Detroit’s population has dropped from 1.8 million (1950’s) to 700,000 (today). There are 78,000 abandoned buildings in the city, and the average
home price has plummeted to $7,000. The once great motor city capital of the world is $18.2 billion in debt and on the road to bankruptcy.
Detroit’s rocky road is an early warning sign about failed leadership. Their difficulties caution government, corporate, and transportation leaders that there is danger ahead if they don’t fully develop three core competencies:
I. Cultivate innovative growth
II. Know thyself and others (an indication of emotional intelligence)
III. Embrace ambiguity and paradox
If you’re not convinced that leaders who perform these three competencies poorly hurt their organization, consider an organization whose leaders (unintentionally and over time) discourage innovation, discount employee emotions, or disregard diverse opinions. What might happen to the organization?
It shouldn’t be hard to imagine that if any of these negative behaviors were the norm, the organization would be in trouble. If all of these were true, the leaders are driving down a dead-end road… which is what happened to Detroit’s political and corporate leaders.
I hope this doesn’t happen to you or to transit leaders in Canada or the USA. Why single out my transit leader friends? Because when I analyzed hundreds of leadership profiles, I discovered that these three competencies are the three lowest among transportation executives.
Click here if you like to read how to avoid driving your team down a blind alley by improving these three competencies…
I. Cultivate innovative growth
Cultivating innovative grow is critical to success because our environment is constantly changing. When that change is a challenge, we can choose to go through it or GROW through it. Car company executives met their challenge by lobbying for import quotas and defending the status quo. Here are a three specific tactics that inventive companies (e.g., Google and Pixar) use that will help you cultivate innovative growth so you can GROW, not merely go through your tough times:
A. Eliminate friction
Google’s approach to innovation is akin to improvisational jazz. Any engineer in the company, at any level, can create a new product or a new feature to an existing product. One engineer tells the story of his first month on the job. He complained to a co-worker about the Google e-mail system. His co-worker told him to fix it himself. The next day, the e-mail engineering team reviewed his code. A week later, Google incorporated his changes into the software. How open are you to implementing new ideas fast?
B. Create a collaborative work environment
Google packs offices close together for better communication, conducts all-hands meetings every Friday, and maintains a rigorous interviewing and hiring process. They hire people with collaboration skills. Just when Detroit’s leaders should be working with small businesses to revitalize the city, the mayor is “leading” a campaign to shut down those who don’t comply with all the city’s regulations.
C. Obtain honest and true peer review
Pixar has a brain trust that consists of the co-founders of Pixar and eight directors. When directors feel they need assistance, they ask the brain trust (and anyone else they think might help) to view their work in progress. The session is a two-hour, lively, give-and-take discussion focused on making the movie better. It’s not ego-driven, and nobody pulls any punches to be polite. It produces results because everyone trusts and respects each other. After the session, the director of the movie decides which ideas to accept or reject. The brain trust has no authority to mandate any changes. How well developed is your culture of candor?
II. Know thyself and others (an indication of emotional intelligence)
How aware are you of your strengths and weaknesses? If you’re like most leaders (and those in Detroit), the answer is “not very aware” according to Professor David Dunning and his colleagues, who reviewed 293 research papers on our ability to make accurate self-assessments. When they compared self-assessment with objective performance measures, they found low correlations. This makes most self-report assessments very suspect. In addition, there was a low correlation between how well employees performed complex tasks compared to how well they expected to perform.
The bottom line from this meta-analysis: Most of us do not understand our strengths or weaknesses well, often because of flaws in how we think. Here’s what you can do about it:
A. Get the facts
Executives seldom have the knowledge required to assess their competence in a given area, which often contributes to poor problem-solving and decision-making.
To address this limitation, it’s usually best to assume you do not have adequate expertise and ask those who do. One study that compared successful and unsuccessful microbiology labs found that the best labs had more group meetings at which researchers had to answer difficult questions from skeptical peers.
Actively seeking candid or negative comments was rare among Detroit’s executives. For example, nobody asked what might happen down the road when public and private leaders settled labor disputes with generous, underfunded pension liabilities.
Yet, leaders who focus on facts experience many positive outcomes. It improves their self-awareness and performance, as well as increases the positive perceptions their direct reports and peers have of the leader’s skills. It will do the same for you.
B. Learn from frequent and candid feedback
If you receive incomplete or inaccurate feedback following a decision that is subsequently implemented, it creates an erroneous sense of accomplishment, thereby hindering your efforts to know yourself and others. Perform rapid after-action reviews (AARs) following your important decisions to avoid this deception.
Your AARs gain be conducted in a brief, 20 minute meeting. After you or your team complete a project or important activity, discuss these six fundamental questions:
- What was the desired outcome?
- What was the actual outcome?
- Why the difference?
- What are the lessons learned?
- What will we do differently next time?
- With whom should we share our lessons?
The truth — not your opinion — sets you free.
C. Select the right standard
A senior executive once complained to me that the ratings he received from his CEO during his annual review were not as high as the ratings his peers were given. When I asked how he knew so much about his peers’ evaluations, he confessed that he actually had no data.
I suggested that he compare himself to an objective performance standard and invited him to take the XLM 360-leadership assessment. When he did, he was able to compare his self-evaluation to the perceptions of his boss, peers, and employees. These additional data points were enough to convince him that he had a few “development opportunities” to work on if he was to become a more effective executive.
Make sure you select the right standard when you evaluate your strengths and weaknesses, as well as those around you. (Incidentally, six months later, this executive’s XLM assessment follow-up showed significant improvement in two competencies. His delighted CEO has promoted him.)
III. Embrace ambiguity and paradox
Detroit’s leaders could only think in black and white terms as their future became foggier. They didn’t stretch when they felt pulled by competing demands (meet union needs and company financial goals, address the current budget shortfalls and stop the urban flight, tackle competing stakeholder demands collaboratively…) Listed below are three techniques you can apply when you are confronted by ambiguous issues.
A. Invite the rank and file
Author Stephen Ambrose observed that we knew more about the surface of the moon in 1969 than Lewis and Clark knew about the territory they were exploring in 1805. Whenever they were uncertain, Lewis and Clarke asked all 35 men of the Corps of Discovery (and later their Shoshone companion Sacajawea) for input. After carefully considering the various perspectives, the captains made the decision. How often do ask for input from those on the front lines?
B. Assign a devil’s advocate
President Kennedy divided his Cuban missile crisis team into two sub-groups and charged them with developing alternative approaches. In addition, Kennedy assigned the role of devil’s advocate to make sure that he and his team surfaced and debated every assumption and risk.
C. Analyze causes of the problem
Brainstorm a list of the possible causes of your problem. Use a rating scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being a slight possibility and 5 being a highly probable cause. In a column next to your ratings, write what you must do to investigate the cause further. Then, rate how much effort is required to conduct the investigation. Again, use a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being minimal effort and 5 being tremendous effort.
Next, weigh the probability of the cause and the amount of time required to investigate further and determine how you will proceed. Finally, review your analysis with the rank and file (and those who might disagree with your findings), and take action.
Many of Detroit’s political and corporate leaders discouraged innovation, discounted employee emotions, and disregarded diverse opinions (probably unintentionally and over a long time). Don’t travel their potholed road.
How can you adapt the ideas in this article to improve these critical competencies and take a few of the bumps out of your journey? Do you have other approaches to strength these skills? What has worked? What didn’t?
Keep stretching when you’re pulled,
Dave
[1] David Dunning, Chip Heath, and Jerry Suls, Flawed Self-Assessment: Implications for Health, Education, and the Workplace, Psychological Sciences in the Public Interest 5, no. 3 (2004), 69-106.
[1] Kevin Dunbar, How Scientists Really Reason: Scientific Reasoning in Real-World Laboratories, in Mechanisms of Insight, ed. R. J. Sternberg and J. Davidson. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1995, http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~dunbarlab/pubpdfs/DunbarStern.pdf.
[1] Robert Eichinger, Michael Lombardo, and David Ulrich, 100 Things You Need to Know. Lominger: Minneapolis, 2006, 256-258.
Dave Jensen helps leaders manage ambiguity, gain buy-in to any change, improve decision-making, and achieve difficult goals in today’s complex, competitive, and conflicting environment. For a FREE Chapter of his forthcoming book, The Executive’s Paradox – How to Stretch When You’re Pulled by Opposing Demands, visit http://davejensenonleadership.com/
