How to quickly assess a leader

Leadership effectiveness at all levels is an important component of successful strategy implementation.  I’ve worked with hundreds of corporate leaders and I’ve seen all kinds.

Weak leaders are driven by insecurity.  They try to get their subordinates’ respect by being likable or controlling, neither of which engenders respect.  They blame others for failures, take all the credit, and surround themselves with weak subordinates.

Strong leaders are focused on seizing opportunities, making difficult decisions, accepting failures and sharing credit.  They continually earn respect by the way they lead, and they surround themselves with strong and capable people.

One of the fastest ways to assess a leader is by looking at how strong the direct reports are.

• How effective is the leadership in your organization?
• What are you doing to continually improve leadership skills?
• Do your leaders get candid feedback to help them improve?

Kodak and strategic change

One of the lessons of Kodak is that getting really good at what you do can have a severe drawback, especially in our age of rapid change. There is danger in being so good at one thing that you cannot adapt quickly enough to changing environment. In Kodak’s case “quickly enough” was more than ten years.

It is the responsibility of every organization to constantly improvise and innovate just to keep their current position in the market. But remember two key points: First, if you “stick to your knitting” and entirely focused on continuous improvement, you don’t have business strategy – it’s not creating a distinctive competitive advantage. Second, an organization that has ossified around continuous improvement isn’t nimble enough for strategic change. Both are warning signs.

Six key questions to ask yourself:

1. How is your industry changing?
2. Are you actively looking for trends and inflection points that may change your industry?
3. So you have a good way to focus your best minds, with dedicated time, on your future strategy?
4. How adaptable is your organization?
5. Are you building innovation and change readiness into your organization?
6. Have you done a change readiness assessment?

Why Apple is so Profitable

Steve Jobs leapfrogged the competition in computers, music, animated film, cell phones and tablets by developing a distinctive strategy, not by focusing on improving operational effectiveness.

Business strategy is all about strategic positioning, providing something unique, and delivering distinctive value to your customers. Once the strategy is formulated, then you work backwards to determine how to achieve it.

This is very different from how most companies do strategic planning. They begin with the current situation and extrapolate it into the future. That approach inevitably ends up with a focus on operational improvement and a “me too” market approach, not a distinctive strategy.

There is a clear difference between operational effectiveness and strategic positioning. You need to be good at operational practices, or strategy doesn’t matter. But operational effectiveness without a distinctive strategy is a commodity approach and results in competition based on price. In contrast, a distinctive strategy enables either higher prices or structurally lower cost. And both result in better profits.

Do you have a distinctive strategy?

Is Your Team on the Same Page?

It’s a new year and a good time to assess your team’s engagement. A periodic check to make sure that your people are focused, challenged, stimulated and feeling good about direction is a good thing to do. Involve the team in both assessment and improvement. One approach I use with my best clients is a series of questions that you ask people to answer and then have discussions, either individually or as a group, to identify gaps in perceptions and improvement opportunities. Some of the questions address these statements:

• My communications with my manager are candid and open.
• I understand my role in supporting and delivering the business strategy.
• We build trusting relationships at work.
• I value my team members and the work they do.

If you’d like a free copy of my 15 question tool, send me an email (boblegge@boblegge.com) and I’ll send it out to you. All the best in 2012!

The Crab Pot

It’s been interesting to watch the rise and fall of various candidates in Iowa this Fall. One candidate will soar in the polls only to be attacked by the other candidates and the media who pull the leader down. It reminds me of ‘the crab pot’ – a phenomenon I learned about from the superintendent of a large urban school district. When crabs are collected and put into a bucket, they climb all over each other. Eventually the pile of crabs grows up the inside of the bucket so that the top crab can crawl over the top and escape. But the other crabs invariably reach up and pull that top crab down, and the cycle continue, it’s normal in a political campaign, but when it happens within a company, it’s dysfunctional. While some internal competition can be productive, you need to ensure that your people, especially your top management team, are collaborative, supportive, and on the same page regarding your business strategy and priorities.

Why You Cannot Build Teamwork in a Committee

The World Series reminds me that teams can take many forms. Baseball teams operate differently from football, basketball and hockey teams, but in every case, the team members are all focused on the same outcome and either they all succeed, or no one succeeds.

Most senior management ‘teams’ are not teams at all, but rather committees. Each member has his/her own agendas and goals. And they succeed or fail separately — sales may achieve their objectives, manufacturing may not.

When organizations ask me to help them build teamwork at the top, the first step is to understand whether we’re working with a committee or a team. You can improve cooperation and collaboration within a committee, but there is no overriding necessity for one group to give up resources for another.

If you want a team, here are some of the issues you need to address:

• Are the incentives and rewards aligned so that everyone wins (or loses) together?
• Are measures in place so that the team can determine its progress and self-correct?
• Can the team make quick decisions about key issues?
• Does the team represent all important operating and customer perspectives?
• Can the team handle problems candidly and openly?

Do you have a team or a committee? Which do you really need?

When Continuous Improvement is Bad for Your Company

Think about it. Google, the iPhone, Facebook, the microwave oven, the CD player…. None of these were a result of continuous improvement.

I’m all for getting better at the fundamentals, but as a stand-alone business strategy, continuous improvement is “me-too.” Working hard to get better at what your competitors do is a first class ticket to being a commodity, and that means your’re forever competing on price. Research In Motion is a good example — they have made their Blackberries better and better, but in the meantime, they’ve been leapfrogged by Androids and iPhones.

Breakout strategies involve going beyond continuous improvement and taking a sharp left-hand turn, or at the very least, concentrating on how to differentiate your company based on increasing value, not reducing cost. Risky? Yes. But if you want to break out of the commodity rut, it’s what you need.

Spend less of your time (and your organization’s) on fixing problems and continuous improvement, and spend more time on raising the bar and innovating.

On the Farm

We have chickens on our farm and, up until a week ago, we had a rooster.  The rooster had to go.  He was bossy with the chickens and even the humans.  He attacked nearly everyone, and crowed all the time.  The last straw was when the rooster scratched my wife and then drove our ferrier away before he had attended to our horses.

So, the rooster lost his head.  Literally.

Now it’s quieter on the farm and we can walk around without a rooster attack.  However, the most significant impact has been on the chickens’ behavior.  With the rooster around they would huddle in the barn, never going anywhere without the rooster, and not talking or interacting with other animals (including humans.)  Now they wander around freely.  They’re friendly, happy, and producing lots of fresh eggs.

I see similarities between roosters and micro-managers.

Bob Legge works with companies to improve individual and organizational performance.  His clients have included Fortune 500 companies, mid-size companies, non-profits, education and government.  To find out more, contact Bob at boblegge@boblegge.com.  Visit his website at www.boblegge.com.

Copyright Bob Legge 2011. 

Managing By Opinion

In some leadership groups, opinions appear to be more important than facts.  I’ve seen senior management groups where an executive’s in-depth knowledge and experience is over-ruled by opinions from other executives — opinions that aren’t based on fact, evidence or experience — just pure opinion.

Yes, there is always a need for new, fresh and different input, but that doesn’t mean that opinion and conjecture should take precedence over knowledge.  In some ways, it reminds me of dysfunction in today’s press — to much opinion, too much slant, much less professional journalism.  The result is that you reaslly don’t know what to believe.

When secretary of state Colin Powell took office, he gathered a large group of state department staffers together.  He said that he wanted to hear what they think, and what they know.  And he asked them to make sure he knew the difference.

Strategy execution requires consistently good decision making.  If you don’t know the difference between what people think and what they know, it can lead to very poor decisions.

Five Organization Problems That Inhibit Growth

Many companies have these problems, and they all damage the ability to grow.

1. Weak internal communication
2. Inability to react quickly to opportunities (or threats)
3. A preference for over-analyzing problems instead of making decisions
4. A tendency to view business challenges as functional problems
5. Functional close-mindedness

The usual approach to solve these problems is to focus on symptoms, and either cover them up, or develop bureaucratic solutions that add complexity and further reduce speed.

For example, one company, concerned about interaction and communication between groups, set up a process where functional leaders were required to document specific plans to improve communication with other groups.  The result was a proliferation of meetings and needless reports resulting in even worse communication.  When complaints about communications continued, senior leaders were perplexed because they had already “fixed the problem.”

Solving these problems requires an approach that goes beyond the symptoms to address root causes.  In every case, the solution must be focused on the whole organization, not a piecemeal, functional approach.  Furthermore, a bureaucratic and functional mindset nearly always leads to more problems, not solutions.