How to Be the Best Leader Your Direct Reports Ever Had!

Got your attention?  OK let’s first acknowledge that being the best leader your direct reports ever had may not be too difficult.  In practice, the bar on leadership could be set higher, so following the pearls of wisdom imparted below may put you way on the top of the list.  Even if you have some of the rare folks who had a really phenomenal prior leader, following the points below will get you at least a silver medal.   So here it is:

1. Ensure you and your team can articulate your team’s shared work goals in a clear and concise manner – Teams cannot function effectively without having shared goals.  Can you articulate the team’s goals?  Ask three of your people the same question and see how they respond.  Many leaders I know have planning meetings in January and they come up with goals that are rarely referenced afterwards.  Don’t get me wrong, goals can change but at any given point in time everyone should know them.  It is hard to lead a group to the same place if they don’t know where they are going and it is easy enough to make sure common goals are understood.
2. Allocate at least 5% of your time per week to developing your people – Some people respond to this by saying, “Avi, developing my people is my top priority, I need to spend 120% of my time on it.”  Good luck on that.  Let’s do the math.  A normal work week for many is 50 hours, 5% of which is 2.5 hours, a substantial amount of time.  This could be broken into five individual 30 minute slots.  Keep in mind that this is 2.5 hours of dedicated time to development rather than going to a meeting with your direct report or your group staff meeting.  This 5% regular allocation to their development, as opposed to the 95% of time focused on tasks, demonstrates commitment to your direct reports while also being a manageable amount of dedicated time.  It ensures you and your direct reports will be putting enough time into their development to make progress.  What do you do during this dedicated time?  Read on for suggestions on how to use the time and the outcomes you should be aiming for.
3. Be able to articulate your direct reports’ individual work goals to them – In other words, you should know their individual goals well enough to repeat them and confirm you got it right.  Can you do that right now?  Try it.  So, what if your direct report hasn’t set any goals?  What if they don’t know what they want to do? Well, since humans are goal directed, you should be working with them to come up with some goals.  Everyone should have development goals regarding the job they are doing now even if they are unsure of career goals.   What does this accomplish?  First, it demonstrates commitment.  Second, it helps keep development efforts, theirs and yours, on track.
4. Be able to articulate your direct reports’ strengths and development needs – Here is the thing.  Many leaders think they can do this but they often speak in terms of conclusions i.e. she can be really “confrontational.”  That is about as useful as a track coach saying one of her team members is “slow.”  You cannot help someone change a conclusion directly.  Coaching and development needs to focus on the behaviors and activities that the individual engages in, such as “they interrupt others” or “they return to disagreements after others have moved on”, rather than conclusions.  People can directly change behavior.  They can do more or less of an activity.  You need to understand strengths and development needs at this more elemental level in order to be an effective leader.
5. Listen, observe and ask more questions when interacting with your direct reports – You have to listen and observe to understand their goals and to get insight into their strengths and development needs.  You cannot do that if you are speaking.   I recently observed an executive at his staff meeting do 83% of the talking (exact number is because I used the stop watch on my phone).  He objected that he needed to keep his people informed and provide direction.  That may be the case but that doesn’t really take a lot of time.  People love speaking, especially about their most interesting topic – themselves.  That is exactly why listening to our people not only provides us with information it also engenders good will.  Good leaders realize it is about the work and their people not about themselves.  So speak less and do more listening, observing and asking questions.  That’s how the informed leaders become informed.  Besides, it works both ways, so you can always vent and talk a lot to your leader (pass them this post so they know not to ignore you).

Ok, five seems to be a good place to stop.  Please note that all of the above five are measurable.  You can self-assess against them.  If you are not hitting the standard, no worries, just do what you need to do in order to meet it.  All of these areas can be accomplished with focused attention.  Success here is more about putting the time in rather than specialized skills.  You can be the best leader your direct reports ever had (or at least the second best).

Got some feedback? Want to discuss some ideas? You can reach me at:

Avi Shatzkes Ph.D.

ADS Talent Consulting LLC

ashatzkes@gmail.com

adstalentconsulting.com

Coaching Technical Leaders: A Two-Step Approach to Improving Collaboration and Leadership Skills

Over the past several years, while working with hedge funds and banks, I have coached a number of leaders engaged in highly technical work. They work in complex areas such as quantitative research, electronic trading, and software development. Recently, I reviewed 22 coaching assignments with this population and this is the first of several articles describing the more interesting trends that emerged. I believe these results are applicable to technical leaders across industries.

Who are these Technical Leaders? These technical leaders are important individual contributors in their own right. Due to their depth of expertise (most had advanced degrees), they were also managing groups of technologists or researchers. In addition to their management responsibilities, there was an ongoing need for them to interact and collaborate with other groups within their organizations.

What areas did they need to improve? Like many coaching clients, all of the participants had development needs related to leading their groups and collaborating with others. These included common areas such as delegating, providing feedback and listening skills. In several cases, participants had received prior training in these areas which did not result in any tangible improvement.

When discussing interactions with peers or direct reports, my clients would talk about the tasks they engaged in rather than people they were working with. Many knew little about their colleagues and could not describe them in any depth. Most preferred to work independently and saw dealing with others as a necessary evil and a distraction from their core work. Interactions were often through email, even with colleagues who worked in the same office.

Assessment data provided insight into causes of development areas. At the onset of these engagements, I conducted an assessment consisting of a behavior based interview, a verbal 360 and two psychometric instruments. The instruments were the Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) and the Hogan Motives, Values, Interests and Preferences Inventory (MVPI). Looking at the groups’ mean psychometric scores further illustrates the nature of this group.

Their mean percentile score on the HPI Interpersonal Sensitivity scale is a very low 22 (only two scores were above the 39th percentile). For those psychology geeks, this is essentially the Agreeableness factor of the “Big 5.” Lower scores on Interpersonal Sensitivity indicate a lack of awareness and ability to interpret interpersonal cues.  It also indicates a relatively higher focus on tasks and a logical, versus emotional, decision making style.

Their mean MVPI Affiliation percentile score is 26, indicative of a low desire for social interaction at work and a preference for working independently. Their mean MVPI Science percentile score was an incredibly high 94, indicative of a strong preference to work with data and objective facts. Taken together, these results shed light on the group’s overall lack of engagement with their colleagues. Their wiring was working against them in the same way that right hand dominant individuals are poor at left handed ping pong.

How did the story end with a “happily ever after”?  Helping my clients improve required me being a bit counter-intuitive in my approach so that I could get them started on increasing their interaction with colleagues and then helping them learn new skills. This involved a two-step process:

STEP 1 Increasing level of engagement with colleagues – Before working on skill building, my clients needed to increase their engagement with their colleagues and direct reports. For example, in working with “Max”, who leads a team of developers, we established achievable weekly time allocations for meeting with his important stakeholders. A 5% target, given a 50 hour work week, translates to 2.5 hours or five thirty minute slots. He established meetings every other week with direct reports and an ongoing weekly routine with colleagues in other regions to discuss projects. Some of slots were designated as times he would informally engage internal clients, often portfolio managers and risk professionals, and check in on completed and ongoing development projects. To make engagement an ingrained practice, we closely monitored adherence to the weekly target.  At the same time, I assigned Max “homework” designed to gather information about his colleagues. For example, he had to ask a colleague to describe their current work priorities. During the coaching sessions we reviewed the information he gathered. Max began to see how much he had learned and how valuable this information was. The idea of gathering of information that could then be applied to decisions appealed to the scientist in him.

STEP 2 Skill development – Once the allocation of time and data gathering were put in place we began working on skill development. Max now had a forum to practice skills, such as active listening, feedback and coaching. We worked incrementally, teaching a basic skill till it could be successfully applied. It was important to have realistic goals at this stage. Most piano students will not master Rachmaninov’s concertos (I googled that) and will never need to. To improve and make an impact, Max and my other clients generally needed to learn and apply some very basic skills in a consistent fashion.  Keep in mind that most of Max’s colleagues and direct reports were wired similarly to him. So, Max knowing his direct reports’ goals, providing them with clear feedback and career support made him the best manager his people ever had.  Also, when Max engaged in conversations (versus emails) with his colleagues to define and structure work, he got high marks for collaboration.  Essentially, all needed skills were attainable.

To conclude, highly technical leaders have become an increasingly important talent pool.  I have learned that improving collaboration and management skills first involves making changes in the amount of time spent directly interacting with colleagues. This change provides opportunities to learn more about others and practice new skills.

Please contact me directly if you have any questions or if you want to share your own experiences in this area.

Avi Shatzkes Ph.D.
avi@adstalentconsulting.com
914 714-0776
adstalentconsulting.com

Professional New Year Resolutions That Work

Well it is January again, time for New Year resolutions. A time honored tradition that stems from our instinctive desire to improve ourselves. Problem is that resolutions often do not result in any real change. So here are some pointers for setting some professional resolutions that will result in positive change:

• Focus on what you can control – Namely your behavior. Not the behavior of others. For example, not, “improve motivation of my employees,” and certainly not the environment (i.e., “increase market share by 20%”).
• Change how you spend your time – How you spend time, i.e. “spend one hour a week meeting with junior employees”, is more directly under your control than improving your skills (i.e. “improve ability to develop staff”). Improving skill is often a long process, and may not always happen. Changing how you spend time is immediately doable.
• Allocate time to making consistent progress on long term priorities – There are plenty of things that are important but not urgent, i.e. adoption of new technology, developing employees, expanding network etc. Often we don’t find time for non-urgent matters, but progress can be made with a small to moderate weekly focus.
• Commit to small changes – Do not try to do too much too quickly. My general rule of thumb is no changes in time allocation over 5% of weekly time. For a fifty hour work week that is 2.5 hours or thirty minutes a day. 2.5% changes in time are more sustainable.

I could go on but I need to honor my resolution of shortening my bulleted lists.

Happy New Year!

Coaching the Reluctant Leader: Transitioning Executers into Expanded Leadership Roles

Many of the individuals I coach are primarily executers who have obtained leadership positions through excelling in their respective disciplines. Professions which fall into this category include investment bankers, traders, lawyers, doctors, scientists and technologists. Often, it is as veterans that they are advanced into leadership roles requiring new responsibilities in areas that they have not had to focus on to date. Now in addition to personal execution, they are tasked with successfully leading a team. These individuals have been called “player-coaches” in other works, for simplicity sake we will refer to them as “executives.”

I am usually brought in to help when these executives are still producing at a high level but have been less successful in their incremental leadership responsibilities. In my experience, there are common areas, which if proactively addressed, can help to ensure a successful transition. They include:

1. Developing and motivating the talent on their team
2. Increasing capacity of team through process/system improvements
3. Building relationships with internal partners
4. Developing and communicating a strategy

This is not meant to be an exhaustive list, but these are the areas I find come up on a frequent basis. Additionally, these are areas that often are not addressed without guidance. Why are these executives not focusing on these important areas?

One reason is that they are not used to handling these areas. For their entire career, these leadership areas were someone else’s “chores” and the executive just never had to deal with them. For example, this is the first time they directly own relationships with staff groups who provide needed support and resources.

A second reason is that the above areas are all non-urgent activities and, as busy folks, these executives can work a long, hard day without having to address them. That is, until one of them surfaces as a crisis e.g. employee announces they will resign, an internal partner reduces support levels etc.

So how do you coach these executives toward a successful transition?

In doing so, I focus on the following two dimensions that cut across all of these areas:

1. Shifting allocation of time to be congruent with the demands of the new role.
2. Developing needed skills to support executing the demands of the new role.

Both these dimensions are important but I generally focus first on helping the executive shift allocation of time since that is directly under their control. Also, I often find it is hard to determine skill level before the individual starts engaging in the task. Finally, immediate performance gains can be made through the time allocation shift while skill development takes longer.

I approach shifting allocation of time in a very concrete fashion. For a given area of focus, I ask the executive to pick an actual percentage of time they will allocate to the area. For example, a recent executive I coached decided he would devote 5% of his time to developing and motivating his people. Given his 60 hour week this translated to 3 hours, an eternity to these executives. To increase chances of sustainability over time, we cut this in half and decided to break it up as three 30 minute one on one meetings he would schedule with members of his team. On a rotating basis, he was able to cover all of his team after several weeks. The first sessions were spent discussing career goals. Another executive I coached not only increased her allocation of time to process/systems improvement but also ensured each member of her team were doing so as well.

Creation of ongoing routines is the best way to lock-in time allocation shifts. For example, one executive established a monthly routine to meet with his internal support partners. This had the immediate benefit of demonstrating that he placed value on the relationship. A mistake that can be made is only speaking to partners to make a request or when something is wrong. Early meetings with partners should focus on communicating strategy, and committing to joint planning and ongoing dialogue.

Developing skills generally involves some sub set of the common core skills of influencing, coaching, listening, delegating etc. As always, it is important to know the actual skill level needed in order to execute new responsibilities. For example, a technologist I recently coached needed to improve his communication skills. We focused on his ability to deliver messages to groups of people in a concise and coherent fashion. He was able to improve by spending time before meetings identifying key points and structuring them into bulleted messages. He never reached the standard of “inspiring” or even “engaging” but did hit the level of “coherent.” These executives may never excel at certain leadership skills but they can be coached to make realistic improvements to the level required to meet job demands.

Let us review the key points:

1. There are a common set of areas new execution oriented executives often fail to address when transitioning to their new roles
2. Coaches are first advised to help their clients increase the time allocated to neglected areas
3. Coaches should then focus on improving their client’s skill levels to the degree needed to support their expanded leadership responsibilities

I find it extremely rewarding to coach these high performing execution oriented leaders. These executives are those that are directly engaged in the organization’s most important work and helping them improve has tremendous business impact.

Avi Shatzkes Ph.D.
ADS Talent Consulting LLC
ashatzkes@gmail.com
914 714-0776
adstalentconsulting.com

How Do You Stop the Bad Behavior of Valuable Talent? Put it in a Box!

The core strategic advantage of most of the companies I have consulted with is their people. Unfortunately, sometimes the smartest and most productive talent engage in unproductive behavior. A head of a foreign exchange trading desk destroys his phone console on the trading floor in a fit of rage. An investment banker consistently loses patience and erupts at junior analysts. A sales executive becomes sullen and withdrawn when her ideas are not received with enough enthusiasm. I could go on.

This category of valuable but poor behaving talent has the following characteristics:

• The individual is an executive or professional of high strategic value to the organization
• The individual possesses unique assets (i.e. skills, experiences, relationships) that are not common in the market
• The individual periodically exhibits behavior that negatively impacts their effectiveness

Typically, there is some incident that pushes the organization to take action. Often the sole action taken is providing feedback – the theory being that feedback (and feedback alone) will result in a dramatic moment of clarity which in turn results in permanent change with no additional follow up required.

Or the employee is sent to a training class that seeks to build their “leadership skills.” The idea is that the class will teach alternative behaviors that are more productive than screaming or sulking. Again, no additional follow up required.

Surprisingly (italics indicate sarcasm) it is rare that either of these actions eliminate the bad behavior. They fail to work because they are not addressing the behavior directly.

So what does work?

To extinguish non-productive behavior I have found that you need to work with the individual to clearly define 1) what behaviors they should eliminate, and 2) the conditions that trigger the behaviors. I call this the “box” method for reasons that will be apparent.

Here is an example. I recently coached a brilliant technologist, “Mark.” Mark was promoted to lead a team based on his unique depth in financial modeling, computer science and insight into specific fixed income markets. He worked very well with the portfolio managers but was universally resented by his colleagues and his team. Yet even his harshest critics strongly felt that Mark was a strategic asset that could not be replaced. Mark agreed to work with me after receiving feedback from the hedge fund’s founder who was the only intellectual peer Mark acknowledged.

I collected some input from several of Mark’s co-workers and then, working together with Mark, we identified the following behaviors as those he needed to stop:

• Dominating meetings with his recommendations and rationale
• Disparaging others’ input
• Long emails following meetings outlining why he was right and others were wrong
  

This increased specificity helped to focus Mark on exactly what behaviors he needed to change. This was a clear improvement over the general feedback of being “argumentative.”

Mark and I next identified four triggers:

1. Working with “unintelligent” people
2. Being challenged by others on technical topics
3. Being assigned “arbitrary” deadline
4. Others providing unsolicited input on his work

Triggers are conditions in which Mark is more likely to display the undesirable behavior. Awareness of these triggers helps Mark gain greater control. We placed the undesirable behaviors in the center and the trigger conditions around them to create a box.

The box metaphor helps. Boxes confine a set of defined content by boundaries. Putting defined unproductive behavior in a box and then creating boundaries by identifying trigger conditions serves to isolate those behaviors into a recognizable space.

Next we analyzed these triggers to create sharper boundaries around the behavior. Mark listed the people he felt were not intelligent. He identified technical topics he felt he should be above question on. He came to realization that the “arbitrary” deadlines he disliked were those that were imposed internally without consideration of technical requirements. He indicated that he was most sensitive to unsolicited input from those who were not technical equals. This analysis helped further define the “box” in which he was more likely to display the negative behavior.

Just going through the process of creating the box caused Mark to increase his awareness of the trigger conditions. At first, he would seek to withdraw from situations containing triggers, i.e., avoiding technical discussions with those whom he felt were not his peers. Gradually, he began to reinterpret the trigger situations and see them less as “threats” that elicited a fight or flight response (the undesirable behaviors) and more as annoyances. We also practiced more effective alternative behaviors such as listening and negotiation skills. Some behaviors, such as the long, scathing follow-up emails were completely eliminated. Others, such as dominating meetings, were significantly abated. His colleagues and peers wanted and needed Mark to succeed and were relieved to see faster and less painful progress being made on deliverables. One unexpected surprise was that Mark took on the role of actively developing talent in some of the more arcane aspects of modeling and coaching. He liked the “teacher” role and appreciated having a forum to “lecture.” I wouldn’t say Mark became a positive presence but he ceased to be a disruptive one.

I find that my coaching clients find the box method intuitive and easy to work with. Clients have called me indicating they introduced the method to a colleague or one of their direct reports. I would encourage those of you who coach to try using it.

Often I hear that coaching should never be used as a “fix.” I agree that coaching employees who are not likely to add value is a waste of resources and time. However, as sacrilegious as this may sound, in today’s highly technical environment, employees with very high IQ and low EQ cannot be written off. The companies that need talent with rare abilities should become adept at helping these valuable employees shed behaviors that block them from realizing their full strategic value.

Time Allocation: Managing Employee Inventory of Hours

A truism is that a primary role of an organization and its leaders is to improve the skills of its employees. While this may seem sacrilegious, I propose that skill development has been over emphasized and a faster route towards increasing productivity has been ignored. The shortest, most reliable, and most effective route towards increasing productivity is increasing employees’ allocation of time spent on core job tasks and behaviors that directly lead to results.

Consider this simple example. The average baseball player has a batting average of .250, meaning s/he gets a hit on average every four attempts or “at bats.” Let us assume that there are no restrictions to the number of at bats a player has and that they play five days a week. With ten at bats a day, a player will have 12.5 hits a week. If time allocated to at bats is increased by twenty percent to twelve at bats a day the player will have 15 hits a week. To get the same result by building skills and not increasing at bats, you would need to turn the .250 batter into a .300 batter.Based on historical data, that would equate to a full standard deviation movement from the 50 percentile to the 84 percentile. That’s not easy and would involve a great deal of concentrated training with little likely return. It is a lot easier to skip the skill building and get them up at bat twice more a day.

Let’s consider an analogous corporate role, the Financial Advisor. When working for a large wirehouse early in my career, I had access to a large volume of Financial Advisor data. We found that sales performance was remarkably stable over time.Three month sales performance had an extremely high correlation with thirty six month performance. Basically the rank order of Financial Advisors in terms of their performance was pretty constant over time. That’s true across many jobs, after an initial training period the skill levels do not change easily. How employees spend their time however, is more controllable and a leader can coach their employees to use their time more productively.

This seems incredibly obvious. Essentially, in the example above, sales people should spend majority of time calling on clients. Studies, however, demonstrate that the time allocated to core sales tasks is not optimal. This is true for both producers and managers. In one study of branch managers, only 15% of branch manager time was spent on recruiting or coaching Advisors, the two drivers of revenue growth.The majority of their time was spent on administrative and compliance tasks.Without constant monitoring and discipline, time allocation, like all systems in the universe, moves to a greater state of disorder. Improving allocation of time spent on core tasks by twenty percent is not by any means unrealistic.

Besides being a lot easier than skill building, focusing on improving time allocation does not require an increase in cost. Even very small gains represent profitable growth. Certainly more profitable than spending money on training or hiring more salespeople.

Now in truth, understanding the core tasks of a job can be easier for some jobs than others. For many sales roles, core job tasks are relatively straightforward i.e. calling clients, providing advice, asking for the sale etc. For professional services roles, like a consultant or an accountant, it would also seem clear i.e. hours spent on tasks that are billeable. For other roles core tasks may take more thought to identify i.e. research scientist. Yet the exercise of identifying core tasks in all cases is important.Ernest Hemingway, for example, was extremely disciplined about the time allocated to writing and had a fixed daily quota of time spent and output.

Bottom line is that a short route to increased productivity involves leaders doing the following:

• Identifying behaviors that are central toward achieving desired results
• Communicating these to employees
• Helping employees focus by eliminating non-core demands
• Coaching employees to monitor their time allocation and make adjustments to spend more time on core tasks

You don’t hear much about time allocation in the latest leadership books. And that’s too bad, because the clear truth is that for the majority of jobs out there any employee, regardless of skill level, can improve their performance by using their time more wisely. Helping employees in this way would seem an optimal use of a leader’s time.