I've been looking to understand more about the leadership behaviors needed to drive culture change. One of the more interesting things I've been reading about is that of Disney's leadership. More specifically, if you look up the podcast "Creating Disney Magic" by Lee Cockerell (found here: https://www.leecockerell.com/podcast/) you will be able to listen to the former Executive VP of Operations for Walt Disney World Resort talk about how they went about a leadership and culture transformation. It led me down a path to discover the following document called "Great Leader Strategies" that helped leaders better develop themselves, and for the organization to transform their leadership methods (found here: http://www.cforc.org/images/uploads/tools-and-methods/Great_Leader_Strategies_-_July_2006.pdf). This post is going to be the first part of my reflections on these strategies, how I understand them, and how I am trying to incorporate these into my own leadership. I encourage you to read that document linked above and listen to Lee's podcast.
The first part of the strategies focuses on what I consider to be the foundations of a leadership mindset. In Lean Leadership, we often talk about "Respect Every Individual" and having the mindset around how we do that. At Disney they remind leaders to "Treat Everyone as an Individual." An interesting parallel is that this exact sentence is used in Training Within Industry, which highly influenced Toyota's training methods and leadership styles. The document discusses the first two fundamentals: Foster an Inclusive Environment and Structure your Organization for Success.
Foster an Inclusive Environment
What does it mean to foster an inclusive environment? Who do we include? Why is inclusion so important? As a team, if we are not being inclusive we will have people who are or at least feel excluded. Think back to a time when you felt excluded. For me, I can think of many times where I felt that way. How we feel matters greatly. How we feel as an individual will absolutely affect the things we do and that includes the effort we put in on our work. As a leader, we must recognize that when people feel excluded we are doing them a disservice as the leader, and we are allowing them to do a disservice to our Customers. The first thing to do then is to make sure everyone matters and feel that they matter. I've had a few experiences with this in my short time in my own leadership position. There are many instances where people around the community will tell me that they feel like they are being left out of the conversations and the direction as a company we are headed. They have ideas and want to feel valued, yet as a leader I have not recognized that I haven't quite made as inclusive as an environment as I could have.
Here's what I have tried up to this point without knowing about this particular leadership strategy. Every Friday I hold a huddle with my team. We call this our "Reflection Huddle" where we can share our successes for the week, the things we can each do better, and share some lessons learned with each other. This alone has created some inclusion - but it also has been a way for people to feel excluded as well. Imagine if you are an individual within the team listening to all the positives coming from everyone else, yet you are struggling to find many positives for your week. You may feel that you have been excluded from the things the team is working on. As a leader, although I may think this huddle is being inclusive, this huddle alone is not everything. There are layers to inclusion and making sure that everyone feels that they matter. Luckily for me I've got team members that are able to speak to me about these issues. More than once team members have come to talk to me individually about their own work. This has got me to think about what I am doing to ensure that each person, each individual is treated as such. So my next steps as a leader is to ensure that I have at least some time with each person each month. I will be setting up one on one time with every person in the team to give them a voice and ensure they feel as involved and included as possible.
The next few methods build upon this. We must be able to build the self confidence and self esteem of people and develop them. As a leader the development of people is our main responsibility. This concept I think is often hard to grasp. I have seen myself and others think that "Getting the work done" is our main responsibility. In fact, that responsibility lies with the people doing the work! Our jobs are to ensure that they have all that they need to own and accomplish that work at a high level. I've seen examples where leaders get in the way of the people doing the work, which we often call "command and control." In the past couple weeks I have seen this first hand. Within our problem solving framework we have many different roles. Three major roles include the "Champion" or sponsor, a project lead, and a technical expert. A question was brought up "who owns the problem/project?" Without a clear definition of our roles we won't really know who owns it and we end up getting in each other's way. The answer was not as clear as I had hoped - there were opinions for each of those roles to be the owner. As the project lead, I am responsible for gathering the team together and working through the problem. I check in with the technical expert for help on my methods. As the technical expert the responsibility then is to develop the lead in the technical aspects of solving the problem. Back to the project lead, I also will go to the Champion to help explain where we are in solving the problem. The Champion is responsible and accountable to the higher level problems, but in this moment is developing the lead to work together with people to solve that problem. The Champion gives ownership to the lead, but the Champion must still be involved. You can see how this can get confusing for everyone involved. I'll talk more about this when I get to the structure part.
We must give people the opportunity to develop. This takes more time than just giving orders. I could give an order and have someone just do what I want them to do, but then that is skirting my entire responsibility as a leader to develop people. I've taken a strategy that one of my previous managers used with me. The best way I can describe it is "bring me a rock." The concept goes something like this. As the leader, in order to give an opportunity to someone to develop, I must have them seek out the rock. The rock can be anything that is important to the organization. In this case we are needing to develop some leadership development program to help create lean culture. I have my own ideas of what that could look like, but instead of just telling someone what I want, I gave one of the team members the task to find the rock. "Here's the issue. We are seeing a lot of culture problems. You are new to a lot of the ideas we have in our team, so I want you to learn as much as you can and come up with something we can do to help our leaders develop culture." That is so vague it is frustrating. And it was. This required the individual to figure things out on their own, and for me as a leader to get personally involved with their development. In this "bring me a rock" strategy, I learned from my old manager that it didn't quite matter what rock was brought at first, it was more important that the person goes to find one. As the leader I asked this team member to meet back up with me often at the beginning and talk about their issues, struggles, and ideas about what they were trying to do. The frustration at this stage is real. In typical organizations you are given a cut and dry clear task and all you have to do is execute that task. In development, you are given a much deeper challenge, and at first it will seem as though you are just floundering, but in reality, you are going through the process of discovery. I will keep referring to this story as I go through the next couple parts.
So the individual is frustrated, but as a leader I am making sure I am personally involved by meeting often to discuss things. What next? Well in the Great Leader Strategies we must be able to build community, communicate clearly, understand the motivations of people, hear all voices, and be brave. Building community is harder than it sounds. However, it is quite important to the success of our teams. In order to foster the inclusive environment, we have got to build the community of people. In my case, as I was meeting with my team member who is trying to figure out their vague task, there are opportunities to reach out to others and gain new perspectives. One thing that we have been saying to each other is "Operational Excellence must be experienced." We have many things written on the topic, but in order to really get it, you have to experience. So I linked the team member up with people who are out there doing it, and let them talk about and experience how they are developing leaders and culture. This took a few weeks, but each time I met with the team member, the idea formed more and more, the rock started off rugged, and soon we could start seeing the gemstone within. What is interesting about this is that as a leader I had to be able to communicate clearly, and I had to learn how to do this. At first I didn't talk about my strategy of "bring me a rock." After I had a clear discussion of this, the team member had much more clarity of their task. I was not abandoning them. I was able to better understand motivations of this particular team member as well, and encouraged them to hear all voices. We had to be brave in this as well. In order to experience things, we must actually go to the place where it is happening. As an organization we might see this as taboo - to allow people to go places that aren't within their own sphere of work.
Through all of these things, and you can see how many things there are, we build up the abilities of our people. Our people are our brand. Without truly understanding that our role as a leader is developing others, we will constantly be frustrated as an organization and our Customers will be as well. We have got to take the time to communicate properly with each other, to develop clarity among all people, and to ensure that we have created an inclusive environment where all individuals are treated with respect. As it is stated in the document "there are no downsides to inclusion."
This particular section reminded me a lot of the Job Relations portion of Training within Industry. Just as a reference, we can see similar concepts between fostering an inclusive environment and how Job Relations talked about the fundamentals of supervision. "A supervisor gets results through people. Let each work know how he/she is getting along. Figure out what you can expect from him/her. Point out ways to improve." The only way to do those things is to focus on the development of people and being personally involved. "Give credit where credit is due. Look for extra or unusual performance. Tell him/her while it's hot." Doing this makes people feel special, a key component of fostering an inclusive environment. "Tell people in advance about changes that will affect them. Tell them why it is possible. Get them to accept the change." This goes to being clear in communication. Take the time to do communication right - it is very important to communicate clearly and often. "Make the best use of everyone's ability. Treat everyone as an individual." We must really get to know our people on some foundational level. What are their individual motivations? What is their story? Know your people well and treat them each as a separate person - don't fall into the trap of generalizing or saying someone is like someone else - you risk treating them as they don't wish to be treated and this can exclude them.
Design Your Structure for Success
The second great strategy is to design your structure for success. I have noticed this happen often as well. When you have a poorly designed structure, people will become frustrated. We as leaders have to be willing to change the structure if necessary. If the current structure is no longer providing value it once had, we have got to change it. We shouldn't worry too much about how it has always been done, and focus more on how we want it to be done to provide value now.
Let me go back to the previous example of the project team structures. Previously I was talking about having clarity of roles and focusing on developing people. In this case there is more going on with the structure. When the structure is either not clear or not providing the value we thought it would, we create frustration. Recently this has been brought to my attention. I've had many people complain about how long projects seem to take to get through the process. What I am finding is that the roles in this structure are defined in such a way that there is a bottleneck to getting problems solved. In this case, the technical expert within the structure must "approve" the project from advancing from one step to the next. When you have a lot of project teams working on solving problems, you can see how a technical expert can be overwhelmed by having to "approve" projects. Instead of saying "well it has to be this way" what if we changed the structure to get out of our way. In the Great Leader Strategies document, it says to scrutinize the number of layers you have to get information through. The more layers, the more inaccurate communication becomes. It also states that if someone is feeling overwhelmed, we must look at the structure and see if that is the problem.
In this case, I am becoming more and more convinced that we have a structure problem. If our intention is to solve problems and develop people, the clarity of roles and the structure is very important. Instead of acting as an "approver" the technical expert should act more as a coach, focused on the development of the project lead. The Champion will then be more of a "barrier remover" and one to help create opportunities for the lead and project team to develop themselves. This redefining of roles in the structure allows us to remove frustrations yet continue to focus on the development of people and the solving of problems.
Another example of structure causing problems instead of success is the amount of layers I see information having to go through as an entire organization. I've seen information get shared at a top level executive meeting, then that information get interpreted by each individual executive with their teams, communicated through one manager of the next layer, who then communicates it to their management teams. By the time this information gets down just one or two of the layers, we have lost accuracy of the intent and clarity of what is needed. I've been asking myself and others about organizational root causes to the problems we seem to face. I've had a bit of a difficult go at it so far, but generally I'd like to get all of us thinking about this structure part. What is the structure that will best enable success? What can we do about our structure to get us to clearly and accurately communicate at all layers?
We must ensure we have full clarity of the lines of accountability, responsibility, and authority. All three of these things go hand in hand. I have been told that what we lack is accountability. I am starting to see how the structure is not clear about accountability, responsibility, and authority. Those we are saying need to be held accountable, actually do not have the authority within the structure. You can not hold someone accountable to something which they do not truly own. Structurally we need to clarify a lot of things in order for our organization to be great. In my own team, I will need to work to establish these clear lines and figure out if how we are structured is causing more frustration than value. I am not one to just do things the way they have been done before, so I will be challenging my own thoughts and taking real steps to make this work.
This first part is to help reflect upon the concepts of fostering an inclusive environment and designing the structure for success. For me, I am finding that this takes a different focus and effort on my part in the role of a leader. It has made me think of things differently and given some insights into what needs to be done in order to create a great organization. The next part will go into more of finding the right people for the right roles, and ensuring everyone has the knowledge to do a great job. If you are interested in sharing your own thoughts as you go through these Great Leader Strategies, let me know!
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