Mike Hohnen

Coaching for personal growth, change and development

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TEN “Obvious” Questions Concerning Your First-line Supervisors

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I have been a HUGE Tom Peters fan for years. I read In Search of Excellence and have been hooked ever since.

Recently TP has generously been sharing his collected wisdom in the form of the famous TP PPT slide sets. You will find them on his web site here.
There are 23 slide sets in total – more than 3500 slides of wisdom and/or provocation – one set that is particularly close to my heart is no 3 : First-line Supervisors Rule.

Here TP asks these 10 ‘Obvious’ questions

TEN “Obvious” Questions Concerning Your First-line Supervisors

1. Are you, Big Boss, a … formal student … of first-line supervisor behavioral excellence?* (*Yes, this sort of thing can be formally studied.)

2. Do you absolutely understand and act upon the fact that the first-line boss is the … KEY LEADERSHIP ROLE … in the organization? Technical mastery is important—but secondary.

3. Does HR single out first-line supervisors individually and collectively for tracking purposes and special/“over the top” developmental attention?

4. Do you spend gobs and gobs (and then more and more gobs and gobs) of time … selecting … the first-line supervisors? Are your selection criteria consistent with the enormity of the impact that first-line bosses will subsequently have?


5. Do you have the … ABSOLUTE BEST TRAINING & CONTINUING DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMS IN THE INDUSTRY (or some subset thereof) … for first-line supervisors?

6. Do you formally and rigorously … mentor … first-line supervisors?

7. Are you willing, pain notwithstanding, to … leave a first-line supervisor slot open … until you can fill the slot with somebody spectacular? (And are you willing to use some word like … “spectacular” … in judging applicants for
the job?)

8. Is it possible that … promotion decisions … for first-line supervisors are as, or even more, important than promotion decisions for the likes of VP slots? (Hint: Yes.)

9. Do you consider and evaluate the quality of your … full set/CADRE …. of first-line supervisors?

10. Are your first-line supervisors accorded the respect that the power of their position merits?

The job that needs to get done.

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Clayton Christensen – in his book The Innovators Dilemma has done a great job of explaining to us all why it is that time and again market leaders get ambushed by much smaller new entrants. If you have not read it please do it’s a fascinating read.

The classic scenario is that the much smaller new entrant launches a product that is obviously inferior from a quality point of view and therefore the existing players in the market don’t take it seriously. Ryanair is a good example of this and before them, Japanese car makers ambushed the American automobile industry with their compact cars.

And just now we are witnessing that the traditional newspaper industry is flapping around like headless chickens trying to come up with a business model that will save them from disappearing altogether – but they too woke up to late.

The key to understanding why this happens again and again is that established providers focus on their core customers and in that process lose sight of the job that needs to get done.
Take journalism, the demand for news is the same – but the way it is consumed has changed. My grandfather had the maid iron his newspaper before it was brought to him in his study. Well not many people consume news that way any more if you get my drift – but they still need it and somebody is providing it.

The reason I’m taking this up in my blog is because I have noticed how hugely popular a number of essentially couch surfing services have become. Airbnb seems to be the most visible but there are many others.

The concept enables private people to rent out their spare space to travelers. In Berlin a popular tourist destination hoteliers are now asking for government intervention, new rules and regulations because it is estimated that a whopping 5,000,000 bed nights a year are being supplied by private vendor’s. Interesting. Big chains are feeling threatened by small private vendors. What is going on?

Well, if we look at it through the lens of the job that needs to get done my interpretation is that this is not just about price – lots of private vendors are charging the same or more than your average budget hotel. I think this has more to do with hospitality – or the lack thereof.

If you visit a site like Airbnb.com and pick any popular city and look at the comments that some of the popular providers have on their listings from satisfied guests. What visitors appreciate is clearly the personal touch. The host that catered to a particular need, showed them the right dance club or whatever – in every case of a raving review it is clear that there was a real connection between the host and the guests. And that to me is what hospitality has always been about. That is the job that needs to get done.

But lately we have seen especially budget and mid priced hotels automating and streamlining their processes in order to cut costs. Check yourself in and out. Pick up your breakfast in the automate etc. But in the process they threw the baby out with the bathwater.

The obvious success of the couch surfing services is a big wake up call for the industry – we need to refocus on the job that needs to get done – which means being great hosts.

Applying Power & Love to the Service Profit Chain

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One of the misunderstandings that I often encounter when implementing the Service Profit Chain in organizations is that managers suddenly become reluctant to manage. I.e. they are reluctant to be directive or to set and enforce performance standards even when it is glaringly necessary.

They worry they will adversely affect the sacred employee satisfaction that is at the heart of the service profit chain thinking.

The problem is that it has exactly the opposite effect.

The team becomes uncertain, delivery of service sloppy and customer satisfaction goes out the window. And in the worst cases they conclude that creating a great place to works is a bad idea: “ just look what happens”.

They have not understood how to manage the polarities involved.

In order to explain what happens I use the work of a Adam Kahane on Power and Love.

First, we need to start with Adam Kahan’s definition of the two terms.

Power :“the drive of everything living to realize itself with increasing intensity”

Love : “the drive towards the unity of the separated”

So as we implement the service profit chain we definitely turn up the volume on the love part. In the process create a sense of unity, belonging and contribution from the ground level and up. That becomes our foundation

But now we have a situation from a polarity point of view that is often slightly lopsided. In order to balance the polarity and not end up in an anaemic, wishy-washy lovey-dovey kind of culture, it is important to increase the power side of the equation by raising the bar and setting high standards for performance and results.

When done in that order the result is a remarkable increase in commitment, motivation and performance.

This is actually quite logical if you think about it. Just feeling good (but getting nowhere) is not nearly as much fun or challenging as feeling good and achieving something significant.

So what happens is that when we increase the power side of the polarity in order to balance the love side we in fact increase employee satisfaction and loyalty as a result.

Martin Luther King put all this in a nutshell in this great quote:

”Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political and economical change…

And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites – polar opposites – so that love is identified with the resignations of power and power with the the denial of love.

Now we have to get this thing right.

What we need to realize is that power with out love is reckless and abusive and love with out power is sentimental and anemic. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our time.”

The future of adult education is DIY

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A week or so ago I posted a video on the future of education because I found it most thought provoking. Read it here

But since then I have been wondering about what is happening to adult education, what we generally know as professional training and development. Over the past 10 to 15 years we have seen huge growth in companies specializing in all kinds of professional development: leadership communication, assertiveness etc. The list is endless. But I’ve noticed that over the past 2 years a lot of those companies are now mere shadows of themselves. They are just not doing the business that they used to. When I ask my friends and clients in the conference hotel business, they agree – that part of their market has decreased significantly.

So what has happened, have professionals stopped learning?

That is unlikely. The rate of change surrounding us is accelerating at an unprecedented rate and the need for further education and development has never been higher than it is now.

Something is changing

I think that 3 factors are influencing what is happening and that eventually will lead to a significant change in the way we think of professional development in the future:

70-20-10 – Learning frameworks is becoming a standard. That means that the focus is on, on-the-job-learning (70%) supported by peer coaching (20%) with just a dash of actual instruction added (10%).

Time – what I hear from HR managers again and again is that no matter how interesting, exotic and high flying propositions they come up with – they still have a very hard time getting people to actually sign up for the training offered. This has to do with the fact that everybody feels the pressure of more and more things that need to be done and not enough time to do them. So trainings that were previously considered a perk are now often considered an added burden.

Money  – the ROI of the stand alone 2 day training course is questioned. It is expensive to run and if on top of that you need to drag people in to actually attend – it is not the best starting point for any learning to take place.

So, invariably bosses are asking themselves could we do this differently?

My guess is that the onus is going to shift and the companies are going to come to the conclusion that they cannot take responsibility for the personal development of individuals. The competition for great jobs is only going to increase and therefore it’s going to be natural to say to those who would like the good jobs that they need to take responsibility for their own development.

Great companies will encourage and provide the space and opportunity for on-the-job learning, the best ones will also add (peer)-coaching and reflection as part of that package but the last 10% new knowledge is going to be left to the individual in some kind of DIY format.
My guess is that this will be e-learning driven to a large extent.

Not because e-learning provides the best training environment but because it solves the problem of time and money.

And in the same way that when we had to give up our music on vinyl and shift to CD’S and again to shift from CD*s to Mps3 we all cried: “Never will I live with that loss of quality” at the end of the day money and time made us accept a more convenient solution, although it was not as good as what we had.

What is your perspective on all this, I would really like to know?

Dealing with bad leadership

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Back in July I wrote a blog post inspired by a new book out by Barbara Kellerman. ( The End of Leadership)
One of the points in her book that really struck a note with me is how much focus there is on developing good leaders while we seem to be ignoring the problem of the bad leaders.

Since writing that post the issue has been rumbling round my head. And the question keeps popping up: why is it that many organisations have such a hard time identifying and dealing with the bad apples?

But now I think I may have found part of the answer.

In a HBR blog post on August 16 with the title: Are you sure you are not a bad boss? Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman make the interesting observation that bad bosses are not so much characterized by the terrible things they do but much more by what they don’t do.

To most people a bad boss is someone who displays the kind of caricatured behavior that can be observed in television series like The Office. But according to the research done by Zenger and Folkman that type of blatantly impossible behavior only accounts for about 20% of what defines the really hopeless bosses.

By analyzing the behavior of 30,000 managers through the eyes of their peers and direct reports they came to the conclusion that bad leaders are characterized by one or more crucial omissions.

Here’s the list in order, from the most to the least fatal:

1. Failure to inspire, owing to a lack of energy and enthusiasm.
2. Acceptance of mediocre performance in place of excellent results.
3. A lack of clear vision and direction.
4. An inability to collaborate and be a team player.
5. Failure to walk the talk.
6. Failure to improve and learn from mistakes.
7. An inability to lead change or innovate owing to a resistance to new ideas.
8. A failure to develop others.
9. Inept interpersonal skills.
10. Displays of bad judgment that leads to poor decisions.

For a more detailed description of each of the ‘omissions’ you can read the full blog post here.

So my suspicion is that exactly because bad bosses are not doing something that is glaringly terrible, the manager that they report to does not feel a sense of urgency with regard to dealing with them. On the contrary when I think of my own career and other examples that come to mind a person who displays one or more of the above characteristics is exactly the direct report that one dreads dealing with.

But obviously, failing to react means that one has taken a 1st small step oneself towards becoming a bad boss…

No value no business (redux)

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Average is over!

The above title is from a recent column in the New York Times by Paul Krugman. In it Krugman makes the point that in the past and average person with an average education could do an average job and earn an average income without too much sweat. But today as digitization, automation and cheap labor is easily accessible to all it takes more than average to make it. This means writes Krugman that everyone needs to find their unique value contribution that makes them stand out in whatever is their field of employment.

If you think about it that’s not just on a personal level. That also applies to any imaginable company, product or service.

No value no business

But how do we actually define value?

Firstly, we must always keep in mind the value can only be understood from the customer perspective – which means it is highly subjective.

Secondly, in all service businesses there is a phenomenon of asymmetry. By which I mean that what the customer actually purchases is not what we sell.

The simple version of this is when you book a hotel room you are in the market for a good nights sleep but what the hotel provides you with is a room and a bed.

If we then look at the research documented in the service profit chain there is a very neat formula for understanding value from the customer perspective called the value equation:

Value Equation

Value equals Result (R) + Process (P) / ($) Price + (E) Effort

The process part can then be broken down further in to 5 components : Time, Reliability, Competency, Empathy and Proof of delivery.

With this little equation we can map any existing or future service experience/product and in the process understand what the value proposition is. And more importantly what can be tweaked in order to increase value.

The most important part is the ‘Result’ part of the equation. As consultants we can be asked to deliver what on the surface essentially seems the same service but actually provides or fulfills different result needs for different clients. (When hiring a consultant clients can be looking for, a solution, reassurance, someone to do the dirty work, an excuse to postpone something etc) so we can only deliver value once we have a very clear understanding of the Result that is to be provided. Once we know that we can tailor the process and the 5 variables that comprise the process in order to maximize the Result part.

The higher the value we provide above the line more room there is for a payment under the line.

The E-part of the equation relates to how much effort the customer needs to put in apart from what they pay for it. Simply put the easier we make their life – the more value they see.

To better understand the equation try for yourself.
If you have the guts map out your own job. If you’re less courageous just try a-product or service that your company delivers