The Most Important Thing Managers Must Know by Aubrey Daniels

It is quite likely that even the best MBA programs are failing to prepare their candidates with the one thing that will ensure they enter the real world with proven, effective leadership skills; the one thing that guarantees – if applied correctly and consistently – sustainable, positive results. That one thing is a clear understanding of the science of human behavior and how to apply its principles and methods successfully in the workplace. To be clear, this doesn’t just apply to MBA candidates; it extends to anyone in a management position. Once you reach the level of manager, your primary value to the business is not in what you know technically about the business, but it’s your ability to leverage your knowledge through the actions of others.

Most of the time the methods used to motivate others are drawn from “common sense” or personal experience, but as Benjamin Franklin said, “Experience is a dear school and fools will learn in no other.” It would be great if experience taught us perfect lessons, but I would suggest that most of the problems of getting along in the world today are caused by well-meaning people whose experience taught them the wrong things about behavior. For example, if you were to ask the next 100 people walking down Peachtree Street, “Is it possible that yelling and screaming at someone for making a mistake could be a positive reinforcer?” I would not be surprised if everyone said, “No.” However, the science of behavior (behavior analysis) tells us that it certainly could. Is it possible that media reporting of terrorist actions actually increases them? Yes. There are many everyday examples where actions or decisions intended to solve a problem have the opposite effect or have “unintended consequences” because they were designed or implemented without a solid scientific understanding of human behavior. Serious time and money gets wasted using management techniques that have been validated only in the field of common sense.

I can assure you that performance management, as I have defined it in my books and in previous blog entries here, is grounded in a science of behavior that goes back almost 100 years. I encourage you to become acquainted with the Association of Behavior Analysis International (ABAI) where between 1,500 and 2,000 research studies are presented each year for the express purpose of extending the knowledge of human behavior. There are other sources as well. Do a Google search and you will find resources that validate this proven science. For specific workplace examples and success stories of organizations that have applied the science, browse through past editions of Performance Management Magazine.

Behavior, like gravity, is lawful and the laws apply wherever there are people irrespective of nationality, occupation or social circumstances. Time spent learning those laws will be time well spent because no matter how things change in the business world and the outside world, the laws of behavior will remain the same.

I encourage all who are in business to start now and learn all they can about the science of behavior. By doing so, you will bring out the best in yourself and those around you and your organization will thrive as a result.

Engines of Democracy BY: CHARLES FISHMAN

The General Electric plant in Durham, North Carolina builds some of the world’s most powerful jet engines. But the plant’s real power lies in the lessons that it teaches about the future of work and about workplace democracy.

Read the full article here:

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/28/ge.html

Closing the Re-invention Gap. Is news dying or are newspapers dying?

by Adam Hartung

http://www.business-strategy-innovation.com/2010/04/crossing-re-invention-gap-newspapers.html

Is news dying, or are newspapers dying? That’s a critical question. Most of us know the demand for news is not dying – and if you needed reinforcement a recent McKinsey & Company study verified that the demand for news has increased (McKinsey Quarterly “A Glimmer of Hope for Newspapers“). And a lot of the increase comes from people under 35 who are escalating their news demands. Of course, most of this increase is coming from the web and mobile media.

Too often, however, we don’t see our business growing. Instead, Lock-in to old definitions make us think our business is shrinking when it is actually doing the opposite! And that’s the Re-invention Gap. Manufacturers of small printing presses said demand was declining in the 1970s, when in fact demand for copies was exploding. Only the explosion was from xerography instead of presses. So A.B. Dick and Multigraphics, small offset press manufacturers, went out of business when demand for the output of their product was exploding! The market shifted, but it kept growing, and they missed the shift.

Today we see this behavior in most news publishers. Those who print newspapers and magazines are talking about how horrible business is. Only the demand for news is growing more quickly than ever. It’s just not demand for print, which arrives too late for many customers. And because print is too slow a distribution method for these customers, advertisers are abandoning print as well. But only if you’re Locked-in to printing do you say the market is horrible. Because with demand for news growing, if you reposition yourself to serve the growing part of the market you should say business is great!

Tribune Corporation, owner of The Chicago Tribune newspaper is still in bankruptcy. And its future relies entirely on how well it will serve the needs of on-line news readers. According toCrain’s Chicago Business, in “Former Sports Editor Bill Adee Steers Chicago Tribune’s On-line Strategy” print advertising revenues fell by 9% versus last year in the most recent quarter. And according to a quoted investment banker, nobody would have much interest in the value of a print newspaper. That business is destined to keep declining.

But simultaneously the volume of on-line ads tripled! And that’s what a business has to do to cross its Re-invention Gap. It has to move from the old business into the new business – from the declining elements of its business into the growth elements.

What most businesses do wrong is try to apply their old business model to the new business. The old Success Formula has Lock-ins to metrics, schedules, processes, frequent decisions, decision-makers, strategic plans, etc. which the leadership tries to apply to the new business. For example, most newspapers are used to selling ads for several thousand dollars, based upon the number of subscribers. These are pretty large price points. But on-line, ads are sold per page view or per click. Now we’re talking pennies sometimes. And to make money, you have to get a lot of views. Likewise, newspapers work on a 24 hour cycle of news accumulation and publishing, whereas the internet is 24×7 with the opportunity to change headlines and what’s reported continuously. If a newspaper tries to apply the old Success Formulas related to sales, pricing and editorial process they fail.

And that’s why crossing the re-invention gap requires a big Disruption. You have to get the organization to understand that while you are managing the old business, it is destined to eventually go under. So you have to be prepared to Disrupt the Lock-ins, to discover a new way to do the business. And that can only happen if there is a White Space team dedicated to building a business the way the new marketplace will pay for it. Totally separated from the old business. And exactly the opposite of what Tribune is doing by placing the team in the middle of the old newsroom!

At Tribune, one of the big problems is not only the ad pricing model and news scheduling, but the fact that the leadership is still trying to drive content like they did at the newspaper. Over a decade ago Tribune took a direction of accumulating less news on its own, and as a result it republished lots of content. But now on the internet republishing (or content aggregation as it is called on-line) is far less valuable because readers can go to the source. There are thousands and thousands of aggregators – making competition intense and profits negligible. Why page view a Chicago Tribuneweb page that’s feeding info from the New York Times or Marketwatch or MSNBC when you can go directly to the New York Times or Marketwatch or MSNBC and get it yourself – possibly with other interesting sidebars? Succeeding in the new market requires developing an entirely new Success Formula – which Tribune Company has not done. It’s still trying to find that magical “leverage” which will allow it to preserve its “history” (its old Success Formula) while tiptoeing into the new marketplace.

I don’t know any newspaper or magazine publisher that has really attacked its Lock-ins, really Disrupted, or set up a true White Space team to explore how to make money in the growing new news market. News Corp. had the chance when it bought MySpace.com, but failed as it destroyed the MySpace business by “helping” its leadership. This market requires understanding how to get the news and report it cheaply and very fast, to computer and mobile device users. That is necessary to obtain the traffic which would be valuable to advertisers. And simultaneously the new team must package ad sales so as to maximize revenues from page views. Most are far too reliant on single ad sales, and not effectively linking the right ads to the right pages to generate more click-throughs as well as views.

Re-invention Gaps emerge because we let Lock-in blind us to growth opportunities. We define the business around the Lock-ins (such as printing a newspaper) rather than defining it around what the market wants (news). Then when revenues stumble, starting a growth stall, the energy goes into preserving the old Success Formula (and its Lock-ins) first with cost cuts, and later with efforts to “synergize” or “leverage” the old Success Formula into the new market. And this never works. The growing part of the market is entirely different, and requires developing an entirely new Success Formula. That’s why even in growing markets businesses fail, unless they commit to Disrupting the Lock-in and using White Space to move back into the growth Rapids.

Democratic Centralism

According to Richard Holbrooke, currently special envoy to Afghanistan, White House officials such as McGeorge Bundy, national security adviser to both Kennedy and Johnson “cut people to ribbons because their views weren’t acceptable.” Holbrooke goes on to say that Washington promotes what he calls “tactical brilliance framed by strategic conformity”– the ability to outmaneuver one’s counterpart, without questioning fundamental assumptions.

An alternative and more productive culture would be one where you have open airing of views, opinions, perspectives and suggestions upward when MAKING a decision, followed by rigorous and disciplined cooperation when IMPLEMENTING that decision. In many companies the exact opposite happens. People sit in a room, they don’t express their real differences, a false and superficial consensus masks underlying differences, and they go back to their offices and continue to work at cross-purposes, even actively undermining each other.”

 

 

Successful Management

The secret of being a successful manager is keeping the five guys who hate you away from the five who haven’t made up their minds.

Say what?

From a November press release by Nokia Siemens Networks.

Nokia Siemens Networks has completed the preliminary planning process to identify the proposed  remaining headcount reductions necessary to reach its previously announced synergy-related headcount-adjustment goal. To date, the company has achieved an adjustment of of more than 6,000 employees and continues to expect a total synergy related adjustment of approximately 9,000 employees. “With the successful completion of these plans,” said CEO Simon Beresford-Wylie, “we can expect to put this chapter of our history behind us and focus on creating a world-class company.

” The proposed headcount adjustments are a result of merger-related synergies, including changes to our product portfolio, site optimization, streamlining of various functions, and strategic long term R&D and workforce balancing designed to build a competitve Nokia Siemens Networks. Bosco Novak, head of human resources, said, “It is our goal to engage constructively with employess representatives to quickly and fairly achieve these needed changes so we are able to remove the ongoing uncertainty that our employees have about these synergy related headcount reductions.”

Are you breathing your own exhaust?

“A leader can start breathing his own exhaust unless he has some close peers who will keep his mind open by honestly confronting him”

Patrick Lencioni on Virtual Teams

This is from Pat’s POV: February 2009.

When I speak to audiences about teamwork, one of the most frequently asked questions I get has to do with managing groups of people who are geographically dispersed, a.k.a. virtual teams. This surprises me a little because the topic, as well as the solution for addressing it, is certainly not very sexy. But with so many teams these days comprised of members living in different time zones and countries and continents, and with travel budgets likely to shrink for the foreseeable future, there probably has never been a greater need for people who don’t see each other very often to figure out how to work better together. The key is simply about avoiding three mistakes.

The first mistake that virtual teams make is underestimating the challenges of being dispersed. Because e-mail and voicemail and texting and instant messaging have become so second nature, we too often assume that a team member’s physical location makes little difference in the effectiveness of the team. This, of course, makes no sense.

After all, no family would say “well, dad lives in New York, mom lives in San Francisco and the kids are spread around the country, but thanks to my iPhone and computer, it’s no different than living under the same roof.” The simple but often overlooked truth is that without the daily interaction of breakfast or dinner or homework or late night conversations or doing the dishes, a family can’t possibly develop and maintain the strength that it needs to thrive during good times and survive during challenging ones. The same is true for teams who have no incidental conversations in the hallway or at lunch, or in the elevator, for that matter.

Once a team understands the disadvantage of not being co-located, then it will be more likely to take on the next mistake that virtual teams make: wasting the precious time that they do spend together.

Too many virtual teams utilize their quarterly or monthly in-person sessions engaging in social activities, somehow believing that this is how the team will bond. While social time is okay, if there is not a focused and organized attempt to build relationships in the context of the work that needs to be done, then the team will only improve its collective golf scores, or worse yet, its tolerance for alcohol. On the other side of the equation, too many teams go the other way, spending their sparse time together doing detailed operations reviews and addressing overly tactical matters, which is almost as unproductive as golfing. The perfect storm occurs when teams split their time between irrelevant socializing and mind-numbing detail, resulting almost inevitably in everyone coming to dread another useless trip to corporate.

What team members really need to do when they are face-to-face is develop their relationships by getting to know one another’s strengths and weaknesses, not in a touchy-feely way, but in the context of the goals of the business. And they need to establish clear alignment around the bigger picture issues like the team’s core purpose, values, strategic anchors and top priorities. Wasting time in the weeds wrestling with detailed ops issues is fruitless and frustrating when teams are not on the same page relating to these bigger issues. Strong relationships are critical to getting on the same page because it allows the team to debate issues passionately and productively, which increases the likelihood that everyone will buy-in.

Buy-in is especially important for virtual team members because when they get back to their offices, they will need to work with a high degree of confidence that their peers will do what they agreed to do for the good of the team. That is hard enough when those peers sit in the cube or office across the hall and have plenty of in-person meetings on a regular basis. When they’re in different cities, it is much more difficult, which brings us to mistake number three.

The last mistake that virtual teams make is failing to master an event that is one of the most loathed and underestimated of all corporate activities: the dreaded conference call. Yes, even in this age of improved video-conferencing, there is simply no good, reliable and affordable everyday substitute for the speaker phone when it comes to working with remote colleagues. Unfortunately, just as we’ve done with regular meetings, we’ve come to believe that conference calls are inherently boring and unchangeable, a sort of corporate penance. So we accept agenda items that are neither compelling or critical, and we make an unspoken deal with each other: “as long as you let me check my e-mail and balance my check-book and play spider solitaire and do busy work—all with the mute button on—I’ll keep coming to these meetings and offering my perfunctory input to let everyone know I’m still awake.”

What teams have to do—and I told you up front that this is simple and unsexy—is make a serious commitment to one another that they will maintain a high standard of behavior during conference calls, even higher than they would for an in-person meeting. That will mean eliminating outside interruptions, avoiding distractions, foregoing the use of the mute button, and indicating agreement or disagreement verbally to avoid passive approvals born out of misinterpreted silence.

Of course, all of this starts with the building of strong relationships, and the only way our teams are going to be willing to dedicate the time and energy to do that is if we understand the disadvantage of being virtual. If we can’t do that, we should probably just get used to more golf, more spider solitaire, and more time, energy and money wasted during trips to corporate.

How do you restore morale and productivity after layoffs?

The Hayes Group International suggests a five-pronged approach:

1. Plan: Figure out how the layoff will be communicated and how to assist survivors. Work out reassigned tasks and responsibilities ahead of time. Communicate why the changes were necessary and how roles will change.
2. Communicate: Explain how the organization plans to recover, what role the employees will play, and why the changes had to happen.
3. Listen empathetically: Most survivors will likely go through a period of grieving and guilt. A manager who’s able to console his team can help improve morale. When your employees air their feelings, listen more and talk less. Postpone responses and judgments until you’ve heard the person out.
4. Maintain trust: Many survivors will feel at least disappointed; some will feel betrayed. To try to maintain trust, observe these important elements — demonstrate concern, act with integrity, and achieve results.
5. Develop survivors’ skills: With reassigned responsibilities, some employees may need additional training. Anticipate this and have plans in place; talk with your team as time passes to see if they need more support.

Why most change programs fail

1. The ‘programs’ purpose is ambiguous
2. The conceptual framework supporting the program is unclear or inadequate
3. The scope pace and manner of implementation of the ‘program’ are inappropriate for the results expected
4. The tools provided are inappropriate or insufficient
5. The relationship of the program to the organization’s goals is weak
6. The activities of the program are treated as an end in themselves