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The big leap… from team member to team leader

January 26, 2019By Mike Hohnen

In my previous post, we looked at how the first time manager (FTM) is often neglected when it comes to training and development. In this post, we’ll start identifying some of the challenges that the FTM has.

The scenario is more or less the same in most types of service organisation. Due to a promotion or an organisational shuffle, we find ourselves needing a supervisor or team leader on one of our customer facing teams. We are busy. The position needs to be filed fast so our first reaction is to look at the team and see who we have that could jump in.

Who gets promoted to their first managerial position?

And often we find, what we think, is just the right person for the job. The criteria we use to evaluate this are typically this person’s performance. We pick a high performing team member with a lot of personal drive and on top of that, it is someone who is well organised – In short, it’s a no-nonsense person who gets the job done. The underlying implicit logic is that they will be a good example for the others to follow.

And they are good at managing … themselves. But they do not necessarily have a clue about how to manage other people. In fact, often they are distinctly bad at managing other people because they are too self focused.

The typical pitfall’s

They are used to being successful and are therefore determined to also do well as FTMs. Often this means that they either drive their team colleagues too hard or they end up driving themselves too hard as they try to compensate for other people’s lack of performance. And the worst of them do both. But obviously neither works very well and often ends up producing stress reactions in themselves and/or their colleagues.

They see performance as being all about excelling at certain (hard) skills. So their first reaction in their new role is often to look for tools or skills that they can learn that will equip them to do a better job. I see this in virtually every workshop I conduct when I start the day by clarifying what expectations the participants have. Top of the list at each table is nearly always – learn more tools to manage better.

It all about changing perspective

But the reality is that it is not so much a question of new tools and techniques, but more about perspectives. Evolving from a high performing team member into a successful FTM is all about shifting perspectives.

Instead of focusing on themselves as they have been used to, they now need to understand that it is only by focusing on the success of their colleagues that they themselves will be seen as successful.

As I have written about earlier on this blog – the name of the game is engagement. What the first time manager needs to learn and develop more than anything else is the ability to provide an engaging environment in which their colleagues thrive.

Sounds simple when you frame it like this but that is actually quite a big shift.

And the puzzling reality is that most of them are left to figure it out for themselves.

Next week we will look at some more challenges that are typical for FTMs and then in future posts, some ideas and tips on how we can get better at providing the support that this group needs.

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This is the second article in a series on how to lead as a first time manger. If you would like to know more, check out other articles of the first time manager series:

I have a new online training out on this: The Team Leaders Toolbox – check it out

How are you supporting your first time managers?

January 26, 2019By Mike Hohnen

We have on-boarding programs for new employees, we train frontline staff in all aspects of customer service, and we have executive development programs galore… But what about the first time manager (FTM)?

The first time manager is typically an employee who is doing really well in a specific function. They get the job done. And because they are doing well, they get noticed and promoted to their first managerial position. They become some version of a team leader.

Virtually from one day to the next, their job context changes dramatically.

So what type of training program are you offering your new FTMs, that will help them cope with this new situation?

Well, if you are like most organisations out there, you probably are not offering much.

In terms of situational leadership, it is the classical mistake of assuming that because someone is good at one thing, they will automatically also be good at the next thing we ask them to do.

But being a high performer in your functional area does not necessarily equip you to cope with the challenges of being a team leader – and so the reality is that in many organisations, this is a sort of swim or sink situation.

This, in reality, is a way of playing Russian roulette with your frontline employees because it has been proven again and again that the vast majority – some say up to 90 percent – of employees who leave their service job do so because they do not get on with their immediate supervisor.

But retention is just part of the issue. We also know that up to 70% of a given frontline employee’s level of engagement can be attributed to the leadership style of her immediate supervisor.

So to put it in a nutshell, your customer experience at the end of the day is directly related to the quality of your first time managers.

With this little rant, I would like to kick of a series of blog posts over the next weeks where I will explore various aspects of the challenges that FTMs face and what we can do to best help them.

If you are a First time Manager or have recently been one, I would love to hear from you. What were your challenges and how did you learn to cope?

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This is the first article in a series on how to lead as a first time manger. If you would like to know more, check out other articles of the first time manager series:

I have a new online training out on this: The Team Leaders Toolbox – check it out

The price of success is often slow death.

May 25, 2016By Mike Hohnen

In the early nineties, Prof. John Kotter conducted a research on what he, at the time, called “unadaptive organisations”.

The business school case of that time was Rank Xeroz who invented the photocopier, created a highly successful business with a dominant market share, only one day to wake up and find that the Japanese had eaten their lunch.

Kotter pointed out that there seemed to be a pattern in these cases of dominant companies that were suddenly seriously disrupted. (More recent cases of this kind of disruption are KODAK and Nokia; same story and LEGO was within inches of falling of the same cliff a few years back. “We had become arrogant—we didn’t listen to customers anymore,” says Mr Knudstorp.)

A great strategy/product leads to exceptional success.

But success sometimes has some unpleasant side effects.

It starts out with focus, that leads to tighter control, that leads to rigid procedures and rules and eventually just before it’s lights out, to arrogance. The arrogance means there is no room for new input from any of the stakeholders involved – The internal logic is we are successful and therefore we know best – don’t mess with it.

The reason this rigid focus does not work is because it presupposes that the world we live in is also stable or even stagnant – but when everything else around us evolves at an ever increasing speed, we need to evolve with it – that means changing and adapting the whole time.

So how do we mitigate arrogance?

The buzz word seems to be agility – But how does one become agile? We install a culture of continuous learning.

If we are always learning – we are in questioning the status quo – it’s what Peter Senge calls open mind. We are asking questions of ourselves and our surroundings continuously; questions that stem from genuine curiosity. Curiosity about what is going on, what others are thinking and feeling. If we then also take the time to reflect on the answers we are getting, pure magic happens.

You see, it is a bit of a myth that we learn from our experiences. If we always did, we would never make the same mistake twice, would we? So we only learn from our experiences when we take the time to think about them – when we pause for a moment of reflection.

So we need to develop the habit of reflection as the natural part of ending a meeting, ending the day, ending a project.

My favourite way of doing that – which is super fast, is to use the goals grid developed by Fred Nicols – you will find it here.

We ask ourselves two questions: do we have it and do we want it? Then we get four sections: Preserve, Achieve/develop, Eliminate and Avoid. I often do this on a napkin.

“So how did the day go? what would we like to continue doing, do better tomorrow, eliminate or avoid in the future?”
“Thank you all for attending this meeting. Let’s just recap what did we learn today?”

Try for yourself – even on your own. At the end of the day, ask yourself: What did I learn today?

Talents, are they scarce or just picky about who they work for?

May 25, 2016By Mike Hohnen

Lately I have been having discussions with clients about talent scarcity. One of my key points when talking about the Service Profit Chain is that recruitment is a crucial step in the dream team process. If you don’t have people with the right attitude, then it’s uphill from the word go.

But then I sometimes get pushback – we can’t find them, they say. There is nobody out there; we search and search and they don’t surface.

I don’t believe them.

Yes I believe them when they say that the talent they are looking for does not surface – but what I don’t believe is that it is not out there.

Obviously, the amount of talents out there follows a normal distribution curve more or less. So there are more people in the ordinary talent group than there are in the fantastic talent group. In that sense, there is some scarcity. But if I take a calliper and draw a circle of, say, 50km round your business, are you going to tell me that within that circle, there are not the people we need?

Of course there are – that is not the problem. The problem is for whatever reason they are not interested in working for you at the moment.

Why not?

If you are paying market related wages, it is not a question of pay. It is probably a question of reputation. Because the fact is that talented individuals want to work for and with other talented individuals.

The worst thing we can do to our most talented individuals is to ask them to work alongside an idiot – it takes away their job content – it makes their workday meaningless.

So if we want to run a service business that delivers extraordinary service experiences, then we need to attract extraordinary people to deliver that.

If we are not attracting the best talent, we need to start thinking strategically about how do we become the employer of choice in our region in the future?

Strategic HR is smart marketing – wonderful employees attract loyal customers that generate raving online revues.

Is HR part of your future strategy task force?

Millennial, the “impossible” generation

May 18, 2016By Mike Hohnen

From Mike Hohnen: This week I would like to introduce you to Hanh Lam. For the past two months, Hanh and I have been collaborating around the management and development of my website. During that period, we have had a focus on leadership as a theme on the blog. So I have invited Hanh to guest blog this week and give her perspective.

Author’s note: First of all, I want to thank Mike for asking me to do this guest post on his blog. Working together, we talk a lot about leadership and management. Mike once told me people asked if he found it difficult to work with millennials. As I happen to be a millennial, here is a post to address the impossibleness of my generation.

Millennials were born and raised in the age of information and technology, in a globalized world, in times of peace but also in some ways, times of crisis. We are tech-savvy, we have itchy feet, and we are naïve and foolish. We are “Generation Me”, “Trophy kids”, “Peter Pan Generation” or “pragmatic idealists”. There are so many other ways or words people use to describe generation Y. In short, we are really different. We dress differently, we think differently, and we live/work differently.

With access to computer and the Internet from an early age, we receive information and communicate through multiple sources and platforms. We learn and process knowledge from a more global perspective. Being more exposed to traveling and other cultures, we are also more liberal.

Many people think we are selfish, greedy narcissists. That is only partly true with a proportion of generation Y. The reason behind this is that we were born in a time when consumerism was booming. Everything we have is in adequacy and abundance. And our parents, mostly Baby Boomers and Gen X, who lived through wars, recessions, had sacrificed a lot for us to have better lives. And some of us just got accidentally and unintentionally spoiled.

However, most of us aren’t like that. Millennials have already taken over around 50% of the workforce. We have been, and will be, changing the world in every way possible, and for the better. We are responsible global citizens. We care deeply about global issues and we take actions. We learn and adapt fast; we are also very versatile with change.

But, we are also lost… Growing up in a globalized world, we question our identity and doubt about our core values. We do not want a stable, secure life like older generations, so we struggle at times to find our purpose in life. Generation gap probably hasn’t hit any generation as hard as it has us. Millennials live and grow in a fast-paced, constantly changing world. So we get lost and disoriented…quite often.

With the relentless and restless spirit of generation Y, we get lost but we are foolish enough to continue leading and pursuing the life we want. But, we could use a bit of guidance and orientation from older generations. Guidance, not imposition.

People from previous generations, who are wiser, older and more experienced, can be great mentors and advisors for us. On the other hand, we youngsters can show you a thing or two, a different perspective on things, a different side of a world we are living in, a different way to do things. It can be a wonderful learning experience and growing opportunity for both sides if you are patient and open-minded enough to get to know us, listen to us and most of all, grow with us.

Millennials and leadership

Okay so basically we are a bunch of energetic, complicated, crazy youngsters. How does leadership work with us? Or how can you lead or manage us?

Millennials can make great leaders. No doubt. Generation Y is full of ideas and fresh perspectives. We don’t really settle; we always look for a better solution and change. We are determined and naïve enough (yes) to make bold decisions and take risks. We are not afraid to tumble. “Stay hungry, stay foolish” has been pretty much our motto.

And from our yearning to learn, change and grow, comes innovations. Our positive energy and restless spirit are contagious. With us, there is neither boss nor manager. We lead by inspiring, motivating and being part of the team.

If you have millennials as part of your team, depending on your mindset and approach, it can either be the worst nightmare imaginable, or the best management experience of your career. So, how can people deal with us? Well, don’t.

– Give us something meaningful at work, a purpose, and we will stop calling it work. We will live it. A purpose gives us a sense of belonging and we will commit ourselves to the cause you stand for.

– Don’t micro-manage us. Instead, give us the freedom and flexibility to learn, explore and try things our ways. You will be amazed with the ideas we come up with.

– Give us some challenges. We are action junkies and we get bored super fast sitting in cubicles doing paperwork or running errands. Believe in us and maybe let us be in charge of a big project. This will make us feel really valued and respected. We will be even more creative, responsible and engaged.

– Allow us to learn and grow. We love learning and developing ourselves. We will be more likely to choose and engage at a workplace that provides us with training opportunities and mentorship rather than a higher-paid position doing endless repetitive work.

– Listen to us and open your mind. We might be young and inexperienced, but that is actually our advantage. We are curious and we have different views and opinions. If you are patient enough to listen to us and our ideas, we will help you “unstuck” and show you a new way of doing things. Don’t be afraid to change and accept to be challenged.

So after all, Millennial isn’t impossible at all. If you just change your mindset and approach and allow us to thrive, we are actually the “I’m possible” generation.

Exceeding expectations… of your followers

May 6, 2016By Mike Hohnen

Your success as a leader is closely associated with your ability to manage and live up to the expectations… of your followers.

We all know that we need to live up to or preferably exceed customer expectations.

But do we also understand that exactly the same mechanisms apply to the expectations of our followers?

ETC

From behavioural psychology, we know that there are three components that are important for humans when they evaluate an experience.

Emotions, trust and control.

Emotions influence what we remember, how we score encounters and the decisions we make. We all have explicit memories that we access about events, and implicit, or unconscious, emotional memories that characterise our feelings during those events. Emotionally charged episodes (both positive and negative) are often easily recalled.

Trust is a primitive psychological variable that is essential to any robust and enduring relationship. Without trust, there is often no engagement, only negative feelings such as anxiety and frustration. With trust comes a sense of comfort.

Control over one’s environment and knowledge of how events are going to evolve are fundamental psychological needs. Research shows that feelings of control (or lack thereof) can affect one’s health.

Control plays out in two forms: behavioural and cognitive.

Behavioural control means letting people have a say in how they do things (autonomy); and cognitive control is created by conveying information about the process or the outcome you can expect, i.e. as few negative surprises as possible.

What do they expect?

So with all this in mind, what are the expectations around you as a leader?

According to Mastering Leadership a book by Robert J. Anderson and William A. Adams, leaders need to understand that there are two sets of expectations: Explicit and implicit.

Explicit expectations are fairly straightforward. They are typically about accountability, responsibility, results, strategy and execution. The explicit expectations may even be listed in our job description.

But when your followers chose to follow you as a leader, they have implicit expectations in return for that followership. These expectations are typically about competence, fair treatment, commitment, engagement, listening, acting on suggestions, and providing inspiration, meaning, and direction.

But there is not a given list and it will vary from person to person.

Depending on how well you understand these expectations, you will influence their Emotions, Trust and sense of Control and thus ultimately their engagement.

How do you know what the implicit expectations are? Well that is exactly the point, you probably don’t. Because that is the nature of implicitness, they are not vocalised because they assume that you know…

So you need to ask.

Meaning you need to start a series of conversations with the people you lead with the aim to uncover their expectations – what do they need from you?

Eventually the goal is to make the implicit explicit, and then you will positively reinforce the three parameters: Emotion, Trust and Control.

And that is the way to generate a high level of engagement!

Change your mind and grow

April 13, 2022By Mike Hohnen

In my previous post, we looked at two very different ways of seeing the world of work: Transactional and Transformational.

So the next obvious question is why don’t more companies teach their leaders to be transformational?

Organizations have grown skilled at developing individual leader competencies, but have mostly ignored the challenge of transforming their leader’s mind-set from one level to the next. Today’s horizontal development within a mind-set must give way to the vertical development of bigger minds.
___John McGuire and Gary Rhodes Transforming Your Leadership Culture, Center for Creative Leadership

The challenge is that being transformational is not a skill. It’s a way of making sense of the world.

So it is not a question of adding more skills and competencies. What is needed is a different way of thinking.

As human beings and as leaders, we can develop ourselves fundamentally in two different ways. We can add skills and tools to our toolbox, if you like. We often call that horizontal development.

The other dimension of our development is vertical. It is about our growth as human beings. We go through different stages of growth from when we’re born; and these stages are, first and foremost, about how we understand the world. How do we make sense of what is happening around us?

These vertical developmental stages are very apparent when we observe small children, in whom each stage happens over a relatively short time. So, we easily notice the difference.

With grown-ups, it’s slower, and at some points, most of us stagnate at some levels.

It was the Swiss child psychologist, Jean Piaget, who was the pioneer in this area. His work has since been followed-up by researchers such as Jane Loevinger and later Susanne Cook-Greuter.

More recently, Bill Tolbert and Robert Kegan at Harvard, have both worked on grown-up vertical development and what that means in a leadership context.

Kegan describes that grown-ups typically have the possibility to develop in three overall stages. The first one he calls ‘dependent and conform,’ the next one ‘independent and achievement-oriented,’ and the last one is ‘interdependent and collaborative’.

Depending on which of these stages of development you find yourself in as a leader, your approach to a number of classical leadership competencies will be very different.

If we take some of the typical issues that we identify as leadership competencies, they could be strategic thinking, change management, conflict management, and leadership across boundaries.

And depending on where one is in one’s development, one will approach each of these very differently. In the figure below, you will see illustrations of the three developmental levels and how they are handled at each level.

Competencies	Dependent – conformer	Independent – achiever	Interdependent – collaborator
Strategic thinking	– Short-term view – Tactical tasks – Black and white – Either/or – High need for certainty	– Medium-term view – Sees is parts of the system – Sees is some patterns and connections	– Long-term view – Sees many shades of grey – Sees many patterns and connections – Accepts uncertainty as the norm
Leading change	– Change to come from above – Needs and trusts authority to give direction – High need for certainty	– Has own views about best change – Sees the mechanics of change needed – Success is achievement of individuals and teams	– Change is a collaborative process – Comfortable with ambiguity – Success means realisation of a shared vision
Conflict	– To be avoided – Authority is in charge – Feels torn by conflict	– Worked out behind closed doors – Produces winners and losers	– Healthy view together more viewers – Something to be encouraged – Increases learning and performance
Leading across boundaries	– Trusts analysing people you know – Them versus us – Distrust of outsider	– Able to think from others’ perspectives – Horse trades for favours – Focused on success of own self	– Sees the world through others’ perspectives to understand more – Shares knowledge across boundaries – Works in partnership with other functions

If you look more closely at the matrix, you will also see that this is where we find the key as to why we are not seeing as much transformational leadership as we maybe would like.

It’s only at the third stage of development in Kegan’s model, the one that is called ‘collaborative and interdependent,’ that the leader has a mindset that enables a transformative approach — the short explanation as to why this is so, is that, in the two earlier stages, the leader is often more concerned with himself.

The first stage, the dependent stage, is all about fitting in and conforming to the prevailing culture.

In the next phase, independent and achievement-oriented, it’s all about the leader being so oriented towards his own achievement that he risks falling into the trap that it’s all about his project: Better results, market share, new products, or whatever. The leader really wants to succeed personally, often in order to further his career or qualify for a bonus, or whatever. But, because it then becomes all about him and his project, he often doesn’t manage to get everybody else with him. (Followers will engage around ‘our’ project but will tend to disengage if it is just about ‘your’ project.)

It’s only when you, as a human being, have developed to the stage where you are more inclusive and collaborative, have a higher tolerance of others, and are not as focused on yourself – and your personal success – that you actually are capable of inspiring everybody else around you to contribute to what everyone will see as ‘our’ project.

Implementing the Service Profit Chain requires a different state of mind.

May 4, 2016By Mike Hohnen

As we have seen in previous posts, our state is influenced by how we see things – SeeBeDo.

The dominant way of seeing the world of work is called transactional – it’s the something-for-something system – and as we saw in my previous post, it is not madly inspiring.

But what is the alternative?

Is there a different way to look at the world of work that would produce a different state of mind and as a consequence, a different kind of leadership?

The short answer is yes – it is called transformational leadership and what is puzzling about this is that this way of seeing work has been around since the late 1970s.

Transformational Leadership was first coined by the historian and political scientist, James MacGregor Burns in the late 1970s, and was used to distinguish the inspirational leadership style from Transactional Leadership.

It was later expanded on by Bass and Rigio in their book “Transformational Leadership”

“Superior leadership performance — transformational leadership — occurs when leaders broaden and elevate the interests of their employees, when they generate awareness and acceptance of the purposes and mission of the group, and when they stir their employees to look beyond their own self-interest for the good of the group. Transformational leaders achieve these results in one or more ways: They may be charismatic to their followers and thus inspire them; they may meet the emotional needs of each employee; and/or they may intellectually stimulate employees. “

Transformational leadership includes four central components:

Idealized Influence	being a role model that is highly regarded, valued, trusted, and deserving of emulation
Inspirational Motivation	encouraging enthusiasm in others through challenge and instilling a sense of significance while promoting cohesion, harmony, and confidence
Intellectual Stimulation	kindling creativity and inventiveness by encouraging novel ideas, questioning, and thinking outside the box
Individualized Consideration	paying particular attention to the individual needs of each follower

At the core of this is a fundamentally different approach to what work and life is all about

Transactional	Transformational
Homo economicus – humans are rational, and act only out of self-interest.Reward and punishment are the prime motivators.	The integrated human works on developing herself on many levels, physical, mental and emotional.Humans are driven by a need for purpose / meaning and a hunger for development and autonomy.
The transactional manager works within the established way of thinking and does not question these basic assumptions about how the organisation operates.	The transformational leader is continuously renewing the organisation by challenging existing assumptions and implementing new ideas process that question the status quo.
The employee and the employer have opposite interested it a zero sum game, I win/ you lose	The employer and the employee have common or at least overlapping interest and concerns. It’s a win/win or a lose/lose.

There is a ton of academic research that shows that the transformative approach produces superior results. If we then drill down and try to understand what exactly it is that makes this significant difference, two things jump out.

Transformational leadership, more than anything else, creates a high level of employee enthusiasm / engagement.
In a rapidly changing world full of wicked problems – survival, let alone growth, is dependent on the contribution of everyone.

The transformative leader is distinguished by the ability to mobilise all the resources that are present in a given group or organization. And because people feel involved, included, and accepted for who they are, you get a completely different level of engagement. It becomes a self-reinforcing upward spiral.

Because of this, there are better relations and a much better understanding of each other’s perspectives. This also builds a culture where everybody feels like contributing and adding their point of view and ideas without being nervous about being criticized, ridiculed, or otherwise falling foul in the system.

This also means that the transformational leader is more humble in respect to other people and open to their ideas and contributions, because it’s not about the leader as a hero, but about a challenge, a purpose, that we need to solve together.

The transformative organization does better over time – they are much better equipped to handle change.

This also solves a personal inquiry I have had for a few years now: Why is it that some organisations implement the Service Profit Chain framework with a natural ease and subsequent amazing results, while others seem to get stuck.

The answer lies in their fundamental approach to work, is it transactional or is it transformational?

Even with the best intentions, if your fundamental state of mind is transactional, you will not create the kind of internal quality that is foundational for success when implementing the Service Profit Chain.