Companies have made enormous gains with Lean, just-in-time inventory management, Six Sigma, and several quality approaches. We are producing better quality at a lower cost with less waste.
People remain important, and people remain messy.
It’s a mistake for leaders to apply “Lean” and quality methods to people. Organizations work best when human relationships are “thick” – shared experiences, deep levels of trust, abundant communication, shared purpose, deep listening. It’s a both-and reality for high-performing organizations: Manage things, Lead people.
The word Transformation has practically become a buzzword. It’s sexy, seductive.
The open lie is that transformations are elegant. That caterpillar transforming into a butterfly? No one talks much about the intermediate step, and it’s a good thing it’s hidden inside an opaque cocoon.
Transformation is usually an ugly process… and the biggest obstacle is our ego.
Your ego talks to you. It will tell you where the bottlenecks and give you the name of the roadblocks to transformation.
Critically important: Ensure your future state is superior to the current state. There’s danger in status quo. There’s also danger in a crummy future.
Some years ago I was talking with a friend who is an avid golfer. “I score a 10 yesterday! It was great,” he said. I asked him to explain this puzzling comment.
“I used to obsess about my golf score. Most of the time I was furious with my bad shots, and frankly, golf just wasn’t as much fun. So I decided to change the way I keep score for myself.
“If I have even one good shot on a hole, I give myself a plus one. A good shot is one that felt good, the swing was good, the ball went close to my intended target, it stayed in the fairway, or landed nicely on the green – could be any number of things but it was clearly a good shot. I’m happy with it.
“Getting a 10 means that on 10 holes out of 18 I had a shot that made me happy. And focusing on that score – my joy score – has made all the difference in enjoying golf again. I don’t focus on the things that make me mad.”
I greatly admire how my friend re-framed his scoring system. He’s optimizing for a healthy objective.
Leaders can be hard on themselves. Some of this is simply good self-discipline and striving for excellence. We’re always working to improve our craft. But there’s a dark, unhealthy aspect where we flagellate ourselves and make ourselves miserable. This is leadership self-sabotage.
What kind of “joy score” could you track in your leadership work? What healthy objectives should you be optimizing for? Give this some thought.
I take our dog Watson for walks every day, usually both morning and evening. From his point of view, I exist to take him out on walks, feed him treats, and rub his belly for a few minutes between 5:30 and 7:00 pm.
I usually enjoy our walks. I let Watson make many of the decisions about which way we go at intersections, and can figure out how to loop back to our house.
Sometimes I’m in a rush. I have stuff to do. I need to be back at a specific time, usually a short time. This urgency is pressing on my mind. I can feel my blood pressure rising. I want to walk faster.
Of course Watson doesn’t understand that urgency. “Hey, that smells good over there,” he thinks as he pulls in a direction I don’t want to go today. “Just give me a few more seconds to confirm which of my dog pals has peed on this fire hydrant.” “I’m feeling great, let’s go longer today!”
This contrast is a reminder that many of the people I’m working with don’t understand my frame of mind, either. I want this meeting to be short and dense, let’s get to the facts and make a decision. The guy who starts with the long chronological accounting can’t read my mind. The lady giving the presentation doesn’t understand that this is my fifth meeting of the morning and I’m thinking more about the new incoming artillery barrage in my inbox than her same-old-same-old project update. The new colleague launches into a conversation incorrectly assuming that you have all the same context she does. She’s been coached to get to the decision quickly (which is a useful and helpful practice) but in this case your mind is tired and you need her to slow down and lay out the groundwork.
The opportunity is for me to gently communicate something helpful, and to practice self-control. It doesn’t help anyone to simmer in frustration or allow your energized mental frameworks to tune people out.
A colleague asked me this terrific question: How have your ideas on leadership practices changed in the last decade? What would you emphasize today than you didn’t a decade ago?
Ten years ago I was sure I knew a few things.
Twenty years ago I was sure I knew nearly everthing.
Thirty years ago I was sure I knew everything.
I’m 58 now. I hope I’m growing in humility over time; certainly my family, friends, and God provide ample reasons to be more humble! There are fewer things that I’m certain of, but they are deeper and more foundational. I stress these much more now that I did in decades past:
If you need a new idea, read an old book. Be increasingly selective about the quality of your input streams.
Connecting head and heart is crucial for the biggest unique contributions you can offer the world. This connection requires that you be in touch with the transcendent aspects of human experience, not only the logical/physical/computable.
Experience is not the best teacher. Reflecting on experience is the best teacher (even experiences from history and from biographies).
Being an “all things to all people” leader is a fantasy. Aim to be the “very few things to the correct set of individuals” leader. You can inspire at a distance but impact comes with up-close interaction.
Don’t believe the lie that consuming more makes you happy. Joy comes as you create and contribute.
Be a professional, not an amateur. (The difference is substantial.)
Mindsets and Mental Frameworks I still emphasize from previous decades:
Leadership is a craft (learnable skills + art to produce something beautiful and useful)
80/20 – there is always enough time if you have enough focus
Manage your energy, rather than time
Communication is a key paradigm for leading people
Stack skills and work across disciplines to generate breakthroughs
Bad systems overcome even the best individuals, so think and design in terms of systems
All leadership begins with self-leadership; all growth begins at the edge of your comfort zone
I’m anticipating a new renaissance, based on the history of the Medieval Renaissance:
1400-1550
Our time
Conversation about
Pandemics, plagues, wealth inequality, social norms, the roles of government and citizens, what to preserve from the past and what to jettison for progress
Pandemics, plagues, wealth inequality, social norms, the roles of government and citizens, what to preserve from the past and what to jettison for progress
Technology revolution
Printing press (1440) Architecture Art
Digitization & connectivity Medical Materials
New worlds inspiring imagination and creating economic expansion
North and South America
Space – asteroid mining, colonize the Moon and Mars Virtual environments
Human beings remain fundamentally human beings – deeply flawed, awesome potential.
A key insight: the Medieval Renaissance was led by ordinary people to make extra-ordinary choices about what questions to ask, what new things to study, what to try, what imagination could be made real, and how to use their time. A very small fraction of the population created a massively different future.
We don’t need a giant renaissance for you to have one. But if a critical 1% of people do, then the world will experience a new renaissance.
What do you do when evidence surfaces that you were wrong, you believed something in error, you were fooled or conned?
The two most common behaviors:
1. Double-down on the original belief. “I didn’t follow an unscrupulous leader, she’s a genius and most people simply can’t see that.” “That threat wasn’t a hoax – our proactive steps meant it didn’t happen.”
2. Rationalize that the blame lies entirely with others. “There’s no way I could have known that Nobel Prize winner in physics didn’t understand the gold market.” “He is PMI certified, so it’s not my fault that he ran the project into the ground.”
The least common behavior? Honest assessment based on facts, evidence, and outcomes – to purpose to be better next time.
I don’t have a consistent explanation for our frequent refusal to acknowledge we need to change something in ourselves.
Permission to be blunt? *Grow up.* Be the leader who acknowledges an error in judgment or being fooled. Own your part. Learn from your experiences – there is always an adventure of learning and adapting if you’re willing to take it. Model this for others.
The grizzled older man sitting next to me on the plane regaled me with stories of growing up along the Chesapeake Bay. The most memorable:
“My daddy taught us kids to swim the hard way. He rowed me out about a quarter-mile into the bay, then tossed me overboard and told me to swim to shore. The swimmin’ part wasn’t so bad, but getting out of that gunny sack with the big rock was a trick, I tell ya.”
Poorly designed work systems — all the processes and procedures and division of labor that overwhelm even talented people. They know how to swim, but the systems act like the gunny sack and big rock.
One of the great business breakthroughs of the 20th century was learning how to optimize an overall system for a desired result. People learned through process design, supply chain logistics, and high-throughput manufacturing that you must avoid optimizing every sub-part of a process if you want the maximum process throughput. The global maximum point is different than local maxima:
We’ve also learned to eliminate wasted effort and materials, and reduce defects. The LEAN practices include moving tasks/equipment/people closer together to minimize wasted steps and time.
There are two key action steps for leaders charged with improving workplace system performance:
1. Focus on the correct system output to maximize.
Systems are perfectly designed to produce the results they produce. If you want different results, change the system. Beware of optimizing your system for an overly-narrow result; think larger. The most helpful approach is to think from the customer backwards. Who is receiving the output, what do they value, and how can you deliver that? I see far too many cases where organizations optimize within silos of activity, forgetting that every organization exists to serve someone.
2. Strengthen the who-does-what-how-and-when component of systems with incentives to continue to optimize in the desired direction.
You can and should use tools and automation to improve processes, increase throughput, reduce time and labor, etc. There is no resting content because continuous improvements will be required over time.
Most process improvement efforts I’ve seen fail on people issues rather than technology issues. Workplace systems always involve people, and people are messy. Leadership would easier without people, but then leadership would be unnecessary! People are the who-does-what-how-and-when component of workplace systems.
To gain scale and efficiencies organizations tend to divide up work among a set of specialists who each can operate efficiently on a narrower range of work. Large corporations often outsource tasks or project work, or rely on services provided by others. The challenge is to develop a coordinated operating model for each contributor for every part of the process, and then continue to look for improvements.
The new problem created by dividing up the work, compounded if you are paying people for specific work tasks rather than the overall deliverable, is that you created a perverse incentive for individuals to maximize their efficiency at the expense of others. You’re focused on local maxima, rather than the global maxima that best helps your final customer. If you’re paying someone X dollars/hour for their work they have an incentive to maximize their hours, rather than optimize your overall system.
One way that commercial building construction has improved over the past few decades is the practice of a contractual incentive to complete projects on-time with the right building quality. The message to the general contractor is simple: Finish the project early? I’ll pay you a little more. Finish late? I will pay you less?
My observation from working with multiple organizations: most HR, Finance, IT, and Legal departments don’t create these kinds of incentives with contractors, services, and providers.
Your leadership opportunity is to grasp #1 – know the correct system output to optimize – and then work out the people issues to execute to that vision. How can you help people to work together rather than separately? Get rid of the unnecessary gunny sack and rock problems in your systems, and let your people swim!
(Note: this was originally published by the author on LinkedIn in 2014)
[I hope some people reading this will be truly ticked off. I aim to hook a nerve, and yank.]
We’re desperate for leadership.
All leadership begins with self-leadership.
Self-leadership is a function of self-discipline.
We need self-discipline about our eating, sleep, exercise, and nourishing our minds and hearts. You already know what is best. Do that.
Today, at least in the US, we face a combination of trends which will require a new level of discipline:
Infatuation with style over substance. Style matters, but increasingly passes as a substitute for substance.
Ascending post-modern worldviews are dominant in education, corporate leadership, governments. Fewer people accept the idea of absolute truth. Dialog about truth is swiftly converted into arguments about power. Opinion is frequently honored above truth.
Diminished context. Social media largely operates outside complex context. Subject lines, headlines, text messages, and soundbites are sufficient to reinforce mindsets.
Declining trust in most institutions. This is understandable — many institutions are recognizably corrupt.
Large percentage of the population spends hours every day immersed in information streams, weirdly compelled to “keep up.”
We swim in abundance of stuff, food, sanitized environments, and information. Many of us are not handling abundance well. This is proving to be unhealthy.
Far more remote work, less time at the work-site. Distractions abound, peer pressure is physically absent, the benefits of face-to-face social interaction are missed.
T.S. Eliot captured it well in his “Four Quartets” poems:
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper whirled by the cold wind
You might be saying, “But not me, Glenn, no, I’m different!” Are you sure? Let’s test it out:
How do you feel if you sit perfectly still, no sound, no flickering images, for 5 minutes?
If you searched and couldn’t find your smartphone for 15 minutes, what’s your panic level?
When was the last time you turned off your phone for any length of time while you were awake?
If I demanded that you read nothing but books more than 400 years old for a week – no news, no social media, no podcasts – what’s your first reaction?
Full candor: I fail these tests, too.
I’m not trying to make a political commentary – these are the trends in our cultural environment, which is where we must exercise our leadership work.
We’re deeply in this reality. Yet we have agency. We can make choices.
I challenge you to be an intentional leader rather than passively absorbing every aspect of cultural trends. I challenge you to be a free man or a free woman, rather than a slave to circumstances and circumstantial evidence. We desperately need leaders who think for themselves, who speak outside echo chambers, who call out bullshit, who love fiercely, who rally people without manipulating them, who command respect from others even as they wrestle with constructive disagreements.
This level of leadership comes at a price, beginning with your self-discipline. Practice stepping up and out of the swirls of information and emotion which captivate most people. Recognize that the statement “Your truth” is actually “truth and your opinion.” Fast from incessant mindless activity and task completion. Do something which makes you physically uncomfortable every day – a cold shower, fasting from a meal, sitting in a hard chair, exercising in a new way, studying a difficult subject, talking with people who hold a completely different worldview. Select for quality and depth of information and insights. Invest time in measured reflection and meditation on events; Experience is not the best teacher – evaluated experience is. Demand context and alternative perspectives. Demand evidence of truth statements. Live more generously with people than they might deserve. Don’t fall in love with the idea of “the people” and then fail to interact with actual flesh-and-blood messy people.
98% of the people around you may be slaves to their inbox, smart phone, and information as someone-with-an-agenda presents it to them, but purpose to be in the 2% who strive for freedom. It’s a both-and situation – understand the reality of where the 98% are living, and live differently.
Pursue this self-discipline and you’ll become the leader that the people in your sphere of influence actually need. Model this self-discipline, and your sphere of influence will increase.
We had a running joke in my competitive grad school program: “Half of us have impostor syndrome, and the other half don’t know what the hell we’re doing.” I remember multiple times feeling like everyone was about to discover I was an incompetent, ignorant fraud. The same thing happened several times in my early career at Pioneer – I’d have this sensation of being 9 years old in oversized clothes, cluelessly sitting at the adult table while they’re asking for my solution to a world-shattering problem!
Let’s define imposter syndrome, and then talk about how you can effectively work through it.
From Wikipedia:
Impostor syndrome (also known as impostor phenomenon, impostorism, fraud syndrome or the impostor experience) is a psychological pattern in which an individual doubts their skills, talents or accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a “fraud”. Despite external evidence of their competence, those experiencing this phenomenon remain convinced that they are frauds, and do not deserve all they have achieved. Individuals with impostorism incorrectly attribute their success to luck, or interpret it as a result of deceiving others into thinking they are more intelligent than they perceive themselves to be. While early research focused on the prevalence among high-achieving women, impostor syndrome has been recognized to affect both men and women equally.
Nearly everyone I’ve asked will admit to impostor syndrome, though usually in the long-distant past, because it’s hardly safe to say “Yes, I experienced it just this morning.”
My suggestion for leaders: Gently appreciate that everyone on your team experiences some degree of impostor syndrome at least occasionally.
The best way to help others through it is to build them up, honor their engagement and contributions, and frequently remind them of their importance to the larger effort of your organization. When they express doubts in themselves give them reasons for your confidence and optimism. Encourage them to get help or practice where they truly don’t know what they should know to be effective. Mark out when and where they fall short of expectations, and always in a way that points to their ability to do better the next time. Celebrate when people are well-prepared (rather than procrastinate and then perform poorly). People will give more of what gets celebrated. You can even say privately, “See, you did well in spite of your doubts.”
Now let’s pivot to your impostor syndrome. That’s much harder to conquer.
The positive benefit of impostor syndrome is that it shows we want to do well, and for others to think well about us. [I acknowledge there are psychopaths who wield imposter syndrome as a weapon; that’s not you.] Be grateful for this positive core.
The challenge is to effectively work through all the ways impostor syndrome limits your ability to contribute. Here are a few tips:
Impostor syndrome thrives in the abstract, “what-if” realm. Taking action, even small actions, weakens it.
Imposter syndrome fears being laughed at by others, so crush it by laughing at yourself first. It’s ok to have an honest assessment of your strengths and weaknesses, especially in new situations. I have learned to chuckle at my mistakes and errors, and remind myself that it’s ok to both be silly and to learn from it.
Impostor syndrome must have something to compare to – those super people who have more IQ, experience, panache, style, and granite-guts than you do. Impostor syndrome insists you compare yourself only to how you think those people are, not as they are, and certainly not as they were when they were in a new situation.
Impostor syndrome insists you believe that key people around you are thinking about you all the time. Reality check: other people think about you far less than you expect them to think about you, partially because we’re consumed with thinking about ourselves.
Impostor syndrome wants you think that you are the only person in the room experiencing these doubts. Untrue. See the encyclopedia entry for “human being.”
Remember that “faking your way through it” actually works much of the time. Even a forced smile changes your neurochemistry. Standing tall helps your blood pressure and breathing. You learned to walk as a toddler, and you learned to do pretty much everything you know despite the fact that you were a “fraud” before. Most of the inventions that undergird civilization started as experimental faking-till-they-made-it.
Impostor syndrome is only happy when you tell yourself a negative, fearful narrative. Remind yourself that you have a lot to offer and if you don’t offer it, you’re robbing the world.
Impostor syndrome loves loneliness. Surround yourself with people who help you bring out you. Seek positive feedback environments.
