings can literally last days or weeks.

The 'meeting' meeting. These are meetings that are held for the purpose of getting everyone in the same room at the same time on a periodic basis. The formal discussion and agenda aren't really terribly important. Rather, it is an effort by the boss to stimulate and sustain cross–pollination in the organization. One of the finest leaders I have ever met or worked for, General Gary Luck, used this kind of meeting to great effect, bringing all his senior staff and component officers into a meeting once a week to ensure that he saw them all and they all saw each other and talked. The result was much greater integration of his organization, at a remarkably low cost in time and manpower.

Final thoughts:

It is best not to mix types of meetings – really.

Set an agenda and stick to it.

Set time limits and stick to them.

First Time - Part 11: Keeping Book

2009-12-18T10:14:00.000-05:00

Experience is the best teacher, and the best experiences are those that others have suffered through. So, learn from the experiences of others. The best way to do this is to take notes on those around you. Get a notebook and keep a running ‘log’ of the leadership examples around you. Here are some ideas on what I call ‘Keeping Book:’

(And remember, keeping track of good decisions, good processes, good communication, good ‘leadership,’ is often more difficult then keeping track of the bad. You need to keep book on both and learn from both.)

Decision-making: How did someone make a tough decision? What steps did he take, what information was used, how was the problem dissected and analyzed? You can do this from ‘up close’ from your peers, your boss, and some of the other executives or officers in your organization and parallel organizations. You can also watch it in trade journals and the news. Once you start thinking of it in those terms, you will see this kind of information everywhere. Start keeping track of decisions made and then routinely revisit the log, check what has happened as a result of various decisions, and begin assessing what happened. At first, just put down the facts. After a while, you will begin adding commentary.

Communication: How are decisions communicated to the organization? How is information communicated? What techniques are being used? Formal talks, ‘town halls,’ ‘All Hands,’ e-mails, letters, posted notices, informal chats at the coffee machine, a few words at the cookout; all have their place. Watch how various leaders use these opportunities – and others – and watch how well, or poorly, they keep people informed, focused, and motivated.

Planning and meetings: Take note of how various people use and keep control of meetings, how they use and lead planning, how they resolve crises. Some people use them very well, others don’t. Some can control a meeting or planning effort, others can’t. Take a few notes down and think about what went right and what went wrong.

As you keep your notes, try to note the following:

What others do well. Why do they do well at ‘X?’ Is it part of their background or is it something they learned?

What seems to work well for a number of different people? If significantly different people are doing the same thing, is it because it is a fad or because it really works well?

Mistakes, errors, omissions: every time you leave a meeting with the boss and you say: ‘Gee, I wish he had…’ write that down. It is a lesson you need, and a mistake you should avoid.

What others did that pissed you off and why. Whenever you leave a meeting angry, turn the anger into something productive. What made you angry and why? Take note of it because you don’t want to do the same thing to anyone else (unless it really is necessary). As a general rule, angry people aren’t productive.

What I will never do. This is obvious, or should be. But I have seen too many people break this rule: if you see a leader make a decision that really goes against your values, take note and then spend some time thinking through various situations in which you might find yourself with a similar situation, then work out how you would act.

Two final items of interest: try to take note of those decisions and actions that you thought would work that did not and those that others did that you didn’t think would work, but did. Obviously, this requires that you note down decisions and add the simple comment at that time that “I like this decision, it seems like the right thing because …” or “I really disagree with this course of action because…. I would have preferred that we…” Then you need revisit these entries after the fact and look at the outcomes and consider why the chosen course yielded a result different from the one you anticipated.

You will find a wide range of things to write down. Many may never occur again, but many will. The most important part of this is to spend some time every day thinking about the actual mechanics of leaders: watch how they work (and don’t work) and try – every day – to learn from them.

First Time - Part 10: Going to See the Boss

2009-12-14T07:03:00.000-05:00

You will need to go see the boss, we all do. ('Boss' is used here to mean the next person up the chain of command, the one your report to – and might be anyone from a lieutenant to a 4-star, from the shop manager to the CEO, from the pastor to the Pope). But there are two ways to distinguish yourself when you go to see the boss – one bad, one good. You can either be the guy with the problems who asks the boss for the answer, or you can be the guy with solutions. Be the second guy.

This is really a straightforward issue, and ties directly to the issue of decision-making. Before you go to see the boss with an issue, do two things.

One: try something. Going to the boss before you have tried something is to say 'I really don't know how to be in charge,' and may suggest to the Boss that you are 'wrong' for the job. So, before you go to see the Boss, try something.

Three things can happen: 1) Whatever you do works. Problem solved, and you don't need to see the boss. 2) You do something, but nothing happens. If so, try something else. 3) You try something and it clearly doesn't solve the issue. Only in this case do you go to see the boss.

But not yet. Before you go to see the boss, the second thing you need to do is make sure you understand the problem so you can brief him on it. And, have arecommendation, one that necessarily and clearly exceeds your authority. (If it didn't exceed your authority you wouldn't need him to do something, you could and would just do it yourself.)

Now, you have told the boss that you are not afraid to act and lead, that you understand both your role in the organization and the boss's, and you have provided him the necessary information and some options so that he can tackle the problem quickly rather than having to start from 'zero.'

First Time - Part 9: Making Decisions

2009-12-11T09:18:00.001-05:00

This is part 9 in a series of short essays on fundamentals of leadership. While it is drafted for those who have just moved into their first leadership position, I hope there is something in here for the most practiced of leaders, a 'getting back to basics' that everyone needs every now and then.

Making decisions is the real hard part of leadership, it is where the ‘rubber meets the road.’ There is a quote from a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs that is illuminating:

"A decision is the action an executive must take when he has information so incomplete that the answer does not suggest itself."

Admiral ARTHUR W RADFORD, US Navy, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff - Time 25 Feb 57

Consider that that’s what the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had to say about making decisions, from a man who commanded two separate carrier strike groups during operations in the Pacific during World War II.

The point is that decision-making is not easy. The admiral knew that. You need to understand that. So, how do you do it?

A few ‘simple’ thoughts can help you through this:

First, particularly when you are starting out, but whenever you have a complex problem, break the problem into pieces. This is an acquired skill. The first time you try to break a problem into pieces you will probably find it to be very difficult and you will probably feel rushed, as if there is no time to acquire even the most basic facts. Take a deep breath, and then see if there are any simple things that you can start. Are there set procedures that you have been trained on? Walk through the procedures.

Are there any obvious pieces that ‘come off’ the main issue? If so, take care of them right away, or, if they are simple but time consuming, set them aside to deal with later.

When you get to the main point, make certain that you understand your time line: how much time do you have? You need to understand the ‘processes’ of your parent organization and how those will affect your own smaller organization. If you need something in a month, but the request takes three weeks to process, and one week to order, and all requests must be filed on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, and you just found out about your need on Thursday morning, you may find that after you account for preparing a justification for your boss and ensuring the request is in the right format that you have less than an hour to dig up all the information and actually make the decision. Even so, it is better to make a decision in a compressed time line then to wait and then have the decision made for you by the bureaucratic process.

But assuming you now find yourself with less information then needed for ‘the answer to suggest itself’ what do you do?

First, understand that there is no magic answer.

Second, take a look at what information you have, including the opinion of those you work with, and then – take a deep breath and – Decide! There is one simple piece of guidance I have heard from several different leaders over the years. They all said it slightly differently, but it came out this way: make the decision you would want made if you were in charge of the whole thing, or as if you owned the whole company.

That won’t seem to help at first, but remember these few points:

1) In most cases to act is better then to not act: acting gives you some direction and in the wide range of cases any action, if carried out intelligently and aggressively, will succeed.

2) To not ‘act’ means you intend to react, to react to events driven by others; now you are following and they are the ones setting the course.

3) When you act and act aggressively you will find out all the sooner whether you are on the right course or not. One individual I knew used to call it the difference between the rhinoceros and the turtle: turtles move VERY slowly and therefore make few mistakes, but they never get anywhere. Rhinos move quickly and smash into things; they make lots of mistakes. But they will figure out they are headed in the wrong direction very quickly and can then change course. Rhinos make things happen.

When you aren’t faced with a decision, look around you, study your peers and study their situations and their decisions. Practice; think about the kinds of things that you might be called on to do. Imagine yourself in a given situation. Think of the decisions you would want to make, chew on them, and when you think you have them right, ‘store’ them in a ready corner of your mind.

Finally, keep notes. Review your decisions and the results. That review and analysis is one of the key elements that make good leaders into great leaders.

First Time - Part 8: Charisma

2009-12-08T13:10:00.000-05:00

This is part 8 of in a series of short essays on fundamentals of leadership. While it is drafted for those who have just moved into their first leadership position, I hope there is a little something in here for the most practiced of leaders, a ‘getting back to basics’ that everyone needs every now and then.

By now you’ve noticed one or two folks in your organization who have something ‘extra,’ some spark, that makes people sit up and take notice. It seems to draw people in, makes everything they say or do seem so much more effective and more important, no matter what it is. Folks call it charisma.

What is Charisma? The word comes from the Greek kharis, which means favor or grace, and dictionaries will tell you that charisma is personal charm or grace, particularly when it is used to persuade others. Frankly, that doesn’t really tell me much.

From what I have seen, charisma actually is one “simple” thing: it is ‘passion communicated.’

Take a look at the great coaches, and then listen to the players they coached: you invariably end up with the same stories from the players: stories about how the coach may have understood the game (football, basketball, etc.) but the thing they remember was how he brought all the players together and motivated them, how he took a bunch of individuals and made a team.

That’s charisma. It’s a passion that is so complete that it overcomes all the obstacles in your way, your unease with speaking in front of large groups is forgotten, the fear that you may be on the wrong path is swept aside, the concern that you may not be able to actually do what you have planned turns into a challenge.

When someone becomes truly passionate about their goals, they focus their energies, they study harder, they devote themselves to their goals. Their goals become part of their lives, and, in a very real sense they no longer work, rather they are consumed by their goals and it can’t be defined as work.

That passion is not only all consuming, it can be quite infectious. In some areas those with a passion are called ‘geeks,’ think of a comic book convention. But, arguably, all great leaders had something in common with those we often label as ‘geeks:’ they too had an all consuming passion, something that keeps them up late at night, that gets them up in the morning; they are always talking about it, and always want to talk with you about it.

Fans of any sport sense this in the great athletes: not only is the athlete’s performance remarkable, the commitment to that performance, and to winning, the passion for the sport, is communicated in everything act of the great athletes.

As a life long hockey fan, having grown up in Boston, I, like millions of others, was always struck by how Bobby Orr could rally the team without saying anything. Watching him play hockey, even 40 years later, you can see his passion and you can see his teammates feed off that passion.

So – find your passion. Even if the organization you are in is not your passion, bring your passion into your work – connect to your passion through your work, your leadership. Become ‘invested’ – go back to Maslow: move beyond ‘survival,’ move up the pyramid. How far? Great leadership demands that you be at the level of self-actualization.

Now, once there, you need to communicate that passion to others. You are self actualized, and you need to get them to buy into your self-actualization, you need to communicate your passion – in words and in deeds. Put on the mask of leadership and leave it on.

First Time - Part 7: Walk About

2009-12-03T06:29:00.002-05:00

You have probably heard the phrase ‘Management by Walking About.” Except it’s not managing, it’s leading. Simply put, you need to be seen by your people. And not in your office. Get up out of your chair, get out from behind your desk, leave the office, leave the tent and go walk around. Make it a point to be seen every day in your workspaces – no matter how they are defined.

Robert Townsend, who many years ago made Avis #2 from its former position at the bottom of the ‘pile’ (“We try harder”), referred to the wood-paneled offices of the senior executives in many companies as ‘the mahogany prison,’ where senior executives sequestered themselves behind paneled doors and plush carpets and disconnected themselves from the real organization.

To combat this is a life-long effort and it begins with your first day on the job in your very first leadership position. You have to work at it every day, and you should make it part of your daily schedule. I learned this lesson from a long list of great leaders, who every day made it a point to spend time ‘among the troops,’ walking around the ship or the garrison, or walking around the factory floor, or across the trading floor.

But the key was that they were seen regularly and frequently, and they made themselves available for discussions with their ‘troops.’ The impact on the people is always striking and positive – even during the worst times. People not only saw the boss, they could talk with the ‘boss,’ find out what was really going on, what was just nonsense, make suggestions, and simply get to know and be known by the ‘boss.’ And the boss gets similar benefits, feeling the real pulse of the organization and understanding the real hopes and fears of the people ‘on the shop floor.’

In the Army or the Marines you will sometimes find young platoon leaders and company commanders ‘hanging around’ battalion, waiting for pearls of wisdom from the ‘old man,’ and often waiting to be seen. Some Battalion commanders – the poor ones – will reward the ‘sucking up.’ But the good ones will wonder why you are at battalion when you should be with your platoon or company. In fact, the good platoon leaders and company commanders are the ones they don’t see a lot of. The same is true in any business.

Getting out of your office, no matter how constructed, will become increasingly difficult as you progress up through the organization and you must fight for spending time doing this every day. This is a simple, but invaluable lesson. But it is one you need to start to learn on your first day and work at for the rest of your career. So, get up and go for a walk.

First Time - Part 6: The Daily Meeting

2009-11-24T16:13:00.000-05:00

This part 6 of in a series of short essays on fundamentals of leadership. While it is drafted for those who have just moved into their first leadership position, I hope there is a little something in here for the most practiced of leaders, a ‘getting back to basics’ that everyone needs every now and then.

Most organizations have one: a daily meeting to make sure everyone is ready to go, to share information, and pass out any new directives. Some organizations have them first thing in the morning, others late in the afternoon, etc. But, all share a common goal: to make sure information is passed both down and up and that everyone is ready to go for the day ahead.

There are many ways to hold these meetings, but a few simple rules will help you, no matter how or when you choose to hold this meeting.

Keep it brief: aim for 15 minutes, and don’t let it go beyond 30 minutes (You will miss this mark often, but keep trying to contain it). The meeting is not designed to settle anything; it is quick information to make sure everyone is ready. If you need more details, or you need to discuss something, save it for another meeting.

Have an agenda, and try to keep it the same every day. Tweak this until you get it right, then simply post it and pass it out. Again, keep it simple. For example: what is due today, what is due tomorrow, what meetings are you attending, who is not here today, safety notes if there is a holiday approaching, and then ‘around the room.’ One helpful process is to have the folks speak in the same order every day. Any protocol works: designate chairs and work around the room counter-clockwise, by position, whatever you want, but pick a process and stick with it.

Have a process that makes sense: if you keep changing things you will confuse and frustrate everyone, so tell them what you are going to do, and why. If someone thinks they have a good reason to change it, ask him for it and, if it makes sense, change it. This isn’t a religious ceremony; you are just trying to keep folks informed and stay informed yourself.

Inform your people. Don’t keep secrets. The daily meeting is to inform folks, use it accordingly. In particular, use it to squelch rumors. Tell them what you know, and if there are nasty or stupid rumors running about, this is where you can start to kill them.

Let them speak. Make sure everyone has a chance to talk. Easiest step is finish with an “Around the horn. What do you have for me?” And then make eye contact which each person.

If there are issues – redirect after the meeting. Remember, this is for sharing information; it’s not the Lincoln - Douglas debates. If there are issues, move them to another meeting with just the involved parties. Keep it simple.

No personal attacks, no personnel issues that might embarrass anyone. This goes without saying. Don’t let anyone attack anyone – present or not. And if there are personal issues involved, those are not to be shared with everyone. If there is something that will ‘get out,’ such as a sickness or an accident, etc., keep it simple and generic: ‘Joe is ill and will be on sick leave for several days.’ Keep it professional.

No gossip. Use the meeting to kill rumors. Don’t start them and don’t let others start them.

Keep it positive. Use the meeting to pass along news about the organization, and don’t withhold bad news – Never withhold bad news – but emphasize the positive. Leaders face difficulties, accept them as challenges and push through them. They don’t get depressed and they don’t let their people get depressed.

Thank and praise and encourage. The daily meeting is a good place to say thanks or pass out praise to anyone who did something of note the day before. A simple word handed out expeditiously is worth a great deal more than flowery words presented after everyone has forgotten the event.

Once again: Keep it Brief.

First Time - Part 5: Setting a Goal

2009-11-18T08:26:00.002-05:00

This is part 5 of in a series of short essays on fundamentals of leadership. While it is drafted for those who have just moved into their first leadership position, I hope there is a little something in here for the most practiced of leaders, a ‘getting back to basics’ that everyone needs every now and then.

In the previous article I talked about building your first plan. You are probably thinking that this looks very simplistic – it is. Plans, and procedures, should be kept as simple as possible. They will grow extremely complex extremely fast, so ‘simple is good.’

As you get started, the initial purpose of the plan is simply to allow you to establish some control over the whirlwind around you. Everyone feels the occasional moment of confusion whenever they take over any organization. Establishing a schedule, a basic plan, gives you the first element of control over that ‘whirlwind.’

But, you may well ask ‘Don’t you need a goal before you have a plan?’ The obvious answer is ‘Yes.’ But you already have a goal; you were given it, implicitly or explicitly, when you were placed in charge of the division. The boss may have spelled it out, or he might assume you know. Irrespective, that goal is now your goal – at least to begin.

The next step is to set some new goals – your goals. Why? Because your goals should be YOUR goals; it’s that simple. First, the new goals have to include, at a minimum, the goals your boss gave you. But, add to that – what’s doable? Push a little beyond that. Talk it over with your deputy – if you have one, or a friend, your spouse, anyone you trust. Then, after refining, talk it over with your people. Get them involved – let the conversation include them and let it become THEIR goal. And then challenge them. This is how the goal will become possible: because they will want it. Your goal goes through a metamorphosis and becomes their goal – and now all you are doing is making sure they have what they need and helping them achieve.

Now: Brief the boss – one of the most powerful things you can do is to develop new – and greater goals and motivate your people with those goals. But it means nothing if your boss won’t let you seek those goals. And he may not if he thinks it is going to ‘cost him.’ So you need to sell your goals to the boss. You need to show some simple things: how these new goals can be achieved, how they will help the organization, and how they will improve the bottom line – long term as well as short term. If your goals not only help him achieve his goals but also pushes his organization beyond those goals – he looks good. And that means he will back your goals.

First Time - Part 4: Have a Plan

2009-11-13T07:57:00.000-05:00

This may sound like either a blinding flash of the obvious (BFO) or, because of the size of your division and the degree of oversight of your boss, the most ridiculous waste of time anyone has ever put forward. It’s neither.

You need to have a plan. In the military there are all sorts of plans: plans of the day (the daily drill), daily, weekly, monthly and yearly training plans, operational plans, contingency plans, crisis action plans, maintenance plans, preventative maintenance plans, logistics and support plans, etc. There are also standard operating procedures, which really are not much more than the plans when nothing else is planned.

But you are the new guy. The fact is that people are looking for you to do something, tell them something. And what a plan does is give you something to build from. There is a simple way to proceed, without having to create more hours in the week.

Begin with some calendars (there are many ways to do this, but this one has worked for me and others for a long time and it has the advantage of being very simple to start), one page for each month, and run it out for the next 24 months – at least. (You will be regularly extending the calendar forward in time, adding another three months at the beginning of each quarter is an easy way to start).

Mark out on the calendar every significant date for your organization over the next 24 months. Start with the obvious stuff: end of year reports, quarterly reports, monthly reports, counseling and performance appraisals, etc. If a report comes out on the first of the month, when is your department’s input required? And when is your input required? Some simple backtracking will tell you when you need to get basic information together. Now you can tell your people and there will be fewer surprises. Do you have any organizational goals and associated dates? Put them on. In military units there are the obvious deployment dates and the monthly readiness and training reports, as well as various training and exercise dates.

Now, ask some simple questions. Is there any equipment or material that you need to reach those goals? When would you need it? If you need it, when do you need to order it? Is their training associated either with the gear or the goals as a whole? When is it needed? How long does it take? How long does it take to schedule? Spend some time going over these kinds of questions and put them down on the calendar.

You have just completed your first basic long-range plan. Now you can expand on it. Beyond the organization’s goals – the ones you were given – what other goals do you want to achieve? Put them down as well. Engage in the same ‘backtracking’ and identify necessary training and material and equipment associated with those additional goals. Now work out the scheduling conflicts and opportunities.

You now have a good idea of what things you need to do, when, to stay ahead of the routine tasks of the organization. In fact, you just ‘bought’ yourself free time to think about your organization as a whole.

Now for a daily plan. Most organizations have a daily and weekly schedule, and the organization you have just been appointed to lead is probably no different. So, begin with the existing plan. If you have no existing plan, there ought to be a similar division in the organization: ‘steal’ a copy of their daily plan and copy it. If there is no similar division then you will need to make something up –we will address that in a moment.

If you have an existing plan (your division or someone else’s), begin with a sanity check. Is there anything on the daily plan that makes no sense? If so, and assuming it is not required by your boss, delete it. If your boss requires it, take a good look at it. If you think it is there simply from inertia, consider deleting it and see if anybody notices. If they don’t – success! If they do, you can claim ignorance (you just got there) and then you can ask them if they want it as is, or can you offer some changes? Then, change it so that it helps you and your division (have this suggestion in hand before you go see the boss).

Pick at the daily plan so that it satisfies the following: it gets necessary information to you and the rest of the organization - beyond your division; it keeps your people informed; it helps them do their daily job and keep ahead of approaching events and deadlines; it doesn’t interfere with what they are already doing. This will simply be a result of practice, so spend a few minutes on your plan every day until you have something that works and is comfortable.

If you have no plan to copy, begin with the following:

Reports due this week

Reports due next week

Meetings this week

Meetings next week

Training scheduled for this month (who, when, where)

People on Vacation this month

Weekly goals

Monthly goals

Why do this? The real beauty of a plan is that it takes away headaches and allows you time to think about the really important stuff! And that is what you want: more free time to think about and act on what is really important.

First Time - Part 3: Motivating Your People

2009-11-11T07:37:00.000-05:00

You have been told you are taking over division ‘X,’ a dozen hard working folks who ‘tune widgets.’ You understand that you are going to be responsible for making sure those 12 people have everything they need to keep tuning widgets. You are resolved to be a good leader, one who cares about his folks and does the right thing.

Meanwhile, your boss has told you that the division needs to become more efficient (tune more widgets per week, with greater accuracy). You need to figure out how. Where to begin?

The real issue here is how do you motivate your division to achieve this new goal? In short, how do you – how do YOU - motivate someone? The ultimate aim is that the people you lead take on the goals of the organization – that your goals become their goals. But that is quite a bit down the road; you need to begin someplace – today.

Begin with some ‘simple’ steps: build a ‘biography’ on each person: single, married, children and other dependents, education, experience are the basics. There should be a basic file on each that you can use to start your own file. Talking with them – the daily coffee - will give you more information to add to what you know of each.

Health issues will arise. They are essential to understand. And they will demonstrate YOUR motivations. If you are worried about their health and the health of their family, it will show. (One case in point: as much as possible, insist people take their annual vacations. People NEED time off.) You will need to know these people like your family – they ARE part of your family now. So, you need the details.

I can hear some HR folks saying you can’t know this kind of thing. Maybe you can’t in their world. But you need to. These people are not machines, they are human beings with very real problems, concerns, hopes and fear. Most of those hopes and fears have nothing to do with work. But those hopes and fears will carry over into work.

Now comes the hard part. Listen to them, and then connect ‘their’ goals – the individual goals of your people – with the goals of the organization. Though it has been pooh-poohed of late, Maslow’s hierarchy is an excellent place to start to understand how to organize and understand people’s needs and translate them into something that you can directly affect.

For example, almost certainly, if you are in your first leadership position you have a limited role in providing either pay increases or bonuses. But, as Maslow pointed out, there are several psychological drivers that are more powerful, often significantly more powerful, then economic reward vis-à-vis motivations. While there are few people who will not welcome a pay increase or a bonus, the fact is that most people won’t and don’t work harder because their paycheck got a bit ‘fatter.’ They will, however, work harder if they feel they deserved some sort of public recognition for their performance AND they received it.

This is not an easy process, nor is it done once and forgotten. It will require that you get to know each of your people well, and that you then ‘connect the dots’ on each one – separately. Each person will require his own ‘motivational map’ and you have to construct it. Some will be simple. In every division there are 2 or 3 folks who truly are self-starters. They are fully motivated, they are already out ‘pulling the sled.’ All they need is someone to sign the ‘requisitions’ once a week (or some such thing), and then you can get out of their way. One or two will simply need someone to listen to them rant for 30 minutes a week, then they too will go back to pushing the rock up the hill. (Frankly, those people can also be fun, you get to sit and listen to ‘Dave’ sound off for 20 or 30 minutes, you pick up some weird stories to tell your spouse over dinner, and then he leaves your office and he feels great because he got a chance to simply unload it all on someone who was willing to listen.) You then need to ‘figure out’ the rest. Whether it is an overriding concern about a sick spouse or parent, their children’s grades or getting the right fertilizer for their pumpkin patch, you need to figure it out and connect that to what they are doing at work.

Perhaps, it is simple - an exception to work hours so they can take someone to a physical therapy session, or twice a week arriving late so they can get the kids to hockey practice and then school. Maybe it is more difficult, requiring that you get involved and have the company work some adjustment to their healthcare. Maybe it is as obvious as determining a way to reschedule their work shift so that they can meet the requirements of their own schedule and yours; whatever it is, that is a place to start.

The point is this: the best motivations are about people having an opportunity to leave a mark on their world. Most of us may have fairly small worlds, but we still want to leave a mark on it. Money gets us through the day, but it really is rarely about money, once you get past the simple (but necessary) paying of bills. People want esteem, and self-respect, they want the respect of others, and finally, they want a chance to contribute to something else, to help to create something new and something of value. (Even among some the high-rollers on Wall Street it rarely is about simply money; in fact, from what I’ve seen, money was more a way of keeping score, the money itself was rarely important.) Most organizations can create something of value, at least to some limited extent. A fast food restaurant is arguably simply a fast food restaurant. But a fast food restaurant that is also committed to supporting the fight to cure diabetes or that supports inner city schools, or whatever it is, can step beyond the world of fast food, and in doing so provide a greater motivation for its own people. If you want to develop into as a leader, it is your job to find that path.

One final thought: the question of motivations is perhaps the most difficult question to ever answer. It is a subject that often comes up in combat zones, or more accurately, after you have left the combat zone and are looking ‘back’ at it. Young Marine PFCs* have often amazed me because they are, in fact, so motivated. They join the Marines ready to slay dragons. It is rarely as simple as young men filled with piss and vinegar who want to prove they are tough, though there is obviously some of that, and that is the most visible facet of it. Instead, you bump into them by the score in any Army or Marine company, 20 year olds who are truly determined to change the world, and who believe they have both the skills and the opportunity to do so. They are operating at the very top of Maslow’s hierarchy. It is a testimony to the skill of their drill instructors that the gung ho spirit that led them to enlist has been nurtured and fed and pointed so that they get to their first unit and they are coiled steel, ready to spring.

That level of motivation reveals itself years later, when veterans will look back on their enlistment with a great deal of nostalgia, and why not: it is often true that never in the remainder of their lives will they ever operate at the very pinnacle of Maslow’s hierarchy. They may have spent a solid year completely self-actualized, whereas most people will rarely spend more than a few weeks at a time at that level of motivation. No wonder they do incredible things in the military!

* Private First Class

First Time - Part 2: Loyalty, Honesty, Trust

2009-11-09T10:40:00.000-05:00

Before we go any further, let’s just say a few words about a subject that comes up often in discussions on leadership and is, sadly often presented completely wrong. I’m talking about three traits of the relationship between a leader and his team, traits that might be said to be different facets of the same precious stone: Loyalty, Honesty and Trust.

The truth is you can lead without these three traits; people do it every day. Worse, you can do it by ‘faking it,’ living the lie about these three traits, acting the part, but not believing in it and going back on your word in private. That’s possible too, and I see it regularly.

But you will never develop a superior organization, and you will become a great leader without truly practicing these three traits.

Loyalty. I have repeatedly heard people talk about how to instill loyalty among ‘the troops.’ The fallacy there is that loyalty does not work up an organization, it works down an organization. You really can’t ‘instill loyalty’ among the troops. You have to be loyal to your people, not the other way around. If you expect them to be loyal to you, you will be sadly disappointed. If, on the other hand, you are loyal to them, the team will reward you tenfold in both support and performance.

Honesty. It has been said that honesty is the best policy. That is unquestionably true. Be honest with your people. Don’t keep bad news from them, and don’t treat them like children. You should not only communicate with them honestly, you must fully insist that they honestly communicate with you. Which means you must never shoot the messenger. Insist on honesty at all times, no matter how painful. The more you insist, the more likely they are to tell you about a problem early, when it can be fixed, rather than delaying, and letting the problem fester. It’s been said that the boss who insists on loyalty will get honesty instead, but that the boss who insists on honesty will get loyalty. It’s a good point.

Trust. Trust is the gold standard of leadership. You have to trust your people to do what you tell them. There are some obvious reasons for this. First, you can’t be everywhere at once. And the bigger your organization grows, the more senior you become, the more impossible it becomes to do everything or to oversee everyone. Trying to do so will wrap the organization up in needless and unproductive reports on performance and inspections of activities. Second, a lack of trust poisons the organization, sending the signal to all that it really doesn’t matter what they say or do; someone will be looking over their shoulders to second guess them. And once you have ‘sent out’ that signal, it is remarkable how difficult it is to clear the air. Third, if you are doing your job correctly, you will have communicated the mission and trained your people so that they can execute the mission.

Great leaders – really great leaders – recognize that they are not only not irreplaceable, but that they must make it clear throughout the organization that they are replaceable. A great leader sets up his organization and trains and educates his people so that the organization can continue on and achieve its goals whether he – the leader – is present or not. That requires that he not only train and educate, but that he completely trusts them to do the right thing.

More than the most overbearing boss you will ever meet, the people who work ‘for’ you will judge you every day. Every single day they are going to look at you and make an assessment. If you fail in nearly every other thing, but hold to these three traits, they will follow you ‘into a burning building dressed in a gasoline suit.’ But, as the Good Book says, if you can’t trust someone in a small thing, then you certainly can’t trust them in a big thing. If you fail simple tests of honesty, loyalty and trust, ‘your’ people will do what you tell them, but nothing more. And you will eventually fail as a leader.

Loyalty, Honesty, Trust. These three traits form the keystone to motivating the people who work for you. In the end, most people will see through all the smoke screens and masks. What they are looking for is loyalty, honesty, and trust. Practice them early and continually, make them part of everything you do, and they will become part of your fundamental leadership skills.

First Time

2009-11-05T10:16:00.000-05:00

The below is the first in a series of short essays on fundamentals of leadership. While it is drafted for those who have just moved into their first leadership position, I hope there is a little something in here for the most practiced of leaders, a ‘getting back to basics’ that everyone needs every now and then.

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So, it’s your first leadership position. Whether you are the new shop foreman, the lead nurse on the night shift, the junior vice president of the smallest division in the company, a platoon leader, or a division officer on a ship, you are now ‘in charge.’ What does it mean?

First, there is now a gap between you and the ‘rank and file.’ No matter how much you may want to deny that fact, you are now ‘in-charge’ and everyone will recognize it and will treat you a bit differently. Don’t revel in the difference. Despite what others may say, your real role is to make sure your people succeed, and that means you have to help them. In a very real sense, you work for them. The first time I heard that said out-loud it made me stop and think. You are ‘in-charge’ so You Work For Them. Your task is to make sure they ‘win;’ to make sure that they have everything they need to do their job, execute the mission and succeed.

How do you do that? ‘Easy.’* You provide Guidance, Support, and Motivation

That’s what you do: you provide guidance where there isn’t any, you support all the people who work ‘for’ you (SEE ABOVE), and you motivate them when they are not fired up about the job. How do you do that? In some sense, that answers is completely job dependent; the guidance will change, the support will change, the motivations will change. Being a ‘junior exec,’ no matter what the organization, can always be a challenge. You don’t get a real say in the goals of the organization (you may not even agree with some of them), your boss will provide you a framework of guidance within which you are free to act (and it may be confusing and restrictive), and you will certainly be given real limits on the assets – the stuff – you need to do the task at hand. In many cases you will think you have been given lemons. You need to turn it into lemonade.

So, first, don’t get discouraged: get on the bus! Accept the goals of the organization as a whole and move on to your own division goals. Now, you may have already been given goals: sales or productivity or readiness or whatever. You need to look at that goal and find a meaningful challenge that can be used to motivate your people. How to do that?

The key to all your success is going to come from one thing: Communication.

But, in one sense, the answer is always the same: Communicate. Talk with your people. Note, not to them or at them, with them. Communication isn’t a one-way street. In fact, it isn’t even a two-way street. Real communication requires that you not only talk with them, that you listen and understand, but that you also understand what they are saying to each other, both individually and in groups, that you come to understand their level of emotional commitment to the tasks at hand and to each other individually and to the team. Great leadership takes individuals and makes a tightly integrated team. And that comes from understanding individual motivations and connecting those individual motivations with the team’s – your team’s – motivations. And that all begins with communication.

While communication can be difficult, there is no magic here. It begins simply with talking and listening. A few minutes of ‘shooting the breeze’ before the morning meeting, sharing a cup of coffee, are great ways to begin this dialogue. One spectacular leader I know, who rose from the ranks to be the Fire Commissioner of Philadelphia would, as Commissioner, stop at a different Fire House every morning for a cup of coffee. While he learned a great deal about what was going on in the ‘ranks,’ it also presented the firefighters the opportunity to ‘hear it from the boss’ and, perhaps most importantly, it let them know that he was looking out for them. This idea of loyalty and honesty is the very glue of good leadership. And it all begins with sincere communication.

* I am reminded of the Vaudeville line: How do you make a statue of an elephant? Easy, get a big block of stone and chip away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant.

Truth, Lies, and Leadership

2009-10-29T13:36:00.002-04:00

‘It’s so good to see you.’

I read an article the other day about the ‘lies’ we all tell every day. The gist of the article was that we see someone in the hall and ask how they are, and the mutual lie takes place: we don’t really want to know how they are, and the other person knows we don’t want to know. So, everyone is ‘fine’ and we continue on our way. The author’s point was that there are lies we tell every day that are part of the grease of society.

Maybe that is what’s wrong with mankind; a theologian might suggest that this is the real manifestation of original sin on our every day lives. Because we should be glad to see people. If we really were good people we would be happy to see folks, and we would want to know how Mrs. Sullivan’s nephew is doing. We really would want to know the state of health of those around us and we would really be concerned if they weren’t well.

In short, we would care.

There is an old – and cynical - saying that sincerity is the hardest thing, once you can fake that you can fake anything.

So what does all this have to do with leadership?

Easy: to be a great leader you DO have to care. You must want to see all those people every morning. You must be sincere, truly sincere, not just faking it. And the reason for that is simple: you and the people you lead are inextricably woven together – your dream has – if you are a great leader – becomes their dream as well; for your dream to be fulfilled, they must also succeed. Great leaders care more about their dream then they do about themselves. And the people you lead are now part of that dream. Caring about them and caring about your dream quickly becomes essentially the same thing.

General George Patton said that the coward who wears the mask of a hero soon takes on the characteristics of the latter. What he meant is that you can become what you aren’t, if you live it every day. The leader must live his role every day; he must communicate it every day. (And Patton had great leadership skills; he knew what he was talking about.) And at the core of that communication is sincerity. Great leaders are truly sincere. And since they care about their vision, they care about each and every one of their people. They intrinsically understand that the people who believe the vision ‘become’ the vision. So, great leaders must care about every single person.

But, you will respond, how can I care about 100 different people? It’s too tasking. I hardly know all their names. Next you’ll tell me I should care about their wives or husbands, about their kids, about their grand parents. I can’t do that.

Of course, most people can’t do that. But you must do what you can. In short, you have to care and simply do the best you can. Learn and remember what you can. Write it down. You don’t remember all of your brothers’ and sisters’ birthdays and anniversaries. But you can write them down. The same applies to the people who work with you and ‘for’ you.

In the end, great leadership requires a personal commitment from the leader to the vision and to the people who have adopted the vision, and a personal commitment from each of the people who follow the leader. That commitment is rarely given to an individual they don’t like and trust. And that means that you must engender that trust. Trust is the opposite side of the coin from sincerity: you can’t have one without the other.

Think about that the next time someone in the office asks you how you are feeling.

The Micro-Manager

2009-10-27T14:11:00.002-04:00

One of the requirements of any leader is the ability to simply walk away and let someone else handle ‘it,’ whatever ‘it’ is. Whether you are the Manager of a McDonald’s and you are letting the shift team leader handle some issue, the captain of a ship letting one of his division officers handle a problem, the senior VP of a Fortune 500 corporation or the President, there are situations every day that will require that you turn a ‘blind eye’ to the problem and let someone else handle it, in their own way. It will not turn out quite the way it would have if you had handled it yourself, but if you have already done your job properly – picked and directed the people beneath you, instructed them and motivated them to adopt your goals for the organization – it will work out properly.

Doing otherwise is overstepping your bounds, and is the first step towards micro-management.

One of the significant steps to turning yourself into the consummate micro-manager is the call for more data. Unfortunately, we are now equipped with the technology to provide mountains of data to any willing supervisor. Whether it is an automatic reporting system that forwards operational status of every vehicle in your company’s fleet (and their precise location), an endless stream of e-mails from every junior executive, foreman, supervisor, accountant and secretary, a hand-held texting device of some sort, etc., today’s executive can stay connected ‘24/7,’ to the dismay – and the continual underdevelopment - of his subordinates.

There are those that will respond that “I need to, this is necessary to make sure that…” My answer is that if it is necessary for you to do that, you need to fire your subordinates. But, you cannot possibly do their jobs for them, unless you know how to get more than 24 hours into each day. And, the fact that you continue to receive a steady stream of reporting will incite you to micro-manage when you otherwise might not. Ignorance may or may not be bliss, but it is quite possible to know too much.

Of course, there are exceptions. Or perhaps it is better to say there are apparent exceptions. Winston Churchill, one of the great leaders of the last 500 years, made certain that he was very well informed about every major facet of the economy even as he ran the war. And, when he deemed it necessary, he would delve down deeply into the workings of any branch of the government or private sector. But, Churchill not only rarely did this, he had made it abundantly clear that he trusted the decisions of his subordinates, and he had a wealth of leadership experience to draw on that made these ‘transits’ into various lower organizations of great benefit not only to himself, but to literally everyone involved.

Churchill also rightly recognized that the literal survival of his nation was at stake. Nevertheless, he left to his various ministers wide latitude to act and rarely if ever reached around them or gathered data that did not come through them. Churchill is, in fact, an excellent, though rare example of the great leader – he imparts the vision but remains above much of the day to day workings, focusing on the grand issues while remaining informed about what is happening around him.

Key to this was his ability to shut himself off from the outside. Churchill understood when he didn’t need more information.

That is why the news out of Washington for the past year worries me. For example, the President is receiving a daily brief on the economy, just as he receives a daily intelligence brief. One can hear all the caterwauling from the press (if they ever bothered to read this): the nation expects the President, perhaps even demands that he keep his fingers on this economic crisis. Well, if the American people expect that doing so requires daily detailed briefs on what is happening (and I doubt they do), then they are wrong.

One of the things that caused this crisis was the insane fascination that nearly everyone has with the daily market movements. It has caused all sorts of bad (terrible) financial and economic decisions, as managers and experts have become mired in trying to make their quarterly, monthly, maybe even weekly estimates come true. The last thing this nation needs is a President who isn’t thinking about the long term. Yet that seems to be just what is developing in Washington: a President who is going to focus on short-term economic issues and let the future take care of itself.

Our economy will recover irrespective of what Washington does in the short term, and the key element of making money available to the credit markets was already being addressed before New Years, though that will take some time to sort out. But having the President digging into daily economic activity and trying to make decisions based on them can only be disastrous. There are several very real structural reasons for this, as well as the obvious point that there is simply no way to condense the daily activity of a $14 Trillion dollar economy (that’s $14,000,000,000,000) into something that can lead to a single human being making meaningful decisions. Particularly when that individual has some other pressing issues, such as a war in Afghanistan, a war in Iraq, and the rest of the executive branch to run.

Structurally, the Constitution provides only a few tools with which to manage (or manipulate) the economy, and they are all large and very blunt instruments. Tax policy, monetary policy, government spending and bureaucratic regulation are the only tools the President has (unless he seizes an industry, which is at best questionable Constitutionally), and they are all ‘very large hammers, always looking for large nails.’ The idea that the President is receiving daily briefs on the economy leaves me wondering what is he going to do if he finds something he doesn’t like?

Good (never mind great) leaders focus on long-term visions, think strategically and manage the strategic vision and leave the daily churn to the ‘lieutenants,’ trusting them to inform him when they needed his help. Such leadership is rare and only comes with great experience.

Your job as the leader is to provide vision and guidance and motivation. Communicate, motivate, and then Delegate to your subordinates the authorities they need to execute their tasks, and help them do their jobs. The key to that is experience and reflecting on that experience.

For junior executives, the lesson you need to take away from this discussion is that you need to grab as much leadership experience as possible as you grow old. You need to watch the leaders around you and take notes, both the good ones and the poor ones. Watch how they delegate. Watch how they step aside and let junior managers take charge. Watch how the micro-managers work. Take notes on what worked and what didn’t and think about the ‘why’ in each case. Resolve to commit to the mission, whatever it is, and then grit your teeth and let one of your subordinates do it ‘his way,’ and help him succeed.

The Nelson Touch

2009-10-21T08:35:00.000-04:00

Today – 21 October - is the 204th anniversary of The Battle of Trafalgar, during which the Royal Navy, under the brilliant command of Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson, smashed Napoleon’s fleet and ensured both the survival on England and the eventual defeat of Napoleon. Admiral Nelson died during the battle.

All well and good, but what can we learn about leadership from Nelson that is relevant today? There is a phrase that has come down to us through the many biographies and paeans to Nelson – the ‘Nelson Touch’ – that bears a bit of reflection.

The phrase refers to both Nelson’s incredible ability to win battles at sea (his record is truly ‘incredible’), as well as his ability to motivate his crews, to elicit from them performances that were seemingly beyond their capabilities. Again and again the crews of Nelson’s ships performed heroic, seemingly impossible feats. Each time it seemed as if there was no way to improve on their performance. Each time, each victory seemed to lead to an even greater battle and a greater victory.

So, what was the Nelson touch? What was it that Nelson did that led men to not simply follow him, but to perform at levels well above what they might have expected of themselves, and certainly above the expectations of other leaders?

At the most basic level, the Nelson touch was several ‘simple’ ingredients, blended together, and applied consistently over the course of his career: First, Nelson knew his job; he studied and trained and learned all that there was to know fighting a ship at sea. He then applied that knowledge to his crews, training them to become the best crews in the world. Second, Nelson was committed to the mission of the Royal Navy: defend England and defeat the French fleet. He devoted his life to it and demonstrated that in word and deed daily. Third, he communicated both his professional knowledge and his commitment to the mission to his crew.

Nelson’s ability to communicate with his crews is really what sets him apart. Nelson spent a very great deal of time communicating with, talking with his officers and men. He had frequent dinners with his officers that would last long into the night during which he not only could observe them and judge their individual strengths and weaknesses, but he could also impart to them his plans, and, more importantly, his method of thought. It wasn’t necessary for Nelson to be present on each ship during the battle because he had so trained and educated his officers that he knew each would act appropriately irrespective of how the battle developed.

These three traits, tightly interwoven with a fourth – his complete trust in the men who served with him, produced the ‘Nelson touch.’ And each is as applicable today, in any leadership position, as it was then.

Professional Competence: Know your job, and know it better than anyone else. Then train your people. Give them the training and education they need to know their jobs.

Dedication and Focus: Commit to the mission. Before you can expect anyone else to devote himself to your cause, you must. Whether you are fighting the enemy fleet, or simply building a better small business, you must commit to success before you can expect anyone else to do so.

Communication: Talk to your people, tell them what you are thinking, what you expect of them, and listen to them. You need to understand their motivations and you need to make your motivations, your cause, their cause. Work with them on their issues and their ideas. You need to learn their strengths and weaknesses (everyone has both), and then learn how best to use each person’s skills to maximize their performances, both individually and as a team. As a general rule, none of us communicate enough; spend more time communicating WITH (not talking at) your people.

Trust: Once you have trained them and motivated them, once you have placed them where their talents best fit your goals, once you have done your job, get out of the way and let them do their jobs. Trust them. Remember, if you can’t trust them after you have trained them, you haven’t done your job.

These ‘simple’ ideas: competence, focus, communication, and trust – are at the heart of the success of perhaps the greatest admiral in history. But, the Nelson Touch can be applied to any leadership situation.

Leadership vs. Bean-counting

2009-10-16T09:09:00.000-04:00

Succession is one of the most difficult things in the world to get your arms around: who will carry on the vision that you have created and nurtured. Good leaders often identify themselves by finding the right people to place as their successors and then letting those people lead, as they step into the background.

Of course, the key is the ‘right people.’ Who are the right people? Oddly enough, it can be almost anyone, if you are a capable enough leader and can inculcate in your followers the full breadth and depth of your vision. If you can, it fully becomes their vision as well, and then you will find that your vision will survive well beyond your presence in the organization. Even when you choose the wrong specific successor, if the ‘rank and file’ hold to your vision, they can prevent the organization from straying in the hands of a less than capable successor.

But, most often the leadership of an organization is not successful in developing that quality of ‘followership,’ nor is the organization structured to prevent the less than capable (new) leader from steering the organization towards ‘the rocks.’ Instead, what often happens is this: the great visionary finally retires, and is replaced by the great communicator:* someone who mostly understands the vision, but whose real skill is in his ability to provide an inspiring speech, to fire up the ‘home team’ and keep things moving in the same direction.

Then comes the second transition, and the communicator moves on. Invariably, the communicator is replaced by a manager. But not just any kind of managers, but by a bean-counter, someone who lets the numbers make decisions. Let me be clear: managers are a good and necessary part of any organization; accountants are also a good and necessary part of any organization. From managing a fast food restaurant to planning the invasion of Europe, management and accounting are as necessary as leadership. Bean-counters are not.

The bean-counter is the guy who hides behind the numbers, who chooses to react to the numbers rather than use the numbers to inform and to assist in making hard decisions, decisions that will, in the end, change the numbers.

Sometimes the great communicator and the bean-counter are the same person; the communicator changing over time as the organization moves further and further away in time from the founder and visionary. The communicator enters ‘uncharted’ territory and become resistant to change, because he is intellectually incapable of it. Change is needed because the world keeps changing, and that means the plans and operations must change to compensate for those changes in the environment. If plans and operations aren’t changed there is no hope of achieving the corporate goals, because the plans should always reflect the world in which you are, not the one in which you were.

Some organizations will face this problem as a result of a change in the Board of Directors, who will replace the titular leadership but then constrain it to act within the confines of the bean-counter’s numbers. This can be quite destructive, as the nominal ‘leadership’ will make pronouncements and announce plans to do ‘X’ but will be prevented from actually doing so by the efforts of the bean-counters who will report the potential numbers to the board. The nominal leadership ends up frustrated and the ‘rank and file’ end up confused.

If you are leading an organization, or a team or project within an organization, and it is one that is going to endure well beyond your tenure in the organization, you must spend as much time as you can both informing and shaping the people who work for you, so that the vision is sustained by the team, by the workforce as a whole – NOT you, and then you need to spend time identifying and grooming your successor. Before you pick a successor make sure you have had a chance to thoroughly evaluate his performance both as a leader and a manager, as well as his commitment to the vision. That evaluation will take a minimum of months, and may well take more than a year. Failure to do so means you will inevitably be replaced by a bean-counter; failure to do so will mean you have failed as a leader.

* Not to be confused with ‘The Great Communicator’ Ronald Reagan, who was, in fact, a visionary and a great leader.

Focus, Focus, Focus

2009-10-09T07:56:00.000-04:00

What do you think about Tiger Woods’ tennis game? Dr Anthony Fauci’s work on continental drift? Itzhak Perlman’s work in oils? Steve Job’s work in aircraft design?

The short answer is that you don’t. And there is a reason for this: great achievement requires focus and years of effort. Could Tiger Wood’s have a great tennis game? Certainly. But, it would be at a cost: he wouldn’t be the world’s greatest golfer. Dr. Fauci could undoubtedly master geo-physics, but only at the expense of the work he has done in immunology. The four individuals above are all bright ,talented men. And all have sacrificed greatly to achieve the level of expertise they enjoy. And so it goes. Every field requires both focus and sacrifice, because every time you choose to spend more time on your chosen field, you have less time to spend on other areas of interest.

But you MUST do that to succeed as a leader. First, you must focus on the few key issues that surround your strategic goals. You will never be a world-class trap and skeet shooter and a world class leader of a growing business at the same time. If you want to be a world leading research biologist AND run a successful chemical plant the odds are you will do neither. Pick one. Second, you will find as you rise in seniority in your field that many people will want you to spend time on their issue. Sometimes you must, it is unavoidable. This is particularly true as your position becomes more public. But understand that very time you do so, you lose time you could be spending on your key issues.

The history of the US Presidency is illustrative: the great presidents have all been men who focused on one or two great issues, and generally let other issues slide, handled by either the bureaucracy or generally ignored by the executive. They focused their energies on several major issues, rarely more than three during their entire term in office. Even with the huge support staffs that the White House has sustained throughout most of the last century, Presidents have found it very difficult to substantively address more than a few issues over the course of four years. Presidents who have dabbled in issue after issue while appearing in support of cause after cause have maintained their popularity but accomplished little.

If that is the case for that level of leadership, how much more so for you? In fact, one of the real problems for small and medium sized companies is that there is so much for the CEO/President/’Boss’ to do – must do - that does take away your time from your company goals. It is incumbent on you to delegate as much as you can to others, focus your energies on the two or three key issues, ignore a host of ‘other’ issues, and recognize that this is the price you pay for success.

Time is the most expensive ‘commodity’ you have to manage: spend it wisely.

Leadership and Manners

2009-09-23T13:01:00.000-04:00

There has been a lot made about the behavior of various people over the past several weeks. There is also a point to be made about personal behavior in regard to effective leadership. The point is simply this: behave yourself. And you should insist that those who work for you, especially those who are in leadership positions, also behave themselves. Assuming your mother wasn’t Ma Barker, it is probably best to remember those things your mother used to tell you: don’t yell, don’t make a scene, etc.

This is more than simply good manners, it is an essential part of good leadership. This is true for the simplest of reasons: it’s not about you. If you are leading people, it is about the goal, whatever that goal is, whether you are Alexander trying to conquer the known world, or Ray Kroc trying to make a hamburger faster and cheaper. Making a scene shifts the focus from the goal to you. Which means you are losing ground on your goal. So here are some simple rules, which may sound like they came from your mother. But they are worth practicing and, as important, enforcing.

Don’t yell. Yelling is a lousy way to get people to pay attention to your thoughts. I have a general set of instructions that allow yelling in the following cases: someone is shooting at you; the building is on fire; you’ve won the lottery; your team just scored. If you are alone you may yell at your computer when it loses a file, or at the news for saying something stupid. Other than that – no yelling.

As for all those TV shows and movies where the heroes yell at each other, I suspect that the directors and writers have never been in real high stress positions with good leaders. If they had, they would find there is very little yelling.

Does this mean that there have been effective, even great, leaders who haven’t followed these rules? Yes. But they have been exceptions to the rule. And, in fact, even a cursory review of history will show that they were rarely as harsh with their followers as history has painted some of them. Even as terrifying a figure as Genghis Khan was known among his people as a fair leader who took care of his troops.

If you have manager who yells a lot, you need to keep an eye on him.

Don’t interrupt. When others are talking, listen. And pay attention. Was the Congressman wrong to interrupt the President? Yes. And he appropriately apologized. (That some other Congressmen and Senators have, over the past several years, called the last President both a liar and someone who took glee in the death of US soldiers, and booed during the course of his address to Congress, and didn’t fully apologize, is a disgrace.)

Again, your mother was right: don’t interrupt. When someone else is speaking, listen to him. Let them make their point. Communicating is not a one-way street. If you really are concerned about the goal of the organization, and not your ego, you may find they have a good point. And if you don’t listen, you won’t understand their point and won’t be able to explain to them, if necessary, what issue they missed and why the organization is doing ‘A’ and not ‘B.’ This process of listening and then explaining sends the clear signal that you are not only interested in what the people in your organization think and say, but that you want to hear it, and that if there is a difference of opinion, that you are going to help them understand why the organization is doing one thing and not the other. People will feel included and will get behind your position.

On the other hand, if you find you can’t explain your position well enough to convince the doubters, it may be because your position has some holes in it. Listening and engaging in polite give and take will help you realize that fact a great deal faster then yelling and interrupting.

And paying attention is just as important. I recall a session of Congress several years ago where a picture of the Congressmen and Senators showed a number of them sitting and reading material that clearly was not the President’s speech. Or sleeping. There is a word for that kind of thing: rude. Don’t do it. Don’t let others do it.

So, if one of your managers constantly interrupts others, it is probable that they are poor communicators.

No Name Calling. First, don’t do it. Under any circumstances. Second, if someone says something, don’t assume you can understand his motivations. Because ‘Joe’ said ‘X’ doesn’t give you or anyone else the right to claim he’s racist, a sexist, an elitist or any other kind of ‘ist.’ If you think his behavior has crossed a line of decency, go talk to him yourself – one on one. Then you may need to act. But based on some clear facts, not hearsay and assumptions and name calling.

Three Strikes – You’re Out. Repeat Performances Shouldn’t Be Excused. Since I assume that my readers are all bright professionals, this won’t apply to you. But it applies to your junior executives. If ‘Joe’ keeps getting himself into embarrassing positions where he is yelling and then apologizing, yelling and apologizing, yelling and apologizing, he probably is the wrong the guy to be in front of people. Get him some professional help. There are exceptions to this rule, but there are very few, and should be reserved for those who show dramatic leadership and management skills.

While this may sound ‘preachy,’ the fact is that polite discourse is essential to convince people to pursue Your goal. You are trying to make people follow your ideas, and that means they must come along willingly, joyfully. Of course you should be passionate about your ideas, but you also need to respectful of others. Don’t forget that and, most especially, don’t let your junior executives forget it.

Sharpening the Axe

2009-09-15T16:10:00.001-04:00

Abraham Lincoln used to say that ‘if I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I would spend six hours sharpening the axe.’ The meaning is clear: if you want to do something right, you spend time in preparation.

Of course, preparation – sharpening the axe – can entail many things. But, in virtually every setting it means investing in your people so that they can actually do the job assigned. That means training, education, making sure they have the right tools to do the tasks assigned, and the opportunity to practice and develop expertise with those tools.

Yet I heard it again just a few days ago: a friend of mine who works in a very large organization (hundreds of thousands of employees) and the problem was: “we don’t have time to do ‘that,’” the ‘that’ in question being a comprehensive training plan. In a sense, he was right. His bosses were absolutely not going to give them enough time to train, to sharpen the axe. They wanted results right now. There is a word for that kind of thinking: stupid.

I had a boss many years ago who would confide in me at times like that. And he always ended those sessions with some words of wisdom that I have never forgotten: “How come we never have time to do things right the first time, but we always have time to do things right the second time?”

And we always did. We would receive a poorly thought out directive from higher headquarters. We would reply that to do ‘A, B and C’ we would need to set aside some people, pull the problem apart, focus some assets, and work out a scheme that would tell us which people, and which assets to place against the task, and how much time it would take to get the job done right. This, of course, was rarely acceptable to higher headquarters. We would be directed to begin and we would dutifully plunge on. Invariably we would come up short because they had tasked us to do something for which none of us was trained or equipped. Then there would be some yelling and screaming and then we would start again. This time we would be allowed to get the right people, the right training and the right tools and we would finally finish the task. And so, instead of costing X dollars and taking Y days to complete, it would cost 2 X dollars or more, and take 2 Y days or more to finish the task.

Is there a way to stop this? Yes. It is simple but for most leaders and managers, it is very painful.

1) Give an order to you subordinate, tell him what to do. Don’t tell him how to do it.

2) Trust your subordinates. This means you must believe them to be competent. If you don’t believe they are competent, fire them and put in somebody you do believe is competent.

3) If your subordinate tells you he needs assets and training to complete the task, give it to him (See #2 above).

4) Believe in training and preparation.

There will be those who will say “I can’t.” You’re wrong. You must. If you ‘can’t,’ then your business model is flawed. It’s as simple as that. Good organizations train and prepare. The better the organization, the more time and investment is made in preparing, in sharpening the axe. Great organizations spend what may seem like huge amounts of time and effort in preparation. That’s why they are great. The preparation comes first, not second. Invest in your people, and in your organization; sharpen the axe.

Communicate

2009-09-12T09:30:00.003-04:00

Here's a simple question: Do you like to be kept in the dark? People walking around you know what’s going on while you have no idea? People stop doing one thing and start doing another and you don’t know why? People moving from one job to another and no one is telling you?

It stinks, doesn’t it?

There is no more disturbing a situation then to be ‘outside the huddle.’ But, the fact is that many organizations operate like that on a daily basis and don’t even recognize it.

To make it clear, I am not talking about either real government or corporate secrets. There are obviously many situations where certain information needs to be protected. Everyone knows about soft drink companies that keep their formulas within a small group of people, as an example. And there are some issues that management can’t discuss by law, except within well-defined parameters, such as efforts to acquire a publicly traded company. And certainly, there are many cases within the federal government and the military where safety demands that only certain people know certain things.*

What I am talking about are those situations where upper management simply stops talking. A number of years ago I was working on amending a particular strategic plan and one of the folks I was working with noted – in private - that “we’re not actually doing this,” that is, the organization wasn’t really following the existing plan. He then went on to complain that the organization didn’t have a plan. I corrected him at that point. The organization clearly had a plan, it just wasn’t the one we had labeled as ‘the plan.’ They – the senior leadership - had a plan, but they weren’t sharing it with the rest of us.

In short, all of us were being kept in the dark. The plan we were working on was pretty much useless, and the goals we were working towards – or thought we were – weren’t the ones the boss was working towards. We never found out for certain what those goals were.

The net result of all that type of behavior is an organization that simply repeats what it has been doing, but isn’t making any progress towards ANY goal – because the goal of the boss is not what the ‘rank and file’ are working towards.

If you really want to, you can run your organization that way. It is inefficient and ineffective, it destroys morale and team cohesion, and it wastes your people on unproductive activity. It also guarantees that you will never achieve anything approaching excellence in your endeavors.

Or, you can choose to include your people in your decision-making and in your planning. You can agree to keep as few secrets as possible and work as hard as possible to communicate with your people. There are those who will object that you need to keep this or that secret. I saw a poster recently that said something to the effect that companies that aren’t interested in keeping secrets aren’t really interested in competing. I suppose that that might be true in one or two very narrow, high technology industries, but the most competitive industries in the world keep few secrets. In fact, the free movement of information has become a hallmark of most of these industries.

The fact is that clear communication is necessary for excellence in execution. Watch a few football games on a Saturday in Fall and you will see this: good teams will very quickly learn to read the other teams; among evenly matched teams more plays will fail because a player was in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing then will fail because the other team ‘read’ the offense. And why was the player in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing? Because he didn’t get the play. It may be his fault, maybe he wasn’t listening, but communication failed.

* Though, having lived in that world for many years, many times people got ‘carried away’ and restricted distribution of various pieces of information to such a degree that it negatively affected the situation.

Some Thoughts on Span of Control

2009-09-07T15:11:00.013-04:00

I listened to a report on the news today that said that the President was appointing his 37th ‘Czar.’ Frankly, I didn’t know the number was that high. I have seen one list that showed he had only 34. One resigned over the weekend, and another was established over the weekend so the number should be the same. The President also has 15 cabinet members who report directly to him, as well as the Vice President, his Chief of Staff and several other officers such as the Director of National Intelligence. All in all, President Obama has, at least on paper, more than 50 people reporting directly to him.

The point of this article is not to comment on the debate as to whether the appointment of czar’s is either constitutional or appropriate; that is for another time and place. The question is whether it is effective? The question is whether having dozens of people nominally reporting to one person exceeds the limits of Span of Control.

Span of Control is a term and a concept that has fallen out of favor over the past decade or so, not that it ever had a great following. That is because Span of Control speaks directly to one of the great barriers to effective leadership and management: hubris. Over the past decade or so, as computers have become omnipresent, the idea of the ‘flat organization’ has come into its own. Normally proselytized by ‘management consultants’ and ‘deep thinkers’ with little leadership experience, the idea is that the modern manager can have dozens of people reporting directly to him or her and can effectively lead though such an organizational structure.

In fact, this is the worst kind of nonsense.

If by ‘manage’ we mean nothing more than the collection of performance data from a number of different offices, and there is no requirement to either consult or mentor the individual reporting to the ‘manager;’ no requirement to provide any guidance; no need to understand both the subordinates’ operations; nor any need to understand the subordinates’ responsibilities or issues, then it might be possible to have several dozen people reporting directly to one ‘manager.’ But, in such a situation, the ‘manager’ is not really managing (never mind leading); instead, the ‘manager’ is doing nothing more than collating data and keeping a report card on performance.

It has become popular to suppose that ‘flat organizations,’ in which a hierarchy is replaced by a large group of who interact as peers, are more capable and responsive in today’s information economy. That is true in specific cases. But the key to those cases is that flat organizations will work as long as decisions can be made by consensus, such as in the early stages of some – but not all - research and development.

The problem with flat organizations is simply this: people are people. Certainly, if you have 15 or 20 motivated people working on the early stages of a project it can be quite exhilarating to watch them move forward as a team, to develop new ideas, to arrive at innovative solutions. But, eventually there comes a time when decisions have to be made and egos have to be assuaged. In fact, the first is the easier of the two. Someone must be responsible for making the decision, and that is the manager, not the group. That can be done fairly simply, at least relative to the second half of the ‘equation.’ The second half of the equation is getting everyone focused on the operation AFTER the decision has been made. After the decision, whatever it is, some efforts will be terminated, some ideas – the ‘children’ of some of the people involved – will be crossed off the list, and those who were the creators of the surviving ideas become the ‘firsts among equals.’ It is now up to the leader to motivate everyone else and keep the organization moving forward.

To everyone out there who says ‘that doesn’t really happen,’ my answer is that it does, in every organization on the planet. And the manager will need to spend time with every single individual in the organization to keep them motivated, as well as with select groups – who will respond differently then the individuals inside that group. These responses will rise up among the most professional, senior, educated people, just as they will among a group of high-school students working in a fast food restaurant.

So, how many people can a manager ‘manage?’ In those rare ‘flat’ organizations that really do work well, I have seen very capable managers who are completely tapped out at 12 to 15 people. It is first and foremost an issue of the complexity of the issues at hand. As the complexity increases, the level of emotional involvement will also increase and the number of people that can be managed will decrease. For very complex problems the number of people who can be effectively managed – by the most capable managers and leaders – is remarkably low: three or four people.

Most people will respond that that is silly, that they have seen all sorts of organizations that have considerably more than four people reporting to the CEO. Furthermore, few CEOs report any difficulty with having 8 or 10, even 12 direct reports.

The answer, of course, is that most CEOs and Presidents suffer from both hubris (and believe the are doing a great job when they aren’t), and as important, despite the fact that they may have 8 or 10 or even 20 people reporting directly to them on paper, in fact another thing happens. Instead of 20 people reporting directly to them, in fact, most of the people who ‘report’ to them are adrift, working for no one most of the time.

What happens is this: the Boss (CEO, President, whatever) sets up his organization with a dozen or more people reporting directly to him. He spends several months trying to keep fully informed on the progress of each of these people. Eventually (usually within three or four months, but often less than that) the Boss becomes intellectually and emotionally exhausted from the effort and begins to focus on just a few key areas, usually either the ones he is intimately familiar with, or the ones that he was brought in to fix. The Boss then spends the vast bulk of his time focused on just two or three issues, and for the most part ignores everything and everyone else. These become the key items the Boss talks about all the time. Then, at seemingly random intervals, or whenever someone else brings up an issue in one of the other, non-key areas, the Boss ‘dives in’ up to his elbows and stirs things up. Then, as soon as interest wanes, that issue is abandoned and the Boss moves to another issue or back to the two or three key issues. In this way some issues are dealt with frequently if erratically, and others will seemingly disappear from view for weeks or months at a time.

Speaking of limits to span of control has almost become heresy. I have heard various consultants refer to ‘span of control’ as ‘yesterday’s news.’ When questioned they inevitably are found to have little or no management or leadership experience. More disturbing, many senior leaders are seemingly unconcerned with the issue, firmly believing that they can manage both the detailed information flow and the even more difficult personnel issues associated with a dozen or more people working together. The fact is that they can’t. As tasks become more complex, the span of control must decrease if you want to provide real leadership. And, as people ‘mature’ and develop ever-larger egos, managing the interrelationships among peers becomes more difficult.

In short, Span of Control is a real issue; you may think it doesn’t apply to you. If so, you’re wrong.

Bonuses, Payraises, Promotions and Other Unpleasentries

2009-09-03T08:16:00.002-04:00

What can possibly be unpleasant about a bonus or a pay hike or a promotion? To the recipient, very little. Everyone likes a pat on the back, and if it’s ‘tangible,’ all the better. But if you are the one who identifies who gets a bonus, then you are also the ‘guy’ who identifies who doesn’t get a bonus (or a pay raise, or a promotion), and telling people why they ‘didn’t make the cut’ is one of the more difficult and unpleasant duties of being a leader.

No matter what system you use, no matter how you go about these issues, eventually, you still must come face to face with the guy who didn’t get the promotion which he certainly believes he deserved. So, what can you do to ease this process?

The answer is both difficult and simple: Communicate. Communicate early and often. There are, in fact, four facets of communication that you need to address.

One – Communicate - Organization wide communication that tells your vision of performance. This sets the stage for more specific communication that will follow by setting overall standards and showing how those standards fit into the organization as a whole. In short, you need an organizational performance statement: this is what is expected out of this department, this division, this plant, etc., over the next year. Communicate this performance message to the entire organization regularly enough that everyone understands it.

Two – Guidelines for individuals. Have clear work-place performance guidelines: what is the standard for performance (also, what is unacceptable); how pay increases, bonuses and promotions will be distributed; if you have any ‘perks,’ how these are allotted also should be clearly spelled out. This would include such items as special parking places, executive dining rooms, etc.

My own experience is that most perks, except in very restricted forms, normally have a negative impact on the organization as a whole, while providing only a minor benefit to the recipient. For example, parking; either give everyone an assigned parking space, based on some clear criteria for assigning where (longevity moves you closer to the front door, for example), or don’t have ANY assigned parking. Most perks eventually devolve into playing favorites; and whether that is true or not, that is how most people perceive them.

At the same time, keep the guidelines simple – spend some time with key advisors, get feedback from your people, and turn this into a positive experience for everyone. Don’t make the guidelines complex or the process of understanding and following them onerous, nor should you turn this into a long, tortured Byzantine requirements list.

It is also best to make these guidelines demanding. What you must avoid is setting standards that allow everyone to be ‘4.0’ performers. In fact, the best system would make it impossible for anyone to have a ‘perfect score,’ which is not to say that any performance system must have a ‘scorecard’ of some sort. Setting very high standards can be a very powerful motivator, and at the same time allows people to avoid the frustration of seeking to be ‘perfect.’

Three – Counseling – There needs to be regular Counseling. Establish a formal process to provide performance reviews to everyone several times throughout the year. Personally, I think it needs to be at least quarterly. People should not only know how well they are doing, they need to have enough awareness that they can respond to the appraisal and make corrections and not ‘lose’ a year. The more frequent the counseling, the easier it becomes and the less time will be spent trying to finesse these meetings. (Time must still be committed to preparing for these meetings, but as frequency drops the normal response is to make these meetings very formal and guarded. That is what you are trying to avoid.)

There also needs to be an informal counseling mechanism, that is, one that is not on anyone’s calendar, but allows you as the manager to do your job. Remember, the point of counseling is not to scare people or identify someone so you can fire them; the point is to improve both individual performance and overall organizational performance. Accordingly, you, and your managers, need to make a point of frequent review of the performance of those who work for you and when you notice changes, provide comment. Thus, if one of your people is showing a marked improvement in performance, it should be noted (and if it is sustained, a public notice is best). If there is a decrease in performance, you should provide counseling as soon as possible, in private.

Fourth – Feedback – there must be a Feedback mechanism, a process that provides an avenue of communication from the people of your organization ‘up’ the chain. This allows them to tell you how well they think they are doing, and how well they think the organization is doing. The feedback mechanism also allows them to voice frustrations if they feel that performance is not being properly evaluated.

Feedback mechanisms also should allow you as the boss to better identify managers who are either positively or negatively affecting performance. To facilitate this, feedback needs to be reviewed not only by immediate supervisors but also by at least the next echelon and perhaps two echelons. You also need to solicit feedback on how You, the boss, are doing. This is hard; people will be reticent to speak the truth, or will lay it on thick – or will vent – you need to do this frequently enough that you get beyond most of this, and then – write it down and review comments from lots of folks and see what stands out – good and bad. You will find kernels of truth in there.

Several other traits to aim for include:

Clarity. Keep clear, simple records of counseling and evaluations. If you need to replace a manager tomorrow, the new ‘guy’ needs to be able to understand what is happening and why.

Fairness. You need to not only be fair, you need to appear to be fair. Take a close look at what you are doing and how you are doing it and adjust your procedures until everyone trusts the system. This will pay big dividends in the end.

Transparency. Be transparent. There is no worse trait of any system of promotion or awarding of bonuses or position then one that keeps everything a mystery. Not only does it eventually lead everyone to believe that there is a cabal, an in crowd, it also prevents many people from doing what is necessary to improve their own performance. There are organizations that routinely have promotion processes that are confidential and when someone is promoted very quickly or when someone suddenly fails to be promoted when everyone expected it, there is no specific explanation. Instead, vague generalities are issued and people are left to guess.

To avoid that, insist on transparency: identify the selection criteria as part of overall corporate policy, and when selections need to be made to promote people, make certain that you are using those criteria. If you need to change those criteria – tell everyone. And, when selections are made it should be clear that those promoted fit the selection criteria.

Limits. Finally, it should be obvious, given the level of effort involved in a sound counseling and evaluation process, that there is a practical limit to how many people you can evaluate. This is another limit on span of control. If you had 50 people working directly for you and you were trying to evaluate their performance and approve bonuses and make recommendations for promotions for all 50, and you were being diligent in making sure that you were giving them regular feedback and counseling, etc., you would find you don’t have enough time in the week to do everything you need to do. If you are performing the observations, evaluations and assessments completely on your own, it will be difficult to supervise more than a dozen people and do a thorough job.

Proper evaluations and recommendations for promotions, etc., require close observation. In some jobs with a high degree of routine, a simple assembly line perhaps, it may be possible to thoroughly supervise up to 20 people directly, with no assistance. But if the assembly line is even the least bit complex and requires regular decision-making by the workers this number will quickly fall.* As the tasks of the workforce increase in complexity, the task of making accurate assessments will force you to continually reduce the number of people being supervised by any one person. Experience will help you set those limits. Once you know those limits, you need to resist the temptation to exceed that number.

Next, we’ll discuss how promotions and pay increases ought to be implemented.

* Some service industries reward personnel based on simple criteria, total sales, for example. These systems can work, but they also produce a work force that is mercenary in the strictest sense of the word. There is no motivation for the organization as a whole, and overall organizational goals or department goals are meaningless.

Instituting Excellence - Part 2

2009-08-27T21:17:00.000-04:00

In the previous article I talked about how to ensure that you have the best possible people on your team, and discussed the three key steps in that process: selection, training and investment. In this article I will talk about the organizational processes needed to sustain organizational excellence over time.

Let’s begin by assuming that you have instituted the three keys steps outlined previously to ensure that you have the very best people in your organization: you have selected the very best, you have established a comprehensive training and education program for your people, and you have given them the best resources and technology available to both practice with and to operate with on a day-to-day basis. Let’s also assume that you, as the leader, are doing what you should be doing to provide the necessary guidance and motivation to your people both individually and collectively.

In part 1 I discussed training and education as central to achieving and maintaining excellence. Training and education must be considered in three separate categories: individual/short-term training and education, component and short and medium term training and education, and organizational/long-term education and training. The first two: individual and component training and education were addressed in the part 1, and reflect training and education provided to individuals and to smaller elements of an organization, whether it be an individual department of a company, a separate production or service facility, an individual command in the military or any other organization that functions on a day-to-day and week-to-week operational level.

Organizational excellence then, as opposed to the individual excellence that was discussed in part 1, builds on individual and component excellence and extends that excellence both across the entire organization, and extends it out in time, making it a true long-term (multiple year) effort. Training and education give way to large-scale exercises, where the entire organization is forced to integrate around long-term goals and function as a cohesive unit to achieve long-term - that is strategic goals.

What then remains must be done, in addition to what was discussed in part 1 to ensure that you build on the individual and component excellence begun in part 1 and both achieve and sustain organizational excellence in your overall, strategic endeavors?

There are three key steps are necessary to instituting excellence in your organization over time, and they are necessary irrespective of what you are doing. The three steps are: Planning, Leadership Selection, and Exercises

Planning

Planning, when carried out properly, is a means to identify the major goals of any organization and develop a plan to reach those goals, using the complete assets -- human, financial, intellectual, technological and physical – of the organization to achieve those goals. Properly constructed and executed, a (strategic) plan not only integrates all the actions of the organization, ensuring that each contributes to achieving the major goals, but it also makes it clear how the organization intends to achieve the goal or goals.

Unfortunately, planning has a bad reputation among many, and in some cases it is deserved. But it is deserved because people place the emphasis on the wrong elements of the plan. There are three major perspectives on planning and plans: those who view planning as a means to get ‘the cook-book’ to success; those who view plans as something to be feared because they will turn into ‘dogma’ and will handcuff the organization into a rigid course ahead; and those who view planning as a means to focus an organization on a long-range goal while still providing the flexibility to address short and medium term problems and take advantage of emerging opportunities.

The fact is that any plan can be turned into ‘dogma’ by a leadership that has invested heavily in the planning and finds itself, usually due either to excessive fear or hubris, unable or unwilling to change the plan. Alternatively, plans can become ‘security blankets’ for the timid, something to ‘hide behind,’ the plan being regarded as an instruction book that will be followed irrespective of whatever is happening, allowing the leadership to disengage.

A story from the German General Staff (the source of all modern strategic planning) from the mid 1800s is illustrative of how the staff process is supposed to work: a staff officer was receiving a tongue lashing from Prince Frederick Charles because of a tactical blunder in a major army field exercise. The officer, a major, offered the excuse that he had been obeying orders and that an order from a superior was equivalent to an order from the King. The Prince responded that ‘His Majesty made you a major because he believed you would know when NOT to obey orders.’

This is as true today as ever: staff planners should be chosen because they are the best available, and they need to understand not only when to follow the plan, but also when to deviate from the plan. The job of the senior leadership, as we shall discuss below, is to identify the staff planners.

When the planning process is used properly, planning, and the planning staff that produces the plan, is a mechanism for institutionalizing sustained identification of strategic goals and identifying a means to achieve those goals. If used properly, this is the cornerstone of sustained organizational strategic excellence.

In organizations throughout history that have been led by truly great figures, as long as that great figure leads the organization, the organization survived and thrived, based on the leaders exceptional leadership skills. The planning process, when executed properly, can substitute for the great leader, providing organizational focus through the planning process, integrating every aspect and individual of the organization – from the executive staff to the newest and most junior worker - into a single, cohesive organism. How does it do this? Simply put, the process demands top down focus on the goals; it ensures needed assets are identified to meet the goals; it identifies the specific tasks needed to achieve the goals, breaking the whole into manageable pieces; it identifies the needed support and infrastructure; it develops a communications and feedback mechanism to follow progress; and it identifies the needed people and skills to achieve each task.

Planning, when done properly, integrates the goals of the organization into its very fabric. It aligns all the pieces – and the people - and focuses them on the overarching goals. And to ensure that that remains true, good planning begins with selection of the very best people into the planning staff. These people are trained in the planning process and then given access to the best possible information concerning the organization and the various environments within which it operates (physical, technological, political, etc.). As planners these people are free to study and focus on the organization as a whole and where it is, where it is headed and how it might get there. They engage in rigorous planning, always conscious, as good planners must be, that they are dealing with incomplete information. And how does the system compensate for the incomplete knowledge? By taking the very best people in the organization and placing them on the planning team: individual excellence and experience fills the gaps that will develop in the plan.

Leadership Selection

Once the organizational leadership selected the members of the planning staff it is incumbent on that senior leadership to ensure that these people, who are now the best informed people in the organization and the ones with the most familiarity with the course into the future, are placed in positions of authority to both facilitate the execution of the plan and to identify which ones are ready more greater authority (promotion). This process of identifying the best people you have, assigning them to the planning staff, and then moving them to key leadership positions is not a rapid move. Rather, as conditions permit, they should remain on the planning staff a minimum of several years. During that period they will be used, in addition to their duties on the planning staff, to lead special projects that arise from time to time, and if your organization permits it, to lead key elements of the organization through exercises.

The planning staff’s function, in a nutshell, is to assist the leadership of the organization in the initial planning, in the directing, in the assessing and monitoring, and in the integration and coordination of the various elements or components of the organization, as well as providing feedback to the leadership to ensure the leadership’s direction is as accurate and effective as possible. Given this requirement, it is clear that these must be the best people in the organization.

Senior leadership should also use exercises to identify planners/future leaders who are capable of improvising the plan to achieve maximum short and medium term results while still ensuring progress on long-term goals.

During exercises the planners should be assigned to a higher position then one they would normally be considered for. This allows the senior leaders to begin to identify the maximum level of authority that that individual is capable of handling. These exercises, as well as the opportunities to lead various special projects, at the same time provide the planners with valuable feedback as to the efficacy of the plan and facilitate the development of branch plans and sequels, keeping the plan up-to-date and focused on the real organizational goals while remaining ‘in contact’ with the real world.

Exercises

Exercises are used to test elements of the plan. Obviously, while there are some organizations that can easily use exercises to guide their organizations (large military organizations are obvious examples), there are many organizations, particularly those in the corporate world, where it is difficult to imagine using exercises to improve their performance and chart their future, both because of the degree of difficulty in creating a exercise that would accurately ‘model’ a particular industry, and because it would be both difficult and expensive to pull a number of people away from real operations and have them spend adequate time on the exercise to draw accurate conclusions. (While this will eventually change as computer modeling improves, it is still quite a few years away.)

The answer to such organizations is the desktop ‘game’ or seminar. Even in the most complex service organizations the use of organized seminars, and talking through the corporate plans when faced with a series of ‘what if’ questions, will give the leadership considerably more preparation and flexibility in a real crisis then if this type of activity is not pursued. For the planning team to spend two afternoons per month with the executive team working through a series of ‘what ifs’ and then bringing the executive comments back into the planning sessions, reviewing the plans, and further refining branches and sequels would go a long way to keeping the plan alive and focused and the organization, from the executive staff to the rank and file, on the ‘same page.’ This also gives the executive staff more time and opportunity to evaluate the members of the planning staff, a key element of the quest for excellence.

Exercises provide the leadership both the opportunity to evaluate key elements of the plan as well as creating an opportunity for the senior leadership to observe the planners and develop qualitative assessments of their key people – the planners. The senior leadership should be looking for those people who can provide superior performance at the operations level of the organization, can produce high-quality long-range plans, and can also provide superior strategic level leadership and decision-making.

It should also be clear by now that it is essential to not withhold your best from the planning staff. The planning staff is so important if you wish to institute excellence your very best people must be pulled from your operational units and placed into your planning staff at the appropriate times.

In Conclusion

It should go without saying that, just as there must be an investment in individual training and individual technology, that investment must be extended across the organization as a whole and integrated so that the technology in each component is supportive an interoperable with the technology in other components. This investment in technology and training is included in the investment discussed in part 1, but must be sized to ensure that there is the necessary interoperability and sufficient assets to include the large scale exercises discussed above. Thus six key elements are necessary to provide comprehensive and sustained organizational excellence:

1) Selecting the best available people
2) Providing these people the best possible education and training
3) Investing in these people and components to ensure they have the best possible mix of technologies and the most comprehensive component training and exercises, and that these technologies are interoperable
4) Developing comprehensive, integrated long-range (strategic) plans
5) Using of the planning process and the planning staff to cull the organization for the most creative and talented leadership
6) Using large-scale, across the board exercises to both test and refine the plan and to better identify the next generation of leadership within the organization

Instituting Excellence

2009-08-20T15:52:00.000-04:00

This is part one of a two-part discussion on organizational excellence

Why are some organizations so good? Why do some organizations – teams – continue to excel? There are many examples, some jump immediately to mind – the Blue Angles (the US Navy’s Flight Demonstration Team) and their Air Force counterparts, the Thunderbirds; the US military’s Special Forces units such as the SEALs and Delta; certain sports teams that, even if they don’t win their respective championships every year are continually in the playoffs or are always ‘a threat’ (the Yankees, the Lakers, Manchester United). So, why are they so good?

It is not accurate to say they have the very best people, if by best people you mean that someone went out and lined up the brightest and most physically fit people in the nation and then ran them through an endless series of tests and took the top 1/100dth of 1%. In fact, in a very real sense, none of the top organizations recruit in quite that fashion.

In fact, in even the best sports teams, they don’t have the very best. Rather, they attract whom they can, then take the very best that are available.

So, selection is the first step: pick the very best people who are both a) available, and b) really want to be there.

This first element is obvious, you can only select from what is available. Even the New York Yankees can’t hire every great pitcher and hitter. They have to work with what is available, and work through the ‘draft’ process. And the Yankees are illustrative: despite a vast amount of money, they clearly don’t have a monopoly on all the great baseball players. But, the second element is key: you need people who want the people who really – REALLY – want to be there.

A friend of mine who was at one time an instructor at one of the schools that train some of the most elite special forces personnel in the US military told me that there was a board on one wall at the school that contained the names (and their record) of the personnel who had performed the best on each of the physical tests at the school: most push-ups, most pull-ups, fastest run, fastest swim, etc. They would show it to the new students and let them ponder it a while, then tell them that not one person on that board had made it through the school. Simple physical prowess wasn’t (and isn’t) enough. The only people who made it through were those who really wanted to make it through.

So, what does that mean to you? It means that you have to create and maintain an environment that people really want to be part of. What does that entail? In the simplest sense, it means Challenge and Reward and, in the end, self-actualization. Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs, though it appears to have fallen out of fashion, is essentially right. You can pay someone a great deal of money but still not get great performance out of him. In fact, as demonstrated by most professional athletes, the money is more a means to keep ‘score’ on how much the team respects them then anything else. Think about how many great professional athletes play for deferred salaries because of their love of the game. And in the same light, how many times have teams traded away a player who was clearly great and clearly had great years left in his career because he clearly didn’t fit, and clearly didn’t want to be on that particular team?

More to the point, fighter pilots are not the highest paid people on the planet – far from it. No one joins the Army, Navy, Air Force or Marines for the pay. And they certainly don’t stay in because of the pay – and to become ‘excellent’ in the military is not something that happens on your first enlistment; all the really excellent soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines have 10, 12 or more years of service behind them. These people stay in for intangible reasons, reasons that extend well beyond any issues of pay. As has been demonstrated time and again, the very best can easily earn more money in the private sector, but choose to remain in the service. They do so ‘simply’ because their real motivations, and their real rewards are well above the economic. Much like top athletes pay is of significance, but it is not the reason for doing what they do. Rather, it is a necessary but lesser element of their full motivation.

So, you have to create a spirit, an ethos inside your organization that people dearly want to join. To do that, you must first have clear gals and a consuming vision of your future, one that people can adopt and see themselves as part of. And that vision must connect to their personnel motivations so that the organizational goals and their personal goals coincide. And second, you must communicate that vision, and communicate it with passion. I have written elsewhere that charisma is ‘passion communicated.’ You must develop a clear and compelling goal and vision. You must develop a passion for your organization. And then you must communicate all of this; you must develop your charisma.

The second step is training.

Training: what do I mean by training? Training encompasses a wide range of issues: at its simplest, training is the process to teach a particular skill. At its broadest, your ‘training program’ should include the sustained education of your people. (There is a simple and obvious counterpoint to this: organizations that don’t spend time training and educating their people don’t care about excellence.)

In fact, if you are pursuing excellence, ‘training’ must include teaching skills, to include routine refresher training to ensure that even your most skilled people are exposed to new techniques and processes, sustained education where you move beyond the teaching of skills and expand knowledge bases and allow your people time to think through a wide range of issues, letting them develop new techniques, and explore new possibilities.

In many organizations training is the first variable that is cut when money becomes tight. The argument is always along the lines of: ‘our people are the best, we can sustain for quite a while with less training, and when things turn around we’ll increase training again.’ When you hear this you are on the slippery slope and headed down – away from excellence.

Real excellence means you never scrimp on training and education. Never. In fact, it is fair to say that training and education is the one place you can’t cut. If you really need to cut, reduce the size of the organization before you reduce the size and scope and breadth of your training and education program; 100 completely trained people are better than 150 partially trained people, no matter what the accountants say.

So, how much is enough training? This is always a good question. The simple answer is that there is no easy answer. But a look at any organization that truly embraces excellence shows that the amount of time spent in training, education and ‘rehearsal’ is usually quite large. It is a fair rule of thumb that training is analogous to communication within your organization: you probably aren’t doing enough.

A good example is flight training in the US military. Initial flight training for a Navy (or Army, Marine or Air Force) pilot lasts more than a year, after which the pilot reports to a ‘replacement squadron’ where he will receive training in the particular type of aircraft he is going to fly (let us assume it is an FA-18, but the process applies to every type of aircraft in the US military). Once he has finished training at this squadron, and roughly two years after he was commissioned, he will report to his first operational squadron. Once in that squadron he will continue training, both individual training and training as a unit, that lasts more than a year, before he is allowed to lead a section (two) of aircraft on a mission. After three years in that operational squadron the pilot will be transferred to a training squadron as an instructor. Following two years as an instructor the pilot will either go back to an operational squadron or he may spend two years on a staff of one type or another. If he spends two years on a staff he will then return to the fleet in his next tour, but only after he spends three to four months in refresher training in the ‘replacement squadron.’ In fact, every time that pilot returns to ‘flight status’ after a year or two on a staff, he will spend several months in flight ‘refresher ‘ training.

I have a friend who is has just received his third star, and has literally thousands of hours flying fighters. He has been in the service for 30 years. He is en route to his three star command after two years in Washington. He will receive refresher training despite the fact that he is one of the most talented and experienced fighter pilots in the US military. He will also receive months of prepatory briefs and lectures on everything from the various organizations that make up his new command to concerns of higher headquarters, issues and concerns from the parallel organizations of the other services, etc. In short, the military believes, in most cases, that the required amount of training to achieve excellence is very high indeed. It’s not a case of how much training can we afford; it’s a case of how much training represents the minimum to ensure excellence.

Ask yourself this question: how many Fortune 500 executives, with 30 years or more experience in their industry, have received 3 or 4 months of training and education prior to moving to a new slot as president of a major division? How many might have benefited from the opportunity to study the organization and the industry and the economy and the surrounding technology for several months, and then spent a month or so thinking about what they have learned and how it might best be applied? How much would the entire organization benefit if each new president or vice president spent some time learning about the industry and technology and then thinking about how to apply what they’ve learned before they jump into ‘the driver’s seat?’

The same questions can and should be asked at every echelon within the organization.

If you are still not convinced, ask yourself this: who is the greatest golfer in the world? Answer, Tiger Woods. Who is the greatest tennis player? Roger Federer. And what do they do when they aren’t playing golf or tennis? They practice. They review their game, they work to maintain and improve their conditioning. They study. They are the very best. And they work harder at it than anyone else. Great surgeons are no different: they don’t, despite what the movies or TV shows may show, go home and have a double martini. Rather, they spend evenings reading journals on new procedures or new ways to execute old procedures. Long before the AMA instituted mandatory refresher training they were regularly attending seminars and conferences in order to improve their techniques and their results. And despite what Hollywood likes to show, the greatest surgeons aren’t 35 or even 45 years old, they’re all in their 50s or older because they have taken years to study and refine their craft, blending science and art into true excellence.

The third and last step is investing in your people. Buy them the right tools, give them the best resources you can to accomplish the tasks at hand.

This is really an extension of training, ensuring that the training is the very best available, focusing on training, education and practice with the very best equipment and facilities available. This will include ensuring that your people have access to changes and developments in new technologies and techniques and that the trainers are always being retrained.

One of the reasons the US was so successful in air warfare in World War II (and continues to be so) was that the US made a point of pulling the very best pilots out of combat and returning them stateside and making them instructors. These top pilots then instructed new pilots in the most effective tactics, techniques and procedures to ensure they were the best-trained pilots AS A WHOLE as they entered combat. The result was that while there were individuals in the German and Japanese air and naval air forces who were very talented, the average US pilot by 1943 was a considerably better pilot than the average German or Japanese pilot and that difference continued to grow through the end of the war. In short, US leadership committed to long-term excellence by investing the best pilots in training, rather than focusing on short-term gains.

The US then put these highly trained pilots in the best aircraft we could make. Throughout the war the US invested substantial amounts of money in developing and improving a continuous stream of new aircraft, each one an improvement on the last. Lessons learned in design, in manufacturing and in maintenance were incorporated into each new model to improve the final output. Mistakes were made and the industry learned from those as well. By 1944 US aircraft were, on the whole, the best in the world.

The implications for any organization are simple and clear: your best people not only need continual training – like everyone else, your very best also need to spend time training others, providing them the benefit of their experiences. Those that worry that taking your best (fill in the blank: salesman, engineer, secretary, pilot, etc.) out of the operational unit and putting them in training as an instructor means you lose that production are thinking short term. Excellence is only obtained by long-term thinking and long-term investment. No excellence is obtained with a short-term effort.

Resources also include technology, and technology is a tool. Walk into a master craftsman’s tool shed and look around. You will usually find a wonderful mélange of new and old technologies: the latest saws and plains, laser levels, etc., mixed with wood chisels, mallets and handsaws. What you won’t find is any tools that are of low quality. A master will use all his skill and experience in selecting his tools. Few if any get terribly wrapped up in either technology for technology’s sake or in avoiding technology because ‘the old ways are better.’ Their focus is on the end product. If a new saw with electronic sensors ensures a more accurate cut, then they will use. If not, they won’t. Think of Norm Abram of New Yankee Workshop. The same is true whether you are talking about a master welder, a great surgeon, or a top salesman: they recognize new technologies as tools that help them do their jobs, not as threats to their position.

Conclusion

Obviously, most companies or organizations can’t afford the level of expenditures of the Navy or Air Force in training pilots. But what they can do is clearly and publicly commit to selecting the best and then training and resourcing their people. They must Commit to Excellence. Stop worrying about quarterly returns and recognize that the greatest capital investment you can make is in your people and their talents. To those who respond that investing in people will only result in people jumping ship and taking their talents to a competitor there are two answers: first, some people will leave after receiving your training, but that can’t be helped. But, second, the reason that your organization is turning out excellent people who will be hired by your competitors is that your organization is more than a training program: it is the complete ‘package:’ an organization that can recruit among the very best, because your organization has vision and passion and embraces excellence. If there is no commitment to excellence no matter how much money is invested in your training program it will only turn out an average ‘product.’ But, if you commit to excellence, if you provide real leadership, if you have a clear goal and a clear vision, then you don’t need to worry about those who leave, or about your competitors, because great leadership and a commitment to excellence will mean success.

Lessons from Captain Herreshoff

2009-08-01T10:34:00.000-04:00

I had the opportunity to visit the Herreshoff Marine Museum in Bristol RI recently, and I highly recommend it to anyone who has any interest in boats, yachting, marine architecture or simply the latter half of the 19th and first half of the 20th century.

The museum provides a wonderful insight into a fascinating figure of American history, Nathanael Green Herreshoff, and can teach some valuable lessons on leadership. For those who don’t know, Herreshoff was one of the preeminent naval architects of his age, and with is brother’s business genius, ran one of the most successful yacht yards in history, turning out a long line of successful and innovative yachts, as well as the US Navy’s first torpedo boats.

What is of note is Herreshoff’s success is due to a few characteristics that are essential for any great leader.

Intelligent – Herreshoff was unquestionably a very intelligent man who studied his profession endlessly, eventually mastering every facet of the design and construction of yachts. This included the Herreshoff yard making their own bronze fixtures, designing their own engines and cutting and sewing their own sails, never mind the designing and building of the hull of the yacht.

Herreshoff experimented with a wide range of designs and concepts, including such items as the self stowing (folding propeller), the first patent on a catamaran, developing a technique to splice wire to rope, a number of techniques to build lighter and stronger wooden hulls, the first fin keels and the first bulb ballast on a fin keel. In all he designed more than 2000 yachts to include five that defended the America’s Cup. This list is by no means complete.

Focused – Herreshoff focused on his design and construction work. Herreshoff understood yachts and ship design. He did not understand all the ins and outs of business. Nor did he spend time trying to master it. Instead, he remained focused, throughout his 72-year career as a naval architect, on mastering every facet of ship and yacht design and construction. The results speak for themselves, from the long list of innovations to the long list of successful designs and the incredible number of designs that are still being used. But ‘Captain Nat’ was not a businessman nor did he try to be. Thankfully he had his brother John. There is a lesson here for many innovators and entrepreneurs: it isn’t necessary that you know how to run your business; it is necessary that you find someone you can trust who can manage your business. Together the Herreshoff Brothers were an incredibly successful team and each focused on and played to their own strength. If either had tried to succeed on their own neither would have been the success they became together.

Uncompromising on his vision – Finally, Herreshoff knew what was the right answer in his designs and was uncompromising in pursuing the answer. The results, represented in the long line of fast and very successful yacht (and torpedo boat and motor launch designs) are self-evident. Again and again he would develop a new approach to an old problem in order to save weight, provide greater strength with the same weight, develop an easier means to do something so that the overall result was faster or easier, etc. This led to a wide range of additional designs in various pieces of boating gear, such as various types of winches and fasteners that were lighter or smaller or easier to use. At the same time, it is fair to say that his brother’s business acumen, and his ability to successfully argue with his brother, guaranteed them both a great deal of financial success. His brother was, in his own way, as uncompromising as was ‘Captain Nat.’

In the end, this commitment to excellence and his drive for ever faster and more capable yachts advanced the entire naval design industry, and we have all benefited in various ways, small and large, from his efforts.

71 years after his death it is also fair to say that you can mention the name Herreshoff to virtually any naval architect anywhere in the world (and many sailors and yachtsmen) and you will get an instantaneous response, usually accompanied with a smile as they remember their favorite Herreshoff design. In doing so, they are both saluting a fascinating figure and recognizing the characteristics of one of the leading figures in the history of naval architecture, and a worthy example for anyone, afloat or ashore, who is interested in truly leading his or her industry.

Setting An Example

2009-07-29T09:55:00.000-04:00

There is no more meaningless a line in the realm of leadership than ‘Do as I say, not as I do.’ One of the things that you can absolutely count on, whether you manage a Boy Scout Troop or a Fortune 500 company is that your behavior, your day-to-day actions, will be watched and copied. All of them.

All of the glossy charts on the wall, all the corporate bulletin boards – physical and electronic, all the public announcements, all the ‘town meetings, won’t matter a tinker’s damn if you don’t ‘walk-the-walk.’

And what does it mean to ‘walk-the-walk?’ Is it enough to say the right things at large gatherings, is it enough to have pertinent details about this or that activity so that you are always the best informed, is it enough to always dress appropriately, is it enough to know everyone’s name, or any of the other 101 traits that people note as signs of leadership?

The short and simple answer is: No.

The fact is that as people progress up the ladder of any organization several things happen: the first is that simply by having been in the organization for a while they know a good deal about it and about the various forces – economic, political, social, legal, etc. – that affect it. Second, they have people working for them who’s job it is to feed them information. They are ‘kept smart’ by the system. Third, if they have a decent aide or two they also have a steady stream of information coming into their office on whomever they are likely to meet today. If they are very good, there will be a list and one or two sentences on everyone in a given division if they are going to visit that division today, as well as a run-down on what the division does, it’s production numbers for the year, etc. This will allow them to not only seem to know all the details on the division as they walk through, it will allow them to seem to know many of the people. Fourth, after giving the basic two or three corporate briefs to perspective investors a dozen times or so, and having practiced it 50 times or so, the CEO has five or ten minutes of a ‘speech’ available without even thinking about it. For the average CEO to stand up and give some ‘off-the-cuff’ remarks should be as easy as breathing.

There are scores more examples of executives looking ‘good.’ It is really not substantially different than what many politicians do. All of this can be understood as nothing more than preparation and a bit of a ‘show.’ It will be enough for politicians. But it isn’t enough if you are actually going to motivate people to work hard for you.

The fact is that in the end most of the people who work for you are going to notice the little things that are big things: Are you positive and upbeat or are you angry? Do you treat people fairly? Do you take care of people or just use them? Do you hold to your word?

If you are the leader of an organization, any organization, it is accurate to say that your ‘mask’ must always be on. You always need your game face. When you are buying groceries and you bump into one of your people, when you are going to the movies, when you are dropping kids off at school – whatever it is – you have to be cheerful, confidant, and glad to see them. If you don’t remember their name, say “I’m Pete. I’m sorry, I forgot your name’ and shake their hand. Now listen to them. Pay attention, because they will say something and it is directed at you. And how you respond, the way you stand, whether you pay attention, will get around the company. Count on it.

The people who work for you, no matter how senior you are, no matter how intellectual and jaundiced you think your employees are, will notice everything about you. And here is the important point: eventually they will reflect it in everything they do. You don’t need to be perfect: no one expects that. But they do expect honesty and fairness and hard work and the truth. If you are telling the board one thing and the people who work for you another, it will get out.

The French essayist and playwright Jean Giraudoux once remarked that: "The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made." He was, of course, being cynical. In the end sincerity will either support everything you do, or insincerity will undermine it.

If you are not sincere about wanting to lead, about wanting to build a better Scout Troop or a better Bank or a better Oil Company, then you should leave. More to the point, if you don’t really care about the people of your company, they will figure it out sooner or later. It may take a while, but they will eventually find out. And when they do everything you say or do will be at risk. Decide to lead and commit to it, and commit to your people and your organization, or get out of the way.

40th Anniversary

2009-07-20T21:57:00.000-04:00

40 years ago today man first stepped on the Moon. They were able to accomplish this because they, and a great many others, embraced the best that is in us: they reached beyond their grasp, they strove to do what was said to be impossible, they aimed for a goal that was greater than any that had come before. This spirit of adventure and the conquest of the frontier is the very core of the survival of mankind. They were successful as a result of the efforts of literally thousands of men and women, and though only 12 men actually made it to the surface, each of these thousands share in the success, though we don’t remember their names.

Nevertheless, there are a few figures who stand out. One is President Kennedy, who galvanized the nation and the world and focused the efforts of those thousands with his leadership into space. Below is that speech. Following it is the list of all the Apollo astronauts, to include the three men of Apollo 1 who died in the fire on the launch pad.

PRESIDENT JOHN KENNEDY'S RICE STADIUM MOON SPEECH
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September 12, 1962

President Pitzer, Mr. Vice President, Governor, Congressman Thomas, Senator Wiley, and Congressman Miller, Mr. Webb, Mr. Bell, scientists, distinguished guests, and ladies and gentlemen:

I appreciate your president having made me an honorary visiting professor, and I will assure you that my first lecture will be very brief.

I am delighted to be here and I'm particularly delighted to be here on this occasion.

We meet at a college noted for knowledge, in a city noted for progress, in a State noted for strength, and we stand in need of all three, for we meet in an hour of change and challenge, in a decade of hope and fear, in an age of both knowledge and ignorance. The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds.

Despite the striking fact that most of the scientists that the world has ever known are alive and working today, despite the fact that this Nation¹s own scientific manpower is doubling every 12 years in a rate of growth more than three times that of our population as a whole, despite that, the vast stretches of the unknown and the unanswered and the unfinished still far outstrip our collective comprehension.

No man can fully grasp how far and how fast we have come, but condense, if you will, the 50,000 years of man¹s recorded history in a time span of but a half-century. Stated in these terms, we know very little about the first 40 years, except at the end of them advanced man had learned to use the skins of animals to cover them. Then about 10 years ago, under this standard, man emerged from his caves to construct other kinds of shelter. Only five years ago man learned to write and use a cart with wheels. Christianity began less than two years ago. The printing press came this year, and then less than two months ago, during this whole 50-year span of human history, the steam engine provided a new source of power.

Newton explored the meaning of gravity. Last month electric lights and telephones and automobiles and airplanes became available. Only last week did we develop penicillin and television and nuclear power, and now if America's new spacecraft succeeds in reaching Venus, we will have literally reached the stars before midnight tonight.

This is a breathtaking pace, and such a pace cannot help but create new ills as it dispels old, new ignorance, new problems, new dangers. Surely the opening vistas of space promise high costs and hardships, as well as high reward.

So it is not surprising that some would have us stay where we are a little longer to rest, to wait. But this city of Houston, this State of Texas, this country of the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward--and so will space.

William Bradford, speaking in 1630 of the founding of the Plymouth Bay Colony, said that all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and both must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courage.

If this capsule history of our progress teaches us anything, it is that man, in his quest for knowledge and progress, is determined and cannot be deterred. The exploration of space will go ahead, whether we join in it or not, and it is one of the great adventures of all time, and no nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in the race for space.

Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolutions, the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be a part of it--we mean to lead it. For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace. We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding.

Yet the vows of this Nation can only be fulfilled if we in this Nation are first, and, therefore, we intend to be first. In short, our leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to make this effort, to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of all men, and to become the world's leading space-faring nation.

We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. I do not say the we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.

There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

It is for these reasons that I regard the decision last year to shift our efforts in space from low to high gear as among the most important decisions that will be made during my incumbency in the office of the Presidency.

In the last 24 hours we have seen facilities now being created for the greatest and most complex exploration in man's history. We have felt the ground shake and the air shattered by the testing of a Saturn C-1 booster rocket, many times as powerful as the Atlas which launched John Glenn, generating power equivalent to 10,000 automobiles with their accelerators on the floor. We have seen the site where the F-1 rocket engines, each one as powerful as all eight engines of the Saturn combined, will be clustered together to make the advanced Saturn missile, assembled in a new building to be built at Cape Canaveral as tall as a 48 story structure, as wide as a city block, and as long as two lengths of this field.

Within these last 19 months at least 45 satellites have circled the earth. Some 40 of them were "made in the United States of America" and they were far more sophisticated and supplied far more knowledge to the people of the world than those of the Soviet Union.

The Mariner spacecraft now on its way to Venus is the most intricate instrument in the history of space science. The accuracy of that shot is comparable to firing a missile from Cape Canaveral and dropping it in this stadium between the 40-yard lines.

Transit satellites are helping our ships at sea to steer a safer course. Tiros satellites have given us unprecedented warnings of hurricanes and storms, and will do the same for forest fires and icebergs.

We have had our failures, but so have others, even if they do not admit them. And they may be less public.

To be sure, we are behind, and will be behind for some time in manned flight. But we do not intend to stay behind, and in this decade, we shall make up and move ahead.

The growth of our science and education will be enriched by new knowledge of our universe and environment, by new techniques of learning and mapping and observation, by new tools and computers for industry, medicine, the home as well as the school. Technical institutions, such as Rice, will reap the harvest of these gains.

And finally, the space effort itself, while still in its infancy, has already created a great number of new companies, and tens of thousands of new jobs. Space and related industries are generating new demands in investment and skilled personnel, and this city and this State, and this region, will share greatly in this growth. What was once the furthest outpost on the old frontier of the West will be the furthest outpost on the new frontier of science and space. Houston, your City of Houston, with its Manned Spacecraft Center, will become the heart of a large scientific and engineering community. During the next 5 years the National Aeronautics and Space Administration expects to double the number of scientists and engineers in this area, to increase its outlays for salaries and expenses to $60 million a year; to invest some $200 million in plant and laboratory facilities; and to direct or contract for new space efforts over $1 billion from this Center in this City.

To be sure, all this costs us all a good deal of money. This year¹s space budget is three times what it was in January 1961, and it is greater than the space budget of the previous eight years combined. That budget now stands at $5,400 million a year--a staggering sum, though somewhat less than we pay for cigarettes and cigars every year. Space expenditures will soon rise some more, from 40 cents per person per week to more than 50 cents a week for every man, woman and child in the United Stated, for we have given this program a high national priority--even though I realize that this is in some measure an act of faith and vision, for we do not now know what benefits await us.

But if I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun--almost as hot as it is here today--and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out--then we must be bold.

I'm the one who is doing all the work, so we just want you to stay cool for a minute. [laughter]

However, I think we're going to do it, and I think that we must pay what needs to be paid. I don't think we ought to waste any money, but I think we ought to do the job. And this will be done in the decade of the sixties. It may be done while some of you are still here at school at this college and university. It will be done during the term of office of some of the people who sit here on this platform. But it will be done. And it will be done before the end of this decade.

I am delighted that this university is playing a part in putting a man on the moon as part of a great national effort of the United States of America.

Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, "Because it is there."

Well, space is there, and we're going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God's blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.

Thank you.

The Apollo Crews

Apollo 1
Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Commander
Edward White, command module pilot 
Roger Chaffee, lunar module pilot

Apollo 7
Walter Schirra, Jr, commander 
Donn Eisele, command module pilot 
Walter Cunningham, lunar module pilot

Apollo 8
Frank Borman, commander 
James A. Lovell, command module pilot 
William A. Anders, lunar module pilot

Apollo 9
Commander James McDivitt, commander
David Scott, command module pilot
Russell Schweickart, lunar module pilot

Apollo 10
Thomas P. Stafford, commander
John W. Young, command module pilot
Eugene A. Cernan, lunar module pilot

Apollo 11
Neil A. Armstrong, commander 
Michael Collins, command module pilot 
Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr., lunar module pilot

Apollo 12
Charles Conrad, Jr., commander
Richard F. Gordon, command module pilot 
Alan L. Bean, lunar module pilot

Apollo 13
James A. Lovell, commander 
John L. Swigert, Jr., command module pilot
Fred W. Haise, Jr., lunar module pilot

Apollo 14
Alan B. Shepard, Jr., commander 
Stuart A. Roosa, command module pilot
Edgar D. Mitchell, lunar module pilot

Apollo 15
David R. Scott, commander 
Alfred M. Worden, command module pilot 
James B. Irwin, lunar module pilot

Apollo 16
John W. Young, commander 
Thomas K. Mattingly II, command module pilot
Charles M. Duke, Jr., lunar module pilot

Apollo 17
Eugene A. Cernan, commander 
Ronald E. Evans, command module pilot 
Harrison H. Schmitt, lunar module pilot