Lead, Follow, Or Get Out Of My Way

I have seen many organizations whose leadership team feels like they are merely floundering around instead of providing effective leadership.  Those who realize this are in a good position because they have identified that they have an issue that they need to fix, and they are willing to fix.  (Kudos to them!)

What I have noticed is that many times they flounder because they have lost sight of their mission.  The organization’s mission is the foundation of its vision and operations.  Although “mission statements” became trendy several years ago, as a concept they were severely overused, and the process of forming a lofty “mission statement” became an end unto itself — to hell with whether the mission statement actually reflected what the company did.

Your company’s mission should be simple and well-defined.  I once heard the head of a state department of transportation interviewed on a radio program.  The host asked him what was the department’s mission.  Instead of simply stating “we fix the roads and make them better,” the head of the department bloviated for 3 or 4 minutes about all the things they did, and never once did he utter anything that could be called a “mission.”

Here’s a simple exercise any leader can perform at the start of the new year to see how well your team understands your mission:  Ask each team member to write down the following:

1.  What is our company’s mission?

2.  What is the mission of the department/division our team belongs to?

3.  What is our team’s mission?

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Then analyze each response to see (a) whether it is correct and (b) whether everyone has the same or similar response.  This will give you a tremendous insight into the clarity your team has regarding your mission, your next higher level’s mission, and your organization’s mission.

Too many times we see organizations jump into action at someone else’s request without thinking about whether it is the right thing to do.  A request comes in for the team to “Jump!”  The team’s response is to ask “How High?”  This is a problem if this team is the Crawl team, not the Jump team.  Although we always hate to respond to any request with “that’s not my job,” the fact is that requests for action must be analyzed for the following qualities before responding:

• Does the requestor have authority to make this request?
• Does the team have authority to act upon this request?
• Is this team the correct team to act upon this request?

When you and your team are asked to “Jump!”, always think before jumping.  Ask whether you should jump, do you jump at all, is jumping what is best, etc.  Respond, don’t react!

We hear a lot of talk about the need for innovation, or the ability to come up with new and better ways to do things.  Here is the question I pose to you:  Is innovation a matter of having imagination, or is it a matter of having the guts to use innovation?

I pose this question because I see many situations where people know what they need to do to innovate, but they fail to innovate because of a lack of will, a lack of energy, a lack of resources, or fear of the political games that will result.  Yes, sometimes organizations need some fresh ideas on their operations or procedures.  But sometimes they just need someone to have the guts to actually execute those ideas.

I welcome your comments.

A king does not abide within his tent while his men bleed and die upon the field.  A king does not dine while his men go hungry, nor sleep when they stand at watch upon the wall.  A king does not command his men’s loyalty through fear nor purchase it with gold; he earns their love by the sweat of his own back and the pains he endures for their sake.  That which comprises the harshest burden, a king lifts first and sets down last.  A king does not require service of those he leads, but provides it to them.  He serves them, not they him.

Gates of Fire, by Steven Pressfield

An interesting article about White & Case’s change of organizational structure. Instead of power being decentralized among the 35 separate legal offices housing 2,500+ attorneys, the firm is restructuring its leadership along both regional and practice area lines.

Although normally decentralization can be a good thing, it has its disadvantages if it focuses too much on geography and does not allow common visions among the organization’s functional groups.

There is an old saying among soldiers that “you can fool a general, but you can never fool a private.”  The reason for this slogan is that although a high-ranking general officer may have grand ideas about what to do, and will color them with lofty phrasing, the private (i.e., the lowest-ranking soldier) is the person who actually has to execute them.

Since the private is the one that ends up executing the grand ideas, he knows it for the dirty work that it is.  He may have a much better idea of what specified and implied tasks must be completed to get the job done.  In fact, he usually does have a better idea because he is closest to the situation — and thus may have greater access to raw data than the general, who normally receives information that has been massaged, interpreted, and shaped by others.

The point of this is that the farther up the chain of command we are, the farther away we are from the raw information.  We must always be on guard to peel back the layers of information to get to ground truth.  And, we must never be afraid to ask for advice or input from those charged with executing the tasks necessary to implement our ideas.

Don’t ever give an order you cannot enforce.  Enforce the orders you give.  (This assumes, of course, that the order you gave was one you expected your subordinates to follow.)  Inability to enforce your orders is indistinguishable from unwillingness to enforce them.  If you do not enforce your orders, it hurts your authority because your employees perceive you as making them generate wasted effort.  Your employees lose respect for you because if you fail to enforce the order, it says unwilling to hold them accountable because you are a coward or don’t care enough about the task.  And if you cannot enforce an order, your employees will take that to mean the order should not have been given.

Here are some examples of how you can tell the order cannot be enforced:

• You are unable to determine whether the employee followed the order.
• You do not have authority to enforce the order.
• You will not have the time or energy to enforce the order.

LEADERSHIP QUOTE:  “The quality of leadership, more than any other single factor, determines the success or failure of an organization.” –Fred Fiedler and Martin Chemers in Improving Leadership Effectiveness

LEADERSHIP TIP:  Investing in your rising leaders.

I ran into a person who is an internal coach within a large Fortune 500 company.  In our conversation, I learned that the CEO is a large proponent of coaching, mentoring, and developing leaders at all levels within the company.  She shared with me that word on the street is “if the company has assigned you a coach, that means they think you are on your way to promotion.”

The point of this story is not to promote coaching, but to illustrate how important it is to devote time and energy to developing our leaders.  In the context of the Fiedler and Chemers quote above, the quality of leadership means both having good-quality leadership and having leaders who are willing to set conditions conducive to creating good leadership.  The fact that the entire organization sees coaching as an indicator of promotion potential means the organization believes in developing talent for leadership.

And when your organization believes in quality leadership, it is on its way to success.

UPDATE:  Link to the study mentioned in the article:  http://abajournal.com/files/Anatomy_of_Law_Firm_Failures.pdf

An article in the National Law Journal about a recent report stating why certain large firms failed this year, and why more failures are on the way.

The most telling part of the article is that lack of leadership and lack of realistic strategic vision were key contributors:

“Nearly half the failed firms that Hildebrandt looked at had problems with their internal dynamics, ranging from lack of clear strategies to a dearth of strong leadership. The majority of the failed firms had no long-term strategy, a strategy that the partners didn’t fully commit to, or a strategy that simply was unrealistic. ”

My definition of leadership is “Communicating a shared vision, and inspiring others to achieve it.”  As with any organization, law firms that lack the communication, the shared vision, and the inspiration, by definition lack leadership and are doomed to fail.

LEADERSHIP QUOTE:  “Productivity gains come from improved coordination, rather than from increased effort, when all employees willingly engage in analysis, planning, and decision-making.”  William Ouchi

LEADERSHIP TIP:  Don’t work hard; work smart.

Too many times, organizations fall into the trap of thinking “work” always equals “productivity.”  What follows from that is we think increasing our work effort will result in an equal increase in our productivity.  So many of us think the way to increase productivity is simply to increase our effort, yet we overlook the inefficiencies in our organization that rob us of productivity.  Like sand on the chain of a bicycle, there are always small inefficiencies in our policies, procedures, and systems that slow us down.  If your bicycle’s chain is clogged with sand and slowing you down, does it make sense to pedal even harder, or would you be better off wiping the sand away first?

So, how can you discover the hidden inefficiencies in your organization?

1.  Ask questions.  Get out from behind your desk and ask people at the bottom of the chain of command.  There are more good ideas on the factory floor than at the CEO’s desk.  Ask them “if you could change one thing to make this place run better, what would it be?  If you were king for a day, what would you do?”  Additionally, ask people what training or resources they could use to do their job better.

2.  Make a list of every initiative, project, product line, or service line your organization is currently involved in.  Then, determine whether it fits within your core business.  With a tip of the hat to Jim Collins, author of “Good to Great,” ask these three questions:  Are we the best in the world at it?  Are we passionate about it?  Can we make money at it?  If the answer to any of the three questions is “no,” consider dumping that initiative.

3.  Analyze your lines of communication.  Who is supposed to communicate with who?  Who is actually communicating with who?  Why is there a difference?  Are people analyzing each piece of information they receive by “why is this information important” and “who else needs to know?”

If you clean the sand off your bicycle chain, you can go faster and travel farther with the same amount of effort.