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Why Good Employees Derail

Here are the top five reasons good employees 'go south', how to spot them, and what to do about it.

Essentially all of these boil down to poor manager-employee relationships, as the line manager is the person ultimately responsible for managing top employees

Here are the top five reasons good employees 'go south', how to spot them, and what to do about it. Note that all of these boil down to poor manager-employee relationships, as the line manager is the person ultimately responsible for managing top employees:

1. Inconsistent / frequently changing priorities.

Why It's a Problem:
Nothing irritates a top performer more than 'ditch to ditch' or fad-based management.
How to Spot It:
Employees 'hunkering down' every time a new 'initiative' is introduced. Glazing over at 'strategy' meetings.
What to Do About It:
Set a short- medium- and long-term strategy and stick to them for a reasonable period without being distracted by the newest new thing. See John McCain's campaign strategy for examples of how *not* to do this.

2. Condoning mediocrity.

Why It's a Problem:
The #1 reason high performers leave organizations in which they are otherwise happy is because of the tolerance of mediocrity.
How to Spot It:
Disdain and distance between top performers and others who are not pulling their weight. Dissatisfaction with rewards (compensation, bonuses, awards, etc) given to others.
What to Do About It:
Set high goals for the entire organization, and build in both rewards (for success) and consequences (for failure). Apply both consistently and fairly.

3. Round peg / square hole syndrome.

Why It's a Problem:
High performers like to do what they're good at - not used as a a stop gap in some other way. They view themselves as Ferraris, and get frustrated if they think they are being used as a golf cart.
How to Spot It:
Disengagement from their allocated tasks and responsibilities. Lack of follow-up and accountability. General mopiness.
What to Do About It:
Review (with them) what you want this person to do. Freshen up job descriptions and re-orientate top performers to tasks that only they can do.

4. Underutilization.

Why It's a Problem:
Same as above - when you're a Ferrari (or think you are) you don't want to spend your time idling at the curb.
How to Spot It:
Freelancing in areas that aren't their responsibility. Getting under everyone's feet. Going rogue.
What to Do About It:
Have the employee produce a list of what they could/should be doing to occupy free time. Review and agree on utilization. Look at your own delegation skills - if you have an underutilized top performer, it's a sure sign you're a micro-manager who has problems delegating.

5. Playing favorites.

Why It's a Problem:
Top performers not only believe in a meritocracy - it's their air and water. Start playing favorites and bypassing people despite their results, and your top performers will be out of there before you can say 'Holy second cousin'.
How to Spot It:
Your sister Sarah's son Jimmy seems much happier than your best sales person.
What to Do About It:
If you need to be told, you shouldn't be managing people.

Why March is the Most Dangerous Month (and a checklist to fix it)

As an Irishman (a real one - I was born and lived there for 40 years), I know that March is supposed to be a lucky time - you know, Paddy's day, 4-leaf clovers, all that stuff.

The reality is that March is the most dangerous month for most organizations, divisions, departments and teams: What you do in the next 30 days will most likely determine your success for all of the rest of the year.

Look at this chart to see why:

You have three types of activity going on right now:

1. - The stuff that's taken off and is succeeding (green line)
   
2. - The stuff that's 'just ok' (orange line)
   
3. - The stuff that's going nowhere (red line)

By about now (end of Q1, the dotted blue vertical line), these three types of activity will have made themselves known to you - you should be able to distinguish between them - whether they are revenue targets, hiring goals, fund-raising activities, customer service initiatives, leadership development or installing a knowledge management system, you know at this point which activities have got traction, and which haven't.

The end of the first quarter is a key leverage point for your resources:
See that leveling off of the successful activities (the green line)? That's the result of you spending the rest of the year trying to improve or resuscitate the other (mediocre and/or dying) activities.

Here's what you need to do:

1. Maximize successful activities:

In a typical year, the next three months (or your quarter 2, if you're not working a calendar year) is spent in semi-denial, watching the data, cajoling everyone to try harder, and hoping things will come better in the second half.

As with individual performance appraisals, far too much time is spent analyzing and post-morteming failure, rather than dissecting and repeating success.

You need to ruthlessly analyze your currently successful activities and work out how to maximize them, by (a) making them even more successful, and (b) doing more of the same elsewhere.

2. Cut those activities with no traction:

Get out of denial and just stop those activities that are yielding no return. You have limited resources (you do have limited resources, don't you?), and you need to focus those resources on where you will get a return.

Yes, I know there are very good reasons for continuing to try to 'push through' with these near-dead initiatives (particularly if they were your idea in the first place, or are 'favored sons'), and you're probably rehearsing those reasons in your head right now. Your call...

3. Set clear short-term goals for 'blah' activities:

These are often the hardest activities / initiatives to call - those which haven't really taken off yet, but there is some return, albeit miserly.

With these activities you're probably getting what I call 'the velvet deferral' by now - a regular assurance from the key player(s) that 'all the signs are there' that they will break through shortly - whether it's a salesperson (or team) with few sales but a big list of 'nearly there's', or a project team hopelessly behind schedule but 'on the verge of a breakthrough'.

With these 'orange line' activities, you need to set very clear, non-negotiable short-term goals. The key thing is to stop the resource distraction earlier rather than later. Reframe the sales targets, or the project schedule (or whatever the original objective is) for the next 3 months, and make it clear that if they are not attained, you'll pull the plug and redirect their resources elsewhere.

Business Incubators Don't Need To Fail

Sramana Mitra has another interesting discussion on entrepreneurship going on in her often excellent blog - but it starts from an unsupportable precept. Sramana asks: "Why do business incubators fail"

I co-founded and ran a successful incubation company for many years. We started in west Belfast (Northern Ireland), and by all external measurements we were set up to fail - extremely high local unemployment, an unskilled workforce and next to no sources of capital, all in the context of what was in effect a war zone.

Five years later the program was an outstanding success, had won the European Union Job Challenge Award and we were replicating it throughout the UK and beyond.

I believe there were three main success factors:

1. The program was conceived and delivered by hardened entrepreneurs who were compensated for success;

2. The local government agencies pump-primed initial start-up costs then got out of the way, and

3. We made the first few cohorts exceptionally competitive to get into, carefully selected only high potential participants, and delivered early, headline-grabbing successes - this drove the program virally and produced a great pipeline of motivated applicants for future cohorts, as well as enthusiastic partners and sponsors who wanted to become associated with the program for their own PR purposes.

Short version: business incubators don't have to fail.

Emulation Isn't Innovation (Exhibit 947)

On a recent trip to California I (yet again) forgot to pack my iphone charger, so I was happy to find an Applestore in Mission Viejo...or so I thought.


Turns out this is a Microsoft store. The Apple-cloning was so embarrassingly cheesy that even most of the t-shirted genius-alikes looked uncomfortable.

When you're in the The Big Rut a real burst of innovation can sometimes reverse the downward slide, but mindless emulation won't.

Thankfully there was an actual Applestore 50 yards away. No-one looked embarrassed.

Yes, you can get a copy of Predictable Success today

After David Allen tweeted his 1,399,136 followers today (seriously - see the screenshot below) about Predictable Success, I received a raft of emails from new readers asking when my book "Predictable Success: Getting Your Organization Back On the Growth Track - and Keeping It There" will be available.



The answer is - right now.

Buy the ebook version of Predictable Success...and get the hardcover book free

The hard-cover print version of "Predictable Success: Getting Your Organization On the Growth Track - and Keeping It There" will be published on June 7, 2010 - but for a limited time you can get the eBook (pdf) version right now, and get the printed version delivered to your door on publication day - absolutely free!

Simply click the link below to buy the eBook version of "Predictable Success" for $19.95 - you will be able to download it immediately to your desktop and begin reading it 5 minutes from now.

Then, on June 7, 2010, your very own copy of the hard cover book version will arrive at your door absolutely free of charge - we'll even pay the shipping!

Toyota's wider problem: a broken axle.

Toyota's recent woes are symptomatic of a wider dysfunctional pattern that most every organization experiences - even yours. Here's how it works:



Every organization rests on a 3-legged stool:

1. Sales (including the marketing function);
2. Ops (production, r&d, delivery, warehousing - whatever is involved in getting your product and service out the door), and
3. Admin (accounting, treasury, HR, IT, legal and anything else not in 1 or 2 above).

Part of the success in any business is to manage the innate tension between these three functions - if there is no tension, the business enters The Big Rut, becomes stagnant and will die.

However in extreme circumstances the tension can become uncontrollable with one of the functions 'going rogue', pulling itself out of the orbit of the other two and creating a wholly unstable business. At Toyota, the sales and marketing function pulled away from the orbit of the operations and admin functions (specifically, product quality control) causing its latest disaster:



But the sales function isn't the only candidate for 'going rogue'. We've all seen businesses become so infatuated with its product or service that an obsession on continually enhancing the product quality, product spec, and/or constant product 'innovation' takes over any compulsion to actually 'ship' something to customers. This is sometimes called 'the inventor syndrome', but big companies can fall prone to it, too (Wikipedia 'Xerox PARC' for a classic example):



And as you'll know if you've ever had the joy of trying to interact with a utility company, there are many businesses in which the admin function has gone rogue, drowning everything it does in red tape and isolating the organization's ability to successfully got to market, let alone provide a quality product or service:



Where's your axle problem? Which leg of your stool is most likely to go rogue?

Have you the courage to burst your own myth?

We all perpetuate myths - about events in our past, about people we know, about ourselves. It's a natural human trait.

Leaders aren't exempt this trait. Think of leaders in the news over the last six months - Steve Jobs, Tiger Woods, President Obama, Toyota - to name but a few...and think of the myths perpetuated about them (and sometimes by them). Brilliance. Discipline. Focus. Execution. Quality.

Then think of what has happened to their status as leaders as a result of allowing - often, encouraging - those myths.

I'm not being judgmental here, and I'm not suggesting that myth-making is necessarily bad, or wrong. I am saying that mindless myth-making, or heedless myth-making, always has consequences, and those consequences are almost always bad.

What myths do you allow about yourself as a leader? Which do you encourage, or at least condone?

What would happen if you stopped? What would happen if you actively, gracefully dismantled that myth?

Now that's what I call a book delivery...

I buy a lot of books - maybe three or four deliveries a week arrive to my home office from Amazon.com. But even for me, it's unusual to have 300 books arrive at once, as happened last week. And it was especially exciting to discover they all had my name on them as the author.

Julie was back in the UK when the advance review copies of 'Predictable Success' arrived (visiting her favorite nieces of course), and I got so excited I had to go get my trusty Flip and record the event for posterity...



Since then I've calmed down (a little) and even managed to send out the copies promised to the winners of our 'Help us choose the cover' competition.

Next week we start sending out review copies to TV, radio, newspaper, magazine and blog book reviewers. If you would like a copy to review in your publication, web site or other media, just send us details and we'll get a copy out to you.

Boredom - The Leadership Killer

About half the executives I meet are in the wrong job - they either shouldn't be in a leadership position at all, or the position they're in is a mismatch for their talents and skills. (This is not always the executive's fault, exclusively - many have been herded into their mismatched position as a result of a 'battleground promotion', or have simply fulfilled the Peter Principle).

Of the other half - those executives who are truly competent, and in the right role for their skills - I'd say only about ten percent demonstrate true leadership on a sustained basis. Some show leadership occasionally when a crisis demands it, some show leadership in every circumstance other than a crisis, some start out leader-ly and watch it dissipate, while others simply never try.

Of those that remain (10% of the competent executives, say 5% of the total executive pool), the most frustrating executive to watch (and work with) is the individual who clearly has the capacity for leadership, but who blows it for a simple, common, infuriating reason - a low boredom threshold.

Over and over again, the same pattern repeats: a good leader emerges - sometimes even a great one, the leader develops a loyal and committed team, and exciting things start to happen. Then exciting things stop happening. It never becomes totally clear why, the team (and the leader) get frustrated, and one or more careers get put on standby. Additionally, major resources may have been burned off by the leader taking the organization down a series of cul-de-sacs that are expensive to get out of, and certainly much time and effort will have been wasted.

Truth is, the reason why those 'exciting things stop happening' and the organization gets derailed is incredibly prosaic: the leader's low boredom threshold torpedoes sustained forward momentum. Impatient for success, bored with the mundane and uninspired by routine, the leader becomes an arsonist, carrying a can of gasoline and throwing a lighted match at anything not burning brightly enough. Consistency of routine is traded for the pyrotechnics of newness, adherence to process is sacrificed to the thrill of a hail mary, and change is valued for its own sake, rather than as a tool for delivering results.

Here are a few indicators that you may be boredom-bombing your own leadership:

Monday mornings you play 'shake-em-up'. Your team members increasingly dread the monday morning meetings where you lay out the next new intuitive or call for 'radical new thinking' about existing initiatives.

You have unplanned meetings with whoever is available. That 'great idea' you just had can't wait for the next executive team meeting, so you grab whoever's walking past your office door to flesh it out.

Agendas are for sissies. Now that you do actually have everyone in an executive team meeting, it's too good an opportunity to fire-hose them with your thoughts on, well, whatever you want, rather than actually work through the agenda.

You're incredibly passionate about... ...well, what month is it? Each month there's a great new business model or strategic tool or business insight or vision or phrase or word that if only everyone will truly 'get it' will revolutionize how we do business.

You complain that your team members are universally poor at being accountable. It's highly unlikely that you're suffering the statistical misfortune of a 100% strike-out rate in having un-accountable employees. It's much more likely that they can't practice accountability because you keep moving the goalposts.

The New Rules For Managers in 2010

Although it will undoubtedly be better than 2009, this next year is still going to be tough for many organizations. It's going to be even tougher - perhaps even disastrously so - if your managers don't understand how deeply the last economic cycle has changed the rules of effective management.

In this half-hour webinar, I explain how the rules of effective management have changed and what it means for you and your managers.

(Note: This is a remote recording of a screencast given to a group of managers, so the recording quality is only average, and questions at the end have been edited out for confidentiality.)



Not seeing the video above this text? Click here to view 'The New Rules for Managers' from Les McKeown on Vimeo.