Christmas tree leadership (Tannenbaum/Schmidt Continuum)

O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree,
How lovely are thy branches!

For some reason, this little portion of the third stanza is all I seem to remember of the song, despite hearing it repeatedly from late October through mid-January for decades.  It's an ode to the beautiful Christmas tree, and has been recorded with many different lyrics over the past 50 years.

Wondering what it has to do with leadership?

Insured Victim Effect (a.k.a., no harm, no foul)

Sometimes bad things happen.

• A dead tree falls on a neighbor's fence from an adjacent property.
• An arsonist burns a home to the ground.
• A valuable diamond necklace is stolen.

When we first hear of things like these, our first reaction is often to the event itself and the well-being of the person - we want to make sure the person is okay.  But before we launch into a diatribe about how awful the person or entity is that caused this to happen, it's quite common to interject one quick question:  "was it insured?"

Go to sleep

My three-year-old is starting to transition out of naps and into a 7:00 fussiness that stretches each evening into long ordeals as we march towards bed.  Once he’s down, he tosses and turns for a while, finally working his way to sleep.  Because of my schedule, he’s often starting his day earlier than some other children his age.

Blockers

When I speak about talent management, I describe the work as follows:  talent management is about ensuring the right people are in the right roles at the right time.  It's easy to say - rolls right off the tongue.  However it's very complex, and not so easy to implement.

Most large firms have a formal review of talent at least once per year. A component of this conversation is to discuss individuals in three broad dimensions: performance against goals; behaviors that benefit the individual, team, and firm; and the potential to develop and contribute at a higher level in the organization.

Catching Negativity

My three-year-old son picked up a bad habit at school. When asked why he was behaving this way, he said “I don't know. Adrien does it!” And with that, he repeated the behavior again.Unbelievable. My impressionable, well-behaved boy was being corrupted by this child! It must be true that one apple spoils the whole bunch.

Communication Timing

Scenario 1:  Driving down the interstate on a recent evening, I notice a car in front of me with a right turn signal on. I assume the driver will be taking the next exit. We pass one exit, then another. Since the vehicle is in the right lane, I assume the driver has inadvertently left the signal on, perhaps after changing lanes. After several miles, the vehicle turns on the third exit as the signal is extinguished. It's almost a surprise to see the vehicle take the exit.

Scenario 2:  A new information system is being rolled out across an enterprise. In January the project team launches a robust communication strategy that touches all employees, sharing the benefits of the new system and what to expect. During the last week of the first quarter, a small group of key stakeholders receive a brief email stating a new go-live date in the third quarter. The communications to all employees continue with the same focus on the benefits of the new system and what to expect. In the fourth quarter the system goes live. Adoption of the new information system is abysmal. The project team discovers that several groups in the business have created their own siloed solutions, and there is no appetite to convert to the new system.

Both scenarios share a lesson about communications: timing is everything.

Vegas

Las Vegas happens to be a popular vacation destination for many of my colleagues. I haven't been myself, but from the anecdotal evidence there is an event series common to most of these trips. A certain amount of money is allocated as “fun money,” meaning it will be gambled away. At some point the person wins a big gamble at one of the many tables or machines. At that point, the person starts to feel lucky, and decides to continue gambling with the hope of repeating the big win. Over the course of the vacation, the remaining cash is spent, and the person comes home, having spent all of the “fun money,” and sometimes much more.

Just Like Me

Are we really all the same?

There is a great deal of interest in behavioral research over the past several years, and the energy around the topic hasn't waned. From pop psychology books to academic studies of leadership, there is renewed interest in what makes people behave the way they do. To research these differences, large samples are often taken from across several companies and disciplines – this ensures the data is statistically relevant to a larger population.

This practice alone surfaces an implicit assumption that shared behavioral traits exist within certain functions and organizations.

During a guided visit to a busy trading floor, the people there were described as pampered, very hardworking, and compensation driven. A recent stop at a financial advisory office struck me because every person dressed alike, and had shared vocal intonations, mannerisms, and gait. At a recent nonprofit gathering, the similarities in personality were absolutely striking. At a funeral I attended a few years ago, someone looked at my pin-striped suit, cuff-links, and polished shoes and said “oh, you must be a banker” - which I was.

Every day we are able to function more efficiently by thin-slicing parts of our world (nod to Gladwell's book Blink), ascribing characteristics to particular people and things based on our prior experiences with similar people and things. We know that, generally speaking, similar people have similar traits.

Think about these statements, one by one. Likely an image will form in your mind as to characteristics of the people.

• He's a boxer


• She's a ballerina


• He's an administrative assistant


• She's a president

Is it valid to think this way?

MarketWatch article:"What I've Learned From the Market Bubbles"

Quick hit:  check out "What I've Learned From the Market Bubbles" on MarketWatch.  Very quick read, and a nice macro view of a repeating bubble trend.

The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell (2000)

Malcolm Gladwell, a writer at The New Yorker magazine, has become better known for his books than his articles in recent years.  He has written a string of bestsellers in the new millenium:  The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, and What the Dog Saw.  Gladwell fittingly started with The Tipping Point, a view into understanding change.

Span of Control

Recently we tackled an organizational design project. This particular project, like most, included determining the appropriate organizational shape.

Organizational shape is exactly what it sounds like – if you're looking at an org chart. People talk about flat organizations, tall organizations, etc. A flat organization is one that has a lot of direct reports for every manager, and a tall one has fewer. If you're staring at an org chart, you can see the difference in the “shape” of the chart, a rough triangle with the head of the organization at the top.

The number of direct reports a manager has is that manager's span of control.

Division of labor

If you've worked with a performance improvement consultant (nod to Geary Rummler, founder of the Performance Design Lab, may he rest in peace) or anyone in the organizational design field, you've probably taken a very close look at how work gets done in the organization.  Here's a term you might come across in one of those conversations:  division of labor.

Talent Assessments

Walking down the sidewalk this afternoon in a bustling city, I overheard a group of professionals having an interesting conversation. A woman in the group was talking about a personality assessment she was being required to take by her manager. She was appalled.

“Why do I have to take a personality assessment? It's the work that I do that's important, not how I do it!” She went on to share her concerns that this was probably the first step towards her termination, and that she's been a top performer relative to her peers. There was a lot of nodding & sympathy all around.

Foreclosures: what you need to know (a re-post from 2007)

This is a piece I had published in December 2007.  As the pundits and reporters spin us out of the Great Recession, I thought it might be interesting to look back at my thoughts from a couple of years ago - as the pundits were spinning us into the Second Great Depression.  Enjoy. :)

-Bryan

Foreclosures: what you need to know

Bryan Seaford©2007

Things we learn by age two

Some friends of mine and I were talking the other day about human development, and how quickly we learn. As I thought more about how we develop – and when we develop, my thoughts turned to a time not too long ago when my son had just turned two years old. By that age, so much has already been learned.

Instructional Design

Great and enduring leaders are also great and enduring teachers. In organizations, the function is usually called learning, training, development, or some combination of the three. In short, the idea is to equip the team with the knowledge to make both the team and the individual successful.

Delivering quality training is more than simply telling the team to “do what I do and you'll pick it up.” It requires a thoughtful design process that develops the content necessary to make the team successful.

Marketing Mix: 4P Model (a.k.a.,"Marketing 101")

In large swaths of the US, the word "marketer" is synonymous with "Business Development," "Sales," or "Advertising."  This is especially true in the SMB (small- and medium-sized business) space, where there is often one person or department wearing all of these hats at once.

At it's purest, the textbook definition is pretty broad.  Stuart & Solomon in Marketing:  Real People, Real Choices define marketing as "the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of ideas, goods, and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organizational changes."  It's big, broad, and deep.

Back in the 1960s a Harvard professor named Neil Borden wrote an article called "The Concept of the Marketing Mix" in a Journal called Science in Marketing.  Soon after, he started sharing the idea in his marketing classes at HBS.  The ideas are simple and straightforward, and the academic marketing community hasn't come up with a better model since.

Ceteris paribus and the MBA

“Ceteris paribus.” I still remember my first year in B-school, hearing this phrase being bandied about like everyone in the room knew what it was. I learned later that I wasn't the only one Googling the phrase after class.Ceteris paribus is a Latin phrase that roughly translates to English as “all other things held constant,” or “all things held equal.” It's used in scientific experiments, finance, economics, and complex models of several stripes. Ceteris paribus is a quick way to say that, if nothing else in the world changes at all, then a change in variable X will create a change in variable Y.

Your brain at work

Check out the web site, yourbrainatwork.org.

It's a collaborative effort by The Conference Board and the Dana Alliance (wholly supported by the Dana Foundation).  The Conference Board is one of the best business reference & research sites I've seen.  The Dana Alliance is a group of neuroscientists "committed to advancing public awareness of the progress of brain research and to disseminating information about the brain in an accessible fashion.

The site is very easy to read and understand, and is a nice reminder that we all need to continue to build our experiences...and build our brain.

Enjoy!

College Connections

You may have noticed this phenomenon as well...Every Autumn, you mysteriously run into people you haven't seen since high school or college.  Sometimes they reach out to you, sometimes you might reach out to them, and sometimes - most times for me - it just happens.

It's November, and I've connected with a few old schoolmates, just like every year.  Some relationships blossom once more, and others end in a warm-hearted remembrance of some shared event before the connection once again fades.

It's always interesting to see where others are, remember what we once were, and ruminate over the changes that happen in life.Here are two general thoughts around this:  one is a bit academic (not a bad thing), and the other is an application.  Let's touch on the academic first.