Using coaching skills in a management setting

Coaching by Managers: No Appointment Required - Leading Effectively Blog

Doug Riddle at the Center for Creative Leadership blog:

Perhaps a coaching approach could yield a positive result without taking a lot of time. What would that look like? One of the key components of a coaching mindset is a determination to let the person coached keep responsibility for the solution. So a coaching leader will respond without taking over the problem. Questions are the preferred medium. "What have you done so far to solve this?" could be a good opening. "What else could you do?"  "What do you know about why your colleague is not delivering?"

A good manager is often in motion. That's part of the natural behavior pattern of a good manager, in fact, someone that keeps moving, engages as appropriate, fights fires where they burn; they are the movers of rocks and the carriers of water.

That's why this piece from Doug Riddle adds so elegantly to the manager's toolkit: developing key coaching skills allows good managers to understand when it is important to slow down in a problem-solving scenario, to engage, and to provide the direction and guidance that enables a team member to solve problems more quickly themselves.

That is, after all, where the coach excels: giving the team the gift to see their own abilities in a new and brighter light.

Read Doug's piece today -- it'll take you just a few minutes and will give you a great new way to look at problem solving with your staff.

Ann All illustrates importance of strategic planning with senior teams through the Fed?

Ann All: Feds Make Project Management Progress | Blogs | ITBusinessEdge.com

Ann All on changes in the federal government IT process:

Federal CIO Vivek Kundra appears committed to improvement, saying that beginning next month the government will provide detailed twice-yearly updates on how well agencies are implementing his 25-point federal IT reform plan. Created by Kundra and the Office of Management and Budget with collaboration from past and present federal CIOs, Congress and the private sector, the plan was released in December. It proposes major changes in federal IT governance and procurement as well as infrastructure and systems.

Take a moment and digest what's going on here: the Federal CIO's office worked with the Office of Management and Budget, past and present federal CIOs, Congress and the private sector to develop what amounts to the strategic plan for the operation. Do you think that's an easy thing to do? We don't. Throw into the mix a commitment to produce a progress report against that strategic plan twice a year and, well, in any other context it would feel less ironic to say it might take an act of Congress to get this done.

All's piece points out some great resources and analysis if you're interested in IT process re-engineering. But in quick summary, she offers this from a 2008 state task force report on IT failures that are absolutely prescient:

• Create standardized written policies for IT project procedures and uniform IT policies and procedures across agency lines. Government agencies are finally starting to realize what manufacturers and other private sector companies have known for quite some time: Companies with standardized processes operate more efficiently and cost-effectively than their less-standardized peers.
• Use off-the-shelf software whenever possible, and require approval for software customization.
• Create work environments in which employees can raise and resolve issues.
• Require executive sponsorship for all IT projects.

Even as All's piece is focused on IT management, the lessons are far more broad. Simplify and streamline communication to enable your people to do more, more quickly, more clearly, without increasing the burden of support.

Tanmay Vora on virtual teams, tips support strong teams of all kinds

QAspire Blog: 10 Key Lessons On Leading Virtual Teams Effectively

All of Vora's points are accurate, but one stuck out at us more than others: "Lack of trust is one of the biggest killers in a virtual team environment. The way you manage a team tells a lot about how much you trust them."

Tells a lot? It tells everything.

When a team is away, leaders tend to get insecure and start micro-managing. They just push decisions to their teams, rather than involving them in the decision making. This works against building a culture of trust and empowerment.

We've talked about the people process before and just how important it is to model the right behaviors in your own leadership to facilitate a strong team, whether virtual or not. Remember, though, the other legs of the stool; modeling positive leadership for your people is directly supported by team-friendly processes that communicate clearly, and technology that supports communication and strategic objectives. The strongest teams emerge when all three -- the people, process, and technology variables -- are functioning at their strongest and supporting the weight of the project equally. With strong teams comes respect and trust, not only in leadership, but in one another.

Sometimes the hardest choice is choosing not to merge organizations

Harvard Pilgrim, Tufts Health Plan Call Off Merger | WBUR

From WBUR.org, Massachusetts' second and third largest health providers dissolve intentions to merge:

The surprising decision comes some five weeks after the insurers announced they were exploring a merger. On Jan. 25, the companies signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding — the first step toward a possible merger. The companies had spelled out who would lead the combined organizations and the new board.

While conducting due diligence, the insurers said it became clear a merger would not have been as financially prudent as first thought.

“We have spent the last six weeks in a vigorous process thoughtfully exploring the practical feasibility of combining our two organizations for the benefit of our customers, members and the many other people we aim to serve,” said Harvard Pilgrim CEO Eric Schultz in a statement. “As a result of this process, we have now determined that we are stronger as individual competitors than one company.”

This is a terrific example of the merger process going right. Start talks deliberately, define goals clearly, assess stakeholder reactions soberly, and make the best call for all involved. Sometimes -- as in this case -- the best call is not to merge organizations. In healthcare, in an era when the most critical path to success is in reducing costs and increasing efficiencies, it seems almost counter-intuitive to decline a merger opportunity that could yield such rewards.

Holly Green has a wonderful post over at Blogging Innovation this morning:

Blogging Innovation » Is Everyone on Your Team Running the Same Race?

Too often companies invest a lot of time and energy in creating their strategic plan, but then make almost no effort to help people understand it, buy into it, and support it. To ensure that everyone in the organization runs the same race, we need to inform, engage and inspire people -– not just once when the plan is introduced, but continually throughout the year.

While Green isn't writing specifically about the hard choices that come with merging organizations, her guidance is spot-on. Getting key stakeholders aligned--staff, vendors, and in this case patients in particular--and ensuring a sound level of understanding and confidence in the organizations to support a merger is critical to ultimate success in a new organization. As we see with Tufts and Harvard in this case, if you can't find alignment, the deal's off.

Building your legacy as a leader through focus and simplicity

Create Your Legacy as a Leader - Paul Leinwand and Cesare Mainardi - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review

Paul Leinwand and Cesare Mainardi for HBR this morning:

The surest way to build a company whose leadership will outlast your own is to focus your attention on the few essential things that your company can do better than anyone else. If you can reinforce that focus in every decision you make — from mergers & acquisitions to new product launch to budgeting or cutting costs — it can help you win market share, generate sustainable growth, or even turn around a decline.

It's not about following the path of greats, they say, rather having a clear understanding of what it is that you do best. And that's the tricky part, too: understanding what you do best. It is far too easy for organizations to become mired in day-to-day at the expense of clarity. If you're in this particular boat, be critical, and make 2011 the year of simplification. For everything you do, can you draw a line up the strategic plan from that activity to your organizational objectives?

Leinwand and Mainardi offer three "drivers of coherence" which are great, though one in particular really jumps out in support of the simplification challenge: "Can my team articulate the three to six capabilities that describe what we do uniquely better than anyone else and how these capabilities support our value proposition?"

Join us at EACUBO 2011 in Philadelphia!

UPDATE: Thank you all for attending!

We had a terrific turnout at the conference and thank you all for joining us for an engaging session. We've received requests for slides, which you'll find embedded below.

Managing Through Change - EACUBO 2011

View more presentations from Teibel Education Consulting.

I'll be speaking at the EACUBO Annual Conference 2011 in Philadelphia! This is one of my favorite events, and I'm honored to be presenting with a great friend and colleague: Karen Davis, Vice President for Human Resources at Brown University. Our talk, in line with much of our current work at Teibel, is called "Managing Through Change - Helping leaders and staff adjust to accelerating change." If you'll be in Philadelphia for the event, please stop by and connect in person!

Session Details

Location: Hyatt Regency Philadelphia at Penn's Landing Date: Thursday, 3/31/2011 Time: 3:00 - 4:15 PM

Speakers

Karen Davis, Vice President for Human Resources, Brown University Howard Teibel, President, Teibel Education Consulting.

Session Description

"It's not so much that we're afraid of change or so in love with the old ways, but it's that place in between. It's like being between trapezes. It's Linus when his blanket is in the dryer. There's nothing to hold on to." Marilyn Feguson

Change is constant. No matter what we do, it's either foisted upon us or we're instigators of the change. Either way, it's up to us how we relate to it. Mastering handling change puts us in a better position to adjust to the growing needs across our organization. In this session you will learn how you personally relate to change and strategies to lead others through the complexity and ambiguity of a changing work environment.

For more information on the conference, visit EACUBO.org.

TED brings celebrations of wonder; Dir General of Al Jazeera celebrates the power of young voices

The TED conference is going on right now in Long Beach, CA. The theme this year is "The Rediscovery of Wonder," and given the current institution of change across the Middle East right now, it's only fitting to share this beautiful, passionate talk from earlier this week from Wadah Khanfar, Director General of Al Jazeera. Yes, it's political. But even more than politics, Khanfar celebrates the power of people -- young people, young voices -- using technology to mobilize and create change in their lives. It runs about 17 minutes and is worth every second.  

Apple unveils iPad 2 in San Francisco, reminds us of the stories we should tell every day

It happened. As was widely rumored and feverishly anticipated by technology pundits around the world, iconic Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the iPad 2 at a media event yesterday in San Francisco. It's all really very exciting and whatnot, and the device is fascinating, useful, super-duper, etc. But the launch yesterday represents a much more interesting undercurrent in the market place for post-PC devices. The biggest question from yesterday's event?

What is wrong with every single competitor in this space?

Apple introduced the iPad 1 last year, around the same time. In the year since, Samsung has come out with a tablet running the Android operating system. Blackberry maker RIM has repeatedly announced that their tablet will be fantastic. If you have a Blackberry. And it's on, and in your pocket. They've been talking about their tablet for months with no sure sign that it's ever going to launch apart from a few happy demos at a recent technology trade event. The press seems to be aflutter with the new Motorola Xoom tablet, though Motorola can't seem to manufacture the darned things in a way that they can come anywhere close to Apple on price--the Xoom starts at $800, almost twice as much as the starting price of the iPad.

This is simply starting to look embarrassing. But there's a story here, and it's buried in this quote from Carolina Milanesi from Gartner:

Competitors are making the same mistake that mobile vendors made with their response to iPhone: they are making the battle about hardware, and with tablets this is even less the case than it was for smartphones. What you are empowered to do with your tablet makes the difference.

Apple's story has always been one of nuance, not muscle. It's about how these devices are beautiful, and at the same time invisible, allowing users to do what they want more fluidly than ever before. For Apple, these devices are a means to delivering service to users; whether that's delivering the latest books, movies, and music in a best-in-class experience, or providing a platform for developers to write great apps to do the same for their own users. This is how Apple changes the world every day, by building the tools and technologies that so elegantly convince users that they can do the same.

That's also why it's much more fun to talk about Apple than so many of their competitors. Because at the end of the day, we should all be able to look back at the activity in our own service centers and claim that we were able to deliver the same best-in-class service to our customers that Apple delivers to theirs. In higher ed, can you say that about financial aid? Administration? Facilities? Contrary to what we often trick ourselves into believing, all the towers of pomp and circumstance exist to support one core mission: to create a best-in-class environment for our students such that they may go forth and change the world themselves.

Are you leading your teams honestly? Bring the "lifestyle business" ethic to teamwork

How Female Entrepreneurs Define Success - The Entrepreneurial Mind

The good Dr. Jeff Cornwall picked up on a concept out of Erin Albert's new book, Single. Women. Entrepreneurs. I haven't read the book yet, but from the review, it sounds like it is worth picking up. The central idea of Cornwall's post is that younger entrepreneurs, led by new views of entrepreneurship from Gen X and Y women, are choosing a different sort of model as they begin to grow their businesses. From Dr. Cornwall:

"Women, especially Generations X and Y, want to make their business and personal lives and aspirations work more in harmony," Albert said. Because of this, they choose to limit the size of their businesses and not pursue outside funding from investors or loans to fuel more growth.

This approach to entrepreneurship is referred to as pursuing "a lifestyle business."

However, every business should be viewed as a lifestyle business. If you choose a business deliberately based on your goals, aspirations and values, you can create a business that is an intentional reflection of the lifestyle you'd like to live.

Ours is not an entrepreneurship blog, nor is this a post focusing on start-ups. But that last line is priceless -- it's a reminder to think about what it means to live and work intentionally. Why? Because authentic people are better communicators, better trust-builders, and deliver better, more consistent results on teams.

One of the most consistent complaints we get from leadership teams in crisis is that they don't have enough "buy-in" from team members. It's such a nebulous word, buy-in, and as it turns out, it's a couch for all the ills that come from individuals not bringing their full attention and honesty to the teams to which they belong.

Our first objective: find out what is in the way of team members participating to their fullest. Which typically leads to the first action of bringing authenticity to tough teams: cut those who don't honestly want to be involved.

Teams have personalities, and they'll model the behavior you bring to the table. If you're living and leading authentically, honestly, you'll attract those to your team who want to deliver the same.

Email Bankruptcy - How are you dealing with communication overload?

It's Time for a Vendetta Against Email - Alexandra Samuel

Yes, we get too much email. Given the sort of work we do, we're at the heart of creating a good bit of it with our clients, too. But this week, Alexandra Samuel lends her voice to the hue and cry for a change in perspective when it comes to the way we deal with the daily ding of our email notifications.

But with email volume rising to meet, and then exceed capacity (it's a good rule of life: volume always rises to exceed capacity), it's time for us to revisit the social convention that all answerable email deserves an answer.

Our take on email to date has been to find better ways to filter and process, to ensure that actions that stem from email get into the right systems. Turns out, there's another trend afoot: people are mad at their mail.

Samuel's method, to "put the cost of communication back on the sender," is a compelling reminder for all of us. In her case, if the sender doesn't receive a response to a message he or she felt was response-worthy, the sender would carry the responsibility to resend the message via a higher value channel -- letter? phone? tweet? -- reading Samuel, you might get the impression that anything would be a higher value communication channel than email.

We're not so bearish on email, but this serves as a good reminder for those of us who work with teams, and generally exist to help teams make processes work better (including communications processes).

We take a more McLuhan approach (remember "the medium is the message?") as we deal with communication. Our rule of thumb: as you think of the message you want to send, consider carefully the implications of the channel you choose to send it. Need a quick answer to a yes/no question? How about an SMS text message? Need to share a spreadsheet or PDF attachment? Perhaps email is still the workhorse for you. Need to get the recipient to think deeply about an important issue? No matter what the kids say, there is still to substitute for picking up the phone, or getting face-to-face to address important challenges.

When you model the sorts of behaviors you prefer in dealing with how you communicate with your teams, you'll be surprised at how quickly they reciprocate, and drive the value of email back up in the process.

Develop grit, get things done, and achieve results for yourself and your team

Nine Things Successful People Do Differently - Heidi Grant Halvorson

Heidi Grant Halvorson has a good post this morning on traits of successful people -- specifically, what successful people do to achieve the goals they set for themselves. From Halvorson:

Grit is a willingness to commit to long-term goals, and to persist in the face of difficulty. Studies show that gritty people obtain more education in their lifetime, and earn higher college GPAs. Grit predicts which cadets will stick out their first grueling year at West Point. In fact, grit even predicts which round contestants will make it to at the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

The good news is, if you aren't particularly gritty now, there is something you can do about it. People who lack grit more often than not believe that they just don't have the innate abilities successful people have. If that describes your own thinking .... well, there's no way to put this nicely: you are wrong.

What's more? The same can be said of ineffective teams. Just as people have individual personalities and behaviors, so do teams and departments. Any group of people working together to achieve an objective can be changed, modeled, and driven in such a way that they develop grit -- they create in themselves a more single-minded passion for achieving results.

Halvorson's post is a great read this Friday -- a terrific reminder on how top performers achieve results as individuals, and as teams.

Professor Michael Roberto's Blog: Can You Identify Star Employees Early On?

Professor Michael Roberto's Blog: Can You Identify Star Employees Early On?

The good professor Roberto offers an interesting find today. He's discussing how organizational leaders find high potential future leaders among entry-level ranks:

They must think about the skills and capabilities required to succeed in future leadership positions and look for signs of potential in those areas, rather than simply looking at task performance in the entry level job. After all, good technical skills often make you stand out in an entry-level job, but those capabilities don't mean you have great leadership potential. In addition, companies need to watch for the late bloomers, who perhaps take awhile to find their footing.

This is absolutely one of the top areas for improvement: promotion expertise across institutions. The great assumption -- that current performance is the primary key indicator for success as a future manager -- is rendered false with one quick swipe of the sword of leadership truth: performing a task is a different role than managing others who are performing that task.

Different jobs.

Different sports.

Not even in the same ballpark.

Too often, we see directors promote top-performing employees to team managers based on performance in the role. The logic is sound on the surface:

1. the employee is a top performer therefore they have a deep understanding of the role and what it takes to be successful
2. they have a track record of success which will help them build a relationship of trust with their new employees
3. they understand the metrics by which their performance is being measured, and so on, and so on.

All these things are true.

But the challenges that come from management are so often unrelated to functional performance of the team. Managing people requires a unique skillset, one many are not prepared to learn, understand, and deliver if all they've done is the entry-level functional role. And don't forget: these promotions tend to leave a bigger hole in the team than anticipated -- promoting a top performer to middle management creates a vacuum of lost productivity in the seat they once filled.

Stanford U. partners with Silicon Valley in new hospital project

Apple cofounded effort to design and build $2 billion New Stanford Hospital

Fascinating project coming out of the Bay Area this week:

This month, Apple joined eBay, HP, Intel, Intuit and Oracle in an "unprecedented" joint philanthropic effort to help Stanford Medical Center build a new $2 billion hospital, designed to use the latest technology available in ways mirroring the innovation of Silicon Valley tech companies.

...

More than just contributing resources, the partners will work with New Stanford Hospital planners to develop innovative new approaches to providing patient access, information, education and navigation, a program that "has the ability to change the face of health care," according to Stanford Hospital president and chief executive Amir Dan Rubin.

When looking at the connection that exists between technology providers and the healthcare industry, we're used to seeing a vendor-customer relationship at work; innovation exists in manufacturer's laboratories and is adopted by hospitals as needed. To have this level of involvement between such a unique body of non-healthcare partners in technology should make for a wonderful case in peeling back the way healthcare works (and doesn't work) in a bubble. This will be a project worth watching.

Take a look at a brief promotional tour of the project, courtesy Stanford. The talking head here is Ron Johnson, Apple, Inc's senior vice president of retail. Johnson is the man behind the Apple Store retail experience. Not that his involvement should be an indicator of what you can expect when you hit the new hospital (healthcare Genius Bars?), but you can't say there aren't senior leaders involved who haven't given any thought to how people interact with service centers!

Dilbert, the Three Pillars, and Manager's Elbow

"Instead of being a pyramid, could I be a two-legged stool, like you?"

We can't let Friday pass without a quick nod to the greatest management consultant: Dilbert. As you wrap up your week today, ask yourself: Do you suffer from Manager's Elbow?

Reed Hastings of Netflix is a "2-in-1" leader worth study

Become Businessperson of the Year - Paul Nunes and Tim Breene - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review

Paul Nunes and Tim Breene share insight on what they call 2-in-1 leadership:

They not only grow their current business but simultaneously develop the next one that, ultimately, will enable a graceful transition from the first. It is one thing for great leaders to successfully confront great challenges. It is quite another for them to rapidly scale a successful business and conceive, grow and manage another at the same time — especially when they know the new venture may cannibalize its parent. We call this change from one successful core business to another "jumping the S-curve" and we're betting that we'll be seeing a lot more leaders like Hastings doing it.

The Hastings they're referring to here is Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix. Hastings is at the center of a quiet media empire, doing his part to shake the foundation of distribution with little red envelopes. But he didn't make "Businessperson of the Year" for the disc by mail program. He made the list for doing everything he can to destroy it.

In the last two years, Hastings has executed the Netflix streaming service across mobile phones and set-top boxes around the world. This new product category directly competes with the core mail-order model that the company is built on. But Hastings had the foresight and guts to take the risk. Whether he knew he'd be at the helm of the ship steering the industry or not, he's doing yeoman's work as a role model for the audacity required for great leadership in the face of great risk.

Nunes and Breene offer some truly interesting thinking in today's post -- absolutely worth reading today.

"Jeopardy" is a platform for challenging our assumptions about people. Seriously.

"Jeopardy!" and man vs. machine: Artificial intelligence will always be a step behind - latimes.com

Steven Baker is author of the up-coming "Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything." If you haven't seen the three-part match, the finale will be broadcast this evening and Baker will be updating this post with real results shortly after.

First, this passage from his op-ed in the LA Times is worth a chuckle (Watson, if it isn't clear, is the name of the computer competitor):

Once, when queried about a famous French bacteriologist, Watson skipped right past Louis Pasteur and responded instead: "What is, 'How tasty was my little Frenchman?'" (the title of a 1971Brazilian movie about cannibals). Even worse, Watson churned away for nearly two hours to come up with such nonsense. Things have changed.

Yes, funny. Funny to a fault, actually. The real message is one of shifting priorities in our offices. We've written much recently on efforts to rethink how we manage our people, how important they are to the way process and technology interact. But the advent of a super-computer that is actually competitive on a show like Jeopardy feels like a more important message than one of simple entertainment.

So, we offer this question: are you using your teams to complete the tasks that are worthy of their capabilities? Your people are (generally) a vastly underused resource. Consider the challenges you are giving your teams and the trust you give them to deliver creative results with minimal supervision. In most cases, getting great results from them will hinge more on giving them challenges that are up to their ability rather than the converse: that you have staff whose collective ability is not up to the tasks they are given.

Baker summarizes:

The rest of us will adapt to the invasion of question-answering Watsons by focusing on work at which the human brain excels — and will leave the rest to machines. We've already outsourced long division, spelling and much of our highway navigation to machines. Now we'll look to them more and more to dig through mountains of data and come up with answers for us. This should free us up to do what remains uniquely human, at least for now: generating fresh ideas.

UPDATE: Wired has a terrific set of pictures inside the Watson facility, if you fancy a tour.

Turns out business analytics is people! It's people!

Business Analytics: My Valentine’s Day True Love Confession

Here's a terrific piece from Gary Cokins on his evolving relationship with business analytics and performance management frameworks:

Until about three years ago, my main interest was explaining the “how-to” of all the methodologies comprising business analytics and the enterprise performance management (PM) framework and mechanism. Examples of these methodologies are forecasting, strategy maps, scorecards, dashboards, correlation analysis, activity-based costing, driver-based budgeting, customer demand management, and so on. I have implemented these techniques. I’m a practitioner. I love explaining to people how things work and inspiring a vision on how those same things can work much better in the future.

What happened to me three years ago? I was smitten. A competing suitor of my “how-to” love appeared. It is my new “why-to” love – explaining the benefits of why to implement and integrate analytics-based performance management methodologies. They both compete for my attention. This is what occurred.

Sounds like you'll be knee-deep in data reading that intro passage, but I assure you, Gary offers a real gem in his piece that is worth reading. He arrives at a conclusion that people people have been pushing onto performance management systems for decades. In short: the barriers to adoption of smart performance management practices are no longer predominantly based on limitations of our measurement systems. They're based on our broad misunderstandings of how people want to be managed!

Thanks, Gary, for the insight!

Working-out-loud to drive out information hoarders

The new compensation: going to anti-hoarders? — Scobleizer Robert Scoble has an absolutely fascinating post on the nature of information sharing in the workplace. The upshot is this: at most companies, the systems we use condition us to become what Robert calls information hoarders -- private email systems, private document folders, etc. But in a recent interview with Yammer CEO David Sacks, Robert asked the executive "when companies would be compensating people based on the value they are pouring into the system."

What a great way to phrase that question!

It helps a bit to know that Yammer is a company that provides what amounts to an internal Twitter -- a place for employees to share their status, resources, links, and more, in real time with the rest of the organization. Salesforce has rolled out a similar tool with their Chatter service. Taking a service inside with something like Yammer or Chatter suddenly makes the potential benefit of a more public, status driven workforce make much more sense. From Robert, the upshot is right here:

So, when I go and ask whether we should compensate people based on the information they SHARE with a company, that’s a topic these new CEOs aren’t quite willing to talk openly about.

Why? It freaks the information hoarders out and makes them less likely to change to information sharers. In such a world old systems like Microsoft Sharepoint stay relevant and new systems like Yammer don’t get adopted. I’m quite convinced though that in the future at least some of big-company compensation will come from whether you have good knowledge sharing skills.

Think about the time and energy you spend transitioning when you lose long-term team members. Does your succession plan deal with all the nooks and crannies of intellectual capital your critical employees have collected in their tenure? Do you have a system that capitalizes on that knowledge for the institution at large?

Conditioning employees to practice more diligence in their approach to documenting their work on these company-public systems is one way to ensure fewer information silos, and soften the blow when key team members move on. Robert's post is absolutely worth reading in full.

Are you prioritizing your people?

Re:Focus: Our Priorities Reveal our Values

Simon Sinek shares a smart perspective today on his blog:

I listened to a presentation given by top executives of a large firm recently. In their presentation, they listed the company’s priorities:

1. Top line growth
2. Enhance shareholder value
3. Focus on global expansion
4. Enhance customer satisfaction
5. Our people

I think it’s safe to say, they don’t really value their people. Or at least they don’t put their people before growth. Ironically, the best organizations I’ve ever seen, the ones that are actually more profitable for the long-term, all put people before growth on their list of priorities.

One of the core principles of our work with clients is to bring alignment to the people, process, and technology that make up complex systems. To those unaware of the Teibel approach to change, it might seem as if we give equal weight to these three broad areas.

While each are critical to overall success, Sinek's observation pokes a fine hole in long-held MBA wisdom, and supports our own experience: without the right people, and the right attention to the experience those people bring to their work, a rich conversation about change that drives results can never really happen.

Where you might be failing by trying to engage best practices for employee success

Making Sure Your Employees Succeed - Amy Gallo - Harvard Business Review

Amy Gallo contributed a fine piece to the HBR Best Practices blog today. Fine really is the word for it -- while she outlines the textbook premise on employee engagement well, I can't help but be left with a longing for at least a bit of discussion around how infrequently the textbook approaches really apply in employee development these days.

Commenter Rick Ross and I are kindred spirits. From his response:

Creating a plan - The formulaic "goal\ objective \ milestone \evaluate risk" method works in the increasingly rare environments where tasks are simple and easily measurable. More sophisticated methodologies are required in environments with higher complexity and where results that are harder to measure. Nothing will deflate motivation faster than being measured in an invalid way.

That last line says it all, and it's the overriding concept I think we are well-served to remember. We deal with great complexity at work, which requires a degree of intellectual dexterity as we try to define the measures of our success. So, what could serve to make a measurement invalid? A) When it doesn't make intuitive sense to the one being measured and, B) When the one being measured had no part in the definition of the metric.

Integrating new processes ends up being a more organic process than we ever expect, and certainly more organic than the textbooks predict. Working with staff to build a planning process that provides clear direction -- and maintains flexibility and adaptability over time -- is key to making change stick in the long run.