#38-9/18/07: How Ruthless Should You Be?
How Ruthless Should You Be?
“How much time is the right time to train an employee?”
Posted by Steven Cerri on Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Today I was talking to a VP at a client company. We were discussing the difficulty in hiring and training people to fit into a job. The time it takes for them to fit the culture, to fit the job requirements, to fit with the customers… all that fitting that has to take place can take 9 months to a year. And then if you’ve hired the wrong person some companies don’t decide to let the person go until another 6 months or more have gone by. The VP was bemoaning the fact that it seems so difficult to hire the right person for the job these days.
This line of the conversation got me thinking about something that I have seen over and over in my career and in some cases I’ve experienced first hand from both the giving and the receiving side of the fence. And that is, “How ruthless should a manager be when it becomes increasingly clear that an employee may not work out?”
We’ve all heard the quote attributed to Jack Welch and other famous managers and that is, when asked the biggest mistakes they’ve made in their management career, they have answered, “Not firing someone soon enough.”
Now the idea here is that it’s important and useful to be “ruthless”. Ruthless in a way that says, “I can make the tough decisions when I have to.”
Now I’ve known and do know executives who are not ruthless at all. In fact they have a very difficult time firing anybody. They wait and prolong the firing far beyond the point where everyone in the company knows it should happen. The very interesting thing is that these companies did not suffer from that behavior. Everyone knew that the company had a big heart and a long fuse and just accepted it as the way the organization worked.
On the other hand, I’ve known and know executives who have a very short fuse and fire very quickly when it is clear the employee may not work out. While their company’s bottom line doesn’t seem to move up or down, the moral does seem to dip a little and never quite recover. But then again, that executive is not so interested in moral. If he or she was, they wouldn’t be so quick to be ruthless.
Now my point is not to pass judgment on the kind nor the ruthless executive. Right now I’m just commenting on what is out there. What I want to talk about is the continuum and the implications. Here is what I mean.
Imagine at one end of a continuum is the executive who is slow to fire. Patient, trusting, and prone to give the benefit of the doubt is this executive’s mantra. We’ll call this the Patient side of the continuum.
At the other end of the continuum is the executive who is quick to fire if the person is not working out. They are impatient and quick to react to less than adequate performance. We’ll call this the Ruthless side of the continuum.
And then there is that range in between those two extremes of the continuum where most of the executives and managers of the world live.
I now want to connect the dots… I want to connect this continuum to management, leadership, and entrepreneurship.
Most managers live on the Patient side of the continuum. They attempt to hire the right people and then they tend to train and coach the employees in the hopes that they will become good solid performers.
Many leaders live on either side of this continuum as do many entrepreneurs.
However, there is a breed of entrepreneurs, executives, and leaders that live on the end of the continuum.... at the ruthless end. And their behaviors are very distinct and evident. They treat employees like gears in a watch. If they find a gear and it doesn’t fit they don’t send the gear to be re-machined so it can function in the watch. They simply throw away the gear and get another gear and try it. If it doesn’t work they throw that gear out and get another one. They keep doing this until they find a gear that works.
Notice that this approach really makes the entrepreneur responsible for only one thing… picking the gear. They are not responsible for managing the employee. The employee is supposed to come fully competent and capable of doing the required job. If not, well we must have picked the wrong person… NEXT candidate!
This then is the dilemma, especially of small businesses, because small businesses would like to behave like the ruthless entrepreneur. Small businesses don’t have the time or money to carry people who are not producing. And yet, small business are not prone to behaving in a ruthless manner to their employees.
This then is the tug that goes on in small businesses. You’ve seen them. The manager who, on the one hand, would like to be ruthless and shows it with the blustering “bark” of someone who would fire an employee at the drop of a hat and, on the other hand, won’t actually “bite” and take action to fire the under-performing employee. As a small business owner, manager, executive, or leader, the following steps will help.
The first step is to analyze how you and your company treat this issue… the issue of employees not turning out the way you’d hoped.
The second step is to become clear about the company’s and your tolerance for being ruthless. You may want to be ruthless from a financial point of view, but won’t go there because of your values.
The third step is to be very clear regarding the expectations you have about employee performance and convey that information to employees in clear and certain terms.
The fourth step is to put in place a time line for the company, the specific employee under consideration, and their manager so that everyone knows when the decision point is being approached.
The fifth step is to “future pace” your decision so you will clearly understand the implications of a ruthless decision if it has to be made.
The sixth step is to make the decision, if necessary, and follow through.
The final seventh step is to assess the consequences of the decision and adjust going forward if necessary.
I’m not saying that I favor being ruthless. It’s not my style. But for any of you working at the higher levels in an organization it’s a part of life. When an employee is young and lacks experience, they are given a great deal of leeway, training, and coaching in order to become competent. However, as the employee’s career progresses certain assumptions are made about their abilities. At the level of the senior manager or executive, it is assumed that they are competent and they can “drop into a position” and be left alone to succeed. If they perform, wonderful. If they don’t, it can be “asta la vista, baby”.
In my career, I’ve used several of the steps I listed above many, many, many times. I’ve only used ALL of them twice, meaning I didn’t often have to be ruthless. I was lucky I guess.... I had a knack for turning people who didn’t seem to work out when they reported to others… into star performers when they reported to me… the steps and the process really do work.
Be well,
Steven Cerri
Posted by Steven Cerri on 09/18 at 08:32 PM (0) Comments • Permalink
#37-9-17-07: Is Colin Powell A Leader?
Is Colin Powell A Leader?
“Should we take Colin Powell’s advice?”
Posted by Steven Cerri on Monday, September 17, 2007
I’ll bet I’ve got your attention now, haven’t I? Actually, I’m very serious when I ask “Is Colin Powell a leader?” and “Should we take his advice on leadership matters?”
There are plenty of people who think that merely asking these questions is a sign of lack of patriotism or a lack of understanding of what leadership really is. I think it’s the exact opposite.
Let me tell what started me down this path in the first place.
I was listening to NPR one day and they had a news story on leadership. Apparently one of the NPR news people had gone around the country and interviewed people who were considered “leaders”. One of the questions posed to these so-called leaders what a request for a definition of leadership. This news person quoted Colin Powell’s definition of leadership from his book. I’m paraphrasing only slightly here when I say that Colin Powell wrote: “When a leader’s men stop coming to him with their problems, the leader has stopped leading.”
The NPR news person continued for a minute to elaborate on Colin Powell’s book quote. There was the expected deference to the idea that on the battle field the leader must have the confidence and trust of his men and if those men don’t come to the leader with their problems the leader is no longer trusted and therefore, cannot lead and is no longer leading.
Whose going to argue with that? A person would have to be nuts to disagree with Colin Powell let alone disagree that trust is important in leadership. Right?
Well not quite. I’ve lead a lot of very good, very powerful, very accomplished teams, and bringing me their problems was not what my role was about. In fact it was the exact opposite. I wanted to ween then AWAY from bringing me their problems. If they continued to be incapable of making their own decisions, I would continue to be the leader of a group people who could not think on their feet and who could only get things done when they were told what to do next. If I didn’t make them capable of making their own decisions I would end up with a group of “children” who had to come to “father” to know what to do next. That, I didn’t think, was truly my role as a leader.
So this put me on another track. Actually it put me “back on track”. It put me back on the track I’ve been on for some time, and that is leadership looks different depending on the situation. Here is what I mean.
When you are a military leader, you actually can’t have direct reports thinking for themselves. You can’t have people deciding in the field that they are going to go against direct orders. (Now I know that the US military prides itself in allowing more decision-making authority to the field personnel compared to the Russian soldiers, but the bottom line is that the military can’t tolerate a high level of independent decision-making in the field… chaos would be the result.)
However, I come from the environments of the commercial and government business areas. In these environments, especially the commercial business arena, leaders expect their direct reports to think for themselves. Leaders expect their direct reports to bring their problems and their SOLUTIONS, and after some time we expect our direct reports to bring fewer and fewer problems to us and just give us the outcomes of their solutions.
So as I worked through this thought process, I went back to my previous statements made in my seminars and my university courses and that is “leadership is a function of the context”. Leadership looks different depending upon the situation, the risk, the expertise required, the time horizon, etc. Colin Powell is a military commander. As such, leadership in that environment requires that the direct reports “bring” the problems to the commander. There is little need for the entrepreneurial spirit on the battlefield.
However, in the business environment of the commercial world, a direct report who is constantly bringing problems to the boss and waiting for the boss to give “marching” orders is doomed to a short career.
In the business world, the real world of business, the true leadership answer is even more complicated than I’ve explained it so far. Because in reality, there are times when it’s important to behave like a military commander and there are times when it’s important to behave like Mr. Rogers. There are times to have your direct reports bring their problems to you and there are times when you want them to think for themselves. True and effective leadership is the ability to do both and to teach your direct reports when to do which.
All this translates into this important message: “The bottom line is that it’s important to be careful when listening to people talk about leadership. Most people don’t understand that leadership is a function of the context… except the very best leaders do! When you read a book, listen to a speaker, or get some advice regarding leadership, remember the context and the relationship between the context and the person giving the advice. Whether they know it or not, the context is driving their experience of leadership. If the context they are coming from is not the same as the context you are in, don’t trust the advice. Let me repeat that statement: “If the context from which they are deriving their advice is not the same as the context you are in, don’t trust the advise.”
So Colin Powell is a great teacher of leadership if you are a military commander. He is not a good leadership teacher if you are a product manager in a commercial printer company or an aerospace corporation program manager building a satellite. I guarantee it!
Be well,
Posted by Steven Cerri on 09/16 at 10:54 PM
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Can a Jerk Be a Successful Manager?
So here’s the question… can a jerk still be a successful manager?
The answer of course, is Yes!
I know it all depends on how we define “successful” but there is no doubt that within our culture and actually within the business world as a whole, success is usually defined as financial success. There are many people who are financially successful from a business, management, or leadership perspective even though no one would classify them as “not being jerks”. All you have to do is read through the business magazines and journals and you can quickly pick up who is well respected for their “all round” good approach to people as well as business issues and those who are just respected for their “business acumen”. The literature is filled with names like Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Robert Nardelli, Bill Gates, Michael Eisner, and Leona Helmsley. Some of them have changed over time and some have not. (I’ll let you fit them into the appropriate category, past and present.)
So if we define success as financial success (including the financial success that comes from achieving what you set out to accomplish which in turn provides you with financial rewards) you can be a jerk or you can be a nice person and anywhere in between.
So why even care? If you can be successful financially, why should you even care about how you treat people?
The answer is “time”. The answer is “longevity”. You can’t be a jerk and be successful in the long run. You can make your millions of dollars quickly but you can’t sustain success in the long run by abusing people. There are some people who will join the jerk and work for him or her for a while… but sooner or later the rudeness grows thin.
People self select who they want to work for. And there are some people who will work for the jerk… for a while. But in fact, it’s becoming more and more difficult to be a jerk and be successful. The reason for this is workplace diversity and by that I mean that today’s workforce is make up of people of all ages, from teens to 70 year-olds. Today’s workforce is made up of men and wome from all over the world, with various cultural and educational backgrounds. Today’s successful managers and leaders are not those who are jerks but those who are flexible enough to be able to integrate that diverse workforce and mold them into a team.
It finally gets down to this one question… “How do you want to live your life?” There are plenty of people who don’t want to live a life of consideration for others. There are those that do. Financial success can be achieved by both. So in the end, the question is “How do you want to move through the world?” “How do you want to treat people?”
Don’t be fooled into thinking that you have to be like someone else in order to be successful. Don’t be fooled into thinking that you have to be nice and compassionate or that you have to be ruthless and heartless. First be yourself and then be flexible enough to be successful.
Personally, I’m of the belief that we can have it all. I want to move through the world being involved with people in a supportive and positive way, AND be flexible enough to be effective.
Be well,
Posted by Steven Cerri on 09/11 at 09:57 PM
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Steven Cerri #36-9-12-07: Can a Jerk Be a Successful Manager?
“How bad can we be and still be good?”
Posted by Steven Cerri on Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Steven Cerri
