We're talking about leadership. The third module is effective leadership.
Here are some thoughts on how to beef up your effective leadership creds. That is next.
Hello. Hey, I hope you're doing great. Welcome back to the Barry Farrar Show. We're talking
about leadership. I normally speak to a freedom issue, usually something connected to a current
event, but since all organizational impact for change starts with leaders, I thought
I'd provide some quick thoughts in this four-part series. These takes on leadership are certainly
not everything on the topic, not even close. I've been to a whole lot of leadership seminars
and I'm sure like you, I've forgotten a whole bunch. I've had the honor of being in leadership
in some kind of a role for almost four decades. I've even taught some leadership courses.
And I've got to say that I don't know anything close to all there is out there on good leadership.
But it seems to me that just about everything on good leadership could broadly fit into
one of these four words, authentic, artful, effective, and excellent. Now in the first
module we looked at authentic leadership. Now this isn't a false humility, but simply
having a sound estimate of ourselves. To gather talented people who have leadership capability
of their own, we've got to embrace the concept that we can grow and improve. Otherwise we'll
lose the respect of our most inventive people. Embracing self-assessment and personal improvement
in light of the functions and the responsibilities of a leader is just healthy. In the second
module we looked at artful leadership. And this is the ability to practice the nuance
that's required at the right time to affect positive change with intentional influence.
Artful leaders understand the priority waiting for the organization, the team, and then the
need of the moment. They can evaluate their impact through the lens of their primary leadership
style. And if we become more artful, those learned techniques will help us know when
to absorb a mistake for the benefit of deep learning, when to build relationship even
at the expense of a task, when to drill down on the details, when to inspire, when to allow
more freedom, and when to command, when to coach, and when to develop, and how to subordinate
yourself to get the big picture goal accomplished. Without authentic and artful leadership, this
next one, effective leadership, is going to feel perfunctory. Now they will still work,
but not with the same overall positive cultural impact. So, assuming we have embraced those
two concepts of authentic and artful, today we look at effective leadership. Effective
leadership means the ability to get things done through others, your team, your subordinates.
It also includes the notion of high levels of productivity. It includes a clear understanding
of authority and responsibility, not only for yourself, but for your team. It's able
to bank on a well-articulated culture. It drives to performance. There are three primary
tools to increase your team's output and productivity. First, you've got to articulate a clear culture
with no more than three concepts. Second, connect the culture to overall goals. And
then third, simplify and bring into the present day your performance management system. So
let's go to culture first. You've got to have three areas that you touch. You can name them
whatever you want, but they've got to cover the following three general concepts. First
is just really the point of the whole business or the organization, and that's the customer.
Who's your customer, even in a non-profit? In some form, you need to convey that you
will deliver an exceptional proactive service. You're thinking in advance of how to take
care of that customer, and you deliver that service exceptionally well. This transcendent
purpose requires regular training, anticipating issues, doing it right the first time, even
asking permission of your customer to solve the real problem. That's a powerful tool,
by the way, to lower the temperature, and it enables excellent solutions. Teaching your
team how to define the problem, how to evaluate alternatives, how to decide on the best solution
and implement that best solution. So proactive service knows the customer's touch points.
You train your team on how your customer actually feels at each stage. You start with that initial
awareness of the need that your product or your service touches, and then you walk your
people through the process that a customer experiences, from awareness to research to
very
various distribution channels, to purchase decision,
to the way in which they make the purchase,
to usage of the product or the service,
to overall satisfaction.
So when you go through that, you're
providing proactive service, and you're
delivering a level of customer experience
that deepens loyalty.
Proactive service creates a secure customer.
I've written a lot about it.
If you want to check out any of my books.
But that one is huge, and that's got to be the first pillar.
The second pillar has to do with your team knowing
their authority and responsibility.
Authority must match responsibility.
Authority is the right to take action.
It's the right to control the outcome,
and the resources to pull it off.
Responsibility is the skill to carry out the duties,
the competence to make good decisions,
and the willingness to be held accountable.
This equips your team to succeed.
It eliminates passing the buck, and it creates a secure team.
Finally, there's the third pillar,
and it is continuous improvement.
And some people like to call it innovation.
Continuous improvement requires a brutal truthfulness.
It's got to be transparent.
It uses very disciplined techniques,
and it's fast, and it's efficient.
Continuous improvement identifies the issue,
and then it plans for an adjustment.
It implements the change on a small scale.
Then it analyzes those results, and it
determines whether it made a difference.
Was it a good difference?
And then if the change was successful,
it implements that change, that improvement, on a wider scale.
And then it takes it to scale.
Over time, this creates a new and better process,
and it can be quite dramatic.
Continuous improvement understands
what's better than before.
It does what's better, and then it creates a secure business.
Why is that?
Well, you end up competing with yourself
before the competition vanquishes you.
That's why.
Some organizations prefer to call this pillar innovation,
and I've done that before in some of my companies,
and that's great too.
But in reality, most businesses, it's
difficult to measure innovation.
But continuous improvement, it's easier to observe.
It's easier to manage and deliver.
But either way, you need to be changing for the better
in measurable ways.
So those three pillars, some rendition of proactive service,
authority and responsibility for your team,
and continuous improvement will give you
a secure customer, a secure team,
and a secure organization.
So once you have your culture easily understood,
you're ready to connect the culture to your business
or your nonprofit's goals.
You can now run with your performance management system.
And I'm going to call your team executives just
to make it easy on me.
I'm usually dealing with executives.
Not all of you might be at that level
where you're dealing with executives
under your chain of responsibility and authority,
and that's fine.
You can just replace executive with employees or team members.
So anyway, it's just easier for me
to do it that way instead of going back and forth.
So each of your executives should
have very clear objectives and goals.
I usually try to keep it to four at the most.
For example, your CFO may have one of his goals
to implement a cybersecurity solution.
He's going to have to update it as soon
as he gets that implemented, but that
might be one of his goals.
The performance management system that we use
combines three things, a problem-solving approach
with an old-school managed-by-objectives
results-based approach, along with the third piece, which
is a strong use of an attribute-supported assessment.
So what this does is it provides useful professional
development opportunities.
And if it's managed properly, it's very productive.
But it does look back.
It's pretty straightforward to make
the goals and the objectives clear.
That's what you did last year for this review.
You either raised the money or you didn't.
You either grew the company or you didn't.
You either spent according to budget or you didn't.
But how do you make attributes objective?
Well, in my experience, there's two things.
First, you allow the executive to weigh in.
This discussion with the executive
honors their assessment and enhances your ability
to work together with a problem-solving approach.
If you manage expectations properly,
they'll not inflate their scores.
Second, you provide 10 to 14 subcategories
to flush out an objective score for each category.
For example, under work ethic, we have 11 items to score.
That's how we're trying to make this concept,
this nebulous concept of work ethic, more objective.
We score the overall degree to which the work habits are
correlated to the goals.
When the person arrives and leaves work,
we score the pace of work, the efficiency of the pace of work,
the quality of the work.
Then we're going to rank the work habits
by what the executive is really best at.
And we use six.
You can use whatever you want.
But we go with developing, planning, controlling quality,
maintaining, attending to detail, and managing people.
So those six, we score and rank them with them.
or the skill demonstrated by the executive,
the degree to which the executive functions,
like an owner or a bureaucrat, the degree
to which the executive plans ahead and anticipates issues
effectively.
By the way, as I mentioned, we give this review system
unscored to the executive in advance.
He or she will score it themselves
before the actual meeting with you.
In my experience, most of the time,
we come to agreement for each score.
And we can use whatever, I mean, you
can use whatever system you want.
We found that it's best to use a 1 to 7 range.
So we convey that a 1 is pretty lousy
and a 7 is close to perfect.
So let's be realistic and honest with each score.
Most of them are going to be in that 4, 5, or 6 range.
Work ethic is one characteristic that we look at.
But then we also cover personal characteristics.
We score how confident the executive
is in front of others with issues that he understands.
And also, we score how confident the executive
is in front of others with issues she does not understand.
We want to make sure that he or she can stand in front
of people the right way and be honest and communicate
a fair level of confidence.
We also score how confident others
are in the executive's decisions and in their judgment,
how mature the executive is in a variety of contexts,
how flexible or rigid the executive is to adapt
to varying circumstances, how stable and calm or too easily
alarmed he is under pressure.
Does he meddle after he's delegated?
Still, under personal characteristics,
we score how frequently the executive designs or invents
better ways of doing things.
This is that continuous improvement piece.
How open or intransigent is he to new ideas?
The range of information she can handle.
We look at the ability that he has
to inspire others or her receptivity to correction.
The image that he gives off.
Is it professional?
And we also score the executive's attentiveness
to details.
Are they accurate?
Do they do a good job of that?
And the level of initiative and how well she embraces change.
So that's personal characteristics.
Then the next category that we have is relationship building.
Here we score the impact that the executive
has with his peers, the impact she has with her superiors,
the impact he has with his subordinates.
Are they more equipped than before?
We score the impression the executive
leaves with the customer.
How close does it get to being invaluable?
We score the impression the executive
leaves with a prospective customer, with vendors,
and with the public.
Is he viewed as wise, impressive, or not so much?
We score the executive's diplomacy and persuasion
skills.
Are they artful and highly developed?
The final attribute we score is in the category
of job performance.
So this is usually pretty easy to assess.
What's the executive's technical grasp of his job?
What's his aptitude for new concepts?
We score his time management skill,
how consistently he completes his job duties,
how dependable she is to follow through on her projects.
We score her ability to be an effective steward of company
resources.
Does she get quality at the best price?
We score the decisions that he made in light of his authority
and responsibility.
Is he a solid problem solver?
We score each of the objectives that he
had from last year, usually not more than four, a lot of times
just three.
What was his degree of success on each of those objectives?
And we do that on a 1 to 7 scale.
And that's pretty objective, that one.
Did he accomplish his goals or not?
And overall, how did the executive
perform compared to the expectations that we had?
So then we look forward.
Over the next year, what are the objectives and the goals?
What training and development and other support
do you need to get that done?
And this is really an effective performance review system
that we've used for quite a number of years
in a variety of different industries.
It's proven to be a very useful tool,
but it's too comprehensive to be effective regularly.
It's really best once a year or even once every two years
with a more abbreviated version on the in-between years.
And of course, depending on the position,
you're going to shrink some of those characteristics.
What we like about this performance management approach
is it allows the executive to negotiate with us
on the scores.
She might recall something we forgot.
That's OK.
We want it to be fair and accurate.
We like the hard-hitting and clear managed
by objectives element.
Are we getting stuff done?
Are we accomplishing our goals?
We wanted to triple in three years, did we?
You can't argue with metrics.
We either accomplished that growth goal or didn't.
We also like the honest attempt to make attributes,
like work ethic, objective.
We've found that it keeps the team motivated.
They know that there's no.
no traps, there's no hidden formulas,
there's no attempt to triangulate anybody.
It's just an honest endeavor to improve at every level.
So a formal written review is a very useful approach,
especially if you're direct and truthful.
We try to decouple the time of the review
with the time of the raise.
And that might sound unusual, but we
like to have it separated.
A lot of companies disagree with that approach, and that's fine.
I'm not here to argue with you on it,
but we found that the person is just
focused on the raise if they're coupled with the review.
So we just eliminate that whole expectation.
We really want the individual to think and to continue to grow,
to know what his strengths and weaknesses are,
and to know what level of support
we're going to provide him, and for him
to know that we're really for him
and that we're willing to support him.
The formal review takes a chunk of time,
but it's a helpful self-assessment,
and it's a great professional development tool,
at least in our experience.
Having said all that, reality kicks in.
You cannot wait a year to let your guy or gal
know how well they are doing.
So we endeavor to simplify and bring
into the present day the performance management system.
So that performance management system I just described,
that's the performance review, but that system is good.
It's effective, but it takes a lot of time.
So to get the most out of each of your people,
you need a regular, less formal communication, which
helps drive great performance.
At the end of the day, there's really
just four basic questions everyone wants an answer to.
Number one, what do you want me to do?
Number two, what does it look like when it's done well?
Number three, how will you help me when I need it?
And number four, will you periodically
let me know how I'm doing?
And since everyone is busy, I think
it's a great practice to initiate
these questions with everyone on your team fairly regularly.
You can't just wait for them to ask you.
So you go up to your executive or your employee,
and you say, do you feel you know what I want you to do?
I mean, that can be a simple stand-up meeting.
It could just take 30 seconds.
The next question at some point doesn't
have to be in that same meeting.
Hey, do you think you know what I
think a job done well looks like here with this objective?
I'm just kind of touching base.
Do you think I have communicated that to you effectively?
And this might involve a little more coaching or data
gathering, but it can still be done fairly regularly.
And then, do you know that I will
do what I can to provide you support when you need it?
I mean, this can be followed up with a simple,
do you need any help on anything right now?
I mean, you might find that your executive has been holding back
on something, maybe even just out of embarrassment.
And you can help solve that problem right now
and reinforce that you're an even-handed leader
and support that person, that executive,
that employee of yours.
Then finally, that fourth question
that now you're kind of initiating
instead of waiting for them to tell you
whether or not it's been answered,
do you feel I give you helpful feedback
on a regular enough basis?
Let her answer that question.
And don't say, well, hey, you're doing fine.
Give her something concrete.
The reality is we need to make the performance management
system fluid.
It's got to be kind of part of everyday conversation.
To do that, there's really five skills
that you can easily self-develop to make sure
that the feedback that you're delivering really is useful.
Number one, active observation.
Look around.
This is just getting out of your day-to-day tasks
long enough to understand the context, the actions,
and the interactions of your executive.
Just actually observe them.
Number two, a clear POR.
Establish a point of reference.
It's just not fair if your executive,
your employee, your subordinate
doesn't know what's in your mind.
So take a little extra time to clarify the goals,
your desires, the responsibilities that he or she has
at the beginning of the period or the event
that's being evaluated,
and then have them say it back to you.
I've learned that as a general rule of thumb,
this whole thing takes an extra 15 minutes.
But if I'll do that,
just 15 more minutes of effort upfront,
it'll make it clear,
and then it'll establish this point of reference
with my team with clarity.
Then number three, leading questions.
Now, for people that are leaders,
they're usually high D driver leaders, this is hard.
Yet if we seek to understand what took place,
it's very helpful.
So good questions just help facilitate
the executive's evaluation of the experience themselves.
So they're thinking it through
instead of you just answering it or just solving it.
It's also more effective than just direct teaching.
This is where we endeavor to.
deploy some of the coaching leadership style.
Executives remember things longer
when they've come to it themselves.
They've got a deeper learning experience
if they come to finding through questions
that you're asking that they have an answer themselves.
And you know you're doing this right
if you're using more what and how questions than why.
Why kind of goes to solve it.
Let's just get this over with.
What and how allows for some process.
The goal here is to help your team learn from,
think about and evaluate their own experience.
And honestly, that is gold.
Number four is deliberate listening.
This literally demands concentration from most of us.
I mean, most of us leaders are just lousy at listening.
We're wanting to talk and have other people listen to us.
Yet when we truly listen,
it creates an atmosphere for meaningful interaction
and we must listen well to understand
and provide good feedback.
Listening will help formulate better questions as well.
And then finally, number five, direct feedback.
So now you can give the executive your score, so to speak.
Don't overqualify, don't hem and haw.
It actually makes it worse.
For example, what I'm observing
or what I'm understanding is, and then just say it,
don't soften it more than that.
It's just, this is what I'm understanding.
Your executive already knows that you're for him
if you're leading him properly.
Then you continue.
You're struggling a bit here in this area
and you would serve yourself and your team better
if you did this.
And then just be direct, just say it.
This is the instruction.
This is a challenge or counsel.
People are starving for it.
Don't be afraid.
It will help you and him or her.
Don't beat around the bush.
It's either a word of instruction, a challenge to improve.
It's counsel or advice
and it's all pointing toward being better.
People love it when they're on the receiving end of it.
It makes them more effective.
So the effective leader uses the four questions
and the five skills to help the executive learn
in a fair and open way.
And it causes him to want to develop and get better.
And it works on the fly.
You don't have to have this long sit down.
You don't have to schedule it out in advance.
Just create a culture where you own your own mistakes
and where everyone has permission to ask questions
and everyone knows that you're on their side
and where it's okay to be human
and where it's also expected that we grow and improve
and you should be able to increase the productivity
of everyone on your team.
And that makes you an effective leader.
So we've talked about the authentic leader.
We've talked about the artful leader
and just now the effective leader.
Next time we close things out with the excellent leader.
Until then, to your freedom.
Hi, I'm David Farah.
Thank you for listening to my dad's podcast,
The Barry Farah Show, Culture Shift.
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