Archive for the ‘Leadership’ Category

Executive Success - it’s a simple equation…

Wednesday, March 4th, 2009

It’s not WHAT you know.
It is not WHO you know.
It is not HOW you deliver.
It is ALL of it.

In the new world of tough competition for positions, careers and recognition it is important to remind ourselves that it takes 3 to be successful and compete.

We can look at this as the following formula:

SUCCESS = IQ * EQ * XQ

IQ - Intelligence, Credibility

Most of us have been taught that through learning and personal development we will succeed. It is certainly part of the equation but the as John Maxwell’s classic reminds us - Talent is Never Enough.

EQ - Relationships, Intimacy

Relationship building may be the most misunderstood area of the equation. Many assume EQ is the area for salespeople and managers. Others believe that having 10,000 online “friends” or consumers does the trick. The most important for us is to create long term relationships of give and take that will help you advance your agenda. Whether it is sales, politics, social or otherwise. Keith Ferrazzi emerged as the most prominent advocate of this skill.

XQ - Execution, Consistency

The most under-appreciated factor in success is to actually deliver the goods, so to speak. Being smart and knowing the right people only matters if you produce results. We are always astonished how many people forget this. Leading advocates of this skill are Bossidy , Kaplan and David Allen .

In fact, our research shows that most executives overweigh their focus in one of these areas so much so that certain archetypes are emerging

The Expert Archetype: “IQ eq xq” - I am the expert in my field, I have the best insight. I already know the right solution.
Typical roles that overemphasize this skill: consultant, advisor, attorney, researcher, professor.

The Connector Archetype: “iq EQ xq” - I build connections with everyone. I can leverage it to advance their and my agenda.
Typical roles that overemphasize this skill: sales, marketer, politician, PR, fundraiser.

The Manager Archetype: “iq eq XQ” - I deliver results through teams. I meet objectives, deadlines and budgets.
Typical roles that overemphasize this skill: project manager, plant manager, supervisors, crisis managers.

Great, very insightful (IQ), but what can I do about this (XQ)?

ACTION STEPS:

1.) DEVELOP ALL 3 SKILLS: All successful leaders create a balance of these 3 skill areas and augment their own shortcomings by partnering with others that are strong in areas where they are weak. It is interesting to see what other executives think about relative importance of these skills in today’s economy. Check out our global executive poll:

2.) EXCEL IN ONE OR TWO - Our research shows that in order to be considered an effective leader - in a given corporate or social environment - it is critical to meet the ‘minimum’ expectations in ALL 3 areas and demonstrate excellence in at least 1 area. According to Marcus Buckingham the best approach is to ‘Build on your strengths’ and focus on the area where you are already good at.

3.) BALANCE THEM, DAILY - We believe it is important to strike a daily balance to make sure all of us work on tasks that strengthen all 3 areas and create a personal development program to improve each discipline. What-if our daily GTD lists have reminders to do that… (we will talk about that our next blog)

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Execution Gap - a buzzword that did not deliver

Wednesday, January 16th, 2008

For the last 5 years Execution Gap has been a favorite buzzword of healing underperformance in business. Simply stated most organizations fall far behind at least some of their stated goals due to lack of follow-through by their members. Countless organizations focus on this from FranklinCovey through Palladium to David Allen. According to research by Steven Covey, • only 9% of employees can relate their daily activity to their company's goals • only 44% can describe what their company's goals are David Norton (the inventor of the Balanced Scorecard) states that 90% of the companies fail to execute on their strategy. More than half of the people in this country work without clearly understanding what they are really supposed to do. There are dozens of consulting outfits focused on this topic and the key recommendations are as follows:

  • Companies should focus on fewer goals (2-3 at most)
  • Break down goals to chunks that team members can relate to and get excited about
  • Everyone should have a role at least in developing the action plans (decentralize strategy)
  • Everyone should do what they said they would do
  • Measure results and hold each other accountable
  • Spend 20% on planning and 80% on actions
  • Make sure incentives and disincentives are aligned with actual results

When the majority of the population faces strategic planning once a year in the form of New Year Resolutions and no elementary training in any form of planning or execution discipline it is not surprising that only half of the people surveyed can translate organizational goals to personal goals. Wouldn't it be great if high school or college curricula included execution as a critical element. There are pioneers out there from David Allen Co, Franklin Covey's K-12 Execution Training and volunteers like Marc Orchant that one day may create a better trained society in results and follow-through.

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Technorati Tags: Execution Gap, GTD, leadership, Right Stuff Employee, Strategic Planning, success

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Time Magic Quadrant for GTD maniacs

Sunday, March 25th, 2007

I got an email to my last post with an interesting twist. A fellow GTD enthusiast started measuring the time he spent in the various segments of the Team Magic Quadrant and came up with an obvious insight:
If you want to be a leader you should spent time doing leader-like things.

I put his time assessment in the chart to make the point. Now he wants to structure his next action list so that the priority is determined by the Magic Quadrant. Way to go, Rick.

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Magic Quadrant for Teams

Thursday, March 22nd, 2007

Early in the year most companies go through performance evaluations and the necessary rating systems. They typically answer the question of who is an “A”, “B” and “C” player with the inherent assumption that every person can become an idealized “A” player and in fact organizations can be built with all-A teams. I’m not going to argue the statistical futility of this effort, rather point to what is really important in an organization:

Build a world class team with a mix of A/B/C players, that is a high diversity high performance team.

A client friend of mine asked a similar question during the performance season. He had some great thinkers and some outstanding doers in his team. Sometime both. He started plotting them on the magic quadrant, a matrix that compares ability to execute and the ability to formulate and articulate a vision or a plan.

The (simplified) result is below. What is interesting is what he did with all of that. He ended up with 4 categories of people:

Human Magic Quadrants-4

  • Leaders - who can define a vision / outcome and have the energy, commitment to follow-through till the results are there
  • Innovators - who come up with awesome ideas, plans, goals but never actually deliver the results
  • Performers - who will climb any mountain, break down any wall to reach an objective but have a hard time plotting strategy
  • Apprentice - who need a lot of direction in both planning and execution of the tasks

He had A/B/C players in all these categories but decided to team up his Innovators and Performers on projects so they have a great plan and they execute on them. He also made sure his well-rounded leaders were put in charge of mentoring the Followers.

The jury is still out on the experiment but the team loves the clarity around the roles much better than being given a “B” again. Now they can all be “A” players in their own game without having to become something they are not.

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Leaders Ask the Right Questions

Saturday, January 20th, 2007

I have worked with thousands of executives and managers over the years doing strategy work and in that journey I sometimes become the stand-by sounding board and coach for many.

One of the most puzzling and unsettling in those deeper conversations is the nature of corporate success. Many of my newfound friends were puzzled how their peers and (typically) bosses seem to move ahead with ease and grace while they were busy delivering on all their commitments and getting lost in the bigger picture.

Over time I came to a conclusion that is hardly scientific but statistically fairly accurate. The difference between super-achievers and the rest has a lot to do with the questions they ask and act upon and not just the skills they bring or the results they deliver.

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Let me explain.

I noticed that my most successful customers had a rich vocabulary of transformational questions: Why do we do what we do, why should we serve these customers, why shouldn’t we try something else, what would be a better direction, what else can we try, what succeeds elsewhere, etc. Then listening intently to the achievement-challenged populace the questions tend to take a different tack: How can we work on this, how can it be done, who should do it, when should we do it, who’s job is it, etc…

Over time I logged the questions leaders ask vs the questions followers ask and came to a set of simple but fairly universal conclusion based on my little “questions determine destiny” theory.

  • We all play both leading and following roles in different circumstances.
  • Leaders are those who spend the majority of their cycles thinking WHY and WHAT questions and then follow through their answers with action.
  • Followers spend the majority of their time asking HOW, WHO, WHEN questions and act on those tactical levels.
  • Anyone can change their direction by focusing on WHY, WHAT and delegating the HOW, WHO responsibilities.
  • Asking the right questions is not enough. Acting on the right questions makes people leaders.
  • And of course it is just common sense.

I now use the above chart to mark my contacts based on the interactions we have and sometimes share my statistics if the topic comes up.

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The Strategic Plan That Isn’t

Friday, October 6th, 2006

It is the season of corporate planning in most companies with various senior leadership teams moving to offsite locations reflecting on their strategic vision. Nowadays not only the CEO’s leadership team develops strategic plans but almost any function.

In fact I was asked to comment on a “Strat Plan” of an IT department at a client and I had to point out that their most important project “retiring AS400 servers” really had no strategic value.

Strategy is the most overused business term and most people forget that in business it means competitive advantage or as Michael Porter defined it:

It means deliberately choosing a different set of activities to deliver a unique mix of value.

I have to agree with Tom Peters when he argues that most strategic planning efforts really aren’t strategic at all and he quotes various strategy gurus to prove the point. Henry Mintzberg (former chairman of Strategic Planning Society) in his classic book warned about the decline of strategic planning 12 years ago and it came to roost.

You know you are working on something strategic if the knowledge of your strategic plan would have directors breaking out in sweat in boardrooms at your competition.

Let’s just call most of the annual planning efforts operating plans. I do not think it is a derogatory word and while it may take away some of the sense of significance of the drafters of such plan it does remind us that gaining competitive ground needs something extra to happen.

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The notion that operating plans are strategic plans build on various favorite myths (and probably many more):

Senior management role makes you strategic. You need to think about it. Unless you are brought on board from a strategy firm or your company’s corporate development or M&A team you have not spent any time thinking about strategy. This is not a skill you grow on the day of your promotion. Many organizations (typically sales and product development) naturally have competitive streaks but they hardly dominate.

Long term plans are strategic. No. Plans that edge out competition are strategic. Everything else is tactical. Well, long term plans are long term with broader margins of error and lower accuracy. Unless they focus on what gives you practical advantage in the market they have no strategic relevance.

We are clear on our competitive advantage. You can ask various groups in the same company about their competitive advantage and you will get answers ranging from “we hire the best”, “we are lowest cost operation”, “we have the best channels”, “best products” and almost always “great service”. Almost never the same answer. Therefore it will not add up to a plan.

Strategy happens at the top. Well, no. Strategy happens in the trenches and while strategic thinking should happen on the top most often only the governance (metrics, targets) are established by the CxO team. Very often the line organizations are left to their own devices on figuring out how they are going to reach those targets and by doing so actually formulate strategy (which is about beating the competition).

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Strategic Advantage and Strategic Rewards

Thursday, October 5th, 2006

Even companies that understand what their strategic advantage is have the hardest time aligning reward structures to match the strategy.

In many cases a firm may break away from the pack in manufacturing with superior customer service but maintain higher rewards for engineers and backoffice functions due to industry conventions. Similarly a service company shifting to productize its offerings may still reward their professional services staff better than their newfound development or engineering staff.

Many of the same companies believe that they are paying market rates but that may not be enough. If they are pursuing a differentiation strategy than they will have to attract and reward the most differentiated (best) employees and suppliers in that category to maintain competitive advantage.

It means that in areas where you want to have competitive advantage you will have to pay top dollar and in other areas you will pay the “going market rate”.

Jack Welch in the book Winning pointed out time after time that companies have a hardest type assessing talent and retain the highest performers and get rid of the lowest performers. In this sense it is true of employees and suppliers.

I have yet to meet a company that does not believe that they hire only A-players... Who is hiring the B and C players? It is an unfortunate and inefficient myth. As a motivational speaker told us in our first partner meeting in my E&Y days: “Half the people in this room are below average”. It is true and not necessarily a bad thing. You will not be able to reward and motivate the A-players in non-strategic areas and similarly you have to create great opportunities and rewards for A-players in strategic areas.

Companies that under-reward players in strategic areas will eventually erode their competitive advantage which holds true for most companies with one size fits all compensation structures and procurement procedures.

To win, you have to reward the real A players in your areas of strategic advantage and happily hire and retain the B and C players everywhere else and keep those motivated with specific performance metrics.

The following table may serve as a strategy guide for building the right teams. My earlier post also describes characteristics of A-players in any successful environments.

Strategy Reward

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How to get entrepreneurial employees

Wednesday, October 4th, 2006

You can have the best product, the greatest market if your employees do not have the juice then you will not win.
Ever since I joined the large enterprise world 3 years ago after over a decade of startup and partnership stints, I have been constantly puzzled why large corporations have a special breed of employees that just do not have the energy, juice, drive like the ones I worked with in my high growth business days.

MIT professor Joseph Hadzima had an interesting lecture that helped me reflect on what he calls Entrepreneurial Employees.
He described seven characteristics that make the people with the Right Stuff stand out from the cubicle-bound corporate mainstay:

  • Ability to deal with and thrive on risk
  • Be results oriented, accountable for results
  • Energy. Lots of it.
  • Growth potential. Having what it takes to get to the next level
  • Team player and less politics. Seriously.
  • Multitasking ability. Being able to perform more than one role
  • Self-improvement oriented.

I guess I just created a little checklist for myself. I have the Wharton MBA recruiting day ahead and I think I may have created the ultimate filter for bringing entrepreneurism back in the mix.

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Is There a Microsoft-Free Zone?

Thursday, September 28th, 2006

Nowadays I’m a complete Mac user, but having run a Windows security software business before I am always fascinated by the various strategic moves Microsoft makes. An article from EDS Fellow Randy Mears poses an interesting question that is relevant for many technology businesses large and small: What trends do you jump on and which do you ignore?

Given their practically unlimited resources, Microsoft has the means of hedging their bets in a massive scale and keep a finger in most technology pies from video downloads (MS Video), music (Zune) to social networking (Wallop). Or as Zoli mentioned, the also run blogging tool, the Windows Live Writer. They also have as many enterprise focused business ventures as they have consumer-oriented ones. In fact there is hardly any facet of the technology business that Microsoft does not enter.

It is a very different business model from other technology majors like IBM, SAP, Oracle that tend to keep closer to their core business without the broad line extensions typical of Microsoft.

Is it possible that Microsoft gave up on pursuing an innovation-based core competency strategy in pursuit of a GE-esque number 1 or 2 in every segment model? Now, GE does that very profitably while Microsoft’s excursions outside their core OS/application businesses into internet, media, gaming or web properties have not yielded shareholder return.

While many startups and experts worry about Microsoft’s adventures into all things technology, I think the real question is where Redmond wants to be. While they are too big for pure play, clear direction certainly would help investors better evaluate the stock and the customer base can also figure out what this vendor is really great for.

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Why Business People (still) Speak Like Idiots

Wednesday, September 27th, 2006

We are cognizant of the inherent synergies in our cooperative alliances….

Having sat through a 2-hour mind-numbing product presentation full of the latest buzz-words reminded me of the great book I read a while back titled "Why Business People Speak Like Idiots". In order to be part of both the watercooler and the boardroom inner crowd people use sentences they could not possibly explain even under duress. To help straight talk and reduce trance at the workplace - this book is a great guide. How can you find out your own Bull* Ratio? The authors collaborated with Deloitte Consulting to publish a free tool that would give your eloquent prose a Bull rating. Come on, go ahead and realize how much of this muck slipped into your vocabulary… Torero!!

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