Learn the 5 steps to getting ahead at work.
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Act Appropriately to Your Business Situation
Many managers over-use certain styles of management, and need to build their strength in other styles.
Monday’s Tip: Determine if you over-use a management style. Think about your performance as a manager in the past month. Have you been dropping the hammer too much? Have you been disappointed by people because you consistently fail to hold them to account? You need to be able to use a variety of leadership styles to be effective as a manager.
Tuesday’s Tip: Act with appropriate urgency. We sometimes like to think everything is urgent all the time, but your business situation will determine your degree of urgency. If you in a turnaround situation, for example, then you should be very impatient. Under normal business circumstances, you should reel-in your level of urgency.
Wednesday’s Tip: Gather the right level of information. Some situations call for a leadership style that requires making decisions quickly. Other situations are better handled by gathering more information before making a decision. Both are correct – which one is most appropriate in your situation?
Thursday’s Tip: Consider your business situation when determining your priorities this week. Your priorities during the start of phase of a project, are much different than those when a project is up and running. Yet some people fail to adjust their priorities accordingly.
Friday’s Tip: Make sure others understand the business situation. You have spent this week examining how you should act and react based on your business situation. Make sure your people, and other stakeholders understand how you view the business situation
How to Get Ahead — Don’t Be an Idiot
Every now and then Jed or I will be sitting across the table from someone who will confide in us that he really wants to be promoted into the next job. Sometimes, he may not know what that next job is, but he really wants it. “How do I get ahead?”, he may ask of us. This got me to thinking:
Boot-licking – Constant, shameless, thorough and quality bootlicking.
Eliminate the competition by quietly and carefully sabotaging their every move. If you think they might be higher in the standings than you for the next role — take them out.
Sewering Your Boss — Maybe if you make her look stupid enough, they’ll fire her, and put you in her role.
Constantly Champion Your Own Virtues – If people don’t know how wonderful you are, it’s about time you told them. Don’t be afraid to repeat, ad nauseam.
Sorry – I seem to have lost my inner-monologue.
It’s frightening how many people think that one or more of the above will work. We see it time and time again, even if people don’t fully admit to employing some or all of these techniques.
There is no doubt that occasionally a boot-licker will slip between the cracks and have some success for a limited period of time. Maybe even a year or two. However, there is always a reckoning. This is not to say that the most qualified person always gets the job – organizational politics are a fact of life that people need to accept. I don’t know of any organizations that are pure meritocracies.
But people who attempt to prosper by insincere means most often meet their demise with the same level of intensity as they played the game. What comes around goes around – even though it may take longer than many of us might like.
So how do you get ahead in your career? Start by not being an idiot. If you can’t manage that, you’re not going to get ahead anyway, so you might as well cut your losses now. (Oops – there’s my inner-monologue again).
If you want some other ideas, download our latest podcast on How to Get Ahead – Wily Manager Style.
In the meantime… let’s be careful out there.
Micro-Managing: A Great Way to Get Fired
OK – we’ve all done it. Decided to do something ourselves because its easier and faster than holding the appropriate person to account. Maybe you’ve even done it with your children. Micro-managing – the gift that keeps on destroying.
Every manager has been warned against this, so let’s look at why it happens, given the most common excuses most managers give for doing so:
It’s faster to do it myself. It probably is faster… the first time. But if you look at the amount of time it will take you to teach or correct someone else in the execution of a task, versus the amount of time it will take you to do it on an ongoing basis, the answer is clear.
I can do it better. You probably can… for a while. However, if you insist on doing every individual task yourself, you will become quickly overwhelmed, and will end up doing some (high) proportion of those tasks poorly.
My people aren’t capable. If this is the case for any amount of time, you are clearly not doing your job as a manager. It is your job to develop people. Occasionally you truly don’t have the right talent, in which case you have to make changes to your talent bench.
I need to keep close to the details. Actually, you probably don’t. As a manager, it is not your job to be expert at everything. It’s your job to create experts, and be able to ask some semi-intelligent questions of them.
If I don’t do all these tasks, I won’t be useful anymore. Listen to yourself. If you’re that insecure in your role as a leader, you need to examine whether you should be in a management role at all.
The bottom line is that micro-managers sap the productivity out of organizations by failing to capture the discretionary effort of their employees. They don’t develop people, which is a primary function of a leader. They also limit their own career mobility by trying to make themselves indispensible in the role they are in.
Micro-management is a self-destructive behaviour, and a great way to get fired. Then you’ll have lot’s of time.
The Results-Oriented Work Environment (ROWE)
Apparently the most recent flavour of the month is the Results-Oriented Work Environment or ROWE for those who prefer to only work with acronyms. It a great name because how could anyone not want a more results-oriented work place? Some of its detractors call it something different – anarchy. I would probably call it self-employment.
ROWE, in its most current incarnation, was pioneered at Best Buy, and is in use at other high profile companies such as IBM and Netflix. The theory is a simple one: employees set their own time, schedules, and work methods, and are instead measured on the output of what they produce. In theory, it sounds like an excellent idea, and in certain cases it could probably work very well.
I can think of a two situations where it really wouldn’t work:
- It can’t work where there’s a high degree of inter-dependence with other stakeholders. As a refugee of the Retail Food Industry, I can say without reservation that it would be a disaster if employees wrote their own schedule. As great as it would be for the bulk of employees to work banker’s hours, it would get pretty frustrating for customers who predominantly shop at nights and on weekends.
- It can’t work in situations where it is difficult to measure the output of employee effort. If there is any degree of variation in work processes, then the measurement thereby becomes very difficult. For example, any profession with case-work (lawyers, social workers, insurance etc.) are inherently difficult to measure. Some cases may be easily wrapped up in a few minutes, while others may require weeks of research and follow up.
I know we’re all supposed to buy-in to the myth that any and all things are measurable, but the luxury of believing that falls only to academics who have never had to actually measure anything. Ask a professor how to measure teaching effectiveness, and watch her face as she looks like your dog when you pretend to throw the ball and then hide it behind your back.
The second group of people who insist that all things are measureable are management consultants – who, (for the low cost of $5000/day plus expenses) are more than willing to help you measure everything in your business. Unlike the professors, these folks don’t believe it, but they make good money convincing organizations to try it.
Should you try to better focus your organization on results? Yes – that’s your job as a manager.
Should you impose measurement systems on everything? Maybe – it depends on your business, and how meaningful you can make your metrics. Where possible, you should measure and evaluate people mostly on their output.
Should you set people loose and tell them as long as they produce X widgets in a given week, they can do whatever they want? I think that’s a recipe for disaster for employee morale, risk management, and true accountability.
Of course, that’s just my opinion, I could be wrong (with thanks to Dennis Miller).
The Vision Statement
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Vision helps to define where the organization is headed. The vision should paint a clear and compelling view of the future that helps everyone understand where the organization is headed and perhaps what it will be like once you’ve reached your desired state. It must motivate, be ambitious and should stretch people to achieve more than they thought possible.
A clear vision is one that answers the question …Where are we headed?
Once you have your vision in place, then you can proceed with the strategies, plans and budgets to map out exactly how you will move ahead to realize the vision.
A clear vision has the potential to break through all the forces that support the status quo and encourage a true commitment by:
1. CLARIFYING the general DIRECTION for the organization;
2. MOTIVATING people to take ACTION in the right direction;
What Makes a Vision Great?
Clearly, some visions are better than others. Who can question the success of Bill Gates’ “A computer on every desktop” at Microsoft? This vision was successful because it possessed a set of characteristics shared by all great visions. Great visions are:
- Imaginable – they convey a picture of what the future should look like.
- Desirable – they appeal to the long-term interests of employees, customers, stockholders, and others who have a stake in the enterprise.
- Flexible – they accommodate individual initiative and allow alternative responses in light of changing conditions.
- Memorable – they communicate a message easily and are somehow ‘catchy’ or hard to forget?
What Works and What Doesn’t Work
What Works
- Trying to see – literally – possible futures
- Visions that are so clear they can be articulated in one minute or less
- Vision statements that are creative and memorable. It needs to be simple, yet catchy to make it stand out. Think short, fun and to the point.
What Doesn’t
- Assuming linear or logical plans and budgets alone adequately guide behavior when you’re trying to leap into the future
- Overly analytic, financially based vision exercises
- Giving fifty-four logical reasons why our future needs to look different than our past
Get the Complete ‘Strategy Starter Kit’
The Strategy Starter Kit includes:
- Strategy Starter Kit Workbook (pdf, 40 pages) – A series of questions and fill-in-the-blanks that result in your completed Business Planning Document, containing aligned Mission, Vision, Strategies, Goals & Objectives, as well as a Sustainment Plan to ensure success.
- ‘Aligning Vision, Mission & Goals’ Full-Length Video (approx. 15 minutes) – Audio (mp3) and Visual Slides (ppt) can be downloaded separately
- ‘Aligning Vision, Mission & Goals’ Cheat Sheet (pdf, 1 page)
- ‘Mission Statements’ Podcast + Podcast Slides (mp3, ppt)
- ‘Mission Statements’ Cheat Sheet (pdf, 1 page)
- ‘The Vision Statement’ Podcast & Podcast Slides (mp3, ppt)
- ‘The Vision Statement’ Cheat Sheet (pdf, 1 page)
- ‘SMART Goals and HARD Goals’ Podcast & Podcast Slides (mp3, ppt)
- ‘SMART Goals and HARD Goals’ Cheat Sheet(pdf, 1 page)
Get instant access to the Strategy Starter Kit…
Mission Statements
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While the vision statement is future oriented and describes where the organization wants to be in the future, mission statements are firmly grounded in the present, describing what the organization, department or team does. The Mission describes the purpose of your organization, product or service. It answers the question “Why are we here?”
Even if you are working within a larger organization think as though you are in business for yourself as though you are a consultant or contractor with skills and talent the organization needs for a specific purpose. Why do internal or external customers need you? What is your team or department committed to providing to it’s internal or external customers?
Why Create a Mission?
A clear mission provides grounding and purpose to your organization. It communicates the focus of the organization. What the organization does. It’s purpose. A well-written and well-communicated Mission can coordinate the actions of many people in a fast, efficient way.
Without a focused mission statement, the risk is that the organization limps along, attempting to be everything for everyone, with no limits, no parameters, and no focus. Lacking focus the organizations energies and resources may become stretched over more activities than can be properly served with excellence.
Mission statements help clarify what business you are in; with that clarity you are then in a much better position to articulate your strategies and goals.
What Works and What Doesn’t Work
What Works:
- Mission statements that are clear statements of the business purpose
- Missions that are moving, capturing your heart as well as your head
- Focused language that provides guidance in decision-making, clearly explaining what the company or department or team does.
What Doesn’t:
- Unfocused statements – we will be successful in everything we do … we will exceed the expectations of our customers.
- When the Mission is too confusing. If your mission statement is packed full of technical terminology and business lingo, it loses its effectiveness.
- Mission Statements that are too long – trying to cover absolutely everything. Relating fifty-four things the company does.
- A Mission that is not grounded in reality. It’s okay to be hopeful, but when hopefulness crosses the line into sheer fantasy … there is a problem.
Get the Complete ‘Strategy Starter Kit’
The Strategy Starter Kit includes:
- Strategy Starter Kit Workbook (pdf, 40 pages) – A series of questions and fill-in-the-blanks that result in your completed Business Planning Document, containing aligned Mission, Vision, Strategies, Goals & Objectives, as well as a Sustainment Plan to ensure success.
- ‘Aligning Vision, Mission & Goals’ Full-Length Video (approx. 15 minutes) – Audio (mp3) and Visual Slides (ppt) can be downloaded separately
- ‘Aligning Vision, Mission & Goals’ Cheat Sheet (pdf, 1 page)
- ‘Mission Statements’ Podcast + Podcast Slides (mp3, ppt)
- ‘Mission Statements’ Cheat Sheet (pdf, 1 page)
- ‘The Vision Statement’ Podcast & Podcast Slides (mp3, ppt)
- ‘The Vision Statement’ Cheat Sheet (pdf, 1 page)
- ‘SMART Goals and HARD Goals’ Podcast & Podcast Slides (mp3, ppt)
- ‘SMART Goals and HARD Goals’ Cheat Sheet (pdf, 1 page)
Get instant access to the complete Strategy Starter Kit…
STARS – Matching Strategy to the Situation
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Effective leaders strategically change their leadership behaviors depending on the type of business situation they encounter. They make decisions and take actions differently in different situations. Here’s how they do it:
If the business situation can be described as a ‘Start-Up‘, then:
- Degree of Urgency: HIGH
- More Learning or Doing: DOING
- Offence or Defence: OFFENCE
- Tough Calls: MAKE NOW
- First Action: ASSEMBLE TEAM & RESOURCES
If the business situation can be described as a ‘Turnaround‘, then:
- Degree of Urgency: VERY HIGH
- More Learning or Doing: DOING
- Offence or Defence: DEFENCE
- Tough Calls: MAKE RIGHT NOW
- First Action: CUT TO DEFENDABLE CORE THEN REBUILD
If the business situation can be described as a ‘Accelerated Growth‘, then:
- Degree of Urgency: HIGH
- More Learning or Doing: DOING
- Offence or Defence: OFFENCE
- Tough Calls: LEARN THEN ACT
- First Action: LEARN QUICKLY, PERMIT MISTAKES
If the business situation can be described as a ‘Realignment‘, then:
- Degree of Urgency: MODERATE
- More Learning or Doing: LEARNING
- Offence or Defence: OFFENCE
- Tough Calls: LEARN THEN ACT
- First Action: STUDY THEN REDIRECT RESOURCES
If the business situation can be described as a ‘Sustaining Success‘, then:
- Degree of Urgency: LOW
- More Learning or Doing: LEARNING
- Offence or Defence: DEFENCE
- Tough Calls: LEARN THEN ACT
- First Action: STUDY THEN CREATE URGENCY FOR CHANGE
For more information about the STARS Model, see Michael Watkins’ book, The First 90 Days.
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STARS – Matching Strategy to the Situation
Different business situations require different managerial behaviors. In this podcast, find out how to make decisions and take action in a way that is appropriate for different situations.
Listen to the STARS Podcast:
Take a look at the ‘STARS‘ Cheat Sheet
Politeness in the Workplace? Go #@$% Yourself!
I’m not really sure when it happened. Sometime over the last few years it has become socially acceptable to have a potty-mouth at the office. Most often I am invited into workplaces for short periods of time – usually a few months – so I normally don’t know anyone when I first show up, and have to take some time to get to know people.
I find it incredible that people who don’t know me are quite willing to use exceptionally foul language in our very first meeting. I should clarify two things:
1) I’m not there to fire them, or otherwise torture them… which may be construed as just-cause for an expletive or two.
2) I’m not offended by any of this, and use my own fair-share of foul words in more familiar company.
I just find it curious that people think words your mother always told you she didn’t want to hear are now common-place in work settings. In my experience, this transcends just about all demographic groups. It is not just younger people, nor is it just men. I have witnessed this in large cities, and small ones, in a wide variety of industries. I think it’s safe to say this has become a societal thing.
So… what is to be done? Probably nothing. But I would caution anyone who cares that first impressions are very powerful, and if you litter your first impression with language that would make a lumberjack blush, then you will inevitably come across as insensitive and less intelligent.
As a general rule of thumb, it might be good to know someone’s last name, before asking them (in so many words) if they like sex and travel. Likewise, don’t assume that you’re not offending anyone, just because everyone else seems to be swearing. It’s amazing that many offices insist on no fragrances or smelly foods for fear of upsetting someone, but have no similar guidelines for certain forms of noise pollution.
Until you know who you’re talking to, you might want to channel Bill Cosby more so than Eddie Murphy. In the mean time… check out this clip for how one office handled it.