Leadership Principles

Introduction
Manager’s are often under pressure to compromise and deviate from what they feel is right. A manager, project manager, or any other leader needs a baseline of principle from which to base his actions. Managers need to know when to stand firm.
The Principles
These principles of leadership are based on my understanding of "Tough Minded Leadership" by Joe D Batten. The "traditional" approach to management is based around a steady state with well defined projects to make incremental changes. It concentrates on budgets, objectives, and timescales. This approach fails dismally in times of rapid change. It fails the individual and the organization generally due to its attention to the invalid goals of budget, schedule and objectives. A far more dynamic approach to management is required. It is more challenging. It recognizes that budget, timescale and objectives are in flux. The principles ensure meaningful deliverables and keep managers sane.
So what are they principles?
Create Expectation
Create a common understanding of project, corporate and personal goals. Develop plans cooperatively as a team to achieve progress on personal goals through achieving project and corporate goals. Create expectations of each person fulfilling their role. Create personal moral contracts between team members to help each other achieve personal goals.
Expectation := Results
Open honest supportive expectation become results. You create a moral obligation that is far stronger than threat or authority because this is personal.
Don't order, direct, instruct or tell team members what to do or how to perform. This is hard to achieve. The corollary, which is more difficult, is to get those above you in the management to act in the same way.
Integrity
"... what's on my lung is on my tongue. I will always stand up for myself and I won't toe the line. I won’ t play the game if it's not an honest game and an honourable game. There are a lot of people who don't make waves and don't speak up. I can't be like that." - Alan Sugar
If you don't know, then say so. If a schedule is slipping then say so. If quality is low then say so. If you screw up then say so.
Always be open, honest and vulnerable. If someone takes advantage of that vulnerability then that's life! Integrity is more important than a job. It is important to accept that the truth is often risky in the short term. However, messing with the truth is more risky, especially in the long term.
If you're dealing with suppliers, then be honest and open. You may say, "What about negotiation?" I would reply, "What about partnership?" A good negotiator can reach a fair deal by being honest and open. If you reach an unfair deal then you open yourself for the same treatment later. In technology, you must accept that the supplier has some aces because technology is not a commodity.
Expect the Highest Standards of Yourself
Give 100%. Don't be above the team. Don't be a hypocrite. Encourage and accept criticism from the team - but make sure you can handle it. Make sure you know enough about the jobs that others are doing to know what they are facing. Also to gain their respect, to contribute to their work, and to understand their progress or otherwise
Guts and determination are an essential expectation.
Enthusiasm
It’s that can do, positive thinking thing. Most objectives are near impossible when they are served up by management. You have to be positive to be able to work out how to achieve something useful. There will be plenty of negative people in the team ready to accept failure from the start. Your enthusiasm and ability to find solutions will win them over so they can make a constructive contribution. There will be plenty of people outside the team ready to pull you down. You're determination will prove them wrong.
See the Positive in Everyone
You need to see the positive in everyone, particularly in the team when often you have no choice over the members. Everyone has strengths that can be used to support the work and others in the team. Sometimes they hide them well - maybe that's their strength!
People are People
Try to understand why people act as they do. It is often down to their conditioning, their background, and the environment that they are or were working in. The only way you will understand how people think is to get to know them. If you think badly of them then they probably think the same way of you. Is that how to do a good job? Give them a chance. They might give you a chance when you screw up!
Tell The Truth
"I have only two eyes and ears: there are other eyes and ears on the pitch and I am always prepared to listen." - Lawrence Dallaglio
Tell your boss the truth. He can't make sensible decisions without good information. Managers are idiots because no one tells them the truth!
Don't wait until you have the full facts, it might be too late. Give your boss the pieces of the jigsaw that you have. Between you might be able to see the full picture.
Please, Thank You and Help!
It is simple courtesy to say please and thank you but how many managers say it? It's also important to act on it. In an appraisal, a good rating or a pay rise says you meant it.
Asking for help is a great compliment to someone and rarely an imposition. It also recognises that you are not perfect.
Fun
No job is worth it if there is no fun. The fun should be during the work as well as socially. Don't do stupid hours.
Some managers and users won't like to see your team enjoying themselves. You need to protect the team from the "Victorian" work ethic, it’s destructive. Why should anyone work for you if it isn't fun?
Control
If the personal contracts are in place then the team control themselves. Communication within the team is established to deliver the contracts. Reporting is automatic. Exceptions are reported as potential failure to honour a contract. Regular reporting is automatic to help you fulfil your role.
Be Bold
"Its not what you predict but what your imagination inspires. It is aspiration that creates the future." - Zurich Group advertisement.
Work is about realizing a vision. That vision must be communicated and understood by the team. A bold plan is an honest plan. It doesn't say more than is known - you can't commit to a date until you're on top of it. The management or client won't like it but you have to tough that one out.
When you have information, create a plan that uses it. Don't ignore the facts because they don't fit.
Live the Plan
You have to believe in the plan for others to take it seriously. If others are to take it seriously then it must be credible and your belief in it must be credible.
Conclusions
The principles are simple but effective -

• Create expectation
• Integrity
• Expect the highest standards of yourself
• Enthusiasm
• See the positive in everyone
• People are people
• Tell the truth
• Fun
• Control
• Be bold
• Live the plan

SMART Objectives Considered Harmful!

Introduction
Having been a member of staff, a manager and a consultant I have met SMART objectives many times and in many forms. Being faced with the need to create them for myself and help my team create once again, I feel the need to vent some frustration with the apparent obsession with something that I have finally come to conclude is a harmful activity that is best avoided. This article explains why I consider SMART objectives should not be developed. Apparently, the best order to consider your objectives is M-A-R-S-T: so let’s begin…
Measurable
Measurable is supposed to be the most important consideration. This allows you and everyone else know that you've achieved your objective.
But this creates a problem - not everything worth achieving is easily measurable.
Therefore you are left with the option of picking something easy to measure or you spend time creating a measurement scheme that accurately reflects what you are trying to achieve.
There are many tales of company activities being distorted by inappropriate measures. Staff changed their behaviour to reflect the measures that their performance was being judged by, “to hell with customer service, I’m measured on how many calls I complete inside 2 minutes”. The thing is that such measures seemed entirely reasonable when they were developed.
There are three basic approaches to measuring schemes that are often introduced when simple approaches fail. Measuring schemes that mimic balanced scorecards, those that have several measures that are in tension with each other, and surveys.
Balanced scorecard based approaches are often introduced without an understanding of how balanced scorecards drive performance. A complete set of objectives should be based on a strategy map i.e. a diagram showing the cause and effect relationships between the achievement of different objectives which ultimately result in the achievement of the financial objectives of the organisation. Without the understanding of cause and effect, the result is that objectives conflict and the individual’s contribution to the overall performance does not improve. These strategy maps must be consistent throughout the organisation at all levels and across all functions to be effective. Without this consistency, all that results is a random set of activities that does not deliver improved business performance. My experience of getting this right is that is takes about 3 months at about 25% of managers time to get the scheme right, then it has to be updated every few months. The overhead is just not acceptable!
The tension approach requires that conflicting objectives (e.g. quality vs. timescale vs. cost) are formulated and the result is a creative balance. Again, such an approach requires significant management effort to deliver and, quite simply, most managers either are too busy or can’t be bothered!
The last resort of the manager required to measure the immeasurable is to “ask the customer” what they think. On the basis that everyone has a “customer” and “customer service is a good thing” then it must be valid to “ask the customer”. Unfortunately, as the work of Kaplan and Norton on balanced scorecards and strategy maps shows, the customer is only one dimension in the equation. In addition, why is an internal customer’s subjective opinion of your service that is probably biased by politics a reasonable measure that drives corporate performance?
Achievable
It is conventional wisdom that there's no point in starting a job you know you can't finish. Here are some criteria for deciding if a job is achievable…

• It's measurable
• Others have done it successfully before you
• It's theoretically possible
• You have the necessary resources, or at least a realistic chance of getting them
• You've assessed the limitations

This is pure cowardice, if you want to be successful, if you want to make an impact, you need guts. Making sure you can succeed before you start is for wimps! Leaders take risks, they attempt the impossible. Sometimes they succeed – and its fun to succeed. Sometimes they fail – where’s the next challenge?
As an interim manager I built a career taking on jobs that no-one thought could be achieved. In fact, no-one understood the jobs, they just knew something had to be done, and I was up for a challenge. My most satisfying and successful jobs have come by “going where angels fear to tread”.
Realistic
Apparently, you should be realistic because even if it's achievable, it may not be realistic. You need to understand…

• Who's going to do it?
• Do they have (or can they get) the skills to do a good job?
• Where's the money coming from
• Who carries the can?

This is all about getting the resources to do the job. To me that’s just part of the job, you don’t start with the resources. You decide to do it, you get the resources, you deliver, simple!
The key is that what you are doing is important enough and that you can convince others of this. Your conviction and passion are far more important than realism.
Specific
Apparently, the devil is in the detail. The guidelines say that you will know your objective is specific enough if:

• Everyone who's involved knows that they are involved – no, we’ll get going and win them over when we need to!
• Everyone involved can understand what we are trying to achieve – we’ll develop an understanding together
• Your objective is free from jargon – I’m all for writing it down, it becomes more real, but lets develop a language together that works for everyone.

In a dynamic environment, you start with an idea and only with an idea. Then you act on it and bring people along. Those that can help get involved and develop the idea further, it becomes a team thing, its not mine anymore, it belongs to all of us.
If we wait for the specific, then the enthusiasm goes and the best ideas, which are often the most difficult to conceive of as successful, never get started.
Timely
Timely means setting deadlines.
Time is money, so is quality – too many people get hung up on artificial deadlines that damage the business by riding roughshod over people’s private life and reducing the quality of delivery. The only real deadline is one where someone dies if you don’t make it, so lets get the value of a timeframe into perspective.
This isn’t an excuse for procrastination or for delay, everything has an appropriate timescale. Often you can’t know it until after you start, if that’s the case then don’t create an artificial deadline.
There’s nothing wrong with having a hoped for timescale, a target can be useful to focus the mind, there’s nothing wrong with having review points, but if you don’t know when your objective will delivered that doesn’t mean you can’t start.
Conclusion
SMART objectives create inertia and are an excuse for doing very little. They damage businesses by stifling creativity, swashing enthusiasm and making mediocrity acceptable. They are a crutch for poor managers.
If you want to improve your bottom line, recruit leaders, encourage leaders, give everyone the freedom to achieve.