The Management Distillery

Are you the best for your customers?

Note that I didn't say if you are the best in the world? I asked if you the best for your customers or said another way, are you the best for those you serve? There is much talk about being the best in the world at what you do. Doesn't that sound overwhelming? How can one instantly focus on being the best in the world at something that you may not have even started yet? And how do you measure if you have become the best in the world?

Seth Godin makes an excellent point in his book The Dip –

The Best in the World? Anyone who is going to hire you, buy from you, recommend you, vote for you, or do what you want them to do is going to wonder if you're the best choice. Best as in: best for them, right now, based on what they believe and what they know. And in the world as in: their world, the world they have access to.

Hence the lesson learned here is to focus on what your customers need and how you can be the best at meeting those needs. Thinking this way does a few things:

• You will not be overwhelmed trying to be everything for everyone.
• You will know and focus on your customer's needs.
• You will know who your competition is and what you need to do to get ahead.
• You can quantify and measure your success (almost instant feedback).

Your comments and feedback are welcome.

Best candidate – the law of diminishing returns

Daniel Hamermesh makes an interesting point in his Freakonomics blogpost - Why Finding the Best Isn't Worth It.

"Despite that, rational marital search, job search, or search for a high quality/low price product should stop when the gains from additional searches begin to fall short of the cost of spending the time and money searching and of giving up the pleasure of what you can already get".

What we can learn from it is that grass on the other side may always look greener and we need to and can make the best with what we have. Don't stop looking for the best or striving to be the best, but don't let yourself and your organization get into analysis paralyses either. It's a fine line to walk, but intuitively you will know what the right answer is.

The Organization’s Wish List

Keeping an inventory of ideas and wishes for your organization can make you incredibly focused.

I am a big proponent of keeping lists. They help us focus because we know that everything that needs to be done is captured some place and we can be reminded of all those items in an instant (just go take a look at the list). The same goes for organizations, there are lots of ideas and things that we would like to do, but can't all at the same time. These ideas and actions need to be captured in what I call The Organization's Wish List (TOWL).

The idea of keeping the TOWL came to me through the intersection between the concepts of Brainstorming and Scrum (an agile project management methodology).

• Brainstorming: to get the most out of your brainstorming session, the group should throw out as many ideas as possible. Don't care about the quality of the ideas, just keeping putting them down. What you end up with is a list of everything possible, reasonable, impossible, and unreasonable at this time.
• Scrum: Scrum is an agile project management methodology introduced by Ken Schwaber. It primarily related to software development initiatives, but I use its best practices and principles in management consulting. The key concept that relates to TOWL is one of a Product Backlog. The goal is to keep an inventory of everything that needs to be done and add to the list as new items come up.

At an organizational level, keeping the TOWL provides the following benefits:

• Keep track of your organization's ideas at a centralized place.
• Create an opening for management and employees to engage.
• Promote creative thinking and problem solving within your organization.
• Allow for an optimal use of an organization's resources – during the ebbs and flows of workload, resources can be directed to work on a TOWL idea. This helps build and maintain momentum.

The bottom-line is to keep your pipeline of ideas open and manage that pipeline as your business development and sales pipeline. You never know when the tide changes direction and you may have to consider new ways of doing business.

Luxury vs. premium – so relevant to consulting too!

Seth Godin's latest post on Luxury vs. premium is relevant to goods and equally relevant to services, especially as we see them in the context of the consulting profession.

"Luxury goods are needlessly expensive. By needlessly, I mean that the price is not related to performance" – Admittedly I am small consulting company outfit, but have seem many a business deals go towards the big players (not to say that they are not competent, they are) just because the client prefers to have a big name on the cover of the report. It's not only the big ones, many small outfits price in a way that makes them look exclusive. Somehow paying extra (quite a bit extra) adds credibility.

"Premium goods, on the other hand, are expensive variants of commodity goods. Pay more, get more" – now this applies to both large and small consulting companies. The customer is looking for a good end product, i.e. companies need to focus on excellence – making sure that their products and services are top-notch. And then and only then, do you get to charge a premium for it.

So the lesson learned here is to focus on developing your services. Be a thought leader in your area of expertise. Work to build a reputation and focus on being Premium over Luxury.

 

Our role as the facilitators of change is more important than ever!

I co-chaired the CBODN Annual Conference on May 1^st (Organization Development and Change: Helping Organizations Navigate Tough Economic Times) and it's clear to me that we are living in unique times. Indeed, these are tough times and times that require an extraordinary effort. But these times also present us with a unique opportunity, an opportunity to change the conversation.

Ed Schein gave a thought provoking keynote about "What else is going on?" And Gallup (Richard Blizzard and Charles McClendon) gave a compelling presentation, showing the correlation between managerial focus on employee strengths and the employee engagement. Taking that a step further, we could see the quantifiable results of this engagement and how Actively Engaged employees (as opposed to Not Engaged and Not Actively Engaged employees) can make the difference to come out of these tough economic times.

What makes our role as the facilitators of change more important than ever is the nobility of the OD and Change Management profession? It is our role to help individuals and organizations reflect and act in a way that changes the conversation.

The Corporate Citizenship conversation

It's a 'job security' tactic, rather than 'being excellent at what you do' tactic.

Just like Corporate Governance has been the big wave, Corporate Citizenship is becoming more and more important for organizations to maintain their competitive advantage. This concept is especially troublesome for smaller consulting firms (I have mostly seen it from a Federal Government Consulting point of view), where employees primarily act as the "pair of hands" consultants. It's a catch-22 situation where companies want their employees to be close to the clients (these projects can last years), but then comes a point where the employee's relationship to the corporate is just to collect the paycheck. Their daily interaction, direction, etc is all coming from the client or as some call them their "Client-Boss" or simply their 'Boss".

This lack of the company-employee bond is very common and primarily stems from:

• Body shop mentality – the company provides the resources, bills, gets paid, pays the employee, and keeps the profit.
• 100% collocation – the consulting business often requires consultants to be on-site with the client, but when its years before the employee visits corporate because they have no business there, it's obvious to lose the connection.
• Who's in-charge? – employees suffering from this identity crisis will tell you that their employment is solely a function of funding for the project and how much their client likes them. Just a hard fact of the consulting business.

Here is the issue – no one benefits from the lack of Corporate Citizenship. Granted it provides short-term benefit to those indulging in it, in the long run it leads to a tarnished integrity (its everything in the consulting business) and is the ultimate career-staller (it's a 'job security' tactic, rather than 'being excellent at what you do' tactic).

There is a fix – Take Responsibility

• Employers need to be responsible to put in place mechanisms that engage employees on a continuous basis. There are several ways this can be done.
• Employees need to act as good ambassadors for the corporate.
• Clients need to demand excellence from both the employer and the employee. It's the employers responsibility to train/develop its employees that in-turn become result-oriented consultants.

If you have any questions or comments about this post, feel free to leave them here. I will get back within 24 hours.

Underperforming employee = BIG opportunity

>> And if you are having trouble getting motivated to put in this work….remember (a) as a Manager it's your job to take care of your people; (b) Regardless of the outcome, you gain the most out of this situation.

Tom Foster recently put up a question (When is Enough, Enough?) from one of his readers about when to lay-off an underperforming employee. You may want to read the post to get the context of the question, but my response below addresses the performance management question in general. My view is based on the Manager's role and our stuff that needs to get out of the way, especially with personnel decisions.

- Seems like you are convinced that he doesn't get it and probably won't anytime in the future. You also mentioned that it is the same feedback you have received from others on your team. Well my first reaction is that intuitively, the person in question would also know this. Does he think that you are for him? Or just looking for ways to get rid of him? Would he trust you?

- You are lending yourself as a victim to this situation. You want to do well as a new manager, would like to show productivity and profitability of your team, but you Manager is concerned about the consequences of firing someone. That's a tough sell.

BUT, there is so much that this situation provides for your growth. You could turn this around into a big positive for you, gain the trust of your employees and your manager. Here is what I would do:

- Start afresh and give this guy the benefit of the doubt. Don't have any negative conversations about his performance with anyone, especially others on the team. If they want to talk, just say "now's not the right time for this". It's likely that you may have to dig yourself out of this hole.

Sit down with him and explain that this situation puts both you and him in a tough spot. If he doesn't improve his performance then you may have to release him, which neither of you want. Assure him that you will work with him to make this better. Ask the following questions:

• Is he interested in the work?
• What according to him will take to get his performance to acceptable levels? (He might say more time…and that's OK). Follow-up, with a need to build a performance management plan that will show incremental progress. Remember, there is always something you can find to measure performance.
• Have a weekly one-on-one meeting with him to review progress. Build trust with him. Really believe that he can make it.

After doing this for at least 2 months, if the situation does not improve at all, I don't think documenting a lay-off would be the biggest problem you have. But if you do turn this around, think about the confidence you will gain in your managerial ability and the trust you will gain with others.

And if you are having trouble getting motivated to put in this work….remember (a) as a Manager it's your job to take care of your people; (b) Regardless of the outcome, you gain the most out of this situation.

 

Consequences of making decisions

"Sometimes bad things happen when good people are unlucky and sometimes scoundrels get away clean. Judging decisions based on their outcomes will wind up condemning too many unlucky people and acquitting too many scoundrels".

There is lot of talk about the role of managers and leaders in decision-making. Drucker calls decision-making a "specific executive task". He goes on to say that "Managers are responsible for service results". Gino, Moore, and Bazerman in their research (No harm, no foul: The outcome bias in ethical judgments) found that "people judge the wisdom and competence of decision makers based on the nature of the outcome they obtain". The study presents a couple of convincing examples of how others may perceive your decisions differently based on the results.

Although the study focuses on ethical decision-making, we see this sort of behavior apply to our daily and work lives every day. An executive makes a decision and if it is goes well, there is celebration, bonuses, and a band of fans…and if it goes bad, there is disappointment, Monday morning quarterbacking (I call it the waking up of the nay-sayers), and depending on how bad the consequences are, some people may even lose their jobs.

"Often, the decision process is difficult to observe and so the only way we can evaluate a decision is based on its outcome", say Gino, Moore, and Bazerman.

Food for thought:

• How do you react to decisions and their outcomes?
• How does your organization react to decisions and their outcomes? Does it foster a decision-making culture or are employees content in maintaining the status quo?

What can you do?

In cases where a decision has unfavorable results, first give the decision-maker the benefit of the doubt. (It's like what my Org Behavior Professor said on the first day of class – "If this was the last day of class, your grade will be an A, now it's up to you to make it a B, C, or an F"). If you trust him/her to make a decision, then support them with the outcomes. Judge them based on the information available to them when making the decision and not on what you know now.

Starting off with Benefits and Concerns

Benefits and Concerns is a facilitation approach to help a group bring out their thoughts and opinions about the initiative right at the outset. This helps baseline everyone's position and lays the groundwork for finding common grounds among diverse opinions.

If setting up and managing expectations is the corner stone for an effective management approach, then how do we do it when it comes to putting together a project with a diverse group of people, with differing management objectives and get them to agree on something.

In my opinion, the Benefits and Concerns exercise has always laid down the groundwork to alleviate the initial heat and resistance that a diverse and politically charged group can bring to the table. Not only that, it helps you as the leader or the facilitator to take a step back and see where your judgments, opinions, and biases may interfere with the group. If you are about to embark on a new initiative, here are some ideas that you may want to play around with:

Before the kick-off meeting

• Write down what your role is as a part of this initiative? Duh…isn't it obvious…but then again no harm in putting down a few bullets on a piece of paper
• In your view, what does success look like? What will it provide (what is the benefit to the stakeholders)?
• In your view, what will come in the way?

At the kick-off meeting

• Open it up addressing the purpose of the meeting to embark on this new initiative. Most likely everyone would know it, but helps to confirm.
• Explain that you would like to set up the project in a way that provides a win-win for everyone (there will be skeptics). And to make sure that everyone's expectations are met, we need to have everyone understand them. So, here is the process to get that information: We will go around the room and get you to answer the following three questions:
  • What does success look like to you?
  • What are the benefits of this initiative?
  • What concerns do you have? Or what will keep us from getting there? (Here you might want to give an example or two…people need to feel safe to share…say something like: "here is something I can see coming in the way – we might not be able to get everyone to agree on a common approach".
  • Go around the table and get this information from everyone. Take good notes and only talk if you need to clarify something…no opinions from anyone else other than person who is supposed to talk.
• By the end of this exercise, you and others in the group will have a good sense of where the group stands with the initiative. Now you are ready to start discussing the concerns, how they can be alleviated, while building a coalition around the benefits the initiative brings.

Note: this process requires good facilitation skills, so do some reading and practicing before you first foray into this. Also, this by no means is the silver bullet to set up and manage expectations, but a tested tool.

Characteristics of a good Project Management Methodology

>> straightforward in explanation, intuitive in practice, and verifiable in compliance

If you are thinking about taking your organization through a process improvement project, possibly pursuing a CMMI or an ISO certification and need to have a project management methodology in place, this writing provides some pointers. Remember, a project such as this provides an opportunity for true Organization Development and Change Management. The difference being that OD is an organization's journey to reflect and define its future, while Change Management is the discipline for getting from an As-Is to a defined To-Be state. Nonetheless, there are three tenets/critical success factors that will drive the outcome for this project:

 

 

• Developed through collaboration – stakeholders need to have a sense of ownership. This is especially true for the PM community, who will be the main consumers of our deliverables. Additionally, working in collaboration with your PMs (or middle management) will give you access to a lot more ideas and foster the culture of teamwork at the organization.
• Fosters Growth (What's In It For Me) – one way to provide a sense of ownership and energy behind this project is to clearly define and communicate the benefits to each one of our stakeholders. Following is a list if some stakeholders a brief description of what's in it for them:
  • Individual employee – there is a lot in this for the individual employee (a) They don't need to re-invent the wheel every time, which has a direct impact of their ability to deliver high quality work products, while beating their deadlines; (b) Learn new skills and approaches that are proven and repeatable; (c) Approach their work in a planned, rather than a chaotic manner.
  • Program/Project Managers – in addition to the benefits they get from being an individual employee, a good management methodology is a basis for a high performance team. With this methodology, PMs will be able to (a) Deliver projects with a greater probability for success; (b) Provide project governance with defined roles and responsibilities; (c) Provide the basis for performance measurement – their own and their team's; (d) Set themselves up for performance awards, promotions, and engagement in special projects at the corporate level.
  • Corporate (Executives and Back-office) – (a) Provide an enhanced governance structure based on clear communication and expectations; (b) Business development – not only as an aid for proposals but also a competitive advantage in precise delivery; (c) Future capabilities development via special projects that engage high-performing employees; (d) Provide an employee leadership/development track; (e) Shift dependence from individual employees to roles.
  • Customers – ultimately our goal is to maximize profits, which is only possible through satisfied customers. Some benefits for our customers include (a) Being able to deliver on their goals through a reliable partner in your organization; (b) Provide career-growth and expansion of their current individual and divisional roles and responsibilities.
• Easy to implement – last but not the least, the process needs to be simple and adoption-ready, which means to be straightforward in explanation, intuitive in practice, and verifiable in compliance.

A 4-step management philosophy

 

• Set-up and manage expectations – a strong focus during the initiation and planning stages to ensure everyone is on the same page is the ONLY way you can bring project success. Primary deliverables here include the Project Charter and the Project Management Plan.
• Communicate, communicate, and communicate – defining, planning, and implementing the communication structures go a long way to manage conflict and keep everyone abreast of the project status. Primary deliverable here is a Communication Management Plan that defines what, why, when, and how the project information is distributed.
• Proactive Risk Management – paying constant and structured attention to internal and external factors that can derail a project provides for a platform for their early detection and resolution. Primary deliverable here is a Risk Management Plan that defines the project risk management methodology, the risk register/inventory, and the risk management meeting schedule.
• The best business development is doing excellent work – our reputation precedes us. Concentrate on making sure that our service delivery is exceptional, resulting in expanding existing client engagements and positive past performance references.