Make Sure Everyone Is In the Room!

   I was just recently consulting to a company where we caught a very instructive error.

  We have a new individual at the head of one department.  He is pretty savvy about customer record management and the Internet but handling the administrative aspects of these things is not the highest and best use of his time.  Consequently, he brought in a fellow he had worked with elsewhere who has good depth in this level of execution.  The new fellow, a fine person and quite talented, was suddenly up to his eyeballs in the customer database and finding all kinds of incomplete records.  Prior to my consulting visit, he had literally spent weeks trying to get his arms around it and clean it up so that his department would have a sound basis for marketing, especially electronic marketing. 

   I have the advantage (and the privilege) of a long-term relationship with this company.  My specialty is in leadership development, culture and strategic development and execution.  I’m by no means an Internet or Customer Record Management expert.   However, I like to get to know all the people in my client organizations where size allows it.  So I sat down and visited with this gentleman who has been spending the last several weeks in front of computer tunneling his way into customer data.  In the course of things, I asked him if he had discussed any of his findings with two other managers in the organization both of whom, to my knowledge, are also deeply involved with customer data, even though they are in different departments.  He blinked like someone who had just been awakened at 3 AM and said, “Well, no.”  I immediately called in the two other fellows and in short order, it was clear that the new man’s efforts were redundant and unnecessary.   This was no cause for upset or blame.  It is actually a common error when new people are brought into a situation and given such a powerful sense of urgency about accomplishing certain tasks that they don’t have time to really get to know all the other key players in the organization and acquire a good sense of what their responsibilities are. 

  So very quickly, everyone now knew that we already had a clean customer data base available to all departments for their various marketing needs.  We also all knew that we had an outside vendor whose software was cleaning our database literally on a daily basis.   This vendor was contracted by a highly tenured department head but the information hadn’t yet been shared with the new men.

  The organization is now poised to move ahead in short order with a series of electronic marketing campaigns.  And guess what?  Now, when these campaigns are designed and scheduled, everyone from all departments that market will be in the room together.  There won’t be a hair of distance between any of them.  They’ll avoid bombarding clients with too much information, developing campaigns that conflict with each other and they’ll make sure everyone in the organization all the way to the ends of the front line will know what’s going on. 

   Dr. Deming, my beloved mentor, was urging organizational leaders sixty years ago to make sure strategy was a collaborative effort and toward that end, to get all the right people in the room—from design engineers to sales people, from vendors who will play an important role in a given process to the people on the line who turn wrenches or take customer calls.  It’s as necessary and desirable today as it was then, but not just when high level strategic decisions are being made.  Everyone who touches a process or policy should be in the room together on a periodic basis to make sure we get the most informed decisions and they’re executed in the most efficient manner; one key part of efficiency being that all who should know do know.  This is one of the many reasons I regularly counsel my clients to “err on the side of over-communicating.” 

Fear and Leadership

    It is early April of 2011.  Just when we start to see signs of some increasing vitality in the economic recovery, the headlines are dominated by three "downer" stories:  the situation in Libya, the situation in Japan, the situation with our national political leaders posturing and haggling over the budget.  Not a pretty picture.
So the challenges will continue for quite some time for all of us who are in leadership positions. 
   Today I want to speak to one challenge in particular.  Fear.  The fear that arises in every sane leader
at times like these.  To not feel at least a bit of fear is something less than human.  On the other hand, to allow it to overwhelm you, to invade your decision-making process, no less the energy and attitude you bring to your teams every day--well, that is courting disaster.  But it is never easy to manage fear within us.  Fear arises from deep within the human brain, in the limbic system and the brainstem.  These structures have been
around for literally hundreds of millions of years, beginning with the lowly lizard and diversifying and developing up the evolutionary chain into mammals and ultimately primates.  They are designed, among other things, to keep us safe.  Our fear reactions tend to be lightning fast and overwhelming...for a good reason.  They are supposed to mobilize our entire physiological system to fight or flee.  You don't successfully defend your life against a mortal threat without engaging every atom in your body and mind .  These structures vastly pre-date the rise of civilization and workplace societies such as we have today.  The neocortex, the "new brain" that overlays these earlier-developing structures, is often no match for their power and urgency.
   Nonetheless, if we have chosen to be leaders, we owe it to ourselves, our people and all our stakeholders to stretch our mental and emotional muscles to achieve a measure of calm in order to make good decisions.
It's completely ok to freak-out in the privacy of your home and car.  It's not only ok, but probably wise to let
yourself go (again, in privacy) from time to time when the pressure builds.  Real men, and women, real grownups do cry in the face of such challenges.  They do get triggered into rage against the deeper feeling of helplessness that can strike in the face of constant, grinding challenges.  So this is a matter of choosing the appropriate place to let that tension out.  Crying is a great stress reliever, usually more so than pounding the hell out of a pillow, although that may be necessary as well. 
   But when we walk into our professional lives, we've got to be the grownup in the room in order to bring a measure of modulation to those around us who may be peaking in their fear or sense of helplessness.  This does NOT mean putting on a game face.  It means you drained off some of your own energy before you got to work and you are authentically in a better space.  Fear can be useful when it isn't overwhelming.  It informs us of danger and we should listen to it.  But if it is the only voice in the room, we will usually make poor quality decisions.  So, by all means, take into account the energy from that feeling.  Allow it to make your mind all the sharper and your heart more attuned to those around you.  There may be times when it calls you to significantly alter your strategy.  In the depths of the Recession, a lot of us had to do that and it was
largely appropriate.  However, there is a rising tide now, albeit, it is rising too slowly for most of us.
Still, if you developed a new strategy for your organization in the depths of the Recession and you have been sticking with it, it's probably best you continue to do that. 
   My mentor, Dr. W. Edwards Deming gave us a phrase I consider one of the most beautiful in any language:  constancy of purpose.  He coached us not to tinker and tamper every time we get a number we don't like but to make sure we are looking at the big picture, measuring the big picture...and staying the course, unless credible trends call us to make a shift.  More often than not, though, what we're being called to is another thing he named well:  continuous improvement.  Stick with your strategy and keep improving it day by day.  Foster an environment of truth-telling on all levels of the organization so the best ideas are regularly percolating upwards to the decision-makers.  Foster an environment where people feel safe to try things, to fail and to learn from those failures and apply those lessons in a timely manner to keep driving improvements. 
  Lead from a perspective that serves the greater good, just as you did in better times, but with more collaborative attunement to the dangers at hand.  If you can do this, if you can let yourself feel the depth of your fear in private and use it as one voice in the room in public, while fully engaging your team, you're likely to look back on this time three to five years from now as one when your mettle and your metal as a leader
were both proven.
C2011 Bob Kamm