Tag Executive coaching

This article has been reprinted several times, most recently,

the Engineering Management Institute has reprinted it

What you can do with this: You can print, read, share, and discuss it.

How to use this material:

• • • Discuss. Remind. Encourage.
    • That’s my recommended approach to helping people commit and develop.
    • I recommend reading and discussing the first three articles with your team and repeat weekly.
    • Each can be read in less than three minutes and discussed in 10 to 15 minutes.

How to prepare:

• • • Share one of the articles with your team and schedule a time for discussion.
    • Or share the guide with your department leaders and have them facilitate smaller discussions.
    • Ask everyone to read the discussion article.
    • Ask them to make notes on anything they find valuable or disagree with. If you prefer, give them some questions about the material for ideas and ask them to provide some advanced thought.
    • On your own, read the article, make your notes, and answer the questions you intend to ask or give.
    • Give some quick thought to any likely objections or challenges to the material you can anticipate from your group. (Who might ask what and how you want to respond?)
    • Introduce your upcoming discussions in person or by email. Feel free to use the following as a suggested script to edit to fit your style:

“I came across a few short articles that significantly impacted me. I thought we all might benefit from reading and discussing them over the next few weeks – one each week.

“Each article can be read in less than three minutes. Please read the first one and give some advanced thought to it. Make notes on anything that connects with you.

“Let’s kick off next week strong and meet in the conference room Monday morning at 8:00 for 20 minutes at most.

“I think the effort will be good for our work, but it also might be helpful to each of us personally.”

Discussion tips:

• • • Be enthusiastic.
    • Avoid interrupting or finishing someone’s thoughts or answers.
    • Add a small gap of silence to an answer – just a beat or two. This may allow someone to expand on something and avoid someone feeling that they need to rush through their answers.
    • When you feel someone might have more value to add, encourage them with a “What do you mean, Nancy?” or “Can you expand on that?” or “What happened next?”
    • Invite different people to contribute to the discussion or have other people lead the talks each week.
    • Be ready to help the discussion move on if someone takes too much control of it. (“Good point, Bob. If we have time in the end, let’s come back to this.”)

Discussion #1: Slippery Moments & Quiet Quitting

The Gallup organization says that in North America, roughly:

• • • • • • • 29% of us are engaged and care about our work
            • 54% of us are just “Going Through the Motions.”
            • 17% are “Disgruntled” and get in the way of those who care

Of course, we all have moments when we are not working at our best, but the “Going Through the Motions” people or those who have “Quietly Quit” are challenging to deal with. Dealing with the “Going Through the Motions” or “Disgruntled” can be slippery and trip you up.

Slippery Moments Discussion Questions:

• • • • • How do you think the numbers from Gallup stand up here?
        • What are some typical examples of moments we see here?
        • What are the consequences for our customers/ourselves?
        • What are your thoughts on the problem?
        • What are a few specific things we could start doing today to make those “Going Through the Motions” or “Disgruntled” moments less frequent? What else?

Discussion #2: Distraction Diet

Imagine the incredible results you’d have if you focused more during your day. You could:

• • • • • • • • Contribute more
              • Serve people better (internally and externally)
              • Come up with more ideas
              • Waste less time ramping back up
              • Create more opportunities
              • Plan better
              • Be less frustrated and stressed

Five ways to knock out the bulk of distractions:

1. 1. 1. 1. Establish focus hours for yourself. Set aside time each day when you’ll be unavailable for anything but true emergencies. If you can, commit to no inter-office communications during focus hours unless it genuinely can’t wait. No small talk. No “Hey… just a sec” interruptions.
         2. Turn off email alerts and commit to checking them at the most minimal level you feel is possible without harming service to others.
         3. Turn off chat and messaging apps (personal and team) unless your work requires it to get the job done.
         4. Avoid the web during your money hours (hours of the workday where you make good things happen) unless you need it for your work. The distractions are endlessly pleasant for those who’d prefer to avoid making good things happen (not your goal).
         5. Face away from distractions if you’re in a setting that allows you to do so.

Distraction Diet Discussion Questions:

• • • • • What are the most valuable of the five ideas for us? The least valuable? Why? Why not?
        • What impact can our distraction have on our customers/colleagues?
        • What are some other ideas we could do to improve?
        • If we gave out an award to the most focused person on our team/department, who would win it? Why?
        • How can we help each other when we slip? What kind of agreement can we make to stay committed to better focus?

“The major problem of life is learning how to handle the costly interruptions. The door that slams shut, the plan that got sidetracked, the marriage that failed. Or that lovely poem that didn’t get written because someone knocked on the door.” ~ MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. (1929 – 1968)

Discussion #3: Do as I say, not as I do.

Given that most of us can’t get it right all the time, is it just more good advice?

• • • • • Someone suggests you be more approachable to invite opportunity and better relationships, but you hide behind your desk.
        • Is the advice wrong if a boss is not patient or thankful but suggests that you should be?

When I find myself indulging in being grumpy, I’ve found it helpful to remember four things:

1. 1. 1. 1. 1. I’m a grown-up.
            2. It’s not about me.
            3. I won’t be here forever.
            4. I want to make good things happen for others (which, in turn, will make good things happen for me).

Do as I Say Discussion Questions:

1. 1. 1. 1. 1. What connected most with you from the article? Why?
            2. Why do you think someone’s hypocrisy makes it easier for us to disregard their advice?
            3. What does “Go first … and stay with it” mean?
            4. How do you think we can better minimize our occasional negative moods?
            5. What would you add or revise to overcome grumpiness?

My conclusion

It’s always the leader.

• We try to hire the right people. We do our best to develop and grow those people.
• But we get busy and stop listening. Take a few moments each month to use these questions to prompt a conversation.

Listen.

• You will be surprised, even shocked, with what you will learn.

An emergency requires quick decisions and clear instructions.

There may be a little time for a discussion with your team.

However, a vast majority of cases do not require an immediate decision.

There is almost always time for the team to consider the situation and develop solutions.

A thoughtful Leader needs to take time to let others react to the situation.

You have to create space for open decision-making for the entire team, even if that space is only a few minutes long.

This is harder in strict top-down leadership structures because leaders must solely anticipate decisions and alert their teams of upcoming decisions. In a top-down hierarchy, subordinates do not need to think ahead because the boss will decide when necessary.

How many times do issues that require decisions come up on short notice?

If this regularly happens, you have a reactive organization in a downward spiral. When problems aren’t foreseen, the team doesn’t get time to think about them, a quick decision is required from the boss, which doesn’t train the team, etc.

It would be best if you changed the cycle.

Here are a few ways to get your team thinking for themselves:

– If the decision needs to be made urgently, make it. Then explain why later, when there is time, and then have the team ‘Red Team’ decide to evaluate it.

Read about ‘Red Teamin’

– If the decision needs to be made on short notice, ask your team for input, even briefly, then make the decision.

– If the decisions can be delayed, push it back to your team to provide input. Do not force the team to come to a consensus. Consensus is a lazy leadership style that silences differences and those in dissent. Cherish dissent. Remember, if everyone thinks as you do, you don’t need them.

For decades the leadership ‘Talking-Heads’ emphasized that good leaders were learning leaders.

I, like you, fell for that platitude. But quite frankly, I think unlearning may be more critical.

I recently had a conversation about the changes we have seen since we grew up in the 60s.

Such as; A family friend’s son publicly transitioned from his birth gender of female.

In the 60’s, there were jobs that women were not allowed to do. Pot led to debauchery. LGBQ people were harassed, jailed, and ejected from institutions like the military. People of colour were routinely openly and legally the victims of racist policies. First Nations people were kept behind locked gates.

Today is where unlearning becomes essential.

Can you unlearn things you would have bet the ranch on?

Since the discovery of thousands of Residential School unmarked graves where babies & children were unceremoniously disposed of, we have been steadily unlearning the history that was taught us. There is a whole other version of history that includes people of colour and events so brutal it is heartbreaking.

I have spent the past few decades unlearning and expanding my view of how the world was made. And how we got here.

And celebrating the changes: women are serving in the military as combat soldiers. LGBQ people are proudly out in the open. ‘Off-Colour’ humour that was once perfectly acceptable is now recognized as horrifying.

These changes are 100% needed. We need to recognize the different versions of history and acknowledge that other people have perspectives that are as valid as our own.

The Post-Pandemic Workplace

Return-to-office planning is ramping up, and as many companies have experienced tremendous change in headcount over the past two years, the transition back to the office introduces the challenge of welcoming new team members and reorienting existing employees.

We know that many of us need to unlearn what the traditional workplace looks like. From space to desks to resources, for new to returning workers to what our leadership team looks like and does.

Since there is no one-size-fits-all approach, we need new methodologies to guide our organizations to face unprecedented challenges — and opportunities — to create a better workplace experience in the post-pandemic era.

We need to unlearn that headcounts and floor space are signs of importance and value. As the economy reopens, competition will be intense. Everyone will return to a changed workplace. Expectations will differ from person to person and could create tensions across generations at work.

These new sensibilities will affect how leading companies attract, retain, and inspire talent for many years. Culture is rooted in community and the “social infrastructure” that connects people and shapes how we interact.

The modern workplace will need to foster in-person and virtual relationships, build communities at work, and allow people to achieve more.

It is super hard to unlearn something.

It is a truism that nothing is harder to do than to unlearn something you hold to be true.

For many of us, historical leadership models point to outmoded arrogance and assumptions that the leader has a hold on reality and truth.

When leaders are 100% sure about something, they convey inflexibility. In turn, their obstinacy discourages debate and dialogue. Whether they are aware of that fact or not, a leader who radiates a high level of self-assuredness communicates to those who follow that they must agree with their boss or remain silent.

This leads to compliance and complicity — even willful blindness, which can lead people not to bring up big problems when they see them.

In his article “The Simple Difficulty of Being a CEO,” leadership consultant Patrick Lencioni refers to this trait as “invulnerability” and says it’s one of the temptations of a CEO that can lead to failure.

“The adage ‘Don’t let them see you sweat may be appropriate for actors or salespeople, but for leaders, it’s a problem,” he writes.

“Arrogance hampers your ability to build trust among your people.”

Lencioni says that when leaders do not admit to being wrong, employees mirror that behaviour, which becomes “a never-ending posturing exercise, where real dialogue dies.”

The longer a successful leader has been around, the more this assuredness can tune out different thinking, approaches, and ideas.

Don’t be that leader.

Here are three shifts you can make to continue learning and unlearning:

Shift #1: Engage in continual learning — and never assume you are done learning.

How? Ask open-ended questions that begin with “What” or “How might we?”

Shift #2: Be present and “quiet the chatter.”

How? Carefully analyze the critical events or communications that challenged your thinking and beliefs. Write them down, then reflect on which of these might be ones you need to unlearn.

Shift #3: Welcome diversity in thinking and approach.

How? Immerse yourself in a divergent perspective to gain a deeper understanding of it. Follow new people on social media, watch different news channels, and keep your mind wide open.

Remember the phrase, “Minds, like parachutes, work best when open.”

You may have to unlearn what you once thought true and sure to get your mind opened

Credit to:

Patrick Lencioni & The Table Group for the “First Team” concept,

Jason Wong of https://www.attack-gecko.net/

and  Dalmau Consulting for the image

I loved my job.

I was part of a powerful and effective executive team to whom I was loyal. I had no problem identifying that they were the team I was personally responsible for and accountable for.

They were my ‘First Team.’

I had built my team into a great team. People took on some of the most complex projects you could imagine and not just succeeded but excelled. I felt great loyalty to everyone who directly and indirectly reported to me.

But there is no doubt that my division was my ‘Second Team.’

Read about what Punk taught me about this situation.

“First Team?”

A First Team – best articulated by Patrick Lencioni – is the idea that true leaders prioritize supporting their fellow leaders over their direct reports—that they are responsible to their peers more than they are to their individual or “Second” teams.

If you’re not entirely on board with that concept, I get it.

In my experience, a “First Team” mindset has been transformational in creating a high performing organization by improving the quality of leadership and management practiced.  

When leaders have built trust with each other, it becomes significantly easier to manage change, exhibit vulnerability, and solve problems together.

I was part of a team who looked and functioned as like example A in the drawing:

When I fell out of my “First Team.”

Things changed when I got a new boss close to me and considered myself a trusted confidant. Over time she went quiet, stopped sharing reasons for decisions and stopped responding. People were hired onto the leadership team I belonged to, whom I believed did not demonstrate the standards I expected of them. My performance began to slip, and my reactions to events were not always as professional as I either hoped or was expected of me.

In retrospect, all the signs pointed to the simple fact that I was nearing or had gone past my best before date as far as she was concerned. To be clear, I have never purported myself to be perfect in any regard. Still, in this case, I was dealing with a boss who was not providing me precise and proper performance management nor effective leadership.

As pictured in example B, I lost faith in my boss and much of the leadership team.

So much so that I focused on my team, and slowly but surely, I became more and more isolated from the organization’s objectives.

 Other Examples of a Broken “First Team”

Imagine a world where the top leaders in your organization are gathered to solve the company’s most pressing challenges. Instead of coming together as a team focused on solving that problem, they approach the exercise more concerned about their self-interest than solving the company’s needs, as pictured in example D above.

Or are you part of a leadership team so disconnected from the rest of the company that they have

no idea what is happening on the shop floor? Picture example C above as the worst of ‘Undercover Boss.’ Where leadership has no idea.

But probably just another day at work for many people, and it’s why I spend a lot of time building a First Team mindset with my clients.

Read more about unaligned leadership teams.

Tragic?

Here are some of the ways I’ve had success in creating a First Team mindset:

Be Explicit

Be explicit about the behaviours you expect from your leaders. Be clear with my managers about their responsibility to one another, including detail of the First Team expectation in the job description and interview for how they’ve practiced it.

Treat Them Like a Cohort

If you don’t treat your leadership team like a cohort, they won’t become one. Ensure you regularly bring together your leadership team, including everything from mailing lists and slack channels to team-building exercises and social events.

Information and trust are the currencies of leadership, and demonstrating an equal distribution through shared experiences is a powerful tool.

Help Them Help Each Other

Encourage interdependence and normalization of help-seeking amongst team members.

Please encourage them to talk to one another about their problems and refer them for help.

Role-play difficult conversations with a fellow manager role play it.

Help Them Help You

Invite your First Team to help you solve your problems.

This vulnerability may feel scary, but it has proven beneficial to leverage your leaders’ capabilities to lead to better outcomes for your organization. And it is a great development opportunity because it exposes them to the types of problems they will face at the next level of their career.                   

Make it Stick

To ensure that you and your leadership team is adhering to the First Team concept, I recommend reviewing the following with your team:

• • At every opportunity, point out the priority of Team #1 before making any critical decisions.

This will put leaders in the correct frame of mind.

• • Demand that team members prioritize the executive team over all others.

When the executive team is truly cohesive and prioritized appropriately, their ability to face complex challenges with further confidence bonds the team and models unity to the organization, this requires an absolute, unwavering commitment to the First Team.

• • Explain how the team’s direct reports will be impacted.

We all know that if there is any daylight between executive team members, it ultimately results in unwinnable battles that those lower in the organization are left to fight.

Like many of the concepts I consult on, First Team is as powerful as it is simple.

Learn more about how I work with executive teams

I have seen highly educated leaders with vast experience have an “aha” moment about the First Team concept resulting in an immediate impact on their team’s cohesion and ability to succeed.

The author, Douglas Adams once said … “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”

According to a 2018 PMI (Project Management Institute) report, roughly 48% of projects don’t finish on schedule.  

Imagine, nearly half of all project deadlines are missed, resulting in increased costs, unhappy customers and ruins reputations and careers.  

What to do?

Here are three reasons deadlines are missed and what you can do to keep things or track:

1. Optimistic Planning Creates Unachievable Timelines

It is very human to be overly optimistic about how long it will take to complete a task.

This is called “planning fallacy.” (A theory developed in 1977 by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky)

Imagine your last project took 16 months to complete. It’s natural to assume you can do it in less time, because now you have more knowledge and experience.

But that optimism can quickly lead to missed deadlines.

Other causes of optimistic timelines are:

• • • Assuming the project will go as planned, with no issues.
    • Not understanding how long it’s taken to complete similar projects.
    • Failure to realize constraints on resource.

How to Create Realistic Timelines

The key to a more realistic schedule is to rely on analysis and data.

If you’ve completed similar projects in the past, use that data as the basis for realistic estimates. The more data you have, the more confident you can be in your estimates.

If you don’t have enough past project data to guide you, then you can use the following methods:

Method 1: Use a multi-point estimation technique

Take multiple estimates and combine them to arrive at a more realistic timeline. For example, average:

1. 1. 1. The most optimistic amount of time you think it will take.
      2. The most pessimistic amount of time you think it will take.
      3. The amount of time you believe it’s most likely to take.

Method 2: Engage your team to create ‘bottom-up’ estimates

A bottom-up approach to estimating requires that you build your timeline by having team members estimating each individual task and then combining them to arrive at an overall project estimate.

This ensures tasks they may understand but you may not be aware of are not over-looked.

And, you increase employee buy-in and confidence in the schedule.

Method 3: Build in Contingencies

By building contingencies into your schedule, you can help account for known and unknown risks, which will result in a more achievable timeline. It’s typically a flat 5–10% of the project cost and/or timeline added to the schedule baseline in case something unforeseen occurs.

2. Unclear Expectations Result in Missed Deadlines

If your team is unclear on when a deadline is, how can they meet it?

Communication problems can lead to you thinking your team understood their deadline when they didn’t.

Imagine the following conversation:

You: “Can you get this back to me by Thursday, at the latest?”

Team member: “Well, I don’t know. There are may be defects, if I have to correct errors, then I doubt I’ll be able to complete this before Monday.”

You: “Look, unless they’re critical, just leave the bugs and focus on this. I really need it no later than Friday.”

Team member: “Alright, I’ll try my best.”

Based on this conversation, the boss expects the task to be completed Thursday unless there are critical defects.

The team member believes they have till Friday, unless there are critical bugs, then Monday is the drop-dead deadline.

How to Communicate Expectations Clearly

Here are three ways you can ensure your team understands their deadlines.

Method 1: Use your project management systems

If you assign work informally or inconsistently, it can be easily misunderstood, forgotten, or considered unimportant.

When you hand out assignments verbally, people can easily forget about what was discussed or misconstrue your words. For instance, if you say, “I’d like to see this by the end of the week,” a team member may see that as a request and not a hard deadline.

When their name is assigned to a task in project the end date in the system allows for no question as to when their deadline is.

Method 2: Implement feedback loops

A feedback loop, or communication loop, is a simple process for ensuring what you’ve communicated has been heard and understood.

You ask them to repeat back to you what their deadlines are. In our hypothetical conversation, imagine if the team member was asked what the agreed-upon deadline was and replied: “Friday, unless there are critical defects, then Monday.”

You would have the opportunity to clarify expectations before missed deadlines.

Method 3: Conduct check-ins

The last thing you want is to discover after the deadline was missed that there was a misunderstanding as to when it was.

By incorporating periodic check-ins into your schedule, you’re achieving three things:

1. 1. Creating opportunities to remind employees of a deadline.
   2. Re-communicating the importance of that deadline.
   3. Creating opportunities for team members to give you feedback to so you better understand what is going on and identify potential problems and warning signs, without having to micromanage your team.

3. Poor Time Management

If you asked people how many hours a day they spend doing productive, project-related work, what answer would they give? Assuming an 8-hour work day, they may guess 7–8 hours.

But, research shows that this is a huge overestimate.

There are coffee breaks, bathroom breaks, smoke breaks and visiting.

In an average 8-hour work day, most people only accomplish 5 hours of productive work. Much of which is multi-tasking and constant interruptions.

In reality, your team is achieving less than 50% of their time doing uninterrupted productive work each week.

If you are assuming a 35–40-hour work week, but only achieving 12.5–25 hours of work, there is no wonder there are missed deadlines!

How to Improve Employee Time Management

Here are three ways you can help your team better manage their time and become more productive:

Method 1: Reduce time wasters

Have your employees record what and how they spent their time.

By tracking their own time for a few days, your team can discover time wasters and discover bottlenecks in the process, such as the time they’re forced to sit idle while waiting for reviews or approvals.

Or time spent in unproductive or unnecessary meetings. Consider giving your employees permission to attend only the meetings they are directly impacted by and allow them to excuse themselves from the unnecessary ones.  

Method 2: Eliminate distractions and interruptions

While being connected and accessible can boost collaboration and communication among the team, it can also detract from productivity.

Every time we’re interrupted, it destroys our focus, time that could otherwise be used to meet project deadlines.   

Here are three ways you can help your team eliminate distractions and interruptions:

1. 1. Encourage blocking time for specific tasks.
   2. Recommend employees only check email and messages at designated times.
   3. Provide a quiet, isolated space such as an empty office for employees working on anything complex or high-priority.  

Method 3: Avoid overloading your team

You may find that your team is still over-allocated, after all you can’t completely remove emails, meetings, and other interruptions.

Even if you can help your employees achieve 30 hours of productive work a week, you’re still overloading them by assuming a 35-40-hour work week in your schedule.

When people cannot get everything done in the time allotted to them deadlines will slip.

If your team members have too much on their plates, you will need to either increase the size of the team or push out the timelines.

If some of their workload is for another project or manager, ensure everyone is aligned on what is prioritized, and work together to agree to an attainable schedule.

Conclusion

Missed deadlines are all too common across all industries and businesses.

If your team is one of the nearly half of project teams with missed deadlines, it’s due to one of three problems: overly optimistic estimates, unclear deadline expectations, or poor time management.

Fortunately, all three of these are avoidable.

By following the advice above, you can ensure that your team doesn’t miss another deadline from here on out.