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Be Rigorous–Not Ruthless

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A while ago I was talking to a professor who does some teaching on leadership, and he said he wasn’t a fan of Jim Collin’s Good to Great because he had seen Collins’ “first who, then what” principle often used to justify laying off talented people from organizations.

I told him that I thought that would indeed be a pretty bad application of the principle, but that these people were misunderstanding Collins. Collins’ principle is sound; but this misapplication of it is not.

I was just recently dipping in to Good to Great again, and noticed that Collins actually deals with this very issue. It comes down to the distinction between being ruthless and being rigorous:

To be ruthless means hacking and cutting, especially in difficult times, or wantonly firing people without any thoughtful consideration.

To be rigorous means consistently applying exacting standards at all times and at all levels, especially in upper management. To be rigorous, not ruthless, means that the best people need not worry about their positions and can concentrate fully on their work.

. . .

To be rigorous in people decisions means first becoming rigorous about top management people decisions. Indeed, I fear that people might use “first who rigor” as an excuse for mindlessly chopping out people to improve performance. “It’s hard to do, but we’ve got to be rigorous,” I can hear them say. [Note: I’ve actually heard people say that! Pretty bad.] And I cringe. For not only will a lot of hardworking, good people get hurt in the process, but the evidence suggests that such tactics are contrary to producing sustained great results.

The good-to-great companies rarely used head-count lopping as a tactic and almost never used it as a primary strategy. Even in the Wells Fargo case, the company used lay-offs half as much as Bank of America during the transition era.

In contrast, we found layoffs used five times more frequently in the comparison companies than in the good-to-great companies. Some of the comparison companies had an almost chronic addiction to layoffs and restructurings.

It would be a mistake — a tragic mistake, indeed — to think that the way you ignite a transition from good to great is by wantonly swinging the ax on vast numbers of hardworking people. Endless restructuring and mindless hacking were never part of the good to great model.

I would just have one improvement here. Probably few people set out to purposely take a “mindlessly hacking” approach. Most who do so probably don’t even realize it, but instead think they are doing right.

So I think the most helpful point Collins makes here is that the disposition of every organization should be to value and keep its people. Lay-offs are an over-used tactic, especially in downturns, and do not generally correlate with sustained great results (as I’ve blogged on before).

The disposition of a company should be to retain its people (assuming alignment with the values and that they are performing) both because this most aligns with the value of people and because it actually benefits the organization more. For, as Collins points out later on this same page, the ultimate throttle on growth for any company is “the ability to get and keep the right people.”

So the lesson of the “first who, then what” principle is not that people are easily expendable. They are not, and should not be treated as such. The lesson is actually the opposite: people are valuable, and the disposition of an organization ought to be to keep them. Endless restructuring and removing of talented people, even due to changes in strategy, were “never part of the good to great model.”

Make Sure to Distinguish Authority and Competence

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Andy Stanley makes this point well in Next Generation Leader: 5 Essentials for Those Who Will Shape the Future:

Every leader has authority over arenas in which he has little or no competence. When we exert our authority in an area where we lack competence, we can derail projects and demotivate those who have the skills we lack.

On any given Sunday morning, I have the authority to walk into our video control room and start barking out orders. The fact that I don’t know the first thing about what’s going on in there does not diminish my authority. Eventually the crew would do what I asked them to do. But the production would suffer horribly. If I were to do that Sunday after Sunday, our best and brightest volunteers would leave. Eventually our paid staff would start looking for something else to do as well.

There is no need to become an expert in, or even to understand, every component of your organization. When you try to exercise authority within a department that is outside your core competencies, you will hinder everything and everyone under your watch. If you fail to distinguish between authority and competence, you will exert your influence in ways that damage projects and people.

Is it Biblical to Choose a Job You Love?

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It’s almost silly to even ask that question. It’s like asking “Is it biblical to chose a spouse that you actually want to be with?” Yes, of course it is. Why would you marry someone you don’t want to marry? Likewise, if you have the choice (and we do much more often than we realize), why would you chose a job you aren’t excited about?

In fact, Paul’s teaching on marriage is actually a helpful analogy here, because it gives us a principle. In regard to marriage, he says: “A wife is bound to her husband as long as he lives. But if her husband dies, she is free to be married to whom she wishes, only in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 7:39). So marriage is an area of freedom — marry whom you want (as long as they are a Christian). In other words, what you want to do is not only a legitimate consideration; you are free to make your choice on that basis.

In fact, Paul goes further: “Yet in my judgment she is happier if she remains as she is. And I think that I too have the Spirit of God” (v. 40). Now, at first it doesn’t sound like he’s going further, because he is actually recommending in this case that a widow not remarry. He’s not forbidding remarriage, but just recommending against it in this case. My point here is not to discuss whether it is better to marry or not. Rather, here’s the important point: Paul’s reason for his advice here is that she will be happier if she remains as she is.

In other words, your happiness is a valid and legitimate consideration in making life decisions. Paul is suggesting that she actually would be happier not to remarry. Again, the issue of whether someone should get married or not is not my point here. My point here is that, remarkably, Paul considers happiness a fully legitimate consideration in making the major life choice of whether to marry and whom to marry. In fact, it actually seems to be the primary consideration in the decision, since his entire reason for recommending singleness here is that this path would, he argues, result in greater happiness.

If happiness is a legitimate consideration in choosing a spouse, then it would also seem to follow that happiness is a legitimate consideration in making other life decisions as well, such as where you work and what you do for a living.

I’m not saying that there aren’t more things to take into account. But enjoying your work and having a job that suits you is a right and good and significant consideration in choosing your work.

Tomorrow I’ll give an example of what this looks like.

Willow Creek's Global Leadership Summit Featured in Fast Company

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Last December, Fast Company did a story on Willow Creek’s Global Leadership Summit. It’s a good article and worth your time. And I commend Fast Company for doing an article that features some of the excellent leadership development that is going on in the church right now.

I’ve been to the Summit twice, and it is fantastically helpful. In fact, the Summit often includes many of the leadership thinkers I tend to quote on this blog, such as Jim Collins, Chip and Dan Heath, Marcus Buckingham, and others. It has been a great experience to see some of them in person.

Here’s a great comment from Hybels on the importance of good leadership in the church:

The summit sprang from Hybels’s conviction that church leaders lacked leadership training. “I’d been trying to help churches train pastors, and I kept asking myself, Why do some churches flourish and others languish? Is it location? Denomination? Urban versus rural? Rich versus poor?” Hybels says. “I could think of an exception to every theory, until I realized that every thriving church was not just well fed but also well led. It was a potent combination of great teaching and great leadership.”

I agree with Hybels: churches need to be well taught and well led. For too long we’ve tended to create a dichotomy between the two. But good theology and good leadership belong together, and mutually serve one another.

Sometimes the Summit is criticized for bringing in secular thinkers (a criticism which would also apply to this blog!). I don’t think that criticism holds water; maybe I’ll talk about that issue sometime. I am grateful and excited for what the Lord is doing through the Summit to help teach his people more and more about effective leadership. It would be worth attending if you are able.

Excellence is not the Opposite of Failure

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Marcus Buckingham states this well in Go Put Your Strengths to Work:

The radical idea at the core of the strengths movement is that excellence is not the opposite of failure, and that, as such, you will learn little about excellence from studying failure.

This seems like an obvious idea until you realize that, before the strengths movement began, virtually all business and academic inquiry was built on the opposite idea: namely, that a deep understanding of failure leads to an equally deep understanding of excellence. That’s why we studied unhappy customers to learn about the happy ones, employees’ weaknesses to learn how to make them excel, sickness to learn about health, divorce to learn about marriage, and sadness to learn about joy.

What has become evident in virtually every field of human endeavor is that failure and success are not opposites, they are merely different, and so they must be studied separately. Thus, for example, if you want to learn what you should not do after an environmental disaster, Chernobyl will be instructive. But if you want to learn what you should do, Chernobyl is a waste. Only successful cleanups, such as the Rocky Flats nuclear facility in Colorado, can tell you what excellence looks like.

Study unproductive teams, and you soon discover that the teammates argue a lot. Study successful teams, and you learn that they argue just as much. To find the secrets of a great team, you have to investigate the successful ones and figure out what is going on in the space between the arguments.

Well said.

What Killed Myspace

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The cover story for the latest issue of Businessweek is The Rise and Inglorious Fall of Myspace.

There are a lot of reasons, obviously, for the massive decline of Myspace. But here’s something that especially stood out:

“There was lot of pressure to drive revenue. There were things that we knew would be more efficient for the user that we didn’t act on immediately because it would reduce page views, which woul dhave hurt the bottom line.” — Shawn Gold, Myspace’s former senior vice president for marketing and content

In other words, the pursuit of profit was placed ahead of the user.

Deadly. Just deadly.

There’s a lesson here, which I’ve blogged about often: You have to put your user/customer/constituents before revenue.

If your organization places higher priority on money than the people it serves, you are already on your way down.

Sometimes people say “but if we don’t put revenue first, we won’t make enough money to survive.” But this has it backwards. If you do put revenue first, you will likely undercut the very things that actually produce revenue — things like goodwill, generosity, genuine service, and remarkability. The way to ensure that you have enough revenue to survive and thrive is to not put revenue first.

Profit matters, obviously. But the best companies put something other than profit first — and, paradoxically, become more profitable as a result.

Don't be a Squelcher

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Richard Florida is talking about community leaders here, but his point applies to all forms of leadership, including leading and managing in organizations:

Unfortunately, leadership more often than not works in the opposite direction by squashing civic energy. Jane Jacobs once told me that communities everywhere are filled with creative vigor, but that some of them are run by squelchers. Squelchers are control freaks who think they know what’s best for their city or region, even as their leadership (or lack thereof) causes a hemorrhage of bright, talented, and creative people.

Squelchers, he said, are the kind of leaders that use the word “no” a lot. They constantly put roadblocks in the way of community energy and initiatives. I’ve seen firsthand how these squelchers drain the life and energy from their communities. The respond to new ideas with phrases like “That’s not how we do things here”; “That will never fly”; or “Why don’t you just move someplace you’ll be happy?” (From Who’s Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life)

The Virtue of Inefficiency?

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Sometimes, the quest for efficiency is a red herring. Consider the example of the first light bulb, described in The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy:

Thomas Edison’s first light bulb wasn’t at all efficient. One 1905 observer complained that “the incandescent lamp is an extremely poor vehicle for converting electric energy into light energy, since only about 4 percent of the energy supplied to the lamp is converted into light energy, the remaining 96 percent being converted into heat energy.” And the power plant that Edison built to light his bulb didn’t convert even 10 percent of its heat into electricity.

But the end-to-end losses of over 99 percent seemed worthwhile to produce such a wonderfully clean, compact, cool, and safe source of light. Efficiency was beside the point. As Jill Jonnes recounts in Empires of Light, gas and oil lamps didn’t stand a chance against such a superior alternative.

Sometimes a concern for efficiency undercuts what really matters. To have said “96 percent of the energy that goes into the light bulb produces heat, not light, so let’s get rid of this thing” would have missed the most important thing: we have light. And this is way better than oil lamps.

It’s often the same way in organizations. An organization often starts out vibrant and energetic and full life. Things are getting done, and people love what they are doing.

But then someone says “we need to get this organized better.” So they bring in the efficient organizers, and the life and spirit of the organization is efficencized right out of it.

Of course, organizing is a good thing. The problem is in treating it as the main thing. Or, which is the same thing, sacrificing the things that create the life and spirit of the organization to the perceived need to “have control” and be efficient.

Don’t be an efficient organizer  — someone who cares about cost-cutting and efficiency as though they are more important than the mission and goals of the organization. Put the mission first. Be efficient where you can, but don’t let that become the point.

Develop Your Leadership Potential

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Alex Chediak has an excellent article over at Boundless on developing your leadership potential.

His three points are:

  1. A leader must strive for excellence
  2. A leaders must think clearly
  3. A leader must combine humility with boldness and realism with optimism

Here’s an excerpt from his first point:

Remember that God’s timetable may be different from yours, and be faithful with what He’s given you right now, while also striving to be a wise steward of your current growth opportunities. The Bible says that whatever your hand finds to do, you should do with all our might (Ecclesiastes 9:10). And that in everything you do, “work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving” (Colossians 3:23–24). That means that in serving your “human masters” (your bosses or professors) you are actually serving Jesus Christ. So do it with excellence, as best you can.

Paul gives us an example of godly striving — an ambition to accomplish much for Christ. He made plans to go to Rome and then Spain and to continue his church planting among the unreached (Romans 15:20–24). He spoke of being zealous for good works (Titus 2:14) and said this zeal should mark us all. In the Parable of the Talents, the mere preservation of one’s talent brought scorn and reproof. The Master, it turns out, expected an increase, a return on investment (Matthew 25:14–30). To whom much is given, much is expected (Luke 12:48).

So go ahead and aspire to achieve great things for God’s glory. Don’t equate humility with mediocrity. There’s a subtle, yet significant difference between seeking to make a name for yourself and seeking to make a name for Christ. When we’re obedient, diligent and fruitful stewards of the gifts and opportunities God gives us, we honor God. Titus 2:10 talks about our lives adorning the gospel message — making it look beautiful in the eyes of others. Christians are called to excellence in all that they do. Excellence is both attractive to others and inherently valuable. Therefore, those who excel are often placed in positions of authority or influence (so they can motivate others to excel).

Read the whole thing.

Low-Trust Cultures vs. High-Trust Cultures

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Stephen Covey outlines the differences very well in First Things First, which is one of the most helpful books on productivity around. He compares high trust and low trust organizations in the areas of supervision, evaluation, span of control, motivation, and structure and systems. Here are some highlights.

Supervision

In a low-trust culture, supervision is associated with words like control, monitor, hover over, and check up. In a high-trust culture, people supervise themselves according to the agreement. The criteria are clear, the consequences are set. There’s common understanding of what’s expected. A manager, leader, or parent becomes a source of help — a facilitator, helper, cheerleader, adviser, counselor, and coach — someone to remove the oil spills and get out of the way.

Evaluation

In a low-trust culture, you’re into forced ranking, external performance evaluation, and judgment. In a high-trust culture, the judgment goes into the performance agreement before the fact instead of after the fact. People judge themselves. Their evaluation is not just a function of measurement, but also of discernment. “The numbers are looking good, but I feel a concern about this particular area…” People are much more aware of the issues that affect their performance and success. [Note: The “discernment” here should not devolve into subjectivity. It needs to be anchored objectively in the mission and values of the organization.]

Span of Control

In a low-trust culture, the span of control is small. It takes time and energy to hover over, to check up. You can only control so many people. In a high-trust culture, you don’t need to hover over and check up. You aren’t trying to control but to release. Instead of one to eight or ten, you have one to fifty, one to a hundred, one to two hundred.

Motivation

In a low-trust culture, you’re into “the great jackass theory of motivation” — the carrot, out in front, the stick behind. In a high-trust culture, people are internally motivated. They’re fueled by the fire within. They’re driven by a sense of passion about fulfilling a shared vision that’s also a co-mission, a synergy between their own mission and the mission of the family or organization.

Structure and Systems

A low-trust culture is filled with bureaucracy, excessive rules and regulations, restrictive, closed systems. In the fear of some “loose cannon,” people set up procedures that everyone has to accommodate. The level of initiative is low — basically “do what you’re told.” Structures are pyramidal, hierarchical. Information systems are short-term. The quarterly bottom line tends to drive the mentality in the culture. In a high-trust culture, structures and systems are aligned to create empowerment, to liberate people’s energy and creativity toward agreed-upon purposes within the guidelines of shared values. There’s less bureaucracy, fewer rules and regulations, more involvement.

It isn’t my point in posting this — my point is to encourage you to keep building a high-trust rather than low-trust culture in your organization because it is intrinsically right and better for people — but Covey next makes a connection to personal time management. And his connection is this: high trust cultures save a lot of time, because you don’t have to spend so much time controlling, monitoring, checking up, supervising, coming up with hokey motivational programs, creating (and enforcing) pointless rules, and sorting out the communication problems that result from low-trust environments.

He concludes:

We spend an incredibly inordinate amount of time dealing with symptoms of low trust, but learning how to deal with the symptoms faster is not going to make a qualitative difference.

“First things first together” is a function of empowerment. It’s the ultimate way of moving the fulcrum over from the “one to one” ratio to a “one unit of effort to one thousand units of results” ratio. There’s no time management technique that can even begin to approach the results. And that’s why empowerment is at the heart of Quadrant II [that is, true personal effectiveness and effectiveness within organizations].