Dual C Business Solutions

Consulting Success Equation

Below is the equation that I have on my office wall to ensure the proper mindset for being a consultant.  I've got 2 chapters completed of a book outlining the equation and the application of it to consultants wishing to take their practice to the next level.  Stay tuned for more information. 

Passion + Relationships + Value= Satisfaction + Profit

[Actions]

Passion: Intense, subject matter enthusiasm.  I am passionate about Organizational Development and Technology.  Are you passionate about your career choice?  If not, make a choice to change.

Relationships: See “But enough about me” outlining the value of relationships in consulting.  Relationships are built on trust and nurtured through authentic communication.

Value:  Confidence is required that you can bring the value of your passion to your clients.  I believe it was Dr. Alan Weiss who wrote, “The first sale is to yourself”, which reflects the need for supreme, self-confidence regarding implementing your subject matter to improve your clients.  If you are passionate about playing golf on the moon, it is unlikely that will translate into a specific value to a client.  

[Results]

Satisfaction: This is the feeling in knowing that the client has realized the value of your consulting.  People talk about job satisfaction and life satisfaction.  Since a consultant’s life is intertwined with his or her passion, separating these measures of satisfaction is useless.  “If you enjoy your job, you never have to go to a day of work.” – Someone wiser than I

Profit: One of the benefits of pursuing my passion is that the quality of my work will be significantly higher than any other career choice.  A higher quality of work means increased client satisfaction and thus more profit.

Warning!

Fully adopting the attitude and approach above will result in having much more fun!

Top 5 Client Resistance Justifications

Below are the Top 5 client justifications for resistance to positive change along with responses.

1.    Client: "We don't want to stir the pot."

a.    “Are you more concerned that you will stir up something unpleasant or that you will have to eventually replace the pot?”

b.    “The only result of stirring in cooking is a better tasting soup.”

c.    “Put away the spoon and start cooking with a hammer.”

2.    Client: "We've always done it this way."

a.    “That would only be effective approach if all of your competitors felt the same way but I’m positive they don’t.”

3.    Client: "That would harm an internal relationship."

a.    “How much harm will be created by allowing dysfunction to fester?”

4.    Client: "This message should be softer.”

a.    “When has a soft message resulted in meaningful change?”

b.    “The only thing that can result if professional candor is not encouraged is mediocrity through sycophantic, decibel-driven decision making.”

5.    Client: “Leadership would never approve this approach.”

a.    “Why?  I’d love to illustrate the value to them.”

b.    “If the concern is how you’ll look if this idea is rejected, then you are not the correct person driving this change through.”

Be prepared, objective, candid and professional. 

Your attitude will set the state for your partners to act in the same manner.

The best advice I can give in overcoming resistance is to confront without being confrontational.

Organic Leadership

Veni, Vidi, Vici.  “I came, I saw, I conquered”, Julius Caesar’s famous words distill organic leadership to its most basic form.

Witnessing organic leaders develop in a team when confronted with change or conflict is the sign of a high performing team.

Organic leadership is when an individual decides to own a specific change or challenge without through completion being directed to. 

The idea of organic leadership does not map directly to initiative.  Initiative is required for each state but is only a portion of the entire process.

The process to organic leadership is quite simple but each state transition is increasingly more difficult.

 

Recognition:  All change starts with recognition of the need for change.  Change could result from a problem.  Unfortunately most individuals stop at this step because of laziness, lack of vision, or the reaction was simply of building up a defense.  This step cannot be taught but may evolve through experience.   

Ownership:  By becoming the owner of the change, the individual creates an accountability and therefore additional work. Ownership implies specific rights, accountabilities and responsibilities.  Cultures where accountabilities are not enforced will also prevent some individuals from moving on.  Ownership must be publically communicated.  Self identifying owners will not create the necessary accountability.  This is why many “self-help” tapes encourage individuals to share their goals with others.  Individuals who are poor at following through will falter here. 

Engagement:  Ownership has been established.  Accountabilities have been created.  Engagement is following through on the established parameters of ownership.  It is the process of creating a solution to address the change or conflict that is looming.  Note this is the first time that a deep analysis is likely to occur in identifying the root cause.  The results of the Engagement step will be an action plan.

Influence:  The implementation of the action plan from the Engagement step requires peer level influence.  One of the rights created by the Ownership is an implied authority.  This is the execution step.  Intent without action is worthless.

Organic Leadership: A successful influence step has resulted in an Organic Leader.  Fortunately this honorific isn’t permanent.  However the process becomes easier the more often it is practiced.  Organic leadership is a process available for each conflict or change facing a team.  The result is an overall improvement in the team quality and effectiveness.

In the entire Organic Leadership process there isn’t a single place that says “Wait for Management to make a decision.”

The onus is entirely on the individual.

Veni, Vidi, Vici.

Merger Mania

At a high level; a merger is simply the management of redundancies, communicating objectives, ensuring collaboration and most of all ensuring the proper partnership across all levels of the new organization.

Just an average day at the office, right?  Simple in the same way that open heart surgery is simple.  To further extend that analogy would require more medical knowledge than I can muster.  In a final effort to resuscitate the correlation, both activities require implementing change while still performing at full speed.
Beep beep beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep…

Moving on.
A Business Capability (BC) is a function that performs some discrete activity that adds value.  Most organizations have a catalog of these capabilities mapped to the different business processes and systems to ensure an adequate portfolio vision.
Below graphic is an example of the Business Development business capability at a generic corporation.

 
It is safe to assume that both organizations have teams, business processes, and technology to accomplish this BC.  Would you acquire a company that didn’t do business development?

For each of the business capability redundancies, identify:
1.    Percentage of overlap
2.    Gaps analysis
3.    Cost of closing gaps
4.    Cost of changing business process
5.    Risk of coexistence

Leadership will then be able to make the appropriate decisions on how best to address each capability based on priority, risk, and cost.

Communication needs to remain at the top of the list for leadership in ensuring a smooth merger.  Magniloquence and verbosity fall short in value to an organization than message content.  Have no doubt that the rumor mill is working all three shifts.

In one meeting at the MN Entrepreneurial group, The Collaborative. One of the CEOs on the panel was discussing his first companywide meeting after acquiring a business.  His introduction was one of the most impactful that I’ve heard.

    “If there are two things you need to remember from this speech, they are:
        Number 1;  You have a job.  You’ll have a job tomorrow.

        Number 2;  You’ll have the same benefits package you do today.“

Years later one of the machine operators said that his message immediately and unquestionably squashed the scariest rumors about downsizing and benefits.
It is imperative to communicate early and often about the pending changes to either people, processes or systems.

This most difficult integration point is the people.  The significant difference in personalities, cultures and attitudes between the teams will lead to difficulty.
Let me say that again.  Integrating people is hard.  Even more so if they are former competitors.
An unfortunate tendency of the acquiring organization is to discount the value of the people of the acquired organization.
The perspective change from ‘Us versus Them’ to ‘Us versus the Market’ is a time consuming, investment intensive endeavor.  There will undoubtedly be some attrition as individuals are unable to adjust.  Non-trite team building is necessary at all levels to ensure the proper partnerships are developed.

Other considerations:
1.    People
    a.    Career Paths
    b.    Job Descriptions & Levels
2.    Technology
    a.    Data Center Location and need
    b.    Licensing
    c.    Vendor contracts
    d.    Support SLAs
    e.    Technology Portfolio
3.    Business Development
    a.    Market segments and penetration
    b.    Customer lists and cross selling
4.    Strategic
    a.    Flagship product lifecycle
    b.    Hybrid products and services
5.    R&D
    a.    Investment priorities
    b.    Intellectual property knowledge sharing


Oh, did I mention that the new organization still needs to generate revenue while completing the merger?

Good luck!

Taking the Cult out of Culture

 

 

All organizations, regardless of size, have an unwritten code of conduct that is often referred to as a “culture”.  Cultures differ from policies at the broadest level as they are not included explicitly in the employment contract. 

 

The bromide, “Drinking the Kool-aid™”, is often used to describe the embracing of a culture.  Does anyone find this sobering that this saying is also often associated with an unfortunately permanent, cult-like behavior?   The oft repeated story about a group of monkeys, a set of stairs, a water hose and a banana regarding social acceptable behavior is a perfect example.  Eventually, the original lesson was lost through attrition but the behavior or culture remained.  As I stated before the culture sets expectations regarding workplace behavior.  These behaviors are the result of learned responses based on copying current staff or leaders within the organization. Since these behaviors have been ingrained in the organization it becomes difficult to adopt any changes or improvements.

 

Unethical behavior breeds unethical behavior. 

Meeting intensive culture breeds meetings. 

Inclusion breed inclusionary activities and exclusionary prejudices. 

Self-sacrifice breeds volunteering. 

Humility breeds humble employees. 

Excellent customer service breeds revenue. 

100 hour weeks breeds more 100 hour weeks.

Work/Life Balance breeds higher morale.

Drinking at work breeds more drinking at work.

Coercion for results breeds further coercion.

 

And so on.

 

Outsiders and newcomers to any group will often see the varying degrees of cultural dysfunction.  Unfortunately these same individuals are hampered by the need to “fit-in”.  The second and third level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs ensure that any proposed changes would be tempered by this peer pressure.  Through constant exposure the employee will soon be quaffing the Kool-aid™.

 

Essentially a culture is the peer pressure to do or not do activities that are considered appropriate behavior.

 

There are 3 rules that can take the Cult out of your organization's Culture.

 

1. Employees should challenge inappropriate corporate cultural trends. 

2. Leaders should embrace, recognize and promote positive trends.

3. Leaders should recognize and quash any negative trends.

Your Staff is not Normally Distributed!

Peer reviews, 360 feedback, mid-years, S.M.A.R.T. goals.  A host of techniques exist that are used and sometimes abused to better rate employees.  The challenge will always exist in translating subjective metrics to objective measurements.

For example, how can attributes like "team-player", “organizational agility” be translated into a scale that allows for valid comparisons across a team, division, and organization?    One approach is to provide a weighting for the different attributes. 
Below is an example weighting performance scale for an entry level technical resource.
 

Performance Attribute	Weight
Team Player	25%
Communication	10%
Technical Aptitude	50%
Organizational Agility	15%

     

Therefore resulting will be the Expected Performance   would be:
 
         

The next question to those still paying attention is how Performance Value,  is calculated.
Many organizations collect these values from peers, managers and direct reports.  Some companies weight the Performance Values based on the source.   The weighting system becomes further obfuscated to:

 

 

The dangers of Role weight is the topic of another article since the organization’s culture significantly affects this type of weighting.

Having fun yet? I could go on with adding employee level as well.
How does this compare to other divisions?  Certainly the weighting would be different.  The undoubtedly  extroverted sales division would weight Communication and Extemporaneous speaking significantly higher than the technical division.

Assumptions:
    There is a max performance and merit raise dollar value (B) for an entire organization.  To extend the assumption, this would be split in some way between the divisions and finally the teams.  For the sake of this argument, let’s assume an even distribution of these dollars.  Therefore:



 
Resulting in the following:
B(team) = Total dollars available for a particular team.
P^  = Expected employee performance on the team.

Final Step:

Intuitively the final step is mapping the division of B(team) to each employee.  This is one of the most difficult activities when defining the bonus & merit distribution.  Some organizations have yet another nifty equation to use.  Stick in the P, get out a bonus.  Others, leave the consideration to the manager and finally the scariest organizations are the ones who enforce a specific distribution for employee performance.  I know of a large tech company requires all the teams to have a near Normal Distribution for the bonus and merit increases.

Problems with forcing Normal Distribution in performance management:
1.    Effectively mitigates the ability for outliers, extreme high performers and awful employees, to stand out.   These outliers require significant focus from investment(high potential) or relationship severing(low).

2.    Fails the variable independence test.

Since both Team Size and B(team) is finite and known.  Employees are directly competing for the same B(team).  Employees will act in self interest in maximizing their portion of B(team).  Self interest will result in each team member attempting to game the system by lowering the Performance(attribute) value for team mates while working to maximize their own. 
Therefore, the lack of independence inputs results in a distribution unlikely to coincide with a normalized distribution.


Leadership Challenge:
I encourage leaders to challenge any math distribution specific performance management system.

How does your organization approach merit and bonus structures?

Positive Contagious Leadership

What can Marketing teach us about Leadership?
Please put down the torch and pitchfork for a moment.

Foundation for comparison:
Marketing value is derived from creating exposure both prior to customer acquisition and post product delivery in creating a positive contagious experience.  A positive contagious customer experience is the foundation of word-of-mouth or viral exposure.  Trusted source recommendations carry the greatest weight in exposing products and services.  

So, how can this knowledge be leveraged when leading an organization?
Any leadership role, authoritative or otherwise, requires a significant, if unconscious, investment in marketing.  You are under constant scrutiny for cues on the proper responses to professional conflict and other external stimulus.  It is imperative remain positive in face of the reasonable professional conflict.  Not all conflict can be reasonable and leaders need to focus on conflict that provides business value.  
There is a significant difference between having a Positive Contagious Attitude and being a Pollyanna.  Endurance combined with a positive attitude outweighs blind optimism.  To expect to prevent negative events from occurring based on our attitude is ludicrous.  

A leader’s attitudes will set the tone for employees.

Back to marketing.  Each interaction is basically a selling opportunity.  If the majority of these interactions are positive, the expectation that the future will continue to be positive.   

Will your EBITDA be improved?  Probably not.  
Will it stop the SEC from investigating your odd footnotes involving misc. remuneration?  Unlikely.
Will your staff be more motivated, approachable and encouraged?  Yes.  
Will your staff be more willing to be more adaptable to change? Definitely.

Bottom line - Positive attitudes are contagious.  Infect someone today.

Attrition Echo

There is a resource void coming at the (manager - 1) levels of many organizations.  It is best described in a story about Bob.

Bob is a successful line manager with 10-15 years experience.  Unfortunately he was downsized like nearly 2.6 million people in 2008 according to a CNN.com posting.  The effects of supply and demand remain accurate regardless of the circumstances.  Therefore with the increased people pool, I hate the word resources, and dwindling positions this led to a high demand.  Economics 101.

 The result has played out in the following template fashion many times over.

1.    Bob gets laid off. 

2.    Bob applies for everything available at his level and one step below. 

3.    He competes with other applicants at the lower level position of a senior contributor.

4.    Bob is hired at Fake Inc. because he is competing with less qualified individuals.

5.    Bob accepts a lower compensations package and lesser position because he is a firm believer in eating meals and having a roof over his head. 

6.    The economy recovers within Fake Inc.'s industry.

We join our story in progress between steps 5 and 6.  Bob, like most professionals, are keenly aware of the ebb and flow of opportunities in his area of expertise.  He considers his current position temporary.  This attitude is an unfortunate reality for those hired during the recession.

Bob identifies and accepts a great opportunity where he is offered a position as a line manager.  His new compensation package is more in line with expectations and Bob lives happily ever after.

 Bob's resignation of Fake Inc. is what I call the Attrition Echo where highly qualified individuals begin to resign from temporary positions.

The Echo will occur when the economy is rising again and companies are able to focus more money on investment and growth opportunities.  This resource void will prevent companies from optimally executing on these investments. 

How could Fake Inc. address the Attrition Echo and ensure they can keep Bob?

Fake Inc. needs to address Bob's "temporary position" attitude through various people management methods. This could be through a review of Bob's career path goals and compensation plan.  Fake Inc.'s HR rep should work with him to ensure he is satisfied with the opportunities that are reasonably available to him while still acknowledging his previous accomplishments.

What are your thoughts?  How would you handle this?

Are you prepared for the echo?