Ron’s Short Review: When we know what we’re looking for we miss a lot of relevant information.
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Is your arrow headed up or down?
Over the last twenty years of consulting work, I’ve seen many of the ups and downs of the American Corporate landscape. In the nineties the high-tech industry was on an extreme upward climb. And then the dot.com bust. The large Pharma industry was doing great through the nineties and into the “oughts” and then the patents began to expire causing extensive downsizing and mergers. The collapse of the American auto industry and the industrial age has been dramatic. And those are just the major industrial cycles. Every business has its own cycles as well. At any point in time your arrow can be headed up or down as industries and businesses cycle.
It always seems to be easier to exhibit patience when the arrow is headed up. When it’s headed down there seems to be less tolerance, more friction and increased pressure to just do it “my way” that breaks down the fiber and fabric of a team. But, if these cycles of ups and downs seem to be inevitable and a natural part of our business, how do we maintain patience equally well during the up swings and down turns?
Hope! Teams with no hope have no room for patience. Teams with hope seem to maintain patience even in the most difficult of circumstance.
Now hope is one of those words that has lost much of its original intent or has certainly taken on at least two definitions. Most people think of hope as a wished for feeling that all will turn out positive in the end despite current circumstance. But some of the original understandings of the word and concept of hope is a positive assurance that things can and will be accomplished in spite of current circumstance.
One of the experiences that I’ve had through the years is that no matter how difficult or poor circumstances may be for the overall corporation, I have always been able to fine “pockets of excellence.” There is always a team or a division or a unit where the people are positive, energized, respectful and patient as they work toward their desired results even under difficult circumstance.
One of the results that you can work toward and you can maintain, even when the business may be suffering (maybe through no fault of your own) is how the team will actually work together.
- How will we face the challenges?
- How will we ration our limited resources?
- How will we make decisions and what will be the order of our priorities?
- How can we prepare for multiple scenarios and be prepared to act as each unfolds?
- What can we learn about the make-up of our team and identify patterns of stress before they manifest?
Teams that commit to positive team interactions, understandings, and support in the face of daunting circumstances survive better than those who let the circumstances dictate. You’ll find that patience can be experienced even in difficult times with a little planning, fore thought and commitment.
Ron’s Short Review: Good understand of personal and group decision making.
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A while back (June of 2010 actually) I wrote my first blog on Patience. Good patience is one of those elements that can help build great teams or more importantly, lack of good patience can quickly break down a team. In that first blog on patience, I referred to a client who would lose his patience when he didn’t see sufficient progress as critical deadlines approached. I’m convinced there is one key part of that statement that must not be overlooked – “As critical deadlines approached.”
Coming out of engineering school, I spent the first decade of my career immersed in project management for several large projects. That decade left me with a couple of very deeply held beliefs:
1. You can only make up about 10% of a remaining schedule.
2. Projects schedules are lost at the beginning, not at the end of the schedule.
I do not consider these belief’s as hard and fast rules but more solid “rule-of-thumb” concepts. After closely tracking many major projects from engineering to construction to software design and development, I became convinced that you could only make up about 10% of the remainder of any schedule. In other words, if you are tackling a project that will take about four weeks of effort (20 working days) you will run into difficulties if you let the first two days slip by without accomplishing the first stages of the project. It seems so innocent, “The project is not due until next month and it won’t make much difference if I don’t get started until the end of the week or first thing next week.” Wrong! While it’s likely that you will in fact complete the project on time, you’ll not fully appreciate how much those first lost days will add to the stress, overworked, overwhelming feeling of not having enough time to accomplish everything as the weeks move along and all of your other projects get layered on top of these “delayed” projects.
Which leads me to my second belief: projects schedules are lost at the beginning, not at the end of the schedule. It’s not what you accomplish or don’t accomplish during that last week of a four week schedule that makes the difference between success and failure (or stress vs an orderly pace), it’s what you did or didn’t do during that first week of the four week schedule that makes the difference. Unfortunately, we’ve forgotten all about what we put off during that first week and therefore don’t associate with that feeling of being overwhelmed and overworked during the last week of the project.
Patience doesn’t happen by reacting calmly to missed deadlines. Patience is induced by setting aggressive early checkpoints on projects so that they experience an orderly pace as the deadline approaches.
Patience:
• Don’t forget your own learning curve (from the first blog). Leaders must work harder than they expect to help people understand new expectations, learn new processes, and have a vision of the new normal.
• Patience is improved and put to better use when there is more discipline at the beginning of a project instead of trying to handle the pressure better at the end of a project.
Ron’s Short Review: Helping us understand how our brains actually work helps us understand and make better decisions.
Ron’s Short Review: This one is simple and powerful. It will also explain why we can’t get out point across when we talk about what we do.
Image Source: Dmitry Krendelev, Creative Commons:
In my last post, we began to talk about the need for viewing our teams and companies as systems, as described in The Fifth Discipline. In Peter Senge’s book by that title, he said that cause and effect are not closely related in time and space and therefore hides from us the fact that our individual actions have systemic effects across our teams and companies. That’s one of the reasons why I like business simulations.
One of the business simulations I run is Paper Planes created by Chris Musselwhite of Discovery Learning.
In this simulation each person is assigned a work station for one element in the making of a paper plane (cutting, folding, gluing, stenciling, etc.). Each person is well trained and fully equipped to perform their job as the plane progresses down the assembly line. We then start up the system to produce as many planes as possible. While each station of one or more people work feverishly to maximize the productivity and through-put of their station, the first run of the exercise always fails to produce the desired outcome. Through successive rounds of debriefing, reengineering and re-running the simulations, teams get better by orders of magnitude. What they all discover in the end is that optimizing their piece of the work does not optimize the whole. We need to look at the entire system as a whole and optimize the system, even if that means sub-optimizing some of the work stations.
Another simulation I enjoy running is The Beer Game. This sounds like a fun (and maybe dangerous) game to run at an executive off-site. The Beer Game was invented at MIT, referred to in Senge’s book and is still given to MBA students at MIT twenty years later. It is similar in nature to Paper Planes except that it’s designed to simulate a logistics system with a brewer (manufacturer), a wholesaler, distributor, retailer and customers. Again, the games helps teams experience in close time and space what plays out in a real logistic system over hundreds of miles and many weeks of time. All of a sudden, it becomes clear to the participants that optimizing the individual pieces of the system does not optimize the whole. The problems need to be figured out at a systemic level.
What’s going on with your team or company? Are you working at maximum effort and efficiency only to see your department or team fail at their overall mission and assignment? Are you working your tail off in your team but some other department must not be carrying their load because you’re not getting the corporate results that you should? Are you looking for blame? Must there be someone else at fault for your corporate failures? Maybe you’re not looking at it systemically to understand how your actions and approach affect the whole. The Fifth Discipline.
Ron’s Short Review: Goleman continues to reinforce that it’s our emotional intelligence that actually makes a difference.
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The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization
A mile marker is one of the people, events, experience, or moments of learning that when you look back have influenced, shaped, or directed you along your way. I can identify specific “markers” in my mid to late twenties that clearly lead me to the consulting/coaching business. My wife was putting together a scrap book of our early lives recently and made the comment that I must have had consulting/coaching skills as a young child based of the comments classmates had written. Mile markers are important to identify to understand our own growth, development and direction.
The Fifth Discipline was one of those books for me. I had been educated in the discipline of Project Management at the engineering school of the University of Michigan. Managing and running things was a scientific discipline that could be learned and applied to getting things done. But, right from the start I had always felt that the most productive thing I could do was to help people grow, develop, learn and help the teams function well together. I believed that if we could improve the people side of the business, the business would be successful. Here was a book that “scientifically” presented these principles in an organized form.
What are the five disciplines?
- Personal Mastery
- Mental Models
- Building Shared Vision
- Team Learning
- Systems Thinking (Fusing it all together)
For this discussion I want to focus on number five, Systems Thinking.
We tend to be aware of System Structures “out there” in the “real world”. Physical structures like a manufacturing plant are visible to us. We can see the raw materials and parts coming in one end of the plant with the finished product exiting the other end. We can see what happens when parts don’t show up on time. We can identify “bottle necks” in the system and work to alleviate the restriction. We can even see the systems that are not so physical such as cost and demand relationships. The Fed works with a “system” to determine interest rates as they try to manage (manipulate) the economic structure. But what we don’t really see or more importantly don’t believe is that our individual human behavior works in a system across our team and company. Until we can step back and see things in a systemic way, we will fail to change the behavior that is causing the bottle necks and disruptions to our peak performance.
One of the reasons we don’t see “the system” in our teams and companies is what Senge describes as “Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space”. That’s one of the reasons I like business simulations. They allow us to act out and see the system at work in a closely related time and space. That brings me to the rest of my blog title: Paper Planes and The Beer Game. But, that’s all the time and space I have for this post. Tune in to Paper Planes and Beer Games in the next post.
Ron’s Short Review: Another framework for viewing organizations and their behavior.
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Peter Drucker often spoke of being effective versus being efficient. His simple definition was: Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things. Much has been written by leadership and management gurus as well as Drucker himself about this concept and you can find many wonderful pieces on the web about this subject. But I would like to focus on one particular aspect that I often see relating to this topic; the development of people.
I have had many leaders and managers (including myself) say something to the effect of “It’s just quicker to do it myself.”
Often the reason or excuse is that:
- I don’t have time right now to teach someone.
- It would take me just as long to teach them as it would to just do it myself.
- And, even after I take the time to teach them, they won’t be as efficient or effective as if I just do it myself.
That’s being efficient: Get the job done. Get it done now. Get it done “right”.
Notice that getting the job done efficiently is not necessarily being effective. We live in such a rapidly changing world that we can no longer afford to be dependent on efficiency. Efficiency is the price of admission these days. Over the last decade or more I have observed my clients wring every ounce of efficiency out of their production, supply chain, and logistical systems. Efficiency simply keeps you in the game. Efficiency is no longer a game changer.
However, when it comes to people leadership and management, much of our effort is still focused on efficiency, not necessarily effectiveness. I posted an earlier blog on victim versus creator. Highly efficient systems can induce a victim environment by dictating every aspect of getting things done efficiently. Effective/creative systems tend to be messy, particularly on the front-end. Our effective desires and measurement systems don’t often have the tolerance for starting down that effective/creative path. But, without an effective/creative approach we won’t survive. The world is changing too rapidly to depend on efficiency.
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There is constant talk of reinvention. Companies need to reinvent themselves. People need to reinvent themselves. I live in a state (Michigan) that needs to reinvent itself.
How does a state reinvent itself? The state of Michigan has been associated with the auto industry for over 100 years. During the peak of the auto industry, Michigan was one of the wealthiest states in the nation. Today it is one of the poorest and the only state that has lost population between the last two census reports. I’ve often tried to think of what Michigan would look like if Henry Ford, R.E. Olds, and many of the other pioneers of the auto industry had started in Ohio (or some other state) rather than Michigan. I have to assume that we would have an economy and state government geared to a level of a different and maybe less robust industry. We also have the cereal industry started by W.K. Kellogg and C.W. Post. Our tourist industry is outstanding and we even have a thriving oil and gas industry. But… the state would look much different today had we not had the auto industry. How do we rethink who we are?
I can only draw on my personal experiences when I think about reinventing ourselves individually. My career seems to have progressed in decades. For the first ten years of my working career I worked in the engineering/construction business, building large power plants around the country and learning the project management business. Then one day I saw my first microcomputer and decided that this little box (actually a 35 pound “luggable” machine in the early days) was going to change our lives. Six months later I was developing software for the new and growing microcomputer industry. After ten years of working with computers and software I had to ask myself the age old question “what do I really want to do when I grow up” and came to the conclusion that I had felt fulfilled working in two very different industries because my goal everyday was to create (and be) the best leaders and develop the best functioning teams. I believed that if I could grow myself, help grow the people and develop good team dynamics, the business would take care of itself. My developing vision was helping leaders and teams continually improve their performance. I thought that would be fun if I could get up and do that every day. Thus began twenty years (and counting) of consulting and coaching in the leadership development and team building arena.
What fulfills you? Have you stopped to ask yourself that question? It may be scary and risky but it will also help you to continually reinvent yourself. A necessity in today’s rapidly changing world.