Dirty Word Re-visited – Mistakes
March 31, 2009
Unless you live in a very different world than I do, you have probably noticed one of the dominant reactions to our times: fear. If you’re an employee, you may fear the possibility of that unplanned visit by the HR team. If you’re a boss, you may fear the directive to trim yet more cost from your area of responsibility. If you’re a consultant, you may fear that meeting with a client or prospect when they tell you they just don’t have the funding to do your project.
All of those circumstances can lead people to especially fear mistakes, and this can be a real problem for leaders. Instill a deep fear of mistakes in your team and you just might keep an already faltering organization stalled for some time. Here’s a story to illustrate:
I have a friend named Shaun who runs a very unique program at a Chicago-area high school. He is a chef by training, and attended the prestigious Culinary Institute of America (kind of the Harvard of chef schools). The guy can cook. But he’s chosen to put his skills to work teaching high school students how to run a first-class food operation. In fact, they run a full restaurant at their high school and serve top-notch meals to faculty and staff. And you thought extended summer breaks were the best part of teaching!
A graduate of his program was accepted to an elite chef school and sent to Spain to apprentice under one of the top chefs there. On her first night in the kitchen, she was handed an order of chicken and told to put the appropriate sauce on it. Unfortunately, the instructions were given in Spanish and this young lady spoke no Spanish: nada. She looked around, took her best guess as to which sauce to use and finished the dish.
Much to her chagrin, her immediate supervisor looked at the dish in horror: she had finished this chicken dish with chocolate sauce. The supervisor showed the dish to the head chef. He looked at the dish and the young American chef waited for the inevitable Gordon Ramsey-like explosion. She mentally had her bags packed for a return trip in disgrace.
Instead, the chef smiled and said, “You will do well. You took initiative. I would much rather you take initiative and make mistakes sometimes than that you wait to be told what to do.” The dish had to be trashed and started over, but the chef had learned something important about his young student.
“The initiative is marvelous. The chocolate chicken – not so much…”
So as leaders, now more than ever, we must find ways to encourage initiative and courage even when they cause mistakes. Yes, we should watch to see if team members can learn from and anticipate future problems. But courageous (imperfect) action almost always beats fear. Who needs some recognition for taking initiative despite fear in your world?
Stress Test Revelations
March 16, 2009
Everyone seems to be getting stress tests these days, not just major banks. Practically every organization is facing circumstances that will reveal underlying fundamental health. That health comes in many different facets – financial, strategic, and operational. In the Fast Company article I wrote during our last recession, I wrote about leadership lessons I learned during that time.
Here’s one more that I’m noticing these days as my team works with senior leadership teams facing strategic challenges: These times will reveal the mettle of your leadership team itself.
A recent email from a friend of mine brings this to light. She is a world-class sailor who has competed on a team that has won many of the major prizes in their class. In a recent regatta, they had a complex maneuver that went disastrously wrong in the middle of a race. Unlike many teams (sailing or otherwise), this team didn’t implode or avoid thoughtful review after they limped into the finish line. Instead, they consulted their on-board video footage of the 15-second incident and spent two hours reviewing the maneuver in excruciating detail. Each person got time on the hot seat, examining how his/her actions contributed to the situation and how they could perform better next time.
In most executive teams, this sort of candid review would be flat-out impossible – team members would be incapable of honest, direct review of a mistake without feeling threatened. So too often, leadership teams just walk around the mess or spend a lot of time privately assigning blame. For the leader, this preserves superficial peace. But everyone knows that it erodes the ability to perform over time.
Here’s how my friend describes the difference in this championship team:
Our team debriefs are such a testimony to the power of feedback. There is a school of thought that ‘learning from experience’ is enough. Be diligent in your own reflection and ‘make sure you learned the lesson’ whatever it is.
But there is SO much more to be gained if you are in a trust based – high communication environment where you can generate critical and constructive feedback. Adding the perspective of others – to put the pieces together to create a bigger picture – brings a whole new level of understanding and solution.The challenge is – that you have to have the relational trust and respect among those participating in the ‘feedback’ – or it won’t be productive. (emphasis mine)
Now before anyone thinks, “That’s fine, but it’s just a bunch of mumbo jumbo about trust. We’re dealing with strategic issues here,” let me add my friends conclusion.
The upside of being on our team is we can pull off maneuvers which other boats can’t due to our communication, timing, and crew work.
In other words, they sail faster and win more trophies!
Today’s environment can help us to assess many things about our organizations. The waters are stormy. More than ever, we need to be adept in the hard skill of getting our leadership teams to ruthlessly face the facts while fostering trust and respect.
Leader’s Job 1: Define the Win
March 11, 2009
Hmmm… How do we get to this exit?
Most of the business community is playing defense right now. With seismic shifts in the financial markets, stunning changes in consumer behavior, and layoffs all around, it’s easy to see why. No wonder so many people are looking over their shoulders.
With that trend comes a tendency toward confusion and drift in our organizations. For instance, I was speaking recently with a senior executive who had recently taken on responsibility for a critical strategic function in his company. As he spoke with team members, he realized that they were pretty demoralized but he couldn’t immediately see why. Then it hit him – they had been working hard for over a year on high-profile projects, but they had never really understood what success looked like. As a group of high achievers, they found this extremely frustrating. They didn’t know if or when to celebrate, so the job had just turned into a long slow slog.
As I work with senior leaders and their teams, I’ve come to believe that this is one of the most important (and surprisingly, neglected) roles of a leader – to define the “win.” People desperately want to know what success looks like. Yes, they want to know so that they can see if/when they may receive a bonus or promotion (or in today’s world, keep their position). But even more, the people you really want on your team – the ones who have a self-motivating engine – just get off on achieving success. And most of those high-achievers are very self-critical. If you don’t help them identify and celebrate the achievement of a tangible goal, they will usually feel like they could/should have done more.
In times like these, it’s hard for leaders to step aside long enough to define the win – beyond “survive!!” But it may just be more important now than it ever has been.