Who Are You Calling Old and Selfish?

Posted on April 13, 2010 | Leave a comment
Are Civil Servants Too Old and Selfish for Gov 2.0? That’s the title of an interesting blog post and discussion on Generation Shift. When I saw the tweet about the post well, of course, I took it personally. I’m 55, I’ve been tweeting for almost two years and I can’t really remember when I started Facebook it’s been so long. Not only did I adopt these practices personally, but I promoted them as best as I could at CIA, including being a senior sponsor early on of the Intellipedia effort. I must admit however that all of these activities made me “a person of interest” at CIA–that‘s meant to be funny. (I’m reminded of a conversation I had once with a colleague, during which no doubt I was lamenting the slow pace of change and the general reluctance of government to engage with the new. He looked at me wisely and wryly and observed: ” being for change in a government bureaucracy is not unlike being a mobile home in the path of a tornado.”)
So of course I agree with the principle that government is slow to change, but I don’t think it’s because we are too old and selfish. Yes we are old and no doubt selfish, but that hasn’t stopped us from doing other things that clearly were better for us. In our lifetimes we’ve stopped smoking, started walking long circuits in our neighborhoods most evenings, and learned to recycle plastic and paper products…….so we’re not like dense.
But clearly there is a problem. Why have so many in my generation, particularly in government, decided to draw the line against transparent collaboration (except, of course, they don’t use those terms–the terms I’ve heard are “waste of time” or “lonely hearts clubs.”) Some factors that I think are more credible than the cheap shots of  old and selfish are:
  • Insulation. This applies particularly to government civil servants in managerial slots. Once they reach a position of authority their days become so programmed (with both necessary and Alice-in-Wonderland events) that it becomes impossible for most outside factors to penetrate their consciousness, at least not without serious lag. It takes a real act of will to step outside “the cone of importance“ to look at what is actually going on in the world. This is not necessarily related to age or selfishness.
  • This brings me to a second point, related to insulation, but worth calling out separately. Let‘s call it  Government Exceptionalism. Not unlike the view that America holds an exceptional place in the world and a special role, government exceptionalism argues that the role of government is somehow different from other functions in human and civil society. I don’t know that this position is often explicitly expressed but I would argue that it is implicitly accepted by almost everyone. Those outside government even espouse this view, except they often argue that government is exceptionally inefficient. The function of government itself is inherently broken, they say. But within government, the exceptional argument goes more like this: what we do is very hard, very critical, very special and we just can’t accept any new method that comes down the pike. (I actually don’t believe that most of what government does is exceptional. Most of what government does is actually transactional or knowledge work, which makes it very eligible for the introduction of transparent, collaborative practices.)
  • The final factor I’d offer is Existential Fear. I admit this is probably rather rare, but I do believe there are those in government who understand that Gov 2.0 implementation would eventually lead to a different, and I believe necessarily smaller, footprint for government. Often government is simply the mechanism by which one group of citizens connects to another for necessary interest or mutual advantage and through which the norms of behavior in that transaction are stipulated and enforced. These are exactly the types of activities that mature social networks can do automatically. In the same way that the internet paradigm has destroyed the middleman role in many economic and social activities, social networking has the potential to do the equivalent for government.
(I’m reminded of a visit to my local Post Office almost fifteen years ago. If you remember AOL installation CD’s were everywhere then. It was raining AOL CD’s. This particular year the Post Office had a stack of AOL CD’s available for perusal as you stood in line. When I got to the counter, the postal worker, whom I thought eccentric at the time but now realize was prescient, said “I can’t believe we have these AOL CD’s here. Don’t people realize they will drive us out of business?”)

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Posted in Change, Collaboration, Government Performance, Leadership, linkedin, Nature of Federal Workers, Organizational Dynamics, Social Networks

Leadership Lessons from Galaxy Quest (Friday Afternoon edge-taker)

Posted on April 9, 2010 | 4 comments

Friday afternoon…time to take the edge off the week.

I’ve written before that, as a veteran of many a leadership course–can’t you tell?, I grew quite tired of having to draw leadership lessons from required viewings of war movies. (Henry V is always a favorite here, although to be fair that is one of the more nuanced of the lot.) And I offered up that it would be great fun to work up a leadership seminar based on the movie Galaxy Quest, a sendup of the Star Trek genre. (For those of you who don’t know the movie, well first shame on you, but it features Tim Allen, Alan Rickman, Sigourney Weaver, Tony Shalhoub and several others. They play the actors of a Star Trek-like TV series who many years later make their living by attending fan shows. The problem occurs when the group of actors meet up with a distant alien population, the Thermians, who understood the old TV shows to be historic documents. When these pacific people are threatened by a belligerent enemy planet, they build out all the technology exhibited in Galaxy Quest for real but now need the experienced crew, i.e. the actors, to make it all work correctly. Here’s the trailer.) (It looks like the whole movie is currently available on YouTube, cut up into scenes, if you’ve never seen it.)

So the clips available (legally) are limited, but the clip below actually captures one of my favorite leadership moments. Tony Shalhoub, who plays the engineer “Scotty” character–Tech Sgt. Chen, has been asked to help the gentle Thermians with their engineering problems. The Shalhoub character’s only real expertise, however, is eating, but watch how he engages the Thermians with his questions to draw out the answers they don’t know they already have. So here you see the importance, as a leader, of listening, asking the right questions, and encouraging your colleagues to think for themselves. This has the extra benefit of being a scene cut from the movie, so even if you’re a Galaxy Quest fan you haven’t seen this scene before. (You only need to watch the first scene in this clip, but you may enjoy the others. The clip does seem to play slow most times, but usually plays better if you click through to YouTube itself.)

There are many other wonderful lessons in the movie about the importance of being corny and emotional as a leader and about how a group of selfish actors become a selfless team. Unfortunately, I’m not enough of a hacker to isolate the scenes. But maybe some day, when I’m a high-priced consultant and can afford the film rights…

Happy Weekend!!!

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The Discreet Charms of the North American Knowledge Worker

Posted on April 7, 2010 | 2 comments

Over a very pleasant meal yesterday, my lunch partner and I began to exchange ideas about how best to manage knowledge workers. Quite a challenge, we both agreed, and leaning toward hell when you need to manage knowledge workers against a deadline. This topic deserves more careful consideration, I thought, but given that I’m not in a position to do that right now, a blog posting will have to do.

How to attack the problem? Taxonomies can be useful. I’ve always said the first and extremely important step in analysis is putting things into categories. (Gathering information and studying it are also necessary, but these really are the key steps in research, not analysis.) So for your consideration, RecoveringFed offers the following schema for knowledge workers, at least certain pathologies among them, based on my 25-year career in managing them. (Caveat: These categories are largely based on managing knowledge workers responsible for writing papers. (shudder…) Many knowledge workers, (most?) are still judged against this metric, which I believe for the most part is unfortunate, because there are many more interesting and meaningful ways to measure the impact and productivity of knowledge workers. I am also hopeful that new technologies, represented most recently and dynamically by the iPad, will finally break the absolute bond that written argumentation has on our knowledge culture. All that said, many of the same issues that affect writing also apply to other presentational approaches, such as briefings or multimedia work. In the end, a knowledge worker is justified by sharing her knowledge to achieve or help others reach a desired outcome. Usually that sharing occurs within the context of a deadline.)

And now for the categories…

1. The Dustin. Stereotypically, analyst types are considered to be introverts with deficient social skills. In the extreme, some knowledge workers appear to be borderline autistics, who fail to make eye contact in conversations and lock themselves in their offices to meditate upon their work. Either they demand absolute quiet or can only work with some head-banging music on in the background. Not particularly effective in brainstorming sessions. (Named for Dustin Hoffman and his signature role in The Rain Man.)     Management Approach. Largely TBD by whether they are productive or not. But it is probably not wise to force them into settings and activities that make them uncomfortable. One rule of thumb I always used in management: I am not here to change your personality. If your parents didn’t succeed, there’s little chance any of my interventions will work.

2. The Organizer. I know you’ve met this individual. She is the one who researches the topic to the nth degree, always has a full list of conferences and seminars she can attend to get smarter, usually takes copious research notes and prepares extensive outlines, but somehow never actually makes much progress on the paper or presentation itself. Chatty organizers can be particularly problematic, because they will chat up everyone on the team with their latest research discovery, creating the appearance of progress but preventing its actual attainment. Often when they do try to reach conclusions, organizers find it quite difficult to distinguish the salient from the merely interesting. They are often unable to write for impact because they can’t see the forest for the trees. Management Approach. This is a case where more imaginative job design and collaborative work approaches can maximize the contribution of the organizer. Create the expectation that all research results will be deposited within a collaborative platform available to all. That way, her colleagues can make maximum use of her contributions. (Think about it. Shouldn’t this be standard operating procedure in almost all knowledge work?) Look at the expectations that you have on employees. Why does every knowledge worker have to independently produce a paper or briefing? If research is her strength, build upon it.

3. The Expert Pontificator. In some ways similar to the organizer, except that the EP, unlike the organizer who really does like to research and discover new stuff, usually huffs and puffs based on ideas harvested a long time ago in a galaxy far away. (I was going to call this type the Huffer-Puffer, the term I’ve used in the work place, but I didn’t think the meaning would be obvious.) There’s not much more really that needs to be said about the EP who, unlike the previous two types, is often not productive at all in my experience.  Unlike the Dustin, who just doesn’t participate in brainstorming sessions, the EP is capable of destroying them. Management Approach. It is important that you not allow the EP to dominate discussions and inhibit other team members. Talking privately to EPs about their behavior never works; they are impervious. But politely but firmly telling them in a meeting that it is time for others to speak usually works, although it may make them angry and lead them to sulk which, at least tactically, gets you what you wanted anyway–they shut up. (Remember the language: “it is time for others to speak” not “you’re dominating the discussion. let others talk.” Don’t personalize it.) Also, it is important for other team members to see you tackle the issue. As a manager you are judged by whether you tackle the hard problems directly and when you fail to do so, you diminish your leadership bank account. Another benefit accrues when you tackle the issue–the other team members become empowered to handle situations themselves because you have clearly established the norms of behaviors. In fact, perhaps the only hope of getting through to EPs and thus create the conditions that will motivate them to change is if they begin to hear the same constant message from everyone.

4. The Dominator. There is a striking difference between the EP and the Dominator; the Dominator actually knows his stuff and tends to have a low tolerance for those he considers less capable . (This is also different from the EPs, who actually like to be with people who are not capable because they are more likely to form the fawning audience.) Dominators are almost always productive because they are in fact competent; but their presence can stifle the development of other knowledge workers and lead to group think around the Dominator’s preferred solutions. Dominators epitomize the paradox of expertise–they are often the last ones to detect systemic change because they are such export defenders of the current paradigm. Dominators can be wrong but their usual expertise with rhetorical techniques can overwhelm the argument of others even when in the end they will be proven correct. Management Approach. Some of the same techniques you used with the EP are necessary with Dominators, but you need to be careful because they are productive and necessary voices on your team. Just because they are cocksure doesn’t mean they are wrong. One technique you might try is asking dominators to create Team B analysis to argue against the prevailing wisdom. If you make the task rewarding and very competitive (dominators love competition), they may actually do a very good job of tearing down their own arguments. It could just be a learning experience for them.

The next three categories in the schema deal more specifically with the productivity part of knowledge work, i.e. these types describe styles in preparing presentations against a deadline. They can be used in conjunction with the previous four categories, so, for example, you can have a dominator who is a crammer and an organizer who passes the trash. (Which gets me to think that an individual’s cognitive style can also be laid over these categories; there are many dimensions to knowledge work and I am in fact only covering a slice of it in this posting.)

5. The Vester. You’re a manager, you check with your team member who tells you that the paper due to the client in one month is already well underway. You chat about it again in two weeks and yup, we’re still on track but no, he doesn’t have anything to show you yet.  Essentially the same answer a week later; not only have you not seen anything, neither have any of his colleagues. When you and the others finally see the presentation a couple of days before the deadline, it is just not as good as you expected, there are significant conceptual issues, and the whole project would have benefited from others input much earlier on in the process. The Vester is the knowledge worker who wants to do everything privately, who keeps everything close to his vest, and yet is not always capable of executing well enough by himself,  putting aside for now the reality that in almost all knowledge work projects, the product that benefits from several inputs will be better than the single-threaded one. Management Approach. This is particularly difficult type because 1. it is common and 2. generally it is incentivized by our reward and recognition system. Knowledge workers want to be single or primary authors because they are not stupid and seek to maximize their rewards and recognition. One of the approaches I used, and to be honest I don’t know that I had as much success as I wanted, was to tell colleagues their performance would be judged not by how absolutely perfect their product was, but by whether their results were in line with what I expected from someone of that experience and background. So, for example, drawing implications out for a client is usually much more difficult than describing the possible solutions spaces. And I would point out that spending two weeks trying to get a difficult bit right was not a very smart use of their time if I or another team member could complete that particular task more efficiently. There’s much more to be said on this issue but in the interest of conciseness, which I’m afraid may already be a lost cause, I’ll move on.

6. The Crammer. This is me. This is my usual approach to working on projects. I don’t like to start writing until I know exactly what I want to say and mysteriously I often don’t know what I want to say until the night before the deadline. I’d like to think that I execute well, but I disappointed in my career. It is a high-risk approach to knowledge work. The most disconcerting part about being a crammer is that it also leads you into becoming a liar. I’ve had managers, for example, who were hoverers, who asked you every week, or more often, how your project was going. So every time, even though I may not even have put finger to keypad yet, I would invent some progress report–“yup, I did ten paragraphs this week.” When Knowledge Workers Lie!!! Management Approach. OK, some have suggested lying about the deadline. Your crammer is already lying to you; you are creating a vicious cycle. Or requiring them to turn in sections along the way. Also bad idea!! Usually crammers only do their best work when they are in that caffeinated, adrenaline surge of creativity. You may lose less hair as a manager in the short term, but the final product will suck. A better idea is to create another real deadline or event before the project deadline that forces the cramming to occur sooner. So for example, scheduling an important, desirable trip, conference that overlaps the deadline is always a good idea. I’ve also found that crammers, at least the well-intentioned ones, work better when they are teamed with another colleague who is more methodical, particularly someone you know they have good rapport with. It is one thing to disrespect a deadline; another to disappoint a colleague. Another benefit for collaborative work design.

7. The Garbage-person. For my money, the worst type of knowledge worker, at least in terms of productivity. They don’t even try to do good work, unlike the inexperienced or poor performer who actually is not yet capable of better product. The garbage-person, who in some ways is a product of the dysfunctions of knowledge work,  has decided that, because the quality control and editorial process mangles her intellectual property and/or does her work for her, it’s not worth her time to even try. So she turns in work that represents the minimum possible effort. Management Approach. Here is another type who would benefit from working in a more transparent, collaborative environment. One, the example of others work may penetrate. (cross your fingers) Two, contributing to the projects of others may be more rewarding and rekindle in them the desire to do good work of their own. But let’s not kid ourselves. The garbage-people are hard cases; they are cynics, which is  the most destructive force in a team.

My outline had me making a few more generic points about managing knowledge workers, but I’m sure I’ve exhausted your patience as a reader. I know I’ve exhausted my energy as a writer. Next post!!!

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Posted in Knowledge Work, Leadership, linkedin, Work Design

The Two Tow Trucks–Friday Afternoon Edge Taker-3

Posted on April 2, 2010 | 1 comment

My car has a manual transmission. I’ve always driven cars with stick shifts–I just love the more intimate connection with the engine. I particularly love to drive the 6-speed manual, diesel-engined cars you get to rent in Europe. (I think one of the dynamics you have to guard against as you get older, by the way, is the inclination to want to make things smoother–take the bumps and dips out of life and experiences. Not only does this make life less zestful, but it’s actually bad for you. The more experiences you have, the sharper you remain. Researchers, for example, have concluded that walking barefoot (and baring other appendages) is actually good for your brain health. Exposing and stimulating all those nerve endings, otherwise trapped behind layers of fabric, keep your mind even more active. See here for the radical cure.

But as I was saying, my car has almost 90k miles with its original clutch, a personal best for me. And the specter of clutch failure had been preying on my mind for about twenty thousand miles when Wednesday, KERPLANK, the clutch pedal collapsed to the floorboard, and I immediately had to pull over. (Those of you who are car experts will recognize this turned out to be not the clutch, but a leak in the hydraulics–a more reasonably priced repair but a turn of events which still leaves me prey to clutchophobia. Sigh…) FINALLY I get to call AAA after decades of loyal subsidies. The service rep was excellent, the tow truck arrives within 15 minutes of the call, drives past me on the two-lane residential street, and proceeds to make a u-turn to come back to me.

In this picture, you can see the truck in the rear view mirror just as it has become stuck in the mudpit on the shoulder. Perhaps you’ve heard it’s been raining a lot on the East Coast this year.

After about five minutes of reverse-forward, forward-reverse, the driver stops by to say Hi and to tell me he has called another tow truck to tow him out of the mud pit. Here they are when they first meet.

And here you see the kiss and embrace of the two trucks.

And the resulting environmental damage.

The truck driver was a jolly fellow. I’ve tweeted this elsewhere, but I took the opportunity to ask him which cars he towed most often. With no hesitation, he said VWs. The cars he tows least–Nissans.

Happy Spring to all!!!

PS: I have no connection and receive no financial remuneration from any of  companies/businesses mentioned.

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Arbitrary Work Design is a Sin against Nature

Posted on April 1, 2010 | Leave a comment

My guess is that the next 10-20 years are going to see a revolution in work design and productivity–particularly in knowledge work–that will topple the concept of jobs. I’ve written about this before, here, but I was fired up again this morning while glancing at a lovely website, Design Observer, and a recent posting there by Azby Brown, a New Orleans native who has been living in Japan for more than 20 years. (Now that must be a very creative combination of cultures.) Brown in his post talks about the lessons he has learned from master Japanese carpenters, and this passage struck me in particular:

The final conversation was about microclimates. Master Nishioka was describing to me how important it was to match a tree to its structural use in the building, based on where on the hillside it grew. “Valley trees are too wet for most uses, trees at the top of the hill sprout a lot of branches because they don’t have to compete and are very knotty, but trees from the middle slopes compete with others and have long trunks with branches clustered toward their crowns. Those make the best beams, because they’re straight and fairly free of knots.” He went on to describe how trees from the north face differ from those found on the south, and so on.

This is no doubt something that most experienced carpenters know; that the environment trees grow in shapes their function as wood. I’m also familiar with this same type of issue relative to grapes grown for wine. Winemakers increasingly are marketing their better wines not just on vintage, but on the particular hill slope the grapes grew on, for example.

And yet when we match people to jobs, well oftentimes we don’t even try. Job descriptions are created in the general, not in the particular, and although some of this production line approach may be suitable for certain industries, it is not suitable for knowledge work. If mission performance suffers, the usual management response today is to find fault first with the person, not with the job design. We would be more productive and more in balance with nature  if we reversed the response. After all, job design is generalized; the person is not–each of us is the results of a particular path we took in life, none of our trillions of steps can be retraced. It strikes me that if people are indeed our most valuable resource (jargon sigh), then we should care as much as carpenters and winemakers do to take full advantage of their individual and particular talents.

Speaking of trees, nature, and balance, the cherry blossoms were at their peak yesterday in Washington D.C.

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The Difference Between a Leader and an Asshole

Posted on March 31, 2010 | 2 comments

Ah…retired life can be so liberating. I don’t think I’ve ever used the word “asshole” in a title, although it has too frequently been the mental, unspoken caption I’ve applied to individuals entering my life. (And I’m sure I’ve been mistaken or horribly unfair in many cases where I’ve applied the word. There are so many reasons to avoid being judgmental about people, not the least of which is that you are frequently ignorant of the context of their actions.) (I’m also wondering what impact using the word “asshole” in my title will have on the number of visitors to my blog. Clearly some individuals are using search terms on the internet that I don’t normally employ; it always amuses me when, based on my use of a particular word in a tweet, a new cohort of followers emerge, only to drift away as they come to realize I actually write more about philosophers than pornographers. But I digress…)

Anyway, yesterday I was having a fun and productive lunch and my companion noted, wisely, that the qualities that allow individuals to achieve positions of status  and thus titular leadership in an organization are not synonymous with the real qualities of leadership. (Bulletin: another problem with our personnel system has been discovered!!) But the comment got me to think whether we can articulate these two different lists of attributes. Actually, this blog is all about articulating the leadership list, so the task really is to create the “so you want to be a leader” list. But then I remembered one of the bloggers I follow has already created such a list, at least the negative version. Bob Sutton, a business professor at Stanford, has a great blog called Work Matters and a great checklist, developed with Guy Kawasaki, on asshole behavior. Many of the behaviors listed are hard and tough–just the kind of behavior an ambitious person may engage in in the struggle to the top; a sure sign that your organization is either a. immature or b. ossified is if it equates being hard and tough with being a leader. (Which reminds me of one of my pet peeves: leadership courses that force students to watch only WAR MOVIES to learn leadership attributes. But that would be a topic for another post.) In any case, the Sutton/Kawasaki  list is excellent; I’m particularly fond of #8: Card Shark. Individuals who hoard information should be disqualified permanently from leadership positions.

There is a lot of great content on Sutton’s blog. I love his list of “15 things I believe in,” which runs as a side panel. Every one is a gem. Number 15 for example: work is an overrated activity.

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Friday Afternoon Edge Taker–2

Posted on March 26, 2010 | 1 comment

While in Florida doing the spring training thing, I met one of my college roommate’s fellow ushers at the Washington Nationals ballpark in Viera. This is a new acquaintance for my longstanding friend Susan and as the three of us were having lunch the usher mentioned she had worked in Germany for 30 years as a school nurse in the DOD school system for military dependents. Oh, I had lived in Germany as a kid, I said. I remembered it fondly, particularly my sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Fisher, whom I consider the best teacher I ever had. Mrs. Fisher was a Japanese-American and the only other fact I remembered about her personally was that she liked Lana Turner movies.

Susan’s fellow usher said: Mrs. Fisher!! One of my best friends in Germany was a Mrs. Fisher who was a Japanese-American. She had retired and was now living in Chicago.

Could it be? Yes, it could be. I now have Mrs. Fisher’s email and will send her a note reintroducing myself. I hope she remembers me from 44 years ago.

And I got to thinking about the incredibly strange, surprising, scary, and yet at at times incredibly uplifting journey life can be. Of course this is just some 1 in a trillion coincidence. No matter that the previous day I had been thinking about what metric I should employ to decide among the options available to me in my second life. And I had decided, I should choose the option which offers me the greatest opportunity to learn. Nah…it is just a coincidence, I’m sure.

But I’m reminded of the great book I read more than ten years ago, Leadership and the New Science by Meg Wheatley. If you check her website you learn it is now in its third edition. One of the most inspirational statements I ever encountered came from that book’s first edition. In the epilogue, it used to say, but now I think it has been rewritten, that we should live our lives in confidence, knowing each step we take brings us closer to understanding the meaning of our lives.

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Leadership Lessons from the Passage of Health Care Reform

Posted on March 25, 2010 | 1 comment

I’m sure others will soon, if they haven’t already, write on this topic and I imagine the business schools will take it on as a case study, but the passage of health care reform strikes me as chock full of practical leadership-management lessons. My interest is not in the pros and cons of the legislation, but rather in the approach President Obama took as a leader of the process. Leadership is, after all, a value neutral proposition; history has shown many times over that great leaders can do horrible or wonderful things. Often only the passage of time will reveal which is the case.

Health care reform of course suffered greatly from a dynamic already discussed in this blog–reform efforts are expected to be letter perfect from the get-go, even though the status quo itself evolved unevenly in fits and starts over a very long time period. It is this dynamic that almost always places reform efforts in defensive positions, regardless of their merits. So to lead the effort to pass the legislation, President Obama had to demonstrate great persistence. But it was more than just persistence. The President had to indicate, by his actions not just his words, that passage of the health care reform legislation was his single most important priority (Lesson 10). That’s why it was particularly effective, I thought, at the end when the President postponed and then rescheduled his Asia trip to stay home to continue twisting Democratic appendages. Whether the postponements were genuine or part of a considered strategy hardly matters. Creating drama, after all, is a useful leadership strategy when you’re in a difficult struggle. Battlefield commanders have long known this. (The need to create drama is part of what I’m driving at when I say in Lessons 7 and 8 that Leadership is emotional and corny. If you’re above a little theatrics when something is really important to you then you do not understand fully the high emotional content of leadership and followership.)

Another consequence of Obama’s dramatic personal interventions in the Republican/Democratic congressional death match was that he was able at key moments to reframe the debate. The televised working sessions with Republicans were really about trying to regain control of the context of the legislation. Whenever you’re involved in a change effort, you will find those who don’t agree with you will likely first try passive/aggressive approaches. If those don’t work then they will still, I think, try indirect approaches such as reframing the terms of debate. This you must avoid at all costs. Just think back on the number of times a reform effort you considered worthy was ambushed by issues that were only tangentially related to the central thrust.

By the way another leadership lesson was illustrated by President Obama’s sessions with Republican lawmakers. And that is Lesson 4–conflicted, crunchy meetings are usually a very good thing. In this case I think both sides of the debate gained by discussing the substance of their disagreements, rather than the headlines.

But I think the most important lesson to be illustrated is #12, first articulated to my knowledge by Ron Heifetz of the JFK school: leadership is disappointing your followers at a rate they can tolerate. To get the legislation passed, President Obama had to abandon several goals that were and still are dear to his core followers. He certainly disappointed people and, although he carried these followers  in the health care vote, only the passage of time will reveal whether in the end they will tolerate the disappointment. One of the disappointments these followers carry, no doubt, is the regret that President Obama was not more heroic. What do heroes do? They fall on their swords. But as Lesson 13 states: heroism is not a leadership strategy. Why? Well, you can’t be heroic very often; it does not bear repetition. And in the end, heroism depletes your leadership savings account, leaving you with nothing to call upon to face the next challenge.

And so I’m reminded of Lesson 19: Leaders essentially have bank accounts that contain the deposits of their employees’ trust. Unlike the spending habits of the American public in the last decade, leaders need to draw down upon those trust accounts very carefully. You will gain new deposits when you meet your employee’s expectations but remember more often than not you’re in the business of disappointing them, so make withdrawals carefully. If you don’t you will find that when you most need your employees’ discretionary energy, your trust account is overdrawn.

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White Noise

Posted on March 22, 2010 | Leave a comment

I was in Manhattan this weekend doing the Broadway show thing, staying at a hotel in the 50’s on Lexington Avenue. Great location but the street noise makes it tough to sleep. No matter how high up you are, you can hear what’s going on in the city at that very moment, the sirens, the loud, perhaps somewhat sloppy couples, the trucks in reverse. The second night I tried to create more white noise by turning the thermostat down, forcing the fan to run continuously. It masked the street noise and, at least for me, made it easier to sleep. But it got me to thinking that white noise isn’t just something you create to sleep in a Manhattan hotel room; white noise is a condition of most organizations. White noise is the foreground of regularly scheduled activities and, dare I say it, make-work that mask the sounds of the real work and concerns of the individuals in your organization.

Being a RecoveringFed, I’m familiar with all the white noise we have in government. President Obama appointed Jeffrey Zients to be the government’s Chief Performance Officer in part to whack away at the white noise in government, although to my knowledge he’s never used those terms to describe his mission. So what are some specific examples of the white noise that get in the way of hearing reality:

  • The litany of regularly-scheduled meetings, all with a specific liturgy, from which one could not deviate. Aaaaargh!! Haven’t you been hungry sometimes to discuss what’s really happening–the true truth–at a meeting? Have you ever been the one to try to initiate that conversation? Fun, huh? So instead of admitting, for example, that the workforce doesn’t take seriously the latest edict from up high because it knows from past experience that we have no mechanism to follow-up on compliance, we instead discuss the text of the official announcement. White Noise!!
  • The entire industry of official announcements and organizational newsletters is a classic example of White Noise. Smart employees, i.e. most of them, approach these documents as if they were deconstructonist literary critics, scouring the texts for hidden meanings and what was not said. (This reminds me of my visits to the area of France known as Languedoc where Nostredamus lived off and on. When you tour the region, you visit this one village, Alet les Bains, which legend paints as a town in which Nostredamus lived. Not because he ever wrote about the town (and he wrote extensively of the region) but because he never wrote about the town–a clue to its importance to him. But…..I digress.)
  • Metrics. Measuring the really important–your organization’s progress toward its goals and your staff’s progress toward their personal bests–is a key executive function. But I’ve seen too many metrics that are nothing but make-work, and boy, do they take a lot of work!! How do you know which category your metrics efforts fall into? Has your organization first had a serious conversation, reviewed at least annually, about what specifically it wants to accomplish in a given timeframe and how tactically it plans to get there? Unless you’ve had that conversation, your metrics are almost certainly White Noise.

And the list could go on.

So, how does one break through White Noise? One tool are in fact social networks, which are, at an elementary level, simply trying to make transparent and persistent the sounds of the city, the conversations that are going on anyway among your employees, your customers, your clients, and your colleagues. There is NO WORSE feeling as a manager than to be the last to know. And there is no worse indictment of your performance as a leader. Encouraging a culture in your organization and within your network where people want you to know the truth is one of the most powerful tools you can have as a manager. And as a tactic nothing makes transparency easier than the simple, intuitive platforms with which most of your employees are already familiar.

But it will be hard at first. Senior leaders, and for some reason I think government executives suffer from this more acutely,  flinch when they hear what their employees and customers really think. They would rather, I guess, not hear the sirens, the loud arguments among their staff, or even about the individuals and processes threatening to throw the entire organization into reverse. They live under the delusion that if you don’t hear about it, it’s not really happening. They turn on the White Noise.

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Posted in Government Performance, Leadership, linkedin, Organizational Dynamics, Social Networks

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Friday Afternoon Edge-taker (One Day Early)

Posted on March 18, 2010 | Leave a comment

I’m riding the DC metro today and I overhear the following conversation. Scout’s honor.

Two women, in their 40s, probably in the workforce on their lunch break. They’re talking about a television show and the conversation turns to exotic dancers and pole dancing.

Woman 1: Hey did you hear that some people are lobbying to make pole dancing an Olympic sport?
Woman 2: No, but that would be good. It would give exotic dancers another career option.
Woman 1: You know one thing I’ve never understood is where do they put their money.
Woman 2: What do you mean?
Woman 1: Well if they get $1200 in tips where do they put it. I mean if they get 12 $100 bills well I can see how they could tuck that into their G-string but what if they get it all in twenties. Where do they put it.
Woman 2. Well, maybe they have lockers.

 
In my effort to keep readers educated as to latest trends, here’s a link to a story about the Olympic petition.

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