X-Teams Solve Key Corporate Dilemmas

Leading a team chartered with innovation? Working with a group globally? Unable to secure funding from management for your ideas?

Deborah Ancona outlines the dilemmas that she finds organizations facing today in this article X-Teams Solve Key Corporate Dilemmas. Briefly, how do you innovate when people are burdened by day-to-day customer and business demands? How do you empower people and teams to gather information from their world and use it to innovate? How do you quickly develop leadership talent within an organization.

While the article and her new book with Bresman, X-teams: How to Build Teams That Lead, Innovate and Succeed (Amazon link) focus on areas of innovation, the thinking and process suggested in this book and related articles (see also an interview of Bresman for Insead Knowledge) can be more broadly applied to moving an organization from a local to a global perspective. Too often we find local organizations looking outside of their own organization only when they need help. Already constrained by the model they are using, they have trouble seeing the value when they finally look outside. Chartering an organization to be externally focused at all phases of their work will open their minds to innovation, whether at the idea, execution or growth phases.

To employ these ideas, we must encourage and support extensive networks into other functions, other countries, and other companies. We must find ways to bring "outsiders" into team processes for limited periods of time and with specific purposes. We must ask for and reward the sharing of ideas and the leveraging of experiences and people.

What ways to you see to use the concept of X-teams in global organizations?

Retaining Young Talent

If you have time, listen to an HBR interview of Chris Resto, co-author of the book, Recruit or Die: How Any Business Can Beat the Big Guys in the War for Young Talent. Whether managing young talent or considering how to retain in a challenging market like China, this book (and podcast) give some great recommendations.

Meaningful Work: One key to retention is to have people feel that from the first day of work, they are engaged in meaningful work. What is meaningful work? Work that is clearly aligned with the mission of the company. They need to know how and why their contributions contribute to the company. The manager has the foremost role in this education, yet it gains the most power when reinforced by as many people and as many systems as possible in the organization.

Mentors: This book recommends that most people, particularly newer in the workforce, want to feel nurtured. The manager needs to step out of a management role and engage with the employee as a mentor. Equally as strong is appointing a senior leader to engage as a mentor with each new employee. It's this leader's role to help the employee look at where they are going next? While the manager coaches, manages and mentors for today, the senior leader helps the employee look beyond to tomorrow. Nurtured and supported for the future.

Network: Encourage and support your new employees in meeting people broadly throughout the organization. The employee builds social ties, and deepens their understanding of how the people and structures interrelate in the organization.

Develop: What have you done for me today? The employee of today is looking for constant development. The manager and organization that provide the employee with opportunities to strengthen their skills and resume on a frequent basis will win in the war for talent. Resto recommends having discussions with employees that highlight how the work they have done and are doing is strengthening their careers and resume. If you, the manager can't see it, the employee certainly won't.

Do I feel motivated by my work? Am I supported by my manager and the senior leadership? Am I part of a team? Is my career being advanced? If the new talent in your organization can answer "yes" to all of these questions, you are well on your way to tackling the retention problems.

90% in the top 10% of performers?

Business Week just published a survey of 2000 American middle managers and above, over the age of 25, and found that an astonishing 90% believed themselves to be in the top 10% of performers.

While just a couple of days before this publication, Marshall Goldsmith on his blog entry, The Success Delusion, writes:

Without even being aware of it, we often:

• Overestimate our contribution to a project;
• Have an elevated opinion of our skills and standing among our peers;
• Conveniently ignore the costs of time-consuming dead-ends that we have created;
• Exaggerate our projects’ impact on profitability by discounting real and hidden costs (the costs are their issue – the success is ours).

Many of our delusions can come from our association with success, not failure. Since we get positive reinforcement from our past successes, we think that they are predictive of great things to come in our future.

Self-esteem and confidence are powerful tools in driving success. Yet how best to temper those with a bit of humility? Picking one thing to work on, practice the art of reflection (what will I do differently when I next encounter this situation?) and watching for skills in others that you may want, all will help you to keep a learning mind. You may still believe that you're a top 10% performer, but there's always more to learn.

Self Assessments & Performance Management

Kris Dunn over at the HR Capitalist in What's That Smell? Self Assessments & Performance Management writes:

As an individual who recently revamped a performance management system from the old subjective system (everyone gets the same 80 items, rank on a scale of 1 to 5) to one driven by cascading goals driving individual objectives across the organization, I've had a lot of time to ponder things in the performance management space. One thing I have ran into is the value of allowing employees to evaluate themselves as part of the process (Self-Evaluations!!)....

Now, I don't want go all Dennis Miller and get off on a rant here, but the prospect of self-evaluations is more riddled with holes than the final season of the Sopranos.

Here's why I don't like Self Evaluations:

1. There is always a gap between real and perceived performance, and the gap is always largest with your lowest performing employees.
2. Self Assessments set up managers who struggle with performance management to fail unnecessarily.
3. Self Assessments are often crutches for managers with poor writing skills.
4. Most employees confuse behavior and performance that "meets" expectations as "exceeding" expectations.

Every system has pros and cons. Certainly the downsides listed for self assessments are valid. A self assessment should NEVER be the sole tool of the performance evaluation. Yet just as managers can be lazy about the writing, most of us are over influenced in evaluation of performance by recent events. The manager, who no doubt should take the time to track and discuss performance throughout the year, frequently only gets to it once a year. Should the employee then be penalized because the manager only deals with the issue infrequently?

I argue that the employee has the responsibility to write up their own performance review and offer it up to the manager. They have a greater vested interest in seeing that the performance period is looked at in total; that all of the performance criteria are considered. And besides, who has the most to learn from really thinking about the performance - the manager or the employee?

See my blog posting at Writing Your Own Performance Review for recommendations to the employee on this process.

Slow Leadership » The Law of Repulsion

Over on Slow Leadership, Carmine Coyote writes,

The more you focus on what you don’t want, the more of it you’ll keep finding to get rid of. What you give most attention to nearly always assumes a larger role in your life. This isn’t some nutty “law of attraction” nonsense; it’s a simple observation of the way that the human mind works. People who become obsessed with the amount of dog-poop thoughtless owners leave behind on the street see it everywhere. It drives them mad. The rest of us simply step in it, curse, and forget about it. Still, you can sometimes learn even from what you step in. I’ve had it up to here with the “Law of Attraction”—about as goofy an idea as ever spawned a thousand web sites and helped lead gullible people astray. Nevertheless, there is a kernel of truth hiding within the hype. The more you focus on something, the more you’ll keep thinking about it and the bigger the part it’s therefore probably going to play in your life—at least in the short term.

I agree with these sentiments on the “Law of Positive Attraction”, but there is something to it. Brains are limited in what they can handle in a conscious state. As a consequence, adults go through life seeing, hearing and experiencing countless things to which limited or no attention is paid. There are significant events, for example an explosion, that impinge regardless of attention. Less significant events register and are stored in short-term memory only with conscious attention. Attention appears to work by biasing the brain toward the stimuli and by reducing inputs from competing regions. Further, studies indicate that attention must be complemented by a mental state predisposed to accepting or rejecting the information. Conscious attention serves to open the brain to inputs allowing new or stronger neuronal networks to form.

Bottom line, if we’re looking for good, we’re more likely to spot it. If we’re looking for problems, we’re more likely to find them and reinforce our perspectives. Our ability to use our conscious minds to change our brains is phenomenal.

For more on this, I invite you to visit my blog at You Can Teach an Old Dog New Tricks or for even more on this subject, you can download my research report: Through the Mind We Create Change from this page of my website.

Three signs of a miserable job

Do you hate your job? While Gallup finds that 77% of Americans hate their jobs, a University of Chicago survey shows satisfaction at 86%. Let's see, they were either talking to vastly different survey samples, or the questions were wildly different.

The reality is that there are a lot of people who feel trapped in their jobs for financial reasons, who feel unappreciated by their bosses, and who face each day's work as another day of drudgery. There are a lot of self-help gurus out there who would suggest that you should find your passion, and the money and satisfaction will follow. Easier said than done when financial security is shaky and others are depending on your earnings.

Another school of thought is that the job is about the money. If you want satisfaction, you should seek it in another area of your life. Certainly more practical, and worth factoring into job choices; but this denies the reality that work takes up a very large portion of our waking hours.

Nash and Stevenson in their book, Just Enough: Tools for Creating Success in Your Work and Life, suggest that success has four components:

• Happiness – feeling about pleasure and contentment about your life
• Achievement – accomplishments that compare favorably against similar goals others have strived for
• Significance – the sense that you’ve made a positive impact on people you care about
• Legacy – a way to establish your values or accomplishments so as to help others find future success.

In an ideal world, maybe our job can give fulfill needs in all four of these areas; but most people live in less than idea worlds. Rather than seeking everything from one aspect of our lives, perhaps it would be more useful to find happiness in hobbies, family and community work; to find significance with your friends and in service to others; and to find legacy through your families and other creations from your heart. Who knows, maybe in looking for satisfaction out of the job, it will be easier to get out of bed in the mornings.

For more on the three signs of a miserable job and what managers aren't doing about it, see Lisa Takeuchi Cullen's blog through the title link.

The W List: a.k.a. Women Who Blog

Social networking is a powerful phenomena - spreading information about people, services and ideas in remarkable ways. I stumbled upon a list of women who write at The HeyMarci Blog and tracked over to find this version of list at Krishna De's BizGrowth News of the many growing versions of the list. At last sighting, the list has gone virally; spreading and growing in an exponential fashion.

Here was the list as of August 8:

• advergirl Leigh Householder
• Back in Skinny Jeans by Stephanie Quilao
• Biz Growth News by Krishna De
• BlogWrite for CEOs Debbie Weil
• Brand Sizzle Anne Simons
• Branding & Marketing Chris Brown
• CK’s Blog CK (Christina Kerley)
• Communication Overtones Kami Huyse
• Conscious Business by Anne Libby
• Conversation Agent Valeria Maltoni
• Corporate PR Elizabeth Albrycht
• Customers Rock! Becky Carroll
• Deborah Schultz by Deborah Schultz
• Diva Marketing Blog Toby Bloomberg
• Email Marketing Best Practices Tamara Gielen
• eSoup by Sharon Sarmiento
• Flooring The Consumer CB Whittemore
• Forrester’s Marketing Blog Shar, Charlene, Chloe, Christine Elana, Laura and Lisa
• Get Fresh Minds by Katie Konrath
• Get Shouty by Katie Chatfield
• Inspired Business Growth by Wendy Piersall
• Kinetic Ideas Wendy Maynard
• Learned on Women by Andrea Learned
• Liz Strauss at Successful Blog by Liz Strauss
• Lorelle on WordPress by Lorelle VanFossen
• Manage to Change by Ann Michael
• Management Craft by Lisa Haneberg
• Marketing Roadmaps Susan Getgood
• Moda di Magno by Lori Magno
• Modite by Rebecca Thorman
• Narrative Assets by Karen Hegman
• Presto Vivace Blog Alice Marshall
• Productivity Goal by Carolyn Manning
• Spare Change Nedra Kline Weinreich
• Tech Kitten by Trisha Miller
• The Copywriting Maven Roberta Rosenberg
• The Engaging Brand by Anna Farmery
• The Origin of Brands Laura Ries
• The Podcast Sisters by Krishna De, Anna Farmery and Heather Gorringe
• What’s Next Blog B L Ochman

To this, I add from my own watch list

• Brazen Careerist by Penelope Trunk
• Cassandra Rae by Cassandra Rae
• Evil HR Lady
  

and of course me, at Coach Blog - Read Solutions Group by Sherry Read.

I look forward to comments linking in more great women bloggers.

Forward-Thinking Cultures

Mansour Javidan in his HBR article July-August 2007 Forward-Thinking Cultures recounts his research on cultural bias toward future orientation. Future orientation is "the extent to which a culture encourages and rewards such behavior as delaying gratification, planning and investing in the future.

The research suggests that westerners, Taiwanese, and Singaporeans have more future-oriented than the Chinese. For organizations with a focus on long-term planning, Chinese employees can be left disillusioned by the process and disempowered by their ability to impact such long-term outcomes.

As Javidan suggests, the key is to translate any longer range objectives into short-term goals. Equally important is to link rewards and career growth to these short-term goals. Continuously communicating the linkage between the short-term goals and longer range objectives, and gradually increasing time horizons will help your team feel as though they have can impact the organization's outcomes.

Remote Leadership: When you can't just walk down the hall and see how things are going

Whenever you are in the world, more likely than not, you lead people or teams that are not located in the same office as you. Or if this isn't the case, you may well be dealing with a remote leader or manager. So if you can't walk down the hall and see how things are going, what are some of the keys to successful remote leadership?

In this article, we'll look at three elements:

• What is different about remote and face-to-face leadership?
• What structures support remote leadership?
• What are the actions you should take as a remote leader?

Are there really any differences between remote and face-to-face leadership or isn't good leadership just good leadership?
Strong leaders are skilled in establishing a vision, motivation, engagement, goal setting, performance management and continuous improvement, among other things. In principle then, there is no difference between remote and face-to-face leadership skills. In practice, both the leader and team members lose information about the subtle messages. In their article, "Virtual line management: The competitive advantage", Bente Thomassen and Henrik Villumsen of The Danish Leadership Institute argue that the crucial difference is the leader's lack of access to the atmosphere or tone of the workplace. There are more clues when you can see, hear, and feel a person's tone or a group's atmosphere. The messages that surround you as a leader provide information on productivity and morale. Distance makes many of these messages and clues harder to spot and read.

Leadership becomes even more challenging when you have a mix of local and remote team members. It is extraordinarily easy to assume that the remote team members are facing the same challenges and opportunities as the local team; and perhaps more importantly, to assume that the remote team members have the same needs as the local team. In fact, the remote team members work in a different environment, and as with any group of people, have individual needs. Michael Watkins, in a recent Harvard Business Review Online article give s recommendations to remote team members in "Remote Leadership: Meeting the Challenge of Working for a Virtual Boss" by Michael Watkins.

What are the structures supporting good leadership?
All leaders need to establish structures to support goal alignment and the achievement of desired results. A remote leader should look particularly at these areas.

1. Do the remote team members have supported technology that will enable communication, collaboration and access to information? Technology solutions can include web-based scheduling software, teleconferences, videoconferencing, groupware, and webconferencing.
   
2. Do your remote team members understand their limits of authority? Build a decision tree with your team members that outlines the kinds of decisions that can be taken independently, the extent of input you need to have, and the level of communication required (approval needed, advice sought, informed, part of regular updates).
   
3. Does the format of your regularly scheduled team meetings enable clear two-way communication and a sense of involvement? Conscious efforts must be made to include remote team members if there is a sizeable local group; jokes, side discussions, visuals are often lost over the conference lines, leading to a sense of disconnection, rather than inclusion.
   
4. Are you choosing the appropriate forms of communication for each message? Formal follow up and discussion can occur over email. Satisfying your curiousity about an issue may best be done over the phone to avoid a sense of micromanagement, and to ensure your team members are chasing your questions, rather than achieving results. Balance your knowledge and control needs against the pitfalls of micromanagement.
5. Have you established a pattern of individual interactions tailored to the needs of the individual team member? Some employees relish a brief interaction daily; some do better with a formal weekly update call. Also ensure that your employees know the best way, and the best times to reach you with more urgent updates.
   

What actions do you need to routinely employ to be a successful remote leader?
Structures enable communication. Your actions as a remote leader within and outside those structures are the elements that lead to success.

1. Your ability to manage the subtle messages from yourself and the work place are correlated with remote leadership success. Quoting Thomassen and Villumsen, "the further away, the clearer, explicit and unambiguous the message" must be. Whether your team members are on opposite coasts of N. America or separated by 12 time zones, context, jargon, and differences in cultural directness can dramatically effective the understanding of your messages. Simplifying your message, frequently repeating key messages and seeking understanding are key steps to establishing a clear direction.
2. The effective remote leader watches closely for the unsaid messages to gain keep a firm grasp on the atmosphere. Be aware of the number or frequency of phone calls or emails, length of messages, changes in tone or words employed, breakdown in interactions between team members, and hints of problems. Be sensitive to what your people are telling you, and what they are not disclosing.
   
3. Know who the thought leaders and social leaders are within a remote group. Deputize them to signal you when problems arise and need your intervention or presence.
4. Set aside time for social interactions, both face to face and through your normal means of team communication. Employee engagement is strongly linked to a sense that the boss cares. Building a depth of relationship remotely is more challenging, and more necessary.
5. Gallup research documented in "The Fourth Element of Great Managing" reminds leaders of the need for frequent recognition. Gallup recommends recognition be given at least every 7 days. Frequent recognition in a remote situation quells the question, "do they even know what we are doing?" The remote leader who consciously reaches out to every employee on a weekly or more frequent basis to acknowledge and support work, will enhance employee engagement and productivity.

The remote leader faces many challenges. He must establish values from a distant, communicate a shared vision for the future, build trust with individuals and teams, balance the need for control against micromanagement, and ensure that employees feel engaged, productive and supported, all at a distance. She must be spend additional energy attuned to subtle hints and changes in the workplace. He must know how and when to intervene. Those who successfully take on the challenges of remote team members find their overall leadership skills greatly enhanced.

- What have you found to improve remote leadership? What impact has remote leadership had on your overall leadership skills? -