Tag: leadership

My agency is experiencing new senior leadership due to the recent election, and I sense concern among existing management that our existing plans will not be followed by the new senior leadership. How can we better prepare for senior leadership planning changes without negatively disrupting our existing plans and momentum?

–Anonymous

Changing leadership at the top of any organization, especially at a government agency, can pose great challenges for ongoing initiatives and organizational change efforts that are underway. A new leader, even if appointed by the same president that appointed the prior one, may see things differently from their predecessor. The president’s agenda or priorities may have changed. The political landscape may have shifted requiring a different direction. The new leader’s preferences and personal objectives may be very different from the prior leader’s agenda.

For managers as well as the America people, such shifts in focus can be costly if not disastrous. Not liking what they see, a new leader might shift course and stop or cancel initiatives and projects already underway. To be clear, ending some of these activities might be the right thing to do if the leader’s expectation is that they will not deliver the promised value. Yet for other initiatives and projects—those that are likely to deliver enough value—terminating these activities can create a kind of scorched earth. Months and years of work can disappear into smoke and ashes. The investments—sometimes totaling tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars—sunk into planting and growing a new forest of capabilities are burned through with no return. And, organizational morale can collapse like a charred log into a pile of embers too hot to approach but nonetheless smoldering, waiting to start a blaze if fresh fuel is added from above.

How can your management avoid such negative consequences? How can you make a case for sustaining momentum while simultaneously building trust and understanding so that the leader comes to rely on you and your management team?

All too often managers try to sell a solution (i.e., the initiatives and projects underway) by dressing them up to look like what they think the new leader might want. Maybe this kind of selling can work; but, I suspect that it doesn’t work very often. New leaders can see through smoke screens or, at least, are suspicious of them. If so, the leader evaluates the solutions based on how they perceive value and what problem they infer management is solving. The net result is that management’s pitch easily can strike out.

In baseball as with engaging any new leader, I can’t guarantee that you will get a homerun, let alone a hit, every time. Nonetheless, five steps may increase the likelihood that you can get on base and keep your initiatives and projects moving ahead.

1. Share all related symptoms: Start by sharing with the new leader all of the symptoms and indicators that launched the issue in the first place. Without understanding the original symptoms and indicators of pain, it will be difficult for any leader, especially a new one, to understand the problem being solved or to assess the value a solution can create.
2. Comprehensively formulate the challenge: Help your new leader understand how the challenge was formulated. What are all the root causes and how are these causes generating the observed symptoms and indicators? Without understanding all of the root causes it becomes easy to adopt a simplistic view of the challenge and an incomplete understanding of what needs to be done.
3. Assess the value created if a solution can be found: Work with your new leader to assess the value that can be created if a feasible solution can be found. Doing so provides a basis for assessing not only the value of each solution but also which one offers a better approach. Without first establishing how much value can be created, every solution looks expensive.
4. Compare solution approaches: Wise leaders always compare the best alternatives they can develop before making a decision. By sharing with your new leader the alternatives considered and how they stack up against the root causes and their respective costs, the leader will come to appreciate why you chose a particular solution approach.
5. Outline implementation details: Finally, share the implementation details for the chosen solution approach. Not only describe how you will achieve the promised upside value but also please pay special attention to explain how you have taken steps to mitigate the downside possibilities.

Building trust and creating understanding with a new leader is not easy. Using these five steps creates an additional challenge because communicating them takes time and represents an unfamiliar sequence—new leaders may ask “tell me what you are doing, not what problems you are solving.” That said, if a new leader understands the challenge and the value that can be created then they will have the best available information and knowledge with which to make an informed decision about the solution implementation underway. With a new communication approach and little luck, you may be able to increase your batting average on maintaining existing plans and momentum.

Duce a mente (May you lead by thinking),

Jackson Nickerson

July marks the end of the first year of BEE’s Coach Development Program (CDP) with a dozen leaders preparing for certification by the International Coach Federation. Participants say it has been a transformative experience, developing new skills as coaches as well as increasing their personal leadership capability.

Sequestration and budget cuts mandate that agencies find ways to grow their leaders internally and the CDP allows them to do just that. With minimal investment, agencies can develop a cadre of leadership coaches that can eliminate the high cost of external coaches. The efficacy of this approach is borne out by an agency that has asked us to create a customized CDP for them.

Coaches Mwelwa and Johnston

The Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology finds that when cost is a major consideration, internal coaching can be an appealing option for executive development.

Studies have found that external executive coaches can cost an organization anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000 per person, thereby limiting the number of people who can benefit from coaching.

In addition, internal coaches understand the culture and know how to navigate their way through complex organizational systems. Internal coaches are able to provide more real-time feedback and understand the contextual factors affecting the behavior of individuals and teams.

Leaders-as-coaches play an instrumental role in organizational robustness as well as pipeline development. Research shows that engaging in compassionate coaching also helps sustain the leader’s personal effectiveness. Researchers at Case Western have found that coaching by leaders has a psycho-physiological effect that restores the body’s natural healing and shifts one’s mood.

Their findings suggest that leaders who employ coaching as a key part of their leadership role are able to sustain themselves by balancing the efforts of chronic stress with the ameliorative effects of coaching others.

In essence, developing leaders-as-coaches has a direct relationship on leader effectiveness (Boyatzis, Smith and Blaize, Developing Sustainable Leaders through coaching and Compassion, Academy of Management Learning & Education, 5(1), 2006: (8–24).

Read more about the Benefits of Internal Coaching »

Photo credit: Library of Congress, Washington Varsity on the Hudson River, 1914

Prof. Jackson Nickerson answers management questions in a column published by Government Executive magazine. Here’s his latest response to a recent query about budget cuts.

Q: The budget cuts for all federal departments seem to be certain to happen. During the mid-90s, federal employees’ morale was adversely affected by the way we imposed the cuts. In our attempts to preserve workforce morale, what would be the worst way to implement these cuts and what would be the ideal way to implement these looming cuts?    -Anonymous

A: Let there be no doubt that shrinking an organization is far more difficult and painful than building and growing one. Indeed, workforce cuts will always be painful for workers, leaders, and organizations. The important question is how to impose the least pain at the lowest cost for all involved.

Let’s focus on two competing approaches (although there is a spectrum of approaches) to personnel reduction: gradual and deep.

Gradual Reductions, which some in the government refer to as “slicing salami,” typically are accomplished through retirements in conjunction with pay and hiring freezes that can last many years. Congressional and agency leaders usually adopt a salami approach with the idea of minimizing employee and leadership pain by retaining as many employees as possible, reducing the need for major reorganization, and minimizing the loss of employee motivation.

The downside of gradual reductions is that they send the wrong kind of economic and career signals to workers: don’t expect rewards or advancement for many years to come even if you work hard. If your workers come to expect that they have no pay and promotion opportunities, they are more likely to engage in four behaviors that undermine worker happiness, leadership effectiveness, and organizational culture. These behaviors can drastically erode organizational performance for years to come. The behaviors are:

1. Your better and more productive workers with economic and career aspirations will leave the organization, significantly reducing workforce productivity.
2. With expectations that hard work won’t translate into pay and promotion (and social, emotional, and ideological motivators are insufficient to compensate—see EIG January 25, 2013) and an ongoing fear of future forced departure, workers are more likely to not work hard, not take risks, and keep their heads low to avoid being targeted.
3. Workers always engage in social comparisons. In growing organizations, comparisons stimulate hard work and investments in improving their capabilities. In gradually shrinking organization, social comparisons create a special kind of invidious anger where workers “blame management” for causing perceived inequities. Workers engage in politicking that seeks to punish managers for creating inequities and level workers so that none get ahead. These behaviors poison relationships, collaboration, and organizational culture and are disastrous for organizational performance.
4. If a peer group member is promoted, social comparisons generate another kind of divisive behavior. Knowing that promotions are rare, peers often believe they were unfairly passed over and sabotage the promoted worker even if the individual is a friend. Hiring from the outside can eliminate sabotage but also eliminates expectations of career advancement, which further diminishes motivation.

For the reasons above, gradual reductions create a kind of long and aching pain for workers, leaders, and the organization. It imposes pain on workers by making them unhappy, unmotivated, and unproductive for the entire episode and beyond. Those who retire early can be unhappy with their premature departure and so too can those who left to seek employment elsewhere. Leaders face their own challenge in such an environment as motivation can become practically impossible. The net result is a downward spiral of organizational performance.

A Deep Reduction involves a one-time cut in the number of personnel with the purpose of reducing manpower far more than is immediately needed. Such a decline also is associated with substantial organizational restructuring and, therefore, is like a brief but sharp pain. A deep cut (and adopting a promote-from-within policy) is designed as a one-time event so that workers can expect that they will have pay and promotion possibilities in response to hard work and investing in their capabilities.

A deep cut obviously is personally costly to those forced to leave the organization. Leaders often attempt to partially offset these costs by offering job placement and training services, which can be effective especially in a growing economy. Although it is difficult for someone losing their job to understand, a new job with potential for increasing pay and promotion—not available in a slowly shrinking organization—has the potential of offer economic, emotional, and social rewards that may somewhat compensate for the pain of forced departure. Importantly, those who remain in the organization frequently face the costs of survivor’s guilt. But, a recent Excellence in Government article provides ideas for lowering these costs.

With respect to leaders, a deep cut imposes substantial costs because of pain experienced by forcing departures and the cost of massive reorganizing with fewer workers. But on the plus side, a deep cut can keep the workers from adopting the four disastrous behaviors. If workers expect pay and promotion in response to hard work then they will eventually respond accordingly, which will help retain and attract a highly capable and motivated workforce, which are important inputs for a productive organization.

In summary, the fundamental trade-off for reducing employment is between a brief sharp pain of a deep reduction and a long aching pain of gradual reductions. History shows that a long aching pain corresponds to the enduring loss of talent and motivation, destructive behaviors, and falling organizational performance. Although it may at first seem counterintuitive, a full weighing of the costs and benefits suggests that the sharp brief pain of a deep reduction may impose the least pain at the lowest cost for workers, leaders, and the organization and the approach may better maintain and support one of the greatest public service workforces in the world.

Duce a mente (may you lead by thinking).

Photo credit: Tax Credits on Flickr

Policy and leadership were smoothly woven together in the Brookings Executive Education (BEE) course Politics and Policymaking. This open enrollment program is one of the required courses for the MS-Leadership.

Combining academic expertise and illustrious experience from Capitol Hill, this course brought to life the intersection of these two essential learning elements. Lynn Ross, PhD, of Georgetown Public Policy Institute introduced the class to the policy process via the policy windows framework. This model provides participants with the means to actively engage in the process as policy entrepreneurs.

Dennis Hastert, former Speaker of the United States House of Representatives

Steven Smith, professor of political science, and director of the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy at Washington University in St. Louis, discussed real world examples of rational choice theory and spatial theory.This additional analysis provides participants with a tool to assess the likelihood of policy change.

Closing the program was former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Dennis Hastert. Speaker Hastert emphasized the way to learn is to jump in and do it.  Nothing can duplicate personal experience. He additionally advised that knowledge is the greatest power an individual can acquire and the key to being effective is to stay savvy on key issues. In essence, Hastert said, “knowledge is power”.

Capitol dome photo by: SMSGT Munnaf Joarder, U.S. Army familymwr

 We are keenly aware that investing in executive development during a time of dramatic budget cuts, furloughs, and hiring and pay freezes might seem paradoxical. Yet the only real solution to doing more with less is to develop new ways of thinking and adopt new tools for leading.

Brookings Executive Education’s (BEE) new paradigm for executive success—Leading Thinking™—provides the mind-set and frameworks to lead organizations in this challenging environment.

The Brookings Executive Education 2013-2014 course catalog is now available. BEE is managed by Olin Business School in partnership with the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C.

New Courses at Brookings Executive Education:

Leading Through Influence
In this new, interactive course, learn how to influence people both within and outside the chain of command. Develop key skills of informal leadership: navigating politics, understanding power, and exercising influence.

Insider’s Budgetary Process
This in-depth course on the federal budget process examines the methods that go into formulating both the president’s budget and the congressional budget and, ultimately, authorization and appropriations.

Flexibility and Decisiveness
In this new class, you will learn how to adapt and work effectively within dynamic change, to see possibilities that lead to breakthrough concepts, and to employ models of decision making appropriate to the situation at hand.

Regional Challenges, Threats and Opportunities: South and Central America
Latin America presents opportunities for government and businesses alike. It is a region with countries that are creating new identities and establishing strategic alliances with partners around the globe. In this new seminar, you will learn about the economic and political changes that represent threats and opportunities for the region’s northern neighbor.

View all BEE 2013/14 courses at-a-glance