Minding Gaps

Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln" Has Big Lessons on Leadership

 

by Thomas J. Lee

More books have been written and more movies filmed about Abraham Lincoln than anyone else in modern civilization, and for good reason. His life and his presidency offer timeless lessons in leadership, character, and communication. Steven Spielberg’s new, eponymous movie captures it all with color and verve. The film is excellent, and I urge everyone to see it.

Lincoln opens nationwide on Friday, but it is already showing in a handful of cities, including here in Chicago. So a few days ago I took time out of my workday to see it. My commute to the theatre included a Chicago River “water taxi” ride, which floats right past the site of the old Wigwam (on the river at Wacker Drive and Lake Street) where, in 1860, the nascent Republican Party nominated the Illinois prairie lawyer for the presidency. Of course, little could anyone at the time imagine the historic repercussions of the selection.

Like many of you, I have long been fascinated by Lincoln. This year alone I have read two full biographies of him, Lincoln by David Herbert Donald and A. Lincoln by Ronald C. White, both of which are masterful (if you read only one, choose the White volume), as well as three lesser works about his presidency and assassination. Anyone who studies leadership as a calling should devote a great deal of attention to Lincoln.

Spielberg has said he wanted to make a movie about Lincoln for more than a decade, but he didn’t know how to squeeze so much material into a couple of hours. He got his answer when he read Team of Rivals, the marvelous book on Lincoln’s bipartisanship by Harvard historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. The final two chapters of that book focus on Lincoln’s single-minded advocacy, in early 1865 just weeks before his assassination, of the Thirteenth Amendment, which would ban slavery. (As a point of history, the constitutional amendment was necessary because the Emancipation Proclamation two years earlier had been a wartime measure, and therefore it would be of dubious legality after the war’s end.)

But here’s the crux of the matter: Lincoln’s re-election in November 1864 had long coattails. He would enjoy larger majorities in Congress beginning in March 1865. The commonsense thing to do was wait till then, when approval of the Thirteenth Amendment would be easier. Lincoln refused. He insisted on moving quickly. As he declares in the movie (portrayed exquisitely by Daniel Day-Louis), he wanted Congress to act “now, now, now!”

That is one of six insights on leadership that I drew from the Spielberg production: Bring a sense of urgency to the important. If it’s important to do tomorrow, it’s important to do today. Do whatever you can now. Don’t wait, even when waiting would make things ostensibly easier. Do what you must do, do what you can do, and do it now.

Here are five other lessons I took from the Spielberg movie:

Communicate through storytelling, analogies, example, and anecdotes of personal experience whenever possible. Lincoln, like other leaders before and since, relied heavily on storytelling. Stories are powerful tools, because they give people a vivid way to remember a theoretical point. Our ancestors have been telling stories for millennia. We are hardwired to love stories. Lincoln knew it. Spielberg and Goodwin know it. As a leader, you must know it.

Go to the people whose support you need. Listen to them first, and then appeal to their nobility. Do not wait for people to come to you. Do not expect them to come to you. You must go to them, and you must listen before you speak. Then speak to their concerns and issues. As a general rule, when you speak publicly, invoke their values and beliefs. People want to be about something larger than themselves. (It is true, as the movie illustrates, that Lincoln was not above scratching backs for votes. He knew his power, and he used it when he had to.)

Recognize and accept practical limitations, and work within them. “Politics is the art of the possible,” Lincoln’s contemporary Otto von Bismarck would say a few years later. That is not a license to do nothing. Rather, it is worldly acknowledgement that the perfect can be the enemy of progress. In the movie, Pennsylvania Congressman Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones), who knows that people are inherently equal, is forced to say in House debate that he favors equality of legal rights only. Had he claimed more, the Thirteenth Amendment might very well have lost.

Know that ideas have consequences, and the consequences can be grave. The movie is filled with poignant scenes. One of them involves the president’s son Robert watching soldiers dump a barrow of human limbs in a mass grave. Another shows the president on horseback touring a battlefield of human carnage. There are more. For us, too, even in our day-to-day business, even in comparatively modest endeavors, ideas can have consequences from livelihoods to security in retirement to more. Never dismiss an idea as “merely a theory.” Ideas matter.

Abandon the pretense of perfection. We are all human. Few historical figures rival Lincoln for integrity, but even Lincoln was an imperfect man. There is evidence he fudged on an expense account as a congressman, and he could stretch the truth when he wanted. He pulled rank as commander-in-chief to discourage his son Robert from joining the military; and when he lost that argument, he inveigled General Ulysses S. Grant to give Robert a safe sinecure. This is not to excuse or justify such behavior, only to acknowledge the imperfectability of the human animal.

As you watch Lincoln you will doubtless come to your own insights. Please capture them in a note to me (at tom@arceil.com), or click on Comments below and share your thoughts with other readers. Whatever you do, don’t miss this movie. Be sure to take your kids, too, and talk about it afterward.

 

© Copyright 2012   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Imagine If Everyone Were As Focused as This Young Man

by Thomas J. Lee

My old next-door neighbor was a wide receiver in the National Football League. One evening, while we were both grilling out, he and I got to talking about football. He began describing for me what it was like to play professional football before thousands and thousands of people. Then he said something I will never forget.

Carl had so honed his craft, so thoroughly ingrained it, that when I asked how it feels to catch a pass in a game, he had to take himself physically through the motions to be able to respond. It was comical in a way.

At one point, standing on the patio, he had his arms outstretched, as if he were catching a pass over his left shoulder. He remarked that, as he is running to reach the pass, he cannot hear the stadium crowd.

That just stunned me.

I found that incredible. Think about it: Fifty thousand, sixty thousand, maybe seventy thousand fans in the stadium, most of them screaming their throats dry, and he cannot hear them.

Carl went on. He said he can hear his own footsteps, and he can hear his own breathing. But he cannot hear the crowd. As the ball falls gracefully into his arms, almost in slow-motion, his only focus is on wrapping his fingers around it, pulling it in and keeping it close, and then reaching the goal line with it. Those are the only things that matter. Everything else, including the crowd, ceases to exist. It just isn't there.

Now that's focus.

Imagine, just imagine, if the dozens or the hundreds or the thousands of people in your organization all had such extraordinary intensity of focus around your business goals and strategy. Most certainly they, and you, would be performing at a level you have only dreamed about.

There are tools and techniques to build that kind of focus. But the master key that unlocks it is your own focus. For you cannot ask of others what you have not demanded of yourself. If you yourself, as a leader, are not truly focused on strategic imperatives, no one else will be.

Begin with this simple question, and answer with a bucket of ice-cold honesty: What is it that you are most concerned about? Let's agree to net out the personal stuff: your kids, house repairs, aging parents, weekend plans. As you come to work each morning, what is it about the business that is most on your mind?

If you're like many managers, and probably most, execution of the business plan isn't front and center. Nor is realizing a long-term vision. Living out the company's values isn't close. While your monthly nut and year-end bonus are probably right up there, chances are your day-to-day focus any given morning is on a personnel issue, or a conference call at 9, or a dysfunctional staff department, or a draft marketing plan, or an OSHA inspection, or performance reviews, or squeezing another 1 percent from next year's budget, or any of a thousand other things that compete for your time and attention. That's the reality of life in management.

Because your focus is on these front burners, it is only natural to put truly strategic issues on the back burner. We quietly tell ourselves it is only for a day, only for the week. We'll get to the important stuff next week, next month.

Meanwhile, anyone and everyone with whom we come into contact immediately senses our real priorities, our real focus. We cannot hide. Every question we ask, every comment we make, betrays our real interest, our real concern. Because our real priorities and real focus are something other than the organization's strategic vision and long-term goals, the vision and the goals slip to second place, and then to third, and then off the grid altogether.

We all know that the hardest person to manage, and the hardest person to lead, is one and the same. You say hello every morning in the mirror. Only you can change that person's priorities, and therefore it is you who must.

Tomorrow morning, and for just one day at a time, shift your focus. Throw a spotlight on the strategic. Let the little things fall into place on their own. They will, after all.

For just one day, focus on the truly important things. Govern your questions and comments so that most of what you say, all day, creates energy around your strategic imperatives. Don't neglect or even diminish the lubricants of human relationships, of course. But let any substantive remark about the business revolve around the organization's vision and strategic intent.

Imagine you are Carl, running out and in. Reach out your arms. Look for the ball. Run to it. Listen to your own footsteps, your own breathing. Let the ball fall into your arms, as if no one is watching. It's just you, the ball, and the goal line.

Chances are the game will change.

 

  © Copyright 2004-2012   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Ozzie Guillen's Foul Ball on Fidel Castro

by Thomas J. Lee

Every business manager, government official, and aspiring entrepreneur should sit up and pay rapt attention to the ordeal that Miami Marlins manager Ozzie Guillén is going through this week—and then remember to choose her words very, very carefully.

A native of Venezuela, where he still has a home, Guillén has enjoyed a long and successful career as a baseball player and manager. He managed the Chicago White Sox to a World Series championship. After leaving the White Sox last autumn, he signed with the Miami Marlins, who have just built a shiny new stadium in the Little Havana section of Miami. The city's million-strong community of Cuban Americans is the heart of the Marlins' fan base.

After only five days as Marlins manager, Guillén is interrupting a road trip to fly back to Miami and apologize after telling Time magazine of his admiration for Cuba strongman Fidel Castro. Guillén had gone so far as to say he loved and respected Castro for remaining in power so very long. No mention of machine guns, firing squads, 30-year prison terms, or anything of the sort.

You can read all about it for yourself in these dispatches from the Miami Herald, Bloomberg, and the Associated Press.

Regular readers of the Minding Gaps blog know that I generally advise leaders in business, government, and any other sphere to "say what you think, and think what you say."

However, there are five important boundaries on that advice. I call them the 5Rs. You should speak only when your thoughts are "5R Ready."

So before you say what you think, make sure it is:

• real, which is to say based on observable facts and familiar experience;
• relevant to the challenge at hand;
• respectful of people and their feelings;
• relationally constructive, not destructive; and
• reasonable and rational, by which we mean both within the bounds of reason and logically derived by reasoning.

If it isn't, you should be asking yourself some tough-love questions as to why you're even thinking such things. They're toxic to you and everyone else. Before you speak, get your head together.

Ozzie Guillén's remarks to Time magazine met none of these five tests. They didn't come close.

If I were advising Guillén, I would suggest not going before a bank of microphones. Rather, he should be sitting down with Miami's ex-pat community and just listening to its voices. Then, after coming to a better understanding of Castro, he should apologize without using the words "if I have."

Maybe, just maybe, he can survive. No bets though.

 

© Copyright 2012   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

The Irony of Seeing and Believing

 

by Thomas J. Lee

On any given issue, people may or may not hear what their leaders say. But they will always see what the leaders do, and seeing is believing.

Does that strike you as true? It certainly does me.

And yet there's a problem with such a facile analysis: The opposite is also true.

Believing is seeing, too. That's right. Just as seeing is believing, so is believing seeing.

Think about that. We're not just playing with words here. It's an important if complicating point for leaders and for anyone who counsels leaders on communication.

Not only do people believe what they see with their own eyes (that's the seeing-is-believing part), but they tend to see mainly that which they already believe (the believing-is-seeing part).

Their eyesight—yours and mine, too—is naturally selective. We see things first, notice things most, and remember things longest that conform to our own perspective and that confirm our own judgment.

It's certainly no secret that two intelligent, reasonable persons can experience the same event—a concert, a movie, or a dinner in a restaurant, say—and come away with sharply divergent impressions.

How often have you and a friend read the same book and disagreed on it? Listened to the same political debate and disagreed on the candidates? 

The fact is that each individual processes new data through his own lens of preconceived expectations, needs, experiences, opinions, and concerns. This frame of reference changes slowly, if at all.

That basic dynamic holds as well for news and announcements about the workplace. What people already know and believe bears heavily on their reaction to additional information and messages.

Does that make leadership communication in the workplace pointless? Not really, no. It does make it more difficult though.

As a practical matter, it underlines the need to educate employees constantly on the company's strategic reality. The more that people know, the more likely their beliefs will reflect the company's real-world environment.

Moreover, it reminds us that, as the best comedians and orators have long understood, we are always speaking to an audience of one. Never to a crowd, but always to each individual person in the crowd.

The distinction is critical. Ever notice how a riveting speaker works a room? She fixes her eyes on one person at a time. Afterward, almost to a person, people say: "I felt as if she was talking just to me." That's what we mean.

What are the implications of all this for business leadership? Even in the largest organizations, any leader must keep uppermost in mind who it is that he is hoping to lead, and must address their issues as they see them.

He should ask: How much do people already know about the situation, the direction for the future, the organization's progress? What do they think of it? What is their emotional state? Exactly what are they worrying about, fearful of, concerned about, hopeful for?

That—even more than the nuts and bolts of the message—is the most important consideration in leadership communication. In it lies the secret of great communication. Speak to the human heart and what lies inside, and you cannot go wrong.

So just remember this: It is always, always the who before the what. Never the other way around.

 

Coming on Friday

Be Your Own First Follower

 © Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Finding Strength in Uncertainty, Because of Uncertainty

 

We are on our annual study and renewal period through June 30. During this time we are reprising some of our favorite posts of the preceding twelve months. We'll return with all-new essays on Friday, July 1.

 —TJL                         

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Are you often sure of yourself?

Are you often certain you are right?

I confess that I am. I dislike that about myself.

Not that I announce it loudly, or at least I don't think that I do. But I feel it. Often it is stirring in me as other people are talking. I quickly find myself concluding—prematurely, on little evidence—that I know more and have thought more about the subject at hand. Rarely is that true. I just think it.

It is an omniscient self-certainty, and, even when it is talking quietly to me, it is obnoxious. It is arrogant. It is corrosive to thoughtful, reflective leadership.

You see it in politics all the time. Tune in either of the two more dogmatic cable networks here in the States (that's Fox News for the right, MS-NBC for the left), and you cannot go an hour without coming across it. All the pundits and politicians are absolutely, positively convinced of their own point of view.

I fear their arrogance is contagious. More and more, people are just so certain of their own viewpoint—so certain that they have no time for anyone else’s.

Justice Learned Hand once wrote: “The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.” That is just so profoundly true.

Many years ago, when I wrote a weekly newspaper column, I confessed to my own doubts about the Vietnam War. In one column, I told of a high-school class reunion that I had recently attended. Before dinner, we had memorialized a classmate who died in Vietnam. His parents were there with us. His mother told us that she was always so patriotic, but that she still couldn’t quite understand exactly what her son died for. Neither could I.

After the column appeared, I received a thoughtful, gentle letter from a conservative reader. He wrote to comfort me. He said: “I wish I were as certain about anything as some people are about everything.”

Indeed. Indeed.

 

Coming on Wednesday

What Are They Saying About You?

 © Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Ten Strategies for Straight Talk in the Workplace

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Over the past week or so we have been exploring ten “talk traps” and their alternative. Talk traps are conventions of internal communication (for leadership in companies or other organizations) that often prove problematic.

The ten talk traps are Small Talk, Sunny Talk, Scare Talk, Sweet Talk (or Smooth Talk), Smart Talk, Simple Talk, Song and Dance Talk, Slick Talk, Snarky Talk (or Surly Talk), and Self Talk. We identified an eleventh, too: Snarl Talk. You can click here or scroll down to read all about these common talk traps.

As we explained, some of these talk traps work just fine in the right place and the right time, but they can backfire in the wrong place or the wrong time. Others are always ill-advised.

We also took a long look at some difficulties that beset Straight Talk, the preferable alternative to those ten talk traps. It turns out that Straight Talk can often pose its own challenges, few of which are obvious to the leader.

Here are ten strategies to make sure that Straight Talk, not one or more of the common talk traps, is undergirding your leadership communication in the workplace:

1. Lay a good foundation. You cannot begin talking about your business environment early enough. If you’re not in the habit, start now. You needn’t talk about future plans that are not yet finalized. Just talk about the past and the present. If you don’t begin now, people won’t be prepared when you do. The straight talk you eventually offer will very likely come as a shock to the system.
2. Establish a broad context. Address the weaknesses of your processes and products as well as the strengths. Talk about changes in technology, customer expectations, and speed to market. Deal openly with your culture, its advantages and its disadvantages. Discuss the business from multiple perspectives. It’s important to view reality from the point of view of customers, investors, hourly employees, even competitors.
3. Consider forming a small communication council consisting of articulate individuals at various levels of the organization or team, both non-management and management, who can provide diverse perspectives on what’s going on.
4. Recognize the fact that senior management has the luxury of time and typically a sophisticated educational background to help it absorb the need for change, while rank-and-file employees typically do not. By the time a new policy or strategy comes down, its imperative is clear to senior managers but can still be a mystery to ground-level employees.
5. Be sensitive to the words and phrases you use to describe the business landscape and to establish the direction and the case for change. Jargon and acronyms that are part of your own day-to-day vernacular can be meaningless to others, especially to employees who must execute your strategy. Language that has no meaning cannot possibly have any credibility or impact.
6. Test your stated values against the real drivers of your decision making. It’s easy to invoke a list of pretty values and nominally pay homage to them. It’s quite another thing to recognize the powerful impetuses that truly direct and shape policy. What really matters? That’s what your values are, like it or not. (One good test: Ask yourself whether you're willing to fire a senior manager you personally like but who violates a value.)
7. Set a high bar on standards and accountability, but acknowledge that none of us is perfect or perfectible. Make clear what rises to a capital offense and what doesn’t, and underscore the hard importance of aspirations. Don’t be impetuous or fickle. Do insist on common rules. If you expect an hourly employee to pay a parking ticket on company time out of his own pocket, the same rule has to apply to a senior vice president.
8. Appreciate the problems inherent in cascading. By cascading, we mean disseminating strategic information through an organization one level at a time. Cascading spawns rumors and creates a tangled web of misinformation and misunderstanding. It is a big problem in a lot of companies, yet it is routinely accepted as necessary and even desirable. It’s neither.
9. Take emotions into account. Emotions are a big part of everyone’s personality. Ignore them at your peril. Probably no emotion is more ubiquitous at work than fear: the fear of speaking up, the fear of questioning authority, the fear of offering an idea. If you’re not dealing with it, you’re being victimized by it.
10. Get into the nitty-gritty of specifics. It is one thing to lay out a grand strategy. It is quite another thing, and much more difficult, to translate that big strategy into detailed implications for rank-and-file employees. You must do this; the failure to do it is all but an abdication of management in support of leadership.

There’s more, but that’s enough to give you pause as you move forward. Don’t let it paralyze you, and certainly don’t allow it to keep you from speaking the truth. Honesty is still the best policy. Just be careful out there.

Coming on Wednesday

 Four Rules for Growing Engagement

(We will be off Monday for a national holiday in the United States.)

 

(c) Copyright 2011 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved. 

Ten Talk Traps Every Leader Must Carefully Manage

Editor's Note: In the past we have presented lists of three and five talk traps. Some of you suggested additional kinds of talk traps, so we grew the list. Here is a revised and larger version incorporating your suggestions. Thank you!

 

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Business leaders are supposed to value communication.

But not all communication is created equal. In tone or substance, the wrong kind of communication often backfires. We all know that, because we have all been there.

Here are ten kinds of "talk traps," along with a bonus. Some have their place and their moment when they serve you well, but at the wrong place or the wrong moment, they gravely compound problems. Others are always ill-advised.

In every case, they are tricky. They can easily send the wrong message or confusing and contradictory messages, and their patronizing or presumptuous attitude can alienate employees or other constituents.

Lots of leaders unwittingly fall into these traps. So here is a little guide.

• Small Talk is useful for exchanging pleasantries and greetings, of course. As a social lubricant, it is usually harmless, and occasionally it can be informative. Be sure you don’t neglect it. But if small talk is the totality of your communication as you wander about the workplace, you’re missing a great opportunity. Small talk is no substitute for relevant, substantive information about the company’s direction and decisions.
• Sunny Talk, also known as Sunshine Talk or Pumping Sunshine, is the tendency to paint a rosy, simpleminded picture on an unrosy situation. As a leader, you’re supposed to be optimistic and resolute. Just don’t be a Pollyanna. Employees who hear an endless stream of Sunny Talk eventually stop listening. Who can blame them? Everyone knows the real story is rarely if ever so wonderful. The problem with Sunny Talk is its patronizing assumption that employees need to be manipulated in order to be influenced. How sad.
• Scare Talk is just the opposite. It constantly paints a picture of woe. It, too, can cause all kinds of problems. Just as the future is never entirely pretty, it’s never completely dismal. Employees know that. By the same token, a leader should have the courage to share unhappy news, as, for example, the reason a big customer is jumping to a competitor. It can be just what’s needed to help sharpen the edge of customer service, product design, or service quality.
• Sweet Talk, also known as Smooth Talk, seduces people into taking shortcuts they probably shouldn't, or to accept a deal or situation that is not in their best interest or the company's best interest. Managers under pressure to meet deadlines, budgets, or quotas are often to blame. At its worst, Sweet Talk can result in shipping goods of poor quality, overlooking safety precautions, violating labor agreements, or disappointing customers—any of which can do severe damage to the company's reputation and cost customers or even human life.
• Smart Talk is the tendency, all too common in both business and politics, to let words substitute for action. You will often see it when someone is trying to sound smarter than he actually is, or when he is pretending to have information or answers that he doesn't have. It backfires when the real information becomes available, which, in the 21st Century, is invariably sooner than the smart talker anticipates. You will also see Smart Talk in action—or, more aptly, inaction—when organizations are averse to the change they must undertake. They find it easier to talk about change than to actually change. They are in a state of paralysis by analysis.
• Simple Talk underestimates, ignores, or glosses over the nuances, uncertainty, difficulty, or general complexity of a situation or challenge. It offers iron-clad directives in spite of frequent circumstances that cry out for exceptions. As a result, it leaves people feeling like cogs rather than individuals, as units rather than persons, as a machine rather than a team. People are inclined just to shrug their shoulders rather than exercise discretion and judgment, and then to blame their management. Often customers will sense the air of resignation. Not good.
• Song and Dance Talk is full of excuses. Any veteran manager or frontline supervisor has heard his share of Song and Dance Talk from underperforming employees. When managers themselves indulge in the same thing, employees quickly realize they are working for a can't-do management team and a never-will company, and they begin looking for the exit.
• Slick Talk is an effort to distract someone from a legitimate concern or to mislead someone about something of legitimate concern to them. It takes its name from high-gloss, high-polish production values that call attention to themselves such as an expensive video, a lavish meeting, a slide presentation with brilliant graphics, or such extensive collateral documentation that a reader doesn't know where to begin. Spin often accompanies it.
• Snarky Talk or Surly Talk frequently rears its ugly head in pressure-cooker situations when patience is wearing thin. This is just the uncivil, demeaning treatment of people. It may consist of only a single word, such as "Brilliant" or "Genius," uttered in a scornful, mocking tone. Or it may consist of extensive unnecessary background information that is implicitly condescending. It may even be a sneering, if looks could kill facial expression. Managers who frequently resort to Snarky Talk are often intellectually intelligent but emotionally unintelligent, perhaps narcissistic and sometimes even belligerent.
• Self Talk is perhaps the most difficult of them all, for no one else ever hears it—but everyone can see its consequences in your choices, behavior, and regard for others. Think of it as covert communication: what you are saying, and how you are saying it, to yourself. What happens to your outward dignity when you are alone in your thoughts? What are you explaining away in a mean-spirited way? How much vitriol do you heap upon yourself? Do you curse yourself? Or are you critical of others for things you excuse or overlook altogether in yourself? Are you ever privately racist or sexist in your thinking? How do you account for personal slights to your ego?

Here's the bonus, though I hesitate to use the same nomenclature. If I did, I suppose it would be Snarl Talk. Like the snarl of tangled cords behind your television or stereo, it refers to the tendency to pack too much information and too many themes into a presentation, publication, or report. Anyone on the receiving end senses a data dump and usually shuts down for want of a tighter focus.

Yet another kind of talk is the leader’s most valuable tool: Straight Talk. But all too often, leaders think they’re talking straight when they aren’t necessarily.

 

Post Script: I couldn't resist using the picture. For the record, I am not suggesting that business leaders are like this caricature of a used-car salesman. Well, a few are, but fortunately only a few. 

 

 

Coming on Monday

Why Is Straight Talk So Difficult?

 © Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

{Numbers} Effective Managers Repeat Themselves

 

Numbers, a twice-monthly feature, regularly presents business data that is noteworthy, puzzling, alarming, widely misunderstood or misinterpreted, or otherwise deserving of explanation, comment, or clarification. We accompany it with thought-provoking questions or commentary for reflection and discussion. It appears on the first and third Monday of each month.

Since its inception two years ago, Numbers has presented data on a wide variety of issues: employee engagement, organizational culture, trust in business, information overload, strategic communication, CEO compensation, layoffs, job satisfaction, Internet usage, nonverbal communication, fear in the workplace, and many other variables.

You can read any or all of those posts (and hundreds of other short essays, as well) whenever you wish, just by scrolling through the archives. For a particular subject, use the search button atop the right column.

by Thomas J. Lee

Ever since the pioneering work of Frederick Winslow Taylor a century ago, managers have been trying to do more with less. Efficiency is good.

For many managers, that is certainly true of communication. They want to say something once and be done with it. Especially in a time when we are all assaulted daily by thousands of messages—emails, advertising, announcements, complaints, questions, Google searches, conversations, requests for this and that, the news—brevity is the soul of clarity as well as wit.

There's just one nagging issue: Does it work? Can we truly say something only once to someone and seriously expect to communicate well?

The answer isn't so simple.

In some circumstances it can work. Probably all of us remember hearing some particularly pleasant or hurtful words on the job: "We want you to start work next Monday" or "You have to go to Fresno again" or "We won the Smith account" or "Everyone has to take a pay cut."

On the other hand, when I am troubleshooting poor communication, one-off instructions often emerge as a problem. For routine information, saying something once is tantamount to never saying it at all. People don't remember hearing things that they were told just last week.

Now comes intriguing new research on the importance of redundant communication. A study reported in the current (May 2011) issue of Harvard Business Review found that managers who deliberately repeat themselves are significantly more effective than managers who don't. The key word there is deliberately.

The researchers noticed that the effective managers were building redundancy into their communication plans. Even before they communicated the news the first time, they were planning how to do it a second and even a third time.

The pattern was especially pronounced among managers without formal authority. These days, that includes more managers than ever before, as companies form ad hoc project teams for special assignments and limited periods of time.

The study of six companies shows that 21 percent of managers without formal authority routinely sent redundant messages—for example, following up a face-to-face meeting or a telephone conversation with an email—while only 12 percent of managers with formal power did likewise, according to Paul Leonardi of Northwestern University and Tsedal Neeley of Harvard Business School.

The powerless managers got things done faster and with fewer hiccups, presumably as a result of the redundant messaging, the professors said. Meanwhile, managers with official power tend to rely on their authority. They apparently assumed that employees would just follow their directions, and they believed that communicating once was enough.

"We’re so bred to believe that clarity is the key to being a better communicator," said Leonardi. "The literature says pick the best medium for the [message], and anything else is wasteful. This research suggests that’s not true. You need to use multiple media.

"It’s not necessarily just about clarity. It’s about making your presence felt. Employees are getting pulled in many directions and reporting to lots of people and getting tons of communications. So how do you keep your issues top of mind? Redundancy is a way to do that."

For many of you, this will confirm your lingering suspicion and our intuition. You know from your personal lives the importance of repetition. After all, how many of us are content to hear our spouses say "I love you" only once?

If there is anything I have learned over the years, it is that people are not robots, and that business is all about people. As advertisers and politicians seem to have known all along, managers should repeat themselves. I say:  Managers should repeat themselves. I say . . .

 

Coming on Wednesday

Rogue Communication

 

©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

Be Slow to Understand—Be Very, Very Slow

by Thomas J. Lee

Most of our regular readers are successful business managers, and they, which is to say you—you regular reader, you—are smarter than the average dormouse. If you aren't necessarily a card-carrying member of Mensa, you certainly aren't a member of Densa, either.

What you probably don't realize is that your above-average intelligence—the sheer power of cognitive discernment that helped get you this far—is a problem for you. Yes, a problem.

That's because your intelligence interferes with your listening. It is quite a paradox, but it is true. Intelligent people have greater difficulty, not less difficulty, in listening to other people.

Why is that? By definition, intelligent people are quick to absorb and process information, and they think analytically and evaluatively.

Strictly as a quantitative measure, they can listen intelligently at the rate of 400 to 500 words per minute, perhaps even more, all while analyzing the message they are hearing and evaluating the speaker.

Meanwhile, the speaker is in the slow lane. He is probably speaking at 125 to 150 words a minute, or 175 to 200 words a minute if he is talking fast. The bottom line: Listeners are always faster than speakers, and smart listeners are especially fast.

That isn't good. It means you are probably missing some or perhaps even much of the robust information, the subtlety, the emotion, and the crosscurrents of what is being said. You're reading the headlines and maybe the first couple of paragraphs, and then you're psychologically turning to the comics page.

In coaching leaders, I nudge them toward what I call intellectual patience. Be slow to understand, I counsel. Be very, very slow. You will find yourself more reflective, more appreciative, and more nuanced, and therefore wiser than you otherwise would be.

Intellectual patience is just a predisposition of cautious, deliberate exploration and discovery. Imagine yourself walking in the dark, as if you have awakened in the middle of the night and are stumbling to the kitchen for a glass of water. Without a night light, you need to walk slowly, lest you trip over a child's toy on the staircase (as I once did, seriously). 

That is how you should listen. Be quiet. Pay rapt attention. Do not preoccupy yourself with judgments about the speaker or with your own list of things-to-do. Don't interrupt. Don't think of what you are going to say next. Just listen. Listen patiently, and let the speaker finish, even if you are busy. Enjoy the balm of silence on your psyche. Reflect before asking a good, thoughtful question, and then let silence work like yeast. Finally, given a choice between interpreting a message harshly or generously, let yourself be big.

Maybe, just maybe, your intelligence will get out of your way, and you will actually hear what the other person is trying to tell you. You may even understand and accept it.

 

Monday: Romance in the Office

(c) Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Quote / Unquote: Carl Jung on Causation and Accountability

 

Quote / Unquote is a feature that appears irregularly but frequently. It offers a simple, noteworthy quotation on some aspect of leadership, communication, or business. In most cases we also provide context, comment, or questions to stir discussion.

 

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Carl Jung (1875-1961) was a pioneering Swiss psychiatrist whose work has had an impact on virtually everyone who reads this blog. If you have ever taken a Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator profile, you have met the good Dr. Jung.

Jung's 1921 opus, Psychological Types, is the foundation of the MBTI profile. The MBTI, as most of you know, recognizes 16 general personality types based on binary data on each of four metrics: extraverted (E) versus introverted (I), intuitive (N) versus sensing (S), thinking (T) versus feeling (F), and perceiving (P) versus judging (J).

(For the record, I have taken the MBTI three times over a span of fifteen years, and each time my type is just slightly different. I am on the cusp between I and E, always extremely N, somewhat to the T side, and again on the cusp between P and J. My I/E and P/J scores waffle just a little. But because I am at the fulcrum of each, and the assignment of type is binary, it is enough to give me different scores.)

Jung was also a fountain of incisive, deep, Zenlike quips and quotes. It was he who said: "That which we resist persists." He also observed: "Your vision will become real only when you look into your heart. He who looks outward dreams. He who looks inward awakens." There are many others like these two.

I have long thought that business leaders especially can grow by reflecting on this little gem from Jung:

 

That which we do not bring to

consciousness appears in our lives as fate.

 

A quotation like this can seem elusive, ambiguous, airily theoretical. In the day-to-day rush of business it can seem irrelevant and even useless.

But take a moment to think about it. Devote some serious reflection to it, perhaps with a pen and a journal at hand. Ask yourself:

• What aspects of your professional life do you ascribe to fate or destiny? In what ways could you take accountability for them? How might you bring them to the surface?
• What aspects of your personal life do you ascribe to fate, or to luck, for better or for worse? In what ways should you throw a spotlight on them and take accountability for their presence?
• What aspects of our public and civic life do we tend avoid taking responsibility for? In what ways should we? What are the consequences of not?

What other questions might you ask? What insights of your own can you offer?

 

(c) 2011 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.

Edison Peña, Running In Defiance of 'Destiny'

 

by Thomas J. Lee

In need of a little inspiration today?

Look no further than Edison Peña, one of the Chilean miners trapped underground for two months. All the miners are paragons of endurance, to be sure. But among them, Peña stands apart: not only through the 69 days of imprisonment that he shared with the other miners, but in his own dauntless courage and in the sheer resilience of his own human spirit.

Yesterday this 34-year-old man ran the New York City Marathon, its 26.2-mile course wending through the five boroughs before ending in Central Park. Running a marathon is a big achievement for anyone. Running a marathon after training on 3-mile and 6-mile runs through dark tunnels a half-mile underground, with every reason to doubt his own survival and only a miner's lamp to light the way, is just this side of phenomenal.

For the first 17 days of the miners' ordeal, Peña did no running. There was little point, for there was little food and little hope of survival. He curled up in a fetal position and waited to die. But when the first drilling bore reached the miners and brought more food, he was able to recapture hope. So he did what a runner would do: he trimmed a pair of work shoes and began going for daily runs.

"I ran to forget I was trapped," he told the New York Daily News last week. "I became two people: the weak person who wanted simply to give up and the person who chose to be strong, to run and survive. Eventually, I chose to live."

Asked what he thought about during those runs in the mine, he offered a sentiment that could very well serve as a mantra on a beleaguered day for any of us: "What I thought about as I ran in the mine was that I was going to beat destiny. I was going to turn the tables on destiny. I was saying to that mine, I can outrun you. I'm going to outrun you. I'm going to run until you're just tired and bored of me. And I did it."

On hearing of his daily runs underground, marathon officials invited him to New York as their guest to ride in a pace car. He replied he would actually prefer to run in the marathon. He did just that. Though he needed an ice pack at mile 20, he finished more than an hour ahead of his goal to the cheers of thousands of spectators. The cheers were nice, but he was already on top of the world, quite literally.

There is a mighty lesson for all of us here. It is altogether too easy to prostrate ourselves on the doorstep of destiny, to tell ourselves that whatever our lot appears to be is meant to be. So let us take a little inspiration from Edison Peña and his fellow miners.

Let us stare down whatever destiny looks to have in store for us, and just say No thanks. Let us rise up and go for a run today, as if in miner's shoes through dark tunnels. Let us finally and defiantly cheat destiny of all its dark and dreary doomsaying, just as Edison Peña did, and one day we, too, will emerge to the cheers of throngs and taste the sweet sunshine of a different destiny, a destiny we create for ourselves.

Thank you, Señor Peña, for your inspiration to us all.

 

(c) 2010 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.

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Leadership Is All About Inspiring Change

 

Minding Gaps has been taking a few weeks of respite to rejuvenate, write, and plan. During our absence, we are reprising some of our own favorite posts from the past year. Today's post explores the myth that people refuse to change. We will return to this space with all-new essays on Monday.

— Tom      

 

by Thomas J. Lee

A year or so ago, a big-name chief executive of a big-name high-tech company was asked by The New York Times what he had learned through all his years in senior management. His answer startled and saddened me.

He replied, and I paraphrase, that he had learned an immutable fact of life: You cannot change people.

The response startled me because, in a curt phrase, this big-name CEO was all but abdicating the hard work of leadership. He was saying that he saw himself not as a leader—rising to the challenge of inspiring change—but as a manager, responsible for meeting deadlines and quotas and budgets.

The response saddened me because, after fifteen years of working in the vineyards of leadership and communication, I was meeting yet another senior executive who just didn’t get it. There are altogether too many of them. They give lip service to leadership and communication, and then they shrink themselves and their work to the petty tasks of administration.

Anyone in a position of visible responsibility in any organization—even a parent in a family—inevitably and invariably changes people every day, all day long. Every little thing the leader says or does has some impact, for better or for worse. Every comment and every behavior can be influencing, even inspiring. That is especially true for younger and newer people on the team.

I vividly remember my first weeks and months at the corporation I joined fresh out of graduate school. It is fair to say I was a little rough around the edges. But I was alert to any cultural cue that would enable me to fit in and feel comfortable.

Within days, I noticed that all the men in the headquarters office were exceedingly polite, that etiquette was in. Men held open the elevator doors and chivalrously pulled back chairs for women. No one used profanity. Everyone’s shoes were always polished. Men wore only gray suits with starched white shirts. Within days, I bought an etiquette book, another couple of suits, a half-dozen more white shirts, and another pair of black wing tips.

That is a banal example, to be sure. But it illustrates a young employee’s eagerness to adapt to the cultural environment. Leaders inevitably and invariably define and shape that environment.

The reality is that people change all the time (just try to find a treadmill or a stationary bike at your gym in January!), and leaders have an enormous, outsize impact on people. The wise leader appreciates that fact and earnestly accepts responsibility for influencing and even inspiring people.

You can’t change people? Nonsense. You cannot not change people.

  

(c) Copyright 2010 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.

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The Jiminy Cricket Test for Decisions

What is the minimal threshold for a good decision in your company?

How low is the bar set?

If managers often make decisions that set your organization on a course to do things that are dangerous or illegal or unethical, then it is set too low.

Just look at the litany of companies whose managers have made disappointing decisions: This year alone it has included such iconic names as Hewlett-Packard, BP, and Toyota. In recent years it has included Enron, HealthSouth, Tyco, and many others on a lesser scale.

Some of these decisions looked innocuous at the time, but they rocked the companies to their core. It goes to show you that decisions at any level of a company can ultimately cost billions of dollars, the confidence of investors and customers, and the good name of the enterprise.  

I believe every organization should put all its managers through rigorous training on how to make basic decisions that accord with responsible conduct.

Here is a simple template you can use. We call it the Jiminy Cricket Test for Decisions.

(If you were deprived of Walt Disney cartoons as a child, you may be wondering who Jiminy Cricket was. He was a dapper little guy who served as Pinocchio’s conscience. If you have to ask who Pinocchio was, you’ll just have to look it up.)

The idea behind the Jiminy Cricket Test is to hold every decision, no matter how small, to a set of clear minimal standards.

Here it is. Just get in the habit of asking yourself these six short questions before you say or do anything of consequence:

• Is it safe? If what you are about to say or do endangers anyone, now or in the future, it doesn't pass this test. If it encourages anyone to act dangerously or take unseemly risks, it doesn't pass this test. If it ridicules safety standards or procedures, it doesn't pass this test. If it relegates safety to anything other than your No. 1 concern, then it doesn't pass this test.
   
  
• Is it legal?  Ask a good attorney whether your comments and conduct comply with both the spirit and the letter of the law, here and in any other jurisdiction that is involved. Ask also whether your course of action respects everyone's legal rights. If not, don't do it. If you are unclear or uncertain, gain clarity and certainty before proceeding. If it “pushes the envelope,” you should have serious reservations.
   
  
• Is it ethical?  In other words, does it do right by all parties? Is it inherently honest and fair? Or, truth to tell, are you trying to trick or deceive anyone? Are you fully living up to all your obligations, explicit and implicit? Are you honoring the Golden Rule?
   
  
• Is it strategic?  Only now, after clearing hurdles on safety, lawfulness, and ethics, do we get to a standard business issue. By strategic, we simply mean “of or relating to strategy”—nothing more. But that’s enough. In most companies, altogether too many activities are undertaken that have little or nothing to do with the firm’s business strategy. Anything you are doing or managing should be connected to one or more components of your organization’s strategy. If it isn’t, question the need for it.
   
  
• Is it smart?  Does it have a foundation in factual research, and is it the consequence of rigorous thinking that frankly tests assumptions and looks for bias? Or is it the whim of an executive who is convinced he or she is always right? Does it reflect the advice of experts you have consulted? Does it incorporate all relevant data you have available?
   
  
• Is it wise? Does it look down the road to its likely consequences? Is it respectful of all constituencies and stakeholders? Does it reflect the values your company espouses? Does it take account of all the organization’s responsibilities and its full purpose? Is it farsighted rather than shortsighted? Is it noble? Does it make you proud to be doing the work you are doing for this organization?
  

That’s it in a nutshell. Just six short questions that every manager would do well to ask before saying or doing anything that matters.

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How BP Can Change Its Safety Culture: A Case Study in Leadership

A Special Report and Comment

BP’s new chief executive, Robert Dudley, states that his top priority is changing the company’s culture around safety. That’s a tall order. Behemoths the size and complexity of BP don’t change overnight.

Fortunately, Mr. Dudley has a remarkable, highly successful case study in his own company’s archives. He should dig out the musty file and look it over.

One of the companies that BP purchased in its heady 1990s expansion was Chicago-based Amoco Corporation, itself the product of a 1950s merger of Standard Oil Co. (Indiana) and the American Oil Co. of Baltimore. Indeed, Mr. Dudley cut his professional teeth at Amoco. He worked there from 1979 until BP acquired Amoco in 1998.

Amoco once faced a grave safety problem of its own. Through a comprehensive intervention, in which I played a role, that company dramatically changed its safety culture. If Amoco can do it, so can BP. It won't be easy, but it can be done.

Amoco's Safety Challenge

As a matter of public record, from 1986 to 1996, Amoco lost 121 lives of employees and contractors worldwide. That's an average of one death per month.

For most companies in most industries, such a rate of fatalities is unimaginable and intolerable. BP’s numerical death toll over the last five or six years is roughly similar, though BP is larger than Amoco was, so its rate is somewhat less.

For a long time, Amoco's management looked the other way. Eventually, however, the senior leadership got fed up with the drumbeat of fatalities. Larry Fuller, the company's change-minded CEO, finally declared that creating a new culture of safety was his No. 1 priority.

He formed a cross-functional team to address the issue. The team was headed by Richard Spies, who subsequently worked with Mr. Dudley in BP Russia. As an internal consultant, I lent support to the Amoco team. (I have never had a connection to BP.)

The first thing the team did was to examine the causes of all 121 fatalities. That was important, because oil industry lore held that many fatalities were inevitable due to the flammability and lubricity of its products.

As one executive told me, “You have to remember that almost everything we make is fully designed and intended to explode sooner or later. We just want it to explode inside an engine.”

The inevitability assumption was a balm to the conscience of executives. But it didn’t hold up to scrutiny. The team’s rigorous analysis showed that only a minority of the 121 fatalities worldwide were even the nominal result of explosions or fire. Most, by far, were actually the result of carelessness. Undoubtedly most employees were usually working carefully, but the tragic toll pointed to serious problems.

The Real Causes Come to Light

In fact, the analysis found the real culprits to be a pattern of haste, neglect, and flagrant disregard for safety. More than anything, there was a pervasive and wrong-headed culture that gave priority to production over people. The company never intended to create that culture. It just happened. 

Day in and day out, too many employees and contractors were failing to take routine safety precautions: attaching fall-protection equipment, tying down ladders, locking out and tagging out valves, buckling seat belts, insisting on hard hats and steel-toe shoes, respecting no-smoking areas, and even simply obeying traffic laws.

In focus groups with employees, we came across vivid anecdotal evidence that gave color and immediacy to the problem. The conclusion was inescapable. To altogether too many managers, other things mattered more than safety. A litany of their day-to-day decisions said so.

The analysis and its conclusions were bracing but not shocking. As a company, we had given only lip service to workplace safety. Our ongoing business conversation back then was all about exploration, production, and marketing. The prevailing message to employees, both explicit and implicit, was straightforward: Success was measured in dollars.

A Comprehensive Approach Was Essential

None of that would do any longer, and we knew it. Looking for solutions, we took a bold, comprehensive approach. In ways large and small, we set out to create a new culture that would truly put safety first. We were successful.

Words had to come first, but words alone would not suffice. In a three-page letter to staff signed by all the company’s top executives, senior management emphatically said that financial results would henceforth take a back seat to safety. The leadership had to be just that blunt; otherwise, employees would continue to believe the opposite. In a culture dominated by engineers, the company also appealed to an engineer’s ethic of process control. They imposed individual goals and plans for safety performance.

Then came resources. The company created a process-driven safety management system. Thousands of managers underwent training in the system, so that everyone was on board. It included an in-house investigative agency, modeled after the U.S. government’s National Transportation Safety Board. Our trained experts, deployed around the world, would speed to the site any serious mishap, fatal or not. They would determine the fundamental “root cause” and share it with management.

The final ingredient was the visible commitment of leaders. Employees wouldn’t believe the new culture until they saw it, so they had to see it, day after day after day.

Here, management pulled all kinds of levers. Executive promotions would rest heavily on safety records. All operations around the world were to stand down so that personnel could focus on safety issues. In a company that lived in meetings, every agenda of every meeting was henceforth to begin with discussion of workplace safety—even the meetings of the board of directors and the annual shareholders meeting. 

Many other interventions and policy changes reinforced the central message. Together, all these things sent a powerful, persuasive message that safety finally did matter more than anything else.

The Happy Result . . . Until Things Changed

In the months and years that immediately followed, the company's safety performance improved noticeably. Fatalities and injuries plummeted. Today, we can confidently say that somewhere, people are alive because of the work we did.

I left Amoco in 1997, prior to its acquisition by BP. For a while afterward (BP also acquired ARCO about the same time), the toll of fatalities for BP as a whole was approximately what Amoco alone had been experiencing in the 1980s and early 1990s. It continued declining for several years.

Then, something at BP changed. I don’t know what. It does appear to be systemic, as evidence of serious problems long predated the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe this spring.

Persistent issues with the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, a crisis on another Gulf of Mexico platform known as Thunder Horse, and the disastrous explosion at the Texas City refinery in 2005 are corroborative.

(Just last week, BP was fined $50.6 million for safety violations at the Texas City refinery in 2009, four years after the 2005 explosion that killed 15 workers. The company has also committed to spending $500 million on safety at Texas City alone.)

Plainly, the safety culture that Amoco went so far to establish in the late 1990s is long gone. It desperately needs to be brought back.

Recognizing and Applying a Best Practice

If, as former Shell USA president John Hofmeister maintains, the industry has “earned the right” to continue drilling in the Gulf of Mexico by dint of its 30,000 successful wells over the course of decades, it will absolutely require a culture that truly values safety above production. For the sake of human life, nothing else is more important.

Turning around the BP safety culture will plainly be a formidable challenge. It won’t happen soon or quickly. But, as Amoco’s experience convincingly shows, it can be done. Mr. Dudley should just ask around.

— TJL          

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Should Hewlett-Packard's Board Have Fired its CEO?

Hewlett-Packard’s board of directors demanded and received the resignation of CEO Mark V. Hurd last week after an internal investigation, prompted by a complaint of sexual harassment from a vendor, uncovered irregularities in his expense account.

The allegation of sexual harassment proved unfounded, and the amount of money in question for the expense reimbursement was reported to be between $1,000 and $20,000. Mr. Hurd said an assistant had prepared his expense vouchers, but he took responsibility and offered to reimburse the company for the difference. The board insisted he go.

By all accounts, Mr. Hurd was performing very well as chief executive of HP since 2005, when he took over from ousted CEO Carly Fiorina. Investors enjoyed an average annual total shareholder return exceeding 25 percent. Many employees were chafing, however, under his cost-cutting regime. Pay cuts were the order of the day even as the company was making a great deal of money.

A few more complicating details: Under terms of his contract, Mr. Hurd is walking away with a stipend of $12.2 million; counting stocks and options, his total package may approach $40 million. The company's employees are, for the time being, without a leader. Investors suddenly lost billions of dollars in valuation, perhaps temporarily, as the stock plummeted. The woman who filed the complaint turns out to have a checkered history, and she has stated publicly it was not her intent to have Mr. Hurd dismissed. Shortly before she filed the complaint, HP had decided not to renew her contract.

Here is a report from The New York Times that describes the board’s decision making. The article points out that the board was primarily concerned with public-relations damage control. Here is an Associated Press account, and here is another report, from Venture Beat, a Silicon Valley newsletter.

There are two schools of thought here.

One school is zero tolerance. It holds that the CEO must set the ethical tone for the entire organization. Any deviation from propriety—indeed, any appearance of impropriety—condones ethical laxity. This perspective argues that it’s unreasonable to hold other employees accountable for standards that senior executives only wink at. By this thinking, the board was fully justified in firing Mr. Hurd. Indeed, any other course of action would be unimaginable.

The other school of thought is minimal deviation. It recognizes that all people are imperfect, and it acknowledges ambiguity and complexity, so it expects rigid perfection from no one. It still expects leaders to set the moral example, but often in a gray cloud of uncertainty. By this thinking, the board should have taken into account the complexities of the situation. Instead of dismissing the chief executive, it might instead have imposed a penalty of some sort, taken the reimbursement, and perhaps responded in other ways as well, short of dismissal.

Jack Welch, the iconic CEO of General Electric in the 1990s, had the practice of using a 2 X 2 matrix for evaluating managers on both their demonstrated values and their business acumen.

For those managers in the northeast quadrant, who consistently both honored the values and performed well, Mr. Welch said the future was clear and bright: onward and upward. For those managers in the southwest quadrant, who did neither, the answer was equally obvious, if not so pleasant.

The difficulty came in the northwest and southeast cells: managers who did one but not the other.

Mr. Welch suggested that managers who honored the values but didn’t perform well should be given a second chance in a different role, perhaps even a third chance. If they consistently failed to perform, they would have to leave on that reason alone.

He further suggested that managers who performed well but ran roughshod over the values be counseled as to the importance of the values. If, over time, they continued to flout the values, then they, too, would have to leave for that reason alone, in spite of their good business performance.

In the case of Hewlett-Packard and Mark Hurd, one could argue that a serious financial penalty coupled with intensive values-based coaching might have served the company and its stakeholders better than outright dismissal.

Mr. Hurd’s friend Larry Ellison, founder and chief executive of Oracle, was quoted yesterday in The Times as essentially taking that point of view. He was critical of the Hewlett Packard board. But Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, professor of management at Yale University, argued just the opposite. He applauded the HP board's decision last week, though he also had harsh words for the contract that Mr. Hurd negotiated with the board.

What do you think? Why do you think the way you do?

Here are some questions to ponder:
 

• Have we created a kind of third rail in business, such that any chief executive demonstrating errant judgment is automatically dismissed, with a large payout to boot?
  
  
• Should the company's public image in a situation like this be the board's most important concern? If not, why not?
  
  
• Can we reasonably expect perfection from any leader?
  
  
• What ethical transgressions do justify a zero-tolerance policy? What issues require something less?
  
  
• What do you think of executive contracts that provide for substantial payouts on dismissal?
  
  
• Should the executive's business acumen and performance be taken into account here, at all?

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The Price of Losing Your Temper at Work

Three months ago in this space, we turned our attention to the place of emotion in business. The occasion for those remarks was another promise by the Chicago Cubs pitching ace, Carlos Zambrano, to control his emotions in the upcoming season.

Zambrano has always had both the blessing and the curse of an emotional powder keg deep inside him. When he keeps his temper under control, the emotion becomes a jet propulsion that gives the whole team a heroic intensity. The results can be phenomenal; in 2008 Zambrano became the first Cubs pitcher since the 1960s to throw a no-hitter.

But when Zambrano loses control of his temper, he explodes violently. He yells at everyone. He throws things. He kicks the furniture and appliances. He comes unglued and unhinged. These pyrotechnic displays infuriate and alienate everyone around him—his teammates, the fans, umpires, broadcasters, front-office staff, even his own family. No one likes them.

So at the start of this season, Cubs Manager Lou Pienella extracted a promise from Zambrano to keep his emotion in check. Zambrano went public with his commitment. Referring to his growing daughters, he said: “I want to change because everything I do is on TV. . . . My girls are big now, and I have to be a good example for them. That’s why I guarantee it.”

It took only three months for Zambrano to break his commitment. Last week, in a frustrating game against the crosstown rival White Sox, he let loose with a tantrum to end all tantrums. Piniella reacted calmly and responsibly. He told Zambrano to take a shower and go home. General Manager Jim Hendry told him to stay home until he could apologize. As of this writing, Zambrano is still at home pouting. 

Many of you can relate to this. Anyone who has suffered through a relationship, either personal or professional, with someone who frequently erupts like Zambrano knows just what it feels like to be on the receiving end of such rage. Both the ferocity and the unpredictability of the eruptions are exhausting and debilitating. The slightest, most innocent comment can ignite another explosion. Everyone’s natural reaction is to retreat, to stay out of harm’s way, to be as small and incidental as humanly possible. Of course, that’s no way to live, and it's certainly no way to work.

Explosive tempers are thankfully rare in the world of work, but they are out there. Probably all of us have felt the shrapnel of one or two—maybe more. It isn’t a pleasant experience, and it can be downright dangerous.

If you have an explosive temper, or if you have someone in your organization (especially in management) who does, you owe it to yourself and to the company to get some help promptly—today, not tomorrow, before the next volcanic eruption occurs.

Business can benefit from powerful emotion, but it has to be harnessed. Only when those powerful emotions are in gear for good can they do any good. They need to be kept in control as a positive force for positive good. When they get out of control, bad things happen.

I like emotion. It’s a terrific thing in business, truly. We just need to keep it working for us, and not let it conspire against us.

Update: Carlos Zambrano has agreed to undergo professional counseling. He has been suspended from the team until July 15, 2010. When he returns, he is expected to apologize to his teammates and the fans.

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Do Your Values Need a Stress Test?

A good friend of mine recently underwent a stress test, complete with an injection of thallium and twelve minutes on the treadmill. As he is somewhat overweight and travels frequently, our mutual friends and I feared a worrisome reading. But a few days later his physician called with good news. It appears that his cardiovascular system is in fine shape. We were all relieved.

Another good friend looks to be the picture of health. He is trim, energetic, happy, and fairly active. But he is the first to tell you he is actually not in such good physical condition. He holds a stressful position in senior management, and his blood pressure is very high. Frankly, he needs to find more time for rigorous exercise, and he could use a stress test.

Many companies are like these two men. Assumptions about them can belie their actual condition. They should have a checkup of their own to determine the health of their vital systems. Indeed, probably every company should undergo periodic stress tests to determine how healthful or unhealthful its cardiovascular system, in particular, is.

The cardiovascular system of a company can be thought of as its values and their day-to-day application, in word and in deed. The values are like oxygen-rich red blood cells coursing throughout the organizational body, informing and driving decisions and the conduct of business. A healthful company is enriched by the oxygen of its values. Its values are what they say they are. They give life to the company's promises to its stakeholders.

In the best companies, the stated values inform and drive decisions at every corner and cranny of the organization. People in these companies routinely consult the values, either naturally and intuitively, or deliberately and reflectively, so that they can be confident they are doing the right thing for the right reason, always.

In the worst companies, a kind of plaque has built up within the organizational veins. It is like the lipoproteins that clog arteries. The plaque constricts the flow of blood—the nominal values, you will remember—to the arms and legs of the corporate body.

The situation is like atherosclerosis, only of values. In these companies, the “oxygen” never reaches the feet and fingertips. So day-to-day decisions lack the lifeblood of values. Often, the wrong thing is done, or things are done hit-and-miss without regard to values. The values are regarded as an impediment to good performance, not as leverage for good performance.

The very worst of these companies are just waiting for a life-threatening coronary. They are the next iterations of Enron, Lehman Brothers, HealthSouth, Washington Mutual, and Tyco. Unless companies in this condition get quick attention, it is just a matter of time before their gritty, actual values catch up to their pretty, stated values. They are disasters, catastrophes, just waiting to happen.

If your organization has taken the time and gone to the trouble of articulating its values, it should take the time and go to the trouble of stress testing its values. It should find out whether its values truly are informing and driving its decisions, conduct, communication, policies, and relationships, which together define the organization.

You may find out they are, and you are in good shape. On the other hand, you may find out you are running a real risk of a heart attack. Either way, you may not be in the condition that you appear to be. It's worth your while to find out.

While you're at it, call your doctor and arrange for a complete physical exam, too. After all, you just never know what's around the next corner.

We will be happy to talk with you about designing a stress test for your 

organization's values. Just call us at +1-847-247-2241.

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Query: "No One Tells Me Anything Anymore"

A day before he became prime minister of Britain last week, David Cameron set a disarming and wishfully candid tone for his future leadership. A reporter asked him if the Conservative Party, which he leads, was making any progress cobbling together a coalition government. Cameron replied: “I don’t know. No one tells me anything anymore.”

Perhaps he was being coy, but as prime minister he will learn the truth of his own statement. As anyone who has ever run anything knows, it is indeed lonely at the top, precisely because so few people confide in you, and because so many people want to influence you. Everyone, it seems, has his own agenda.

You know that, don’t you? Regardless of whether you are leading a small team or a gigantic company or even just yourself, you know that to be true.

Take a few moments and reflect on your own leadership. Ask yourself some reflective, penetrating questions about your foundation of facts:

• How do you know the things you regard to be true?
  
  
• How impartial and objective are your sources of information?
  
  
• Is it even possible, in your position, to make sure you have accurate, complete, and timely information? If so, how?
  
  
• Are you more concerned with "getting the message out" than with "getting the information in" on which to base your thinking?
  
  
• How does your judgment depend on correct information? What happens to your judgment when your information is incorrect?
  
  
• Assuming you have access to valid information, in what ways does your mind interpret and misinterpret it before you make a judgment on the basis of it?
  
  
• Being brutally honest with yourself, how often do you screen out information that doesn’t comport with your biases and preconceptions? How do you modify information to fit your sense of the social environment, your own experiences, and your expectations? What are the consequences of all that?

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15 Alarm Bells of Dysfunctional Communication in Business

Short of an exhaustive audit, there's really no quick and simple means of objectively evaluating a company's business-strategy communication for employees. Still, it's important to try. So just how can you assess the clarity, credibility, and coherence of communication around business strategy and priorities?

One way is to look for signs of dysfunction. It isn't pretty, but it tells you what needs attention.

Here are fifteen alarms to keep an eye out for. Each is a flashing red light. If you see any of them in your organization, you have work to do. If you see more than a few, you have lots of work to do. If you see most or all of them, you may want to run for the hills.

Alarm No. 1: The terms "leadership" and "management" are used interchangeably. There's actually a big difference between them, though senior people often wear both hats. Moreover, the difference affects the communication for each. Management concerns itself with performance to standards. Control and authority are paramount; deadlines and budgets are common metrics. Leadership, on the other hand, is about inspiring change through people. While framework and direction are important, the real leverage for change is the focus, curiosity, passion and courage of the troops. It follows that communication for management is directive and commanding, and communication for leadership is enlightening, inspiring and empowering. Because the distinction is so often overlooked, companies commonly default to directive, commanding communication that undermines leadership and stymies innovation and change. That's a loud siren of its own.

Alarm No. 2: Senior management is oblivious to its own implicit, unintended communication. Everyone knows that "actions speak louder than words" and that "the facts speak for themselves." Yet few companies regard communication with employees as anything beyond words and numbers. Do they honestly think employees have blinders on? A company's internal-communication process should concern itself not just with the "official truths" (verbal messages, as articulated by leadership) but also with the "ground truths" (perceptions and perceived reality expressed by policy decisions, visible behaviors of executives and senior managers, cultural forces, the organization's evident purpose, etc.). Otherwise, the company's credibility with its own people will be highly questionable.

Alarm No. 3: There's a tendency for positive spin on negative news. Let's leave spin to the politicians and their handlers. In business, we are who we are. More than anyone else, our employees know it. That's the simple truth. When bad things happen to good companies, good companies acknowledge it. They own up to their own responsibilities, and they get busy. They don't try to pull the wool over everyone's eyes. That's why good companies are good companies—and it's also one reason why good companies are good places to work.

Alarm No. 4: Upward information is stifled and choked. How often did your mother say you had two ears and one mouth for a reason: to listen twice as much as you talk. Why then do we continue to think of communication as the dissemination  of information and ideas, not as listening? Why do we think of good communication skills as the ability to persuade, not the inclination to listen? When was the last time your senior leadership team fanned out on a Listen and Learn tour of your facilities? Face it, ground-level personnel usually have a wealth of information about production difficulties, customer preferences, and their own frustrations. Ignore it at your peril.

Alarm No. 5: Your executives and senior managers think they know everything they need to know about communication. In my experience, few do, and the exceptions prove the rule. Most executives and senior managers would do well to undergo advanced training in organizational and leadership communication and then see to it that all managers and supervisors have a similar experience. The time and money invested will pay for itself within weeks and then for months and years afterward, many times over.

Alarm No. 6: Communication is an afterthought, not a forethought. Stephen Covey taught you to begin with the end in mind, remember? In business, that means crafting a strategy with an eye on its execution. That in turn means preplanning the communication of any strategy or strategic initiative. Never leave communication to an afterthought. Incorporate an integrated, strategic communication plan within your overall strategic plan. Devote the resources (time, money, attention) to it at the front end, not the back end.

Alarm No. 7: Little or no effort is made to educate employees on the industry and competition. We know from focus groups and surveys that employees everywhere want to contribute more to their company's success. To do so intelligently, they need more information about the industry and the competition. Why not share it? Doing so has a couple of side benefits: It reflects confidence and trust in people, and it creates more readiness for change. All around, it's a win-win.

Alarm No. 8: Silos predominate, and they have missiles. Companies that foster or tacitly condone a kind of sibling rivalry among staff departments or line operations (such as manufacturing plants, sales regions, or service teams) are asking for trouble. Information will invariably be hoarded, and other units will deliberately be kept in the dark. Worse, an environment of hostility will take root. Customers will notice, and they won't like it.

Alarm No. 9: Acronyms and buzzwords obscure reality. Everyone knows this drill. The language of business is buzzwords. But don't be too quick to condemn all of them out-of-hand. Some are helpful as shorthand for complex programs, products or initiatives. The difficulty arises when acronyms and jargon intentionally obscure or even distort reality. Remember, you can't fool employees for very long, and you shouldn't ever want to. They are on your team, aren't they?

Alarm No. 10: Useful information is withheld from employees. Just as you wouldn't mislead employees, you should have no need or desire to keep them in the dark. Think of strategic information as currency for growth. Its rapid exchange increases everyone's intelligence. In turn, intelligence increases alignment, and alignment makes customers happy. One more thing: If you keep useful information from ground-level employees, you can expect them to do likewise—from you.

Alarm No. 11: People are doing lots of non-strategic work. Here's another red flag. If your business vision, strategy, and goals are well-understood and widely accepted, then virtually everyone should spend their days and weeks on strategic challenges. If people are doing lots of non-strategic work, either they don't have a full appreciation of the strategy and its attendant priorities, or their time isn't being well-managed.

Alarm No. 12: Your company relies on cascading to "get the word out." There are two things you need to remember about cascading: (1) It doesn't work in organizations of any real size, and (2) it tricks you into thinking it does work. Better to disseminate vital information and messages by group meetings, group voice mail, and group email in one or two steps. Use managers and supervisors to flesh out the implications on day-to-day work and to listen, then listen some more, and finally to really listen (did we say listen?) to rank-and-file employees.

Alarm No. 13: Employees complain about the latest "program of the month." This is a real red flag, and it's a common one. A revolving door of management programs suggests a skittish leadership, eager to jump on every bandwagon that rolls into town, and lacking strategic ballast of its own. How can any company develop intensity of strategic focus when its eyes are jumping from one thing to the next every few weeks? It can't, and without focus, it cannot achieve lasting success.

Alarm No. 14: Publications or web sites gloss over hard reality. If your company magazine or plant newsletter has loads of personal or marginally strategic material (bowling scores, articles on unusual hobbies, classified ads, pictures of the summer picnic, service anniversaries), you're missing a terrific strategic opportunity and reinforcing secondary concerns and priorities. There's a place for all that stuff, but it's by pull (i.e., something that employees seek it out, perhaps through a web portal), not push (i.e, something sent to everyone). Use the push media for business issues, challenges, and priorities. While you're at it, call a spade a spade. Talk openly about a competitor's strategic advantages. After all, that's how you talk to your peers in management, isn't it? Why should ground-level employees be any different?

Alarm No. 15: Managers communicate mainly by email, even to colleagues in the same office a few steps away. Email has its worthy uses, but it should never be a crutch or a substitute for routine face-to-face conversation and dialogue. Take an otherwise sane, decent human being (even an engineer!), put him behind a computer, and he can morph into a cyberpath. The quasi-anonymity afforded by our silicon cocoons has an effect not unlike road rage. Simple but important mitigating effects of facial expression, tone, humor, hand gestures and such disappear. Words lose their roundness, and they become harsh. Relationships suffer. Trust, respect and dignity go out the window. Is that what you want?

All these alarms are actually dysfunctional syndromes. They exact a real toll on your organization and its prospects for breakthrough achievement.

To the extent any company brooks them, it erodes its own shared vision and common purposes, it opens itself to turf wars and infighting, it becomes subject to cynicism and denial throughout the organization, and it can paralyze itself with fear. At best, people will just go through the motions, lacking any real commitment to the company's future.

So there you have it: fifteen signs of corporate dysfunction. Even one or two of them require your attention. A handful requires your urgent attention.

 

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Onions for Toyota and the Chicago News Media

Orchids and Onions is an occasional feature offering encomiums for laudable decisions or noble behavior, especially in challenging circumstances, and criticism for poor decisions or untoward behavior. We’ll bestow orchids on people or organizations that are doing or trying to do the right thing. Onions will go to people or organizations that are doing the wrong thing or just behaving heedlessly.

We inaugurated the feature on January 15 with an orchid to Google. Today’s column marks our very first onions, one to Toyota Motor Company and the other to the Chicago news media.

Toyota Motor Company has been so good and so successful for so long, it is especially regrettable to see it stumble in the recent series of car recalls. This is the company, after all, that founded lean manufacturing, not as a dictum or directive from senior management, but rather as an inclusive culture of attention to detail, which evolved and percolated up from ordinary employees who were determined to build the best car they could.

But bad things do happen to good companies, as they have happened to Toyota. The best companies prove their worthiness by responding to product issues with sincerity and gravity.

Toyota has stumbled not once, not twice, but three times and counting, going back to last autumn, when it pooh-poohed concerns about accelerators. Its published remarks have appeared intended to restore sales as quickly as possible, even at the expense of continuing danger for drivers and passengers of their cars.

The choice of executives to speak for the company has been clumsy, too: the U.S. sales manager instead of the corporate chief. Even comments overtly aimed at assuaging the public’s hostility are ham handed, as when it says that “stopping production is never an easy decision.” Of course it isn’t, except when the alternative is to continue producing cars that may have fatal flaws. Then it is an easy decision—or it should be, anyway.

Frankly, we were expecting more from Toyota.

•          •          •

Chicago’s newspapers are famous for their hard-nosed reporting and bare-knuckled competition. The local radio and television reporting usually isn’t bad, either.

This is the city of The Front Page, written by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, both of them onetime reporters at the old Chicago American. It is the home of the Billy Goat Tavern, a greasy spoon and saloon frequented by crusty reporters where, one morning years ago, gangsters left the lifeless body of an unfortunate mark on the doorstep. It’s the city of the late, legendary reporters Mike Royko and Len O’Connor, who railed against both local outfits, the mob and the machine.

Many of Chicago's best journalists were products of rigorous training for young reporters at the now-shuttered Chicago News Bureau, which for decades fed basic news to all the city's newspapers and broadcast stations. Its motto for reporters: "If your mother says she loves you, check it out."

Now newsrooms everywhere have been struggling through tough times, but Chicago’s media seemed to be enduring and proving their worth with solid reporting leading up to last week's primary election. (Note to readers outside the United States: American primary elections nominate candidates to run against each other in general elections.)

Alas, they all missed one thing: a candidate who is a pawnbroker with a rap sheet and enough cash from dubious sources to pour $2 million into his own campaign.

As fate would have it, this particular candidate won his party’s nomination for Illinois lieutenant governor, nominally the No. 2 position in state government and a heartbeat away from the governor's office. By law, he would run in tandem with the incumbent governor in the general election next November.

Unfortunately, voters first learned of the man's arrest record (for threatening his girlfriend, a prostitute he met in a massage parlor, with a knife to her throat, among other things) two days after the primary election. Chicago's legendary reporters had to be embarrassed. They hadn't lived up to their legend.

Of course, voters were aghast. If the pawnbroker remained on the ballot, serious voters would have no choice in the general election next November. The other party would win a lopsided victory for the governor's office.

The pawnbroker, a deze and doze kind of guy, first insisted he wouldn’t step aside. After a few days, some powerbrokers talked sense into him, and he resigned from the November general-election ballot.

Still, the blunder remains. Chicago’s fine news media didn’t live up to their legacy. Let’s hope their collective oversight doesn’t betoken the future of Chicago journalism.

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Trust and Teams

Let’s assume that healthy teams are essential for the collaborative thinking and cooperation on which the execution of your business strategy depends. Is that fair?

If so, let’s take it a step further to posit that internal social cohesion is necessary for the health of teams. Is that fair as well?

Now let’s take one more step. Would you agree that trust is essential to the social cohesion? That, in the absence of trust, the cohesion is just not going to develop?

If we’re still together on this line of reasoning, I have a few questions for you.

• In your organization, what are the enemies of trust? What eats away at trust?
  
  
• What are the obstacles and barriers to building trust?
  
  
• To what extent are the fear of rejection, the fear of censure, and the fear of condemnation among employees obstructing and eroding the trust you need for the sake of teams?

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Query: Actualizing Your Actual Vision

Appearing irregularly but not infrequently, Query is a short, simple, and hopefully powerful feature. It consists of a single question, or perhaps two or three—or four, or five (sometimes we can’t help ourselves)—closely related questions.

That’s it. Nothing more. It is intended to ignite or reignite a flame of introspection, reflection, exploration, and reinvention.

We won’t belabor the point. We won’t build an elaborate context. We won’t try to manage your thinking. All we want to do is start or restart some deeper thinking about your role as a leader, your efforts to engage people, and the effectiveness of your communication.

As you wrestle with each particular question, also ask yourself why we're posing it and what it means for your impact, influence, and inspiration as a leader.

• Setting aside for the moment your enterprise’s official vision, what is it that you and your colleagues are truly working to achieve? What do you want to leave behind when you retire or sell?

• Why isn’t this actual vision your official vision?

• What are you doing today, tomorrow, and this week to make your actual vision a reality?

• What obstacles and impediments are in the way? What is slowing you down?

• How are you overcoming those obstacles and impediments?
  
  

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Your Leadership Depends on Their Conversation About You

Every workplace is a conversation. The nature of the conversation—its content, its tone, its energy—reflects the degree of engagement or disengagement of the employees.

The conversation is about the organization, its purpose, and its leadership. To the extent the conversation understands and appreciates the nobility of the organization and of its leadership, the employees will be inclined to follow the lead of leaders.

If and when the conversation cannot find the nobility, or if and when the conversation determines that the supposed nobility is a lie, the employees will be disinclined to follow the lead.

It’s pretty much that simple.

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The Six P-E-O-P-L-E Principles for Good Meetings

Yesterday in this space we cited some ominous data on the number of meetings in a typical business day and on the percentage of a typical manager’s time devoted to meetings. The figures were frightening but not particularly surprising. (Just scroll down for that post.)

Today, I want to share with you my simple acronym and mnemonic for remembering the six essential characteristics of good business meetings. If you, as a team leader or a department head or a plant manager or even a chief executive, regularly insist on meeting all six of these principles, your staff meetings will command everyone’s interest and participation.

A note of clarification: By a meeting, I am referring to any scheduled gathering of three or more persons, typically colleagues, even if “scheduled” means arranged a moment ago. Ideally, the definition of a meeting would also include reference to an agenda. In practice, however, some spur-of-the-moment meetings don’t have an agenda. We’ll talk about that in a moment.

The acronym is easy to remember. It is PEOPLE. It works like this:

P is for purposeful. Every meeting should have a purpose. The purpose of a meeting should drive its time, its place, its agenda, and the selection of its participants. Avoid perpetuating any meeting held for no reason but habit, the fact that it has always been held on this day and at this time. If the purpose of a meeting isn’t clear, important, and acceptable to everyone in attendance, then it’s up to the leader to make it clear and establish its importance or to question the value of the meeting.

E is for engaging. A meeting is a gathering of sentient, thinking human beings—not robotic automatons. It presumes that participants have something of value on their mind to share: an experience, perhaps, or an observation or a creative suggestion or even an impertinent question. If the supposed purpose of a meeting is simply and only to disseminate information at or to people, then engaging participants isn’t important. But if that’s the case, the meeting itself probably isn’t necessary, either. You could phone it in.

O is for organized. Here is where the agenda comes in. The best meetings have a thoughtful agenda that reflects their purpose and their necessity. An agenda should be noteworthy for the alignment of its topics with the strategic intent of the organization, the inclusion of topics that are important to the mission and strategy, and the exclusion of topics that are trivial or tangential. Even if the meeting is quickly organized, it is still worthwhile to scribble down an agenda.

P is for productive. Meetings should drive toward consensus, toward decisions that everyone can support. No one but the chief executive—and sometimes not even the chief executive—gets his way or her way all the time. But after a decision is reached, everyone in the organization should have the maturity and the loyalty to get behind the decision 100 percent. It isn’t necessary, and often it isn’t even possible or prudent, for a decision to be reached and announced at every meeting. But every meeting should plainly be headed in that direction.

L is for leader led. Even on broadly democratic management teams, someone should be responsible for the meeting. All of us can remember attending meetings that got out of control, or that devolved into endless bickering and dickering, and none of us wants to go there again. The leader should draft the agenda, make sure the meeting starts and ends on time (incidentally, the only way to start and end meetings on time is to start and end meetings on time), build the momentum and impetus toward a decision, and generally meet the expectations for the meeting.  

E is for efficient. Meetings are huge drains of an organization’s time. They should be kept as short as possible, but no shorter. All appropriate background information should be circulated beforehand. Presentations should be prepared and rehearsed and quite possibly taped and posted on an internal web site beforehand, so that the meeting itself can focus on discussion, deliberation, and decision making.

Three special notes:

I’ll surely be dismissed as an irrelevant crank when I say that boards and committees whose only reason for being is cosmetic, legalistic, or technical should be reconsidered and either abandoned or reconstituted and rejuvenated. Really, their hollow core isn’t fooling anyone.

Also, after a couple of years of the increasing use of even long meetings by online connection, I am growing more skeptical about the ethic of relying heavily on GoToMeeting and its kin. Short or perfunctory meetings are fine online. But there’s something about face-to-face contact that inspires trust and confidence and therefore a following. Eventually, people will rediscover that. I say the sooner the better.

Finally, for quick meetings of less than 15 or 20 minutes, and for participants whose work is primarily in an office, consider holding meetings in a corridor or place where there are no tables and chairs. People sit too much all day long anyway. By standing, they will be more energetic, more participative, and more alert.