What is the first question that gets asked when something goes wrong? This should be an easy one for everybody. The first question that is asked after something goes wrong, or not according to plan is: Who is to blame? It seems to be built into our DNA that we look for someone to blame. This process has evolved into an art form in recent times. It is now even the subject for tongue in cheek commercials, which in my book means blaming someone else for our own performance (good or bad) is now part of our social, and business fabric.
If we happen to fall off a ladder, we blame the ladder manufacturer for not putting a warning label of some sort on the ladder that clearly states that ladders are in fact dangerous pieces of equipment and that the scaling of them should not be attempted by the uncoordinated, clumsy or stupid. Going even further, the epitome of this blaming cultural art form has to be the getting burned by spilling hot coffee in our laps and then blaming the provider of the hot coffee for providing coffee that is too hot. The fact that “spilling” the coffee was involved seems to have been left out of this picture.
I have digressed, but I think you get the picture. Since childhood we have been conditioned to create excuses or blame others for our behaviors. “The dog ate my homework” has moved into our cultural lexicon, as a method of blaming an unexpected external event for not having an assignment completed. “The sun was in my eyes” likewise has evolved into a catch-all method of blaming external factors for not being able to perform an expected function. The bottom line here is that we like to blame other people, issues, factors and things for when we fail to meet expectations. The fact that the dog may have been around for years or that the sun has been around since well before the dawn of man and is a known source of glare, both of which could have and should have been taken into account during preparations, is conveniently not mentioned.
All of this evolution and history of the culture and art of passing the blame for our inability to achieve our objectives or to succeed in completing our tasks brings us to business. I think we have all been around people who are never at fault for missing their goals. They are artful. They are glib. They are eloquent. But they are not leaders. They usually elicit looks from their peers that are normally reserved for politicians, used car salesmen and poorly trained puppies that may have tried their best but just couldn’t seem to go on the paper.
The simple fact is that sometimes in business things do not go the way we hoped, expected or planned. It can be for reasons that are outside of our control or within our control. It doesn’t matter. For whatever reason the job didn’t get done. It happens. I will now impart to you the best phrase to use when creating excuses and placing blame when this type of situation occurs:
“It was my responsibility.”
Stand up. Look in the mirror and recognize the person responsible. Regardless of what happened you shouldn’t get to blame anyone else. Leaders understand this.
It may not have been their fault that the objective was not achieved, but it was their responsibility to achieve the objective.
Other leaders recognize this. It is the leader’s responsibility to put the team in a position to succeed. That means they need to provide the appropriate resources (time, money, people, there really are no other resources than these) to get the job done. If the team doesn’t succeed you cannot blame the team. It is the leader’s responsibility to put the team in a position to succeed.
It is the leader’s responsibility to put the right people on the team. If the right people are not on the team it is not the team’s fault. The team will do the best that it can with the people that are selected for it. It is the leader’s responsibility to foresee the potential issues and roadblocks to the team’s success. It is not the team’s fault that the unexpected occurred. The team is in place at the direction of the leader. A leader needs to be prepared with alternative and back-up plans in case the unexpected does unexpectedly occur.
In business as with falling off a ladder, we seem all too prepared to place the blame for any missed achievements on others. We are all too willing to place the blame elsewhere for our own lack of performance. We also seem to be all too willing to allow others to exhibit the same blame shifting behavior. The blaming art form has given rise to a new activity and the creation of a new word to deal with the blame generation process:
“Blamestorming”: The Oxford Dictionary defines blamestorming as: Group discussion regarding the assigning of responsibility for a failure or mistake. The Urban Dictionary defines it as: Sitting around in a group, discussing why a deadline was missed or a project failed, and identifying a scapegoat. Check out:
http://www.tvspots.tv/video/53353/DIRECTV–BLAMESTORMING
No team is mistake free when it comes to the execution of their responsibilities. No team achieves one hundred percent of their objectives one hundred percent of the time. No team should be blamed for this fact. Just as the leader should acknowledge and attribute all team successes to the team, the leader should NOT blame the team for any failures associated with the team’s performance. Just as the leader receives their credit for the team’s performance from the fact that they enabled the team to be successful, so should they take responsibility for not enabling the team’s success.
Blame is a funny thing to me. I think it openly diminishes the one doing the blaming. However it also seems to unavoidably diminish the one being blamed. Once the accusation is made or the blame assigned, at least some of the stigma associated with that event will remain, regardless if the accusation or blame is proved to be unfounded. That to me is a lose – lose proposition. There is no benefit to be gained by anyone by trying to assign blame anywhere.
The leader that stands up and takes responsibility, and does not look to attribute blame to anyone else, will again be the leader that is looked up to by their team and will be respected by their peers. Just as the leader receives some of the credit even though they attribute the success to the performance of their team, they will also not receive all the blame by taking responsibility for the issues associated with the missed achievements by the team.
I know it goes against just about everything we have seen and been taught to this point of our lives, and it also seems to go against what is now accepted as the cultural norm but when it comes to issues in business I just can’t see the value in someone uttering the professional equivalent of “The dog ate my presentation” or “the fluorescent lights were in my eyes” when not taking responsibility for their performance.
Category Archives: Responsibility
Every Day
I read an article about Jerry Seinfeld the other day. In it he was discussing some of the secrets to his success. Now obviously they can’t be secrets if he is openly discussing them, so maybe we should refer to them as some of the tenets he adhered to in the pursuit of his goals. Perhaps tenets would be considered too strong a word for describing his approach to applying himself to his comedy craft. However you would like to describe what he did along his road to success, he boiled it down to a simple phrase. He did something every day.
The example he used related to his writing. Whether he was writing for his stand up routines or the ubiquitous “Seinfeld” show, he wrote every day. That was his goal. He didn’t set the goal to write a joke, or even a good joke. He didn’t need to pound out a chapter in his book, or a scene for the show. He didn’t even need to make sure that what he wrote was good or used in any of his multiplicity of ventures. He just needed to write.
He knew that by getting started his ability and talent would take over. Some days would be better than others and the output of a higher quality. He knew that by the continued application of his effort he would continue to improve across the board. Eventually the output from his bad days would be better than the output of his earlier good days. The objective was the activity, not some specific amount of output. He knew the output would come if he achieved his goal of doing something.
I thought this was an interesting approach to doing ones work.
I, like many others am something of a goal oriented worker. I like to set the bar at a specific and acknowledged height and then either leap over it, or find an equally impressive way to limbo under it. One day it might be a graceful hurdle that takes me to the other side of the bar and the next might be a skidding face-plant that takes me sliding under it. Others are more process oriented where they can look to a prescribed set of steps that they can embark on that should result in them getting to the other side of the bar. The Seinfeld approach did not seem to fit into either of these categories. To extend this example it would almost be described as “start moving in the direction of the bar” and eventually you will be on the other side of it.
I think I like this approach because of the daily activity goal. It seems that we spend more and more of our time on conference calls and in meetings and in other activities that might be considered to have questionable value-add in the conduct of our business responsibilities. We seem to have reached a point where we have to consider the output of these conference calls and meetings as part of our business responsibilities, even though we seem to achieve very little in the way of definable progress in them.
It would be at times like these where I would start to apply the “Every Day” business scenario. The idea here would be that leaders in the various disciplines that they are responsible for, would need to set a goal of doing some work in their discipline that is additive in moving that discipline forward.
For example, research and development leaders would need to make sure that every day they do something that furthers the research and development of the business. That does not mean reporting on their team’s progress, nor does it mean explaining to management what the latest development release is looking like. It means doing something directly associated with furthering an aspect of a products research or development. Sales leaders would need to spend time each day actually selling, not reporting or tracking, etc. Operations leaders would need to set time every day to work on how to improve their business’ efficiency.
This is obviously pretty simple stuff, but business in its proper form in not necessarily complex. After all, how many times have we heard people say that they are so busy that they don’t seem to be able to get their real work done? What Seinfeld seemed to have found was that the focus should not be on getting the real work done, but rather getting started on the real work. He realized that the getting done part of it would actually take care of itself.
On the surface this seems a little counter-intuitive to me, but the more I think about it, the more comfortable I get with it.
It seems that leadership roles have a tendency to attract a significant number of non-productive and “office-trappings” types of responsibilities. These functions usually take the form of making and presenting status reports, attending peer team meetings and calls to assure coordination, reviewing, approving or denying requests, and other similar such activities. I am hard pressed to find a way to associate these responsibilities with leadership, other than in how fast one can discharge and complete them and get back to the real functionality and responsibility of the business at hand.
Unfortunately it seems that as leaders matriculate up the corporate chain they may be judged more on how well they perform these attracted functions, and less on how well they actually perform their Research and Development, Sales or Operational responsibilities, to extend the previous example.
This is where “Every Day” would come in to play.
We should all look to find a way to make sure we perform some of the specific activities that are required to further the goals of the business, every day. This does not mean that we should be happy with making progress on the charts for the next business review. It does mean that we should work on something that would eventually need to be reported on in your business review.
Put simply “Every Day” means to me that we don’t need to report on something every day. Every day we need to do something that may need to be reported.
It may end up that it does not need to be reported. It may not provide the expected or desired impact. On the other hand, it might eventually turn out to be a game changing improvement to the business. The point is that none of those things will happen unless you are applying yourself to the objective.
Seinfeld knew that not everything that he wrote was going to be used, or maybe even good. He did however recognize that he would never have anything much less know what was good or not unless he wrote. He saw that the goal should not have been to only write good content, because he could not clearly discern the good from the not so good unless he had them both available to compare. Hence his objective was simply to write.
The analog to this approach that I would choose for leaders in business would be to focus some time every day on the non-administrative work that you and your team are responsible for accomplishing. I know this sounds silly to the point of almost being inane, but
having been through the days where it seemed that the administrivia and process ruled over work and performance, I think it bears repeating: It is easy to get lost in the busy of busy-work and forget to try and accomplish some real work. And it is the real work that needs to get accomplished, every day.
Learning Opportunities
Normally when I get started on a new post I have an idea as to what the title should be. I sat here and knew what the topic was that I wanted to cover, but try as I might I could not come up with a title that satisfied me. I had a few but when they sound trite to even my own ear, they don’t make it to the post. Hopefully an idea for the title will present itself during the course of the post. Interesting, I normally don’t have a problem titling a post.
Over the course of my career I have learned that I am a positive reinforcement type of individual. I tend to focus on what I need to do to get better, as well as what the team needs to do to improve. That does not mean that I ignore my own or others mistakes. It does mean that I have found that going back and beating myself up, or beating up others for past mistakes does not normally provide a constructive solution. Since there is no way to go back and modify a behavior or decision that has already occurred, it seems to me that the best approach is to acknowledge the issue, understand what caused it, and take the appropriate steps to first solve it and then make sure that you have learned enough so that you don’t repeat the same issue in the future. Pretty simple, but it seems to have worked very well for me.
Too often it seems that issue resolution loses its way and becomes more of a historical re-visitation of the issue in order to make sure that blame is appropriately assigned. While culpability will be a topic of concern in the longer term, the immediate topic needs to remain on the issue resolution. Besides, I have also found that by the time the issue has manifested itself, those ultimately responsible for the issue are either abundantly aware of their own actions that were the genesis of the issue, or long gone from the scene.
No one likes to be wrong and no one likes to make mistakes. However once the mistake has been made there is the immediate need to rectify the situation. Corrective actions need to be scoped out and implemented. Once that is done and the solution is in process, then the learning opportunity can be examined on both an individual and business level. Again the focus needs to be on what has to be done on order to achieve the desired results or conversely what needs to be done to avoid the undesirable results.
It may be a subtle difference but it can and will set the entire tone for the team going forward in how it behaves and works. Looking at what needed to be done right in order to achieve the desired goals will automatically create a learning experience when people compare it with what was actually done. Looking at what was done has the potential to be perceived as more of a blaming experience than a learning experience.
Focusing on the positive aspect of what needs / needed to be done instead of focusing on the specific activity that generated the issue is one of the best ways to keep an issue that currently just needs resolution from devolving into what can be perceived as almost solely a blame assignment exercise. It is critical to understand this from a team leadership point of view, otherwise you can run the risk of having the team disengage from the resolution process.
By keeping a focus on what needed to be done you can retain the team’s capability to make aggressive decisions and take decisive actions. If everyone understands that issues will be resolved and reviewed from the point of view what needed to be done as opposed to the perception of holding any individual or team’s mistakes up for analysis, you will continue to encourage the team to make those types of decisions or to take those kinds of actions.
If your post issue actions become not much more than an analysis of the incorrect decision or action, you will begin to incite those individuals or teams to not “risk” making those decisions or to take those actions, as no one like to have the mistakes specifically and publically aired. By focusing on the negative you are encouraging the team to avoid the negative reinforcement.
You would hope that avoiding this negative reinforcement would result in more positive result generating decisions and actions. What I have found is that it normally results in fewer decisions or unilateral actions of any kind as people withdraw from risking the negative exposure.
Let me repeat that. Negative reinforcement or even the perception of negative reinforcement will result in fewer mistakes and issues because people will stop making decisions or taking actions. The only way to assure that you are never wrong is to not make the decision or take the action.
By looking at what needed to be done instead of what was done the business leader can communicate the same learning experience to the team or individual without the perception of it being an analysis of what that team or individual did wrong. Everyone makes mistakes. The objective is to keep everyone striving to do more, but with fewer mistakes. If people only recognize the downside of the mistake, the analysis of what they did wrong, they may choose to reduce the potentiality of repeating that uncomfortable event by becoming just that much more conservative in their approach to business.
In the times of that much more aggressive competition and the various drives to reduce costs and improve margins, it will not be the fully conservative approach that will carry the day. It will be new and innovative ideas, decisions and actions that move organizations and businesses forward.
Not everything new and innovative will work. However I think we are all in reasonable agreement that many of the current methods and directions associated with businesses (and government for that matter) today will not take us where we need or desire to go.
If we focus on the mistakes that get made instead of taking action to correct them and focusing on what the proper course of action is for future events we are encouraging people to not make mistakes. This on the surface is good. The only problem is as I have already said; the only way that I know of to assure that you don’t make a mistake is to not do anything. In taking the mistake focused approach, this is invariably what you get – fewer mistakes because there are much fewer decisions and actions taken.
I still don’t have a title for this post that I am fully happy with. That means that I will have to go with instinct on this one. If it’s wrong, I guess I’ll just have to look at it as another learning opportunity for me.
Thick Skin
A new year always brings many opportunities with it. The opportunity for both business and personal growth. The opportunity to break eighty on the golf course. The opportunity to break seventy on the golf course. The opportunity for our elected officials to step up, tell the public the truth and most importantly, solve some problems.
Some of these opportunities are more likely to occur than others, and are listed in no particular order of increasing improbability of happening.
The beginning of a new year also means that it is time to review the last year’s performance. That usually translates to year end performance reviews. I have discussed the need for, and various approaches to giving performance reviews in the past. Most of these approaches usually reduce down to: Be professional, be factual, be balanced (what was good and what could be improved) and most importantly, be brief.
Chances are that the person you are conducting the review with is probably enjoying the review at least as much as you are.
This time though, I’m going to take a little bit of a different approach to the joys of year end reviews and approach them from the point of view of the person being reviewed. We all essentially report to someone, and that someone is responsible for conducting our year end review.
I have tried several times to conduct year end reviews with my wife, but for some reason it seems that these meetings end up becoming her yearend reviews of me. Go figure.
I have had many different types of managers in my career. There have been those that clearly were uncomfortable with the review responsibility and only provided the most cursory of reviews. There were those managers that took their review responsibility way too seriously and scheduled two to three hour reviews in an effort to make sure that I obtained the maximum benefit of the considered and judicious input they had regarding not only my performance, but just about any other topic in life that came to mind while they were talking to me. And there have been those that did the bare minimum just so they could say they performed the review if they were asked.
There was a manager that once handed me his manager’s year end review form that he was supposed to fill out on me, and asked me to fill it out for him so that he could then turn around and conduct my year end review with it. This was interesting the first year it happened, and I tried to be pretty honest with him and myself regarding my performance. The face to face meeting was obviously pretty brief. The second year it happened, there wasn’t even a face to face meeting. The third year that it occurred seemed to me to be a call to action.
As in the previous years I filled out the form, but this time I added a “new” objective to the list. This new objective was that I be able to “walk on water”. In order to exceed this objective I would need to be able to walk on the air above the water. In order to achieve this objective I would need to actually walk on water (not during the winter on ice – frozen water, as this would meet the goal, but wouldn’t be note worthy). Anything else would be a “needs improvement” rating.
In this instance I rated myself as an “achieved – with an asterisk” in that I noted that I was not able to figure out how to walk on the water, but I was able to part the water and walk across the bottom without getting wet, which was almost as good. The only difference was that my shoes got a little muddy.
He never said a thing to me about it. I don’t think he even read it. I still smile every time I think back to that form and realize that it is a duly signed review archived somewhere in the human resource records of a major corporation.
Occasionally however, I have had the good fortune to work for a leader that took his responsibility seriously, and put the time in to conduct a considered and accurate review of me. They usually took the approach that we all want to do well, but that invariably there were areas where we all could do better.
I have discussed in the past the necessity that we all conduct “difficult conversations” with our team member when the time or situation calls for it. Now it is time to understand how to handle having an uncomfortable or difficult conversation conducted with you.
Being told what you didn’t get done, or what you need to do better is going to happen. You need to understand and accept this. It might not have been your fault or responsibility. It might have been unavoidable. It is conceivable that you might have actually not performed up to your usual high levels. There may in fact be no one on the planet that could have performed better than you under these circumstances. It doesn’t matter. Regardless, it is the start of a new year and you are going to be reviewed on last year’s performance.
The first thing to understand and acknowledge when being reviewed is your area of responsibility. The issues and the decisions that spawned them may have taken place elsewhere or in the past, but you are there now and for better or for worse you own the situation now. You are now the responsible party.
Don’t dodge it. Don’t blame it on past administrations. We have enough politicians doing this. Stand up and note what your area of responsibility is. Chances are that it is already recognized where the issues arose. There will be those issues that are not attributable to you and those that are.
Also remember that this is a review, not a “blame-storming” session. It is always difficult to not be defensive in a situation where those things that have not gone as well as anyone would like are being reviewed. As strange as it may seem, I have found that the less defensive that I am about difficult issues, the less accusatory sounding people are when they discuss the various points to be covered. I have also found that sometimes there is truly valid input available on what and how I can do better.
Always remember in a review that facts are your friends. Discuss the facts and how they may be interpreted. Do not try to modify or discuss opinion, yours or anyone else’s. Trying to modify or discuss opinion is called an argument. Having an argument as the result of a yearend review is definitely the definition of a lose – lose situation. Without the facts to support a different performance perception, a yearend review argument will generate a negative outcome on this year’s review, and a poor expectation will be set for next year’s performance and review as well.
No one likes to be the recipient of a difficult discussion or review. The natural reaction is to try and justify or argue the position. This approach invariably fails unless there are facts available to both parties that can modify opinions. And even then there is only so much that you can say or do. It is a very fine line.
When I have conducted difficult conversations or reviews I have been careful to address the behavior or performance and not the person. It is business and we are professionals. No matter what it feels like, it should not feel like a personal attack. I did not enjoy the conversation, but it was my responsibility to conduct it.
The same rules seem to apply when you find yourself on the other side of a difficult conversation or review. Do not allow it to become personal. It is business and you are a professional. It is difficult to do, but it is a must. Be professional, be factual, and be balanced as to what you can do to improve the situation. If it was felt that the issue needed to be addressed with you in the first place, there needs to be some sort of response provided that the message being sent was acknowledged and received. I said acknowledged. I didn’t say agreed.
Sometimes it takes thick skin to accept the responsibilities that go along with being a leader. There are very few who can say that they have not erred or that their performance could not be improved. Sometimes i
t is not fun to be told this by someone else, but it does go with the position.
Bad Deals
I started off my business career in sales. I admit it. It’s not something I am particularly proud of…come to think of it, it is something that I am particularly proud of. I can honestly say that I spent time in one of the most difficult professional disciplines around, the professional discipline of trying to get someone to give you their money. I learned a lot in sales about dealing with customers. I also learned a lot about dealing with the internal mechanisms of the company that I worked for as well. I thought that any customer that I could make a deal with and get an order from was a good customer. As I have progressed through my career I have learned that not all deals and customers are good.
For the average salesperson an order is an order. The more of them you get, the more commissions you get. The more commissions you get the more money and personal esteem you acquire. Along with this comes better houses, cars, big screen TVs and along with the laws of natural selection an increased opportunity to pass your sales DNA along to future generations of sales people. In case you missed it, sales is a jungle.
The ideal sales deal is that you provide your customer with something they need, a product or a service, and they provide you with something you need, primarily money. As long as everyone keeps this sort of exchange arrangement in mind things normally go well, and for the most part they usually do.
Occasionally however there have been recorded instances where things didn’t go well. Many of these sorts of instances are attributable to honest mistakes or misunderstandings and the preponderance of them can be cleared up by honest and diligent work by both parties associated with the deal.
Then there are the outliers. Those deals that you have entered into that despite the fact that you’re doing everything right, either one or both of the parties to the deal are unhappy. Either the customer is not getting what they wanted, or you are not getting paid. Sometimes both. What do you do?
The first step is to find the nearest Home Depot store. Go there and go into their Bathroom / Plumbing section and find a really nice mirror. Buy that mirror, take it to your office, hang it on your wall and spend some time looking at and questioning the person in that mirror to make absolutely sure that you are in fact living up to your end of the deal. Try to look at the person in that mirror from the customer’s point of view. Have you told the customer everything the need to know? Have you done everything you need to do? Start with you.
If you have completed step one and are reasonably confident that you and your team are providing all the entitled goods and services to both the letter and the spirit of the contract then the issue may in fact lie on the other side of the deal, with the customer. This is usually a pretty rare, but not an unheard of event. You may have a customer that through either the normal or abnormal conduct of their business is difficult to deal with.
I have not had to deal with this sort of situation very often thank goodness, but when I have it has normally fallen into one of two categories: it is either a very small customer that for whatever reason has been forced into a position where they cannot adhere to the deal they made, or a very large customer who feels that they are either such a desirable customer or so dominant in their market that they do not feel that they have to adhere to the deal they have made.
Of the two scenarios, I prefer the first one. A company that can’t honor the deal for the most part will be willing to work with you. There may be a solution out there where the deliverables of the deal can be altered to where both parties can be addressed. A small customer company by its nature can be a fragile enterprise. There are risks associated with dealing with them. They will however usually try to work with you.
On the other side of the spectrum is the large company. These are companies that understand the role and position in the market and use it as leverage against all of their suppliers. If you want their business then they feel that you will have to play their game. Most customers want their partners to make a reasonable profit. This usually assures them of a continued available supply of the good or service that they want or need. Some however just want the deal now and will not care if you are around for the next one or not. They know there will be someone else there if you are not.
The usual response to this tactic is for the organization to agree to the terms because the organization decides that it wants the business bad enough, and the size of the business is large enough to warrant an agreement. There will usually be pressure from the sales team trying to convince everyone of the strategic nature of both the business and the customer in question, and how the profit will be made up on the next deal.
It never happens that way, and there is nothing strategic about unprofitable business. I have addressed this topic specifically in the past. You can talk yourself into just about any kind of business, but you cannot talk yourself into profitability.
Once you are into one of these types of deals where the customer is obviously leveraging you there are only a limited number of things you can do: You can look for a legal way out, or look for a way to minimize the damage and exposure while you meet your end of the agreement. After all, you signed it.
Exiting a deal because you don’t like the terms of a contract you signed is usually only an option of last resort. Unless you have been demonstrably misled by the customer, this really isn’t an option. But it is also a financial decision as well. If the fines and penalties for leaving the contract are less that than the losses expected from continuing, it needs to be reviewed.
That usually leaves buckling down, trying to reduce all costs associated with the deal in question, and then getting out at the earliest legal time. Issue the exit / cancelation notification and don’t take any argument from the sales team or customer. These are the teams that were responsible for the deal in the first place. Don’t allow them to prolong the inevitable.
Be polite. Be firm. Be gone.
Sometimes bad contracts are expensive opportunities to learn lessons. Other times they can just be plain expensive. They can be lessons about markets. They can be lessons about sales teams and their compensation incentives. They can be lessons about specific customers. The important point is that they need to be lessons that are learned.
If you have only a contract or two that fall into this category then they could be an anomaly. If you have multiple bad deals in a specific market or with a specific customer, you need to learn how to de-risk those types of deals, or avoid those specific markets or customers.
If you have multiple bad deals across multiple markets and customers, then you have a sales force issue, where their objectives and incentives are not aligned with the profitability objectives and requirements of the company. This is a key point. If you have a number of bad deals you have an issue with your sales team and their compensation plan. You probably need to make sure that the sales team has some sort of margin or profitability goal associated with their compensation in order to avoid this situation.
Regardless, the only person responsible for a bad deal is the one that agreed to it. Don’t sign a bad deal hoping you can make it better. Don’t specifically blame the customer, but if they are unwilling to create an agreement that is at least fair to both parties you need to remember and learn from it. Learn from it and put the processes in place to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Bad deals happen only because you agree to them.
Why Ask Why
Have you ever asked yourself why you are doing what you are doing, right now, in the office? Most of the time we spend in the office seems to be composed of a pleasingly familiar set of activities that we have been doing for quite a while. We continue to do what we have been doing usually because at one time or another it worked on a problem. We received the positive feedback we were looking for and incorporated it into our routine. Not to sound too trite but I think we can all agree that today, and looking forward, the business world does not look anything like routine.
Believe it or not I was too young to really remember the 1960’s, but I have read about them and have watched innumerable movies that were set in the period. This of course makes me an expert on the 1960’s. After all this intensive research, and all the popcorn and sodas associated with watching the research, I think you can distill down an entire decade in American history into a two word sentence:
Question everything.
The reason that I have taken this half century retrospective (gosh, is it really fifty years ago?) is that it may be time to dust off the “Oldie but Goldie” catchphrase and start ruthlessly applying it to business.
It is easy to start down a simple road in business. The problem is that almost no road remains simple, or straight. There are always twists and turns, and probably even a few loop-the-loops in every business road.
I’m sorry; I got carried away with my metaphors there. I’ll try to keep that sort of behavior to a minimum.
My point is that every business needs to continually ask itself why is it doing what it is doing. Just because it started down what it thought was the right road a while ago doesn’t mean that it is still the right road today. Again, this is pretty basic stuff, but when it all gets boiled down to the basics, business is really pretty simple.
Business is about customers.
Now despite what the courts or politicians may rule or claim, businesses are not people. I think it is much the contrary, in fact I think it is the opposite: People are business. The business can’t ask itself why it is doing what it is doing, but the people can.
This brings us back to the comfortable routine that the majority of people in business have day in and day out, going down the road that they started out on some time in the past. The easy path, the path of least resistance is to continue down the path that we are on. A plan, program or model may have been put in place and work begun. Chances are that time has passed. At the risk of propellering off into rampant triteness again, if time has passed, chances are that times have changed.
The only real constant in business is customers.
When we begin to ask ourselves why we are doing what we are doing, any question we ask that does not have the word “customer” in it, and does not focus on how to bring value to the customer is probably a wrong question to ask. It will be this single minded approach to how we address changing what we do and why we do it that will enable businesses to navigate the necessary changes in directions, and different roads that must be traversed.
Small businesses are usually held up as models of outward facing, customer oriented businesses. I think this is probably correct. I also think that this is probably not due to any deliberate focus or business magic. I think the reason that small businesses focus on the customer is because they don’t have anything else to focus on. They are small businesses. By definition they do not have much in the way of internal infrastructures, or any of the other trappings of large businesses. They only have an idea or product and customers, so by default that is all they focus on.
It is usually not until a business becomes large and somewhat successful that it begins to focus on things other than customers. This is also the appropriate time to start asking the difficult questions. If you ask yourself the “why are you doing this / is it for the customers’ benefit” question, and you either can’t answer it or associate it with a customer value, then you need to start looking deeper at what you are doing.
Companies seem to begin to lose their way, and their customer focus when they start to concentrate on better ways to do things instead of doing things better. It’s a subtle but important difference. Focusing on a better way to do things means you are shifting your attention to how you are doing something. Focusing on doing things better means you are still focused on what you are doing.
In most instances (but admittedly probably not all instances) your customers will not be particularly interested in how you do something. They will definitely be interested in the result of what you have done. To put it another way, do you really care how a company builds a car? If the company uses all manual processes or a fully automated production line, does that materially affect your buying decision on the car?
Speaking only personally at this point, I don’t remember asking the car salesman those questions the last time I bought a car. I was more interested in the resulting product, its safety, reliability, efficiency, and most importantly if I thought I would look cool driving it.
This again is a good time to bring us back to asking ourselves why we are doing what we are doing. We need to always focus on and keep in mind if what we are doing is providing value to the customer, or if we are doing it for some other reason. Are we internally focused on our own systems, programs and processes and trying to hopefully provide ourselves value or are we focused on improving what we provide to the customer and providing them more value. It may sound a little strange but we need be relentless and ruthless when it comes to customer focus and what we are doing. If we don’t, when we take our eyes and minds off that customer for whatever period of time while we focus on some internal aspect of how we do things, someone else who is focusing on that customer will take that customer away.
The next time you walk into your office and begin your normal start of the day routine, you probably ought to ask yourself “why”.
Learn Young
I recently read an article by Julien Smith titled “20 Things I Should Have Known at 20”. I thought it was excellent. Where was he when I was twenty? Looking back at who I was when I was twenty (in my case, at my age I require binoculars, very high power binoculars to look back at myself at the age of twenty) his list of twenty items to know reads like a litany of youthful opportunities. Some I was fortunate enough to have taken advantage of on my own. Some others, not so much. As I read through Julien Smith’s tips I was not only entertained by how well they applied to the world in general, I was also surprised at how well they applied to the business world specifically. This got me to thinking, which as we all know is a dangerous state for me to be in. I’ll provide a few of Julien’s “tips” for twenty year olds and then follow them up with a few of my corollaries for would be leaders in the business world. Hopefully I won’t be reaching too far and Mr. Smith won’t object too much to the way I have chosen to apply his work.
1. “The world is trying to keep you stupid. From bank fees to interest rates to miracle diets, people who are not educated are easier to get money from and easier to lead. Educate yourself as much as possible for wealth, independence, and happiness.”
I am not going to say that corporations want to keep their employees stupid. That is definitely not the case. They definitely do however want to communicate their vision, strategy and spin on the status of things. That is how they attempt to manage you. Listen to them carefully when they communicate. Understand what they are saying and almost as importantly what they are not saying. Bad news or difficult issues are almost always couched in other or less direct terms.
Educating yourself on your markets, competitors and business trends is going to be a key. Read up on what the analysts are saying, both the good reports and the bad ones. Leaders don’t put their faith in any one specific source. It is your career and you are going to be responsible for making decisions that will affect you for years to come.
2. “Do not have faith in institutions to educate you. By the time they build the curriculum, it’s likely that the system is outdated– sometimes utterly broken. You both learn and get respect from people worth getting it from by leading and doing, not by following.”
After having just told you to do your research on not only your company but your competitors and the market in general, it is only fair to tell you not to place all of your faith in that information regardless of the source. Where do you think it came from? The very companies that you were researching. There are very few independent sources of information on businesses. Remember the words of every investment prospectus when it comes to information:
Past performance is no guarantee of future success.
What companies have done in the past is only a guide to their potential future actions. Learn to take input from several sources, including your gut and instincts, triangulate it as best you can, make a decision and get going. Trust yourself. It’s said that eighty percent of life is just showing up, so show up. Once you get things moving you’ll be surprised at how easy it can be to change the course if you find you need to. Leaders don’t wait until a decision is fait accompli or made for them.
3. “Read as much as you can. Learn to speed read with high retention. Emerson Spartz taught me this while I was at a Summit Series event. If he reads 2-3 books a week, you can read one.”
Twitter, Facebook, texting and email are not reading. Read novels. Read books. Read articles. Read Blogs. You will be surprised at how much of what you read you retain and can apply to work and your life in general. I have observed that you are perceived by how you communicate. Content, grammar and diction may not be important in today’s immediate forms of communication, but it is crucial in business. Poorly written communications and correspondence in the business world will hold you back. You learn not only the content but also how to better communicate by reading books.
4. “Connect with everyone, all the time. Be genuine about it. Learn to find something you like in each person, and then speak to that thing.”
Chances are that some time in your career that you are going to have to find a new job. It is the new normal in the business world. It is more effective for a corporation to let people go in one group and hire new or different people in another group at the same time. It may be no comment on your performance or anything else other than the corporate performance. It just happens. Be ready for it.
Learn to retain friends and associates. Be out going. Go to lunch. Maintain a business card catalog and periodically reach out to people. I learned this one much later in my career than I should have. It’s not hard and it does not take much time. When the time comes, and it inevitably will, having an extensive network of contacts and relationships may be crucial to your career. Even if there does not come a time where you need to impose on them, you will be surprised by the opportunities that they can create for you.
5. “Don’t waste time being shy. Shyness is the belief that your emotions should be the arbitrators of your decision making process when the opposite is actually true.”
Leaders have opinions. Good leaders like team members who also have opinions. If you have a studied and knowledgeable solution to a situation or topic, share it. It is not a competition for attention. It is a desire to get the right answers and more importantly get things done. Notice the difference I have noted. Everyone has an opinion. Not everyone has a solution.
Do not allow a fear of being wrong or a shyness to keep you from providing a solution. I think that it probably goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: If we had more solutions we would probably have fewer problems. Think about it. Good leaders will search for team members with differing opinions and solutions. Differing approaches almost always result in a stronger team solution.
It’s interesting where we can get our inspiration. I think we all have either been, or are going to be twenty years old at one time in our lives. If you ask my wife she would probably say that I still act as if I were still twenty sometimes, usually, okay, a lot. I think Julien Smith put together twenty items I wish I had known. I won’t go through the other fifteen items. You can read the rest of them at http://inoveryourhead.net/20-things-i-should-have-known-at-20/. It is also interesting how things that we should know at the age of twenty are also applicable to business at just about any age in life. I guess that learning truly does never stop, especially in business. I probably should have learned that earlier too. I guess I’ll try to learn the ones I missed and apply them from now on.
Not My Job
I don’t want it to sound as though I am a continual complainer about today’s business environment and conduct. There are many aspects of it that I appreciate. It is just that I believe that it might be better if what has already been proven to be effective in the business environment were retained and combined with what the best of today has to offer instead of seemingly being discarded and replaced whole cloth. I also understand that despite what just about every media outlet reports and would like us to believe, that the business environment is still a difficult place and probably will be for some time to come. Despite all this and probably more, there is one trend that I have witnessed in the conduct of today’s business that I just don’t seem to be able to get my head around. I don’t understand how anyone can ever respond to a question, request or assignment with the words “It’s not my job.” It seems to me that this phrase has been insidiously creeping into our business lexicon. I have mentioned in the past that it seemed that companies prized employees that had a breadth of experience in that they felt it enabled them to take on new roles and added responsibilities. The difficult business and economic times appears to have taught companies that instead of retaining the generalist who may be capable of performing a great many different functions very well and grow into a multi-dimensional business leader, they may now instead focus on the shorter term and opt for a specialist who may be highly proficient in one particular skill, to the exclusion of the others with somewhat less potential for leadership upside. The equivalent comparison here would be looking at someone who competes in the decathlon, a ten discipline competition, and comparing them to a sprinter who only competes in the one hundred meter sprint. The winner of the decathlon is viewed as the best overall athlete, but today if you need someone to run one hundred meters, you will more than likely choose the sprinter. And tomorrow if you need someone to throw the javelin or clear the bar in the high jump you can replace the sprinter with someone else who better fills those specific needs then. As I said, a much shorter term approach to immediate needs. I am drawing a corollary between the advent of this corporate preference for business specialists and the beginning of the “Not My Job” mentality. It seems only natural that if you were brought in for a single purpose that you might not be knowledgeable of or have the predilection to perform other jobs or assume other responsibilities. As an example, if you are brought in to sell, your single focus now is to get the customer order. It seems that profitability, margins, availability of product, functionality, deliverability, etc, are now reduced in your hierarchy of priorities. They are now someone else’s job. If the people responsible for those functions are not as good at their roles as you are at getting orders, it is quite probable that business profitability as well as customer satisfaction will suffer due to potentially too low prices and undeliverable commitments. However, there will probably be plenty of these somewhat difficult orders. I have also discussed in the past the proliferation of the virtual office and being remotely located in the performance of your role. Prior to the advanced bandwidth and networking capabilities that we enjoy today, functions and businesses were usually collocated within a specific building, floor or area. This face to face interaction gave rise to business terms such as “efficiency” and “synergy”. People physically worked together. This also seemed to be a period of intense creativity and development. There were many magazine articles displaying pictures of people sleeping at their desks in the California Silicon Valley as they were driving to create their new businesses and business models. As we have evolved to a more “virtual” environment we seem to have possibly lost some of the synergy, productivity and interaction that drove many of the new ideas. We may also be seeing the beginning of a corrective movement associated with the virtual office world. In February Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo Issued a directive that all virtual or remote employees in that company need to come into an office to work. She was worried about not only the creativity that was lost when people stopped physically working together, but also the productivity that was lost. We’ll see how this “virtual” reversal goes, but I find it very interesting that a technology and digital bellwether company like Yahoo, a company that was a leader in the new digital age has adopted such a contrary stance to virtual office working. Perhaps it was a different time, but I see it even today in that there seems to be more collaboration and less job responsibility deflection in a face to face meeting than in a conference call. A set of disembodied voices on a conference call do not seem to engender the same kind of commitment that is achieved when people are in the same room. An even greater level of commitment seems to be created when people leave the conference room and know they will need to continue to face their peers in the office area. It seems when you hang up the phone everyone is “gone”. It is easier to say “Not My Job” because you rarely if ever have to face them.
The corollary that I am drawing here is that psychologically it is easier to say things over the phone than it is to say them in person. With the advent of virtual offices and conducting the preponderance of work either by phone or electronic media, we have made it in effect “easier” for people to say “Not My Job”. They get to say it over the phone instead of face to face.
Perhaps it is also the advent of the more matrix oriented business structure that has given rise to the “Not My Job” growth. In the past general management or more hierarchical business structures, when a request was made if it was not already a given job responsibility, it was positioned as the addition of a new job responsibility. In today’s somewhat more matrix and consensus oriented business structures, where there is more functional specificity, as well as far more functional overlap, managers seem to be structurally encouraged to focus on only those activities that fit cleanly within their responsibility definitions.
Instead of having a business structure that promotes the addition and incrementing of new responsibilities, we now have one that encourages ever tighter focus on a specific set of responsibility definitions and processes. The result seems to be more and more “Not My Job” responses.
Despite what the typical business RACI matrix (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed) may state, leaders when asked take responsibility. It may not be in their job definition. It may not have been anything that they have done before in the organization. But when they are asked, or when they see a business or performance gap that needs to be filled, they step up. If the requirement is truly outside the bounds of their expertise, they don’t say it’s not their job. They take on the responsibility to find out who has the required expertise and see to it that they get the job done.
There is always a time and a place for pushing back on assignments, but in business now, if a job needs to get done it needs to be everyone’s job to see to it that the job gets done. I think if we heard more “I’ll do that job” and less “It’s not my job” we would make much better progress.
Do Something
The business world right now is a pretty scary place. It has probably always been a pretty scary place but I just may have been blissfully, no, euphorically unaware of it. Either that or I was just too dumb to realize how scared I should have been about the things I was doing. On the other hand, that may have been the unintentional contributing factor to some of the successes I was having. It also explains to some extent all the resistance that I had met along the way. I was doing something. I think we have all been party to those conversations where we as minions of those that inhabit the uppermost floors of our corporate buildings were discussing what we consider to be the oh so apparent solutions to the myriad of problems our business is facing. Words like “management” and “should do” and “ought to do” are thrown around like a baseball around the infield after a strikeout. Agreement is usually unanimous that management should do something. Imagine that. My final comment here is that currently 60% of the members of the US senate and almost 40% of the members of the US House of Representatives are lawyers, and we all know how well those institutions are performing in the solving of our problems. Enough said. Where I am going to go with this is to focus on solving problems. This is a dangerous road for many of us in business to take because it involves assuming responsibility, taking action, sometimes without even being told to, and doing something. And when you do something like that you will invariable make some people happy, and you will also make some other people unhappy. The hope is that you please the proper people. The objective is to make you happy. Regardless, taking a considered action is always the first step in solving a problem. Without action you don’t solve a problem, you just continue to cope with it. I like to work on generating quantitative (measurable) improvements in businesses and solving problems. I guess I got this from my dad. I also have a degree in physics, just not a PhD. I like making visible progress. I like learning new things. I think many people do. I like to work with and associate with people who operate in this way as well. I also think that there are many who are not comfortable in that change oriented environment. These events can entail significant changes and certain amounts of discomfort for not just me, but for everyone else as well. Not everyone understands or agrees with the fact that every job description and every job function should entail a certain amount of discomfort. People like to be comfortable. When people get comfortable at what they are doing, they tend to want to stay comfortable. As they stay comfortable, the groove they are in gets ever deeper and soon little change and no improvement is possible. If everything else in the business world would now just cooperate and never change, these comfortable people could stay comfortable. Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way.
I am going to give a little attribution to my dad here. He told me:
“Engineers solve problems. Lawyers dwell on them.”
I don’t know if he stole that from someone or if it was one of his own. He does have a PhD. In physics and is a really smart cookie in my book, so I prefer to think of it is one of his own comments. Way to go dad.
Now I am not going to get into lawyer bashing, although I do agree with about ninety percent of the quotes in existence as they pertain to lawyers. If you want to know what that means, just Google “lawyer quotes” and start reading. Now there are some creative writers.
There also seems to be plenty of people who could be described as problem dwellers in business. These are the people that seem to exist for the sole purpose of dealing with a known problem. You would think that with this sort of focus on a problem that it would be eventually solved. If that were the case, then there would no longer be a need for the problem dweller. What normally happens is that like your home dwelling that periodically needs updating and improvement, the problem dwelling at the office will be periodically updated and improved. And like you comfortably living in your home, the business problem dweller will go on somewhat comfortably working on the updated problem.
There are also those that either do not want the responsibility for doing something, or do not want to have to face those that will resist the change associated with doing something. These people are relatively easy to spot because they have a tendency to identify themselves as people who are not doing something. They call themselves “enablers” and “facilitators” and other such descriptors. What is an enabler or a facilitator? In today’s scary business world I would say that an enabler or a facilitator is someone who enables or facilitates someone else being able to do something.
I don’t know about you, but when it comes time for my annual reviews I like to be able to point to specific actions and say I did X, Y and Z, not I enabled someone else to do X, Y, and Z.
When you do something in business, such as solve a problem, it now means that everyone will now have to do something else. If they were working, or dwelling on that problem, they will now have to find another problem to work on. They can no longer be comfortable doing what they were doing.
This is called progress.
It may be a little disconcerting to associate discomfort with progress in business. I don’t think this should be the case. Progress, even incremental progress will require change of some sort. In physics, a force is said to do work when it acts on a body so that there is a displacement of the point of application, however small, in the direction of the force. Thus a force does work when it results in movement. In physics changing a system requires that you apply a force or impart some work into the system. To do that you have to do something.
If you don’t, in business as in physics the system will not change. And as I said before, change is usually not comfortable, but I am not going to dwell on it.
Good Advice
The topic for this blog was suggested to me by my good friend Chris D. I thought it was a great suggestion since I think we have all been through and around the “advice” circle in one direction or the other. Thanks Chris. Advice is a funny thing. Almost everything about it seems to fall into one of two categories. There are those people that ask for advice and those that don’t. Those that ask for it can either use it or not. There are those people that offer advice and those that don’t. There are those that only offer advice when asked, and then there are those that offer advice even when they are not asked. People who fall into that last group are usually referred to as “annoyances”. I am willing to help just about anybody in business. I am a big believer in Karma. What goes around, does usually in some way come back around, and I never want to miss an opportunity to try and put the Karma universe in my debt. That being said there is also a physical limit to the number of things that I can do or help with at the same time. What that means is that I don’t like to be exercised unnecessarily on business topics. If someone is going to ask me for advice and I am going to put in the effort to try and generate a reasonable and workable response on their behalf, I would like to see at least some of my “advice” effort implemented. Otherwise, why have they bothered to ask me, and why have I bothered to respond. Advice also comes with a couple of strings attached and they involve feedback. If you ask for advice, it is usually assumed that you will use at least some of it. You need to let the provider know what you used, and it is normally good for to say “thank you”. By the way, saying thank you seems to be a lost art. If you did not use the advice there is an implied obligation and you owe the provider an explanation of why you didn’t use it. This is a common courtesy. It is particularly important if you ever want to ask for that person’s advice again.
I once heard it said that there are two types of people: Those that divide people into two types and those that don’t. I think we can all safely say that we fall into one of those categories. I have also heard it said that there are actually three types of people: Those that know how to count and those that don’t, but I have digressed a little here. I think there are also two types of people that ask for advice: Those that are genuinely asking for help with a topic or issue, and those that are not.
Usually when someone asks for advice they are indeed looking for help on how to execute one of their responsibilities or assignments. Their requests are usually reflexive in nature and pertain to how they should complete their tasks. You are asking someone “what should I do?” Some may see asking for advice as a weakness. It’s not. If you know someone that has experience or expertise in a function you need to perform, it would be foolish not to ask their advice.
If you get in the habit of asking for advice and then either ignoring it or choosing to not implement it, people will stop providing it. This is similar to the story about the boy that cried “wolf”. Eventually there really was a wolf, and after so many false alarms, no one came to help. Sometime in their business careers, everyone could use some advice. If you have the reputation for asking for advice and then ignoring it, don’t be surprised if it is not available when you really need it.
The idea here is to not unnecessarily ask for advice. It communicates that you may not know which course to take and vests the person you are asking in the outcome you choose. If you think you have a potential solution in mind but may want a little more information, or perhaps some suggestions on a topic then don’t ask for advice. Ask for an opinion. Everybody has an opinion on everything. I heard a friend once say that they had an opinion and that everyone else was entitled to it. When you ask for an opinion you are essentially asking “what would you do?” You are not directly investing them in the success of the effort, and are not usually expecting the same depth of response.
Asking for an opinion doesn’t seem to invest people in the solution the way asking for advice does. I don’t know why this is. I would guess that requested advice is deemed valuable where a requested opinion is just that; an opinion. People who ask for advice are saying that they need help. People who ask for help usually receive it. People who provide help usually like to see it received and utilized. People who are asked for and provide an opinion usually assume that you probably have some clue as to what you need to do and will not be as put off if and when you ignore their opinion.
At least in my opinion.