Working in virtual environments

Although I am a supporter of virtual working environments it is undeniable that working close to other managers has its benefits. I just read a post called "4 ways leaders can stay on top of the issues" from John Baldoni, heard from a company that was regrouping some of their senior managers into the same location, reviewing my post from yesterday "Going to the spot..."..., and was thinking about the proximity vs virtuality issue.

Everyday there are more companies that are sponsoring home-work, cutting travelling budgets, taking full advantage of Instant Messengers, VOIP and installing virtual meeting rooms with huge screens and cameras for videoconferencing.

The post from John Baldini starts pointing out that many managers don't leave their offices frequently enough which doesn't allow them to really understand what is going on with their companies. He suggest 4 ways leaders can stay on top of the issues:

Study up: this relates to the managers ability of going through the huge amount of information and being able to choose, select and frame it in a way it allows to understand the issues and root causes, ask good questions and make decisions.

Listen up: listen to employees, customers, stakeholders. Ask them the right questions and make them feel safe to make suggestions and recommendations. Very often managers don't ask the right people or just mishear what employees think or have to say.

Inspect up: this would be like going to the spot. Go and see by yourself what is happening and what the problem is.

Follow up: hold people accountable for the decisions and agreements everyone made and followup on it. If you don't you will loose the momentum, people will loose their focus and you won't be able to provide feedback as you move along the project.

Being close to employees, stakeholders or customers is clearly much easier if you need to go through these 4 ways, but can you be as effective being close as virtual?

It's probably the same except for "Inspect up" which may require travelling, but in any case it's also only a matter of distance. If you work at Headquarters and have a problem in a manufacturing plant, you may be able to go see it for yourself if you are some miles away, or may not if you are in a different country.

It may be a question of having the right local people and hold regular effective face 2 face business reviews with them to compensate with this.

My only additional recommendations is that, to succeed through a virtual environment, you ensure you develop a human relationship with your peers, employees, customers or stakeholders, as close as you can as you would do if you were very close and face 2 face. I'll write a post soon on how to start a job in a virtual environment

What are your thoughts?

Going to the spot - Genchi genbutsu

One lesson I've learned and has been very useful in the past is: if you have a big problem, go to the spot or place where you have the trouble and understand it by yourself through first-hand observation.

Managers often underestimate the power of it. This doesn´t mean that you shouldn't empower your teams to solve the problems by themselves, but if you need to know what is going on, take the time to go the spot with your team and review the gap analysis and action plans with them right there.

I just learned that this is a typical Toyota practice part of the Toyota Manufacturing System (TMS) called genchi genbutsu.

Feedback: Communication

Meeting deadlines is important, but most important is to be able to anticipate delays in any project. If for whatever reason some employee is requested to deliver a report with a given deadline, 2 things may happen: 1) he delivers it on time, 2) he doesn't

The problem is not that he didn't deliver the report on time. The problem is that he creates uncertainty about any future deadline if he consistently fails. Failing to deliver a report on time may be due to several reasons. If that person is truely a good performer the problem may be that he accepts workload and deadlines that he cannot possibly accomplish. It's much better to develop a culture of honesty where bosses request deadlines that are compelling but achievable and employees are honest about what they can do and cannot. In the worst case, if there is open communication between both of them, they will work out any difficulties to accomplish their objectives.

I haven't seen this type of honest communication very often and this terribly hurts companies. Employees and bosses not only get frustrated, but it also impacts trust, which is key to deliver good results.

My recommendation: promote honest communication. If you are a boss, always try to figure out if your requests are realistic and open communication channels with your employees. Promote trust. If you are the employees, provide honest feedback to your boss is the deadlines are not realistic and avoid surprises and uncertainty.

Elevator Speeches about yourself

There is a short but interesting blog posting from Daisy Wademan Dowling titled How to Perfect an Elevator Pitch About Yourself. She provides 5 simple recommendations to perfect your speech:

1. Practice, Practice, Practice
2. Focus on impact
3. Focus on "I" instead of "we", empahisizing your own individual contribution
4. Be slow and steady
5. See the whole world as an elevator and give your speech to everyone

Does anyone know of elevator speeches that may be good examples?

Wrong analysis when thinking of insourcing vs outsourcing

It is interesting how many companies make wrong decision when evaluating insourcing vs outsourcing options. Let me provide one example that may be typical.

Let’s assume I have a factory in the US and an affiliate in any other country that manufactures the same product as I do, but is also vertically integrated into one component and manufactures it in-house. When the US affiliate has to decide if they want to buy that component from an external supplier or from the affiliate they compare the final landed cost for that product.

A simplified analysis would look like this:

Here, the obvious decision is to buy from the external source, but this lies under a wrong assumption as the in-house analysis doesn’t consider incremental costs. Variable costs are not always really variable. If the in-house factory is running with free capacity then adding this new volume to the factory may, for example, not necessary require additional Headcount.

If we assume that this new volume won’t require additional headcount, a different analysis based on incremental costs would look like this:

The theory of constraint (see The Goal by Goldratt) recommends assigning the whole cost to the constraint. If some element in your process or system is not a constraint, then the cost for it is equal to cero.

Don't implement solutions, prevent problems

Alan Webber wrote a book called Rules of Thumb, which is a collection of 52 life lessons. In a recent article he reviewed 3 rules from that book that he thought are especially interesting at these times.

 

I liked rule #4 very much: Don't implement solutions, prevent problems

 

This statements leads to some very interesting thoughts. First, of course it would be much better if managers were able to anticipate issues and prevent problems instead of firefighting. But on the other hand we also tend to praise and admire those managers that were able to go through tough times solving huge problems. We even like to ask questions during interviews trying to find out how the manager we are interviewing was able to solve difficult problems under tough circumstances. How do you evaluate the ability of someone to avoid problems by anticipating them?

 

Surely, the business results from a manager capable of preventing problems will be much better than one who is not, but how do you know if the result were good because of the "preventing problems" capability or anything else?

 

Maybe this is why we don't have the type of managers we really need and have more managers that implement solutions, instead of managers that prevent problems.

 

What are your thoughts about this?

Managers vs Entrepreneurs

I was just reading an article from HBR by Bill Taylor which refered to a paper published 25 years ago by Peter Dickson and Joseph Giglierano. They argued that Executives and Entrepreneurs face two very different sort of risks.

Executives fear to make wrong moves that will lead them to failure, which they call "sinking the boat", while Entrepreneurs are afraid of missing to opportunity to make a decision that would have led to success. They call this the risk of "missing the boat."

The author of the article contempts that of course people are more afraid of "sinking a boat" rather than "missing a boat", which is the reason why companies are very conservative during crisis.

But on the other hand when there is a crisis, there is also an opportunity

Read the original blog post here

Career Management: PIE Model

Some years ago a former boss showed me a model related to Career Management that I found very interesting. The model is called PIE and the acronym stands for:

P: Performance
I: Image
E: Exposure

Most people believe that to be able to progress in a professional career, performance is the only important thing you have to master. Unfortunally this is wrong. Performance is very important, and of course it is usually very difficult to progress if the results you achieve are not good, unless you work for a company where meritocracy is not valued.

Your image is not only build on performance. It also builds on how you communicate, on how you help developing others or even the way you achieve the good performance. It is how the others (and not only your boss) sees you. It is your personal brand. It's like when you have a product that performs very good, but has a poor brand.

Exposure is the third important element and the one you should be looking for when your Performance and Image are good. Getting exposure is creationg the opportunities for others to know you, your performance and your image. Don't take for granted that your Directors and Vice-Presidents know who you are. Sometimes they may know, but not enough to fully take advantage of your already well established performance and image. You may have a good product and image among your current "customers". Now you need the opportunity to show yourself to those prospect "customers" that will make the difference for you.

I recommend you to think about yourself and where you stand in PIE. Where are your gaps? Is it your performance? your image? your exposure? Think about it, assess your strenghts and weaknessess and develop your personal action plans that will help you with your career.

Recommended Articles: About sleeping...

I recently read a very interesting article by Anne Field which briefly explained why sleeping is so important and I thought it would be useful to share. Many hard-working managers are very proud of their own ability to sleep only 5-6 hours, but this will really only affect their personal and company's performance.

 

http://feeds.harvardbusiness.org/~r/harvardbusiness/hmu/~3/lB3EUxNCMys/why-sleep-is-so-important.php

 

 

Let's start with Leadership...

Leadership is a very complex term. When looking at scholars and journals you will find hundreds of possible definitions, many experts trying to identify the characterstics of leaders and infinite discussions about it.

Leadership is really complex and I don't expect to be able to unfold the mysteries of this concept what I will give you one tip that will help you excercise leadership, at least in one possible but also frequent situation.

Who is the leader when you are in a business meeting? This is simple. The leader is the one who's got the marker or chalk, because he "owns" the blackboard. Owning the blackboard means a lot. He doesn't only decides what to write down, but also everyone will see him as the one who makes that decisions. He is the center of the attention.

If he is good, he'll promote rich, valuable and diverse discussions and the team will accomplish their goals for that meeting. But in any case, he'll be seen as the leader for that meeting.

So next time, if you want to be seen as the leader in a business meeting. Just grab the chalk and own the blackboard!!!