The New Leader Opportunity

The New Leader Opportunity

by | Jan 26, 2025 | Leading

“Business is NOT a democracy!”

The CEO had raised his voice. I wouldn’t have said he was actually yelling, but his face was a darker shade tending toward red, and he was definitely speaking louder than he had been moments before.

My colleague, a consulting partner, was explaining that there was considerable disagreement with his post-acquisition integration plans and not just from the acquired company. This news did not please him, which caused him to so forcefully state his view of business governance.

The partner paused briefly, and then said quietly, “it is true that business is not a democracy, but it still requires the ‘consent of the governed.’”

Now it was the CEO’s turn to pause. He exhaled. His clenched jaw relaxed some and he enunciated clearly, “Fair point. . . . continue.”

The partner continued and ultimately we were engaged in a post-acquisition integration restart project, which featured the combined leadership team making decisions about which businesses would be left alone, which spun off, and which would receive additional investment. Staffing, the issue that had caused the dissent, followed those decisions. The CEO was sanguine about the outcome, but I think still believed that people should have just done what he told them to do.

I recognized the “consent of the governed” phrase from the US Declaration of Independence, but it turns out to be older than that, June 15, 1215 to be exact, the Magna Carta. The English King John affixed his seal to a document written by his barons, facilitated by Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, which gave people rights to have input into laws that governed them, and justice “equally” before those laws.

Business is not a democracy, but lack of input and perceived injustice can still cause people to vote with their feet, either dragging them or using them to walk out, taking critical knowledge and skill with them.

The New Leader Opportunity

Acquisitions are one new leader opportunity. Suddenly you are leading a whole new group of people and if you treat them as the “spoils of victory,” you will make acquired company staff aware of their feet. You will also telegraph to everyone else how little you value expertise.

Anytime you lead a new group of people it is a new leader opportunity. The opportunity communicates how you value followers, or don’t. Unity, input, transparency, and fairness are watchwords.

Sometimes new leaders come from inside the organization, sometimes they are hired from the outside, but often they are put in the role to make a change. This is most visible at the CEO level. Jack Welch was promoted from the GE Plastics division to replace Reg Jones; Lou Gerstner was hired from RJR Nabisco to replace John Akers at IBM. Both had board mandates to radically change their corporations. However, any new leader can come from inside or outside, and almost always those that do the hiring expect that something will change. Understanding that expectation is the first step for a new leader.

The Why

At the CEO level there is often a decline or lack of growth in revenue or profitability or both that moves the board to act. Sometimes at lower levels, there is a lack of improvement, or innovation, or there are some people issues driving the change.

A new leader must understand and explain why people should choose to change.  What has changed with customers, competitors, technology that necessitates doing something different? And why not changing is not an option.

“Because I said so” rarely worked with my children, but it definitely doesn’t work with adults. Nor do the corollary statements ‘we bought you,” the “boss or board says so,” or any other “my way or the highway” sentiments. People may comply, in the short term, but they will also become aware of their feet.

Insight – Action – Results

This is the model I used to frame change. Insight is the data behind the why. Action is what we do more of, less of or differently. Results are the outputs we are trying to achieve. It is simplistic. For most changes, there will be breakdowns between insight and action, as people take different times to understand or act. There will be actions that don’t produce the desired result and “back-to the-drawing-board” moments. But a leader must frame what we are trying to do and why and engage people in the how and when.

The Who

Rarely do the same people who got us here, get us there. Oh, it is possible that the status quo folks will seamlessly become the passionate converted to the new vision. But frequently, those who lead the new change will be those outside the existing power structure. It’s why Jim Collins made the first step of Good to Great, decide “who’s on the bus. This is the essence of John Kotter’s “guiding coalition,” from The Heart of Change.

So who is on the bus? My list of criteria includes people who: :

  • Have internalized the “Why” of the change.
  • Are true problem solvers who invest the time to define and analyze a problem, not just suggest solutions before having the facts.
  • Have extraordinary communication skills – looking for clarity over eloquence, and simplicity over sounding smart.
  • Others listen to. (This often has nothing to do with positional power, but everything to do with competence.)
  • At least one person who immediately jumps to the “worst case scenario.” This is your risk assessor, your seer of unintended consequences. You don’t want a whole team of doom and gloomers, but one or two people with this view – and a sense of humor – can help avoid disaster.

Wasting the Opportunity

Often, you get one opportunity as a new leader, to attract followers, to engage people and help them choose to change. If you waste that opportunity, badmouthing, berating, and blaming, it is hard to come back. If you act unilaterally, or fail to have empathy and gratitude, the only people who follow will be those who want something from you. And no one will tell you when you’re blowing it.

Feedback and Accountability

Reward the people who give you the “straight skinny,” the people unafraid to say “the emperor is naked.” Even King John, who was not known to be a good king, agreed to clause sixty one in the Magna Carta.

Clause sixty-one gave the barons the right to appoint twenty-five barons ” to keep, and cause to be observed with all their might, the peace and liberties granted and confirmed to them by this charter.” The barons would give the violator (including King John) the opportunity to correct a transgression. If not corrected the barons could take the offender to trial.

King John, perhaps the worst king in Britain’s history, agreed that he was not above the law and could be held accountable. He didn’t live up to it, but others have since.

So business is not a democracy, but it does require the consent of the governed and some accountability beyond stock options and bonuses.

Untangling the Mess

Untangling the Mess

by | Jan 19, 2025 | Consulting

He was introduced to us as “Charley, an old-time key logger,” an introduction that seem to both amuse and annoy him.

“Thanks, I guess, Carol, Did you really have to put in the “old-time” bit? These folks can see I’m old just by looking at me.”

“Oh, sorry Charley,” Carol from HR laughed, blushing a bit, “But I hope he tells you some stories about being a jam-breaker.”

Charley didn’t look like a lumberjack. He was about five-nine, slight of build, and lean in a hard sort of way. He was bald with the gray fringe buzz-cut short except for a little forelock which stood straight up about three quarters of an inch in what might have once been a crew cut.

There were about ten of us in the group, contract facilitators of what were called “quality circles,” for a forest products company. This was our half-day orientation to the business, a multi-slide show with various speakers, to be followed by a small school bus tour of some facilities.

I don’t know why I instantly liked Charley, but I think I wasn’t the only one in the group who did. His face glowed of working outside with deep smile lines. I thought he must be over seventy. Maybe he was younger, but I was in my thirties, what did I know?

“Well,” Charley began. “most of those stories are what a male cow leaves in a field. Nowadays, most all product moves by truck, but when I started, way back with the cavemen, much of it went into rivers. There were logjams and some of my early training was as a jam-breaker. I might have actually had the title of ‘key logger,’  but the idea that a guy could show up in a pick-up and point at a log in a jam, say ‘that one,’ and drive away while the crew pulled it and all the logs flowed downriver is pure Disney. Most of what I did, was stop dumping logs upriver and make sure no one was standing on the jam when it broke.

There is an analogy though, to what you folks will be doing here. Our improvement efforts depend on information from guys at the mills, and field surveyors and logging crews. They’re going to have complaints, and identify problems. Some’ll suggest solutions. Your job is to untangle the mess, to see the connections, and the stuff in the way, like the old-time key loggers used to do.”

Charley went on to orient us to the business, to show us slides of logging sites and roads, of raw product sawmills and pulp mills and manufacturing facilities for paneling and composites. He spoke for about an hour, handed out a glossary of terms and took some questions. He was a lot more interesting than the accountant who followed him.

The first session I facilitated was a disaster. The session process we were given, was as Charley had described it, three questions: complaints, problems, solutions. In a three hour session I never got out of complaints. Evidently, other facilitators were having the same problem. Someone suggested starting with “What’s working well?”

That made a huge difference in the mood of the groups and facilitators were actually able to get to some solutions.

By the third of the six sessions I evolved four questions:

  • What is happening that should be happening?
  • What is not happening that should not be happening?
  • What is happening that should not be happening?
  • What is not happening that should be happening?

These questions started with what was working well. That placed some perspective on the complaints and problem definition that followed. The “positive” view outlined what was working, identifying constraints for any solutions, so we didn’t break what was working.

Staying with the fundamental question, what is happening, was a fact based approach  and avoided the kind of fact-free speculations that we would call “conspiracy theories” today.

In the rest of my career in consulting, I used these same questions in many contexts. I used them with continuous improvement teams who were having difficulty defining a problem because they had combined many different problems in a tangled mess. I used them in an initial meeting with a division CEO who was unclear what was wrong, but knew it threatened planned results.

Over time I learned to record these questions in this matrix:

What is happening: The Is-Should matrix

This matrix makes the tangled mess visible. It shows that what might seem like one problem is many problems, which may be interrelated, but also may be able to be addressed separately.

I always started with the positive, what is happening that should be happening and what is not happening that should not be happening. I asked “what else?” until we ran out of the category before moving on.

When the tangled mess was complete, I asked which problem was the greatest priority, or had the biggest pay-off or was linked to others so that solving it would help the others. People were often amazed at the clarity it produced and were grateful to be “unstuck.”

 

That felt a little like Charley’s key log stories, not as tangible, nor as cool, but rewarding all the same.

 

Cover Traveling the Consulting Road

There are more stories and consulting tools like this in Traveling the Consulting Road: Career Wisdom for New Consultants, Candidates, and There Mentors.\ Available on multiple platforms here

Patience Redux

Patience Redux

by | Jan 12, 2025 | Living

Some life lessons we are meant to learn. . . over. . . and over again.

Not long ago I wrote about patience.  I quoted a one-time client, who didn’t take well to my advice to “Be Patient.”

“Patient?! Alan, the world was not built by patient men!”

I went on to note that high performing entrepreneurs and inventors were not known as the soul of patience. Neither, I suppose, are military leaders. It is hard to imagine General Patten, Napolean, or Genghis Khan, being described as patient.

I have in my life been patient, sometimes with children, sometimes too much with people who were behaving badly towards me. One thing I have learned about myself: I am NOT a patient patient. By reasons of my upbringing, it takes a long time for me to concede to see a doctor. When I finally do, I expect miracles, instantaneous miracles, or faster, if possible, please.

I am not patient with my own body, which  (who?) I sometimes accuse of, and demean for, letting me down, even when I have been abusing it (him?). Separating my body from myself and anthropomorphizing that part of me as separate from me, is an artifact of my upbringing too.

For most of my life, I have been fortunate to be extraordinarily healthy.

At seventy and seventy-one, my patience as a patient was tested when I fell running and did some damage to my cervical spinal cord. I wrote how helpful I found Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer:

“Lord, please give me the serenity to accept those things I cannot change,

The courage to change those things I can,

And the wisdom to know the difference.”

A surgeon performed a minor miracle on my neck. I am extraordinarily grateful. I wasn’t patient. I pushed myself in physical therapy (PT) and I recovered use of my disconnected body double. “Good job, body, ole pal. Took you a while, but you got there.”

Now I face another challenge.

As a child my mother reacted to an ugly face I made. “Don’t do that. Your face will freeze that way.”

A week ago, my face froze. Or, at least, the left side of my face stopped working and drooped. Thankfully, my problem is not one of the more disastrous causes of such an effect, stroke, brain tumor, or meningitis. I have an attack of Bell’s Palsy.

Bell’s Palsy is an overload of cranial nerve number seven, which controls facial movement and expression. The cause is “idiopathic,” which is to say that medical science has no clue why it happens. It sometimes happens in response to a virus, or bacterial infection, stress, or multiple minor issues.

Recovery time is indeterminate, five days, three weeks, three, six, nine months. A few unfortunate sufferers need surgery to recover; fewer still fail to heal, smile crookedly, but live otherwise normal lives.

“So, lighten up Alan,” my estranged bod might rightfully respond. “Yeah, drinking coffee through a straw is a pain and you have to remember to chew on the right side so the food stays in your mouth. But quit whining! There are too many people in Greater Los Angeles whose everything has been consumed by fire, and too many in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan who live with bombs falling on their heads, and too many injured, ill, or hungry, who may not live to see the dawn.”

“Suck it up. Rest. Get through the effects of Prednisone withdrawal, see the neurologist. Do the PT.”

“Yeah and I can practice the lines of side-talkers throughout history:

  • WC Fields: ‘my little chickadee,’
  • Edward G. Robinson: ‘Tough guys don’t dance, see. Tough guys’ guts cut and bleed in a knife fight.’
  • Edward Teach, Jack Sparrow, Pegleg Pete: ‘Arrgh, Matey’ (Actually, I won’t be eighty for three years –  hopefully this’ll be over by then. Arrgh, Matey, I’m 80 – get it?).”

“STOP! Send some money to relief efforts!”

“OK body, bud, I’ll be a more patient, patient. You know we ought to work together more. Integration. That’s the ticket.”

“Yeah? I’ll believe it when I see it.”

Change: Alarms and Indicators

Change: Alarms and Indicators

by | Jan 6, 2025 | Leading

How do I know if things are going wrong?

A couple of months ago I wrote about the basics of Change Craft, which comes down to simple questions: Why? So What? Who? What? How? I finished with “expect back sliding, missed targets and failure.”

A reader commented to me by email, “Alan, those are all results indicators. By the time I see those, the change process has already gone off the rails. What are the initial condition indicators or process alarms that will help me avoid a problem before it happens.”

“Good point, Ted,” my response began and I went on to describe the flashing red lights a change leader should look for. They aren’t always obvious. Mostly they are language cues that indicate a dangerous mindset.

If you hear yourself or your boss or those on your team say these things, watch out!

“Easy Peasy”

Change is not easy. Individual self-improvement is hard enough, but add to that the difficulty of groups of individuals it gets exponentially harder. Different people hear the same word differently. For example, my wife believes that “worry” is much more serious than “concern,” but if I hear “I’m concerned” that is “DefCon 3, Stop everything you are doing and FIX this.”

So even people who share the same national and corporate culture will hear the same words differently, complexifying describing change rationale, and giving instructions. That complexity multiplies by the numbers of people involved. Now imagine cross border communication, or acquisition integration communication. How do you know people are hearing what you mean?

Also, a change plan, inputs, activities, outputs, and responsibilities, especially recorded on Microsoft project or similar software, looks like every other plan. It is likely to produce a “of course – we got this” reaction, which has to do with tasks not people.

“Need to know basis”

Secrecy and change success are negatively correlated. Oh, I get that when making a strategic change in products or markets, you might want to keep some of the information close to keep it away from competitors. However, in the absence of information, people just make stuff up, and what they make up is often destructive.

I once worked in a health insurance company that was breaking into the Medicare Advantage market. An IT manager decided to “get ahead of the game,” and installed time clocks on the Customer Service Representative’s (CSR) screen, and a new call code MAD (for Medicare Advantage Deployment). A rumor started in the call center among the CSRs that MAD stood for “Measured Against Downsizing.” The not-yet-operational clocks were perceived to be measurement devices and that each CSR was being evaluated against some criteria that would lead to a workforce reduction in force. In a matter of weeks the rumor spread across the company to other call centers and CSRs were threatening a walk out – all because some executive wanted to keep the new market entry strategy a secret, and CSRs didn’t “need to know.”

“We/they, us/them”

This is a tricky one because talking about us and them happens frequently in business, we-company, they-suppliers or customers. But when you hear leader saying us/them about layers or departments, or change teams talking about other change teams using we/they, it’s a signal of artificial divisions and a lack of integration, which is death to change initiatives.

This shows up in change activities. “The training is for them, not us.” We get the full briefing; they don’t.” “They get paid overtime for out of worktime change work; we don’t.”

Most organizations are hierarchical; and “siloed” vertically, but when you need the whole organization to move as one, as in an integrated change, then hierarchies and siloes can slow you down or stop you dead.

“Resistance”

“Resistance to change” is a cliché, “We fear change,” Is a frequent Saturday Night Live joke. Many change models actually describe what you need to do to overcome the rational, political, and emotional resistance to change.

While it is true that some of us don’t like arbitrary change, (“So why exactly is it better to put the apple corer here, instead of where we’ve always kept it?”), most people don’t fear change and they don’t resist change. They fear loss in unknown circumstances, lost of job, pay, reasonable workload, etc. Mostly they fear a loss of autonomy, the right to choose the change on their own terms. In short, they don’t resist change; they resist your change, because they weren’t consulted, or it wasn’t explained to them.

So when you hear your change team talking about “resistance to change,’ they may be covering up their failure to engage people properly.

“That’ll never happen”

I don’t know for a fact if anyone on the IT manager’s team at the Medicare Advantage change effort brought up the unintended consequences of “getting out ahead of the change”, described above. I imagine that if it was brought up, it would have been met with, “What? That’ll never happen. The CSRs won’t even notice!”

“That’ll never happen” is the command and control leader’s response to raising low probability-high consequence events. In risk analysis, real dangers are glossed over with the conflation of the likelihood and consequence scales. “Come on. What’re the chances?”.

Unintended consequences are a real concern in change. What seems like a simple action changes unseen variables. “Raising the temperature one degree, did increase viscosity and therefore throughput, but it also increased pressure and the ‘U’ pipe sprung a leak.” Uh-oh.

The biggest single oversight of unintended consequence I ever saw, was in an acquisition of a competitor in specialty chemicals. The low value brand bought the premium brand, both US firms. Realizing that acquisitions are an aggressive competitive act, the leaders paid attention to market share and concluded that combined global market share of 16% wouldn’t be threatening in a market where the number one and two players had a combined share of almost 70%. In public relations announcements they signaled that this was a one-time event, (i.e., “don’t worry ‘bout us – no threat here”). One month into integration the number one player, a German firm, bought one of the firms’ domestic suppliers. The combined two US firms bought 60% of this supplier’s output and the German firm didn’t want to get squeezed out of US supply. Instead the combined firm was.

The head of production at the acquiring firm had raised this possibility and suggested long term supply contracts. He was told “What? That’ll never happen.”

 

People make change happen

A consulting partner once told me, “change is about the decision; people will fall in line.” And sometimes they do. Usually, when they do, it is because some leader engaged them in the process and treated them as equals worthy of trust. People don’t come equipped with warning lights. The only flashing alarms we have are body language and words.

 

Pay attention and listen.