Do you manage like Microsoft?

When Microsoft, the company know for its ferocious attitude when protecting its own turf and simultaneously stomping on everyone else’s, released Kinect it unleashed a frenzy of innovative development among the great unwashed, AKA the open source community.

Rather than embracing their out-of-the-box thinking Microsoft started stomping, but when the rabble attacked, Microsoft backed down—part way.

In statements, Microsoft said it “does not condone the modification of its products” and vowed to work with law enforcement “to keep Kinect tamper-resistant.” After geek outrage spilled onto the Web, Microsoft spent the next day clarifying its position. It stressed that it objected to miscreants who might, say, use Kinect’s camera to peer into living rooms. It would not, however, sue well-intentioned tinkerers. After that peace gesture, Microsoft stopped discussing Open Kinect publicly.

Do you (or your manager) act like this?

Do you freak out when faced with innovation outside of the expected and difficult to control?

Do you threaten the instigators and/or your team to bring them back in line with your narrow vision?

Or do you cheer them on, embracing ideas that didn’t originate with you and weren’t planned, but open up new paths and even new worlds to conquer?

The world has changed and you need to change with it. Years ago someone said that Microsoft shouldn’t try and act like a scrappy startup when it was a 500 pound canary, but now that canary is merely obese.

Doctors faced the same dilemma, going from a world where their word was law to one in which patients research and demand a say in their treatment—and vote with their feet if they don’t get it.

And before you see this as an age-related problem look around. It’s not hard to find Microsoft-styled managers and doctors of all ages.

The Microsoft vs. open source is a good analogy for two different types of management MAP and you need to choose which you want to be.

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eamon33/1528968969/

Its studies show that [word deleted] workers are looking for flexible jobs that have “a climate of respect, work-life fit, supervisor support and learning opportunities.”

Would reading this sentence lead you to expect yet another story about the work expectations of Millennials?

If so, you would be wrong.

The sentence comes from a Wharton article called The Silver Tsunami that discusses the value older workers bring to employers.

Now consider these ten points on how to manage from a recent BNET post

1. Don’t be the boss. At least, don’t appear to be
2. Don’t be dismissive, help them learn new skills.
3. Use their experience.
4. Understand differences in lifestyle.
5. Validate them.
6. Know what motivates them.
7. Talk to your employees.
8. Don’t’ be intimidated by them.
9. Introduce a mentorship program…
10. If [word deleted] employees do step out of line, reel them…

Sounds a lot like advice on managing Gen Y, doesn’t it?

But it’s not; it’s advice on how to manage when employees are older than the manager.

Do you see where I’m going here?

Boomers, Gen Xers, Millennials.

They are all people; people with similar desires and foibles, although usually expressed in different terms.

And they all want similar things from their managers: respect, challenge, opportunities to grow, work/life balance—the same things you probably want from your boss.

And it’s your job to provide them to everyone.

Flickr image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/zedbee/103147140/

There are three functions required to live in the 21^st Century—no matter your country or circumstances.

Whether you choose to live loudly, taking risks and seizing every opportunity, or just move through life with minimum effort every person living leads, manages, and sells every day of their lives.

And I do mean everyone, from the very top—heads of state, financial barons and CEOs to everyday people and the homeless.

Look at each from a functional point of view.

Lead means “to go before or with to show the way” and you probably do that at least 50% of the time in your daily life, even when you only lead yourself.

Manage means “to be in charge.” You can be in charge of various things or various people at various times, but you are always in charge of yourself.

Sell means “to persuade or induce someone to do something” which is what you do when choosing a movie, putting your kids to bed or convincing your boss about X.

After a years of reading and watching myself and others I find that these three functions, in their broadest sense, seem to embrace everything we humans do.

What do you think? Did I miss anything?

Flickr image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aussiegall/759309122/

A post on Harvard Business Blogs entitled Every CEO Should Write an Annual Memo To The Board caught my eye, not for CEOs, but for you. You may not be CEO of a company, but you are CEO of your life—your vision, your plan, your effort. You deal with the same problems as every CEO and you owe it to yourself to do the same kind of appraisal of the current and the coming year. Read the article and if you have problems tweaking it to fit you I’ll be happy to help.

With the start of Christmas shopping I have a suggestion that anyone business junkie would love to have—it’s a new book called Story of American Business: From the Pages of the New York Times.

Last is a story that will make you see red—at least I hope so. There is great controversy over the hiring of illegal aliens, but that’s not today’s focus. Given the reality of businesses hiring them the real question is do they deserve the same treatment as legal employees or does the fact that they are illegal give managers carte blanche in how they are treated? This isn’t a hypothetical question. Watch this video and share your thoughts on the manager’s actions.

Image credit:  MykReeve on flickr

Management M&M is a new weekly feature focusing on various management misses and messes. I hope you’ll send examples from your own experiences for me to use—anonymously, of course.

I found an interesting bit of idiocy in a recent McKinsey survey (free registration required),

Even though overall reliance on financial incentives fell over the past 12 months, a number of companies curtailed their use of nonfinancial ones as well. Thirteen percent of the survey respondents report that managers praise their subordinates less often, 20 percent that opportunities to lead projects or task forces are scarcer, and 26 percent that leadership attention to motivate talent is less forthcoming.

The technical term for this is ‘how stupid can you get’.

At a time when corporations large and small need the highest level of employee engagement just to survive, let alone thrive, they are making every effort to convince their staff that they don’t give a damn about them.

This attitude essentially says ‘you are worth neither money nor time, but I want you to work harder and produce more than ever before’.

The survey also touches on the reason for the idiocy.

…nonfinancial ways to motivate people do, on the whole, require more time and commitment from senior managers. One HR director we interviewed spoke of their tendency to “hide” in their offices—primarily reflecting uncertainty about the current situation and outlook. This lack of interaction between managers and their people creates a highly damaging void that saps employee engagement.

Well, doh.

The higher you move in an organization the more you are required to accomplish your goals through the efforts of others, but the less time you make to do that.

Sure doesn’t sound like a winning strategy to me.

Image credit: Finsec on flickr

How do you lead/influence/motivate/cajole/force others to move in the direction you choose or achieve a necessary goal, large or small?

That question is the basis for yards of books and megabytes of content, but in spite of all that I thought I’d add my 2 bits to the total.

My 2 bits is found in 2 words: vested self-interest (VSI).

Over the years, I’ve found vested self-interest to be not only the most powerful people motivator around, but also one of the least expensive, since the cost is mainly from the effort to learn what it is for each person.

Contrary to what a lot of people think money isn’t always in first place. If it were, then companies wouldn’t lose talent to other companies offering the same or even lower pay.

Just as it’s an error to always assume that dollars will do it, you can’t assume that what turns on one turns on all. Hot buttons are as individual as your people are and don’t always involve tangibles.

As a manager, it’s up to you to discover each of your people’s hot buttons, i.e., what really turns them on, and then find a way to satisfy it in return for what you want in performance, innovation, etc.

Taking the time to learn what the buttons are allows you to power your team as never before, which, in turn, gives you the ability to satisfy your own.

Remembering that generalities are always dangerous, here are some of the most common hot buttons

• public recognition – not just for big things, but for the small—it is the everyday wins that power most people’s working lives;
• strokes – a few words here, a compliment there, doesn’t take much time, but be warned, people aren’t stupid, if your comments are lip-service only they will know and respond accordingly;
• giving back – supported or encouraged volunteer programs, leave day banks, etc.;
• making a difference – internally and/or externally; and
• growing/stretching – the opportunity to do something new, learn new skills, etc.

Obviously, money is still a motivator, but it’s not always big bucks, it’s more that the amount is relevant to the accomplishment and logical relative to the company’s circumstances.

And it doesn’t need to be “new” money; it can be a different way to cut a current pie. For example, I get many queries from senior execs asking for exotic approaches and detailed how-to’s for implementing cultural and other intangible changes that often require encouraging (and at times, coercing) their managerial staff into actually doing them.

The most successful method I’ve found is as simple as one, two, three.

1. Carefully define, in a quantifiable manner, what you want done (not “increase retention,” but “reduce turnover by X%”).
2. Include these well-quantified goals in the managers’ annual objectives. (This is not a variation of MBO.)
3. Make it clear to your managers that they will be evaluated on these goals and that the evaluation will impact their annual reviews and compensation.

Vested self-interest will do the rest.

Please join me Thursday to see VSI in action.

Image credit: steve heath on flickr

One of the greatest mistakes that managers make is buying into the belief that being in charge means being in control.

Both views start before that first promotion and are influenced by how they are managed and their reaction to it.

As with kids who are raised by a compulsive neat nick, they typically grow up either emulating that trait or totally rebel and become slobs.

Being in charge means taking responsibility for the myriad of things needed to accomplish the goals assigned to their group. That includes the actual goals, acquisition of new talent, care, feeding and professional growth of the team, maintenance and improvement of the physical environment, culture and anything else that comes up.

Control leads down a different path—one geared to power, restriction, manipulation, domination and even oppression.

Yes, the managers you had before promotion influence you, but it is your MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) that makes the choice of which road to follow—just because you work for Attila The Hun doesn’t mean you have to do it the same way.

And even if you did head down the control path that doesn’t mean you have to stay on it the rest of your days.

You can change; you can always change; like an alcoholic who chooses sobriety you can choose to go from controlling your team to being in charge of it.

If you do make that choice expect to find yourself working less and accomplishing more; having more fun and achieving greater personal satisfaction; having less turnover and receiving better reviews and being the manager for whom everyone wants to work.

Image credit: sundstrom on sxc.hu

Years ago when I was a headhunter I recruited “John,” an inarticulate hardware engineer who wore his hair like Willie Nelson, had a beard streaked with gray, no-fashion clothes and was a bit vague about the world.

But John was brilliant and a genius in his work. He could look at a circuit design and know that it wouldn’t work, although he couldn’t always explain why.

The vp he worked for at the time ignored him, dismissed his opinion, built the circuits anyway and was shocked when they wouldn’t work.

All that changed when I stole him for a client whose focus was content, not looks or delivery.

“Jim” had no belief in intuition, but a deep belief in what he called ‘unconscious pattern recognition’, which, he said, was why John knew a bad design when he saw it.

John told me years later that Jim was the only person in his whole career who seemed to appreciate and value his skills.

According to Jim, in many ways John was a pain to manage, but his value to the product development effort more than off-set the irritation factor. He said that if managing people was easy managers wouldn’t be paid a premium.

And that brings us to the point I want to make.

I’m really tired of hearing managers constantly complaining about

• needing to hire ‘self-starters’ so they can focus on building their leadership skills;
• the amount of time they spend settling team member disputes;
• how childish their people can be; and
• how the time spent hiring take them away from their ‘real’ work.

If you choose to become a manager you need to understand that

• no matter your level your people will always take precedence over everything else, because without people there is no company;
• people do become childish when thwarted or upset and that one reason that you make more money is that it costs more to hire a trained, adult baby-sitter than a teenager;
• few stars are born, rather they are the result of how they are managed; and
• if you don’t like the above three points you shouldn’t be a manager.

Management isn’t everybody’s cup of tea, so how do you know if you are/will be good at it?

Look in the mirror and answer this question:

Would you be happy and engaged if you reported to yourself?

Image credit: arte ram on sxc.hu

Shortly after I started writing Leadership Turn I did a post about diversity, ending with this—

“Another way to look at it is that any increased spending on diversity development is an investment and will be more than offset by the increases in innovation, productivity and revenues. If spending $100 results in a bottom line increase of $1000, did you really spend the $100, or did you gain $900? $900 that wouldn’t be there if you hadn’t invested the initial $100.”

How do you define diversity?

True diversity isn’t just diversity of race, gender, creed and country, but what I call the new diversity—all those plus diversity of thought.

Think about it, if a manager really works at it she can create a rainbow-colored group who all think the same way—George W. Bush’s initial Cabinet was ethnically diverse, but their MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) was homogeneous.

It’s far more difficult to put together a group of totally diverse thinkers. Managers tend to hire in their comfort zone, but more and more that refers to how people think, rather than how they look.

So what should you do to ensure that you’re building a truly diversified team?

Here are five key points to keep in mind when you’re both hiring people and managing/leading them.

1. Avoid assumptions. People aren’t better because they graduated from your (or your people’s) alma mater, come from your hometown/state or worked for a hot company.
2. Know your visual prejudices. Everybody has them (one of mine is dirty-looking, stringy hair), because you can’t hear past them if you’re not aware of them.
3. Listen. Not to what the words mean to you, but what the words mean to the person speaking.
4. Be open to the radical. Don’t shut down because an idea is off the wall at even the third look and never dismiss the whole if some part can be used.
5. Be open to alternative paths. If your people achieve what they should it doesn’t matter that they did it in a way that never would have crossed your mind.

Finally, remember that if you’re totally comfortable, with nary a twinge to ripple your mental lake, your group is probably lacking in diversity.

How do you hire and manage diversity?

Your comments—priceless

Don’t miss a post, subscribe via RSS or EMAIL

Image credit: lumaxart on flickr

There are three universal functions that people at all levels do in the course of daily life and I bet that you can’t guess them.

Every day, no matter who you are or what you do you lead, manage and sell.

Most people don’t believe me when I say this.

Workers think they don’t lead or manage because they’re workers and non-salespeople, especially engineers, are usually adamant that they not only don’t, but couldn’t, sell.

The point is that these three functions have been swathed in enough mystiques that most people believe they don’t do them when, in fact, they do them daily.

You sell every time you convince someone to do what you want them to do.

You lead every time you take the initiative instead of waiting for someone else to do it.

But people hesitate to use words such as sales, manage or lead to describe what they do unless they’re in that profession or already at a certain level in the organization and that holds them back from growing.

We humans have a habit of assigning value to acts based to a great degree on the language used to describe them.

I’m not suggesting that you use this language for bragging rights, but you should use it inside your head when you think about what you do.

For instance, if you’re an engineer who, after thoroughly researching the subject, presents a compelling argument to your boss for buying a new piece of software or equipment and it is purchased as a result, then you sold your argument.

The same is true when your idea of where to have lunch or which movie to see is chosen—you sold it.

Or you’re the junior member of the team, but you take the initiative to research something that you think will contribute to the success of the project even though it’s not your responsibility, then you’re leading.

When it comes to managing most people realize that to get anything done anywhere in their life requires various management skills, but they rarely call it that.

But if you want to grow that’s exactly what you need to do.

Examine what you do every day, including the little things, and acknowledge each time you led, sold or managed and then use the correct language when thinking about it.

It’s what’s in your head, what you believe, that’s important, because no matter what others say, if you don’t think it you won’t believe them.

Image credit: flickr