Monthly Archives: August 2011

Learning to Work with Different Management Styles

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To get work done as a team, the members have to recognize that they all think about the work differently. Four typical styles seem to be fairly common among us.

1. Analyzer – this person is very factual, very detail oriented. The person insists on research and studies and proofs. The person is a god-send on a team because they love to do the “dirty” work of handling the details; on the other hand, the person is a nightmare with their insistence on everything being exactly right.

2. Persuader – this is the sales person, the spin master, the one always looking to sell or persuade. This person loves to talk, to tell about it, to make everyone agree. This person really helps with the executive summary, but he/she is a difficult person to pin down to get detailed work done.

3. Cooperator – this person wants everyone to get along, to be nice, to avoid conflict and agitation. This person is great on a team to keep everyone informed, to keep everyone coming together, to stop people from conflicting and disagreeing. On the other hand, this person short-circuits the essential need for the “abrasion” so necessary among very smart people to fight through misunderstandings, false assumptions, and other project killing intellectual bias and preferences.

4. Pusher – this person gets the work done – no matter what! Push it, move it, kick butt and take names. Meet the schedule and deliver the results on time! This is a great person on a team to keep the energy up and keep the process moving forward and on time. However, these same qualities often cause hurt feelings, alienation, anger, and resentment among team members.

So, if a team leader understands these styles or forces among the members, he/she can use the good traits for the good of the work and lead to minimize the bad traits of all team members. Everyone should agree to move to the middle, to be a combination of all of the good traits for the good of the activity.

Never show fools unfinished work!

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“Never show fools unfinished work!” Some people just can’t prototype; they can’t play with ideas.

When an organization uses rapid prototyping as a tool in its designing, creating, and innovating activities, one of the worst killers of the spirit of free and open thought is a detailer/authoritarian type person who cannot “play around with” ideas. For this person, things are either right or wrong. These anal types are bound strictly by rules and regulations, most of them held as moral imperatives. We say, “Hey, loosen up! Brainstorm and play around with us as we try to think this through.” But, the person responds, “You cannot have a 1 in an outline without a 2. Period!” We say, “Stop thinking about that right now? Come on, think with us about the whole design and concept of the new piece of equipment.” The person responds, “No. You can’t have a 1 without a 2. That’s the rule!”

For example, we were writing a proposal for a large aerospace company, and the team was prototyping what logistics must be considered. An editor from the home office had been sent to help on the team. The editor stopped the brainstorming and prototyping and demanded that everyone observe the difference in spelling between ‘principle’ and ‘principal’. We were all flabbergasted at the narrowness and the false morality of the issue. She killed the prototyping spirit, and it wasn’t until we demanded that she return to the home office and leave us alone that the fun and free and highly creative intellectual spirit returned.

If people cannot prototype, don’t ever let them be on a creative or innovative team where serious (and playful) intellectual work needs to get done.

In Sales work, SILENCE IS NOT GOLDEN!

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The President of the construction company was an ornery and abusive man. As a salesman with his company in my territory, I really did not like to visit his company. About a year ago, I sucked it up and on a Tuesday mid-morning I walked into the office to meet with him. He complained, bad mouthed, and generally trashed me and my company for about an hour.

After I left, after I had calmed down, I called in my meeting report and in it asked senior management in my company for help. The report got routed to a senior VP in Product Development that I didn’t know. He was in the same Golf Club and Church group as this man. At a social gathering, our VP stepped in as a friend, explained to the man how it didn’t help either company to have such a negative relationship, and sincerely asked the man for his help. The next time I visited, he asked about me, talked about his company’ needs, and outlined a buying/selling strategy for the next year with our company.

If I had just been mad and suffered in silence, nothing good would have come. By reporting my experience, and because our reporting system pushes our meeting reports up in the organization to all senior managers, a solution was found and implemented. We have to talk about our customer encounters, good or bad, and the organization must have a system that pulls our reports up to people who can make a difference. SILENCE IN SALES WORK IS NOT GOLDEN!

Continuous Reporting and Feedback System

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Organization leadership should consider the sales organization as a partner in strategic data collection, with the organization leaders being the specific generators of strategic interest. This means that the Executive Council (all division or unit VPs and Sr. VPs), responsible for the operation of the organization should decide what they need to know from the customer base and the marketplace and then communicate those needs to the Sales team. Then, when a sales person is traveling to meet with customers, he or she will “look around” with the needs of the organization leaders in mind. The sales rep is now a partner with the organization leaders, gathering the specific information that leaders need to run their organizations and feeding it back into the organization through the sales meeting reporting system.

This teaming creates a tremendous learning environment for both the organization leaders and the sales team. The organization leaders have “eyes” out there in the marketplace, looking out for their needs, and the sales reps have “needs” in the organization that are asking for answers and information. Both are seeing, listening, learning, sharing, and collaborating. If the organization leaders communicate regularly with the sales team, and if the sales team members report accurate, complete, and current information immediately after the sales calls, we have a synergistic system of strategic knowledge sharing that has tremendous power to make an organization and individuals successful.

Thus, the Product Development VP might ask the sales team to look for customer or competitor product features that are positive or negative. This VP might ask the team to look around the property or ask around the offices about competitors and competitor programs, services, or products now being purchased. The Customer Service VP might ask the sales people to look specifically for any indications that current service is not serving the customers well, or to look for competitors who are serving the customers in new or improved ways, and then to report that information back to the VP through the sales reporting system. The Marketing VP might ask the sales team to promote a certain product or to sell according to a new promotion and then report back how the packaging, the names, the prices, and the products are received. The Finance VP might ask the sales reps to introduce a price increase or to change the pricing structure and to see how these changes are received. This VP might ask the sales team to inquire about competitors and if they are raising prices and by how much. All of this information is then reported back to the VP through the sales reporting system.

If the organization leaders “PULL” the information they need from their partners on the sales team, then give continuous and helpful feedback to the sales members when the information comes streaming back, then the sales people will feel a sense of belonging, a sense of importance and value, and a desire to work hard to meet the needs and expectations of their partners on the organization leadership team. Thus, the organization creates what is called a “double loop” feedback system, driven mostly by the organization leaders but maintained by continuous reporting and feedback among the leaders and the sales team members.

Always Include a “Wild Card Meeting” as Part of Strategic Thinking

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Oftentimes in a sales organization, when there is a problem or issue to be resolved, it is helpful to bring a “wild card” person into the discussions. The principle here for strategic thinking is “the power of divergent thinking” – getting honest and spontaneous input from as many people, as far and wide as possible, as early as possible.

This can be a company insider or outsider, an executive or the maintenance supervisor. Invite someone who isn’t involved in the work or with the issue or problem and let them sit in one of the early discussions. Nissan Automotive’s Creative Director reports that administrative assistants from other divisions of the automotive company were often brought into early design meetings to force designers to explain things more clearly and to be exposed to different points of view regarding their work. With one car design, the Creative Director reports, the spontaneous comments of several administrative assistants regarding a new design was “YUCK! UGLY!” – two minutes into the meeting. Needless to say, the designers who were “blindly in love” with their “baby,” the design, were taken aback and a new (and far more productive) direction of creative thought began.

Divergent thinking prevents “group think,” where people who work among others like them begin to think alike and lose perspective. A multitude of well-documented biases enter into thinking when too many people who think alike spend too much time together. “Group think” also makes the thinking susceptible to strong egos, messy politics, and crises caused by poor planning. As early as possible, bring people together from different departments, different levels in the organization, and outsiders with entirely unrelated areas of expertise and talents. Have a formal time set in the design schedule for the “Wild Card Team” meeting, so leaders can be assured such divergent thinking is happening.

Convergent thinking, where the opinions start merging and harmonizing, comes naturally to the human mind (we like it when things all come together), and we have to fight to keep thinking divergent long enough for everyone to express their ideas BEFORE any decisions or commitments are made. The greatest enemy to clear thinking is convergence that happens too soon with too few people involved. Then, in time, after the divergent thinking, easily and quickly in most cases, the thinking converges on one solution and everyone says, “just right,” or “yes, that feels really good,” or “I really like that solution.” Then, fire the team up to go full bore forward to implement the solution.

Over 95% of Knowledge is Qualitative – IT Fails to Process it!

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Fortunately, we are learning today that IT-oriented solutions – that ignore the humans involved – are often failures. CRM is an example. CRM was hailed as the great and wonderful solution to organization- and customer-based communication. IT-oriented companies developed all kinds of complex and expensive software, and the investments in CRM solutions have been astronomical in cost (money, loss of time, disruption to organizations, confusion over systems, incredibly poor decision making, etc.).

What we are learning is that over 95% of the significant information for understanding of the customer situation is qualitative – insights, feelings, perceptions, observations, intuitions, gut instincts, etc. This is the “messy” information that gives us context, background, and purpose rather than just numbers and statistics. It is the 95% of critical knowledge that IT cannot handle. Qualitative knowledge is often unspoken and unstructured, requiring a person to speak it out, talking about it and talking it through. It takes a little time to work implicit feeling or intuition into explicit text and formal knowledge. Organizations must find ways to let people “tell about it” without the constraints of IT fields and character-limited boxes.

We need ways to capture voice data, convert it to digital for processing, and then privilege it in management discussions, decision making, and proper action. Voice-based communication systems give organization leaders the 95% of the qualitative knowledge that is such a valuable and defining “competitive and intellectual asset” to the organization.

The Power of Early Rapid Prototyping for Group Thinking

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Prototypes are tools to think with. Prototyping is an activity that stimulates thought because the team or group can see and touch the product of their thinking long before the demands of schedule, quality, and price become the drivers. We all know how prototyping is essential in engineering and design because prototypes are simple, inexpensive, testable, and changeable. Prototyping cultures or organizations are ones where innovation and creativity are encouraged and expected, and where the prototyping demonstrations or prototype products of that thinking are welcomed and engaged with.

Early rapid prototyping is the use of the prototyping process as early as possible in any project or activity involving a group. It is a means for the biases, preconceived ideas, inclinations, past experience, ego trips and politics to get out in the open where they can be challenged before they become too set into the thinking regarding the work. Quickly engage everyone, as diverse a group as possible, in throwing out every idea possible regarding the project or activity. Record all ideas and form them into a product that looks as exactly like what the end result will look like as possible. Build in all specifications and expectations and limitations. Mock it up on paper as it will look when finished, mock it up with styrofoam and glue and string and sticks as it might look like when it is in production. Hold what might be the end product in your hands as you can envision it right now. Over the time or life of a project, a team will create many early rapid prototypes as tool to see and understand and pull talent from every person involved. Kind of like brainstorming, early rapid prototyping is more practical, more pragmatic, more specific, more detailed, and more end product focused.

No engineering or design project would ever begin without prototyping and prototypes; no project that involves thinking and ideas, with an end product as its purpose, should ever begin without early rapid prototyping.

The Strategic Value of Sales Report Intelligence

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Nobody reads it! Nobody cares! Why am I doing this? We recently saw a sales report from a field rep who had been traveling on the road for several days. At the end of his sales report near the end of his trip, clearly discouraged, he puts these words in the report: “Is anyone reading this? Who are you? If you are reading this, please call me at [number]. I want to know who reads these reports. Does anyone care?” To be alone out on the road for several days is bad enough, but to think that no one cares is really de-motivating and discouraging. We hear often from the sales reps that reporting is all a waste of time because no one reads sales reports anyway. Stop to think for a moment – we try to motivate people in a thousand ways, but there is no greater motivator than a sales manager who reads the sales reports and gives immediate, honest, and helpful feedback, and then who moves the strategic information forward and upward in the organization, all the while giving the sales rep (by name, with cc: to sales rep) credit and praise for the information. The organization must “pull” for the information from the sales reps, want it badly, and earnestly seek it and reward it with attention and recognition and dignified and honest praise. After all, accurate, timely, and complete reconnaissance from the field is the dominating force that gives the Generals what they need to win the battle.”

Who’s Got The Monkey?

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Don’t let the monkey jump! A Harvard Business Review article titled “Who’s Got The Monkey?” talks about how weak managers let their employees push their responsibilities off on them rather than insist that they shoulder the responsibility. Weak sales managers who do not require their sales reps to report regularly on customer sales meetings have “let the monkey jump” onto their backs for gathering strategic information and disseminating it throughout the organization. To shift to another metaphor, these weak managers are letting the “tail wag the dog,” with the sales reps in control of the flow of strategic information from the field into the company. “Would you fire your top sales rep if he/she does not report regularly?” – Who has the monkey? Is the tail wagging the dog?

Business Intelligence System – control of data coming in and reporting going out!

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Critical to business intelligence and knowledge management is early rapid accumulation of information from as many diverse (credible) sources as possible – both quantitative data and qualitative knowledge. Massive aggregation or accumulation of the most accurate, current, and complete information, in a form that is usable easily and quickly must be a high priority for organization management. Every morning, leaders should be able to open their knowledge management dashboard and see the total information profile or graphic with the information processed and presented for maximum rapid understanding and action. We cannot talk about “organizational intelligence” or “strategic knowledge” or “knowledge application” unless we have a steady flow of reporting from all those out in the marketplace, especially those who are working with customers and competitors. Sales reps, technical field leaders, executives and managers, customer service people, manufacturing and product innovation and development leaders – anyone directly connecting with the marketplace needs to be reporting continuously, quickly, into the business intelligence system. At the touch of the “Refresh” button, a leader should be able to see at a quick glance exactly what is going on with the marketplace, customers, competitors, products, customer service, product performance and reception, etc.

Fast and timely reporting, with accurate, complete, and current information, processed quickly into usable form, given to the right people who have the power to collaborate and come up with strategic understanding, proper decisions, and forceful action – that is what a business intelligence system should deliver. Control over the data coming in, and control over the reporting of the data coming out!