Leadership=Motivation
=Innovation+Productivity
Get ready for the latest global challenges
Kathleen Brush
ISBN: 978-0-9828823-0-6
Copyright 2010 Kathleen Brush
Smashwords Edition, License Notes. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
A special thanks to the editor Martha Simpson, a master of the craft.
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The last time I saw George Robert Brush Jr. smile was when I told him I was writing this book. He died of cancer shortly after this. For decades he enjoyed my management stories and encouraged me to share my experiences so others could learn from them. This book does that. This one is for you Dad.
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Have you ever felt like you’re ill-equipped for the business challenges you face as a leader? Are you unsure how to lower the costs of production to compete with new low-cost foreign competitors? Are you struggling to keep product portfolios continuously competitive and innovative across global markets? If you are, you wouldn’t be alone and no leader should feel badly about feeling poorly equipped. The world of business has been experiencing unprecedented change, but the practice of leadership hasn’t, and it is leaving leaders everywhere unprepared.
For the past twenty years I’ve been in the trenches as a turnaround person, variously nicknamed the Hatchet Woman, the Poker-faced Princess and Calamity Kathleen. I thought my nickname should be Cleaning-lady Kathleen because that is exactly what I was doing; cleaning up the messes left by scores of well-intentioned leaders. Over time I thought it would become easier to tidy up. Instead, it’s gotten harder. New problems keep surfacing because the world of business is constantly changing in increasingly complex ways.
This is a big problem because the timing could not be worse. The salad days of leaders operating obscurely with fat paychecks and little accountability are ending. Today every leader has to be concerned that mistakes or missteps are bound for infamous immortality on the internet. Leaders also need to be concerned with the current zeitgeist that calls for holding leaders accountable for failure. The most troubling part of this is that the same jumbo catalysts that made this crisis so severe – always-on, interconnected, global markets – are placing incredible demands on the skills of leaders and management training has not kept up.
To keep their organizations relevant and competitive leaders must maintain a focus on continuously improving innovation and productivity. This is easier said than done. In the past couple of decades we have gone from domestically focused businesses using communications with limited reach to organizations with boundless communications that span multiple continents, economies, political systems, histories, and social/cultural systems that are filled with hungry global competitors. The cascading issues that leaders must address are numerous. Without question, the complexities that leaders are facing today are, historically speaking, exceptional.
Economies yesterday were protectionist, isolated and manufacturing based. Today they are interconnected and service based. Yesterday employees were building products, today they are the products. Yesterday an organization's principle assets were equipment. Today they are the employees. Yesterday products were transported by ship and truck. Today they also travel by plane and electronically. Yesterday competitors, customers, standards, regulators, strategies, and suppliers were domestic. Today they are global. Employees used to have relatively homogenous backgrounds and they were physically present in the office. Today they span four generations, have heterogeneous backgrounds and they are often connected to their work electronically. Yesterday credit flowed freely. Today it's constrained. Yesterday communications had limited reach and transmission was measured in hours and days. Today reach is unlimited and speed of transmission is measured in nanoseconds. Yesterday storage capacities were measured by filing cabinets. Today capacities are measured in petabytes. Yesterday successful strategies were either innovative or low price. Today they are low price and innovative enough. Yesterday the cost of mistakes was 1X. Today it's 10X.
As lengthy as this list of challenges is, it’s only a fractional list. Still it amply illustrates what the expression unprecedented change really means. It also offers a partial explanation for why leaders, even MBA graduates, those with years of experience, and others who have attended management seminars, or studied books on leadership feel ill-equipped for the issues they face today. The information conveyed through any of these sources is bound to be too dated, the coverage spotty, and the treatment of topics too isolated from global realities to prepare anyone for the complexity of challenges that leaders face today.
Two American Google executives were recently sentenced in Italy. Their experience at a Fortune 500 company and their Ivy League law degrees left them unprepared for how Italian courts would interpret a personal privacy regulation in relationship to web content. The executives were sentenced because an offensive video of an autistic child was uploaded to the Italian-language Google Video site, even though it was removed promptly when authorities made the request. The convictions set off howls of protests from Google and beyond, asking if it was really possible that corporations could be expected to analyze all of the content that they host on their computers. The courts in Italy confirmed that it was possible and they made it clear that they were uninfluenced by the data-volume issue, which every leader must face today, as an excuse for violating a law.
One of the convicted executives said, “If individuals like myself and my Google colleagues who had nothing to do with the harassing incident, its filming, or its uploading onto Google Video can be held criminally liable solely by virtue of our position at Google, every employee of any internet hosting service faces similar liability.” It was a good quote that American jurisprudence might relate to, but not so in Italy where corporate chieftains are already held accountable for the actions of their businesses. It might also seem like a good quote if the Italians saw Google as an internet hosting service that simply transmitted data without seeing it or interpreting it. But the Italian courts saw Google’s ability to tie ads to content as the services of a media company.
The question remains, what did Google do wrong? They could have responded more quickly. There were earlier requests from private sources to remove the video. In today’s hyper-paced world, fast responses are expected. Perhaps the convictions were influenced by a number of pending antitrust cases against Google in Italy and other countries in Europe. Squashing local companies may seem like business-as-usual in the United States but it is never a crowd pleaser in Europe. Or perhaps it was related to people being fed up with fat cat corporate executives, like those from Google, who sing a song of “you can make money without doing evil,” but who run paid advertisements alongside a video of a group of Italian teenage boys harassing an autistic child. Or maybe it was influenced by Google, as the world’s largest content provider competing with Italian Prime Minster (PM) Berlusconi’s media empire. PM Berlusconi has never operated as just another competitor, anymore than Vladimir Putin was just another advisor when he was challenged by now imprisoned Mikhail Khordorkovsky, the former CEO of Yukos Oil.
We may never know why these Google execs were sentenced. The influence of politics, economics, history, and social cultural factors on business today makes diagnosing problems, let alone avoiding them, incredibly complex. What we do know is that being an effective leader today requires many skills and they all must contemplate global and internet complexities. The goal of this book is to allow the reader to start building the foundation of skills that leaders need to reasonably execute their responsibilities. The focus is on those hard/functional and soft/behavioral skills that will equip leaders for the challenges of overseeing continuous improvements in innovation and productivity in an environment saturated in challenges that are global in scope, fast paced, employee-centered, and super complex. The objective is not to present a treatise on any functional area, but to share information that is essential to every leader, including unique insights into tested theories, some self-tested new theories, new methods, and useful practical applications.
Coverage, from a global perspective, will be given to the hard skills of finance and economics, marketing, business law, human resource management, information technology, quality management, and corporate governance. Significant coverage, also from a global perspective, is given to the indispensable hard skills of organizational behavior, strategy, and integrity, and also to soft skills. Anecdotes that I have accumulated through years of practical experience are generously spread throughout the book. Many of these may conjure up thoughts of Dilbert or The Office, but the outcomes in these real stories have not been funny. Their purpose is as cautionary tales of the devastating outcomes that leaders who are unprepared can inflict on their organizations and their careers. Being a great leader can be one of life’s greatest adventures, but you have to avoid the Dilbertesque pitfalls to really enjoy the experience.
Note: The anecdotes included in this book were inspired by real life experiences, but names have been changed to keep identities private. They are derived from organizations, public and private, domestic and international, small, medium, and large. A majority of the chronicles are from the high tech industries where I have worked for most of my life. I can say with some degree of confidence, however, that there are no organizations of any size, in any industry, located anywhere that are immune from leaders who are ill-equipped to meet today’s leadership challenges.
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Section I: Leadership and Management Overview
This section begins with a discussion of leadership and what it means to be an effective leader today. Effective leaders, in summary, are those who have the requisite skills to motivate their teams to continuously improve innovation and productivity within a world operating on internet speeds and filled with global-in-scope challenges. In doing this, these leaders stay focused on maximizing the value they deliver to their employees, customers, shareholders, and the communities they serve.
Newer challenges leaders face include: wide variations in macroeconomic indicators across potential markets; building marketable products for developing countries; keeping track of regulations around the world; making sure that information technology is not a source of competitive disadvantage; understanding that quality is not an option; and that corporate governance around the world is not modeled after the United States. This section then progresses to the who, what, when, where, and how of leadership, with an emphasis on who can be an effective leader, succinctly defining what it is that leaders do and identifying the required soft and hard skills that represent how leaders achieve the what, where, and when of leadership.
Section outline:
- The differences between effective and ineffective leaders
- The who, what, when, where, and how of leadership
- An introduction to the soft and hard skills of leadership
- Hard skill insights: Finance and Economics; Marketing; Business Law; Human Resource Management; Information Technology; Quality Management; and Corporate Governance
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Which is more important to business: management or leadership? It’s a debate as empty as: Which is more important to life: water or air? In either case, survival requires both. If you are unfamiliar with the leadership/management debate, it centers on the idea that leaders lead people and managers manage projects. The argument is crazy because leaders lead people to complete projects, and managers manage projects by leading people. What would be the value of a manager with a big, well-defined project plan who couldn’t lead people? Or vice versa?
Take charismatic Sergio, who was a natural leader for persuading employees to work on some ill-defined idea that he could feel in his bones would change the company in some meaningful way. When employees sought directions he would churn out some inspirational words and provocative thoughts, but nothing concrete to guide them. In the end, projects would be completed, sometimes looking a bit like a fish and a tad like a fowl and never really producing the game-changing benefits Sergio had alluded to. In time Sergio’s ability to persuade his employees to burn the midnight oil on one of his murky schemes faded as the employees realized that their charismatic leader couldn’t define or manage a project if his life depended on it. Feeling no satisfaction in working hard and having nothing to show for it they were soon counted among the employees who were unmotivated, uncreative, and non-productive.
Vladimir, on the other hand, was a born project manager. He could create a detailed plan and schedule for how to build the Taj Mahal. His downfall came from employees who weren’t motivated to complete his plans. Once he complained to me that his employees were lazy. I asked him what he did to motivate them. It soon became clear that he didn’t realize that motivating employees was one of his responsibilities. He thought employees motivated themselves in exchange for a paycheck. I told him paychecks motivate attendance. He said, “I have no interest in dealing with employee issues to get them to do their jobs.” I said, “The behaviors of employees are not issues. Leaders have to be experts on employee behaviors in order to keep motivation humming. This expertise is a hallmark of an effective leader.” He said, “Okay, I get the difference. In that case I have no interest in being a leader, but I would like to keep my current level of compensation.”
Sergio and Vladimir were both failed leaders. A human can’t survive with just air or water, and a business can’t survive with just charismatic leaders or just project managers. In this book, the terms leadership and management and leaders and managers are used interchangeably and each implies leading and managing. There are three other terms whose use here must be clarified: (1) product refers to products and services. (2) An effective leader is a manager with the hard and soft skills needed to lead competently, which is a lot more than charisma and project management skills. (3) An ineffective leader has some hard and/or soft skill deficiencies. If you are unfamiliar with the terms hard and soft skills or what their requirements are for an effective leader, rest assured that defining these skills and requirements is a central purpose of this book.
Henry Mintzberg, a distinguished professor of management and strategy at McGill University, found that most leaders instead of spending time contemplating the long-term were slaves to the moment, moving from task to task with every move dogged by another problem in a division or another phone call [or electronic communication]. His observations mirror many of the experiences that I have had with leaders who are driven by requests and problems that arrive daily via electronic and telephonic messaging and impromptu face-to-face exchanges. At the end of the day these reactionary leaders are stressed out and exhausted, but if they took a moment to reflect on the day’s accomplishments they could point to activity but not productivity. Definitely nothing that could be considered strategic or forward-moving. Organizations need thoughtful, skilled, effective leaders – not unguided, unskilled perpetual motion suits.
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Effective Leaders: Who, what, when, where and how
At this point the shoe size that an effective leader must fill should be coming into focus as pretty big, begging the questions: Who can be an effective leader? Are there situations when the requirements for an effective leader change? Are there geographic locations where effective leadership calls for different skills? What actually do effective leaders do and what do they need to know to do this? Finally how do effective leaders fulfill the what, where, and when of leadership?
Who can be an effective leader?
Born leaders? Nonsense. That’s like being a born surgeon. Surgeons, like leaders of any organizational type, business, government, academic, social clubs, etc., are built one skill and experience at a time. Every addition strengthens their effectiveness. The only leaders, however, who will truly be effective, are those who are passionate about leading. These leaders love being the person who guides, mentors, counsels, and inspires employees to do and be their best. My gym friend Larry is a great example of someone who could have been an effective leader but he decided that he was happier as a non-leader. He found the challenges of being a leader unfulfilling, frustrating, and exhausting. He said the day he decided to dismantle his business and become an independent plumber was the best day of his life.
When Larry was the boss, he worked from sun up to sun down. He spent many frustrating hours every day either fine-tuning the work of his employees, or cleaning the tools that were left dirty by his sloppy workers. I spoke with Larry about ways to motivate his employees to be more conscientious and caring but he was uninterested in trying to teach employees behaviors that he felt they should have learned as children. When we spoke about understanding that some generations saw being a hard worker as a valuable trait, but more recent generations saw it as a behavioral artifact, he scowled. It was the same reaction my father, forty years his senior, would have had. Larry couldn’t accept any explanation for employees not working hard. When I told him employees had to be motivated, he said he wouldn’t mind taking underperformers on a trip to the woodshed. I asked him if he would miss having a title, a higher earning capacity, and driving a one-ton pickup. He said he placed a higher value on his sanity and being happy again. He added, “Some people are not cut out to be leaders. Fortunately my wife agrees or I could be stuck being miserable but with a few extra bucks that I would probably blow on drinking my sorrows away.” I agreed and congratulated him on having the courage to admit that he was happier without the status and money that accompanied being the boss.
I see too many miserable managers like Larry. They don’t enjoy providing directions, mentoring, counseling, or motivating and they dislike the pressure of guiding employees to a brighter future. Sadly it’s often because they don’t know how and they also don’t know that this does not need to be a permanent condition. Still they stay in their positions for reasons of self-pride, a belief that status is admired, that money supplies happiness, or because they don’t want to disappoint family and friends. These managers are ineffective and miserable. Meanwhile their employers pay top dollar for an ineffective leader who demotivates employees. It is a lose, lose, lose.
Paco ran his own business and shared some of the same employee-type frustrations as Larry, but nothing was getting in the way of continuing to build his business. His company was his passion. When he found himself uncomfortable leading he hired a couple of college graduates to do it for him. A non-college graduate, Paco assumed that a degree inferred job qualifications. If he had my experiences working with empty suits with degrees, he might have thought differently. He would have known, too, that you cannot outsource leadership, anymore than you can outsource being a parent.
After a series of delayed projects Paco decided that his new leaders might not know everything. Uncomfortable with how to manage this, he did nothing and as a result their performance got worse. They seemed to be testing the limits on how far they could push Paco. Paco knew he had to step up to the plate and exert his authority, but he couldn’t. He loathed the thought of making awkward inquiries, issuing reprimands, or meting out punishment. Like so many leaders he could not accept that competently leading sometimes requires Santa Claus to deliver coal.
Businesses that prosper have managers who are passionate about leading – not passionate about parts of leading – all parts. Leaders must be able to administer both rewards and sanctions. They must be able to hire and fire and to be compassionate and intolerant. Anyone who is unwilling to span the range of responses required of a leader is wrong for leadership.
In 1930 Max Weber, in The Protestant Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism, noted that “a manager’s cultural heritage could not help but to form their patterns of behavior.” This wisdom holds true today. Problems regularly surface when leaders, absent the benefit of training, are raised in one culture and then transplanted to work in another. Leader behaviors that were culturally correct in their home country can be found offensive to customers, and demotivating to employees in the host country. This means that someone who is right for leadership in her native country, without significant training, can be wrong for leadership in another country.