Tag: leadership

Q: How can I get other people to implement my ideas? —Anonymous

Good ideas aren’t a rare commodity. They come up all the time, often in response to a problem, challenge or opportunity. If implementing your idea falls entirely within your realm of authority, then it may require some sweat equity and other resources, but otherwise execution shouldn’t be too difficult. If you come up with a new way to manage the processing of forms, for example, and you are the only one involved in that task, then implementing your idea should present few barriers.

But for most ideas, implementation requires other people. Superordinates, subordinates, customers and complementors all may be needed. Some, if not many, of these individuals may resist execution for a variety of reasons. It may not be in their best interest, or they think they have better ideas, or they don’t want to put in the extra effort. Resistance to change is particularly vexing when you don’t have authority over these resistors. So, how can you get other people to implement your ideas?

Here are four approaches:

Convincing

Perhaps the most common approach, convincing draws on psychological techniques like listing more ideas than necessary and conceding on the ones that don’t matter, using “we” and avoiding “I” in your proposals, providing an explanation with research and statistics to support your ideas, and pointing out the need for change from various perspectives. These techniques attempt to convince people while trying to avoid raising their ire.

Even if you are viewed as trustworthy, trying to convince those who believe your idea is not in their best interest or who don’t want to take on more work can meet resistance.

Socializing

Instead of just convincing others, you can socialize the idea as a means to get them to contribute their own thoughts on how to advance and improve it. The hope is that the opportunity to contribute will lead to acceptance.

But socializing can take a long time, during which resistors can enact their own strategies to delay or prevent implementation. Often, decisions don’t get made because each modification to the proposal leads to round after round of conferring.

Critical thinking

The phrase “critical thinking” has many definitions. At Brookings Executive Education, we focus our critical thinking curriculum on developing processes to formulate challenges. While proposing solutions and trying to convince people can lead to political reactions and resistance, sharing a comprehensively formulated problem creates a different pathway. Assessing value and for whom becomes easier and more transparent. Any idea, not just yours, can be evaluated against the formulation and potential value. It allows others to assess whether an idea fully tackles the challenge and generates enough return on investment.

Using critical thinking skills can help you solve the right problem the first time, but it has some challenges. You still may need to convince and socialize; although if done well, these steps might be much easier than otherwise. Perhaps more challenging is investing in critical thinking processes in the first place, which require training and practice.

Team Formulating

Instead of tackling the problem by yourself, a more productive way may be to engage a team. By involving those likely to be affected by a future solution and asking them to help formulate the challenge, the team will jointly own the problem. Team members also can co-create the solution, which reinforces their ownership. Such ownership typically leads to rapid implementation as long as you help move barriers out of the way.

Formulating with a team takes both time and technique. The time investment upfront to co-create the formulation will seem unusual to most people used to leaping to a solution and, as a consequence, suffering the challenges of implementation. But that investment can pay dividends by dramatically reducing the time needed for implementation. The technique aspect refers to the processes and facilitation needed to guide the team. Few people are trained in such techniques, so adopting this paradigm may not be easy.

With these approaches in mind, you might be starting off with the wrong question. Instead of trying to convince and socialize to get your ideas implemented, work with others to think critically and formulate the challenge in a comprehensive way. Such an approach may require some training, but people are more willing to implement ideas when they co-create and own them than when the ideas are seen as belonging to you.

Duce a mente 

(May you lead by thinking)

Bonuses in government are in the news, again. The House recently voted to eliminate performance bonuses at the Veterans Affairs Department in response to the scandal regarding patient wait lists that ultimately led to the resignation of Secretary Eric Shinseki. Two reports—one by the VA’s inspector general and another by the VA secretary—suggest that employees may have manipulated wait times in order to meet employee performance goals needed for bonuses.

While some have pointed to poor leadership and a corrupt culture as explanations for this behavior, I would like to explore another potential cause: the role of performance bonuses in government. Bonuses are common enough in for-profit businesses to suggest that they play an important role in providing useful incentives for shaping worker behavior. But are bonuses for achieving performance targets an appropriate way to provide incentives in government?

To explore this issue, let’s turn to economics. A tenet of economics is that people will strive to achieve performance targets in response to incentives, which is the foundation of the principal-agent theory. In the theory’s simplest form, a “principal” (in this case, Congress or senior leadership) sets an objective, offers a reward for achieving the objective, measures whether the objective is met, and provides a payment if ”agents” achieve the objective.

This common-sense idea depends on a number of critical assumptions. Let’s work through these assumptions to see if they hold in a government context. The simplest version of the theory assumes that:

• The principal specifies objectives that can be achieved.
• The principal measures efforts or outcomes accurately and precisely.
• The principal pays out the bonus if earned.
• The agents choose to put in effort only for the purpose of achieving the objectives.

If these assumptions hold, then both the principal and the agent are better off: the principal gets the desired performance outcome by encouraging the agent to work harder than might otherwise happen if only a salary is paid, and the agent makes more money than might otherwise be the case. On first blush, using bonuses seems like a good idea.

Yet in many instances, especially in government, these assumptions do not hold.

First, the political process makes it difficult to specify an appropriate set of objectives. Not only must Congress figure out what objectives in fact are achievable, it must specify all the objectives to be achieved. Achievable objectives require either detailed knowledge of the job and person’s ability, or a way to experiment and actively adjust the incentive as they learn what is achievable. Congressional leaders, even with best intentions and the best staff, rarely can access enough knowledge to figure out appropriate and achievable objectives.

More importantly, most jobs have many objectives, and specifying all of them (think about all the specific objectives needed for a business to make a profit) waters down the impact of any single incentive so that it becomes meaningless. Instead, if incentives are provided for some objectives and not others then the former will be achieved whereas the latter likely will languish for lack of a reward.

Or as anyone who has worked in sales knows, workers quickly learn how to game the incentive system to their advantage, which requires the principal to keep changing the incentive structure in futile attempts to get the desired behavior. With the time it takes to respond to such needs, Congress can never keep up with such gaming.

Second, to pay out bonuses, objectives must be measured. All too often some objectives are easy to measure while others are difficult. For instance, measuring profit or stock price is relatively easy but measuring ethical behavior is difficult.

Incentives encourage agents to focus on what is easily measured and put less effort into the objectives that are more difficult to measure. Indeed, large bonuses lead to accomplishing easy-to-measure objectives whereas difficult-to-measure objectives will fall by the wayside as workers shift their attention from one (like behaving ethically) to the other (like earning the bonus).

Measuring the objectives for government jobs, especially for senior leaders, is inherently difficult. Unlike businesses, aggregate measures like profit and stock price are not available in the government. Without simple aggregate measures, objectives promulgate, increasing both the number of measures and their variance.

Third, can the government promise bonuses and then follow through? Sometimes yes, and as we have learned through the experience of shutdowns and congressional votes, sometimes no. In the private sector, employees can take contracts to the courts to resolve disputes. Government employees don’t have access to the same means for resolving such disputes. Without expectations of payment, no additional effort will be forthcoming.

Fourth, agents have more choices than working hard to achieve their goals. If they can earn more by gaming the incentive system, then some will. If it is easier to cheat with a low likelihood of getting caught and punished, then some might. If agents come to expect that they have a “right” to a bonus because they receive the bonus all the time and the principal makes it practically impossible to achieve it or takes it away, then jealously can be sparked.

Jealously is among the most dangerous of emotions and is associated with anger, rage and feeling threatened. These emotions can cause agents to take extreme actions, even justify unethical behavior in the name of righteousness, if they believe a right or possession has been taken away or they are being treated unjustly.

Blaming leadership and culture for bad behavior may not be wrong, but it may not tell the whole story. Government is different from business and even from not-for-profit organizations. Borrowing best practices from one domain—like bonuses in business—and grafting them onto another—like bonuses in government—can have problematic and deeply troubling consequences.

Government leaders need to understand these differences and guard against adopting “best practices” from business when doing so can harm lives, reputations and the value that we as citizens rely on from our government. Performance bonuses for government employees are one of those so-called best practices that are bad for government.

Duce a mente
(May you lead by thinking)

Q: I am trying to figure out how to address accountability in my office. In the Culture Climate Survey, staff identified accountability of leadership as an issue. In the past, leaders either avoided problems or tried to address them after they became far too serious. This is a very sensitive issue because when leaders are held accountable, it is often done in private. Every now and then, often when it is too late, a leader is transferred to another office or agency. How do we assure our staff that their leaders are being held accountable beyond posting office values on the walls and without exposing the details of what’s being done?—Anonymous

Thank you for emailing me your question! Accountability is in the news for many reasons. From low scores in the Climate Culture Survey to the resignation of Veterans Affairs Department Secretary Eric Shinseki, accountability is a hot topic in Washington. In this age of austerity, “accountability” (or the lack thereof) is the word most commonly used when something has gone poorly.

Organizationally, troops on the front line commonly are held accountable, often in a way in which their colleagues know about it. But are leaders held accountable? Sometimes actions like the resignation of Shinseki are high profile and easily observed. But in other instances, measures taken in the name of accountability are behind closed doors or not seen by the troops. How can the troops know that leaders are being held accountable instead of being let off the hook?

Accountability has two components. One involves blame. When something goes wrong, the public, politicians, leaders and managers want to hold someone accountable by punishing the guilty. In other words, accountability occurs after the fact.

The other component of accountability involves responsibility, leadership and engagement. It is an attitude that people adopt because they believe what they do creates value for others, and therefore they take responsibility for organizational outcomes. They perceive that leaders support their efforts by helping them remove barriers impeding the mission. People also perceive that they have reasonable influence over the evaluation of their work and that the rewards and consequences are fair. In such an environment people choose to be accountable.

If accountability, especially for senior management, is viewed as an issue in your office then what can you do improve it?  Here are four suggestions:

1. Formulate the real problem. I suspect accountability concerns represent an indicator or symptom of a bigger issue or set of issues. Calls for accountability are like canaries in a coal mine. They are indicators of a pervasive problem, such as lousy leadership, a corrupt culture or organizational pathologies. It would be quite rare for an organization to score highly on all dimensions of the Culture Climate Survey except for accountability.  From your question, it sounds like you may have stepped into a role that involved some leadership problems in the past and you are trying to turn the workforce’s expectations around. Dig into the organization’s history so you understand the path it took to arrive at its current state.

2. Demonstrate your credible commitment to a leadership approach that differs from the past. A credible commitment is one in which you put something valuable, like your reputation, on the line. If you want people to engage and accept personal responsibility then you must do the same in a public way. You must take responsibility for what your team has done poorly or a project that has not gone well. When you take full responsibility, you can then investigate why things happened and work with your team to take steps to make sure the situation does not happen again. Of course, if good things have happened you want to celebrate the team and give employees full credit to demonstrate how you are supporting them.

3. Set clear expectations for individuals and the organization. If expectations are understood across the organization, then it becomes easier for people to be accountable. Such broad understanding puts their reputation at stake. All too often, leaders incorrectly assume people know what they should be doing. Even if people know what they should be doing, changing demands, short-term pressures and firefighting can cause individuals and groups to quickly lose focus and drift. Set expectations and keep everyone focused.

4. If employees consistently fail to deliver and accept accountability, help them find a situation in which they can commit. That may mean changing responsibilities in their current job, and other times it may mean helping them seek out opportunities in other organizations. In proposing the latter, do so respectfully and consistently, irrespective of a person’s position.

A workforce that chooses to be accountable likely will respond favorably to climate culture surveys.

Duce a mente
(May you lead by thinking)

Image: Raymond Bryson, Government Accountability Office Building, Flickr, Creative Commons

Mike Crews, CFO, Peabody Energy, is also a 2004 alumnus of Olin’s Executive MBA (EMBA) program. He reflected on his time at Olin while speaking at the EMBA Leadership Perspective Series held at the Knight Center on March 31. He noted that he learned a great deal about self-awareness, managing people, working together, and especially thinking strategically while an EMBA student.

Crews comes from a family of CPAs – he’s the third generation in the accounting profession. He has risen through the ranks at Peabody from Senior Manager of Financial Reporting to Assistant Corporate Controller, Director of Planning, Assistant Treasurer, and Vice President of Operations Planning before he was promoted to Chief Financial Officer in June 2008. From the beginning, Crews found that there were people at Peabody who were interested in his development and that the company had opportunities for advancement and growth.

At one point in his career at Peabody, Crews saw a need to create a position of VP of Operations Planning and brought this idea to his superiors. They agreed and suggested he take the role, which he did. This was out of his area and comfort zone, and he expressed to the audience the need to be open to trying new things for your career to progress. He also spoke on the need to let people know what you want. Tell people if you want to advance or try a different role.

As Peabody’s CFO, he sees his top priority as execution of the company’s strategic plan. Crews observed that the CFO and CEO must be able to work side by side.

As a mentor, he said it is good to identify hard workers and give them further opportunity through stretch assignments. Of his mentors, he said, “mentors got more out of me than I ever thought.”

Information sessions, seminars, and other events are a great introduction to executive programs, and they provide an opportunity for you to meet Olin faculty, students, and alumni. Learn more.

Debbie Sterling graduated from Stanford in 2005, the year that Steve Jobs delivered his now famous commencement address, emphasizing the importance of following one’s passion. Jobs’ message combined with the encouragement of a high school teacher to study engineering, and a self described “itch” to change the world, sent Sterling on a mission to create toys to “get girls building.”

Sterling launched her award winning toy company GoldiBlox in 2013. She spoke at the Leadership Perspective Series: The Female Entrepreneur’s Guide to Raising Startup Capital, sponsored by Olin’s Executive MBA program and held at the Knight Center March 26. Sterling described her entrepreneurial journey and how she went about raising startup capital.

Sterling began raising funds first by saving up enough money to quit her job as a brand manager for a jewelry company. Next, she submitted an application for an elite capital accelerator program that rejected her idea. Then she tried friends and family, and finally Kickstarter, an online threshold pledge system for funding creative projects.

She said that in the beginning, she had absolutely no interest in asking family and friends for money. “But once I asked, I believed that GoldiBlox was a great investment, and anyone who got involved would be lucky to be a part of it.”

The accolades for Sterling and Sterling’s company have rolled in steadily since she got funded. For Sterling, Time’s “Person of the Moment” and Business Insider’s “30 Women Who Are Changing the World”.

Honors for GoldiBlox include:

• Most Audacious Companies of 2014, Inc. Magazine
• World’s Most Innovative Companies of 2014, Fast Company
• Educational Toy of the Year 2014, Toy Industry Association
• People’s Choice Toy of the Year 2014, Toy Industry Association

The session with Sterling also included a panel discussion on the topic of raising startup capital facilitated by Michelle Duguid, Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at Olin, Maxine Clark, Founder of Build-A-Bear Workshop and Mary Jo Gorman, Lead Managing Partner of Prosper Capital.

Who are you ? What key traits define your character?

Are you a leader? Do you value integrity? Are you an idea generating machine? Or are you an executor? Do you respect other’s ideas and work methods?  How do you handle politics?

The Olin program accelerates the discovery of answers to questions like the above.

We are set in a group, starting out as strangers, and we must work with these people for at least a year. It’s similar to the majority of work places. It’s rare when we get to pick every person on our team. Naturally, everyone has their own background, their own method of solving problems, their own way to manage projects. Some people are predisposed to work better together than others. Background, experience, and personality all factor into how this plays out.

Luckily I’ve had the fantastic fortune of being placed on a team of brilliant individuals, who all can play as a team. We work hard, we get the work done, but we make sure we are enjoying ourselves and building the team and our relationships along the way. We have fun.

In my opinion it has everything to do with the team members’ character traits. We trust each other. We work together to manage the work load. We understand when members have other conflicts and cover for one another.  We also keep it light-hearted. There is no need to kill ourselves here.

Not every team or individual will have this experience though. So, when conflict arises, how will you handle it? Will you avoid it? Will you try to go behind the person’s back? Or will you confront the challenge head on? It’s easy when times are good, but what about the tough times? How will you lead as an individual to get the most out of this experience for yourself and for your team? The habits developed in this program are likely to be how we behave in the workplace.

Again, this environment allows us to experiment with how we want to lead and work in a team. The opportunities to deal with conflict, to let your leadership shine through, to understand others and ourselves better all exist throughout the program.

The picture of who we are, how we work, what our values are and how we deal with others naturally illuminates over the course of the program.