Ingredients to Successful Teams - Trust

There has to be trust between team members, and trust between staff and their manager. Without it information won’t flow properly, productivity will suffer as people go into Chess mode trying to out maneuver who they view as their “opponent”, protectionism sets in and information becomes well guarded keys to job security,  etc…

Trust comes through honesty. Being able to openly say what you have to say in a constructive manner,  being able to voice opinions without fear of reprisal, and being able to admit to ones mistakes.

Trust also needs to be earned; but the nice thing is that most people are initially willing to give the benefit of the doubt and afford another individual a high degree of trust.

Trust is also easily lost and extremely difficult to  earn back once that occurs. If a person trusts someone and that trust is compromised, it will take an enormous amount of effort to regain that trust as now the shields are up, precedence has been set, and that person will always be suspicious of that someone again. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me…

The Cancerous Employee

The Cancerous employee doesn’t have Cancer, they ARE Cancer. They affect whatever is around them in a bad way - and overtime the cancer spreads outwards. As the tumor grows what would be healthy productive employees eventually become demotivated by the Cancerous employees around them.

Like real Cancer, the Cancerous employee is difficult to remove. They become entrenched in the organization through other people, technology, and subject matter expertise.

Getting rid of the Cancerous employee is just as challenging as real Cancer - you have to localize where the Cancer is and hit it hard, and chances are you’re going to affect good tissue (e.g. departments and teams in this case). Cancer doesn’t go down easily, it infects in as many places as possible, and it’s difficult to know where all those areas are and know if you truly eradicated all those areas.

Characteristics

• Negative attitude.
• Usually doesn’t collaborate with the team.
• Hoards information.
• Actively (even if subconsciously) demotivates others.
• Chronically complains.
• Sees only the negative side of any situation.
• Unable to admit to ones mistakes.
• Extremely resistant to change, new ideas, etc…
• Emotionally unstable.
• Has few allies in the team.
• Complains about others weaknesses, even when they share the same weakness (this is because they believe that the rest of the team exists to serve them).

Recommendation

• Like with real Cancer, you have to bite the bullet and get rid of the disease - it only can get worse.
• Isolate him/her so that the collateral damage is minimized.
• Cover your bases in all the areas that the person is involved in.
• Have an extremely well thought out contingency plan in case this person leaves before you are ready.
• Have an extremely well thought out plan to remove this person.

Being Right

There is a significant difference between being “right” and having the ability to articulate and persuade others that you are right.

When the Death Star was built, I’m sure some low-level engineer tried to mention the exhaust ports are vulnerable to proton torpedoes, but he was unable to persuade others that he was right.

If you aren’t naturally articulate and persuasive, then you must spend time preparing and practicing your talking points in order to get your point across.

Predicting the Future

The farther into the future that predictions are made the more accurate they become.

-Unknown

Should you manage your employees’ career?

Everyone knows the adage that “if you aren’t promoted in 2 years, you should find another position”. They also say the fastest way to gain salary increases and titles, is to change companies every 2 years. This of course applies to the employees who are highly motivated and have career goals. Not all employees are like this, many are quite happy to stay in the same position for decades.

The situation:

• You’re a highly motivated professional and have been excelling in you position. You are a superstar.
• You haven’t been prompted in 2 years and the company is content with you in your current position.
• You’ve received small inflation based pay raises.
• You don’t see a career path/room to be promoted in the current department/organization.
• Your next job may be your manager’s position.

In this situation, if you’re itching for a large pay increase, direct reports or that “Senior” moniker in your title, what choice do you have? If you discuss it with your manager, you may just confirm what you already know, that there isn’t a new viable position available for you. It will also create an uncomfortable atmosphere at work, if your manager thinks your looking for a new position and will be leaving soon. On the flip side, your manager may value you, and work to give you what you want.

Now that the foundation is set, how should you as a manager handle this situation? Should you care to actively be concerned about your superstars leaving? How do you answer these questions?

• Who is a superstar and highly valued?
• Which superstars are highly motivated to move-up?
• What if your organization doesn’t have available positions?
• Do you consider your superstars as numbers, and do not concern yourself with their careers, but just with what they can do for you today?

There are 2 schools of thought on this: Have a visible career progression path for all positions. In this case, the company is active in managing career paths and retaining superstars. The other option is no policy/action from management and let the chips fall where they may. In a large and profitable company, managing careers is possible, in a smaller company; it’s very difficult. Concrete solutions? I encourage discussion on this topic.

Top Reasons why small businesses fail

50% of new businesses fail in the first 5 years, here’s the top reasons why:

• They lack the power of the Force
• They  chose the  Jedi side (if they did have the power)
• Lack of experience
• Ran out of funds
• Bad Location
• Lack of inventory management skills
• Spent too much money on assets
• Inadequate credit arrangements (not enough, interest too high, etc…)
• Using business funds for personal reasons
• Growth was too fast
• Competition
• Low sales volume

Five Leadership Tactics To Make 2008 a Pivotal Business Year

A great article was posted today on 5 leadership behaviors for teams and companies to be successful.

Check it out… 

Identify the Owner

You’ve heard the saying, “Too many Sith Lords in the Command Ship”, I think you earthlings have a similar saying of “too many chefs in the kitchen”.

Collaboration is great, and should be a natural part of your organization’s culture - but issues and confusion will arise if owners of areas aren’t clearly defined.

Whether it’s fighting a crisis, issue resolution, routine tasks, domain areas, to projects - there has to be ONE owner. Otherwise it’s unclear where information ultimately needs to flow up to, and what the chain of decision making needs to be.

Is your technical staff on-call? What if that pager goes off, but it’s not in that persons particular area of ownership or expertise? The person on-call is the owner - the owner of the alert, and they have the power to rope in the subject matter experts needed, and/or the owners of such areas. Ultimately the resolution of that alert is theirs.

On a Project, there has to be a single-owner. Don’t confuse this with sponsors and supporters of the project. The owner of the project is ultimately responsible for getting the project done.

Do you have a Database team? There has to be someone who owns the maintenance plans, data architecture, schema design, database change policy and processes, etc… It doesn’t mean they have to come up with all the ideas, and all of it could be the result of the team collaborating on what the best practices need to be. And it doesn’t mean they have to do all the work. But the owner is responsible for making sure that that collaboration occurs, gets documented, and somehow enforced.

When fighting a business crisis or a technical one - make sure the owner is clearly defined. Otherwise people are going to naturally float decisions up their management chain, it won’t be clear whose making the decisions in the first place - so you get this decision confusion that results in latency as everyone tries to sync up on who decided what.

The Ivory Tower Syndrome

This syndrome occurs when top management becomes disconnected from the reality of the business.  Organization size, complexity and information filtering all contribute to the problem.

In order to avoid the Ivory Tower syndrome, the Sith recommend that all top management, including the CEO should spend 1 hour a month, observing desk-side, in rotation with every position in the company.  From the janitors to marketing, no position is too menial for this task. If the position uses a body, then that body is a cost to the company and needs to be performing their duties in an efficient and purposeful manner.

The purpose of this task is to observe front-line employees in the organization and directly observe problems, inefficiencies and procedures that the employee is using in their daily activities.  Information filtering is a constant threat to top management, and sometimes the only way to really know what’s going on, is to get your hands dirty.

Out-sourced workers and contractors should also be observed as the company ultimately pays for their services and everything above applies to them.

Once management is on board for the program, someone should have the responsibility of scheduling the desk-side observations in a random, unannounced fashion and ensure everyone participates in their sessions.

Productive vs Active

Now and then I’ll see military units such as squadrons of Storm Troopers scrambling around suspect rebel planets, or see our Software Development staff feverishly coding to make the UI look cooler.

But here’s a question that I pose to Executives, Management, and Product Managers - is such staff being productive, or merely active?

Frantic Work May Feel Productive, but is it?

To feel productive often people go into a frantic work pace, they’re motivated to get things done, and they want to bring value to the organization and themselves. But just because they’re moving quickly, firing off a ton of emails, defragging hard drives, whipping rebel prisoners, and experimenting with some new tools doesn’t mean they’re being productive.

This sort of activity should be allowed, the reason people do it is it’s a way to mentally recharge. Reasons may very, but for example they might have come off off a long and intellectually intense project, or when dealing with a particularly complex problem they need to walk away from it and focus on something else for a bit so that they can come back to it with a fresh perspective, and emotionally it helps them recharge (being able to innovate with new technologies, or tackling some no brainer tasks to feel they got a lot done, etc…).

The Difference

But, from a people management perspective this type of activity needs to be controlled as it might not be productive. The difference is productive activity is prioritized work; it’s an established effort that is aligned with the organizations mission and stated goals, has time allocated for it, and should also be line item on a person’s performance plan.

Allow It - But Control It

So, stick to the 80/20 rule here - make sure that the productive time for your people is at 80% or greater. If innovation is important in your organization - make it part of your mission and state goals, that way your allocating the time for it.