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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

In response to the various keep-your-mouth-shut stratagems presented in recent columns came this inquiry: “Is there no room in the type of discussion you outlined to share our ideas with others, and simply ask for feedback? Can’t strong leaders ask for and actually accept contrary positions, or are we so governed by fear of retribution that we would be fools to offer a contrary idea, in which case, “strong leader” becomes an oxymoron?”

Of course, strong leaders can ask for feedback and listen to contrary positions without inflicting consequences. When they do, some people just might offer those opinions. Others offer whatever opinion they think the leader wants to hear. A third group … the wisest in many circumstances … remain quiet, figuring that once a strong leader offers an opinion, his or her mind is sufficiently made up that the risk of offering an alternative point of view vastly outweighs any possible benefit.

Strong leaders offer their ideas and honestly solicit honest feedback, hoping to hear something useful. Stronger leaders hold their own ideas in reserve, and improve the odds of hearing useful feedback by doing so.

Listening is hard, especially when you have strongly held opinions. Organizational listening is harder. Listen to an individual and you have two difficulties to overcome: keeping your own mouth shut and understanding the other person’s meaning. Try to listen to the organization and you’re faced with a choice of problematic channels, none well-suited to telling you what you desperately need to know, which is What’s Going On Out There?

One of the most difficult issues in organizational listening is the Proximity Trap. It’s the almost unavoidable tendency to listen more to those who have the most access to you.

Whether it’s because you like them, or simply because they sit nearby, you converse with some people more than others.

This can lead to minor distortions, or it can cripple your ability to make decisions based on an accurate understanding of What’s Going On Out There. In particular, in many organizations access and knowledge are inversely related: People in the field know what’s really going on, but they have the hardest time reaching you.

Military thinkers have been aware of this issue, the staff vs field problem, for centuries. Sometimes they solve it, sometimes they’re quite happy with it (in peacetime it’s far more comforting to hear what you want to believe than what’s really happening) but any good military officer is familiar with the topic.

Military leaders have an almost formulaic understanding of the need to reserve time and attention for understanding What’s Going On Out There. It’s part of their job: C3I (command, control, communication and intelligence).

Business leaders as a group pay less attention to such matters for some reason. Far from reserving time specifically for organizational listening, many consider it to be something done in their spare time, when they aren’t needed for more important or urgent matters. So when they can relax they hold employee lunches, “skip meetings,” or practice their open door policies by actually being inside their doors.

We run our businesses lean and mean these days, which means staffing is thin throughout most companies. Thin staffing turns situations that would otherwise have been minor inconveniences into major crises for the simple reason that there’s nobody available to deal with them.

Come a crisis and leaders cut out inessential and time-intensive activities. Frequently, this means they stop listening to anyone other than the people with easy access.

Which is exactly the wrong thing to do: It’s in difficult times that leaders need the best information the most urgently, such as what’s going on in the field.

But finding out takes time and they have no time, so instead they have to trust their gut and those around them who have no better idea of What’s Going On Out There than they do.

What, you thought decisions from headquarters are dopey because they come from stupid people?

Well, sometimes. More often, it’s because they fell into the Proximity Trap, so they’re worse than stupid.

They’re ignorant.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

From time to time, I’m asked what books would be helpful for someone in an IT leadership role. And while I’d never stoop to naked self-promotion, clothed self-promotion is another matter entirely. To that end:

IS Survivor Publishing is putting the finishing touches on Leading IT: The Toughest Job in the World. It’s a practical guide to the discipline of getting others to go where you’d like them to go under their own power, providing guidance on the eight tasks of leadership: Envisioning the future, delegating, making decisions, staffing, motivating, building and maintaining teams, establishing culture, and communicating.

We’re trying to get some sense of how many copies to print in the initial run (early April) so if you’re interested in buying a copy, please send a brief e-mail to books@issurvivor.com to let us know.

Thanks.

This isn’t, of course, the only book I’d recommend. It is, however, the only one that turns a profit for me, which is why I mention it first.

Another that’s well worth your time is really a series. Anita Cassidy is another Minneapolis-based IT consultant who (it pains me to report since she and I compete) does excellent work and is held in uniformly high esteem by her clients. Anita has written several books about various aspects of running an IT organization, starting with A Practical Guide to Information Systems Strategic Planning. And it is practical: It gives you the table of contents for an IS strategic plan, along with a realistic process to follow for creating the contents. Anita and I share a core principle, embedded in her books: If it doesn’t lead to action, there’s no point to it. Her strategic plans are designed to be implemented, not just admired. Highly recommended.

My friend George Colombo has recently published Killer Customer Care. It wasn’t written for CIOs, and no, I’m not recommending it to help you improve service to your internal customers. If you haven’t been paying attention: The whole notion of internal customers is a very bad idea.

If your company’s strategy depends on customer retention, Killer Customer Care is worth your time and attention. It’s one of those books companies can use tactically, one idea at a time, or strategically to guide a complete customer relationship management program. Either way, this book can help you re-frame a CRM implementation from installing software to redefining how the business runs. For a lot of CIOs, that’s critical.

Then there’s Business is Combat, written by the president of Afterburners Seminars, James D. Murphy. Former fighter pilots, Murphy and crew have translated the disciplines used for successful air combat into business terms. Particularly valuable:

  • A better way of thinking about mission: In air combat, pilots have missions — each has a start and a finish; for each, the criteria by which success is gauged is entirely clear. In IT, defining work this way would seem to have an advantage over the traditional IT mission statement, which usually lack clarity and rarely include any notion of completion.
  • Plan, brief, execute, debrief: Combat pilots perform this loop with every mission. Many IT organizations have a process focus. If you make the plan/brief/execute/debrief loop the centerpiece of how work gets done, you’ll be instituting a process-centered culture — the critical step, usually ignored, required for making excellent process natural to the IT staff instead of an imposition.
  • Task overload: When people have too many things coming at them, they cope by filtering out most of them, focusing narrowly on one or two items they can deal with successfully. In air combat, this is usually fatal. In IT, it usually means staff hunker down and deal with whatever tasks they’re most comfortable with while the important and urgent are lost. Checklists are the cure — if you’re going to focus on just one thing, make it a checklist and the right things will get done in the right order.

Want one more? Read Good to Great. It isn’t great, but it’s pretty good. Two excellent insights stand out: (1) Great organizations are led by individuals who focus on building great organizations rather than personal aggrandizement (once stated this shouldn’t be much of a surprise); and (2) those who lead great organizations are willing to confront the “brutal realities of their existence” rather than telling each other comforting stories.

While I can’t testify that these are the five most important books you can read this year, I can testify they’re worth your time to read.

And since in the business press the wheat-to-chaff ratio is asymptotically close to zilch, that’s a pretty decent accomplishment.

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