All Posts by Bob Lewis

|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

While we’re on the subject of Total Cost of Ownership, News of the Weird reports that it costs the U.S. Mint 2 cents to manufacture each penny.

Which has, I’m sure, a clear tie-in to this week’s topic: How COVID-19 has transformed business leadership.

We can keep this short: It hasn’t.

Except that it has aimed a spotlight at those who are in leadership roles but shouldn’t be.

Back in 2002, in InfoWorld, I published these words:

Leadership is easiest in a crisis.

Crisis provides motivation and mutual trust, something leaders have to provide themselves in less urgent times. Crisis also provides alignment of purpose, allowing leaders the luxury of authoritarian decision-making. In less urgent times, leaders must consult with others, building alignment of purpose through the hard, delicate, necessary work of careful consensus building.

Leadership calls for competent execution of eight tasks (see Leading IT: <Still> the Touchest Job in the World): (1) Setting direction, (2) making decisions, (3) staffing, (4) delegating, (5) motivating, (6) managing team dynamics, (7) establishing culture, and (8) communicating. They comprise the job description for anyone in charge of an organization.

Before COVID-19 these eight tasks were what leaders had to master. That hasn’t changed, except that the stakes are higher and some of the tasks have become more difficult.

That the stakes are higher is obvious. So is what’s making many of the eight tasks harder — acceleration of the ongoing shift from in-person to remote employees.

Leaders still have to set direction. Excellent leaders won’t delegate that task to the virus, limiting their horizon to today’s immediate challenges. Yes, they do have to set a course that navigates through the crisis. But they’re also looking down the road to anticipate how their markets will change and what they need to do to take advantage.

Adequate leaders make decisions. The best leaders pay attention to how they make them, or, better, to who makes important decisions and how. Because the best leaders recognize that if they’re the best person to make most decisions they’ve done a terrible job of …

Staffing: The need to attract, recruit, hire, and promote the best talent available is, if anything, more important. That’s true for most businesses right now, because the stakes of bad decisions are higher, so leaders need the best in place to delegate decisions to. That means retaining the best in the face of painful layoffs and furloughs.

But it’s the soft skills of motivating, managing team dynamics, engineering and establishing culture, and most of all communicating that haven’t changed at all in principle … nothing about how they have changed has altered the essence of leadership one bit.

But leaders will have to brush up on the techniques they use.

Take a simple example — one that used to be so broadly accepted that it has become an assumed part of the leadership landscape: managing by wandering around. Guess what: Most business leaders, should they wander around, will wander around empty cubicles.

This and other informal techniques like so-called “skip lunches” (because those at the table communicate directly with an executive leader, skipping the intermediate leadership levels) to get an unfiltered view of What’s Going On Around Here … Zoom-based skip lunches are a non-starter.

And in a related development, those who work in teams will seldom if ever meet their teammates face to face either.

Merely competent managers will accept purely transactional relationships as an inevitability and adjust how they assign and receive work accordingly.

Excellent leaders will fight this every step of the way, recognizing that effective organizations are still built on trust-based relationships. For example, just because Zoom has supplanted … let’s start calling them “flesh-to-flesh” interactions … is no reason for leaders to abandon the once-common practice of weekly or bi-weekly one-on-one conversations with their direct reports.

Which gets us to communication and its sub-skills of listening, informing, persuading, and facilitating. Leaders still need to listen … to individuals, but also to figure out the more interesting challenges of organizational listening … so they know What’s Going On Around Here. They need to inform everyone of everything they need to know. They need to persuade everyone that the direction they’ve set is the right one so employees energetically help make it happen.

As for facilitation, the fine art of getting other people to listen to each other, in my experience very, very few leaders are even remotely competent at facilitating web-conferenced meetings. That’s true even of those who were quite good at face-to-face facilitation.

So how has COVID-19 changed business leadership? The job description hasn’t changed a bit. But the techniques leaders apply to their work?

These need serious attention.

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|In: Cognitive Enterprise|Last Updated:

Culture is the new governance, and where it isn’t, it should be.

As my co-author Scott Lee and I pointed out in The Cognitive Enterprise, culture provides metaphorical lane markers. Formal governance mechanisms are more akin to guard rails — it you make contact with either one, something’s gone badly wrong.

Only sometimes, even culture is overkill.

Take posted speed limits. If you obey them because otherwise you might get a speeding ticket, that’s governance. If you drive five miles an hour faster than the posted limit, that’s culture — following an unwritten but near-universally accepted modification to what formal governance requires.

But when it comes to the choices drivers make about their velocity, governance and culture only matter when a far more powerful regulatory force isn’t in play — traffic.

When embedded in traffic, governance, culture, and personal driving preferences don’t matter. If the posted limit is 50 mph but the cars surrounding you are moving at a uniform 30 mph, you’ll drive at 30 mph.

It’s akin to states of matter. Light traffic is parallel to how gases behave — each molecule (car) moves along on its own with only infrequent interactions with other molecules. On public roads we don’t want these interactions to happen — they’re called “collisions” — which is why we have posted speed limits.

Heavier traffic is akin to the liquids, where fluid flows supplant individually independent molecular action. Driving in traffic is liquidity in action.

Add even more traffic and we discover how water molecules must feel when the temperature drops below freezing. Traffic jams and solid matter have a lot in common — nobody, whether drivers or molecules, is going anywhere.

(Physics minded readers might be wondering how the fourth state of matter — plasmas — fits into the picture. At the risk of beating the metaphor to death … race tracks?)

How does this fit into the broader subjects of culture, formal governance, and the decisions and results you, as an enlightened driver … no, wait, as an enlightened business leader … want to accomplish?

Heck, I don’t know. I just like the metaphor.

Not good enough? Okay, let’s poke at this and see where it takes us.

Most of us, most of the time, think about governance in such contexts as boards of directors, business change steering committees, and architecture review boards. At their best they help the organization maintain a fluid state, where everyone’s efforts pretty much line up with everyone else’s efforts, moving forward without a lot of high-impact collisions to disrupt the smooth flow of things.

Except that, for the most part, when the organization is already in a fluid state, traffic and culture make governance superfluous.

Part of effective governance is recognizing when not to say yes. Saying yes too much is like letting too many cars onto a road not designed to handle so much traffic. Effective governance tries to keep things in a fluid state so the organization doesn’t freeze up into solid-state immobility.

What counts as organizational gas? Consider so-called “shadow IT,” where business departments implement applications they need but that IT lacks the capacity to deliver (see “saying yes too much,” above).

Most of the German autobahn legendarily has no speed limits — it’s a gas.

But from Wikipedia: Any person driving a vehicle may only drive so fast that the car is under control. Speeds must be adapted to the road, traffic, visibility and weather conditions as well as the personal skills and characteristics of the vehicle and load.

When it comes to shadow IT, this isn’t bad guidance. We might imagine shadow IT governance following this sort of model, where driver’s education courses take the place of speed limits. You don’t want a shadow-IT free-for-all any more than Germany wants insane driver behavior on its roads.

On the other hand, forbidding business departments from using suitable information technology because IT lacks sufficient bandwidth amounts to … well, forget the metaphor. Refusing to allow business departments to operate at maximum effectiveness because that’s how your governance works changes risk management from one enterprise good among many to the only factor taken into consideration.

As for plasma: How about research and development? You want to encourage it, but in a safe environment … a metaphorical race track … where only trained drivers are allowed.

I’ve probably pushed this metaphor beyond its limits.

Still and all, I think it’s fair to say that too often, governance devolves into stifling, choking bureaucracy. With the right culture it’s needed far less often than it’s imposed, and when imposed it focuses on reducing costs and risks much more than on increasing revenue and opportunity. And often, traffic makes it unnecessary.

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