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Archive for April, 2009

What Do Golf and Leadership Have in Common?

April 30th, 2009 by Forum Corporation

By André Alphonso, Managing Director, Forum India


A few weeks ago, in New Delhi, I happened into the company of one of the leading golf coaches for professional golfers in the Asian tour: Kel Llewellyn, an Australian who coaches several well known pro golfers on the world circuit. I asked him what he focuses his coaching on with his golfers. He replied that at least 80 percent of his coaching effort goes into getting the mind right and prepared for tournament play. Kel explained that, in the pressure-cooker environment of a golf tournament, skill is less important than getting your thinking right. One poor shot can often snowball into a poor performance on a hole, a round, and possibly a tournament. According to Kel, the best golfers are able to recover: in the pressure of a golf tournament, they are able to correct their thinking through their self-talk or internal monologue.

Anyone who has ever played golf knows this is not an easy task. Average golfers are not able to adjust their thinking sufficiently when they are faced with adversity—they castigate themselves and over-think every shot they take. It’s a vicious cycle of thinking that repeats in other rounds and other tournaments.

There are many parallels between golfing and leadership in the current economic times. Leaders all over the world are facing more pressure today:

· They must still achieve results (a task more difficult to execute than it was a year ago).

· They must keep increasingly demanding customers satisfied and loyal in a marketplace in which competitors’ prices are plummeting.

· They must keep their people motivated and focused when their people’s friends and associates have just been laid off.

· After waves of cost cutting in their organizations, they must come up with ways to cut costs even further.

· They are continually inundated with headlines and sound bites about company closures, massive layoffs, and pundits’ predictions of continued economic doom and gloom.

Leaders who have made the cut in their organizations find themselves in a pressure cooker reminiscent of the final round of a golf tournament. If you are one of these leaders, consider your self-talk and the way you explain adverse events to yourself. Answer the following questions in the context of the adverse situation you may be finding yourself in. Do you think that:

· You have little or no control over your current situation?

· Someone or something else is going to have to fix the problem?

· The problem’s impact on you is pervasive and long lasting?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you are in danger of falling into a vicious-cycle thinking pattern—a thinking pattern that will not work for you, your team, your organisation, or your customers. As a leader you will be sub-optimising your impact.

So you may ask “How do I break this pattern?” Forum has found using four simple tactics effectively will make your self-talk work for you rather than against you:

· Control: What control do I have in this situation? What proof is there that it is completely out of my control? What are the hidden opportunities in this situation, and how can I use them to turn it around?

· Ownership: How can I take ownership and improve this situation? How can I stop wasting time on blaming and/or complaining? What can I personally do to overcome this?

· Scope: What is the scope of this situation? What aspects of my life will it really impact? How realistic is this?

· Time-span: How much time will this situation span? What real proof is there that the ramifications of the situation will be long lasting? What does the evidence really tell me?

How do you practice these tactics? Try them out the next time you find yourself failing on the golf course!

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12 Signs of a Team That Delivers Quality With Speed

April 17th, 2009 by Forum Corporation

 

 By Tom Atkinson, Director, Customer Research 

What’s the best way to achieve high-quality results when you’re under pressure to deliver quickly?  A recent Forum initiative provides some clues.  Forum’s leadership team took an innovative approach to identifying new business opportunities in today’s demanding economic environment:  It created five cross-functional teams and assigned each team the task of building a business case for a potential new learning offering.   

Each team had five members (representing marketing, sales, consulting, project management, and R&D), as well as a sponsor from the executive leadership team.  Team members were distributed globally, and they had to accomplish their work without traveling.  The teams’ job was to research their topic, design their solution, create a plan, and prepare to present it to the leadership team in 3 weeks.

 

Forum’s research team has been studying speed, so this initiative was interesting to the team as a “natural experiment” in speed.  Since all five cross-functional teams had the same deadline, their overall “speediness” didn’t vary, but we expected that some teams would deliver higher-quality results than others in the designated time frame.  We focused especially on the cross-functional teams’ climate, because the link between climate and results is well established by the research of Forum and others (see, for example, Robert Stringer, Leadership and Organizational Climate, Prentice Hall, 2002).

 

After the cross-functional teams completed their work and made their presentations, we surveyed the members about their experience and, in particular, the factors that affected the quality of their work.  All of the teams’ members thought they had done a good job overall:  their ratings ranged from 4.0 to 4.8 on a 5-point scale.  In order to understand what distinguished the top-quality teams from the others, we created two groups of respondents:  team members who rated their team’s quality 5 (7 people) and those who rated it less than 5 (12 people).  We labeled these two groups “higher quality” and “lower quality.”

The higher- and lower-quality groups differed significantly (p<.05) on how they rated their team’s climate on these 12 dimensions (listed in descending order of strength): 

·         Courage and persistence demonstrated in addressing organizational challenges and roadblocks.

·         Team members connected to the work emotionally and intellectually (that is, they were engaged).

·         Specific team performance goals were clearly established.

·         Standards of excellence for individual performance were defined.

·         Team members were encouraged to challenge assumptions, confront brutal facts, and speak with frankness and honesty.

·         The initiative’s goals and the organization’s strategy were clearly linked.

·         Team members rewarded innovation and calculated risk-taking.

·         Team members were free to identify and correct their own errors in their own way.

·         Team members took ownership for their performance, individually and as a team.

·         Team members were encouraged to use their own judgment in solving problems.

·         A bias for action was prevalent.

·         There was a high degree of trust among team members.

 

 team-climate1

 

What actions can a team leader take to achieve the best results in the shortest time?  These findings suggest that the three most important things for leaders to pay attention to are:

 

1.      Communicating the team’s mission in such a way that everyone understands and buys into it, and knows how he or she contributes

2.      Creating a climate that fosters lively and frank debate, open-minded thinking, and experimentation

3.      Appealing to people’s hearts and minds, not just getting the work out

 

Interestingly enough, formal rewards, and even recognition and praise, didn’t make the top-12 list for achieving top quality.  Apparently, if team members are fully engaged and committed to working together, the work has enough intrinsic value; members don’t need special attention or financial bonuses to encourage them to do a superior job.

 

This is only one small experiment; we wonder how broadly the findings might apply.  What do you think drives speed and quality most in your company?

 

 

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The Masters of Golf… and their Caddies

April 13th, 2009 by Steve Barry

By Steve Barry, Consultant

Reflections on another incredible Masters golf tournament …

Golfers approach each round with a strategy. Constant adaptation within that broader strategy and skill-set is required, depending on changing conditions, the outcome of the prior shot, or competitive shifts on the leaderboard. Sound familiar, business leaders?

The strategy and adaptation are carried out in many small decisions made throughout the course of the round. Golfers do not make these decisions alone, however. Don’t forget about the caddy! Sure, caddies carry the clubs. But they also:

  • Provide data about each shot a golfer will take (for example, on the precise distance to a target).
  • Soundly understand the golfer’s strengths and weaknesses, and confer to discuss risk/reward benefits of shots, and ultimately make decisions.
  • Record and measure results of shots. This is critical for learning from these shots for future rounds.
  • Provide a trusted sounding board and emotional support on pressure-packed stage.

Now, golfers generally stick with one caddy in playing different courses all over the world. But is that really the best model? With so many decisions to make, wouldn’t they be better off using caddies with the best technical information about each new course they play? For instance, when in Scotland, why not select a caddy who knows Scottish links course strategy inside and out?

No–they stick with one caddy. And I think that’s fascinating. I infer two things:

1. Making a good decision is important. But making the shot really matters. Different caddies might help a golfer make slightly better decisions from a technical standpoint. But a trusted caddy will help the golfer commit to the shot—and hence, make better shots. A good example is Tiger Woods’s relationship with his caddy, Steve Williams. Williams will call Tiger off of a critical shot—even as Tiger is just about to hit—to change clubs if there is a shift in wind. Tiger knows that and expects it from him. Trust and two-way communication mean more to performance than does superior technical information.

2. Learning creates better shots. Specifically, learning that involves roughly 50 percent technical information (about each hole or each shot) and 50 percent personal information. Caddies also know the variables make up the human context in which a decision is made (for example, the golfer’s history, tendencies, and ball flight). When golfer and caddy have a shared history and an openness in which they are able to discuss options, they are able to make better decisions together. And their decisions will always be that much better the next time.

What shots are you trying to make? Have you set up the right relationships, with the right people, to help you pull them off?

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What Headlines Will You Write?

April 9th, 2009 by Forum Corporation

By Kerry Johnson, Executive Consultant

Over the past month or so I’ve had the opportunity to talk with many of our customers about the impact of the tough economy on their businesses. The focus of these group talks has been on what leaders can do to make a difference. Forum’s view is that leaders can make all the difference to their company’s success in tough times.

Our view is based on some extensive secondary research on companies that have been successful, and have even thrived, in past recessions. There is a clear and compelling set of actions leaders in those firms focused on that seemed to make the biggest difference. We have also tested our hypotheses with a number of our current customers to make sure that they have strong face validity. You can out learn more about these findings on our website: www.forum.com

The core findings of our research are outlined in the model below. When I’m talking with customers about these strategies I point out that there are no surprises here—none. Everything we’ve learned about good leadership in bad times brings us back to the basics.

The big insight is that in tough times the basics are more important than ever. Failing to apply them can be catastrophic.

Our main message: applying core and critical leadership best practices is not a matter of choice in these tough times, but a matter of necessity.

I start my research conversations out by sharing the day’s headlines. As someone told me recently, “there is nothing like a crisis to focus the mind.” People are sitting up and taking notice, and they are reacting strongly to typical headlines like these:

  • CHINESE GROWTH PLUNGES, WITH GLOBAL AFTERSHOCKS
  • RISING DEBT, FALLING SALES, MEAN ROUGH ROAD FOR FIAT
  • SONY FORECASTS FIRST LOSS IN 14 YEARS
  • MICROSOFT TO ELIMINATE 5000 JOBS
  • HYUNDAI MOTORS PROFIT FALLS 28%
  • IBM EMPLOYEES BUZZ ABOUT LAYOFFS

I then ask people to share with the group a headline they might write for their own company. The gloomy headlines continue for a bit, and then a very interesting thing happens—someone in the group will say something like the following:

  • CEO STEPS UP VISITS TO CUSTOMERS
  • LEADER OF SALES FORCE CONDUCTS WEEKLY TOWN HALL SESSIONS TO BRIEF STAFF ON BUSINESS
  • PEOPLE STARTING TO THINK IN REALLY NEW WAYS ABOUT THEIR BUSINESS
  • THE MAIN THING IS STILL THE MAIN THING

Underlying these “headlines” are some very important and positive themes that point directly to the four main strategies leaders can apply to encourage and focus their teams. These “headlines” are a perfect counterpoint to the negative messages of the real (and accurate) news headlines, because they speak of opportunity and of potential.

Our customers come up with these “headlines” independently, before they see the model, and they launch a very productive conversation.

Let’s think about these headlines:

CEO STEPS UP VISITS TO CUSTOMERS. This reminds us how important it is to consider the customer first and foremost. Companies with the will and the foresight and the discipline to weather tough financial storms, never lose sight of the value proposition they offer to their customers. They also know that in times as turbulent and complex as these that their customers’ expectations are likely to be impacted. How will they change? What is the new value proposition? How will we deliver it? These are the key questions to explore. And, time is of the essence. Your competitors are out there already looking to take market share, or looking simply to position themselves to be the supplier of choice when the economy rebounds.

Anne Mulcahy, CEO of Xerox, provides a great example of the leader who is in touch with her customers. She logs thousands of air miles a year visiting customers to learn and relearn what they expect from her company. Mulcahy is as relentless as she is positive in this quest.

LEADER OF SALES FORCE CONDUCTS WEEKLY TOWN HALL SESSIONS TO BRIEF STAFF ON BUSINESS. A leader also needs to stay as connected with his or her workforce or team as possible. In a vacuum of information we tend to make up our own headlines. Keep your teams, and especially your key talent, informed. Let them know in realistic terms and with as much certainty as is possible what they can expect.

The paradox of tough economic times is that our best employees are now more likely to be stolen away by our competitors than they are in good times. Our customers are telling us that the most important thing their managers can do is to stay connected to them, involve them, and engage them.

PEOPLE STARTING TO THINK IN REALLY NEW WAYS ABOUT THEIR BUSINESS. This customer-generated headline makes a good point: the thinking that got us into this mess is not going to get us out of it. We need to think in new ways about working together, especially across the boundaries we inadvertently build in our organizations. Doing that allows us to leverage the good work done within our teams and elsewhere. We should be learning from one another as much as we can.

It also says that we need to become more adaptable in our thinking and in our working together. “We’ve-always-done-it-that-way” thinking is a formula for disaster. Opportunities are knocking, calling, e-mailing—in fact, they’re shouting. How will we hear them if we’re thinking like we always thought?

Often we’ll learn about opportunities from our own people—if we give them a chance to offer ideas and ask questions. Now, more than ever, they will tend to keep their heads down. The irony is that now is really the time for them to be “heads up.”

THE MAIN THING IS STILL THE MAIN THING. Our customers are quick to tell us that this stuff sounds like the old stuff! What’s new? In fact, nothing is new on the face of it. What’s new is what’s underneath. That is the real insight: The actions and behaviors of great leaders worked because the leaders were diligent in taking and practicing them. Like Woody Allen says, “Eighty percent of success is showing up.” You know what good leadership practices are. You also know that the danger inherent in not using them is far, far greater in tough times than in good times.

The main thing is still the main thing. Financial discipline is still the main thing. So is sound business practice. So is leadership best-practice.

So, now is the time to focus on your customers, on your key talent, on communicating clearly and authentically, and, most of all, on creating a positive, adaptive work climate in which people raise their personal level of responsibility, add more to their team’s success, and, at the same time, feel recognized for their contributions.

What are your headlines? What will they be in a year’s time? How will you get to them?

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