The Business Sensei

Baker Street Irregular

Fans of Sherlock Holmes might remember the occasional scene in which a scruffy urchin appears out of nowhere, speaks briefly to Holmes, and then disappears again. Holmes then solves the case, and explains to the stunned Watson that he cultivated the urchins as sources of information. They are his “Baker Street Irregulars.”

For those who prefer a more recent image, fans of James Bond movies will remember the endless parade of agents who show up long enough to give Bond some critical piece of information or equipment. Unlike Holmes’s informants, the mortality rate amongst Bond’s “irregulars” tends to be awkwardly high. Star Trek, of course, was famous for its “Red Shirts,” the red uniformed security officers who would always die within minutes after appearing on camera. In all these cases, the character shows up on camera just long enough to move the plot forward and then disappears. In a very real sense, they have no existence before they are needed and no existence after their function is fulfilled.

When they are present, they exist only to meet the needs of the story, or at least of the hero.

Of course, these examples are all fiction. What bearing could they possibly have on reality? When I run predictive scenario management training exercises, a type of serious game, I find the same behavior manifests: many participants tend to assume that the other players in the scenario are only there to support their goals. They don’t quite recognize that each participant has their own goals and their own needs that they are trying to meet. As a result, conflict often erupts between different individuals and groups who each assumed that the other individuals and groups were present only as “red shirts.”

Read the rest at the American Management Association

As Above, So Below

(just in time for this article, I’ve even managed to get comments working properly (maximum spam blockage/minimal hassle) on my blog!)

While it is well known that rolling stones gather no moss, it appears that they are pretty rough on McChrystals. Recently, the news has been filled with headlines about General Stanley McChrystal and the story about him in Rolling Stone. Agree or disagree with how the situation was eventually resolved, it offers some important lessons for businesses.

While everyone has days when they aren’t happy with their boss, their job, their clients or just about anything else, what you say and how you say it makes a big difference. In General McChrystal’s case, perhaps the most striking elements of the article was not what he said, but what his staff said. Occasionally expressing frustration is normal. Open disrespect in the general’s staff is not, and says more about his opinions than anything he said. This attitude sets the tone for how the general and his staff will interact with others, people who, in a business environment, might be viewed as internal or external customers.

Read the rest at Corp! Magazine

No Escaping That For Me

“Destiny! Destiny! No escaping that for me!”
– Gene Wilder in “Young Frankenstein”

As fans of Mel Brook’s classic comedy Young Frankenstein know, Gene Wilder’s destiny as Dr. Frederick Frankenstein is to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps and create the monster. This being a comedy, things do work out somewhat better than they did in the original story. Destiny, it appears, can be changed with sufficient effort. Indeed, precisely because Frederick Frankenstein realizes that he’s following in Victor Frankenstein’s footsteps, he is able to turn things around at the last minute and bring about a happy ending.

In my consulting projects and in conducting leadership training with various groups, from college students through executives, I’ve frequently observed destiny in action. People play out the roles that they believe they are supposed to play out. Organizationally, we act as we’ve been taught to act in our various roles: CEOs are expected to behave in one way, managers another, engineers yet another. For example, in some companies it’s perfectly normal for engineers to show up to work in jeans and T-shirts, but totally inappropriate for a manager to do the same.

Read the rest at Corp! Magazine

I Told You: 360-Degree Feedback Done Right

“We were thinking of doing a 360-degree feedback to help him understand what other people think.”

This very frustrated comment was made to me recently regarding efforts to explain to a very senior manager that his style of leadership wasn’t working for his team. At that point, all efforts to convince him to change were foundering on the manager’s simple perception that things were working just fine.

Such being the case, it’s hard to imagine how a 360 can help. Sure, he might find that his subordinates don’t like him very much, but he might also feel that his job isn’t to be liked, but to get people to perform.

Read the rest at LabManager Magazine.

8 Questions About Your Hiring Process

What is the most important factor in successfully recruiting top candidates? If you said things like salary, benefits, or the economy, you’d be wrong. It’s your organizational culture. I have a longer article in the upcoming Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership about the role of organizational culture in the hiring process. To give you a taste of it here … let me first say that when you start to throw around terms like “organizational culture” you may think that it’s academic, or that it’s abstract. It’s not.

Read the rest at ERE.Net

Decider’s Remorse

Recently, I was attending a board meeting for a certain organization. They were contemplating some significant changes to several long-standing policies, which naturally generated quite a bit of discussion. The various options were carefully laid out and analyzed. There was a great deal of discussion over how well the different changes would address the identified problems. The president very carefully checked to make sure each member had had their say, that each member felt heard, and that each member was comfortable making a decision and accepting whichever decision was reached.

The vote happened, and a decision was made. No problem!

The problem came up at the next board meeting, when the president said, “I’m not comfortable with our decision. I think we should revisit it.”

Read the rest at Corp! Magazine

Too Many Chiefs

Recently, someone told me that, “We don’t need leadership training. We’re all leaders.” When I asked how well they worked together and actually got things done, she then said, “Well, you know, leaders all have good ideas. We have some strong personalities. It can take a while.”

Overall, she was half right. Just because someone is a leader, that doesn’t mean they automatically have good ideas. In fact, only poor leaders think that they only have good ideas. However, she was correct in that they didn’t need leadership training. Rather, what they needed was membership training.

Read the rest at Corp! Magazine

Communicating With Retention In Mind

Some years ago, I was working at a high tech company during a recession. Granted, it wasn’t a Great Recession, but it was bad enough. There came a certain point where an employee who had not had a raise in two years, went to the CEO and asked for a raise. The CEO’s response: “I agree that you’re one of our top performers. But, in this economy, you have nowhere to go, so I’m not giving you a raise.”

The CEO had forgotten one little point: when we least expect it, economies get better. It’s exactly when things are looking worst that the opportunities start to appear. In this case, the employee left and had a new job with a 50% raise within a couple of weeks. He told me later that if he’d received almost any raise, he’d have stayed. It wasn’t about the money.

Now, when I tell this story in training exercises or when I’m giving a talk, someone always says that if the CEO and the employee had only communicated then the situation would never have come up. That’s a nice sentiment, but not one that quite makes sense. The two people in this little dance were communicating. Unfortunately, the content of their communication led them down a path that did not benefit the CEO or the company at all; in fact, the loss of that employee at that time set product development back six months.

Read the rest in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership

Deja vu All Over Again

“This is like déjà vu all over again.”

–          Yogi Berra

In the classic British science fiction series Doctor Who, there is a scene in which the Doctor is trapped in a time loop: the same events keep taking place over and over with no end in sight. Naturally, this being fiction, the Doctor quickly recognizes what’s going on and figures out a way to break out of the loop. In real life, it’s not quite so easy. Granted, actual time loops tend to be pretty rare; not so the feeling of being stuck in one.

Read the rest in the CEO Refresher

7 Things You Should Communicate

This is the short version of an article that was accepted for publication by the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership. The full version will probably be out in a month or two.

It’s not enough to say that if you want to keep the best people when the economy improves, you just need to communicate more. It matters what you say and how and when you say it. Communication occurs in the context that you’ve created over time, and how your communications will be received will depend a great deal on that context. If you want to keep your best people, then you need to do your homework. (Or, conversely, if you want to recruit someone else’s key people, find companies that did not do the homework suggested in this article.)

Read the rest at Ere.net