On one level the email staff memo republished by Bob Sutton on his excellent web site is funny. It sounds as if Fawlty Towers was run by someone with Lenny Bruce’s vocabulary.

On the other level, it’s disturbing just how bad some managers can behave. And it must harm the business.

Bob Sutton: Asshole Boss of the Year?. (Warning, the language may cause offence).

Businessweek has a great short piece by Marshall Goldsmith describing the five steps you need to take to become an effective leader.

Often this kind of material is more about the writer’s prejudices than evidence-based advice. Goldsmith drew on a study of 86,000 people working in major corporations before devising his list – so I suppose this might be better titled “increase your corporate leadership effectiveness”.

Goldsmith says the jury is out on whether great leaders are born that way (in fact he asks his readers for their opinions on this). However, he argues the essential skills are not hard to learn.

One tip I particularly like is:

Periodically ask co-workers for suggestions on how you can do an even better job in your selected behaviors for change.

I may not always like what I hear when I get feedback, but good or bad it is always welcome.

How to Increase Your Leadership Effectiveness – BusinessWeek.

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An interesting piece at Computerworld about the father of modern management and the first person to use the phrase “knowledge worker”. I’m not sure about describing Drucker as a “life coach” though – it’s a term I’ve learnt to mistrust.

Peter Drucker as Life Coach: Book Shares His Wisdom.

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Sub-titled “15 successful strategies for becoming a good manager”, Nick McCormick’s book Lead Well and Prosper is a straightforward, common sense leadership guide for new managers. It’s specifically written for people who are moving from working as part of a team to leading a team.

I mentioned the book in passing back in March. A few weeks later a review copy of the book arrived. As I was working on a major project, it promptly went below all the urgent reading only to surface in the last few days.

The book originally caught my eye because McCormick encapsulated the 15 key points it contains in a simple list. At the time I said it squares with more or less everything I’ve written on the art of management here on this site.

Read the rest of this entry »

Nothing illustrates the role of information in modern business better than the emergence of the CIO or Chief Information Officer.

It’s a senior management role that first appeared in the late 1980s. In theory at least, the role combines information technology know-how with all-round business skills.

It may a simple and clichéd view, but the cartoon CIO should be able to read a circuit diagram, debug programming code, find out where the bodies are buried in a set of corporate accounts and understand the general thrust of a opaquely-written marketing plan.

Being able to leap tall buildings in a single bound and stop a locomotive in its tracks don’t appear in any job description I’ve seen so far but they’d probably help.

CIO Magazine offers this mission statement prepared by the Gartner Group:

To provide technology vision and leadership for developing and implementing IT initiatives that create and maintain leadership for the enterprise in a constantly changing and intensely competitive marketplace.

It’s not a bad stab at defining the role, but the words could apply to the bespectacled kid hacking away at Linux in the back room of an ice cream parlour.

In fact, Gartner’s mission statement could apply to just about anyone working in information technology with a mere smidgeon of ambition. And it is London to a brick most enterprises in this quadrant of the galaxy regard their marketplace as constantly changing or intensely competitive.

Leadership and vision

On the other hand, I’m impressed Gartner managed to squeeze in the concepts of leadership and vision. To me these are certainly the important features that distinguish a good CIO from the dross. Of course, leadership and vision is not about being the first company to sign up to a new initiative being pushed by one of the big technology vendors. It means standing up to the snake oil merchants.

Likewise, CIO leadership and vision isn’t about blowing the budget on expensive new toys. Though some technology vendors use the words to imply exactly that. In their view visionaries spend money on their products regardless of whether they are proven or not.

And leadership most definitely is not about ploughing into heroic IT. The era of huge, unworkable mega-projects came to an end about the time the first CIOs appeared.

These days most companies recognise that information technology is a tool that will carry out the business plan. It’s part of the CIOs job to make sure IT and related knowledge resources are harnessed towards the key business goals and not an end in themselves.

Pinnacle of knowledge work

In many respects a CIO position in a large corporation is one of the pinnacles of knowledge-workerdom. It’s not necessarily the top knowledge worker job even for those knowledge workers with an IT background, indeed some CIOs have progressed to the CEO position, but the specialist nature of CIO work means such a transition is unusual even in those companies where the strategic application of technology and information tools lies at the very core of the business.

While some CIOs climbed to their position from technical careers in programming, systems analysis or even support, you don’t need to have an intensely technical background to reach this exalted position. That’s because in many case a CIO is more involved in applying technology to help an organisation reach is business goals than managing the technology on a day-to-day basis. That is why some people stepping into the CIO position and similar senior IT-related roles come from a user or application background.

Management education

If you do have a mainly technical background and you hope to step into a CIO role at some point, you’d be better off looking at expanding your management education and not your technical skills. Obviously an MBA will help more than Microsoft certification or any further IT qualifications. You’ll need a strong business orientation and some in-depth experience working on commercial applications in a key industry sector.

It’s possible you arrived in IT management with a first degree in a non-technical or non-vocational subject. Some recruiters might recommend you to top up your technical education before shooting for an MBA as a stepping-stone to the CIO role. In my opinion, it makes more sense to gather technical expertise on the job and concentrate your formal education resources on that MBA. Having some major project success on your CV is more likely to impress potential employers than any formal IT qualification. Remember, CIO is more about strategy than hands on computing.

Not all top-ranked corporate IT professionals are CIOs. There is generally a clear distinction between the role of Director of IT and CIO. The former is mainly involved with implementing strategies on behalf of senior management. It’s perfectly normal for a Director of IT to give advice at the senior management level, but the job is primarily technical. On the other hand, the CIO role is more strategic. In some organisations the Director of IT reports to the CIO.

The rewards for successful CIOs can be enormous. Of course it does depend on the size of an organisation and the size of the job. There are CIOs working in Australia with salaries well in excess of A$500,000. More often CIO positions involve more modest salary packages along with generous performance bonuses – possibly in the form of stock options.

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Keeping people motivated when a company goes through a major business change is a challenge. There are many factors to juggle. Tinkering in one area may unbalance matters elsewhere. Workers worry about losing control during change.

And then there’s uncertainty.

Each person has what we could describe as an uncertainty threshold. Your threshold may be high; someone else may have a lower threshold. When extra uncertainty pushes people above their threshold, they feel uncomfortable.

People – particularly those in knowledge-based industries – often take everyday uncertainty in their stride. External events, like a terrorist attack or economic downturn lift background uncertainty levels and reduce people’s capacity to deal with workplace uncertainty. Yet most workers cope well during normal times. Read the rest of this entry »

When a business goes through change, the way people react depends on whether they feel in control. Think of radical business change as a fast drive over a tricky mountain pass. The journey might be thrilling while you’re in the driver’s seat. Sitting in the front seat with a route map guiding the driver and anticipating what’s coming up is nearly as good. But from the passenger’s point of view the journey might be terrifying – or worse.

If you’ve ever looked down from a passenger window on a mountain pass and found you can’t see the edge of the road, you’ll have a good idea of what change management feels like from the average employee’s point of view.

We’ll stretch the metaphor further. While most of us feel it is best to have some control over the hazardous journey, we’d like to feel whoever is in the driving seat is up to the job. This isn’t just a matter of the driver having the right credentials and exuding confidence, the passengers are about to trust that person with their lives.

People’s feeling about control over their working lives goes way beyond change management. The European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions surveyed workers and found employees in certain occupations and industry sectors now have less control over the pace and methods of work than in the past. This lack of control is directly linked to workplace stress.

Participative management under attack

While the modern idea of participative management is under attack from all directions it remains the best way of giving employees a feeling of control over their working lives.

You might feel this is a luxury at a time when most knowledge-based industries are in recession, but this downturn will finish soon.

When that happens employers will once again struggle to find workers with key skills. Employers with enlightened human resource policies during times like these will be first out of the recession and will be in a position to keep up momentum.

Participative management says ownership plays an important part in ensuring people commit to workplace actions. Allowing people to take part in management, planning and decision-making means they’ll feel better about implementation.

This doesn’t mean management cedes all its decision-making responsibility to the workers.

In most cases ordinary workers will only control a minor part of any change process. But they’ll quickly recognise being able to comment at any level is important. What’s more, being able to have control over workplace minutiae is massively better than having no control.

Happy workers are productive workers

People who are given more choices and power will feel happier about any process. To use the jargon, they’ll take ownership of the change.

On the other hand, if change is merely imposed as a fait accompli they’ll do their utmost to resist.

On the psychological front, workers who feel powerless and out of control will feel stressed. There’s a whole body of evidence to back this up. Stressed workers under-perform, they make errors and their absentee rate will rocket as sickness and lassitude kick-in.

But this will be the least of your worries. As Rosabeth Moss Kanter described in her 1977 book, Men And Women of the Corporation, in organisations it is not power that corrupts but powerlessness. (You can read an online summary of parts of the book at this address.)

Mr and Mrs Jobsworth

Kanter, who is a sociologist by training, describes the way powerless people often become petty and territorial. She says they often become rules minded and over controlling. The British term for this kind of attitude is ‘jobsworth’, as in “I can’t do that, it’s more than my job’s worth.”

The issue here is people who lack formal control over their work put huge amounts of energy and thought into controlling the little part of the world where they are able to exercise power. One thing they often do is take extraordinary measures to scotch any reforms or changes. In other words they’ll actively work against workplace change.

Two-fisted managers might rationalise none of this matters. They may remind themselves that a period of change and upheaval is a good time to turf out dead wood and end resistance.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; after all, one driver for workplace change is to shake out poor performers and various roadblocks to progress.

However, there is a major problem, often this resistance can become so great, it totally undermines the change process or somehow damages the core business along the way.

Moreover, during a period of mishandled change, it is not unusual for the dead wood to stay and for key workers to decamp. Remember that, even in a time of relatively high unemployment for knowledge workers, employees who are particularly skilled and therefore valued by one company are likely to be valued by another.

See also:Managing change

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How often have you read a job description referring to change management? The term isn’t as common today as during the latter years of the twentieth century, yet change management skills and experience remain ‘must have’ qualities for many senior appointments. If you want to progress to the top, you’ll need to put a tick in this box.

Like many phrases used in recruitment advertising, the term is often misused. A recruitment advertisement using the term change management might simply mean a willingness to sack people.

Others might use it as a euphemism for an aggressive or even bullying management style. I’ve seen it used that way. I’ve also seen it used in a context where the recruiter meant ‘an ability to get things done’.

Yet more often than not, when an employer asks for change management skills it means they are looking for someone who can successfully steer a team, department or organisation through a metamorphosis. We’ll deal here with this meaning.

Business change

In the business world, change tends to take one of two basic forms. The first happens when an organisation consciously decides to remake itself. This could be part of a merger, demerger or management buyout. It could be when a company changes focus – for example the way IBM under Lou Gerstner moved from a hardware orientation to consulting services. Or when Apple switched from being a computer maker to making music players and mobile phones.

In theory this kind of change is an orderly process. You’d start with a master plan and the alterations would be made in a systematic fashion.

Any reconfiguration will lie mainly within the bounds of the organisation and controlled by that organisation.

Here the challenge is like looking at a map and saying to yourself ‘we’re are now at point A, what is the best route to get to point B?’ When things blow off course, you can always go back to the map and triangulate a new course to point B.

Change due to external forces

If only things were always that simple. The other type of change happens when external pressures drive organisations to reconfigure.

This can be as simple as a new piece of legislation or government regulation. An example might be the changes required within accounting businesses when governments introduce a new tax system. To understand how complex this can become imagine what processes might have taken place if the US government had broken up Microsoft.

Government led change may be negotiable and often comes with plenty of warning.

Other external forces driving change that are less predictable. For example: social upheaval, radical technological advances, economic upsets, competitor action, accidents, war and so on.

Some change is merely the rough and tumble of market forces – nobody would deny Cisco has been through periods of unforeseen change over the years.

Although there are exceptions, few companies can expect to have much influence over these external forces and even where there is an opportunity to influence external change, things might not happen the way you expect.

Distinguish between types of change

It’s worth making a clear distinction between the two different ways of dealing with external change. Usually external changes push companies into reactive responses. These can be knee-jerk responses or more measured approaches, but the key is going through the change and dealing with problems as they arise. When change is sudden and unforeseen, there may be no option but to react this way.

Alternatively, companies can attempt to anticipate change and prepare for it. This doesn’t necessarily need a crystal ball. All it requires is keeping well informed. For example, agricultural companies already know the climate is changing; some will be making plans as evidence of global warming emerges.

Software developers can look at the road maps for future product development issued by companies such as Intel, Google and Microsoft. Carmakers know some jurisdictions will require zero emissions by as set date.

Multinational oil companies like BP and Shell often have role-play exercises coaching executives through dummy external shocks. For example they might look at how a military coup in a major oil producing country might affect their business. This is an important way of preparing for radical external change. It enables executives to build teams and learn how things get done when the everyday ground rules of business change.

Companies in other industries engage in similar speculative activities or have informal think tanks to work through various scenarios. You may apply a simplified version of some of these techniques to your own situation.

Preparation, planning and research are important keys to dealing with change in any area of activity. However, there are events that no amount of planning can adequately prepare you for. Companies at the World Trade Centre might have laid down plans to deal with computer failure, or even a large-scale disaster at that building. They may have work-shopped a whole range of ideas. I doubt if many anticipated a scenario killing the bulk of their employees in a single morning. Yet, companies that looked at other scenarios would certainly have had a starting point for deal with that kind of crisis.

You may think dealing with a terrorist attack has little to do with change management. In truth, the connection is slim. Yet, airlines faced with plummeting ticket sales and security companies faced with massively increased demand went through their own change management processes after the terror attacks.

Of course most of the change management you will need to deal with will be on a smaller scale and, hopefully, less dramatic. We’ll look more closely at the issues for change managers in another post.

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