by Charles Plant | Feb 12, 2014 | Leadership Development
As you know, I spend time helping companies with strategy execution, whether that is through consulting, coaching or training. Strategy execution may be the biggest problem out there in companies. You can see some stats I’ve used to prove that assertion here.
Lately I’ve been wondering why it is so hard to find people to talk to at companies about this subject. What I concluded was that no one is responsible for strategy execution and I’ve finally been able to prove it.
I went on LinkedIn and did a search on the term “Strategic Planning.” Lo and behold, this term was used 7.9 million times by people in my extended network. Then I searched on the term “Strategy Execution” and got 81,000 matches.
That’s 100 times more people out there doing Strategic Planning than are doing Strategy Execution. No wonder companies have so many problems. Everyone out there in businessland is doing the planning and virtually no one is executing.
by Charles Plant | Feb 7, 2014 | Leadership Development
I think what we have is a problem of the old rules for success not catching up with the new realities. Case in point is Joshua Steimle’s artcle in Forbes. In it he says that the best advice he got was that accessibility is important if you want to be a good leader.
The problem is that the person who gave him that advice stopped working in the 1990s and never had to use email, voice mail or any of the other mails that make you hyper accessible. He never had to get bogged down by the immaterial and unimportant because this old thing called middle management filtered everything.
We have to start to learn new leadership skills for the new economy. So, new rules for a new world. Stop being accessible.
- Make your employees deal with the immaterial things themselves.
- Turn off email at night, on weekends, and on holidays.
- Train employees not to copy you on things.
- Train them not to ask for your advice unless the issue is material.
- Allow them one update email a week.
- Meet with them once a week to hash out issues.
Unless you work in a hospital, no one will die from this lack of accessibility. You’ll force employees to become more self-sufficient, you’ll do a better job of delegating and lo and behold, you’ll probably be less stressed.
I started the week thinking maybe Larry and Sergey were bad leaders for being inaccessible and now maybe I think that it’s genius. I think I’ll do a bit more of this questioning stuff. Next up, listening. Maybe as a leader it’s just better not to listen to people.
by Charles Plant | Feb 6, 2014 | Leadership Development
Unfortunately, technology is forcing us to be more accessible than we should be. You might have thought you had seen the end of this topic as I focussed on it in my last two blogs. Not so, I’m going to beat this one to death. I think I have to because I’ve had a few conversations with people about this issue.
Technology has given people we work with the ability to send us umpteen emails even if we’re only copied. While they wouldn’t think of phoning with the same information or dropping by to chat because that would be intrusive, email is not seen as intrusive and therefore there is no social bias against invoking it.
Look at the issue of time and accessibility. No one you work with would think about dropping by your house on the weekend or at night to tell you something. Neither would they phone you because there are social rules against this.
But for some reason there is no social stigma against sending emails at night, on weekends or when someone is on vacation. Technology is forcing you to be accessible 24/7.
What all of this accessibility means is that instead of using precious time with other people and focussing only on material things, things that matter, we are inundating our coworkers with immaterial things. We are able to copy people on anything and we are. Managers can never say “You never told me” because they’re hearing everything, even if they shouldn’t.
As a society we have become fixated on the immaterial and are missing the big picture just because people are accessible. And this accessibility is ruining people’s lives as they are overwhelmed by communications.
“They” say that being a good leader means being accessible but technology has meant that we’re now accessible for the immaterial and we are wasting our time on things that don’t matter. It has taken our eye off the ball and diluted our focus from what is really important.
by Charles Plant | Feb 4, 2014 | Leadership Development
I did a bad job with yesterday’s post. As with many issues in leadership there are politically correct answers and then there is reality. There is no one clear way to be a leader and in some instances like being accessible, there are pros and cons.
The point I was trying to get across yesterday (and failed miserable according to one reader) is that being accessible can be a good thing in a leader but it can also be a bad thing.
Way back in 2000 or so when I got my first Blackberry, I noticed that people at work were involving me in more decisions. Whereas before the damn thing was invented, I could be out of reach, its invention now meant that I was accessible. Accessible for small decisions, immaterial things, things I didn’t need to be involved in.
Yes, I was accessible but I wasn’t delegating as much as when I was unreachable. And there is the counterpoint to accessibility: delegation. Being a good leader means delegating does’t it? (We’ll debate that one another time.) But it also means being accessible right?
So as an employee which way would you rather have it? Would you prefer a boss who was accessible but didn’t delgate as much or one who was inaccessible but delegated more?
These nuances in the subject of leadership are killing me. The more I learn, the less I think I know.
by Charles Plant | Feb 3, 2014 | Leadership Development
I am reading a book called In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes our Lives, which, as you might imagine is the history of Google. As a book, it is a marvellous story about one of the world’s most influential companies.
The book has a great story about Larry Page and Sergey Brin who hated meetings. Up until 2007, they had a team of personal assistants to do the things that personal assistants do. (Having never had one, I don’t actually know what they do but I hear they can be quite useful if you’re really rich.)
If people wanted meetings with Larry and Sergey, they would ask the personal assistants who would in turn ask them if they wanted a meeting on such and such a topic. However, because they had assistants, it was easier for employees to ask them to meetings where they would have been loath to ask Larry or Sergey directly.
So they got rid of their assistants in 2007 and either took or didn’t take meetings requested through Google Calendar. (It also meant that the other executives assistants had to do more work because Larry and Sergey had no one dedicated to other menial work.)
Without assistants though, The pair became inaccessible because you had to catch them directly to make major decisions. “Larry got rid of his assistants so that he would never meet with anyone who couldn’t figure out how to get a meeting with him.”
If you wanted a meeting, you had to figure out where either one was or where they were likely to be so you could catch them in the hall and harass them.
In a way I can sympathize with them. Employees demand a lot from leaders and can rely on leaders too much. While being accessible is the first step in being a good listener, maybe too much listening is a bad thing. Inaccessibility has certainly worked for Page and Brin.
by Charles Plant | Jan 30, 2014 | Leadership Development
Chris Norton – Cassels Brock
I have picked enough on Holacracy in the last few days but I want to ask one further question. What research did the founders do to arrive at this marvellous new management theory?
- Did they subject it to a rigorous analysis by their peers?
- Did they test out assumptions in small scale before testing it on a whole company?
- Did they compare results between companies or before and after implementation?
OK, that’s more than one question but really, why are so many management theories based on untested ideas? And why are so many people willing to listen to so much untested bumpf and even more, why are they willing to pay so much money to inexperienced consultants who sling this stuff around like they are gods of strategy?
Like many others I have fallen prey to many a new idea and then been disappointed by the results. I don’t mean to rant but you might stop for a second and ask yourself; why are you doing what you do?
- How do you know it’s the best way to get results?
- How will it affect those with whom you work?
- How can it be improved?
- How will you know if you are getting it right?
And when I start spouting off on some new theory, ask me those same questions. I have a friend who shall remain nameless (Chris Norton) who has asked me those questions for close to 40 years. It is an endearing quality of his and I’m thankful often that many years ago he asked me a question like that. His question pops into my mind on a regular basis.
How can you prove that?
