Posts Tagged ‘Leadership and Management’

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Two Important Leadership Tests

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010

Somewhere in the mix of my father, the United States Military Academy and the Army I learned two important self tests for leadership: the “Man in the Mirror” test and the “Would I” test.  While I am human and have failed these tests and their exacting standards from time to time, I think they have on balance served me well.

The Man in the Mirror test is:  Can you look yourself in the eye (in the mirror) after you’ve made this decision?  The question is profound and very powerful.  It alone, if asked at the appropriate time, might keep you from making otherwise foolish ethical choices and poor leadership decisions.  Would it have kept Lay and Skilling, Maddoff or Kozlowski  from  violating their fiduciary responsibilities?  While I can’t answer this question, I do believe that if a person is “on balance good” and hasn’t succumbed to greed induced sociopathic behaviors, then this test will help keep them straight if asked at the appropriate times.  As we’ve written before, building tests such as these into your daily routine can help you from taking the long journey of small steps towards unethical behavior.

The “Would I” test is much more focused on the concept of “Leadership by Example” that we discuss in The Art of Scalability.  This test is also simple.  You just ask yourself “Would I be willing to do what I am asking this person to do?”  Maybe you are asking someone to work during their anniversary.  Perhaps you are asking someone to skip a child’s sporting or school event.  Maybe you’ve just given them some last minute assignment that will cause them to work all night, like completing a presentation for you to give at a conference tomorrow.  “Would I” is not an excuse to be lenient on people, or not to hold people to aggressive standards.  Rather, it is a test to determine if you are truly meeting the expectations that you hold of those around you.

In one respect, the “Man in the Mirror” and “Would I” tests fly in the face of concepts such as Strengths Based Leadership.   They exist to keep us from failing due to shortsightedness, a lack of introspection and aggressive or excessive egoism.  They are rooted in the concept that we sometimes fail because we fail to see how our actions will be perceived or acted upon by others.  Leaders are humans, and leaders make mistakes.  The “Man in the Mirror”, if employed often, helps us to avoid dangerous ethical pitfalls and the “Would I” test helps us avoid burning out our teams.

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4 Types of Organizational Cancer

Thursday, April 1st, 2010

I’m a cancer survivor.  Not the kind of biological cancer that took my mother and some of my friends, but the evil and malicious cancer that mutates and destroys the people and performance within an organization.  I’ve learned through my personal battles with “org-cancer” that you have to act quickly and decisively to excise these “org-tumors” the minute they are detected.  Early detection and treatment are the only way to keep these beasts from destroying your organization, your product and your company.  Here are the four most common types we find in our practice:

The Information Hoarder – This nasty cancerous employee believes that information is power; the more he has relative to everyone else, the more powerful he is.  These cancers don’t like to share information unless it makes them look good. Information that makes them look bad gets secreted away, allowing problems to fester and destroy your product or customer relations.  This employee will provide or expose information only when it meets his or her own needs.  This is an engineer who might not want to share knowledge about a codebase, an executive who only shares metrics that show stellar results and hides those that show problems, or a sales person who refuses to share how he or she has been so successful.  Solution:  Remove this cancer before it grows.  Do not promote this individual and do not allow others in the organization to believe this behavior is acceptable.  As a CEO, this cancer is very dangerous for a board of directors.

The Bragging Hero – As Fish has written before, you should be creating a culture that embraces those who keep problems from becoming crises.  That said, nearly every business has a crisis from time to time and typically there are a number of heroes who help solve them.  You want the type of hero who corrects a situation and moves on without fanfare.  Be wary of the hero who repeatedly trumpets his or her accomplishments.  Often this person can be seen hanging around the Information Hoarders and sometimes they are the same person; an information hoarder who brags about his or her heroic accomplishments.  Solution:  Sometimes this cancer can be “treated”.  Explain the need to reduce self publicity and if you are unsuccessful, excise.

The Gossiper – With all the talk about how much time a company should spend on new products vs maintaining old products, who has the time to invest in morale destroying gossip?   Time spent gossiping by definition steals away from both new product or maintenance time.  This cancer often greets people with “Did you hear about John’s affair?” or “Have you heard about Jeanette’s new boyfriend?”  Let’s be honest – most of us indulge in this behavior from time to time – but I’ve seen people spend an hour plus a day discussing the latest gossip.  You can spot this person because they think they know something about everyone and they aren’t afraid to share it.  Baseless, third hand rumors can destroy the lives of good employees.   This type of cancer shows up in more extroverted professions like project management.  Solution:  You can try to treat this cancer by explaining the effects of their actions on the lives of others.  Most likely you will be unsuccessful and you will need to excise the mass.

The Passive Aggressive Seditionist – This is the cancer upon which the phrase “grin-f&#$er” was based.  This person will say “yes” and make you believe he or she is on your side and “fighting the good fight” all while spreading rumors about you and maybe even making up some stories of his or her own.  They are often seen in the company of Gossipers and sometimes will be the rare but extremely deadly combination of Passive Aggressive Gossiping Seditionist.  Whether of the merged mutant variety or the base type, there is no treating this cancer.  It must be irradiated, chemo’d and excised with extreme urgency.

Make no mistake about it, you have no obligation to continue to employ these mutated employees.  Very often these employees get a lot done, but as we’ve explained in the past it is critically important to evaluate both behaviors AND performance when building a culture of excellence.  “Treating” (counseling) or removing them is the right thing to do, and you can never act too quickly.

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4 Things I Wish I’d Learned as an Undergraduate

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

I recently had the honor to speak with the CS and IT majors of the USMA (West Point) Class of 2010.  Recognizing that these young men carry an incredible burden for all of us,  I struggled for what I could tell them.  These young men and women, after all, are going to be the tools of our international efforts against terrorism for quite some time to come and in 5 years will likely see 2 combat deployments.  The price they pay for their “free” education is much higher than the one my partner and I paid and larger still than the 99.9+% of the rest of their generation (those that never serve their nation in uniform).

I settled on trying to pass along four things that I wish I had learned in school – before the Army and before becoming a civilian.  These aren’t four things that I wasn’t taught mind you.  I may have been taught some of them, and at any rate the burden for learning should really be placed upon the student – especially in college.  These are four things that I wish I had recognized, retained or learned on my own; four things that would have made my Army and civilian life much easier.  Here they are as I discussed them with elements of the USMA Class of 2010:

1)      Moral and Ethical Challenges Occur Frequently – More So Than You Might Think

It doesn’t matter if you are in the Army and parts for your dead-lined vehicle magically appear overnight or you are reviewing the use of company assets and find that people are using company assets for personal use – potentially in violation of company policy.  Sometimes even people who are on balance “good” make ethical mistakes.  And make no mistake, there are morally bankrupt people committing unethical acts at an incredibly high rate all around us.

Most of us, quite honestly, are ill prepared to address ethical issues upon graduation.  Many schools barely touch the subject.  Even the service academies, with their strict honor code, too often paint topics as black and white rather than the spectrum of blacks, whites and grays that occur in the real world.  As we’ve written in the past, the journey to moral bankruptcy isn’t one giant leap, but a series of small steps.  Draw lines in the sand early in your career so that you know you are heading in the wrong direction as you progress.  Build a support group of people who will tell you the truth and help guide you should you start to go astray.

2)      Smart People and Terrible Teamwork Equals Crap Technology

Intelligence is only one of many independent variables (inputs) resulting in the dependent variable (output) of overall team performance.  Behaviors of individuals within the team are another equally important independent variable.  Leadership and culture are important moderators of this equation.  It is possible to have brilliant jerks, incapable of getting along with anyone, who completely destroy the output of the team.

We should reward people on their accomplishments and their ability to work as a team.  Intelligence is great, but we simply don’t pay people for being smart.  Who cares if you are smart if you can’t either get something done or alternatively destroy team morale and throughput?  Consider using this 2×2 matrix presented within The Art of Scalability to evaluate the individuals in your team for both behaviors and accomplishments.

3)      Leadership is about EQ – Not IQ

Our frequent readers will also remember this from our postings abroad.  As Malcolm Gladwell has indicated within his book Outliers, all of the evidence points to the notion that the most successful leaders have some minimum IQ.  But IQ alone is not sufficient to be a successful leader.  The greatest leaders have high emotional quotients, often considered a combination of social intelligence and emotional intelligence.

Two of the world’s foremost experts on the topic of leadership and social and emotional intelligence, Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee have written two wonderful books on this topic:  Primal Leadership and Resonant Leadership.  In keeping with our theme of 2×2 matrices, here is Richard and Annie’s representation of commitment and emotional quotient.  The Y axis indicates how mindful the leader is of himself/herself (emotional intelligence) and how mindful they are of others (social intelligence).  The X axis indicates their overall emotional tone towards others.  Successful (aka Resonant) leaders have on balance a positive emotional tone and are in touch with themselves and their teams.

4)      It’s All About Performance

See my brief discussion of the model for success.  Superior performance, I argue, is measured as improving long term stakeholder wealth.  This might be emotional wealth in the case of some non-profits or financial wealth in the for profit world.  This means getting things done on time, on budget, in an ethically appropriate manner, with the right quality and meeting the expectations of stakeholders.  Time and experience are just moderators to this equation; they only help performance.  Independent variables are intelligence, drive, commitment, behaviors, etc.  Look to build the right teams with the right behavior at the right time.  Don’t get tied up in how much “experience” people have.  I’d rather have a dedicated person with 5 years of experience than a lazy person with 20.

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Speak in Terms of Objectives – Not Actions

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

Have you ever been in a position where a project you were managing was late or over budget? Have you ever supported an application that had a customer impacting service outage? How did your boss respond to these issues? Did she say something like “I want a review of our quality strategy” or “I’d like to see our application rollout strategy”? Maybe they asked for something even more nebulous and less connected to the issue at hand like “Show me our site and product integration strategy”. Huh? What does that mean?

It’s easy for managers to react to incidents and problems by requesting that certain actions be taken by a person or team. The problem with such an approach is that it feels like a punitive action to the people from whom the action is being requested. Maybe the group or person needs to receive performance feedback, but by asking them to take an action you are not really giving them feedback. If your goal is to both provide feedback and ensure the underlying issue is corrected then provide candid performance feedback and explain the desired goal of the corrective action.

Great leaders understand intuitively that they should speak in terms of desired end states and then ask for plans to achieve those end goals or states. Another approach is to use the Socratic Method and ask your team what an appropriate end goal should be, whether they’ve achieved it and how they should correct their approach to achieve that goal. The first is probably the best approach when the team is overwhelmed or you are in the middle of a crisis. The latter approach is best for higher performing teams who have simply hit a “bump in the road”.

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VP of Operations

Monday, November 16th, 2009

One of the most common questions we get from individuals is “what is the path to becoming a CTO?” We posted about this before and focused on the skill sets required as opposed to the path to get there.  We highlighted 1) good knowledge of business in general 2) great technical experience 3) great leadership 4) great manager 4) great communicator and 5) willing to let go.  This time we’re going to one of the jobs that is often a stepping stone to the CTO job.

The VP of Operations is the person who leads the Technology Operations or Production Operations team.  This team has responsibility for running the hardware and software systems of the company. For SaaS or Web2.0 companies this is the revenue generating systems. For corporate IT this is the ERP, CRM, HRM, etc. This team is often comprised of project managers, operations managers, and technical leads. As the head of the Operations team the VP of Operations has responsibility for monitoring, escalating, managing issues, and reporting on availability, capacity, and utilization. Incident and problem management as well as root cause analysis (postmortem) are some of the most important jobs that their team accomplishes. In order to perform this role well the VP of Operations must have good process skills, a strong leadership presence, able to remain calm under fire, and goof overal knowledge of the system.

The VP of Operations is often also responsible for the Infrastructure team. This team is usually comprised of system administrators, database administrators, and network engineers. This team procures, deploys, maintains, and retires systems. As the head of this team the VP of Operations has requirements for budgeting, balancing time between longer term projects and daily operations on the systems. This team understands the system holistically and are often the most useful when performing scalability summits. In order to perform this role well, the VP of Operations must have a good understanding of each of the technical roles that this team is responsible for, including the databases, operating systems, and the network. This doesn’t mean in order to succeed in this role a person must be able do each of these jobs but they do need a good, solid understanding in order to converse, brainstorm, debate, and make decisions in each of these technical realms.

If you compare this list of skills that we mentioned at the top of this post with those mentioned as necessary to succeed as the VP of Operations you’ll see they overlap a good deal. Great technical experience, great leadership, and great management skills will serve you well as the head of operations and will also go a long way to developing most of the skills you will need as a CTO.

We’re approaching the end of the year, a time that many people and organizations use to reflect on what they have accomplished and what they want to accomplish next year.  A good idea as part of your personal growth is to use the list above and score yourself as honestly as possible in terms of skills.  If you’re missing some of them make sure you have some goals in place that help you acquire a few more of these each year. Do this and not only will succeed one of the important jobs that lead to the CTO job but when you do arrive at the CTO position you will be one of the successful ones.

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