Your Strategic Edge

The most important reason to be an effective leader is to help the group achieves its goals.  Not for the status, or the power, but the results. 

So today, find ten minutes to review what those results are and identify the relatively few actions that will have the greatest affect on the group achieving those results with minimal time and resources. 

Then focus your time on just one of…

Learning from Facebook executive departures

The departures of key executives from Facebook last week are the latest over the past 18 months.  They highlight a number of key lessons in strategy and strategy implementation:

Leaders must make the key decisions.  While leaders will look for input from others on decisions, it is the leader who has ultimate accountability for corporate direction and success. Leaders make tough decisions.  The…

The Key to Large-Scale Change

I’ve been road bicycling in Aiken, South Carolina over the past week and have been amazed at the amount of litter along the backroads.  I remember as a kid in New York when litter was a big problem, and I recall the anti-littering campaign complete with litter bags available at every gas station, pervasive TV and radio commercials encouraging people not to be “a litterbug,” and penalties for…

Avoid Accountability Gaps and Overlaps

I saw a professional soccer game on the big screen at a Mexican restaurant last night.   I always admire how really good soccer players know their positions and how adept they are at passing the ball.

When we played soccer in high school, we all ran after the ball in a mass.  I had a friend then who would yell, “You’re bunching!!!” 

Sometime the top people in an organization are “bunching.”

Too Busy to Succeed

Most of the leaders and senior executives I work with are grappling with not enough time in the day.  They are running hard trying to stay on top of key issues, but it’s affecting their work effectiveness and personal lives.  They need a way to focus on the issues and tasks that are most important and jettison the rest. 

This is particularly true for:

Executives newly promoted to…

Why You Need to Talk With Employees

A leader needs to keep in touch with customers because a business’ real value is realized on the outside. 

But it’s just as important to keep in touch with employees.  Get out of your office, talk to people individually and in groups, find out what’s working, what’s not working, what’s getting in their way of being as effective and productive as they’d like to be. 

Only by doing this will…

Time to Clean House?

Computers get bogged-down over time as programs take more and more memory.

Similarly, organization structures and processes get bogged-down by the ongoing addition of policies, procedures, and rules.  Almost always these new rules are designed to make work easier for one group, but the result of all departments adding rules is an overall slow-down.

It’s a good idea to periodically put every…

How to Stop Circular Discussions about Decisions

One of the ways that meetings can be both frustrating and inefficient is when participants are faced with a situation and are going around and around debating alternative solutions.

I’ve found it’s very helpful to remember that decision making has three components: 

The objectives or results desired

Alternative options to achieve the objectives, and

Risks inherent in the alternatives.

When…

How to Improve Accountability

The word “accountability” can have a lot of negative connotations for people, including managers.  In most cases, that’s because they either don’t understand accountability, or had a bad experience with a boss who used accountability as a cudgel. 

It doesn’t have to be that way.

It’s not that people don’t want to be accountable.  It’s that they don’t want to get belittled or punished.  In…

Strategy fails when it’s not implemented well– when it’s not connected to what goes on in people’s jobs day-to-day.  You need to connect it.  And you also want decisions to be made consistent with strategic intent.  Strategy implementation has to be part of the daily fabric of the organization.  It’s not done once a month, it’s not something you do once a week; it must be the daily fabric of…

3 Leadership Themes for 2019

A quick observation:  My best clients, the ones who get the most value from our work together, take the ideas we discuss and put them into practice instead of thinking about them or dwelling on why they can’t act.  They are also already effective leaders with an ongoing desire to get better and stronger.    

As you go forward this new year, put emphasis on the following:

Your vision.  Give…

Strategy formulation and planning are really two different things.  And of course the value isn’t in spending three days setting strategy.  The point isn’t walls full of easel sheets and group think, it’s all about what do you do to make things happen.  Strategy is NOTHING without implementation.

Implementation is putting strategy into action. That means several things:

Creating…

Strategy Isn’t Tactics

Strategy isn’t about starting from today and going forward into the future.  It’s about defining the future you want and working backwards from it to determine how you’re going to get there.  If instead you begin with where you are today and plan to make improvements going forward, what you’re doing isn’t strategic.   It’s operational.  It’s all about tactics and incremental improvement to try to…

What Nobody Tells You about Consistency and Efficiency

For all the benefits of six-sigma, lean, JIT, etc. (and there are significant benefits,) you must not let the focus on efficiency drive out innovation and creativity. 

This is particularly true for engineers who need dedicated time to work on new and different ideas. 

The more you become obsessed with consistency and efficiency in operations, the more likely you are to be diverted from…

Being excellent and efficient at getting things done is good. It’s what effective managers do. Being excellent at deciding which things to get done is critical. It’s what effective leaders do. ****** This is a week for giving thanks. If you’re not good at thanking people, this is a good week to begin. And thank you.To all my clients and friends, to all my readers, and to all the people who influence…

How to Address Resistance to Accountability (or to any change)

Last week I heard from a teacher in the Boston area in response to my piece about accountability. She said, “Wow! This is what I do every day as a teacher!”

Many managers and executives tell me that their people aren’t ready for accountability, or have a negative response to the word ‘accountability.’ Is that the case in your organization, and if so, why?

Here’s what works when you encounter any…

Do You Have An Accountability Absence?

  A significant challenge for management today is accountability. You must count on people doing what is expected of them, and doing it on time. But despite how important this is, many managers don’t know how to hold people accountable without seeming to be dictatorial. And employees today tend to ascribe negative connotations to the word “accountability.”

It doesn’t have to be that way.

Establis…