Who is helping?

One of the CEO’s I am working with on a business transformation said to me about his managers,

“No, he won’t actually help solve the problem, he is more of a reporter.”

Ouch!

Think about your behaviors.

Are you at any risk of being a reporter?

Do you often highlight things that aren’t working?
Do you study things and point out what is wrong?
Do you regularly play devil’s advocate?

Oops!

What adds value?

I always talk about the importance of adding value to the business.

When it comes to reporting trouble, many people confuse what adding value actually means. They think that identifying and exposing problems is adding value. Or that doing analysis and providing insightful commentary about what is broken is adding value.

It is not.

So, you may be thinking…but you have to identify problems if you want to solve them. Or you need to know about issues if you want to fix them. Surely the person who raises these issues is adding value because the business “needs to know”.

Talking vs. Doing

The big, BIG difference for adding value is between talking and doing.

It is the difference between describing the current state or moving something forward. …Between exposing a problem and fixing it, or at least proposing a solution.

Do you have reporters on your team?

You can find them — talking.

Sounding smart, playing devils advocate. Raising important issues. Figuring out what is wrong. Telling people about it.

Do you have solvers on your team?

The solvers are the ones that show up and say, nervously, “I hope it’s OK, but I did this.”

Or, “I found this nasty issue, but here is what I have done to resolve part of it. Can I get your thoughts on these two options to fix the rest of it?”

When solvers run into an impossible problem they say to themselves, “Man this is screwed up, what is the first thing I am going to fix? What will I propose that will move us forward?”

The reporter is the one that gets to “Man, this is screwed up”, and thinks “I have to come up with the most compelling way to communicate how big of a problem this is so that people will get sufficiently worried about it, and I will get credit for exposing it.”

Reporting vs. Solving – the behaviors

Example: An organization that is chronically late delivering.

The reporter might analyze root causes and talk about lack of definition, poor test plans, poor communication, lack of accountability. All may indeed be real issues, but the reporter will expect someone else to lead and to act.

The solver will think through what actions might actually help. Even if it won’t solve the whole problem, they will endeavor to at least move something forward.

In the case of something like chronic late delivery a solver might say, “I am going to create a sign-off document that defines what finished looks like. This will help all of us clarify what specific actions must be completed to reach the deadline. It might not solve the whole problem, but it will make things better and we will learn something by doing it.

Another example: Sell higher

If an organization is not selling strategically enough, a reporter might present information about background and revenue and current sales skills, and recommend kicking off further study.

A solver will find someone in another organization inside or outside the company who is an expert and learn from them. They will experiment. They will try a new sales process. They will tune it until they hit on what succeeds. They will propose specific changes to share the learning.

What is your proposal?

You want to send a clear message that being a reporter is not good enough.

In every organization I have ever led or consulted with, I have found that merely responding to every single news report with the question, “What is your proposal?” goes a long way to solving this. Consistently doing this changes the culture and separates the solvers from the reporters.

The people who come back with a proposal will rise in the organization. Next time and forever after, they will start with a proposal.

The people who get annoyed by this and say things like, “I just thought it was important to make you aware of this”, (by the way, even typing this makes me cringe – I can still picture the specific people who regularly said this to me). These people will never be significant contributors to the success of the business.

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The big idea…

If I could offer one idea that will have a huge impact on your success and your satisfaction with work, it would be that you give yourself time to think.

(you can stop reading here if you accept that point!)

When do you think?

I work with so many executives that tell me they would be so much better at their job if they had more time to think.

Think about a typical day, week or month in your work.  How much time to you spend in uninterrupted, quality thinking time?

I know when I was a corporate executive I had the same problem.  My calendar was fully booked.  If I tried to schedule time for myself it would get over-ridden with urgent customer problems, staff crises, or emergencies from my boss to deliver something to his boss.

My personal, thinking time got wiped out.

So I needed to work differently.  I have written much on the topics of defending your time and energy, making more time, delegating better, and many other topics which help you use your time more strategically.

But today I just want to focus on this one idea:

Give yourself time to think.  Schedule it.  Protect it.

This will have a bigger impact on your success than almost anything you can do.  If you are giving yourself this time, don’t ever feel guilty about it.  If you are not, start taking it.

Key point: Remember, your job as a leader is to build capability underneath you, so your team can handle more work, and so you can apply yourself to solving higher order problems.

Enable your team to do the work

• Let your team handle the customer escalations, you need to create the quality program that reduces them.
• Let your team handle the marketing events and deliverables, you need to create the market-changing strategy.
• Let your team handle the product development.  You need to create better processes to deliver more, faster.

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You will never do any of this if you don’t give yourself time to think.  You will get caught up in a sea of activity and reacting.

Think about it this way:  If you stay overwhelmed with activity you are not doing a good job.

Schedule time to think and HIDE

Try it for 2 hours.  Tell everyone you are at the dentist.  The world will not come to an end.  Hide. The hiding part is important. The activity knows where to find you.

Think about how you can improve all of this chaotic, reactive, repetitive activity and do something better.

Then give yourself 2 hours a week to think.

Don’t feel guilty

I can’t tell you how many teams I work with where they all live in fear of their instant message window saying “unavailable” for a second.  It’s fascinating that no one holds it against anyone else, but each person feels this huge pressure to always be available.

I know people who work at home who are afraid to go to the bathroom because they think their company will think they are not working if they don’t answer IM’s instantly.  This is crazy.

Why not put your IM status for an hour or two as “working on a deadline” or “on a call” or “be back at 2pm”?

If you tell people to expect that you will be away from IM working on strategic projects a few times a week, no one will hold it against you.

Being over-available

If instead you stay infinitely available, but never do anything strategic, you will fail to do your job well.

I hear upper managers talking about their workhorses… “Oh yeah, we can throw anything at him,  he’ll work round the clock, he’ll travel anywhere, we can always count on him… “

Notice they are not saying, “he is someone we should promote.”

If you work tirelessly 24×7 to accomplish a goal or meet a deadline once in awhile that is OK, and sometimes necessary.  But if you work tireless 24×7 for 5 years you will be stuck.

If you never give yourself time to think about how to work better or more strategically, and just keep doing all the work as it comes at you, you will never be as successful as if you figure out how to rise above it.

What is a good succession plan?

I find it  interesting is that most companies do one of two extremes when it comes to succession planning:

1.  Nothing at all
2. A very cumbersome process with lots of documents and checkpoints for multiple candidates which never amounts to anything.

Let’s find something in the middle…

Get someone ready

Think about succession planning in its core form:  How do you get someone (specific), ready to take your (specific) job?

Every manager should be thinking about this.

The benefits are numerous.  If you do this,  as a leader you score many wins:

• The whole organization gets more capable
• You have a real and meaningful way of motivating your top performers
• Other people see you delegating some power, so they trust you more
• You get to hand off some hard work that you don’t have to do personally!

3  Steps to effective delegating

Succession planning is all about delegating.

As a leader, you need to make sure you have someone on your team that can step up.  Once you do, you need to be prepared to delegate big, hairy, strategic stuff, not just superficial, well contained, safe stuff.

1. Let them practice your work

The first part of someone learning your job, is about the work.  You need to give them opportunities to practice working at your level.

A lot of times we think the way to motivate our top performers is to have them work on the most fun or interesting projects.  That works to a point, but it does not do anything to help get someone ready for your job.

Face it, how much fun work do YOU get to do?

You need to give them opportunities to practice the ugly, mind-numbing, heavily matrixed, controversial, boring, unsupported, failing, no-win kind of work you deal with every day when you wake up.

What is the hardest and most distasteful thing you own?

That’s what you give your top performer.  You give them the benefit of seeing what it is really like in your shoes.

They get to suffer like you do.  But they get to work on big stuff. They get access to your network and stakeholders.  They have the chance to do something creative and heroic to get this done.

What may be drudgery for you, can be really motivating for someone who gets to step up.  OK, you should probably give them a more pleasant task too, while you are at it…

But don’t shy away from giving smart people hard work.

And don’t feel guilty about it.  (I often did, but then realized that this was better for everybody, and that people appreciate it, not resent it, so I got over it)

2. Let them practice your relationships

The next part of getting someone ready for your job is to make sure they are practiced and comfortable with the social requirements at the next level.

If they are stepping up, they need to fit in socially too.

They need to be someone that your peers want to include personally. They can’t stand out like a sore thumb as the junior person in the room,  who has no basis for relating to the big execs.

You need to give your top performer a chance to practice at these relationships.  Give them opportunities to present for you. Arrange one-one meetings with them and your peers.  Send them as your delegate to your boss’s staff meeting when you are out of town.  (Go out of town if this never happens.)

If your succession candidate does not develop personal relationships with your boss and peers they will never be ready to step into your job.  And it won’t matter because they will not be given the chance.

Unless your candidate is viewed by your boss and peers as someone socially worthy of the role, they won’t get it.  So your succession planning will fail. Either you will be stuck, or the company will go outside to fill your role when the time comes.

3. Let them practice your decisions

OK. Here is where the rubber meets the road.  You need to give someone a chance to practice making the decisions that you make.

If you never delegate important decisions you are fooling yourself that you are doing succession planning.

How will somebody ever be ready to take over, if you have owned all the decisions along the way?

Will you delegate important decisions?

Think about the next few months of decisions you need to make.  Investments, priorities, partnerships, road map choices, marketing strategies.  Give your top performer the task of owning the project AND the making decisions.

Let them feel the pressure of owning the outcome fully.  Let them get the experience explaining, defending, and selling their choices. Let them get the experience fixing it if it goes wrong.

Is this scary? Yes.

Might they choose wrong? Yes.  Might they choose better than you? Yes.

The point is, if you never let them own and make key decisions, you are cutting off the single most important training you can give your successor.
See also Let People Fail.  They will never be ready for your job without this.

Thanks

This topic of succession planning came up in a discussion the other day in one of my member Coaching Hour calls.  Thank you to the Azzarello Group members for making the discussions so valuable.

HERE’S WHAT WE TALKED ABOUT
IN THIS MONTH’S MEMBER WEBINAR:

You can download the Podcast
Make More Time

Take control of your time

1. It’s up to you. No one other than you has any motivation whatsoever to make YOU less busy.  Your boss, your team, and your peers only benefit from your endless output.

2. Pick the right FEW things to do, and do them really well.  Don’t get overwhelmed by the activity of your job. Choose your activities to be the ones that support the most critical business outcomes.

3. Delegating: You can’t get there without delegating.  Think about delegating not as just assigning work, but as freeing yourself up to add even more value.

Create More Time – Do More Smart Stuff

4. Just take some time back. Schedule time for yourself and HIDE to think and work on the most important things.  If you don’t hide the activity will know where to find you.

5. Shift some time from activity/working to thinking/planning time.  Work ON your business not just IN your business.  Thinking of improvements and efficiencies helps make even more time.

Clear the Deck – Do Less Stupid Stuff

6. Seek and Destroy Chaos: deal with bad meetings, bad communications, and bad working habits.  Make the container smaller and time-box low value activities.

7. Resist temptation to solve and resolve things that don’t matter.  Don’t use time on things that don’t achieve critical business outcomes, even if they are more fun to work on.

Optimize the Time You Have

8. Manage your energy: Deal with being overwhelmed, get over disappointment quickly, make things easier on yourself not harder.

9. Improve working habits: Get better at using “in between” times, and don’t spend “prime time” on low value activities.

10. Magic: If you can align your FEW Priorities with where you have natural strengths it’s magic. You can and get more done, have a big impact, and you’ll make time because you can go fast when you are doing things you are really good at.

Download the Podcast Make More Time to learn more.