How a Great Leader is Defined

Passing the Big Issue test doesn’t require making brilliant strategic decisions.  The Big Issue test is all about your employees.  Here’s why;

Every day you make hundreds of decisions, most minor, a few major.  Dealing with major problems can consume your entire focus, especially when the future of your business rides on the outcome.

That’s when a Big Issue is most likely to pop up.

Say you run a factory.  A component shipment just arrived and the defect rate in tested samples is too high. Normally you would reject the shipment and let the vendor inspect and sort, but you need to meet a ship date for your largest customer.  Sorting in-house means shutting down other operations.  Do you eat the cost and the delays on other jobs and satisfy the customer, or do you miss the ship date?

You sit staring at your desk, knowing no matter what you decide you’re kind of screwed…

… And that’s the moment an employee walks in and says, “I really need to talk to you.”  You automatically start to say, “Let me get with you a little later…” but you look up and see he is visibly upset.

He continues. “I used to be able to call our babysitter to make sure she got the kids home safe from nursery school, but our lunch period was changed to an earlier time this week so now that doesn’t work.  My supervisor won’t let me leave the line to call, so all I can do is worry until we take our break…”

Inwardly you wince.  You empathize but you have your own problems to deal with:  Deciding whether to eat thousands of dollars in cost or upset your biggest customer.

That’s when you take the Big Issue test: Can you deal with the employee and his problem as if it was a Big Issue?  To you it’s not a big issue; to him it is a very Big Issue.

Give his problem the attention and consideration he feels it deserves and you pass.  Assume your issue is more important and brush him aside — no matter how politely — and you fail.

Every employee perceives issues differently.  To a shop-floor employee, break schedules, interpersonal problems with team members, lack of proper tools… all can be Big Issues.  To you, losing a major customer or incurring thousands in additional expense is a Big Issue.

Both of you are right.

Great leaders treat employee issues, no matter how “small,” as Big Issues. Great leaders give employee concerns the same attention they give “larger,” business-critical concerns.

When an employee comes to you with a problem, no matter how minor it may seem to you, to them it is a Big Issue.  You only pass the Big Issue test when you can view problems from the employee’s perspective.

The Creation of a Brilliant Idea

In competitive environments, businesses need fresh, creative ideas to stay on top.


 Unfortunately, it can seem like coming up with a brilliant new idea is a matter of luck or talent — neither or which you have, especially when you need it most.

Brothers Kevin and Shawn Coyne think otherwise. In their new book, “Brainsteering: A Better Approach to Breakthrough Ideas,” the authors lay out a method for generating new ideas that anyone can learn.

Business owners often fail to come up with great ideas because they are using the wrong approach — too broad and unfocused — say the authors. According to their book, two principles lead to fruitful idea generation: asking the right questions and adding enough structure to focus efforts.

While at the consulting firm McKinsey and Company, Kevin worked on a project to improve the firm’s own ability to generate ideas. He looked at extremely successful businesses: ones that had either reshaped the entire industry or went from zero to a billion dollars in sales in under six years.

In 42 of the 43 businesses, says Shawn Coyne, “the founder had asked a single question at outset — or could have asked a certain question — that would have led you to same idea.”

Arm and Hammer Baking Soda is one of the authors’ model companies. Until the early 1970s, according to Shawn, Arm and Hammer was mostly used for baking. Then the company asked, “Who uses our product in surprisingly large quantities and how can we get more people to use our product that way?” When the company noticed a small number of customers using its product to deodorize refrigerators or to aid in washing clothes, it created a campaign to encourage customers to expand their use of baking soda. Today, the majority of its business comes from these other uses, he says.

The brothers deduced a set of guidelines based on such examples that can help other businesses come up with similarly groundbreaking ideas:

Acknowledge your constraints upfront. Brainstorming often fails because it is too unfocused, scattering participants’ creative energy. In the real world, constraints exist.

Ask focused questions. A good question forces you to look at a problem from a different angle. Instead of asking an overly broad question such as “How can we increase profits?” ask a more focused question like, “What’s the biggest hassle customers face when using products/services in our category, and how could we eliminate that hassle  (in ways that others haven’t done already)?”

Don’t assume that you (or your staff) can’t come up with creative ideas. The stereotype that some people are analytical and others are creative, but that people can’t be both, is not true. These are complementary forces that work together to produce better ideas. One helps you evaluate whether ideas are good or bad, while the other gives you perspective to help identify a new category of ideas.

Shawn says that the brain steering method can be used for all types of businesses, but he has one note of caution. “If you are not willing to put real time and energy into brain steering, don’t waste your time”.

Essential Duties of a Great Manager

Great managers are great based on their actions.  Actions reign supreme.  Intentions are meaningless —results are everything. Just not the results you might think.

Consistently accomplish these five missions and everything else follows:  Fame, fortune, promotions, bigger offices, and snazzier business cards.  You, your company — and most importantly your employees — benefit greatly.

Don’t, and no matter how hard you work, you will eventually fall short.

Mission #1:  Develop Every Employee

Focus first on hitting targets, achieving results, and accomplishing concrete goals and you’ve placed your management cart well before its horse.  Without great employees no amount of focus on goals and targets will pay off.  Employees can only achieve what they are capable of achieving, so it’s your job to make every employee more capable.

Plus, even the most self-starting employees can only do so much to improve their skills.  As a manager you owe it to your employees to provide the training, mentoring, and opportunities they need and deserve.  In the process you listen, guide, and develop loyalty and commitment.  Reviewing results and tracking performance is transformed from enforcement into personal progress and improvement — both for the employee and for business.

Employee development is not an item on your to-do list.  Employee development is your primary responsibility.  So don’t worry about reaching performance goals.  Spend the bulk of your time developing the skills of employees and goal achievement will be a natural and long-term by-product.

Mission #2:  Deal With Issues Immediately

Nothing kills team morale quicker than issues that don’t get addressed.  Interpersonal squabbles, performance issues, inter-departmental feuds… all negatively impact employee motivation, enthusiasm, and even individual work ethics.

Small problems never go away.  They always fester and grow into bigger problems — and when you ignore an issue employees immediately lose respect for you. Without respect you can’t lead.

Never hope a problem will magically disappear (or someone else will deal with it.)  No matter how small, deal with every issue head-on.

Mission #3:  Take on a Rehab Project

Every team has an employee who has fallen out of grace:  Publicly failed to complete a task, blew up in a meeting… or just makes particularly slow progress.  Over time you see by his peers — and that employee — as a weak link, when that happens, while he probably would love to “rehabilitate” himself it’s almost impossible.  The weight of team disapproval is just too heavy for one person to move, but not too heavy for you.

Before you remove a weak link from the chain, put your full effort into trying to rehabilitate that person instead.  Say, “John, I know you’ve been struggling but I also know you’re trying.  Let’s find ways together to can get you where you need to be.”  Express confidence.  Be reassuring.  Most of all, tell him you’ll be there every step of the way.

Don’t relax your standards.  Just step up the mentoring and coaching you provide.

Granted, sometimes it won’t work out.  That’s okay.  The effort is its own reward.  And occasionally an employee will succeed and you will have made a tremendous difference in a person’s professional — and by extension, personal — life.

Mission #4:  Never Be Self-Serving

You can get away with this once or twice… but that’s it.  Never say or do anything that in any way puts you in the spotlight, however briefly.  Never congratulate employees and digress for a few moments to discuss what you did.  Never say, “This took a lot of work, but I have finally convinced upper management to let us…” If it should go without saying, don’t say it.

Your glory should always be reflected, never direct.  When employees excel you excel.  When your team succeeds you succeed.  When an employee rehab project turns into a superstar, remember they should be congratulated, not you.

You were just doing your job the way a great manager should.

Consistently act as if you are less important than your employees and everyone will know how important you really are

Mission #5:  Be Gracious With Your “Fame”

Hear of an autograph seeker blown off by a celebrity and you probably think, “If I was in a similar position I would never do that.”

Wrong.  You do. To some of your employees, especially to new ones, you are “famous.”  Even if you’re well down the management food chain you’ve still reached a level they someday hope to reach.

That’s why an employee who stops to talk about what to you is inconsequential isn’t always trying to avoid work or ingratiate him or herself; sometimes they just want to spend a few moments with you.  When that happens you can blow them off… or you can see the moment for its true importance:  A chance to inspire, motivate, reassure, or give someone hope for greater things in their life.  The higher you rise, the greater the impact you can make — and the greater your responsibility to make that impact.

Everyone is a “star” to someone.  Make sure you are generous with your stardom.

Undermining Team Innovation

According to the old saying, success has a thousand parents but that failure is an orphan. But leadership expert, consultant, and venture capitalist John Hamm says that managers are often partly to blame. They either miss signals or neglect to take the corrective action that puts projects on track, or they create situations that make failure inevitable.

Hamm, who wrote Unusually Excellent: The Necessary Nine Skills Required for the Practice of Great Leadership, said in an interview that when pursuing aggressive goals, teams often lose faith in what they can accomplish. When that happens, they look for elegant ways to explain away the failure. A leader has to see what is actually going on, Hamm says: “a set of symptoms not obvious to the untrained eye, but obvious to that person.”

Set the impossible goal

“Big hairy audacious goals are amazing in terms of getting people to really go beyond where they thought they could,” Hamm says. But set too aggressive a goal and a leader can make it impossible for the team to succeed. Hamm calls it the three-minute mile principle. “If you try to get people off the couch to train for the three minute mile, they’re not interested,” he says. “They have to believe that the goal is just out of grasp.”

Leaders have to establish credibility by creating goals that are compelling but not impossible. “If you have a tyrannical boss … they might not say it to his face, but no one’s on that plan,” Hamm says. A good metric is that everyone should feel the goal to be about 10 percent out of their reach. Much more, and the team shuts down at the beginning because the members think success can’t possibly happen.

Measure the wrong things

A second management mistake is to choose the wrong metrics and encourage a team to deliver censored data. Hamm offers an example of a manufacturing company in which the salespeople kept asking for product changes because the customer requested them. But the CEO checked to see how many of the change requests resulted in orders, very few. So the CEO asked the sales team to track that conversion rate by salesperson. Suddenly, the practice stopped.

Measurement ties back directly to the goals, as well. “There’s a lot of human behavior that goes to work every week in organizations, but it goes to work attempting to achieve something,” Hamm says. “So you should make sure that they’re clear on what they’re supposed to achieve. If you get those goals 20 percent wrong, you should go to the woodshed. You can’t blame the construction crew for building to the blueprints and not liking the house.” Proper measurement helps determine whether the efforts or the underlying goals are off.

A related problem is the manager who embraces optimism and hates hearing bad news. Employees will tailor their reports to better fit the expectations and prejudices of the leader. That may be comforting in the near term, but the practice will undermine all goals and performance.

The USA: Still the Best Business Managers in the World

It’s not a contest exactly, but it might be interesting for you to learn that American firms are the best managed in the world.

That’s one finding of a research team from Harvard Business School, London School of Economics, McKinsey & Company, and Stanford. The group surveyed over 10,000 firms in 20 countries about management practices across operational management, monitoring, targets, and people management. The result: The first global database of management practices.

The group ranked US managers the best in the world, followed by those in Japan, Germany and Sweden. Brazil, China, and India were at the bottom of the management chart, managers in the UK, France, Italy and Australia somewhere in between.

What American managers and their employers do better than any other group in the world is manage and motivate people, according to the study.

“American firms are ruthless at rapidly rewarding and promoting good employees and retraining or firing bad employees,” according to the World Management Survey. Why?

More competition. Large and open US markets generate the type of rapid management evolution that allows only the best-managed firms to survive.

Human capital is important. America traditionally gets far more of its population into college than other nations.

The US has more flexible labor markets. It is much easier to hire and fire employees.

China is a study in contrast when it comes to people management.

“Many developing-country firms, even while trying to implement new techniques like Lean Management, ignore the fact that labor is different from other ‘inputs.’ the authors write in a Harvard Business Review blog post. “Many of the Chinese firms surveyed did not even employ managers who spoke the same language as the workers, relying on interpreters or basic sign language for communication. As you can imagine, this does not lead to a feeling of mutual support between management and workers.”

Read the full study and come back to tell me why you think American managers are world class — or not.