I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I’ve been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies — an impression that has been reinforced almost daily — is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it’s a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one. It’s pretty crazy. There are probably a hundred or even two hundred different ways you can compare the two companies, and Google is superior in all but three of them, if I recall correctly. I actually did a spreadsheet at one point but Legal wouldn’t let me show it to anyone, even though recruiting loved it.
I mean, just to give you a very brief taste: Amazon’s recruiting process is fundamentally flawed by having teams hire for themselves, so their hiring bar is incredibly inconsistent across teams, despite various efforts they’ve made to level it out. And their operations are a mess; they don’t really have SREs and they make engineers pretty much do everything, which leaves almost no time for coding – though again this varies by group, so it’s luck of the draw. They don’t give a single shit about charity or helping the needy or community contributions or anything like that. Never comes up there, except maybe to laugh about it. Their facilities are dirt-smeared cube farms without a dime spent on decor or common meeting areas. Their pay and benefits suck, although much less so lately due to local competition from Google and Facebook. But they don’t have any of our perks or extras — they just try to match the offer-letter numbers, and that’s the end of it. Their code base is a disaster, with no engineering standards whatsoever except what individual teams choose to put in place.
To be fair, they do have a nice versioned-library system that we really ought to emulate, and a nice publish-subscribe system that we also have no equivalent for. But for the most part they just have a bunch of crappy tools that read and write state machine information into relational databases. We wouldn’t take most of it even if it were free.
I think the pubsub system and their library-shelf system were two out of the grand total of three things Amazon does better than google.
I guess you could make an argument that their bias for launching early and iterating like mad is also something they do well, but you can argue it either way. They prioritize launching early over everything else, including retention and engineering discipline and a bunch of other stuff that turns out to matter in the long run. So even though it’s given them some competitive advantages in the marketplace, it’s created enough other problems to make it something less than a slam-dunk.
But there’s one thing they do really really well that pretty much makes up for ALL of their political, philosophical and technical screw-ups.
Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon’s retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple’s Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally — wisely — left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn’t let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they’re all still there, and Larry is not.
Micro-managing isn’t that third thing that Amazon does better than us, by the way. I mean, yeah, they micro-manage really well, but I wouldn’t list it as a strength or anything. I’m just trying to set the context here, to help you understand what happened. We’re talking about a guy who in all seriousness has said on many public occasions that people should be paying him to work at Amazon. He hands out little yellow stickies with his name on them, reminding people “who runs the company” when they disagree with him. The guy is a regular… well, Steve Jobs, I guess. Except without the fashion or design sense. Bezos is super smart; don’t get me wrong. He just makes ordinary control freaks look like stoned hippies.
So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He’s doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion — back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year — he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses.
His Big Mandate went something along these lines:
1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.
2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.
3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team’s data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.
4) It doesn’t matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols — doesn’t matter. Bezos doesn’t care.
5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.
6) Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired.
7) Thank you; have a nice day!
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Ten Tips On How To Work With Your Board Of Directors
http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/16/ten-tips-on-how-to-work-with-your-board-of-directors/
Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Len Jordan, who is a venture partner at Madrona Venture Group and currently holds board seats at companies like Cedexis, MaxPoint Interactive, Zapd, Control4, DSIQ, Medio and Wetpaint.
Whenever I invest in a new company, I send the CEO my customary email with advice on how to work with his or her new board. I’ve spent 24 years in the software industry—including holding operating roles at three early-stage software companies and board seats at 12 startups—so I thought my “Top 10″ list on the care and feeding of board members might be helpful to other CEOs and executive as well.
So, without further ado, here it is:
1. Have a plan, and get your entire company and board to understand and support it.
A company’s business plan and strategy is the map of where we are going. The plan almost certainly will change, but the best CEOs keep everyone informed about where we said we are going, where we are currently going, and why we changed plans if we did.
The plan should not be that complicated. Too many business plans use multisyllabic adjectives and adverbs—the plan should be simple even if the products are complicated. The essence of the business plan should be simple enough for a six year-old to read and understand.
We should agree on a plan that describes our target customer; the company’s product; and competition. This plan informs the product roadmap (including timeline and hiring requirements, such as how many people you need to build, market and sell the product) and P&L (revenue, expense and net income) broken out by month and quarter and by R&D, sales and marketing and general-and-administrative expenses. The sales and marketing plan goes with this, including a product and pricing model.
The preference is to approve the above and then stay out of the CEO’s way—the opportunity
cost of your time is incredibly high.
2. Tell us if the plan changes for “small reasons”.Most plans change for tactical reasons — e.g., the product is earlier/later than expected. Or customers are adopting/buying earlier/later than planned. I like a process in which, if the plan shifts, the CEO pre-emptively throttles the investment/spending without being asked. For example: tell us what level of business progress/metrics (e.g. downloads, installs, usage, trials, bookings, contracts closed, etc.) you want to see to feel good about spending to the plan (or below it if necessary), even if we are not yet certain about exceeding revenue during the current period.
Conversely, what level of progress above plan would make you want to invest more aggressively and what key investments (products, sales and marketing hires) would you make? Having the entire plan and contingencies agreed to ahead of time makes it a lot easier for you to do your job and for us to stay out of the way. Plans don’t have to be perfect, and they change, especially at startups.
3. Tell us if the plan is changing a lot for “big reasons”.Sometimes plans need to change for strategic reasons. The best CEOs are continually testing and retesting their basic hypothesis. Is there still a fundamental problem we are solving, or market opportunity we are addressing? Are we still pursuing the right product? Are we selling to the right customers? Are the ways we are selling and marketing right for the market and product? Are we as competitive as we thought? Is our team as good as we had hoped?
Being a CEO is hard because you need to have conviction and commitment to a specific strategy, but you need to continuously challenge the assumptions underpinning it without whipsawing your team, customers and board. The best CEOs stay on-strategy, but are very deliberate when making strategic changes.
4. Strategy mistakes are harder to admit than execution mistakes.It’s hard to admit when a strategy is flawed. It’s very easy, on the other hand, to decide that the market, customer and product thesis is correct but sales-and-marketing execution is weak. I’ve seen too many companies delay making a tough strategy choice by first trying to fix the flaw through a change in execution. If execution is flawed, fix it, but look beneath the veneer to make sure the substance underneath is sound.
5. The average of two strategies is usually not a strategy.Whether you have a board or not, you have to commit to a cohesive strategy. In tennis you can play at the net or the baseline, and both can be great strategies, depending on the circumstances. The average of the two — playing in the middle of the court (commonly referred to as ‘no- man’s-land’) — is the worst place to play and is never a good strategy. Too many startups split the difference: They continue with the old strategy, add a new strategy (like a new product), under-resource both and fail at each.
Good strategy starts this way: Assess the company’s essential attributes—market, team, product, customers, competition–and develop a simple one page SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis. Frame alternatives, discuss tradeoffs with the board and make hard choices. The classic startup mistakes often consist of giving up on the right strategy too early, choosing the wrong new strategy, assuming the old strategy provides more benefit to the new strategy than it does or choosing, instead, to focus on both an old and new strategy out of fear of making the wrong choice. It is scary to have both feet and hands off the rock at the same time.
6. Email is good for delivering straightforward information; board meetings are good for explaining complicated information and discussing alternatives.I love short (above the fold) weekly email updates from CEOs on key progress points (product development, hiring, revenue, key partnerships, etc.), but it’s OK if they are less frequent (coming every other week, or once a month). But bad news should travel fast—this includes losing a key customer, a key engineer quitting, etc. The road has bumps; I’d rather know about it when it happens than after it leads to some other issue (like a product delay or a revenue miss). Also, I’d prefer that problems/opportunities not only get communicated, but that options be developed to address the problem or opportunity. Frame the situation and assess the pros and cons of a few choices—it makes it easier to help come up with a reasonable solution.
7. Board meetings are not pitches. You have our money, so let’s figure out what to do with it.The best way to earn trust from your board is not to tell us what’s going well; it’s to tell us what’s not going well. Better yet, make everything run well but tell us the things you want to focus on that could become problems if not addressed. If you do #6 , the board meetings can be less about updating the board and more about discussing key strategic choices/decisions and ways we can better tune our execution. A basic review of financials, customer progress, product development, partnerships, hiring, etc. would be great, but we’d also like you to expose key strategy elements (SWOT) and get us to discuss and react.
Receiving board decks two days ahead of time means we can add more value in the board meeting. Also: The best companies can get the board deck down to 10-15 slides, max, especially if #6 is happening. Allocate time for strategic topics at key board meetings and from time to time, invite an outside/expert that can challenge the group at key strategic inflection points. Finally, as with any meeting, don’t unveil controversial topics at board meetings for the first time. Give people a heads up ahead of time so they discuss the topic at an average blood pressure.
8. Ask for help — we work for you. Really.We like helping recruit employees and partners (customers). Put us to work, let us brag about you to potential employees and provide context and support. We can assist with strategy questions. You should know more about the business than we do, but our distance can provide perspective. And perhaps we have seen patterns that can be applied from other experiences. This can be incredibly valuable as long as we don’t over or mis-apply the patterns in the wrong instances based on the wrong attributes.
We are OK if you seldom call and are also OK if you call every day when we are working on something that requires it. We do appreciate just getting a check-in call from time to time. A little like calling your mom in college, sort of. If you only call to ask for money she will know something is up.
9. Involve your exec team with the board.It’s good practice to have at least one board member interview all exec hires; different perspectives can be good. Having the exec team in the board meetings can be great, especially if they present the area of their responsibility (product development, sales, marketing, finance). That said, it’s also important to have a closed session of the board that is just the board plus counsel, to discuss board-only matters.
10. Tell us how we are doing.We hope to add value but will make mistakes and can often manage things better. Tell us about these areas and we will try to get better. We will do the same with you. And tell us when we should stay out of the way — you run the company, and sometimes the best thing we can do to help is let you do that.
The average early stage company takes nine to 10 years before it will exit. So we likely are going to work together a long time. Let’s make it productive, rewarding and fun.
Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Len Jordan, who is a venture partner at Madrona Venture Group and currently holds board seats at companies like Cedexis, MaxPoint Interactive, Zapd, Control4, DSIQ, Medio and Wetpaint.
Whenever I invest in a new company, I send the CEO my customary email with advice on how to work with his or her new board. I’ve spent 24 years in the software industry—including holding operating roles at three early-stage software companies and board seats at 12 startups—so I thought my “Top 10″ list on the care and feeding of board members might be helpful to other CEOs and executive as well.
So, without further ado, here it is:
1. Have a plan, and get your entire company and board to understand and support it.
A company’s business plan and strategy is the map of where we are going. The plan almost certainly will change, but the best CEOs keep everyone informed about where we said we are going, where we are currently going, and why we changed plans if we did.
The plan should not be that complicated. Too many business plans use multisyllabic adjectives and adverbs—the plan should be simple even if the products are complicated. The essence of the business plan should be simple enough for a six year-old to read and understand.
We should agree on a plan that describes our target customer; the company’s product; and competition. This plan informs the product roadmap (including timeline and hiring requirements, such as how many people you need to build, market and sell the product) and P&L (revenue, expense and net income) broken out by month and quarter and by R&D, sales and marketing and general-and-administrative expenses. The sales and marketing plan goes with this, including a product and pricing model.
The preference is to approve the above and then stay out of the CEO’s way—the opportunity
cost of your time is incredibly high.
2. Tell us if the plan changes for “small reasons”.Most plans change for tactical reasons — e.g., the product is earlier/later than expected. Or customers are adopting/buying earlier/later than planned. I like a process in which, if the plan shifts, the CEO pre-emptively throttles the investment/spending without being asked. For example: tell us what level of business progress/metrics (e.g. downloads, installs, usage, trials, bookings, contracts closed, etc.) you want to see to feel good about spending to the plan (or below it if necessary), even if we are not yet certain about exceeding revenue during the current period.
Conversely, what level of progress above plan would make you want to invest more aggressively and what key investments (products, sales and marketing hires) would you make? Having the entire plan and contingencies agreed to ahead of time makes it a lot easier for you to do your job and for us to stay out of the way. Plans don’t have to be perfect, and they change, especially at startups.
3. Tell us if the plan is changing a lot for “big reasons”.Sometimes plans need to change for strategic reasons. The best CEOs are continually testing and retesting their basic hypothesis. Is there still a fundamental problem we are solving, or market opportunity we are addressing? Are we still pursuing the right product? Are we selling to the right customers? Are the ways we are selling and marketing right for the market and product? Are we as competitive as we thought? Is our team as good as we had hoped?
Being a CEO is hard because you need to have conviction and commitment to a specific strategy, but you need to continuously challenge the assumptions underpinning it without whipsawing your team, customers and board. The best CEOs stay on-strategy, but are very deliberate when making strategic changes.
4. Strategy mistakes are harder to admit than execution mistakes.It’s hard to admit when a strategy is flawed. It’s very easy, on the other hand, to decide that the market, customer and product thesis is correct but sales-and-marketing execution is weak. I’ve seen too many companies delay making a tough strategy choice by first trying to fix the flaw through a change in execution. If execution is flawed, fix it, but look beneath the veneer to make sure the substance underneath is sound.
5. The average of two strategies is usually not a strategy.Whether you have a board or not, you have to commit to a cohesive strategy. In tennis you can play at the net or the baseline, and both can be great strategies, depending on the circumstances. The average of the two — playing in the middle of the court (commonly referred to as ‘no- man’s-land’) — is the worst place to play and is never a good strategy. Too many startups split the difference: They continue with the old strategy, add a new strategy (like a new product), under-resource both and fail at each.
Good strategy starts this way: Assess the company’s essential attributes—market, team, product, customers, competition–and develop a simple one page SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis. Frame alternatives, discuss tradeoffs with the board and make hard choices. The classic startup mistakes often consist of giving up on the right strategy too early, choosing the wrong new strategy, assuming the old strategy provides more benefit to the new strategy than it does or choosing, instead, to focus on both an old and new strategy out of fear of making the wrong choice. It is scary to have both feet and hands off the rock at the same time.
6. Email is good for delivering straightforward information; board meetings are good for explaining complicated information and discussing alternatives.I love short (above the fold) weekly email updates from CEOs on key progress points (product development, hiring, revenue, key partnerships, etc.), but it’s OK if they are less frequent (coming every other week, or once a month). But bad news should travel fast—this includes losing a key customer, a key engineer quitting, etc. The road has bumps; I’d rather know about it when it happens than after it leads to some other issue (like a product delay or a revenue miss). Also, I’d prefer that problems/opportunities not only get communicated, but that options be developed to address the problem or opportunity. Frame the situation and assess the pros and cons of a few choices—it makes it easier to help come up with a reasonable solution.
7. Board meetings are not pitches. You have our money, so let’s figure out what to do with it.The best way to earn trust from your board is not to tell us what’s going well; it’s to tell us what’s not going well. Better yet, make everything run well but tell us the things you want to focus on that could become problems if not addressed. If you do #6 , the board meetings can be less about updating the board and more about discussing key strategic choices/decisions and ways we can better tune our execution. A basic review of financials, customer progress, product development, partnerships, hiring, etc. would be great, but we’d also like you to expose key strategy elements (SWOT) and get us to discuss and react.
Receiving board decks two days ahead of time means we can add more value in the board meeting. Also: The best companies can get the board deck down to 10-15 slides, max, especially if #6 is happening. Allocate time for strategic topics at key board meetings and from time to time, invite an outside/expert that can challenge the group at key strategic inflection points. Finally, as with any meeting, don’t unveil controversial topics at board meetings for the first time. Give people a heads up ahead of time so they discuss the topic at an average blood pressure.
8. Ask for help — we work for you. Really.We like helping recruit employees and partners (customers). Put us to work, let us brag about you to potential employees and provide context and support. We can assist with strategy questions. You should know more about the business than we do, but our distance can provide perspective. And perhaps we have seen patterns that can be applied from other experiences. This can be incredibly valuable as long as we don’t over or mis-apply the patterns in the wrong instances based on the wrong attributes.
We are OK if you seldom call and are also OK if you call every day when we are working on something that requires it. We do appreciate just getting a check-in call from time to time. A little like calling your mom in college, sort of. If you only call to ask for money she will know something is up.
9. Involve your exec team with the board.It’s good practice to have at least one board member interview all exec hires; different perspectives can be good. Having the exec team in the board meetings can be great, especially if they present the area of their responsibility (product development, sales, marketing, finance). That said, it’s also important to have a closed session of the board that is just the board plus counsel, to discuss board-only matters.
10. Tell us how we are doing.We hope to add value but will make mistakes and can often manage things better. Tell us about these areas and we will try to get better. We will do the same with you. And tell us when we should stay out of the way — you run the company, and sometimes the best thing we can do to help is let you do that.
The average early stage company takes nine to 10 years before it will exit. So we likely are going to work together a long time. Let’s make it productive, rewarding and fun.
Saturday, October 15, 2011
The Must-Have Leadership Skill
listen, communicate, persuade, collaborate.
Daniel Goleman is Co-Director of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations at Rutgers University, co-author of Primal Leadership: Leading with Emotional Intelligence, and author of The Brain and Emotional Intelligence: New Insights and Leadership: Selected Writings.
"We hired a new CEO, but had to let him go after just seven months," the chairman of an East Coast think tank complained to me recently. "His resume looked spectacular, he did splendidly in all the interviews. But within a week or two we were hearing pushback from the staff. They were telling us, 'You hired a first-rate economist with zero social intelligence.' He was pure command and control."
The think tank's work centers on interlocking networks of relationships with the board, staff, donors, and a wide variety of academics and policy experts. The CEO urgently needed to manage those relationships, but lacked the interpersonal skills that organizations increasingly need in their leaders. A CEO who fails to navigate those relationships artfully, the think tank's board saw, could torpedo the organization.
Why does social intelligence emerge as the make-or-break leadership skill set? For one, leadership is the art of accomplishing goals through other people.
As I've written with my colleague Richard Boyatzis, technical skills and self-mastery alone allow you to be an outstanding individual contributor. But to lead, you need an additional interpersonal skill set: you've got to listen, communicate, persuade, collaborate.
That was brought home to me yet again reading "Making Yourself Indispensable," by John H. Zenger, Joseph R. Folkman, and Scott E. Edinger, which makes the strong point that a leader's competencies are synergistic. The more different competencies a leader displays at strength, the greater her business results.
But there's another critically important rule-of-thumb: some competencies matter more than others, particularly at the higher levels of leadership. For C-level executives, for example, technical expertise matters far less than the art of influence: you can hire people with great technical skills, but then you've got to motivate, guide and inspire them.
While Zenger, Folkman, and Edinger make a strong empirical case that competencies matter, it overlooks a crucial point: some competencies matter more than others. Specifically, there are threshold competencies, the abilities every leader needs to some degree, and then there are distinguishing competencies, the abilities you find only in the stars.
You can be the most brilliant innovator, problem-solver or strategic thinker, but if you can't inspire and motivate, build relationships or communicate powerfully, those talents will get you nowhere. What Zenger and colleagues call the "interpersonal skills" — and what I call social intelligence — are the secret sauce in top-performing leadership.
Lacking social intelligence, no other combination of competences is likely to get much traction. Along with whatever other strengths they may have, the must-have is social intelligence.
So how do you spot this skill set? An executive with a long track record of satisfactory hires told me how his organization assessed social intelligence in a prospect during the round of interviews, group sessions, meals, and parties that candidates there routinely went through.
"We'd watch carefully to see if she talks to everyone at the party or a dinner, not just the people who might be helpful to her," he said. One of the social intelligence indicators: during a getting-to-know you conversation, does the candidate ask about the other person or engage in a self-centered monologue? At the same time, does she talk about herself in a natural way? At the end of the conversation, you should feel you know the person, not just the social self she tries to project.
I wouldn't use such subjective measures alone — you're better off to combine them with best practices on hiring without firing. But don't ignore your gut.
Daniel Goleman is Co-Director of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations at Rutgers University, co-author of Primal Leadership: Leading with Emotional Intelligence, and author of The Brain and Emotional Intelligence: New Insights and Leadership: Selected Writings.
"We hired a new CEO, but had to let him go after just seven months," the chairman of an East Coast think tank complained to me recently. "His resume looked spectacular, he did splendidly in all the interviews. But within a week or two we were hearing pushback from the staff. They were telling us, 'You hired a first-rate economist with zero social intelligence.' He was pure command and control."
The think tank's work centers on interlocking networks of relationships with the board, staff, donors, and a wide variety of academics and policy experts. The CEO urgently needed to manage those relationships, but lacked the interpersonal skills that organizations increasingly need in their leaders. A CEO who fails to navigate those relationships artfully, the think tank's board saw, could torpedo the organization.
Why does social intelligence emerge as the make-or-break leadership skill set? For one, leadership is the art of accomplishing goals through other people.
As I've written with my colleague Richard Boyatzis, technical skills and self-mastery alone allow you to be an outstanding individual contributor. But to lead, you need an additional interpersonal skill set: you've got to listen, communicate, persuade, collaborate.
That was brought home to me yet again reading "Making Yourself Indispensable," by John H. Zenger, Joseph R. Folkman, and Scott E. Edinger, which makes the strong point that a leader's competencies are synergistic. The more different competencies a leader displays at strength, the greater her business results.
But there's another critically important rule-of-thumb: some competencies matter more than others, particularly at the higher levels of leadership. For C-level executives, for example, technical expertise matters far less than the art of influence: you can hire people with great technical skills, but then you've got to motivate, guide and inspire them.
While Zenger, Folkman, and Edinger make a strong empirical case that competencies matter, it overlooks a crucial point: some competencies matter more than others. Specifically, there are threshold competencies, the abilities every leader needs to some degree, and then there are distinguishing competencies, the abilities you find only in the stars.
You can be the most brilliant innovator, problem-solver or strategic thinker, but if you can't inspire and motivate, build relationships or communicate powerfully, those talents will get you nowhere. What Zenger and colleagues call the "interpersonal skills" — and what I call social intelligence — are the secret sauce in top-performing leadership.
Lacking social intelligence, no other combination of competences is likely to get much traction. Along with whatever other strengths they may have, the must-have is social intelligence.
So how do you spot this skill set? An executive with a long track record of satisfactory hires told me how his organization assessed social intelligence in a prospect during the round of interviews, group sessions, meals, and parties that candidates there routinely went through.
"We'd watch carefully to see if she talks to everyone at the party or a dinner, not just the people who might be helpful to her," he said. One of the social intelligence indicators: during a getting-to-know you conversation, does the candidate ask about the other person or engage in a self-centered monologue? At the same time, does she talk about herself in a natural way? At the end of the conversation, you should feel you know the person, not just the social self she tries to project.
I wouldn't use such subjective measures alone — you're better off to combine them with best practices on hiring without firing. But don't ignore your gut.
Making Yourself Indispensable
Making Yourself Indispensable
by John H. Zenger, Joseph R. Folkman, and Scott K. Edinger
A manager we’ll call Tom was a midlevel sales executive at a Fortune 500 company. After a dozen or so years there, he was thriving—he made his numbers, he was well liked, he got consistently positive reviews. He applied for a promotion that would put him in charge of a high-profile worldwide product-alignment initiative, confident that he was the top candidate and that this was the logical next move for him, a seemingly perfect fit for his skills and ambitions. His track record was solid. He’d made no stupid mistakes or career-limiting moves, and he’d had no run-ins with upper management. He was stunned, then, when a colleague with less experience got the job. What was the matter?
As far as Tom could tell, nothing. Everyone was happy with his work, his manager assured him, and a recent 360-degree assessment confirmed her view. Tom was at or above the norm in every area, strong not only in delivering results but also in problem solving, strategic thinking, and inspiring others to top performance. “No need to reinvent yourself,” she said. “Just keep doing what you’re doing. Go with your strengths.”
But how? Tom was at a loss. Should he think more strategically? Become even more inspiring? Practice problem solving more intently?
Learn more about developing your strengths with this slideshow.
It’s pretty easy and straightforward to improve on a weakness; you can get steady, measurable results through linear development—that is, by learning and practicing basic techniques. But the data from our decades of work with tens of thousands of executives all over the world has shown us that developing strengths is very different. Doing more of what you already do well yields only incremental improvement. To get appreciably better at it, you have to work on complementary skills—what we call nonlinear development. This has long been familiar to athletes as cross-training. A novice runner, for example, benefits from doing stretching exercises and running a few times a week, gradually increasing mileage to build up endurance and muscle memory. But an experienced marathoner won’t get significantly faster merely by running ever longer distances. To reach the next level, he needs to supplement that regimen by building up complementary skills through weight training, swimming, bicycling, interval training, yoga, and the like.
So it is with leadership competencies. To move from good to much better, you need to engage in the business equivalent of cross-training. If you’re technically adept, for instance, delving even more deeply into technical manuals won’t get you nearly as far as honing a complementary skill such as communication, which will make your expertise more apparent and accessible to your coworkers.
In this article we provide a simple guide to becoming a far more effective leader. We will see how Tom identified his strengths, decided which one to focus on and which complementary skill to develop, and what the results were. The process is straightforward, but complements are not always obvious. So first we’ll take a closer look at the leadership equivalent of cross-training. The Interaction Effect
In cross-training, the combination of two activities produces an improvement—an interaction effect—substantially greater than either one can produce on its own. There’s nothing mysterious here. Combining diet with exercise, for example, has long been known to be substantially more effective in losing weight than either diet or exercise alone.
In our previous research we found 16 differentiating leadership competencies that correlate strongly with positive business outcomes such as increased profitability, employee engagement, revenue, and customer satisfaction. Among those 16, we wondered, could we find pairs that would produce significant interaction effects?
by John H. Zenger, Joseph R. Folkman, and Scott K. Edinger
A manager we’ll call Tom was a midlevel sales executive at a Fortune 500 company. After a dozen or so years there, he was thriving—he made his numbers, he was well liked, he got consistently positive reviews. He applied for a promotion that would put him in charge of a high-profile worldwide product-alignment initiative, confident that he was the top candidate and that this was the logical next move for him, a seemingly perfect fit for his skills and ambitions. His track record was solid. He’d made no stupid mistakes or career-limiting moves, and he’d had no run-ins with upper management. He was stunned, then, when a colleague with less experience got the job. What was the matter?
As far as Tom could tell, nothing. Everyone was happy with his work, his manager assured him, and a recent 360-degree assessment confirmed her view. Tom was at or above the norm in every area, strong not only in delivering results but also in problem solving, strategic thinking, and inspiring others to top performance. “No need to reinvent yourself,” she said. “Just keep doing what you’re doing. Go with your strengths.”
But how? Tom was at a loss. Should he think more strategically? Become even more inspiring? Practice problem solving more intently?
Learn more about developing your strengths with this slideshow.
It’s pretty easy and straightforward to improve on a weakness; you can get steady, measurable results through linear development—that is, by learning and practicing basic techniques. But the data from our decades of work with tens of thousands of executives all over the world has shown us that developing strengths is very different. Doing more of what you already do well yields only incremental improvement. To get appreciably better at it, you have to work on complementary skills—what we call nonlinear development. This has long been familiar to athletes as cross-training. A novice runner, for example, benefits from doing stretching exercises and running a few times a week, gradually increasing mileage to build up endurance and muscle memory. But an experienced marathoner won’t get significantly faster merely by running ever longer distances. To reach the next level, he needs to supplement that regimen by building up complementary skills through weight training, swimming, bicycling, interval training, yoga, and the like.
So it is with leadership competencies. To move from good to much better, you need to engage in the business equivalent of cross-training. If you’re technically adept, for instance, delving even more deeply into technical manuals won’t get you nearly as far as honing a complementary skill such as communication, which will make your expertise more apparent and accessible to your coworkers.
In this article we provide a simple guide to becoming a far more effective leader. We will see how Tom identified his strengths, decided which one to focus on and which complementary skill to develop, and what the results were. The process is straightforward, but complements are not always obvious. So first we’ll take a closer look at the leadership equivalent of cross-training. The Interaction Effect
In cross-training, the combination of two activities produces an improvement—an interaction effect—substantially greater than either one can produce on its own. There’s nothing mysterious here. Combining diet with exercise, for example, has long been known to be substantially more effective in losing weight than either diet or exercise alone.
In our previous research we found 16 differentiating leadership competencies that correlate strongly with positive business outcomes such as increased profitability, employee engagement, revenue, and customer satisfaction. Among those 16, we wondered, could we find pairs that would produce significant interaction effects?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)