Execution Excellence – how much is Discretionary?

I was googling “execution excellence” recently and I was amazed at how much there is new on the topic, so I have lots of reading to do. But as I read the first few books / articles two themes started to emerge.

The themes are discretion and discipline. Some articles refer to how much discretion individual managers and employees have to impact execution for better or worse, despite all the efforts leadership teams put into designing strategies, systems and processes that generate consistent outcomes. The other theme is the need for discipline in order to execute excellently.

Bower & Gilbert (HBR Feb 2007) have studied the discretion that managers have to use their asset allocation discretion to support or ignore strategy and Jeffrey Immelt from General Electric (interviewed in HBR in June 2006) was even able to put a number on it. Despite all GE’s efforts to create disciplines on the cost side of their businesses, a recent study of pricing in the GE appliances businesses indicated that their salespeople have discretion over an estimated $5 billion in revenue. This is an astonishing figure, according to Immelt, that could translate into $50 billion across the whole of GE. The answer, according to Immelt, is to create more discipline in [the execution of] pricing decisions.

In many organisations I see the same issues occuring: managers and individuals have discretion over pricing, discounts, complaints, claims and resourcing decisions, which can affect the people and product strategies of their various business areas. One of most important roles of management is to support others to make disciplined decisions, rather than easy decisions, because although most people want to come to work to do a “good job”, their habits can get in the way.
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When is Good Enough, enough?

As a perfectionist, I have long struggled with “good enough” vs “the best” and have found a book by Barry Schwartz called “The Paradox of Choice” to be very useful to me. He articulated my concern, by identifying that some choice was good, but too much choice could be overwhelming and that aiming for “the best” was problematic, because you could never know if you really had “the best”. Today you might, but things could change tomorrow!
In my trainings, I often draw a normal distribution or “bell curve” and ask managers to describe what is “good enough” performance, compared to “not good enough” and “excellent”. Of course, it is usually hard for them to put the distinctions into words, yet this is a fundamental need of employees – to know what standard of performance is required of them.

This is where solutions focused questioning is helpful, so we can move from an abstract concept like “the best” to practical examples of what is “good enough” (or “best enough” for those of us who think “good enough” is a cop out).

For examples of solutions focussed questions to help flesh out “good enough”, keep reading.
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Leadership Development – what works

I’ve been thinking again about how to combine leadership development with charity work in third world countries. Last year I started developing the concept of sending mid-level managers to lead action learning projects in third world countries on behalf of charity organisations. I tested a version of this concept with Jules Routledge and AFADU and we learned a lot about what is needed to support leaders in such environments, especially leaders who see themselves as primarily technical experts.

My preliminary conclusion is that this sort of action learning project is useful for mid level managers, because it exposes them to totally new environments and stretches their influencing skills, but is a bit too much of a challenge for new/technical leaders, unless they already have a good base of people skills.

Over Easter, I was interested to read an article sourced from my favourite HR website www.HR.com, which seems to support my thinking.

They quoted a Hay Group study “Best companies for Leaders” which surveys organisations to find out “the best practices for identifying and fostering leadership talent”.

The Hay Group found that the top three practices were:
* Having leaders at all levels who focus on creating a work climate that motivates employees to perform at their best.
* Ensuring that the company and its senior management make leadership development a top priority.
* Providing training and coaching to help intact leadership teams, as well as the individual leaders, work together more effectively.

The remaining best practices highlight the need to start early on mid-level managers and high potentials (and indicates that perhaps my idea will grow legs):

* Rotational job assignments for high potentials.
* External leadership development programs for mid-level managers.
* Web-based self study leadership modules for mid-level managers.
* Executive MBA programs for mid-level managers.

They also found some activities that appeared not to achieve the stated goals of leadership development…

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Building Greatness – first who, then what

I was really looking forward to hearing Collins speak at last month’s NPODs conference and hopefully to have him answer the one question that bugs me about his book “Goood to Great”. The thing I didn’t understand was “How can you know the ‘right’ people before you know what you want to aim for?

Jim is an energetic speaker who opened with a ‘left hook’ – “good is the mortal enemy of great” and finished with a right jab – his current research is showing that the “signature of mediocrity is not resistance to change, as they had suspected, but a chronic inconsistency” Hmmm.

I liked knowing that his research is grounded in ‘contrast’ aka twin studies in psychology. Colleague Porras twigged to the idea that organisations have twins too – so their research approach is to look for the impacts of “nature” and “nurture”. The conclusion is that greatness is not a function of environment or circumstances but of choices and discipline – sounds like nurture to me.
Anyway to cut a long story short – you can read my summary notes below if you are interested in the long story – he did give us an answer to my question of “how do you choose ‘who’? and the answer is “choose based on values”. You first select “who” by choosing people who share your common values and then you collectively decide what. Of course – it all makes sense now. He also said that you cannot make people share your values, only find those who already believe in them. Interesting….
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All Hail the Captain Coach

One of the questions we regularly discuss with clients and colleagues is “What makes for a good leader in Australia?” and I keep coming back to the work of Graeme Hubbard and his colleagues in the book “The First XI”. They describe good leadership in Australia as:

“Captain coach leadership – where the leaders are part of the team, on the field of play, yet leading and coaching at the same time”.

This rings true for many of us, we want leaders we can model – who have attributes that we desire to develop – and we want them to be part of the team with us – someone who is approachable enough that we can ask for their support and encouragement. This is admirable and it is also a challenge because the implication is that leaders can and should model and coach others in everything they need to know and do.

The next question that intrigues me is “what can our leaders do?”, if, in the language of sport, they are not able to be ‘best and fairest’, ‘highest goal kicker’ and ‘best team player’, all at the same time and an attractive answer comes from the strengths-based approach.

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Sharing Ideas at nPODS – Goran Carstedt

I recently enjoyed immersing myself in ideas for two days solid at the National People & Organisation Development Summit organised by Andrew & Tammie Greatrex of Global Leaders Network. I vowed publicly to summarise the sessions I attended but of course work got in the way, so I have chunked the task down to summarise a speaker every few days.

Day 1 session one – Goran Carstedt, former head of Volvo and IKEA and Society for Organisational Learning (SOL) steward. I enjoyed the session and the slight let down was that he had to start late and shorten his session, so he cut out most of his stories and talked instead about the underlying principles that he had learned as a leader. Even though I loved the principles, I see the value of stories in the ones he did tell.

Goran started by talking about the benefit of sharing ideas (see my blog entry from 10 Jan!) where we each end up with more and that the ‘new logic’ is not what we own (scarcity has value) but what we share (plentitude has value). This confirms the value of spending time to learn technology like blogging, that allows me to connect with a larger audience and reinforces my commitment to sharing ideas.
He spoke of setting up SOL fractals around the world and I liked the idea of learning fractals – each a smaller image of the whole. This is one of my passions at the moment – how to encourage learning communities in organisations.

I especially liked: that we ‘create’ human energy by inviting people to contribute to something meaningful, purposeful and learningful – something worthy – not by requiring obedience to rules and regulations and profit. This is becoming a bigger theme in contracting with clients – we want to work with clients who want to share their returns with their employees and other stakeholders. Thus, I loved the distinction that “Profit and Not-for-Profit are two ends of the continuum and in the middle is Not-only-for-Profit“. Creating a new mental category opens up lots of opportunities for organisations that have been constricted until now and it is another demonstration that we cannot think and imagine new ways of doing and being until we have the language to support it.

Three more ideas I particularly liked:

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Management Innovation – is this an oxymoron?

A recent article by Gary Hamel, titled ‘The Why, What and How of Management Innovation’, intrigued me, but I wasn’t sure what it meant. I’m familiar with product, process and service innovation but management innovation? In my opinion there’s a word missing – the article is really talking about management process innovation, but obviously that’s not as strong a title.

So what’s the message?

Hamel says that “A management breakthrough can deliver a strong advantage to the innovating company and produce a major shift in industry leadership. Few companies, however, have been able to come up with a formal process for fostering management innovation. The biggest challenge seems to be generating truly unique ideas”.

He suggests a series of questions to uncover whether our management processes are supporting or exacerbating big organisational problems and whether they are supporting or limiting big organisational opportunities.

This links to another HBR article by Bower & Gilbert – Whose Strategy is it? The authors have observed that the “carefully-crafted strategies of senior management” can be derailed by the decisions of middle and front line managers. They rightly observe that “every time a manager allocates resources, that decision either moves the organisation into or out of alignment with its intended strategy”.

So, taking asset allocation as a management process, we can apply Hamel’s thinking and ask “How we can innovate the system to ensure it delivers asset allocation decisions in line with the desired strategy?”. In a wider sense, both articles refer to the typical management issue of how to innovate the personal choices that all managers and employees make about where they allocate their time and efforts – which is the province of the Personal Efficiency Program that Paul is licenced to run.

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