I get a lot of questions from people about what it takes to be a good general manager.

So I am going to write about this over the next few weeks on this blog.

General Management is very different than your last job

Stepping into a general manger role for the first time is a big deal because it is a very different job than you’ve had before.

I know a guy who is a new general manager and he thinks he is doing a good job. But if you talk to anyone around him, or above or below him, they are all frustrated with him, and they are worried he is not going to make it.

If you ask him, he admits there are challenges in his market and in his team, but he reports somewhat abruptly that it is all under control, and that he’s doing fine.

I actually see this quite regularly.

At the root of this is some combination of insecurity, fear, ego and pride. None are worth failing for, (nor do they get any better after failing!)

Never suffer in silence. Never fail alone

I feel like a broken record on this sometimes…

Get help. Don’t try this alone. Get a mentor or a coach.

Make sure you have someone helping you who cares about you and your career success, who has a lot of experience as a general manager.

You need someone to advise you how to do the parts of the job you don’t know how to do yet. You need someone to tell you what you don’t know you don’t know.

Learn fast

In your career, if you are in totally over your head, and you are scared, it does not mean that you are failing, it means that you are advancing!

But you need to get your bearings fast and start doing a competent job.
And nothing helps as much as getting help.

I was very lucky to have mentors, and I have never been shy about asking for help.

For example, as a new GM I went to my mentor to get advice for best practices on what to delegate vs. what to focus my personal time on, how to measure my staff, how to improve execution in sales and on product delivery, how to prioritize strategic partnerships and organic growth.

Before this my perspective on these things came from doing the work personally. What I wanted to learn was how great general managers add value when they have to worry about all of these things at the same time.

Don’t get bogged down

It’s easy to just wade in and start doing the job, and react to what comes along.

You’ll be asked to produce strategy documents and financial plans, to launch products, and talk to the media. But I find that most people who just dive in end up working at the wrong level.

They get too bogged down. They leave their organization waiting for big decisions. They don’t drive accountability. They fail to recognize duplicate efforts, communication issues, and chronic execution problems. The spend their time on tactics and fail to make strategic progress.

Here are the big things a General Manager needs to care about.

Number 1. Get a mentor or a coach. (don’t skip #1) (broken record)

Number 2. Split your thinking, and budget your time into the following areas:

• People
• Process
• Profit
• Communicating

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As a general manager, you need to divide your attention across these categories and make sure that you:

1. Are connected to reality, and know what is working and not working
2. Establish clarity about the scope of your business and its advantage
3. Make clear assignments, measure and track accountability and recruit support from your team. (hint: have someone help you do this)
4. Have a prioritized plan to improve
5. Build your credibility with the Board, C-Level staff, external audiences and your employees.
6. Grow your network.

I will talk more about all of this, and share my thoughts and experiences about how to be a great general manager in the next weeks, and I invite you to share yours as well.

Leave your thoughts in the comment box below!

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Last week I was the keynote speaker at an event for a services organization in an energy company.

I spoke on the topic of Adding more Value to the Business.

This is an important topic for all of us.

The bottom line here is that you can’t wait to be told what adds value, and you can’t count on your job description as written to add enough value.

You need to figure this out for yourself.

You need to educate yourself about what the business values, and then tune your work specifically to deliver more value.

Do more than your job description

Your job description is valid for a moment in time — the moment when it is first given to you. As soon as you start doing the job, what the job needs to be evolves as the business grows and as the world changes.

If you do your job as written for too long a period of time, you will become out of date. You will begin to lose relevance to the business. You will not be adding enough value.

Don’t wait to be asked or directed

Yes, you need to do your job, but you also to think about how to improve the way your job is done. Don’t give this extra work of figuring out how your job needs to evolve to your to your boss. Sort it out on your own and make a recommendation. (That’s what high performers do).

What adds value?

I have collected some questions that will help you figure out how to tune your job over time to make sure you are adding enough value.

1. Who uses my work & what do they need most?

• Who are the consumers of each piece of work that I do?
• Do they still use it? Do they still need it?
• Do they pass it on to others? What do those people need?
• Can the content I deliver be modified to be more useful or relevant?
• Can the manner in which I deliver it be improved to be more useful or relevant?

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Note: Stop producing work no one cares about.

Check! I know so many organizations that are over-busy producing reports, analysis, or sales and marketing that no one uses. Don’t burn up your time on things that no one cares about. DO actively learn what they find most useful, and tune what you produce to be more valuable.

2. What business outcomes does my work drive?

• What is the business outcome that happens as a result of my producing this work?
• How does my work impact profit?
• Does my work impact quality, innovation, efficiency, competitiveness, cost reduction, process improvement, sales effectiveness…
• Can I tune my work to create a better or different business outcome?

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Note: If you can’t connect your work to a business outcome, you are in danger of not being relevant.

If you are not relevant you are not adding enough value. You need to stay educated on the most important outcomes the business is driving and stay connected with them.

Even if you are a cost center providing an internal service, you need to find ways to improve efficiency or usefulness.

3. What does my work cost?

• How much does it cost the company for me to do this work?
• Can it be done for less?
• What happens to my work after it’s delivered?
• What are the downstream costs of the things that I do?
• Who else does my work cause work or costs for?
• Is there a way to make my work more efficient for others?

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Note: Own improving the outcomes your work causes, not just delivering the work.

Always be finding ways to take cost out. If you produce 50 reports, maybe 20 better reports would do? (Everyone will like 20 reports better than 50!)

If you do things manually or in a chaotic reactive mode, how many people are impacted by this? How can you create a process to streamline the work, make it less complicated, and require fewer touch points, questions, or follow-ups?

4. What has changed?

• What has changed in the market since I started this job?
• What has changed in our customers’ business since I started this job?
• What has changed in our competitors’ business since I started this job?
• What has changed inside our company since I started this job?
• Do these changes require a change in the way my job is done?

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Note: If you are not evolving your job, you will no longer be qualified when the game changes.

Or you will be doing the wrong job, and your job will get eliminated. Be the one to recommend changing your job to meet the evolving business needs.

5. Growth & Scaling

• How much has the company grown since I started this job?
• How much does the company plan to grow in the future?
• What still works in the way I do my job if the company is much bigger?
• Which things about how I do my job don’t work if the company is bigger?

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Note: When companies get bigger all the jobs change.

You can’t keep using the same way of working. It doesn’t scale. You can be the one to build a new process that will scale, or you can be the one who gets pushed aside by someone with experience at a bigger company.

6. Help others

• What can I do to communicate better?
• How can I share more knowledge?
• How can I teach someone to be more effective?
• How can I help someone step into a bigger role?
• How can I help someone believe that something bigger is possible for them.

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Note: If you are not helping others, you are not adding enough value.

The other upside is that helping others can put a meaning into an otherwise unfulfilling job. If you are feeling unsatisfied about being in a corporate role that doesn’t make enough difference in the world, help someone. When you help someone else, you change the world for that person.

Don’t wait

I see a lot of people thinking that answering these questions is not part of their job. They wait for others to answer them, and await new instructions from their manager.

It’s dangerous to rely on your job description to tell you what to do, or to wait for your manager to tune your job along the way. It’s much safer (and your are adding more value) when you do it yourself. Take that weight off your manager. You decide what needs to get done to drive the future goals and continue to add the most value.

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Who, me?

I remember when I first joined HP, I was notified by my manager that I was to attend a meeting with HR to discuss mentoring.

I went in thinking, “Boy, I could really use a mentor. I am new here, and this is a big company. A mentor could help me learn about other parts of the company and help me build my network.”

I was stunned in dis-belief when I realized that they were recruiting me to BE a mentor.

At this point in my career I had no idea what I had to offer. In fact, I was pretty nervous. “I’m going to get found out…. My mentee is going to report me as being a useless mentor”.

I tried to humble my way out of this responsibility, because I was afraid to fail, and because I wasn’t sure I had time to be a mentor. (Interesting to note how I thought I had time to work with a mentor, but not the other way around…)

I failed to avoid it!

I left that meeting as an official mentor awaiting an assignment of my first mentee. I was given a brief pamphlet about mentoring, which I don’t recall having learned anything from, and I was off to the races.

Two main reasons people don’t mentor

1) They don’t feel like they have something to offer.
2) They don’t think they have enough time.

Let me talk about both of these.

1. You DO have something to offer

What I learned from my mentees surprised me. They would come and talk to me about what was happening in their jobs, and I would share stories about similar things that I did. (I can’t emphasize enough that it did not feel like I was sharing anything of value.)

I was amazed when they would come back and say, “Thank you so much, I did what you said and it worked wonderfully!” When they repeated back to me what they had learned and what they had done, I was staggered to find out that those stories had been so useful.

The reason this happens makes sense once you think about it.

The things you already know seem obvious to YOU.

So you don’t think they are valuable or impressive. They don’t seem fascinating or important — precisely because you already know them!

But the things you know are indeed fascinating and important to others — all the people who don’t know what you know!

And you don’t have to know how to be a mentor, you can just start.

No matter where you are in your career you can be a mentor to someone.

There is someone who can benefit from what you know. And they will do better from having the encouragement of someone who thinks them worthy of investing in.

I have been a mentor ever since. I have found it to be a huge source of learning and inspiration. I always learn stuff from the people I mentor.

2. You have enough time

When I was at my busiest as an executive, I would relish my mentoring appointments.

It was like having a vacation in my schedule for an hour. Every other hour I was on the hook to solve problems, negotiate, mediate, make difficult decisions, sell something, invent something… When I had a mentoring appointment, it was a lovely break from my own job. I was not going to end that meeting with bigger problems or more to do.

But the more important part is that you feel better about your job when you help someone else. You feel more in control. You feel less overwhelmed.

If you feel like you have no time, when you give a little time to help someone else, you realize that you do have time. It actually makes you feel less overwhelmed if you give time to help someone else.

How to become a mentor

If you are mentoring today, bravo, and thank you from the world at large.

If you are not, volunteer.

Here are some ideas:

1. If you have relationships with your manager’s peers, go to them and say, “I am not currently mentoring anyone but would like to. Is there someone in your organization who would benefit?” By the way this does not hurt your credibility with your manager’s peers! But that’s not the primary reason to do it.

2. Make the offer to someone in HR. Ask if there are any high performers one or two levels down that would benefit.

3. Make the offer to your neighbors. Perhaps they have children entering the workforce.

4. Strike a deal with your peers to each mentor someone in the others’ organization. You’ll also get the benefit of getting smarter about the business. You’ll get a steady stream of information from another part of the business, from another level, which you don’t normally interact with. This is gold.

There is really no downside.

Be a mentor!

Join me for a Special Interview with Tim Sanders

I moved this blog topic up to align with my upcoming interview with Tim Sanders about his new book Today We are Rich.

Of the many valuable lessons in this book, the concept that having something to give makes you rich is a common thread, whether it is time, money, gratitude, help, positivity, or just spending the energy to move something forward.

Please join us for a fantastic conversation on Wednesday April 20 at 9am Pacific Time.
You can register here.

You can also download Tim’s free eBook ahead of time:

(by the way every click to download sends a donation to the Smyles foundation to educate at-risk children)

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The Power of Confidence with Tim Sanders
Wed April 20 9am PT
Register here

This month’s webinar topic: Be Less Busy, Be More Strategic drew record breaking attendance.

People at all levels are feeling overworked and over-whelmed.

You want to be more strategic, but it’s really hard when the work keeps getting piled on and the pressure never lets up.

So how do you carve out (and defend) the time to be more strategic?

Download the podcast Be Less Busy, Be More Strategic to learn how.

Here are some of the things we covered:

Harsh Realities:

It’s up to you. No one other than you has any motivation whatsoever to make YOU less busy. Others only benefit from your endless busy-ness.

Successful people rise above the work. The most successful people were not the ones who were less busy along the way. They did not get to work in a protected bubble so that they could focus on what was important. They figured out how to deal with it.

Leadership is supposed to be hard. As a leader you are faced with ambiguity, crisis, not enough resources, too much work and too many demands. Welcome to being a leader. That is what the job IS. Your job is to deliver despite everything that lines up to kill you!

Work on what matters

DO Better. It really is Be Less Busy AND Be more Strategic. It’s always both. We talked about how to defend your time and focus on higher value work. By the way, this is a great summary of what I mean by “DO Better” – Less Busy, More Strategic.

Connect your work with business value. First, understand what the business truly values. Know the priorities of the CEO, your competition and your customers. You need to be the one to judge what matters most. Don’t wait to be told.

Advise Your Executive

A Secret: Your boss wants you to push back. See also Saying NO to your Boss. You need to catch all the work but not try and do all the work. We covered several techniques for doing this.

Not all requests are created equal. Keep a list of everything they ask for. Embarrass them with it. Get their feedback on what is still important. Make informed suggestions to your boss for how to prioritize to add the most value. Offer value by suggesting how to sort through it all.

Negotiate. You need to connect the dots for people and share why you are working on what you are working on, and why it is valuable. The more people understand what you are doing and why it’s so important, the more you will be forgiven for not doing everything.

Not all or nothing. Focus does not mean you stop everything else completely. Think instead about what you will do first. Then what you will do later, slower, of lesser quality or less robustly.

Build Capacity, Grow Capability

Prepare for the future. Being strategic means being prepared for the future. Are you and your team ready for what the business will need in the years to come? Do you know what that is? Do you know how your jobs should evolve?

Get better at something. A critical part of being a successful leader is to both deliver work AND increase the capacity of what your team can deliver. If you only deliver work, but your team does not get more capable, when the business grows you will not be qualified anymore!

You, Your Team and the Business. We talked about ways to build capability so that your team can step up to free you up to solve higher order problems and add more strategic value. We also talked about how to help all the people doing the work to also step up and build efficiency and new competencies into the business.

Find a partner. It’s so hard to find time to be more strategic, so the best bet is to schedule time and to work with a partner. That way you hold each other accountable for using the thinking time for being strategic (instead of doing more work). It also helps you stay focused on the commitments you each make to grow your organizations.

Want to hear more of the discussion?

Download the podcast of the webinar Be Less Busy, Be More Strategic
or
Download the complete webinar including the podcast, presentations and worksheets.

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I had an opportunity to talk with David Spark about the career obstacles and setbacks I have faced and how I over came them.

We recorded it. It’s worth listening to!

The Podcast

• Right Click to Download the podcast
• Left Click to Listen

The aha’s from the conversation…

1. It’s up to you. Don’t wait to be discovered or asked. Do better stuff on your own.

2. See the bigger picture. Don’t get so focused on your job description, that you fail to see what your real job is.

3. Don’t be invisible. You must be visible, but don’t be annoying.

4. Are you relevant? If you are the only one who understands why what you do is important, you are in trouble.

5. Don’t do everything. Set Ruthless Priorities. Get something done really well that has a big business impact.

6. Don’t struggle alone. Get mentors. Successful people get help.

7. Get on “The List”. All decision makers have a list of people they will consider for a great job.  If you’re not on the list, you don’t get the job.

8. Be Less Busy. Working too hard can get you stuck. Don’t be a work-horse. Your reward is more work.

9. Get the right experience. Decide what job you want and get experience in it before get the job.

10. Be happier. You will be better at your work if you are thriving in it.  Don’t stay miserable. Do something different.

Take control

What I learned (and the great news!) is that you have way more control than you think once you decide to change how you work. Take control of making your career (and life) better for you.

The Podcast

• Right Click to Download the podcast
• Left Click to Listen

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Thank you.
Happy  Holidays.
And a Prosperous 2011!

I had the opportunity to interview Stan Slap, CEO and Author of the New York Times best selling book:
Bury My Heart in Conference Room B.

Download the podcast of the interview here:

What we talked about:

Stan Slap: Buckle up, we’re going off road.

Stan asks:

Did you ever imagine that when you were 15, or 18, or 22 and swore that you were going to live your life your way, to the fullest, that you would ever be in a discussion where someone was encouraging you to do that and you were hesitant, fearful and unsure about whether you should?

The Power of Emotional Commitment

Stan challenges all of us to lead from our own deepest values.

Stan talked about allowing yourself to live those values at work. You only get one life, and the clock is ticking. So why wouldn’t you?

Personal Values drive Corporate Performance

There is nothing like emotional commitment in managers and employees to fuel corporate performance. You’ve seen it. You’ve felt it. When someone is emotionally committed to a cause nothing can get in their way.

So why is it so hard for companies to get emotional commitment?

Emotional commitment is what companies want most from their managers but the very concept of being a manager often means having to serve your company over your own values.

So what companies want most from their managers (emotional commitment and increased performance), they most stop their managers from giving. Stan explains that it’s not “the company”, that is the reason for this. It is the managers themselves.

Why do managers stand in the way of their own emotional fulfillment?

Because it’s uncomfortable initially to expose who you really are and what you really care about at work, or you may not think your company deserves your emotional commitment.

But Stan challenged us to consider that the cost of emotional detachment (lack of fulfillment and poor performance) is even bigger.

He shared some fascinating insights from his research with tens of thousands of managers:

When asked, What are your core values? the two things that came up more often than anything else, were family and integrity. When asked, What core values do you find work most compromises? the top two answers were family and integrity.  Yikes!

Stan gave us the roadmap

1. Understand your core values
2. Share them with your team
3. Show your team why bringing them into work makes life better for them
3. Encourage them to bring their core values to work
4. The emotional commitment will greatly increase your team’s performance
5. Your company responds well to increased performance.

This is fuels corporate performance.

Leading from your own deepest core values, it is going to increase your performance, and the performance of the company.

Don’t wait for permission

Don’t wait for permission or sanction for this to come from above.

Many people are angry and frustrated and resentful about how badly their companies are treating them.  So why would you want to give your emotional commitment to your company?

You don’t do this for company. You do this for yourself.

Do this for YOU

Make a commitment to yourself to be more fulfilled by leading from your values. Do it for yourself and your team. Good things will happen.

We talked about how this approach engenders remarkable levels of emotional commitment support from your team. I can personally vouch for this. It works.

Stories

Stan told a fascinating story about a woman who drew  her core value of loyalty from a horrific experience in her past going to a segregated school in the South.  There are many remarkable stories in his book about how people discover their core values.

What are your core values?

What are your moments of truth?  Who are you really?  What do you care about at the deepest level? How would it feel if that person was welcome at work?

Download the podcast to learn  more.

Buy Stan’s book on Amazon (not a paid affiliate link, just a convenience) or anywhere books are sold (including Brazil, and China!)

Thanks Stan, it was great!

Stan Slap has revolutionized performance for many of the world’s most successful companies. His international consulting company, slap, specializes in achieving ferocious commitment from manager, employee and customer cultures––the three groups that decide the success of any business. His client list ranges from Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft to HSBC and Viacom.

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?
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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?
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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.