Nebulosities create a lack of clarity in our communication. They contribute to vagueness and ambiguity. They’re the language of “saying things indirectly.” We may think we’re getting our point across without being too aggressive. Instead, we make it a cloud of words. Often times, they come to a different conclusion.
After spending over 1,000 hours per year with CEO’s I have an observation, companies break in the middle.
Hold a stick with both hands at each end. Your right hand is the CEO, your left hand is the front-line employee. Everything in between is the middle. Now bend the stick…until it breaks.
The break will happen somewhere in the middle. No matter the strength of the branch, it will break with the right amount of pressure. This is why it is so important to pay attention to the middle.
These are stressful times with hard decisions and long days. For many of our members, this is the first economic downturn they have faced. This is my sixth downturn and... I believe that we will win.
I read (and listened) to 24 fantastic books in 2019. Most of them were business related, personal growth or pure entertainment. I rate books based on impact to me and add bonus points if I reread it. The 2019 nominees are:
Nebulosities create a lack of clarity in our communication. They contribute to vagueness and ambiguity. They’re the language of “saying things indirectly.” We may think we’re getting our point across without being too aggressive. Instead, we make it a cloud of words. Often times, they come to a different conclusion.
After spending over 1,000 hours per year with CEO’s I have an observation, companies break in the middle.
Hold a stick with both hands at each end. Your right hand is the CEO, your left hand is the front-line employee. Everything in between is the middle. Now bend the stick…until it breaks.
The break will happen somewhere in the middle. No matter the strength of the branch, it will break with the right amount of pressure. This is why it is so important to pay attention to the middle.
Our habits, schedules and priorities changed in 2020. Some for the better, some for the worse. Many people found time to focus and read. I believe taking time to become a better version of ourselves is a cornerstone to living a healthy and happy life. Reading is one activity that feeds our minds.
My list of books this year mirrors some of the challenges we faced in 2020. While I read fewer books (18), I found that different topics felt more impactful and my selections changed. For example, only one book in this list was published recently. One I read for the second time. Many of the other books I read met a need in my life or in the lives of the people I serve.
And here is the list of the books that had the biggest impact on me in 2020. I hope you find value in this and look forward to hearing your recommendations for me!
5) “Blue Ocean Strategy”, Renée Mauborgne and W. Chan Kim
To be fair, I first read this book in 2005. It is a classic and the concepts are timeless. But in the context of 2020, it is an important read. Change hit us hard and fast. Leaders were first forced into survival mode and then, into change. Every economic downturn creates Blue Ocean opportunities. The key is to find them and swim there as fast as possible. A number of our Vistage members launched new products, services and revenue stream in 2020. This could explain why 78% of our member companies had record years… yes, record, best ever years. Read this book and surface your opportunities.
4) “Building a Story Brand”, Donald MIller
Miller does a masterful job of defining what a brand really is and how to build one effectively. Step by step in the context of reality. For years I have been frustrated by brand strategies that don’t take into account profitability and market opportunity. This book lives in reality and is a practical approach for any business or individual to enhance or build their brand effectively.
We typically think of companies as a brand, and they are. Each of us is a brand as well. Applying these principles to ourselves and being intentional about how we are viewed is critical. Miller’s book provides that context and tools.
3) “Ready, Fire, Aim: Zero to $100 Million in No Time Flat”, Michael Masterson
Across the 60 Vistage member companies and 100 leaders I work with, I see companies at every stage of growth. Masterson’s book outlines hurdles, challenges and opportunities and each stage. He highlights the need for entrepreneurs to lessen the dependence on themselves and instead build a repeatable and scalable company. The four stages of growth are clearly defined and make it simple to place yourself and your company in the right stage. The ideas are practice and growth is not emphasized at the expense of profitability. This is a great read for entrepreneurs at every stage of their journey.
2) “Predictable Revenue”, by Aaron Ross
I’ve said for years the most profitable and valuable businesses are predictable. Predictability takes effort and process. Aaron Ross lays his proven process out step by step in this fantastic book. There is nothing fancy, unproven or flashy about building a predictable revenue model. Spend the time to develop it correctly and watch it work. I love sales and own the Sandler Training franchise in San Antonio. Selling is about process, not personality. You can see our predictable revenue model at www.tomcuthbert.com/funnel.
“Doesn’t Hurt to Ask” by Trey Gowdy
Now right out of the gate you may think this book is political. It’s not. You may also think the selection has something to do with my political views. It doesn’t. Trey Gowdy has written an extraordinarily thoughtful book that hits to the heart of true human connection and understanding. Gowdy uncovers techniques, ideas and concepts that foster curiosity to work to understand the “why” of belief. It is that curiosity that builds rapport and relationship with those who think, feel or believe differently than we do. In my mind, this is exactly what our country needs in light of all that we have lived through this past year.
Trey narrated the Audible version I listened to. His South Carolina accent and friendly demeanor reveal a legitimately curious and caring human being. He shares wonderful stories. Some will bring you to tears, others will make you laugh and most will make a point that could forever change the way you see other people.
Listening intently and asking great questions is the core of my job as a CEO coach. I challenge you to open your ears and mind to be curious about what you might be missing. Then, ask a question. You will build relationships, uncover truth and foster trust.
Best Practices for Navigating the Coronavirus Crisis
Over the past few days I’ve had dozens of conversations with our CEO members as we all navigate uncertain times. Decision making has never been more important. Some businesses have been immediately and severely impacted. Others are able to continue by taking it day by day. We are facing uncharted territory and need to work together to support, help and care for each other. This is what Vistage is and there is no more important time for us to come together. The following is a list of ideas I have taken from our CEO community. I hope you find value in them and let me know how we can help you.
Now is the time to lead. Be the CEO and balance compassion with clarity
Over communicate. Keep your team informed and be available to answer questions
Keep routines in place, meetings, 121s, L10s and huddles
Be clear with expectations; Roles, responsibilities, timelines, reporting
Set virtual meeting expectations. Timing, dress (no pajamas!), agenda, camera on, expected outcomes
Establish “work from home” boundaries. Work hours, check ins, meeting attendance, reporting
Make people feel safe in the office environment. Visible cleaning supplies, hand sanitizers, social distancing
Prepare your employees to work from home. Ensure your team is equipped to meet virtually. Laptop or iPad, wifi connection, workspace
Be calm, patient and empathetic. Understand each person will deal with this differently. Follow economic data and research
Leverage all available resources. Including local, state and federal assistance, technology and most importantly, your Vistage community
Understand the impact to your industry and company. This crisis is different than those in the past.
Capture what’s working now and what you could have done better. Journal these ideas for better best practices in the future
Include employees' families in communication if possible. The uncertainty extends to them as well. Keeping them in the loop will increase retention in turbulent times
Cut all “comfort costs” and anything deemed unnecessary. Be cautious to cut people or other assets you may need back sooner rather than later. Find cost saving ideas at www.tomcuthbert.com/costcutting
Be ready for when the clouds lift. This recovery could come far more rapidly than others. Successful businesses will be prepared to regain momentum and take market share coming out of this crisis.
Don’t overlook the opportunities. Not all businesses will weather the storm. Opportunity will exist for acquisition and partnership. Additionally, new products and services will be needed. Now is time to invest in people, identify “blue oceans” and plan for what comes next.
Tom Cuthbert
I read (and listened) to 24 fantastic books in 2019. Most of them were business related, personal growth or pure entertainment. I rate books based on impact to me and add bonus points if I reread it. The 2019 nominees are:
I heard a story recently I thought I would share with you...
A number of years ago a salesman had gotten lost and drove up to a house to ask for directions. He got out of his car and walked up to the porch where an elderly gentleman was rocking in his rocking chair and an old hound dog lay stretched out near by. As he approached the dog lifted his head and let out a moan. A moment later the dog again lifted his head and moaned. The salesman began to ask for directions when the dog’s moaning interrupted him. He almost got his question out when the dog moaned again.
Finally the salesman asked, “What’s wrong with your dog?”
The old man looked down at the dog and then to the salesman and said, “He’s lying on a nail.”
“Lying on a nail?”, asked the surprised salesman.
“Yep”, said the old man, “It bothers him enough to complain about it, but not enough to do anything about it.”
Doesn’t that seem to be the way with some people? They’ll complain about something, and they just won’t do anything about it.
We don’t need to have the same outlook. If something is bothering you then it is probably bothering someone else too. Take that step to do something about it. You can make change happen.
Tom
When you’re in a position of leadership, it’s easy to think you know exactly where to take people—they just need to listen to you.
That is a flawed approach.
Our job as leaders—whether in business, in family, or in life—is to take people From Here to There.
Before we can take them There we must first know where they’ve come From. Once we understand that, then we can learn how they got Here. Only then can we help them get to their There. This takes self-reflection and answering questions similar to what I asked Anna. While you may understand what it is holding them back, they need to discover it for themselves.
Reply-all is the easiest and most common way to waste someone else’s time.
Unless used for a purpose, it is inconsiderate and demonstrates laziness on the sender’s part. Reply-all has become more than just an annoyance in business; it is a legitimate time waster.
I encourage the companies I work with to have a communication protocol and a conversation code of conduct. These are simple rules to respect each other’s time and improve productivity while increasing the level of effective communication. Reply-all is often left off and so I wanted to suggest some general rules for the “reply-allers” out there:
1. Only reply to those who need to hear a reply
2. Only reply when you have something to say
3. Do not send attachments to reply all
4. Do not reply to say thank you
If you have reply-all abusers, here is a list of exercises for them following your Intervention!
· Repeat after me, “I will never use reply all”
· Write 1,000 times on the board, ”Reply all sucks”
· Calculate what every single person’s hourly rate is and estimate the number of minutes it takes to read unnecessary emails. Add that up and write a check for that amount to your favorite charity!
Most importantly, be respectful of other’s time. There is nothing more valuable.
Are CEOs born or made? According to entrepreneur-turned-top venture capitalist Ben Horowitz, most of the tricky skills needed to excel are drummed into leaders through years of experience.
Likening critical CEO capabilities, such as giving difficult feedback, to learning the unnatural motion of lifting your back foot first in boxing, he claims "it generally takes years for a founder to develop the CEO skill set." In short, Horowitz insists CEOs are made, not born.
But just because becoming an exceptional leader takes a whole lot of practice, it doesn't mean everyone can become a CEO through hard work. While you invite disappointment if you believe some people are simply naturals at the job, you invite years of wasted effort if you don't also acknowledge that certain fundamental mindsets are a prerequisite for getting started on this long path of learning.
What are they? Experts suggest you need to nail these basics before you can even start to think of yourself as potential CEO material.
The first tip-off that a commitment to continual self-improvement is key to leadership success is the fact that nearly every business icon you can think of--from Warren Buffett and Bill Gates to Oprah Winfrey--describes him- or herself as a perpetual learner. But if you want more quantitative backing for this idea, it exists too.
According to The New York Times, research shows that you're more likely to reach the top of an organization if you've had a variety of roles, from finance to marketing, rather than hunkered down and built expertise in just one department where you felt comfortable.
"Evidence suggests that success in the business world isn't just about brain power or climbing a linear path to the top, but about accumulating diverse skills and showing an ability to learn about fields outside one's comfort zone," writes the paper's Neil Irwin.
Mary Barra is the CEO of General Motors.Daniel Roland/Stringer/Getty Images
Are CEOs smart? Sure, running a company takes a certain degree of intelligence. But for top leaders, the ability to gather and listen to exceptional brains is more important than personal mental horsepower. Great leadership involves enough humility to respect others' gifts and enough confidence to reveal your own limitations and accept their help.
Or as entrepreneur Kevin Johnson cleverly put it, you need to be OK with sometimes feeling like you're the dumbest person in the room. "The average person is intimidated by smart people ... If given a choice to spend a week quarantined with really smart people or people of average intelligence, the average Jane would choose people of average intelligence," he writes.
If you're CEO material, however, you'll put learning and results before ego and surround yourself with the truly brilliant. It's why Johnson is always looking to make a super smart friend. "They make me feel inadequate and sometimes just really stupid, but I am OK with that, because I know that I learn so much from them," he explains.
Indra Nooyi is the CEO of PepsiCo.Joe Raedle/Getty Images
How does Elon Musk, leader of some of the world's most long-shot ventures, deal with risk? He doesn't ignore it. In fact, he recently told an interviewer that he's absolutely terrified by the huge risks inherent in pursuing borderline insane projects such as Mars colonization. "I feel fear quite strongly," he reported.
But faced with terrible odds, he doesn't resort to irrational optimism. He acknowledges the likelihood of failure and accurately assesses the long list of risks he's facing, but then he proceeds anyway. "When starting SpaceX, I thought the odds of success were less than 10 percent, and I just accepted that actually probably I would just lose everything. But that maybe we would make some progress," he continued.
This odd coupling of open-eyed risk assessment and a willingness to dare anyway is a hallmark of great CEOs, according to Robert Scoble, who studies CEOs for Rackspace. The ideal CEO, he wrote on Quora, is "assured of the achievability of long-term goals yet nervous about the attainability of near-term milestones. This schizophrenic mindset ensures that an entrepreneur maintains an unyielding belief in the manifestation of their vision while never taking for granted the execution of their startup's most basic tasks."
Tim Cook is the CEO of Apple.Getty Images/Andrew Burton
Some call this quality passion. Others refer to it as focus. But whatever term you want to use, being a great CEO requires the ability (if not an inborn compulsion) to latch onto interesting questions or problems, shut out distractions, and work relentlessly until you have a solution.
As a young programmer, Bill Gates, for instance, was famed for working at his keyboard until he nodded off, still sitting up. When he woke, he simply looked up, oriented himself for a few seconds, and began working away again. GoPro CEO Nick Woodman pursued his dream of a better surf video obsessively, through months of intense experimentation.
Perhaps Dropbox founder Drew Houston described this quality best, using the metaphor of a tennis ball. "The tennis ball is about finding the thing you're obsessed with," he said. "The most successful people and successful entrepreneurs I know are all obsessed with solving a problem that really matters to them. I use the tennis ball for that idea because of my dog, who gets this crazy, obsessed look on her face when you throw the ball for her."
Do you get a crazy look in your eye when you spot a problem in need of solving?
Meg Whitman is the CEO of Hewlett Packard.Flickr/HP/HP Deutschland
You want to run a business, not write a hit TV show, so why is the ability to tell a great story so important to success as a CEO? Because humans are renowned for their imperviousness to logic (just look at basically any political discussion, if you need proof). If you want to change minds and convince people to follow you, you're going to need to appeal to emotion. And nothing arouses our emotions as much as a great tale.
"CEOs have to deal with conflicting interest groups," said Scoble. "Customers often want something investors don't. So a good CEO is really great at convincing other people to get on board, even at changing people's opinions."
Read the original article on Inc.. Copyright 2016. Follow Inc. on Twitter.
I used to wake up, stumble over to my phone, and immediately get lost in a stream of pointless notifications. This digital haze continued throughout the day, keeping me from accomplishing important tasks. I was distracted, anxious, and ineffective as a leader. I knew I had to change but could not seem to break free from the behaviors that kept me locked into the same cycle.
This problem is not unusual. Executives across the world stumble through each day in much the same way. Two major challenges are destroying our ability to focus.
Ride share companies are important to cities like San Antonio for many reasons. These include safety, enhanced livability, reduction in traffic, cost savings, jobs and even infrastructure efficiencies. But one key reason ride share is important to San Antonio is the significance to the tech community. For San Antonio to become a tech hub and grow our jobs base, we must embrace technology companies.
By Lynn Brezosky San Antonio Express News
September 24, 2015
Back in 2006, Google and Yahoo thought that they could ignore Tom Cuthbert and Click Forensics, his upstart San Antonio-born click fraud analysis company.
“They wanted nothing to do with us,” Cuthbert remembered Thursday. “They wanted us to fall off the face of the Earth.”
But by 2007, Yahoo and Microsoft had hired Click Forensics, which would later acquire and became Adometry, a company that specializes in tracking the effectiveness of ads.
Last year, Google bought Adometry for an undisclosed sum.
Cuthbert, now a speaker and chairman for Vistage International in San Antonio, an organization for CEOs, shared the story in a workshop, “Disruptive Growth: The Ten Clicks that Rocked Google.” It was held at the San Antonio office of the Association of Mexican Entrepreneurs (AEM).
Angel Salinas, who leads AEM’s workshop committee, said Cuthbert, who was his coach at Vistage, was a natural choice for one of AEM’s workshops, which aim to help Mexican entrepreneurs learn to do business in the United States.
“One of the things that we want to try to do at the AEM is provide business experiences or business cases that can help us strategize or plan better,” Salinas said. “So if we can find speakers like Tom to come and share their stories, their insights and their experiences and how to translate that into our world, that’s what we want to try to accomplish.”
Cuthbert’s tale started in 2005, when click traffic at Campbell’s Soup, a client of Cuthbert’s Web analytics company Optimal IQ, showed some strange spiking. Optimal IQ found that there was software generating fake clicks housed in the advertising agency’s server.
“Someone in the ad agency was trying to make the campaign look to Campbell’s Soup better than it was,” Cuthbert said.
Sensing this was just one example of a serious problem, Cuthbert retreated to his hangout spot, Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, to think: “How could this become an opportunity?”
He and Chuck Wall, Jason Smith, and Tom Charvet — co-founders of what would evolve into Adometry — started with some market research.
They went to a trade show on online advertising, bought a table and put a sign on it that said “Click Fraud,” just to see how much interest it attracted.
The answer was a lot.
“In our minds, that validated click fraud was a problem,” Cuthbert said. “Some percentage of Google’s revenue was not valid. And hundreds and thousands of advertisers were not getting what they paid for.”
To assess the problem without risking Optimal IQ’s reputation, they created a product under the name “Click Tracy.”
“It’s a small company at this time, we didn’t want to invest a lot of money, we didn’t want to go out on a limb to decide if this was really a big problem.”
But they had to change the name when lawyers for Hearst Corp., which owns the San Antonio Express-News, sent a “cease and desist” letter protecting the “Dick Tracy” brand.
In January 2006, they launched Click Forensics.
The pitch: By sharing data that could be aggregated to run algorithms to find anomalies, online advertisers would be helping their industry learn about click fraud and getting reports on it for free. They had a plan that was not unlike something out of a football playbook, as well as a clear premise.
“We want to help advertisers get what they pay for,” he said.
They launched the Click Fraud Network to start collecting the data.
They enlisted Alexander Tuhzilin, a New York University expert, to help determine when they had enough data to back the assumption that click fraud was wasting a significant amount of advertising spending.
They bought a domain name and started working trade show booths and talking to the industry about the problem.
“We needed data, we needed people on our side and we needed folks to help us focus on the problem,” he said.
Within seven weeks, their network of participating advertisers had grown to more than 1,000, including big-league advertisers in travel, finance and retail.
Click Forensics’ initial click fraud index determined that 13.6 percent of clicks were fake. For the $10 billion-and-growing online advertising market, that meant a lot of money lost to clicks from competitors, people paid to click and especially clicks by bots and botnets.
Six months after Click Forensics released the index, Google published a report on why Click Forensics and other “third-party click fraud auditing firms” were overestimating the problem. But the problem was getting worse, all around the world.
Click Forensics’ next step was creating the Click Quality Council, which comprised major advertisers including Progressive Insurance, Target and Expedia.
Cuthbert appeared on CNBC. Business Week published a cover story on how click fraud was the “dark side of online advertising.”
Click Forensics moved to Austin in 2007 to attract talent and investment dollars. They were things San Antonio lacked at the time and a reason Cuthbert is a founding member and board member of the city’sTech Bloc initiative to make the city more attractive to tech companies and personnel.
Venture capital poured in: $28.5 million over the life of the company. Revenue streams grew. Yahoo and Microsoft came to dinners to talk about the problem. In 2008, Google started working with Click Forensics, too.
“They eventually had to do it,” Cuthbert said. “The industry was calling for it.”
Original article: http://www.expressnews.com/business/local/article/Cuthbert-recounts-taking-on-Google-6528115.php
Executive coaching is hot. What was stigma (“You’re so broken you need a coach?”) has become status symbol (“You’re so valuable you get a coach?”). Tiger Woods and Michael Phelps have coaches. Even President Barack Obama has a coach, if you count David Axelrod. Microsoft ‘s young high-potential leaders get coaches. If elite athletes and organizations think they need coaches, shouldn’t you have one too? Shouldn’t we all?
No. Executive coaching–personal training in leadership from someone who provides it for a living–should be used like a powerful prescription drug that works best under certain conditions. When employed as a cure-all, it is less effective, too expensive and has negative side effects.
Executive coaching is not aspirin. It’s interferon. So when should it be prescribed for an executive? When should it be avoided?
Based on the latest research and 25 years I’ve spent coaching senior executives and high-potential young leaders, here are five diagnostic questions you should ask before making the decision to hire a coach.
1. How valuable is this person’s performance and potential to your organization?
When done right, executive coaching is expensive and time-consuming. It should be reserved for people who are critical to your organization’s success, or will be in the future. In general, this includes everyone at C-level, heads of major business units or functions, technical or functional wizards, and your bench of high-potential young leaders.
Just how expensive and time-consuming is executive coaching? Although there is tremendous variation in fees and arrangements among coaches, be prepared to pay a C-level coach what you pay your top attorney. If this seems excessive, consider that a coach must have the experience and expertise to quickly grasp a leader’s situation, challenge assumptions and choices, and bring credible, fresh ideas to the table. Doing this with your best and brightest is not easy. And given the influence a coach can have on an executive’s decisions and actions over the course of a typical six-to-12-month engagement involving bimonthly meetings, regular phone calls and e-mail check-ins, a bargain coach whose sophistication does not match the client’s is a big mistake.
2. What is the challenge the person is facing right now?
People, relationships, organizations and behavioral change are what executive coaches know best. When an executive is struggling to learn how to best manage herself and engage others, you’ve found the sweet spot for executive coaching.
He might be a chief executive officer trying to figure out how to work with his board chair. Or a regional vice president scaling up to global responsibility, learning how to lead her former peers. Or a technical wizard who destroys teams with his resistance to all ideas but his own.
But be warned: An executive coach is not a consultant. He may have technical or functional expertise. But he should not be used as an answer person, an extra pair of hands or a bolster for a weak leader. He helps executives think through and tackle their own problems. Self-reliance, not dependency, is the goal.
3. How willing and able will the executive be to work with a coach?
The client has got to want to change. A bright, motivated coaching client can step up to most challenges. A bright, unmotivated one will waste everyone’s time and money. Working with an executive who has been pressured into coaching by his boss or human resources department is an uphill battle, though it’s not impossible.
Coachability is important. Look for a track record of unusual growth under the guidance of teachers and mentors. Coachable executives readily share their experience. They are realistic about their strengths and weaknesses. They learn from others but do it their own way, taking responsibility for whatever happens. They know how to leverage a coach.
4. What alternatives to coaching are available?
There are many ways to help executives grow as leaders. High-level training, mentoring, reading, job rotation and special assignments are just a few. The most overlooked alternative is attention from the individual’s own manager. As coaching has become more fashionable, I’ve seen too many managers abdicate their own coaching responsibilities, turning a struggling executive over to a professional. Sometimes the problem is beyond what the manager can handle. But often managers hand off executives because they’d rather not deal with messy people stuff.
The manager is already being paid to coach. Don’t incur an executive coaching expense if the problem is within that manager’s capabilities.
5. Are key people in the organization ready to support this person’s efforts to grow and change?
Changing the way you think and act is tough even when you have support from others. But when key leaders above or beside you are indifferent, skeptical or hostile to changes you’re trying to make, things get exponentially more difficult. Coaching works best when key people in the executive’s world stand solidly behind her. They need to provide tailwinds, not headwinds. Coaching relationships in a vacuum of support fall apart before any goals are achieved.
When conditions are right, executive coaching can be one of the best people investments you’ll ever make. But it is not a panacea for every executive development problem. Answer these five questions, and you’ll make better decisions about who is likely to benefit from coaching. And who isn’t.
Douglas McKenna is chief executive officer and co-founder of the Oceanside Institute. Formerly head of leadership development at Microsoft, he coaches senior executives around the world.
By Ron Ashkenas
We’ve all heard the famous bromide that “honesty is the best policy.” But when it comes to performance feedback, honesty often falls by the wayside. Many managers hide behind performance management checklists or water down their feedback with generalizations. And on the other side of the equation, employees tend to position themselves in the most favorable light possible in their self-assessments, and avoid giving constructive feedback to the boss, even when it’s requested. The result is a lack of candid dialogue between boss and subordinate — which not only prevents the organization from improving, but also stymies individual development.
The odd thing about this phenomenon is that everyone knows that performance feedback should be more candid. There are hundreds of articles about the value of candid assessments and most supervisory and management courses include some variation on how to have “courageous” conversations (corporate-speak for “honest”). There also are some organizations, such as GE and (the new) Ford under Alan Mulally, that insist upon it.
Research also shows that employees are far more engaged when they receive honest feedback; and that leaders who rate highest in managerial effectiveness are those who most actively seek feedback from others. Yet performance feedback continues to look like the Emperor’s New Clothes, where everyone pretends that it’s different than it is.
The reality is that candid, two-way dialogues are intensely uncomfortable and cause anxiety on both sides of the table. The boss, for example, often worries that too much candor might be hurtful or damaging. As one senior manager said to me, “If I tell this person what I really think, it could destabilize her and make it difficult for her to do her job.” At the same time, the boss may also want to be liked by the subordinate and doesn’t want the relationship to deteriorate, especially if they have to work side-by-side. So it’s easier to pull punches than to say something that might damage the relationship.
On the other side of the ledger, subordinates worry that negative feedback will adversely affect their job continuation, career prospects, or earning power — so they may appear defensive or anxious, which makes it even harder to have an honest conversation. And if the manager asks for feedback, many subordinates will try to say nice things as a way of currying favor, or signaling a quid-pro-quo arrangement of “I’ll give you positive feedback if you give me the same.”
The net result of all this angst and (largely unconscious) anxiety is a stilted, pro-forma, ritualistic, and not very productive pattern of dialogue about performance. It’s a pattern that adds little value to the organization or to managers and employees.
Unfortunately, given the powerful nature of the underlying psychological forces, it is difficult to break this pattern. Most people believe Jack Nicholson’s line from the movie, “A Few Good Men,” when he shouted: “You can’t handle the truth!” That doesn’t mean that there’s nothing you can do. On the contrary, given the enormous value that more honest feedback can produce, here are three suggestions that might be worth exploring:
Whether you are the boss or subordinate, initiate conversation about the issue, the underlying psychology, and the value of getting it right. Use this blog post or other articles like it as a way to get the discussion started. The more you can build awareness of the dynamic, the better your chances of dealing with it.
The easiest way to do this is to conduct these discussions at different times (even if your corporate process wants you to do them together). Doing this allows you to focus the conversation on how you and your subordinate can better accomplish key goals and projects — so the discussion is more work-related than “personal.” Making this explicit division removes some of the emotion from performance assessment and might free you up to be more candid.
So don’t wait until the formal process kicks in and you’re under the gun to fill out forms and have a high-anxiety performance review. Instead, engage your people (or your boss) in a series of mini-discussions about how things are going and what can be done differently. The more frequently you have these conversations, the more comfortable they will become.
Honest performance feedback is not easy. But learning how to do it well can make a huge difference both for you and for your organization.
Reposted with permission from HBR.
Author:
Ron Ashkenas
Bio:
Ron Ashkenas is a managing partner of Schaffer Consulting, and is currently serving as an Executive-in-Residence at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. He is a co-author of The GE Work-Out and The Boundaryless Organization. His latest book is Simply Effective.
San Antonio has been my home for more than 20 years. We are blessed with a wonderful city that has a growing economy, great weather and a diverse and lively community.
What we don’t have is a strong vision for the next 20 years. San Antonio lags behind other cities in transportation, higher education and a connected, vibrant urban core. To strengthen the economic base, we need to draw technology companies, attract and retain educated people and diversify our industry footprint.
I became interested in the mayoral race a few months ago when Uber announced they were leaving the city. I wanted our leaders to understand the importance of Uber, Lyft and other technology companies. Services like this are good for our city and enhance the livability of San Antonio. I was mad and so I got involved.
When I first met Mayor Ivy Taylor in March, several things surprised me. First of all, she is an excellent listener. She listens first and speaks later (a trait not often found in political leaders). She seeks to understand and asks great questions. The Mayor looks through a single lens in leading this city, “what is best for San Antonio.” She has no political ambition, no desire to please everyone and dislikes politics in general. She refused to take money from those with whom she is negotiating. I respect that she is neither intimidated nor influenced by special interest groups. I trust that Ivy Taylor puts San Antonio first in every decision she makes.
I wanted to be sure she understood my perspective so I shared my story. My co-founders and I launched a technology company in San Antonio in 2005. Click Forensics was founded here and built to help advertisers get what they pay for. We were solving a complex data problem and needed both funding and technology talent. Despite our best effort, these did not exist in San Antonio at that time. With an investment from a venture capital firm, we relocated to Austin. Over the next seven years, Click Forensics became Adometry and grew significantly. The company gained global recognition as the leader in advertising attribution technology. In 2014, Adometry was acquired by Google. All of this occurred in Austin, not San Antonio.
This experience has made me take a hard look at the city I love most of all. I don’t want other companies to have to leave San Antonio in order to grow. Many young people are moving out after graduation and I want our city to be one that can attract and retain talented and educated young people. We need to make changes that will position our city as a leader in the years to come. Ivy Taylor shares that vision.
Every month, I spend more than 100 hours with 40 CEO’s, business owners and senior leaders. I feel equipped to recognize the traits that make a leader great, and those that make poor leaders. I’ve met the candidates and have an open mind. Ivy Taylor is the perfect leader for San Antonio today and tomorrow. She has a willingness to listen, has a deep background and education as an urban planner and a sound process for decision making.
Dictionary.com defines a politician as:
By definition, Ivy Taylor is an awful politician. After getting to know her, I’ve found that she is a wonderful leader. San Antonio needs someone to help us become all we can be. We don’t need a politician to lead this city. We need a visionary leader who will listen, lead and get things done. I look forward to supporting Mayor Taylor in the runoff election and working with her to make this city truly great.
When I meet a CEO or executive who tells me they me they are "too busy", they are saying they are not doing the things they should be doing. Priorities are driven by others, their day is chaotic and "less important" things such as exercise, family and time to focus hit the back burner.
Too busy means unproductive, unfocused and ineffective.
In a one-to-one yesterday with a Vistage member, we took time to process this issue. I've listed a few of the bullet points that came out of that meeting. If you are experiencing excessive busyness, maybe we need to talk.
Share calendar with direct reports
Get a printer in your office
Schedule everything! (workouts, recurring meetings, lunch dates, reading, projects, research, emails)
Consider Outlook/ Sanebox/ Boxer to help with email management
Keep Monday and Friday as interaction day. Reduce or eliminate meetings on these days.
Use meeting best practices (read Death By Meeting) - agenda, purpose, outcome, time limit, recap
Schedule routine one-to-ones (121’s) with direct reports - more here
Consciously manage distractions (see below)
Consider what are you doing that someone else could or should be doing
Books/ Resources
At its core, business is simple. It is about serving others. People make it complicated. Re-focus on the basics: serving your employees, customers, and communities then abundance will follow.
Imagine if . . .
How much more engaged and productive would they be? How much more successful would your organization be?
No Purpose, No Will
I recently visited Oxford Castle in England where I experienced the Crank Machine, a tool of physical and psychological punishment utilized in the 19thcentury prison system.
As the name implies, the Crank Machine has a handle which can be turned or “cranked.” The hardship: this particular handle is connected to nothing but pulleys and brakes, making the turning of it more difficult. Think about the toughest spinning class you ever attended and then some. With a stationary bike you don’t go anywhere, but you can achieve an effective and balanced workout. The Crank Machine was tied to nothing productive. As a form of punishment, prisoners were compelled to turn it up to 15,000 times a day in their jail cell.
The Crank Machine’s sole purpose was to break the will of prisoners – to extinguish their purpose and engagement in life.
Stop Breaking The Will Of Your Employees
Do you hold weekly business update meetings no one finds valuable, but fail to rework them for the benefit of attendees? Have you asked for such meeting feedback?
Do you request weekly work updates from your employees? Or worse, daily updates? While your intentions may be good and have business value, do your employees perceive the reports as simply a way to make sure they are working when not supervised?
While my Crank Machine example is admittedly extreme, modern organizational tasks perceived to have little or no value can have the same, negative impact on employees. The very act of doing such work could demotivate and punish someone wanting to make a difference in your organization.
Studies show nothing is more disengaging than doing work without perceived value, even if you are paid well for it.
So, how do you eliminate wasteful, non-value added work in your organization and benefit from deeply engaged, self-managed employees? Keep your business simple, maintain common organizational purpose and follow the ants.
Let The Ants Lead
Did you know highly organized ant colonies – sometimes numbering in the billions – have no leadership? Despite this, ant colony organization is so advanced, effective and purpose-driven that notable companies like Southwest Airlines, Air Liquide and others have used their pattern of behavior to solve complex business challenges.
Ants are self-managed. They use triggers and interactions in their local environments to independently guide their work decisions. This is possible because all ants embrace a common purpose and follow a few, simple rules.
When building their nests, researchers discovered three, main rules ants consistently follow:
It can be deduced from the research that ants self-manage themselves based on the rhythms and connections in their environment. In a human equivalent, these connections could be the rate others are working nearby and what is seen/heard in their area. Providing there is common purpose for every person involved in the task, no defined leadership is needed to accomplish it. Successful examples of this self-managed model can be found in thriving organizations like L.W. Gore & Associates, Zappos, The Morning Star Company and Treehouse.
Discover Your Organizational Purpose
To create an environment which fosters a high level of self-management and engagement, employees must be aligned under a common organizational purpose. A simple way of discovering this purpose would be to ask the following questions:
By flipping the questions around, you can gain a powerful new perspective on your common organizational purpose:
By answering these questions and having your employees do so, too, you can gain useful insights into what is really valuable work – that which serves your employees, customers and community – and what is simply wasting time and disengaging your workforce.
Let your organization evolve from employees with a common purpose. Go back to the reason your organization exists in the first place – its purpose – and focus only on work which feeds that purpose.
How far off is your organization from this model? Please let me know in the comments area below.
Also, check out my new book How to Find a Job, Career and Life You Love (Second Edition) at LouisEfron.com.
by Leslie Pratch
Effective leaders must meet challenges and resolve them productively, day after day, for many years. They must constantly adapt to the unforeseen--and must mobilize, coordinate, and direct others. But when hiring executives, how do you know which candidates possess such abilities? When they all look good on paper, how do you make a choice?
Given the frequency of CEO turnover, and the frequent cases of CEO failure after long, successful careers in the same place where they became CEO--think David Pottruck at Schwab or Doug Ivester at Coke--it's clearly not that easy. But it can be done by including an analysis of executives' readiness to acquire new skills and strategies for coping with complexity and change--in other words, their active coping mechanism.
ACTIVE COPING IS A STYLE OF APPROACHING LIFE, BAKED INTO WHO YOU ARE
How a person approaches life's challenges develops as a result of their nature and their nurture. Some people run from problems, some lash out at others, and some passionately wait and hope that problems (or even opportunities) will just go away.
Active copers, by contrast, are built to be capable and eager to deal with whatever obstacles and opportunities they face. Active copers continually strive to achieve personal aims and overcome difficulties, rather than passively retreat from or be overwhelmed by frustration. They move towards the problems and opportunities with open arms and open minds.
An active coping style lets a manager go further and faster more surely. Consider an analogy with a car: We can get where we need to go driving an ordinary, inexpensive car, and we can make it through life with a less than optimal coping style. But to drive on curvy, treacherous roads in dark and foul weather, we need a superbly engineered car, and that car will also get us farther, faster, with less likelihood of accident or breakdown in other situations. A strong framework of coping enables a leader to survive the rough spots and to perform better than others would in ordinary times too.
In business, unexpected events occur, for which no playbook has been written. Active copers do not lose their footing in such cases, but rather thrive on the opportunity to seek out information about what is happening, rally the right team, and learn as part of the process of steering towards success. With each new challenge, active copers ask: What really is going on now, and what is the best way for me to deal with it? What can I learn from this event? How can I use this event to strengthen my commitment to the ideals that I pursue?
SKILLS AND TRAITS ASSOCIATED WITH ACTIVE COPING
I’ve found in my 17 years working to evaluate executives that active coping is an attribute of a healthy personality structure. This means that the “activity” is not always overt and observable; sometimes it takes place internally, in decisions made, visions developed, and conflicting drives resolved. An active coping stance, however, often gives rise to certain observable traits and skills. These should be sought out in anyone being courted to run a business. They include:
Awareness. Active copers are able to see reality, including their own needs, capabilities, and limitations.
Courage. Active copers are brave. They seek out new experiences; they are not intimidated by challenges.
Resiliency, toughness, and the ability to learn from experience. Active copers, like all humans, make mistakes. Life is too complicated to anticipate every possible contingency. Active copers regroup and recover.
Energy, fortitude, and the willingness to persevere. Active copers summon the energy to continue to move forward even under the most trying circumstances.
Resourcefulness. Active copers invent solutions to problems by creatively pulling together the resources they have at hand or by developing new ones.
Decisiveness. Active coping gives a person the fortitude to handle conflicts among competing goals. Making a choice means giving up an alternative. Active copers face that loss and move on.
Executing a plan. Active coping involves planning. Active copers anticipate, strategize, and weigh the risks of potential actions. Then they act. Active coping combines introspection and action.
These are the kinds of traits active copers show and business leaders need to have for dealing well with fast-changing and always uncertain situations.
--Leslie S. Pratch is the author of Looks Good On Paper?: Using In-Depth Personality Assessment to Predict Leadership Performance, which was released July 1 byColumbia Business School Press.
