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Boss vs. Coach (Round 1 Goes to…)

13 Thursday Jun 2013

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Vince Lombardi

Sports metaphors are so tempting. They are almost unavoidable when trying to explain how a particular something in business is much like something in sports. Who among us hasn’t heard, “Home court advantage,” “Slam dunk,” or “Break your duck”?

And, why is it that college and professional coaches are so often used as examples for business leaders to follow; and what explains the popularity of consultants calling themselves “coaches”? I think the reason is partly explained by the very nature of knowledge work.

You see, knowledge workers, e.g., scientists, software programmers, marketers, engineers, et al. are experts. They are unresponsive, or at least respond adversely, to being controlled, directed, and disciplined. The nature of their work requires three things for them to perform at a high level and to be effective: Meaningful work, feedback, and continuous learning. Of these, feedback, which needs to be timely, relevant, and actionable is the fastest way to help a knowledge worker improve her performance. When management provides knowledge workers with information, perspective, actual vs. projected performance, etc. it is acting much more like a coach than a hard-nosed task master trying to direct the action using rewards and punishments.

In sports, it is easy to see the way coaches give feedback to their players—experts in their own right—and the impact that feedback has on the individual or team. The coaching is often televised right there on the sidelines and the results are just as immediate. So, next time you’re thinking about how to elevate the performance of your team remember why coaching is a better perspective for you. Give your people the information they need, tell them how they’re doing compared to others and other groups, and give them the chance to develop new knowledge to do their work.

After all, it’s not like you have the time, or ability, to run out on the field, hike yourself the ball, fall back, make a difficult throw—and then go catch your own pass. You need players for that—and they need a coach.

Jim

Lucavìa
gojimlucas@lucavia.com
lucavia.com
(925) 980-7871

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© Copyright Jim Lucas 2007-2013 All Rights Reserved

R.I.P. Customer Experience

13 Thursday Jun 2013

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Customer experience is dead! I’m not talking about businesses that only give lip service to creating a valuable experience for their customers. Or about those that put their own interests ahead of their customers’ or even those that treat customers as transactions instead of individuals. Although, as I’m sure you’ve experienced, all of this is often true.

What’s on my mind is something our greatest living psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, points out here. Apparently, each of us has an experiencing self and a remembering self. The experiencing self is the one who lives in the present moment—the one who is reading this sentence. The remembering self is the one who is in charge of memories—and it’s the one who is the boss with a B. Kahneman observes, our memories are all we get to keep from experiencing life so our only perspective is that of the remembering self. But its power doesn’t stop there. The remembering self also makes the decisions about which future experiences we’ll choose. The way it does that is by evaluating our future experience options and then simply selecting the one that’s likely to produce the best memory.

This knowledge has profound implications for business. It compels us to adjust our attention from creating and marketing “the customer experience,” toward creating what I’m calling, Memory Marketing.

I am creating Memory Marketing to help my clients develop memorable customer experiences. This opens up new perspectives for businesses and gives them new ways to transform their customers into loyal advocates.

Jim

Lucavìa
gojimlucas@lucavia.com
lucavia.com
(925) 980-7871

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© Copyright Jim Lucas 2007-2013 All Rights Reserved

Can You Decide?

12 Wednesday Jun 2013

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Executives make scores of decisions every day. Cumulatively, organizations make hundreds and thousands of decisions daily. How do you ensure the quality of your decision making measures up to your own high standards?

An earlier post explored how divergent opinions must be considered before the best decision can be reached. But your decision-making process must also be explicit if your decisions are to be efficient and effective—and subject to improvement. Drucker’s philosophy is that a specific decision-making process is essential. In summary, he calls for us to:

  • Make as few decisions as necessary. Many issues, when raised, have already been settled. Don’t waste time rehashing old decisions—unless there is new information or the context has changed. Many things that come up are just exceptions to decisions that have already been made. They don’t require new decisions so much as simple problem solving.
  • Before making a decision, establish what the decision must accomplish—including how it is to be measured and how stakeholders must be aligned for it to succeed.
  • Set aside enough time to make good decisions. Fast decisions are often bad ones.
  • Start with what’s right—not what’s acceptable—and realize many good decisions go against the grain and “The same old way.”
  • Convert decisions into action. No decision is a good decision until it has been fully implemented. Otherwise, it is just an intention.

Organizations large and small are prone to drifting. A small nascent organization is just as likely as a corporate behemoth to “fly by the seat of its pants, or rely on gut feel.” Implement a decision making process and you’re less likely to wake up one day with a mess on your hands wondering, “How did we come up with that?”

Jim

Lucavìa
gojimlucas@lucavia.com
lucavia.com
(925) 980-7871

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© Copyright Jim Lucas 2007-2013 All Rights Reserved

How Confident on a Scale of 1-10?

12 Wednesday Jun 2013

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I recently touched on the notion that most organizations encourage, and even pressure, members to display confidence. To expand, I’d like to summarize some of Daniel Kahneman’s, work in Thinking, Fast And Slow because it has a lot to say to executives. In a nutshell, overconfidence can cause a world of hurt if we misunderstand how it works in decision making vs. how it works in implementing a course of action.

In decision making, overconfidence leads to a host of potential problems. First of all, we forget how little we really know about any given situation and we overestimate how much control we have over our environment. This alone creates a tendency to take more risk than we realize or should. Then, compound it with norms surrounding executive behavior. Imagine how successful Marketing Executive A would be if she were to admit how little she and her team really know about market trends over the next five years. Compare that to Executive B who confidently tells a very coherent and compelling story about how events will unfold over the same timeframe, backing up his story with selected information, imagery, and the swagger to match. Even if both executives were completely aware that each knew very little, still they would usually be penalized for admitting it. Because most organizations prize the stories of overconfident experts it leads them to take much riskier positions than a more thoughtful decision making approach otherwise would; where everyone is heard from and all must support their opinions with facts.

In implementation, however, confidence and optimism are true friends because they increase our resiliency. Even excellent and/or lucky decisions require implementation, and things never seem to go smoothly. We encounter setbacks. Funding comes in fits and starts. We lose or transition key personnel. Competitors react or anticipate our moves.

Confidence and optimism are essential to weather the ups and downs of putting our decisions into action but should be regarded skeptically when making those same decisions.

Jim

Lucavìa
gojimlucas@lucavia.com
www.lucavia.com
(925) 980-7871

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© Copyright Jim Lucas 2007-2013 All Rights Reserved

When Opinions Matter

11 Tuesday Jun 2013

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Steam-engine

Think about the last time you were part of a decision making group and you were kind of the odd one out. Even better, think of a time when you were one of those in the mainstream and felt the decision about to be made was absolutely the correct one.

Think about the last time you were part of a decision making group and you were kind of the odd one out. Even better, think of a time when you were one of those in the mainstream and felt the decision about to be made was absolutely the correct one.

Drucker points out that a decision is a choice among risky alternatives. None of us can tell the future so it’s impossible to be certain in advance—even though most groups and organizations encourage, and even pressure, group members to be confident in their decisions. In fact, in Thinking, Fast And Slow, Daniel Kahneman, speaking on the cognitive bias of overconfidence, writes, “…Doubts about the wisdom of the planned move are gradually suppressed and eventually come to be treated as evidence of flawed loyalty to the team…the suppression of doubt contributes to overconfidence in a group where only supporters of the decision have a voice.”

In The Effective Executive, Drucker offers a way to avoid the overconfidence that infects decision and makes them riskier than they need to be. Paraphrasing, his prescription for what constitutes effective (good) decisions is:

  • Start with opinions, or hypotheses, which must be tested before they can be counted as facts. It’s kind of like the old saying, “Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions.” In this case it’s, “If you’re going to bring me an opinion, you’ll be on the hook to test your opinion to prove it as fact.”
  • As a test, the group should ask itself, “What would the facts have to be to make opinion X the correct one?”
  • Be ever vigilant not to commit the sin of confirmation bias and only find facts that support a foregone conclusion.
  • Above all, effective decisions are generated by a clash of divergent opinions—not groupthink.

So, next time you’re in a decision-making meeting maybe the single best thing you could do would be to take one small step and make sure everyone expresses his or her opinion—before the train leaves the station.

Jim

Lucavìa
gojimlucas@lucavia.com
www.lucavia.com
(925) 980-7871

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© Copyright Jim Lucas 2007-2013 All Rights Reserved

The Sad Truth About Multitasking

10 Monday Jun 2013

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multitasking

You won’t talk to more than two or three executives before hearing about the need to multitask. Two or three more and you’ll start to get the idea that multitasking is almost considered a moral good.

On the other hand, you won’t need to look very hard to learn that multitasking is a myth. LMGTFY: http://onforb.es/137OyTM. At best, multitasking is the rapid shifting of attention from a single task to another (think: short-order cook) and at worst a quality wrecking ball (think: a student doing homework while talking on the phone, texting, with a chat window open, and little sister nearby who wants to play).

Executives are busy folks. Being busy, important, and in demand all have their own rewards. It’s simply hard to resist when someone absolutely must have your input or the contract will be lost, the sale will fall through, or supply will be disrupted. But, how to choose?

Knowing how to choose is about setting priorities. In fact, not setting priorities leads to the pressure to “multitask” in the first place; there are simply too many opportunities/issues to address and too little time. Drucker observed that either we choose the priorities or the pressures of the business will. Who among us would volunteer to have our priorities determined for us? However, that is exactly what happens when we try to do it all.

Drucker urged us almost 50 years ago to do what today’s science is proving as fact. We can only do one thing at a time. As soon as we start looking for ways to switch from being busy to achieving results, doing one thing at a time not only starts looking very attractive—it’s also lightning fast compared to 20 or 30 half-done projects.

Jim

Lucavìa
gojimlucas@lucavia.com
www.lucavia.com
(925) 980-7871

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© Copyright Jim Lucas 2007-2013 All Rights Reserved

Lean Forward

07 Friday Jun 2013

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the-future

Executives are a special class of knowledge worker. Where a particularly talented individual might impact a large circle of coworkers, the executive’s output affects the whole organization.

In Drucker’s thinking an executive can exist anywhere in the organization, not just at the CXO level. For our purposes, let’s imagine a functional manager (Finance, Marketing, R&D, etc.) in a company of any size. These folks are usually super achievers with a lot of talent and, as Kahneman might say, a lot of luck. They come in all personality types, shapes, genders, and sizes but the good ones, maybe only the great ones, can deliver on an executive’s true value:

  • Create direct business results linked to the strategic plan
  • Multiply their impact by working through others in the organization
  • Build the organization’s values and constantly reaffirm them
  • Build and develop tomorrow’s talent
  • Take action to ensure that innovation is a top priority.

I’ve worked with many executives. Too often they are considered successes or failures based on their ability to work inside their organizations. Too seldom were they judged based on their impact on customers, shareholders, and the marketplace.

Regardless, I think it’s fair to say one of biggest challenges for any executive is keeping one foot in the organization as it is (the past) and one foot in the organization as it must become to survive (the future). If you are an executive, lean forward.

Jim

Lucavìa
gojimlucas@lucavia.com
www.lucavia.com
(925) 980-7871

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© Copyright Jim Lucas 2007-2013 All Rights Reserved

Where Goals Come From

06 Thursday Jun 2013

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It-seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time. How often do you finish your day and think, “What have I accomplished?” At the end of the month did you spend your time working on your objectives or something else entirely? Several years into your career does it all “add up”?

It is inevitable for you to lose control of your time. Daily operations steal your time and bias you toward what is, essentially, the past. Everyone wants something from you all the time. Your time is not your own and, tragically, you get a little hit of serotonin every time someone makes you feel like the business can’t live without you. But is this motion or is it progress; are you conflating the two?

Plan your work and work your plan is hardly new. In fact it may be so old that you’re bored with it. But, have you ever wondered about the proper foundation for your plan in the first place? If you’re after the right results, and you’re willing to pursue your goals, then where should goals come from? If you start from a blank sheet of paper each month, or quarter, or year you will inevitably end up back in the first paragraph somewhere.

The best place, really the only place, your goals can come from is from your strategic plan. The reason why you exist (Statement of Purpose). What it will look like when you achieve success (Vision). A three-to-five-year Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG/Mission). If everything you do is stubbornly grounded in these three founding statements then everything you do will concentrate effort rather than diffuse it. You won’t confuse motion with progress. And, you will achieve the right results more and more often.

Jim

Lucavìa
gojimlucas@lucavia.com
www.lucavia.com
(925) 980-7871

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© Copyright Jim Lucas 2007-2013 All Rights Reserved

Got Results?

04 Tuesday Jun 2013

Posted by in Results

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You’re working 60 hours a week and just got promoted. Your CEO is working 90 hours a week and acquired a rival firm. The company just moved into its new offices. Funding has been approved for a team to represent the company at CES 2013. Marketing just did an internal screening of an incredible new 30-second spot to air during Mexico vs. Italy in June. None of these are results.

Results happen outside the organization where your customers perceive them. Inside your organization there are only efforts. Make your systems stronger, increase your headcount, grow your budget, hire the best people—and still, you have only effort.

On the other hand; increase sales, decrease returns, improve your customer satisfaction scores, increase the size (or frequency) of your average sale, and reduce your costs to maintain or increase your product’s value.

Now you’re seeing results.

Jim

Lucavìa
gojimlucas@lucavia.com
www.lucavia.com
(925) 980-7871

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© Copyright Jim Lucas 2007-2013 All Rights Reserved