Making leaders “greedy for new things”
July 30, 2010
Here’s something I’ve seen many times in my work with growth-oriented clients. The leadership team works hard to free themselves from the burdens of everyday business, go off-site to remove distractions and engage each other (and people like me) to imagine the possible.
Then it happens. They have a list of promising growth projects staring them in the face and they all get a certain look…
You can almost hear the audible pop of circuit breakers blowing and see little puffs of smoke from people’s ears as gaskets blow. ”We already have so much – too much – on our plates. How will we do this too?”
Perhaps in their anguished cry lies the answer. Years ago, Peter Drucker suggested several policies for organizations who are trying to grow aggressively. Here’s policy #1:
Abandon what is no longer productive or is a mistake.
While not novel (think of Jim Collins’ “stop doing list”), it’s one of the simplest yet most difficult policies to enact. How often do we take the time to dig into our existing portfolio of work and say, “That project (or process or whatever) had its day. But its day is over.”
So before shelving your growth projects (which is certainly a better option than just loading everyone up and hoping it comes out it the wash), here are a few questions to ask:
- Is there any way I can streamline what I/we do today? Where is the wasted effort and energy? How often do we just keep doing things the way we do them (or allow our team members to do so) even though we know they’re leaking effort all over the floor? My BPI/Lean/Six Sigma friend, Mike Posdal (aka The Process Doctor), once saved a hospital significant money in how they ran their kitchen for goodness sake! Do you think maybe we’re leaking effort too?
- Can I use this challenge as a way to have an under-utilized person reach more of their potential? One way to free up our high potential leaders is to challenge them to train one of their staff member to take over 20% of that up-and-coming leader’s responsibilities. Yes that takes time (and yes, they may resist because they love being that go-to person on whom everyone counts). But it will either provide additional challenge and opportunity for yet another person in the company – or reveal that these team members have reached the limits of the capability and/or interest. Which leads to…
- Is it time to supplement or upgrade our talent? I leave this to last because it tends to be expensive, time-consuming, and (most paralyzing for many leaders) emotional. But in this age that seems to be a permanent do-more-with-less era, we can’t afford to have the “less” people still onboard be less than stellar, eager, and with huge upside potential. And let’s face it, there are many capable, hungry people out there to choose from right now.
So maybe over-loading vs. shelving those growth projects is a false choice. Perhaps there’s more capability hiding in your organization if you just take a few moments to look. It’s certainly worth a try…