It goes without saying that leaders are driven to succeed—to do the best they can for both themselves and their organizations.
It also goes without saying that they expect their people to succeed—to do well in the jobs they’re paid for, meet and exceed targets, handle projects effectively, produce new ideas, create constructive relationships with colleagues and business partners, develop the people around them, reach their own potential, and so on.
Yet all too often, leaders set themselves and others up to fail. They “throw sand in the gears” of their organizations, by creating conditions in which under-performance is guaranteed.
That’s a hell of an indictment, so let me explain it.
For more than a decade, I’ve encouraged my clients to reduce all their strategies to a few goals and a series of 30-day action plans with specific people responsible for each result. This has four critical benefits:
- It forces people to break work down into “do-able” chunks, and to focus on the few things that really matter rather than the many which otherwise crowd their agendas.
- It puts immense pressure into an organization, as 30 days isn’t long and there’s no time for wheelspin. When it’s clear exactly what needs to happen, by when, and whose name will be called, people have to put their heads down and get moving.
- It enables you to see, very quickly, whether your strategy is on track or needs fine-tuning, and how the people responsible for various actions are doing. Fast feedback and accelerated learning let you deal with problems and opportunities in as close to “real-time” as possible.
- It enables you to quickly praise or reward people for a job well done, or guide, sanction, or replace those who don’t deliver. So the very process of driving your strategy becomes a powerful performance management process. And because success does lead to more success, celebrating some quick wins provides important motivation.
Making plans and assigning work is the easy bit. The hard part comes when you start reviewing progress. For that’s when things either get a boost or fall apart.
Every time you bring your team together, you have an opportunity to either turn them on or turn them off. The way you craft and conduct your conversations will either bring out the best in them or the worst.
Review meetings need to be both respectful and robust. So on the one hand, people must be treated decently. They must be listened to and given the sense that they are valued and their ideas count. But on the other hand, they need to know that your purpose is not to create a “social club” or win a popularity contest.
This is about work and results and progress. Everyone must know that they’re expected to deal in facts and well thought-through opinions, and that there’s zero tolerance for blaming, bluster, bullshit, or excuses.
I’ve sat through any number of these review sessions, in companies of many types. Some leaders get things right: people come well prepared, the conversation is informative and constructive, and they leave feeling positive and knowing exactly what they need to do next. But often, things break down quite quickly.
Typically, everyone pitches for the first meeting. The first few people to report back do it well. Mike, Sue, and Dumesani seem to have a grip on things and achieved what they had agreed to. And they’ve thought about what they need to do in the next 30 days. They get a “thank you” and a pat on the back. Smiles all around.
But then there’s a hiccup. Damien couldn’t do what he should have because he was still waiting for budget approval. Or a supplier had let him down. Or he’d had to deal with some emergency or other. Or he hadn’t been able to recruit a key person because the headhunters hadn’t come back to him. Or the IT guys hadn’t delivered. Or Jeff or Derek or Sam or whoever had been away for much of the month and hadn’t been available to discuss certain issues. Or…
What the leader should do when this happens is come down hard on the individual, question each of his “reasons” and make him explain why he couldn’t do something about them, demand that he take his plan for the next 30 days 100% seriously, and make it clear to everyone that such behavior is not acceptable. In other words, the “rules of the game” must be firmly established right from the get go.
What the leader actually does when she gets the ducking and diving is say, “Oh, OK. Thanks, Damien. Well, do try to sort those things out and get things moving before the next session. Now, let’s move on. Who’s next?”
In that moment, the leader has done two extremely dumb things: first, she has taught Damien that not meeting commitments is acceptable, that non-performance doesn’t matter. (And she has thanked him for letting the team down!) But even worse, she has taught the whole team the same thing. So her very first review session has set the tone for trouble.
When the next meeting comes around, one or two people don’t show up and more of them report that they haven’t done what they promised. Even fewer pitch for the third meeting and there’s a longer list of excuses. Meeting four gets called off because too many call in to say they can’t make it. Meeting five gets rescheduled a few times, but then doesn’t happen at all.
Game over!
Strategy reviews are, in effect, training sessions. You can make them work for you or against you. Clients who use my 30-day planning process say it’s the best thing they’ve ever done. The pity is that things so often start with a bang but end with a whimper. And that clever executives keep wondering why executing strategy is so hard, when it’s they who enthusiastically agree to a sensible way of working then show they didn’t really mean it.
Effective leadership requires tough love. Leaders need to show empathy, foster teamwork, and be unfailingly polite to their people. But they also need to instill discipline, enforce compliance with agreed procedures, and show courage in handling those who play fast and loose with their organization’s future.
Notions like “servant leadership, “principled leadership,” and “values-driven leadership” are all popular. However, if they’re not leavened with firmness, they cannot possibly drive performance and results. Being nice is no substitute for managing. Empowering people does not mean simply letting them loose and leaving them free to do or not do whatever they choose.
The buck stops on the leader’s desk. He owes it to himself to use the power of his position to make things happen. If he doesn’t, he’ll undermine himself because his people will know in a flash and lose respect for him.
If bad habits are allowed to creep into a business, it’s hard to get them out. Only the leader can stop them in their tracks. And strategy review sessions offer the ideal forum for doing it, because they usually involve senior people who, in turn, teach the rest.
Of course, virtually any other get-together—even those chance encounters in the passage where people share ideas or update each other about projects—provides a similar opportunity. But the discipline, structure, and status of a 30-day review makes it special. Not to be wasted.
