Management lessons from the cat
January 10, 2010 by janet · Leave a Comment
Yes, even pets have something to teach us about management and change.
Do you recognise this pattern? You need to make a change. You make a plan and a schedule. But when you start to move forward, you go…well, backward.
Welcome to the complex and unpredictable world of change – the inevitable consequence of managing in a world of choice. It is happening around us all of the time, but the most recent lesson I learned in management came from trying to manage my cat.
In October, Starksy (pictured) was diagnosed with diabetes and prescribed special food and medicine. He now requires an injection of insulin each day at 7:30 AM and 7:30 PM, immediately after food. That should be easy enough, I thought. And, I changed my schedule and his.
But, when I tried to implement the changes, Starsky objected. He following me around the house from 6:00 PM and meowing relentlessly – unable to understand why I was withholding his food. When 7:30 finally rolled around, I would finally put the food down. But, instead of eating, he would just walk away. Since food is required before injections, now I couldn’t give him his scheduled shot. When I tried to force him to eat the food he had been insisting on just 10 minutes prior, he refused and wanted to go outside instead.
My plan and schedule had gone horribly wrong. Managing a cat was proving just as complex as managing humans.
In my August blog on Leadership, I explained managing complexity like this:
Traditional command and control models of leadership were better suited to managing in an industrial age – predictable, orderly structures, like machines and factories. But it’s not the machines doing the work anymore, it is people. And, it’s not a product we are producing, it is innovation and knowledge. And once you rely on people to produce innovation, things get considerably more complex. Management skills of planning, scheduling and delegating are second to those of visioning, boundary setting, empowerment and communication.
Management theory is all well and good, but does it actually work in practise? Well, here is how I used it with Starsky:
What’s happening?
Starsky, like our employees, is applying choice. The more I try to control him, the more unpredictable he becomes. We are interdependent – for every behaviour I try to change, he exhibits a response – often an unpredictable and undesired one.
The alternative
The secret to getting control of the situation was actually to stop trying to control it at all and focus instead on boundaries and empowerment. Now, Starsky can have his food any time after 6:30. I don’t stand over him with a needle waiting for him to finish eating. If he wants to go outside, I let him because I know that he will be back within the hour to finish his dinner.
The result
As soon as I relaxed my standards of control and empowered Starsky with more choice, we both started getting what we wanted.
My Advice
If your projects aren’t getting the results you intend, try changing your focus. Spend less energy on the schedule and more on the enabling the desired outcomes through boundary setting, vision setting, communications and empowerment.
Teamwork…do I have to?
November 9, 2009 by janet · Leave a Comment
Love them or hate them, teams are a part of our organisational language. But, as much as the word is used, it is not always clear what makes an effective team.
Let’s say your team has a goal to produce and execute a marketing plan. In fact, your goal is to write the best darn marketing plan the organisation has ever seen. Since the plan has various sections that need to be researched and written, it can be broken down into parts and assigned to various team members. But wait…is that really the best way to create a stellar marketing plan?
How you structure the work depends on what you are trying to accomplish. Doing marketing as a team is not like painting a house. If you just all go off and do your own sections, you won’t benefit from the collective experience and ideas within the team. A key benefit of teams is that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The best ideas for your marketing will likely emerge from the creative process. To benefit from that emergence, you need to make yourselves more interdependent - in other words, how you work together as a team will impact the marketing plan that emerges.
So, before you jump into the details, take some time to get to know each others’ backgrounds and working styles. If the task is important to you, take the time to talk about individual and shared motivations. New research has shown that teams with well-articulated charters and performance strategies create initial conditions that foster the emergence of team success*.
But, you might be thinking… is it even worth it? Not everyone likes these ‘getting to know you’ activities and there is something to be said for ’if you want something done right, do it yourself’. Is there really any benefit to working in a team? Well, that depends on what the goal is – more on that in next week’s post.
*Mathieu, J.E. and Rapp, T.L. (2009). Laying the Foundations for Successful Team Performance Trajectories: The Roles of Team Charters and Performance Strategies. Journal of Applied Psychology. Vol.94, No.1. 90-103
Achieving your goals in 3 easy steps (well, sort of)
October 15, 2009 by janet · Leave a Comment
Imagine if every person in your organisation pursued and accomplished 1 big thing this year. An organisation of 100 people would accomplish 100 big things. How many did you accomplish last year? You can teach the leaders and managers in your organisation to do this effectively and make it fun and meaningful. Want to hear more? Listen to this short podcast with Phil Dobbie on BTalk Australia…
http://blogs.bnetau.com.au/aussierules/2009/10/11/making-goals-work-btalk-australia/
Are you happy about the way goals are set and tracked in your business? In large companies it’s often a HR driven process that is carried out once a year, used as a tool for appraisals, and bears little relation to what occupies people day to day.
On today’s BTalk Australia Phil Dobbie talks to Janet Horton, the founder of Handspring Consulting…it all begins with setting goals that the employee actually wants to do.
Mastering business growth
October 1, 2009 by janet · Leave a Comment
Trying to grow your business? In his seminal work, The E-Myth*, Michael Gerber observes that growth requires you to play multiple roles at once – the entrepreneur, the manager and the technician. But, it’s hard to be strong in all three areas at the same time without losing focus on the big picture or the attention to detail.
The technician is usually the one who gets you into business in the first place – you take the stuff you love and turn it into what you do. But, the business also requires an entrepreneur…a visionary who will dream and scheme to create new things and a manager who will create order.
In larger businesses, these roles are done by 3 separate people and there is a natural tension that exists between them that pushes the business forward. But businesses that are small in size and young in age often do not have the luxury of 3 different people to fill these roles. This means that you tend to gravitate to your favourite role, which can lead to stagnation, or active inertia (lots of activity without change), which can lead to burnout.
What’s the solution to all of this? Gerber says that if you are going to make your business your life, then make sure it’s the one you want. Here is what you need to do:
- Understand your goals and motivations: what specifically do you want to achieve and what would it mean to achieve it?
- Define your organisational strategy: what will this organisation look like when it grows?
- Define your management strategy: By what metrics will I measure the organisation? (cash flow, sales pipeline, etc)
- Define your people strategy: How will I select and motivate them?
- Define your market strategy: Who are your customers and why will they choose to do business with you over the alternatives?
- Define your systems strategy: How will the work get done? Don’t manage the business in your head. Document how things get done so that others can step into roles as you grow. Pretend it is a business that will be franchised, even if it isn’t. That will make what you do repeatable and predictable.
Sound hard? Well it is and it isn’t. The hardest part is finding the time and head space to work on the business instead of in the business. And if you want to reach your goals faster, try using some outside assistance. Read about Two Heads Business Advisory Board services here.
*Gerber, M. E., (1995). The E-Myth Revisited: why most small business don’t work and what to do about it. Harper Collins, New York, NY.
Death by Meeting*
August 21, 2009 by janet · Leave a Comment
If your management team suffers from boring, tedious, and unproductive meetings, here is a solution. Patrick Lencioni’s book, Death by Meeting proposes a better structure and context for meetings: Stop throwing every topic needing discussion into 1 meeting (meeting stew) and instead, create 4 different meetings – each with its own important purpose and function.
- Quarterly comprehensive strategy – the opportunity to step away from the daily and weekly issues that tend to occupy most of our attention and take a holistic view of the business
- Monthly strategic – the time to review ‘parking lot’ items that have come up in weekly tactical meetings and wrestle with and decide on the critical issues.
- Weekly tactical – resolve issues, remove obstacles, and ensure everyone is on the same page
- Daily check in – wait…don’t panic! This is only 5 minutes per day and it will save you heaps on time in the rest of your day because you will coordinate schedules and cut down on email chains
I actually had the opportunity to implement this in my own organisation once, and I can say…it really worked. Some people will object with ‘it’s too many meetings’. But, as Lencioni points out, if you add up the hours your management team spends leaving voice mail, roaming the halls to clarify issues, and the lag time of staff waiting for clarity, the methodology suddenly doesn’t seem quite as overwhelming. Doing meetings right is about getting it right the first time so everyone can get on with the business at hand.
Tips for success:
- Daily: don’t sit down, keep it administrative, hold it daily, regardless of travel schedules
- Weekly: don’t set an agenda. Start with a lightning round where each manager gives an update and shares key metrics for 60 seconds. Let the group set the agenda after the lightning round, based on what is most important. Postpone strategic discussions until the monthly meeting
- Monthly strategic: Discuss, deal with and decide critical issues impacting long term success. Do research prior and engage in ‘good conflict’
- Quarterly off-site: Don’t overstructure, but don’t turn it into a boondoogle either. Consider using an outside facilitator
The book is written as a management fable, which sometimes feels a bit insulting to the intelligence. But, it’s worth persevering. We all know how frustrating and time-consuming un-productive meetings can be. I can speak from personal experience – this is a powerful tool that can make a huge difference to productivity and job satisfaction. Need help? Give me a call.
*Lencioni, P. (2004). Death by meeting. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Week #3 Charting the course
July 13, 2009 by janet · Leave a Comment
Imagine yourself for a moment not as a leader or manager in your organisation… but as William Dawes – navigator responsible for 1000 convicts and crew of the First Fleet as it sailed from England to Australia. Your goal is Australia, your plan is charted on the maps, and you monitor your progress using the ship’s clock, telescope, and a sky full of stars.
Setting a goal without a monitoring plan is like pointing the ships toward the South West and hoping for the best. Things rarely go to plan. Success isn’t in the goal setting, it is in the monitoring.
Yet, meaningful monitoring is often absent from our business objective discussions. Busy leaders of organisations barely have time to construct meaningful goals for employees, much less worry about how they will be monitored. Goals are distributed to employees and managers hope for the best.
If you are stretched for time, try setting fewer goals and spending more time on action and monitoring plans. Make sure the monitoring is easy, timely, and motivating. Most importantly, make it specific. Where do we want to be? By when? How will we know?
Monitoring Julie and Joe…
Last week they both flagged the need for monitoring as part of their action plans. Julie said she would review the kiosk usage results weekly and make adjustments. Joe said we would provide weekly progress reports between now and September.
Without good monitoring, you get updates that are subjective. ‘Ran reports and distributed to local managers’. ‘Spoke to 4 people about their company user-centred design processes.’ The information is meaningless because there is no monitoring plan for comparison.
Julie’s goal is measurable – a 20% increase. It should be easy for her to break down how she expects that 20% to materialise. Will it be incremental? Will certain behaviours (training, for example) drive demand for kiosks? She plots her desired usage per week and creates a simple report comparing desired to actual usage, which can be distributed to each participating store. Stores meeting their goal can share stories of success. Stores not meeting their goals can make adjustments. Julie can easily see where she needs to focus her attention.
Joe’s action plan is more subjective, but it can still be monitored. He has already identified the content elements for the report he is writing. Joe needs to publish a schedule for writing and researching the report – Where will he get the data? By when? You get the idea.
It is easy in theory, but rarely done well in organisations. It takes patience and a bit of time. It also takes attention to detail. Let’s face it…monitoring isn’t sexy. Goals are sexy. They are full of dreams and possibilities. Success is sexy…it’s about celebration and recognition and accomplishment. Monitoring plans are the stuff in between. They are about execution. Or, as a friend recently said to me ‘goal setting is like falling in love, execution is like caring for a baby’.
But, imagine if every person in your organisation successfully pursued and accomplished 1 big thing this year. An organisation of 50 people would accomplish 50 big things. How many did you accomplish last year?
Week #2: Turning goals into action
July 3, 2009 by janet · Leave a Comment
If motivation alone drove goal achievement, we would all be skinny, rich and fit. Getting motivation right is essential, but it is not enough. To actually achieve the goal, you need a plan of action. Good action plans are specific. Not only do they say ‘what’ and ‘how often’, but they say them in a way that is meaningful. This is where the manager can help.
Back to Julie and Joe (continued from last week’s post)…
Remember that Julie’s goal was to increase store kiosk usage by 20% this year. Now that Julie can see that the store kiosks will help the people she cares about, she is motivated to start. Yet, when she writes down her action plan, it sounds something like this.
· Print and review usage reports every Friday
· Provide usage data to other franchise managers
· Visit stores to discuss/review progress
· Develop training materials to fill knowledge gaps
Sound good? Not quite. With just 30 minutes of conversation, Julie’s manager uncovers a bunch of problems with her plan. She can only run the reports when she is in the office and she is often in the field visiting customers. When she does have time to run the reports and share data with the managers, it often falls on deaf ears. She doesn’t know which stores she will visit. And, since she is already suffering from time constraints, it is unlikely that she will be able to develop training materials, even though she thinks this is a good idea. Her action plan simply won’t work. Julie and her manager refine the plan as follows:
· Block schedule for Thursday and Friday next week to review usage reports
· Select a group of stores with sufficient customer traffic to impact overall usage by 20%
· Schedule a meeting with regional GM to discuss rewards for participating stores
· Meet with franchise managers of these stores and ask them to take part in a pilot study between August and December
· Work with each target store to write an action plan for their pilot
· Review results weekly and make adjustments (more on monitoring next week)
· Review progress in January and create new action plan
Our goal for Joe is to get him to change the way he is designing software features. Because he was not convinced of the problem, Joe’s manager decided to give him a learning goal – to review user feedback and find out how his peers in other software companies have addressed this problem. Joe loves to read and talk to others about industry trends so he has already started. His first action plan sounded like this:
· Post a question on the social networks and industry blog sites
· Attend the user-centred design conference in the UK in September
· Subscribe to the technical journals
· Report back by December
The good news is that Joe has taken some ownership of his goal already – he has been researching information sources and forums. The problem might now be making sure Joe doesn’t treat this goal like a blank cheque. Also, he seems to be more focussed on the learning than the reporting back. His manager works with his enthusiasm, but tightens up the goal and ties it to the desired outcome: an actionable report and recommendations to management.
· Spend 4 hours per week monitoring industry forums, journals and blogs related to user-centred design
· Subscribe to the association’s webinar series (sorry, there is no budget for a boondoggle to London this year)
· Agree content elements of report with manager by end August
· Provide progress reports weekly and a draft report to the manager by end September
· Review results and create new action plan to refine findings and begin feasibility studies in October and November
In both cases, we don’t really know what Julie and Joe are going to find as they get started, so we can’t create a complete action plan for the whole year. But, we can create a partial action plan that includes a reminder to update it once more information is known.
Anyone who has ever been to Human Resources training will know about the concept of setting SMART goals (specific, measurable, attractive, realistic, and time sensitive). This is a great model to follow. But, in my experience it does not get to the heart of the matter: The goal is just the ‘what’. The action plan is the ‘how’ (and how often). It’s the ‘how’ that is often the difference between success and failure, yet managers and employees don’t spend nearly enough time there.
Next week…the final piece of the puzzle…building a good monitoring plan.
Goal setting…Has it been a year already?
June 26, 2009 by janet · 1 Comment
Managing people? Setting goals? The process can actually be a lot more fun than the average organisation makes it out to be. Starting this week, follow my series on successful goal setting and avoid the mistakes observed in so many organisations getting it wrong.
Last night at a dinner party, a friend asked me if I had anything useful to read on employee goal setting. My friend has been newly promoted and now manages 12 staff – she’s loving it. Her request should have been easy. Yet, when I scoured my over-flowing bookshelves, I found nothing to loan her but an old (and rather uninspiring) Harvard Business Review on managing people. More than that, when I searched my heart, I uncovered lots of unpleasant memories of corporate life and the dreaded annual setting of objectives.
The problem I find with much of the objective-setting literature and training is that…well, it misses the point. Over the next 3 weeks, I will tell you why and what to do about that. We will also follow the case of 1 manager and 2 employees trying to achieve some goals. Ready? Let’s get started.
Step One: Why are we doing this?
If all of this employee goal-setting stuff is so painful, why do we do it? In response, most organisations say something like this:
“We want employees’ to be clear on the behaviour and performance we need from them to successfully contribute to our business.”
Stop. Welcome to the first problem: Motivation. That statement is about you – the business (or the manager)…not them (the employee). People just don’t get motivated by other people’s stuff. The most motivating goals are those that intrinsic to the person – the stuff that is interesting and important to her.
So, here is goal setting rule number 1: If you want an employee to be serious about the goal, make it about her instead of about you. She will try harder, for a longer period of time and feel more satisfied when she attains it. *
How do you do that? Well, you could ask her. If there is some flexibility on how the objectives are set, get the employee involved in setting the goal in the first place – tell her the problem the business is trying to solve and get her to suggest how she would help. If you don’t have that level flexibility, make a link between your goals and hers and find a place where they have something in common…tie the goal to something important to her.
Let’s look at a couple of specific cases:
Julie is a franchise sales manager for an electronics provider. Her primary responsibilities are to provide support to franchise owners and managers to help them sell products, manage campaigns, run effective businesses. She is measured on profitability and satisfaction of the franchise. This year, Julie’s boss has given her an additional objective: to increase use of sales kiosks by 20% for all Australian franchises (not just the ones she manages). Julie has not made any progress on her goal. She says she has been too busy to start it.
Joe is a software architect. His primary responsibilities are to design and program new features. He is highly respected for his knowledge and problem solving skills. Joe’s company has identified usability as a major force driving support costs and preventing sales. Because of this, Joe’s management would like him to implement user-centred design standards into his work, but implementing those will take time away from other features he wants to add. Joe has refused to do it. Because Joe is so valuable to the business, his manager has not pushed him on the issue.
Motivating Julie and Joe
Since Julie’s objective has already been defined, we need to know what will motivate her to get started. Talking to Julie, we learn that she feels a strong loyalty to her franchisees (customers) and is motivated by helping each one be more successful. She admits that she doesn’t see the point of having kiosks in the stores and that she doesn’t want to hassle the franchisees about them. Her manager explains that the kiosk sales are a way to free up time staff time so they are able to serve more customers and drive more high-value sales. Once Julie sees the benefit to something she cares about (her customers), she is more motivated to start working on the goal.
Our objective for Joe is something we know he is not really interested in doing. He is not convinced of the problem – he is in denial. Getting someone out of denial usually requires information. If Joe is the type who likes learning and information, we could try giving him a learning goal. He could be given a research project that would allow him to review technology journals and talk to others in his field (things he likes to do anyway). He could report back with his findings, conclusions and recommendations about usability. Remember, goals don’t always have to be about performance to be impactful.
Next week: Step two: action planning – turning motivating goals into action.
*Sheldon, K.M. & Elliot A.J. (1999), Goal striving, need satisfaction, and longitudinal well-being: The self-concordance model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 76(3).
Professional happiness…an oxymoron?
May 25, 2009 by janet · Leave a Comment
Readers of this blog are well aware that I am fascinated by the elusive concept of finding satisfaction with our work. Ironically, as I write today’s entry, I am currently experiencing my perfect working moment: a creative setting, a view of the harbour, and a power source for my laptop. I have escaped from my home office to the 2009 Sydney Writers’ Festival.
It seems fitting, then, that my first event of the weekend was Caroline West and The Happiness Mistake. I arrived (fashionably late) for the session that was already full. Before disappointment could set in, a friendly volunteer directed me to the overflow broadcast area on the main pier where I listened while studying the jellyfish and sipping my coffee in the sun. This is what West would call happiness state 1: a momentary pleasure.
West actually proposes 6 separate definitions of happiness that take into account complexities that include states of mind, endurance of feelings, and the source of your perception. It is for this reason that she also proposes that we abolish the word happiness altogether for something more clear and achievable.
If you are struggling with the concept of professional happiness, it is no wonder. You may not even know which happiness you are striving for. Is it maximising the number of happy life moments or working toward achieving a big aspiration? Is it measured against an internal standard or something external to you? All of these will have an impact on your pursuit of happiness. West suggests that we take the advice of Aristotle and take the time to contemplate our work.
In his book The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, Alain de Botton reports that fewer than 15% of us are happy in our employment. He suggests that industrialisation drives our need for scale and specialisation. But scale does not help us find meaning in our work and meaning is what we need to increase our pleasure. De Botton suggests taking the time to find meaning in our everyday tasks much in the way one might while gardening or doing the washing up.
But the dissatisfied professionals I see most often are those who do not feel they have that much control over their work environments. The tasks (and sometimes the jobs) seem to be given and taken away at random so that the thing that gave you meaning yesterday may no longer be yours today. That’s where I think ‘Plan B’ comes in. When I worked in corporate, I always had ‘Plan B’ (I called it the ‘I quit’ plan). It was both the action plan and the savings plan that supported my mental health. Your Plan B might simply sit in a drawer at home gathering dust, but just knowing it is there can make a big difference to your professional happiness – call it a philosophy of happiness with a little reality sprinkled in.
It’s time to expand your job description
May 4, 2009 by janet · Leave a Comment
“In a bad economy, the best work environments are those where you control of your own destiny.” That’s a reminder I received from a friend the other day. Her point was that people with stable jobs and predictable incomes might feel more secure. But they might not have the job security they think they do. It got me thinking…
Can’t everyone take more control? Try this quick test: Take a look at your ‘to do’ list for this week. How many items on it are ‘other driven’? How many are ‘self driven’? If your to do’s are activities that only benefit others, you might not be doing anything to benefit your own career development. Some ideas for changing the balance…
1. Build a personal brand – where do you really shine and what is best left to others? What is your personal philosophy about the work you do? This takes a bit of reflective time, but is well worth the effort. Half the battle of figuring out what you do well is recognising it (and ‘not it’). Whatever ‘IT’ is, it is worth celebrating. Take time to figure ‘it’ out.
2. Spend more time out of the office – my favourite quote from my friends at Pragmatic (pragmaticmarketing.com) is “the answers to your questions are not in the building”. Companies make mistakes and miss opportunities because they spend all of their time talking to each other. Pretty soon, the truth becomes self-created and is not valuable to the rest of the world. Get out of the office and talk to others. Get some perspective on yourself and your organisation.
3. Take advantage of every development opportunity. When I think of all of the corporate training I skipped because of some urgent deadline (and what I now pay for out of my own pocket), I feel a little sick. You know those programs that you don’t think count as ‘real work’? Well if you would go along with an open mind, you just might learn something useful. Better yet, how about those continuing education credits where your company puts money towards a degree? There are tons of resources and interesting programs out there to support your growth. What are you waiting for?
4. Change jobs more often. Job and role loyalty is great to a point, but you aren’t doing yourself or your employer any favours staying in a job too long. Movement is good for both of you. The temporary discomfort it creates leads to perspective and new ideas.
5. Network. Your network is part of your resume. It’s an asset you carry with you. Care for it.
It’s time to expand your job description. Instead of just adding to your employers’ business value, spend some time developing your own. The 2 activities don’t need to be mutually exclusive. Done right, you can both win.
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