Using the stage…

I’m paraphrasing something that
Simon Cowell (the one who’s the real music industry pro on American Idol)  said to an early contestant:

You do not seem to be taking advantage of using this stage to perform for millions of people.  You are acting more like this is a try-out than a performance.

I got to thinking about how people go about communicating, presenting, and behaving at work, and I think this is such an important point:

Are you performing when it counts?

…Or  are you just presenting, clarifying, and getting through the information?  Are you  defensive — like this is a try-out or a test you need to pass?  Or are you really owning it and using the opportunity to its full advantage?

It’s a valuable insight:

Think of any communication as an opportunity to perform.

And I don’t mean a shallow, disingenuous performance.  Or one that is data and quality free.

I mean a performance that is compelling because you really care about it, you invest in how you will present not just what you present, because it matters to you personally to have an impact.

Make something happen

Own the Outcome, not just the communication.

A good way to think about this is, what would you do differently if you were taking responsibility for the outcome and the actions this communication drives, not just the transmission of the information?

To turn a communication into a performance, you need to think about not only what you want to communicate in terms of the content, but how you will capture and hold their attention.

• How will you motivate, interest or excite them?
• What is the difference that you want this communication to make?
• How will people’s point of view be altered if you succeed?
• What will they do differently?
• What will they remember about the topic? About you?
• How will they be entertained or bored?

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This is really one of those things that sets high achievers apart.

They have the ability to inspire others with their ideas – to cause motion and action with their words.  They invest in the performance.

Here are some examples:

Performing a product roadmap presentation

If you are presenting a product roadmap recommendation, your goal is to share the information clearly. You can show timelines, technology choices, product feature additions, costs, competitive data, etc.

Get people excited.

But If you are performing a product roadmap presentation, your goal is to get people excited enough about the future that they give you the funding now, and continued support along the way.

You might include videos of user experiences and requests, physical prototypes, an interactive demo, or mock headlines that trounce the competition.

Performing a Business Review

For these, we always spend so much time on the data, presenting — covering every detail and defending against every hard question in the financials.

You are so much better off if you spend some time performing proactively, off the defense.

• How are you going to inspire your reviewers most about the business?
• What kinds of ideas will they personally respond to, over and above the numbers?
• Why do you personally believe in this business?
• What are the most exciting customer stories about how your products and services changed their business?
• What is your top sales person doing that you are excited about replicating?

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I’m not suggesting that you skip the data and put on a song and dance show instead of managing the business.

But you can get a lot further with your stakeholders if you take responsibility to excite them with the right images and stories, instead of only boring them with a straightforward presentation of data, progress, and plans.

Performing a Budget Approval presentation

Not just numbers

If there was ever a reason to step up your performance, it’s to get your budget approved.

Loads of data and metrics will not help as much as exciting them about what they will get for the money, and showing them how much you are personally motivated to make a big impact on the business.

Even the most number conscious executives will respond to a compelling story about something that transforms the customer experience or the market.

If it’s a big deal, invest the energy to get your creative, marketing, and sales people to help you with content.

One good story can be worth a thousand spread sheet cells.

For more ideas on communicating better see:

Do you stand out enough?
Fight the Bull
Don’t Bury the Lead

Getting Clear

As I work with management teams who want to successfully execute a change…

Or to get their organization to step up to a more strategic or scalable way of working…

They often tell me, this is not a new idea, but we need to make it stick this time.

I have been thinking a lot about this lately – Why is it so hard to get organizations to stop doing what they are currently doing, and to start doing what the need to be doing?

Here’s the thought: Clarity is the secret sauce for execution, but clarity causes conflict, and most people don’t like conflict. So execution stalls.

Comfort with conflict

You need to be comfortable with the fact that creating real clarity is going to expose disagreements. It’s going to expose gaps. It’s going to expose things that you need to deal with.

It can be much more comfortable to just leave everything fuzzy so you don’t actually have to address these things. This is one of the key reasons why so many change initiatives fail.

Clarity gives you the specific trail map to success

Any successful business agenda or initiative needs a tremendous amount of clarity to succeed. First you need to be really clear about the desired outcome. What is expected?

Then:

• You need to break that big goal down clearly into smaller, concrete parts
• You need to be clear about who is responsible for each piece
• You need to be clear about how each piece is resourced
• You need to be clear about what doing something different in each case means to the old way of doing something.
• You need to be clear about how the roles of specific people change
• You need to be clear about not only what the new tasks and deliverables are, but what are the new behaviors and values that are expected at each level.
• You need to be clear about how the success of each role will be measured.
• You need to be clear about what the consequences are for not doing the new thing
• You need to be clear about what will be communicated.
  .

But getting clarity on any one of these points opens the door to conflict.

For example if you say: We need to improve the quality of our products. The priority of the next product release is quality.

That may sound like a clear statement, but…

• Does that mean that you will hire new people for testing?
• Does that mean that you will include customer testing earlier in the process?
• Does that mean that you will measure the performance of the engineers differently? How so?
• Will you re-rate the priority of all the bugs in the system? Or just some of them? Under what criteria?
• Does that mean that you will stick to your quality plan when the sales force is clamoring for new features?
  .

Or if you say: We need to sell higher up in organizations

• Does that mean that you expect every rep to spend some time on strategic deal making? How much time? Doing what, exactly?
• How will you engage customers differently? Are people trained to do that? Who will be trained?
• How will you measure if it is happening? What will you do it if isn’t?
• Or does that mean that you will split the team into tactical and strategic teams?
• Will you change the comp plans of the sales team?
• Will you create new product/solution offers to appeal at a higher level?
  .

Discussing the answer to all these kinds of questions out loud, with your team, opens the door to conflict.

Once you get really clear, people will not agree.

But that’s the important part.

That means you are doing it right

As I bring teams through this process of getting real clarity, taking the time to hear the opinions and debate, we reach a point where everyone can see what to do differently, specifically.

It becomes clear what everyone needs to do personally to achieve the big goal. Everyone leaves knowing exactly what is expected, and how they will be measured on what they do moving forward.

Being Fuzzy – the comfortable hazard

If you are not clear enough to cause and then work through conflict, I call this being fuzzy. Being fuzzy may be more comfortable in the moment but it causes several problems.

• Nothing changes.
• People go back to whatever they were doing before because they clearly know what that is. They don’t know specifically what they need to do, to do the new thing.
• When the outcome doesn’t happen, you can’t put your finger on what isn’t working, because you never defined exactly what “working” looks like.
• If people are not performing you can’t do performance management because you haven’t defined the expectations clearly enough to show the gap.
• If you can’t show the gap, you can’t get people to cross it
  .

Don’t settle for shallow team pleasantness, or avoid performance management at the expense of getting your business strategy implemented.

As a leader you need to create clarity and navigate through the conflict it causes, if you want to get anything important done.

10 IDEAS FROM THE WEBINAR:

LEADING CHANGE

Download the PODCAST to learn:

Your job as change leader

1. Change is not just for big, special occasions. You always need to think about leading change even when it is not forced upon you.  Leading change is key to getting important things done, and to build capability in your team over time — otherwise you are standing still.

2.  Change is not complete after the planning and the announcement. The hard part is making it stick.  We talked through 6 hazards to successful change.  What problems arise? What leadership approaches are required to overcome them them to create new expectations, behaviors and habits?

Six Hazards to Successful Change

3. Lack of Concreteness – Big Goals may  feel good and sound exciting but leave staff wondering what to do exactly…  We talked about how break down big goals into clear, tangible action plans.

4.  Lack of Real Agreement – Sometimes it’s passive aggressive, sometimes it’s outright dissent, but more often everyone “agrees” with good intentions.  The problem is that they just don’t realize that everyone has a different impression of what was agreed to.  Action breaks down.

5. Hard to Stop what you are currently doing. The gravity and momentum of the current workload is very strong.  We talked about how to motivate action on new priorities to help break free of the status quo, and start progressing on the new stuff.

6.  Having the guts to stick with it. What do you do when urgent requests come in, maybe even from your boss, that throw your strategic agenda off course?  How do you respond?  This is probably the most challenging aspect of all.

7.   Inconsistent Communication. The default is that people think you are not serious… Just wait it out, this change will go away.  You need to communicate a lot  about the new behaviors you expect.  We talked about the difference between communication and socialization of ideas to make them stick.

8.  People are not capable. If you are raising the bar, not everyone may be able to clear it. We talked about how to assess your team relative to the change and have a fair and clear plan to deal with people who do not make the cut.

Clarity invites conflict

9. A theme throughout the session was the importance of clarity. Many change agendas fail because clarity opens the door to conflict.  So people who are not comfortable with conflict avoid it by keeping expectations and measures fuzzy.  Fuzzy prevents change from sticking, because you can’t measure and enforce anything specific.

Worksheets and Templates

10. The Leading Change Worksheets for this session include tools for:

• Actions: Breaking down big goals into clear measurable tasks
• Roles: Defining behaviors and expectations for new roles
• Communication: My magic timeline tool, to make sure change sticks.

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How YOU can Lead Change More Effectively

• Download the PODCAST for details on what to do and how to do it.
• Download the  WORKSHEETS to plan your specific actions and communications.
• Download the Career Year of Action Guide to help you use your time better.
  Give yourself the time to do what is necessary beyond your job description to be successful.

Browse the Member Library

Browse the member library for more podcasts, worksheets and tools to:

* Be a Better Leader
* Be More Effective
* Build your Network
* Get a Better Job
* Grow your Business

All downloads are FREE to members.

• Learn about Membership
• Become a Member

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When I work with executive teams,  I uncover obstacles to execution that the team are  just not seeing.

They are too close to it.  Here’s a common one…

Who is capable?

I want to talk about what happens when the GM and the executives don’t share a view of who is capable at the next level down, and what to do about it.

Here’s how this often goes…

My team is stuck in the weeds…

I talk to the General Manager and they are concerned that the executives who report to them are stuck in the details and tactics — that they need to step up, think and work more strategically, and delegate better.

I would love to delegate, but cant…

Then I talk to the executives and learn that they would LOVE to delegate more, but feel trapped because some of their people are not capable enough.  They also feel like they don’t have the ability or support to make changes.

Expectations Diverge…

So the GM is thinking that the execs are upgrading talent where necessary, but the exec’s are not making changes to staff because they think there is some reason they can’t or shouldn’t — that they need to work with the people they already have.

Different views of key players

Also, often there is a key player that the exec trusts but the GM doesn’t, so there is lots of questioning or second guessing from above.

Or sometimes it’s that the GM has a “favorite” that the exec sees as not performing, so feels like their hands are tied to do anything about it.

Execution slows or stalls

This shoots the whole strategy in the foot.

The work of getting the strategy executed never quite lands in the right place.

Managers know they should delegate, but if they don’t have people capable of delegating to, they will jump in to get the work done personally.

They strain under the workload because they are doing too much of the work personally.  They attempt to do their strategic work AND to “cover” for the weaker players on the team.

The strategic stuff takes ultimately takes a back seat to the current, urgent work.  And the GM remains frustrated that the execs are still in the weeds.

A really straightforward way fix this

1. You’re allowed and required. As a manager, accept as a fundamental truth that you should have confidence that you can delegate to every single person on your team and trust the outcome.

2. Get really clear about your players. Answer the following questions for each person:

• What is my level of trust and confidence to delegate to this person?
• If not 100%, what is the issue? What types of things break down?

• What is the risk to the business if this person doesn’t deliver well?
• Will training work?

• Does my boss trust this person?  If no, why not?

• What is my recommendation for this person/role?
  • Train the person
  • Eliminate and get a new person

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3. Review it! Then (here is the magic), sit down with your boss and review these assessments for every single person on your team.

Get your boss’s opinion about these questions for each person.  Talk it out.  Get aligned.

Don’t guess.  Find out.

Don’t make assumptions that you can’t fire people because your boss likes them, or that you are not allowed.

Don’t make assumptions that your boss does or doesn’t trust someone on your team without asking specifically.

This saves so much time and heart ache.

Get all the opinions and concerns (yours and your boss’s) out on the table and then act. Get a plan.

Reduce Execution Risk

You and your boss need to be in lock step to make sure that you both trust every single person on your team to be delegated to.

• If you trust them, but your boss doesn’t, you are going to get stuck in the work because your boss will demand that you check up, or show up personally.
• If your boss trusts them, but you don’t, you are going to get stuck in the work, because you are going to feel the need to check up on them and re-do the work.

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It’s your job to build the team that can deliver what the strategy requires.

See Also: Strategy into Action

Don’t let different expectations about who is trusted get in the way.  Find out and then build the right team.

I also often talk about the importance of “Thinking like a General Manager.”

But, I haven’t really spelled it out…

If you are thinking like a General Manager, what would you be thinking about?

Think Broad, not Deep

Even if you don’t want to be a General manager…

If you want to make a relevant, significant contribution, and advance your career, you should think like a General Manager –  no matter what role or level you are at.

You need to understand broadly what drives the business,  so you can really understand how and where your piece fits in, how to add the most value, and communicate better outside your team.

Questions to ask

To help you get started, I put together a list of questions that a General Manager would want to know about the business.

This is not meant to be an exhaustive list to manage the business by.   I haven’t included analysis of Financial Statements or Cash Flow.  This is about understanding what makes the business go, across the whole business.

How does the company make money?

1. How does your company make money?
2. What are your sources of revenue? How much does each provide?
3. What are your sources of profit?  How much does each provide?
4. What things are your company’s fixed expenses?
5. What things are your company’s variable expenses?
6. Where do you and your department fit in the expense picture?
7. Where do you and your department fit in the revenue generation process?
8. What can you do personally or with your department to impact revenue or profit?

Geography

9. Where in the world does your business operate? What things happen in which locations?
10. How is the revenue split among geographies?
11. How is the profit split among geographies?
12. What are the advantages that geographically dispersed workforce offers your company?
13. What are the biggest operational challenges the company faces with geographically dispersed teams?
14. What are the cultural considerations that impact how you operate in each geography?

Market

15. What markets does your company compete in?
16. Are your markets growing, shrinking or flat?  Why?
17. How does your company’s growth compare to market growth?
18. What are the risks of your primary market changing and being less available over time?
19. How will you know? What are the most important triggers or changes in your markets to be watching for?
20. What is your primary advantage in the markets you serve?
21. What is your biggest competitive disadvantage in the markets you serve?
22. Where are the biggest opportunities for new markets?

Value Proposition & Strategy

23. How do you measure if your customers are successful? For them? For you?
24. How do your customers define whether or not their purchase was successful?
25. How much does your product cost the customer over the lifetime of owning it?
26. What is the most important thing the customer relies on your product or service to do for them?
27. How well does the customer think you do at what is most important to them?
28. How does the customer measure the ROI of your product?
29. Who are your most successful customers? Are they profitable?
30. Who are your most profitable customers?  Are they successful?
31. How do your customers describe why they bought your product (or service)?

Competition & Market Perception

32. Who is talking most about your product space externally? What are they saying?
33. How do prospects in your market talk about you vs. your competitors?
34. What is being said about your company and products on message boards, blogs, and other social media?
35. What can you do personally to improve the discussion about your company and offers?
36. Who are your direct competitors? What are your indirect competitors?
37. How do your competitors answer these 100 questions?

Sales

38. How is your product sold? What are the steps in the process? How long does it take?
39. How much of your product is sold directly by your company?
40. What partners and other channels sell your product?
41. Which are the biggest sales channels?
42. What is the cost of each sales channel per dollar of revenue? Which are the most profitable?
43. Which channels provide the biggest source of referrals and new customers?
44. How are your internal sales people measured and paid?
45. How are your sales channel partners measures and paid?
46. How can they each make the biggest bonus or commission?
47. How do you get information from sales into your team?
48. How does your company train its sales channels?
49. What could you or your department do to make the sales team more successful?

Marketing

50. How much do you spend in marketing relative to others in your market?
51. What are the most important things Marketing is doing this year?
52. What are the key marketing messages that are being promoted?
53. How does your company use the web and social media to connect with customers and prospects?
54. How is the Marketing organization measured?
55. What are the most and least successful marketing programs?
56. Who are the key industry analysts, mavens, spokespeople for your market? What do they say about you?

Finding Customers

57. How does your company find new customers?
58. What does Marketing do to find new customers?
59. What does Sales do to find new customers?
60. What makes your current customers refer new prospects?
61. Do your customer support or services organizations uncover new leads? Could they?
62. How can you personally help find new customers?

Service and Support

63. How do you provide support and service to your customers?
64. Which types of support do customers prefer?
65. Does your company invest to provide service as a competitive advantage or treat it as only as a cost?
66. What is the cost of support for each product line?  Which have the highest support costs? Why?
67. Does the cost of support align with the profitability of the product?
68. Are there any bad support practices which damage customer relationships?
69. Are there any product issues which create too many support and service needs?
70. Do you make money on Support? How?
71. Do you make money on Service? How?
72. Do you give away service and support to generate new business?
73. How are the service and support teams measured and paid?

Product Development

74. How much do you spend on Product Development relative to other companies in your market?
75. What is the product development team measured on?
76. How does the product development team decide what to build?
77. How does the product development team deliver to schedule commitments?
78. How does the product development team get input/feedback from customers?
79. How does the product development team measure and track quality?

Supply Chain & Manufacturing

80. How does your product get built?
81. Is cost of with building your product a either competitive advantage or dis-advangage?
82. How are costs measured and tracked?
83. How is quality measured and tracked?
84. Who are all of the vendors and partners involved?
85. Which are the largest partners/suppliers?
86. Which partners or suppliers have you as their biggest customer?  Smallest?
87. On what basis are vendors and component parts selected?
88. On what basis are suppliers chosen?
89. What is the method of communicating with partners?

Distribution Channels

90. How does your product actually get to the end users/consumers?
91. How long does it take between customer order, customer payment, and receipt of goods?
92. Is your distribution process a competitive advantage in your business or not?
93. What are your distribution mechanisms and technologies?
94. What is the speed and cost of each?
95. Which do the customers prefer?

Technology

96. What are the key technologies that your business depends upon?
97. What aspects of your technology create the most risk in your business?
98. How do the IT costs relate to the business objectives?
99. How can/does technology provide a competitive advantage to your business?
100. How can/does technology provide a cost advantage in your business?

Some actions to take with this list:

• Make sure everyone on your team knows how the company makes money – this is so important if you want your team to contribute to the business in a meaningful way.
• Give a section of this list to a high performer as a development exercise.  Have them go get the answers and then educate your team.
• Invite a person from another area of the company into your staff meeting, and use these questions to start a discussion and learn how their group works.
• Personally meet people in other functions and use this list to start a discussion to learn what they care about.

Why does this matter?

By thinking like a GM you will:

• Get better ideas for how to add value to the business.  See connections you would otherwise miss.  Always be working on things that are most important to the business.
• Be able to speak in the language of the business. Talk about what you do in a way that really matters to others. Be more relevant. Negotiate better.
• Rally your team around a bigger purpose. Motivate them, show them how what they do fits into the overall strategy.

Have more impact, and build career capital

Thinking like a General Manager, by definition puts you on a broader playing field and reveals issues and opportunities beyond your function you would not otherwise notice.

It gives you an opportunity to connect and communicate with the the business so that you improve both your results and your status.

Please add your ideas for thinking like a General Manager as a comment on the blog.

Attend the next FREE Webinar on:

LEADING CHANGE
March 17, 11am PST
Register Here

At some point the world will change and you will be in a re-organization.

Get support before you get buried

When I talk about my DO Better, LOOK Better, CONNECT Better model, I know people struggle with this (support) part.

They sigh and think, I really should do this, but I don’t have the time.

It gets put on the back burner, because it doesn’t feel like part of the day job.

Excellent work alone does not protect you

It’s happened to me.  I’ve been buried.  My results were outstanding, but they were not visible or relevant to the people making the decisions.  My work mattered to me and my team, but not to them.

The world changes and you get pushed down a level, or your job gets smaller, or you’re pushed out entirely.

My heart always goes out to people in this situation, and when they ask me for advice, and I give them some ideas about what they can do to make the best of it right now.  But then I reluctantly tip-toe into that, “Take this as learning, and don’t let this happen again”, place.

My annoying lecture goes something like this:

Air Cover

If you had been creating more air cover (people at high levels that know you and care about your career), and building your credibility and relevance over time, you might not be in this position…

Someone in a position of power might have said, Wait, we need to watch out for this person.

This person is really valuable, and if we just put them somewhere organizationally convenient for us, but bad for their career, we run the risk of losing them.  We need to create a spot for them in the new organization that does not feel like a step down.

That’s what you want to happen in a re-org.

If you want some additional help building this type of support, check out the free resources at the bottom of this article, but in short…

How to build support

Let’s face it, the urgent stuff typically falls into the DO Better category – get the work done, deal with the crisis, close the deal, respond to the customer.

Then the tasks to build support both in LOOK Better — necessary to build your credibility and relevance, and in CONNECT Better — to build a strong network of support,  get pushed aside.

A tempting trap – the “high ground”

It’s tempting to work this way because it feels like you are doing the right thing because you are working really hard and delivering results.

Or sometimes people feel like they don’t want to be one of those people protecting their job, instead of doing their job.  That is not what I am talking about.

Take care of the future now

OK, so since we can’t travel back in time, let’s work on taking care of the future.  Don’t wait until you are in a bad situation.

Act now:

• Do an Assessment.  How much air cover do you have?  Do you have a relationship with your boss’s boss or boss’s peers?  Do you have relationships with people running other organizations?
• What is the context for talent assessment in your company? Who is in the room when people at your level are talked about?  Do you have a good relationship with any of those people?  How many of them know who you are?
• Do you have a mentor?

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Start finding ways to meet and engage with these people, and get at least one of them to be a mentor — to officially care about what happens to you.

It’s not just politics

Before you start heading for high ground again and saying, that’s politics.  I don’t do politics.  Remember that high Credibility and Relevance are not just about protecting your job.  They as much, or even more about increasing your effectiveness.

They let you get more, higher value work done.  They are necessary to deliver the RIGHT results that decision makers care about.

Even though you are really busy with the work, it’s important to remember that this is a vital part of your job longevity and success.

Communicate with Stakeholders

In my Career Workshop, we cover the concept of a Stakeholder Communication Plan™

Know who your stakeholders and influencers are and communicate with them on purpose, consistently, in ways that they find valuable.  Be relevant, to them by visibly working on things that matter to them.

Build your credibility by having a strong Personal Brand, clear communications and executive presence.

You are better off

This is not a perfect system.  For example, when a company gets acquired it is often assumed either that 1. all the people in the acquired company are stupid, and all the good jobs go to managers in the parent company, or 2. that all the incumbents are stupid, so all the good jobs go to the people in the new company and all the “legacy” people get pushed out.

Or sometimes your mentors retire, or your Air Cover leaves the company and you need to start again.

You can’t always stay on top in an re-org, but you are always much better off if you have relationships and air cover than if you don’t.

With the right support there is a chance you will land on your feet.

Have a head start, at least

Even if you don’t land well in the new organization, you have a huge head start of connections, useful knowledge, relationships,  and good will in your network, with the people who can quickly help you find a different job.

I encourage you to spend a few hours a month on these things to put yourself in the strongest possible position, and to develop relationships with key people BEFORE you need their help.

Some FREE Resources to build Air Cover

I’ve collected some articles below that can help you focus on the LOOK Better and CONNECT Better aspects of building enough air-cover so that you will have more organizational clout and support when the world changes.

Communicating with Stakeholders
Do you stand out enough?
Don’t be boring
Fight the Bull
Don’t bury the lead

Being Relevant
Responsive or Reactive?
Be more Relevent

Bulding Credibility
Executive Presence
Tuning your Personal Brand

Building Support
Authentic Networking
5 Mentors Everyone Needs

Additional Help

If you want some help fitting this type of work into your schedule, check out:

Career Year of Action Guide

The Career Year of Action Guide will help you plan your time to optimize your DO Better tasks, to get more of the right, highest value work done, AND help you make time for the necessary LOOK Better and CONNECT better tasks, to build credibility, relevance and grow your network of support.

Membership

And if you want to get monthly reminders and direct support from me to keep your career on track, become a member.