Category: Beyond Leadership

With a growing need to manage project based work coupled with the need to vet an individual’s leadership capabilities, organizations are assigning hi-potentials with informal leadership roles, or project manager roles, before giving them the positional and formal leadership authority over others.

As a chance to prove capabilities, those given project management roles need to understand how to succeed at both the task of getting the project done and the priority to get work done through others. Often these two priorities seem to be conflicting, when in reality they are not. Informal leaders often fail when they see the only goal to be getting the project done, and neglect to realize how the imperative of getting the project done will only be accomplished through the work others. This necessities strong people management, not just task management skills.

If you’ve been given an informal leadership role you should:

1. Know and understand the members of your project team. Meet one-on-one with members and ask:
   1. What motivates them?
   2. What strengths to they have that they bring to the team?
   3. What are their stressors? In other words, what points of resistance or skepticism do they have about this particular project? What do they think should be done to help mitigate these potential issues?
2. Build buy-in by creating a game plan as a group. Bring the group together and based on feedback gathered in one-on-one meetings, create a game plan together that includes timelines for implementation and project meetings, assignments and ownership for each team member.
3. Practice what you preach. Set the tone for the project by following through on your assignments and commitments per the project plan and staying true to a meeting schedule that is set.
4. Realize that providing support for others to get work done is your number one priority.  If a team member needs you, that is your first priority, not the list of tasks on your to-do list. This helps to take the first three steps to the next level.

Most hi-pos know how to get stuff done. That’s why they are hi-pos. But what will set you apart is being able to transition your focus on getting work done to getting work done through others. This is even more of a challenge when you do not have positional authority. But if you take the time to know your team, build buy-in, practice what you preach and provide support for others, you’ll prove that you have what it takes to be able to transition to a formal leadership role, because true leaders don’t need a title to lead.

One of our key questions around this idea is: What characteristics are most important in terms of employment marital bliss? Dating sites have isolated key variables leading to marital satisfaction by matching people correctly, can’t we get better at doing the same thing for employers and employees and save us all a lot of time and headaches?

In all the reading we’ve been doing around this idea, organizational fit seems to matter more than almost anything, but what does this mean? Consider how Jennifer Chatman who is a Professor at the Haas School of Business at University of California, Berkeley, describes this:

“Those who fit well with the [organizational] culture stayed longer, were promoted faster, and demonstrated greater commitment to the firm. Interestingly, these outcomes of person-culture fit mattered more for performance than did the more typical person-job fit we think of which is how well people’s knowledge, skills, and abilities fit the specific job.”

What this means for employers:

• You need an organizational “job description” that defines your organizational culture. We suggest driving this by defining your organizational values (which lead to your competitive advantage).   For example, seven organizational values for defining organizational culture that a prominent research theory suggests are:
  • Innovation
  • Stability
  • Respect for People
  • Outcome Orientation
  • Attention to Detail
  • Team Orientation
  • Aggressiveness
• Assess and select candidates based your organizational job description more so than on individual job descriptions.
• If you do these two things, you’ll get more satisfied and engaged employees who will produce better business results for you.
• Define who you are through your values. There are a lot of good career card sorter activities based on values. The Work Importance Locator is one tool you can use for free.
• Vet potential job opportunities for a fit with your values. For example, if value teamwork and collaboration and the organization recognizes and rewards individual contributions, it may not be a perfect marriage for you. Neither is right or wrong, it is just the way you and the company are “wired” which is hard to change.
• If you do these two things, you’ll be happier in your work life, which will lead to more happiness in all aspects of your life.

Do any of these values contribute to a competitive advantage for your company?

What this means for employees

• Define who you are through your values. There are a lot of good career card sorter activities based on values. The Work Importance Locator is one tool you can use for free.
• Vet potential job opportunities for a fit with your values. For example, if value teamwork and collaboration and the organization recognizes and rewards individual contributions, it may not be a perfect marriage for you. Neither is right or wrong, it is just the way you and the company are “wired” which is hard to change.
• If you do these two things, you’ll be happier in your work life, which will lead to more happiness in all aspects of your life.

Have you found your employment match made in heaven? If so, why is it a perfect match?

Read more about Chatman’s research here: http://amj.aom.org/content/34/3/487.short

We’ve been getting a lot of questions lately related to performance evaluations. Specifically, these questions center on how to structure evaluation forms in a way that supports priorities of the organization and drives individual and, therefore, organizational performance.

Of course, it’s really not about the form at all. It’s about knowing what drives the performance of your organization, translating that to individual metrics, then equipping leaders with the ability to focus on constant performance feedback.

1. Make it values based. Center your evaluation form around the values of your company not individual characteristics like “dependable”, “initiative”, “communication” etc.   If you don’t have company values, facilitate a workshop with your leadership team to define your values (and mission).

Values should translate into what creates your competitive advantage as a company, therefore, they are a way to communicate to employees through their performance evaluation how and if they are demonstrating the values that contribute to sustainable competitive advantage for the organization.

In fact, every talent management process or form (your selection process, onboarding, training, compensation, etc.) should link back to your organizational values.

2. Avoid overlap of dimensions.  Make sure each dimension measures only one thing. Structuring your form around values instead of individual characteristics should help with this.

3. Less is better. Having said #2, in terms of dimensions and in terms of the scale, less is more.  Make it as simple as possible while still ensuring you are measuring everything that could impact job performance which impacts competitive advantage.

4. Use a 3 point scale:

1. Doesn’t meet expectations
2. Meets expectations
3. Exceeds expectations

5. Require ratings be back up with behavioral based examples. This helps to avoid subjectivity. Every rating should be supported with at least one behavior based example. Consider training raters on how to write good behavioral based examples and then get your team together to calibrate each other on what constitutes which rating on the scale. In other words, make sure that if manager A sees employee A behave in one way, and manager B sees employee B behave that same way, employee A and employee B both are rated the same.

6. Make it clear what a score results in. For example, if a person exceeds expectations overall it leads to x% of a raise, or x amount of dollars in the form of a bonus. In reality, you need to think through this recommendation and be prepared to back it up from a budgetary standpoint before even implementing the other recommendations.

Plain and simple! Having large scales leaves room for different raters to interpret things differently and brings more subjectivity into the process.

How well are your performance evaluations working?

In my last post, I talked about the importance of goal commitment when setting goals for yourself and/or those you lead.

Today, I want to discuss the law of diminishing returns and how it relates to goal setting.  I have honestly thought about a dozen different things that I want to focus on for the New Year, have you?  The law of diminishing returns tells us that the more goals we set, the less likely we are to achieve them.  One goal distracts from another, leaving us less likely to accomplish anything.

From a personal perspective, one way to avoid this is to have a mission statement (see the January 2^nd post) and make sure that any goal you set is related to that purpose.  Another way is to answer two questions that Stephen Covey advocates for asking in his chapter on “Principles of Personal Management” in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.  They are:

Question 1: “What one thing could you do (you aren’t doing now) that if you did on a regular basis, would make a tremendous positive difference in your personal life?”

Question 2: “What one thing in your business or professional life would bring similar results?” (pp 146)

These can be very simple things.  The key is, there are only two actions or goals and they are done regularly (see last week’s post on changing behaviors to create habits and goal commitment).

From a leadership perspective, the law of diminishing returns tells us, keep it simple.  Too many goals tell those we lead that nothing really is important (and we tell ourselves this when we set too many for ourselves).  I recently heard a Facility Manager in a meeting say that he had three things he focuses on and measures relentlessly (based on lean principles) with his team of over 700 people.  He said he never leaves a meeting with anyone without focusing on those three key goals.

Nothing gives us all ADD more than too many priorities. Have you experienced ADD, and therefore diminished results, because of too many goals or priorities?

**This post originally appeared on Horizon Point Blogpost January 23, 2012.