the mere urgency effect

Another motive for meetings is what some scholars call the Mere Urgency effect, in which we engage in tasks—such as a meeting where each person recites what they’re working on, whether others need that information or not—to help us feel like we are accomplishing something tangible. If your spouse asks you, “What did you do at work today?” and you answer, “I had six meetings,” this might be why.

Arthur C. Brooks

"Meetings are Miserable," The Atlantic. November 17, 2022

the eight step process of successful change

 Set the Stage

1. Create a Sense of Urgency

Help others see the need for change and the importance of acting immediately.

2. Pull together the Guiding Team

Make sure there is a powerful group guiding the change – one with leadership skills, credibility, communications ability, authority, analytical skills, and a sense of urgency. 

Decide What to Do

3. Develop the Change Vision and Strategy

Clarify how the future will be different from the past, and how you can make that future a reality.

Make It Happen

4. Communicate for Understanding and Buy In.

Make sure as many others as possible understand and accept the vision and the strategy.

5. Empower Others to Act.

Remove as many barriers as possible so that those who want to make the vision a reality can do so.

6. Produce Short-Term Wins.

Create some visible, unambiguous successes as soon as possible.

7. Don’t Let Up.

Press harder and faster after the first successes. Be relentless with initiating change after change until the vision is a reality.

Make It Stick

8. Create a New Culture.

Hold on to the new ways of behaving, and make sure they succeed, until they become strong enough to replace old traditions.

John Kotter

Our Iceberg Is Melting: Changing and Succeeding Under Any Conditions. St. Martin's Press. 2005. p.130, 131

be energizing, not energetic

Here is the paradox: You can actually speed things up by slowing down. There is no doubt that being energetic is contagious and therefore a short-term source of momentum. But if you lead by example all the time, your batteries will eventually run dry. You risk being drained at the vey point when your leadership is needed the most. Conveying a sense of urgency is useful, but an excess of urgency suffocates team development and reflection at the very point it is needed. “Code red” should be left for real emergencies... with [a] co-drive mindset, [we need] to widen [our] sights and recognize and reward people who are good at energizing others. Energizing behavior is unselfish, generous, and praises, not just progress, but personality too.

If you lead by beating the drum, setting tight deadlines, and burning the midnight oil, your team becomes overly dependent on your presence. Sustainable speed is achievable only if the team propels itself without your presence. Jim Collins wrote that great leaders don’t waste time telling time, they build clocks.

Self-propulsion comes from letting go of control, resisting the urge to make detailed corrections and allowing for informal leadership to flourish. As Ron Heifetz advocates, true leadership is realizing that you need to “give the work back” instead of being the hero who sweeps in and solves everybody’s problems.

Resist the urge to take the driver’s seat and allow [yourself] to take the passenger seat instead. Leading from the side-line, not the front line will change [perspectives]. Instead of looking at the road and navigating traffic... monitor how the driver is actually doing and what needs to improve. In [your] mind...fire [yourself] — momentarily — and see what happens to [the] team when [they are set] free, [taking] charge instead of looking to [leaders] for answers, deadlines and decisions.

Merete Wedell-Wedellsborg

"Help Your Team Do More Without Burning Out" Harvard Business Review. Oct. 15, 2018

are you undercommunicating?

Transformation is impossible unless hundreds or thousands of people are willing to help, often to the point of making short-term sacrifices. Employees will not make sacrifices, even if they are unhappy with the status quo, unless they believe that useful change is possible. Without credible communication, and a lot of it, the hearts and minds of the troops are never captured....

Executives who communicate well incorporate messages into their hour-by-hour activities. In a routine discussion about a business problem, they talk about how proposed solutions fit (or don’t fit) into the bigger picture. In a regular performance appraisal, they talk about how the employee’s behavior helps or undermines the vision. In a review of a division’s quarterly performance, they talk not only about the numbers but also about how the division’s executives are contributing to the transformation. In a routine Q&A with employees at a company facility, they tie their answers back to renewal goals.

In more successful transformation efforts, executives use all existing communication channels to broadcast the vision. They turn boring and unread company newsletters into lively articles about the vision. They take ritualistic and tedious quarterly management meetings and turn them into exciting discussions of the transformation. They throw out much of the company’s generic management education and replace it with courses that focus on business problems and the new vision. The guiding principle is simple: use every possible channel, especially those that are being wasted on nonessential information.

Perhaps even more important, most of the executives I have known in successful cases of major change learn to “walk the talk.” They consciously attempt to become a living symbol of the new corporate culture. This is often not easy. A 60-year-old plant manager who has spent precious little time over 40 years thinking about customers will not suddenly behave in a customer-oriented way. But I have witnessed just such a person change, and change a great deal. In that case, a high level of urgency helped. The fact that the man was a part of the guiding coalition and the vision-creation team also helped. So did all the communication, which kept reminding him of the desired behavior, and all the feedback from his peers and subordinates, which helped him see when he was not engaging in that behavior.

Communication comes in both words and deeds, and the latter are often the most powerful form. Nothing undermines change more than behavior by important individuals that is inconsistent with their words.

John P. Kotter

"Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail" Harvard Business Review. May-June 1995

a sense of urgency

Most successful change efforts begin when some individuals or some groups start to look hard at a company’s competitive situation, market position, technological trends, and financial performance. They focus on the potential revenue drop when an important patent expires, the five-year trend in declining margins in a core business, or an emerging market that everyone seems to be ignoring. They then find ways to communicate this information broadly and dramatically, especially with respect to crises, potential crises, or great opportunities that are very timely. This first step is essential because just getting a transformation program started requires the aggressive cooperation of many individuals. Without motivation, people won’t help and the effort goes nowhere....

A paralyzed senior management often comes from having too many managers and not enough leaders. Management’s mandate is to minimize risk and to keep the current system operating. Change, by definition, requires creating a new system, which in turn always demands leadership. Phase one in a renewal process typically goes nowhere until enough real leaders are promoted or hired into senior-level jobs....

In a few of the most successful cases, a group has manufactured a crisis. One CEO deliberately engineered the largest accounting loss in the company’s history, creating huge pressures from Wall Street in the process. One division president commissioned first-ever customer-satisfaction surveys, knowing full well that the results would be terrible. He then made these findings public. On the surface, such moves can look unduly risky. But there is also risk in playing it too safe: when the urgency rate is not pumped up enough, the transformation process cannot succeed and the long-term future of the organization is put in jeopardy.

When is the urgency rate high enough? From what I have seen, the answer is when about 75% of a company’s management is honestly convinced that business-as-usual is totally unacceptable. Anything less can produce very serious problems later on in the process.

John P. Kotter

"Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail" Harvard Business Review. May-June 1995

what has changed with leadership in the past 50 years?

Very Little.

Tom Peters is a business and leadership legend widely known for his historical bestseller, In Search of Excellence, which has been called "the greatest business book of all time" by Bloomsbury Publishing.... 

In an interview with Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, Peters didn't mince words on the current state of leadership, saying that "nothing has changed in 50 years, including the maddening fact that all too often a business strategy is inspiring, but the execution mania is largely AWOL."

In his latest work, The Excellence Dividend, Peters collects everything he's learned in his 35-plus years of writing and speaking on the best practices for businesses and their leaders. He also puts the finger on the most common offenses people in management roles have made--and keep making. 

1. Inability to execute well.
2. Seeing 'excellence' strictly as long-term strategy.
3. Failure to develop a thriving culture.
4. Failure to put employees first.
5. Failure to listen.
6. Ignoring women as potential leaders and consumers

"Poor cross-functional coordination and communication is the principal element in the delay of everything," Peters says. If your organization's health is suffering due to internal conflict and too many obstacles in the way of progress, leaders aren't actively working together in a coordinated way to effectively execute.

How do you interpret excellence in leadership or business? Most leaders think "strategy," "planning" and "vision" are pathways to achieve excellence "out there." But Peters says managers fail to capitalize on immediate excellence--how we connect, listen, inspire, and admit mistakes on a human level to employees or customers. "Excellence is conventionally seen as a long-term aspiration. I disagree. Excellence is the next five minutes," says Peters.

"CEO job No. 1 is setting -- and micro-nourishing one day, one hour, one minute at a time -- an effective people-truly-first, innovate-or-die, excellence-or-bust corporate culture," Peters says. 

Peters says excellent customer experiences rely entirely on excellent employee experiences because it's the employee who makes or breaks the customer connection. This means leaders must see extreme value in them and pour into their career growth and development. "Training is any firm's single most important capital investment," adds Peters.

I've often written that effective communication isn't just about talking; it is also the ability to listen and understand what's happening on the other side of the fence. That's what great leaders do. "I always write 'LISTEN' on the back of my hand before a meeting," Peters says. 

On a more strategy level, Peters says "women buy everything" and make up a majority of consumer and business purchasing decisions, yet are largely underserved. But his conclusion hints at the underrepresentation of women in the C-suite: "One indicator of readiness to embrace this colossal women's market opportunity comes from conducting what I call a 'squint test.' One, look at a photograph of your exec team. Two, squint. Three: Does the composition of the team look more or less like the composition of the market you aim to serve?" Now there's a reality check.

Marcel Schwantes

"6 Things The Smartest Managers Already Know But Keep Getting Wrong" Inc.com. Oct. 8, 2018

objectives and key results

LinkedIn manages its teams using a task-tracking system called ‘Objectives and Key Results,’ abbreviated as “OKRs.” First developed by Andy Grove at Intel, the strategy was popularized by John Doerr from Kleiner Perkins. Today, this shorthand is all over Silicon Valley. But it’s easy to dismiss a corporate-sounding acronym as just another leadership trick for distilling people’s work. Nothing about OKRs sounds inspiring. It’s how LinkedIn used them that helped employees connect more to the company’s collective mission.

In Grove’s famous manual “High Output Management,” he introduces OKRs by answering two simple questions: (1) Where do I want to go? (2) How will I know I’m getting there? In essence, what are my objectives, and what key results do I need to keep tabs on to make sure I’m making progress? When you think about it, these questions are very personal, speaking to the core of how people spend their days. It makes sense that everyone within an organization should have their own OKRs every quarter. The important thing is tying these individual OKRs to team OKRs and, ultimately, organizational OKRs. This alignment packs power and efficiency.

Understanding the personal nature and motivating potential of OKRs, Weiner defines them more broadly. They should be about “something you want to accomplish over a specific period of time that leans toward a stretch goal rather than a stated plan. It’s something where you want to create greater urgency, greater mindshare.” For all these reasons, OKRs should become more important the more senior an employee becomes. When you’re in a leadership position, “You are sending the signal to the rest of the organization that ‘this matters,’” Weiner says.

OKRs should definitely not be is easily achievable. Low expectations may seem to yield glowing results, but they eventually stall people, teams and companies in the long run. OKRs shouldn’t be too malleable either. They’re supposed to be quarterly beacons, not shifting from week to week. Along these lines, Weiner prefers that his team members set three to five OKRs for themselves in any given quarter. Anything more than that has the potential to distract from what really needs to get done.

Interview with Jeff Weiner, Linkedin CEO

"The Management Framework that Propelled LinkedIn to a $20 Billion Company" First Round Review. 8/2/2013

simplify and focus

Today, most assume that Xbox was somehow destined to be a winner, but having been Microsoft’s chief Xbox officer, I am here to report that its early years were much more like a ship on the rocks than a sloop cutting through the waves.... As I reflect on surviving the near-death Xbox experience, which we turned around using a strategy process called the 3P Framework to create Xbox 360... I would humbly suggest the following...

Simplify and focus. When things are going badly, there is rarely one obvious problem. In fact, the issues are usually more like a giant knot of yarn, rich in complexity with threads running randomly through the organization. To untie the knot, you can’t pull on every part of it at once. Instead, you have to reduce your activities to a few focused efforts that are both urgent and important. As you begin pulling on those areas, more clarity will emerge, and logical next steps will appear. The secret to solving complex problems is actually radical simplicity.

Robbie Bach

"The Big Leadership Lessons I Learned Almost Failing To Create Xbox For Microsoft" Forbes. 11/5/2015

simplistic reductionism

[T]here is [a] temptation which we must especially guard against: the simplistic reductionism which sees only good or evil... The contemporary world, with its open wounds which affect so many of our brothers and sisters, demands that we confront every form of polarization which would divide it into these two camps. We know that in the attempt to be freed of the enemy without, we can be tempted to feed the enemy within. To imitate the hatred and violence of tyrants and murderers is the best way to take their place. That is something which you, as a people, reject.

Our response must instead be one of hope and healing, of peace and justice.... Our efforts must aim at restoring hope, righting wrongs, maintaining commitments, and thus promoting the well-being of individuals and of peoples. We must move forward together, as one, in a renewed spirit of fraternity and solidarity, cooperating generously for the common good.

The challenges facing us today call for a renewal of that spirit of cooperation, which has accomplished so much good throughout the history of the United States. The complexity, the gravity and the urgency of these challenges demand that we pool our resources and talents, and resolve to support one another, with respect for our differences and our convictions of conscience.

Pope Francis (Jorge Mario Bergoglio)

Speech given to Congress. Time Magazine. Washington D.C. 9/24/2015