As promised, this week’s post is a follow-up from last week’s post about using inclusion as a means of broadening “your” leadership skill set.  In that post I stated that by drawing on the knowledge of their team members leaders can understand all aspects of the problems they are facing, and find the best solutions.  By doing so they improve their effectiveness in making decisions and gaining support and commitment for implementing those decisions…two important leadership skills.

In this post I am writing about the use of delegation as a means of broadening “your” leadership skill set.  Delegation enables you to access and utilize skills that you may not possess.  In my recent post on Delegation, http://www.scottneilson.com/?p=397, I discussed the importance of delegation from the perspective of improving productivity, motivating employees, and reducing costs.  In that post I noted that your job as a leader is to orchestrate the activities of your team to achieve the goals and objectives of the organization, not to DO them all.  That means that as a leader you must find a way to access the special skills of your team members and deploy them effectively in reaching those goals.

To do so, however, you must first acknowledge that no one possesses all the skills required to be the best leader in every situation…not even you!  There are some skills that others will have that you will not.  There will be situations in which someone else possesses a set of skills which are better suited to the situation than your own.  This is NOT a flaw in your makeup as a leader, it is simply a reality.  However, it is also an opportunity.

As an example, I was once a part of an organization in which the CEO had an undergraduate degree in marketing and had started working her way up the corporate ladder in marketing functions until she had moved into general management.  She was not technically trained, but was highly effective in leading the operations of the business.  Her challenge was in understanding all of the technologies of our business and remaining abreast of advances in those technologies. 

To supplement this skill shortfall she relied on her Chief Scientific Officer to keep her informed of the relevant technical issues facing the business and industry.  She knew enough, and had the CSO explain enough of the details, to enable her to incorporate that technical information into the decisions she was making to lead the business. 

She also followed this approach with all the key functional areas of the business.  She was not expert in any of them, except perhaps some aspects of marketing.  However, even in that area it had been more than a decade since she had had daily direct responsibility for marketing.  She had become expert in orchestrating all the activities required to move the organization in the desired direction…leading. 

In this example the skill she accessed and utilized to help her lead the organization was remaining abreast of industry knowledge, although there are many skills you can draw upon by delegating.  As Peter Drucker said in his book “The Daily Drucker”, know the strengths of the individuals on your team.  To further that thought I would add that you must use those strengths wisely.  You must be clear on who possesses what leadership assets.  Those assets are at your disposal and they are just as much assets as your technology, equipment, facilities and processes. 

As a leader, it is absolutely one of your responsibilities to draw on ALL those assets, and to orchestrate their effective use to move the organization forward in meeting goals.  Recognize the areas in which your employees may be better suited to accomplish certain tasks than you.  Leverage those strengths to supplement your own skill set.  By doing so, you expand your own set of leadership skills, not because you have instantly developed that skill yourself, but because you have accessed them in one of your team members and drawn upon their skill to meet a certain business need of the moment.

I think it is fair to say that all leaders have a limited set of skills for doing business and leading an organization.  The skills they generally possess are those that they have relied upon and been successful with throughout their careers.  As with any other such asset, they have come to lean on those skills as their primary skills for leading a business.     

If their leadership role is a limited one with a defined short term outcome, such as leading an integration, divesting specific assets, or downsizing, those skill limitations may not pose a problem.  However, if the role is to be long term, leaders must have the ability to recognize the changing needs of the organization and utilize the appropriate skills to respond to them. 

Leaders must also recognize that as they address one set of problems, others WILL emerge.  Chances are that these new problems will be problems with which they are not accustomed.   This is true because problems are less likely to arise in a leader’s area of strength simply because they tend to be more attentive to issues in those areas.  As a result, new problems are likely to arise in areas in which the leaders are less familiar and for which they may not have the appropriate skill set.  It is at this critical juncture that leaders must have access to new skills.  How do they do that?

There are many answers to that question…many ways to adapt to change.  But, one that is readily available, and easy to implement on short notice, is inclusion.  In this case, inclusion means involving other members of the team.  By doing so, leaders supplement their own set of skills and abilities.  They use the insights of their team members to understand all aspects of the problems they are facing, and they draw on the strengths of their team members to find the best solutions.  As a result, those solutions represent a broad array of perspectives which gain commitment and yield better results.

Inclusion enables a leader to adapt to new situations by drawing on different skills – the skills of their team members.  No doubt you have heard the maxim that great leaders surround themselves with a great team.  This does not mean that great leaders are lazy and find a group of experts to do the job for them.  It simply means that they cannot be expert at everything.  Therefore, they must have a strong team working with them.   Inclusion is a process through which to gain information, expertise and skill in as many areas as possible in handling your widely varied leadership responsibilities. 

As a leader, this requires you to put your EGO aside and recognize that being an effective leader does NOT mean making all the decisions, but rather it means enabling the organization to arrive at the correct solutions by involving the right people at the right time.  It requires you to develop a culture which fosters participation.  It requires you to establish the appropriate mechanisms to enable that participation to take place.  It requires you to systematically put the important issues on the table for discussion.  However, be sure to note, it does NOT require you to make decisions based on consensus.  As the leader, you ALWAYS maintain the right and the responsibility to make the final decisions. 

Next post will look at Delegation as another way to “Broaden Your Skill Set” as a participative leader.

Thank you, Amy, for submitting this piece.  It is a wild one.

Have a look at this article.  It is long, but I have captured some excerpts below and made some comments.  I would be very interested in reading yours. The link is:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128362511&sc=nl&cc=es-20100711

Employee performance reviews should be eliminated, according to UCLA business professor Samuel Culbert. “First, they’re dishonest and fraudulent. And second, they’re just plain bad management,” he says.

Periodic reviews create circumstances that help neither the employee nor the company to improve. As Culbert and his co-author, Larry Rout, write in their book, Get Rid of the Performance Review! annual reviews do not promote candid discussions about problems in the workplace — and their potential solutions.

I cannot speak to whether performance reviews are truly “fraudulent”.  That has never been my observation, but I do not know on what grounds the author is making that assertion.  My observation is that performance reviews are not effective because they are poorly prepared and executed.  This seems to be a chronic problem in organizations, and I do not think that it is because the concept is wrong.  I think it is because the practice is flawed.  It seems that the process generally lacks leadership commitment requiring it to be done well, and it lacks rigor in how it is actually performed. 

• Management does not make it clear that performance review is fundamental to the success of the business. 
• Management often does not require that the basics are in place to enable that to happen, i.e., they do not oversee the process to ensure that job descriptions and goals exist and are clear and accurate. 
• Management does not do an adequate post mortem of the process to evaluate how well and completely it was conducted, and to determine how to make it better in the future.

Many organizations I have seen have a decent approach for defining job roles and responsibilities, and setting goals for the year.  However, the process often seems to fall apart in the measurement of performance against those goals, and the discussion or feedback about that performance.  Often, managers do not clearly define what the expectation is or how it will be measured.  When the time comes to evaluate performance they have to come up with that way of measuring it, if they even do that at all.  When it is done it is often done after the fact by the manager and comes as a surprise to the employee.  In addition, managers often do not take the time to collect all the relevant information to do an adequate job of really measuring performance.  As a result, the performance review discussion is flawed.

Further, the discussion itself often becomes combative.  Managers are frequently not well trained in conducting effective conversations about performance.  As a result, individuals feel personally attacked and the opportunity for constructive discussion is lost.  See the link http://www.scottneilson.com/?p=391 for our previous post on Feedback.

The author Culbert goes on to say that “The boss already has heard [from] his boss what they want to pay the guy, or the woman. So they come up with a review that’s all backwards.”

Unfortunately, I have to agree with some aspects of this point.  I have experienced many times when performance charts are force fitted to comply with a pre-determined pay raise amount.  Having said that, in my experience it is an overall amount that must be distributed based on what the company can afford, not based on an individual.  The manager’s task is then to manage that pool of salary increase funding as best they can to make it as equitable as possible.  In all honesty, I cannot say that that is inappropriate.  The business can afford what it can afford.  Now, one may certainly take umbrage with what that amount is and how it is determined, but it is not at all unusual, nor inappropriate, for businesses to know how much they can afford to give in pay raises and to determine a pool of funding from which to distribute those raises.

This aspect also is connected to how the organization wants to strategically position themselves from a pay perspective.  Some organizations intentionally do NOT want to be at the high end of the pay scale.  They do not mind the fact that they will lose some of their best employees to competitors who are willing to pay top dollar for top performance.

Finally, forcing a percentage increase to be distributed across an employee base does require managers to distinguish between employees who are performing and those who are not.  This is an area in which managers are notoriously weak.  It is distasteful for many to have to do this and so, given the opportunity to by-pass that responsibility, they will take the easy way and give everyone a good rating and pay raise, which defeats the purpose of pay for performance.  This approach does require them to make some effort to distinguish between good and poor performers.

Asked if performance reviews might be tweaked instead of eliminated outright — for instance, a manager might use statistics to measure an employee’s effectiveness — Culbert says that one-dimensional measurements can bring a new set of problems.

“Once you set up the metrics, that’s the only focus for the employee,” Culbert says. “The problem with performance reviews is that the metric that counts most for the employee is the boss’s opinion. So the employee starts doing what he or she thinks is going to score in the boss’s mind, and not even talk about what he or she believes is necessary for the company to get the results that really matter.”

Yes, this is likely to happen.  One performance measure is unlikely to result in strong overall performance of the business.  However, I will come back to my previous assertion that this is a result of poor execution, not bad concept.  There are models for elementary approaches such as Balanced Scorecard which are designed to address the fact that there are many aspects which must be performed well and will be measured.  They just have to be used and executed properly.

How could something so obviously destructive, so universally despised, continue to plague our workplaces?

• In part it’s because the performance review is all executives have ever known, and they’re blind to the damage caused by it.
• In part it’s because few managers are aware of their addiction to the fear that reviews create amongst staff, and too many lack the confidence that they can lead without that fear.
• In part it’s because HR professionals exploit the performance review to provide them a power base they don’t deserve.
• And in part it’s because few people know an alternative for getting the control, accountability, and employee development that reviews supposedly produce—but never do.

This I do not agree with, especially about HR professionals using it to “provide them a power base they don’t deserve.”  Again, I think that the concept of performance review is correct.  It is the execution that is flawed.

Reviewing performance is good; it should happen every day. But employees need evaluations they can believe.

Agree here…again, refer to the post on Feedback link: http://www.scottneilson.com/?p=391

…the alleged purpose of performance reviews is to enlighten subordinates about what they should be doing better, the real purpose is intimidation aimed at preserving the boss’s authority and domination in relationships. 

No, not buying that one.  While it probably does exist, I would not make the blanket statement that the “real purpose” of performance reviews is intimidation and preserving the boss’s authority and domination.

To me, the problem boils down to one word: insecurity (although incompetence comes in a close second). Too many managers relish the authority they have—and fear losing it. They worry they won’t be able to persuade their direct reports to do things their way. So they get their self-confidence the only way they know that the current corporate structure allows—by intimidating their subordinates into silent compliance. In other words, they scare the hell out of them.

Personally, my observation has been that organizations do not do a good job of training their managers to manage.  That includes many aspects, such as organization design (to match the key processes of the business with the desired outcomes), job definition and description (to provide clarity to the individuals about who is doing what to get there), and performance management (to enable effective and constructive discussions to take place to enable individuals to see where they are hitting the mark and where they are missing it in the daily performance of their jobs).

I would love to hear your thoughts on this.  Please reply right to the blog rather than emailing me with your thoughts

Who is better at leading a technically oriented business; a person trained in a related technical area or a person trained in business?  The raging debate continues.  Which do you think is best and why?

In my industry, drug development services (the D side of R&D), there seems to be a never-ending debate over the skill set required for business leaders.  The question is, what is the best educational background, technical (meaning scientific – Ph.D. in some related area) or business (meaning a specific business degree such as Finance or Marketing, or an MBA)? 

First, here are some clarifications.  In this case we are talking about:

• GM and CEO positions (senior leadership roles);
• businesses that are established, not in the start-up phase;

Weigh in with your thoughts!  I will try to keep track of them all and try to distill the responses into some overall conclusion.