Small Management Glitch

Dear Managers and Leaders!

I am writing this post from a waiting room in a medical clinic. Nothing life threatening, don't worry! I fell from my bicycle on Sunday and now my right shoulder hurts badly. I need to know what is going on before I leave for the USA on Friday.

As you can imagine, I had thousands of things to complete before leaving, but now, I can see my to-do list being compromised: the time I spend with doctors is time I will not be working! Health is at the bottom of the Maslow pyramid and I can't ignore the fact that I hurt.

So, what do I have to do to still be successful despite this change in plan?

• Review my to-do list and add "DOCTORS" at the top of it
• Analyse what will fall off the list and evaluate the impact
• Review priorities to make sure that the most important items will be done before I leave

So, as you can see, there is nothing major, here, just a small management glitch to face. I should be able to get over it without too much problems!

Now... what is so wrong with my shoulder?!?

What about you, dear leader? How do you usually deal with unforeseen events that wreck your plan, your schedule? Do you deal with them with extreme distress or with philosophy and method?

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, then please visit www.innovachron.com or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

Give the Gift of Time

“If there is no time for reflection, there is almost no chance for improvement.”-- Fred Harburg, senior VP of leadership and management development, Fidelity Investments Company

Dear Managers and Leaders!

I was talking to someone this morning about the necessity for a leader and his team to work on important things that are not necessarily urgent. The important but not urgent things are the ones that will bring a lot of return to you and your team, not necessarily today, but down the road. As a leader, the best and most important gift you can give your team and yourself is the gift of time, time to reflect and work on important but not urgent things that matter to your team.

What are those important things that you should be working on? Well, I cannot list everything here and some items would be very specific to your situation. But let me list a few generic things that, I hope, will get you thinking some more about what is the important elements that you should spend time on. If you feel like it, please add more elements in your comments. This will help everyone with this “important” topic!

• Improve processes used by your team
• Refine your team’s sense of purpose
• Refine your team’s and team members’ specific objectives
• Better planning for your projects that includes risk analysis and mitigation
• Ensure you develop a culture for your team
• Ensure that workload is well balanced within your team
• Social bonding within the team
• Learn new skills or perfect ones that you possess
• Listen more to your team members
• Think about the next few brick walls that your team will have to face in the near future and define strategies to work around them or to tear them down before your team gets to them (that means less fire fighting!)

Now let’s face it, most leaders already have their hands full just dealing with what is urgent. Extinguishing fires every day takes up a lot of time! How can they even think about working on things that are not urgent, just important? Well, the paradox lies in the fact that, without spending time working on what is not urgent, a leader will always be stuck in fire fighting mode.

So, how can you get out of the fire fighting spiral? The first advice that I can give you is to make a conscious decision to work on important things that are not urgent. This is the first event that must occur before anything else can happen. Then, you must reserve some time every week in your agenda to work on important aspects of your work that are not urgent. Label these reserved time slots “IMPORTANT MEETING” and write them down in your agenda. Make the commitment to never remove them. My advice here would be to start small. You will see improvement even if you have a single one-hour IMPORTANT MEETING with yourself every week. This would probably be a good place to start.

Once you have the IMPORTANT MEETINGs reserved, I’d say that the next step is to come up with a plan as to what to attack first. However, don’t be too structured during those sessions. Give yourself time to brainstorm and think without too much structure. Dreaming about the future is also an important aspect of leadership...

Note that I’m definitely not the first to discuss this topic. Stephen Covey is covering this in great details in "Habit 3" of his excellent book “7 Habits of Highly Effective People”.

What about you dear leader, are you spending time working on important but not urgent elements of your work? Have you ever come to realize that this was an essential part of your work and changed your ways to “make it happen”? Please share your experience with us here so we can all learn how to best approach this problem!

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, then please visit www.innovachron.com or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

The Power of Teams!

Dear Managers and Leaders!

I wanted to share something I found last night. It is, in my opinion, one of the jewels you do not find often on YouTube. Of course, it struck me from a highly emotional perspective because it reminded me of things I did in the past and team experiences I had in the past.

When you will follow the link at the end of this post, you will see a video of a jazz choir that simply does amazing things together. They sing the song Africa from Toto, without a single instrument, and they use their hands and body to simulate a storm (close your eyes at the beginning for a stunning effect). Go watch it after you’ve read this post as I’m sure you will be impressed!

So what does it have to do with leadership, management, and the power of teams, you’ll ask? Well, a choir is a team, and a very good example of a team. It has a leader (the conductor); it has team members; and the group shares a clear common objective and challenge: to perform a music piece that will impress their public.

As I was watching the video, I felt that group was a very good example of a team. So please be attentive to the following details as you will watch the video:

First, look at the singers:

• It is clear that they like what they are doing
• They have fun
• They are highly focused
• They had a tough challenge and they did it - together!
• They are proud of what they have produced (look at their faces at the end!)

Then look at the conductor

• He does not sing, but he let his people do it
• He coordinates the various movements of his team – but he does not over do it
• At times he dances at the front, more like someone who wants to raise the emotion level in his people than someone who is worried of the result
• He shows he is confident in his people. He trusts they will succeed.

I firmly believe that teams can do great things, a lot more than what individuals can perform alone. I think this choir is a great example of a team doing great things together and I wanted to share that moment with you!

What about you dear leader, have you ever led one of these super teams, the ones that truly exceed expectations? Please share your experience with us here so we can all learn about what it takes to assemble such a team!

Here is the link. Enjoy, it is Summer after all :-)!

Africa By Perpetuum Jazzile

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, then please visit www.innovachron.com or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

Leadership Symptoms Analyzed (6)

Editor’s note:

This post is inspired by a discussion that happened on the Leader’s Cafe Foundation Forum in LinkedIn. The forum can be found here: Link To LinkedIn Forum. And the specific discussion can be found here: Specific Discussion.

Dear Managers and Leaders!

In my six previous posts, I first listed 6 symptoms that leaders should take really seriously and then analyzed the first five symptoms: "A team member does not produce what the leader was expecting", "Team members are not coming up with new ideas" and ""Team members are unwilling to push their boundaries", "Team is operating from fear", and "No one seems to know what is urgent, crucial, or at which point we are right now". Today, we come to a conclusion with our analysis and tackle the sixth and last symptom: Resistance to change.

“Change is constant, direct, and temporary, for once things change, you can bet they are going to change again. Learning to thrive on constant change is the next frontier.”

-- Michael Dell, Direct from Dell

When I started to reflect on leadership, it struck me how leaders must be initiators of change. They must constantly be on the look out to find ways to improve the performance of their team and then implement these changes to ensure their team is always running at its peak performance. Without this constant search for improvement, the team can have good performance, but will never strive and will eventually lose momentum. That means that on top of improving the product that the team produces, a good leader always works on his team, trying to perfect every aspect of it.

What that constant search for better performance means to the team is that it will often, if not always, be in a state of change. Improving team performance means changing something to make the team better. So change needs to become a second nature, a part of the team’s everyday life.

You can see how a leader’s success is closely tight to his ability to successfully implement change in his organization. Without this capacity, a leader cannot improve the team’s situation or performance and will slowly but surely lose his leadership. The team will not follow him for a long time if he constantly fails at implementing change. So, as we can see, change management is very crucial to leadership!

For a leader, if team members or the entire team resist change, it is a serious condition that must be dealt with promptly. When you feel the team is not engaged or energized by a proposed change, then you need to investigate and correct the situation rapidly.

Causes

So, what can cause people to resist change? Here is a list of potential causes of resistance to change.

• People disagree with the change – If people think that the change will not bring them to a better situation or that the improvement is not worth it, then they will not accept the pain of changing easily.

• Too many changes, too rapidly – As a leader, you must know your team enough to understand their acceptable “change pace”, the pace at which they can accept change. If you go beyond the change pace of a team, you risk losing people, driving people to burn out, or de-motivating your team members.

• Fear they are unable to adapt – Change actually means that something needs to ... change! People will have to adapt to a new situation. Resistance can be triggered if people are afraid that they will not be able to adapt to the change. For instance, if someone has never used a computer and the change requires her to use a computer, then the difficulty to adapt will be seen as really high and will trigger fear and resistance.

• Threat to their security – We have already talked about security being the second level of the Maslow pyramid. If people feel that the introduced change is a threat to their sense of security, they will definitely resist change. For instance, if the change consisted of using a computer to do a task that someone was actually doing manually in the past, that person might resist change because she feels it is a job security threat.

• Dear-to-heart changes – It is possible that you are trying to change something that is important for the team. Maybe the team is proud of what it accomplished in the past using their old way of doing things. Maybe they are not ready to change because the old way is their branding so to speak.

• Failure of past change initiatives – Maybe people resist the current change because of a bad history with change. Maybe the previous initiatives were failures or did not bring the promised improvements.

Solutions

To help limit the resistance to change in your team, I would offer the following strategies to guide you in your implementation of change initiatives.

• Listen – You first need to listen carefully to your team members and understand all their concerns, fears, and objections. Don’t see them as negative; see them as different points of view that will allow you to refine your ideas, to improve your plans.

• Communicate – You need to be totally transparent with your team members if you want your change initiatives to be successful. You need to explain to them why you think that this change is required and what improvement it will bring to the team. Always talk about the positive and negative impacts that a change will have on the team members themselves and link them to the importance the change has for the team and the rest of the organization. You need to calm people and make them feel secure. Ensure that you understand the possible threats that a change can represent and the fears that your team members could have facing the proposed change and address them right from the start.

• Validate – You should always validate your change initiative ideas with at least some people on your team to ensure you are going in the right direction. You do that before going public with your idea so you have time to refine the initiatives.

• Engage – The easiest way to ensure there will be no resistance to change is when the change initiative comes from your team members themselves. In that case, people will immediately feel compelled by the change, understand why it is required, and they will be willing and eager to implement it.

What about you dear leader, do you see a lot of resistance to change in your team? Also, if you see other causes or other solutions, please share them with this group by adding a comment below so that everyone can benefit from your experience!

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: InnovaChron offers a series of workshops and programs that help teams work together to create their vision, solve their problems, and improve their performance. To find out how to generate change initiatives from your team, please visit InnovaChron's web site or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

PPS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, then please visit InnovaChron's web site or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

Leadership Symptoms Analyzed (5)

Editor’s note:

This post is inspired by a discussion that happened on the Leader’s Cafe Foundation Forum in LinkedIn. The forum can be found here: Link To LinkedIn Forum. And the specific discussion can be found here: Specific Discussion.

Dear Managers and Leaders!

In my five previous posts, I first listed 6 symptoms that leaders should take really seriously and then analyzed the first four symptoms: "A team member does not produce what the leader was expecting", "Team members are not coming up with new ideas" and ""Team members are unwilling to push their boundaries", and "Team is operating from fear". Today, we will continue our analysis and tackle the fift symptom: No one seems to know what is urgent, crucial, or at which point we are right now.

As you lead your team, you really want to have all your team members on the same page. You want them to build the same ship, to march to the same drum beat; you want them all to be aligned with your vision. This is what you want. However, reality can be quite different from what you want! Leadership deals with human beings and human beings are diverse, understand different things even when listening to the same source, have their own agenda, and sometimes forget. To succeed in having everyone on your team focused on the same end goal requires your constant effort and attention.

That means that you must always be aware of where your people are really going, not where you think they are going. You must also constantly re-enforce communication of your vision, of where you want them to go.

Signals

So, what are the first few signals that should alert you about an alignment problem within your team? I would say the following should compel you to re-state your vision and priorities to your team:

• Bad priority call by one of your team members – If one of your team members makes a priority call that goes against what you would have made yourself, you should be alerted and try to understand why it happened and align the team member right away.

• Lack of focus, or the focus is not important to attain the vision – When you see people on your team going in all sorts of directions that are not important to the achievement of the vision, you should definitely have a talk with them and re-focus their efforts.

• Team’s ideas are going in wrong direction - In team discussions, ideas brought up by your team members are not going in the right direction. You can see that if you followed them, they would not lead the team in the direction set by the vision.

It is probably impossible to come up with an exhaustive list of signals, but you should understand the general pattern and apply it to your particular situation.

Causes

Causes of this lack of alignment in your group can be multiple. Here are a few possibilities to help you sort out what is happening in your team.

• Lack of vision from the leader – if the leader himself does not know where the team is going, then the team will have problems following the leader. As soon as the vision becomes blurry, you will see the team members actually creating their own vision, consciously or not, and follow this vision.

• Lack of communication of the leader’s vision – if the leader has a clear vision of where the team is going but if that vision is not communicated clearly to the team, then it is equivalent to not having a vision at all.

• Team does not share or embrace the leader’s vision – here we are in a situation where the leader has a good vision of where the team is going and he has communicated that vision clearly to the team. Now, if the team does not share that vision, if the team members never bought into the direction where the leader wants them to go, then the leader will always have to fight with the team to make them go where he wants.

• Vision is clear but the plan is ill-defined – everyone agrees here on a clear, well-communicated vision. However, that vision is far and away and the path to get to the vision has not been clearly established. That means that the goal is defined but has never been actualized. People see the goal but no one knows how to get there. In this case, you are not facing misalignment but rather confusion as to how to make the vision real.

• Leader did not set priorities clearly – if the team is not clear as to what the priorities are, or if everything has equal importance, then it is really difficult for the team members to make the right calls by themselves when faced with a difficult situation.

Solutions

As you can see above, your team will lose its sense of direction when a vision for the team is not clearly established and shared by your team. When team members do not know what the collective vision for the team is, they will define their own vision and act upon it. This might not be conscious, but this is what will happen because a certain vision needs to be created before action can take place. You cannot really hammer a nail if the shape of the house to build is not well defined in your mind. The problems come when people building the house together do not have the same vision of the shape of the house. The house will likely never be finished if everyone working on it had a different vision of the completed house.

Leading a team is like building a house. The team needs to share the same vision of their end product or destination otherwise nothing will be achieved despite all the effort put into it. The team needs to share a collective vision. As the leader of the team, you own that collective vision. You are responsible to make sure that the collective vision is created, shared, communicated, and acted upon.

Note that I’m not saying that you need to define that collective vision on your own. Please do not get me wrong here. It is OK, even preferable, for the leader not to create everything himself. Have your team help elaborate the vision! Have your team find solutions to their own problems as a team. This is actually extremely powerful! If you have your team participate in defining the collective vision of your team, you will see that people are suddenly engaged and the vision will be automatically shared by everyone on the team. On top of that, your team’s vision will then be anchored in reality because your team members are on the floor every day. They are connected with reality.

What about you dear leader, does your team have a clear collective vision? Do you have all your team members acting in concert and going in the same direction? Also, if you see other causes, other signals, or other solutions, please share them with this group so that everyone can benefit from your experience!

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: InnovaChron offers a series of workshops and programs that help teams work together to create their vision, solve their problems, or improve their performance. To find out more, please visit InnovaChron's web site or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

PPS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, then please visit InnovaChron's web site or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

Leadership Symptoms Analyzed (4)

Editor’s note:

This post is inspired by a discussion that happened on the Leader’s Cafe Foundation Forum in LinkedIn. The forum can be found here: Link To LinkedIn Forum. And the specific discussion can be found here: Specific Discussion.

Dear Managers and Leaders!

In my four previous posts, I listed 6 symptoms that leaders should take really seriously and analyzed the first three symptoms: "A team member does not produce what the leader was expecting", "Team members are not coming up with new ideas" and ""Team members are unwilling to push their boundaries". Today, we will continue our analysis and tackle the forth symptom: Team is operating from fear.

For your team to function at its full capacity, it needs to feel safe to take risks and work at its limits. It needs to operate through synergy and collaboration to go beyond what each individual can achieve. A team operating from fear will not have the right environment and confidence to push its limits, transcend its capacity, and deliver on their promises.

Detecting that a team is operating from fear is probably tougher than detecting the symptoms that we discussed in earlier posts because it involves feelings. We will try below to help you detect this situation with more accuracy and then we will discuss how to turn the situation around.

What type of fear?

I am not a psychologist so I cannot give you an authoritative list of fears that people can have in the workplace. However, here is a list of what I consider when I think about fear in the workplace:

• Fear of losing a job (the number one fear, especially in the current economic climate)
• Fear of losing a position
• Fear of being embarrassed in public
• Fear of being hurt emotionally
• Fear of impacting one’s family (if working too much or losing a salary for instance)

How to Detect Fear?

Here are a number of things to check when you are wondering whether your team is operating from fear.

• Lack of Sharing – When people on your team keep information to themselves or refuse to help each other, then there might be fear involved. It is possible that the people keeping information for themselves want to avoid being surpassed in skills by others which would mean a fear of losing one’s job, or at least losing the capacity to advance in one’s career. Information is power and sharing information could mean losing some power over the others in the minds of those protecting information.

• Yes Sir! mentality – When your team never questions your decisions, when you are alone at the top making all the calls and never encountering any criticisms, voiced opinions, or positive feedback, then it is possible that your people fear the consequences of speaking up.

• Finger pointing – When a problem occurs and people immediately try to find the culprit rather than focusing on solving the problems, then you most likely have a fear issue to deal with. It is necessary to find the root cause of a problem, but not in terms of finding the culprit. If your team is in that mode, then you should definitely look into this as a serious symptom that will generate more and more problems down the line.

• Protect-your-back mentality – This often goes hand-in-hand with the finger pointing. If your organization is caught up in a finger pointing match every time a problem occurs, obviously, people will do everything they can to protect their back so that fingers will point in other directions should problems occur. When team members have a protect-your-back mentality, they will not want to push their limits and operate at full capacity. They will also lose a lot of time just protecting their back instead of doing productive work!

• Risk avoidance – If people on your team avoid risks, it likely means that they do not feel safe in their environment as we already discussed in yesterday’s post.

• Mania to have everything in writing – When people ask that everything be captured in writing, it means that there is lack of trust and fear that things can turn bad. This is why people who do not know each other well will sign contracts to close their deals while family and friends might just talk about doing things together. The level of trust is higher. If people on your team constantly ask that things be written down, you should consider that a serious symptom that is likely related to fear or lack of trust.

What Should You Do?

So what should you do if you detect that your people are operating from fear? First, I’d say that you need to discover the root cause of their fear and eradicate it. If the fear is not grounded in reality, then you need to tell your team clearly that there are no reasons to be afraid. For instance, if people are afraid of losing their job because of the economic climate and you do not see any potential layoffs in the making, then you must reassure your team. On the other hand, if their fear is real, then you need to work differently and minimize the impact of their fear.

Second, as a general rule, you must create a safe working environment for your team. Your team needs to be a place where people don’t feel threatened to lose their job at the slightest mistake. It needs to be a place where people are not judged or found culprit but rather a place where they can learn and experience more and more things, where they can be recognized for the risks they are taking and praised for their ideas. Your team must be a cauldron where the magic potion of trust and coaching will drive your people to develop and produce more than the sum of what each team member would have done alone.

What about you dear leader, have you ever felt that your team was driven by fear? Have you ever found yourself protecting your back or finger pointing every time a problem occurs? Please help me complete the picture by adding your comments!

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, then please visit www.innovachron.com or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

Leadership Symptoms Analyzed (3)

Editor’s note:

This post is inspired by a discussion that happened on the Leader’s Cafe Foundation Forum in LinkedIn. The forum can be found here: Link To LinkedIn Forum. And the specific discussion can be found here: Specific Discussion.

Dear Managers and Leaders!

In my three previous posts, I listed 6 symptoms that leaders should take really seriously and analyzed the first two symptoms: "A team member does not produce what the leader was expecting" and "Team members are not coming up with new ideas". Today, we will continue our analysis and tackle the third symptom: Team members are unwilling to push their boundaries.

As a leader, it is really important to grow your team. If you don’t, then your team will become stale and you will not be able to grow your vision, aspire for better things for your team. A dynamic team, just like a dynamic individual, is a team that grows!

You can grow your team by bringing in more people. The new people will bring fresh ideas and energy on to the table and will help expand your team further. But bringing in new people is not always possible due to political or economical reasons.

Another way of growing your team is by growing your team members. As a leader, you need to ensure that the people on your team are challenged and involved in a constant learning process. You have to give stretch objectives to your people that will help them go beyond what they have accomplished up until now. This will keep them interested, focused, and challenged. Also, it will allow your team to tackle more and more difficult tasks and thus take more and more space in the larger organization.

But what do you do when someone on your team does not want to grow anymore? What if someone constantly refused your stretch assignments and only wanted to be confined in the same tasks over and over again? That person comes in, does his job, and leaves, without showing a desire to succeed and to go beyond what was accomplished yesterday.

As this person’s leader, you need to have a serious discussion with him to understand why he is not willing to go beyond his boundaries. It may very well be caused by personal reasons (divorce, illness, ...) and you may have to accept the current situation while the personal conditions persist. If personal reasons are not causing the situation, I would next explore these environmental conditions as potential factors.

• Compelling vision for the team - When the team spirit is really low and when people don’t feel they are part of a real team, when people do not share a common compelling vision, people will not feel like going the extra mile and pushing their limits. If you feel your team is not pushing hard, look at how people perceive their team and how motivated they are to make the team succeed. To accept to grow, people need to feel they are part of a bigger something that becomes more important than their own comfort.

• Accept mistakes - Pushing our own limit means taking risks. It means going beyond what we have accomplished so far, with no proof that we can actually do it right the first time. For people to accept to go beyond their boundaries, they need to feel they are in a safe environment where mistakes are allowed. Safety is at the second level of Maslow’s pyramid. Most people will not take risks if they do not feel it is safe. So, support people you have stretched by accepting their mistakes.

• Incentives and rewards - People need to have a reason to grow, to go out of their comfort zone. You must make sure people understand why you are asking them to achieve these stretch objectives. You need to explain why these goals are essential for them, for the team, for the larger organization. You can even explain the process of growing and why you are asking them to grow. Also, you need to celebrate growing successes more than any other accomplishments. Do not forget awards and public recognition of your people’s successes. This is very important.

• Realistic stretch - People will follow you and work on your stretch objectives as long as they believe they are attainable. If they feel they will fail even before they start, motivation will not be there, people will not feel safe, and they are then likely to give up before they start. Your first job as a leader is to carefully choose assignments so people will be able to achieve them. Your second job is to convince your people that they can and will achieve their stretch objectives.
  
  
• Coaching them to success - Once you give a stretch goal to someone on your team, you cannot leave him alone with it. You must feel responsible for his success. You need to follow what he is doing and help him along the way. Not that you should do the job for him, but you must support him and guide him towards success. If someone on your team fails a stretch objective, he will be less likely to tackle your next stretch assignment with enthusiasm and could soon become one who refuses to push his boundaries.

What about you dear leader, have you ever met people who did not want to go beyond their boundaries? Have you ever felt like not going beyond your boundaries? Please help me complete the picture by adding your comments!

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, then please visit www.innovachron.com or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.