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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

Every so often incredible leaders appear — people who unite whole populations to a common purpose. People like Alexander, Attila, Ataturk, Elizabeth, and Hitler.

You only have to unite IS, not all of Central Asia but the lesson is the same: When you lead, everything is multiplied. Lead well and you achieve great things. Lead poorly, abstain, or lead well but in the wrong direction, and things get ugly fast.

Leadership is the fifteenth and last episode in our series on creating an integrated IS plan. Planning for leadership may seem like a strange idea, but really, doesn’t expecting leadership to happen by accident seem even stranger?

You need a leadership plan — not to populate your leadership team with interchangeable clones, but to find that happy center where managers have latitude to lead according to their natural proclivities without fragmenting your organization into a collection of separate fiefdoms with no consistency of style or culture.

What are the key elements of your leadership plan?

  • Skills inventory management: There are particular skills you need in your organization and they change from year to year. Your plan should describe how you plan to balance training internal staff, contracting with outside experts and recruiting experienced practitioners to ensure your organization can apply sufficient skills to the jobs at hand.
  • Staff growth plan: Beyond the right skills, employees need depth, experience, judgment, perspective … professional growth … and the increasing levels of responsibility and influence that reflect and take advantage of it. This isn’t fuzzy stuff — it gets down to hard decisions, like, “We can’t promote Pauline because we don’t have anyone to take over maintenance of the payroll system.” And before you say something like, “That’s why they call it ‘work'”, remember: If you don’t give Pauline these opportunities, someone else will, and you still won’t have anyone to take over payroll maintenance.
  • Compensation and incentives plan: Depending how you count, the best programmers (for example) are between five and fifty times more productive than average ones. Most companies peg salary levels to “the marketplace” and pay the best no more than about three times the lowest entry-level salary. The disparity demoralizes your best people, but history has repeatedly shown that the marketplace must set prices rather than any intrinsic assessment of value. Once you assess performance, your tools for managing the tension between market and value are salary, spot bonuses, at-risk pay/annual bonuses, stock ownership, promotions, and non-financial incentives. Each has a role to play. Make sure every leader understands and uses all of them.
  • Culture plan: Culture is the behavior people exhibit in response to their environment. Most of their environment is other people’s behavior — it’s circular. Telling employees to change their response is pointless. The only lever you have is the behavior of the leadership team. Define the culture you want, in concrete behavioral and attitudinal terms, and figure out how the leadership team must act to foster the change.
  • Communication plan: Should all information flow through the chain of command? (No.) Should you regularly send broadcast e-mails to the whole organization? (Yes.) How often should you hold all-hands meetings? Staff meetings? How do you find out what’s really going on in your organization? Planning how you’re going to communicate with employees is important. Planning how you’re going to listen to them, so you can get unfiltered information, is vital. Creating the expectation that you’ll do so is most important of all.
  • Leadership training plan: Did you think wishing would make it so? In addition to formal training, schedule role-playing exercises to elucidate how leaders should handle difficult situations like giving bad news, giving good news (if it isn’t difficult, why are so many leaders really bad at it?), leading meetings, delegating … all the behaviors and attitudes for which you want to create a common understanding. Some people gripe about role-playing exercises. My own experience is that those who gripe the loudest think they’re good at leadership but aren’t.

Effective leadership means harmonizing all of these elements to consistently set direction and encourage the best performance from every employee. That takes planning, because it’s too complex to rely on improvisation.

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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

“Patriotism,” explained Samuel Johnson, “is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” In a less famous rebuttal Ambrose Bierce disagreed, insisting that it is, instead, the first.

CIOs aren’t, for the most part, scoundrels. Desperate, perhaps, but not scoundrels. It appears that reorganization, not patriotism, is what they resort to first.

We’re in the home stretch of the integrated IS plan, and the subject is how your department is organized. Here’s the first sentence of your plan for next year: “Since we’ve demonstrated repeatedly that reorganizations cause more problems than they solve, this year we will focus on making the organization we have work more effectively.”

There are situations that call for top-to-bottom reorganization. If the company strategy has changed dramatically, requiring radically different work efforts than before, major changes may be necessary. If so, they should be the result of a careful analysis of how you plan to get work done in the future. Reorganizations should, in other words, be your last resort.

Not your first.

We’ve covered the disadvantages of reorganizations in this space before. (See “How not to fix IS,” April 27, 1998). To recap, major reorganizations distract employees from real work, eliminate risk-taking, and metaphorically raise the walls between departments. Reorganizations are supposed to break down barriers to getting work done, but invariably they raise at least as many as they eliminate.

This year you aren’t going to do that. Instead, you’re going to look for all of the factors that keep the organization you have from working well. How? Just ask your employees. They know, and they’re probably dying to tell you, not necessarily in flattering language.

Then figure out what you’re going to do about these barriers to working well.

Some of the most common problems are leadership issues in disguise. We’ll address those in the section to be discussed next week. In the section on organization you’ll address mechanical problems, such as:

  • Overemphasis on organizational boundaries: Any emphasis is overemphasis, so this problem never goes away. You have to have an organizational chart. The moment it inhibits employees, it’s a problem. Encourage and reward an attitude of “never mind who owns it – we need to get this done.”
  • Competing financial goals: I know it’s hard to believe, but in some companies each manager has a budget and is rewarded by his or her performance against it. Yes, it’s true – some companies encourage managers to pad their budgets, which is always at the expense of other departments. The best budget-seller wins. If my bonus depends on my financial results, think I’m going to help you out?
  • The wrong groups: Over time, some groups outlive their usefulness. Over time, new requirements call for the creation of new groups. While massive reorganizations usually cause more problems than they solve, continual grooming of your organization makes all kinds of sense. The trick is to do this without creating organizational winners and losers, because employees who see organizational change as a risk focus on keeping their heads down and staying out of trouble, not on getting the job done.
  • Communication barriers: Among all the possible barriers to communication, three stand out. The first is physical: cubicle walls are too high, people who need to collaborate work on different floors or in different buildings, and so on. If possible, get people who work together a lot nearer each other.

The second barrier is psychological: Shyness is common among technical folk. Create lots of situations where people who wouldn’t normally work together have a chance to interact.

The third barrier, following the chain of command, is just stupid. The chain of command is for giving work direction. If the only way Fred Smith can talk to Irene Jones is for Fred to first talk to you so you can talk to Irene’s boss to set everything up … who’s going to bother?

No matter how you’re organized, your organization will facilitate some work and impede the rest. You’ll never fix it by reorganizing. Instead, plan to eliminate as many of the impediments to cooperation as you can.

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