RealTime Leadership

“Get a feedback loop and listen to it. … When people give you feedback, cherish it and use it.”

- Randy Pausch (1960 – 2008) was a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and a best-selling author, who achieved worldwide fame for his speech The Last Lecture, after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and having only a few months to live.

Most people, by now, know the story of Randy Pausch and his Last Lecture.    The book was a best-seller and the video of the lecture itself has been viewed by over 11 million people on YouTube.  The entire lecture is a powerful and moving presentation on achieving your dreams and living a fullfilling life. 

Being that I’m in the busines of helping organizations develop leaders, I found the lecture fascinating on another level – namely the insight it provides us into one man’s struggle to achieve his goals, to continually grow and develop as a person and to live a happy life.  The popularity of the book and the lecture lead me to believe that the insights shared by Randy do not apply to him only, and are really fundamental to the human condition.  We can learn from these insights and apply them to leadership development programs at our organizations.

One thing that Randy discusses is the importance of feedback.  During his childhood and into his college days, Randy had little use for feedback.  Like many of us, he didn’t initially see the value in feedback.  But at some point in our lives and careers we hit what Randy calls a “brick wall.”  This is a barrier that temporarily prevents us from achieving our goals.  Randy has a great attitude about these barries; ” Brick walls are there for a reason. They give us a chance to show how badly we want something.”  Well, in order to break through these brick walls, we often need feedback from others to tell us what’s missing or what we need to do differently.  During graduate school, a professor did just that for Randy, helping him to see how his attitude was holding him back.

Through the course of his life, Randy came to appreciate feedback so much so that he would seek out what he called “feedback loops.”  These are processes that give us the feedback and information we need to continually improve and develop as leaders. 

Contrast Randy’s attitude and feelings about feedback with what we sometimes encounter with leaders who are receiving 360-feedback.   Through our leadership development practice at RealTime Performance, we deliver thousands of 360-feedback reports every year to companies like Emerson, Nordstrom, FedEx, Chubb and Johnson & Johnson.  Although many leaders do view 360 as a positive excercise, there is always that group of managers who perceive it to be a negative experience right from the start.

These employees mistakenly consider receiving feedback an unpleasant exercise to be avoided if possible and minimized if absolutely necessary.  Successful leaders like Randy understand that feedback is a special gift because it is something we can’t give ourselves.   We can go out and buy ourselves a watch or new clothes, but we can’t give ourselves the knowledge of how we are perceived by others unless we ask. 

Furthermore, the people who invest their time to provide us with feedback are often taking on a risk.  When someone delivers feedback, they risk damaging the relationship, especially if the feedback is critical or hits on a touchy subject.  Feedback comes at a price to the feedback-giver as well.  That’s why, feedback truly is a gift.

As we prepare to celebrate Thanksgiving tomorrow with our families, now is an appropriate time to take account of the many things to be thankful for at work.  As a leader, what comes to mind for me is the debt and gratitude I have for the people I have the honor to work with everyday.  So how do I, as a leader thank the many people around me who not only contribute to my success, but more importantly to the success of the organization?  One way is to simply say “thank you.”  But another more powerful and sustainable way to say thank you is to treat people with respect and acknowledge and encourage their full commitment and contribution throughout the year.

There are times, however, when the pressures of work kick in and deadlines need to be met, and it is easy to slip back into the mode of barking orders.  It is times like this when I try to remember a simple rule; “Treat your people as if they were volunteers.”

I did not come up with this rule, rather it was given to me as a “gift” by Vice President at a major global company, who I was interviewing for a leadership development project.  When I asked this individual to characterize his approach to leadership, he summed it up this way;

“In my mind, I like to lead people as if they were volunteers.  The fact is, the great people who work for me, the high-performers,   can leave at any time.  Their skills and expertise are in demand.  If I don’t lead them and treat them as volunteers, all I get is what I ask of them.  But if I ask them what they think and how they approach a situation, I get their full input, energy and passion.”

So let’s be thankful for the people who work for us this Thanksgiving, and let’s acknowledge the gift of their presence by treating them like the volunteers they truly are.  Happy Thanksgiving!

Earlier this month, while catching a flight home to Seattle from New York City after a long week on the road meeting with clients, I made it to my seat, sat down and breathed a huge sigh of relief.  For a moment, it was bliss.  I knew in a few hours I would be home to see my family.  But then the slow, creeping realization set in that my email in-box was overloaded with hundreds of emails I was unable to get to while on the road.  Furthermore, I had five voicemails on my cell phone and probably more waiting for me on my office voicemail, which I had not yet checked that day.  Although I was working hard all week, the work flowing through my inbox did not stop.

Just as the visions of un-read email set in, and the feeling of dread started to take over, I was greeted by the gentleman in the adjacent seat, who by good fortune was Paul Burton, an expert on time management and productivity.  For the next five hours, Paul diligently and patiently coached me on his method for managing the flow of work that was beginning to overwhelm me.  Together, we opened my Outlook and he began to change and configure my settings.  The alert that went off every time an email arrived, gone.  The preview pane that allowed me to read the first few lines of an email (and thereby saving me time?), gone.   The “to-do”  list scribbled with paper-and-pen in my notebook, gone and replaced by the Task feature in Outlook. 

Next he took me to a view in Outlook that showed my calendar for Monday and all my tasks that were due.  My schedule for Monday was ugly, back to back phone calls and meetings.  Paul said, “You have train wreck coming on Monday and you didn’t even know it.  But that’s okay, we’ll deal with it.”

As our plane made its way across the country, Paul and I went through my entire email in-box, quickly categorizing email in one of four categories; Trash, Archive, Reading and Work.   The Trash and Archive items were promptly eliminated or filed away, while the Reading and Work where scheduled in the future using the built-in reminder system in Outlook (of which I was vaguely aware but completely intimidated by).   The very last email in my in-box was from April, a request from a colleague about one of our products.   Who knows what sales opportunity was lost or what credibility was eroded by my inability to reply to a simple request?

Paul’s method for time management is called QuiteSpacing, and it requires a fundamental shift in how we think about work.  Whereas before, I was constantly writing and re-writing to-do lists, since implementing the QuiteSapcing techniques, I have effectively managed the flow of work as it streams in through email, voice mail and my physical in-box.  Before I was managing my work like the old Ford production facilities, now I’m managing work-flow like the Lean Toyota Production system. 

Once my inbox was cleared, I felt a sense of freedom and I was able to focus on the one or two very important work items I needed to complete before Monday.   When I arrived home to my family,  insted of thinking about the work that was piled up, I was able to focus my attention on my wife and kids and be fully present for them.

Since the arrival of the Internet in the early 1990s, the amount of information bombarding busy executives has steadily increased.  Think about the distractions that hit us every day; email, voicemail, mobile phones, blackberrys, blogs, twitter, meetings and conference calls just to name a few.  As this revolution in work management has been developing, unfortunately the tools, technologies and skills required to manage this information have simply not kept up.  Overtime, we have developed habits, most of them bad, for how we deal with information. 

The personal transformation I have gone through over the past few weeks has allowed me to look at the field of leadership development from a slightly different perspective.   For example, how can we expect leaders to have the prescense of mind and the clarity of focus required to truly coach and develop their direct reports if they are completely overwhelmed by electronic information and requests?  In the past, the answer to this question was to send executives to “time mangement” training along with their soft skills training, but unfortunately, so much of what passes for time management training today is right out of the 1980s.  We don’t need help with our file-o-fax, we need help with our in-box.  Outlook has incredibly usefull features for information management, but most of us are unaware or simply do not know how they work.  The irony is, we think we’re too busy to take the time to learn and actually change our habits.  What I have come to realize is; how leaders deal with electronic requests is integral to the competencies of delegation, feedback, performance management, execution, networking; really every aspect of leadership.

If we want our leaders to truly breakthrough the constant noise and distraction of modern business, and transform into true people-leaders, we need to quiet their space and give them the freedom to  be themsleves.  And to effectively do that, they need to acquire the skills to effeciently manage the flow of electronic work and requests that define the modern office.

In October 2006, Netflix announced a competition to significantly improve the recommendation system currently used at the popular movie rental site.   Teams and individuals were competing for a $1 million prize.   Last week, an article in the New York Times reported that two finalist teams have been selected and a winner will be declared in September.

There was no shortage of entries for this competition, so what was it that contributed to the success of these two teams?  When pressed, these teams did not credit some brilliant insight, rather they pointed to the power of teamwork and collaboration. The article notes:

“…the formula for success was to bring together people with complimentary skills and combine different methods of problem-solving.”

One of the leading teams is from AT&T Research and is comprised of statisticians, machine learning experts  and computer engineers from four different countries.  The other leading team is actually an conglomeration of over 30 people called the Ensemble, the result of team combinations as the contest progressed.  It turns out, as more and more teams combined their best ideas, the solution got better and better.  One of the contestants, David Weiss, says:

“the surprise was that the collaborative approach works so well, that trying all the algorithms, coding them putting the together far exceeded our expectations.”

And Weiss might add that the combined solution worked better than any one team’s approach (with the possible exception of AT&T Research) and certainly better than any one individual’s approach. 

This kind of competition, and the incredible innovation it is driving for Netflix is the tangible result of several trends that we, in the leadership development community, must be aware of and adapt to:

1. Technology enables greater collaboration.  The kind of collaboration and teamwork required to conduct a competition like this is only possible because of the rapid changes in technology.  It is much easier and simple now for teams to work remotely and share information in real-time.   As Web 2.0 tools become more ubiquitous, the successful organizations will be the ones that are able to rapidly build high performing teams in a way that is faster and more effective than the competition.
2. Diversity of thought and perspective leads to the best solution.  In the past, diversity has been viewed by many in our field as a compliance issue.  What the Netflix competition highlights is that diversity of thought and perspective is a crucial ingredient for any team or organization that is attempting to solve problems and find optimal solutions.  This idea, although not new, is thoroughly explored in the book The Difference by Scott Page.
3. Successful companies manage talent both internally and externally.  Traditional talent management is about attracting and developing talent within the organization, but that is starting to change with the advent of crowdsourcing.  When you think about it, what Netflix has accomplished here is the successful outsourcing of an incredibly complex research and development problem.  From a talent management perspective, we need to give Netflix credit for attracting and motivating some of the best minds in the world to work on their problem, and the net investment was only $1 million.   In return Netflix has gained two great solutions and a lot of free publicity.   Motivating  talent outside of your organization to solve difficult and complex problems is a growing trend and a major shift in how organizations have traditionally viewed leadership and talent management.