Engagement, passion – the big WHY.

November 20, 2011 1 Comment

Only one in five employees are fully engaged. (Deloitte’s Center for the Edge: The Shift Index).

I personally view this video as a warning; the perils of over-rotating on a left-brained, rational approach to life, which removes context, meaning, and the big WHY of what we do. Passion and vision are largely missing in the world of work, and when they do exist in doses that are sufficient to stir our emotions, we often fail to realize their potential. We don’t connect the WHY with the HOW and the WHAT.

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift…and the rational mind is a faithful servant. – Albert Einstein.

We need both, not only to survive, but to thrive.

Filed under Influence, Leadership, Learning, Research, Thinking Tagged with Business, Culture, Leadership, Organizational culture, Research

Lead like the great conductors

September 1, 2011 1 Comment

Create the conditions for others to tell the story with you. Enjoy!

Filed under Leadership Tagged with Leadership

Deliberate Practice – the Leadership Kata

August 21, 2011 Leave a Comment

A kata is a set of actions that are assembled in sequence to help you train your mind and body to perform with precision, proper form, and to help you develop muscle memory so that these forms are available to you without thinking. The word “kata” comes from the martial arts. At the Agile2011 conference there was a tutorial titled “The Agile Leadership Kata: Discovering the Practice of Leadership” by Tom Perry. We applied the kata to the practice of leadership. Slides form the session can be found here.

Stephen Denning refers to leadership communication as performance art. All performance requires practice. Katas are a practice tool. Why bother? As a leader, why does it mater if I practice? If my current set of leadership tools are working, do I really need to develop new ones?

Leadership and Process Principles for Agile Finance

July 18, 2011 Leave a Comment

I’ve been reading “Implementing Beyond Budgeting” by Bjarte Bogsnes. Finance is sometimes a neglected area in terms of Agile Transformation and Bogsnes’s book offers rock-solid advice. The first element is the set of leadership and process principles.There are 6 of each:

Leadership:

Customers. Focus everyone on improving customer outcomes, not on hierarchical relationships.
Organization. Organize as a network of lean, accountable teams, not around centralized functions.
Responsibility. Enable everyone to act and think like a leader, not merely follow the plan.
Autonomy. Give teams the freedom and capability to act; do not micromanage them.
Values. Govern through a few clear values, goals, and boundaries, not detailed rules and budgets.

Process:

Goals. Set relative goals for continuous improvement; do not negotiate fixed performance contracts.
Rewards. Reward shared success based on relative performance, not in meeting fixed targets.
Planning. Make planning a continuous and inclusive process, not a top-down annual event.
Controls. Base controls on relative indicators and trends, not on variances against the plan.
Resources. Make resources available as needed, not through annual budget allocations.
Coordination. Coordinate interactions dynamically, not through annual planning cycles.

These are difficult principles to live by without trust, transparency and simplicity in your organization. Adopting these principles takes time and effort, and a rather gargantuan mind shift. Eventually you’d want them all, but if you had to start somewhere, which principles would start acting on tomorrow?

Can we apply Pareto to the budgeting process, focusing on the top 20% of financial decisions and issues aligned with the Product Backlog?

Decisions on what to STOP doing are as important as the decision on what to START doing. Are you making the hard calls? Can you apply Pareto to both decision types? What will we fund? What will we kill?

More to follow on this topic in a future post.

Filed under Finance, Leadership, Organizational Transformation, Pareto Tagged with Business, Business process, Change management, Finance, Leadership, Management, Organizational Change

Robustness vs. Resilience

May 24, 2011 Leave a Comment

An awesome slide presentation from Dave Snowden of Cognitive Edge. Black Swan Events, Power Law Distributions, and Pareto. Enjoy!

Moving from a system designed for robustness to one that supports resilience represents a significant strategic shift. Whilst systems have commonly been designed to be robust – systems which are designed to prevent failure – increasing complexity and the difficulty it poses to fail-proof planning have made a shift to “resilience” strategically imperative. A resilient system on the other hand accepts that failure is inevitable and focuses instead on early discovery and fast recovery from failure.

Filed under Black Swans, Innovation, Leadership, Learning, Pareto Tagged with Agile, Business, Change management, Cognitive Edge, Dave Snowden, Failure, Innovation, Leadership, Learning, Management, Organizational Change, Organizational culture, Power law, Research, Resilience, Strategic Management, Transformation

Leadership in the Digital Age – Listen, Learn, then Lead

April 13, 2011 Leave a Comment

Leadership matters, and more so when the stakes are high. Listen to Brig. General Stanley McChrystal talk about his leadership experience. A great talk. Some of the things he said that really resonated:

Leaders can let you fail and yet not let you be a failure.
Relationships are the sinew that holds a force together.
Leaders are good because they are willing to learn and to trust.

In this age of excessive speed, multiple generations of people with different experiences and contexts, widely dispersed teams, the ways in which leaders act matters more than ever. Enjoy the short video!

Filed under Leadership Tagged with Leadership

Sources of Complacency

March 8, 2011 Leave a Comment

Leading change without a Sense of Urgency… is it possible? John p. Kotter lists 9 sources of complacency. They are:

The absence of a major and visible crisis.
Too many visible resources.
Low overall performance standards.
Organizational structures that focus employees on narrow functional goals.
Internal measurement systems that focus on the wrong performance indexes.
A lack of sufficient performance feedback from external sources.
A kill-the-messenger-of-bad-news, low candor, low confrontation culture.
Human nature, with its capacity for denial, especially if people are already busy or stressed.
Too much happy talk from senior management.

So now what? Kotter recommends BOLD action. He suggests:

Link 50% of top executives’ pay to significant quality improvements.
Find ways to get all the external customer complaints in front of everyone every week.
Sell the jet and corporate headquarters and move into a building that looks more like a battle command center.
Set an objective to become #1 or #2 or we are forced to liquidate and shut our doors in 2 years.
Set your business targets so high they cannot be met doing business as usual.
Stop measuring sub-unit performance and narrow functional goals.
Use consultants to help force the honest conversations that need to happen.
Use company newsletters/communication to provide not only good news, but business reality.
Bombard people with information on these future opportunities for capitalizing on these opportunities, and on the organization’s inability to do so.

Over-managed and under-led cultures fail to do this according to Kotter.

Filed under Culture, Influence, Leadership, Organizational Transformation Tagged with Business, Change management, Communication, Culture, John Kotter, Leadership, Leading Change, Management, Organization, Organizational Change, Sense of Urgency, Transformation

Why You Need to Fail

March 2, 2011 3 Comments

This is a great video from Derek Sivers on the importance of failure for learning. Thanks to my good friend Catherine Louis for pointing it out. What resonated with me was the whole notion of fixed mindset versus growth mindset. A fixed mindset person believes that talent is innate and there is no point in trying to get good at something you are not “naturally” wired to do. A growth mindset person believes that anyone can learn anything given motivation and effort.

You can imagine the implications for a business leader who has worked hard to rise to the top and is told everyday how great she is and the fear of failure drives out the growth mindset and replaces it with a fixed mindset. We learn most and grow most by making mistakes. We need a growth mindset to do it. And we need to be willing to try experiments. The video is just under 15 minutes long. Grab a coffee (or a martini) and enjoy!

Filed under Leadership, Learning Tagged with Derek Sivers, Leadership, Learning, Mindset, Transformation

The Longitude Problem

February 23, 2011 1 Comment

Expert entrainment is both good and bad depending on the domain in which it is applied. Dave Snowden‘s video explains why. Not only is this instructive, it is humorous. The main points I took away were:

Despite having a plausible theory and good empirical proof, uptake of a new idea is not a slam-dunk. External pressure is needed to to drive change in many instances.
Mental filters cloud our thinking. Adapting one set of mental tools to solve a problem in another domain can fail when you are operating the complex domain.
And finally, the Welsh discovered America.

Leading change effectively means dealing with expert entrainment by adding competing perspectives. Enjoy…

Filed under Innovation, Leadership, Organizational Transformation Tagged with Change, Change management, Dave Snowden, Innovation, Leadership, Learning, Longitude, Organization, Organizational Change, Research, Transformation

How Adopting Agile can Lead to Business Failure

January 22, 2011 Leave a Comment

For Agile veterans, this list of failure reasons is not new. But it never hurts to be reminded of what they are. So here is the list by Clinton Keith and Mike Cohn. I wish everyone would read this list and post it on their bathroom mirrors. You can find the source document here.

Don’t trust the team or agile. Micromanage both your team members and the process.
If agile isn’t a silver bullet, blame agile.
Equate self-managing with self-leading and provide no direction to the team whatsoever. (Good leadership always matters!)
Ignore the agile practices. They don’t apply to management. (As a manager and leader, this is my favorite.)
Undermine the team’s belief in agile.
Continually fail to deliver what you committed to deliver during iteration planning.
Cavalierly move work forward from one iteration to the next. It’s good to keep the product owner guessing about what will be delivered.
Do not create cross-functional teams. Put all the testers on one team, all the programmers on another, and so on.
Large projects need large teams. Ignore studies that show productivity decreases with large teams due to increased communication overhead. Since everyone needs to know everything, invite all fifty people to the daily stand-up.
Don’t communicate a vision for the product to the team or to the other stakeholders.
Don’t pay attention to the progress of each iteration and objectively evaluate the value of that progress.
Replace a plan document with a plan “in your head” that only you know.
Have one person share the roles of ScrumMaster (agile coach) and product owner. In fact, have this person also be an individual contributor on the team.
Start customizing an agile process before you’ve done it by the book. (Another favorite of mine.)
Drop and customize important agile practices before fully understanding them.
Slavishly follow agile practices without understanding their underlying principles. (I call this one Agile-By-Rote).
Don’t continually improve.
Don’t change the technical practices.
Rather than align pay, incentives, job titles, promotions, and recognition with agile, create incentives for individuals to undermine teamwork and shared responsibility.
Convince yourself that you’ll be able to do all requested work, so the order of your work doesn’t matter.