Authentic leadership

It never surprises me when I see a business doing great things, they are recognized as a leader in their field and then attract a large amount of people to hear them speak about what great things they are doing.  What does surprise me, and frustrate me, is that there are not more businesses doing great things. Is it fear? Ignorance? Stubbornness? I’m not quite sure.

I’m specifically talking about doing great things in the leadership space. I attended a HRINZ special interest group presentation last night on what Refining NZ is doing in respect to leadership development. The key message I got was: be yourself. This is the concept of being who you are rather than what other people want you to be. It’s about being comfortable in your own skin. Indeed, Ken Rivers (CEO, Refining NZ) spoke about 17% of people’s performance being related to them being comfortable with themselves and only 3% of performance being about people having alignment with the business values. Furthermore, it is not about money or technology it is about the people. How are the people using the technology?

And this all comes down to the conversations that leaders are having with their people. People, people, people, conversations, conversations, conversations. Need I say more?

What really struck me though, was that the leaders at Refining NZ really do walk the talk on this. Even down to the way that the content was presented. Ken Rivers, in particular, was authentic. He presented in such a way that I felt like I was having a conversation with him (without another 100 odd people sitting there). Also, who has the balls to say that they don’t really do anything all day but talk to people and check the sports results? Traditional managers must be rolling in their graves (although I don't think they're dead yet)!  But it sends a very clear message to the business – my job is to talk to people. People are important.

It’s not new-fangled, complicated to understand or even, seemingly, difficult to implement. So why aren’t we all doing it? Well, first of all it should start at the top. For most people/managers/leaders, if you said that you just talked to people all day and that was your job (putting aside people whose jobs it is to talk to people all day – sales, recruitment etc.)  you’d then, probably, be waiting for the redundancy hammer to fall. If it starts at the top, then that fear should be removed. Secondly, how comfortable are we being ourselves? And, how has that been ingrained in us over our careers? In my short career so far I have at times felt like I’m not allowed to be myself. Because it might rock the boat, people might get upset or it’s not the way the business does things. Some of this has been the nature of my job, and some of it a tension between my values and the values of the company.

On reflection, if I was more aware of my values and leadership style earlier in my career I might have made different choices. It is all a learning curve. So, I really like this concept of getting in touch with your own self and your own authentic leadership before focusing on the business values. And if your business doesn’t yet facilitate this, then there is nothing to stop you doing it – take personal responsibility for it.

Digital literacy for adults

One of the things that I’m quite interested in is the use of social media for learning. Platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook etc have far more uses than just catching up with friends. They are a way of sharing information with like-minded people – something I’ve talked about in my blog before. In my search for resources on how to uses these medias for learning, I found a lot targeted at secondary school teachers, particularly in the United States – seems they’re a lot more ahead of us in that area. Go figure!

I’m particularly interested in how adults can use things like blogs, Twitter and LinkedIn as learning tools. There is a great book called Social Media for Trainers by Jane Bozarth that provides some very practical ways to facilitate learning through Twitter and other resources (I have not got past the Twitter section in the book yet – I've been so busy taking notes and jotting down ideas that it is taking me a while). I’d also like to add that I have the book on kindle – so I am playing around with being uber-digital myself.

However, I think the first stumbling block for a lot of adults is the fear of the digital media. Until adults have signed up to these tools and have a basic idea of how to use them (and in a way that they feel psychologically safe) they are going to find it difficult to learn from them. I think what is missing is basic digital literacy education. How do I tweet? How do I participate in groups? How do I write a blog? etc. There has to be some easy to digest information that gets adult learners over this first hurdle. Note: Jane Bozarth has some stuff in this area, there is also a bit on YouTube but you kind of have to be in the know to find it all. 

As I said, there is a lot of great information out there for school students. One particularly great site is cyberwise.org (which also has some useful stuff for adults).  There is some material that is generalizable for both groups but the adult audience is different from the student audience. How do you ease someone into the digital technology when they are sacred of it? You can assume that 'scared' adult learners won't be in the know or have the wherewithal to seek out information on how to use digital media for learning. So how do we feed it to them? Or, make is accessible?

Have you found any great information for adult learners? If so, please comment and let me know.

Values vs. Money

Last night I attended a HRINZ event entitled ‘How successful managers think’ presented by Peter Withers from the University of Auckland Business School. Peter talked about the skills managers needed to perform in a VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) world. The key theme was that business leaders needed to have a holistic view of the world whereby decisions are made with consideration for their far-reaching implications. This means operating with a global mindset rather than a New Zealand-centric view.

The presentation was interesting and informative on a number of different levels. However, I found the notion of NZ leaders taking on practices the rest of the world uses challenging. Just because everyone else is doing it, doesn’t mean we should. I don't disagree that, as a country, we should be competitive. But I do think we should do it without compromising our values.

Peter told the story of a NZ water bottler who was offered a distribution deal with Whole Foods stores in the US. It involved distributing their product across 400 stores in the States. The catch was that the bottle label had to be changed to show nutritional information. Like this:

Energy……..0

Fat………….0

Sugar………0

Etc.

The water bottler turned down the deal because he didn’t want to change the label. He missed out on becoming a multi-millionaire as a result. Stupid right?

But isn’t it also stupid to put a nutritional label on a bottle of water that has no ‘nutritional’ details? I say again, just because everyone else is doing it, doesn’t mean it should be done.

Perhaps an extreme example, but who remembers the debacle of American Financial Institutions paying massive increases to their executives? And then they went under. People still made money of this.

I acknowledge that people suffered greatly from the demise of the Financials, water bottle labels are perhaps not an apt comparison and improving our business practices are important to the well-being of all New Zealanders. But where do you draw the line between values and money?

Apparently the rest of the world describes kiwis (NZers) as really nice people. We’re nice, and naïve and that’s pretty much it. It would be nice to be considered nice and rich but, if I had to choose, I’d rather be known as a good person than a rich person. Maybe the secret to our niceness is that we have really strong values. Is that a bad thing when you see all the troubles of the world on the news every night?

Money or values? Which would you choose?

Practical ways to become lean

In last weeks blog I talked about creating a lean office and how lean is not just the realm of manufacturing. This week I’m going to share some practical ideas for making your office lean. It’s really all about continuous improvement and its useful to have a few tools to encourage this.

The first tool is visual management. All the other tools fall out of this one really. This is about displaying your results in an easily readable and public way. The best way to do this is as a team. For example, as an HR team or a customer services team. What are the KPIs (key performance indicators) you have for your team? Can you measure these each week or month? Keep a track of them on a graph and put it up where everyone can see it. Now, what is your goal? For example, if you measure something like turnover or time to hire (these are very HRey examples but you'll have your own), you might want to reduce them. How do you do that? That's where some problem solving tools come in.

Keeping track of your KPIs and identifying where you want to be will help you identify gaps . These gaps trigger a problem solving process that generate ideas. You could use a variety of problem solving techniques. My favorite is brainstorming. You get a bunch of people together, who have some knowledge of the problem, and throw ideas up on a board or sheet of paper. No idea is a bad idea. When it works really well you can get some great innovations.

And that brings me to another tool to encourage innovation. Because it’s all about continuous improvement and innovation is really the cornerstone of that. To encourage it, publicize and celebrate it. If people are working in teams get them to present each month an innovation that their team has successfully implemented. This could be quite informal, you don’t necessarily need power point, but it gets people talking about it and highlights innovation as something important. An innovation is simply something done differently, so it doesn’t have to be big. But all the little things add up.

Speaking of little things adding up, integral to these tools is consistency. It’s all small steps to continual improvement but continual is really the key word. Lean is about continually fine-tuning your processes so that you are doing it faster, cheaper and to higher quality. Everything changes so quickly nowadays that no one can afford to improve as a one-off. 

I hope that you find these useful and I’d be interested in hearing your ideas for making business lean.

A lean office

‘Lean’ is often considered the realm of manufacturing. I believe it also has application in an office environment. To recap, ‘lean’ is a manufacturing method pioneered by the Japanese and picked up by the American automobile industry in the 1950s after they begun to loose market share to Japan in quite a significant way. ‘Lean’ involves using less of everything: materials, people, time, effort etc. The idea is that everything you do has to add value to the end customer. In a manufacturing context, this is the value added through the production process. For example, goods sitting around as work in progress (WIP) are a waste. The resources used to store the product are seen as an unnecessary cost to the customer. 

Everyone has a customer right? So whether you are in manufacturing or not, whatever you are producing, whether it be a good or a service is going to be bought and consumed by an end customer. So is what YOU do adding value to the end customer?

If you are working in an office environment, think more broadly about how you add value to the customer. Start with identifying your customer. This would be the customer of the business you are working for. If you don’t have direct impact/involvement with the customer either trace backwards (or forwards) between your role and theirs. This means identifying the people you have involvement with within the business. How do you add value to them? How do you help them to do their jobs better, faster and with less cost?

Next identify what you do in your day-to-day work that does not add value to yourself or anyone else. This means identifying business costs that could be reduced, things that could be done to higher quality or done faster. Ask yourself, if this the best possible way I could do this?

Really great examples of common office practices that could be done better are filing and stationary. Do you have filing cabinets sitting in your office that you haven’t opened in the last 6-12 months? Yes? Get rid of it! If you haven’t looked at it in that long you’re probably not going to. If you work in an office with 60 odd other people and if even half of them get rid of all the crap they’re not actually using imagine how much space you’d have. Space costs money; is the use of that space adding value to the customer? Stationary is the other one. How much space does your stationary collection take up? Do you stock up on stuff just in case there is a run on staplers? Inventory systems used in manufacturing environments can also be used for things like stationary cupboards. For example, you only have one stapler in the cupboard, when that goes you buy one more stapler. There are stationary suppliers now that come in and automatically replenish your cupboard when it gets past minimum levels. You use less space as a result.

These are really only two examples of the potential of ‘lean’ practices in an office environment. Other ways to save time, money and improve quality can be identified with other ‘lean’ techniques such as process flow mapping, problem solving and 5S (sort & discard, shine and inspect, signpost and order, simplify and standardise, sustain), and visual management, just to name a few. The key is to continually identify opportunities for improvement. The way I see it is that you work towards making yourself redundant. This can be quite a challenging idea for people. The right mindset is needed. Rather than, what work fills in your 9 to 5 day? What work adds value to your customer?