Helping CEOs Add Value

jim | April 16, 2013 | Communication, Leadership, Lean/Six Sigma, Performance Management, Strategy Clarification and Execution

The CEO of a Fortune 200 company had regular town hall meetings with his employees for years. When we conducted focus groups with employees to learn what they thought of the meetings, they liked what the CEO said during the town halls but when the meetings were over employees didn’t know what they were supposed to do differently as a result of the CEO’s message.

“We want to help but don’t know what to do differently,” one employee said.

Were the CEO’s town hall meetings adding value if nothing changed as a result of them? Not if you subscribe to the lean definition of value–any action or process that a customer would be willing to pay for.

I know many people who would say the CEO’s visibility and willingness to communicate information about high level strategy added some measure of indirect value. To some extent I agree. On the surface, he didn’t do any harm.

But to a larger extent I disagree. Resources were spent on the town hall meetings. Employee downtime added to the cost. But work didn’t change. And because work didn’t change, results didn’t change.

So the effort was a pure investment with no short or anticipated long term gain. Try as you might to make a thoughtful gesture equivalent to adding value, it isn’t. Is it safe to say that the CEO town halls were actually draining value from the organization? If the CEO is getting paid to increase shareholder value, did the town hall meetings reflect an activity that was counter to the CEO’s goals?

I believe so.

So, should the CEO stop conducting town hall meetings. No. The company should supplement the town hall meetings with other activities that interpret the CEO’s message to the people in the organization. Business unit and department leaders need to interpret the CEO’s message. They need to explain:

How company goals relate to our business unit of department goals.
Here’s what we need to do to drive corporate success.
And then relate this to the various people in the organization.

The sales person in the field, the brand manager at headquarters, the R&D people in the lab, the inventory manager, the machine operator, and the folks in shipping and receiving all need the information custom tailored for each area.

Leaders at all levels then need to make sure that everything they say and do are consistent with the CEO’s message. They need to make sure people have the resources they need to get the job done. Then leaders need to get out of the way.

The CEO’s town hall message adds value only when it gets translated and communicated throughout the organization.

Leaders Make the Weather

jim | February 26, 2013 | Communication, Corporate Culture, Leadership

Everything a leader says and does is scrutinized for meaning because being a leader assumes importance as a form of communication, often far beyond what the leader imagines. People watch what leaders say and don’t say, what they do and don’t do.

My dear friend Roger D’Aprix, author of The Credible Corporation, tells a story about an employee in a focus group who emphasized the importance of the leader’s impact. “The boss makes the weather,” the employee said.

We notice where our bosses sit, where they park or whether they use public transit, what’s first and last on their agendas, and questions they ask (or don’t). We watch their body language. We note their tone of voice and facial expressions. We pay close attention to what they wear, who they promote, and who they ignore. Then we do what they do.

I recently worked with a new leader of a large company’s business unit. His team is still trying to figure him out. All eyes were on him as he entered a meeting 20 minutes after the planned start time, poured himself coffee, spoke quickly to some of the meeting participants and then sat at the head of the table–in the authority position.

Within his first few minutes, he communicated that being late to meetings is no big deal and that he’s the boss.

The first agenda item called for updates from several of the business unit’s team members. As each team member reported, their eye contact was largely on Mr. Leader. But Mr. Leader was busy with other things. As he pretended to listen, he was either banging away on his laptop or thumbing away on his smart phone. Occasionally, he looked up and proffered opinions, only some of which were relevant to the ongoing conversation. He was communicating: I’m very important. I’m very busy. I’m not 100 percent here for you.

As the meeting moved along, Mr. Leader began silently excusing himself to step outside the meeting room to engage in smartphone conversations. The meeting went on without him. By noon of this all-day meeting, most people had intellectually and emotionally checked out. They too, were banging on their laptops and thumbing away on their smart phones.

When you take a leadership role–whether CEO or first line leader–you take a role in a fishbowl. People will take their cues from you and will replicate your behavior.

If you’re late, your people will be late.

If you take copious notes at meetings, your people will take copious notes at meetings.

If you are aggressively challenging your people, your people will aggressively challenge.

If you ask supportive questions, your people will ask supportive questions.

Leaders must be what they want others to be.

We Do That

jim | January 29, 2013 | Leadership, Performance Management

A client recently asked how some companies are able to develop such strong leadership teams. So, I spent a couple of minutes explaining how companies like IBM, P&G, 3M, PepsiCo, McDonald’s and General Mills clarify their expectations for leaders and then select, assess and develop them based on those expectations.

These companies also use the performance management process, often including a healthy portion of incentive pay, to hold leaders accountable for assuming the agreed-upon roles and meeting or exceeding expectations. They make it abundantly clear that what you achieve in terms of financial or operating results is as important as how you achieve it.

My client grimaced and responded, “We do that.”

I hear “We do that” from too many business leaders who confuse adopting basic fundamentals with executing them exceptionally well. They confuse checking the box with an obsession to be excellent. They confuse having a great plan with having great execution.

How well do you, “do that?”

Top Two Reasons Leaders Don’t Work As a Team

jim | November 28, 2012 | Communication, Corporate Culture, Leadership, Strategy Clarification and Execution

We recently surveyed CEOs about their top concerns and learned that many worry their own leaders aren’t all on the same page, despite assurances to the contrary.

When leaders aren’t in sync on company direction or priorities, they’re apt to:

Send mixed messages that confuse people
Create silos and turf battles that are debilitating and
Make it difficult for employees to do great things for customers.

Here are the top two reasons I’ve found why leaders aren’t on the same page, with ways to avoid both.

1. Lack of Vision and Strategy Clarification

These leaders assume that everyone on their team has a common understanding of the language included in the vision, strategy and goals documents.

Take the term “world class.” Everyone says they want to be world class, but what does it really mean? What does it look like? What do we have to do to become world class—specifically? How do we measure it?

Unless the words and phrases are translated into the way work gets done, leaders lead by assuming that we’re all on the same page when we’re not.

When I’m working with leaders to clarify their vision or strategy, I encourage them to paint a clear, detailed picture of what the vision or strategy is and is not. This “will do/won’t do” exercise turns something that starts out gray into black and white.

Vision metrics enable leaders to agree on what is world class and then communicate those expectations to the rest of the organization. For instance, agreeing on a zero lost time accidents for the next four years makes a clear statement about the safety goal. There’s nothing vague about that number.

2. Goal and Incentive Misalignment

During an employee survey we conducted for a Fortune 500 client, employees told us they knew the CEO encouraged collaboration among business units in order to go to market with a broad portfolio of products and services.

However, while employees agreed with the importance of collaboration, in reality they said there were huge walls between the business units and organizational departments. These silo walls were impeding collaboration. The leaders’ goals or incentives to the enterprise vision and strategy didn’t rigorously connect.

I asked to see the goals and incentives of the top leaders because I know how powerfully they communicate. They drive what people do. I saw what I’d anticipated.

Jason’s goals and incentives focused on Jason’s business unit while Kristin’s goals and incentives focused on her business unit. Some of the leaders had enterprise goals but others didn’t. Some weightings were as large as 75 percent or as small as five percent. A five percent weighting communicates a low priority to whatever is attached.

To stimulate collaboration across the organization, the enterprise goals and weightings for this company were modified so they were similar and shared among the leadership team. This created interdependency across the team. It communicated, “For the enterprise to be successful, we all have to be successful.” Leaders must reinforce the importance of the larger team.

Clarify and Align…Everything

Step one of getting everyone on the same page is that leaders need to clarify the organization’s vision, strategy and performance targets.

Step two is to align the entire organization to those targets. Rewards, recognition, work processes, formal and informal communication, learning and development and organizational structure must all communicate and enable the same thing—a resolute focus on the vision, strategy and financial targets.

Then everything and everyone is on the same page, all the time.

Communication Pros Take Notice

jim | October 24, 2012 | Communication, Corporate Culture, Human Resource Management, Leadership

In the mid-nineties, a University of Michigan professor named David Ulrich made a bold statement: “HR must give value or give notice.”

Back then, many top companies were reinventing their human resources departments —shifting work from traditional personnel administration toward workforce capability building and dramatically increasing the value that HR contributed to their organizations.
Fifteen years later, communication departments need to take notice.

Last week, I addressed a regional conference of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC). They heard a similar wakeup call from my former colleague and past IABC chairman, Mark Schumann, whose keynote presentation bluntly asked: “Can business communication reinvent itself or is the ride over? And he pointed out that: “Our profession is disappearing before our eyes.”

I spoke the day before on a related subject: “Reinventing the Role of the Communication Function: From Tactical Implementers to Value-Adding Change Leaders.” While Mark’s comments centered around the what and why of the need to change, mine addressed how that change needs to take place, based on work we’ve been doing with clients for a long time. From the audience’s reaction, it hit it the spot.

Here’s the short version of what’s going on.

Communication departments are doing the same things today that they were doing 30 years ago—distributing news and information. Only the media have evolved.

Amid the flurry of communication activity is Adam, who sits in his sales office in Dallas losing customers and revenues because he can’t get pricing information quickly enough to pass on to his prospects before his competitors do. Then there’s Jennifer, who struggles to meet her claims processing accuracy and speed goals because she hasn’t received proper instructions on how to do her job. And in the company across the street, they’re having trouble getting new products to market because their matrix structure all but stifles the cross-functional information sharing that’s needed to innovate.

Lack of information, inaccurate information, mixed messages and slow moving information represent organizational friction that gets in the way of people who otherwise could get passionate about eating the competitors’ lunch, if only they could get the information they need to do so. Essentially, many communication people are very busy doing the wrong things—things that add little to no value, if you define value as those things for which customers are willing to pay.

However, as with HR departments of the mid-nineties, today there are enlightened communication pros who are hard at work reinventing themselves. They report to leaders who understand that one of the most virulent forces working against organizational super performance are communication breakdowns that almost dare people to try to be their best at what they do.

Reinvented communication departments are focused less on output and more on outcomes that matter. Results such as improving quality, service, delivery, safety, costs and productivity. Their priorities are based on the size of the gains they can create and the amount of returns they can generate, not who screams the loudest. This business concept is being adopted by departments that heretofore have been stuck playing a role that was relatively detached from the business of making money.

As I told my crowd in Pittsburgh, you’re going to have to step back and ask yourselves Philip Kotler-like questions such as what businessare you in, how are you going to add value, what do you really need to be good at it? Assess what’s working and what’s not while putting a price tag on both. Then you need to shift your work to that which adds measurable value to your organization and scrap that which doesn’t . Skill-up now so you can be amazingly good at what you need to do to succeed.

This is a big job. But those who’ve made the transformation are happy people. They know they’re valued for the value they add. They go home at night knowing they made a difference in peoples’ lives.

The bonus is they’re also viewed as equal partners by their peers in other departments, including HR.

A CEO’s Lost Connections

jim | October 4, 2012 | Communication, Employee Engagement, Leadership, Performance Management

The CEO of a large company recently expressed frustration to me because he had a sense that his people weren’t connected to his vision and the strategy—“despite having explained it maybe a hundred thousand times,” he said.

“We need to connect people,” he said. “People in the field need to understand that if they keep doing the same things, we’ll just get the same results. That’s not good enough.”

Lack of connectedness, both vertically and laterally, is rampant in companies. It represents a form of organizational friction that prevents people and the business from achieving performance levels that are otherwise achievable. Many employees don’t know how their work directly affects company goals (vertical connection), or they are beset by organizational silos that practically dare people to work together (lateral connection).

Everyone reading this Report is part of an organization dealing with this type of friction. No company is immune. Many companies, however, have done a stellar job making the connections.

One of the best places to start improving connectedness is by building business and financial literacy. It arms people with the information they need to make better decisions. Better decisions lead to smarter actions that produce better results. The more you properly connect, the better your operation gets.

Business literacy teaches people about the competitive marketplace, customers and their requirements, the company’s products, services and market position. Financial literacy teaches people about the real game. The money game. If we don’t make money, we won’t be around no matter how noble our cause.

Real-Life Example

A high tech engineering company we work with has taught its employees how they can influence cash flow. The parts inventory manager knows she needs to maintain just enough inventory to make sure the machine operators on the manufacturing floor can meet the promised customer delivery date. If she can’t get a needed part to the machine operator in time, she’s messing with cash flow because the customer isn’t going to pay for the product until it’s received.

Is it an extreme concept to think that every person should understand their impact on the business? Is it an extreme concept to think that every member of a given sports team or orchestra should know their role in winning the contest or playing the symphony? Of course not.

Why don’t more businesses teach people the real game? Because it’s hard work.

It’s easier to tell people what to do and hope “they get it,” but that ends up frustrating both employees and their CEO. Doing what’s easy doesn’t help people make smarter decisions, create ownership, or change work so results skyrocket.

By taking on the more challenging approach to creating connectedness through business and financial literacy, you will see business performance get jacked up to unheard of levels.

Do You Have a Say/Do Gap? Are You Sure?

jim | August 1, 2012 | Communication, Corporate Culture, Leadership, Strategy Clarification and Execution

“Your actions speak so loudly I can hardly hear what you’re saying.”

That’s what one young woman told her supervisor. “You’re confusing me,” she told him. “One minute you’re discussing the importance of improving our team’s work quality,” she said. “But almost in the same breath you’re telling me there isn’t any money to train our team so they can improve. There’s a big say/do gap here.”

In this silly U.S. political season, it’s easy for candidates to get caught in the say/do gap rut. “I promised one thing but I delivered something else.” Oops! A say/do gap.

Gaps between saying one thing and doing another are everywhere in many organizations, almost always created by leaders, the most powerful communication source in any organization.

People listen to what leaders say and watch what they do. When leaders say and do the same thing, people are more apt to decide and act in ways that help the business succeed. If the say and do communication are at odds, people become confused and performance suffers.

For this reason, I’ve written Walk the Talk©, a free guide to 50 specific actions that have helped good leaders make sure that what they say and do are consistent with successfully executing their business strategies.

If you want to build walk the talk into your leadership development program, I’d be glad to discuss ways you can do it successfully.

Nothing Soft About Culture, Sports Fans!

jim | July 18, 2012 | Communication, Corporate Culture, Leadership

Today, I want to share my blog space with Dave Jackson. Dave heads communication for Global R&D at Alcon, the eye care division of Novartis, based in Fort Worth, Texas. We’ve worked together on large culture change and leadership issues. Dave knows that culture is hard as rocks. It drives what people do. It drives financial performance. Dave’s also a huge sports fan. I invited him to share his thoughts about culture, Penn State and every organization that wants to win.

Now, here are Dave’s thoughts:

As a sports fan, I’ll read almost anything about professional or college athletics. And as a communication professional, I’m equally curious in learning about communication breakdowns and how to fix them.

These two interests came together last week with the publication of the Freeh Report and its lucid detail on the inaction of Penn State administrators that put children at risk on the campus for more than 10 years. The report gives Penn State more than 100 recommendations to help protect children on campus in the future.

The recommendations are grouped into eight categories, and the first category is culture. Freeh concludes, “… there is an overemphasis on ‘The Penn State Way’ as an approach to decision making, a resistance to seeking outside perspectives, and an excessive focus on athletics that can, if not recognized, negatively impact the University’s reputation as a progressive institution.”

Freeh noted something that all leaders should understand: Our actions are our strongest form of communication. How we behave as leaders sets the tone for the entire organization: What we say and don’t say. What we do and don’t do. Where we devote our time and priorities.

While Penn State talked publicly about the “Grand Experiment,” in which the football program would serve as a model for excellence both on the field and in the classroom, when a tough decision needed to be made, the reputation of the football program came before the safety of children.

Take note of how you set the tone for your organization. Do you spend time in your office, in meetings with a select few individuals, or out among the workforce? What behaviors and results do you recognize? What measurements do you equate with success? You’ll find that these items shape the culture of your organization much more than any catchphrase, speech or poster.

Just like they did at Penn State.

Communicate Like Air Traffic Control

jim | July 11, 2012 | Communication, Leadership, Performance Management

Why don’t some people let you know when they get your emails, especially when the messages contain important information? Not only is it bad form, but it can set the scene for mistakes.

In today’s business environment, there’s way too much at risk NOT to close the communication loop. There’s an overreliance on assumption. “I assume she got it. I assume she understood it.”

Not always!

Just because you send an email doesn’t mean you communicated anything. And because you received an email doesn’t mean the sender knows you got it—unless you use the Outlook feature that enables this.

My model for closing communication loopholes is the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration’s Air Traffic Control (ATC). Their exchange helps assures that sender and receiver clarify what was said and heard.

Here’s how an ATC exchange might go.

ATC: “United four zero five cleared for takeoff on runway two four right.”

Captain: “Cleared for takeoff, two four right, United four zero five.

ATC: “United four zero five, climb and hold at ten thousand feet.”

Captain: “Climb to ten thousand and hold, United four zero five.”

Now, everyone doesn’t need to exert this much rigor in their communication. In fact, some might consider it a bit anal. Well, ok, perhaps it is too much. But, it’s a hell of a lot better than no response at all.

The point is that when they’re closing the communication loop, the opportunity for mistakes declines while the opportunity for clarity and understanding increases.

People say they’re too busy to respond to emails. Busy is no reason for not doing it right. One of the busiest people I know is a big muckety-muck for a large corporation. He responds to every email, even if it’s simply, “Got it.”

Works for me.

It’s How You Play the Music

jim | June 21, 2012 | Communication, Leadership, Performance Management, Strategy Clarification and Execution

The leader of a large organization wanted help shifting his first line leaders’ roles to servant leadership, which means leading others through development, coaching and facilitation. Servant leadership is intended to replace command and control leadership.

We’d just finished assessing this leader’s work environment. People we talked with told us the current leadership doesn’t foster a climate of openness and trust. They said they don’t have the information or resources they need to do their jobs well. First line managers weren’t involving people in decision making. The operation was underperforming on three of its four major goals.

Clearly, if the work environment was improved in the right way then performance could improve. The leader asked what exactly could we do to address his dilemma.

I began explaining the steps in great detail, including brief stories about other large companies who had successfully navigated their way through the same process. I mentioned how they’d clarified the leaders’ roles, gave them new skills, measured their progress and held them accountable for doing their jobs differently. In each case, operating or financial performance improved.

When I finished describing the process he responded, somewhat abruptly, “We already do that!”

Ah, but it’s less about the process itself and more about how it’s executed.

“All music groups have access to the same sheet music,” I told him. “All sports teams have access to the same plays. But it’s not about the sheet music or the plays. It’s about how well the music is played or how well the plays are executed.”

With that, he nodded and we proceeded to improve his operation.

I repeatedly hear reputable and well-intentioned business leaders who think the shiny new object will be the source of skyrocketing performance. “Let’s do one of these,” a leader says pointing at a new business book that promises instant success. The staff says, “Yes sir,” and another program bites the dust.

Great execution is hard work. If your goal is excellence, ten percent of the trip should be about having the right strategy or plan. Ninety percent should be about damned good execution. How well do you play the music?