Pronoun Problems
September 29, 2009
One of the the biggest complaints I hear from leaders about their teams goes like this:
They’re all good individuals, but they just refuse to think at the organizational level. They sit in their silos and own little responsibility for the success of the whole enterprise (or business unit or function or department).
I’m curious by nature, so I’ll often ask a question like, “What tells you that?” Often, there’s a long pause.
“It’s a gut feeling I have,” they respond. And I can tell from their expression that this “gut feeling” is a very lonely feeling. These senior leaders are the only ones carrying the bag at the end of the day for the whole – and that’s not only lonely, it’s often dangerous.
Sometimes, I’m lucky enough to get to observe their teams and it doesn’t take long to see the symptoms of silos. One of the most obvious signs is language. No, I don’t mean whether or not they curse each other out – although that can be a sign that something isn’t exactly right. I simply observe which pronouns the members of the leadership team use when talking about the organization.
Here’s an example: Not too long ago, I was facilitating a strategic alignment session for a leadership team made up of functional leaders and general managers of business units. As usual, my process asked them to think at the enterprise level. On a regular basis, as the leaders talked about the current and future direction of the business, they would say things like:
- “Well, you people at (XYZ Corp.) do things this way. We (in our business unit) do it differently.”
- “Our results have been pretty good over the past two quarters.”
I found myself repeatedly asking, “When you say ‘we,’ exactly who is ‘we’?” Over the course of our multi-day working session, we all got more sensitive to this thing of seeing the whole and managing the whole that I talked about in a prior post.
So if you want to test your own organization for silos, listen for a while to leaders as they talk. What do their pronouns tell you about where they consider “home” to be and what they truly own? It’s a simple signal that can reveal a lot.
What other signals tell you how prevalent silos are in your organization?
What creates momentum? – Help figure it out!
September 28, 2009
For most of my career, I’ve been working around organizations who are trying to get moving. One thing has often struck me – some organizations have that mysterious commodity called momentum. They have a pattern of progress, of getting things done. There is a confidence and an inexorability about how they operate. They attract people, capital, and opportunity as a result.
They also seem to the be exception…
I’m curious about what separates those with momentum from those who fight inertia. So I’m glad that our team has launched a research survey designed to identify organizational practices that generate momentum. The questions are based on the experience of seasoned leaders who have shaped and deployed strategy for years. Our goal is to gather the input of hundreds if not thousands of organizational leaders and to examine the data for trends. Imagine if we could find the practices that most predict success? That would be pretty powerful for everyone.
You can participate in a couple of ways:
- Complete the survey yourself. It takes about 10 minutes and you can launch it by clicking here.
- Share the survey with people from other organizations. They can find it by going to http://www.noondayventures.com/bid_rs.html.
- Encourage others in your organization to complete the survey. In fact, if you want to compare your organization’s practices against the entire database, just get at least 10 of your colleagues to agree to take the survey and send a request to research@noondayventures.com. We will send your organization a personalized survey so that you can get this valuable information once the research is complete.
We look forward to sharing the results with you in the future.
What is new normal?
September 22, 2009
As I work with senior leaders and their teams these days, a question often emerges in the room: What is new normal? Leaders have seen customers hit the “re-set” button and they wonder when – and if – things will get back to the “good old days.”
Some of this wondering may be our natural forgetfulness. As John Steinbeck says in East of Eden, in the good times people forget how difficult the bad times can be – and in the bad times, people forget how good it can be. But in most parts of our society, people sense that there are fundamental changes afoot. The chess board is not just bumped. It has been dumped.
I was lucky enough to sit in on a talk by Gary Hamel, one of the most published strategy thinkers, a few weeks ago. One of the memorable quotes from that talk goes like this:
You’re either going forward or going backward. There is no in between.
And yet it strikes me that our searching for “new normal” can lead us to do the exact wrong thing: hunker down and wait. Part of this instinct may be useful. Too many of us run around like headless chickens when things get turbulent. But if Hamel is right (and I think he is), simply assuming crash position indefinitely will probably send us backward.
Instead, here are a few questions I’m asking clients these days – and pondering myself:
- Every era has a “normal” – the opportunities and constraints that define the age. What might they be for us over the coming five years?
- Every era has outliers who find and exploit the secrets to success in that era. How do outliers discover and exploit those secrets? How well are we doing that in our company?
- Every era has turning points that create opportunities? What turning points are we experiencing? What opportunities does the dumped-out chessboard create? What established competitors are in turmoil? What new customer base is opening up?
What do you think? What leadership group in your organization needs to talk about these questions? Your answers may make the difference between going forward or going backward.