Traveling Light Blog

I recently created a webinar for entrepreneurs in WebFWD’s incubator program. I focused on free ways to leverage your natural energy patterns individually and as a team. Since start-ups have only time, a little money, and energy, I believe any free edge an entrepreneur can gain is an edge the entregpreneur should grab.

These energy patterns and tools apply to anyone who needs to sustain energy in a high-pressure work environment, though. Luckily, WebFWD makes their webinar files public within weeks, so you can now attend a replay any time: http://blog.webfwd.org/post/20967241169/energy-a-startups-most-precious-resource.

While you’re there, check out the supremely cool, diverse open source companies in the program: Big Blue Button, CASH Music, Entropy Wave, IHeartCode, Open Photo, Meemoo, Symbiota, and Tomahawk.

Executive coaching is a one-on-one process dedicated to the development of the leader. Its popularity has grown exponentially since I coached my first client in 1994.

The pattern of investment has also shifted, in my observation. Ninety-seven percent of Selby Group’s executive coaching services are sponsored by the leader’s employer, however the opposite is true for the general population of professionals, with 97% of all coaches hired by the individual, generally without the knowledge of his or her supervisor.

In some regards then, now is the best time to invest in coaching because if you’re not coaching your go-getters, someone else is, and the more they invest in their own careers with their own funds, the less likely they are to envision your organization in their futures.

Inside organizations today, the name executive coaching is actually a misnomer in many cases, as more and more executives invest in their directors and managers years in advance of promotion to the executive level. If this is your strategy, now is a great time to begin, since most companies are back on a growth track and thinking about the future. It’s a savvy investment, as it allows the budding leader to take current performance to a new level while preparing for executive responsibilities, and smoothing the transition to a much larger role. It’s also an outstanding retention tool.

In some cases, though, now is the worst time to invest in coaching. To determine if now is the best time or the worst time for you to invest in executive coaching, consider the questions below.

Considerations for Investment in Executive Coaching:

1.	What will this individual’s growth allow you to do that you can’t do now?
	Examples:

• gain new sales
• turn him loose with the investment community to raise three times the funds he is raising now
• reduce my direct involvement in her team and focus my efforts on new business
• improve morale and decrease attrition of our highest-paid and hardest to replace professional staff

2.	What is the value of this change? How will your condition be improved if the leader hits or exceeds his or her development goals?
	Examples:

• We can reduce rate of manufacturing errors at least 30%, which totals $2.4 million over five years and finally brings our costs in line with our competitors
• We can leverage her C-level relationships to build new business and take key accounts from our top competitor
• Once this person can take the reins, I can move on and move up

3.	What is at risk if you don’t develop this leader?
	Examples:

• Lost opportunity; our competitors are already ahead of us on 12 fronts
• Loss of key accounts; decision-makers want a more senior-level discussion from our Client Services VP; our key competitor has just landed a seasoned VP and is going after our accounts
• Lost revenue

4.	Which outcomes are most important to you?
5.	How will you know the leader has achieved success? Put in more traditional terms, how will you measure progress toward the outcomes?
	Examples:

• Steady increase in case value
• Steady reduction in turnover in Engineering
• Fewer new hires let go in first six months due to poor performance

6.	Why now?
	Examples:

• Pending promotion
• Unique opportunity in the competitive environment; if we don’t leverage it now, it will be gone
• Realized we have a huge gap in succession planning for VP of Marketing
• Losing our best people and want to invest in remaining top performers to show we’re serious about providing opportunities for growth at our firm
• Excellent track record in bringing in revenues, but a recent blip in performance, want to get him back on track and develop his potential to double revenues
• Individual is a star in own field, but has lost 50% of team members because they can’t stand working with her big ego, and we can’t convince others to transfer into her department for the same reason

7.	If you want a particular coach, why do you want this particular coach? What are you looking for? Experience? Credentials? Leadership? Empathy? Support? Willingness and finesse in delivering tough feedback?
8.	Why coaching? Coaching alone is not the best solution to challenges involving more than one person. Team development, restructuring and realignment, staffing changes, or change management are some of the many powerful alternatives that can be used with or without coaching to address more complex challenges.

I don’t think I’ve ever included a joke in my Friday musings, but this one had me laughing so hard I just had to share it. It’s called The Price of Gas in France.

A thief in Paris decided to steal some paintings from the Louvre. After careful planning, he stole the paintings, got past security, and made it safely to his van. However, he was captured only two blocks away when the van ran out of gas.

When asked how he could mastermind this seemingly impossible crime and then make such an obvious error, he answered, “But, Monsieur, that is the reason I stole the paintings. I had no Monet to buy Degas to make the Van Gogh.”

See if you have De Gaulle to tell this joke to someone else. After all, what have you got Toulouse?

Two enthusiastic thumbs-up for Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think by Steven Kotler and Peter Diamandis. I particularly recommend the book for those of us who work in information technology, biotechnology, healthcare, and nanotechnology sectors.

The authors integrate developments in these and other disciplines with reliable data and thought-provoking hypotheses about large-scale trends to paint a vision of the not-so-distant future.

Tom shook his head in frustration and asked me, “Why do I have to keep overruling their decisions?  I thought the people closest to the customer were supposed to be the ones who knew the business the best.”

It had been a rhetorical question until very recently. Now he really wanted to know. A general manager with a brilliant track record, Tom had once again produced superior results for the stockholders and created thousands of jobs, but the personal toll was huge. Everyone worked unsustainably long hours, talent was hard to find, and now that the company was growing at a rapid clip, Tom and his management team absolutely had to scale.

I’m not revealing anything revolutionary when I say that you must drive decision-making down as a precondition to scale up. There are limits to how many decisions any one executive can make in 24 hours, even if you skip meals, a lot of sleep, and a personal life.

However, this fell off of many leaders’ priority lists in recent years. My conversation with Tom took place several years ago. Throughout the Great Recession, I rarely had this conversation with anyone. With so many companies in crisis mode, decision-making flew back up the ranks. Command and Tight Control became the norm. Executives became accustomed to making even small decisions that used to be in the hands of directors or even managers, such as approving job offers for individual contributors and signing off on $5000 PO’s. Directors started functioning like managers and managers like individual contributors.

As one manager put it, “The message was to get in the boat and row right now in exactly this direction until the boss yells to change direction, so we did.”

Now that the crisis has passed for so many companies, it’s time for most executives to delegate decision-making once again. It’s a hard shift to make after being in the habit of tight control for so long, so if you recognize yourself in this article, don’t beat yourself up. Once you’ve become accustomed to making do with extremely limited resources and powering your way through every situation, it takes a mental and emotional reset to make the changes that allow your talent to do all they’re capable of to support growth, let alone lead them on a path of learning and development so that they grow, too.

So how do you know if you need to let go? Take a look at the process steps below and see if you recognize yourself in any way. It’s a boomerang-like pattern:

1. You hand off decision-making authority to one of your direct reports.
2. He or she makes a poor decision, or at least one that’s not as good as the decision you would have made.
3. You know you shouldn’t disempower this person but you don’t want to put the business at risk, so instead of taking the decision authority away, you ask for more frequent report-outs on the project to keep closer tabs on it.
4. Your direct report spends additional time preparing reports for you and providing updates, leaving less time to think through subsequent decisions, get your guidance, and improve his or her judgment.
5. You get more frequent updates but the decisions aren’t any better; it’s just more frequent reports about bad decisions.
6. You lose confidence in the direct report, and start overriding his or her decisions during meetings or in email threads. Worse, you start questioning his or her judgment in other areas. It’s as if a shadow of doubt has been cast over everything he or she does.
7. You now own the decision again, since you are the one making it. You also have the additional challenge of managing someone who feels micro-managed, humiliated, or insulted, and who spends more time covering his or her backside, ducking for cover, and agonizing over how to position every email to the boss. This person isn’t taking chances, growing, making mistakes, and learning. He or she is just executing your decisions and wondering why you changed.

As this sequence shows, much like additional vacation days, once you’ve given someone decision-making authority, it’s hard to take it back without creating a whole new set of problems.

I developed the following checklist to help you assess if you’ve got your ducks in a row to delegate an important decision. I’ve used this checklist myself as I was developing it, and found that it helped me identify some of my own blind spots. You can also use it after a delegated decision has gone bad (or even just sideways), and to assess what you need to change to continue improving your delegation going forward. You can even use it to stimulate your team’s thinking about how effectively they delegate, too. Consider this the Swiss Army Knife of delegation.

Checklist: The Sweet Spot for Effectively Driving Decision-Making Down in the Organization

Knowledge – does the person have full knowledge of…

	Downstream impact of decision?
	All key stakeholders and their interests?
	What the decision is and what it isn’t?
	Context of how this decision fits into the business?

Skills – how skilled is this person at…

	Communicating with stakeholders up, down, sideways, and outward?
	Choosing and using appropriate diagnostics such as root cause analysis, force field analysis, technical analysis, etc.?
	Decision-making itself, including awareness of his or her natural strengths and blind spots in decision-making?
	Building stakeholder relationships?
	Collaborating where appropriate or helpful?
	Persisting to see the decision through?

Leadership from You – are you ready, willing, and able to provide…

	A clear, clean hand-off?
	Coaching from the previous decision-maker (usually this is you) through several decision cycles?
	Advocacy to get needed resources?
	Specific feedback and dialogue?
	Consistent reinforcement when others appeal to you for a different decision?
	Appropriate time allocation for his or her learning curve before delegating full authority or authority for additional decisions?

I encourage you to use this list as a jumping off point for a conversation with your direct reports. Don’t just keep it to yourself. You can learn a lot more hearing their perspectives in addition to your own.

What would you add to this list? Is there anything with which you disagree? Let me know. I’m interested in learning your perspective.

That’s me in a rare Introverted moment, peeking out from behind the intellectual powerhouse Riane Eisler. When this photo was taken, the multi-talented author and researcher had just spoken at Roberta Guise’s Thought Leadership Symposium for Women.

We also had the opportunity to get direct coaching on PR to spread our thinking to a much larger audience, a top literary agent, a successful blogger and self-published author, and an expert on handling the rejection and attacks that thought leaders (particularly female thought leaders) are bound to experience.

Best of all, I had two and a half days completely dedicated to improving my thought leadership in the company of other women with similar goals, and we’ll have an hour together each month for a full year. If Roberta decides to offer the symposium again, Traveling Light readers will be the first to know.

In just one month, I’ll begin mentoring the brilliant entrepreneurs in Mozilla’s start-up incubator, WebFWD. WebFWD supports projects and companies that align with the Web principals outlined in Mozilla’s Manifesto. We’re in the early stages of shaping my role, so stay tuned for more details. Learn more about the WebFWD Mentors here: https://webfwd.org/about/mentors/.

Web FWD is new and exciting, but going to their San Francisco office feels like coming home. They are in the former Hills Brothers coffee plant complex where I worked during my tenure at Nestlé. I feel like I should be swiping a Nestlé security badge every time I walk through the courtyard, and I could swear I still smell coffee roasting over in the Commodities group.

There’s been a trend lately toward business leaders beginning to promote and recruit more flexible leaders to serve in their organizations and be placed decisively in the succession plan. These flexible leaders have broader strategic and influence skills that apply across the enterprise, even though they may not be the very best performer in any one area.

One example would be engineering VP’s who are not better engineers than the directors who report to them. This trend even has a buzzword: “horizontal skills,” posed in contrast to the deep domain expertise that historically has been more highly valued all the way up the organizational food chain.

However, it’s not all wine and roses for those of us who hold these newly-valued broad, horizontal skills. There’s a downside we must navigate in order to leverage this trend for all it’s worth and minimize the downside risk. I first wrote about this risk three years ago, but upon reflection, realized I was too early, so I’m bringing it back into the spotlight today.

If you pride yourself on how well you "lead with flexibility" or "adapt to whatever is needed of me," you’re at risk of a malady I’ve dubbed "Gumby-itis." Gumby is a children’s toy that can be bent and stretched considerably without breaking. In fact, that’s about all you can do with Gumby. If a child wants or needs anything but flexibility, Gumby gets left on the floor, abandoned for a toy with a more interesting purpose.

The Gumby character, who had a television show for many years, always wants to do what’s right and what’s good. He wants to be helpful. His heart is in the right place.

Highly flexible, broadly-skilled leaders can become a lot like Gumby. Sometimes that’s advantageous, but the biggest mistake flexible people can make is to adopt the strategy of staying so flexible that no decision-maker really knows what you want.

When internal competition increases — as it now has in nearly every company — it’s easy to innocently make this one big mistake, but it will leave you unfulfilled and no better off.

I know I’m working with someone who suffers from Gumby-itis when the people above him or her in the organization say, "I’d like to give more constructive feedback and suggestions, but I can’t figure out what he wants" or "She has a lot of talent and has been successful in several parts of the company, but I can’t help her get where she’s going if she won’t tell me where that is."

If this is you, you must do one thing differently, starting today: Claim Your Space. Claim it!
There’s something you must understand here in order to see why this is so important: the majority of leaders suffer from the opposite of Gumby-itis, which might be termed, "Will of Steel-itis." They decide what they want, they claim it, and they charge forward until it’s theirs.

They love direction and they love a clearly defined goal in any aspect of their lives. It gives them shivers up and down their spines. When you tell them "I’m staying flexible in these demanding business conditions and I’ll happily fill any key gap," it drives them nuts. They don’t know what to do with that. It’s not a goal. It’s a wishy-washy statement.

So when an opportunity comes along that you really want, they don’t even realize you want it because you haven’t told them, and they plug in someone who has claimed that space instead of you. You’ll get what’s left over, which is usually not a role that excites you.

Don’t blame the boss. Maybe he or she didn’t make enough time to recognize your talent, but a boss is busy looking in a lot of directions and doesn’t always have the time to figure out what you’re not telling him or her.

You’ve got to claim that space if you want it to be yours.

What if you can’t decide which space to claim? As someone who’s struggled with "entrepreneurial ADD" my whole life, believe me: I feel your pain! But that doesn’t change the fundamental fact that we flexible folks get farther and have more satisfaction by making a choice and claiming our space. Survey the territory you occupy and then pick something that interests you, benefits the company, and is aligned with key priorities.

Define your ideal role within the context of the company, its business, its current challenges, and its long-term strategy. It’s possible that this role doesn’t yet exist, and it may never exist, but at least it gives decision-makers something that more closely resembles a goal.

Make it known that you would like to be considered for similar roles as the need arises, or better yet, offer to take on some responsibilities in this area, in addition to your current job. Most importantly, ask for their feedback as to how you can focus your own development efforts to become the best possible candidate for such a role.

Give those goal-loving "Will of Steel" folks what they need in order to help you reach your highest potential. Claim your space!

Speaking of things coming full circle, I first met talented executive coach and leadership trainer Julia Snowden when she facilitated an outstanding training program for us at Nestlé. Now I’m pleased to finally announce that she is our newest Selby Group affiliate. You can learn more about Julia’s background and expertise at http://www.selbygroup.com/team_snowden.html.

Speaking of talented women, my colleague Roberta Guise is leading the “Thought Leadership Symposium for Women,” February 24–26 in San Francisco and I plan to be there. “It’s to get women’s voices recognized as authorities,” she says. If you’re a woman or know of one who wants to take the leap from expert to influencer, let Roberta know! Click this link for more info http://bit.ly/tuRYe4.