Top 10 Managers You Don’t Want to Be Like.

Hey, You Wanna Work for Me?

See this guy?  He was a manger of a fairly big operation.  Quite successful too (if you judge success on cajoling people into coughing up their dough and making shady deals… which some of you might).

The problem with his management style was the “success at all costs to everyone else” approach, which ultimately and ironically cost him everything.

Two questions every manager ought to consistently ask themselves:

1.       What is my motivation for doing what I’m about to do?

2.       What might the consequences be on everyone around me, and then back on myself?

I know, you think that you are no different than Al Capone.  But doing business with people has taught me that time and time again, we let the ends justify the means.

And when people get into tight situations, they tend to move towards short-term actions that save the career, the reputation, the finances, etc.

This is why we keep saying that clear purpose and values in organizations are so important. They give members a handrail to grab onto when decision-making gets stressed. They provide clarity where there may not otherwise be such.  They also provide a handrail for those moments when nobody is looking. They’ll never replace personal character, but they sure can help a soul with good intentions.

What this Means to You:

For managers of front-line staff, beware of shutting down contributions, imposing policies and constraining action in favor of maintaining your own semblance of control (i.e. satisfying your own internal needs and validations, making yourself look-good at the expense of organizational purpose, etc.).

For senior managers at the strategic apex, be careful of making the entire organization work for your personal gain (i.e. serving yourself at the expense of the entire organization. Think Enron, not just Capone).  Avoid the assumption that those below you are of less capacity or lower social structure.

If you are not careful, you will find yourself bereaved of organization and influence, and left with your head in your hands.  Let’s just hope it’s still attached to your neck.

So, here’s the list of the Top 10 Managers You Don’t Want to Be like.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

10 Lessons on Business from General Custer

How to Avoid Your Own Last Stand.

With the recent story breaking about the Flag from Custer’s last stand selling at $2.2 million, I found some great “lessons learned” that can help us to avoid his same mistakes, whether it be on a literal battlefield or in the market of competition in business and career.

At the same time, let’s not forget that failure is an integral part of success, when it’s reviewed, digested and used to actually shape future decisions.  I was once told by a successful entrepreneur that the best way to have a successful business is to fail at three others.

So what can we learn from the Battle of the Little Big Horn to help us avoid our own ‘last stand’?  Here is my every day interpretation of 10 reasons why Custer was defeated.

1. Never act alone.  Leaders never succeed by themselves. Leverage the support, resources and wisdom of those around you.
2. Avoid professional and organizational fatigue.  There is nothing like driving so hard for an objective, only to achieve a Pyrrhic victory. Remember, man was not made for business, but business was made for man.
3. Harness the power of focus.  Multitasking is a farce. Don’t spread yourself or your organizational energy too thin.  Focus everything on what’s most important, knock it out, then move on to the next most important goal.
4. Expect everything – that way you will always get what you expected.  Somewhere, there is a kid with a laptop starting a business that will blow you out of the water if she gets the chance.
5. Don’t get outnumbered. Keep your networks and circles of influence growing. In this increasingly networked world, you draw instant power from your ability to move thousands through social media.
6. Don’t ignore the advice of others, especially your customers and constituents. Build your own meta-knowledge.
7. Never go up against someone named ‘Crazy Horse”. It just sounds suicidal to begin with.
8. Fight every battle like it’s your last stand. It just might be.
9. Be determined. No matter the circumstances that face you, remember the Stockdale Paradox.
10. You can never have too much information; about the customer, about the competition, about the performance of your product or service, about your own people and your own organization.

Don’t underestimate others.

Be More Successful -> More ‘Professional’

Over the past twenty years, there has been an occasion where I have been accused of not being professional (usually when someone is suffering deep emotional problems). Worse, I have myself thrown the term out to describe someone else’s behavior (I have always been mentally stable). I don’t even know what ”professional” means. I do get paid – isn’t that professional? Let’s put it this way: In the good old days, I wouldn’t have been able to go to the business olympics – only amateurs were allowed (and while my performance may be amateur, I have been paid on numerous occasions for my athletic acts of business which is a clear violation of both old-school olympic and current NCAA standards. Though I don’t have enough tattoos to make any NCAA team nowadays, even women’s soccer.).

Let’s face it: appearance matters. And while I do mean the way you look, I don’t just mean the way you dress and do your hair. The way you appear to others makes a difference. (oh yeah, I finally found a description for ‘professional’).

Back in the tumultuous aftershock of 9/11, I was stuck trying to save my own business and looking for work at the same time. I got pretty good at interviewing (either for a new client or a new job), and learned a valuable lesson: It’s not so much what you say, but how you say it. In other words, my verbal appearance made a huge difference when interviewing. Time after time I was able to win positions or contracts (before they were frozen due to the economic hit) by my ability to answer questions freely, non-chalantly, and completely. It was my ability to communicate that made others think, “This guy is sharp, we should seriously consider him” (suckers).

Now obviously, you have to be able to produce good work for your charade to be fruitful in the long run. If you’re interviewing, you need to have the right resume in the first place to get very far, but in the end, I believe its one’s ability to communicate effectively that determines, to a large extent, where their career goes.

Communicate with words. Communicate with physical appearance. Communicate with personal style and with business results.

Photo by S. Diddy

The Great Questions of Leadership

For those who might wonder just how effective their leadership is in their organization, let me introduce you to “The Great Questions”.  I work with a lot of leaders who are doing everything they know how to stay on top of the responsibilities that rest on their shoulders: from being great managers of work, to great managers of people, to making an impact and getting things done. And often, in the heat of the moment, with the pressure on, it’s easy to begin to fall into common leadership traps such as complacency (not really leading at all anymore) or naivete (not knowing what a leader is supposed to really do in the first place).

So every time I sit down to work with a leader, no matter what the chief complaint or symptom is that brought us together, I always begin with the “The Great Questions”:

1. What is the purpose and/or mission of your organization, department, etc.?
2. Are you accomplishing it?
3. How do you know?

Let’s talk about the power of those three simple questions, from both the inquirer’s and the receiver’s side.

What is the purpose and/or mission of your organization, department, etc.?

This first question is meant to take all of the things competing for a leader’s time and attention, all of the distractions and all of the small stuff that has become big, and blow it away by regaining context of what this whole thing is about in the first place: why are we here and what are we supposed to be doing in the long run? Asking this question helps calm the seas, focus on what matters most, and quickly tells the interrogator how well the leader understands why the organization even exists in the first place. By doing so, we frame the important conversation and throw anything not directly related to it out the window, off the plate, persona non grata, etc.

Are you accomplishing it?

This is the point where leaders either have an immediate answer or pause to think.  If they have an immediate answer, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are or are not on target, it just means that they think they are.  This question is not meant to be debated, it’s really a set-up for the next question by getting them to answer yes or no, and then slapping question number 3 on there for gut check time.

How do you know?

How do you know is a question about awareness, about measurement, about active inquiry into the ultimate question of “are we successful or not?”  It tells you so much about the manager or leader before you, and what may or may not be missing in their organization.  It also is a question about knwoledge vs. conjecture:  We are asking if they KNOW.  Often, it is difficult to really know, but we want to find out how they are framing their paradigms of the organization.  in 9 out of 10 organiztions, I will bet that the manager never really asks that.  Instead, it’s, “Am I doing what I need to do to keep my boss off my back?  Am I doing what I need to do to look good?”  Those aren’t wrong questions, rather they are more likely indicative of what the real organizational mission may be, rather than what the framed poster in the break room or company banner claims.

How do you know lets the interrogator see if the leader and their organization is measuring their purpose and mission – if not, then it probably is not being fulfilled, and the activities, systems, processes, people and focus within the organization are almost certainly out of alignment, are fragmented and disjointed.

Leaders who lead by “The Great Questions” tend to do less managing and more actual leading and torch bearing, thanks to the vision and clarity that working within the big three allow you to achieve.

So go on, ask them, of your self, of your direct reports and of those you report to.

Seeing the Unseen in your Marketing Operations

Ever walk into the room when someone else was mad or had a serious argument with someone else in the room, and though you didn’t see or hear it, you knew something wasn’t right?  You could feel it.  The attitude was thick, like an invisible smoke, and it clung to everything in the room.  Well, that’s an example of part of what I call “Seeing the Unseen”.

When it comes to moving your marketing organization up a notch, it means moving the rest of your organization up a notch as well, because, well, the marketing function doesn’t exist in a box.  And if you think it does, then we need to get you some super X-ray vision glasses, because there is a lot that you aren’t seeing.

To improve marketing, the first step is understanding what is actually going on, which means mapping your core processes.  What is a core process?  Its one of those macro, big, overall sorts of things, like making a widget.  Core processes may have many sub-processes in them, but overall, its what you do in order to do what you do.  Got it?

The problem you will run into, is that if you aren’t experienced with process analysis and mapping, then chances are that you will actually record what you want to have happen or project what you wish was being done vs. what is actually being done.  But if you get it right, and you can hang that on the wall, then you’ve just created the instrument that all improvement can be based on.

Think of it, with a process map, you begin to see the current state vs. your soon-to-be-defined desired state.  You can see places that are lean and mean or fat and filthy.  You can look at what’s being measured, what ought to be measured, and what you probably should stop wasting your time measuring (executive’s like metrics, but let me tell you – most of them are pure waste.  I’ll have to write on that later). And you add insight into communications and information sharing, decision-making, performance and talent, and all of a sudden you have the organization right there before your eyes to no longer subject you to its whims and fancies, to be subjected by you. At least in theory.

The bottom line is this: Start today. You don’t need an exhaustive effort or even a Visio file to begin.  Simply take out a piece of scratch paper and determine the first, most overall thing that you do:  Draw a factory in the middle of the page (that’s the marketing department, or sales, or accounting, or HR or whatever).  Then draw an arrow coming out of the factory to the right and write down what it is that the factory produces.  Try not to make a list of things, but the one thing, overall, that it produces inside that sweat-shop of horrors.  Next draw an arrow going into the factory at the left, and write down what the input is into the factory – the raw materials that will magically be transformed inside by a group of hourly and salaried and sometimes volunteer workers pushing buttons and pulling levels and wiping their diaphoretic foreheads.

And now you have started.  You can begin to look inside the factory, and follow the inputs, as a fly on the wall or a speck on the raw materials, and trace them through their transformation into the big product that will come out the other end.  Along the way, note the places that the inputs change form into something completely different (like raw customer data into an ideal customer profile, or requirements into a campaign plan), just like a cake mix changes with the addition of eggs into a completely different substance.

With a little time and some more scratch paper, you can develop a working model of the work process that flows through your organization, and the foundation is then laid for operational insight, measurement and management for organizational success.  If that doesn’t work, I have been known to donate a lot of hours to helping others out.  Feel free to reach out.

Got a Tough Problem? Take a Nap.

For me, brilliant flashes of clarity and genius happen in the shower.  Honestly, the shower has come to be my holy of holies, and if my increasing water bill wasn’t such a liability, I’d be much further ahead in life.  But the research has come to show that creative problem solving is enhanced with REM sleep.  So maybe Costanza wasn’t that far off after all, building a bed below his desk and sleeping there.  Tapping into your circadian rhythms and finding out your peaks and valleys in daily productivity and thinking, you might want to start scheduling a nap in your day before those big brainstorm sessions or campaign kickoffs.

Hey Interviewers, Here’s a Gut-Check for You: “Interview Illusion”

“…We all think we’re good at it. We are Barbara Walters or Mike Wallace, taking the measure of the person. Psychologist Richard Nisbett calls this the “interview illusion” — our certainty that we’re learning more in an interview than we really are.”

I love this. So true. I was a part of a great organization that actually did learn how to interview, and I learned a lot from them. Unfortunately, most don’t.

http://ow.ly/7GoF

The Business of BANT

I am amazed at how many sales and marketing organizations that I come across that lack defined process, and in doing, lack the ability to manage and improve their own operations.  In the past 15 years, I have been in marketing and sales organizations throughout the world, both small and Global 2000 in scope, and it never fails to astonish me at how much they lack a simple, common set of criteria for prospect evaluation. Of those that do, few use a nomenclature that is enforced and consistently applied throughout the funnel and across the organization.

Enter BANT: an acronym that, I believe, was introduced to the world through IBM (please correct me if I am wrong).  While I have met a ton of sales professionals who know about BANT and give me the, “Yeah” head-nod and twist of the face that means, “I consider those things with my prospects, who doesn’t?”, very few cognitively use it and measure their activity with it  (That’s the thing about successful sales people – few know why they are successful or what they are doing that really drives success).

Whether you acutally use the acronym BANT or some other tool, the question is: do you have a set of clear criteria that is codified, articulated and implemented across your organization? Its not enough to rely on the “gut instinct” of your sales pros – challenge that instinct and ask them something along the lines of the following:

• Does the prospect / prospect organization have Budget, or will they have it in an acceptable timeframe for us to work with them?
• Are we working with the right Authority(ies) in the organization that can actually purchase the product?  How do you know?
• Does the prospect organization / individual have a matching Need with our product / solution?
• Is the prospect’s Timeframe to purchase an acceptable one for us to be spending our time with them?

Now, there are a couple of key considerations to point out when working the enterprise and/or complex sale.  The first is from a sales management point, that it is not enough to ask those questions.  In fact, you may not want to ask those questions at all, but get at them from a different angle, such as, “What kind of budget do they have at this time, and what are their spending plans for it? Is someone competing for that money?”  Asking questions such as these puts the team on the spot to really learn what the purchasing situation of the prospect is.  I have heard too many sales leaders (and I am even talking VPs of Global Sales) that glance over these, rather than using this as an opportunity for not only accurate forecasting, but mentoring, training and modeling sales skills to their organizations. My favorite question is “How do you know?”.  Simple, straight forward and cuts through the salesman two-step.

The second point of using BANT in a B2B role, is that you may need to be following multiple BANTS: one for each contact and one for each account, perhaps each opportunity if you are selling multiple products into large accounts.  You may have an individual that has 3/4 BANT in the system, or even full BANT, but because we know that it is never just one person making the purchasing decision in an organization, the account or opportunity may not be at full BANT yet.

The second, and equally important part of BANT is that it is not simply for sales, but for marketing as well.  We must let go of the days where marketing activity is merely creative outlet and flashy campaigns. Marketing exists for one reason and one reason only: to get sales.  And with the dramatic change in the purchasing process over the last 30 years, marketing in most organizations has become the sales team.

It’s marketing’s role to manage those inquiries and suspects and begin to score them based on their BANT position, creating messaging, communications, interaction and conversations that move prospects towards full BANT, and there is a way to do that, because not all BANT is equal.