the operating plan

The strategy process defines where a business wants to go, and the people process defines who's going to get it there. The operating plan provides the path for those people. It breaks long-term output into short-term targets. Meeting those here-and-now targets forces decisions to be made and integrated across the organization, both initially and in response to changes in business conditions. It puts reality behind the numbers. The operating plan is not budgeting for "We did better than last year." Such budgeting looks into the rearview mirror to set its goals; an operating plan looks forward to the hows.

Ram Charan 

Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan with Charles Burck. 2002. Crown Business, NY, NY. p. 226, 227

taking accountability for culture

I think it's about time that organizations and their senior leadership really start taking accountability for their culture. There has been a war for talent for years now, but it’s only getting worse. It’s easy for the finger to be pointed towards recruiting or human resources, or towards broken processes or compensation and benefits not being correct, but overall, for many organizations the culture of leadership needs to seriously be addressed. Research has shown for years that money is not what motivates most people. It definitely contributes to attraction and retention of course, but one of the biggest drivers of retention is leadership and accountability within a culture. Until leaders start turning inwards and reflecting on their own behaviors, stop leading from a place of their own fears and insecurities, start setting expectations upfront with employees, have open, direct and honest conversations, address issues immediately, focus on removing roadblocks for employees to get their jobs done instead of creating more roadblocks, and ultimately be objective enough to support their development and career progression (including giving the tough feedback with their best interest at heart), then the revolving door of talent will continue to become an even larger problem for organizations.

Kerrie Campbell

Is Quiet Quitting and Quiet Firing really a new phenomenon? LinkedIn Article. September 10, 2022.

what other decisions can they handle?

[GM CEO Mary Barra said,] “A lot gets set aside when you’re going through a restructuring process, so it was an opportunity to really define our culture. So, brainstorming with the HR department, I said let’s change the dress code. Let’s make it ‘dress appropriately.’

But the HR department ironically posed my first hurdle. They started arguing with me, saying, it can be ‘dress appropriately’ on the surface, but in the employee manual it needs to be a lot more detailed. They put in specifics, like, ‘Don’t wear T-shirts that say inappropriate things, or statements that could be misinterpreted.'” 

“What does inappropriate, in the context of a T-shirt, even mean,” she asked the audience, half-jokingly. ”So I finally had to say, ‘No, it’s two words, that’s what I want.’ What followed was really a window into the company for me.”

After replacing GM’s 10-page dress code treatise with a two-word appeal, Barra received a scathing email from a senior-level director. ”He said, ‘You need to put out a better dress policy, this is not enough.’ So I called him—and of course that shook him a little bit. And I asked him to help me understand why the policy was inept.”

The director explained that occasionally, some people on his team had to deal with government officials on short notice, and had to be dressed appropriately for that. 

“Okay, why don’t you talk to your team,” Barra replied. ”He was an established leader at GM, responsible for a pretty important part of the company, with a multimillion-dollar budget. He called me back a few minutes later, saying, ‘I talked to the team, we brainstormed, and we agreed that the four people who occasionally need to meet with government officials will keep a pair of dress pants in their locker. Problem solved.'”

“What I realized is that you really need to make sure your managers are empowered—because if they cannot handle ‘dress appropriately,’ what other decisions can they handle? And I realized that often, if you have a lot of overly prescriptive policies and procedures, people will live down to them,” she said.

“But if you let people own policies themselves—especially at the first level of people supervision—it helps develop them. It was an eye-opening experience, but I now know that these small little things changed our culture powerfully. They weren’t the only factor, but they contributed significantly.”

Leah Fessler

"GM’s dress code is only two words" by Leah Fessler. Quartz. April 3, 2018.

some might call it character

IQ offers little to explain the different destinies of people with roughly equal promises, schooling, and opportunity. When ninety-five Harvard students from the classes of the 1940s – a time when people with a wider spread of IQ were at Ivy League schools than is presently the case – were followed into middle age, the men with the highest test scores in college were not particularly successful compared to their lower-scoring peers in terms of salary, productivity, or status in their field. Nor did they have the greatest life satisfaction, nor the most happiness with friendships, family, and romantic relationships.

A similar follow-up in middle age was done with 450 boys, most sons of immigrants, two thirds from families on welfare, who grew up in Sommerville, Massachusetts, at the time a “blighted slim” a few blocks from Harvard. A third had IQs below 90. But again IQ had little relationship to how well they had done at work or in the rest of their lives; for instance, 7 percent of men with IQs under 80 were unemployed for ten or more years, but so were 7 percent of men with IQs over 100. To be sure, there was a general link (as there always is) between IQ and socioeconomic level at age forty-seven. But childhood abilities such as being able to handle frustrations, control emotions, and get on with other people made the greater difference. 

Consider also data from an ongoing study of eighty-one valedictorians and salutatorians from the 1981 class in Illinois high schools. All, of course, had the highest grade point averages in their schools. But while they continued to achieve well in college, getting excellent grades, by their late twenties they had climbed to only average levels of success. Ten years after graduating from high school, only one in four were at the highest level of young people of comparable age in their chosen profession, and many were doing much less well.

Karen Arnold, professor of education at Boston University, one of the researchers tracking the valedictorians, explains, “I think we’ve discovered the ‘dutiful’ – people who know how to achieve in the system. But valedictorians struggle as surely as we all do. To know that a person is a valedictorian is to know only that he or she is exceedingly good at achievement as measured by grades. It tells you nothing about how they react to the vicissitudes of life.”

And that is the problem: academic intelligence offers virtually no preparation for the turmoil – or opportunity – life’s vicissitudes ring. Yet even though a high IQ is no guarantee of prosperity, prestige, or happiness in life, our schools and our culture fixate on academic abilities, ignoring emotional intelligence, a set of traits – some might call it character – that also matters immensely for our personal destiny. Emotional life is a domain that, as surely as math or reading, can be handled with greater or lesser skill, and requires its unique set of competencies. And how adept a person is at those is crucial to understanding why one person thrives in life while another, of equal intellect, dead-ends: emotional aptitude is a meta-ability, determining how well we can use whatever other skills we have, including raw intellect.

Daniel Goleman

Emotional Intelligence. Random House LLC, 2006. 358 pages, p.35,36

hiring the right people

The best employee development practices start with hiring the right people in the first place – the people who share the firm’s values. Along the way, you’ll find people who don’t meet that standard: let them go sooner rather than later.

While that may sound harsh – maybe even the opposite of taking care of your people – careful hiring and disciplined termination are vital to building an organization where trust is highly valued. You're not showing respect to your employees if, through your inaction, they're forced to put up with co-workers who don't carry their own load or share the company’s values.

Joel Peterson, Professor of Management at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

In A Great Business, People Trump Things. Forbes Magazine. 10/17/2012