The Business Sensei

Hire Slow And Fire… Slower?

How often have you heard someone from a company say, “We hire slow and fire fast?”

I’ve heard this line so often that it sounds sort of a like a mantra or one of those wise sayings that are taken for granted but are generally wrong: “I invest for the long term,” or “There is no room for emotions in the work place,” or “The Red Sox will never win.”

This is not to say that it’s always wrong to “hire slow.” However, it’s important to understand the different ways that a company can hire slow. Some of them make more sense than others. What, fundamentally, does it mean to hire slow? For that matter, what does it mean to “fire fast?”

Read the rest at the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership

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Between Two Points

My first jujitsu sensei liked to frequently remind us that if you wanted to go from San Francisco to LA, you didn’t go by way of Portland, Oregon. Naturally, the wise-guys in the class, which included me, would make cracks about the airline schedules. I don’t know if there actually were flights that went from San Francisco to LA via Portland, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest!

Of course, the point my sensei was trying to make was that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. While this is certainly true in normal mathematics, fans of “A Wrinkle in Time,” might recall that a tesseract is the shortest distance between two points. While traveling via tesseract is purely science fiction, the fact remains that sometimes the direct route, that is, the straight line, is not the most rapid means of getting to your destination. Sometimes, you’re better off with a metaphorical tesseract. This is true in business and, as it happens, also in jujitsu (although that’s a separate topic). As a case in point, let’s look at the increasingly popular Results Oriented Work Environments (ROWE).

Read the rest at Corp! Magazine

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.

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

Demonstration please!

A couple of weeks ago, I was in Omaha giving a talk on leadership. The room was packed (in fact, the best attended talk at the conference!), and the response was enthusiastic. The one slightly odd comment that I got afterward was that the talk should have included group exercises.

This was an hour talk and there were at least 100 people in the room. A group exercise? I figured it was a joke. Then I found out that some of the other speakers had received similar comments, quite possibly from the same person. I’m wondering now if the commenter actually listened to any of the talks.  One of my points was that a good leader takes the time to understand what can reasonably done in a certain amount of time, and that trying to cram too much in is a recipe for disaster. At least one other speaker made similar points.

Apparently this unknown commenter was either not listening, didn’t believe it, or simply has no concept of what he (or she) is asking for. That, in turn, makes me wonder about how this person does as a manager. I have to wonder if they’re busy pushing their team to attempt more and more in less and less time with no sense of whether or not it makes sense to do that amount of work in that amount of time.

Realistically, part of being a successful leader is recognizing what people can and cannot do in the time available. The goal is not to drive people harder and faster, but to use the time well. Complex projects take time to complete; driving people too hard at the beginning makes it much less likely that you’ll get to the end. Rather, what actually works is to start slowly and pick up speed; to choose your targets and focus your energies; and not to throw in something if it would detract from the overall experience rather than adding to it.

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