Leadership Code

Leaders want engagement from their teams because it leads to more active participation, increased ownership, and higher performance. Engagement is much more than simply expecting someone to do their job because you are paying them a salary or wage. Leaders regularly ask their teams to put in more time and effort to meet critical goals and milestones.

In my experience, too many leaders fail to remember that engagement is a two way street. Asking without giving in return undermines the level and quality of engagement. Going to the well too often drains it dry. To get engagement, the leader needs to invest in their team and show them that their investment is meaningful and important.. In last month's newsletter I talked about the RCI Model and  how establishing relevancy is an important step in engaging team members. In this edition, I will cover the second foundation of the model; cost.

Cost
There is no such thing as a free lunch. To accomplish great things one must be willing to take risks and make sacrifices. While the leader needs to model this behavior, they must also get others to follow them in making commitments and sacrifices. Too many leaders ignore, minimize, or underestimate the costs that others pay to accomplish something. Other leaders throw one demand after another at people because it produces results and that is all they know. They practice what I call the demand spiral which ultimately generates burnout and employee flight.  Leaders can also overestimate the value of the rewards or compensation that they give. Team members can feel insulted or undervalued as a result.

Costs can be thought of either as expenditure (time, effort, energy) or as loss (i.e., a long-standing benefit goes away or an opportunity is lost). People conduct a personal cost analysis on what leaders ask them to do. They think of the sacrifices they will have to make versus the rewards that they will get. They basically ask, "what is it going to cost me and what will I get in return?" They evaluate whether or not the ratio is more tilted towards the cost side or the benefit side. They evaluate whether or not costs are equally distributed across the organizational hierarchy. They evaluate your ability to deliver on the promises you make.

Perceived cost is uniquely individual and can be emotionally charged. If what you are asking for involves investing a lot of extra personal time or losing something that is valued, people may feel threatened and openly resist acting on your request. People will tenaciously try to hold onto things of value to them. They will defend these benefits and react negatively if they perceive that you are trying to take away things they value. They may also resist in a more subtle, passive manner. The perceived cost can also be related to opportunity cost. For example, what you are asking for may not involve a lot of time but it may compete with or prevent them from spending time on tasks that are higher in value to them.

Faster leaders understand that people attach their own subjective costs to commitments. These leaders make dealing with those costs a priority because missing the connection can lead to lack of commitment, outright rebellion, and a dramatically slower organization. They also understand that leadership is not exempt from costs and they make a concerted effort  to ensure they experience their share . Faster leaders treat the interaction between costs and achievements as a type of negotiation. To address cost,  I suggest the following things:

• Don't take performance and engagement for granted
• Develop an understanding of the perceived costs to any action
• Build an accurate justification for the costs- connect them to a worthy goal or endeavor
• Create an environment where costs can be openly talked about
• Distribute costs equally. Make sure that management sets an example and takes its share.
• Minimize the cost whenever possible
• Concentrate costs so that the organization can deal with them and move on rather than stringing them out over time
• Clearly identify and communicate the benefits/cost linkage
• Develop a realistic sense of the rewards you can provide
• Provide incentives to balance out the sacrifices



Faster leaders are more successful leaders. Being able to quickly sort through information to determine what is critical, sizing up people accurately and rapidly, establishing work environments that are fast paced and full of positive energy, and establishing a direction that is compelling are indispensable skills that translate directly into faster leadership.

However, working against the leader’s capacity for speed are things like lower levels of employee engagement, workforce skepticism, economic upheaval, organizational inertia, and the sheer volume of competing priorities and things that need to get done. Many leaders find themselves in the position of competing for the attention and mindshare of people in their organizations which significantly slows them down. It is like you are always pushing the boulder up the hill.

Everyone uses priority filters to deal with the overwhelming amount of information and demands we get bombarded with on a minute by minute basis. While your need for action or response may be quite high, your team may have filters in place that end up placing your call to action at the bottom of their list. The result is that your progress is slow and the level of effort you need to expend to get something done is high. When ownership is not felt by the other person, you end up supplying the motivational fuel. 

You can’t mandate commitment, it is a choice. Getting through someone’s filters and eliciting their commitment involves persuasion and influence. Investing in these activities early in the engagement process dramatically speeds up your leadership and improves performance. Your potential for success will be dramatically increased if you use what I call the RCI™ model. Being a faster leader involves establishing relevancy, addressing costs and consequences, and communicating importance and immediacy. This model can equally be applied to individuals, teams, or organizations.

Relevancy

We all make decisions and judgments regarding whether or not something touches us, is connected to us, or is meaningful. Things that we define as relevant are things that impact us in positive or negative ways, and touch us personally. Generally, we make time or commit resources to issues that are connected to us and we ignore or minimize what we define as non-relevant. Issues that top the relevancy list include such things as security, job satisfaction, the ability to impact outcomes, being included and valued, autonomy, work role and responsibility, family and personal life, recognition, and connection. When something passes our relevancy test, we make the decision that it is important to us and our well-being, and we respond to it.

Faster leaders understand that helping others establish a personal connection to a challenge is a critical aspect of employee engagement. If someone sees an activity as personally relevant they will supply more of their own motivation, be more self-managed and tenacious in pursuing the result. I recommend that you follow a three-step process to establish relevancy. First, build an understanding of the framework and resonating themes of the people you are leading. Second, use this understanding and translate it into vision and action that speak to others by connecting it to their desires, needs, and hopes. Third, overcome objections, resistance, and apathy by reinforcing the messages over time and modeling the behavior. Faster leaders formulate a powerful answer to the question that is in everyone’s mind “why should I care?”

Stay tuned for Part 2.



I was thinking the other day how the thermostat is a great metaphor for effective leadership. This device in every household is a relatively simple mechanism that reads temperature and initiates action to maintain temperature within a desired range. By constantly checking the temperature and triggering a heater or air conditioner to kick on for a specific time, the thermostat keeps your home’s temperature where you want it.

Effective leaders act like thermostats in their organization by doing three things: setting the range, developing a feedback system, and using action to either increase or decrease performance pressure.

The first step of setting a desired performance range is usually done by selecting goals and objectives that you want the organization to achieve. The challenge is to select stretch goals that are within the capability or potential of your organization. It is also important to take into consideration the environment (i.e., business, competitors, and the economy) that your organization is operating in because these outside forces can add additional stress. These variables make up your desired “temperature range”.

The second step is to develop an accurate feedback system that informs you about the real-time performance level and amount of stress the organization is experiencing. An objective feedback system is critical because our reactions to stress and tension can contaminate how we see things; we let our anxiety or uncertainty drive our behavior. This feedback system can involve metrics, observation, and feedback from other individuals. The most effective systems identify trends and spot leading indicators so that you can act in time. The primary purpose of the feedback system is to trigger corrective action. The key is to put in place a system that has high accuracy and minimal time delay.

The third step is to develop and use a set of actions that either increase or decrease the performance pressure or demand in small increments. Rather than responding reactively, the actions should be organized and ready when you need them so you can be proactive. For example, when an organization is experiencing high stress, the effective leader will decrease demand by organizing activities that allow people to blow off steam and relax a bit. It is important to be able to move the performance dial both ways (higher and lower) because over stressing the system causes performance to rapidly deteriorate while not enough pressure leads to lack of urgency and distraction. It is important to constantly make small corrections and changes to avoid falling into a cycle of overcorrection or oscillation.

While I have been mainly focusing on organizations, the thermostat model can be equally applied to individuals by using the same three steps. By taking the example of the thermostat to heart, leaders can improve their effectiveness and keep their organizations performing at a high level.



During crunch time leaders need to practice what I call the PUERTO model. Food for thought.

• focus on ruthless Prioritization
• think through and Understand your impact on other individuals, teams, and organizations
• practice Efficient communication (meetings, emails, conversations)- no wasted energy
• provide Reinforcement to others (resources, assistance, positive recognition)
• make effective Transfers and hand offs so that nothing gets dropped
• take Ownership- overcome obstacles, resolve issues, and maintain momentum

To increase your impact as a leader you have to be both effective and efficient. Good time management is key to both of these leadership characteristics. In past postings I have covered how both meetings and the open door policy can consume your time if you don't manage them well. Next up, email communication. 
Email can be a particularly insidious time waster and checking your email can evolve into an addiction of sorts. One sobering survey from CLO Magazine (2009) shows just how much email can take over our lives as leaders. “Of those surveyed, 34% said that they thought they checked their inbox every 15 minutes. However, monitoring software that tracks what someone actually does reported a different story when fitted to those users’ PCs. In reality, many were viewing e-mails up to 40 times an hour. The burden to respond quickly to e-mails appears to be partly to blame and when combined with the volume of e-mails being received, stress is the outcome for 33%.”
If you believe you have an email addiction, follow these simple steps to control it:

• Check your email at three set times per day. Once in the morning, once around 12:00am, and once later in the day. You will gain control and still catch most important emails.
• Turn off your email alerts. These alerts act as Pavlovian Conditioning and reinforce the addiction.
• Remember that the vast majority of emails are really not that important. Just because you received an email doesn't mean you have to check it.
• Communicate to people your email preferences (i.e., what headings to use, when to use other communication methods, the types of content you are interested in).