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Archives for September 2007

Developing People and Gardening

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Michael McKinney over at Leading Blog has found some great stuff on developing people from Lord Sharman.

“To some degree, developing people in an organization is impossible. You can’t develop them; they develop themselves, and so your job is like that of a head gardener. You figure out what the various microclimates are around the place, and then you figure out the qualities of the plants that you need to go into those microclimates. Similarly, you select the people based on their strengths and place them in those jobs.”

Key point: If you have someone who is under-performing ask yourself “is this person in a microclimate, a context, in which it is possible for them to thrive?” If not – then move them. A cactus won’t thrive in a bog.

“I’ve seen notes of appraisal interviews, which say that two-thirds of the interview is spent talking about what the guy’s not good at. Now, that’s great—I can’t imagine anybody coming out of an interview like that feeling anything other than very depressed.”

The Gardener

“What you want to do is spend time talking about what the person is good at and how he’s going to develop that. Sure, see whether you can do something about the weaknesses, but to my way of thinking, appraisal interviews should be two-thirds about what the person is good at and how those great assets can be used within the organization.”

Key point: accentuate the positive – and get locked into a virtuous spiral rather than a death-roll of negativity and decline. Have you caught someone doing something well today?

“You’ll always have people that find it much easier to be critical than to be encouraging… If you start criticizing your colleagues about what they’re bad at all the time rather than encouraging them, that’s sure as hell going to get down through the organization very quickly.”

Key point: Learning to recognise, encourage and promote the positive is a surprisingly hard habit to acquire. In many organisations it is almost counter-cultural! I know this is something that I always have to keep working on personally.

How Top Companies Breed Stars

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Geoff Colvin, Fortune Senior editor at large has just done a great piece for Fortune Magazine on how the best companies go about developing leaders. It is a long piece – but here are the headlines:

“You couldn’t be blamed for rolling your eyes when American Express chief Ken Chenault says, “People are our greatest asset.” CEOs always say that. They almost never mean it. Most companies maintain their office copiers better than they build the capabilities of their people…”

“A close look at the companies on our list reveals a set of best practices that seem to work in any environment… These companies operate in every kind of industry and are based all over the world. But what’s most striking are traits they share – specifically, nine practices that combine to create world-class leadership development.”

  1. Invest time and money
  2. Identify promising leaders early
  3. Choose assignments strategically
  4. Develop leaders within their current jobs
  5. Be passionate about feedback and support
  6. Develop teams, not just individuals
  7. Exert leadership through inspiration
  8. Encourage leaders to be active in their communities
  9. Make leadership development part of the culture

Great to see that much of this resonates with what we teach in the Progressive Managers Network! Delegation, coaching, feedback all come through strongly in this research.

Bob Geldof on Time Management

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This morning on Radio 4 they did a piece on the role of the internet in modern society.

Bob Geldof offered a wonderful piece of time management advice.  I understood him to say that that none of the companies that he was ‘involved with’ were allowed to receive e-mails before 2.00pm.  He went on to say that he ‘would like to think’ that this improved productivity.

I am sure it does.  The whole morning is available without e-mail distraction to do high value work.  This stops people easing their way into the day by ‘doing’ e-mails only to find half the day gone and they have got nothing (of real consequence) done.

I only download e-mails every three hours – a thought which horrifies most people.  But once they recognise that there really is no such thing as an urgent e-mail – and that I  enjoy the benefits of long periods at work un-interrupted by e-mail most start to see the point.

Another good reason for Bob’s ‘no e-mail till 2’ rule is that doing e-mail is a pretty low level activity.  Much of it can be done on auto-pilot – so do it after lunch – when we take a bit of a performance hit anyway.

Managing People With Passion

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My working life has been spent working with a wide variety of organisations. But they all have one thing in common. Each is trying to make the world a better place. Whether operating in the private, public or third sector they have all been about making things better.

People join these organisations because they:

  1. Want to make a positive difference in the world
  2. Develop their own potential and capacity in making this difference
  3. Want to provide food, warmth and shelter for themselves and their loved ones.

They want to belong in an organisation where they can grow, make a difference and earn a living.

They need respectful and nurturing management. The salary to them is important – but in the long run it is personal growth and making a difference that they really value. They need management that focuses on helping them to make their contribution.

Many of the organisations I have worked with have struggled in this area. People lose their sense of purpose and identity as they become consumed by delivering ‘the service’ or ‘the contract’. They become more technically proficient at what they do – but their optimism and belief slowly fades away and performance slowly degrades.

This process is driven by an orthodox approach to management that focuses on tasks and fails to engage with dreams and aspirations. The noble goals are transformed into routine. There is a famous story about the floor sweeper at NASA who proudly told visitors that he was working to help put men on the moon. Well, in many organisations this process of ennobling a job is completely reversed. People doing great work, contributing to great goals, become reduced to ‘marketing co-ordinators’, ‘database administrators’ or ‘account managers’. They get absorbed into management systems, balanced scorecards, customer service standards and the other paraphernalia of modern management and they lose sight of what they are all about.

Managing people with passion has to be done differently. It has to keep the sense of purpose ‘up front’.

It has to keep the passion burning.

Diversity and the Art of Delegation

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  • How do you get other people to do what needs to be done?
  • How do you make time and space in your diary to do the things that only you can do?
  • How do you manage to escape doing those aspects of the job that you don’t like or find hard?

Delegation of course.

But what if your team, the pool of people available to delegate to, is just like you?  Similar personalities and temperaments.  Similar preferences and skills.

If you fall into this trap then those things that you want to delegate – they are likely to want to delegate too.  The jobs that you hate – they will hate too.  delegation becomes a difficult, risky and painful process.

If on the other hand you have a diverse team with a wide variety of skills and preferences then it is likely that you will find someone to delegate to who will enjoy the new work.

By recruiting a team with diverse skills and preferences you will make delegation much more straightforward.