Getting the Wrong People Off Of Your Bus

One of my directors on my team created this parody of the usual motivational posters hanging in many offices today. It’s a great parody of Jim Collin’s comment in “Good to Great” about getting the right people on the bus and the wrong people off of the bus.

I’ve used Jim Collins thoughts on identifying talent as a tenant of my leadership style. The person on my team created this graphic and I printed it and hung it on my whiteboard. It’s funny in a twisted way but it really does speak to the harsh reality we face as leaders. Sometimes, the only way to improve the organization is to stop the bus and kick some people off.

I gave a speech at my April All Hands that discussed the tenants of “Good to Great.” Here is an abridged version of some of the key themes that I discussed.

• Level 5 Leadership:
  Modest & Willful, Humble & Fearless - More Plow Horse, than Show Horse — a workmanlike diligence. –
  Modest / Humble - a compelling modesty, self effacing, and understated, whereas two thirds of comparison companies (losers), had leaders with huge personal egos that contributed to the demise or continued mediocrity of the company.
  
• First Who … Then What: We expected that good-to-great leaders would begin by setting a new vision and strategy. We found instead that they first got the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats–and then they figured out where to drive it. The old adage “People are your most important asset” turns out to be wrong. People are not your most important asset. The right people are.
  
• Confront the Brutal Facts (yet never lose faith): Every good-to-great company embraced what we came to call the Stockdale Paradox: You must maintain unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties AND at the same time have the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.
  

One of the disappointing aspects of leadership is the acknowledgement that not everyone is going to buy into your vision. You can’t implement your vision when you have people in your organization who are smiling in your face and stabbing you behind your back. Having an idea of the talent and commitment you have and making painful but necessary “bus stops” is the only way to ensure you have a team focused on aligning around your strategy.

Using MS SharePoint and ITIL Service Catalogs

I’ve been trying to find the time to do an IT Service Catalog for about a month now. An IT Service Catalog is a definition of what your IT department does and how to engage them. There is a description of what you do, whom to contact when you need to escalate, and service level agreements for each specific service.So here’s the idea.

The idea is to create a self service intranet portal where people will check there first before they call IT for common questions. This would drive down costs within IT as well as improve customer satisfaction. New hires don’t know who to contact for things IT takes for granted. They are an easy source for questions to populate a FAQ site is new hires both inside and outside of IT that have started in the past month. Their frustration level is high because so much of what we do in IT is undocumented. People who just started want to become productive fast and provided FAQs on an intranet site can increase their productivity. These questions are the same frequently asked questions that every new, and some existing, employees have every day. What IT can do is categorize them by functional area in the IT Service Catalog and then have members of IT answer them online. Version two would be to use a wiki so everyone in the company had the ability to ask questions as well as contribute to the knowledge of information.

We plan to use Microsoft’s Sharepoint Services to post the content on our department’s portal. I’ll let you know how it goes in about thirty days.

Two Great Quotes on IT Measurement

I’m getting ready to send out our August Balanced Scorecard Operational Review deck to our IT organization today. It got me to thinking about a couple of my favorite quotes that I wish other parts of the organization would use to manage their teams. The first quote is on the first page of every monthly scorecard. If I could force people to sleep with this quote under their pillow at night I would.

“Trying to improve something when you don’t have a means of measurement and performance standards is like setting out on a cross-country trip in a car without a fuel gauge. You can make calculated guesses and assumptions based on experience and observations, but without hard data, conclusions are based on insufficient evidence.”

Mikel Harry, an author of a good book on “Six Sigma.”

We can definitely debate the impact Six Sigma has had on corporations but the quote is fantastic. His book is the origin of my phrase “we are a facts based, math based organization” that I try to instill into the team. His second quote that I love states that “you don’t truly understand a problem until you can express it mathematically.” Both good quotes and I definitely agree with them. Without facts, my nine year old daughter expressed it best when she said “Opinions are like armpits. Everyone has them and sometimes they are smelly.”As she gets older she will change the wording slightly but the message and its meaning will still stay the same.

All Hands Team Building Exercise

At AOL, we seemed to thrive on doing team building events. I haven’t done any since I’ve been at my current company. My first team building event that doesn’t involve drinking at a bar is tomorrow at our all hands.

At our September All Hands meeting, we are going to spend most of the meeting reviewing the data and comments from the Customer Satisfaction Survey we did in August.

In addition to the normal project updates, and priorities, this one will involve a team building exercise. Here’s the instructions:

• Breakout the department into teams of five people who they normally don’t work with.
• Review the customer satisfaction survey results.
• Propose five recommendations to address low scores.
• Post their recommendations on our IT Ops Wiki page.
• Appoint a spokesperson and have them present the information back to the entire department.

They’ll have 20 minutes to perform the exercise. The goal is have people come out of their shells and meet other people in the department. A secondary and equally important goal is to give a real life example of how easy it is to post content that is available to everyone via a Sharepoint Wiki.

Sharepoint isn’t just for posting files in document libraries. It can be much more. Hopefully this team building exercise will leave an impression with the team that will help them think differently about how easy it is to collaborate.

I’ll post the recommendations once they are done. This should be fun.