I was recently brought in to help put together a Process Improvement Plan for an employee of a solid people manager. This employee was easy going and well liked however, his performance was not meeting expectations.

Having worked closely with this manager for many years, I was very surprised why he was having trouble putting together the plan and why he asked me to come in.

His basic response was…
I just can not figure this guy out. His lack of performance is actually keeping me awake at night. He knows what needs to be done. I sit down with him on a monthly basis to set priorities and expectations. Yet he still fails to get them done. I just can not believe that he does not see the problem. I am actually scared that he does not see this coming.

So I asked…
What has his performance reviews been like? Have you told him how you felt.

The reply…
I hit him pretty hard during the last performance review. I think I wrote a novel about his ‘misses’. I gave him very concrete examples and very specific expectations for performance. This conversation should not be a surprise to him.

So isn’t this the natural progression - I asked.

Unfortunately it is. He replied.

Last question…
Do you feel that you have been true to yourself and tried everything you could to help the person? And it sounds like you have been honest with him… right?

Yes.

Then there is little choice.

Now imagine in your case, how hard it would be if you had not collected all of the data, all of the conversations, and all of the feedback… it would have been a surprise. Bottom line the person did this to himself.

Help him… but he has to have to will to get it done. This employee has not embraced knowing himself (strengths and weaknesses.)

Sad.

Knowing yourself is the first step in your personal Leadership Development.

I was invited to participate in another great day of presentations from the hourly workforce to upper management.

This time though there were some ‘outsiders’ from the plant. Actually these hourly visitors were from a sister plant. They were unable to attend the seminar at their ‘home’ plant.

I thought it was a very interesting dynamic to watch. Would they be accepted? Would they be considered outsiders? Would they participate?

It was amazing to watch.

The outsiders were embraced by the team!

They made them feel fully welcomed and actually tried to help these individuals solve their problems to. Not in a demeaning way but in a truly helpful way.

Why can hourly people see past all of the politics and get right to solving the problem at hand? Whereas management has to posture themselves as the know - it - alls for everything?

This is a lesson for everyone… rank does not matter when improvements are being discussed.

What a wonderful lesson I learned today.

So today I got to sit through several presentations made by hourly personnel to upper management. Not plant management but… Vice President of Operations and the Director of Human Resources.

Now you may ask what type of projects could these hourly personnel be working on that would require the presence of the Business Leadership Team…

Here are just a few.
Vacation Scheduling Policy (which is a corporate policy)
Mandatory Overtime (again a corporate policy)
Optimization of Process XYZ (strategic assets for the business)
Operator Based Maintenance (yes driven by a mechanic to convince operators to take ownership)
and there were a couple others.

You may wonder how this plant manager got his hourly personnel (or for that matter the corporate team to let the hourly personnel) work on this project. He told me it was easy…

He set the business need and asked them to do it.

The results… simply stated… unbelievable!

It reminds me of a training exercise where two groups of participants were asked to take a marker and jump up and mark the highest point on the wall (there was a piece of paper on the wall!)

Now after the initial round each of the groups were given 5 lb ankle weights. Each group was also given a set of instructions.

The first group’s instructions stated:
Try to get back to the same height that you jumped before. If you do it, you have made a nice improvement.

The second group’s instruction stated:
5 lbs will have little effect on your jumping ability (and p.s. the other team will not have any weights). Good Luck and I know you can beat them.

Guess who won?

Team two.

We don’t ask enough of our employees or of ourselves. Great leaders set big goals and then get out of the way so that their employees can perform.

I don’t like to use data to make decisions.

This was a surprise to many of my co-workers.

Their comments back… All I ever hear you ask for is DATA. Or what does the data show us. Or it looks like we are going against the data that is staring us in the face. How can you not be DATA driven. That is all that you ever talk about… DATA.

Well… it comes back to accountability.

I know that if I set the expectation for people to use data. And I hold them accountable for using data… they will ultimately hold me accountable for the use of data.

Now you may be thinking about how does this relate to the use of a DISC profile.

Well… my DISC profile reinforced that using DATA was not one my strengths.

So… instead of ignoring this fault… I put a process improvement plan in place to defeat it.

Use the DISC profile to ‘Tell you something about Yourself’

You may be surprised on how you can improve yourself… if you just listen.

Again, knowing thyself if the key to your Leadership Development

Short post today…

If one of the Corporate Team shows up at your site, how do you behave?

Do you act the same way that you normally do?

Or do you put on a dog and pony show for them?

And I bet at the end of the day you are very tired!

Why?

Because you have wore a mask all day and acted like someone you were not.

Pretending to be someone else is though work.

This is your ADAPTED style.

Now imagine if you (or one of your employees) has to wear a mask everyday. How long do you think you will keep them?

More about NATURAL and ADAPTED styles later.

After several months of promoting a situational leadership training series and building his business around this model (high performance work teams), one of his key leaders walked away from the program.

This person had been previously promoted to a position based upon his technical acumen and the ability to get things done. The manager felt that this employee would be perfect for the training series.

Unfortunately the manager was wrong.

So now this well respected employee just completely destroyed the credibility of the program.

Should the manager take the position away from the employee (considering their was an underlying assumption that was communicated to the employee about completing the leadership series) or does he just ignore the behavior and go with the continued results…

Value Decisions are the hardest one to make… especially when those decisions can have a short term negative impact on the business results.

As promised here is a great tool that you can use to prioritize multiple competing events.

I will explain the process first and then post an example of the spreadsheet on my google documents account for all to see.

So here are the steps…
1. Identify 2 to 7 things that you want to base your results on. For example, say you were designing a product and you wanted low cost; high quality; and quick project schedule delivery. Gosh can I ask for anything else? Your three important attributes would be

• Low Cost
• High Quality
• Quick Delivery

2. Next you need to think about how important each of them is in relation to each other on a 1 to 10 scale. Not all of them can be tens. You are kidding yourself if you think they are. One has to slightly outweigh the others. And if you do a reality check, chances are you will find that one is more than a couple points important than the other.

3. Define all of your competing projects, priorities, product designs, concepts or whatever you are basically trying to choose from.

4. Rank each of the above competing projects on the following scale:

• 1: Little or no relationship to the attribute details in item 1
• 3: Some relationship or secondary relationship to the attribute detailed in item 1
• 7: Expected relationship between concept or project and attribute detailed in item 1
• 10: Direct correlation between the attribute and the project

5. Ok here is the tricky part. You need to take the ranking in item 2 and multiply by each of the ranks in item 4 and then add them up. It is easier to see this in the spreadsheet.

Think about this tool on any item that you need to prioritize.

Believe it or not sometimes a project has more than one goal.

Sometimes they even have three Goals!

Consider this quick example… you can either have:
Something Quick, or
Something Cheap, or
Something with High Quality.

You can’t have all three.
Want it Quick? Then you better expect to pay for it!

So what do you do?

Sacrifice one and measure the other two? No, you should actually measure all three. And optimize the result.

Even if you can only maintain one of the three at the current level and improve the other two… that is a win! But you need to make sure that you at least measure all three if they are important.

Chart, compare, monitor all three.

Now, there is one assumption made during all of this… and it is probably a wrong assumption.

All three metrics are weighted equally.

Now… tune in for the next post to figure out how to weigh these goals out.

It is a pretty slick and easy tool to use.

Prioritization Matrix

During my senior year in college, each of us had to work with a team to complete an engineering project. Finally, we got to move from the books to real world applications.

I can still remember one of the design projects - Reduce the Noise pollution in the Courtyard.

Some background…
There was a nice courtyard surrounded by three walls of the engineering building. There were flowers and a couple benches in this courtyard. It was well manicured and had the ivy league look with the bricks and coloring.

The issue was that few people enjoyed the patio because the air conditioning vents which were on top of the building caused a “low frequency hum’ (sorry for getting technical!) whenever they were operational. Eventually people got irritated enough that they stopped using the courtyard.

Anyway… a design team was put forth to solve this real world problem. The Design Team used all of the great tools necessary to come up with their design. They used customer interviews, QFDs for ranking and prioritizing these inputs, etc.

They verified the customer inputs by collecting some field noise data.

They translated this information into a METRIC. The metric was to get ‘X’ frequency eliminated from the courtyard (where X is the ‘low frequency hum’)

So many countless engineering hours passed. Multiple calculations, cad drawings, customer reviews, management reviews, and further modifications until they unveiled the final result.

They built a noise dampener for X frequency… and guess what happened…

They eliminated the X frequency. High 5’s were handed out to all involved. The team was ecstatic.

They invited their customers to lunch in the courtyard the day after the dampener was installed.

And the result…

The customers were not exactly happy.

The low hum turned into a ‘medium hum’ and oh by the way it was now louder.

So… if you judged them by their self-imposed translated metric.
They were a success.
If you asked the customer… they created a worse problem.

During their final presentation, they showed how their design eliminated ‘the problem’. Once again their were high 5s at the presentation.

The judges did not buy it.

The students did not understand why.

We wonder why we have so many problems with people not hitting their goals… maybe it was because we set and/or approved the wrong (translated) goal.

Give people the right goal and they will be successful.

Next up… competing metrics… sort of like dueling banjo’s for all your Southerners.

Had a conversation with a Facility Manager the other day.

He told me he was in a hurry to get the areas cleaned up because the president of the company was coming to visit next week. I asked what was involved with this clean up method.

His reply was to paint a couple areas, remove some trash, etc. Nothing that cost too much.

He sort of explained like this…
You typically keep your house in order. But when you have the family over for the holiday dinner, you take it up a notch. That is what what we are doing here.

I next asked who would be meeting with the president. His comments were well the Staff of course.

Now here is where my challenge question…

How about letting one of your hourly workforce give the tour.

And now even the bigger item…
Don’t go on the tour.

If I was standing next to the Manager… I am sure that could have pushed him over with a feather.

Why as Managers are we so insecure with what our people are going to say?

Get over it. You may be able to fool the president the first time… but you are not going to fool him every time he comes. He is going to figure it out. So if you are trying to hide something… the only person that you are hiding anything from is yourself.

Share the glory with the hourly person. Let him boast about the great things happening in the facility.

He just may surprise you.

In addition, if you always kept this approach in the back of your mind, your approach, communication style, and direction may take a different (and better) approach.

True Story…

We had a baby sitter this summer to help out the wife with the three kids. We found the baby sitter via our church. Very nice young lady who loved our children… but still a typical teen-ager!

Anyway, about 3 weeks into the summer, the wife was starting to be disappointed with what the baby sitter was doing. Actually the problem was with what she was not doing. Specifically, my wife felt like she still had to watch after the kids.

When I would get home at night, my wife would be frustrated that she was unable to get anything done in the house during the day because she had to chase the kids around, etc.

I asked her… did you ever tell the baby sitter what you expected. Or that you were not happy with what she was doing?

My wife’s reply was ‘She is a friend of our family. We go to church with her parents. I don’t want to hurt her feelings…’

My wife is one of the most loving, caring, and sensitive people that I know. But I still had to ask the question…

So if you expect her to change and you never tell her that she needs to change…

Why would expect her to change?

Aren’t you doing the same thing in business?

You fear the hard conversation. You don’t tell employees what they do great and what their improvements need to be. You just get by that month of performance reviews, giving everyone an ‘average’ increase.

All because you are scared to hurt their feelings. Or maybe because you are scared with what they will say back… like: You did not give me measurable goals. Or the business changed… or the other business unit did worse then us and they still got a raise.

So now the employee learns that it does not matter what their performance was because they are going to get the same raise anyway.

You may even try to argue (I call it rationalizing) that your compensation system is messed up and you can’t do anything about it.

Try this…
Take your average wage increase (or target)
Multiply this average by prior year’s salary.
You will get a bucket of money.
Now go through and divide this money among your direct reports.
Yep some of them should get zero if they are not performing.
And others should be rewarded.

Use data to make your decisions and send it to corporate.

Force them to see the issue about differentiating performance. You need to recognize that it is about you. Even if you can’t differentiate the performance because of a ‘broken’ compensation system… you still owe to your employee, your business,and to yourself to give an honest appraisal of their work.

And always remember to think about how you should approach the conversation… more to come on this topic in later posts.

I was working with a couple plant production managers today talking through a project. Sure we talked about all of the financial and business strategy stuff on this project.

We talked about how to sell it to upper management so that they could get funding for the project. They knew it was right thing to do…

Then I asked… so did you ask the persons actually impacted by the project?

The operator and mechanic who are hourly personnel were the folks that I was talking about. If the President of the company came to the site today, would that hourly person be able to communicate why the project was important?

You may wonder why I think this is important… the President is never going to show up, right?

There are a couple reasons. First… respect.

Think outside of work for a minute. Think about sitting in church or sitting at wedding reception. Now here is the question… as you are chit chatting about various things, asking for opinions, etc. Do you ever consider that the person you may be talking to is a CEO or maybe an hourly person at a plant.

I bet you can recall a time when you had some open and honest communication with someone outside of work and you felt great after the conversation. You felt that you learned something and maybe you even shared something with that person.

So why does it have to be any different at work?

Second point… it is actually about learning something.
My late Uncle told me the day that I graduated from college thinking about my first job as an engineer… his wise words…
You don’t know crap.
You won’t know crap for ten years.
And you better find a good plant maintenance person so you can actually learn something.

My Uncle was a long time Plant Manager of an Aluminum Plant… and yes it had a union.

Go figure…

Communicate with people to get different points of view, so that you really can make the best decision… and get the real support to make the project ultimately work. Knowing who to ask and being able to process the data is part of becoming a leader.

Try this test…

Instead of replying to the e-mail that you just got and responding with 25 paragraphs of text and extending the email trail…

Pick up the phone and call the sender back.

It would take two minutes… plus the sender will actually get more from the message because he will understand the tone of your message versus having to guess from the email.

People have different ’styles’ of communication. Some people keep things in and others blurt out the first thing that comes to their mind.

Do you think one of these styles is wrong…. or is one of these better than the other?

Or how about this situation…

How much information do you need prior to making a decision? Do you already know the answer to the question prior to person even finishing their question. Or are you the type of person that needs stacks of data, plus some more…

Again, which is right and which is wrong.

Well… it depends on the situation.

If you are at a party and want to be the star of the show and bunches of fun… say the first thing that comes to your mind. Whereas, when you are in the board room… obviously you should weigh every word very carefully.

I used these extreme examples to illustrate a point.

If it makes sense to change your communication style depending upon these extreme situations, why don’t when you are discussing items with people one on one.

For example, the gal that always talks about numbers, facts, figures, and data in general is probably not real interested in the human side of the story. If you try to hold a conversation with her about the impact that it will have on people… then you might as well talk to the wall because he is not hearing you.

Or what about the other guy that always has the good story to tell about his family, his crazy uncle, or what he did last night. If you try to approach this person and just start talking about work… you have lost him too.

You need to understand your style.

How do you approach people? Do you command a presence? Do you ask a lot of questions?

Let me give you this real life example…

I was working with a facility manager of small company trying to help setup his organization. This person had previously succeeded at another facility because he knew the manufacturing process inside and out. You could not tell him on anything! He was a task master who drove the heck out of people. You could not get anything technical past him.

I still remember the first day that he took over the facility. He told me ‘Michael, I figure in 3 months… I should have this place completely turned around and printing money.’

Now, what was interesting was the plant had made some significant gains over the last 18 months but the business still demanded more. Next interesting point was this new manager did not know anything about the process.

After the first week… yes the first week of being there he decided to make a change in personnel. He wanted to shake things up a bit. So he went to the Manufacturing Manager, who was a very technical and quiet guy to have a discussion.

This Manufacturing Manager had (internal) passion for his job and done some great things at the facility. But he would hardly ever voice his concerns immediately. Basically, he was a non-confrontational type of person.

So, here is what happened. Facility Manager tells Production Manager that he wanted him to become the Lead Engineer for the plant. As the Lead Engineer he would continue to make process improvements for the business and help the team win.

After this communication, I asked the Facility Manager how it went.

The Facility Manager said it was great. He further commented that it was a good move for the employee because he just did not have the guts for the Manufacturing Manager position. I can still remember this line… ‘I need someone that will drive these guys to perform’

I asked… ‘A 48% productivity improvement in 18 months wasn’t sufficient evidence of this?’

He was dumbfounded. He wasn’t sure why I would ask such a question. Then just to put him over the top I asked… ‘So how did you know it went well with the employee’

His reply ‘Well, he smiled, shook my hand, and said thank you for the conversation.’

Finally… I had to ask ‘So if he is truly non-confrontational like you say - why would you expect him to say anything else but to take it. You have lost this employee forever. You might as well give him a package’

Less than one year later the Lead Engineer left for another job. I bet he started looking the day after that conversation.

Know thyself… and know how to communicate will help you improve your Leadership

From the times of the ancient Greeks to the more present day movie ‘The Matrix’

Know Thyself

is one of the first steps to becoming a great leader of people. Philosophers and Oracles have commented that is the only way to become ‘The One’. Ok let’s move on NEO…

You need to fully investigate yourself. You need to understand your strengths and more importantly your weaknesses. Yes, you have them. You are guarding your weaknesses like the crown jewel. You pretend that you can do everything. Face it you can’t. You will ultimately fail because you will get in over your head because you have convinced yourself you are rock star.

So back to knowing yourself…

The very first problem you are going to have is no one is going to be honest with you… especially your direct reports. They don’t trust you. They are going to think that you are setting them up for something.

So who can you ask… not your mother, not your spouse, heck not even your kids on bad days. You need to ask yourself the following types of questions.

• How do I act when a failure occurs in your project, your team’s project, etc…
• How do I act when someone just stole my idea?
• Or another classic… how do I act when your boss tells you to do something when you know its wrong.

Take 5 minutes right now and list your reaction to these things. Think about when you are really tired or aggravated… when you can’t put your smiley face on anymore. That’s you.

Are you really being honest with yourself? Can you handle the truth from an anonymous 360 review. Probably not. You are not ready to…

The great thing about the internet is you can be anonymous and start listing those weaknesses so that you can get them out in the open. That’s half the battle.

Once you see them written down… you can put a Leadership Development action plan together to fix them. I promise we will start slow with the tools.

Take 5 minutes… and complete the exercise. Heck, you can even use the comment section below if you don’t have paper and pen.