The latest MBA: Management By App

One of things I’ve discovered since I started blogging and tweeting is how much I enjoy reading what other people have to say for themselves.  One of the sites I regularly visit is Inc. - it’s guaranteed to provide something of interest and I frequently tweet links to their articles.

For me, the best kind of article is not one that I necessarily agree with, but one that gets me all fired up, sending me off to jot down notes for a potential blog post of my own.  And that’s exactly what happened when I read 5 Brilliant People Management Tools.  The title itself was enough to make me curious, despite my growing weariness of posts with numbers in the title.  The opening sentence was also promising: ‘the formative years of any company have more to do with whom you hire and how you manage them than just about any other factor’. 

But then what happened?  There followed a list of the latest web tools designed to help you manage ‘essential HR and people management tasks’.  If how you manage people is so essential to the success of a new enterprise, somehow reducing it to a series of tasks that can be handled by the odd app or two doesn’t feel like you’ve really grasped how important it actually is. 

Now, I’m as much of a sucker for an elegant bit of software as the next person, and given that the author of this article writes about technical trends, his perspective is hardly surprising.  The problem I have has nothing to do with the use of web tools to manage certain processes – it’s about reducing people management to a series of processes in the first place. 

Process is important (it can for example help ensure compliance to employment legislation) but it is not the be all and end all.  As I’ve suggested before in one of my management clichés series, downgrading management to the administration of company process, policy and procedure can stifle a manager’s ability to motivate, inspire and engage people.  In the formative stages of any new enterprise, it is a manager’s leadership skills that will have the biggest impact on the performance of their people, not their ability to master the latest people management app.

Tim Schuler is a coach, facilitator and business partner. He specialises in bringing out the very best in managers, whether it’s their first management role or something they’ve been doing for a while. More information is available from www.tschuler.co.uk

No-one could ever call me perfect

It’s Monday morning and I’ve started the week as I mean to go on – being human! 

I sent out a routine email asking people coming to a meeting later this week to confirm their attendance.  Only after I had sent it did I realise that I had accidentally inserted one person’s name into the subject bar.  This gave the impression that they were for some reason being singled out.  I hope my quick apologetic follow-up email corrected any misunderstanding and injected a bit of humour into the start of the week, allowing everyone to get on with far more important matters.

This got me thinking about how the need to be perfect can be very disabling.  There have been times when I’ve worried over how to improve a piece of work to such an extent that I’ve invested far more hours than could possibly be justified.  I’d be embarrassed to confess how long I work on some of these blog entries before I’m satisfied enough to publish them - how I envy people who appear to be able to write effortless articles every day.

In my experience, Managers who need to be perfect are often hugely ineffective.  Their anxiety over making mistakes dominates everything.   Whether it’s about their own performance or that of their team members, their focus is primarily on what’s wrong at the expense of what’s right.  Not only is this extremely demotivating and leads to time being wasted trying in vain to eradicate all imperfections (or over-apologising if something slips through the net), the fear of even partial failure stifles creativity.

Being able to balance an eye for detail with an appreciation of what’s really important involves a sense of perspective.  Of course there are times when complete accuracy is vital; there are also times when it isn’t.  Most people are very forgiving of signs of humanity – in fact they quite like them.  For example, there’s something bland about a presentation that’s overly polished; far more engaging is one where the audience can see the presenter’s individuality and even their imperfections. 

So, at the risk of being accused of occasional carelessness, I will not be spending this or any other week putting excessive effort into trying to achieve perfection.  One of areas where I regularly come up against my own fallibility, is the challenge I face when writing these posts to craft a satisfactory (if less than perfect) ending.   Today, I will overcome this with two quotes from two very different sources:

‘I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection.

Excellence, I can reach for; perfection is God's business.’
Michael J Fox

 ‘Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without’

The Analects of Confucius

 

Tim Schuler is a coach, facilitator and business partner. He specialises in bringing out the very best in managers, whether it’s their first management role or something they’ve been doing for a while. More information is available from www.tschuler.co.uk



Unstoppable Leadership

I recently had a Twitter conversation that started like this:

JamesYatesUSD: What does being UNSTOPPABLE mean to you what does it allow you to do?

BetterMgr: Being unstoppable would allow me to do anything - is that a good thing? Definitely better than being unstartable though.

Being a persistent man, James went on to ask ‘what makes you unstoppable?’ and this sent my thoughts off into realms way beyond the possibilities of the odd tweet. 

In many ways I conform to the stereotype of the typical Brit, trained from an early age to be sceptical, with an inbuilt mechanism to keep excessive positive thinking in check.  The capacity to believe I could be unstoppable is just not part of my DNA, while voices in my head consistently warn me of the dangers of unbridled optimism.  So in order to explore what unstoppability might mean, and in particular what unstoppable leadership looks like, I need to put aside my natural tendency to regard such gung-ho concepts with suspicion, and temporarily silence my persistent inner naysayers.

Unstoppability seems to require three things: a compelling vision, the ability to take decisive action and the knack of remaining motivated in the face of set-backs.  Without a compelling vision, being unstoppable is not a particularly useful or desirable leadership quality.   A runaway train hurtles on regardless, causing havoc and crushing those that get in its way.  This kind of unstoppability in a leader often encourages people either to step back and wait for them to crash or run out of fuel (as they inevitably will) or to plan ways of derailing them.  A compelling shared vision on the other hand brings others on board and adds to the overall momentum.

The ability to weigh up available options and take decisive action is an important component of unstoppability.  While some people find that too many options, different perspectives or missing information leads to inertia, the unstoppable leader sifts through the contradictions and makes a decision anyway.  This is where a wise leader listens closely to their inner critical voices, or better still surrounds themselves with people who are not afraid of putting forward alternative views or pointing out the risks involved.  Being decisive is good, making informed decisions is better.  

The real test comes when obstacles start to present themselves.  The truly unstoppable leader remains motivated when things go wrong; they see challenges not problems, and find barriers energising not draining.  A certain amount of flexibility is essential, keeping the vision pure but recognising that there are various ways of achieving it. 

In answer to James’ original question therefore about what unstoppable means to me, I have to confess that it all depends what vocabulary my inner voices have chosen to use today.  On a bad day, it is synonymous with stubbornness, obstinacy, inflexibility and downright pig-headedness – qualities I have been taught to shun from an early age.   But then a little voice pipes up from somewhere to remind me that one person’s intransigence is another’s tenacity, determination and steadfastness, qualities that even the most dyed-in-the-wool Brit can embrace if not with passion (another alien concept) at least with a modicum of enthusiasm.

Tim Schuler is a coach, facilitator and business partner. He specialises in bringing out the very best in managers, whether it’s their first management role or something they’ve been doing for a while. More information is available from www.tschuler.co.uk

Management clichés: ‘People are our greatest asset’

This particular cliché is often used in the belief that it demonstrates to employees how much they are valued.  The truth behind its sentiment however is often debatable, and people are not usually taken in for long by nice words if they are not matched by appropriate action.

If we look at the definition of an asset, a completely different interpretation of this phrase emerges. In finance, an asset is any item of economic value owned by an individual or corporation, especially one that can be converted into cash.  It would seem therefore that not since the abolition of the slave trade could people literally be considered assets, owned by the organisation, used and then disposed of.  Speaking figuratively, it’s not exactly a positive message, although some staff may consider it an accurate description of the relationship they have with their employers.  

Even when professing that employees are their greatest asset, most managers can identify certain individuals they regard as complete liabilities. This suggests that the phrase does not in fact cover all people; it could also be argued that in most cases it probably doesn’t even mean specific people.  There are few instances where an individual possesses the precise combination of knowledge, skills and expertise that makes them so indispensable that they couldn’t be replaced by someone else.  The phrase might therefore be interpreted as meaning the organisation needs people, but not necessarily you; again, this is hardly likely to increase motivation and engagement.

Like with most clichés, the intended impact of saying people are a company’s most valuable asset has been lost through overuse, and familiarity with the phrase has led if not to contempt at least to indifference.  Managers would do well to think of other ways of saying, or preferably showing, that they value their employees.  Without this, the most capable may well look for somewhere where their talents will be more appreciated, while those that remain may take on another characteristic typical of an asset, namely that their value to the company depreciates over time.

Tim Schuler is a coach, facilitator and business partner. He specialises in bringing out the very best in managers, whether it’s their first management role or something they’ve been doing for a while. More information is available from www.tschuler.co.uk