by Charles Plant | Oct 7, 2013 | Leadership Development, Uncategorized
I was asked an interesting question the other day by someone who is looking for a job. She wondered that with all the idiot bosses out there, how can you tell in an interview whether or not you’re going to have a good one.
I didn’t have a good answer so I thought a while on this one and here’s what I decided:
If you want to be successful in your next job, you”re going to have to be working in an environment that supports success. This is your boss’s job, to ensure that you’ll be as successful as possible.
I hadn’t thought about this as the boss’s job but when you get down to it, this is what a boss has to do. A boss has to manage or lead you in a way that makes you successful. So to figure out whether the boss will be any good, that’s what you’ll have to find out, whether she’ll do the things necessary to make you successful.
I’ve said before that if an employee fails, it’s the boss’s fault. He has failed to hire correctly, train correctly, or supervise correctly. But what about an employee’s perspective? What does an employee need besides native capabilities to be successful.
Well it comes down to four things. Besides the right resources, an employee needs to:
- Know exactly what is expected of them,
- Know how they’re doing,
- Know how to get better at it, and
- Know how they’ve done.
If a boss can do those things then you should succeed. For the rest of the week I’ll propose questions that will attempt to get at answers to these questions.
by Charles Plant | Oct 4, 2013 | Leadership Development
There is a great Peanuts cartoon that exemplifies the problem of competing visions. In it, Lucy is talking to Charlie Brown.
‘Charlie Brown, life is like a deck chair on a cruise ship. Passengers open up these canvas deck chairs so they can sit in the sun. Some people place their chairs facing the rear of the ship so they can see where they’ve been. Other people face their chairs forward – they want to see where they’re going. On the cruise ship of life, which way is your deck chair facing?’
Replies Charlie, ‘I’ve never been able to get one unfolded.’
While RIM’s problems of competing visions are well publicized, the problem seems to be a staple of today’s environment.
- Microsoft’s board is now feuding with Gates and considering removing him as they feel he has too much influence.
- Dell has just won his fight with Icahn over the future of Dell Computers.
- The US is mired in a fight over what role government should play in a free society.
Vision intransigence and competition are not something new but seem to be growing in business. As the role of the company founder diminishes, boards have no clear person to turn to to foster a new vision. Their problem is one of building a vision around shareholders or around customers, or have some have done it, around employees.
When there are founders running private companies, vision is clear and the responsibility of one person only. When the company is public or the founder is no longer there, does the CEO really own the vision? In theory yes, but that isn’t always the case.
by Charles Plant | Oct 2, 2013 | Leadership Development
If you thought it was bad when Blackberry had two CEOs, you would not be surprised to find out how much worse it got when they had three.
When Thorstein Heins was made CEO and Balsillie and Lazaridis still sat on the board, the company effectively had three different CEOs with three different visions.
Balsillie was enamoured with the potential of BBM being licensed more widely but Lazaridis and Heins ganged up on Balsillie and killed his BBM initiative. This caused Balsillie to resign from the board and sell all his stock. (Good move by the way.)
Meanwhile Heins and Lazaridis were battling over the keyboard-less Z10 versus the Q10, a QNX based Blackberry with keyboard. Lazaridis had long thought that trying to compete directly with the iPhone was sheer folly given Apple’s 6 year advantage in the market.
Heins won that battle, much to the company’s detriment as history has proven the product to be too late and too complex.
So there you had it. Three CEOs each with a different vision. As it happens, both Lazaridis and Balsillie were right and had there been only one CEO, Blackberry might still have a future. But as it was, the third CEO won and the company is now fighting an uphill battle.
Thing is, there can only be one vision.
by Charles Plant | Oct 1, 2013 | Leadership Development
I must admit that I used to think that having Co-CEOs at a company was a good idea. It certainly looked good when Balsillie and Lazaridis were running RIM successfully a few years ago. But Saturday’s article in the Globe and Mail on the fall of Blackberry certainly cleared up any doubt about Co-CEOs.
As you might imagine, things just went swimmingly for the two of them as long as they agreed on strategic direction. One key to their earlier success was having Co-CEOs, with Lazaridis focussing on engineering, product management etc and Balsillie managing sales and finance.
But that structure began to fail as the firm grew. “The structure made it difficult to get definitive decisions or establish clear accountability.” This slowed things down enormously.
And then strategic differences began to emerge with Balsillie favouring a push to licence BBM to carriers fro use on other phones. Meanwhile Lazaridis was trying to recreate the Blackberry with a new operating system. It can’t have been easy working there with duelling visions.
We’ll never know just how much having Co-CEOs brought about the downfall of Blackberry. But I can bet that companies will be hesitant to try it again. There can only be one vision and this usually means there can only be one leader.
by Charles Plant | Sep 26, 2013 | Leadership Development
I’ve always looked for people to emulate, someone who is a master networker. Today I read a story in Inc. Magazine about someone who would win the title hands down.
Problem is that I can’t imagine anyone emulating his habit of working 16 hours a day and making hundreds of phone calls a day.
The worst part is that he targets someone he wants to meet and he is relentless in trying to reach that person. He’ll call an assistant multiple times trying to get through, not taking no for an answer. In total he might have to make half a dozen attempts to get through to someone.
This is something I just can’t do. If this is what it takes to be successful as a networker, even a mild version of this, then I give up.
