Passion, People and Principles
post # 119 — June 27, 2006 — a Managing, Strategy post
Companies are most successful when they are built on – and live up to -a solid, clearly articulated ideology (also known as a mission or values.) Only when these are absolutely known and shared can firms offer large degrees of autonomy to different geographical and service-line groups, while simultaneously assuring that firm cohesion, trust, excellence and focus are all achieved.
Without REAL shared values, top management can easily slip into being both controlling and dictatorial, and as a result, the company becaomes less flexible, adaptive and innovative.
In any but the smallest firms, it is necessary to decentralize decisions as to what to preserve, what to adapt and what to innovate. If there is any ambiguity in the ideology, then it will be hard for people within the organization to know what is expected of them when there are opportunities that might fall into any of the three categories. – And such choices appear every day, week and month!
While most firms have clearly articulated mission and values expressed as high-level principles, it is not always clear what, precisely, these translate into when it comes to senior day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month or year-to-year behavior.
Few firms have an unambiguous constitution: a clear, explicit understanding of what people in the firm have a right to expect from each other; what the rules of membership are; what the true “non-negotiable minimum standards” are and what is a matter for personal preference or personal strengths.
Companies and the people within them often understand their performance criteria and key values (different things, of course) in broad terms, but not all firms have achieved clarity in reality. Some values are truly “religious” – firms are prepared to be intolerant about them if coaching cannot restore performance. Others values turn out to be aspirational – encouraged but not necessarily enforced. The ambiguity both inhibits performance and makes performance counseling difficult (if not impossible.)
In my experience, the key differentiating factor between “excellent” and “good” firms is NOT a difference in the mission or values that they advocate, but in their ability to achieve diligent execution of their mission and values (to high levels) by introducing a culture of accountability.
The concept of accountability for living up to the firm’s ideology is not a trivial one. In many firms, there is no practical mechanism – hard or soft – to ensure that senior officers (or groups of senior officers in different locales or different disciplines) are achieving – accountable for – living the values of the firm.
To “assume” that senior officers are all doing the right things is almost certainly an insufficient organizational approach. Excellence is only achieved, in any field of endeavour, when an artist or athlete volunteers to discuss his or her performance with a caring, supportive, trusted coach who is charged with the task of helping the performer cross the gap between good performance and true excellence. An athlete or artist who is never coached will accomplish less.
Most companies have procedures in place for ensuring accountability for financial measures. The next challenge they will face is whether their senior officers are prepared to be held truly accountable for the ideologies and value systems they espouse.
What’s your company’s approach for ensuring that everyone actually does live up to the espoused ideology? Or does you company and its senior officers shy away from real accountability on these things?
When I was in college, and had to prepare for exams, I found that I could make things stick in my memory if I actually copied them out from the textbooks or otherwise wrote them down. If I didn’t actually go through the manual task of writing things down, it was rare that I remembered them well.
I think there has been some recent research proving all this – I’m sure each generation of students rediscovers the principle at exam time.
So what’s the lesson for the rest of us? Keep a journal! Keep a diary! Sit at your computer late at night or early in the morning and transcribe what people said you to that previous day.
Transcribing and recollecting the day’s events will help you understand your experiences better – just like it used to help me understand my math or english studies. It forces you to slow down the mental processs and reflect on what you are writing or typing, not just pretend you understand it.
And people – clients, subordinates, colleagues, spouses – will be very flattered that you later remembered (and thought about) what they said. They won’t mind if referring to notes is what helped you do it – they will just be grateful and impressed that you can do it at all.
post # 117 — June 25, 2006 — a Careers post
A lesson I learned early and still apply to my advantage (and, of course, in the service of others.)
Always volunteer to take the minutes of meetings, and to do the first drafts of proposed initiatives or reports. Not only will you get credit for volunteering to do things on behalf of others, but you get control of what’s recorded. You are now part of the decision-making process. He or she who writes the history gets to make history.
post # 116 — June 23, 2006 — a General, Strategy post
On September 29th, 2006, I will be making a presentation in Berlin, Germany to the 14th CEEMAN annual conference on “Creating synergy between business schools and business.” Details can be found at http://www.ceeman.org.
(CEEMAN is the Central and Eastern European Management Development Association.)
In anticipation of my presentation, CEEMAN news published an interview with me (available on my website), in which I am pessimistic both about the ability of business school professors to act in unison to develop strategies for their institutions, and about their true desires to engage with real-world business.
In addition, Business Review Weekly, the leading Australian business magazine, interviewed me recently about my 20-years of experience in working in Australia. That interview, entitled “Some Good Advice,” can be found here.
post # 115 — June 22, 2006 — a Careers, Strategy post
Peter Gwizdalla writes:
I love your Strategy and the Fat Smoker article. It helps me, as an organisational psychologist, in my conversations with my clients about change in individuals and organizations. The only area I still feel needs more ‘tools’ for me is “how do we remind ourselves (and others) on a daily basis, why we’re going thru the discipline and discomfort of doing things differently in such a way that the resolve is renewed and refreshed and consistent? David, do you have any thoughts in this area?
Peter, I don’t have one magic formula for “renewing resolve”, but here are some possibilities, mostly drawn from personal life, that could be applied to organizational life:
- Do it in teams. It’s hard to find the discipline and determination alone, and people will stay true to the effort not to let their team-mates down. The size of teams matters. 5 is best, 10 less good, 25 very weak, and more is pretty useless for the “bonding” effect to work well.
- Keep a visible graph. When you’re losing weight, the mere fact of recording pound by pound progress is helpful, and being able to see the right trend is very encouraging. It even helps you keep things in perspective when you stumble – you can see that it was only one bad day amid a generally good trend. A large part of maintaining resolve is the ability to get back on the horse when you fall off. You always fall off – the only issue is whether you get back on or give up.
- Find yourself a coach – a chief cheerleader, chief critic. Even if that person is not an expert (or a superior), the mere fact of having to be accountable to him or her, having to check in regularly will help. As I often say, guilt doesn’t change a lot of people, but the right degree of embarrassment does. Design the embarrassment mechanism – not too much, but not too little.
- Set small incremental goals, and forget the enormity of the total task, remembering to (over-) celebrate the early successes. (Wow, David! You lost two whole pounds this week. Way to go! You’re on the path, mate!)
- Invent games. (When I’m running on the treadmill I switch between silently counting my steps numerically, first up from 1, then down from 100, then reciting the alphabet forwards and then backwards. It’s the VARIETY of ways of counting that keeps my mind distracted from the effort.)
- I hate to mention this one, but while I prefer to believe in carrots rather than sticks (positive rather than negative motivators), I have to acknowledge that sometimes “scaring” myself works. I have one of those screen-savers that comes built-in to Windows that cycles through my photo collection. And a interesting thing happens. I get a little (a very little) positive motivation out of the pictures that make me look good. But the ones that show me as I was thirty pounds heavier REALLY help me with my resolve. I REALLY don’t want to look like that again.
What’s the business equivalent of putting the “fat picture” on the refrigerator?
I shouldn’t leave this topic without referring you to Gerry Riskin’s blog post The Seven Immutable Laws of Change Management.
OK, everyone. Your turn. What are the tools and techniques and tricks that help you stay the course when you’re really trying to change yourself and your organization?
Brad Farris writes in to ask:
I have used Trusted Advisor in my work for several years. The Reliability and Credibility factors you talk about there have always seemed like “table stakes” to me. The third component, A Low Self-interest, is sometimes less obvious, but once considered is equally non-controversial. The fourth factor, Intimacy, is always the one that gets people hung up. “Why intimacy?” they ask, “Why do we need that?”
What things would you recommend that companies of any size can do to be more intimate with their customers, employees and community? If you are a company who needs scale to survive, is it a given that you have to leave intimacy and trust behind?
For me, the secret to the ‘intimacy’ aspect of trust, whether dealing inside or outside an organization, is the simple act of getting out of role-to-role interactions, and making them encounters between real people. In other words, treat me like a person, not an ‘employee’ or a ‘customer.’
Viewed this way, the issue of creating intimacy is less one of systems, procedures and processes, than it is one of attitude and style. The famous examples are the cabin attendants and pilots of Southwest Airlines, who (according to their reputation) can make announcements conveying serious information but with humor, personality and individualism, proving that you don’t have to be robotic, bureaucratic or rule-driven to get something done. And Southwest is one of the largest airlines out there. It’s all about attitudes, mentality, empowerment, self image, and keeping things in proportion.
As I’ve written many times (and never tire of preaching) it’s the RULES that grind us all down, and they tend to accumulate and take over when organizations grow. If managers only focused on WHAT needs to be done (superbly), and WHY it needs to be done (superbly), then they could empower and trust the front-line staff to figure out for themselves HOW to do it. And if, as a staff memeber, I can then do it MY way, I’m going to make it more real, more human and more intimate for both the customers and for myself.
What about the effects of scale? In my book Practice What You Preach, I studied 139 businesses analyzing the relationship between attitudes and financial results. While there were examples of great intimacy (‘human scale’) the overall trends were a clear decline with scale. In larger offices in general, people did, indeed, give lower scores to such things as:
- Management valuing input
- Management listening to people
- Management being trusted
- Management practicing what they preached
- Management being successful in fostering communication and loyalty
These all declined with larger offices, even though I was able to prove that doing well on these things was a significant predictor of better financial results.
In addition to my statistics, the book contains portraits of nine of the highest-performing businesses I could find in my database. I interviewed not only the managers, but many other people who worked in these nine office.
One of the absolutely fascinating outcomes was that, in line with your question, everyone was worried that they could only achieve their level of excellence because they were ‘small’ and had a strong sense of community and purpose – or, if you prefer, intimacy. But this reaction was expressed by offices that had over 300 people!
This convinced me that creating a sense of intimacy is a managerial phenomenon, not one simply determined by scale. It can be achieved by managers who know how to manage.
So what did the ‘great’ managers do to overcome the effect of size? None of it was very dramatic. Most of the (hundreds) of specific messages are contained at the end of the book could be summed up as “Be human and never forget that we are, too.”
Some specific advice to managers in the book?
- Do your own photocopying occasionally. Wash your own cup
- Don’t hesitate to jump in and help and prove you’ve still got it
- Keep a level emotional keel, don’t over-react to either triumphs or disasters
- Take work seriously but don’t take yourself seriously
- Treat people as adults
- Let people know you as a human being, not just as their manager
- Believe in, and keep the faith with what we are doing
At the risk of repetitiousness, I must stress that these lessons from the book are NOT that these are ‘nice-to-have’ behaviors, but that they are EXACTLY what the managers of the financially highest performing businesses in my database do.
post # 113 — June 20, 2006 — a General, Strategy post
Well team, we’re famous.
The discussion last week on the blog, which started with my posts on Creating Awareness and Marketing Complexity, spread out through the blogosphere with posts by Joseph Thornely of ProPR, Scott Baradelle of Media Orchard, Dave Lorenzo of Career Intensity, and Sean-Paul Kelly of The Agonist, and generated a huge conversation in the comments here at Passion, People and Principles.
Now, our conversation has been picked up…by the June 20, 2006 edition of the Times of London:
Websites transform minnows into whales
By Richard Susskind
This is short-sighted because websites increasingly play a pivotal role in recruitment, in winning work and in shaping the market’s perception of their providers.
While I’m not sure how to take being called a minnow, it is certainly true that smart use of Internet tools can make any professional or organization look like a whale.
Thank you to everyone who so generously shared your suggestions and experience in the original conversation on creating awareness. If the proof is in the pudding, then your advice must be absolutely right – look at this publicity. Keep the great ideas coming!
And thank you also to Richard Susskind, a longstanding friend, for his very kind words about my site.
Of course, I hope you will continue to encourage colleagues, clients, subordinates, managers and friends to register on my website to receive my future articles, podcasts and blog posts. Because at the end of the day, generosity, reciprocity and building relationships are still what even Internet marketing is all about.
One of my past clients wrote to me as follows:
I’m planning a lecture to my staff and selected clients on the issue of e-mail versus personal contact (phone or face to face). Clearly the generations – boomers, xers and y’s relate quite differently to e-mail. Are we hiding behind our e-mails both internally and externally? I advocate we are increasingly.
I love being paradoxical, controversial and counter-intuitive, so even though it’s traditional to bemoan the increasing use of email, let me (just for the heck of it) take the other side and try to make the case (my points are serious here) why using email is INCREASING our abilities to connect:
a) You can type, re-type and re-re-type an email until it says what you want, the way you want it. Done right, there are none of the ambiguities of human speech ( “What I meant to say was..”) Email can promote clarity
b) You can ask a friend or a spouse or anyone else to help you say it right. Try doing THAT in the real world. Email can promote collaboration and friendship
c) You can keep five or six (or more) conversations going at once without anyone feeling slighted that you do not have all your focus on them alone. Email means you can make everyone feel special.
d) You can keep track of what people said and hold them to their promises. Email can promote honesty.
e) Email removes the visual, body-language, verbal-accent cues that we over-rely on when reacting to other people: email can promote the importance of reason and logic, and reduces bias due to gender, racial or national background or appearance. It is profoundly democratic and politically important.
f) Email allows us to think before we react, thereby promoting less stress, thoughtless comments and knee-jerk reactions. It allows people who are not naturally quick at interpreting other people’s remarks to reflect and respond with greater emotional intelligence. Email can facilitate good relationship interactions and language.
Seriously, folks, beyond the clichés that we have all heard, what do you think the strengths and weaknesses of email have been. How is it really changing us for the better AND for the worse?
EileenO’Hara writes:
Last week I attended a local professional networking event here in Kansas City. The speakers kept talking about how they focus on relationship management (‘the romance’). The real estate guy has built a $40 million business of 8 agents mainly on referrals. He said he sends out postcards twice a month, then letters at day 52 and 75, etc. and continues to follow up, and up, and up relentlessly. It seems to work for him. (Personally I’d be quite annoyed to get all that stuff when I didn’t need it.)
The financial services guy boasted that he ‘focuses on the relationship’ and then turns the account over to the ‘technical staff.’ He says he has a staff of 3 and can focus more on his own networking goals –for example, aiming to get on at least 3 non-profit boards this year–mainly to expand his client base. He challenged the rest of us to leverage our own value this way – the old ‘delegate everything you can’.
But why on earth would I think I have a ‘relationship’ with a financial services professional who defers the technical expertise to someone else? To me, this isn’t a relationship, this is sales. I want to think that I am getting the value directly from the person I interact with–my lawyer, accountant share their expertise with me.
So why does this approach seem to work so well for those in real estate and financial services who are so sales-driven? Do you think people feel the ‘relationship’ they provide (the face time, if you will) is as good as actual expertise?
Eileen, I think both sides are correct. The speakers are correct in saying that their approach can be made to “work” to build a business. You are correct in saying that what they describe can hardly be described as ‘relationship-building.’
There’s nothing morally wrong with “sales” and nothing morally wrong with making money through generating and serving a large number of transactions. As I was at pains to argue in my article, many clients are looking for transactions and are not shopping for a professional with whom they can build a long-term relationship. For such clients, the old, familiar “sales by volume of activity” approach works remarkably well, as your speakers illustrated and claimed – you get turned down often, but the numbers work out.
What IS misleading is to call this relationship building and romance. And, it is dangerous to take this approach if you want to have a repuation for being nurturing, caring, focused, customized and in it for the long haul.
As you reported, anyone who tried that approach on you would leave a distinct impression of a KIND of professional provider. Maybe one you want, maybe not. But the core message is this: none of us can have it both ways: we can’t credibly expect to obtain a reputation of being interested in romance if we visibly engage in ‘love em and leave em’ tactics.
Either approach can be made to work. The hypocricy of the middle path will be exposed.
post # 110 — June 18, 2006 — a Client Relations post
Steve Loepfe writes:
Why should you put your money on romance in a one night stand world? I read you loud and clear when you say in your article Do You Really Want Relationships? that one can tap into the riches by caring and sharing and by nurturing long term relationships
But most of the projects I do (I do communication consulting in the context of strategic change initiatives) are of a milestone character. I get to do work for a client maybe just once in a lifetime. A private company only goes public once. Corporations don’t discontinue a unit every day. My clients don’t make a living just by acquiring and merging entities a hundred times a year (unless they’re GE).
Consultants like me live in a disruptive project world characterized by constant discontinuity. Context, scope, people – the times they are’a changing.
Could you share some good reasons why one should believe in romance?
Reason 1: The first thing any new prospect is going to do when he or she has a new need is to ask the people he or she knows who they have use and whether they would recommend them. That’s when you win or lose your next client. Word of mouth reputation wins the gold, silver and bronze for the best marketing techniques to get new clients.
Reason 2. Ninety-nine times out of one hundred, if someone does recommend you it will be because of the experience you provided in working with them, rather than the results you obtained for them. (No-one says “He was a great electrician, look at the quality of the wiring!”)
Reason 3: Even if they don’t have another job for you immediately, your current clients might need you again some day.
Reason 4: Even if reasons 1 through 3 don’t apply, romance the client anyway. We can all use the practice in interpersonal relations so that we are good at it when we do need it!
