Tag Archives: leadership

Great Teams

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Getting the most out of yourself and others.

Perspective is nearly everything when it comes to accelerating your performance, or someone else’s.  Human motivation is more art than science.  No matter what I believe or expect about the natural laws, for example, my opinion has no impact. Gravity does what gravity does, no matter what I think.

Human motivation is different. What you believe about yourself, or others, has an impact on your behavior or someone else’s behavior. The self-fulfilling prophecy does not apply to natural laws, but does apply to us lowly humans.  This is both good and bad.

We are unfinished beings.  We are deflected and controlled, to some degree, by self-talk and the opinion of others.  We evolve, or de-evolve, every day according to circumstances and conditions. This is why negative self-talk and overly critical communication with others is so destructive.

The difference in effect between leadership and supervision is so profound in this dimension. Leadership instills value in others, and their work, thereby increasing their motivation to follow. Great leaders focus this value, not on themselves, but on the individual and the business or project. Leadership starts with a commonly accepted value proposition and “leads” others to fulfillment.

Great teams have three creative qualities:

Creative Abrasion:  Different experiences lead to different points of view.  None may be completely correct, none are completely wrong.  Folks need to listen to others and to have others listen to them, in a safe environment.  In other words, agree to disagree.  Not being able to listen to others leads to the “emperor in his new clothes” syndrome.  Look this up if you don’t know what I am talking about.

Creative Agility:  The ability to test and refine our processes and ideas.  To align our creative effort toward the ultimate objective.  For us, this is fulfilling customer expectations, which leads to customer retention and profit.  It simply is not about us.  We are not at the center of things, the customer is.

Creative Resolution:  Making a decision.  In most cases the best solution winds up being a combination of several solution ideas.  When done right, we hear the word “we” a lot more often than the word “I”.

All of this boils down to a relatively simple concept.  Successful innovation requires a sense of community.  Working together nearly always leads to success.  Working as individuals nearly always leads to failure (or at best, limited success).

What does this mean to you?  See the operation of the business and its functions as a dance that requires partners. Find ways to work together. Focus on how we are doing with satisfying internal and external customers. Quit focusing on other people’s performance and think on how to improve yours.

Great teams are made up of a group of individuals who have a shared vision, an expectation of success, an understanding of their role, and are focused on execution.

The Leadership Riddle

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As a leader I find my fulfillment within the success my subordinates’ experience while executing the strategies and plans that we have put in place. This amounts to me experiencing success in the third dimension by watching others succeed.

I first learned this as a basketball coach, watching my kids on the court successfully execute strategy we had worked on in practice. That was the expression of my success. The more they were recognized the more successful I felt and the more successful I really was.

This is an important lesson in leadership for anyone who wants to be in a position of leading others, either on the field of play or in the boardroom. As I have said many times before, you cannot be a leader if no one is willing to follow you, and no one will be willing to follow you if they don’t trust you. This means that leadership is really about service and about facilitating. It is about allowing the success of others on your team to lift you to greater heights of achievement.

The question becomes this. What is in the wake of your life. Is it broken promises, people who don’t trust you, people who don’t like you, people for whom your presence in their life has been a negative. Or is it kept promises, is it people whose lives have been enriched and lifted up because of your presence in their life.

This really becomes the definition of leadership from the third person perspective. Consider an individual who is looking back at your life objectively, without political spin. It’s not a question of “What’s in your wallet?” as the commercial asks. It is instead a question of “what’s in your life” and the impact of what’s in your life on others.

In other words don’t measure your success as a leader from your own perspective. That will always be biased. Measure instead from the third party perspective, which represents how others feel about you and your leadership role

Sent from my iPhone

Leadership vs Supervision As reprinted from http://MetaOpsMagazine.com

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Leadership vs. Supervision  As reprinted from http://MetaOpsMagazine.com

LIVONIA, Mich., June 13, 2013 — Making leaders, not rulers

Every manager maintains a balance of supervisory and leadership skills. This balance is impacted by the personality of the manager and the situation in which they are operating. These skill sets complement each other in a healthy work environment, but are in conflict in an unhealthy one.

Leadership and supervision are concepts best defined by the source of their authority to act, or their power source. A supervisor gets his or her authority, or power, from the position power provided by the organization. This is a top-down flow of power. Supervisors manage from a command-and-control paradigm that is rooted in the ongoing inspection of performance.

Conversely, leaders get their power from those who are willing to follow. This power can flow from anywhere and anyone. Leaders manage from a facilitator perspective that is rooted in the expectation of performance.

Building on this, there are formal and informal power structures within any organized group of people. Formal power is typically based upon command and control (supervision). Informal power is typically rooted in leadership. These two power structures co-exist within the ebb and flow of people and their perceptions. Sometimes the same person or group of persons wield both types of power at the same time. This typically leads to a workspace with low stress and high productivity. When this is not the case, the formal and informal power “centers of gravity” are found in different persons and tension is created between the two.

In successful military systems, the authority and power structure is very organized and centralized. Conformity is both demanded and enforced, and there is a great need for authority figures to be both a supervisor and a leader. This is why military officer training programs emphasize leadership skills. The tension that results from different formal and informal power centers, within a military group, can be fatal.

On the other hand, look at the typical athletic team. Here, the formal and informal power foci are found in different people. The coach, for example, wields the formal power and a player—functioning as team captain—may wield the informal power. This works because the coach is not out on the field of play as a participant. The team needs a leader “in the game” to carry out the strategy.

Now, how do these power structures apply in the typical workplace? First, the relationship between leadership and supervision is situational and the balance between the two is dynamic. It is usual and normal to find both the formal and informal power being wielded by a single person in one situation and wielded by different persons in the next. In a healthy workplace, there is a high level of trust and cooperation between formal and informal power, which results in a high level of delegated empowerment. In the healthy workplace, productivity is typically high while conflict is minimized.

In an unhealthy workplace, trust is weak or absent. The relationship between the formal and informal power structure is based in conflict. Productivity is typically low and conflict replaces empowerment.

In order to be a truly motivating, inspiring and effective leader, develop and nurture the qualities that are found in good leaders. You must be a good listener who is also capable of motivating his or her team. Knowing your employees’ names is essential for respect given and received. Additionally, credit must be given and received where it is due. Following these guidelines will help you develop into a team leader who is both trusted and deemed trustworthy, and that’s the true mark of leadership.

 

WaltM PhotoWalter McIntyre has spent 30 years in the business world, holding positions from apprentice to Vice President. Throughout that time he has worked in both the manufacturing and transactional sides of business operation. He is currently the Chief Operations Officer and General Manager of Nationwide Parts Distributors in Jacksonville, Florida.

 

Walt earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Greenville College, Greenville, Illinois.  He earned a master’s degree in engineering management from the University of South Florida in Tampa. He is a certified Six Sigma Black Belt, Master Black Belt and Master Trainer.

 

Walt’s motto is, “Have fun learning, have fun doing, have fun sharing.” He can be found on Twitter @waltmcintyre, at his website: leanmeanprocessimprovement.com, or by email at walt.m@att.net.

Walt McIntyre, COO and general manager of Nationwide Parts Distributors in Jacksonville, Florida, presented an analysis of supervision, power and how to turn “rulers” into true leaders in an article published in MetaOps MagEzine, http://metaopsmagazine.com.

 

About Walt McIntyre:

 

McIntyre has spent 30 years in the business world, holding positions from apprentice to Vice President. Throughout that time he has worked in both the manufacturing and transactional sides of business operation. McIntyre earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Greenville College, Greenville, Illinois, and a master’s degree in engineering management from the University of South Florida in Tampa. He is a certified Six Sigma Black Belt, Master Black Belt and Master Trainer.

 

About MetaOps, Inc.:

 

MetaOps, Inc. helps companies increase their market share and profit through a PeopleCentrix™ approach. The company’s team of world-class experts brings an extensive toolkit that helps management see problems and opportunities while teaching staff how to make dramatic improvements and drive sustainable improvement. Learn how to transform your own organization, boosting efficiency and increasing market share, by visiting MetaOps, Inc. on the web.

 

 

Rolling Out Lean Principles in a Business or Organization

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A brief outline of the steps to rolling out Lean in the work place. Bear in mind that I believe success depends upon leadership and mentoring instead of supervision.
First, listen and teach. Set up brief training sessions using classroom time, Gemba walks, 5S, and identifying waste. Teach the group to use Lean tools to recognize opportunities while walking their work space. Frame what you teach in terms of the listeners’ value proposition. This is to gain trust. As a leader, you should be selling instead of telling. Teach basic tools they can use right now. Have the group document a list of opportunities.
Second, lead the group into a baby step project.  If they haven’t done so already, have the team create a list of opportunities and chose which they want to tackle as a project. At this point they become a team instead of a group of individuals. Teach them tools for use in their chosen project and go out and get it done. As others see the team’s activities, you may see the number of individuals interested in participating increase. Allow this to happen. You may have to create more than one team depending business circumstances.
Third, after a successful project, have the team re-evaluate the list they created earlier. It will change based upon what they have learned. Tackle another project from the list. Get some momentum from successful projects. This increases trust. Encourage the team to take on smaller projects in their own work space. Act as a facilitator and a supplier of resources. Lead instead of supervising. Again, as others see the team’s activities, you may see the number of individuals interested in participating increase. Allow this to happen. You may have to create more than one team depending business circumstances.
Forth, you are now in the midst of a Lean rollout. You may want to christen the rollout with a name that is unique to the team or teams. Be careful about asking the team to follow you in the Lean implementation on a larger scale. You don’t want the team(s) to see the process as a “program” they are doing for someone else. They need to see it as something they are doing for themselves (remember the value proposition they started with). The team(s) need to “own” the initiative. There will come a time for them to see it on a larger scale.
Fifth, you don’t have to use special names for tools and projects. This can create pushback. Listen to the people you are working with and they will indicate when, if ever, it is appropriate to start adding special names. The main thing is to keep in alignment with the overall value proposition of the business and in alignment with the team’s value proposition.
Sixth, “keep the main thing the main thing” by not allowing the effort to become personally yours. The effort belongs to the group and the business as a whole. As much as possible, stay in a leadership mode instead of a supervisory mode.

Change Leadership

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All management strategies and paradigms, from old school to Lean, have one element that is the same. That element is people. People are not pawns on a game board, they are not machines and they don’t always follow management’s vision.

In fact, the people side of management is never clear cut, and is nearly always messy. Everyone has their motives for doing the the things they do. Not everyone has the same goals in mind.
Failure to address the human element will undermine any effort that management may take to change the culture in a business. The reason is that culture is all about the human element. You can’t dictate attitudes and motives, nor can you just ask for change.
Here is the secret. All change, all improvement, Lean or otherwise, must be lead. It is experienced together with others. Let me give you an example. Years ago, when hurricane Hugo came through South Carolina, I was managerially responsible for an industrial waste treatment facility. All retention ponds were filling and the plant could not keep up.  The state had given me permission to by-pass the rain water directly to the river in order to keep other contaminated water contained.  This required the re-routing of a 12 inch fiber cast pipe while the hurricane was in full swing. I had a staff of 5 technicians on duty that night. All had families in the storm’s path and all were worried.
This was a time for action, so I  said what needed to be done, grabbed my tool bag, and headed out the door into the weather. I didn’t ask anyone else to go, but everyone followed me into the storm. We fought the weather for more than two hours and got the job done.
After that night, I had a minimum of 15 to 20 workers from around the company volunteering to work with me on a daily basis. We had a reputation for action and a “can do” attitude. In this case strong leadership resulted in strong follow ship. The culture began to change because the employees saw the management team change.
My point is this. If you want to change the culture in your work space, let the change begin with you. If you want to implement a Lean movement, let the change begin with you. Exercise strong leadership and you will get strong follow ship.
Strong follow ship leads to a shared vision. A shared vision leads to less resistance to change.

21st Century Leadership

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In the 1950’s, if you wanted to bring the world’s best minds together to solve a problem, it involved weeks or months of effort, and the exercise limited the number of participants.  Today, with the internet, a million minds can be brought to bear on a problem in minutes. If you hold to the idea that within our corporate human hearts and minds we have the answers to our most pressing concerns, than you must also believe that we are on the cusp of great change. What can hold back a million great minds communicating at the speed of the internet?

This is both the opportunity and the threat. We need leaders focused on the truth, not just random facts, that can bring people of diverse backgrounds together and attack our common problems. We have shrunk our world with technology. This means that global opportunities are within our grasp, not just local or regional optimizations. There are few excuses for leaving anyone behind.

It can also be said that with technology moving as quickly as it is, there is a threat of sub-optimization. That is technology used by one people group to subvert another people group. This refocuses on leadership. The 21st century will be defined by leaders who are able to leverage diverse opinions toward the common problems we face, providing opportunity for participation to anyone who has the desire to make a positive difference. The 21st century leader knows that we are stronger when we work together than when we work against each other.

From a business point of view, the same perspectives apply. The status quo will be replaced by paradigm shifts, and thinking big with bold ideas will lead to financial rewards. Here are a few talking points for global business leadership in the 21st century.

  • Don’t accept the status quo.
  • Must have the courage to shift the paradigm.
  • Use technology to leap into the future. Maybe the biggest opportunity in some emerging markets is infrastructure related.  A cell phone has little value where there is no cellular service available.
  • Understanding emerging markets means understanding the consumer profiles within that market. Being customer centric makes your product or service relevant, which brings about financial success.
  • Think big, but be flexible enough to rollout your product or service according to the needs and infrastructure of the targeted market.
  • Be bold. If you want to lead, you must be willing to lead from the front. That means accepting risk that will lead to financial success.

Defining Leadership

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Leadership is not something that can be defined within the confines of a witty statement. In fact, it may be that you cannot easily define leadership in several pages of intelligent ramblings. My personal belief is that defining leadership is like describing a boot with nothing to go on except a boot print. Let’s see if I can describe the boot print.

First, leadership does not exist outside of the individual. It requires a host to manifest itself. This is why so many fail to capture the essence of leadership when trying to describe it as a separate stand alone quality. Leadership is not a thing to be assigned. It is, instead, a result of other “things”.

Second, leadership does to exist without followship. It works like this. Leadership exists because of followship, which exists because of leadership, which exists because of followship….

For a leader, followship comes in two forms. First, a leader gets the authority to act from their followers. Supervisors get their authority to act from higher up in a management chain. This is why you will often find that the supervisor and the leader in a group are not the same person. The supervisor will never find significant success without collaborative leadership, from themselves or someone else in the group.

The second followship comes from a leader’s willingness to follow others when necessary. Delegation and sharing of control come from trust, which is at the core of leadership. A leader knows to stay focused on those things that only they can do and delegate to others what others should be doing. A leader who will not share control is nothing more than a supervisor.

If you want to be a leader, do not seek to be a leader. I know this seems like double talk, but leadership cannot be coerced or taken like a prize.  Leadership chooses its host, when others chose to follow. In other words, you can chose to be a leader only when leadership is offered from followers. It is earned instead of assigned.

Six Sigma and Business Acumen

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A common mantra in Six Sigma is to “make decisions based on data”. This is a flawed strategy that probably comes from Six Sigma’s dependence on statistical experts instead of business experts. A Six Sigma Black Belt or Master Black Belt is only as good as their business leadership skills. This is why a form test for Six Sigma certification will not work. A form test cannot measure leadership skills or business acumen. You need the full package to be effective. This is why so many Six Sigma initiatives fail. There is too much emphasis on math skills and not enough on business acumen and leadership.

Good business decisions take both data and business acumen. Data by itself can tell you what is happening, if you have measured the right things. Business acumen will enable you to measure the right things and help you to understand the “why” behind the data. Business leadership is used to lead change.
There is also the question of significance. Data can tell you statistical significance, but business acumen is required to understand practical significance. For example, a process change can produce a statistical significant shift in a product or service that is insignificant to the customer or business from a practical point of view.

To continue to be relevant to the business world, Six Sigma will have to become more business acumen and leadership focused.