by Charles Plant | Aug 13, 2013 | Leadership Development
A friend of mine is pregnant (no, it’s not my fault,) and she told me last week that she is constantly being hounded by the Pregnancy Police. Don’t eat this. You shouldn’t be doing that. Are you getting enough sleep?
When she has the baby, she’ll be told a whole set of new things by the Baby Police as to how to raise the child.
This is a huge case of “Do as I say, don’t do as I do.” We’re very good at telling others what to do but seemingly poor at doing what we know we should be doing ourselves.
And yet we expect our leaders to be paragons of virtue. We expect them to behave impeccably at all times. We no longer tolerate leaders who say “Do as I say, don’t do as I do.”
Perhaps we need to cut people a bit of slack because if we expect perfection from our leaders, we’ll scare away imperfect candidates who might have something to contribute.
by Charles Plant | Aug 8, 2013 | Leadership Development
My father tells a story about driving one evening many years ago to a meeting in another town. After driving for a while, he noticed his boss’ car behind him (No surprise as they were going to the same meeting.)
After a short while, his boss passed him and zoomed ahead. When he arrived at the meeting my father asked why he had been in such a hurry. His boss replied that everything was fine until he realized that he was following my father and if he kept doing that, he would inevitably be late for the meeting.
After that exchange, my father resolved never to be late again.
Without trying to determine whether urgency is as a result of nature or nurture, I must admit that I too am obsessed by time. I can’t stand being late. I arrive wherever I’m going early, just so I can wait to be on time. (This makes me quite reliable but it is not a healthy obsession.)
At the same time, I’m not obsessed with quality or cost. These three dimensions, Quality, Cost, and Speed are the only strategic dimensions upon which a firm (or an individual) can differentiate itself from the competition.
What I’m trying to figure out today is whether this is true of everyone, whether each person can be rated on the Quality, Cost and Speed dimensions and we can say: “Yup, she’s a quality person.”
If this is true then we have a new dimension of behaviour upon which we can evaluate people. And even more, we have a new tool for matching the person to the job.
And I’ll go one step rather. If this QCS stuff is a behaviour or a trait then is it learnable? Can you take a Q person and make them an S person?
Think about it for yourself. What are you Q, C or S? And what does that mean to how you work? And can you learn to beef up the other dimensions?
by Charles Plant | Aug 7, 2013 | Leadership Development
I think I blundered into Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits when I created yesterday’s post on urgency. I wasn’t even thinking that way when I started and I think I have to go back to Covey again and see what I can get out of it that’s new.
But meanwhile, Covey’s problem was how to get stuff done when it is Important but Not Urgent. The following chart shows what he’s talking about.
How do you get something to become urgent? Well my current way of thinking is to make it part of a process with a deadline. Once you add a deadline to something, it becomes urgent.
If you are constantly examining your list of Important but Not Urgent projects (use a process to do this) then you can create process around these things with deadlines.
by Charles Plant | Aug 6, 2013 | Leadership Development
I met a company recently that does a great job of creating a sense of urgency in their sales people. And they used a very simple trick.
But first to urgency itself. We all love to procrastinate and I’m among the worst. I’ll leave everything to the last minute if I can because I know that I’ll figure out how to spend less time working on something if I leave it till it’s almost too late.
So you can see this in companies all the time. If you look at the numbers underlying quarterly reports, you’ll find that salespeople will invariable produce most of their sales in the third month of the quarter and in fact, in the last week of that month.
So how do you get them to stop this habit? Well you create artificial deadlines. The company I met, who is incredibly successful in sales has weekly quotas for their salespeople.
With a weekly quota and compensation tied to that quota, people can’t slack off for more than a day or so. Unfortunately, with monthly quotas, people can slack off for a week or more and frequently have trouble making those quotas last minute.
Moving to weekly quotas was difficult in software terms because everything is done monthly in the software world and a month does not divide evenly into four weeks or always start on a Monday. To deal with this they went to the expense of having a custom system built that tracks sales and quotas and commissions on a weekly basis.
And it works like a charm.
by Charles Plant | Aug 2, 2013 | Uncategorized
I’m so excited. I’ve been trying to figure out all week how to play Rock Paper Scissors with Power Politics and I think I’ve figured it out. (Those who know me well know that I actually used Rock Paper Scissors in my divorce agreement as a method to settle future disputes.)
If you’ve been paying attention this week, I’ve gone through the major types of power that exist in the workplace, Positional Power, Expert Power, Coercive Power, Reward Power, Referent Power and so on. The problem is, I couldn’t figure out what to do about the use of these powers. And I’ve finally figured it out.
You can turn Power Politics at the office into a game of Rock Paper Scissors. The thing is knowing what beats what. Let’s look at the three main sources of power, position, expertise, and likeability (referent power).
The thing is that most people see positional power as the ultimate source of power but it isn’t. We know that a bonehead with a title can override an expert. And that ultimately, it doesn’t matter how much you’re liked if there is a respected expert telling you what to do.
But what I just realized that someone who is likeable can often get more done than someone in a position of power. When we have a boss we don’t like, we’ll often go out of our way to ignore or sabotage trivial edicts. But we’ll do lots of unnecessary things for someone we like.
So that’s it. Position beats Expert which beats Likeability (Referent) which beats Position.
Now you just have to figure out how to play the game. When someone tries to occupy a power position at work, you just have to figure out what type of power they are calling upon and use the appropriate one to beat them at their own game.
The best thing about playing Power Politics like this is that you don’t both have to declare at the same time. You can wait until they’ve displayed their base of power before you pull out one of yours that trumps it.
A friend of mine is pregnant (no, it’s not my fault,) and she told me last week that she is constantly being hounded by the Pregnancy Police. Don’t eat this. You shouldn’t be doing that. Are you getting enough sleep?
