Tag Archives: Leadership

On Leadership

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I love to read about innovation, but there aren’t a lot of books specifically about innovation, so I also read about management theories and best practices. Any book on management and most books on innovation will inevitably talk about leadership. As good management doesn’t really mean leadership. However, bad management always mean bad leadership or a lack of leadership.

A few things stick out in my mind when I think about leadership. The first is a clear vision. Where a vision directs the team on where the organization is going and what it is trying to be. This vision is something that the members of that organization can look to whenever there are questions of right/wrong or priorities. It allows people to move beyond the typical office politics, because those never help with achieving the vision.

The second is clear transparent communication. In some cases this is communicating the vision, but in more important cases this is communicating how and why things are going side ways. For example, when I was working at AMD, there was clear communication about our current financial positioning requiring lay-offs to “right size” the business. Now, the execution of those lay-offs and the fact that there were more than one, wasn’t exactly the best leadership. However, the executive team took ownership of the bad situation and ensured the entire team knew what was happening. Furthermore, the executive team was able to point to a vision of what AMD was and use that to rally the team around. In fact, later that year I used the organization’s vision to lead a number of strategic planning meetings to shift where people were focusing work.

The third item that great leaders drive is a culture and taking ownership of their organizations culture. In Ben Horowitz’s book, Who are What You Do he discusses how a manager’s promotion decisions can impact the culture of the organization. In the book, he specifically talks about a sales executive that, apparently, had a habit of telling lies. Some of them small, but some of them were told to his managers and customers. This resulted in unhappy customers. Unfortunately, this sales exec was promoted, which then lead to an understanding to that lying is acceptable for people to get ahead.

In organizations that have poor leadership, typically the three above items are all missing. The members of the organization will fill the lack of communication with their imaginations and spend a great deal of time discussing what could or is going to happen.This leads to disgruntlement within the organization and loss of productivity. It will lead to your best people leaving.

One of the people in the agile community I’m apart of on Linked In would say that this is a dysfunctional organization. In those cases you have two options, either figure out a way to fix the organization from the inside or leave. In the case of AMD and me, I ultimately left, but partially was for personal reasons and partially because the organization wasn’t in the best of shape after the lay-offs. I’m really happy that AMD has righted its ship and is doing much better now.

I think that every person of an organization should reflect on how their management team is behaving. Do they have a vision? Are they following that vision and actively trying to meet it? Are they forthright with their communication? Do they obfuscate when they communicate and allow employees to fester and stew about things? Do they promote a culture that you believe is a healthy culture that you are proud to work in? Do you have a good group of people you work with in spite of the culture the management has put in place? Finally, do you think that you have the ability to address the dysfunction in the organization if you think that you do, in fact, have bad leaders?

Do you work in an organization with bad leaders? What are you planning on doing?

Book Review: Why So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders

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Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?: (And How to Fix It)Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?: by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book does a fantastic job outlining all the ways men fail as leaders. Let me back up. This book isn’t a man hating book. Its goal is to ensure better leadership at any company. The way to do this, isn’t to just promote women, any woman. The way to do this, is to scrutinize everyone the way that women are scrutinized. Because, the data, and this book brings receipts, shows that women are better leaders.

So why are women better leaders? Well, in general women are less narcissistic in fact men are 30% more likely to be a narcissist than women. Second, men are more likely to be psychopaths, about 50% more likely, in fact. Furthermore, while in the general population about 1% of people are psychopaths, 1 in 5! Senior leaders are psychopaths and 1 in 3! Are narcissists.

Most of this book goes on to outline the failings of male leadership, because of the ways that narcissists are horrible leaders. Similarly for psychopaths. The more interesting part, though, is where the author talks about the benefits of women leadership and how that is associated with higher EQ (emotional intelligence). Both narcissists and psychopaths have very low EQ which results in poorer performance. What the author argues for, are leaders with high IQ and EQ. Women are more likely to have higher EQ than men (by about 20%). There are no significant differences between the genders for IQ, which means on the whole women are better for leadership roles because of their higher EQ.

There are a lot of reasons why we don’t pick for high EQ and one of those reasons is “confidence” really perceived confidence. Another is charisma, where male charisma is desirable and often female charisma is ignored or misunderstood.

The book, sadly, doesn’t offer as much in the way of how to fix it as it claims in the title. There are a few sections. First ask questions that can identify if someone is a narcissist. Ask questions to figure out if someone is a psychopath. Then don’t hire them. The other major innovation the book offers is using structured scored interview questions. This will create a mechanism to compare apples to apples rather than wildly different interview questions.

So, I’m disappointed on the “how to fix it” portion. Hopefully the author will include a section at the end with specific links to questions. I know there are reference and end notes, but putting together a rubric that can more easily be applied would be a great way to improve this and allow people to really see what Manpower uses to fix this problem.

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Innovation Isn’t Just a Buzzword

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It’s rather unfortunate that everything has to be an innovation these days. Even worse, is that for a business to be effective, it seems they must drive disruptive innovations. Innovations are simply inventions that have been successful in the market, those inventions might actually business model changes that have been successful in penetrating the market. I personally find that looking at innovation as a framework to analyze business pressure to be extremely interesting. I did this today in an interview and it felt really good as I was able to create context around changes impacting the health insurance industry.

Several years ago I wrote about the 4 types of innovation, Incremental, Modular, Architectural, and Radical. This is a bit different than the framework that Christenson argues, since he only looks at 2 types, Incremental and Disruptive. I believe that disruptive encapsulates both Architectural and Radical. Architectural changes are business model innovations while making a very similar product but one that significantly undercuts existing businesses or creates a new market. While Radical innovations creates a new market but also attacks existing customers, through a new business model and a completely different type of product. Think of a fan competing against an air conditioner window unit, while central air is an architectural change for the window unit.

da9cf-typesofinnovation

I believe that this framework is just as useful for businesses to analyze their environment as Porter’s 5 Forces because it forces businesses to confront the disruptive innovations that they might have overlooked otherwise. Without using this framework it is likely that businesses would ignore the new entrants force as they don’t feel that those businesses will ever compete with them. However, based on historic evidence those entrants that have a different business models or a different metrics for their performance eventually supplant incumbents. I believe that this type of analysis should be conducted annually or bianually as many industries and markets have continually increasing uncertainty and faster rates of change than historically.

What should a manager manage?

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Managers should not be managers of people, they must manage processes. Managers should be leaders of people not managers of people. Managing people by watching them closely is not typically a very effective method to ensure that work is completed. Micromanagement breeds mistrust between employee and manager. Through managing the quality of the processes the manager is able to increase the likelihood of success of their people.

All work is a process. Even if there doesn’t appear to be a process if the work is to be fully completed there are a series of steps that must be completed. It doesn’t have to be a good process, a repeatable process, or particularly effective but if the work is completed it followed a process. Furthermore, if more multiple people do the same type of work without a clearly defined process it’s likely that there will inconsistent results to their work. A manager owns the overall output of all the work of their employees. If the work is consistently subpar or employees have a difficult time picking up the way to do the work that is expected of them, this is the responsibility of the manager to address. It doesn’t matter how amazing the employees are, they could have been consistently excelling in a previous, if the processes are terrible those employees will not succeed.

Not every type of work can effectively be managed through traditional software. For example, software and technology development in both these are “knowledge” activities that unlikely would benefit from a highly structured process. In these cases there are two things that help manage the process. First creating a regular process of checking in, managing what work the developers should be doing, and working to eliminate roadblocks – in software this is Agile software development. Second you create a standard process to feed in consistent data into the truly creative process and consistent outputs so that the consumers of the work are able to use the output of the creative process effectively in their work.

To manage the processes managers need to equip their employees and themselves with tools to do root cause analysis, conduct structured problem solving, and rigorous process improvement. Managers need to take ownership of the end to end process, the data their employees use to complete their work, and the quality of the results. It is important that this becomes the norm as it will switch blame from people, who generally want to do the right thing, to the process and how work is completed.

This is not to say that whenever people deviate from the agreed upon process that the manager shouldn’t address that or if people still fail to meet expectations while working in the process that they can’t be fired. However, leading employees to identify broken processes, supporting them in fixing them, and providing tools to do so becomes the role of the manager rather than micromanaging their employees.

Strategy and Business Management

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As I mentioned in my Business and Silver Bullets article, there are a lot of different approaches to managing your business, or at least a portion of your business. None of these approaches are easy to implement and it seems that there’s a bit of a revolving door around what leadership approach is the best for a given business. Furthermore, it’s troubling to me that organizations are looking at initiatives like Lean and Six Sigma as only operational improvement opportunities. As I’m reading through how Business Architecture works, it’s obvious to me that many of the organizational deployments of LSS have failed in reaching their full potential. I saw it at Samsung, AMD, and I’m skeptical of the full reach I’m going to have at Regence. It’s not a failure of the individuals deploying it or of a given leader, it’s a failure of the full organization to accept that changes need to happen. Organizations need to integrate approaches like LSS into their core strategic planning process. Otherwise those methodologies will only impact a limited area and won’t appear to have a holistic approach to making changes to an organization.

From my experiences Lean and Six Sigma methodologies can indicate the need for organizational re-alignment. These require real change with serious effort to implement those changes. In many cases those are outside the scope of the project facilitator, the leader of the process improvement center of excellence, and likely the owner of the processes. It’s got to come from an executive sponsor. They have to be able to provide the organizational courage to make real changes to an organization. Through these tools it’s possible to identify redundancies and areas where organizations require massive change.

Why don’t organization implement these changes? Too many priorities is likely one problem. Another is that these changes are hard and unless they are well versed in Lean or organizational structures, they won’t understand why the changes are fundamental to continued success of an organization. They may not understand the changes because they weren’t involved in the redesign process intimately enough. Finally, it might also be that these changes are bottoms up recommendations and not top down.

I believe this is why Business Architecture eventually was a created as a discipline. I believe in organizations that are truly Lean that these types of roles are not needed. Simply because the bottoms up approach allows the leaders to focus on different things especially since a true Lean organization is always customer centric. In organizations that there is a great deal of legacy behavior and entrenched management fiefdoms, it might be a requirement to go through an organization like Business Architecture to give the true sense of ownership to the leaders. It makes the bottoms up recommendations that come from the BA team seem like it’s a top down approach that is sanctioned by all of leadership. It let’s people see that clearer tie between the different organizations in a way that a lot of Lean work doesn’t. It’s designed to be holistic not something grown into the whole over time.

This leads to a different method for developing strategy than what a lot of Lean practitioners utilize. Business Architecture focuses on the current capabilities and works to align the strategy from there. Lean starts with the 5 year vision and goals and figures out how to align existing projects and improvement efforts to enact those goal, through providing a metric for the person doing the work on the ground.

I think that these business management approaches are both valid, I’m really biased towards Lean, but I do believe that in many organizations Business Architecture is likely required. It leaves the control a bit more in the leadership rather than the Lean approach. I believe they both can impact strategy in an effective manner, but it’s likely that BA will be more tightly coupled from the start than many Lean initiatives.