Month: April 2014

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5 Principles that Make or Break Leadership

Leadership complexityIt takes just a few minutes to discover whether I am working with a tyrant, a Pollyanna, or a true leader. All I need to do is listen to how they describe their employees.
A tyrant makes statements like, “These people are: entitled, lazy, ignorant, and clueless about how to manage gross profit.  I need you to define what we need in the next manager and to show us how to turn this team around.” The owner had is game face on as he told me this.  I suppose it was to impress on me the weight of the job he was asking me to do – it wasn’t working.  He wanted to hire our company to define what he needed to do to turn around his struggling sales team.  I wasn’t impressed nor was I sure I wanted the contract.

A Pollyanna makes statements like, “I have the greatest team in the world – they are awesome world champions.” However, when I asked why the owner needed us to do employee assessments he simply stated that he needed help.  I learned that their profits were non-existent and their cash flow was inverted.  I did not learn this from the owner – I stumbled on it when interviewing the office manager.  A Pollyanna boss can’t see problems nor do they see reality.  They simply wring their hands and hope that everything will be ok.

A leader makes statements like, “We have had a successful track record. Our team is mostly working well and they are engaged, disciplined, and learning. However, I need you to coach Sue (not her real name); she is struggling in her performance.  She has the skill sets, I was sure we made the right hire but for some reason she has withdrawn and become unresponsive. I will have to let her go if she doesn’t change but I need another perspective to let me know if I missed something.”

Listening to managers, owners, and C-suite positions talk about their employees tells a lot about an organization.  Why bad bosses who describe employees as incompetent ignoramuses don’t correlate the fact their description of employees is a direct reflection of their lack of skill as a leader is always amusing to me.  On the other hand, watching great leaders set high expectations and live those expectations out in front of their team is always inspiring to me.

Over the years I have observed five principles that make or break the success of a company in the short-term and the long-term that are directly related to the behavior of a leader.  Look at the principles below and then think about your own behavior as a leader or manager.  What does it take to change these insights from a negative to a positive outcome?

Principle 1 – how you talk about your employees is a direct reflection of your skill as a leader.  If they are bad employees you are a bad boss.  The fact is that great leaders hire great people. They inspire them to carry out outcomes they could not do alone by giving them a sense of purpose higher than the job itself and authenticating their contribution and their skills. I found that companies who think highly of their employees not only develop them consistently but also show sustained success over time. Conversely companies that have a low opinion of their employees typically make bad hires and struggle from financial crisis to financial crisis with poor performance over time.

Principle 2 – employees behave in direct correlation to what you believe about them. If you believe they are successful they will act that way.  If you believe they are losers they will act that way. This insight was first found in education then also seen in business. It is called the Pygmalion effect and is used by great leaders to improve overall performance.

Principle 3 – employees know no more about the business than you are willing to teach them. Complaining about ignorance when you do not train and develop your employees is ridiculous.  In one company we asked cost accounting to give us an itemized cost of each product.  We put together an excel sheet for their sales team from which they could calculate the impact of discounts on their gross profit while paying attention to the product mix and overall revenue targets.  We trained the sales team in how to use this sheet and trained the sales manager to reject discounts that did not show the impact on gross profit based on the excel sheet. Not surprisingly the team loved this.  It helped them feel they had more control over their own sales tactics. The managers were shocked at this new-found enthusiasm and business acumen.  However, the wish to know how to exercise business acumen existed all along. No one ever trained the team or gave them the data they needed to make smarter decisions.

Principle 4 – the harder you work to control your employees’ behaviors the greater the cost of labor you will generate. Extrinsic motivations generally work to cut employee motivation, remove employee engagement, and drop employee commitment – yet it is the first tool every bad manager uses to assert their superiority.  Recognize the difference between algorithmic tasks (established instructions down a single path) and heuristic tasks (tasks requiring experimentation to find a novel solution).  The point is that reward/punishment motivations work ok with algorithmic tasks but they are devastating in heuristic tasks because they often yield unexpected reactions and impaired performance. Great leaders understand this difference and use it to leverage the intrinsic motivations of their people.  The point is that people are intrinsically motivated purpose maximizers not extrinsically motivated profit maximizers in their performance and decision-making.  In contrast I worked with one client that defined every job as an algorithmic task.  He could not (or would not) see that the tighter he pulled the noose around his people the more inefficient they became.  This showed up in increasing sick days, constant internal complaints, losses due to flagging quality, higher rates of turnover, and increasing number of legal actions against the company by the EEOC. His response to these negative results was to lower the boom and get people in line. How do you think this is working?

Principle 5 – the cost of a bad hire is about 5 times their annual salary over the first year of their employment.  Bad hires ruin great teams. It is especially devastating to performance when a manager protects a bad hire or truly incompetent employee or even promotes them to avoid unpleasant conflict. In one company I watched an incompetent and poor performing employee run the company with the threat of law suits and complaints to the EEOC.  There was ample evidence to terminate the employment and to discipline the manager of that department for failure to discuss flagging performance issues.  Instead company penalized top performers for questioning why this incompetence was allowed to remain.  In another company we tracked the lack of discipline of poor performance to an affair the owner had with one female employee.  She had effectively been paid to remain silent, she did not have to show up to work, and she hated everything about the company. (The company went under about six months after this all came to light.)

What needs to change in your leadership behavior?  What kind of boss are you?  Change is possible though not necessarily painless. Do you see the need to change? Then act quickly and decisively. Hire a coach (and in some cases legal counsel) to avoid impulsiveness and violation of labor laws.  Be honest with yourself, are you a tyrant, Pollyanna, or leader?  What kind of leader do you want to be?

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All Congregations Face Problems – Leaders Differentiate the Healthy From the Pathological

agree-to-disagreeThere are two kinds of problems in a congregation – healthy problems and unhealthy problems.  Understanding the difference is the responsibility of leadership.
Healthy problems propel congregations into recognizing a changing need or environment so that they pay attention to structural changes and development of their people. Healthy problems include: over confidence by the founding pastor who sees herself as indispensable; eagerness – high energy; evangelism orientation without a corresponding discipleship process; seeking new ways to serve the community; growth beyond the ability to deliver; insufficient cost controls; insufficiently disciplined staff meetings; and inconsistent salary administration. If you work in or attend a fast growing congregation, you probably have experienced all of these normal problems.

Unhealthy problems indicate that leaders have ignored needed change.  Unhealthy problems include: arrogance; lack of focus – energy too thinly spread; no boundaries on what to do; pressing for more growth despite inability to deliver quality care; no cost controls; no staff meetings – no communication; and grossly under paid or over paid employees.  These problems show that the congregation has lost its bearing and is adrift.

Even dynamic congregations can lose the drive of their mission when mission looses focus and clarity. The shift of focus is subtle because management strategies included in budgeting, cost reduction, rightsizing, or structural realignment can undermine and distract leaders from the true driver of their success – their mission.

Dynamism in a congregation is situational, it is not guaranteed. It is possible for a congregation to become malformed and enter a period of decline and thus act like an aging organization shortly after it is started. When early aging occurs, simplicity (the earmark of a vibrant congregation) gets lost in complexity as the people in the congregation struggle to explain the gap between their actions and their ideals or to explain how their actions fulfill the mission.

Dynamism induces simplicity as the earmark of a highly reproducible structure.  This kind of simplicity was described by Rainer and Geiger as, “…a straight forward and strategic process that moves people through the stages of spiritual growth.”[1] This definition is important to think about.  Simplicity is not the absence of complex situations – this misnomer only causes frustration.  Complexity and growth go together. Simplicity is the ability of the congregation or Christian organization to support a direct line of action between its mission and its target in the midst of an ever-growing complexity of networks and stakeholders. When this kind of simplicity is lost activity around the mission becomes as congested as a Los Angeles freeway at rush hour.

So how is a simple and dynamic structure developed?  Start with a blueprint i.e., define how the congregation will bring people to spiritual maturity i.e., start with your mission.  Then remove congestion to build movement. Design what you do in alignment with a spiritual maturation process and your core values. Then recruit people to the process to help others grow in Christ. Use the same process in every aspect of how you minister to the community. Then practice your focus, say “no” to almost everything. People are drawn to momentum, but not every opportunity that emerges is something to be pursued as an institutional response. Recall Jesus’ response to the disciples request that he expand his work in Capernaum.  The crowds sought after more but Jesus stayed focused. At the disciple’s request to engage Jesus’ new found recognition Jesus said, “Let us go somewhere else to the towns nearby, in order that I may preach there also; for that is what I came out for.”[2]

When you align your congregation around the purpose it is supposed to be about, you not only keep it simple you also end up launching new ministry because of your focus.  Again, look at who Jesus said “no” to. What were the results?  How many others besides the twelve did Jesus commission to ministry in the New Testament?  Look at Matthew 8:19-22; Mark 5:18-20; John 5:10-17; and John 9:1-41 where Jesus did not inhibit the man from following in the crowd or restrict him from talking. The fact that each of these people immediately engaged in ministry points to the discipleship emphasis of Jesus i.e., act on what you know.  It is as people acted on what they knew that Jesus then followed up to help develop their content. Notice that Jesus did not recruit any of these emerging ministers to the twelve.

We often get it backwards, wanting people to have all right content but who often have no idea how to put it to work and then insisting that all ministry happen through the programs authorized by the staff. It is important to see that any time we organize, no matter what spiritual label we put on it, we pull people together toward a common goal and create tension.  Tension develops between the organization we create and the mission we seek to engage.  The reason tension emerges is that organizations work with four primary drives: self-preservation, growth, effectiveness, and efficiency. A leader’s tension between how they define the work of the gospel and what consumes their time emerges when the organization asserts its drives and imposes its needs on the mission of the congregation. Instead, organization must subsume its drives to the mission it was designed to facilitate as a means of moving people together toward that mission.

Organizations are not people so how does this inversion occur?[3] Organizations become inverted when the people running the organization use its structures and processes to amplify their own drives for power, prestige, and pleasure not serving others.

Organizations invert when its leaders hide in structures and processes to avoid having to take responsibility to serve.  This happens when lead pastors or executive pastors or CEOs hide in their offices each day, running new efficiency studies to wring more money out of the operation and not asking what people experience when they meet the congregation. It happens in congregations when the pastor gets lost in the internal aspects of the congregation and tries to make things more effective (read relevant) or more efficient (read removing objections to the latest trend he/she wants to try) and not taking the time to know the questions people are asking about God.

Hodgkinson adds another perspective to creating a dynamic organization that is particularly helpful to those leaders who inherit organizations or congregations that they must rejuvenate.  To help sift through the haze of complexity, Hodgkinson offers a series of insightful questions that pastors should ask about their congregations.[4]

  1.       Is the organization unjustified in its basic purpose?  Can it describe its basic purpose?
  2.       Is the organization unjustified in its complexity of ancillary purposes?
  3.       Should the organization grow? Consolidate? Reduce? Is the growth pattern valid and defensible?
  4.       What are the latent functions of the organizational effort and are they valid and defensible?
  5.       What, so far as reasonable analysis can reveal, is the shape of the non-quantitative cost benefit account? Is the quality of organizational life adequate under its constraints?
  6.       What consistency exists between the answers to these value questions and the core commitments/assumptions of the leader asking them?

These questions can be a source of hope and vision or a source of intimidation and threat. The emotion experienced when these questions are reviewed is itself a reason to stop and reflect.  Ask yourself what emotion you experience and why?  This practice of self-awareness may lead you back to the question Jesus asked James and John – are you willing to drink the same cup Jesus drank?

So, what problems is your congregation facing?  Are they healthy or unhealthy? Will you exercise the courage and faith to discuss these problems or hide and hope they will go away or that someone else will deal with them?

References:

[1] Thom S. Rainer and  Eric Geiger. Simple Church: Returning to God’s Process for Making Disciples (Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing, 2006), 60.

[2] Mark1:38 (NASB)

[3] Christian A. Schwarz. Natural Church Development: A Guide to Eight Essential Qualities of Healthy Churches (Carol Stream, IL: Church Smart Resources, 1996), 62-65. Schwarz’s discussion of a technocratic versus biotic approach to congregational life is another similar way to assess the tension that occurs in the organization of the church.

[4] Christopher Hodgkinson. Educational Leadership: The Moral Art (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991), 109-110.

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Four Questions to Ask in the Middle of Conflict

conflict-in-recruitmentLeaders face conflict. Conflict simply is a matter of fact.  The presence or absence of conflict has very little to do with whether a leader is successful or not. Instead successful leaders know how to transform conflict into opportunity. So, the question is not how to avoid conflict but how to engage it and how to find the opportunity for break through thinking and development that conflict represents. Don’t rob your organization of powerful and transforming potential by either power over or ignoring conflict.
Mark Gerzon, in his book Leading Through Conflict: How Successful Leaders Transform Differences into Opportunities, outlines four essential questions for approaching conflict.  Make a habit starting your approach by asking yourself:

  • “What else can I learn about this situation?”
  • “Is there some useful, perhaps vital, information that I lack?”
  • “Do I truly understand the way others see the situation?”
  • “Should I consult with others before I intervene?”

Leaders who make a habit of asking themselves these questions avoid the impulsive decisions that generate years of regret later. I am not exaggerating when I say, “years later.” I have worked with leaders who described significant turning points that cost time, money, and tons of emotional energy  in colossal set backs. Rather than ask themselves these questions they responded to in hast and anger. We can and should learn from similar examples.

Ask yourself these questions then you are more ready to engage conversation with the source of the conflict.  The goal in engaging any conflict is to listen generatively and not reflectively.  Generative listening listens from the context of the whole system while reflective listening only hears from inside one’s self. The pitfall of reflective listening is that subjectivity pushes leaders down the rabbit hole of Wonderland and end up with a distorted view of reality. Generative listening on the other hand provides the leader an opportunity to move from simply managing conflict to engaging transformation. Generative listening uses several important skills.  Invite someone with whom you have strongly disagreed to talk with you while you listen – take the following steps.

  • Find a good space. Choose a place to talk without distractions.
  • Take the time. Let the other person tell their story.
  • Respond (versus react). Choose your body language, tone and intention.
  • Show interest. Make eye contact; focus on the person speaking; don’t answer your phone or look at your BlackBerry.
  • Be patient. It’s not easy for people to talk about important things.
  • Listen for content and emotion. Both carry the meaning at hand.  It’s OK sometimes to ask, “How are you doing with all this?”
  • Learn. Listen for their perspective, their view. Listen for their experience.  Discover or learn a new way of seeing something.
  • Follow their lead. See where they want to go. Ask what is important to them (rather than deciding where their story must go or how it must end).
  • Be kind. Listen with heart as well as with mind.

After doing this notice the difference this makes in how you feel about your relationship with the other person.  The act of listening not only brings clarity for both people in the conversation it often brings items to light that have never been considered before.  One conversation does not have to resolve all issues however; a good act of listening goes a long way in bridging seemingly unbridgeable differences.

Leadership i.e., the ability to create a new vision for group action amid competing perspectives, values, and allegiances; is all about getting through conflict.