Another classic says “develop a sense of urgency.”

Yes.  Everyone is in favor of cutting through imbedded bureaucratic delays. But if EVERY day is filled with meetings in which everyone seems to be flapping around, it’s not a sense of urgency you are seeing, it’s a sense of chaos.  The urgent will always get in the way of the important and only a steadfast leader can prevent the “urgent” from winning this struggle day after day, to the detriment of the careful thought process needed for making key decisions.

If you see:

• Many people always walking way too rapidly through the halls, always in some helter-skelter rush to get somewhere else from which they can hurry away again

• Leaders consistently arriving late to meetings and staying distracted even after the meeting finally gets underway

• Leaders insisting that meetings end right on time (to allow time to hurry to the NEXT meeting), even though another five minutes of discussion might have produced a good decision

• People looking past individuals trying to speak to them because the other place they are looking seems urgent

…then you are seeing symptoms of an overdose on urgency.

Watch your hours spent at the job too.  If you are arriving early and staying late day after day after day, you are messing up your work-life balance and you WILL eventually pay the price with your spouse and your kids and maybe your health.  Nor should you think you are necessarily doing good work.  Indeed, consultants tell CEOs that one of the sure signs of a leader who cannot set priorities is the person who always comes early and stays late.  Who are you fooling?

Some cures?  A deep breath.  A laptop lid left closed.  A cell phone turned off.  And, especially, an unyielding respect for the person to whom you are talking NOW.

As a leader you’ve been coached to make sure you “set stretch objectives for your people.”

This is good enough advice if you are careful to make the objectives realistic.  Too often, however, the stretch goals are not carefully considered and the employee’s reaction is similar to that cartoon where the little guy is belly laughing while saying, “You want it WHEN?”  If employees see the stretch objective as grossly unrealistic, they may reject the notion of doing the best they can because their failure is pre-determined.  Instead they may do the minimum required, citing the unrealistic goal as a justification for mediocrity.

An employee needs to “own” a stretch goal and it’s not feasible to own something completely out of reach.

There’s a related issue regarding how individual bonuses are calculated for meeting individual objectives (as opposed to group or department goals).  If a significant portion of someone’s bonus opportunity is tied to achievement of an INDIVIDUAL objective, out of balance with overall company goals, then the person pursuing the individual goal can harm overall results by paying obsessive attention to how the individual bonus will be affected.  For the good of the marketing campaign, the marketing manager should take action A, but he’ll take B instead because B will maximize the personal component of his bonus.  The company’s overall marketing campaign is secondary.  If anyone objects the person will readily say “I am going to meet the goals MY BOSS TOLD ME I HAD TO MEET.”  Happens all the time.

Leaders tasked with setting objectives for the financial bonuses of others simply cannot afford to be cavalier in setting the numbers or in defining individual targets out of step with broader company goals.  Bad goals quickly demotivate entire departments and poorly-designed individual goals provide incentive for selfish behavior.

Coming soon in this series:  What does it mean to tell everyone to “develop a sense of urgency”?

What if your boss says “I will leave you alone to run your own show, but the rule around here is that you NEVER miss your number.”?

That’s autonomy with a big caveat attached.  How was “the number” determined?  Was it the result of a thoughtful goal-setting conversation with your boss?  Or was it just handed to you by fiat because somebody a few layers above said, “Everybody’s department must grow operating income by 10 per cent over last year, period!”?

No analysis of what’s happening to customer demand, what’s happening to market entry by competitors, what’s happening in the larger macro economy that may affect your sales or costs.

If your leader is not joining you in a thoughtful discussion of what “the number” should be, he or she isn’t leading and is only dictating.  And your operation could  be put in peril as a result.  If the implication is “hit your number or die,” then what kinds of irrational things might you do to a short run target and save your job?

• Start buying cheaper materials which reduce product quality?
• Cut back on staffing in customer care centers?
• Cut back on overtime, even though the season is busy?
• Lay off some people?
• Delay the launch of a new product into the next year because you know the first few months of a product launch are dilutive to earnings and will hurt your number?
• Or, at the other extreme, hold back on sales effort because you don’t want to exceed your target by too big a margin and cause NEXT year’s number to be based on your success?  You want a great bonus, but not at the expense of next year’s bonus, right?

The point here is that an unthinking devotion to “the number” can produce distortions and non-optimal results and hardly reflects good leadership.  Worse, this kind of dictation only serves to weaken or even break trust with the leader’s key followers.  Winning and keeping trust is mandatory for long term success of a leader.  Followers will be slow to forgive the kind of manipulation described here.

Coming up soon:  What about the rule that says “Set stretch objectives for your people”?

We are told we should always benchmark against others if we want to be best in class.  Serious benchmarking was especially drilled into business leaders at the height of the total quality movement several years ago.  The problem comes in choosing which other firms become the benchmarks.  If your focus is too narrow, and you benchmark only against firms in your immediate relevant market, you may just be capturing data from a “club of the mediocre.”  A few months ago one of our associates was eating lunch with someone from a company whose customer service was being hammered in news articles and on the customer blogs.  Grumbling about unfair the criticism was the person said, “We have looked carefully at our two major competitors and we know they are no better.”

Hello.  The lament misses the point.  Had no one thought of benchmarking against different companies that have really figured out how to do excellent customer care in a call center and have the customer satisfaction numbers to prove it?  Several insurance companies, faced with severe competition, have established excellent service centers.  So have mail order catalog companies.  Any frequent catalog shopper can probably name several.

Even if you are benchmarking against the correct targets, it’s easy to fall into the trap of just looking at comparative statics, what your AVERAGE number is for “this or that” during the present quarter, with perhaps a simple comparison to a comparable average in a prior period.  But a more sophisticated look will analyze change over several periods, and in particular will look at the RATE of change.  It’s not just a matter of whether you’re getting better or worse, but how rapidly you are rising or falling.  Senior leaders need to be alert that some of their corporate division leaders may not WANT to find change because of concerns about their own corporate reputations.  If a CEO has this issue, at least one person on the company’s board needs to ask questions.

Careless and imprecise benchmarking practices can mask serious trouble.  Even if a company thinks it IS following the rule to benchmark frequently, the truth may be otherwise.

Watch this space soon for the next item in the series about the rule to “always hit your numbers.”

College students from the 1960s and early 70s can remember many of those great protest songs that erupted in those years, especially the ones that resisted having to do something just because somebody told you so.  With credit to the Canadian group Five Man Electrical Band, one lyric those students would recall was:

Sign, sign, everywhere a sign,
Blocking out the scenery, breaking my mind,
Do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the sign?

While nobody needs a cynic hanging around, it IS worthwhile for a leader to develop a healthy sense of irreverence, to ask “Why?” or “Why not?” and to harbor a touch of the iconoclast.  If no leader does this, your organization will be at risk of never being able to see the need to change the familiar.  Nobody will ask, figuratively speaking, if it’s time to take down a sign.

Businesses have a lot of these so-called signs, their rules to live by, reinforced in business schools and restated in company guidance.  These are the good practices businesses are taught they should follow.  You might think of them as “The Great Classics.”

We will not cynically debunk them.  But we WILL, with the spirit of a healthy iconoclast, suggest some ways in which they are misunderstood and misapplied, and will suggest what you as a leader might do differently.

Watch this space.  Coming next: The Great Classic called Benchmarking.

The crowd showed up.  Some no doubt truly wanted to be there, for they knew and respected the retiree for his good work.  For others the function probably met the test of compulsory fun.  All levels of authority were in the audience, from the retiree’s peers in the company’s officer ranks down through the VPs and middle management directors, all the way through group managers and front-line supervisors to the individual contributors in the rank and file.

So what if the size of the audience was hyped a bit by the email “orders”?  The retiree had, in fact, rendered good service for many years and probably deserved a large turnout to say farewell.  The problem was not with this ceremony; it was with a failure to turn out an audience for another one a few weeks later.   From that failure came disappointment and an obvious message that, within this company, there existed a clear “We/They” conflict: WE (the officers) are more important than THEY (the middle managers).

The failure occurred when a longtime group manager was promoted to a director-level position.  This individual had started as an entry-level individual contributor and had, by consistent hard work and demonstration of good judgment, moved up through the company’s levels:  supervisor, manager, group manager.   His promotion now to director was no more and no less deserving of recognition than was the recent retirement of the senior VP.  Oh, perhaps it wasn’t expected that the company auditorium be filled, but there was a reasonable expectation that the meeting room they reserved for his promotion party have enough attendees to gobble up the snacks and empty the drinks.

The middle management peers and their subordinates turned out to honor their friend.  But not a single company officer was in the room.  Not one. No directors.  Zero vice-presidents.  No senior VPs.   They were all conspicuous by their absence.  And of course there was conversation about the no-shows.  The insult was too much of an in-your-face event for there not to be some talk.

How could it happen?  Inadvertence?  “I really meant to encourage as many folks as possible to attend, but I got busy and forgot to send any reminders.”  Perhaps.  But a busy company officer is supposed to have among his/her skills the ability to manage several tasks at the same time, and especially to remember the ones that touch on employee relations.  Hadn’t all these AWOL company officers attended at least one HR seminar that touched on the importance of employee recognition?

If the officer who should have sent the reminders failed, were there NO subordinate officers wise enough or bold enough to step up and either do it themselves, or remind the boss to do it?  Is there a culture of silence born of intimidation?  Is there a failure in the company culture to recognize that consideration for employees is a critical practice for the leaders?  Isn’t it ironic that a company could have a process to make sure flowers are sent when there’s a death in the family, but no “mental process discipline” among the leaders to make sure a veteran trusted employee is recognized by the company leadership for the most important promotion in the individual’s career?

We-They perceptions hang around organizations like the smell of skunks; they are very difficult to eradicate.  And a surprising number of them are created through inadvertence, momentary inattention, failure to practice simple consideration.  Nearly all are avoidable, if leaders will slow down from the hectic daily pace and remember that we-they avoidance is critical to the maintenance of the trust of followers.

You’d think we’d do better at remembering the idea.  Famed women’s basketball coach Pat Summitt of the University of Tennessee wrote about it more than a decade ago in her book, where she relates her decision to remove from the team a star player who had violated team rules about housing.  The cascading effect of not holding the star player accountable would have been unacceptable.

Noted ethicist Rushworth Kidder wrote recently that former senator Tom Daschle’s cabinet nomination was properly withdrawn because to go forward would have put at risk the notion of “the moral commons.”  The waiver or allowance or special handling of a situation for one individual can become a calamity in the aggregate, if all individuals receive the same favored treatment.

The military services have done a good job of teaching accountability as a core value in their professional military education courses for leaders.  Military officer Mike Schmitt, a lieutenant colonel at the time, wrote effectively more than a dozen years ago about rules of accountability.  When I reviewed his work recently in connection with research for a leadership lesson for our company’s programs, I was struck by the timeless currency of what he said.  Some examples, with our comments added:

• To hold others accountable, you must accept accountability for yourself as a leader.  If an executive leader’s bonus is very large because the performance standard lacked rigor, what do others in the company think?  Isn’t the “moral commons” in play, especially in these troubled times of shrinking revenues and layoffs that reach into the homes of millions of families?
• Loyalty cannot be misplaced.  Shouldn’t a leader be loyal to core values such as accountability rather than to individuals who are “good people” and well-known to the leader, if their performance or behavior fails standards?
• Can a leader afford not to create an expectation among followers that they too must uphold accountability in the ranks they supervise?  The strength of the honor codes in the military service academies lies not so much in the “thou shalt not” prohibitions about lying, cheating and stealing as in the so-called “toleration” clauses that say “nor tolerate among us those who do.”   This one can be especially vexing, particularly when a leader’s loyalty may be more to colleagues than to core values.
• Consistency is critical.  While a thoughtful leader can and should consider factual differences between cases, a wide and inconsistent variance in defending accountability as a core value is fatal to maintenance of trust between the leader and followers.  Nor should a leader forgive for convenience.  Is anyone fooled when the star athlete guilty of a transgression is benched for the immediate next “cupcake” game on the schedule but is quickly restored to the lineup for the following tough game against the arch rival?

A veteran antitrust investigator told me once that price-fixing rarely occurs when times are bad.  Look for it, he said, when times are very good and there is “plenty around for everybody.”  The current set of bad times born in 2008 and raging in 2009 seems to be serving nicely to restore a demand for accountability in all leaders.  Let’s hope the demand for accountability will survive an economic recovery.  Leaders of character will have a say in that determination.

Some pain-adding acts may seem trivial to a leader, but the leader should remember it is always the perspective of the receiver of a communication that defines the message, not the sender.  After layoffs, there is obviously a need to have re-organization meetings with the employees who are remaining.  But the timing of those meetings can pile on to the discomfort already felt by survivors who are seeing good friends and reliable co-workers shown the door.  If the “last day worked” for those leaving is to be Friday, is it really necessary to have the needed re-org meetings on the Thursday before they go?  There is often a leader who, in his/her enthusiasm for “putting all this behind us and getting on with the tasks at hand,” schedules the Thursday meeting.  Can’t the matter wait until Monday?  The leader should think of the additional discomfort of the survivor who not only is fretting about saying goodbye to a close associate, but must now make his own survival even more visible by striding off to the Thursday meeting while the laid off employee is left to fill the cardboard moving boxes the HR staffer brought around.  We think a “decent interval” is a good idea and will improve the chances of the leader for establishing a degree of trust with the people in his/her corner of the lifeboat.  Survivors will be feeling pain they don’t show and too much zeal for the quick re-org meeting can be perceived (silently) as a new kind of insensitivity.  One leader who had been through a few rounds of layoffs told us, “I learned quickly that this ‘dance of the survivors’ is to be avoided if you want to keep the good will of your people who are left.”

There is also the problem of “orphans,” the survivors whose managers were laid off and who were thus re-assigned to a surviving manager.  One of these orphaned people wrote to us recently  and described the particular peril of the orphaned survivor.  He said, “My new manager is affable and certainly competent enough, but she isn’t taking time to find out what I know or what I can do.  The inclusion I felt before is gone.  My personal visibility is now low.  The work I did so well before has been assigned to others who simply don’t have the knowledge.   I find myself making suggestions to people who don’t know to listen.  I am now contributing little.”

The thoughtful leader, concerned for the ongoing productivity of the work group, needs to pause and make time…more than a trivial amount of time…to learn the backgrounds and skills and logical work for each inherited orphan.  If the leader doesn’t do so, the orphan will lose self-confidence quickly and the omnipresent question “Am I next?” will take on an even more burdensome importance.  Senior leaders must encourage….indeed, require…subordinate leaders to take such time.  Otherwise it won’t happen.

Lethargy and fear can run through the “lifeboat” like a deadly virus if leaders withdraw and retreat and begin to say nothing about the company’s next steps.  Even “I don’t know what’s next” is better than silence.  Senior leaders should be as forthcoming as company strategy and any encumbering legal issues allow.  Again, it’s the perspective of the receiver of a communication that defines the message, and “no communication” is itself a powerful message that endangers trust among those in the lifeboat.

Over the recent holiday the visitors included four cats and the CATtle dog quickly realized he now had his herd, and his job.  Forget all you’ve heard about herding cats; it CAN be done.  And when the herding was accomplished, the cattle dog would lie down on the periphery of the room where the visitors were kept, head on paws and eyes/ears alert, peacefully watching his herd.  Doing his job!

The human members of this extended family quickly drew the contrast with an experience they had suffered only a few nights before at the local outlet of a major national restaurant chain.  The details need not be related.  It was one of those classic restaurant experiences we have all had and was caused, as they nearly always are, by an almost overwhelming dose of “not my job” on the part of the host, servers, busboys…everyone.

Poor leadership is almost always the root cause of the “not my job” syndrome.  Several scenarios may be at work:

• There may have been some bad hires.  But a bad hire is merely the evidence that a leader lost focus, became hurried, or was never trained well in hiring/interviewing techniques.
• A poorly-trained supervisor.  Usually the training is not lacking in company procedures, but instead in giving the supervisor the understanding needed to lead a mix of employees with individual differences.
• A supervisor may have fallen into the trap of trying to please everyone.  “How do you like me NOW?” is a management technique that never works and especially not when there is a near-peer relationship where the age and experience of leader and follower are similar.
• The leader may be inadvertently doing things that create a “we/they” relationship in which the leaders establish what seems to be a special position for themselves, and the followers are resentful.
• Front-line people have become discouraged because leaders fail to listen when the front-liners come up with good ideas.  The flow of good ideas will stop and “not my job” will take its place.
• Leaders may never have learned effective ways to manage meetings of their teams.  A lousy team meeting is like locking everybody up in a small room when one person has a terrible cold. Soon everyone has it.  “Not my job” is the sneeze we see.
• Maybe there is one weak supervisor in the group of leaders and employees resent the comparatively poor performance of the weak person’s people.   Failing to deal with a weak supervisor will create a “not my job” outlook in the larger work force.
• Employees could be rebelling against a manager who is a bully, jerk, and bad actor.  The employees may not be able to quit, but they easily adopt “not my job” as a work habit.

These are not the only reasons that cause “not my job” to prevail in a workplace; we teach about several others as well in our leadership programs.  But, whatever the governing reasons, they all work through the channel of the employee’s attitude.  For our cattle dog there’s a solution in his genes and it’s much harder for his leader to mess him up.  Not so with the humans.

Commentary

As a current Reservist and a person who has many friends who have served or are currently serving in Iraq and Afghanistan — including some who have lost their lives serving our country — this story strikes me as particularly outrageous.  Why? Because it illustrates all too clearly that the individuals who have pledged their lives in service to our country — who, in this case, have made the ultimate sacrifice – are really no more than an entry in a large Army database.  I’d have said they’re only a name in that database, but the Army didn’t even give them that justice.  They’re just John Does.

You see, whether it’s the contractor’s fault, or a database technician’s fault, or someone else’s fault — that doesn’t matter.  Every person in the chain of command, every person working this project, every person who was involved at all — they all have a fiduciary duty, not to mention a moral obligation, to do it right.  Apparently, those involved in this matter don’t subscribe to the notion that “Everything worth doing is worth doing well.”

When I was a cadet at our nation’s premier military academy — West Point — which also happens to be the Army’s premier officer training school, you couldn’t escape one concept that permeated all aspects of cadet life:  attention to detail. Why was it important for the cuff on your bed to be exactly the right width? Why did your shoes and boots have to be spit-shined and in perfect alignment?  Not because the world would have ended if they weren’t, but because professional Army officers had to have keen attention to detail! Because it’s attention to detail that can be the difference between life or death…

…Or between treating the families of those who have made the ultimate sacrifice with dignity, respect, and gratitude and treating them with so much disrespect that we can’t even notice that 7,000 letters are to “John Doe”!

Reflect on how you’d feel if you were “John Doe,” having lost a son, daughter, brother, sister, or other loved one.  It’s been said that it only takes a minute to do things right.  Take that minute. Show the dignity and respect to others that they are due. Your employees — or, if you’re military, your soldiers, sailors, and airmen — will thank you.

One of our main themes at The LeaderMaker Group is that effective leaders constantly respect their followers as fellow human beings and treat them with dignity, earning and hopefully maintaining their trust over time.  Having such a focus in our — and your — daily practices helps guard against lapses in leadership like in this “Dear John Doe” case.