Archives for July 2018

Since you should align your culture, organization and operations around one of four strategies, it’s helpful to flesh out what the four different cultures mean. In the first of four articles, George Bradt digs into a culture of INDEPENDENCE – unleashing individual creativity and invention

A culture of independence is more open, diffused, caring, flexible, informal and casual. Expect people operating in a culture like this to care about learning and enjoyment, to be proactive and driven by their own interpretation of the intended purpose. These people will be hard to control – which is exactly what you want.

Build a culture like this to unleash creativity and invention – the first step in innovation. Innovation is the introduction of something new. You need to be innovative to stay ahead of the curve whether your primary strategy is design, production, delivery or service.

All cultures are blends of many different elements. Some people will work interdependently. Some will have a bias to flexibility over stability and some things must be stable and reliable. But the over-riding, most important dimension is independence because the sparks of invention are inherently individual. Inventing requires freeing individuals.

Not only is each person in a culture of independence going to behave individualistically, but there is no overall formula for the ideal independent culture. Organizations may vary their cultural preferences on scales like work-focused versus more work-life balance or formal versus informal communication or how they learn.

Purpose

The one thing that probably should not vary is attention to purpose. CEO Tim Cook and all at Apple are clear they are “trying to change the world for the better.” They care about products and people, about inventing products that help people do things they could not have done before, about infusing products with a humanity that others have never done. Their purpose is their ultimate guiding principles.

Apple’s Cook sees himself as their chief enablement officer. His job is to lead the efforts to provide freeing support to Apple’s inventors. As he says over and over again, his job is “to block the noise from the people who are really doing the work” – the designers and inventors.

(This post is taken from an article which first appeared in Forbes.   NEXT:  George examines a culture of Stabillity)

Given enough time and money, your competitors can duplicate almost everything you’ve got working for you. They can hire away some of your best people. They can reverse engineer your processes. The only thing they can’t duplicate is your culture.

Brave Cultures Are Sustainable

All music is made from the same 12 notes. All culture is made from the same five components: Behaviors, Relationships, Attitudes, Values and Environment. It’s the way those notes or components are put together that makes things sing. (Follow this link for more on BRAVE cultures and some ways to put this into practice across interviewing, due diligence, and engaging with the culture.)

In sustainable, championship cultures, behaviors (the way we do things here) are inextricably linked to relationships, informed by attitudes, built on a rock-solid base of values, and completely appropriate for the environment in which the organization chooses to operate. As Simon Sinek famously pointed out, most organizations think what – how – why.

Great leaders and great organizations start with why (environment and values), then look at how (attitudes and relationships) before getting to what (behaviors).

• Behaviors: What impact? Implementation.
• Relationships: How to connect? Communication.
• Attitude: How to win? Choices.
• Values: What matters and why? Purpose.
• Environment: Where to play? Context.

It’s the context that makes it so hard to duplicate a championship culture. Because every organization’s environment is different, matching someone else’s behaviors, relationships, attitudes, and values will not produce the same culture.

Attitude Is the Pivot Point

As you work to evolve your culture, focus on attitudes. There’s a strong case to be made that IBM’s near-death experience was a result of a bad attitude. It thought it was the best. It thought its customers needed it more than it needed its customers. It stopped being flexible. The big thing Lou Gerstner did was reversing that attitude. Behaviors and relationships followed.

Of course, I am oversimplifying things. Few things are as simple as we hope they are.

Of course, you have to be in touch with your environment.

Of course, you have to make sure your values are current.

Of course, people and communication matter.

Of course, it’s all theoretical gibberish until someone actually does something

Attitude is not the only lever. But it’s generally the lever to pull first, using that choice or change to influence the others.

(Editor: Starting Thursday we begin a four-part series by George on culture as a competitive advantage).

 

Feeling like you are one of many, no way to see a path to a more strategic role from where you find yourself. You know you are not completely fulfilled in your career. You pick a direction, any direction to find an alternative to the track you are on.

This leads you to begin interviewing, within your company or outside. You ask, why am I not getting that interview? Or after getting the interview, why did I not get the position? Even if you are working in the same company and in the same position, are you asking why you are not progressing in your career?

Is this you?  And, if so, do you see what is happening?

If you are doing the same thing all the time, no matter how well you do it, no one will see you differently. If you want something new in your career, you must do something different.

You can put it this way: “You can’t get there, the same way you got here”.  Or the way Einstein said it: “Doing the same thing and expecting different results is the definition of insanity”.  No matter how you say it, something has to change if you want different results.

Let’s say you dream of being in a more strategic role. To date, you have been very operational. Are you seeking positions where you can prove you have what it takes to do the job?

Do you apply for a strategic role? Do you ask to be part of that new project at work?  Or are you thinking right now, how can I do that when I don’t have the skills and/or experience (are you crazy)?

 

Why Are You Looking?

Let’s start by looking at why you want a more strategic role.

Do you recall being asked to get involved in a project or you had an opportunity to be part of a strategic conversation? It lit you up like fireworks on the 4th of July. You were so energized, you thought, this is what I really want to be doing.

You got a taste of something different, some exposure to another possibility to earn your living. Something woke up inside you to make you start asking yourself, what is possible for me? Is there more than what I am doing?

Understanding what I call the characteristics or attributes of a position which truly excites you is more important than your skills and experience. Don’t get me wrong; no one is going to hire a business person to be a medical doctor, just because that is what they truly want.

But it also doesn’t mean that an accountant can’t become a professional leadership coach.   Oh, that’s what I did. In fact, I changed my career six times after leaving college. (No, I won’t tell you what span of time that entailed.)

 

Explore Yourself

Back to the point, what you really want to do will take reflection and self-exploration. As a coach, I ask many questions and will take the time to truly understand where you want to take your career.

Some people know in general what they want, yet still need to understand what is driving that decision. Others know what they don’t want, and they need to understand what it is they do want in their careers.

When you are clear on your purpose you begin to see a path. The path will show you how the experience you have can be transitioned into a new career.

The skills you have may be very useful in the new career and applied in different ways. You may have skills you are unaware you acquired while gaining experience doing whatever it is you have done in the past. You start seeing how you can get out of the forest!

Now armed with a true understanding, you are ready to present yourself for the position you truly want. You will have the passions that others don’t have to differentiate you as a viable candidate. You will ask more questions about how the position fits the person you want to be and that will result in a level of confidence about achieving your ideal position.

Fulfill your potential by investing in yourself to discover what you truly want in your career and your life.

I would be honored to support you on your path to fulfill your potential. Remember when you rise, you raise those around you to be a better version of themselves.

 

Laura Di Tomasso is an executive coach based in Austin, Texas. You can contact her and learn more about coaching opportunities.

If you are the smartest person in the room, you are definitely in the wrong room.” – Michael Dell

Ambitious interviewers are anxious to get a crystal-clear picture of candidates including their personalities and primary social motives.  It is also wise to dive deeper and take a close look at the candidate’s background:

• The professional background of the candidate: who are the people on his or her team and who make up the extended professional network?
• The personal background of the candidate

The candidate’s professional background

One of the best ways to separate the average candidate from the excellent, where talent is concerned, is to zoom in on the people with whom they surround themselves. Truly outstanding leaders and managers never forget that they depend on the people around them for achieving remarkable and impressive company targets.

They also realize that by surrounding themselves with the best and the brightest this will have a positive impact on their personal learning curve. For these reasons, they tend to hire the very best people they can find.

Within our firm, De Vroedt & Thierry Leadership Consulting (Cornerstone Amsterdam), we intentionally look beyond the individual when we are selecting talent, and we pay close attention to the people they hired in their present job.

Are their immediate subordinates and colleagues able to equal or even surpass the candidate in skills and achievement? What kind of people are they in contact with professionally? After 20-plus years in executive recruitment I find this all highly relevant information. As mentioned, you can tell a good candidate from the grade of people they select!

Someone who dedicated a large chunk of his working life to talent management and who conducted remarkable interviews was David Ogilvy, the 20^th century advertising master. His assertion that true talent loves to gather excellent achievers around them, to fill in the gaps in their own expertise and areas of improvement – regardless of how talented they are — really inspires me. Here is how he put it:

First, make yourself a reputation for being a creative genius. Second, surround yourself with partners who are better than you are. Third, leave them to go get on with it.”

To Ogilvy, the ideal corporate structure resembles the Russian Matryohka doll, an ever-growing collection of greater people. If you are bold enough to hire those who are greater or better than you, you will end up with an organisation of giants.

Some people may react cynically to this principle, saying that there are plenty of CEOs and top managers who may be talented and yet are bent on selecting weaker individuals to work for them so they can rule without being opposed.

With very few exceptions, such managers are what I call Sun Kings: they surround themselves with people who appear to be good at their jobs but who turn out to be nothing more than submissive followers and dutiful implementers. Potential hires like this are to be avoided at all costs, regardless of where they might have worked previously, or how talented they are in other respects.

If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.” – David Ogilvy

The relevance of screening the candidate’s personal background

Keeping one’s business and personal lives separate may seem ideal, but it is fast becoming impossible to do in a world where the different spheres of people’s lives are converging more often. For that reason, it is useful to examine candidates’ personal lives for the wealth of information home life can reveal about how they might go about their job.

You cannot, of course, investigate the personal life of a candidate without prior permission. You can, however, be explicit in asking personal questions during an interview, or subtly involving someone’s spouse or partner in the selection process. Just be sure that you are on the right side of your country’s pertinent legislation and regulations.

A candidate should not feel pressured into answering such questions: you must remain meticulous and transparent in your selection process, avoiding questions which are obviously disrespectful, rude or transgress into an area of protected privacy.

I noticed that the dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish and what the best person could achieve was 50 or 100 to 1. Given that, you’re well advised to go after the cream of the cream.” – Steve Jobs

Conclusion

If you are determined to find the best and the brightest I advise you to look at candidates from various angles. You should keep their entire background in mind.

Who have they surrounded themselves with, both professionally and personally? Do they surround themselves with people who fight for what they believe is the right course of action, or are they simply yes-men who follow orders and implement what is being told?

Worthwhile candidates know that a company atmosphere encouraging employees to speak up is an invigorating place to work. And in a tight labour market that will be comprised 50 % of the millennial generation, it will also be a way to become an employer of choice!