Tuesday, January 3, 2017

Emotional Journey of Creating Anything Great

Monday, October 31, 2016

The Ten Commandments of Business Failure

Wednesday, October 5, 2016

The New Marketing & Sales Funnel

Tuesday, October 4, 2016

How the Best CEOs Get the Important Work Done

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HBR STAFF
If you’re a chief executive officer, your job is to execute. It’s written right into your title. But what does it mean, in terms of daily tasks, to be the company’s top “executer?” After all, CEOs don’t actually build factories or sell products.

It’s tempting, therefore, to view the CEO as primarily a thinker; someone who mulls and shapes strategy. That is a part of the CEO’s job, of course. But the best CEOs know that strategy is just theory unless it’s actually translated into frontline routines―unless the rest of the company actually is executing the strategy.

The CEO’s job is to make sure that happens. The best CEOs focus primarily on four things: communication, communication, communication, and overseeing resource allocation to ensure that the priorities they’re communicating are actually the ones getting funded.
The problem with the first three of those tasks: It can be incredibly boring. The same messages must be repeated again and again ad nauseam. But the best CEOs resist the desire to chase the next shiny object. They stick maniacally to their communication role to guarantee that the strategy is baked into frontline routines and behaviors.

And just because it’s repetitive doesn’t mean it’s easy. First-time CEOs often feel like their own company is conspiring to drown out those messages. Based on our research and decades of experience working with CEOs, here are six tips for CEOs who want to get the boring—and most important—stuff done:

Liberate yourself from your own staff. Your time and your energy are your most valuable resources. Focus them on what’s most important and start saying “no” to people—starting with your immediate staff. The average CEO inherits a staff committed to serving the institutional requirements of the office of CEO, not the CEO’s strategic agenda. If you don’t ruthlessly protect your time, you will watch your calendar rapidly fill up with retirement parties, ribbon cuttings and other corporate tasks that have nothing to do with advancing the strategy.

Many CEOs apply a 60/40 rule: They devote 60 per cent of their time to “must-do” tasks like governance and investor relations and the other 40 per cent to personal focus on strategic execution. And they constantly review the 60 percent to decide if really need to do them or can delegate them to others. One pharmacy retail chain CEO who wasn’t particularly good at investor relations simply hired people who were better and entrusted them with that duty.

Disentangle yourself from the Byzantine bickering of the professional managerial class. Most companies have a professional managerial class that absorbs way too much time and energy and distracts CEOs—and others—from focusing on customers and the front line. CEOs can waste a massive amount of time simply tending to the egos and petty squabbles of professional managers―time better spent connecting directly with the front line and solving their needs. I recognize this sounds harsh; it is. Of course, every organization needs professional managers, and many of the great value-creation stories of business can be traced to their efforts. But we have to be honest: If we can point to companies that are under-managed, we must also point the finger at companies that are over-managed, where the professional managerial class appears to spend as much time perpetuating its own agenda as it does supporting the front line.

As part of the ongoing research effort for our book, The Founder’s Mentality, we’ve studied why companies retain or lose the characteristics that help them avoid growth-killing complexity and stay focused on their insurgent mission to serve customers. Our surveys, research and extensive interviews suggest that this sense of mission fades first and fastest at the upper and middle layers of the company as they become diluted with professional managers.

Professional managers tend to worry most about stakeholders somewhere in their own office. They are more likely to tell their family about face time with the CEO than about solving some faceless customer’s problem. Avoid becoming a dinner table boast and instead spend your time maintaining the energy and sense of mission of the frontline employees who devote their day to serving customers or supporting those who do.

Laminate your “strategy on a page” and find joy in talking about it for the thousandth time. The best CEOs create some sort of strategy on a page. I’ve known some who laminate it to survive the 1,000 conversations they initiate. They constantly remind everyone what matters in the simplest terms possible. How a CEO spends his or her own time sends a powerful message about what matters to the business, but that doesn’t let them off the hook on the boring part of the job: They still must repeat that message over and over and over again.

We even argue that CEOs should focus on a “strategy on a hand” (which liberates them from their laminates). The thumb represents a simple, jargon-free description of “why we exist,” and the fingers are the three to four ways the company must excel to make that happen. At Indian consumer products company CavinKare, the thumb is “Whatever a rich man enjoys, the common man should be able to afford, and our job is to find a way to solve this.” At one Brazilian retailer, it’s “To give aspiring lower-class consumers the opportunity to own furniture, ‘white goods’ and consumer electronics by helping them solve their financing needs.” At Google, it would be “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

The best CEOs instinctively distill an often complex strategy into a few clear elements that can easily cascade through the organization, and they revel in making that happen. “The role of a CEO is to simplify the complexity and stick to a few themes that are easy to understand,” the CEO of one luxury goods company told us. Or, as an airline CEO reflected in a recent conversation with us, “In any company I’ve been in, there haven’t been very many people who are capable of standing back and making the complicated things very simple. Yet that’s where the real value is.”

Celebrate the doers. Every company needs thinkers, but CEOs need to fight the natural tendency of corporate hierarchies to glorify them. Instead, they must remind everyone that it is the doers—the key employees who directly support customers—whose actions advance the mission of the company.

“My sales force are the heroes of my business,” the CEO of one consumer goods company told us. “I want them to sell all day, outhustle the competition, get our products onto the right shelves at the right width and height. I’ve told them over and over that they are not the brains of the company, but the arms, legs, ears and eyes.”

He continued: “For example, if the sales reps see new competitive activity or something interesting in-store that worries them or presents an opportunity, they take a photo with their smartphone, write a few lines about the issue and send them off to the heads of sales and trade marketing. Then they go back to selling. The thinkers back at headquarters get about 150 pictures a week, some of which get translated by the marketing staff into new sales initiatives. And every month, the company gives an award for the best new sales initiative―not to the marketing department, but to the sales rep whose photo triggered the new initiative.”

Be the question guy, not the answer guy. Thousands of issues can distract a CEO from what really matters. You don’t need to solve every problem. As the CEO of one food company told us: “I need to know about those issues and I would be cross if I didn’t. But I don’t have to fix them.” If a problem is getting in the way of the doers, you should make sure it gets solved. Otherwise, it can probably be delegated to someone on your team to figure out. Most CEOs start the job believing they need to have all the answers, but over time they realize they need to have good questions, such as “How does this activity help translate our strategy into frontline behaviors and results?” There it is, the boring part again.

Ignore the conventional wisdom of coaches. CEOs hear a lot of bad advice urging them to stay in their box and work through the management structure. Watch out for these phrases:
  • “The CEO should look up and out.” This is the notion that the CEO’s job is to manage the board and outside stakeholders, leaving day-to-day operations of the companies to others. This is poppycock. One would hope the CEO attained his or her position by being one of the best operators in the business. Why abandon that strength once they are in the ultimate position to exercise it throughout the company?
  • “The CEO should work through the layers and not connect directly with the front line.” Nonsense. Messages must be delivered directly. We’ve all played the game of telephone as kids and know the twaddle that emerges at the end of the chain. A CEO who communicates through layers is a CEO who dooms the organization to drivel. This doesn’t mean you ignore the management layers in between – bring them along, share the stage and debrief and coach them afterwards. But deliver messages directly.
  • “The CEO must rise above the details of the business.” Total nonsense. Revenue comes from customers, and customers care massively about the details of the business. Deep customer loyalty is born of the infinite decisions required to get these details right. The CEO must live here.
  • “The CEO’s job is to set the strategic direction and then leave the execution to others.” Utter nonsense. Strategy is meaningless without execution. Execution is where strategy turns into results. Do both.
And yes, execution by communication can be boring. Yet you will often find that the messages need repeating—and that each time you do, you learn a lot about what’s working and what isn’t in different parts of your company. In the long run, these simple messages make your job much easier. Performance management gets linked to these simple themes. That, in turn, encourages leaders throughout the organization to absorb and live the same priorities. It shows employees that their own path to success is tightly linked to strategy. And clear, simple themes win over investors and analysts, too.

Here’s the rub. Ultimately, you need to find joy in this. And there is joy. Each conversation is an opportunity for mutual discovery, for mutual insight. You can be successful as a CEO only if you can mobilize the hearts and minds of thousands, so you must love this mobilization and take joy in helping each group and each individual discover what the strategy means for them. CEOs don’t lead companies, they lead a collection of people who all need to move in the same direction. And that demands a thousand conversations.

James Allen is a partner in Bain & Company’s London office and a co-head of the firm’s global strategy practice. He also leads Bain’s Founder’s Mentality 100 initiative. He is a co-author of a number of bestselling books including Profit from the Core and The Founder’s Mentality: How to Overcome the Predictable Crises of Growth (Harvard Business Review Press, June 2016).

Ships don't sink because of water around them....

How to Manage a Toxic Employee

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There’s that one person on your team — the bad apple who has nothing positive to say, riles up other team members, and makes work life miserable. If you can’t fire him, how do you respond to his behavior? What feedback do you give? How do you mitigate the damage he inflicts? 

What the Experts Say
There’s a difference between a difficult employee and a toxic one, says Dylan Minor, an assistant professor at the Kellogg School of Management who studies this topic. “I call them toxic because not only do they cause harm but they also spread their behavior to others,” she explains. “There’s a pattern of de-energizing, frustrating or putting down teammates,” adds Christine Porath, an associate professor at Georgetown and the author of Mastering Civility: A Manifesto for the Workplace.  “It’s not just that Joe is rude. The whole team suffers because of it.” Of course,  your first step as a manager should be to avoid hiring toxic people in the first place, but once they’re on your team, it can be hard to get rid of them. “Oftentimes the behavior doesn’t run against anything legal so you can’t fire them if others in the organization don’t agree that a line has been crossed,” Porath explains. Here’s what to do instead.


Dig deeper
The first step is to take a closer look at the behavior and what’s causing it. Is the person unhappy in the job? Struggling in their personal life? Frustrated with coworkers? “You might meet with them and ask how they’re doing — at work, at home, and with their career development,” suggests Porath. If you find there’s a reason for why they’re acting the way they are, offer to help. “A manager can use this information to coach the person, or suggest resources to help address the root of the problem.” For example, adds Minor, if the person is going through a divorce or struggling with a mental health issue, you could offer “counseling resources or time off that could potentially alleviate” the underlying issue.


Give them direct feedback
In many cases, toxic people are oblivious to the effect they have on others. “Most of the time people don’t realize that they’re as destructive as they are,” Porath says. “They’re too focused on their own behaviors and needs to be aware of the broader impact.”  That’s why it’s crucial to give direct and honest feedback — so they understand the problem and have an opportunity to change. The standard feedback rules apply:  Objectively explain the behavior and its effects, using specific, concrete examples.  “It’s not helpful to say, ‘You’re annoying us all,’” Porath explains. “You have to ground it in the work.”  Also discuss what kind of behavior you’d like to see instead and develop an improvement plan with the employee. “What do you expect them to change? Strive for clearly defined, measurable goals,” Porath says.  “You’re giving them the chance to have a more positive impact on people.”


Explain the consequences
If the carrot doesn’t work, you can also try the stick. “We all tend to respond more strongly to potential losses than we do to potential gains, so it’s important to show offenders what they stand to lose if they don’t improve,” says Porath. If the person is hesitant to reform, figure out what they care most about — the privilege of working from home, their bonus—and put that at stake. For most people, the possibility of missing out on a promised promotion or suffering other consequences “tied to the pocketbook” will be a strong motivation to behave in a more civil way.


Accept that some people won’t change
Of course, you should always hope that the person can change but not everyone will respond to the tactics listed above. Minor is currently researching toxic doctors and says that early results indicate that some are either unable or unwilling to change. Porath’s research on incivility has meanwhile found that “4% of people engage in this kind of behavior just because it’s fun and they believe they can get away with it.” In those extreme cases, you should recognize that you won’t be able to fix the problem and begin to explore more serious responses.


Document everything
If you conclude that you really need to fire the person, you must first document their offenses and any response you’ve offered so far. “You want to establish a pattern of behavior, the steps you took to address it, the information, warnings or resources provided to the employee, and the failure of the employee to change,” Porath says.  Include “supporting material” too: formal complaints, relevant information from performance evaluations, such as 360-degree or peer reviews. The idea, says Minor, is to protect yourself and the company and to show your employee exactly why they are being let go.


Separate the toxic person from other team members
Even if you can’t get rid of a bad apple, you can isolate it from the rest of the bushel so the rot doesn’t spread. Minor’s research shows that people close to a toxic employee are more likely to become toxic themselves, but the good news is that the risk also subsides quickly,” he says. As soon as you put some physical distance between the offender and the rest of the team – for example, by rearranging desks, reassigning projects, scheduling fewer all-hands meetings, or encouraging more work-from-home days — you’ll see the situation start to improve. Porath calls this “immunizing” the others. “You’re trying to protect people like you would with a disease,” she says. “You will hopefully decrease the number of run-ins and the cognitive loss.” But make sure to do this with discretion. Let employees come to you with their complaints about the toxic colleague and use “one-on-one conversations” to coach them on how they might minimize their interactions.”


Don’t get distracted
Managing a toxic person can eat up your time, energy, and productivity. But “don’t spend so much on one individual that your other priorities fall by the wayside,” says Porath. To counteract the negativity and make sure you’re still thriving, “surround yourself with supportive, positive people” and “look for meaning and purpose in your work,” she says.  Also focus on basic self-care. “If someone is draining you, build yourself up by exercising, eating right, sleeping, and taking breaks, both short-term ones and vacations,” she says. “Being healthy and proactive is the one thing we know that buffers people from the effects of toxic behavior.”


Principles to Remember
Do:
  • Talk to the person to try to understand what’s causing the behavior.
  • Give concrete, specific feedback and offer the opportunity to change.
  • Look for ways to minimize interactions between the toxic employee and the rest of your team.
Don’t:
  • Bring the situation up with your other team members. Allow them to mention it first and then provide suggestions.
  • Try to fire the person unless you’ve documented the behavior, its impact, and your response.
  • Get so wrapped up in handling the issue that you ignore more important work and responsibilities.
Case Study #1: Give direct feedback and support the rest of the team
Christina Del Villar, the director of marketing at the e-commerce operations software firm Webgility, managed a small team at a start-up earlier in her career. One employee, Sharon (not her real name), a senior marketing manager, was making the rest of the group miserable.


“She was an alcoholic, abused drugs, and had a medical condition,” Christina recalls, Her work was “full of mistakes,” her work ethic was poor — ”she was often out of the office, at least one day a week, if not more” — and she frequently took credit for others’ efforts.

Christina made sure to document the behavior but says she couldn’t fire Sharon because the woman “had threatened to sue for a variety of reasons, including her medical condition” should she be let go. Instead, she worked to prevent “the negativity from seeping into everything” by routinely giving Sharon feedback and direction. “Sometimes people don’t realize the impact they’re having so I like to have a blunt conversation with them about their behavior, what they can do to change it, and how they can work better with the team.”  Her approach was “delicate” because, with Sharon “you never really knew who you were going to get on any given day.” But she learned to read her employee’s “state of mind” and “pick days where she would be more accepting of this kind of conversation.”

Christina also supported the rest of the team. “Sometimes it was as easy as saying they were doing a great job or thanking them for stepping up to “fill the void” left by Sharon, she explains. She also encouraged them to focus on themselves and their work, “not on what someone else was or was not be doing.” When they complained about Sharon, she offered advice “while still respecting everyone’s privacy and staying within the law.”

While Christina’s efforts reduced the negative impact Sharon was having, the problem was ultimately solved by circumstance. When their business was acquired by a larger company,  Sharon moved to a different department.

Case Study #2: Help him rebuild his reputation
Daniel Hanson (not his real name) once managed an IT team at a large multinational that suffered every time it had to interact with Bob (also not his real name), a senior internal consultant. “He had a habit of talking down to people and being dismissive and was blissfully unaware that his behaviors  irritated people,” Daniel recalls.


With a little probing, Daniel discovered some of the reasons for Bob’s negativity. “His personal life was a mess between bad relationships and estranged children. Plus he’d realized that he had reached a certain age and hadn’t achieved the professional satisfaction that he wanted and he thought he deserved.”

Still, Daniel made clear to Bob that his behavior needed to change. He recommended a counselor provided by the company and offered up his own time and advice in weekly meetings. “I told him this was his last chance and that the next step was a formal performance management plan and almost inevitably exit from the business,” he says.
Although many managers “hated Bob with a passion,” Daniel encouraged them to stop talking about him behind his back, “to see that he was trying to change and to include him in more senior projects under close observation.” He spoke to people individually and “pointed out that his contribution on numerous projects had been immense.”

“Gradually, as Bob’s behavior changed, their attitudes toward him changed as well,” Daniel says. He’s proud that, when Bob did eventually transfer to another team, it was because he’d wanted to go, not because he’d been forced out.

Amy Gallo is a contributing editor at Harvard Business Review and the author of the HBR Guide to Managing Conflict at Work. She writes and speaks about workplace dynamics. Follow her on Twitter at @amyegallo.

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