Kitchen Nightmares: Exercises

I realize that some people may not believe that you can teach your managers anything about leadership from a reality television show. I wasn’t convinced either at first. So to prove FOX reality shows can (accidentally) educate leaders, I’ve included the link to two videos. Each one is a 43 minute episode. After watching the video, I created the questions that I thought highlighted the most relevant management points. I then facilitated the discussion with my team. The entire meeting lasted 90 minutes. We had a great time! We had a lot of laughs but the lessons about not having too large a menu and how people lead under pressure were not lost on my team. I hope you find them useful also.

Chef Gordon Ramsay heads to Fair Lawn, NJ, to visit Campania, an Italian restaurant that’s losing more money than it’s making.

Video: Campanias

1. Was Campanias meeting their customer’s expectations in terms of food portions? How does this compare to IT and what are the implications?
2. What was Campanias known for with its customers? What were Joe’s views on this?
3. Was there a turning point when Joe’s team finally took their jobs seriously?
4. Discuss how Ramsay handled “the old bag”. If the customer is always right, why did he insult her?
5. How would you describe the working relationship between Joe and the team? Are there similarities within your company?
   

   
   

Chef Gordon Ramsay visits Secret Garden in Moorpark, CA, to help French chef and owner Michel try to put his restaurant back on the map.

Video: Secret Garden

1. Describe the relationship between the Chef Michel and his employees. Is it based on trust? Do they feel empowered?
2. How does Chef Michel respond to feedback and criticism?
3. How does Chef Michel and the team respond under pressure? What actions does he take and what are the effects on the team?
4. How did Chef Michel deal with the remodeling and new menu in his restaurant?
5. What is the Information technology equivalent of their “menu”? What can we learn from it?
6. What did Chef Michel do when things went wrong with the new menu? Are there examples in business or IT where you have seen a similar response to the introduction of a new process or technology?
7. What was the “cardinal rule” that Chef Michel learned and how does it relate to IT?

Leadership Lessons from Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares

“Restaurants close easily. Especially when the owner isn’t committed 110%” said Gordon Ramsay on a recent episode of BBC’s reality show “Kitchen Nightmares“. My buddy Geoff who is a CIO in the area mentioned this show when we had lunch this week. He told me that this show was a great management training class for IT managers. I was familiar with Gordon Ramsay and his liberal dropping of F-Bombs on other shows but I never really took him seriously as a businessman. After watching two episodes of Kitchen Nightmares, I have changed my opinion of him. He definitely understands how to run a business, which in this case, happens to be restaurants.

For those not familiar with the show, celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay selects a restaurant owner that is about to go out of business and helps them analyze what is causing the failure and helps turn their restaurant around. At least he tries to turn them around. Ultimately, his show is an examination of the leader who runs the business and their failings as a manager. In both episodes I watched this week, the owners had individuals in the kitchen that were disruptive and not taking their jobs seriously. That’s a problem in a restaurant or in an IT department. In both episodes, the manager-employee relationship was skewed. Managers either hired friends or weren’t sure how to manage their staff. Employees didn’t respect their boss and this manifested by tardiness and lack of attention to their job duties. The real losers were the customers.

In the first episode (Ruby Tates), the owner of the business learned from Ramsay how to manage his employees and turned his restaurant around. Sadly, in the second episode (Piccolo Teatro), the other owner didn’t address their own inability to manage the restaurant and the restaurant went out of business. Kitchen Nightmares will not make you cancel your subscription to Harvard Business Review, but it is still a good management tool for watching the effects poor leadership has on a organization. And it’s a lot more entertaining than reading those HBR case studies!

For more information, go to http://www.bbcamerica.com.

Always Hire People Smarter Than You

I am surprised how frequently I see managers at every level including vice presidents surrounding themselves with people that are less technically competent than themselves. We all were once great technical individual contributors. That’s probably how most of us got our first shot at management. But to develop as a leader, you first have to let go of being a subject matter expert. You must hire people or develop existing staff to take that role. If you insist on being the smartest guy in the room, you will never learn how to grow as a people manager. You will be so busy trying to hold onto your technical expertise that you will stifle the very people who you need to develop so you can be a better leader. This will lead to great frustration within your organization because you will be so busy wearing an old hat that you don’t focus on setting the strategic direction of your department. And by stifling the people on your team, you will lose talented people who don’t see career growth and that causes you to take more control of the technical situation which then leads to greater and greater attrition. This is the true definition of a vicious cycle.

Assess your organization. If you are the leader and the subject matter expert, you are setting up your department for failure.

Your Moral Compass

As a leader or future leader of people, we have to remember a simple fact which is our character is always on display. Last week’s revelation about New York Governor Eliot Spitzer is a prime example of that. There are probably two schools on this issue. One would offer that it was a victimless crime and while illegal, shouldn’t tarnish the works that he has done bringing criminals to justice. The argument would offer that in most situations, he acted beyond reproach. “Why should this incident force him to step down?” people would ask.

The other school, to which I am a student, would offer that a person’s character is shown when people are not looking. In this case, he thought that he was getting away with something. Because he deviated away from leading a moral life, his public career is now over. And let’s not even contemplate what his wife is saying to him right now. She has been publicly humiliated as well. This is caused by what I call situational ethics. Situational ethics is when people believe that morality is relative. They espouse that they can act according to a set of principals in certain business situations, but at other times, it’s ok to bend the truth, mislead people, or act in ways that if revealed would be embarrassing to them.

How do you treat your waitress?

Someone a long time ago told me something that I think about every day. They said that you can tell the character of a person by how they treat their waitress. The point is that people’s true character is exposed when you don’t have to be nice. Everyone has to be nice to their boss. In the corporate world, people are nice to others because they believe they can gain something politically. You don’t have to be nice to your waitress. He or she has no power over you and cannot influence your life. And that’s exactly why people’s character comes out. If you go to lunch with a group of coworkers and you see one of them being rude or abusive to your waiter or waitress, you know all you need to about how that person treats people who don’t have political power to challenge him.

Golf and Ethics

I love golf. I love being out there with friends as well as with coworkers and vendors. It’s a great game and it provides a lot of great experiences. But it is also useful for understanding your character as well as the people playing in your party. Everyone who plays golf knows the old adage, “you learn more about a person in four hours of golf than you do in a year of working side by side with them.” This is an adage that has never failed me when trying to understand the true character of the people I interact with in the corporate world. For those of you who have never thought about the insight you can gain, consider the following next time you are playing with someone for the first time. When they shank the ball into the woods, or if they hit the ball in deep rough, how do they respond? Do they curse and slam their club into the ground? Do they blame the wind, rain, sun, height of the grass, condition of the course, distractions from animals or other external events? Or do they look at what has happened and acknowledge that they were the cause of the poor shot and accept the fate that their swing delivered to them? When they get to their ball and they see that it is a terrible lie, or behind a tree, or out of bounds, do they take their club and give themselves a “foot wedge” by moving the ball into a more favorable spot? I played with a former executive who I knew for a number of years. When I played golf with him, I gained an insight into why other people considered him untrustworthy. On the course, he consistently tried to improve the lie of his ball without regard to the rules of the game. Many times he probably thought that I wasn’t looking. Sometimes he probably didn’t care feeling that he had his own set of rules that he played by regardless of what the overall rules stated about improving your lie. After watching him play golf, I never looked at him the same way again. I also understood the political dynamics at work better thanks to observing him on the golf course.

As leaders, we are always being watched. Everything we do and say is observed by our team, and our company. This extends to happy hours, and other social events as well. You’re always on the clock. Never forget that. Eliot Spitzer thought he was off of the clock when he was secretly wiring tens of thousands of dollars to prostitution rings. He thought he was off the clock when he paid for services while holding the highest office in the state of New York. My former colleague thought he was off the clock when we would routinely cheat at golf.

They were wrong. As leaders and future leaders, we shouldn’t forget these lesson and the importance of being grounded in a moral sense of right and wrong.

Emerging Leaders Series

Several people have asked me to lead a series at work on how I analyze and look at technical and business problems from a leadership perspective. I shyed away from it because I thought it was the hight of hubris to think that I have corned the market on what it takes to be a good or great leader.

But when I thought about a couple of emerging managers/leaders in my department, I decided that it would be helpful to write down some thoughts that I could share with them. This is by no means an exhaustive formula for how to lead people but it will hopefully be food for thought for people who want to eventually take leadership roles. It will hopefully also explain to some managers what the difference is between managing and leading.
Here’s the outline so far. I have not ordered the topics yet. That will come next week:

1. Moral Compass: There’s no such thing as situational ethics.
2. Trust and Alignment. You’re not a leader if nobody is following you! (Source: Steven Covey’s principal centered leadership)
3. Good to Great: Getting the right people on the bus. (Source: Jim Collins)
4. Good to Great: Confronting the brutal truth. (Source: Jim Collins)
5. Jon Luc Picard on Leadership: Decisiveness in times of crisis (Source: Star Trek, The Next Generation)
6. The game of Risk or how to clean your own house before you go into someone else’s.
7. Ducks and Bunnies: Know your audience before you start speaking.
8. Bears and Sharks: Understand your opponents strengths and weaknesses before you go into battle.
9. WIIFM: Selling your ideas means understanding what other people need to be successful.
10. Play your position. Know your team and your strengths.
11. Situational Leadership: What motives you may not motivate me.(Source: Jim Blanchard)
12. Problem identification and definition: Can you express it mathematically? (Source: Six Sigma)
13. Developing a wholestic strategy through the Balanced Scorecard. (Source: Kaplan/Norton)
14. Fancy titles and $3 buys a latte at Starbucks.
15. The three IT levers you can pull to solve business problems. (Source: UVA MSMIT)
16. Creating a climate of change through GAP analysis (Source: UVA Darden School of Business)

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.

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.

11 Traits of a True IT Leader

1. Fluency in both technology and the business
2. Ability to work at tactical and strategic levels simultaneously
3. Foresight to connect disparate pieces into cohesive solutions
4. Flexibility
5. Commitment to lifelong learning, with a readiness to stretch beyond core competencies
6. Marketing competence
7. Consummate communication skills
8. Ability to find and manage top talent
9. Vendor management expertise
10. Project management excellence
11. Willingness to delegate

Source: “Ones to Watch”, CIO Magazine, 7/15/2005

Never trust your company to keep organizational secrets

I was reminded last week that no matter how confidential you try to keep a job search, someone inside the company will let the information leak. The best strategy is always to tell your team that you are sourcing for a new position in the department before you actually extend an offer to a candidate. In the long run, it’s better to just tell people that a search is going on and manage the message instead of them hearing through the “HR grapevine” that a candidate accepted an offer.

One of my favorite books is “Good to Great” by Jim Colins. I forget to implement his cardinal rule for change management which is “tell the brutal honest truth.” If I had done that earlier, I wouldn’t have had a team walking around wasting productivity wondering who the new guy is and if they are a) losing their jobs, or b) being pushed down the org chart.

Of course we care about you. We just don’t want to hear from you!

I had this client last year who wanted to get the pulse of his new organization. He asked me to take a look and see what I could learn. Pretty straight forward stuff.

I scanned the enviornment and listen to many annadotes about his team’s unhappieness. Story after story articulated a variation of “we don’t get training” or “nobody respects what we do.” So then I asked the obvious question to the senior leadership which was “have we ever done an employee opinion survey?” Chortles of laughter ensued. “We don’t want to actually ASK them how they feel” said one Vice President in IT. “Beware of what you are going to find out if you do this” cautioned another SVP in HR.

As I survey the company it was almost as if people in leadership positions knew that there were HR problems but by not discussing them they hoped they would go away. This is a classic example of the executive team thinking they are actually smarter than the people in the trenches who are doing the work. I hate to break this to some senior leaders but command and control org charts just don’t stand a chance next to the informal grapevine that runs through companies. If you think the DBA doesn’t know how low morale is in her department, you’re sadly mistaken. If you don’t think the person working third shift NOC knows who does and doesn’t have their resume posted on Monster. com or an updated listing in LinkedIn, you have your head in the sand. The problems are there. Everyone in the department knows this. Do something to FIX the problem instead of ignoring the problem.

Here’s what the client and I did to address the internal issue:

• You don’t have to spend alot of money to get a survey off the ground. Go to Surveymonkey.com and create an account. This will give your employees a degree of confidence that the survey is actually anonymous.

• Pick five to ten questions using a 1…5 scale that ask about key indicators of employee satisfaction. Here are some samples I’ve used in the past:

1. “How satisfied are you with the work you do?”,
2. “I feel it is easy to accomplish work in my department”,
3. “I have had a 1:1 with my manager in the past 30 days”,
4. “I feel I am paid fairly for the work I perform”
5. “I believe the leadership team is effective in leading our department”

• Add an opened ended question (or two) asking them to provide additional comments.
• Survemonkey.com will provide a link that you can send out to the team.

Once you close the survey, you will have mathmatical facts to support the pulse of your department. Don’t just sit there and check off that you’ve completed a survey. Do something with the data! Pull your leadership team together to review the data. Present your findings at your next staff meeting and your next department all hands.

Publish the honest and brutal truth. This is what separates leaders from followers. Now once you have published it, people are actually going to expect you to do something with it. That’s why connecting the questions with measurable initiatives is so important. Implement training on how to conduct 1:1s. If people feel they are underpaid, have HR do a competitive analysis. If they don’t have confidence in the leadership team, hire a consultant to find out why.

The problems of aligning human resources around the business direction is always challenging. It’s made more challenging when the leadership team has no idea that they are leading but nobody in their department is following. Surveying your department and helping understand their joys and pains will help retain the talent you have which means you have a better chance of hitting your department and business goals.