3
Misaligned Leadership and Unclear Direction

A great mentor of mine, Jeff Bowden, correctly foresaw an interesting niche in consulting: helping organizations translate new strategic directions into meaningful implementation plans. And not just plans, but the actual execution itself. Sometimes the single biggest problem in an organization is faulty leadership alignment. It could be that different leadership teams, on any level, are working at cross-purposes, or it could be that their goals conflict with each other. Sometimes conflicts are over turf and politics, sometimes they are personal, and sometimes each leader or team is doing what he or she thinks is best but without sufficient alignment and shared sense of direction.

Large organizations can be dysfunctional, or they can be crisply aligned and operationally excellent. In this chapter, let’s look at the issue from the point of view of alignment and direction. After all, rarely does leadership sit around in endless meetings trying to devise new ways to make things difficult; it can just seem that way at times to people further down the food chain. What follows is a glimpse into the challenge, taken from my years in consulting with senior teams on the implementation of strategy—not the creation of strategy but the actual work required to implement the strategy effectively.

DOES MANAGEMENT KNOW WHERE WE’RE GOING?

How many times have you heard about frontline employees, those with actual customer contact or direct responsibility for delivering a product or service, who are frustrated by their management or by other groups when it comes to delivering a high-quality product or superior service? It’s usually not for lack of great company vision statements promising to deliver “world-class service” and “superior value” to “delighted customers” that “exceeds expectations.” We have all bumped up against “Dilbert” mission statements that fall flat.

If you work for an organization that promises the moon and can’t get off the launching pad, how do you overcome internal challenges, obstacles, and other roadblocks if you actually do want to make a difference and get something done? To be fair, let’s keep in mind that your company probably truly does want to deliver worldclass service to delighted customers. It’s just that senior management likely has no idea how frustrating it is to actually do that.

So, What’s in the Way?

While there may be dozens of other candidates, in the following chapters we will discuss common practices that result in corporate roadblocks to achieving great results. For each of these internal roadblocks, a set of effective workarounds is offered. The discussion will include a handful of real-life examples, many of which involved several workarounds.

Perhaps the challenge to increased effectiveness can best be summed up with the old story about something that had to be done:

An important job had to be done, and everybody was sure that somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it, but nobody did it. Somebody got angry about that because it was everybody’s job. Everybody thought that anybody could do it, but nobody realized that everybody wouldn’t do it. It ended up that everybody blamed somebody when nobody did what anybody could have done.

A comment we hear in organizations just about every day intended to justify same-old-same-old thinking reprises the ageold theme of “that’s just the way we do things around here.” That posture leads sooner or later to “that’s not my job” thinking. From there, it’s a short slide into the inferno of “check your brain at the door—they don’t pay us to think around here.”

Given that state of affairs, what do you do if you actually care—if you actually think, if you truly want to get something meaningful done?

CREATING ALIGNMENT

Let’s take the example of Jack Bauer, from the television show “24.” He’s forever up against his own government’s bureaucracy, one that is seemingly more interested in following procedures than actually preventing the terrorists from blowing up the world. Now, I realize that “24” is a stretch. Not many of us are dealing with saving the world from thermonuclear holocaust, and seldom will torture and assassination be in our tool kits.

All the same, I’ll bet you can still recognize similar challenges in your own organization. You may see the way forward, and someone is quick to tell you that your idea just won’t work or that the rules prevent it. If you haven’t experienced this scenario where you work, perhaps you have friends who have been through this version of hell.

If you do recognize the challenge, then perhaps you need your own team of agents dedicated to rooting out the roadblocks, overcoming the obstacles, and getting things moving again. Maybe you will have to become an independent agent, your own Jack Bauer, working alone to get things done until the higher-ups start to notice.

Over the past three decades, I have worked with several major aerospace companies on how to improve their ability to attain the Holy Grail of government contract performance: meeting schedule, cost, and quality targets. As you might have noticed, the aerospace industry frequently bumps into situations that culminate in large cost overruns and late projects burdened with performance problems.

Here’s how one aerospace engineer put it:

If ever there were a textbook example of a dysfunctional organization where nothing gets done except under the table, it’s the company I work for. My blood-and-guts approach is to ignore management and do what I think is right, at whatever personal consequence. We seem to have two kinds of effective managers here. They are polar opposites to each other and do things totally differently, yet both are fairly successful. We have the “politically correct” maverick who looks after personalities, feelings, and political positions, while the “covert operator” flies underneath the radar screen, maneuvering whatever it takes to get the job done. Both get things done when their organization is heavily stacked against them, both are highly imaginative, and both have a habit of “coloring outside the lines.” Interestingly, neither style seems to make it to VP, precisely because they often do not agree with VPs that certain things are impossible.

Quite frankly, much of my company is managed by executives who will happily tell you something won’t work and will punish you if you prove them wrong. Seriously, people get punished for succeeding! Amazing, but true.

My oh my! Can you imagine what that culture must be like? Sounds as if someone needs to fine-tune the alignment in that organization. . .

Get Everybody on the Same Page

When I undertake a performance-improvement assignment for any size of organization, I like to begin with a meeting of the senior team. That team could be the executive committee of the entire corporation, or it could be the senior team charged with running a business unit, a manufacturing location, or a critical functional group. For our purposes, let’s imagine we are sitting down with the seven members of an executive committee.

We start out with a brief introduction, stating that our purpose is to help the organization accelerate measurable and meaningful performance against critical strategic imperatives. From there, it goes something like this: “Ladies and gentlemen, please take out a sheet of paper and write down what you consider to be the mission, vision, or purpose of this organization.”

I then collect those seven sheets of paper and read them back aloud. Fifteen years ago, it would have been highly unlikely that those seven statements bore much resemblance to one another. In today’s world, in contrast, most groups can echo something pretty similar. I suppose that accomplishment has something to do with a combination of consultants and marketing departments who produce slogans engraved on walls and printed on name badges. That’s a good thing.

The next request goes something like this: “Please take out another sheet of paper and write down what the top three strategic goals are for the coming 12 to 18 months.”

This is where it gets interesting. Typically, adding up the responses on these seven sheets of paper will reveal an average of 18 answers to the question about the top three strategic goals. Seven people, three goals, 18 answers. Swell, huh? From there, it’s a self-evident query to the assembled team: “If you have 18 answers to a question about the top three goals, is it any wonder you have so many disagreements about priorities, funding, resource allocation, head count, and so forth?”

The next telling question: “If you have that much differentiation sitting around this leadership team, what must it be like three layers down? How confident are you that if you could look over the shoulders of your key managers, you would see them working on what you consider the most critical tasks, projects, or goals?”

As you can imagine, this wake-up call tends to both get their attention and generate quite a bit of push-back. The Ops person says their focus is different from Sales, which is different from Finance, which is different from HR, and so on. “Of course we have different goals—we have different functions.”

They may be correct, but they are not aligned. Even though they all share the same “vision,” they each translate that vision according to the specific role or function that pertains.

Rather than examining corporate performance through the lenses of their respective functions or silos, what would it be like if they all could articulate the same three, four, or five critical goals that the organization needs to achieve in order to be successful? What if from there, each group, business unit, or functional area could articulate how its part of the business aligns to support those key organizational goals? What if each could articulate the goals, objectives, and key projects that its respective units need to achieve in order to stay on track, both as individual units and as a larger corporate entity?

Instead of dozens of priorities, they would have some five to seven truly critical priorities around which the organization could align. Granted, there are probably at least 20 to 30 other areas requiring attention, each having its own claim to being a priority. However, once you spend the time to clarify the critical few, you are likely to find that the critical few serve to drive the others.

I know this is what most organizations say they do, but it’s not what happens much of the time. If any of this saga sounds familiar to you, try not to take it personally. It’s a lot harder than it may seem to align a bunch of moving parts, especially when the metrics for each part tend to be more about the silo than the organization as a whole. In fact, most organizations struggle with how to find metrics that integrate corporate objectives with individual unit performance, much less cross-unit integration.

However, if we can get the senior leadership talking about this subject for even a few hours, we are likely to identify those critical few priorities that, if accomplished, will help drive the others at the same time. In fact, it’s kind of like driving a car: the car has hundreds of moving parts, each critical, but you can organize them with a few key priorities, probably no more than six or seven.

For example, could you manage if you had information only on speed, fuel, the electrical system, and fluids coupled with the ability to control acceleration, direction, and braking? Even though all kinds of other things are going on, with just a few critical components to focus on, you can organize and manage your way down the road.

Make sense? Written this way, it probably does. So, what’s the challenge, and how does it impact people up and down the organization?

If individual leaders lose sight of the larger purpose and vision, they will tend to become a bit myopic in their focus on unit performance. In extreme cases, unit performance can outstrip the larger goals of the organization. Oddly enough, the more myopic or narrowing of focus, the more the number of priorities is likely to grow.

CONFLICTING GOALS, PROCESSES, AND PRIORITIES

Could the frustration you feel in trying to get something done in your organization be traced to misaligned leadership? Are different groups marching toward different goals or to different performance drumbeats? Are you being measured on your ability to get something across the finish line, but you require the support, cooperation, or coordination of another group? If so, then you might have also encountered the situation in which the other person, department, or team recognizes the importance of your project, but it’s just not on that party’s performance radar screen; the boss of that area is measuring people based on something else altogether.

Working from the theory that happy career equals happy boss, it’s hard to fault the other folks for paying attention to what makes their bosses happy. So, what do you do when these kinds of conflicts show up? Let’s back up a couple of steps and revisit the notion of control, influence, and respond, which was introduced in the first chapter. Sometimes the biggest improvement opportunities start right at your own desk. On many occasions, I have seen apparently large organizational stumbling blocks virtually dissolve as a result of the exercise of asking three direct questions:

1. What needs improving around here and why?

2. What could you do that would make a difference that requires no one’s permission other than your own?

3. What could you do that would make a difference that requires permission, cooperation, or approval?

If you apply these three questions to the real work you have in front of you, you may be pleasantly surprised to note how many issues dissolve simply as a function of how you answer the second question. I’ll bet that you have a heck of a lot more power and control than you think you do. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that nothing will ever change in your arena, especially when you have seen well-intentioned people go down in flames when they tried to make some kind of meaningful difference. You needn’t abandon hope, because question number two still contains considerable hidden power: simply by posing the question to yourself, you may discover a number of actions that you can take on your own that will help. Once you take the appropriate actions that you can, you will most likely rise in the perception of others— “Now, there’s someone who is willing to act.” As a result, you may be in a position to wield greater influence than those who merely complain. Even if no one else gets on board, by taking the actions that you can, you will make a difference, and at least one person is guaranteed to notice—you!

WORKAROUND QUESTIONS

Workarounds can vary from the rudimentary and tactical to the complex and strategic. Even at the most basic levels, it’s important to keep in mind what your intention is in coming up with the workaround. Determining what the issue is and why it matters needs to come before charting what you can do and how you make it happen.

The following questions all build on the core focus areas of control and influence. If you have a specific issue that needs a workaround, you can apply this question string to that specific issue. You can also use the sequence to examine your job in general and perhaps discover areas that could be improved that have not previously shown up on your radar screen.

1. What around your workplace could be improved?

2. Why does it matter? (critical goals, improved performance, ability to produce results, etc.)

3. Who cares about this other than you?

4. What could you do to make a difference that requires no one’s permission other than your own? (personal organization, project management, time management, meeting management, decision making, information sharing, etc.)

5. What impact would taking that action have on the situation?

6. What impact would taking that action have on how you perform your job?

7. What impact would taking that action have on someone else (a coworker, your own team or department, other teams or departments, customers, etc.)

8. How would the other person(s) notice?

9. If you improve what you can on your own, what else could be improved if you had permission, approval, cooperation, or support?

10. Who would need to be on board?

11. Why would it matter to them? To their management? To the organization?

12. How would their own jobs or experience of their jobs improve if they took action?

13. How does having taken your own independent action help them take theirs?

14. How can you support them in the process?

15. How would taking this approach to improvement help you better respond to customer, supplier, or competitor situations?