All Posts in Leadership

|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

When Wess Roberts wrote The Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun, I hope he got a lot of angry mail.

Last month I made some suggestions about what IS leaders could learn from McDonald’s and the roof fell in. While a lot of my mail was complimentary, many correspondents took issue with some of my advice, all of my advice, the notion that there are any parallels between McDonald’s and IS, some or all of McDonald’s business practices, and the quality of the McDonald’s dining experience.

You would think I had said you have something to learn from Attila the Hun. Hey, that was Wess Roberts, not Robert Lewis.

It’s easy to find reasons not to learn from others. The Germans, for example, discounted relativity because Einstein was Jewish. The result: No atom bomb, they lost World War II, and we watch reruns of Hogan’s Heroes.

Because McDonald’s experiences high turnover in counter help and pays low wages for these positions, some of my correspondents said you have nothing to learn from it when you look at your own hiring practices.

Wrong answer. You have a lot to learn, not by blindly imitating but by paying attention. McDonald’s structures its work to require as little expertise as possible. It hires anyone who can do it. And it pays its employees what the market will bear. Neither McDonald’s nor its counter and kitchen workers think of these jobs as careers – it’s just basic employment. It’s better than welfare, and McDonald’s can sell burgers at a competitive price.

McDonald’s recognizes the need for jobs as well as careers. Do you? If you’ve structured every position in IS as a career, you’re probably making a mistake. Jobs in IS require more expertise than working the counter at McDonald’s, but in some situations you can still move expertise from individuals to systems and processes. Figure out when it makes sense to do so. Have you looked for the opportunities, or have you assumed they don’t exist?

In IS, you often structure the work around the unique abilities of the employees you have instead of first defining the position. McDonald’s doesn’t have much to teach you here, but a local entrepreneur, who gets more from 10 employees than competitors get from 20, may. Since he’s in the garment trade, though, not IS, you have nothing to learn from him, do you? Sure you do.

Some letters indicted the whole fast-food industry, not just McDonald’s, saying it exploits workers. Yes, and many employees in IS wear pagers and are on-call 24 hours a day. Is that exploitation, or is it the nature of the work, and so long as there’s no misrepresentation as to what’s expected, there’s no harm and no foul?

Whether it’s Attila, McDonald’s or (worst of all, according to some participants in my Infoworld.com forum) Microsoft, you have something to learn from any individual or organization that has proven itself highly effective. And with all due respect to Stephen Covey, not all of the lessons are obvious, they won’t all feel good, and they don’t all come from people and companies that are admirable in every respect.

In fact, you won’t find any company or individual you can admire in every respect. Not one. Not even you. Or me. Although it’s easy to be self-righteous, it’s hypocritical because no matter how much the other guy looks like Bill Clinton with Zippergate, somewhere in your own life you know you’re Newt Gingrich, just as guilty only nobody knows about it.

Self-righteousness is just another form of arrogance. If you’re unwilling to learn from McDonald’s, are you willing to listen to an employee you find personally irritating? Probably not, but you’re doing both yourself and that employee a disservice.

Learning from others is like learning from history. Sure, there are lots of wrong conclusions you can draw, and if you do learn you’ll find a whole new set of mistakes to make. But if you fail to learn, from history or from contemporaries, you’ll just make the same old mistakes, and that isn’t just dumb … it’s boring.

Comments

|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

“Practice makes perfect,” we learned as kids.

“Do things right the first time,” we learned in Total Quality Management.

Doing things right the first time is for manufacturing. It means quality happens during assembly, not during inspection, when you’d have to do it over. Outside of the factory, you have to make mistakes first.

Practice is as useful for leadership techniques as for methodologies like Use Case Analysis, or really difficult skills like welding.

Perhaps that’s why so many people turn into jerks when they’re promoted to leadership positions.

Let me explain. An important part of leadership is the ability to deliver bad news — small, but important nonetheless. Unfortunately, it’s as unnatural as the embouchure for the oboe (trust me) so we usually flub it the first time out.

What happens next? Some leaders avoid repetition. They either leave management or just skate by difficult situations. Others overreact the other way, giving lots of people bad news, whether or not there’s bad news to give. It’s that practice thing we were talking about earlier.

Most bad news doesn’t have to be given. Two open-ended questions do a better job: “How do you think you performed?” and “How could you do better next time?” Usually, you’ll find that the employee already recognizes the problem and, with encouragement, can figure out what would have worked better. Just empathize, so the employee knows this isn’t a catastrophe, applaud the employee’s professionalism in recognizing a substandard result, and reiterate the employee’s value to you and the company.

This doesn’t always work, though, and when it doesn’t, be prepared. Here are some tips and techniques on how to give bad news (but don’t expect to be excellent at this until you’ve been through it a few times):

Tip No. 1: Make sure this isn’t just a personality conflict. Employees don’t have to like you but do have to respect you. You owe them the same attitude.

Tip No. 2: Scale your delivery. If it’s trivial, don’t bother. If it’s not that big a deal, say so and explain why you’re taking the trouble to discuss it at all. If it’s a significant issue, make that clear, too.

Tip No. 3: Be sure of your facts. It’s demotivating for the employee, and embarrassing for you, if you find out the events you’re reacting to never really happened, or happened very differently from what you’ve surmised.

Tip #4: Plan the conversation. Don’t trust your natural eloquence. Make sure you know what you’re going to say and how you’re going to say it.

Tip #5: Be resolute. Yes, resolute, corny as it may sound. And keep the conversation focused. For example, you may have an employee who, through passive resistance, is subverting a goal you’ve set. If the employee questions your goal, say, “We can schedule a meeting for that conversation if you’d like. Right now, that is the goal and we’re discussing your decision to not achieve it.”

Tip #6: Listen, but don’t let the conversation drag out. Your goal is to make sure the employee understands you – liking you or the message probably isn’t feasible. Paraphrase the employee’s position and confirm you got it right. Then ask the employee to paraphrase your message. When you’re sure the employee understands you, end the meeting.

Tip #7: Retain your composure. Anger is unprofessional. Exhibit the behavior you expect. If the employee becomes angry, don’t respond in kind. If it continues, say, “We’ll continue this conversation when you’ve regained your composure.”

Tip #8: Bad news is private. Be careful, though. While it’s never appropriate to chew someone out in public, many experts suggest, and some HR departments insist on, a witness to any difficult performance-related discussion. Since sexual harassment itself, unwarranted accusations of harassment, and wrongful termination lawsuits of all kinds are real, private conversations can be risky, and not just when you and your employee are of different genders. Consult your HR department for advice and to determine your company policy.

One last thought: While it’s important to be able to give bad news effectively, it isn’t important to like it. If you find that you enjoy the experience … you’ve stepped across a dangerous line.

Comments