One of my great pleasures is working with sharp, knowledgeable, dedicated, and determined leaders and Board members of impressive non-profit organizations. These organizations are almost always doing amazing things, but too often I find them feeling totally strapped and constrained by resources. The staff is overworked and underpaid. Most non-profits walk a fine line between hope and despair. Financial limitations, and the insecurity that creates, lead to way too much focus on money and the wrong metrics. When you focus on money, you devote most of your time to boosting donations, memberships, and attendance. You constantly brainstorm new schemes to attract more of each. Meanwhile, you don’t care who donates, joins, or attends, as long as those numbers are going in the right direction. The problem is it does matter where the money comes from. That money, and your considerable efforts to acquire it, control how you use your limited resources. Typical consequences of chasing money include:
Top-notch leaders share three essential traits. Two of these traits are well understood, common targets of conscious improvement, and the topic of numerous articles published daily. The third is another matter entirely. It is not well understood and is rarely discussed in helpful, instructive ways. That’s too bad because it offers the single greatest opportunity to improve results and productivity. 1. Respect How you treat people matters. It matters a lot. Top-notch leaders know this. And while the Internet is filled with advice about how to treat employees, it all boils down to one word: Respect. If you respect your employees, you:
You can’t solve a problem without eliminating its cause. Unfortunately, most organizations either struggle to find the real cause or they skip that step and just try “solutions” at random. Those solutions range from seemingly small changes such as: • New forms • New rules • New meetings • New forms and rules for meetings To enormous initiatives such as: • New employee engagement programs • New performance management systems • New organizational charts, titles, and office assignments You get the idea. (Contribute your favorite “futile fixes” in the comment section of this article!) What do these ”solutions” have in common?
My clients, readers, and audiences complain frequently about getting dragged into issues that ought to be resolved without their help. Every time an issue is escalated one, two, three, even more levels, the cost is significant. “Why can’t people just solve these problems themselves?” they ask. Well, you can’t eliminate a problem without eliminating its cause so here are the 10 most frequent causes of unnecessary escalation. 1. Unclear Priorities Employees can’t make decisions without understanding the factors that should govern those decisions. Sometimes those factors are project specific – requirements, customer expectations, cost/schedule trade-offs – and sometimes they are company wide and involve strategic priorities – priority accounts, product life-cycle plans, customer service expectations, quality/schedule trade-offs, etc. Without clarity, employees often need to escalate what could be simple decisions.
Both the New York Times and Inc. have written about Zappos’ holacracy recently. Why isn’t it working? Order is essential. You can’t work with other people to produce anything, especially anything of significance, without order. I don’t care if you are throwing a dinner party or building an airplane. Decisions must be made, responsibilities assigned, and plans laid. In a traditional hierarchy, “the boss” drives the decisions and assignments. A holacracy is an effort to replace the traditional hierarchy with a more flexible, organic, network so different people can assume different roles, including being ”the boss,” depending on the circumstances and their skills and interests. In theory, it sounds great. In practice, not so much and this is why:
“Process people” love me. At first sight. These are the people who perceive processes, seek processes, and, given a chance, create processes. They crave recognizable beginnings, middles, and ends accompanied by discernible progress. Order and efficiency make them happy. As a result, they are the people most aware of the daily chaos that kills corporate productivity. They desperately wish their companies would learn to create greater clarity. If you aren’t a process person, you may not have a clue what I’m talking about. Perhaps you don’t see the chaos. You don’t really think in terms of process. You aren’t aware of the fact that 50 – 90% of your time, and of those around you, is not adding value for which customers are willing to pay. Meanwhile, the process people drive you crazy. You see them as the guys who want to document everything. They are always creating new forms and demanding you follow new procedures. To you, those efforts to create order look a whole lot like bureaucracy and you wish they would just go away and let you get your job done in peace. And you are right. A good deal of the time, process people ”solutions” are often more orderly than efficient. Rules, forms, and procedures create systems, and systems should not be confused with clarity. I see numerous systems daily that are complete overkill, miss the root cause of the problem, and/or locally optimized to make one set of tasks easier, usually at the expense of others, including customers. Here are just a few examples:
“Ready, Aim, Fire” is so old-fashioned. Careful, thorough, risk averse planners simply need not apply. This fast paced, action oriented world demands a lot less “readying” and “aiming.” Pilot programs are a great response. Until they succumb to these common ailments: 1. Collaboration killers If your goal is results, you need everyone driving toward those results and partnering for success. When you set up a pilot program, you shift the focus from achieving results to judging the program. People who need to be steadfast collaborators become observers and critics instead. An “us vs. them” mentality ensues and you won’t get the partnership you desperately need to succeed. 2. Discouraging persistence Dogged determination drives more projects across the finish line than any other force. Pilots rarely generate that level of determination. Instead, a noble champion and a fan or two are often seen slaving away while others dismiss the work as ”just a pilot” – a short term, temporary, half-hearted inconvenience.
I remember when my husband and I first considered having a baby. We discussed how it might be better to wait. I don’t remember that conversation, but I do remember the realization that we would never be ready. If we had waited until we had had enough money, wisdom, and kid-free experiences – until we were completely ready, we never would have had children! If you wait for everything to be perfect, you will never do anything. Nonetheless, I witness daily examples of people delaying action on their top priorities while they plan, practice, research, check with a few more people, or wait for someone to return from vacation or maternity leave. In other cases, they distract themselves completely by “getting all their ducks in a row” or tackling low hanging fruit of little importance. I have a Fortune 500 client who has postponed the start of our project every month since October because they aren’t quite ready. A business owner who attended my most recent speech has been thinking about doing a webinar, but isn’t quite ready. Next thing you know, it will be December again! Don’t spend February getting ready. Get clear about your priorities and figure out what concrete steps you need to take today, tomorrow, and next week so that on March 1st you can look back at February as a month of amazing action, not a month of preparation!
When I opened the refrigerator this morning, the space normally occupied by 100% natural orange juice was taken by an alternative. The unnaturally long list of unrecognizable ingredients and pledges of less sugar and calories raised my hackles almost as fast as my pause raised my husband’s defenses. He thought we could try it. I thought he had flipped. In some marriages, this could be the burnt toast that breaks the camel’s back. Why? Because we shop the perimeter of the grocery store. Our cart contains little other than fresh fruit, vegetables, chicken, and seafood. Since we don’t squeeze our own juice or keep a cow, we venture into the center aisles for things like juice and milk. However, the criteria that drive our selections remain constant. The brand of juice and milk matters little; the length and contents of the ingredients list matters a lot.
Our political process is a mess. I don’t think we’ve been this divided since the Civil War. Compromise has become a dirty word. Many are unwilling to read or listen to opinions unlike their own. Healthy debate seems a thing of the past. And it’s all because politicians, the parties, and people in general have staked their identities to alternatives, not to objectives. Let me explain what I mean. Alternatives are choices. Options. Routes to a destination. Means of achieving an end. Here are some examples: No new taxes Tax the rich Defund Planned Parenthood Medicare for all Small government Big government My right to arm myself as I desire is sacrosanct You all know people wedded to these alternatives. As a matter of fact, these have all become objectives in the minds of many. But they aren’t objectives. They are all alternatives.