Paul's Update Special 4/28

Does Your Organization Drag? Three Secret Ingredients for Higher Productivity | The Fast Track

Does Your Organization Drag? Three Secret Ingredients for Higher Productivi... These are the specific causes of organizational drag. Here's how to zero in on your organization’s time, its...

In their new book, TIME | TALENT | ENERGY: Overcome Organizational Drag and Unleash Your Team’s Productive Power, Bain & Company partner Michael Mankins and his co-author Eric Garton identify the specific causes of organizational drag – otherwise known as the collection of institutional factors that slow things down, decrease output and performance, and drain people’s energy.

The book claims that the average company loses more than 25 percent of its productive power to organizational drag. This is often an inevitable complication of companies getting larger and instituting more processes and procedures. As Mankins told writer Stephanie Vozza at Fast Company, the most common processes relate to expense management.

One secret of companies with less organizational drag involves putting a majority of star performers on mission-critical projects that are essential to the business. Another relates to the development of inspiring leaders.

In the book, Mankins and Garton suggest the following strategies for liberating employees’ time, talent, and energy, and consequently eliminating organizational drag:

Understand Exactly How Time is Spent

Software is now available to track meetings and other activities that eat up staff hours. Because time is money, it should be treated as such. This means being vigilant about creating and sticking to time budgets, and practicing good meeting management.

Connect Everything to Your Mission

Make sure your “reason for being” translates into an effective employee value proposition and that your people are engaged and motivated by your mission. Help employees understand how their daily work relates to the big picture and do what you can to ensure that they “head in” as opposed to “back in” to work in the morning. This will be easier if you deliberately develop leaders who are capable of inspiring their people AND getting results.

Eliminate Needless Bureaucracy

Strive to create a high-autonomy organization without losing benefits of scalability and repeatability. Strike the optimal balance between autonomy and organizational needs, and ask yourself whether you have fallen victim to unnecessary processes, micromanaging, and overly prescriptive rule books. Count the nodes – or intersections – in your organization. Are individual employees empowered to make decisions, or are they held up by the number of nodes through which they must pass? Examine your operating model carefully, looking at structure, accountabilities, governance, and methods. Your goal should be to simplify wherever possible!

What to Do About Mediocrity on Your Team

What to Do About Mediocrity on Your Team Four ways to raise the bar.

The toughest test of a manager is not how they deal with poor performance — it’s how they address mediocrity. Mediocrity is not destiny. In fact, I’ve even seen examples of government bureaucracies in tragically broken countries that dramatically turned around their performance in a matter of months. They do it through four leadership practices that lead to performance excellence. Each is a prerequisite for the next.

1. Show the consequences of mediocrity. Your first job as a leader is to ensure everyone is clear about what they are doing and why they are doing it. Find ways to connect people with the experiences, feelings, and impact of good and bad performance. Keep the human connection alive by telling stories that illustrate work well done — or not. And avoid impersonal/bureaucratic language when talking about performance; frame your work in human terms every time you can.
2. Use concrete measures as influence. Mediocrity often hides behind a fig leaf of absent, fuzzy, or excessive measures. In contrast, meaningful measures make poor performance painfully apparent. Goals should connect clearly and meaningfully to the work leaders are doing and why they are doing it.
3. Establish peer accountability. Mediocrity is also often a sign of strong supervision. My colleagues and I have found that:
1. On the weakest teams, there is no accountability.
2. On mediocre teams, bosses are the source of accountability.
3. On high performing teams, peers manage the vast majority of performance problems with one another. On top performing teams, peers immediately and respectfully confront one another when problems arise. Once you’ve helped the team connect deeply with what they do and why, and established meaningful measures, you need to build a culture of peer accountability – where everyone can challenge anyone if it is in the best interest of serving the shared mission.
4. Speak up. High performance is a norm that needs to be defended regularly and vigilantly. There will inevitably be times you will be asked to make personal sacrifices to defend that norm. What you do in these moments is a sign to the team of your commitment to high performance — and, therefore, your worthiness to demand it of them. 

Individual performance problems are far easier to address if you’ve done the work of establishing a norm of excellence. These four simple but important practices can rapidly and profoundly shift a group’s expectations in a way that leads to both better results and a substantially more rewarding work experience for everyone.

Employees Are Your Biggest Brand Advocates

Employees Are Your Biggest Brand Advocates By Pratik Dholakiya Engage staff to show off your culture.

Who do you think has the most intimate knowledge of your brand culture and business? Your employees are without a doubt one of the most untapped, organic sources of promotion and content within your organization, and yet few companies know how or when to use that resource and why it works.

Finding your hidden brand advocates.

Not every member of your team is going to be authentically emphatic about your company. If you have agreed to pursue the opportunity of using employee brand advocates in your marketing strategy, the first step is finding them.  A questionnaire or voluntary online survey will help you expose the staff members who are most passionate about your brand, and the survey model will help them speak freely and comfortably about your products or services.

Once you have received the survey responses, a qualitative review will connect you to the staff members who are activated and ready to share positive things about your corporate culture. Engage those who provided the most energetic responses in the campaign planning. One important aspect about sharing your culture and brand from the inside out, is to make sure that you are involving staff from various departments, and not just sales or marketing. Then what you produce will be an authentic, non-fabricated expression of who you are as a business and why your products or services are outstanding.

Campaign strategies and ideas.

Did you know that one of the most endearing exercises that brands can engage in is transparency? Giving consumers a glimpse behind the scenes can include:

• Video tour of a production facility
• Meet and greet introduction to staff, from executive leadership to shipping and receiving
• Meeting the talent or creative team behind favorite commercials, products or services
• Celebrating long-term employees who achieve benchmark anniversaries with the company
• Holiday or fun corporate events that punctuate your brand’s mission and how that carries through to cultivating an enriched social and team environment

Consumers love brands who love their employees. And they also favor organizations that are proud of achieving a positive corporate culture.

Set Key Performance Indicator’s and guidelines.

Introduce the campaign to your employees and document your expectations and standards for sharing appropriately on social channels when referencing the brand. This may involve some training and support about social media best practice for employees who many not be used to sharing in an official capacity.

Make it fun! Create an incentive, contest or reward for staff who contribute to any advocacy campaign. It will help keep them excited about their involvement and inspire them to share more often.

Paul's Update Special 4/21

Five Strategies for Leading a High-Impact Team

Five Strategies for Leading a High-Impact Team Why "teams are not cocktail parties," and other words of wisdom.

Nobody sets out to lead an ineffective team. The only problem? Many of the strategies leaders have adopted to improve teamwork, while well-intentioned, are not all that effective. Leigh Thompson, a professor of management and organizations at Kellogg and an expert on teamwork, clears up five popular misconceptions. In the process, she offers a roadmap for building and maintaining teams that are creative, efficient, and high-impact.

1. Teams are not cocktail parties: don’t invite everyone.

When building a team, business leaders often fall into two traps: they make the team too big and too homogenous.

Trying to be overly inclusive leads inevitably to a team that is too large. One strategy for managing team size is to consult specialists only when their expertise is required rather than keeping them on full time. Adding some fluidity to team membership can also help with the problem of homogeneity. 

“We found that changing the membership of a team—taking out one member and putting in a new member while holding everything else constant—actually leads to an increase in creative idea generation,” says Thompson. This process also prevents so-called “cognitive arthritis,” which happens when static teams start to think along well-worn mental ruts.

2. It is possible to set ground rules without stifling creativity. Some structure may even spark creativity.

For team leaders, nailing the balance between offering freedom and providing structure is never easy. Though it may seem like a drag on creativity to spend time establishing ground rules, teams function better over the long term with an explicit written charter. This document identifies—ideally in one sentence—the goal of the team, establishes the rules of operation, and defines where responsibilities lie.

“Teams do a pretty good job of evaluating or expanding on ideas, but they don’t do a good job of generating ideas.Teams that develop a charter end up being more nimble, having more proactive behavior, and achieving their goals more than teams that don’t bother,” says Thompson.

Even the process of developing a charter can improve team cohesion and effectiveness. 

3. Drop the pride talk. Vulnerability can be a good thing.

Corporate retreats tend toward the celebratory. Managers highlight progress and recognize employees of the year. Such praise aims to act as a kind of cultural glue, binding teams together through shared accomplishment and optimism.

“This is pride talk,” says Thompson. But does pride talk actually improve teamwork?

Thompson ran a series of studies in which some teams were told to share accomplishments with each other while other teams shared embarrassments. To her surprise, Thompson found that team members who talked about an embarrassing moment generated more ideas in subsequent brainstorming sessions. Embarrassment, not pride, spurred creative and effective teamwork.

“It’s somewhat unintuitive that putting out our worst moment in the last six months can actually help our team,” says Thompson. “Almost all of our intuitions are wrong.”

4. You may be able to cut your meeting time in half—if you are smart about it.

In theory, meetings are designed to increase team efficiency—a purpose they rarely live up to in practice. Most teams meet too infrequently and for too long, says Thompson. Research has demonstrated that, given a two-hour meeting, people will work to fill it; but meetings that are half as long are usually just as productive. It is better to have four hour-long meetings than two two-hour meetings.

What can leaders do to make the most of a shorter meeting? “Teams do a pretty good job of evaluating or expanding on ideas, but they don’t do a good job of generating ideas,” Thompson says. So to optimize meeting time, she recommends a facilitator solicit contributions related to the agenda beforehand to serve as the starting point for discussion.

Facilitators are also responsible for encouraging full participation. After all, the diversity of a team is only valuable if that diversity is given voice. Studies have shown that on a team of eight people, one or two members often do up to 70 percent of the talking.

Thompson recommends “speed storming”—“think of it as brainstorming meets speed dating”—as one way to get the entire team involved. This exercise briefly pairs team members for one-on-one discussion and ideation sessions. After pairs have talked for a short period, people shift seats and begin again with a different partner.

5. It is possible for teams to get along too well. Agree to keep disagreeing.

“Some teams are too polite,” warns Thompson. “They don’t challenge one another because they’re afraid that they will drive a wedge in team cohesion.” But properly managed disagreement helps teams avoid groupthink while probing the strengths and weaknesses of any idea.

The challenge for leaders lies primarily in sowing productive disagreement, which means creating an environment where everyone feels comfortable voicing their own opinions and challenging others’. And the disagreement must remain free of personal attacks.

“You’re hard on the problem and respectful of the people,” says Thompson.

In practice, eliciting this kind of “responsible feedback” can be difficult. So Thompson offers a tip: have team members write down rather than vocalize their opinions and recommendations. Studies of brainstorming indicate that teams often never make it past the second idea before they suppress their concerns. However, when ideas are challenged—without being assaulted—this can often spur truly great ideas.

“When team members are thinking through different possible courses of action, then everybody can be writing cards that talk about a pro and a con. This helps build a balance of feedback,” says Thompson. “Let’s talk about the positives; then let’s talk about the negatives.”

Ready or Not, The Future Is Now

Ready or Not, The Future Is Now Machine learning is changing the way organizations curate content and manage learners. But are CLOs using its fu...

Machine learning is changing the way organizations curate content and manage learners. But are CLOs using its full capabilities?

Machine learning is the underpinning for many common learning technologies, including learning management systems, MOOCs, data analytics and other tools. The allure of machine learning is clear, said James Cross, director of learning product strategy for Workday. “Research shows that it increases engagement and makes the learning experience more relevant and ‘sticky.’ ”

The technology works through a series of algorithms, or computer-based queries that allow a piece of software to learn from data over time so it can identify trends and patterns that inform future searches and suggestions. In other words, the software watches what learners do, and how they engage with content, then proactively provides them with content they need the moment they need it.

“The ultimate goal of this technology is to create a more custom learner experience,” Cross explained. “Think of it as Netflix for learning.”

Machine learning offers exciting opportunities for learning leaders to deliver better, faster, custom content. It also should prompt them to take stock of their current skill set. Machine learning enabled tools can automate common tasks, like updating LMS databases, transcribing documents or assigning content. “That can free CLOs to focus on more important tasks, like culture building and strategic planning,” he said.

Before a company can make use of machine learning or artificial intelligence to improve their learning strategy and programming, they need to figure out how the technology applies to their business case, what benefits they want to derive from the tools, and how to make that happen, said Dani Johnson, vice president of learning and development research for Bersin by Deloitte. To do that, learning leaders need to educate themselves on how these technologies work, what questions they want answered, and how to use the information they glean.

They also should think about how these tools will change the way they do their jobs and the knowledge their people need to acquire. Johnson said in the past two years there has been a huge shift in the skills organizations need. The most innovative CLOs are crafting new learning strategies in response to technology trends to meet long-term talent development goals and to effectively engage learners. “There is a huge opportunity here for forward-thinking CLOs to have a dramatic impact on organizational strategy — if they are willing to adapt.”

4 Things You Need To Know To Build A High Performing Team

4 Things You Need To Know To Build A High Performing Team These four conditions to success provide teams the tools they need to be productive and efficient.

Everyone wants a team that gets results, but the process is often easier said than done. High-performing individuals and teams operate above the market average and consistently meet their goals. It can be trial and error to put together the right combination of employees with the right project responsibilities, but building a framework for a high-performing team means the environment is in place that nearly every combination of employees can work together to reach their goals.

Mary O'Hara, Chief Human Resources Officer and SVP at Blue Shield of California, provides her four conditions to success to create a high-performing team environment in any office:

1. Critical few. Every person or team should have the critical few things they are working on. With these tasks as the focus, employees know exactly what their responsibilities are and how to use their time and direct their effort to meet their goals.
   
2. Multiple modes. High-performing teams distribute the work and create multiple modes of how people work. This will look different for each organization and can include things like breaking it into smaller teams, having employees focus on different areas of a project, or using various technologies to solve problems.
   
   
3. Established operating norms. High-performing teams aren't immune to challenges and obstacles, but they know how to handle difficulties when they arrive. With operating norms in place, the team isn't completely de-railed when obstacles arise and can continue working after putting the operating norms into place. Having a clear and agreed-upon process also removes office drama and interpersonal conflict because team members already know how to interact with each other.
   
4. Feedback training. A big part of working in a team is being able to give and receive feedback. Employees at all levels learn how to apply feedback without it taking away from their work experience. Giving employees the tools allows them to quickly apply feedback and speak openly with their team members without worrying how people will respond.

These four conditions to success take some effort but can provide teams the tools they need to be productive and efficient. A main theme is providing employees and teams with the tools and training they need before the work gets difficult and people can get distracted and sidelined.

Creating a high-performing team isn't something that only applies to a single team at a company--it becomes part of the culture and is soon applied to every team within the organization.

High-performing teams can make a huge difference within an organization in morale, revenue, and efficiency. The good news is that putting these teams together isn't as difficult as it first may seem. In the team-oriented future of work, creating strong teams will be of utmost importance.

Paul's Update Special 4/14

PwC: Five Global Shifts Reshaping the World

PwC: Five Global Shifts Reshaping the World According to PwC, there are five global shifts reshaping the world and their implications for organizations, ind...

According to PwC, there are five global shifts reshaping the world and their implications for organizations, industries and wider society will be significant. The five global megatrends are:

• Demographic shifts: migration of global spending power to emerging economies
• Shifts in economic power: investments in emerging economies and volatile and rapidly changing conditions
• Accelerated urbanization: more than half of the world’s population live in urban areas and almost all of the new growth will take place in lesser known medium-sized cities of developing countries.
• Climate change and resource scarcity: increased population, urbanization and prosperity will increase the demand for energy, food and water supplies.
• Technological breakthroughs: digital revolution has no boundaries or borders and changing behavior and expectations as much as the tools to deliver new services and experiences.

In the fourth industrial age, there is a big change in people and demographics. According to Mike Quindazzi, managing director at PwC, there are more of us, we are having less children, and we are getting older. We are getting older by 30 years compared to 100 years ago. In fact, in you were born in 2017 versus 2016, you will live 10 weeks longer.

50% of population growth from now and 2050 will come from Africa. By 2030, we will add another billion people to the population. By 2050, we will add another billion. The rising middle-class from Asia is another shift in demographics. There is a rapid rise of people moving to cities: 1.5 million people are added to cities every week. 

Quindazzi highlighted the massive cost reduction of computing and storage as some of the technological trends that have helped fuel the digital economy. He also points to the API economy as the driver for businesses shifting to the cloud in order to accelerate innovation velocity and grow scale.

The gig economy and sharing economy will continue to disrupt legacy business models. Every business will be a digital business and there are essential technologies that will drive digital business transformation. Some companies are working towards digitizing all of their products and services by 2020. Quindazzi also spoke about business disruption with new emerging and essential technologies including artificial intelligence and smarter applications.

Quindazzi also discussed the upcoming Davos conference and the theme of responsive and responsible leadership. Digital transformation is accelerating at unprecedented rates. All leaders need to think about building trust in the digital world. All leaders must extent their digital personas and be more accessible to all stakeholders. Companies need to take the lead on how we engage with stakeholders, develop a diverse workforce and be inclusive and collaborative.

For more insights on the five global megatrends, I highly encourage you watch our video conversation.

(1 hour, 5 minutes)

DisrupTV Episode 0044 – Featuring Mike Quindazzi, Patricia O’Connell and La... This week on DisrupTV, we interviewed Mike Quindazzi, Managing Director at Pwc, Patricia O'Connell, Author o...

We Wait Too Long to Train Our Leaders

We Wait Too Long to Train Our Leaders The average supervisor has been managing for 10 years before he gets any training.

When I looked back at our database of some 17,000 worldwide leaders participating in our training program, who hailed from companies in virtually every sector throughout the world, I found that their average age was 42. More than half were between 36 and 49. Less than 10% were under 30; less than 5% were under 27.

But the average age of supervisors in these firms was 33. In fact the typical individual in these companies became a supervisor around age 30 and remained in that role for nine years. It follows then, that if they’re not entering leadership training programs until they’re 42, they are getting no leadership training at all as supervisors. And they’re operating within the company untrained, on average, for over a decade.

The fact that so many of your managers are practicing leadership without training should alarm you. Here are three reasons why:

• Practicing without training ingrains bad habits. My children and grandchildren learned to ski at early ages. I began when I was 41. They learned the fundamentals early and well. I did not. They didn’t pick up any bad habits. I did. While they were taught correctly, I learned my skills willy-nilly — just like all those supervisors left to their own devices until they reached their 40s. Worse, I practiced my questionable skills over and over, ingraining them deeply.
• Practice makes perfect only if done correctly. Practicing for hours doesn’t automatically create excellent skills. Say, for instance, that, as an aspiring golfer, you go to the driving range and practice by hitting buckets of balls. You draw a circle 20 feet in diameter, move back a bit, and proceed to hit balls until 80% land in the circle. Then you move farther back, take a different club, and do the same thing. That is deliberate, focused, and productive practice. Perfect practice makes perfect performance.
• Your young supervisors are practicing on the job whether you’ve trained them or not. Would it not be in the organization’s and the individuals’ best interests to begin that process the moment they’re selected for that position?

For as long as I can recall, there have been those who have observed, “With all the money and effort being spent on leadership development programs, why don’t we have better leaders?” The answer to that question is obviously complex, but could a part of the answer be that we have simply waited too long to develop these skills? It may be possible to teach old dogs new tricks, but there’s no question that the sooner you begin, the easier it is.

If Your Talk Doesn’t Do These Three Things, Don’t Give It

If Your Talk Doesn’t Do These Three Things, Don’t Give It No matter the size of the audience or the occasion, every memorable talk is a hat trick that nails these three e...

No matter the size of the audience or the occasion, every memorable talk is a hat trick that nails these three elements:

1. ENTERTAIN

This is the base of the starting point. Want to know how entertained your audience will be by the time you get up to talk? For starters, we all touch our phones 2,500 times a day, according to researchers at Dscout. We’re scrolling Instagram, watching SNL clips, reading fantasy football trash-talk, and listening to podcasts. This is now your competition. So how do you beat it?

Well, you have one major advantage over the latest Wait But Why article, and it is that you’re here. You’re live. You get a deeper personal connection from the beginning. Nobody needs a Wi-Fi signal or has to tap a link to watch you. You get 30 seconds of free attention.

So what do you need to do with that momentary leg up you have on your listeners’ attention? Reward it immediately. Raise interest as you get onstage, create a laugh, but most importantly, be the most into your speech of anyone there. The audience can only rise to your level of excitement—nobody else’s—so no apologizing, no self-deprecating, and no remarking, “Well, now how am I gonna follow that?!”

A good test is this: If your speech entertains one other person you’re close to (especially a friend or significant other) during a dry run, it will entertain a whole room. Start with the toughest critic first.

2. EDUCATE

Humans are learning animals. We’re always growing our minds, abilities, and knowledge. In fact, why are you on this site right now? Chances are you came here to learn something.

So what is your speech teaching? Make sure you can write out the answer to that question in fewer than 140 characters. If the essence of your message is too complicated to tweet, it’s too complicated period: “I’m teaching my employees why they should feel proud about last year’s results and excited about next year’s goals”; or, “I’m giving people new techniques to apply at work to improve their personal well-being."

3. EMPOWER

This one is the biggest trick of a good speech, the hardest to pull off, and admittedly the most ambiguous-sounding as a result. But “empowering” your listeners really all comes down to making them feel like these were all their thoughts. Not yours. We only really do what we want to do.

Remember: It can’t be your message, shared. It has to be their message, heard.

Your role is to lead listeners through a series of iterative thoughts (“iterative” because they build on one another as you progress), where they nod and think to themselves, “Yes, yes, yes.” And fortunately, there are at least three reliable tools you can use to generate this kind of empowerment in your talk:

• Pause and interact. Can you use a flip chart where you create the content together with the audience? Can you leave pauses for the audience to jump in with their own answers? Can you do a short interactive exercise or experiment using the content you just shared? 
• Find a lesson that’s doable, not just interesting. We don’t want to hear how you climbed Everest if we think we never will. 
• Keep it conversational. It has to feel like a coffee-shop chat with your best friend, not like a charmer onstage tossing takeaways into the audience. People want trust. That means sharing your background, your story, your warts and all. 

So yes, giving a great speech that entertains, educates, and empowers is a tall task. Are you up for it?