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The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive
What is the one thing I do that really matters to the firm?
Instead of identifying a single area of focus, expand to four basic disciplines.
Delegate more and more responsibilities to staff members. Then, meetings take on a new sense of urgency and clarity. The executive’s management style can evolve toward a simpler, more focused approach.
Guard the schedule ferociously. Aside from occasional client visits and unavoidable formalities required of a chief executive, everything has something to do with one of the disciplines.
The disciplines enable the executive to narrow the scope of his or her responsibilities to a core set of activities.
In an annual session, work hard, engage one another, and find a way to get maximum productivity; and have a little fun too. Use cascading communication to address the question, “What are the key messages we need to bring back to our people when we get back to the office?”
At the end of a cascading session, remind them of their responsibilities to take the messages back to staffs. If it’s not done right away, you’ll forget some of the main issues, and your people are going to hear about them from someone else. Don’t let that happen.
1. Build and Maintain a Cohesive Leadership Team
Don’t miss any opportunities to argue. Have meetings like internal family feuds. Argue for a while then the leader makes everyone step back from the issue and cast a vote.
Don’t vote on everything. Ultimately, the leader makes decisions when there is no clear answer. But usually the team comes to a fairly quick consensus. Arguing is more like fact finding than advocacy.
When the leader considers ways to make his team cohesive, he wants them to know one another well enough so they don’t hold anything back. Team members can act like brothers and sisters, and when a difficult issue has to be discussed, no one hesitates. Not for a minute. Not once do team members say anything negative about another member of the team. They never say anything negative that they wouldn’t say directly to the person.
2. Create Organizational Clarity
Essentially, it’s about eliminating confusion within the organization, especially at the executive level about important things, like the company’s identity, direction, strategy, objectives, roles and responsibilities.
If the team has difficulty making a decision, they refer to their values, or their mission, or their strategy.
Identity, Values, Mission, Major Goals, Objectives, Roles and Responsibilities
Identity is about the company’s hiring values and its underlying motivation—like core purpose and core values from Built to Last.
3. Over-Communicate the Identity and Direction
Communicate everything from the second discipline—the clarity issues.
The minute you make any of this feel like a marketing campaign, it loses its groundedness. It starts to feel like a slogan more than a reality.
4. Reinforce Organizational Clarity Through Human Systems
If you don’t get clear on the strategy piece, your goals and roles aren’t going to be aligned.
Human systems and operations include things like interviewing and hiring people, managing their performance, rewarding them, and letting them go.
Put every candidate through five interviews. Insist on using a core set of behavioral questions, asked in slightly different ways by different people. And then all the interviewers get in a room and debrief. Do this for vice presidents, consultants, and even receptionists.
For performance management, every manager, at every level, conducts quarterly management reports for each of their people. Everyone does their forms on time—it’s one page with three simple questions:
- What did you accomplish?
- What will you accomplish next?
- How can you improve?
Then, how are you embracing the values?
Every manager spends 90 minutes in a room with each of his employees, going over the report.
Be Cohesive. Be Clear. Over-Communicate. Reinforce.
Organizational Health: The Model
Putting the Disciplines into Practice
There is one competitive advantage that is available to any company that wants it and yet it is largely ignored. What is more, it is as sustainable as it ever has been because it is not based on information or intellectual property at all. It is organizational health.
1. Build and Maintain a Cohesive Leadership Team
Cohesive teams build trust, eliminate politics, and increase efficiency by…
- Knowing one another’s unique strengths and weaknesses
- Openly engaging in constructive ideological conflict
- Holding one another accountable for behaviors and actions
- Committing to group decisions
The essence of a cohesive leadership team is trust, which is marked by an absence of politics, unnecessary anxiety, and wasted energy.
When an executive decides not to confront a peer about a potential disagreement, he or she is dooming employees to waste time, money, and emotional energy dealing with unresolvable issues.
Cohesive leadership teams resolve their issues and create environments of trust for themselves and thus for their people. They ensure that most of the energy expended in the organization is focused on achieving the desired results of the firm.
For cohesive teams, meetings are compelling and vital. They are forums for asking difficult questions, challenging one another’s ideas, and ultimately arriving at decisions that everyone agrees to support and adhere to, in the best interests of the company.
A “personal histories” exercise might sound “touchy feely”, but it is remarkably helpful for members of a leadership team to spend time talking about their backgrounds. People who understood one another’s personal philosophies, family histories, educational experiences, hobbies, and interests are far more likely to work well together than those who do not.
Assessment for Team Cohesion
- Are meetings compelling? Are the important issues being discussed during meetings?
- Do team members engage in unguarded debate? Do they honestly confront one another?
- Do team members apologize if they get out of line? Do they ever get out of line?
- Do team members understand one another? Members of cohesive teams know one another’s strengths and weaknesses and don’t hesitate to point them out.
- Do team members avoid gossiping about one another? Gossip requires intent to hurt someone, and it is almost always accompanied by an unwillingness to confront a person directly with the information being discussed.
2. Create Organizational Clarity
A healthy organization minimizes the potential for confusion by clarifying…
- Why the organization exists
- Which behavioral values are fundamental
- What specific business it is in
- Who its competitors are
- How it is unique
- What it plans to achieve
- Who is responsible for what
Organizational clarity is not merely about choosing the right words to describe a company’s mission, strategy or values; it is about agreeing on the fundamental concepts that drive it.
An organization that has achieved clarity has a sense of unity around everything it does. It aligns its resources, especially the human ones, around common concepts, values, definitions, goals, and strategies.
Why don’t all executives create clarity in their organizations? Because many of them overemphasize the value of flexibility. Wanting their organizations to be “nimble,” they hesitate to articulate their direction clearly.
How does an organization go about achieving clarity? Address questions like, “Why does the organization exist, and what difference does it make in the world? Who has to do what for us to achieve our goals this month, this quarter, this year, next year, five years from now?”
What Behavioral Values Are Irreplaceable and Fundamental?
Many companies want to claim that they are equally committed to quality, innovation, teamwork, ethics, integrity, customer satisfaction, employee development, financial results, and community involvement. Although all of these qualities are certainly desirable and might even exist in a single company at a given time, the search for fundamental values requires a significant level of focus and introspection, and a willingness to acknowledge that all things good are not necessarily essential to an organization.
The healthiest organizations identify a small set of values that are particularly fundamental to their culture and adhere to those values without exception.
Fundamental values are not chosen from thin air based on the desires of executives; they are discovered within what already exists in an organization.
The word mission often creates confusion. Some people think mission is a lofty statement of ideals, others define it as an organizational goal, and still others call it a business definition.
A company needs to be able to articulate exactly what it does, whom it serves, and against whom it competes.
At the highest level, an organization should have one or two basic thematic goals for a given period. These might include survival, efficiency, professionalism, or growth.
A thematic goal finishes the following sentence: “This is the year that our organization will…”
There should be major strategic goals that span the organization and support its overall theme.
Like so many aspects of clarity, the key is to focus on the areas that matter most and to avoid making every possible topic an area of equal importance.
Here are the levels of goals a healthy organization must embrace:
- Thematic Goals: What is this period’s focus?
- Major Strategic Goals: What are the key areas which relate to that focus, and what needs to be achieved?
- Metrics: What are the ongoing measures that allow the organization to keep score?
3. Over-Communicate Organizational Clarity
Healthy organizations align their employees around organizational clarity by communicating key messages through…
- Repetition: Don’t be afraid to repeat the same message, again and again.
- Simplicity: the more complicated the message, the more potential for confusion and inconsistency.
- Multiple Mediums: People react to information in many ways; use a variety of mediums.
- Cascading Messages: Leaders communicate key messages to direct reports; the cycle repeats itself until the message is heard by all.
Within companies that effectively over-communicate, employees at all levels and in all departments understand what the organization is about and how they contribute to its success.
Embrace the three most critical practices of effective organizational communication: repetition, simple messages, and multiple mediums.
4. Reinforce Organizational Clarity Through Human Systems
Organizations sustain their health by ensuring consistency in…
- Hiring
- Managing Performance
- Rewards & Recognition
- Employee Dismissal
Healthy organizations look for qualities in job candidates that match the values of the company.
Conclusion
Executives must keep two things in mind if they are to make their organizations successful. First, there is nothing more important than making an organization healthy. Regardless of the temptations to dive into more heady and strategically attractive issues, extraordinary executives keep themselves focused on organizational health.
Second, there is no substitute for discipline. No amount of intellectual prowess or personal charisma can make up for an inability to identify a few simple things and stick to them over time.
May the Four Obsessions of the Extraordinary Executive serve you well, as you shoot for the stars!