Just quickly - let go!

I was having another conversation with a terrific senior executive client this morning when I found myself saying yet again 'let go!'

Building a great team of people who can do great things means letting go of the very tasks we hired them to take from us! This can be painful. After all, not only are you good at doing it yourself, it's something you enjoy doing, so it hurts to lose it. Letting go successfully goes beyond 'delegation' to actual empowerment. And if what you're giving up feels 'precious', it's even more important to relinquish it, because it's distracting you. That distraction was exactly what my client was experiencing - it distracted him from taking a bigger (but 'riskier') role.

If you don't let go, you get tramelled up in second-guessing, micro-managing, duplicating effort, burdening your task list. You are also ignoring (which will be visible to your stakeholders) your really important issues because perhaps you secretly doubt your ability to resolve them. The very issues that are the pathway to a CEO role or senior partnership - or developing a successful business. 

The very tasks that will enable you to progress your own impact and career. 

So, let go! 

Seven ways to shift your own management paradigm.

In a recent HBR blog, Don't Diss The Paradigm Shift In Management: It's Happening! Steve Denning @stevedenning, looks at the comparison between the paradigm shift model of scientific revolutions and what's happening to management. 

It is both sobering and exciting. 

If you are running anything, you need to think about this. There is a shift going on, which produces 'anomalies' - where what you did that used to work, doesn't work. The action suggested by really good management theory, well-executed, simply fails. The telling graph - 50 years of inescapably declining returns: 

In other words, 'management' isn't working at the large scale, even while some of it is still necessary in the here & now. That's a tough systemic issue to be caught up in!  

While Denning is talking about macro issues and mostly large corporates, this is a real challenge if you're in the middle of your career and wondering what's going on. It feels personal, as if all your training makes you as irrelevant as a carpenter in a semiconductor factory. 

Symptoms - what 'old paradigm' managers utter about the new paradigm: 

'I don't do twitter'

'Being an executive is all about leadership'

'I'm on the way up'

'I'm great at innovation'

'I'm a world-class manager'

'I've been an expert at ... all my career'

'I don't have time to just navel-gaze'

'I don't go for that hoodoo-voodoo stuff'

'It's wrong'

'It will pass'

That's part of the symptomatic vocabulary of those in the old paradigm. Perhaps it won't matter for a lot of executives, for quite a while, embedded in some large organisations, but you might need to explore these ideas, just to get a sense of what you could do now to invigorate your company, focus your team or generate a new career. Someone else may be 'disrupting' your industry right now. 

1. Explore how 'Design Thinking' is both a fad and a real revolution. 

2. Find out which of your competitors is 'disruptive' and how. 

3. Ask your most creative Gen Y's how long they intend to stay. 

4. Examine how many of your customers use you regardless of location. 

5. Go back to a colleague who proposed something 'ridiculous' and understand her idea fully. 

6. Use your organisation's social media reputation to generate at least one new business idea.

7. Innovate ON a process; Innovate AS a process.

The future is not an extrapolation of the present. To survive it you have to swallow some unpleasant truths about the overall system of management that can feel like a personal insult! I remember learning about quantum mechanics - it hurt. But it was a better explanation and predictor of the world than classical mechanics, which it didn't destroy - just included as a 'special case'. 

The irony is that giving up some (not all) of the ideas that made you what you are, will accelerate your becoming what's needed in the 21st century! 

Tough environment for a CEO? Get stuck into it!

A recent Business Spectator blog by Greg Evans (see http://goo.gl/zBYHh) points out why, in a world generally suffering from serious constraints, we seem to have made life here unnecessarily difficult for ordinary businesses. 

"Factors contributing to weaker conditions

A range of factors are contributing to weaker conditions and the immediate near term outlook including:

• Persistent international volatility and the uncertain impact this has on the domestic economy
• An elevated currency is placing pressure on trade exposed businesses and reduces competitiveness
• Changing consumer spending patterns and the preference to reduce debt
• Unease about the performance of minority government and resulting policy responses which endorse a low growth green policy agenda
• The impact of higher utility prices brought about by the carbon tax and other emission reduction measures, and
• An established view of policy makers that business can help deal with the unexpected revenue shortfalls of government through higher tax rates or new taxes"

Read more: http://www.businessspectator.com.au/article/2013/5/1/industries/how-canberra-can-wake-small-business-hibernation#ixzz2SezmdOCH

The words I've highlighted in bold disturb anyone in business! Although later in his article Evans identifies a number of ways to fix these issues, they are all at Government, indeed, Federal level, including for example getting rid of excess regulation. They'll also take a very long time to implement. 

But what's a person to do here & now when running your own business of, say 100 to 5000 people? Electricity prices are the highest in the world. The currency makes your product or service 50% more expensive to export than it was a couple of years ago. And the head of Coca-Cola mentioned in the Fin Review today that labour costs are 15-20 times higher than in, say, Thailand. (Don't pretend they are 'not as productive' either...)

The trouble is that so many businesses have enough trouble with getting work and executing it that there is little time to change the environment. Yet, obviously, that's a task the CEO must undertake, somehow. This has to be done with the Board, not as a KPI the Board will evaluate her on. 

This means changing the system that you're in. Talking about this with a group of professional Board Directors the other day we hit exactly that issue - it's tough to change the system when you're only part of it. Yet when faced with a 'bad' system, the only way out is to disrupt it - even if that's just giving it a good kick in the shins!

It also means reframing your own perspective. If changing the system is hard, changing yourself is harder, especially when there's no time - it's not a 'project' you get resources for. And the outcome isn't guaranteed to be 'good' (ie more money). It feels like changing your brain while you're using it! 

It also means getting your team to innovate on the core question of the business. This also is hard. It's what comes even before the Vision Thing. If you don't have a real Executive - ie a core team with strategic skills feeling responsible for the entire organisation - you have a fractured set of competitive perspectives, that's all. They may 'innovate' but only on their chosen comfort areas. You need more from them. Your role requires more from them. There's no point being a lonely martyr. 

These tasks need a process that includes: 

Tough collaborators - not only 'mates'

Reflection - not only 'thinking'

Creativity - not only 'analysis'

Pain - not only 'confirmation'

Synthesis - not only 'competition'

Rapid testing - not only 'guaranteed success'

If you're up for this kind of process, if you understand that the investment of time (which can be astonishingly short) means a 'rest of life' yield and if you have the courage (not the physical kind, but the intellectual, emotional, relationship kinds), you have a chance to be part of the real game. That real game is what could be available for Australian business when the rest of the world finally changes gear!

I think this is especially important because as employers you have responsibility to create pathways to the future for your employees even if the Government isn't helping. And since I've been hearing about these 'factors' or something similar in Australia and elsewhere for all my career, I don't think they are going to ever really go away. So the work has to be done even if it's 'difficult'.

There's no straight answer. But there's nothing better than wrestling the issues to the ground properly and discovering your best answer! This is what I love doing with my CEO/Exec team clients - it's what makes the difference between barely coping and long-term thriving. Give me a call on 0437 659 312. 

Getting equity capital is tough, but....

Over the last couple of years since the GFC, I've had many conversations about the difficulty of raising capital, particularly in the start-up/midsize space. On top of this banks that lend against assets (your house) have trouble lending against the real asset (your implemented IP) or future cash flows. 

As Ross Dawson points out, when markets can't do what's needed, new ideas arise. Crowdsourcing for capital is one such response.

	Ross Dawson (@rossdawson)
24/04/13 1:30 PM Crowdfunding creates a new layer of capital markets and new layers of value bit.ly/Y2MjSW

It will develop and mature, so some of my current early-phase clients - with organisational structures that don't even fit the current expected model - will be tracking this for the time when growth depends on externally sourced capital rather than cash flow. Or their house. 

There's an interesting question here for anyone running something bigger..... what does this do over the next 10 years for your projected cost of capital? Will you be competitive if your only sources are traditional, with the provider's fee and cost layers built in? 

I don't know the answer, but I'm looking forward to watching the question grow! 

Performance - it's a double-brain affair.

How many initiatives to improve perfomance focus on either 'left brain' or 'right brain' action at the expense of each other? Especially when things get complex, at the senior executive or partner level. Is a one-sided model complete enough?  

Strategy in particular suffers if there's not an adequate balance between analysis and creativity. 

The key to the great high-impact people I've had the privilege to work with has been an integration of both divergent, emotionally-based capabilities with convergent, analytical skills. (And lots of focussed, designed action). It's the combination that's powerful - 'Why have a goal?' and 'How do we make it real?' Each mindset frames and enables the other. 

What's more, the combination is essential for sustained performance. 

In effect, real performance is about being fully human. It should be simple but of course, that's the challenge and the delight! 

Do you know your preferred way of thinking? Does this dictate how all tasks are approached? What do you do - or who do you involve - to compensate and get the balance right? My own helpers ask those questions that I don't like to ask myself. It's uncomfortable but the questions uncover the capacity to answer them and actions that have greater impact. 

What wisdom in the other strange hemisphere of your mind holds the secret to your next level of performance?