Training Middle Managers On People Management Basics

Here is a simple idea: Whenever you have a new manager (project manager/departmental leader) joining in your organization, put him/her through a simple  training program on how to manage people. Train existing managers as well.

The premise: Most project managers/team leaders get work done through team. I have also seen that a lot of people become managers because of their seniority in technical positions. But we know that managing people is far more than just technical skills. Most managers fail because they don’t know how people are managed.

Here are a few things (bare minimum) that MUST be included in the training:

1. Leadership basics, traits and core expectations from a leader
2. Setting a vision (for their projects/initiatives) and long-term thinking
3. Fundamentals of dealing with people (and best practices therein)
4. The art of effective delegation and empowerment
5. Communication skills (oral and written), listening and non-verbal communication
6. How to connect with people (team members, peers and clients)
7. Leading with confidence
8. Presentation skills
9. Awareness about identifying and influencing impact of their actions on others
10. How to coach and mentor people
11. Kindness, care, humility and compassion at workplace
12. A primer on vision and values of the organization and how it translates into real actions.
13. Personal effectiveness and self-management
14. Managing meetings
15. Managing conflicts and understanding differences in personality types
16. Basic fact finding and interviewing skills
17. Expectations Management at all levels
18. (You can add more depending on your organization’s context)

Two critical points:

• Include a lot of real-life examples/stories for each of the above to make it interesting. To complement this effort, give them the URL’s of some of the best leadership blogs out there. Share other useful resources like free presentations, eBooks, podcasts and videos that would help them get into a leadership mindset.
• To ensure that this training translates into meaningful actions, it is crucial to have a ‘leadership development program’ that continuously organizes trainings, inducts new people/aspiring leaders, conduct brainstorming and discussion sessions, seek feedbacks from people periodically to maintain the momentum and mature over a period of time.

I wrote in my book #QUALITYtweet that middle managers are the glue that joins the strategies at the top with actions at the bottom. Induction training like these are a small investment that go a long way in setting the precedence and ensuring that you find right channels to effectively transfer your strategy/values to all layers within the organization. It has a direct impact on overall employee morale’ and your effectiveness as an organization.

Have a Fantastic Friday!

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Download your copy of the 25 Things Managers and Leaders Should Never Do [PDF]. Read it, share it with your friends, or with anyone who is an aspiring leader.

Explore more articles tagged under “Leadership” at QAspire Blog.

Friday High-Five: Posts I Loved Reading Last Week

Friday again - time to share some of the most profound posts that I loved reading last week. These brilliant posts hit the point and leave us with some excellent lessons. A big high-five to these amazing folks.

• Six Thoughts About Middle Management - by Lisa Haneberg
  Lisa says, “Management is a social act. Conversations are your currency to generate excellence and bring out the best in others. Erode relationships, erode results.”
  
• 10 Things: Addressed And Your Awesome Potential Will Be Unleashed- by NICHOLAS BATE
  Professor Bate says, “Believe in Yourself. You don’t have to be liked by everybody to do great things, to live the Life you wish, to change the world. AGREE THAT WITH YOURSELF.”
  
• How to Discuss an Employee Performance Problem - by Dan McCarthy
  Dan reminds us, “Knowing how to sit down with an employee and have an effective conversation about a performance problem is one of the hardest things for any manager to do, new or experienced, and should never be taken for granted.” He also offers practical tips to handle a performance problem.
  
• Three Years of CO - by Kurt Harden
  Cultural Offering blog completed three years and Kurt ruminates on the journey so far. He says, “That is the deal that is blogging. You take a shot at it. Put some thoughts down. Words to sentences to paragraphs, all to hone your skills - writing, reading, thinking. Sometimes you hit and sometimes you miss. But over time there are more hits than misses.”
  
• The performance value of total concentration - by Tim Sanders
  Tim Sanders posted a small and important reminder that working on one thing with total concentration has tremendous performance value. He also reminds that we can’t excel at all things at a time. Must read if you are struggling with your productivity.

Have a Fantastic Friday and a refreshing weekend!

Metrics: Are They Mapped With Your Business Objectives?

You can measure almost anything in your business, but if those metrics don’t serve a real business objectives, they are just numbers with no real meaning. Measurement is a means to an end, not an end in itself.

I have seen extreme cases where organizations either measure so much or they don’t measure anything at all. Both extremes are dangerous, because it de-focuses people from doing the right things.

A lot of business leaders. quality consultants and improvement experts are obsessed with fancy metrics that may not have direct relevance to the business objectives. Whether measuring a project or a business, here are a five steps to map your metrics with your business objectives:

• Know your goals: Identify what are your strategic, tactical and operational goals. Understanding your business challenges and goals is the first most important step. If you don’t know why you are measuring something, you will get numbers and you won’t know what to do with them. It won’t help.
• Identify metrics: What metrics can effectively help you meet your goals? For example, if you reduce your defect rates, you can keep your customers happy. Reducing overrun on your project can have direct impact on your bottom lines. You get the point.
• Identify impact: Some metrics directly impact the goal, while others may have an indirect impact. Identify whether identified measurement has direct or indirect impact. A great way to do this is to draw a two dimensional table with business objectives horizontally and measurements vertically. Map the impact and you will have a great view of your business goals and impact of those metrics.
• Establish operational procedures: You can now establish processes and methods to collect the data, frequency and consolidation mechanism. This is also a great way to ensure that all your operational processes are aligned to perform in a way that it satisfies at least one or more business objectives.
• Don’t forget the “invisibles”: My earlier post “The Invisibles in Business Performance” touched upon one of Deming’s seven deadly diseases - “Running a company on visible figures alone” and listed out some areas of your business that cannot be measured, but can have direct impact on your business. Striking balance between managing these invisible aspects, managing by visible numbers and focusing on people seems to be the optimal route to manage the business.

As I mentioned in my earlier post - “With visible figures alone, a business is run. By managing the invisibles together with the visible figures, a high performance, sustainable and scalable organization is built.”

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Note: My book ‘#QUALITYtweet – 140 bite-sized ideas to deliver quality in every project’ explores the people, process and leadership aspects to build a constantly improving organization culture. Check it out if you haven’t already!

Bonus: Read my post (How to) Have a Great Monday! – and have a wonderful start into the week!

The ‘Invisibles’ in Business Performance

In world of quality and management, W. Edwards Deming is widely famous for “Deming’s 14 points” and “Seven Deadly Diseases”. One of these deadly disease according to Deming is “Running a company on visible figures alone”.

Whether manufacturing or knowledge industry, primary goal of business is to generate value. However, in knowledge world, where the raw material is human brain, how this value is generated matters. Deming opined that everything that is critical for business performance may not be measurable.

However, planning for and managing these invisibles makes all the difference in an organization’s performance – more so in service and knowledge oriented world.

So, apart from visible figures (top line, bottom line, productivity, defect rates etc) what are the invisibles that play a huge role in determining performance of a business? Here are a few I could think of:

• Organization’s vision and values (and the extent to which  values are lived)
• Stories people tell each other at water coolers (organization’s culture)
• Employee’s actual engagement levels
• People’s alignment to organization’s vision and values
• What customers/people say (and to what extent do they really mean it)?
• Existence of invisible functional/departmental barriers
• Knowledge, skills and attitude of professionals
• Actual empowerment to people/managers/leaders in making things happen
• Top Leadership’s viewpoints and mental barriers (short term v/s long term)
• Knowledge versus application gap (and tapping discretionary effort of people)
• Actual training effectiveness (and to what extent it improved business outcomes)
• Innovation effectiveness and dynamic changes in the economy/market forces.

It is said – “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” But what really counts can always be managed.

In my view, there is a difference between “running a business” and “building a high performance organization”. In both cases, generating revenue and profit margins are equally important. But with visible figures alone, a business is run. By managing the invisibles together with the visible figures, a high performance, sustainable and scalable organization is built.

Quality & Improvement: From “Experience” to “Advocacy”

Consider the following scenario:

You go to a new restaurant for the first time. You evaluate quality of food and quality of service. Your first visit was about experimenting with a new place and getting an experience.

A few weeks later, you go there again. You get a similar or a better experience this time. They have added a few new items to their menu. Service is better too. You loved their Italian Pizza. You now believe and trust that this restaurant is really good.

The third visit a few months later, you again get a similar or better experience. New recipes on the offer. The service staff is even more cordial. The ambience, decor has improved. You again ordered their specialized Italian Pizza. After this visit, you are now a “loyal” customer. Every time you want to eat that special Pizza, you visit the same restaurant.

Beyond this point, you start advocating this restaurant to your friends for specialized Italian Pizza. You recommend their food, service, ambience and overall quality. You become an evangelist.

Now think about your organization. How many customers are still experiencing you. How many of them really believe in you. How many customers are loyal? Do they advocate your services to others?

A common mistake organizations commit is to deliver great experience first time and then take the customer for granted. The moment there is someone else who is better and delivers a higher quality experience, a customer is lost!

So, quality is a moving target – each time a customer comes back to you, you need to deliver similar or better quality (of products, services and experience), you need to demonstrate improvement, care enough about them, stay on top of market trends and keep changing the rules of the game (innovation). When you consistently focus on delivering value, your customers move higher up in the value pyramid from “experience” to ‘belief & trust” to “loyalty” to “advocacy”.

Delivering great experiences through people, processes and leadership comes with a cost, but that cost is far less than the cost of losing a customer and then acquiring a new one all over again.

Note: My book ‘#QUALITYtweet – 140 bite-sized ideas to deliver quality in every project’ explores the people, process and leadership aspects to build a constantly improving organization culture. Check it out if you haven’t already!

Hidden Costs 25

As a business leader, if you think “costs” are only the ones where you spend real money, think again. Have you ever realized the costs of:

1. having an inefficient leadership team?
2. setting wrong examples?
3. not treating people well?
4. not aligning middle managers with vision at the top?
5. long unnecessary meetings and deadlocked debates?
6. efforts spent in resolving personal conflicts and protecting individual/departmental fortresses?
7. poor communications and expectations management?
8. not allowing people to make mistakes?
9. loosing great ideas because of a “compliance” culture?
10. acting from a reactive standpoint?
11. not treating your customers well?
12. not demonstrating integrity?
13. ad-hoc-ism and lack of process orientation?
14. not connecting with your people on one-to-one basis?
15. inefficiencies structured within your org chart?
16. treating people like machines (and expecting 100% productivity)?
17. talking only from a “problem” perspective?
18. re-hiring/training new hires when your experienced people leave?
19. not training your workforce?
20. taking “short-term” view of business?
21. analysis-and-planning-paralysis?
22. not challenging the status-quo?
23. un-prioritized improvements and procrastination?
24. not listening to customers and their unique context?
25. not learning from your past mistakes?

These are costs too!

P.S.

• Thanks to Samuel B. Bacharach for including my post “5 Ideas to Ensure Lessons are Really Learned” in his list of 10 Must-Read Social Media & Leadership Stories From July 12-17
• My post “Leadership Belief and Building ‘People-Centric’ Culture” was featured in Carnival of HR – Online Degree Edition along with other GREAT posts on HR and Leadership. Loved the theme!

5 Ideas To Ensure That Lessons are ‘Really’ Learned

Have you ever experienced the following?

You complete a project and then do a small ‘post-mortem / retrospective analysis’ of what went well and what did not. You then document these lessons in a nice looking template and share it with all stakeholders before getting onto the next project. Next project looks exciting in the beginning and then, same set of challenges are encountered. “Lessons-Learned” often end up being “Lessons-Documented-In-Last-Project-That-Are-Going-To-Show-Up-Again”.

All improvement depends on lessons you document and what you, as a leader, do about it. If you are a business leader, project leader or an improvement expert, here are five practical things you can do to ensure that lessons are really learned.

• Assign Responsibility: If you have a quality group, great! If you don’t, you can assign the role of improvement expert to any senior member in your team. Mandate should be to improve the process and implement the improvements. Project Managers are best candidates since they deal with these challenges day in and day out.
• Focus on “actions”: Once documented, identify a set of immediate actions to be taken to ensure that these lessons go into practice. Compile a central action log that contains lessons from all the projects / retrospectives. Assign responsibility for each action and have a deadline. Track the progress from time to time.
• Maintain a central log of lessons learned: Unless lessons are visible, they don’t go into practice. One idea is to maintain a central log of all lessons learned, actions and resulting improvements. This is also a great way to track improvements.
• Revisit them: It is easy to get back to your project challenges and forget the lessons learned. Revisit them from time to time. Have monthly update meetings, publish these on your intranet, create easy to view lists of Do’s and Don’ts – whatever! But make sure that lessons learned are visible to people.
• “Lessons Learned” as inputs to Process Improvement: Convert each lesson into a process. Get the buy-in from teams and then train everyone. This is also a great way to ensure that your quality system evolves with challenges you face in your context.

Lessons are only ‘learned’ when they find their way into the future projects as positive experiences. Challenges help us grow – only when we face new challenges each time and learn how to tackle the ‘old monsters’. Unless we do that, repeating challenges will only wear you and your team out!

Lessons then, are not learned, but just documented. Not fun – I am sure you’ll agree!

Change Management Essentials - 5 Things To Avoid

Most organizational/team improvement initiatives we undertake involve change - from current state of affairs to desired state. Change is hard and painful and necessary for growth/survival. Process improvement is all about managing change - and in my view, change (and its respective benefits) does not happen when you:

• Keep thinking big without starting small: It is easy to get overwhelmed by the large goals you have set for improvement. But remember - the best way to eat an elephant is one piece at a time. Focus on big, but start small. Think about a few key things you can do now, that will take you one step nearer to your goal. You don’t make things better by thinking about it, but by doing something about it.
• You focus solely on “enforce” rather than “enable” and “educate”: Changing habits and hence culture is a long term thing. Unless there is enough buy-in for a change, it does not happen. Best way to implement change is to educate people, enable them and hence empower them. Enforcement only results in dispassionate compliance.
• Think too much about things you cannot change: There are things you just can’t do anything about. Worrying too much about them means loosing focus on what is in your control. I remember a prayer which says, “God, grant me the serenity to accept things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.” Be wise!
• You think change is all about processes: Its not. Change is all about people and their habits. Processes are merely tools that guides them through the change process. Process acts as a compass, but people follow it. Lot of process consultants overly focus on compliance, standards and processes. Focus on people instead, and processes will not only be adhered to, but also improved upon by the same set of people.
• Are a “sole warrior” in improvement/change initiative: If you are the only one who wants change in an organization, it doesn’t happen. All improvement initiative needs sponsorship from the top. People observe people at the top and emulate behaviors. Setting right examples and taking improvement initiative seriously goes a long way in building a constantly improving culture.

But why do we change, you may ask! This quote (I read it somewhere on Twitter) answers your question: “We change when the pain to change is less than the pain to remain as we are.“

Have a Wonderful Wednesday!

Final Part: 7 Things Managers & Leaders Should Never Do

I wrote earlier about “11 Things Project Managers & Leaders Should Never Do” and then continued the chain of thoughts with another post titled “7 (More) Things Project Managers & Leaders Should Never Do.

This is the final part of this series which is compiled to form a handy and portable summary “25 Things Managers & Leaders Should NEVER Do” (Download PDF)

If you are a supervisor, manager or a leader at any level, you should NEVER:

• Conduct long and unscheduled meetings. When you don’t respect your team member’s time, you loose respect too. Resist conducting unscheduled meetings when they are not needed. Even if you do, keep them short. Another mistake? Not conduct meetings at all!
• Try doing critical portions of the work by self. Yes, that may minimize the risk of failure, but your team members will not grow. Delegate and then guide them. Let them raise their game too. Act as a catalyst who helps them improve. If you do everything, you are not doing enough. You need to do more by doing less – and delegation is the way to go.
• Fail to say “No”. Not saying no when it is needed (to clients, stakeholders and bosses) can be a real killer for you, your project and your people. Saying no firmly, but politely is an art every leader has to master. Say no, so that you can say yes to more important stuff.
• Not reviewing the progress. When you don’t review the progress periodically, you loose momentum. Projects generally start on a high note – keep the momentum going by periodic reviews. Take a stock, retrospect and take corrective steps to ensure that your team is on track. Review early and often.
• Run away from fears. In fact, leaders embrace their fears. Fear is our most important emotion. We fear criticism, we fear failure and we fear risk. This should not stop us from doing stuff. It should rather help us doing stuff better. A leader has to overcome fear and help team members do the same.
• Not acknowledging what they don’t know. Leaders become integral when they know what they don’t know – and when they acknowledge it. It is not weak, but a courageous act to acknowledge what you don’t know. You will easily find someone who does. This again boils down to having humility to accept things you don’t know.
• Fail to “celebrate”. We live in an action oriented world, where doing is sometimes over emphasized. We complete one phase and quickly jump onto the another. Celebrate small wins. It gives new energy to the team and also extends an opportunity to know each other better. Celebrating is very human – do it often.

Download your own copy of the full compilation. Share it with your friends. Share it with anyone who is an aspiring leader. Revisit it after a month. After all, we all need constant reminders on what we should “NOT” do!

Thanks for all your comments and support to this series.

Taking a “Project View” of Improvement and Change Initiatives

Yesterday, over a cup of coffee, my friend asked me about my first book and what was my approach towards writing it. I said that I took “project approach”.

This lead to an immediate realization that everything we do is a project, be it loosing your weight, writing a book, painting your home, getting a degree or managing an improvement initiative. For any effort where you have goals, time line, constraints, dependencies, risks and need of resources to be managed - you have a project on your hand. Learning fundamentals of project management is essential for everybody - irrespective of whether you are a project manager or not.

All successful leaders have been great project managers too - they may not have used the formal project plan or a work breakdown structure - but who says project management is only about these essential formalities. Project management is about having a vision, drawing out a plan, leading (others or ourselves), making progress, tracking the direction, managing dependencies, overcoming constraints and most importantly - delivering results.

Here is a simple method of how you can take a “project view” for things you are working on.

• Know your goals (Vision): Lets say you want to pursue a certification in your field. Now, that’s a goal - a project for you. Name it as “Project Certification”. It is also very important to know “why” you are pursuing this goal and how will it help you advance in your life/at work/in organization. Create a list of such goals, prioritise them and take top 3 goals as projects you would work on.
• Categorize all your work under these goals (Work Breakdown): Once you have a project defined, decide on phases/activities involved in achieving this goal. For certification, you can have a phase named “Preparation” with activities like identifying the scope, body of work, spending time learning, special training needed etc. Create such phases (milestones) and have core activities in each phase.
• Create a list of actions (Plan): Now that you know the activities, draw out a basic plan. Give a tentative timeframe to each activity and you’ll know how much time it will take for you to get certified. Identify the resources you will need to get into action e.g. books, training material etc. You can use MS Excel or Google Spreadsheet to draw out these basic plans. Remember - that which does not get scheduled does not get done!
• Act on the plan (Execute): Start executing the plan - this is where the rubber meets the road. Work on the activities and keep ticking them in plan as they get done. Enjoy the process of working on these activities without getting overwhelmed by the results.
• Track these actions (Control): Periodically, track your progress. This will give you an idea of what are additional actions / resources you need.
• Celebrate (Closure): Once you achieve a phase, celebrate. Give yourself a break, relax, unwind and retrospect. What could you do better in next phase so that results are better.

I consider my blog as a project which has a calendar. Initiatives I undertake at work are all planned (and viewed) as projects. This view is very potent - because it helps me push my own goals forward. You can try it out too.

“But this is all common-sense and discipline!”, you’d say. Well, that is what project management is all about!

Have a Fantastic Friday!