by Patty Azzarello

Awhile back I wrote a post about Debate Phase vs. Go Phase.

These labels help timid people raise issues when it’s helpful (Debate Phase) and then keep everyone focused on execution vs. talking more, when it is time to go. (Go Phase).

I got some questions about what to do when people undermine Go Phase with passive aggressive behaviors, when they continue to debate behind the scenes, expecting or trying to get the Debate Phase to re-open.

Let people know you are serious

The basic remedy here is that you need to let people know you are serious about the new work in GO phase.

The natural habit of an organization is not to change. People will always go back to what they were doing before if you are not explicit about making the change stick.

Behaviors don’t change for 2 key reasons

1. Dissenters. Passive aggressive people really don’t agree, and they are trying to do something different on purpose.

2. Reality strikes back. People with the right intentions cave when the reactive pressures of the day re-assert themselves, and they get nervous about doing something different or strategic.

As soon as the first person jumps ship and goes back to the old way of doing things, then others will think, “oh I guess we are not doing this new thing any more and I better get back to reacting to the emergencies like before, because that is what is valued. I believe this to be true because I can see people acting the old way, and I haven’t heard about the new thing in awhile”.

I recommend these strategies to my clients to avoid 3 common failures to predictable, on-time execution and to make change stick.

1. Track Progress Better

Have someone help you track progress.

Do you find yourself communicating strategy, assigning work and owners, and then absolutely hating doing the follow-up to keep checking in with everyone to see if things are on track? Or just being too busy with customers and other things to do a good job at this. When I was a CEO and GM, I know I struggled.

I was lucky early in my career to have someone on my team who was great at this. I assigned the work. He wrote it all down, he made sure I didn’t fail to assign specific owners or dates. Then he relentlessly followed up with everyone involved, and created tracking reports for how we were doing on finishing the things we committed to.

If you are not doing a good job tracking progress you will fail to execute.

If you are not good at this yourself, get someone on your staff to do this for you, or you will never get the important things done. I had a person on my staff to do this for me for the next 15 years of my career once I learned this lesson. I would have failed without it.

2. Communicate More

Have someone help you communicate.

Once you make your decisions and you are in GO phase, communicate a lot. Communicate more than you ever thought you could. Get bored to death with your message.

Talk about key initiatives in every communication, in every meeting, in every 1-1 discussion. Make sure that when people see you coming, they know you are going to want to hear about the key initiatives that are in GO phase.

If you are not communicating regularly, you will fail to execute.

If you are not in the habit of communicating regularly, or other things keep you too busy to focus on it, get someone to help you do this.
Have them put you on a schedule for email and group meetings.

Have them write up a straw-man of the communication. Have it include milestones and great examples of how people supported the new strategy, and questions for you to answer about what people are confused or concerned about.

Don’t ever go more than 1-month without revisiting and communicating your progress on key initiatives with everyone involved.

3. Set a good example

Don’t let sloppy behaviors get in the way

I have seen leaders who say they are serious about execution, that it’s the most important thing to them, but then they are late to their own staff meetings. Or they let missed deadlines come an go and never mention it or deal with it.

If you want your organization to be good at executing, you to set a good example for the quality of execution you expect with your own behaviors. And you need to hold people accountable when things don’t get done.

If you have people helping you track and communicate, it’s just a matter of your following through. (but you still have to be on time for meetings!)
What do you think?

What has delayed execution in your organization and what have you done about it?
Share your thoughts by leaving a comment!

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Patty Azzarello is an executive, author, speaker and CEO-advior. She works with executives where leadership and business challenges meet. Patty has held leadership roles in General Management, Marketing, Software Product Development and Sales, and has been successful in running large and small businesses. She writes at Patty Azzarello’s Business Leadership Blog. You’ll find her on Twitter as @PattyAzzarello. Also, check out her new book Rise…

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by Patty Azzarello

What can you do when demands pile up so high that you and your team are constantly over-booked and the work just keeps coming?

I always talk about how you need to rise above the tactical workload and be more strategic — but what do you do when it’s your boss that is causing the problem?

The disconnect

There is a built-in disconnect that I find very interesting:

When you are working in the business, generally speaking, your job is get work done.

But when you are running a business, generally speaking, your job is to go out into the world, learn things about the customers, the competition, and the market and figure out new stuff to do.

Then you come back all excited about what you’ve learned, and share your ideas with your team about how to improve the business — and they are exasperated. You see it as great new ideas. They see it as more work, changing direction, or fire-dirlls.

There will always be a disconnect between what the boss thinks up and what the organization can deliver.

The secret

Here is the secret. Your boss wants you to push back. Your boss is expecting you to think through the business strategy and the workload an offer advice – not to just try and do everything.

“Oh, no. She’s back…”

I know that when I would come back from a trip, my staff would brace themselves and think “Oh, no, she’s back. Now what? What else is she going to want us to do? We are already too busy, why does she keep piling it on?”

As the boss, I wanted my team to listen and internalize what I had learned. But I did not want them to treat all ideas and requests equally and immediately.

I did not want my team to just try and take on all the work and have it kill them. I did not want or expect them to do everything.

What I wanted was for them to catch all the work, analyze it, make judgements about business priorities and come back to me and negotiate.

Advise your Executive

Big Idea: You need to CATCH all the work, but not DO all the work.

I wanted them to stay focused on the strategic stuff we were working on, but be aware that key triggers were occurring in the market.

I wanted them to think it though and recommend to me how we could stage out all the work. How could we keep focused on the right strategic stuff, but then also come up with a way to prioritize the new ideas and take some of them on over time?

I wanted them to suggest ways of streamlining or stopping things to make room for something new.

I wanted them to debate with my about what is most important and why, and suggest how to re-work the plan to do the most important things first.

Who stands out?

The people who would come back to me with a thoughtful proposal for what to do, in what order, that would be good for the business, and do-able for the team were the ones that stood out as high performers.

The ones who didn’t just accept all my ideas and requests, and helped me think through the strategy and priority stood out as high performers.

The ones who tried to take on all the work and do everything, resulting in everything slipping were not so impressive.

The ones who simply ignored my inputs, kept their heads down, and did not step up to the strategic thinking and debate were not so impressive either.

How to negotiate the workload:

• Keep a list of everything your boss asks for
• Keep a list of the top strategic priorities you are working on
• Have regular meetings with your boss where you take out these lists
• Make recommendations about what to prioritize based on the context of business and the content of these two lists.

When you show your boss these lists several things happen:

• They get embarraseed not realizing they have aksed for so many things. When they see it spelled out right there in front of them, they can see it’s unreasonable.
• You win lots of credibility for keeping the list, catching everything, and not dropping anything. You make them comfortable that you’ve got it covered. They trust you.
• You can ask them “Is this still important”? You will find they have forgotten about several of the requests and have decided that others don’t matter anymore.
• You will realize that you are not beholden to everything on the list!
• You will be able to negotiate timelines and suggest priorities.

Your boss forgets

There is a tendency to treate all requests from the boss equally.

You need to resist this because they don’t intend them all equally.

They can seem equally excited or serious about a wide range of ideas. Some are vitally important, others are just musings. It’s hard to tell. They will often forget things that asked for, or change their mind without telling you.  You need to check. They need you to help them with their thinking.

You are being paid to judge and decide, not just to do everying you are told.

What do you think?

How have you pushed back successfully? How have you found ways to reinvent your workload to add more value. Please leave your thoughts in the comment box below.

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Patty Azzarello is an executive, author, speaker and CEO-advior. She works with executives where leadership and business challenges meet. Patty has held leadership roles in General Management, Marketing, Software Product Development and Sales, and has been successful in running large and small businesses. She writes at Patty Azzarello’s Business Leadership Blog. You’ll find her on Twitter as @PattyAzzarello. Also, check out her new book Rise…How to Be Really Successful at Work AND Like Your Life

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by Patty Azzarello

Organizations waste a lot of time communicating badly.

They fall into the trap of talking about things that have already been decided, or not talking when input is genuinely needed.

Problem 1. People don’t speak up when they should

Executives don’t know all the answers (even if they act like they do).

They rely on healthy debate from their team to get all the important information, opinions and concerns out on the table.
Without that, they can’t make a good business decision.

But the other side of the story is that people often feel punished for speaking up.
When they try to give feedback to the executives they get shot down. It feels like their inputs are unwelcome.

If this happens often enough they stop even trying. Why bother if my ideas are never acted on, and I only get grief for speaking up?

Problem 2. People keep talking when they shouldn’t

I have seen management teams waste huge amounts of time by revisiting decisions over and over again, questioning the direction and circling back for more data.

When this happens, the organization is slow to engage because they perceive the continued discussion to mean that the direction is still in question. So they wait for the answer instead of moving forward. Or they continue to add to the conversation, raising even more issues or data to help inform the decision.

SInce the executives think the decision has already been made, they get really frustrated that people are slow to act, not engaged, and stalling forward progress with more questions, inputs and arguments.

DEBATE or GO?

One of the best tools I have used to fix this is a simple model of Debate Phase vs. Go Phase. I make it clear that for every initiative or decision, there is DEBATE time and there is GO time.

Debate Time: Talking, Questions, Input, Arguments are welcome.

During debate time, I make it clear that I want to hear people’s opinions. I want to hear the arguments. I want everyone to fight for their point of view.

That’s how I get the best and most complete information.

Make a Clear Decision

After debate time is over, I make it clear who owns the decision, and make sure the decision gets made.

GO Time

Then I make it clear that we are in GO time. The decision is communicated and the action is officially kicked off. This is the time to engage in the work, not in the debate. The debate phase is over.

Expected Behavior & Trust

This simple frame and set of labels builds an atmosphere of higher trust because people can understand the rules of the game. They know when and how to participate without getting their head handed back to them.

You give them a chance to feel safe raising their opinions or arguing the point (which you need them to do) because by definition you are in debate phase.

By setting this structure, you can make it clear that during debate time, the expected and valued behavior is to speak up.

Then once you announce the decision has been made and make it clear that it’s GO time, people trust that you will stick to the decision, and that the expected and valued behavior is action, not more talking.

How do you get your team to decide and move forward?

Leave your ideas in the comment box below!

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Patty Azzarello is an executive, author, speaker and CEO-advior. She works with executives where leadership and business challenges meet. Patty has held leadership roles in General Management, Marketing, Software Product Development and Sales, and has been successful in running large and small businesses. She writes at Patty Azzarello’s Business Leadership Blog. You’ll find her on Twitter as @PattyAzzarello. Also, check out her new book Rise…How to Be Really Successful at Work AND Like Your Life

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by Patty Azzarello

Stand-out Leaders

What makes the top leaders stand out it is not their skills, or experience.

Once you get to compete for the top jobs, everyone has impressive skills and lots of relevant experience. So how do you differentiate?

It’s also not just about execution.

Execution is critical, for sure. Yes, you need to be able to set a compelling agenda and deliver on it, but again, that’s entry stakes — it doesn’t make you great.

Where is the greatness?

The higher up you go, your value as a leader is associated more with who you are as a person, than with your skills.
I’ve noticed that there are 3 traits that the best leaders have:

1. They are who they are
2. The communicate well
3. They pick the right people and make them great

1. Great Leaders are who they are

They are people whose words and actions match what they genuinely think and feel on the inside. This is sadly pretty rare.

Egos, agendas, fear, and politics all pull on us to say and do things that we don’t quite believe, but serve to please others, smooth things out, or defend ourselves.  Most people cave in to this pressure.

The best leaders stick to their values

They say and do what they really feel and think.  They bring the core of who they really are to work, and they talk about what really matters to them.  When you see a leader behaving this way it obvious that they are being authentic.   It’s not hard to spot.  You can’t fake it.

You can fake opinions or positions, but you can’t fake authenticity!

This authenticity builds trust and and makes people eager to follow

2. They communicate well

The best leaders communicate well, consistently, often, and to everyone.  They invite people in.  They let people know what is going on.  And to the first point, they tell people what they really think.

One-to-one communication

Great leaders listen.

They don’t just go through the act of listening, they listen with active curiosity because they are genuinely interested in learning the other person’s point of view.

Execs that go through the act of listening, but don’t actually respect the people they are listening to, nor really care to understand  the opinions they are hearing, may get some leadership points for the show, but they are not connecting and they are not learning.

Group communications

A steady heartbeat of communications from the top lets people know that you are there, and that you are engaged.  What you say is almost less important than the fact that you commit yourself to saying it on a regular schedule.

Communicate every week or two without fail. You will score huge leadership points with steady, quality communications.

When people feel in the loop, they are much more motivated, less worried, and more productive, and they consider you to be a better leader than someone they seldom hear from.

Persuasiveness

Great leaders are persuasive.

You don’t need to be a world class public speaker to be a good communicator.  You need to understand people and how to persuade them.  That is why listening and learning helps.

Persuasive communications light the path you are asking people to travel, and sell the reasons why they should go with you.  The best leaders do this all the time.

3. They pick the right people and make them great

The right people

There is nothing more important to effective leadership than to build a team underneath you that is so capable, that you can free yourself up to solve higher order problems.

I will repeat that for emphasis. This is really key!

There is nothing more important to effective leadership than to build a team underneath you that is so capable, that you can free yourself up to solve higher order problems.

Don’t cover for a weak team

If you are personally stepping in to do the work because you have weak spots (people on your team not capable or motivated enough to step up to do more) then you are holding yourself back as a leader.  And you are failing to deliver enough value to your business.

Make them Great

Hire stars, give them big work, support them, and let them excel.  Help them be amazing.  Create an environment where the team works really well, and the individuals can grow to solve bigger problems over time too.

Why this works

I used to wonder why I was so lucky to always have such remarkable, talented, experienced people want to work for me.  What I finally realized is that it was two things:

First, I picked the right people for the right jobs so they could work where they have natural strengths and really thrive in their work. And second, I gave them the room and support to stretch beyond their current capabilities.

So the magic of why they wanted to work for me was that they felt respected and they could be proud of their work. They got to personally achieve more than they knew they could, and got recognized for it.

People like to be amazing and they like to be recognized for it.

In contrast, other bosses did not respect and maximize their gifts and give them the opportunity and support to be amazing.

This feels almost too good to be true, because you end up getting the best people and they move mountains for you.  And all you need to do is show them trust and respect and get things out of their way.

I guess the hard part comes along if you feel threatened by great people.

What do you think?

What do you admire about your favorite leaders? Leave your thoughts in the comment box below.
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Patty Azzarello works with executives where leadership and business challenges meet. She has held leadership roles in General Management, Marketing, Software Product Development and Sales, and has been successful in running large and small businesses. She writes at Patty Azzarello’s Business Leadership Blog. You’ll find her on Twitter as @PattyAzzarello

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