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Are Your Leaders Value Added? |
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“If you want to retain those who are present, be loyal to those who are absent.” -- Dr. Stephen Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People |
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“Learning cannot be disassociated from action.” -- Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline |
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“The most important measures are both unknown and unknowable.” -- W. Edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis |
Are Your Leaders Value Added?
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For years we have used tools and concepts such as lean thinking and six sigma to take the waste out of our front line systems, but we have in general neglected to use these tools on perhaps the most important and costly system in our organizations - the leadership system. Think about -- how much does your organization pay out in leadership wages and benefits each day? Are you getting what it costs from EACH of your directors, managers, and supervisors?
High performing organizations, such as those that have pursued the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, do make an effort to get value from each of their leaders. They measure leadership effectiveness on a regular basis at all levels of the business, they make sure that each leader is developing over time, and they consistently evaluate the effectiveness of the various types of communication that leaders have with their people, both in meetings and on the job.
Most organizations however do not consistently evaluate their leaders beyond the use of the traditional job description. They may have used a 360 degree feedback tool on occasion, but few companies have linked the use of this tool to their leadership development process (if they have formally defined one). Why do we avoid searching for (demanding) measurable leadership performance? Why are we content to assume that the monthly departmental numbers each leader is responsible for give us enough feedback to determine if a leader is doing their job or not?
Using a Leadership Index to Measure Leadership Effectiveness
Face it - the personal decisions and actions of a given leader are not accurately reflected in the daily, monthly, or annual performance numbers of a department or site. Many teams are willing to produce fair or good levels of
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performance in spite of their leader's performance. Worse yet, most leaders are allowed to do the same thing each day from both a behavior and a task perspective - they don't have to learn to make better and faster decisions, they don't have to get more out of each of the plethora of meetings they hold and attend, and they get away with making up excuses for why their projects were not completed on time. Compared to a lean manufacturing process, most leadership processes contain lots of waste.
As for the daily cost of leadership ... I stopped thinking a lot about it once I saw that we were easily wasting a million dollars a day. For example, 50 managers working at a $35 hourly wage rate and receiving 8 hours of pay each day cost a location $14,000 a day, or $3.5 million a year! It is safe to assume that the level of waste in those jobs is minimal? I sure hope that those 50 managers are really making a positive difference.
Are Your Leaders Lost ?
When your leaders perform on the job each day, are they sending a consistent message about performance expectations? Are they behaving in a manner that is consistent with the desired culture of the organization? Are they spending their time on those activities that will benefit the company the most? If not, you probably have some lost leaders.
We would like to think that the strategic planning notebook that we give out each year provides enough direction to make sure that each leader knows where we want to go. We hope that the monthly meetings we have tell everyone where we are going and why. Unfortunately, the daily behavior of each leader on the job almost always overrides the contents of a notebook or the message stated in a meeting.
Most organizations do not have a formal approach for measuring and improving the daily job performance of their leaders. Many leaders act one way when their boss around, and totally different when they think no one above them is watching. The resultant impact on team morale, focus, and performance can be devastating. Lost leaders can do a lot of damage to an organization in a short amount of time.
What kind of direction are your leaders giving to their people each day?
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A More Effective Approach to Leadership
I have learned over the years that the front line supervisor is the key leverage point for making any improvement effort work, or for making sure that the organization’s plans are executed as they are designed in general. Unfortunately, I have also witnessed on too many occasions how most businesses, schools, and hospitals tend to discount, if not completely ignore, the effectiveness of these people. Rarely do they participate in planning efforts, development activities, or good performance feedback processes. We fail to include those who really make the most difference, good or bad!
How do we solve this problem? How do we make sure that all of our leaders, and especially those that work on the front lines, are acting and performing in a manner that is consistent with what we want to be and where we want to go? The answers are simple, but they involve letting go of some belief systems that tend to be pretty deeply entrenched. Beliefs drive personal behavior on the job, and in turn, plan execution and systems design.
The greatest failure of most organizations, outside of neglecting front line leaders in general, lies in failing to ensure that desired high performance behaviors are practiced consistently and that key skills exist, or are being developed, as time goes by. For example, how many of your leaders continue to improve their computer skills to keep pace with changing technology? How do you ensure that each leader is maintaining a consistent focus on the needs of both your internal and external customers? In the simplest sense, how are you making sure that each you person you pay to be a leader is consistently treating each of their people with respect and dignity, and in turn building stronger personal relationships with those people they depend on to get the job done each day?
First of all, we have to accept the fact that these people have a great degree of influence. Secondly, we must define a clear list of both behaviors and task that each leader is expected to use on the job each day. Third, we must regularly measure how well each leader is doing in terms of meeting those expectations. Finally, we must provide sound approaches to personal development to help address those areas of relative weakness.
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Would You Like Some Help?
Over the past 17 plus years, I have helped design leadership systems in a variety of organizations - both small and large - in the manufacturing and service arenas. This experience has helped me discover value added, simple ways to set up systems for measuring leadership effectiveness, linking the results of this regular measurement to a formal leadership development process, and making sure that all leadership communications are both coordinated and value added. Lost leadership is the primary power restrictor for this power system - these tools help you both eliminate that barrier and move forward more rapidly towards higher levels of performance. If you are interested in the leadership systems and tools that I have to offer, send me an e-mail at kevin@greatsystems.com. Better yet, give some thought to working further with me to help you improve your leadership system through my interactive leadership development workshop.
Keep improving! -- Kevin McManus, the Systems Guy
Would You Like to Learn More?
Click on one of the following links to learn even more about Great Systems! and the types of systems improvements I can help you make:
“The only thing I know is that I do not know it all.” -- Socrates
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2007, Great Systems! LLC Last Revised - August 30, 2007 |
Contact me at:
kevin@greatsystems.com |