I am on a bit of a rampage lately about organizations not-addressing missed deadlines.
I see this a lot. The reason why so many organizations have so much trouble doing what they intend to do, on time, is because when they fail to meet a deadline, nothing happens.
Nothing happens…
The dates come and go and no one talks about it.
People who were on the hook either assume that they have been granted more time, or it wasn’t that important to begin with.
Then there is no new deadline established because no one is talking about it at all. So the strategic task takes an even lower priority over the more urgent tactical demands of the moment.
Strategic Progress
This simple failure to address missed deadlines is one of the biggest factors that keeps organizations from making strategic progress.
You can’t let the date come and go and leave the failure totally unacknowledged and unexamined.
This sends all the wrong messages and sets a very low standard of execution.
What you are communicating (by not communicating) is:
It wasn’t that important
It doesn’t matter that it didn’t get done
There are no consequences for missing a deadline
We’re not serious about meeting our commitments
Late is OK
Why people don’t follow up
I have observed four main reasons why executives fail to follow up on missed deadlines:
1. Too busy to keep track
2. Not personally good at keeping track
3. Don’t like the conflict of keeping track
4. Don’t know what consequences to impose when something is off track.
The first two are really easy to fix. Get someone who’s naturally good at this to help you. I talked about how to do that that here.
Number 3 and 4 you can’t delegate. As a general manager, if these things make you uncomfortable you need to do them anyway.
Here are some suggestions:
How to deal with the conflict:
1. Be really clear up front about dates, owners, and measures, and communicate the status at the beginning of the project when everything is “green”.
2. Start communicating regularly about what is getting done before anything goes wrong.
3. Everyone can see their name on the chart with the due dates and measures. It is up to them to keep on track.
4. Then when something goes from green to yellow or red, it is not as much of a conflict to bring it up. At least it is not a surprise. Everyone saw it coming. The person who failed to deliver had the chance to avoid it, and knew before hand that it would be addressed, so the conflict is not personal.
What consequences to impose
You don’t need to fire someone every time a deadline is missed. So if you don’t fire the person for missing a deadline, what do you do?
There are so many options between termination and nothing!
You don’t need to be a tyrant.
But you do need to have a conversation.
Ask, “what happened? How to do you intend to recover?”. The act of having this conversation sends the message that it is NOT OK to miss a deadline.
It should be uncomfortable
Sure it’s an uncomfortable conversation, but it should be! You missed a deadline. That should not be pleasant, comfortable news for anyone.
It’s not about coming down hard on someone or being disrespectful or nasty. It’s about moving the business forward.
Also, I find that strong performers take a lot of ownership in these conversations and put more pain on themselves then they get from you.
Many leaders struggle with the motivation factor. They feel like if they give someone a hard time the person may get de-motivated, be less committed or leave.
In reality, the impact of not having the conversation is that you are letting the person know that what they were working on wasn’t very important, which I think is always even more de-motivating.
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About Patty Patty Azzarello is an executive, best-selling author, speaker and CEO/Business Advisor. She became the youngest general manager at HP at the age of 33, ran a billion dollar software business at 35 and became a CEO for the first time at 38 (all without turning into a self-centered, miserable jerk)
All organizations struggle at some point to put their Strategy into Action (Read: actually get done what they say they want to do).
I find that key problems of executing are common in companies of all sizes and industries — but particularly in companies that want to scale.
Why?
Because people have to do new things to support the evolving business needs, and that’s hard.
It’s hard to get alignment, it’s hard to prioritize, and it’s hard to resist temptation and keep focus.
5 that block strategic progress (and how to fix them).
Or if you prefer reading, here is a brief summary.
5 things that block strategic progress:
1. Talk vs. doing
Problem:
Companies can get very practiced at talking about their strategy.
The trouble arises when people (at every level) don’t understand how to change their day to day work to do what the strategy requires.
Solution:
Translate the exciting, high level strategy-talk into much more mundane, concrete, measurable and trackable action items.
2. People don’t agree
Problem: Nodding heads around the table is a red flag!
It doesn’t mean people agree. It mostly means they think they’ll get out of the meeting faster if they nod their head. If people don’t agree, they won’t move forward in an aligned way. Your strategy stalls.
Solution:
You need to proactively smoke out the misunderstandings, unspoken disagreements, passive aggressive behaviors, and generally weak or apathetic support. Then you need to set up specific accountability.
3. Resource moves are not clear
Problem:
If you want to do new things, you need to move resources to do it.
Your strategy is where you put your resources.
If you are not super-clear about what resources will move, they will never move. Your strategy will not move forward either.
Solution:
Don’t expect your staff to make tradeoffs off-line to drive the new strategy. This never works. You need to do it top down in the light of day.
4. Too busy to change
Problem:
There is no extra time. Urgent crises, customer opportunities, or changing your mind usurps work on longer term strategic initiatives.
So you stay really busy but you don’t move forward or grow.
Solution:
Keep focus on strategic progress by setting measures and tracking progress. If you miss a deadline discuss it. Find out what happened. Never let strategic milestones slip by un-examined. This is a slippery slope into chronically bad execution.
5. Failure to engage and communicate with people
Problem:
The strategy gets stuck at the executive level.
You forget to tell the people who need to do the work what they need to do.
The inertia for people to keep doing what they are already doing is very strong.
Solution:
Create an ongoing communication plan throughout the entire process of executing the strategy. Motivate and engage people to get on board and give them personal reasons to care. Give them the tools to modify their work to support your new strategy.
Get it done this time
Most businesses know what they want to do, they just have some trouble actually doing it.
I work with companies to use my Strategy into Action Progam™ when they are ready to GO FAST. Contact me if you want to talk about this.
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About Patty Patty Azzarello is an executive, best-selling author, speaker and CEO/Business Advisor. She became the youngest general manager at HP at the age of 33, ran a billion dollar software business at 35 and became a CEO for the first time at 38 (all without turning into a self-centered, miserable jerk)
Most strategic planning exercises are doomed from the start by being connected to the annual budget process.
The money always wins.
Strategy is creative. Financial Planning is operational. Strategic and financial planning require different skills, timelines, and different measures of success. You must separate the two streams of work if you want a real strategy.
But most organizations are not practiced at creative, strategic planning, and they are practiced at quarterly and annual financial planning.
So the money wins and the habits win. Strategic planning turns into numbers-driven operational planning.
Making your strategy more strategic
OK, so you have to deliver numbers to your executive committee. And you want to be credible and not look like you are changing your mind or getting surprised.
But just think about delivering your numbers on the planned schedule, and then run a strategic planning exercise completely separately, on a different calendar.
If you are saying, “But we can’t go back and surprise the board and ask for something different after we give them our operating plan”, think about it this way…
If you have a big customer bail on you, or a competitor makes a dramatic move (or the market crashes…) something that you need to react to, you are willing to go back to the board with reactive re-work.
So why not come up with a brilliant forward-looking strategy and associated investment plan? Then go back to the board and say, “We’d like to talk about a new investment”.
Or even better, when you go to get your financial plan approved, also discuss that you in the midst of a multi-year strategic planning process, and your goal is to uncover new growth opportunities outside the current operating plan, so stay tuned…That always worked for me.
What was that on page 132?
You should be able to be communicate your strategy to your mom, without a powerpoint presentation.
If you can’t boil it down to a few key points, your team will never stand a chance of understanding it, internalizing it, and making the necessary changes in their day to day work to actually implement it.
Who are your customers? What do they value?
What is your advantage? How do you win?
What are your measurable objectives for success?
Who cares?
Another common sign of a strategy that isn’t going anywhere is when you have to call the business planning expert in to present the strategy.
Everyone in your organization should be able to communicate your business strategy to another person. And it should be the same story!
If that is not the case, you don’t have a strategy that will get executed.
Part of the problem is complexity, and part of the problem is taking the time to really include the whole organization.
Are you serious this time?
Most strategies fail not because they are not good, but because they don’t get executed.
Most strategies don’t get executed because the natural tendency for ANY organization when they hear about a new strategy is to think, “This is not serious, this will change again, the safest thing for me to do is to keep doing what I’m doing”.
You need to communicate the basic points of your strategy over and over (and over) again, if you want your team to act on it.
(More on how to communicate your strategy in a future post.)
Repetition is what makes people realize you are serious, every day, every week, every month, and every quarter until it’s done. Without this your strategy will stall.
Profit
Strategic Planning and Other Delusions (today)
Want more?
Awhile back I interviewed Bob Kaplan, former McKinsey Director on the topic of: Is Your Strategy Any Good? He talks about these, and more obstacles to a good strategy. It’s a great discussion.
One of the questions I get most frequently is how to get people who don’t work for you, to do work for you.
So many people are in matrixed situations, or they are a program manager over an endeavor that is dependent on people from all over the place.
So you are on the hook to get something done, and you are at the mercy of others that have no motivation to help you.
How do you get them to be more committed to your cause, and to do the work so that you don’t fail?
Public humiliation works
Here is a story from early in my career where I stumbled upon a great way to deal with this.
I was a product manager for a product line that interfaced with multiple third-party products.
Part of my job was to make sure that each time we changed a version of any of the products in our product line, that the interfaces to all the third-party products still worked. This required tasks like building or upgrading new versions of interfaces, and/or testing new combinations of versions.
No help…
I could not do this work myself.
The only way to get this done was to pester the engineers to do it — and they didn’t work for me. If anything, they prided themselves on not having to answer to me!
To make matters worse, this work was never going to be the most important work they were doing. It was never going to be the most interesting or fun work they could do. They had no personal motivation to do it.
List all the work and add names
Because there were so many moving parts, I needed to just get my head around it all.
So I began listing all of our product components, all of the third-party products they interfaced to, and the status of each interface: What needed to be done, the date it was due, and the name of the engineer who was responsible for it.
I put this on the large whiteboard that hung in my cubicle-office.
The reason I put it on the whiteboard was because it was a big enough place to get all the information in one look. Computers weren’t what they are today for displaying information and it was a good thing.
Because of the whiteboard an amazing thing happened.
The engineers all started using the back stairway near my office, and stopping in to make sure their name was not on the board! The didn’t want their name listed as being late for anything, where the world could see it.
I never had to bug them again. In fact, I never needed to even ask them again.
I just had to put the new task on the board and note the date and a name. They would, on their own, seek out if they were on the hook for something, and then deliver it. They were motivated to get their name off “Patty’s whiteboard”.
Here is the big lesson:
By showing the work that everyone needs to do to everyone involved, people are shamed into doing the work so they won’t look bad.
They might not mind being the reason that a program is failing if they don’t really care about the program, but they don’t want to be the obvious reason a program is failing — if everyone will know about.
How to apply this to your program or project:
Here is how I have coached people to apply this to a program or matrixed project of any kind.
Create a document with the key elements of work that you and everyone need to contribute to the program. Make it a one page document.
Show everyone’s work that is due
Show the status of each item
.
Here is a very simple version of what I mean.
The magic is in the distribution
Distribute this to:
Everyone on the team
Their managers
All the stakeholders of the program
Positive communications
All of these people have a postitve reason to know what is happening, either because they are dependent on the program, or because someone on their team has work committed to the program.
If you start doing this at the beginning of the project you are not attacking anyone, you are just communicating work, due dates, and owners in support of a cross-organization program.
If you distribute this regularly from the beginning, and people (who don’t work for you) realize that their peers and their bosses are all seeing it, they will be much more motivated to do their part.
Automatic resolution
And when later, something is not getting done, you don’t need to do anything special to call it out.
Your positive communication process will automatically call people out publicly. They will be motivated to get their name off the list, so they’ll do the work!
This also saves you loads of time from having to pester people individually, which doesn’t work as well anyway.
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Today I want to address a topic on process. But I want to re-label the word process to be “make sure to get stuff done”.
I am never a fan of process for process sake, but I am a big fan of taking the chaos and drama out of executing.
Set a High Standard of Execution
As a General Manager you have to set a high standard of execution.
That means you personally need to do what you say you will do, like be on time for meetings, make clear assignments with owners and deadlines, and then…
When something does not happen on schedule, enforce consequences.
If you say, “Oh well, we didn’t make it, so just keep going till you finish”, you are setting a sloppy standard of execution and you are not delivering on your commitments.
Today I am going to talk about the the getting things done part.
I will cover enforcing consequences in a future article in this series.
How I narrowly escaped disaster
I want to start with a personal story about this.
When I got my first big job, managing a group of more than 150 people with multiple layers of management beneath me, I did not have experience getting things done leading an organization of this size.
Enter the hero of our story…
When I first met with my direct staff individually, one man came into my office and said, “I am your process manager”.
What I said to him is one of the things in my whole career I am least proud of and most embarrassed by… I did not have the leadership maturity to recognize what an awful thing this was to say to someone who works for you, when you meet them for the first time.
I said, “Wow, I never had a full time process manager before”. <yes, cringe>
So let’s just fast forward past the part where he assumed he was getting fired, to where I recognized that he was saving my job.
The gap between assigning and doing
Here is what I mean…
I am really good at translating high level strategy into super-clear actions with owners and measures. I see the big picture, I see the opportunity for how to win, I see what is in the way, and I can prioritize the right concrete tasks that will ensure we make strategic progress.
So imagine the staff meeting where we do this…
Everyone is clear about what we need to do and why. We have made assignments. And we have a schedule with measures and deadlines. Commence back-patting…
But then…
Everyone leaves the room and goes back to work.
All the new stuff is sitting on top of a workload that is already consuming all the time.
Because the assignments are so clear and committed, I assume the new work is being worked on. But it is actually at pretty high risk.
Too busy to do new things
The inertia in an organization to keep doing the current work is very high. The resistance individuals need to break through to plan for, and prioritize the new work, is also very high. This is where it all stalls.
This is where my process manager saved the day.
Tireless execution support
Capture: He would sit in those staff meetings and take all the notes about what was decided and committed and he would write it up, distribute it, AND turn it into a project plan with dependencies and timelines.
Daily Follow up: Then he would go around to every task owner, every week and say, how are you doing on this? He would exert regular, personal, visibility and pressure on what was committed.
Reporting: Then he would create a report and bring it into our staff meeting every week and let us know what was getting done on schedule and what (and who) was slipping.
With that “process”, he enabled me to make sure we all got done what we committed to. He made it easy for me to enforce consequences for being late (another key element of being a good general manager), because what was supposed to happen was spelled out so clearly.
This was invaluable. Without this process, would have failed to get stuff done on time. There is no question in my mind about this.
I really can’t emphasize this enough…
As the leader, I was feeling pretty good about my strategic thinking, and my ability to translate the high level goals into specific, concrete actions to get there.
But as the leader, I was also too busy with strategy, financial planning, communications, customers, traveling to multiple sites, and general corporate stuff, to be the one to personally go around and get updates from everyone, and create reports to track it all.
I can say without a doubt, without my process manager, I would have failed.
I would have failed to deliver, so I would have failed in my job. I would have failed to advance.
Happily ever after
But if nothing else, I am a fast learner. And I know how to get help.
So forever after, in every other executive role I stepped into, I made sure that there was someone on my team who had the natural strengths, skills, and energy to do this process work, to keep the trains running.
As the leader I made the strategy, goals, tasks and measures clear, and this person would do the daily, detailed, relentless work to make sure we executed.
Having a strong partner with me on execution made sure that my organizations always delivered what we committed to. The role was not always called “process manager”. For example one time it was my finance partner, and another, my chief of staff.
Hire your hero
Have this person report directly to you, and give them a lot of power.
This is not a low level administrative job. It needs to be someone who understands the business and someone who can understand the pressure you are under personally. They need to be able to enforce priorities when you are running out of time and you are not there.
It needs to be someone who can influence the people on your team who need to do the work, to do the work.
And even if you can convince a highly capable person not to report to you, it doesn’t work to have this role report into any one function because then the conversation about priorities is skewed. You have the proverbial fox guarding the hen house. The person loses credibility with the other functions, so you don’t get as much stuff done.
Delivering on time gives you huge competitive advantage in the market. You can be more responsive, more innovative, and win and keep more customers.
Don’t put on-time execution at risk. It’s too important. Get help!
So to add to our list of who you need help from:
1. Don’t try to be a GM without a mentor or a coach
2. Don’t try to be a GM without someone to help you track and measure execution.
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Summer is a great time to check in on your goals — to make sure you are making the professional progress you want.
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See what you get
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These labels help timid people raise issues when it’s helpful (Debate Phase) and then keep everyone focused on execution vs. talking more, when it is time to go. (Go Phase).
I got some questions about what to do when people undermine Go Phase with passive aggressive behaviors, when they continue to debate behind the scenes, expecting or trying to get the Debate Phase to re-open.
Let people know you are serious
The basic remedy here is that you need to let people know you are serious about the new work in GO phase.
The natural habit of an organization is not to change.
People will always go back to what they were doing before if you are not explicit about making the change stick.
Behaviors don’t change for 2 key reasons
1. Dissenters. Passive aggressive people really don’t agree, and they are trying to do something different on purpose.
2. Reality strikes back. People with the right intentions cave when the reactive pressures of the day re-assert themselves, and they get nervous about doing something different or strategic.
As soon as the first person jumps ship and goes back to the old way of doing things, then others will think, “oh I guess we are not doing this new thing any more and I better get back to reacting to the emergencies like before, because that is what is valued. I believe this to be true because I can see people acting the old way, and I haven’t heard about the new thing in awhile”.
I recommend these strategies to my clients to avoid 3 common failures to predictable, on-time execution and to make change stick.
1. Track Progress Better
Have someone help you track progress.
Do you find yourself communicating strategy, assigning work and owners, and then absolutely hating doing the follow-up to keep checking in with everyone to see if things are on track? Or just being too busy with customers and other things to do a good job at this. When I was a CEO and GM, I know I struggled.
I was lucky early in my career to have someone on my team who was great at this. I assigned the work. He wrote it all down, he made sure I didn’t fail to assign specific owners or dates. Then he relentlessly followed up with everyone involved, and created tracking reports for how we were doing on finishing the things we committed to.
If you are not doing a good job tracking progress you will fail to execute.
If you are not good at this yourself, get someone on your staff to do this for you, or you will never get the important things done. I had a person on my staff to do this for me for the next 15 years of my career once I learned this lesson. I would have failed without it.
2. Communicate More
Have someone help you communicate.
Once you make your decisions and you are in GO phase, communicate a lot. Communicate more than you ever thought you could. Get bored to death with your message.
Talk about key initiatives in every communication, in every meeting, in every 1-1 discussion. Make sure that when people see you coming, they know you are going to want to hear about the key initiatives that are in GO phase.
If you are not communicating regularly, you will fail to execute.
If you are not in the habit of communicating regularly, or other things keep you too busy to focus on it, get someone to help you do this.
Have them put you on a schedule for email and group meetings.
Have them write up a straw-man of the communication. Have it include milestones and great examples of how people supported the new strategy, and questions for you to answer about what people are confused or concerned about.
Don’t ever go more than 1-month without revisiting and communicating your progress on key initiatives with everyone involved.
3. Set a good example
Don’t let sloppy behaviors get in the way
I have seen leaders who say they are serious about execution, that it’s the most important thing to them, but then they are late to their own staff meetings. Or they let missed deadlines come an go and never mention it or deal with it.
If you want your organization to be good at executing, you to set a good example for the quality of execution you expect with your own behaviors. And you need to hold people accountable when things don’t get done.
If you have people helping you track and communicate, it’s just a matter of your following through. (but you still have to be on time for meetings!)
What do you think?
What has delayed execution in your organization and what have you done about it?
Share your thoughts by leaving a comment!
If you want more ideas on leading better execution download my free report on leading change called “Too Busy to Scale”, or learn about the Strategy into ActionTM work I do with executive leadership teams .
Organizations waste a lot of time communicating badly.
They fall into the trap of talking about things that have already been decided, or not talking when input is genuinely needed.
Problem 1. People don’t speak up when they should
Executives don’t know all the answers (even if they act like they do).
They rely on healthy debate from their team to get all the important information, opinions and concerns out on the table.
Without that, they can’t make a good business decision.
But the other side of the story is that people often feel punished for speaking up.
When they try to give feedback to the executives they get shot down. It feels like their inputs are unwelcome.
If this happens often enough they stop even trying. Why bother if my ideas are never acted on, and I only get grief for speaking up?
Problem 2. People keep talking when they shouldn’t
I have seen management teams waste huge amounts of time by revisiting decisions over and over again, questioning the direction and circling back for more data.
When this happens, the organization is slow to engage because they perceive the continued discussion to mean that the direction is still in question. So they wait for the answer instead of moving forward. Or they continue to add to the conversation, raising even more issues or data to help inform the decision.
SInce the executives think the decision has already been made, they get really frustrated that people are slow to act, not engaged, and stalling forward progress with more questions, inputs and arguments.
DEBATE or GO?
One of the best tools I have used to fix this is a simple model of Debate Phase vs. Go Phase. I make it clear that for every initiative or decision, there is DEBATE time and there is GO time.
Debate Time: Talking, Questions, Input, Arguments are welcome.
During debate time, I make it clear that I want to hear people’s opinions. I want to hear the arguments. I want everyone to fight for their point of view.
That’s how I get the best and most complete information.
Make a Clear Decision
After debate time is over, I make it clear who owns the decision, and make sure the decision gets made.
GO Time
Then I make it clear that we are in GO time. The decision is communicated and the action is officially kicked off. This is the time to engage in the work, not in the debate. The debate phase is over.
Expected Behavior & Trust
This simple frame and set of labels builds an atmosphere of higher trust because people can understand the rules of the game. They know when and how to participate without getting their head handed back to them.
You give them a chance to feel safe raising their opinions or arguing the point (which you need them to do) because by definition you are in debate phase.
By setting this structure, you can make it clear that during debate time, the expected and valued behavior is to speak up.
Then once you announce the decision has been made and make it clear that it’s GO time, people trust that you will stick to the decision, and that the expected and valued behavior is action, not more talking.
As we start 2011, It’s a good time to step back and think about what you want to be true when you start 2012.
Work vs. Growth
If you don’t set some goals, you’ll deliver a bunch of work (which is good) but you’ll be starting 2012 in the same shape you are in now (which is not good enough).
What I mean is that you and your team will not have grown.
You will have delivered more stuff, but have only the same capabilities and capacity as you do now.
Two things about effective leadership
1. As a leader you must deliver stuff AND get better at what you do over time.
2. It is a primary job of a leader to build a team beneath you that is highly capable, so that you free yourself up to solve higher order problems.
If your team does not get more capable, you all get stuck, and the business gets stuck in the same place.
How will you grow yourself, your business and your team?
What do you want to be better this time next year?
Here are three questions you should be answering in right now.
It’s Jan 2012…
1. How will YOU be better or more capable?
Is your network stronger?
Have your communication skills improved?
Do you have a new mentor?
Have you mastered something that the people at the top of your field are doing or thinking about?
Have you got your ideas into the world more broadly/publicly?
Have you become a better mentor to someone?
Are you more fit?
Have you been a better member of your family?
.
I’m not at all suggesting you try and do all of these things, or that these are even the right list of things for you to choose from.
But think about it…In what way do YOU want to be better next year? Decide. Do something on purpose.
Hint: start by scheduling some time to think about this!
It’s Jan 2012…
2. What will your team be capable of, that they are not today?
Will you team be better at…
Making decisions
A Quality improvement process
Managing the backlog of requested work
Communicating more effectively with peer organizations
Dealing with ambiguity
Recognizing and developing talent
On-time delivery
Managing expectations with stakeholders
Building credibility with an adversarial organization
Engaging and understanding customers
Internal or external use of social media
Communicating with employees
Selling more strategically
Business Plans with partners
Customer Service
.
This is a wonderful exercise to kick off the year with your team.
Have an off-site and decide not only what you want to get done, but what you want your team to be known for externally and internally, and what you want to be better at as team next year.
It’s Jan 2012…
3. What major things in your business will be fixed or invented?
Every business and every organization has persistent problems that are critical to get fixed, but don’t seem to ever get fixed. (You’re not alone.)
List your persistent issues. Face them head on.
What did you want to get done and didn’t. Why not?
List your unanswered questions.
What are the big debates and disagreements in your business and team?
What are the most biggest competitive threats that you have trouble addressing?
What are you most frustrating execution issues?
What systems and skills are your missing?
What parts of your organization are not working right?
.
It’s a very productive and valuable effort, to face your most annoying business issues, and decide to solve just one, once and for all. Then pick the next and solve that one.
It’s not just the work…
You need to be really diligent about not getting consumed by only delivering work.
You need to carve out time and energy to rise above the work and improve your game. That is the job of a leader.
If you do focus on work plus capability, the business benefits, the customers benefit, and everyone gets a little happier – including you!
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I had a mentor teach me that that business success was based on these three things in this order. People, Process, Profit.
Do things on purpose
From decades of watching successful business leaders, lessons learned from my own experience as a GM and CEO, and my work with business leaders today, I know that focused, proactive attention in these areas can help you reduce risk and go faster.
And… leaving them to chance can stall your growth.
1. People: Respect People
If you can motivate a talented group people to personally care about growing your business, you have won a big part of the game.
Common misstep:Seeing and treating people as interchangeable resources, instead of as talented, creative partners and contributors in your business growth.
Develop your people and your team. Hire the smartest people you can find, and encourage and support everyone to develop – at all levels. Trust people to take on big things, fail sometimes and learn. Always be building capacity so your team can do more next year than the did this year. See people development as having a hard ROI.
Communicate a lot. Have a bias toward openness, not secrecy. Make people feel included and informed – all the time. Tell the truth. When you can’t share everything don’t stop talking. Share what you can.
Say thank you. Creating a culture of recognition is a very powerful thing. Make sure you have ways of knowing when good things happen, and personally thank people. Make recognition and appreciation a process and a habit.
Manage performance. Do great things for your top performers and have consequences for your low performers. You can’t hide your reluctance to deal with poor performers. Everyone sees it, and it degrades trust and respect.
Acknowledge peoples’ lives outside of work. Invite them to bring their whole self to work, and don’t make their life outside of work need to be in so much competition. A great example of this I heard recently from Stan Slap is to put all of your team’s major personal events and commitments on the work calendar or project plan, so that the whole team can see it, and do their best to plan and work around them. Wish I thought of that 20 years ago!
2. Process: Get stuff DONE
Execute well. Manage and finish the important things.
Common Misstep: I am surprised at how many organizations regularly tolerate not getting done, the things they say they want to do.
Deliver on time. If you are not delivering on time. Fix it. No business can scale if you don’t have the fundamental ability to deliver what you say you will. And people love to get stuff done.
Just enough process. Judge the right amount of process for the size and state of your company. Too much process can stall a fast growth start-up, but not enough will keep a mid-size company from being able to grow, and meet commitments. Decide the right amount, (it’s not none). Put it in place and prioritize it. Make the adherence to the process that supports critical outcomes a higher priority than the work. It’s the only way to mature behaviors and get there. (And you are investing in building even more capacity for the future.)
Measure the most important things and improve. Make sure you are measuring the things that truly matter. What are the key drivers in your business? What makes your business happen? What are the three things that need to happen before someone buys? How do you know that enough of those things are happening?
Make room for strategic thinking and actions. Don’t be so busy with your current business that you fail to make time to work on your bigger, future business. You need to carve out time, people and budget to make sure you are not forgetting to grow your business while taking care of your current revenue stream.
3. Profit: Stay connected to reality
Always be clear about the external perceptions and financial performance of the business.
Common misstep: Tactical activity and wishful thinking can obscure the harsh realities of how well your business is really doing.
Everyone knows how we make money. It is vitally important that every individual knows how the company makes money. What product lines and geographies does the revenue come from? Which of those are the most profitable? What are the fixed and variable costs? Every person should know their role in both the income and expense picture.
External Input, Validation and Measures: Always make sure you are getting the truth from customers, and make sure enough of your measures are externally driven. Don’t congratulate your self too much for delivering beautiful products and offers on time, that the customers don’t find valuable.
Know what’s (really) going on. Come out of your corner office and spend time in the trenches. Kind of like the TV Show, Undercover Boss, but without the disguise. Spend time with the front line workers, see what they are doing and how they are thinking about the business. You will learn more real, valuable information than you can ever learn from your chain of command. It’s not that your managers keep secrets, it just that the information doesn’t boil up with as much clarity and richness as you will learn from getting personally involved.
Sell something. Be acutely tuned to what is selling. How can you improve, accelerate or make the sales process more compelling, effective and efficient? Go on sales calls. Try and sell your products personally. Know what works and what flops. Find and deal with obstacles to the sales process. Know inside and out how your company finds, develops and closes business.
People who are personally motivated, working within a well managed environment that enables them to finish and deliver things, with clear financial accountability will create a profitable growing business. People, Process, Profit.
3 Aspects to Successful Business Leadership.
I had a mentor once that taught me that that business success was based on three things in this order. People, Process, Profit.
As I work with more business leaders, I have been thinking about these things more explicitly.
These things mean very specific things to me and how I lead. This comes from watching the most successful business leaders and how they do it, and my own experience about what helps you go faster and what slows you down.
I encourage you to think about how you lead. What is your approach to leading your business? What matters to you.
Share it with your team.
Here’s mine.
1. People: Respect people’s humanity
I choose to motivate people to want to work for me, vs. rely only on money.
Develop your people and your team. Hire the smartest people you can find, and encourage and support everyone to develop themselves. Trust people to take on big things, fail sometimes and learn. Always be building capacity so your team can do more next year than the did this year.
Communicate a lot. Have a bias toward openness. Secrecy is a bad thing. Make people feel included and informed – all the time. Tell the truth. When you can’t share everything don’t stop talking. Share what you can.
Say thank you. Creating a culture of recognition is a very powerful thing. Make sure you have ways of knowing when good things happen, and personally thank people. Make recognition and appreciation a process and a habit.
Manage performance. Do great things for your top performers and have consequences for your low performers. You can’t hide your reluctance to deal with poor performers. Everyone sees it, and it de-motivate high performers.
Be respectful of people’s lives outside of work. Invite them to bring their whole self to work, and don’t make their life outside of work need to be so much of a competition. A great example of this I heard recently from Stan Slap is to put all of your teams major personal events and commitments on the work calendar, so that the whole team can see them and do their best to plan and work around them. Wish I thought of that!
2. Process: Get stuff DONE
I am surprised at how many organizations I see that tolerate not getting done the things they say they want to do.
Deliver on time – If you are not delivering on time. Fix it. No business can scale if you don’t have the fundamental ability to deliver what you say you will. And people love to get stuff done.
Just enough process – Judge the right amount of process for the size and state of your company. Too much process can stall a fast growth start-up, but not enough will keep you from being able to grow, and meet commitments. Decide the right amount, put it in place and prioritize it.
Measure the important things and improve. Make sure you are measuring the things that truly matter. What are the key drivers in your business? What makes business happen? How do you know that enough of those things are happening?
Make room for strategic thinking and actions. Don’t be so busy with your current business that you fail to make time to work on your bigger future business. You need to carve off time, people and budget to make sure you are not forgetting to grow your business vs. take care of your current revenue stream.
3. Profit: Stay connected to reality
You can get pretty confused about what business you are in if you spend too much time in your office with your close colleagues.
Everyone knows how we make money. I think it is vitally important that every individual knows how the company makes money. What product lines and geographies does the revenue come from, which of those are the most profitibale. What are the fixed and vaiable costs. Every person should know their role in both the income and expense picture.
External Input, Validation and Measures: Always make sure you are getting the truth from customers, and make sure enough of your measures are externally driven. Don’t congratulate your self too much for delivering beautify products and offers on time, that the customers don’t find valuable.
Know what’s (really) going on. Come out of your corner office and spend time in the trenches. Kind of like the TV Show, under-cover boss, but without the disguise. Spend time with the front line workers, see what they are doing and how they are thinking about the business. You will learn more real, valuable information than you can ever learn from your chain of command. It’s not that they keep secrets, it just doesn’t boil up with all the richness you will learn from getting personally involved.
Nothing happens till someone sells something. Be acutely tuned to what is selling and how to improve, accelerate or make the sales process more effective and efficient. Go on sales calls. Know what works and what flops.
People who are personally motivated, working within a well managed environment that enables them to finish and deliver things, with clear financial accountability will create a profitable growing business.
This is a bit of a diversion from my normal topics, but I know many of you are in technology companies, and pretty much all of you are people…
And I have something to say about this.
I was traveling in Cincinnati recently, and was greeted with the following in my hotel room. I was staggered. I removed the actual hotel name, but this was real.
Is it just me, or are these 19 steps to program a wake-up call a bit much?
Technology and Humans
I built a successful career in technology by following one guiding principle:
Make the technology less painful for humans to use.
Focus as much (if not more) energy on the human interface as on the technology itself.
Don’t ever show of the richness of your technology in the user interface. Focus completely on the user’s task. Understand how people are thinking about the task they need to do, and help them do it the way they are inclined to do it.
The point is never to show that your technology is smart and powerful, it’s to make your user feel smart and powerful.
Patty’s 3 Laws of Technology
(Break them at your own business peril.)
1. Technology should not rob people of their humanity 2. If you present technology instead of a human interface it HAS TO WORK 3. Technology should never make people feel stupid
Here is what I mean:
1. Technology should not rob people or their humanity.
Probably the best example of this are those voice automated systems that make you talk to a computer on the other end of the phone. I don’t know about you, but I hate this. I would feel much less robbed of my humanity if I was greeted with a computer voice that said,
I know I’m not a person like you are, and that you’d rather talk to a person, but we think we can help you faster if you are willing to give this a try. We won’t make you talk to a computer and pretend it’s a person, and feel like an idiot shouting answers and phrases repeatedly because we can’t actually understand them… Please help us route your call by keying in your account number and answering ONE question – then you’ll be connected to a real person.
Any time your user interface makes a person translate something they are thinking or feeling into a narrow input that your technology will accept, you have robbed them of some humanity.
2. If you present technology instead of a human interface it HAS TO WORK
If you want me to sign up for your service on your website, don’t require a special new version of a flash plug in for me to do it. Don’t invite me to leave you feedback, only to have a link that doesn’t go anywhere. Don’t optimize your interface so much for one platform or environment that it doesn’t work right in others.
When something goes wrong…
A human can recover and use creativity and judgment (and opposable thumbs) if the transaction does not work. Technology just sits there there not working, and the user goes away having failed to complete the task.
I was duped recently at the airport when I accepted a boarding pass sent to my mobile phone and got to an airport that didn’t have the ability to read it.
I was promised I could pick up a prescription after hours, from an automated pharmacy dispenser, and they had mis-spelled my name when they input the prescription so there was no way I could pick it up and no way for the machine to recover. There was a phone support number on the machine connecting me to a line which was un-manned after hours.
Make it fool proof.
Test everything. One of the best software tests I ever saw was a CEO who sat on the keyboard. The system broke. Test your technology in ways users are not supposed to use it, because they will always do things they are not supposed to do.
Use Standard (boring) components.
Go out of your way to use technology components that are as standard and hard to break as possible.
Don’t try to make your screens extra-pretty, or use bleeding edge widgets and gadgets in your user interface because they amuse you, you are trying to be impressive, or you want to try something new — especially if if there is to be no-human back up when it doesn’t work.
Set your standard to “It has to work”. Not “It has to be leading edge”.
Don’t lose customers.
If you replace humans with technology, if it doesn’t work you will lose customers because you have given them no possible alternative but to go away. There is a corollary to this law which is “Don’t make people work hard to give you their money”.
3. Technology should never make people feel stupid
This issues is starting to go away as technology is actually working better and young people are immune to thinking that it is their fault if it doesn’t work.
Complexity is the enemy
But when technology is unnecessarily complicated and hard to use, it makes (us old) people feel inadequate because we can’t accomplish the task at hand.
I don’t think I have ever got through a self-checkout lane without requiring assistance from a clerk and feeling a bit stupid.
If you buy wine, someone still needs to check your ID. You Fail.
If you by an item that is too large to put in the bag, the system will freeze because it can’t sense that you put it in the bag after you scan it. You fail.
If you buy organic produce, it doesn’t have a selection for organic. You Fail. At this point you are given the choice either to wait for help (you feel stupid) or to steal money from the store because you can’t find a way to pay the organic up-charge (robbed of your humanity, and being made to work too hard to give them your money).
The good, at least mitigating, news is that most self-checkouts follow rule number 2. It HAS to work – so they put human backup there.
Making technology better for humans is good for business.
Apple is an obvious example. But even putting Apple aside as an outlier, I can tell you that in every business where I had responsibility to bring technology products to market, focusing on the human interface was good for business.
We put extra effort on the user’s thinking process, the user interface, the install, the demo, the “start here” experience, the documentation, the customer support help desk, and the sales and contracting documents and processes.
By doing this, my businesses were able to steal share from competitors who were overly focused on the features of their technology alone, and tortured their customers and partners because of it.
People, Process, and Profit