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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.

Appreciation, Affirming Feedback and Retention!

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According to the Department of Labor in the USA, 64% of working Americans leave their jobs because they don’t feel appreciated, while Gallup research shows that 70% of working Americans say they receive no praise or recognition on the job.

Is there any reason to suspect that things may be different or better here in the UK? I doubt it. We have a long history of management by exception (managers leaving the good stuff alone and focussing on the problems). Often work is designed so that managers really don’t get to see or hear the good stuff that goes on.

I have played my part in this.

I once helped a call centre to install a piece of software that allowed callers to rate the quality of service provided by the agent. Low scores generated e-mails to team leaders with attached MP3 recordings of the call and invited them to provide coaching to the agent involved where appropriate.

This helped to quickly reduce the number of problem calls.  But it also had the unwanted effect of damaging the perceptions that team leaders had of many of their agents – because the only stuff they saw and heard was bad. Likewise agents started to perceive team leaders as critical, picky and failing to appreciate the good work that was done. No wonder employee retention in the call centre business is low.

Once we changed the software so that team leaders got e-mailed about the great calls as well as the bad ones things in this call centre rapidly got better.

  • Is your job designed to help you to see, appreciate and feedback on the good stuff that your team members do?
  • Have you been trained in how to do this well?
  • Do you spend enough time and effort on it?

Things To Do To Develop Teamwork

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I have recently been doing a some work with managers to help them learn how to coach their staff to improve performance. One of the most common topics for coaching was team working. Several managers came up with variations of “I wish I could help so-and-so to be more of a team player.” But few have any idea where to start – other then perhaps providing some team building training. Typically they have started to talk about the need to be more of a team player – but with few positive results.

In helping managers to work out how to coach someone to be a better team player I have found that the first step is to help them to define exactly what behaviours they see (or don’t see) that lead them to draw the inference that so-and-so is not a team-player. I ask them;

“What is it that you see this person do that makes you think they are not a team player?”

This usually releases a whole list of things such as:

  • They often interrupt others in meetings
  • They often don’t listen to other peoples suggestions
  • They say they will do something and then they don’t deliver
  • If they don’t get their way then they don’t get behind the decision.

Making this step from a label (poor team player) to a set of behaviours is the essential key to making progress. They can use feedback around specific behaviours to discourage behaviours that aren’t working – and to encourage those that are.

They can develop SMART goals for coaching that will help them to learn new behaviours and habits that are more conducive to team working. We can coach them to behave differently in key team working contexts. An examples of a SMART goal that I have used in coaching people around this topic is:

“Within 6 weeks at least 2 different managers will mention to me your effectiveness in supporting the work of the team.”

Then, by using coaching and feedback to influence specific behaviours it is possible to significantly improve team working within weeks.