Category Archives: Leadership

Your Calendar Reflects your Priorities or Lesson 10

Posted on March 16, 2010 | 1 comment

On one of my first postings, Lessons from a CIA Manager, I listed 16 lessons I had more or less learned in almost 25 years as a manager there. (I think now we may be up to 18 actually.) Lesson 10 was: Your calendar reflects your priorities. You can talk about x or y issue being important to you, but if it never makes your calendar you’re lying to yourself and, worse, lying to others.

This is so simple and yet often overlooked. By now, almost all federal senior executives have had enough sensitivity training to know at least to talk a good game about issues such as diversity, employee engagement, work-life balance, etc. But it does you no good to tell employees that x, y, and z are priorities for you if you never can make the time to actually attend discussions on diversity, meet regularly with small groups of employees for straight talk, and deal with your own work-life balance issues. Remember that as a senior executive, your ACTIONS ALWAYS speak LOUDER than words. The individuals who work under your leadership pay careful attention to what you do.

I remember at some point at the Agency attending a diversity-related function and being thanked by the organizers for actually staying through the entire event. They marveled that “such a busy person” would have the time. Well, harumph! You can’t be very much of an executive manager if you can’t manage your schedule to do the things you say you care most about.

I also enjoyed blogging while at the Agency and found that to be a very effective way of getting my thoughts out to others. (It is amazing how muddy your message gets as it is translated through the layers of bureaucracy.) People would tell me they too would like to blog but they just couldn’t find the time and I would think, OK, communicating effectively with your employees has got to be one of your most important tasks and yet somehow you can’t carve out 30 minutes on your schedule. Somehow, I didn’t really find the time excuse to be that credible.

Finally one last trick about making yourself accessible as a senior manager. I am a slow walker. I like to ride the escalators–I find it pleasant. I learned from a management consultant–but I don’t remember who exactly–that the pace with which you walk the halls determines whether others find you accessible. People walking slowly are telling others, I have time for you, I can be interrupted. And so people will come up to you in the halls to talk, to tell you something you would not otherwise hear from them in a formal meeting. Fast workers send the exact opposite message.

So it’s not enough to  manage by walking around. You need to manage by walking around VERY SLOWLY.

(I googled the phrase “your calendar reflects your priorities” and hit upon several good pieces. Here’s one on whether your to do list reflects your passions. And another on whether your life reflects your moral compass.)

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Why Decisions are Like One-Night Stands, or Lesson 2

Posted on March 12, 2010 | 1 comment

In my posting on Lessons from a CIA manager, Lesson 2 was:  “Remember, your decisions are going to have much less staying power than you’re expecting them to have. Decisions are not committed relationships; they are more like one-night stands.” As perhaps this analogy is not eminently or even imminently clear, it deserves some elucidation.

(Writing the word elucidation above, fine Norman English word if there ever was one, reminded me of the distinction between Anglo-Saxon English and Norman English, of which I learned while I lived in London in the early 90s. When William the Conqueror and the other Normans (i.e. French) invaded England in the 11th century, they brought their Latinate language with them. It promptly began to mix it up with the more Germanic/Norse language of the locals, which is one of the reasons why English is such a rich language, with many more synonyms than most others. We have Anglo-Saxon words, such as start, and Norman/Latinate words such as commence. And because the Normans were the conquerors and the Anglo-Saxons the losers, society began to associate or, to use the A/S word, link Norman English with the better, higher class of people. And to this day, many of us slip into Norman English, i.e. use long, fancy words, when we want to impress with our intelligence, or A/S word smarts. But, I digress…)

Much is made of decision-making. And as my responsibilities grew over the years, I began to appreciate the importance of making decisions promptly. I believe that nothing gums up an organization more than interminably-delayed decisions. Even bad decisions are to be preferred over no decisions because, unless they are nihilistically-awful, any decision at least keeps people moving in an organization, which is always preferable to being stopped dead in one’s tracks. It is simply a matter of physics: it is easier to be agile and quick if you’re already in motion. It requires less energy than getting going from a dead start. This is Lesson 18.

It is important, however, to think of decisions as temporal, even fleeting things. Too many individuals and the media these days think of decisions as these EXTREMELY IMPORTANT EVENTS that will have a permance that merits people like WOLF BLITZER talking about them in BASSO OSTINATO tones. Just flash back to the interminable coverage of the Afghanistan decision made by President Obama late last year. The world we live in today has become so fluid and complex that I actually have come to believe it is counterproductive to think of decisions as having much permanence at all. They need to be made but, even more important, they need to be constantly reconsidered. Hence, the analogy: are decisions one-night stands or are they committed relationships? Well, actually most are probably neither–they fall somewhere in between. But the dynamics of our era continues to shorten their lifespans.

I wrote on this issue about year ago in a piece that was published in Studies in Intelligence, the CIA’s professional journal. In the piece I was mostly discussing the learnings intelligence officers could draw from the economic crisis, but I also touched upon the delusion that our decisions are or should be permanent or longlasting. The folowing chart was included in the piece.

Decisions are clear because the world is:
evident
rational
predictable
human-actuated
straightforward enough to understand
in this world we need intelligence

 

Decisions are fluid because the world is:
obscure
irrational
not predictable
outside the control of humans
too complex for rules
in this world we need sense-making

Editorial note: Given that I am unlikely to stop myself from including the occasional, bordering-on-long tangent in my postings, I will delineate them with green text, so the reader can just jump right over them.

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We Don’t Need No Stinking Rules–or Lesson 17

Posted on March 9, 2010 | Leave a comment

If you recall my post early on regarding the lessons I learned from 25 years as a CIA manager, I was able to recall 16. (And I also promised to flesh out most of them in individual posts–still planning on it.) But I ran across this useful piece yesterday on how the controls imposed by managers create unnecessary complexity in organizations: http://bit.ly/9FFX60 by Ron Ashkenas over at the Harvard Business Review site. And it reminded me of yet another lesson–#17–Management by rule-making is almost always a mistake.

I wanted to write on this right away because it’s an issue that particularly afflicts the federal government. Most of my adult life the news media have been perched on poles, like vultures in the Texas Hill country, waiting to catch reports of the federal government doing something exquisitely stupid–which unfortunately is not a rare occurence, we are humans after all–so they can publicize it and mock it and therefore jack up advertisement rates. Of course, nothing much works for the news media these days to jack up advertisement rates, but the bloggers and social network outlets have taken up the slack just fine, thank you. Leaving aside for now whether this constant focus on the negative is productive or fair, the fact the federal government is everyone’s favorite GOTCHA doll contributes to its tendency to react to mistakes by making new rules–Ashkenas uses the Transportation Security Administration as his first example in his piece. And as these rules add up, “the accumulation of these “reactive” controls often creates complexity, confusion, and unnecessary cost.”

The public focus on government mistakes and the call from them and from Congress to do something about it  is one of the dynamics that contribute to management by nonproductive rule-making. But there are others.

  • The role of ideology in setting government policies. When a policymaker has an ideological belief that concept X is essential to the survival of the republic and concept Y will only hasten its destruction, the tendency to create a rule is strong. These ideological debates could be settled by the use of data, but often neither side wants to take the risk.
  • The tendency for government functions to have legal and/or authoritative foundations. Much–but not all–of what government does is not suitable for market solutions–i.e. choices. Society functions perfectly well whether you shop at Walmart or Target, but we have yet to figure out how to run a society where individuals can shop for the legal structure  they prefer. So the culture of making rules or authoritative decisions slides over into the process of government itself. Related, many of the appropriate functions of government, like national security, are REALLY important, and organizations that carry out these responsibilities like to ensure absolute conformity in execution.

Conformity in execution is important, but what is even more important is conformity in outcome, and that is where the complexity generated by constant rule-making gets you into trouble. A very smart consultant once told me that if you manage everything like it is an exception, then nothing is an exception. This captures the folly of reacting to every mistake with a new rule. So the next time you are tempted to make a new rule, think hard about the message you’re delivering to your work force. Do you want them to think or do you want them to follow rules? Your choice.

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Posted in Leadership, linkedin, Nature of Federal Workers, Organizational Dynamics

Cedars of Change

Posted on March 7, 2010 | Leave a comment

When I’m in TX, where my mom and I have a house and 14 acres north of San Antonio, I spend about two hours every morning clearing cedar, so-called but they’re actually members of the Juniper family. These invasive and water-hogging trees have pretty much taken over the grasslands of the Texas Hill Country and they’re just about impossible to kill. The only animals that will eat them are goats but even they only like the seedlings, so first you’ve got to whack out all the growth. I’ve taken to going out every morning when it’s cool with a good quality tree lopper to commit cedarcide. (eventually I’ll have to burn the stumps too) When friends visit, I put them to work, and it is emotionally very satisfying. (I’m tempted to say it is emotionally satisfying for me to have them do the work, but I’m out there with them too.)

I got to thinking yesterday there are plenty of metaphors to be drawn from clearing cedar that can be applied to clearing organizations, i.e. organizational change. (Organizational change being such a complex and daunting subject you can actually draw lessons for it from just about every moment of life–the movie Finding Nemo, for example, is rich in lessons to be learned…but anyway, I digress…)

When you clear large cedars, i.e. those taller than a person, and your tree lopper can only handle about one inch-diameter trunks, it is best to lop off the tall skinny parts first. Then you’re able to look down at the remaining cedar, see its pattern, and attack the radiating branches killing new beneficial growth underneath.

So it is with change. To really do organizational change well, you have to acquire a proper vantage point where you can really see the best places to attack. This place is probably somewhere near the top of the organization, where the different processes meet to confront success or failure. Otherwise, you’re like the blind men and the elephant, whacking away at whatever you touch first.

The toughest cedars to attack are the ones that have become huge spider webs, with many entangled branches. They usually send out what I think of as running branches low and parallel to the ground, often difficult to see in the brush. But it is critical you attack these.

Any organization around for a while will have its share of spider web departments and processes, which have a pernicious effect on the bottom line but are difficult to identify unless you are standing right on top of them. And you will also find spider web people. They can be unhelpful–i.e. they form the center of unhealthy dynamics in your group, but they often can be good–they are the master hubs that allow otherwise disfunctional processes to deliver worthy output…or they are the key advisers whom others turn to for knowledge. Many change efforts fail when they are unable to account for the complex dynamic of real work.

Unless you have powerful equipment, your cedar attack campaign will leave behind many stumps upon which others can trip. Eventually you have to remove these stumps but if you try to dislodge each one as you go, it bogs you down and I, at least, find it more psycholigically motivating to look back each morning on a larger field of accomplisment.

Similarly, organizational change efforts can get bogged down tackling wicked problems that no doubt need to be removed at some point. But be wary of  the psychological costs tackling these tough spots impose on your followers and lukewarm supporters. Steady momentum in most cases is more valuable than perfection.

When I go out to clear cedar, I never wear a watch or carry anything that would reveal the time. I just set myself a target area and proceed until I’m finished. It strikes me as pointless to use time to measure my effort given that I’m in it for the long haul, but I find that I’m usually ready to break after about two hours of work.

This “time consciouness” seems to be the most important learning from cedar clearing for organizational change. The imposition of what, when you cogitate, are arbitrary deadlines on change efforts is usually one of the dynamics that most undermine them. Think about it! If you have correctly determined what your group needs to move forward, you should want to do it no matter how long it takes. Few change efforts actually need to have drop dead-lines, but these are imposed because of the expected tenure of a particular leadership team, the exigencies of some budget cycle, or, worst of all, the sense–I think perverted–that new, better things either have to be done in accordance with some arbitrary schedule or… not done at all. I remember once being told that time was the cheapest type of literary device.  I would simply offer that time and schedule should almost never be the key organising principle for your change effort, and yet observe how often they are.

There is another reason why time limits are so common. Discombobulation and a decline in productivity often occur early on in a change effort, as individuals struggle to learn new ways of being and doing. The response then is to work through the change process as quickly as possible, which is usually a mistake given the complexity of what you’re trying to accomplish. The best approach, barring an emergency where change is necessary to prevent disasters,  is to be a tortoise–or perhaps a trotting horse, when it comes both to organizational change and cedar clearing. Move at a steady pace, keep your wits about you and your head up so you know when it is time to take a break.

Check out this slide package for a good presentation on this and other pitfalls on the way to organizational change.

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Change is Hard, but how People judge Change is Harder

Posted on March 5, 2010 | 1 comment

The tale of the goddess Athena, springing fully formed (and fully armed!!) from the forehead of Zues is one of the great stories of  Greek mythology, although perhaps it is more accurate to say of Mediterranean basin mythology given that people living there in ancient times shared many of the same myths.  The story is quite colorful, as it actually has Zues swallowing Athena’s mother who busily kept forming Athena inside Zues until she was ready to be launched–a perfect creation. (Here is the Wikipedia version of the tale.)

But unlike the emergence of Athena, everything we have around us in society, in biology, in organizations is the result of a long, often messy, incremental process. (Another word for that is evolution, but I don’t want to get involved in an ideological fracas just yet–although I do hope to tackle the perils of ideology at some point.) None of our current institutions, whether it be the Department of Transportation or the Cable Television System or marriage or astronomy, emerged fully and intelligently formed out of some brilliant individual’s forehead. No, they usually began as half-baked ideas and almost always took turns and detours unanticipated by their originators and early supporters. And, this is the important point, we shouldn’t want it any other way. For only through a process that allows a “thing” to react to the environment around it, change and adapt, can we hope to produce organizations, processes, customs, and institutions that actually work, that deliver most of their promise, that are organically one with their environments.

But if you’re an advocate of a Change Initiative for an organization or a group, the first thing you hear from anyone you brief is: “Well, how is the whole thing going to work?” The only honest answer to that question is “I don’t really know. We’ll have to monitor that carefully.” although by so admitting you might as well just slink back to the advanced methods lab from whence you came. The status quo may have had a 50-year development process with abundant beautiful messiness, but if you as the Change Advocate can’t present the future operating environment as a beautiful schematic in a series of Powerpoint slides, with some vaguely inspirational and symmetrical logo in the corner, then you’re as doomed as doomed can be.

This then becomes a real leadership moment for a Federal Government or any other senior executive. Don’t be the senior executive whose expectations for neat and orderly change are so…well..delusionary that you force your enthusiastic future-thinkers to become hypocrites and to package their proposals in Power-pointless slide decks. Because if you demand certainty, you not only will buy into intellectual fraud, you will also eventually tear the heart out of your change champions.

Approach change for what it is–the normal course adjustment process that keeps your organization alive.

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Posted in Change, Leadership, linkedin

Lessons from a CIA Manager (U)

Posted on March 1, 2010 | 6 comments

OK…..I know…this is a cheap, manipulative title, because in fact my lessons from almost 25 years as a federal manager, almost ten of them as a member of the senior executive service, really have very little in particular to do with the CIA, even though that’s where I was for the duration. So I’ll be curious if putting that word in the Blog Title will drive up  visits. The (U) is an homage to my CIA past; it stands for unclassified. We would have to place such little classification markings after every paragraph we wrote.

So over the years I collected many aphorisms and other concise insights about being a manager and a leader in the government.  Some I’m sure I read somewhere, but can no longer identify the source. Others just came to me, usually in the context of a conversation with others. Again, many if not most of them probably aren’t that unique to government either; I think they have broad application to a wide range of organizations. Because I want to keep my blog postings on the short side, what I will do in this post is list them with a short description when necessary, with the plan to return to most of them individually as subjects of individual posts.

In no particular order:

  1. Executives are individuals who are held accountable for things they cannot control in detail.
  2. Remember, your decisions are going to have much less staying power than you’re expecting them to have. Decisions are not committed relationships; they are more like one-night stands.
  3. Consensus decision-making is an oxymoron. By definition, processes that drive to consensus are actually ways to avoid decisions, except in those very rare cases where everyone in the room is in violent agreement. So really you have two dynamics–you can have a consensus, or, much more likely, you will have to make a decision, i.e. a choice.
  4. Conflict-free meetings should NEVER be your goal, particularly if the issue is at all important. Organize your meetings so  they are argumentative and crunchy–those will always be more productive.
  5. Perfection is never the goal. Progress is the goal.
  6. Leadership is an optimistic activity. Optimism is always the greatest act of rebellion.
  7. Leadership is an emotional activity.
  8. Leadership is, at times, a corny activity.
  9. Leaders must be willing to change their minds, which is another way of saying that leaders must be eager to learn. If you have never changed your mind about some fundamental aspects of your business, then you have not learned.
  10. Your calendar reflects your priorities. You can talk about x or y issue being important to you, but if it never makes your calendar you’re lying to yourself and, worse, lying to others.
  11. Listen to yourself when you’re arguing a  point. Are you arguing to achieve clarity or are you arguing to win? Do the former, not the latter.
  12. Successful leaders are able to disappoint their followers at a rate they can tolerate. This is probably my most important learning and I know where I learned this one, from Ronald Heifetz, who is at the JFK School at Harvard.  Check this link to hear him talk about the difference between technical problems and adaptive challenges.
  13. Heroism is not a leadership strategy.
  14. Breaking through bureaucratic resistance requires the skills of an all-pro running back in American Football. If a hole opens, you have to hit it as quickly and as hard as you can. If you dawdle or hesitate, the hole will close.
  15. A great process is the manager’s best and, I would argue, only true friend.
  16. All excellence in groups derives from individuals providing the group mission with their discretionary energy. But the difficult truth is that managers/leaders can never demand an employee’s discretionary energy. It can only be freely given. At best, the manager/leader can co-create the environment, along with the other group members, that encourages the commitment of discretionary energy.

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Posted in Leadership, linkedin

The Proper Perspective

Posted on February 28, 2010 | Leave a comment

My strategy for adding content to this blog was going to be to start off with a summary posting of the main lessons I had learned from 32 years of government service, and then while away the next few weeks by fleshing out each of the lessons. But I came across this article (it was sent to me by a young man who is trying to carve out a career in national security issues) and I was so impressed by one particular quote from Admiral Mullen, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that I needed to make note of it right away. In this piece Admiral Mullen is reflecting on what he has already learned about the Army during his tenure. And toward the end he talks about the Army being a learning organization and notes:

We are seeing people unafraid to challenge assumptions or old ways. Our midgrade noncommissioned officers and young captains love what they do. They have led in combat. They are remarkably resilient, and they do us all proud. Junior officers and enlisted men and women need to know that it is right to question the direction of their Service and seniors. In fact, they should be rewarded for it. That sort of feedback is healthy, and it foments the kind of change we need.

I am inspired by his words, which, from what I understand from people who know the Admiral, reflect his inner convictions. I also believe his view that junior officers should be rewarded for questioning the direction of their Service and seniors is not a universally-held or even majority conviction among members of the Senior Executive Service. I wish I could honestly write otherwise, but too many seniors I know still want to make decisions secretly, without engaging the workforce, and without inviting real debate.

One of the first steps toward improving the performance of our government is to empower the federal workforce to make a difference. They have good ideas–but they need more leaders who will respect them.

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