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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

In election years past, I’ve avoided the temptation to endorse a particular presidential candidate. The temptation this year is, if anything, stronger than ever, but talk about a slippery slope …

So this week’s re-run from 2007 isn’t so much an endorsement than a suggested thought process for deciding who deserves your vote.

Or, if that’s too hard, who deserves your vote less.

– Bob

I’m going to form a new political party — the Competence Party. Our platform: Competence does matter … a lot more than policy.

We’re deep in the heart of presidential electioneering. Here’s what I haven’t heard from any of the candidates: “If you elect me, I will appoint the best people to every position in government, and I define ‘best’ as ‘most qualified to effectively take care of the people’s business.”

Here’s what I also haven’t heard: “As president, I will insist that everyone who works for me gives me the most accurate information possible — the information I need to hear, not the information I want to hear. I will base my decisions on this information. The only time I will trust my gut is when I decide what to eat.”

Anyone can present ideas that seem brilliant in sound bites and PowerPoint slides. It takes competence to make something useful happen. Most of what any administration ought to be doing is pretty much the same regardless of any policy specifics. That’s especially true if you inject competence into the process of policy formation, to weed out the alternatives that just won’t work.

If you think I’m singling out the current administration, or any recent administration for praise or criticism, I’m not. Form your own conclusions about either or both.

This is about the coming election. Based on the current round of speeches and debates, there are only three conclusions a reasonable person can draw. One is that the candidates think policy issues are all that matter — that if you’re headed in the right direction, then everything else will happen as if by magic. Another is that one or two candidates really do care about competence but are afraid to raise the issue for some reason. The third is that the candidates figure we citizens don’t think competence is important.

Nothing, not even character, is more important.

If you want to join the Competence Party you have to accept the party’s platform. Raise your right hand, place your left on whatever book you want (the Competence Party doesn’t much care where or whether you worship, so long as you’re good at what you do) and vow to uphold these principles:

  • We will know what we want to accomplish, be clear in how we describe it, and know why it’s a good idea.
  • We will concentrate our efforts on a small number of important goals, recognizing that if we try to accomplish everything we’ll end up accomplishing nothing.
  • We will be realistic. We will choose courses of action only from among those possibilities predicated on all physical objects obeying the laws of physics, human nature not somehow changing for the better, and what has gone wrong in the past having something useful to teach us.
  • Our decisions will always begin by examining the evidence. And we will recognize that when our cherished principles collide with the evidence, the evidence wins. Every time.
  • With new evidence we will reconsider old decisions. Without it, we won’t.
  • We will never mistake our personal experience for hard evidence. Personal experience is the evidence we know best. It’s also a biased sample.
  • We will think first, plan next, and only then act. The only exception is a true emergency, where making any decision in the next two minutes is better than making the right decision sometime in the next several days.
  • We will never mistake hope for a plan. A plan describes what everyone has to do, in what order, to achieve a goal. Vague intentions and platitudes don’t.
  • We will sweat the details. Vague intentions and platitudes don’t have any, which is why those who stop with them always fail.
  • We will put the most qualified person we can find in every position. We’ll find some other way to reward high-dollar campaign contributors. Also, if we find someone is not able to succeed at what we’ve asked them to do, we’ll replace them with someone who is.
  • We will never blame anything on the law of unintended consequences. Our job is to foresee consequences, which we can usually do if we think things through.

No, I’m not really going to try to form the Competence Party. It’s enough of a challenge applying these principles to our day-to-day work. I’m not really suggesting you join, either — you’ll have plenty to do applying them to your day-to-day leadership.

And, anyway, building a political party from scratch isn’t something I’m competent to do.

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|In: Process Management and Improvement|Last Updated:

Introducing a new way to do a job to experts in how it’s done now is hard.

The six dimensions of business function optimization can tell us  we need to find new and better ways to do a particular job. But, as a species, we struggle with doing something in a different way, using different tools, at least at the beginning. This struggle regularly kills business change projects, and study after study points out that paying insufficient attention to Business Change Management is one of  the top one or two reasons that a project may fail.

This isn’t new. I am guessing that some Babylonian construction engineer ran into problems with the team when he introduced them to a better way to build a ziggurat.

And, the “Remote First” approach to Project work has made Change management much, much harder.

Let’s start with trust, which is necessary for change management. It takes some different tools and skills to engage in trusted conversations in a remote meeting, and it isn’t a given.

Years ago, one colleague told me that he felt that needed to be in the same room as somebody to absorb their “pheromones” to help build trust. I am not sure those would be the words that I would choose, but it describes what some people might be feeling.

Second, the tools themselves are different for collaboration. There is a tremendous amount of innovation in collaborative tools, but with this innovation we need to do “Meta Training” on the use of new tools that help enable distributed collaboration. For example, instead of gathering around a white board, we may use a tool like Linq to map out a business process.  But, we will jointly need to invest the time to learn how to best use it so it feels as natural as drawing on a whiteboard. Even if we can do much more than we could have with the whiteboard, unless using it is intuitive we won’t get there.  Frustration with the collaboration tools could nudge us into the change resistance swamp right here at the beginning of the conversation.

So what else is to be done?  There are a lot of schools of thought on this, but I think we can get to a few takeaways that can lead to some quick improvements.

  • Use the right communication tool for the job. For critical conversations, Face to Face conversations are better than Video meetings. Video conversations are better than chat or email. And, by the way, insist that all parties keep their cameras on. Otherwise it isn’t a video meeting! Choose video because text messages with emojis may not help you get the alignment that you are craving. The overriding rule is that the most immediate and personal tool for a critical conversation is probably the best one.
  • When it comes to change, people really want two things in life—To feel like they are being heard, and to feel like they are not out of control. (This isn’t the same as feeling in control, it turns out). Simple tools (regardless of technology) that help them feel like they are being listened to, and that they are in control go a long way in building confidence. Working out rules of listening to each other, and “back briefing” of what the other party is expressing are like magic to Change Management.

 

  • The basic, (dare I say “Bare Bones”) tools for Change Management still work. Tools like a Stakeholder analysis, Training Plan and Culture Change Plan should be in the top tray of your toolbox. These tools will help you anticipate and plan activities that will give your business change project a fighting chance of success.

Final point– Change Management really could be thought of as another form of understanding and helping people deal with loss, and especially with the loss of the value their hard-won expertise gave them. They’re dealing, that is, with grief. People act unpredictably when they are grieving, and don’t always behave at their best.  Going with the wisdom a colleague named Daryl, I think it helps to always assume positive intent in the other parties—which is somehow harder to do when we are not face to face, and trying to read emotions or understand somebody via the small cues on a glitchy video tile.

Not to mention replacing body language with emojis when you’re trying to make a point.

 

 

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