Do You Have a Great Planning Process? Part 1

By George McQuain

General George S. Patton said two very important things relating to strategic planning (or any time of planning for that matter). They were “Until it's executed, a plan is only a plan” and “A good plan aggressively executed now is better than a perfect plan next week.”

When I was working on my MBA I was required to do original research and write a research paper. I chose for my topic “Strategic Planning and Its Effect on Company Performance”. I then developed a questionnaire that asked questions about the receiving company’s strategic planning and strategic execution processes. The goal of the questions was to quantify the sophistication of the company’s planning processes in terms of where decisions were made, how progress was measured, how plans were communicated throughout the organization, etc.

I then took my questionnaire and snail mailed it (this was back in the days before the earth’s crust had hardened and Email was invented) to the head of strategic planning at large number of U.S.-based large companies.

While I was waiting for the responses to my survey to be returned to me, I classified all the companies by industry group and began evaluating the responding company’s financial (Net Income, Cash Flow, ROI) and market (sales growth, estimated market share growth) results. I then correlated the sophistication of the planning process of the responding companies against their performance.

My research seemed to bear witness to something General Norman Schwarzkopf said: “The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it.”

What I found was that there was a negative correlation between the sophistication of a company’s planning process and their performance and a positive correlation between their execution process and the company’s performance. In other words, having a great “plan” didn’t translate into great performance, executing your plan did.

As Peter Drucker said "It is meaningless to speak of short-range and long-range plans. There are plans that lead to action today - and they are true plans, true strategic decisions. And there are plans that talk about action tomorrow - they are dreams, if not pretexts for non-thinking, non-planning, non-doing."

While all of this may seem obvious, according to Kaplan and Norton, the originators of the Balance Scorecard,  90% of companies fail to successfully implement their strategies. So, while it may be obvious, a lot of people/organizations are having "issues" here. More on this phenomena in my next blog.

A Great Leader Builds a Great Team—Part 3, You’ve Hired Great People, Now What?

By George McQuain

The last two entries in this series discussed some practical ways that you can identify and hire great people to be on your team. We looked beyond “experience” to address a process for hiring people with the attributes and attitudes that would lead to success in the position you are filling and at three crucial attributes (humility, tenacity and a willingness to learn) that are very valuable in a team member.

In this entry, we are going to examine taking those great people you’ve hired and building them into a great team.

It is unlikely that a single individual will excel in all the areas that are needed to make a team great. It is also impossible for a team leader to be everywhere, do everything, take every decision, and be involved in every interaction that leads to her or his team winning and being great. As a result, the ultimate test for a great leader is not whether he or she makes smart decisions and takes decisive action, but whether he or she teaches others to be leaders and builds an organization that can sustain its success even when he or she is not around.

As I said in the first post in this series:

Throughout my career, I have noticed an interesting pattern. I have observed that great leaders have surrounded themselves with great people, while mediocre leaders have not. This observation poses an interesting “chicken or the egg” question: Do great leaders create great teams or do great teams create great leaders?

Actually, this question, in my opinion, is not an “either/or” question, it is an “and” observation that should be restated as “Great leaders create great teams and great teams create great leaders”.

To get the ball rolling, a great leader can start the process of creating a great team by taking people, and by challenging them and creating a connection with them, unleash their potential to achieve extraordinary results. He or she shouldn’t just accept people as they are; they need to see their co-workers’ potential and care enough to push them past self-imposed limitations to realize that potential. This also involves ensuring that your team pursues a set of shared goals.

The most effective way for a leader to do these things is to build and sustain effective relationships with her/his teammates and to ensure both learning and teaching on the part of everyone on the team (including him or herself). Said another way, the leader must create a two way learning process and the development of leaders in every position on the team they are leading.

This is neither a top-down nor a bottom-up approach to leadership. It is a “Side by Side” approach.

In his book Side by Side Leadership: Achieving Outstanding Results Together, Dennis Romig points out that often the most effective way for leaders to influence others is to "change their own behavior." Romig’s model recognizes that leadership involves facilitating and coordinating a two-way influence process. Not managing in top-down or bottom-up manner.

Such leadership is mutual, interactive, and shared. It involves getting to know your individual team members, letting them get to know you, learning from one another, understanding one another’s goals and the vision and goals of the team, and expecting one another to do the right thing in pursuit of the team’s goals.

Some of the action steps of this approach are:

1.   Foster two-way communication, participation and cooperation in an adult to adult manner. Remember that both you and your co-workers have a lot riding on your team’s success. You must be open and honest with one another.

2.   Mutually create a vision that elevates and transforms the meaning of your team’s efforts. People seek significance. Work together to make your team’s work significant.

3.   Actively encourage new ideas to improve quality and profitability. Do NOT rely on the proverbial “Suggestion Box”. Engage your co-workers in an active discussion of improvement ideas. Expect this from one another.

4.   Involve your team in setting goals, developing plans and implementing the plan. People are more likely to work to achieve something if they are involved in what that “something” is. People generally react negatively to “change” because it is often forced upon them.

5.   Use your knowledge, skills, experience and leadership to work with your team to prioritize goals, plans and ideas. You can’t do everything all the time. Focus on what’s important.

6.   Create workplace ownership by explicitly allowing team members to affect positive change and best service customers in ways that are in alignment with your team’s vision and goals.

7.   Make sure that your team has the resources it needs to win.

Leaders who build great teams involve their team members in that building process and they take direct responsibility for the development of every person on their team as leaders. Through mutual and continuous learning, both the leader and the team will continue to improve and win.

A Great Leader Builds A Great Team—Part 2, Would You Hire This Person?

By George McQuain

Let’s assume you are hiring a new member for your team. While reviewing the resumes/CVs of potential candidates, you come across a resume that contains the following “accomplishments”:

1.     She/he started two businesses that both failed

2.     She/he ran for political office six times and lost all six times

3.     Knowing one of her/his references, you call them and find out that she/he has gone through many “bad” circumstances in their life and that he/she may suffer from depression

Now, would you interview this person or offer them a job on your team?

If you said “No”, you just failed to interview and/or hire Abraham Lincoln, 16^th President of the United States and, arguably, one of the greatest leaders and statesmen to ever live.

In my last blog entry, I wrote about hiring people based upon the attributes/attitudes needed for the role you are trying to fill and tailoring your hiring process and interview questions so that you make sure that the candidate hired has those attributes and attitudes. Today, I am going to address three very important attributes/attitudes that I think are critical and often overlooked in hiring—tenacity, humility and the willingness to learn. In my opinion, these three attributes/attitudes are critical in hiring for a leadership position, a turnaround or for a start-up team that will be charting new territories for your organization. In fact, tenacious and humble are the two main attributes/attitudes of leaders who are “Level 5” leaders in Jim Collins’ book Good to Great--Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't.

If you study the life of Abraham Lincoln, you will find that he demonstrated all three of these attributes/attitudes.

On numerous occasions during the U.S. Civil War, Union forces lost battles and many people called for Lincoln to end the war. Lincoln persisted and persevered, continuously searching for a way to achieve victory. He was tenacious in his belief in the Union cause and that victory could be won. Lincoln demonstrated an ability to withstand adversity and to move forward in the face of losses. Lincoln had an intense will to win and a do or die attitude. He knew what was important and never wavered in his pursuit of it.

Lincoln often demonstrated humility in his interaction with people and in doing his job (President of the United States) in such a way that put mission first (preserving the Union), team second (the army and people of the Union) and himself last. We also see Lincoln’s humility demonstrated in his interaction with others and in his habit of giving the credit for success to others. An example of Lincoln’s humility, is that after he delivered the Gettysburg Address (which some believe is one of the greatest speeches in U.S. history) Lincoln received a letter from Edward Everett who spoke for two hours just before Lincoln spoke. In the letter Everett praised Lincoln for his eloquent and concise speech, saying, "I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes." Lincoln replied that he was glad to know the speech was not a "total failure" (The Lincoln Forum: Abraham Lincoln Gettysburg, and the Civil War by John Y. Simon, Harold Holzer and William D. Pederson). Lincoln appointed one of the best and brightest cabinets in U.S. history (individuals who were also some of his greatest political rivals) because he was focused on his mission, not on appointing people who he would outshine and make him look good.

Lastly, Lincoln had a willingness to learn. It is well documented that Lincoln was an avid reader and that he read most, if not all, of the books in the Library of Congress on military strategy because he knew that military strategy was central to his mission (preserving the Union) and he knew very little about the subject. Lincoln often sought and used feedback, asked questions, sought the input of people from numerous, often different and “off the wall”, perspectives, and learned from his mistakes. He didn’t object when people disagreed with him.

Interestingly, a willingness to learn is often very closely tied to tenacity and being humble. Tenacity, at its core, means doing whatever it takes to be successful and often you have to learn what that is. Being humble recognizes that you do not know everything and you are willing to try new approaches and learn from others to be successful.

I’ll close my discussion of Abraham Lincoln with what Leo Tolstoy; the great Russian author said of him, “He really was not a great general like Napoleon or Washington; he was not such a skilful statesman as Gladstone or Frederick the Great; but his supremacy expresses itself altogether in his peculiar moral power and in the greatness of his character.”

Now, how do you go about hiring someone with these attributes/attitudes? I admit it’s not easy and that it will require you, as a leader, to possess these same attributes and attitudes.

If you look at Lincoln’s “resume” at the beginning of this post, you will see hints at his unwillingness to quit, but often, you will need to interview the candidate with these attitudes/attributes in mind or put them through a battery of “personality assessments”. Regardless, it will take digging and work on your part.

Here are a sample of some possible interview questions:

1.     Describe your most challenging assignment, and how you met the challenge.

2.     Describe a situation that did not turn out as you planned.  What was your reaction? What did you learn from it?

3.     Describe a situation at work where someone created a problem for you.  What did you do to resolve it?

4.     Tell me about the biggest failure in your life. What was your reaction? What did you learn from it?

5.     Tell me about the biggest success in your life. Was it difficult? How did you go about achieving it? What setbacks did you need to overcome to achieve this success?

6.     What is your philosophy of sharing credit for a success? What is your philosophy of sharing blame for a failure? Give me an example of when you put these philosophies into practice.

7.     What new knowledge and skills did you learn from your last job? How did you learn them?

8.     Tell me about a time when you took on a role or project that you knew nothing about. What did you do?

9.     If you had to build a team, what types of people would you ask to be on that team?

10.  How do you deal with people who have a different opinion than yours on how to complete a project?

Use these types of questions to gain an understanding of the person you are interviewing so that you will be able to determine if they are tenacious, humble and willing to learn. In our often risk averse world, it is sometimes worth it to overlook an occasional “failure” and focus on what the candidate learned from the experience. Often, what the candidate learned in their “failure”, their willingness to keep on trying and never give up and their willingness to give credit to others will be much more valuable to you than what someone with a “perfect” career has learned and experienced. Who knows, you might hire the next Abraham Lincoln.

A Great Leader Builds A Great Team—Part 1, Intelligent Hiring

By George McQuain

Throughout my career, I have noticed an interesting pattern. I have observed that great leaders have surrounded themselves with great people, while mediocre leaders have not. This observation poses an interesting “chicken or the egg” question: Do great leaders create great teams or do great teams create great leaders?

Actually, this question, in my opinion, is not an “either/or” question, it is an “and” observation that should be restated as “Great leaders create great teams and great teams create great leaders”.

Over the next several posts, we will look at specific steps you can take to build a great team through intelligent hiring and by challenging your team members to individual greatness.

A fundamental responsibility of management is hiring people. Unfortunately, many managers approach this fundamental responsibility in a very haphazard manner and delegate much of the process to the folks in Human Resources (“HR”). Managers who fall into this camp define the person they want to hire in terms of specific skills and years of experience (often industry specific) and have HR screen out people who don’t fit those criterion exactly.  Then, with a final pool of candidates, this manager will conduct an interview with minimum preparation and make a decision based upon their gut reaction to the person they interviewed. They are just too busy to do otherwise.

Why do I say these things? Because that is what I’ve observed during my career (which includes reading a large number of job postings) and that is what a number of studies tell us.

Studies have consistently shown that people get hired based upon their looks and not the quality of their resume or the quality of their interviews. Other studies have shown that the decision to hire or not to hire is typically made in the first 13 minutes of the interview. Finally, studies have shown that most people are hired based upon there “skills as demonstrated by past positions”, while in 85% of the cases, success is based upon attributes and attitudes and not specific skills.

Bottom line, many managers just don’t put the time and effort into hiring the best people for the job. Would you purchase a $50,000 piece of equipment based on spending 13 minutes looking at pictures of the machine? Of course you wouldn’t. Hiring the right people is a much, much, much more important decision than purchasing a machine. Do your homework. Put effort into the process. Improve your odds at hiring a great employee.

Here’s an approach I recommend:

1.     Define search criterion differently. In addition to specific skills, look for personal attributes and attitudes that will lead to success in the position you are filling.  Customize these to the position and the team this person will be on. Examples of these “Success Factors” might be:

a.     Love of customers and serving them

b.    Ability to work on a team

c.     Ability to work remotely

d.    Honesty and integrity

e.     Communication skills

f.     Leadership skills

g.    Ability to set goals

h.     Ability to make a decision

i.      Ability to solve and eliminate problems

j.      Ability to deal with different and/or difficult people

2.     Write screening questions that an HR screener can ask or look for in resumes that will show evidence that the person has the personal attributes and/or attitudes that will lead to success on the job and in your organization. Most screeners look for skills and experience. Expand the screener’s vision.

3.     Write specific, success factor related situational interview questions that, properly answered, will indicate that the candidate has the success factors needed for the position. I suggest writing at least one situational question for each success factor. For example, if the ability to set and accomplish goals is an important success factor, you might want to ask “Tell me about a time when you set a goal for yourself. Also, tell me about what you did to ensure that you accomplished it.” If a high level of honesty and integrity is expected, you might ask “Tell me about a time when the person you reported to asked you to do something that went against your personal morals. How did you handle that situation?”

4.     Ask all of your final candidates all of the interview questions you have written and take detailed notes on their answers. I personally prefer to not let the candidates ask me questions until I have finished asking them all my questions. I tell them this up front as part of my interview “rules”. I do this so they won’t be able to adjust their answers to fit what they think I want to hear.

5.     Consider asking candidates that need specific technical skills to take skills tests or to demonstrate the skills for you. A good on-line testing resource for this is www.brainbench.com. Or, if you are hiring a salesperson or someone that needs to do presentations, you might want to consider asking them to do a presentation for you on “why they are the best candidate for the position.” Use your imagination to come up with "tests" that will demonstrate firsthand the skills you are looking for.

6.     After you have interviewed all the candidates, review your notes and test results and try to honestly pick the best one based upon what you have learned about them. Look at how they think, what issues they have grappled with, how they learn and apply their learning to their lives.

7.     Make an offer to the best candidate.

Another resource you may want to investigate is the VIA Survey of Character Strengths. The VIA Survey provides an assessment that identifies and ranks a person’s top 24 character strengths. This tool can be found at https://viame.org/www/en-us/getyourviameprofile.aspx. 

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Part 2 of this blog will look at one personal characteristic that I think is often overlooked in hiring. Part 3 will address what it means to challenge your team members to be individually great.

Bill Marriott’s Leadership Lesson

By George McQuain

This morning when I read the newspaper, I learned that J.W. “Bill” Marriott, Jr., CEO of Marriott International, is retiring. As the Washington Post said “J.W. Marriott Jr., who built the company his parents started as a District root beer stand [19 seats in 1927] into a global lodging giant, is stepping down as chief executive, ending a storied 39-year run that ushered in a new standard of dependable, middle-class hospitality for travelers around the region, the country and then the world.”

There are many lessons to learn from Bill Marriott, his family and the company they’ve built.

My first job out of college was at Marriott. After several promotions, I became the Manager, Cash Management. In that role I was responsible for Treasury Management Systems, Banking Relationships, Corporate Loan Agreements and managing the company’s $500 million floating-rate debt portfolio. At the time, I was 26 years old. Marriott was doubling in size every two to three years and the company had just passed $1 Billion in annual revenue.

One day I was in a meeting in my office when my assistant interrupted the meeting to tell me that Mr. Marriott was on the phone and that he wanted to speak with me. Given that I was three levels below Mr. Marriott in the reporting structure and this wasn’t an everyday event, I suspended the meeting to take the call. Doing so had a huge impact on my career and the way I dealt with my co-workers because, on that call, Bill Marriott taught me a very, very valuable leadership lesson.

Here is how the call went:

1.     Mr. Marriott started the call by asking how my family was and noted that he had heard that my wife had recently given birth to our first child.

2.     Mr. Marriott then asked me about my decision to award the banking business of a hotel that was about to open to a certain bank. This was before interstate banking in the U.S. and most banking was local or on a state level.

3.     Mr. Marriott went on to tell me that a very important contact of his was the Chairman of a bank in the same city and the very important contact had called him to ask why his bank had not gotten the business. He, in turn, wanted to know why his contact’s bank had not gotten our business.

4.     I explained to Mr. Marriott the business reasons why I had awarded the business to a competitor of his contact’s bank.

5.     I then asked Mr. Marriott if he wanted me to award the business to his contact’s bank, noting that he was the Company’s CEO and that his family’s name appeared on my paycheck.

6.     Mr. Marriott then asked me a question. I quote “George, does the company pay me to do your job or does it pay you to do your job?”

7.     I answered “It pays me to do my job.”

8.     To which, Mr. Marriott responded “And you are doing it very well. George I will call my contact and tell him why his bank didn’t get the business. Thank you for your help. I really appreciate the great work you’re doing.”

Here are the leadership principles I learned from that brief leadership lesson I received from Mr. Marriott:

1.     Know and care about the folks on your team. Make what’s important to them important to you. Note how Mr. Marriott knew about my new son and asked me about how he and my wife were. He had taken the time to learn about me and ask me about something that was important to me.

2.     Ask questions. Note how Mr. Marriott told me the situation and then asked me “why?” He didn’t tell me what to do; he asked me why I did what I did.

3.     Trust the people closest to the situation to do the right thing and show them respect for who they are and what they do. Mr. Marriott listened to my reasoning and trusted my judgment. In keeping with Marriott’s values and culture, he treated me like an adult and respected my abilities.

4.     Say “Thank you”. In every situation where I personally dealt with Mr. Marriott and every time I observed him interacting with others I ALWAYS heard him say “Thank you”.

Mr. Marriott is a great American business leader and one of my role models, a great man who “walks the talk”. I hope you have learned from his simple, but profound, lesson to me in leadership.

Is It Your Job to Fight Fires? Part 2

by George McQuain

Let me start by answering the question asked in the title of last and this week’s blogs. The answer is a resounding “NO”. 

As a manager/leader, if you think that your job is to fight fires, I would ask you to re-orient your thinking. I encourage you to think of your job as maintaining and improving the performance of your team. That entails actively managing your team’s work processes and improving performance standards by actively designing systems, processes and procedures that eliminate problems and errors.

Additionally, if you think that your “problem” is that your employees don’t do their jobs correctly, I would contend that you are mistaken. During my career, I have led at least twelve successful turnarounds where I have helped teams, divisions and companies restructure, reposition, refocus, morph, re-launch and achieve their revenue and profitability targets.  All of these turnarounds required changes in culture and changes in the way business was conducted. In almost all cases, they required execution against a “life or death” time critical plan. In NONE of them was a wholesale staff change required.

In fact, the potential to eliminate problems lies mostly in improving the systems through which work is done, not in changing employees. In study after study, it has been shown that 85% to 90% of problems are caused by the systems (including training) put in place by management and that only 10% to 15% of problems are under an employee’s control.

So, if you want to improve your team’s performance, focus on the systems, processes and procedures and design them to produce great results.

Last week, I talked about measuring and monitoring “Key Input Variables” as a way to focus on early identification and elimination of problems and as the best way to make sure processes lead to great results.

Here are the key questions you need to ask and answer in designing your process:

1.    What are the results my team and I are trying to achieve?

2.    What key inputs will lead to those results?
3.    What do the values of those key inputs need to be to achieve our target results?
4.    How can we measure those key inputs?
5.    What actions need to be taken when our key inputs are not on target?

How do you identify the key inputs?

Key inputs must be objective and specific being either expressed numerically or as having specific attributes. These five questions must have a “yes” answer:

1.    Is it controllable?

2.    Is it measurable?
3.    Can clear, objective standards be established for it?
4.    Is there an individual in direct control and responsible for it?
5.    If controlled, is it likely to have a significant positive effect on the finished product, customer or client relations, productivity, sales, costs, etc.?

The key is to use common sense and to use as much factual data as you can.

The best specific tool to use in identifying key inputs is a Cause and Effect Diagram. The Cause and Effect Diagram can be used to identify:

1.    Causes of Desired Outcomes (preferred for this purpose)—This approach is more positive, forward looking, identifies what to do, proactive, process oriented and plan driven

2.    Causes of Problems—This approach is more negative, looks backward, reactive, inspection oriented and event driven

The Cause and Effect Diagram can be completed by an individual or by a team in a brainstorming session.

Here is a general example.

Is It Your Job to Fight Fires? Part 1

by George McQuain

Leaders who encounter problems often go through the same emotional stages as dying people: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance.  This process, in my experience, often gets stuck in the first four stages because; as George R. R. Martin has said “Most men would rather deny a hard truth than face it.” As a result, most leaders wait way too long to take tough decisions and manage a project, process or team situation until “fires” are actively burning and everyone is forced to frantically “fight fires” rather than focus on helping the company grow and be more successful.   

As I have often told my teammates, “Bad news is not a good cheese or a fine wine…it does NOT improve with age.” Leaders who recognize and acknowledge the signs of trouble and act (which may mean getting outside help) early have a much better chance of eliminating problems before they occur and achieving consistently great results.

The key, obviously, is early identification and correction of problems. Unfortunately, most managers rely on measuring “results” and do not measure the things that produce those results. This means that they don’t act until the final result is measured and then it is too late to change the outcome.

No matter what the process, it is important to identify the key input variables that drive the results you want to achieve. For example, if I ran a restaurant and I wanted to produce great French Fries, it would be unwise to do nothing more than count the good vs. the bad French Fries at the end of each batch.

Instead, I would:

1.     Buy great potatoes and cooking oil

2.     Know the exact temperature that the cooking oil would need to be in the deep fryer

3.     Know the exact time the fries would need to be in the deep fryer to produce great fries

4.     Measure and manage those key input variables to make sure they are at levels that will result in great Fries.

I would do all these things because I know that if I do them, I will cook great French Fries every time.

Now, here are the key questions you need to ask and answer:

1.     What are the results my team and I are trying to achieve?

2.     What key inputs will lead to those results?

3.     What do the values of those key inputs need to be to achieve our target results?

4.     How can we measure those key inputs?

5.     What actions need to be taken when our key inputs are not on target?

After you and your team have answered these questions, put the measurement systems in place to catch and eliminate issues before they become major problems. Use this approach to transition from denying problems and fighting fires to eliminating the root causes of problems.

My next entry will discuss some techniques to use to identify key inputs.