Issue 5, Weds August 2, 2000
Made in New Zealand - twice winners of the America's Cup

You can't manage change. You can only be ahead of it
Peter Drucker


Welcome to the fifth issue of EDGE FIRST, an eZine dedicated to making you a better leader by providing the two key ingredients of effective leadership:
- provocative thinking about what it means to be a leader
- the tools, techniques and best-practices that drive leadership improvement
In this issue
Looking inwards - Letting go, getting loose – team leadership
Looking outwards – what really, really now, matters to leaders?
Announcements - Members' only, interactivity ...
Postscript – women and leadership

Some of the resources listed below are Portable Document Format (.pdf) files. To access them you'll need Adobe's® free Acrobat® Reader.
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Looking inwards - Letting go, getting loose – team leadership
If you're involved, as your editor has been for the better part of seven years, with organizations that decide to take some risks in the interests of better performance – by embarking on a Baldrige (or Baldrige cousin, baby-Baldrige or similar) exercise, for example – you'll have noticed how often the leaders say their biggest challenge is letting go.

You set up a team, say. They spend a few sessions talking through the functional stuff. Accountability, responsibility, team-building. Boundaries and horizons are staked out and dreamed about. The enthusiasm builds. The collective energy is striking sparks, and before you (and they) know it they're away and running. Self-managing. But they've left their old leader behind! And she's itching to get her fingers back on the levers. Letting go is hard.

Let's say you're that leader. Outside the team but dead anxious that it succeeds. You let it loose, you're accountable – both to the team and to whoever you report to – for the results that team delivers. And you've got your own stretch targets as well. What you gonna do? Giving in to the itch and tinkering can be fatal.

In her nationally (US) syndicated column (A BETTER WAY, August 1) leadership coach Jennifer White wrote “A few days ago, I was coaching one of my clients on developing some new ideas on inspiring his team. Joe has spent the last year building his Dream Team, and he's very interested in making sure he keeps his talent happy. He has a ton of results he needs to produce during the next 12 months, and his success comes down to the accomplishment of his team. Welcome to the world of leadership!”

According to JW, her Joe, underneath it all, is a command and control man, “the type of leader who barks out commands and then gets upset when people don't follow the letter of his law. Joe misses the old days when his employees used to do their jobs because they were afraid they'd get fired.”

Doesn't work, of course, when you've got a team of talented professionals “who tend to have opinions on just about everything. That old style of managing no longer works. Joe is now leading a team that's quite challenging to manage”. And Joe's particular challenge, says coach White, is communicating with his team.

'I don't have time for all that, I've got results to produce,' is his excuse. Not good enough, says the coach; if it matters, find the time.

Maybe the real question is: “What are you afraid will happen if you talk to your people more often? “For most leaders I work with,” she writes, “the answer to this question is control. What's really going on is …:
  • If I spend time talking with my team, they'll just give me more stuff to do
  • They don't follow along with what I'm saying, and they'll question our direction. That's just a big fat hassle
  • They'll open up a can of worms I don't want to address
  • I'm just not good at this people thing
  • I'm the boss. Why should I have to explain everything?
“Joe admitted,” she wrote, that “he had a huge fear that if he told his people more about what is really going on, mass chaos would kick in, and he'd lose control”.

“I know as the leader there's a part of you who doesn't want to explain, doesn't want to communicate and secretly wants a group of folks to blindly follow along,” Jennifer White concluded. “The world has changed, my friends, and that way of managing doesn't work anymore. You have one choice here. You either change with the times or you're going to fail. Mass chaos will take over not because you told the truth but because you didn't.”

So, what happens if Joe overcomes his fear, gets out of his team's hair, and the sky doesn't fall in. BUT – someone's not 'getting it.' What if a delegation grabs him after a stand-up ten-minute team meeting one morning and says, Joe – Wanda's in the way.

If Joe's smart, and Jennifer's done her job well, he'll do some coaching of his own. What do you do when an employee has a performance problem and needs coaching?

Inc. magazine's 'HR mentor' Robert Hoffman says: Ideally, your actions shouldn't be a shock to Wanda. Feedback about performance should be an ongoing process. If you let your team know when they are meeting your expectations, when they have surpassed them, and when they are falling behind, and if you really are leading, and not just defaulting to the team collective, you'll know and they'll know who's making it and who's not. Even Wanda will know.

“Monitor their work, give them guidelines, help them set objectives, and assist with problems,” Hoffman says. “At least once a year, sit down to discuss overall performance and plans for the coming year. At that point, if you have been giving them consistent feedback, positive and negative, there should not be any major surprises for either party.” But if Wanda's performance doesn't improve? It's time to plan a more formal approach. Try this, Hoffman says:
  • Assure privacy and protect everyone's dignity by scheduling a meeting in a quiet office with no interruptions
  • Open the meeting with a positive statement about the employee's progress or abilities
  • Let the employee know that you are still unsatisfied with some aspects of his or her work, limiting yourself to the three most critical problems
  • Discuss these problems in depth and give the employee specific examples of errors in judgment, miscalculations, complaints from other departments, and so on
  • Ask the employee to explain why he or she thinks these problems are occurring. Give him or her an opportunity to vent feelings, but insist upon your right to set standards of performances and to decide whether or not they are being met
  • Ask the employee to come up with a plan for improvement and agree on a timetable for measuring success
  • Offer a referral to an employee assistance program or a counsellor to address possible underlying personal issues
  • Spell out the consequences of failing to meet objectives (disciplinary action, suspension, termination, etc.)
  • Consider putting the problems and corrections in written form, giving the original to the employee and keeping a copy for your records
  • If the employee gets upset or hostile, keep calm. Inform him or her that you can reschedule the coaching session, but that you need to address these issues soon because of their negative impact on the company
  • Follow up with another meeting within an appropriate time frame. If there are improvements, congratulate the employee and make sure he or she understands that the improvements need to be sustained
  • Assure the employee that performance problems are confidential and ask him or her not to speak to co-workers about them. Advise the employee that you will only discuss the situation with other managers if appropriate.
Resources
More about teams? Go to our Baldrigeplus.com exhibit on teams http://www.baldrigeplus.com/Exhibits/Exhibit - teams.pdf. “Just because it looks like a team and talks like a team doesn't mean …,” a collection of material on teams … information from a web site by specialist Will Mays, and a discussion by Dr Brian D Janz of the FedEx Center for Cycle Time Research at the Fogelman College of Business and Economics at the University of Memphis.

Looking outwards – what really, really now, matters to leaders?
Time to look out the window. In issue 2 of this eZine we emphasised Gary Hamel's prescription for leadership – think context, not content. Here's some more thinking about context.

It's from an edited (and summarised) 'conversation' about leading change, between iconic organisation commentators Peter Senge and Peter Drucker (Drucker Foundation News, May 2000 Volume 8 Issue 2, below for more detail), and from an article (Drucker on the Obvious and Unseen) in Chief Executive Magazine, June 2000. Both articles wander around a bit, and Drucker seems to be 'discovering' startling insights that many people have known for some time as conventional wisdom, but there are nuggets …

Drucker says that historically, in any major transition (we've been through two biggies in the last 500 years – Gutenberg, and the steam engine – he says) organizations have to become change leaders. You can't manage change, he says, you can only be ahead of it. You can only make change.

Ecommerce is a fundamental change that nobody predicted, but he believes the dominant factor in all developed and emerging countries in the next decade will be … demographic change! People. Not the 'e' at all.

So how do leaders deal with that?

(1) First, he says, learn to accept that it's coming. And that it's not going to be a Friday afternoon job. Accept that every institution, every business, every nongovernmental institution has to be globally competitive and everyone has to learn to be a change leader. Accept that talking about adapting to change is not only stupid, it's terribly dangerous. The only way you can manage change is to create it. By the time you catch up to change, the competition is already ahead of you.

Also accept the fact that the next 10 years are going to present extreme social turbulence in all developed countries - not because of the aging population, “that is nothing new,' he says, “population has been aging since 1700”. But because of declining birth rates. The population replacement rate is 2.1 live births per woman of reproductive age. In most , maybe all, of the Western democracies, it's currently less than 2. By the end of the century, if current stats are projected forward, “there will be no Italians.”

Drucker predicts that in all developed countries there's going to be racial hatred and extreme social pressure. “On the one hand we will need immigrants to get the labor force we need. And on the other hand, only the English-speaking countries have a tradition of assimilating immigrants. We know it's painful, but also we know it works. No other country has the experience. They're all scared out of their wits.

(2) And the second way to deal with sweeping change, Drucker says, is to create receptivity for change; by building organized abandonment into your system.

Nothing that so concentrates the mind like the knowledge that the present activities and products or services are going to be abandoned in two years. Not because they have been failures, but because they have been successes. They have already accomplished what they are going to do. The time to get rid of a product is not when it no longer produces, but when somebody says, "it still has five good years."

Senge – “Our enterprises are so dominated by an ethic of problem solving that it really undermines this notion of creating. Are we creating, or are we predominantly problem solving?”

Drucker – “I am a little unhappy with all the talk about creativity. To some extent it's a cop-out to cover up our problem focus. There is no lack of creativity. I have never found any. But we are doing our level best in most organizations to squelch it. You have to infuse your entire organization with the mind-set that change is an opportunity and not a threat. Would this be an opportunity for us? And then, if it looks like one, you put two...one or two good people to work on it. It's worth it. And then you have to be receptive to what comes in over the transom. The most important thing I have to tell my people at the top of [an] organization, is that they're not being paid for being clever. They're being paid for being right.

Senge – “It would be pretty easy for someone to feel a bit overwhelmed in the present situation because there's not only so much changing, there's so much changing at different levels.

Drucker – “I think you're absolutely right...People are secure if they realize that this time of sudden...unpredictable is the wrong word...sudden and radical change is a time of opportunity.... I'm very hopeful. Hopeful is the wrong word. Optimistic is the wrong word. The right word, I'm very excited.”

Peter Senge is director of the Center for Organizational Learning at MIT's Sloan School of Management. He has helped leading corporations, including Federal Express, Motorola, and Intel, improve their group learning capacity. He is author of The Fifth Discipline, one of the best-selling books of the decade, and The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook. Peter Drucker shouldn't need any introduction, but for a quick look into the wonderful world of … go here http://www.pfdf.org/leaderbooks/drucker/index.html#resources

Members' Only
We're putting together a members' only page for our merry band of leadership subscribers. The address may change from issue to issue, and we may partition off a section for 'public' access … there's still some heavy-duty thinking going on.

We'll email an announcement soon (maybe over the weekend).

Leadership assessment tools. New members – wonder no more. We'll be delivering the assessment tools as PDF files (the ones you need Adobe's Acrobat Reader to download) via the members' only page – they'll always be available, no need to clutter up your drives or networks. If you'd like them in another format (the native versions are PageMaker files), just ask.

We're keen to experiment with 'interactivity.' Watch the home page at www.baldrigeplus.com over the next few days as we roll out an innovative on-line dialogue on a couple of current issues. If it works there, and you want it, we'll start a private (just us, folks) discussion on your own page as well. Maybe we'll start with a discussion about what your own leadership score is, and how you might improve it!? We'll all hold hands. Don't worry – you'll enjoy it.

Postscript – women and leadership
“If you are honest with yourself, you can easily pinpoint those aspects of your business that are the most unpleasant for you. Once you have done that, make it a priority in your business day to accomplish at least one of them. In this way, you have taken a big step toward achieving your dream of financial and personal independence with your own business.”

From: Women At the Top - Executive Coaching for Female Exec's - by Staci Leipsic, MSW- Certified Business Coach.

In the latest issue: Featured Article: Stepping Out of Your Comfort Zone by Cathy Bryant; Monthly Quote; Coaching Services for Female Executives; Female Executive Appreciation Contest, TeleClasses, B-Coach Systems.
Interested in hiring a coach?
Give us a call. We'd love to talk to you about it! Or any other proposals. Here's Malcolm Macpherson's resume.
Next issue 15/16 August. Reader contributions warmly received!

Copyright © 2000, Macpherson Publishing
All rights reserved. Award and EDGE FIRST are trademarks of Macpherson Publishing. Contact us at www.baldrigeplus.com
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