2. HOW TO DRIVE COHERENCE AND QUALITY - post 1/2

Three key areas will be described in how to develop strategy and engagement.

1.     Getting the right people on the bus (to quote Jim Collins (Collins, 2001, Jim Collins - Articles - Good to Great)

2.     The leader’s role in strategy

3.     Leading by example

Through the execution of these elements of leadership your team will become more cohesive and have a sense of coherence with respect to the goals the organization is pursuing.  This cohesiveness and coherence are inspiring and result in an increase in energy level from the team.

2.1     Getting the Right People on the Bus

Let’s start with the complete quote from Jim Collins’ wonderful book that is a must read: Good to Great:

“Those who build great organizations make sure they have the right people on the bus and the right people in the key seats before they figure out where to drive the bus. They always think first about who and then about what. When facing chaos and uncertainty, and you cannot possibly predict what's coming around the corner, your best "strategy" is to have a busload of people who can adapt to and perform brilliantly no matter what comes next. Great vision without great people is irrelevant.”

The organizational values level analysis is critical, and one of the things to analyze and codify is the definition of behaviours that support the organizational values.  A useful way of analyzing behaviour is through the use of a golden mean type of approach where there is an optimum, an excess and a deficiency defined.  Excerpted in the table below is a part of our behavioural analysis:

Table 1: Golden Mean Behaviours Supporting Values

Part of the analysis not shown in the above table is mapping how many of the values are supported by each behaviour.  The more values supported, the more important the behaviour.  What should be immediately apparent in the above table is that there is a major red flag around complacency.  This is an uncanny valley of negative behaviour around which there are several peaks of desired golden mean behaviour beyond which lie other valleys of undesirable behaviour.

The main driver in achieving the coherence of personal – organizational alignment is to get the right people on the bus in the first place and this is accomplished through a rigorous and efficient screening process guided by the explicitly defined organizational behaviors and values. This is accomplished through behavioural interviewing, a valuable tool with a standard script of questions.  Potential and fit should be prioritized over past experience.  Someone that checks all the experience boxes but does not align at the values level will inevitably suffer with poor engagement, and likely stagnate within the organization, risking becoming cancerous and engaging in counterproductive behaviours.

Interviewers are trained to spot desirable and undesirable behaviours.  A great addition, especially for senior hires is a multi-part case study focused on leadership that tests for manifestations of the four dimensions:

Beliefs (Spiritual, note that this is not about religion, but rather about checking for alignment with values of the organization)
Disposition (Emotional)
Aptitude (Mental)
Level of Fortitude (Physical)

Behaviours can also reveal motivators and demotivators.  In our engineering services organization, a senior technical leader was being interviewed and was asked “How would you feel about mentoring and teaching younger engineers?” to which they responded “I suppose it is a burden I could bear.”.  Interview over, not instantly but in my mind it was; we went through the motions of the rest of the interview.  They were not going to be productive or satisfied in an organization that values learning together, relationships, apprenticeship and in fact, would potentially be very disruptive to the functioning of our team.  There is a high likelihood that  this person will not share their expertise and knowledge; at best grudgingly allowing younger people to ask questions, stunting the development of these enthusiastic youngsters.  When surrounded by other people in the organization that value and rely on sharing, no one will want to work with this individual.  They will become increasingly isolated, and likely resentful, leading to a downward spiral.  If, on the other hand, the organization was oriented towards hyper-individualism (some firms are collections of only experienced people poached from other organizations, there is no program in place for development of junior staff and assignments do not require support of younger people) this person could have made a perfectly good hire.  This is not a judgement on the worth of this individual as a human being (he was a nice guy); he simply will not be able to function well in our environment. 

In modern service organizations where change is constant, it is necessary to have an organization composed of continuous learners (Kotter, 2012, The 8-Step Process for Leading Change | Dr. John Kotter (kotterinc.com)); people who are motivated and energized by learning and sharing what they know.  People who “geek out” for fun.

The importance of demotivators and grievance can not be overstated.  Human beings will become highly demotivated when they feel aggrieved.  Not everyone gets aggrieved equally, nor by the same things.  You need to ask yourself “What are the commonplace occurrences in our organization that may make a candidate feel aggrieved?” and then craft behavioural questions to root out a tendency to excessive grievance.  It is desirable to weed out people who have an excessive tendency to behave in an aggrieved way in response to these occurrences for which you have no control.  In the service industry a thick skin is needed and the service provider is often going to be on the receiving end of unjust criticism and “unfair” situations, “unfair” schedules etc.  What is needed are people who do not dwell on this “injustice” and instead roll up their sleeves to get it done.  The desirable candidates will understand that they have agency, roll with the punches and that within the “injustice” are opportunities.  The highly aggrieved will tend to foment discord among colleagues which can be highly damaging and typically is done in a very passive-aggressive way that can go unnoticed.  This is cancerous and as with cancer once it sets in, will be difficult to remedy.  This should be a lens used in deciding who you want in your organization to ensure that they will be capable of being high functioning in your environment.  If they will feel put out when criticized by a client, they do not belong in the service industry and you are not doing them any favours by bringing them into your organization. 

STORY reserved for POMASYS customers.

It is especially important to ruthlessly eliminate narcissists from candidacy and from within the organization.  The narcissist will tend to fall into the above trap around grievance and be thoroughly cancerous.  Due to the broader social environment of addiction to social media and a “look at me” culture, pedestalizing vapid celebrities rather than accomplishment and competency, we are living in an era of rapidly rising narcissism.  Organizations that can keep narcissism out will have the competitive advantage of a higher functioning team.

Furthermore, when new members of an organization are onboarded, their behaviours should be keenly observed and considered when deciding whether they will stay past their probationary period.  Obviously, this is in addition to what types of results are being achieved but results alone are not enough.  In most organizations arrogant jerks are toxic to the people around them as will be shown later.  Onboarding is discussed in more detail later.

Lastly, regarding recruiting, it is more important to recruit for potential than past experience.  HR departments are typically going to filter candidates based on past experience directly related to the current job.  Some of our best performers came from other industries with seemingly irrelevant experience.  Really bright people recognize analogies from another market or industry and then even bring in new ideas on better ways of doing things. Even though we were focused on life sciences we had stellar recruits including future owners who came from other industries including automotive, petrochemical, and nuclear.  Typical HR practice of only looking at “relevant” experience would have excluded these stars. 

Some example questions we used to great effect are summarized in the table below:

Table 2: Example Interview Questions

TABLE reserved for POMASYS customers.

Interviewing is a very important skill and it is important that the interviewer not only be skilled in building rapport with the interviewee, but to also have a deep understanding of what the organization is looking for in the candidate not only for the position being applied to, but for other potential positions.  The interviewers, especially the hiring line managers need to understand the point of the questions being asked.

A big part of how we make sense of the world is through the telling of stories.  Tribal cultures transmitted wisdom through the telling of stories.  Holy books of most religions are full of story based morality tales.  People in the organization, especially those in any type of leadership role, need to be able to tell stories.  The questions above ought to evoke story telling from the interviewee.

One of my favourite technical stories is a tale of one of my failures as a young engineer:  I had designed two tanks to be connected via a common suction header and due to the nature of the ridged gaskets the header had to be re-engineered during construction; I should have anticipated the need to design around this detail.  The difficulty in re-engineering was mitigated as I had built a really good working relationship with the contractor’s foreman and he gave me a heads up about the problem giving me an opportunity to come up with a fix before things got really expensive.  Without that good working relationship, earned through the demonstration of the respect I had for the contractor’s highly skilled crew, they could have simply completed the installation saying it is done as per the drawings, and sat back with popcorn to watch the disaster unfold later on.  For me it is a memorable experience, and in the telling of this tale it can stick in others’ memories, learning the technical lesson from my mistake, AND the importance of relationship building.

2.1.1     The Triple Threat: Act – Sing – Dance

The idea of the triple threat that can act, sing and dance is useful for the young leader looking to progress their development, and for the senior leader looking to fill a pipeline of future leaders. 

What this means in practice is becoming skilled enough in three areas:

1. The actual work of the business: manufacturing, the service the organization provides,

2. Sales and marketing

3. Business administration

For the young leader, if you want to progress to full organizational leadership you will need to get experience in all three of these areas.  You will build a skill stack, and learn different languages.  Yes, the dancers and actors and singers speak different languages, and to be able to lead a whole organization you will need to learn them to be able to effectively communicate across these tribes.

For the senior leader, keep an eye out for young people that exhibit capabilities to become a triple threat and work with them to develop it.  Get people on the bus who are capable of becoming triple threats.  The triple threat that can excel at all three is a bit of a unicorn and highly prized, however, more common and still very effective is someone who is excellent at one and good enough at the other two.  This later case can still rise to becoming a very effective senior leader within the organization, perhaps leading a division.  Not everyone is a future CEO, and that’s a good thing.  We need capable leaders at all levels in the organization.