The Business Sensei

On MYOB Radio this Sunday!

I will be appearing on the “Mind your Own Business” Radio Show this week. The show provides advice, information and connections for entrepreneurs, service providers and established companies. Tune into MYOB this Sunday between 9-11 AM to hear my segment!

Local Stations:

WBNW 1120 AM – Needham, MA
WPLM 1390 AM – Plymouth, MA
WESO 970 AM – Southbridge, MA
WSMN 1590 AM – Nashua, NH

or stream online @ MYOBTheRadioShow.com

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

Friday’s Appearance on Business Insanity Radio

Last Friday, I was on Business Insanity Talk Radio speaking on the five components of effective leadership. If I’ve done this right, here’s the segment I was in:

SteveOnBusinessInsanityRadio20August

Book news

I just got the word from McGraw-Hill: My book, The 36-Hour Course on Organizational Development, went to the printer today! Although the official release date isn’t until mid-October, pre-orders should start shipping by the end of September.

Here’s a brief excerpt:

Why Are They So Unmotivated?

I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard about some “impossible to motivate” employee who is busily training for a marathon or something else that requires a tremendous amount of dedication, focus, energy, and, you guessed it, motivation.

What you’re looking for are those employees who approach their jobs with the same level of dedication and focus that they approach training for a marathon or other activity. It’s very hard to find those employees. It’s easier to create them.

Motivation comes from many sources. It starts with the culture you’ve built, the vision you’ve created for your company, the goals you set, and your hiring process. Those elements make up your foundation.

Ultimately, motivation is a strong desire to do (or sometimes not do) something. That desire can be imposed from without, or it can come from within and be supported from without. You want the second.

Remember, no one becomes an Olympic athlete for the money, although some Olympians might end up making a great deal of money. Top athletes succeed because they are driven to perform at a high level. The money and the adulation only reinforce that drive. The ones who are out solely for the money are the ones who are most likely to give up.

Push, Pull, or Get Out of the Way

In the Japanese martial art of jujitsu, the practitioner learns to not respond to a push with a push or a pull with a pull. Meeting force with force only creates opposition. While you might be strong enough to win some conflicts, eventually they take their toll. When someone pulls, you push. When someone pushes, you pull or you get out of the way. You don’t oppose.

In jujitsu, the harder you make it for someone to stay on his feet, the harder it is for you to make him fall down. The goal is not to make it hard for your opponent to remain standing; the goal is to make it easy for him to fall down. The workplace is not all that different. Force creates opposition. Threats, fear, even many incentives, only lead to resistance. The very act of trying to force people to do something causes them to become suspicious and reduces their willingness to do it. It doesn’t matter how much they might want to do it.

To be fair, I do hear from managers who insist that force works: they make sure their employees know who is boss and what will happen if they don’t toe the line. There are problems with this approach. Constantly pushing people means that you can’t see where you’re going. All of your effort is going into the act of pushing. Sometimes they’ll feel like you’re going too fast. Sometimes they’ll mistake an attempt to change course as a shove and resist, or they’ll go too far and step to one side, leaving you to fall on your nose. The more you push, the harder it is to hit that moving target.

You want the employees who know where to go and why they should go there—and who understand how to get to their destination without you constantly having to force them to do it. You want a team so dedicated that if you don’t get out of their way, they’ll run you over.

Understanding motivation is the first step to getting such a team.

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

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

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

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