All Posts Tagged With: "senior leadership"
Leading Also Means Managing
Some leaders believe that leadership and management are two different things and they are only responsible for one of them. In “True Leaders Are Also Managers” (HBR, August 11, 2010), Robert I. Sutton uses the words of Warren Bennis to describe a common perception: “To manage means to bring about, to accomplish, to have charge of or responsibility for, to conduct. Leading is influencing, guiding in a direction, course, action, opinion. The distinction is crucial.”
Sutton disagrees, arguing that such a distinction produces leaders with big, vague ideas that can have little to do with reality or can be nearly impossible to implement. It isolates leaders from reality, giving them a reason “to avoid the hard work of learning about the people that they lead, the technologies their companies use, and the customers they serve.”
The Baldrige Criteria does not make this distinction. The first Category in the Criteria asks a number of questions about how senior leaders lead and manage:
- How do senior leaders set organizational vision and values? (Lead)
- How do senior leaders personally promote an organizational environment that fosters, requires, and results in legal and ethical behavior? (Lead)
- How do senior leaders create a sustainable organization? (Lead)
- How do senior leaders create an environment for…
Leadership Matters Most
The ease or difficulty in transforming a management system lies with the leaders of that system. I’ve worked with five Baldrige Award winners and in every case, their executives drove the renovation of their management systems. No company did it the same way: Some had it mastered in a few years while others took a decade or more. Not every senior leader felt strongly about the Baldrige model or the evaluation and improvement process it supports, but as long as the top executive did, it didn’t matter.
Executive attitudes toward creating a sound management system regularly surprise me. Those who recognize its value preach this systems perspective with the fervor of true believers. Those who don’t buy into it bide their time until the boss leaves and they can return to what they know is best. The trouble is, what they know is best is rarely as good as the systems approach they abandon.
Motorola, IBM, and AT&T dominated in the late 1980s and early 1990s when their leaders conducted regular, formal assessments of their management systems. As that process waned, so did their fortunes. AT&T formed its Universal Card Services division in 1990 with a management system based on the Baldrige…
21Jul2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedBaldrige and the Illusion of Control
An email newsletter today from Craig Anderson at Global Performance Systems describes the Baldrige model as open source management technology since a number of people have evaluated and helped improve it over the last 22 years.
Craig’s observation is part of an article on the illusion of control. According to the article, “a team of researchers found that investment bankers who were prone to a high illusion of control had significantly worse performance on analysis, risk management, and contribution to desk profits. They also earned significantly less.” The researchers blamed these results on the illusion of control, which may cause insensitivity to feedback, impede learning, and encourage greater risk taking.
The antidote for the illusion of control is a healthy dose of reality, and the best way to get real is to do a Baldrige assessment. An accurate and complete description of how your organization works will show what is in control and what is not—and it’s rarely what senior leaders think it is, especially with a first assessment.
Craig identifies three keys to shattering the illusion of control:
- Eliminate fear from your organization. This was one of Deming’s major areas of emphasis. Fear destroys the truth by stifling communication and hampering opposing views.…
Making Your Organization Adaptable
Last week, Alan Alda spent an hour on “The Human Spark” on PBS exploring why modern man survived and Neanderthals did not. The likely answer? Adaptablity—and it’s still the key to survival.
“There’s probably no organizational attribute that’s more important today than adaptability,” writes Gary Hamel, author and the world’s leading expert on business strategy, according to Fortune magazine. “In our topsy turvy world, every organization is teetering on the brink of irrelevance, and unless it can change as fast as change itself, it will soon tumble off the ledge.”
Baldrige organizations promote adaptability by valuing agility, a focus on the future, and a systems perspective. They constantly and systematically renew themselves by questioning what markets to serve and what the customers in their markets require, how to make their processes more efficient, and how to engage their employees in change and innovation. Rather than reacting to change, they deploy processes that help them adapt and grow.
In “Outrunning Change—the CliffsNotes Version” on WSJ Blogs (October 21, 2009, click on Part 1 here and Part 2 here), Hamel shares his thoughts on how to build a highly adaptable company:
Anticipation
- Face up to strategy decay.
- Learn from the fringe. “The future will sneak up on you unless you…
Leadership Review
Baldrige.com has posted a number of articles on senior leaders’ roles and responsibilities and how they can improve their performance and that of their organizations. Click on the name of an article in the following list to go to it.
- 10 Critical Questions: Senior Leadership. The most important questions you can ask, and answer, to improve your leadership system.
- The Priorities of Leadership. Ford’s CEO identifies four critical questions he must answer.
- Why Organizations Fail. It has to do with pursuing what you say you are pursuing.
- 4 Parts of True Sustainability. Observations from the Sierra Club’s youngest president.
- A Leader’s Job. According to Deming, it’s to optimize your entire management system.
- The Best-Performing CEOs in the World. It’s not just about shareholder return.
- Stuck on the Rear-View Mirror. Rather than focus almost solely on financial results, leaders need to track the operating metrics that produce those results.
- Leadership: Seeking Unconscious Competence. How far are you up the Conscious Competence Ladder.
- 10 Questions to Ask about Everything You Do. Key questions to ask about your leadership processes.
- An Achievable Mission and Vision. Performance leaders can measure progress on their missions and visions.
- Learning, Teaching, and Benchmarking. Innovative organizations are committed to teaching as well as learning.
- Supporting Your Communities. Samuel Adams has…
The Best-Performing CEOs in the World
Whenever you see a list like this, you know that “best-performing” means best stock performance. As an article on the latest ranking by Harvard Business Review notes, “shareholder return is not the only measure of performance, and it omits contributions companies make to a wide group of stakeholders. But it is the fundamental scorecard for CEOs of public companies. And it’s the same scorecard for everyone.”
So it’s “best-performing” in a very limited sense that makes it possible for the authors to create a list claiming that these are the best-performing CEOs in the world as long as you look only at shareholder return which, according to the authors, is but one measure of performance. If you still think such a list has any value, you can find the list here and the article explaining it here.
One interesting observation from the survey is that insiders who become CEOs tend to do better than outsiders, ranking, on average, 57 places higher than outsiders in the full list.
The authors also created a list of CEOs whose companies performed well after they left. I would think this is a good indicator that the CEOs had helped develop sound management systems that would support continued performance…
29Dec2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedBest and Worst for Employees
Glassdoor.com just announced its second annual Employees’ Choice Awards for best—and worst—places to work. Nearly 100,000 employees completed a 20-question survey on the site in 2009. Survey questions addressed employee attitudes about career opportunities, communication, compensation and benefits, employee morale, recognition and feedback, senior leadership, work/life balance, and fairness and respect. Once the overall ratings are calculated, Glassdoor.com may exclude a company from the list for detrimental acts by management or other negative company events.
This list is obviously not scientific but it does provide a general sense of who does well or poorly on employee engagement. At the Glassdoor.com Web site, you can click on a company in the list or search by company name and get more details about how many people rated it and their pros, cons, and advice to senior management.
The top 25 best places to work are:
- Southwest Airlines
- General Mills
- Slalom Consulting
- Bain & Company
- McKinsey & Company
- MITRE
- Boston Consulting
- Continental Airlines
- Procter & Gamble
- Juniper Networks
- Northwestern Mutual
- Kraft Foods
- National Instruments
- NetApp
- Goldman Sachs
- FactSet
- Medtronic
- Publix
- Chevron
- FedEx
- Apple
- Edelman
- Edward Jones
- QUALCOMM
Companies in the next 25 included Caterpillar (#35), Turner Broadcasting (#36), Intel (#41), Best Buy (#45), and Whole Foods (#48).
The 10 worst companies to work for, according to Glassdoor.com, are:
- Gibson Guitar
- United Airlines
- Spherion
- AutoZone
- Rain Bird
- DHL Express (USA)
- Level 3 Communications
- Dominion Enterprises
- Hertz
- Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
To learn more about employee…
22Dec2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
