It's All So Obvious

Obvious - 1. Easy to see or understand, plain, evident because not concealed, difficult, or ambiguous. 2. Unsubtle lacking subtlety or any attempt at concealment.

Common sense - native good judgment that is free from emotional bias or intellectual subtlety

The following "obvious" observations describe what is required to create improved communication, teamwork, and the leadership needed to achieve organizational breakthroughs:

Newton

• There are three constant forces that cause organizations to fall from the Oregon Top Private 150 Companies or Fortune 500 list: 1) Inertia - a body at rest, tends to remain at rest. It takes five times more energy to start an object moving than to keep it moving; inertia hampers organizational change initiatives. 2) Momentum - a body in motion tends to remain in motion. Old ways of doing things struggle to survive, making change difficult to initiate. 3) Entropy - all things tend to run down. Care must be taken to keep improvement efforts alive. Understanding the power of these laws of nature, competent managers recognize that getting things started and getting things moving requires a herculean effort. Trying to establish new precedents for breakthrough performance in isolated sectors of the business seldom works. Your initial effort requires courageous leadership. Since there is the risk of things not working out, most managers contrast the risks over the rewards, leave things as they are, and then rationalize their failed performances. The gains that could have been obtained by making the commitment to change are never realized. Soon these organizations fall prey to progressive competitors.

Empowerment

• We live in the most competitive time in human history. The playing field of American businesses is no longer limited to North America. We compete in a world that is flat. For America to sustain our standard of living, we must continually create breakthroughs in the very nature of our businesses, the systems and methods of marketing, engineering, production and distribution. Achieving this kind of creative destruction requires courage and empowerment. You cannot achieve the creative innovation required with a post World War II command, control and compliance management style.

Culture

• Culture is the dominant force in our lives and dramatically influences behavior. Behavior conforms to structure; people seek to conform to cultural norms for survival. To create sustainable performance improvements, you must create a culture of high performance. The only organizations that will survive are organizations that create a culture of creativity, commitment, and celebration. You must secure the collaboration, creativity and commitment of everyone at every level of your organization.

Change

• Courageous change is required for breakthrough improvements in performance. If you continue to do the things you have always done, you will continue to get the results you have always gotten. Leaders who achieve breakthrough improvements exercise the courage to change, to swim upstream and break with what is "our identity", the way we have always done it.

Self-Confidence

• Lack of true self-confidence results in managers who fail in all the proactive decisive initiatives required for breakthrough change. Managers who lack self-confidence are reluctant to provide encouraging praise, supportive coaching, and consistent corrective feedback. The solution is helping your managers expand their comfort zones. The stimulus that results from the leader's behavior of providing praise and encouragement dramatically enhances morale and productivity. As morale and productivity improve, the need for correction and discipline decreases.

Goals

• A clearly articulated declaration of the organization's goal. Without this clearly articulated lived-to declaration, there is uncertainty, indecision, speculation, misallocation of resources, and wasted effort. The frontline questions the competency of senior management. This lack of clarity and trust leads to low morale and poor performance.

Alignment

• The slightest misalignment among the senior managers at the top of an organization dramatically amplifies at lower levels, resulting in departments working at cross purposes and sometimes competing with each other. Alignment is achieved by 1) creating a galvanizing vision, 2) declaring a challenging goal, 3) replacing distrust and fear with trust and cooperation.

Enthusiasm

• Leaders deficient in enthusiasm create an organization of lackluster low performers. It's natural for associates to model the leader's example. When the leader is enthusiastic, associates begin to see all the reasons things can be done and demonstrate determination, innovation and persistence. They make commitments, avoid excuses, and deliver exceptional performance.

Communication

• Poor communication is the #1 complaint of employees and managers alike. Poor communication results in poor performance, higher costs, poor customer service, and low morale. Solving the communication problem requires 1) seeing your part in the problem, 2) beefing up all communication systems, 3) strengthening the communication skills and resolve of all managers to do their part in improving communication.

Fix 'Em

• Sending people away to 1-day, 2-day, or even 2-week long "leadership classes" seldom results in behavior changes and never results in culture changes. So the answer isn't "sheep dip" for the one or two managers who "need it". The answer is to engage the entire leadership team in a meaningful learning process that creates new improved behavior habits.

Academic

• Intellectual pursuits that are not matched by a change in a manager's personal behavior that is consistent with the new vocabulary are counterproductive and lead to cynicism, doubt, fear, and giving up. The manager's walk must match their talk.

Task Force Team

• "Study groups" lack the power and authority required to create change. These improvement teams can result in cliques, and outsiders become cynical and disenchanted. Breakthroughs that result in culture and performance improvements must be lead by the senior management team. Senior management must model new innovative, optimistic, forward-looking, vision-driven behavior.

Momentum

• Competent leaders recognize that once progress has started, once improvements have begun in any important areas of the business - innovation, safety, productivity, quality, customer satisfaction, cost reduction, marketing, etc. - when new performance records are set in key result areas, they must maintain their momentum. Now that they have momentum on their side, competent leaders recognize that there's nothing more precious, more valuable, and more to be prized, protected, guarded and nurtured than positive momentum. They recognize the third force to be feared - entropy - and unless conscious attention is provided to improvements made, the organization will retreat to old performance levels. New levels of productivity and innovations will die off. Customer satisfaction scores will plummet. Competitors will find a way into their market space, but now things will different. Associates will say, "I told you so" or "Why did we try so hard, work so hard?" and just return to old performance levels again. Now creating breakthroughs is more difficult than ever.

Change is Difficult

• Change is possible. If a society can move from 60 to 70% of managers smoking in company meetings to no smoking on company sites, other behaviors that are less addictive can be changed. Significant change requires resolve. The subtle changes managers desire in behaviors are sometimes more difficult to identify and communicate than a strictly enforced no-smoking policy. Management's first challenge is to identify the specific, discrete behaviors desired, insure all managers are aligned in their communication of these desired behaviors, and live to these new behavior standards.

Habits

• Changing habituated behaviors, like how you brush your teeth or what side of the bed you sleep on, takes determined effort. Cars didn't have seat belts in the 50s. Few people used their seat belts for another decade. Very few people start their car today without first buckling up. Buckling up is a discrete behavior. To achieve change among your leadership team, you first must identify the discrete behaviors you desire, then train your managers in how to perform these behaviors. After providing direction and training, reward those who adopt the new behavior and provide corrective consequences for those who fail to practice the new ideal standards of leadership performance. (The buzzer reminder and threat of seat belt tickets encourages us to buckle up.)

Staffing

• People who are in jobs they are not qualified for, who are promoted beyond their ability to successfully achieve the results their position requires, must be replaced for three reasons:1) they keep the organization from achieving desired results; 2) they frustrate their peers and subordinates; 3) they establish a precedent, an example that low performance is acceptable, sending a signal that excellence isn't our standard - "you can get by with anything around here".

Training

• Most people, regardless of their position, will perform at a higher level when given the tools and training required to perform their job. This includes senior and middle managers who have had far more training in the technical aspects of their job than how to perform the leadership role they now fill.

Firing

• Firing people is the "easy way out that leads back in". In other words, if selection, support and training systems are not in place when you fire someone for unacceptable performance, chances are pretty good that you will end up where you started with still another person of poor performance.