manager

Do the post-project review before you start the project

November 26, 2017By Mike Hohnen

Sounds nuts, I know, but according to research by psychologist Gary Klein, it’s a great way to improve the actual outcome of your projects.

But before we go into details, there is an additional benefit that fits in with this month’s theme of improving how our top management teams function.

You see if you perform what Klein calls a pre-mortem on your projects, you are also providing a psychologically safe space for your team to voice disagreement or worries without being labelled as negative spoilsports or even worse being seen as disloyal.

So how do you do it? You make a plan for the project in your usual way, or maybe it is just a plan how you are going to execute the day with your team. When everyone is happy that we now have a plan, you announce:

“I am sorry to tell you but it has turned out that project (X) was an unprecedented disaster. Please give me your ideas as what could have happened to derail the project so badly.”

This is a very different question from asking: “So what could go wrong?” When we ask the ‘what could go wrong’ question, voicing your doubts on the team can be much trickier and often decidedly outside the psychological safety zone.

Now, everyone gets out a pad of paper and brainstorms with themselves 3-5 ways that this project could have been totally derailed, or that this day that we planned so carefully ended up a total disaster.

On a whiteboard or a flip-chart, draw a 2×2 as shown below:

Now ask each person to read out their ideas as to why this day/ project went wrong. As they do, note the item in the appropriate square.

Now you have an overview of what problems we might encounter, sorted in a practical way. Discuss how to create proactive solutions where you can see the need and make a backup plan for the issues that you can see could happen under a certain set of circumstances.

You have now achieved two things:

1) You have proactively identified a number of issues that you would probably not have discovered until it was too late.

2) More importantly, you have provided a safe space where it is possible to actually discuss the proverbial elephant in the room. Instead of a messy feedback session loaded with blame and critique, you have made it possible to voice doubts in a constructive way regardless of hierarchies or departmental boundaries.

The method is called ‘prospective hindsight’ and according to Author Karl Weick, it can improve people’s ability to predict the reasons for future outcomes by 30%.

Your top management team may need a hard ‘reset’.

April 13, 2022By Mike Hohnen

Harvard professor Dr. Robert Kegan says:

“Let’s be blunt: In the ordinary organization, nearly everyone is doing a second job no one is paying them for — namely, hiding their weaknesses, looking good, covering their rear ends, managing other people’s favorable impression of them. This is the single biggest waste of a company’s resources.”

And the way I look at it is that the better they are at that second job, the more dysfunctional the management teams become…

So what to do about it? How to stop the madness?

Again, according to Kegan, it requires a different mindset, a culture that goes something like this:

“We hired you because we thought you were good, not because we thought you were perfect. We are all here to get better, and the only way we will get better is to make mistakes, reveal our limitations, and support each other to overcome them.”

And that, says Kegan, is the starting point. That is the basic foundation of how to create what he and co-author Dr. Lisa Lahey have labelled the DDO a Deliberately Developmental Organization in their book: An everyone culture.

In that culture, we would not need to spend time on our second job at all but would use the time more productively to develop ourselves each other and the organisation. This is not as utopian as you might think, but it definitely requires a hard ‘ RESET’ of how the team interacts with each other.

A good place to start might be to go off-site for 2-3 days and agree on a new set of ground rules for collaboration development and growth. There are various ways to do that. One of my favourite frameworks is using Peter Blocks six conversations as the agenda for the retreat.

Invitation conversation. Transformation occurs through choices, not mandates. Invitation is the call to create an alternative future. What is the invitation we can make to support people to participate and own the relationships, tasks, and process that lead to success?
Possibility conversation. This focuses on what we want our future to be as opposed to problem-solving the past. It frees people to innovate, challenge the status quo, break new ground and create new futures that make a difference.
Ownership conversation. This conversation focuses on whose organization or task is this? It asks: How have I contributed to creating current reality? Confusion, blame and waiting for someone else to change are a defense against ownership and personal power.
Dissent conversation. This gives people the space to say no. If you can’t say no, your yes has no meaning. Give people a chance to express their doubts and reservations, as a way of clarifying their roles, needs and yearnings within the vision and mission. Genuine commitment begins with doubt, and no is an expression of people finding their space and role in the strategy.
Commitment conversation. This conversation is about making promises to peers about your contribution to the success. It asks: What promise am I willing to make to this enterprise? And, what price am I willing to pay for success? It is a promise for the sake of a larger purpose, not for personal return.
Gifts conversation. Rather than focus on deficiencies and weaknesses, we focus on the gifts and assets we bring and capitalize on those to make the best and highest contribution. Confront people with their core gifts that can make the difference and change lives.

In my experience, it is well worthwhile to have a person who is not part of the team facilitate these conversations. So that each team member can participate freely without having another job to as well.

On the first evening, I also like to add a Life Map exercise in addition to the Six Conversations. After dinner, each participant takes 15-20 minutes to reflect on the path they have come along in life. They draw that as a graph or map using a template (you can have a copy by simply entering your email below). Once everyone has completed the Life Map, they take turns sharing their story using the life map as the guide. This ALWAYS produces a much better understanding of why each of us is who we are. And ultimately that contributes to higher levels of trust in the group.

I also recomend the book: Community The Structure of Belonging By Peter Block

Why are so many top management teams borderline dysfunctional?

October 30, 2017By Mike Hohnen

“When we create something that is separate from something else, we create limits to our ability to see the interrelationships”
– Gregory Bateson.

For all practical purposes, organisations need organising in a way that makes it clear who does what. Departments, division or whatever. But what we don’t always realise is that doing so comes at a price. Each entity is technically a holon; an entity on its own and part of something else and with that comes to ‘drives’, a power drive to realise itself and a ‘love’ drive toward unity with the bigger whole – What author Adam Kahane describes as a polarity of power and love in his book of the same name.

A polarity that is not well managed tends to tip to one side and become dysfunctional and ultimately self-destructive.

And therein lies the problem of the dysfunctional management teams. It is built into the system, no one pays attention to the need for a balancing of the polarities. On the contrary, in most organisations, there is a built-in bias to feed the power polarity. Heads of department, division etc. are held responsible as opposed to encouraging taking responsibility.

Success as the head of a holon often produces career benefits, personal bonuses but rarely is there a bonus for valuing the common good over own interests. The focus from the CEO is nearly always on optimising each section in the hope that by doing so we will have the best total sum. They may talk about unity and one-team and all that but the way they design meeting agendas, reporting remuneration and bonus systems contradicts the nice intentions.

Only very rarely do I see a CEO (or management team for that matter) where there is a focus on balancing this polarity, which means that there is a more balanced focus on driving unity, wholeness, and interdependencies while toning down the hard boundaries.

Holding managers strictly responsible for their units ( holon’s) performance they will automatically react by insisting on very clear boundaries. This is my department, that is your department. How else can I take responsibility for what is not under my control? But that thinking completely overlooks the reality that all the departments are interrelated and that my success or failure is closely linked to your success failure. In fact, success is not entirely under their control at all.

The only way out of the rigid boundaries is to foster a culture where individual managers take responsibility, which is a totally different story, and where the management team holds themselves collectively responsible for the overall performance.

“Categorising your peers as either stupid or evil is a failure of empathy.”
– Leadership Team Coaching: Developing Collective Transformational Leadership by Peter Hawkins

The key driver of unity is obviously relationships. The better the personal relationship we have on the top management team, the easier it becomes to balance the polarity and think outside own personal interests and gains. But relationships, as we all know, don’ t emerge out of thin air, they require a serious effort, and maybe more than anything else they require an attitude from all concerned that: I will do whatever it takes to makes these relationships work.

Collaboration is a habit of mind, solidified by routine and predicated on openness, generosity, rigour and patience. It requires precise and fearless communication, without status, awe or intimidation. It’s hard because it allows no passengers.
– Heffernan (2013) “A bigger Prize”

If you are an eager student of leadership you will probably also have noticed that the polarity of power and Love is also the polarity of Management and Leadership.

Dysfunctional management teams are a bigger problem than you might think.

April 13, 2022By Mike Hohnen

It’s Monday morning. It’s time for the weekly management meeting. As they filter through the door, they look as if they are attending a funeral. They take their usual seats, open up their laptops and locate the agenda, not that they need to, they know it by heart, it’s always the same 5 items and the CEO starts out with item 1 and every one goes through the usual motions. The 5 people on the management team have been together for the past 3 years. They know the routine by heart. In fact, they know it so well they can almost predict how each of them will answer the questions from the CEO.

If you ask them individually, they all dread these meetings, they just want them to be over and done with. The CEO especially is frustrated. This is his team and they are so far from what we would consider a team as you can be. They are just a group that convenes to share some information that could probably have been just as easily shared on an intranet.

So some people would argue to change the meeting format, make it livelier, sit in bean bag chairs and use lots of post-its etc. But that is not the core problem. When the meetings play out like this, it is just a symptom of something much more serious going on. The core problem here is relationships, the top management team at best don’t have healthy relationships with each other. In the worst cases I have seen, I would even characterize them as toxic and dysfunctional.

Furthermore, the problem here is not so much that they have boring meetings that they all dread, that is their problem you could say. No, the real problem is that if they have rotten relationships with each other, it filters down throughout the organisations and contributes to the dreaded silo thinking. Invariably, employees take sides with their team leader and the relationships across departments suffer accordingly.

Not the best scenario when we are trying to create end-to-end seamless and breath-taking customer experiences.

Company culture starts with the culture in our management team; that sets the tone. That culture is primarily defined by the relationships in that group. If you really want to create a strong culture, you will need to invest time and effort in improving the relationships on your management team. Until you do, not much will change.

What is your experience of top management cultures and how they influence the rest of the system? Leave your comments below or contact me, I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

Are you an accidental diminisher?

April 14, 2022By Mike Hohnen

In my previous blog post, we looked at two very different leadership approaches: multipliers vs. diminishers.

In this blog post, we’ll take a closer look at the diminisher.

So how much output do we get from someone when we hire them to do a fair day’s work?

Well, there is quite a lot of research that indicates that on average, we are getting somewhere between 30 and 50% of what people are actually capable of.

This is also reflected in the Gallup engagement research that shows that +/- 65% of the workforce is not particularly engaged in their work. If you are not engaged, you are probably also not giving it your best.

So what are the barriers for our people to give their best? The top three, according to the research are:

Rules, regulations, and structure in the organisation
Lack of feedback and encouragement
The leadership style of the immediate supervisor

So to put it in a nutshell: If you are not getting max output from your team, it is probably because of you.

Yes, let that sink in for a moment.

That is not because you are a slave driver with psychopathic tendencies, at least I hope not.

More likely your are just an accidental diminisher. Accidental because when you have a diminishing impact, you are likely to be completely unaware of it and probably the last to know.

The first thing you need to think about is your own assumptions and beliefs.

You see, diminishers see intelligence as based on elitism and scarcity. Diminishers appear to believe that really intelligent people are a rare breed and that they are of that rare breed. This naturally leads them to conclude that they are special and that other people will never work out what to do without them.

They also seem to follow a logic that says people that don’t ‘get it’ now probably never will. Therefore, I need to do all the thinking around here.

This is what Caroll Dweck, author of Mindset, would call a limiting mindset.

The Multipliers, on the other hand, have a growth mindset, which is a fundamental belief that basic qualities like intelligence and ability can be cultivated through effort.

Multipliers get more from their people because they are leaders who look beyond their own genius and focus their energy on extracting and extending the genius of others. And they don’t get just a little more back; they get vastly more.
_Liz Wiseman

As we all well know, our assumptions and beliefs govern our behaviour.

So the diminisher typically displays some or all of the following behaviours:

Micromanage things
Do most or all of the talking at team meetings
Have the answers and ask few questions
Be judgmental and critical of others
Create stressful environments that often do not feel safe
Take fast decisions (as opposed to getting everyone buy in)
Drown the team with new ideas and initiatives

So here are a few questions to ask yourself and reflect on:

How might I be shutting down the ideas and actions of others, despite having the best of intentions?
What am I inadvertently doing that might be having a diminishing impact on others?
How might my intentions be interpreted differently by others?
What messages might my actions actually be conveying?
What could I do differently, that would make more space for the to contribute and grow?
These questions can be tricky to get feedback on from your direct reports, for obvious reasons. But what you can ask when there is the right opportunity is: Is there anything that I could do differently that would help you do a better job?

And then listen very very carefully.

Check out Lis Wiseman’s book for yourself: Multipliers, Revised and Updated: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter

This the twelveth blog post in a series where Mike is exploring: Why is it important to develop not just yourself but also the people around you? You can read other posts in this series on Mike’s blog.

Building capacity is at the heart of the Service Profit Chain. If you are not familiar with the intricacies of is model, don’t forget to check out Mike’s online courses where you will find a lot of great tools, resources and knowledge on Leadership Development and The Service Profit Chain.

Are you a Multiplier or a Diminisher?

June 11, 2017By Mike Hohnen

If you want to reap the full benefits of your investment in training courses, you need to make a plan for what you are going to do when the course is over, because that is when the magic really happens.

We know from the 70:20:10 model that most of our learning comes from what we do on the job. That is the 70%.

And we also know that if we always do what we always did, we will always get what we always got.

And even that is not quite accurate because research shows that if we just do what we do, without trying to get better, we will actually regress, and gradually get slightly worse. But that is another story.

So we need to inspire our team members to do something different than what they have always done. That is why we send them on a training course.

But if these training programs are just seen as an entertaining stand-alone event then they do not help us much, except maybe for a few high performers who have the drive to take the materials and build their own implementation program.

So assuming that only a few of our team players are so called high performers, we then need to manage how we can best support the ‘normal’ team members in actually trying out their new knowledge, experimenting, getting feedback and gradually improving in order to ultimately get really good at whatever it is they learnt on the training course. That was, after all, the objective of the whole exercise.

Your approach makes a difference.

The key differentiator in this post-course learning phase is the team leader or the immediate supervisor.

Immediate supervisors, whether they are CEOs, VPs or floor managers come in basically two categories: Multipliers and Diminishers, writes Liz Wiseman, author of the book “Multipliers”.

Multipliers are essentially leaders who make everyone around them smarter, they consciously invest in the success of others. Their basic attitude is that people are smart and will figure it out and when they do, they become even smarter.

Multipliers ask lots of questions – Diminishers have all the answers.

Diminishers, on the other hand, create dependency. They often jump in and save the day. They drive results through their personal involvement and they are never shy to remind everyone how much smarter and more capable they are. When they do that, they drain the energy and motivation from everyone around them, and ultimately that reinforces the dependency.

Multipliers make sure that we get a high return on our training investment whereas diminishers time and again end up reducing all the time and effort that has been invested to nothing.

The key to being a great multiplier is to get people to think for themselves. They will never develop that ability if you always tell them what to do and how to do it. Learning means exercising some degree of choice, as opposed to working to a predetermined script. When you exercise your choice, you have an experience. That experience gives you feedback on how well you did. For most of us, this is a deeply motivating process. So building our capacity based on what we learnt on the course means trying things.

So the multiplier makes sure to hold a debrief meeting when a team member ‘returns’ from a formal training program. The purpose of the debrief is to establish what the team member is now going to work on in order to reinforce and build on the knowledge or inspiration that has been given in the course.

You’ll never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine.
– Johan C. Maxwell.

As with so many other new things, baby steps are the key. Don’t try and implement everything at once but make a plan. It’s the good old 20/80 principle again. What would be a small thing from the course that would make a big difference? That is a great starting point. Once we have that up and running, we move to the next item on the list, and step by step we build our capacity and performance. Use the GROW model to set it up.

So are diminishers evil egotist? No, most diminishers don’t even realise that they are draining the team. They actually mean well. They think they are being helpful. Next week, we will take a closer look at how not to fall into the trap of becoming a diminisher.

Check out Lis Wiseman’s book for yourself: Multipliers, Revised and Updated: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter

This the eleventh blog post in a series where Mike is exploring: Why is it important to develop not just yourself but also the people around you? You can read other posts in this series on Mike’s blog.

What kind of manager are you? A,B or C?

April 14, 2022By Mike Hohnen

We all learn from the feedback that we receive. That is probably no surprise. Your golf stroke is hard to improve if you are blind-folded, you need to see where the ball lands in order to correct your aim. That is one aspect of feedback.

To get really good, we need more than our own observations in order to improve. We need feedback from others who are also observing what is going on. Maybe even someone who encourages us to believe that we can do better than we thought possible ourselves.

So imagine the following scenario.

We take three people. Stand them in a line next to each other and in front of each of them place a bucket at about 5 meters distance. Once they have seen the bucket, we blindfold them and hand them another bucket with 10 tennis ball in it. Their job is to throw the tennis balls and get as many of them as possible into the bucket.

Each person is assigned a manager. And each manager has been instructed to behave (manage) slightly different.

On team A, the manager makes no comments as each ball is thrown but will just count how many balls are in when the session is over and will give the team member a performance review based on that. In this case, the only feedback the team member gets is the sound of the tennis ball hitting or not hitting the bucket.

On Team B, the manager has been instructed to comment on each throw and if it is not in the bucket then point out what the problem is. “Too far, too short, again! way to the side etc.” If the ball is in, the comment is just: “It’s in.”

On Team C, the manager has been instructed to give more detailed feedback on each ball combined with encouragement. “That was just 10 cm too far left but otherwise great shot, try again. Take a breath and focus etc.”

You can try this experiment for yourself. I often do it with larger groups of managers. But you probably do not need to perform the experiment to guess who of the three consistently gets most tennis balls in the bucket at the end of the day.

It’s pretty elementary my dear Watson, as Sherlock would say, but despite that, if you ask employees or middle managers, they are going to tell you that type A or B managers are much more common in their life than type C managers are. From a performance point of view, that is problematic. If we don’t have a positive constructive feedback culture, we will be underperforming, it’s that simple.

So the big question you need to ask yourself is what kind of manager are you?

Take it a step further. Imagine we added a four team, Team D. And here the instruction to the manager is. No matter what happens, just praise and be positive. But no detailed feedback. So this would sound like “Yes! Well done. Wonderfull. Wow!” and so on…

Now I am not suggesting that many managers are giving this kind of useless feedback to their people. No, the problem here is that this is the kind of feedback many managers RECIEVE from their team members. If team members do not feel 100% confident that it is safe to give Type C constructive feedback to their boss then they either say nothing or use some variants of the D style.

How effective is that going to make you? How are you going to know much about how well you are performing as their manager?

So as Ed Catmull writes in his lovely book Creative Inc, “In the beginning, all our movies suck but because we have a culture of candour, we can improve them and make them fantastic.”

You have been reading the fifth blog post in a series where Mike is exploring: Why is it important to develop not just yourself but also the people around you?

Building capacity is at the heart of the Service Profit Chain. If you are not familiar with the intricacies of the Service Profit chain, we have a special treat for you:

For this month only, you can download Mike’s book Best! No need to be cheap if … for FREE using this coupon JLXW8P9QSE. It is only available for the first 50 people so first come first serve.

Download the book here!

Converting knowledge to wisdom

April 13, 2022By Mike Hohnen

“What use is it to have a bellyful of meat if one can not digest it? If it cannot transform us, if it cannot improve us and fortify us?”

Wrote Michel de Montaigne back in the 16th century in one of his many rants against a French school system that “requires you to just parrot back everything you are told”.

So how do we actually convert knowledge into leadership wisdom?

The key word here is experience, experience not as in breathtaking customer experience, but learning from experience.

Because we all agree that we learn from our experiences, or do we?

If you have ever made the same mistake twice, you will have to agree that we do not consistently learn from our experiences.

When then do you learn from your experiences?

Elementary my dear Watson: Whenever you take the time to reflect on your experiences, you make deeper learning possible.

Reflection can be a personal reflection, or it can tackle the form of a team reflection.

Our reflection can be a surface reflection:

What happened?
Which actions were taken?
What were the consequences that we observed?

Or we can choose to do a deep reflection:

What did I learn about myself through this experience?
What are we learning about how this team functions and handles conflict through this experience?
What broader issue can we see arising from this experience?

Surface reflection helps us understand past actions and behaviours. Deep reflection helps us examine underlying beliefs and assumptions.

Both are important. But even more important is to start developing a practice of reflection. Make a habit of having a regular end of day/week or month reflection session with your team. Develop a personal particle of reflection. The best way to do that is to start a journal and spend just 10-15 minutes a day noting down your answers to:

What has been my focus today?
What have I observed?
What am I learning?
What will I focus on tomorrow?

Now your are on track to convert knowledge into wisdom.

This blog post is the second in a series of blog posts where Mike is exploring: Why is it important to develop not just yourself but also the people around you?

Building capacity is at the heart of the Service Profit Chain. If you are not familiar with the intricacies of the Service Profit Chain, we have a special treat for you:

For this month only, you can download Mike’s book Best! No need to be cheap if … for FREE using this coupon JLXW8P9QSE. It is only available for the first 50 people so first come first serve.

Download the book here!