Excerpt from “The High Ambition Leader” Sept 2011 HBR
For the next few weeks I would like to share a few simple tools that help teams stay on track and successful.
Tool #1 – Choose the fewest, most essential initiatives that can 1) be accomplished in 90 days, and 2) align beautifully to your longer-term objectives. Even though it may sound simple, it takes great discipline. Think about having a staging area for building a house – you can’t just build it overnight. Land must be cleared, a hole dug, a foundation created. The echoes of everyday “we are crazy busy” thinking makes us think we can build a house overnight or learn Spanish in two days. But can we really? The idea of this tool is to make choices that help you set up for the next 90 days and then the next 90 days after that.
More to come…
“We tested whether increased caffeine consumption exacerbates stress and disrupts team performance, and we explored whether “tend and befriend” characterizes women’s coping. We gave decaffeinated coffees, half of which contained added caffeine, to coffee drinkers in same-sex, same-aged dyads. We measured individual cognitive appraisals, emotional feelings, bodily symptoms, coping, and performance evaluations, together with dyad memory, psychomotor performance, and negotiation skills under higher or lower stressful conditions. Evidence consistent with the first hypothesis was weak, but we found that women performed better than did men on collaborative tasks under stress, provided caffeine had been consumed. The usefulness of multi component, cognitive-relational approaches to studying the effects of caffeine on stress is discussed, together with special implications of the effects for men.”
Maybe we cut out the caffeine for the guys but wouldn’t that make them more grumpy?
Recently, while waiting for an appointment, I picked up an older issue of O (Oprah) Magazine (Sept ’09) and was struck by a very simple yet powerful reflection. In Oprah’s monthly column “what I know for sure” she discusses fulfillment and finding your power. Oprah writes “when your life is on course with its purpose, you are your most powerful.” This is a quick read and a good reminder of what is in each of our scope and how we can transform and improve areas we care about and focus on. Enjoy: http://www.oprah.com/spirit/Oprah-and-Power-What-I-Know-for-Sure
Often, the best way to see what something is, is to see what it’s not. The term “change management” misses an integral and much-needed strategic component: that line of sight to the most critical work and those most impacted by it. Who keeps score on the satellite level so all stakeholders see where we are in the bigger picture?
The outsourcing industry desperately needs mavericks to pave the way. We need a provider and a client to declare, “We must do whatever it takes to make this engagement work from a holistic level, beyond the service level agreements (SLAs), beyond the project plans, at a level that can be measured by a new dimension.” We need to move from a transaction-based process (necessary to execute the plethora of details) to one that is more integrated, holistically and strategically focused on linking tasks to the larger corporate strategy. This big-picture understanding seems to get lost fairly quickly, especially as you go down in the organization, causing pain and misspent time (see: staffers obsessing about which color background to use for the communication packet).
Mavericks will need a new way of contracting engagements, centered on two major foci:
1) the outcome of the work itself in strategic context, and
2) understanding how all the people involved experience the changes at issue.
Read my entire article – May 2010 HRO Today
Mavericks are willing to point out that transformation initiatives fail when they become a functional initiative instead of a business initiative that is being led by a function. What is the difference? If the transformation effort is owned by the executive leadership team – and by “owned” I mean that they are held accountable for success or failure — their butts and bonuses are on the line. Companies that get this, see greater results with their transformation. Next month HRO will publish a more comprehensive article on this topic in my column. Parting thought: Is your initiative clearly understood with how it aligns with company’s strategy? If not, you may need to rethink the narrative.
Ever notice that what we continually think about permeates how we feel and everything we do? I have recently listened to the book, “Ask and It’s Given” by Jerry & Esther Hicks and the main premise of the book is about when our thoughts and feelings are aligned with our goals, the universe will provide. However, if our feelings are incongruent to our goals, what we want won’t transpire. Think of a radio station frequency tuned into 99.5, but your goals are at 104.6, this creates a conflict within and outside ourselves.
Let’s expand this thinking to teams and focusing the direction. When we are all moving in different directions and doing our best to do the right work, what happens naturally overtime? We naturally drift, fan out and sooner then later realize that our team members are thinking incongruently, the actions no longer link together tightly. Performance lags.
Having our personal and professional radio stations aligned takes constant and consistent effort. If only it were that easy to keep everything aligned. Perhaps it is good to know that fragmentation is normal. So what do we do? Pay close attention to our thoughts and feelings and ask ourselves, “do these thoughts and feelings align with where we need to be going?” Or, “are my thoughts and feelings serving me well to my desired direction?” With regard to teams, have people think about where they are trying to get to. Can each person on the team answer a central question like, “what are the results we are expecting a year from now?” Try this out and have everyone write down their answer, collect them and share with everyone. See what you get. Some insightful dialog might ensue helping to align all your radio stations.
What is your experience with this?
“I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.”
- Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to John Adams (August 1, 1816)
The link below is a great follow on article to recent blog we shared. In essence, we all take such care to the project mgmt zillions of details, do we ever map the coinciding emotional temperature or issues that parallels the work? What would happen if we did?
In a recently posted HBR blog entry, editor Sarah Green made us think about what is really possible in terms of making major transformations happen. On one hand, our experience has shown an organization only has so much bandwidth to make significant changes occur. However, on the other hand, when companies and specifically teams focus on a small number of significant areas, amazing results can happen quickly. What must be in place for it all to work really well? Where do the most impactful changes start — wherever there is a committed number of focused people — at the top — with function heads? We believe the answer is all of the above and there is no one right answer here. What is your experience? What has worked incredibly well in your organization when undergoing a massive change?
