VIGNETTES FOR LEADERSHIP TRANSFORMATION

This month we're going to take a look at numerous vignettes, small slices of 'leadership in action' that can edify, illuminate and guide your own leadership lives.

THINKING MATTERS

We have all read about, or picked up by osmosis, the theory behind 'Blink'. Very simplistically that most decisions are made almost precognitively, in the literal 'blink' of an eye. Intuition, love, insight, taste, judgement, are all predicated on this instant reaction, this affinity or lack thereof.

As with most radical assertions, it's a partial truth. Because the other side of the equation is that there is quite a difference between say Einstein's insight and that of a neighborhood ballerina when it came to unravelling the relation between energy, mass and the speed of light. The parfumier's nostrils pick up a wider spectrum of olfactory information than the rest of us as we decide with a quick spray, whether we like something or not. And as the shelves of any department store attest, there are a multitude of responses beyond 'yes' and 'no' on that front.

While our final response may happen in the 'blink' of an eye -- preparation, experience, study, talent, all combine to prepare us for that moment. Beyond that, certain things require that we NOT go prematurely for our instinctive conclusion, that we challenge our assumptions. Certainly in leadership, in leading teams, and in guiding winning organisations, there are more such moments than not. In short, as Michael LeGault asserts, at times don't blink, THINK!

He provides an interesting example. A mid-sized automotive supplier in Ohio. They put a strip of rubber around a glass windshield and ship these to auto manufacturers. The procedure: an operator places the glass into a machine, the machine places melted rubber around the edge and quickly cools it to make it stick.

However, the glass was breaking! Scrap rates were mounting: 10%, 20%. Bar graphs posted around the area showed the mounting losses of the company. These losses reached one million dollars a week!

The company had their highly educated, young and dynamic plant manager attack this problem. He was flanked by experienced supervisors and engineers. They first looked at the dies (the molds into which the glass was placed) and verified dimensions to thousandths of an inch. They ran quality checks on the glass they were receiving. They put in place process control software to monitor the internal health of each machine. Around the clock, engineers probed, perplexed.

There were temporary improvements, then suddenly another downward spiral, where it seemed virtually every windshield was being devoured by capricious machines that were bankrupting the business.

The head office intervened, almost inflicting a famous guru upon the beleaguered plant manager. This guru's fee was a minimum of $1 million. They were losing that a week. If he delivered, it would be a bargain!

After reviewing what they HAD done, the guru asked for the scrap rates per operator. This caused surprise. The company had the scrap rates per machine, but not of the operators, who were shifted in and out. The guru patiently, almost meticulously, gathered this data for about a month. Engineers almost sneered, feeling intuitively that there was an undiagnosed problem with the machines -- the operators had to do very little here, after all.

However the data the guru gathered pointed to an interesting anomaly. Women operators had much higher scrap rates than males. But two of the gents had scrap rates similar to the women. He asked to see them. They were both slight, and quite short. A million dollar solution now 'blinked' after the analytical 'thinking' already done.

The windshields weighed about 20 to 40 pounds, depending on the model. Operators leaned over to insert them. The workstations were one size fits all. Our guru watched a woman struggle to insert the glass into the machine. Moments later it shattered. As she put the next one in, he called a halt. He ran his fingers along the top edge of the windshield. While properly inserted between the pins, one edge rode out a little farther. He adjusted the edge, the machine was run, and out came a pristine, shining windshield!

All the company then had to do was modify the ergonomics of the workstation, train staff workers more precisely, and modify the die guiding pins slightly. Scrap rates fell below 5%. The plant manager and engineers were sheepish, the guru rode off into the proverbial sunset, aglow with additional celebration.

ACTION POINT: Don't be put off by either arid analysis or unguided intuition. You need enough immersion, enough understanding of the analytics, to then take a truly creative and expansive look at a problem and thereby divine a breakthrough solution. Throughout your leadership interactions, appreciate the potential value of intuitive insights, but always challenge reckless assumptions.

Making solutions work requires passion. Finding the real root causes to our challenges however, so that we solve the right problem -- requires dispassionate investigation and a genuinely curious mind.

PASSION AT WORK

We know we all seek for meaningful work. Human beings yearn for significance. Hence the importance of core purposes that touch us, visionary futures that beckon us, and living values that nurture and validate us.

However, we don't have to necessarily reach so far up or so far away. While we all need the above bedrock to guide and inspire our leadership lives, there are everday realities that are often no less important in determining our level of excitement, engagement and application.

A famous tome on performance management gives a compelling example. Suppose you work in manufacturing, preparing ceramic vases for packaging. As the vases come down in batches of 10, in a box standing upright, you simply lay the boxes on their sides before they go on to be automatically shrink-wrapped. The boxes come fast, so you have to move fast, and with skill. Most people in such jobs don't demonstrate soaring productivity, but do enough to avoid scrutiny, much less trouble. The pay is fairly good, but the work is boring, and not challenging enough. Once a quarter you get a performance review, and you tend to hear excitement from the supervisor only when there is a slip in performance.

More progressive companies here might produce a different motivational reality. We've heard the tale of the janitor at Boeing, describing his job, as 'helping to make aircraft engines'. And perhaps at the company above, this operator could, with different leadership and management, have come to say, 'I help produce and prepare beautiful vases to add to the quality of people's homes and lives.' Perhaps so, but let's look at another work situation, which even without a grander purpose, seems to generate far more sizzle and satisfaction.

So, here's another task description in a very different environment. Team members have to put 10 objects at a time on their side. The objects are 60 feet away. A special tool is given to team-members to accomplish this task. Ideal job performance is to lay all the objects down on the first attempt. But if not, they get a second chance. If they fail the second time, an automatic device removes any objects that remain, and no credit is received for them. The next 10 objects are then placed and the task is repeated.

Despite the repetitiveness and the evident pressure, there is little stress and considerable enjoyment. Over a period of time, proficiency also clearly rises.

What makes this task more enjoyable? Well it is organised quite differently. Each group is organised into a team and selects a name for their team, establishing a kind of identity. They record the results of each attempt on a form. They keep a running total of their daily performance. Totals for each group are publicly posted in real-time. They like this, are challenged by it, and couldn't concieve of a setting where they didn't get such timely feedback.

When someone does well, there is strong encouragement from the manager and team members, much laughing and cheering. When a team member has difficulty, everyone rallies around to offer encouragement, advice and support.

The group is recognised with affirmation, trophies, patches for their shirts and jackets. All such 'kudos' are given out either on the day of the performance, or certainly in time for the next 'shift'.

The team sets group and individual targets based on the best achievements of competing teams as well as their own collective and personal best. Even small improvements are noted and commented upon.

Shockingly, this far from idyllic task is one in which people aren't paid! In fact, they pay to do it! It's called Bowling.

Now you may shout 'unfair!'. It's just a game. Your salary doesn't depend on it, nor your advancement. All true. But beside the point. It can hardly be that if your salary is involved, or if there are real-world consequences, then that makes people less passionate about work! That should make them MORE passionate!

Instead of going down that route, let's look at how you could render bowling as tedious as the everday work lives of many people.

One, we could make sure the bowlers had to take the game seriously at every turn. No more funny team names. Conversation kept at a minimum. No distracting activity, and a humourless supervisor putting unconstructive pressure on them. We would also ensure that the supervisor and the team had a semi-adversarial relationship, one based on hierarchy not on mutual commitment to a shared goal.

Certainly within the team, efficiency, not team spirit, not virtuoso energies, would prevail. No loud talking or joking. Also we want more bowling, so don't have them do their own paperwork. Also, it's inefficient to keep providing feedback with such frequency, so no more flashing scores. We'll mail them the results, and once a quarter let them know how their bowling was for that period -- long after they can do anything about it.

Also, we'll highlight problems, so we'll circle the bad scores in red. And to keep people from slacking off, we'll set the 'average' as the high score of the best performers. That's what we expect. Anything below that is 'substandard'. We won't meet people where they are and build them up from there.

ACTION POINT: Meaning matters for sure. Purpose, vision, values, are the life-blood of organisations. But everyday life injects meaning and vitality too. Look at the excitement found in the everday, and the sterility found in so many work environments. Let's take a leaf out of what works.

Clear job accountabilities, measurable and visible results, a focus on coaching behaviours (not just deriding lackluster results when they occur), building teams and giving them shared goals, making the goals increasingly challenging and yet iteratively achievable, providing ample and immediate feedback (affirmation AND constructive challenge), ensuring positive and enthusiastic reinforcement from a variety of sources (peers, mentors, bosses, other teams, the overall organisation through awards/honourable mention/internal best practise benchmarking, etc). That's how we get turned on...and our teams and organisations with us!

MAKE STRATEGY MEETINGS REALLY MATTER

We all know that meetings are sometimes considered the bane of organisational life. Poorly crafted agendas, inept time-keeping, poor follow-up or lack of decisive action from previous commitments, politically correct platitudes. All this adds up to a colossal waste of time.

Here are three antitodes from three grand masters of leadership. We'll begin with Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, the unofficial global emeritus professor of leadership. Welch would insist on having next level people present at meetings, often without their bosses. He would grill them, challenge them, check out their knowledge, their thinking, their commitment. He would never say anything to them to undermine their bosses. However this gave Welch a very clear understanding of two things. One, the quality of next-level teams. Two, the quality of leadership being provided by his own direct-reports.

By not announcing when these next level presentations would occur as a substitute for the presentations by their bosses that were scheduled, leaders had to continually consult their teams, make sure they had buy-in, ensure they had coached and engaged their people. Everyone was on high alert and tended to interact far more and truly tap the collective intelligence of their talent pool.

Next, let's go to Andy Grove, in his heydey as Intel Chairman. He disliked pomposity and rambling. Hence he had a sign made that he kept at the ready. When someone droned on or digressed, Andy would flash this sign that read: 'Are you making a speech or do you have a point to make?' This sign could be reached for by anybody. Pretty soon, as soon as anyone's hand twitched in the direction of the sign, people summed up, refocused and got to the main headline...FAST.

Most recently, A.G. Lafley, Chairman of P&G, asks for presentations to be sent to him in advance. 3 pages MAXIMUM. He then critiques and sends questions and challenges in advance of the meeting. The 'meeting' is then a bare-knuckles review process aimed at establishing two things: where to play and how to win. So in the battle with Kimberley Clark's Huggies, Pampers took aim at training-pants rather than regular diapers (where to play) and challenging the Pampers cost structure (how to win). The result is meant to be a 1 page document that provides crystalline clarity and drives relentless execution.

ACTION POINT: Strategy is supposed to be our best bet on how we win. Unless the meetings are used to grow people (Welch), get quickly and clearly to the point (Grove), and debate what really matters with an eye to execution (Lafley), we are not only grossly abusing people's time, but we are leeching their energy and underutilising their intelligence. To do this and call it 'strategy' is just obscene.

DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT

Psychologists who excel at change will often advise that when 'stuck' do something, almost anything, different than what you usually do. This is called a 'pattern interrupt'. It interrupts our ritualised and stale responses and forces us to take a fresh, hopefully more creative and purposeful look, at what we're doing.

Here are some company examples of what has been called in success literature, 'the difference that makes the difference.'

Ricardo Semler's zany but successful empowerment lab, Semco, which continues to baffle and unnerve control freaks around the world (read MAVERICK and SEVEN DAY WEEK-END if interested in details), has a policies and procedures manual in cartoons. They are funny, ironic, and make a point. They are a 'self-Dilbertisation' of what it takes to be safe at work, for example. As a result people read them, internalise them, share them, and even apply them.

Google has white boards all over their offices which encourage office graffiti. Product teams use them to swap ideas, passing team members leave sudden flashes of insight there, mind maps are generated and more. But the two largest are devoted exclusively to office graffiti. Jokes and cartoons, strategies under the title of 'Google's Plan for World Domination'. New hires quickly get the personality of the place, and these iterative white boards become like an organic and growing network of community interactions and conversations. Senior leaders pick up more about the pulse of the organisation while passing by than in hours of carefully considered focus group responses.

A client of mine, Engro, who did an employee buy-out from Exxon and then outperformed the parent a hundred fold, had us design a vision session where the spouses attended as co-visionaries. Boy, that shook everything and everyone up. Corporate politesse went right out the window, and a pragmatic realism prevailed. The spouses took issue with corporate sacred cows, gave perspective on the impact on lives and aspirations, and got to commit to a future they had helped design. The essence of that vision for 10 years hence, was achieved well before 5 years.

Another client, American Express, had us design a leadership session for how to drive sales and customer service and had their customers attend, and participate right alongside their own sales and service staff! Everyone paid attention in that session! And the customers gave powerful insight into what they liked, what they detested, how to reach them, and were touched by the trust that American Express was demonstrating by sharing so vividly with them, precisely what they were training their team to do in order to sell to and provide service to them.

In Whole Foods Market, the $4.7 billion provider of healthier organic fare, store department teams are tracked in terms of their productivity, and how they do against 'budget'. If they are under budget, the surplus is shared among the workers who helped produce that. Every four weeks any surplus against budget is divided by hours logged. The result, which they call 'gainshare' is added to worker's hourly wages. All new hires require a 2/3rds vote from colleagues to be confirmed. They are all in it together, that person will impact their results, and they will be sharing their 'gainshare' with them. Once you vote someone in, you also have a stake in helping them succeed. Talk about the 'fruits' of your labour!

ACTION POINT: We all know the traditional remedies to incentivising, brainstorming, issuing policies, visioning and providing sales and service training.

In these as well as a host of other areas ask, 'What's the real result we're after?' Then ask, 'What's something we could do DIFFERENTLY that would jolt people awake, inspire them, ignite them, tickle them?' We therefore get our teams to take a truly fresh look and give a greater part of themselves to making it happen.

SUMMING UP

Leadership is taking everything that you come across, adapting it, optimising it, and leveraging it, for the benefit of our companies and teams. The ancient adage is: 'When the student is ready the teacher appears.' Leaders know that when we are ready, we just begin to SEE the teacher everywhere, in everybody. The purpose of these vignettes is not only to give you hopefully bracing new leadership ideas, but to encourage you to have the presence of mind and heart, to locate and boldly bring to life your own.

MAY YOU HAVE A GREAT MONTH OF LEADERSHIP INNOVATION, VIGNETTES AND VALUE!