Victor Prince's Blog, page 9

How to Manage a "Steamroller" on Your Team

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Hank joined your team six months ago. You hired him because his résumé was great and he projected high levels of competence and confidence in the interview. He was clearly the best candidate for the job. The only warning flag you saw was from your calls to Hank's references. While they confirmed the glowing results on his résumé you sensed reticence on their part. You heard their answers trail off leaving an unsaid “but...” hanging at the end. You attributed it to your inner pessimist looking to find flaw with the outstanding candidate you were hiring.

 

Hank got off to a fast start once hired, immediately producing great results and even instituting new, best practices he learned from prior experiences. However, within a few months, every single one of his peers mentioned Hank was challenging to work with and creating problems for them. They said he tended to barrel along and do his work without coordinating with others. What you saw as confidence in his interview came across to others as arrogance and an unwillingness to listen. The angst and problems he produced eroded your team’s morale and performance and piled stress on you. You found yourself making excuses for his behavior and soothing hurt feelings. You got the sense the frustration your team felt toward Hank began to apply to you as well. Hank was performing like a “Steamroller” high-cost producer- he produced results, but also produced a lot of unnecessary cost in his wake. (Think you might have a "Steamroller" on your team? Take this online quiz.)

 

How to Lead a "Steamroller"

The goal with Steamrollers is to “Reduce Friction.” You want to continue getting great results from them while reducing the toll their actions take on others.

 

Step 1 - Begin by making sure you understand the costs your Steamroller is incurring. Reach out to key stakeholders for feedback about the Steamroller’s bad behavior. Ask them to provide you specific examples of negative situations they’ve created. Ask feedback providers to explain not only the Steamroller’s behavior in terms of their words or actions. Ask them to explain how that behavior had a negative impact. See if there were damaging effects on operations, personal relationships, or other intangibles like morale and culture. One “watch out” to avoid is to try to explain away the Steamroller’s behavior and make excuses for it. Gather the right feedback from these examples instead of solving the problems being shared with you.

 

Step 2 - Next, communicate that feedback to the Steamroller to ensure they understand the impact of their behaviors and the problem.

 

If they’re surprised by the feedback, their main issues could be their empathy and communication skills. Do they understand how their actions impact others? If they don’t, get them training and coaching on these skills. Active listening and reading social cues are fundamental skill requirements in the workplace. Set clear goals and deadlines for them to learn and apply these skills. Treat those goals like you would any other expectation you have of them. Hold them accountable for their progress in demonstrating those skills.

If the Steamroller isn’t surprised by the feedback, your leadership challenge is more about attitude than a skill gap. Make it clear that their behaviors have negative consequences for others and for them. Stop covering for them and make them fix the problems their behavior causes so they can see and learn first-hand. Clearly incorporate the negative impacts of their behaviors to net out in their overall performance review. Spell out the long-term consequences of their behaviors on them - e.g., lower bonuses or raises, difficulty in getting promoted or hired elsewhere, or maybe even termination of their employment.

 

The Payoff

Dealing head-on with a "Steamroller" can be hard, uncomfortable work for a leader, but the results are worth it. Ideally, the Steamroller follows your lead and fixes their problem behaviors while continuing to produce great results. By doing so, you not only have improved your overall team performance, you have also helped the "Steamroller" become an "Exemplar" and improve their own career prospects. (I still appreciate the honest feedback one of my first managers gave me that stopped some of my "steamroller" behaviors before they got deep rooted.) Alternately, if the "Steamroller" does not fix their behaviors, you have begun to hold them accountable for their negative behaviors instead of covering for them. Even if your "Steamroller" does not appreciate that, their teammates will.

 

To learn more about leading people in all eight performance patterns in the Leadership Matrix, visit www.LeadInsideTheBox.com or read our book, Lead Inside the Box: How Smart Leaders Guide their Teams to Exceptional Results.

8 Phone Interview Tips I Learned By Doing Radio Interviews

A few years ago, if I had a phone interview, it meant I was looking for a job. Then I published my first book, and as part of the publicity tour, I've been doing phone interviews with radio stations all around the US. The whole concept of “phone interview” changed dramatically and I started to learn new lessons. Here are the 8 lessons I've learned that are applicable to job interviews conducted over the phone.

 

Turn off your Notifications – I was on my iPhone doing a live interview with a radio talk show host and it was going well. Then my phone made a familiar ding noise. Then several more. A group conversation I had been in on Facebook Messenger days ago just got restarted. I had no idea how to turn off the sound on the iPhone I was using to call into the interview. When I turned the phone volume down I couldn't hear the interviewer. While I was working my phone to figure out how to turn off the dings, I was distracted from the interview questions. I also worried about accidentally hanging up. I could tell the interviewer was peeved by the situation, as his questions went from softballs over the plate to fastballs aimed at my head. Thankfully, the Facebook conversation quickly stopped on its own and the interview didn't get significantly derailed. But it taught me to turn off my Facebook and other notifications for future phone interviews.Control Your "Sound Levels" – Phoned-in radio interviews typically start with the talk show's producer (e.g., the Roz character on the TV sitcom "Frasier") calling you several minutes ahead of your scheduled air time. They are making sure you are still available, and they are checking how your "sound levels" will be on radio. "Sound levels" means there is no room for technical problems on live radio. Your microphone (e.g., your headphones) should be close, still and not rubbing against anything. You should lean forward, smile and project your voice. Background noises (e.g., fans or wind) should be eliminated. You should also come up with a contingency plan if a loud distraction (e.g., firetruck or toddler meltdown) hits during the call. All these tips are valuable for phone interviews too.Do Recon – As soon as I am booked to do an interview, I listen to other interviews by the radio host. I get a sense of their style and some of their typical questions. (Radio hosts almost universally start with the "where are you calling in from" as their ice breaker.) Job interviewers don’t publish or stream their interviews, but you can still do recon on them. They may have a blog or other content on places like LinkedIn that give you clues to what they will ask you. Spending 5 minutes on Google is the best way you can prepare for your 30 minutes in a job interview.Keep it on Track – I had an interview with a radio talk show host who obviously had not read anything about me or my book. I could tell from my recon that his style was to ask general questions and trawl until he heard a keyword that was trending in the news that he wanted to run with. I had prepared and brought every answer to his generic, non-book questions back to my book. That is until he asked me where I got my MBA. As soon as "Wharton" came out of my mouth, he pivoted to ask about a fellow Wharton alum named Trump who is running for president. At that point, I had to switch from playing offense (redirecting everything back to my book) to playing defense (avoiding talking about politics). After I deflected a few loaded questions, he thanked me and moved on. But by keeping it on track, I had kept 8 of my 10 minutes in front of his audience as a pitch for my book. I have experienced similar situations in job interviews where interviewers got us far off track. By doing radio, I have learned to view interview airtime as a precious, fixed resource that I need to keep focused on my goal (e.g., getting hired or selling books).Be the Straight Guy/Gal – I did an interview with a radio show that covers business with a comedy bent. (Mental note: anytime I see two host names in an interview, I now suspect a comedy format.) I knew from my recon they would be smart and edgy funny. They started asking how they could apply the Leadership Matrix (the heart of my book) to other areas outside of leading teams at work - to their family, their friends and even past romantic partners. I have a sense of humor, so a few joke ideas popped into my head. But I knew that as soon as I offered my own joke, I would be making my content part of the joke instead of just serving as a springboard for them to introduce funny stories they wanted to tell. Besides, they are professional comedians and I would be an amateur stepping into an arena far out of my league. So I played the serious, but not-too-serious, content expert role they wanted and that let me promote my book to their audience as much as possible. Looking back at job interviews I have had, I have seen similar situations where my interviewers cracked jokes that tempted me to break character. Maybe they did it on purpose to get a sense of my "at ease" personality. Maybe not. Either way, I've learned to be thoughtful with how I respond.Answer in Empanada Style - Most cuisines seem to have a variation of a food format that has a bit of meat in the middle of a bunch of dough packaged up in an easy-to-handle pocket form. Empanadas. Pierogies. Turnovers. Dumplings. Calzones. There must be a reason for the universal appeal. One key to good interviewing is to form your answers in the same way. When asked a question, set the boundaries of your answer (e.g., lay out the dough), make your point (e.g., put the meat in the middle), and sew it up in a short, easy to digest answer (e.g., fold and seal). Radio talk show hosts are trained to cut people off when they ramble because they know their audiences will tune out. If your answer doesn't suggest a destination within several seconds, you may get cut off. If your answer rambles on for more than 30 seconds, you will get cut off. But if you answer the question by setting the context, making a point, and wrapping it up, you will give the host confidence that you aren't rambling. The same holds for job interviews. Form your answers in easy to digest packages and you will control the interview and make your points.Have Examples – I wrote a book on leadership, so I should have been ready for a radio talk show host to ask me to name a leader I respected. But when asked live on the air I drew a blank and was quite embarrassed. Maybe it was the worry about my Trump question in the interview the day before, but I deflected major damage with a "we see leaders every day" kind of answer. It was not my best radio moment but it could have been if I just went back to my message - my book. I have been lucky enough to work with several leaders that made such an impact on me that I named them in the Acknowledgments of my book. I could have filled that whole radio show with examples of great leadership from them. Going forward in job or book interviews, I will go back to my resume to recall examples I can use.Have your Elevator Speech – When a radio interviewer says “tell me about yourself” it probably means they haven't read anything about you yet and they want to buy time to scan the information they have in front of them. Instead of being an awkward warm up, you should view that as your chance to set the agenda, build rapport, and spark interest for the rest of your interview. When your interviewer ends with "any parting thoughts you want to share" it means they are done with the interview but want to give you a chance to end on a high note (radio hosts) or maybe reveal weaknesses (job interviewers) . Either way, you should seize this as your chance to pitch what you want them, or their audience, to take away from your interaction with them. Make sure you are ready to do it - succinctly and suddenly.

 

5 Project Management Lessons I Learned By Walking Across Spain

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A couple of summers ago, I hiked the ancient Camino de Santiago trail across Spain. It was the best month of my life for many reasons. Along with a lot of other great things I got by walking almost 500 miles, it also reinforced some project management lessons I learned over the years. 

Less is More - When you are carrying everything you need for a month on your back, you learn to be very smart with diffferentiating what you need versus what you want. Variety in clothing colors and styles drives complexity and weight in packing a backpack. By the end of the trip, I found that I used 20% of the clothes I packed 80% of the time, and the rest was deadweight. I ended up throwing away a lot of the "I want" clothes and just washing and wearing the "I need" clothes more. LESSON - As I scope future projects at work, I will keep that in mind and force myself to differentiate between what is essential to deliver well, and strip out all the "nice to have" parts of the project that aren't absolutely required.Someone Has Probably Done this Before - An amazing thing about the Camino de Santiago is that people have been walking that same trail for over a thousand years as part of a Christian pilgrimmage. Whenever I got a blister or a twisted ankle, I realized that hundreds of people probably had that exact same problem at the exact same place and got through it somehow. When I walked by the 800 year-old ruin of a hostel for medieval pilgrims, I realized they probably dealt with the same loud snoring and other problems that today's pilgrims face. My guide book had the following quote from the journal of a German peregrino in the 1400s that could still be written today -  "The women (nuns) in the hostel yell at the pilgrims a lot. But the food is good." LESSON - Whenever I start a new project at work, I will seek to learn from the experience of others who have done similar projects in the past.Know When to Pull the Fire Alarm - As you walk the Camino, you end up meeting fellow walkers (called "peregrinos") who are basically on the same itinerary as you. You end up pairing up in friendships along the way that can last for days or weeks. Early on the trail, I became fast friends with a woman who brought her little dog with her. The first day or two were great, as the dog had a blast chasing butterflies as he bounded ahead of us on a nice cool day. The next day, in the hot sun, the poor dog lagged behind us and stopped to cool off in any puddle he could find along the way. It became clear to me that the dog's life would be in danger if he continued to walk the hundreds of miles more she planned. When the woman kept avoiding my advice to change her plans, I had to make the most dramatic statement one peregrino can make to another peregrino: I told her I would end our friendship and not walk with her any more if she didn't take care of the dog. She wouldn't, so I did, and a couple of days later I heard from other peregrinos that she had taken the dog home. LESSON - Whenever I work on a project team in the future, I will be brave enough to be the jerk who pulls the fire alarm and makes everyone mad at him if I truly know it needs to be done.     Don't Turn Competitors into Enemies - I crossed an old bridge one morning along the Camino and it had a sign with a fascinating story about the bridge. In 1434, a Spanish knight named Suero was heartbroken, so he proclaimed he would defeat 300 other knights in lance duels at this bridge to prove his worthiness to his beloved who had dumped him. The challenge went viral medieval style across Europe and many people came, as this bridge was on the busy pilgrimage route. Suero was gifted at jousting and won, won, won and gloated over his victories. In one joust, the opposing knight wore special double thick armor and Suero wore a woman's blouse over his thin armor to mock him. Twenty four years later, Suero randomly met one of the knights he defeated that year and his luck ran out and he was killed. LESSON - When I win conflicts with people who have different priorities or viewpoints, I will not gloat and will do my best to end the project as friends, not enemies. 
Ask for Help - I walked through many small, sleepy country villages along the Camino. I stopped for lunch in one small town and enjoyed watching the old retired guys across the street watch us pilgrims. When the American couple I was eating with went the wrong way when they left, these old guys were all over it and yelled (nicely) to point them in right direction. Since it seemed that waiting for the chance to be helpful to pilgrims was the biggest pastime these old guys had, I acted confused when I left a few minutes later. Sure enough, they lept into action and noisily pointed me in the right direction. It drove the point home that most people enjoy being helpful and you can make them feel good by asking them for help. LESSON - I will use asking for help as a technique not just to get assistance when I need it, but also as a way to make others feel useful and build relationships with them.So if you want to improve your project management skills, think about a long trip you have taken and analyze it as a project that you managed. What lessons did you learn that you can apply to your future work projects?

5 Ways to "Crisis-Proof" Your Team

If you lead a team for long enough, you will likely face a crisis at some point. Internal things that you rely on every day will break some day. External forces that you plan for can go haywire. Whatever form a crisis takes, leading your team successfully out of the crisis gives you a chance to demonstrate your leadership and quick thinking skills. If you lead your team successfully through a crisis, you might come out with rosier career prospects. If you get tripped up by a crisis, you might not come out of it at all.

 

The best way to ensure you get through a crisis is to prepare for it before it strikes. Much of the damage that occurs is in the first moments after a crisis strikes. If you can prepare your team to react appropriately and quickly to a budding crisis, you can significantly improve the odds of emerging successfully. Here are five things you can talk to your team about now to prepare them for the inevitable crisis.

 

Pre-Define “Crisis” – A lot of bad and unexpected things happen every day, but not all of them should be considered a “crisis.” Leaders should set some clear criteria to help define what a “crisis” worthy of crisis management looks like. Events that pose significant risk to life or safety are obvious criteria that would qualify as a crisis. Things that break the law are another. Beyond that, leaders should give their teams a clear sense of what the threshold is in terms of other potential harm that would qualify as a crisis. Threshold criteria can be measured in terms like monetary losses or number of customers impacted. Setting a common understanding of the difference between something your team members should handle on their own versus what they should raise an alarm to you about will help everyone do their jobs better with less stress along the way.

 

Communicate Up Immediately – If something does happen that meets the definition of “crisis,” team members should immediately communicate it up the reporting chain to you before they spend time looping in others who are not directly affected. Precious time can elapse if a team member tries to contact their peers and others who are indirectly involved before “letting the boss know.” A leader should make it clear to their team that they should always hear bad news from their own team first and never from a third party, or worse yet, from their own boss. By getting informed first, the boss can more quickly assess whether the situation does indeed require crisis management mode. And if the situation is a crisis, the boss can also quickly deploy additional resources immediately, including themselves, potentially. The boss can also make sure that they are the person who informs the higher ups in the organization, showing they are on the case.

 

Go Low Tech – Technology gives us many channels to choose from in communicating with our boss and others. Many people prefer more passive and less intrusive manners of communication such as emails or text messages to communicate. You should make it clear to your team members that if they think they are seeing a crisis, they need to make you know in the most direct form possible. They should call you on your mobile phone or find you in your office. They should not leave a voicemail, send you an email or text you and wait for you to respond. You should make it clear that they have not done their job of informing you until they get confirmation from you that they heard you.

 

Talk in Facts and Data – When a crisis unfolds, it is easy to get caught up in the confusion and panic that might also occur. When your team members are reporting about the crisis back to you, they may end up amplifying the panic and passing on distortions or erroneous information. The way to prevent that is to train your team to gather facts and data that they can confirm first-hand, not just pass on, and give unwarranted credence to, rumor and reactions they observe. Not only will this data help you understand the extent and impact of the crisis, it will also let you know objectively whether it is getting better or worse over time.

 

Prioritize Properly – As the boss, fixing a crisis in your area is a top priority that you might be losing sleep over. After all, part of your role as a leader is to be the person accountable for everything that happens on your team. The buck stops with you, as the old saying goes. If things go really, really badly, you may be out of a job. Don’t assume that your team members have the same urgency as you do about managing the crisis. If things go really badly, your team members may only have a piece of the overall responsibility and be able to survive. It is much harder to replace a whole team than a team leader. If you are planning to put in extraordinary effort and hours to fix the crisis and you expect your team members to do the same, you need to tell them. Don’t just assume that they will know that the crisis at hand overrules everday work schedules and priorities.

So in your next staff meeting, communicate the above thoughts to your team to make sure you are on the same page about what managing a crisis means. It won’t help you prevent a crisis, but it could help your career survive one.

 

 

Five Insightful Interview Questions to Screen Job Candidates

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Selecting great people to fill job openings is perhaps the single most important skill a leader can have. Over my career, I have interviewed hundreds of job candidates and learned many lessons that I encapsulated into a guide that I use to structure interviews. Here are some of the questions I have found that give very useful insights into candidates’ capabilities and attitude:

Walk me through your resume in a nutshell in about a minute. (Note – This is a good icebreaker to start with. It also gives you a chance to see how well they listened to the question and how concise and structured they are in communication. Make sure you emphasize the “in a nutshell in about a minute” when asking the question.) Why are you interested in this job? (Note – This is another good icebreaker. It gives you insights to see how well they understand the job, why they are looking and how much homework they have done in researching your organization.) What do you think would be the most exciting part of this job? What would be the most difficult? (Note – These give you a sense of what they like and don’t like to do. It also gives you a sense of how well they understand the job.) Think about the best boss you have had in your career – what were their two biggest strengths? Now think about a bad boss you had in your career – what were their two biggest weaknesses? (Note – This gives a window on what it would be like to manage them. It’s often a very insightful question getting at their overall style and disposition.) Looking back in your career, what are the two biggest, most tangible, results that you made happen and are most proud of? (Note – This gives you an insight on their focus on getting actual results versus just showing up at work. Allows them to point out their strengths in context.)

If you would like a copy of my full interview guide — including more questions, scoring sheets and exercises — send me an email. Note that before you ask any questions to candidates, it is a good idea to run them by your human relations experts to make sure they are appropriate for your organization. Good luck and Happy Hiring!

The Daily Briefing Book for Executives

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The Daily Briefing Book is a great tool I learned from other executives. Basically, my executive assistant would gather all the materials that people wanted to cover with me in meetings a day before the meeting. She would compile all of those documents, presentations and agenda items into a binder for me to take home the night before so I could prepare for the next day’s meetings. (Putting it all on an iPad is an even better option.) She would put a print out of my calendar for the day on the cover and I would carry that with me through the whole day as the perfect guide to get me through my day of back to back meetings.

By being able to think through my questions and issues ahead of time, I was able to make my meetings more effective. If you are an executive and have not yet started getting a daily briefing book, I highly recommend it. If you are an executive assistant looking for a great new idea for your boss, I highly recommend it too.

Leveling Lake Wobegon - Five Ways to Fight Grade Inflation in Performance Ratings

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Lake Wobegon is a fictional town in Garrison Keillor’s long-running radio show A Prairie Home Companion where it is jokingly said “all the children are above average.” While I am conversationally-dangerous enough in statistics theory to explain how this is possible – hint: average of what? – the point of the joke is insightful. Wherever there is a metric that people feel is important – e.g., income, height – it is basic human nature for people to want to think of themselves as “better than average” on that metric. That phenomenom is so typical there is even a name for it – “The Lake Wobegon Effect.” 

One place where the desire for everyone to be “above average” can have negative consequences for organizations is in performance appraisal systems. If everyone is “above average”, what does that say about your average expectations? How does that affect your overall expenditure and distribution of annual bonuses if they are based on performance ratings?

Let’s imagine an example rating system that is typical of many organizations with 5 levels of ratings:

(1) the lowest rating for those who consistently performed below the expectations for their role,

(2) the second lowest rating for those who were inconsistent – a mix of meeting and not meeting expectations,

(3) the rating for those who consistently performed as they were hired, and are paid, to do,

(4) the second highest rating for those who get the job done and sometimes go significantly above expectations, and

(5) the highest rating for those rare folks who consistently performed above expectations (and some may suspect are superheroes in disguise.) 

Which of those rating categories will be the one that has the highest share of all people rated in it? Common sense would suggest the middle of the road rating of 3 – consistently meeting expectations. After all, if your organization met its overall expectations – e.g., its corporate earnings forecast – for the year, you would think that on, on average, the organization’s employees met their individual expectations to get them there.

More typically, however, the Lake Wobegon Effect takes over and the box in the middle – “performing as expected” – is not the most populous (or in statistics-speak, the “mode”. The one right above the middle one – the “performing as expected and then some” is typically the most populous box.

Why?

Reason number one is the Lake Wobegon effect – on average, people don’t want to think of themselves as average. Unless you figure out someway to change human nature, you aren’t going to change that.

Reason number two is something you can have some control over, however. All things being equal, most managers would prefer not to have difficult conversations with the people they give ratings to about those ratings. If they gave people who are meeting expectations that “average” rating, they worry they will get pushback from their employee.

How can you get managers to have those difficult, yet appropriate, conversations? Here are five suggested strategies, from least direct to most direct.

1) Educate – Ignorance can be one reason for inflated ratings. You can train your managers how to appropriately rate people by sharing baseline examples of what an appropriate rating is for individuals. You can create baseline examples for each rating category by identifying example performance appraisals that nicely describe what a person performing at that role looks like. You can use real life examples (protecting for privacy as appropriate) or you can create a made up one from scratch or that is a composite of real ones.

2) Calibrate – Get managers at the same level together to discuss the ratings they are proposing for their own teams and review those of others. By doing so you can get valuable discussions that compare people and how they are rated. “Pat rated Gale as a 5 out of 5 while Jamie rated Taylor as a 4 out of 5. They have similar jobs. Does that make sense to people who have worked with them?” If moderated well, those conversations can be quite enlightening to help managers see how they are applying the ratings versus others.

3) Motivate – Even if managers are educated and calibrated, they may still want to avoid difficult conversations that might ensue if they rated people as they should be rated, not as they want to be rated. One way to motivate them to rate their people appropriately is to make it clear to them that delivering accurate ratings of their people is a major component of their job that they are going to be rated on. Maybe they are lucky enough to manage a team of people that are all above expectations. If that is the case, that team should collectively be producing above expectations. If they are not exceeding team expectations, does that mean their manager is holding them back? Recasting the performance ratings in that light gives managers a check on their desire to take the easy way out, especially if you make it a big enough part of their overall rating, they will take notice.

4) Incorporate – If you do all the above and you find you still have ratings inflation, you can adjust it on the back end by incorporating it into your overall performance management program. If you use ratings to determine an annual bonus payment or salary increase, you can set the overall budget impact of those costs as fixed and let the distribution determine how it is doled out to individuals. If ratings are generally skewed high, that means there are more people than expected in the high ratings category. If you set a fixed bonus or pay increase for individuals in the higher categories, then you will end up paying more in bonuses and pay increases than you budgeted for. If you set the budget for those as fixed and then set up a system to allocate it based on the actual ratings distribution, you will be able to live within your budget. Doing so will also create an interesting dynamic, where highly rated performers will not be getting bonuses and pay increases as big as they might have expected. If your organization wants a “pay for performance” culture, it will find itself in tension with ratings inflation.

5) Allocate – If you do all the above, you will find that there is an incentive for some parts of your organization to be high raters to push any pain off to other parts of the organization. If you want to make sure incentives are aligned within each division, you can fix the bonus and salary increase pools by division. That way, if one division ranks everyone at the highest level, they will not be able to pay as high of a bonus or salary increase as other divisions that do not have everyone in the highest group. The benefit is that market forces would probably take hold at some point, and the best performers would figure out it is more profitable to work for other divisions. That tension between divisions could quickly turn from productive to disruptive if you want to maintain a common organizational culture of “pay for performance.”

Performance management is one of the most important things you do as an organization. It sets the tone for your overall organizational culture. If you tie performance management to compensation, you are doubling down on the importantce of your performance management system. Money talks, and how you decide to allocate that based on performance says a lot about your organizational values. Whatever performance management system you have, make sure you have thought through how it will end up in practice, not just on paper.

Operational Excellence in 8 Steps: The CapStat Performance Management Program

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One of the favorite jobs I have had was running the CapStat performance management program for Mayor Fenty of the District of Columbia. CapStat was the performance management program Mayor Fenty launched to assess the quality of services delivered by the $10 billion local District of Columbia government. CapStat was inspired by other “Stat” systems that had proven successful in local governments, such as CompStat in New York City and CityStat in Baltimore. At the core, CapStat was responsible for finding opportunities for improvement in District government operations and then hold people accountable for making those improvements through rigorous action tracking.

Here are the key elements of CapStat that enabled that.

The CapStat Team – The CapStat team was a small group (usually four people) of analysts from a mix of backgrounds in management consulting and information technology. There core skills were in problem-solving, analysis and presentations.

The CapStat Meeting – About once per week, the CapStat team would organize a one-hour meeting with the mayor. Each meeting would be on a single issue facing the city and would include the heads of all the agencies involved in that issue. For example, a session on graffiti might include the heads of the Department of Public Works, the Metropolitan Police Department, and the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs. One of the agencies would be determined to be the lead agency. That agency would open the meeting and then it would become much more of a question and answer session led by the mayor.

The CapStat Presentation – The CapStat team would work with the involved agencies to identify the key information the mayor needed to see on the issue. Together they would gather the data, analyze it and then summarize it in PowerPoint slides. The deck would typically total about 15-20 slides, with 20 as the max to keep focus. If the team did its work well, there would be a slide relevant to every question the mayor asked.

The Action Items Memo – During the meeting, I would capture any actions the mayor asked to be done during the discussion. At the close of the meeting, I would project those items on to the screen for all to see and add a “who” and “when” to each. The members in that room could then ask to edit each until we had a final version. Then I would include those into an Action Items Memo and send them to all involved after the meeting.

The CapStat Calendar – Many issues requiring a CapStat session were recurring items, like readiness for snow removal operations or reopening of schools and parks. We would schedule those meetings with the appropriate lead times to give the mayor the opportunity to find out about preparedness for those types of events.

The Action Tracker – We entered all those Action Items into a Quickbase database we called the Action Tracker. Quickbase is a web-based database where we could share views to the people in the agencies. Quickbase turned out to be an invaluable tool to track completion and manage deadlines.

TrackDC – We integrated the Action Items from Quickbase into the TrackDC dashboard, which had a page for each agency showing the status of the Action Items as well as key operational data (e.g., spending versus budget). We set it up so the agency heads could see their own pages too to help them track their agency.

The “Stock Price” Score – We created an algorithm to calculate a 0-100 score of agency performance based on the data in the dashboard. We had higher weights on the things we most valued such as completing their annual initiatives, hitting their Key Performance Indicators, completing Action Items requested by Mayor in CapStat sessions, spending on pace with budget, and their responsiveness to correspondence from citizens and our “mystery shoppers”. The score would go up or down daily based on new information and aging against deadlines. The agency could click on their stock price to see exactly what factors were driving it below 100.

Track.dc.gov – We created a public version of these dashboards and made them available to the public at Track.dc.gov.

As a whole, the CapStat structure and tools created a powerful management infrastructure to help ensure the required improvements in District local operations happened. I presented an overview of it to senior city staffers from about 20 other large cities at a Harvard University Kennedy School of Government conference in 2010 and several cities asked for help in applying parts of the system themselves. Contact me if you would like to see a copy of that presentation.

Improve your Meetings in Four Steps with Data: The Meeting Process Score (MPS)

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Done well, staff meetings, board meetings and other recurring get-togethers can be an essential part of great management. Done poorly, they can be costly, counter-productive and morale crushing. One key to help ensure your meetings are done well is to make sure everyone is prepared when they come in. The Meeting Process Score (MPS) is a way to measure and track how well you as the meeting organizer are preparing attendees for the meeting. Here is how you can create and deploy an MPS for your organization.

Step 1 – Identify the key activities that need to take place before the meeting starts and when they should be done. These tasks probably include things like sending out the following things to all attendees by a deadline:

• Calendar Invite (e.g., via Outlook)

• List of Action Items (a.k.a. “To Do’s” ) from the last meeting (1 day after) 

• Initial agenda with a request for any additional agenda items people want to add (4 days before meeting)

• Final agenda (2 days before meeting)

• All materials (e.g., presentations) going to be presented (1 day before meeting).

Step 2 – Once you have listed all the key tasks required for your meeting, create a scale of how well you actually did them. This could be a simple yes or no or it could be a scale like this: zero (not done at all), one (partially done), two (done but late) to three (fully done on time).

Step 3 – Lay out the roles and responsibilities for each of the tasks in Step 1. Make it clear who is supposed to do each thing. Also determine who will be responsible for assessing each meeting against the scale in Step 2.

Step 4 – After each meeting, rate it against the scale. Then translate the total points achieved versus the potential total into a percentage between 0 and 100 percent. Hint – if your scores are a mix of yes/no and zero to three scales, you will want to make the “yes” equal 3 and the “no” equal zero to maintain an even weight across questions. Record that score on a spreadsheet of all the scores for each meeting. Create a simple line chart of the score on the vertical axis and each meeting on the horizontal axis. With this, you will be able to track how fully you are doing the required preparations and if you are getting better or worse over time. Once you have this chart of your Meeting Process Score (MPS), you should show that chart at every meeting as a way to keep you focused on it.

If you are interested in trying this out at your organization and want to get an example MPS scoresheet, please email me.

Five Management Lessons from Istanbul Airport

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Istanbul is a major crossroads of the world. Maybe THE crossroads of the world. East meets West. Asia meets Europe. Istanbul’s main international airport (IST) lives up to that reputation as well. I recently traveled to Istanbul and was impressed by many things I saw in the modern and clean airport. First, I was impressed at how eclectic a mix of customers and vendors it serves. Men passing by in clothes ranging from robes to suits to shorts. Women walking by in clothes ranging from burkas to pantsuits to skirts. A lingerie shop and a pub just around the corner from a place to pray. In many ways, it was no different from the many other big airports I have iTunesed my way through around the world, but just with the volume and bass turned all the way up this time

As a management consultant, I was impressed by several management practices that seemed to help make it all work.

As soon as you get off the plane, there is an airport staffer sitting at a strategic point right off the jetway asking you if you want to stay in the airport to just connect or if you want to exit the security zone and go out of the airport (e.g., to go into the city.) Having had to figure out international transfers through London and other airports the hard way on my own before, I appreciated how timely and clearly the IST staff posed that choice to me.When you are re-entering the airport from outside, they make everone go through an initial security screen before getting into the densely packed airport area with the check-in and baggage claim areas. The security does not require people to be ticket carrying-passengers, but they just want to make sure they are not letting people bring dangerous stuff into an area crowded with passengers and others who have not yet been through security screening to go to the gates.After I had checked in and went through security, I saw several examples of interactions between tired and frustrated passengers and tired and frustrated airline and airport staff that, despite being heated, ended up pretty successfully. In a couple of examples, passengers skipped past others in long lines to ask the airline representatives for help. The reps were quite disciplined in barely even granting eye contact to the line cutters. After a while, the combinaion of being ignored by the agents and being silently peer-pressured by people who waited their turn in the line encouraged the line-cutter to get in line.At the departure gates, the airline set up rope lanes for people to get into their boarding groups. Instead of creating mini-chaos and line cutting by just announcing the groups, people formed their own lines and could see exactly how things would go. The airline rep just had to open one lane with the previous one had emptied. Quite orderly and easy to know where you stood.Like other large European airports, IST was set up to keep passengers in a large central area until the last minute when they announced an assigned gate. My guess is that commercial retail reasons are a large part of this (e.g., keeping people near the duty free and other shops as long as possible). What I liked about this was that the retail and restaurants were large and thriving, if fewer. Instead of having a lot of small restaurants spread out across the many branches of terminals with hit or miss foot traffic business, it ensured the retailers always had a clientele, and thus were thriving and kept longer hours. Having spent many late hours in airports with a lot of closed restaurants sitting next to empty gates, I appreciated that system.

All well-seasoned, well-traveled management consultants think about how airports could be run better. Many complain. Some of us blog about it.