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What’s Trust Got to Do With It?

by Ron Potter December 1, 2014

Snoopy, Charlie Brown’s irrepressible dog, once lamented,

“It’s not easy being head beagle.”

And in the wake of recent moral meltdowns at both high and low levels of corporate America, Snoopy’s insight may be more on target now than ever before.

For those who still aspire to lead others well, however, the current leadership climate presents a great opportunity—especially for those who earnestly want to lead right. As never before—in all segments of society—we earnestly want to associate with people who are genuinely trustworthy.

Steve seemed to have it all. He was tough, smart, disciplined, quick on his feet, and an effective strategist. He worked hard and could match anybody’s résumé with an impressive list of business and personal skills. With all that Steve had going for him, why was he failing in his latest and greatest work assignment? Was there a way for him to pull out of his tailspin?

Image Source: The US Army, Creative Commons

Before his success in business, Steve had been an Army Ranger. Listening to Steve was like listening to a Tom Clancy audio book, only this was the actual participant reminiscing in real time. Steve’s Ranger training had prepared him to withstand almost anything, including extreme pain, in order to execute a mission. This was one sharp, strong man—Rambo in a business suit. Part of Steve’s extensive Ranger training had included instruction in being a leader at any level of organizational structure. Steve understood both giving and taking orders. He knew how to take charge, size up the situation, and go after the objective.

As part of my consulting approach, I had tested the team Steve was a part of to assess leadership performance. I’ll never forget the afternoon I met with this man who was so discouraged that his whole demeanor drooped. Steve was desperately looking for understanding and some help to regain his footing. What had pierced the strength of this highly trained, combat-proven Ranger?

Steve’s discouragement resulted from feedback he had just received from his peers on his leadership style and how it was affecting his ability to lead, to be trusted, and to be a good team member. He thought his leadership practices were sound, but his peers and those who reported to him directly saw them as oppositional, competitive, and detrimental to the team’s ability to function successfully.

Steve saw himself as a good, competent leader. Before I showed up, Steve assumed he had made all the right moves, had all the right skills, and was doing just great, thank you! Now this devastating feedback from his team told him other-wise. He knew in his heart he had the right stuff, so what was wrong?

What Steve didn’t understand is that skill is only part of the equation. He did have many solid leadership attributes: He was committed and focused, had great integrity, and could endure difficulties. What Steve didn’t understand was that some of his behavior and attitudes were offensive to coworkers. It didn’t matter to them that he was an ex-Army Ranger and had great leadership qualities and a list of achievements to show for it. To them he seemed proud. Steve didn’t understand the difference between being proud of your accomplishments and being perceived as kind of a cocky know-it-all. His air of superiority kept others from feeling they could trust him. Once Steve began to exhibit a more humble attitude in response to his teammates’ feedback and became more attentive to their accomplishments and strengths, trust began to build.

Trust is at the heart of any honest relationship.
Quality leadership is vitally important today, and many people work hard to improve their leadership skills. But all the training and technical skills, as important as they are, will not create an enduring, trusted leader.
Regardless of where you have been and what you have done—or even if you have no experience at all—you can become a leader worthy of trust.

Share with us the leadership behaviors that have prevented you from trusting.

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Listening

by Ron Potter July 9, 2012

Image Source: Kristina D.C. Hoeppner, Creative Commons

In previous blogs you have heard me talk about the difference of listening with the intent to understand versus listening with the intent to respond. So often while we’re “listening” our minds are working rapidly trying to figure out how we are going to respond to what the person is saying rather than trying to figure out what they’re trying to communicate.

Two of my readings recently touched on the power and aspect of listening. One comes from an HBR blog by Ram Charan of June 21, 2012 titled “The Discipline of Listening.” In the article Ram gives several good practical approaches to improving your listening skills but I want to share a few words with you from the end of his blog:

“For leaders, listening is a central competence for success. At its core, listening is connecting. Your ability to understand the true spirit of a message as it is intended to be communicated, and demonstrate your understanding, is paramount in forming connections and leading effectively. Truly empathetic listening requires courage – the willingness to let go of the old habits and embrace new ones that may, at first, feel time-consuming and inefficient. But once acquired, these listening habits are the very skills that turn would-be leaders into true ones.”

Notice that it’s the difference between “would-be” leaders and real ones. So many people believe that it’s what they know that makes them great leaders. In reality it’s what they continually learn that make them great leaders. You can only learn through listening.

I’ve also just begun reading The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed by Adam Bryant. In this book Adam interviews some 70 CEO’s and other corporate leaders to listen and learn what he finds in common with people who make it to the top. The very first trait that Adam identifies is “Passionate Curiosity”. Guess what it takes to demonstrate curiosity?

Adam poses an interesting question at the beginning of the Passionate Curiosity chapter:
“Imagine one hundred people working in a large company. They’re roughly the same age, around thirty five. They’re all vice presidents and share many of the same qualities that got them where they are. They’re smart, collegial, and hardworking. They consider themselves team players. They have positive attitudes and they’re good communicators. They’re conscientious about their jobs. They have integrity. If everyone shares these qualities, what is going to determine who gets the next promotion?”

Adam goes on to discuss a few key principles that allows some of these hundred people to eventually make it to the office of CEO. Number one on that set of principles is Passionate Curiosity. He says of these people:

“They wonder why things work and the way they do and whether those things can be improved upon. They want to know people’s stories and what they do.” Adam goes on to say “The CEO’s are not necessarily the smartest people in the room, but they are the best students. They learn, they teach, and they understand people and the business world, and then bring all that knowledge together to drive their organizations forward.”

In all the research that has been done in the world, we have never found any correlation between success and being smart. However, we find great correlation between success and listening.

Are you truly listening today or just trying to help other people see how smart you are?

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Blog Culture

Boundaries vs Fences

by Ron Potter June 1, 2012

Image Source: Alex Juel, Creative Commons

I recently spent a day with Fritz Seyferth, one of my consulting colleagues. Fritz has a unique background and style that makes him one of the most effective Leadership, Team Building and Culture building consultants I know. Check out his “Foundation of Winning”.

One of the principles that Fritz emphasizes in his consulting work is the importance of boundaries. Boundaries help set and define the culture. Boundaries actually demand more creativity and innovation to keep organizations moving forward. Boundaries are very important and useful for the health and growth of an organization (and individual). But, aren’t boundaries restrictive and inhibiting?

As usual I often learn more from observing my grandchildren then they ever learn from me. Both sets of grandchildren have fenced in back yards. In the back yard fences keep them safe, secure and contained. And in fact, the “boundaries” of play and activity tend to stay inside a parameter that is even within and smaller than the space defined by the fence.

As I observe some corporate cultures I notice that when leaders erect “fences” employees seldom even test the boundaries. In fact I often hear of hidden or invisible rules that keep people away from the fences.
“Oh, we’re not allowed to do that.”
“That would never be acceptable to our boss.”
“There are consequences for going there.”
The playing field actually becomes smaller than the playing surface.

Front yards however are defined by boundaries. There are no fences and the boundaries have to be clearly pointed out and defined to the children.
“That’s the neighbor’s yard.”
“Don’t go into the street.”
“You’re not allowed to go past the corner.”
However, boundaries are almost continually tested and reset. Unlike the backyard the entire world is beyond the front yard boundaries. If we don’t test and continually expand the boundaries of the front yard, we will never explore the world or discover what’s possible.

I’m beginning to think that we should be very clear in our businesses what is a back yard fence and what is a front yard boundary. I work with companies in the pharmaceutical, food and automotive industries among others. Drug and food safety better be a back yard fence. Manufacturing quality better be a back yard fence. There should be severe and immediate consequences for climbing over the fence.

However, when we’re exploring the world in front of us we better be thinking more of boundaries. If people violate our boundaries here we want to know why. We need to have the conversation about why someone stepped out and tried something new and radical. Should that be acceptable? Have things changed? Did they discover a new environment with new opportunities? We certainly should not simply abandon our boundaries. But, innovation happens at the boundaries. New ideas come in from the boundaries. Opportunities are seen from the boundaries.

I think it’s important for you and your company to discuss what is a back yard fence verses what should be a front yard boundaries. There are actually dire consequences if we confuse or don’t distinguish the two. Leaving back yard quality and safety to a boundary discussion will kill a company. Fencing in the front yard will arrest our growth and development keep us from exploring what the world has to offer.

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Horns of a Dilemma

by Ron Potter May 13, 2012

Image Source: Martin Fisch, Creative Commons

“Boy do we have a dilemma!”
“This has presented a real dilemma.”
“This decision is so hard to make because it’s a real dilemma.”

I hear these kinds of statements all the time in my corporate world as well as in my civilian life. What are people saying when they talk of having a dilemma? Usually they want to make the “right” decision but it’s difficult to figure out which is the right decision or the best decision or the least damaging decision. Do you notice that there is a sense of right vs wrong or better vs best or least vs most in those words. Well, if that’s the case, you’re not faced with a dilemma, you’re just making a tough decision. The decision will (or should be) made for the right, best or most side of the scale, it’s just hard.

A dilemma is presented when you’re faced with making the right vs right, or the best vs best or the most vs most. Dilemmas are equally right! That’s what makes them a dilemma.

The original definition (without getting too deep into the word construction) meant the horns of a bull; thus, being on the horns of a dilemma. The idea is that you are about to get gored by one or the other horn, but you get to choose. Note that you’re going to be gored either way. Choosing which decision to make will not prevent you from getting gored! Now that’s a dilemma!

In the rapid paced world of today with global implications, I believe we are faced with more and more decisions that become true dilemmas. It’s not the case anymore that we’re faced with five “must do” activities to keep us competitive and all we need to do is prioritize them. No, today we are faced with five must do activities but we only have the resources and time to accomplish three of them. Which ones do we decide to kill (read the earlier blog on “Have We Decided Yet?”)? Now we’re facing a dilemma.

It’s when the goring for our decision happens at a later date when no one remembers (or admits to remembering) that we chose to get gored by one side of the decision. Today we’re getting beat up (gored) by the boss or the market place for lower sales volumes when we knew that would happen based on the price increase we took because of global commodity increases.

When you’re faced with a dilemma it’s important that you decide which alternative to kill, publicly execute the alternative and publicly record the expected consequences of that decision. Don’t look for someone to blame later, look at the consequences of your decisions to see if they were what you expected. Congratulate yourself if they are what you expected. Analyze your decision making process for improvement if they were not what you expected.

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Have We Decided Yet? Probably Not!

by Ron Potter May 1, 2012

Image Source: Garrett Coakley, Creative Commons

One of my clients (thanks Mindy) recently introduced me to a book called The Primes: How Any Group Can Solve Any Problem by Chris McGoff. While I’ve found several useful concepts in the book one of the most powerful is the definition of the word “decide.” Notice the make-up of the word: De-Cide.

What do the words pesticide, homicide, fungicide have in common? They (and many others) all end in “cide.” The – cide ending originates from the Latin word caedere meaning to kill. It concerns death, destruction, extermination and deliberate killing. There is even a public execution connotation to the word meaning “to put to death.”

In our corporate world we’ve mistakenly come to believe that when we decide, we’re making a decision about what “to do.” But when we decide what to do, we never decide what to stop. It’s a little bit like the overwhelming morass that our governments have gotten into; every year our legislatures add more and more laws to the books, they just never kill any and so our laws and regulations have become so voluminous we can hardly act freely any more. In our corporate life when we continually decide what to do and seldom decide what to stop doing we spread our precious resources thinner and thinner.

See if you can make this shift with your team. When faced with a decision, spend more time figuring out which alternative you are going to kill. Figure out the consequences of killing that particular option. You’ll notice some deep seated attachment and engagement that you never uncovered when you were decide which alternative to “do.” There will be many people in your organization that may have spent many years honing their skills performing the alternative that you’re about to kill. How do you think they’ll react? They’ll do everything they can to preserve their job and skill set. They’ll do it overtly. They’ll do it covertly. But this is exactly what happens when you decide what to “do” versus what to kill. While the priorities have shifted to the more important task that you decided to “do”, nobody told the people doing the other alternative to stop or shift their resources to the higher priority item or to cut their project to the bare essentials. Thus, we are constantly looking for resources to accomplish all of the high priority items and we create work forces that feel overwhelmed and over extended.

Instead, try deciding. Try deciding what to kill. Try dealing with the fall out and consequences of telling people that we’re no longer doing that activity or project. Help them get reassigned, retrained, more engaged in the activities that you’re not killing.

Maybe you’re very good at prioritizing your work. However, when you prioritize your list of 30 activities rather than deciding which ones to kill, you will still have a huge amount of resources working on priorities 16-30. If you will decide, you’ll notice that you have more than enough resources to accomplish the top 15 priorities.

Start de-ciding! You’ll find yourself and your company suddenly much more productive.

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Blog Leadership

Kicked in the Head: Overcoming Fear

by Ron Potter April 1, 2012

Image Source: Azhar Khan, Creative Commons

My recent blog on Getting Past Failure reminded of me an experience I had with a client years ago.

I was working with a new president of a major company. He had taken over an organization that had just seemed to be stagnant for many years. His first instinct was to spend time out in the field riding with his sales representatives to find out what their daily experiences were like. He was looking at the organization from the ground up. His early impressions were that the organization was simply hesitant to make any decisive moves. He thought there were sales to be made and market share gains to be had but the entire organization was simply too cautious, afraid to make any major mistakes and not even willing to ask customers for a commitment.

At the same time, I had seen a National Geographic special that had followed a pride of lions. The lead female is the hunter for the pride. She will decide which prey to attack and direct the hunting party how to help her gain an advantage over the targeted animal. But she is the one who makes the kill. As she was in hot pursuit of her targeted zebra she rapidly moved in to make the kill and leaped for the attack just as the zebra came to a fallen log. The zebra jumped over the log and at the same time kicked hard at the attacking lion and caught her right in the side of the head. This kick sent the lion tumbling through the brush and the kill was lost. For the next several weeks the routine seemed to be exactly the same as it had always been but just as the lioness came to the moment of kill, she shied away. She was obviously afraid of being kicked in the head. Over the coming weeks as the pride became more and more hungry, younger females and even a few of the younger males began to challenge her dominance and position as the lead hunter. Rebellion was increasing when she finally regained her confidence or more likely overcame her own fear and finally made another kill. She and the pride quickly returned to their normal and successful routine.

The company above had experienced some of their own “kicks in the head.” They had received a regulatory citation about some of their sales practices. They had experienced some product failures as well as some competitor products gaining great advantage over their own. And they had experienced their own leadership failing to help them out of this funk. They were acting like the lioness who had been kicked in the head.

As the new president began to instill a level of confidence in their sales ability, in the quality of their products and in their strategic plan for being successful in the market place (through a combination of face-to-face meetings as well as large scale meetings) you could see the “pride” begin to return. Sales began to climb (even with no change to the product mix or market conditions) and by the time they launched a new product the following year (that product became the largest selling product in its category) the team was pumped up and ready to go. He had helped them recover from their kick in the head. In overcoming fear, the new president was able to lead his team to success.

Where have you and your team been kicked in the head? Things happen beyond our control. I’ve mentioned before a great book titled The Road Less Traveled, Timeless Edition: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth by Scott Peck M.D. The opening sentence of that book is “Life is difficult.” Life (and business) is difficult. We get kicked in the head occasionally. But, we don’t need to let the pride starve because of it. We can overcome our fears and regain our “pride.” Be aware of kicks in the head. Identify them. Talk about them. Figure out ways to deal with and overcome the natural fears that are a result. Life will still be difficult but it can also be encouraging and productive at the same time.

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Getting Past Failure

by Ron Potter March 16, 2012

Image Source: Steven Depolo, Creative Commons

I recently participated in my first clinical trial. Fortunately I was in the healthy comparison group and not the afflicted group. While the trial was related to a cancer study, it was focused on the cognitive aspect of cancer and the immune system. I know, I know…. having me in the healthy cognitive group is amusing. However, it was a fascinating study.

During one section of the study that was looking at the ability to stay focused and concentrate even while being distracted, I was asked to watch the computer screen for long periods of time and quickly identify the direction of various arrows when they appeared on the screen while other information was also being displayed. The test itself was simple in nature but it was the instructions provided by the facilitator that fascinated me.

In preparing for the test she talked with me about handling failure. Because the arrows will quickly flash on the screen and I must indicate the direction of the arrow as quickly as possible, there will be times when I make a mistake. However, it was important that I put that mistake behind me and keep going. She explained the pattern they see when people make a mistake (which your brain realizes a split second after the arrow disappears) they will often make several mistakes in a row because they’re still upset about the one they missed. Interesting! This was not about life decisions or major corporate decision, it was simply hitting one key or another indicating the direction of an arrow. And yet, they could clearly see a pattern that when we make a mistake the guilt (horror, worry, embarrassment, or whatever) can often linger and result in several mistakes just because we didn’t quickly get past it.

We all make mistakes: individuals, teams, corporations… The trick is to not let failure lead to several others just because we didn’t get it behind us quickly enough.

So what causes these lingering affects? Several possibilities come to mind:

Silence – not acknowledging or talking about a mistake (again, either individually or in a team) can cause the additional mistake syndrome
Pride – not willing to admit our mistakes will also cause the escalation of further mistakes
Lake of Patience – an atmosphere where mistakes are not tolerated will actually exacerbate the environment of continued mistakes
Subsequent punishment of mistakes – Often mistakes or even legitimate decisions don’t turn out to be correct in the end. However, when people are punished later for decisions that turn out bad, it creates an atmosphere of low risk and very low accountability. (This is an interesting one that will probably need to be addressed later as its own topic!)

How are you at getting past failure quickly? Talk about this with your team. I believe you will discover that because you’re not putting legitimate mistakes behind you quickly you are creating additional mistakes and a risk averse, low accountability culture that is not serving you in these times of rapid change.

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Patience – Ups and Downs

by Ron Potter February 1, 2012

Image Source: Caleb Roenigk, Creative Commons

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.

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Patience – Project Management

by Ron Potter December 27, 2011

Image Source: Amy, Creative Commons

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.

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The Fifth Discipline, Paper Planes, and The Beer Game – Part II

by Ron Potter October 16, 2011

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.

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The Fifth Discipline, Paper Planes, and The Beer Game – Part I

by Ron Potter October 2, 2011

Image Source: damien_p58, Creative Commons

The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization (No, not the Bruce Willis Film “The Fifth Element”) was first published by Peter Senge (MIT) in 1990. For me it was one of those books that proved to be a “mile marker” in my life.

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.

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Blog Leadership

Effective vs. Efficient

by Ron Potter August 28, 2011

Image Source: · · · — — — · · ·, Creative Commons

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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