And The Winner Is...

So we were fortunate enough a few weeks ago to get icon Bill George who many may recognize as former Medtronic CEO, Harvard professor, and best-selling author, to serve as the judge in what we called The Bill George Challenge. I first mentioned something about it here in a post called: Semper Fi & The Challenge of Leadership

The Challenge was for members to tell Bill what they would have to change about their leadership style to adapt to a more participatory management practice. What role models would they reference? How would they measure the result to assess whether the effort to make such a change was worthwhile for themselves and their organization — would specific behaviors or aspects of the culture also change?

The responses from the membership were incredible, and while there can only be one winner (he gets to be Bill George's guest at HSM's World Business Forum) I am sure that we'll put together a collection of the responses to share.
For now, however, I wanted to thank our winner and former Healthcare CEO, Jay Jarrell, for giving us the okay to let the readers here gain from his thoughts on the subject. Here is what Jay had to say. Once read, it is easy to see why Bill George picked it.

Mr. George,

There is an old adage about having to step inside the shoes of another to understand that person's actions. I believe this understanding is the starting point for practicing participatory management. Asking questions, such as what would motivate me to participate or what would make me work harder, have always guided me in eliciting stronger participation from my staff and others. I have always found that it is my responsibility to create not only the environment for all to participate, but also, to have that occur.

From this beginning, it is a matter of having the generosity to reward success and share the financial success, the patience to listen and communicate, the good sense to encourage, the intelligent curiosity to probe and ask questions, the diligent work ethic to demonstrate personally the more routine daily actions of making sure all that I can make happen in an outstanding way does happen, and the character and integrity to reward.

I am constantly finding myself falling short of practicing what I preach. Believing in participatory management and its benefits is easy, as are having most of the characteristics I described above and practicing them. However, there are two characteristics that I find I typically over time short change.

I often don't take the time to personally reward, believing the receipt alone of previously agreed upon monetary or other awards is sufficient. Also, I find myself not making the effort each day to make the contacts to ensure all of the strategic steps of a certain goal are occurring as well as possible.

To correct the above, I have begun writing out each evening a daily plan for the next day to make sure I practice each of those steps.

President Obama has been inspiring whether you agree with him on all policies or not, and in these dire economic times, he will have to become even more so. I intend to take inspiration from him and try to communicate better a vision and hope for better times.

Measuring the benefit of practicing participatory management may be somewhat subjective, but I can see it clearly. Certainly, achieving your revenue and profitability goals or chosen other specific goals that are quantifiable are a great indication, but industry or even national or international economic crises, as we are now incurring, can prevent financial goals from occurring. I can see the benefit of having practiced good participatory management in the constant flow of ideas and suggestions on a daily basis.

If personnel at all levels down to the lowest are not comfortable in greeting me by my first name, if they are not comfortable being able to tell me their ideas or even just what is oing on at their level that day and how it can help achieve certain company goals, and if they are not completely knowledgeable of the company's goals and the problems the company is facing that month, then I have not achieved my goal.

Those cultural changes of all employees knowing what I know and enthusiastically participating in the achievement of company goals are measurement enough.

The philosophy I try to follow comes from playing and following sports. It's the team that wins or loses, not the individual. By including all employees in my circle, by empowering them with as much knowledge and information as possible, by communicating the company's goals, and then by offering significant rewards and recognition for their achievement, I've used as much leverage as I can bring. The more people a company has working together and intensely toward shared goals, the greater its chance for success.

Thank you for this opportunity.
Jay Jarrell

Congratulations Jay, enjoy the forum. New York in October is a great place to be.

Feedback? Thanks but No Thanks

If you had to pick one word that strikes fear into the hearts of both the boss and the subordinate or the candidate and recruiter, "feedback" just has to somewhere near the top of the list.

Sure, all the books talk about how great getting feedback is, how important it is for our development, how much candidates want it so that they can learn from it going forward, and how much the recruiter wants to share it in order to try and help those involved in the interview process. Yada, yada, yada.

That, of course, is the ideal world. In the real world if you talk to most people, no matter what side of the feedback desk they are on, giver or receiver, most would tell you that they would rather have a root canal without Novocain.

All that said, the fact remains that no one has yet to come up with a reasonable substitute inside corporations for the performance appraisal process. To be sure, there are scores of different models both alpha and numeric most of which have ranges that go from 1-5, 1-10, and with all sorts of wonderfully descriptive terminology that goes from "walks on water" to "is drowning," to "should be drowned." Okay, usually much more diplomatic than that, but I am sure you get the point.

What got me on this kick recently was a post by Gerry Crispin one of the co-founders of CareerXRoads. The title of Gerry's rant was: Who is responsible for feedback? Certainly not the Lawyers. Gerry, among his many talents, has a gift for expressing things in writing, and it doesn't diminish when he's ticked off as he was here.

Of course Gerry has been around as long or longer than I have, and so he is very much aware of the "feedback" dilemma. We all want it, we all need, and most of us hate it. On the other hand, I think there are a lot of us who are much better at what we do and how we do because somewhere along the way someone had the courage to tell some stuff that we really weren't all that excited to hear.

If we work in organizations of any size, then most of us get some formal feedback because, as I say, no one has come up with a better system to try and distinguish between levels of performance in a formal fashion. We all also know, of course, that the informal systems have been doing stack rankings of their own long before there were more structured ways.

My point in all of this is simply this: Given the degree of difficulty that any organization I have ever been associated with has had in providing feedback when there is a structured system in place, expecting the recruiting world to provide it to people they basically don't know is a dream that is not likely to come true any time soon.

At the very least, it makes the giver of feedback uncomfortable trying to share what at the end of the day is their subjective opinion and at worst, they don't want to do it because they are worried about law suits or God forbid someone going postal.

Success on a Shoestring

Even with electronic media that does everything but pump you full of information intravenously at night I just can't seem to keep up with everything that either interests me or which while it may not interest me so much is nonetheless stuff that I feel I should be paying attention to anyway.

All of which is the only excuse I could think of for posting something the impetus of which was driven by the special issue of BusinessWeek that came out the last week of August.

As I am sure we all immediately recall this special issue was the one with the cover headline: Trouble at the Office? and the picture of Rainn Wilson on the cover. Why it took BW this long to realize that there is indeed "trouble at the office" I have no idea, but I was glad to see that at least it was starting to show up on their radar.

Being in the business we are at ExecuNet and are talking with both recruiters and senior level executives on a daily if not hourly basis as we do, the fact that there are "issues" in the workplace comes as no surprise, and while there are any number of keywords that could be thrown out to try and capture the essence of the challenge, at the moment, the two that come to my mind were: recruitment and retention.

The habitual cry we hear all the time is the "war for talent" is getting worse not better (the economy notwithstanding) and keeping my "A" players feels like a losing battle.

Given that as a business we find ourselves very much in the middle of this discussion, I read each article on this topic in this particular issue. I read them with great interest and great hope. When finished I found myself still interested but not particularly hopeful. I was looking for answers and instead found lots of wringing of hands and articles reporting on but not suggesting a whole lot of "to dos" regarding things of which I was all too painfully aware before I had read word one.

I should also say at this juncture that if I had access to the universal solvent to fix these ills, I would have shared it long ago. Unfortunately my approach to life is too simplistic to conjure up such stuff, however, so as much as I wish it were the case, I don't have any silver bullets to offer up. That said, however, there was one article in the issue that I thought at least expressed what struck me as pretty cogent advice in trying to overcome the core issues.

The article was entitled Success on a Shoestring authored by Richard Clark, the CEO of APTARE, a company in Campbell, California and in a tad more than 800 words, Mr. Clarke said two things that I tacked up on the bulletin board above my desk.

1. Establish the DNA of your company and then hire people that fit into that DNA., and

2. Because we are a small business, we cannot afford to lose time, energy, or capital on hiring and rehiring.

Magic? Certainly not. Revolutionary? Hardly. Critical to keep you on the right path? You betcha!

Where Have You Gone Joe DiMaggio?

I guess with the title of this post I am showing my age, but what the heck, if you didn't see the movie (i.e. The Graduate for those who might not recognize the line) , it's well worth it no matter what your age.

I picked the line from the Simon and Garfunkel song because it is a line that laments the loss of ideals and values and seeks guideance from a "leader." Even in the context of the movie, it isn't that much of a stretch to translate the message to the corporate and/or political arena and the headlines we unfortunately see all too often.

If you asked around our office here at ExecuNet, anyone will tell you that I am not a Yankee fan, but when our days become as filled with Bear Stearns and Spitizer as they have recently, it is understandable that there are indeed lots of folks who are wondering where Joe D went.

With all that in mind, maybe that is part of the reason I was so struck by a quote attributed to Jeff Immelt of GE that I have had tacked up on my bulletin board ever since I found it.

When I see it, especially after hearing about some other CEO taking a "perp" walk, it helps to remind me that as disappointing as all that stuff is, there are far more leaders who understand what Immelt is saying and do all they can to build organizations where what he suggests represents the cultures they believe in.

If you have not seen this quote before, if it resonates with your value system, maybe you'll find a spot for it on your bulletin board too.

Manage by setting boundaries with freedom in the middle.

“The boundaries are commitment, passion, trust and teamwork. Within those guidelines, there’s plenty of freedom. But no one can cross those four boundaries.”
Jeff Immelt, CEO, General Electric

Realizing an Organization's Potential

One of the most gratifying things for me in being a part of ExecuNet is the chance I have every day to learn from other members. You can say what you want to about "senior managers" but the fact is that experience is indeed the best teacher and when you get a lot of people willing to share those experiences with their peers, it can be very powerful stuff. It is not only intellectually very stimulating, but on a practical level "learnings" that we all can use as we manage on a day to day basis.

We get these "learnings" from members in a number of different ways but one of the most potent is the online roundtable discussion groups. In the past week or two, we have had a fascinating discussion going on amongt our General Management group on the subject of what one can do to help an organization realize its potential. Pretty important topic since that is usually the charge when management changes are made.

Andy Kankula is one of our members who has been participating in this discussion and in adding his two cents he shared a list of 12 "learnings" that he felt were the keys his succeding. In his case, it was in turning around a major business unit in South America.

If you were looking for a one page list of how to go about managing the kind of change it takes to move an organizaiton forward, what you see below is as good a list as I had seen for a long time. I asked Andy if I could share it here, and I hope that readers here will be as grateful to him as I am for his willingness to let me use it. In doing so, he was quick to point out that his list was not original to him but rather his summary of things that he "learned" from others over the years, all of which just makes me all the more gratified to be part of a group where helping each other is what the roundtable groups are all about in the first place.

Andy's List

1. Brutal honesty and identification of the problems and why the problem exists. This needs to be done without blaming anyone.

2. Simple messages that create a vision and path forward. These messages should define the discipline and should be easy for people to remember.

3. Consistent metrics that relate to tasks that need to be achieved and the goals of the business.

4. Continual feedback about performance expectations.

5. As a leader be confident in your direction and your communication of expectations.

6. Recoginize where and what your peoples capabilities are; define their strengths and exploit them, identify their weaknesses and minimize them. Develop and improve competencies right down to the production floor.

7. Understand your customer and why they buy from you; position your products and services to maximize profitability.

8. Keep asking questions about why we do things the way we do until you get to the point no one can give you a good logical answer. It is at this time people are ready to ask the question " what's the best way to do this...?"

9. Once the discipline is established stick to it and do not waiver unless someone can demonstrate logically why we should detour.

10. At every milestone poor on the praise for the successes and identify what we could have done differently for future revision. And always keep the expectations high.

11. Create good succession plans so that people understand the possible rewards for good performance and development of their capabilities.

12. Plan your own departure to give those that have contributed to the success the opportunity to lead in the future.

Andy closed out his remarks to the other members of the roundtable with this:

After reading all the excellent input its appears very easy to write what makes each of us successful in our own situations. Living it and fighting your doubts and or the doubts of others as they wait for the results of your efforts is the hard part. You always have to ask yourself " am I doing all the right things for the right reasons?..." I think that if you can answer yes to that question you can trust your own direction through many Shakespearean "dark nights".

Any executive knows exactly what he means!

The "Joys" of Leadership - NOT

Here's something that probably falls very much into the category of "so tell me something that I don't know." Being a manager is no easy deal. Indeed, anyone who has ever had to manage a staff knows exactly what I am talking about. Over the years I, like thousands if not millions of others, have read all sorts of articles and books on the topic of managing, not to mention hearing more speeches than I can remember.

What brought all this to mind was a discussion that I had been following in our online GM Roundtable. Members were exchanging views on various aspects of running a business and dealing with the myriad issues that arise be they involving people or products or both.

As you might expect, there were a number of comments surrounding how people felt about and made tough decisions, especially when it came to having to fire people. Adding to this discussion was Kevin Cronin who posted the following:

Early in my career, I heard an accomplished turn-around CEO respond to a question about whether or not he ever lost sleep over people that he had to fire. He said that he had not because there was always some justification for the action. He went on to say that the only times he had lost sleep was when he kept someone on too
long who should have been let go earlier because it caused poor performance
and significant stress to the organization. I have found this a helpful
reflection when dealing with these situations.

I thought this was a very telling remark and one with which I supected many would agree.

As I continued to reflect on what Kevin had to say (and I very much appreciate his allowing me to use his real name) it reminded me of what I have always thought made the role of a manager so challenging.

Simply put I think what makes it so hard for so many of us is that all three of the things that a manager (read: leader) is really asked to do are things that are subjective, not objective.

The three magic "joys" of managing - hiring, firing, and evaluating.

Anybody want to add to the list?