Question, Listen, Discuss, Debate and Learn

Much has been written both here and elsewhere about the continuum of communication. That is to say, good communication practices encompass a back-and-forth exchange of information and ideas where the manager is questioning and listening as much as or more than speaking and conveying information.

      But if listening and seeking input is so important, why do so many managers fall short in that department?

      I suspect the short answer has to do with finite time: managers have much to do and not enough time in which to do it. So in the communication continuum, it often feels more critical for them to disseminate information and data to their teams, and then move onto the next task.

      Certainly there are times in the typical workweek when that is necessary. But the manager that falls into the habit of justifying the overuse of one-way communication is on track for failure down the road.

      In this era of Twitter, Facebook, email, and text messages, we have become accustomed to taking the easy route when communicating with our teams. An email to all team members alerting them to a change of process or policy is certainly appropriate. But when email blasts become a manager’s principal means of communicating to his/her team, then he/she is no longer communicating. He/she is spewing. Such information downloads fall on deaf ears.

The Team’s Value to the Organization

The reason we build teams of people within our organizations is to achieve the excellence that several people working together can attain that the individual working alone cannot. So it stands to reason that the person managing that team wants to tap into the best that his players bring to the mix.

      Questioning, listening and engaging in proactive dialogues is how the best managers do that. So what exactly does that look like, ideally?

      Again, I add the word “ideally” because we have to be cognizant that the sturm und drang of the day-to-day business can sometimes overwhelm and cancel out the good intentions of striving for excellent communication.

      So let’s assume that the periodic ebb and flow of busy-ness on the job allows for contemplative moments when one-on-one conversations or productive team meetings can occur. The well-organized manager knows best when those times are most likely to be available – first thing Monday mornings; at the end of the billing cycle; before the next production run gets started, etc.

      The wise manger with foresight finds those periodic opportunities and works them into the calendar. Those times become the most valuable of the workweek or month. When the manager and team members are prepared, much can be accomplished, and the ball figuratively moved down the field.

Preparation is Key

Preparation on both sides is critical but means something a bit different, though it follows parallel tracks. The manager, in particular, should come to these regular meetings with an open mind, ready to hear and learn things he may not expect, as well as a desire to discover and discern specific information related to issues of the moment, in particular the current challenges and opportunities the team is dealing with.

      A significant component of the manager’s preparation is staying plugged into the larger organization and the outside world that impacts the business as a whole. He/she should be able to bring that information to his/her team and make it relevant to their day-to-day efforts.

      These meetings are also chances to reflect together on how their unit might work better with other units, how collectively they can contribute to the organization’s larger purpose. To that end, it is the manager’s responsibility to bring in the outside view that is not regularly conveyed into the confines of a unit’s figurative walls.

      For their part, the employees’ responsibility is to come to these discussions with ideas, insights and open minds. Their preparation is best achieved over the course of doing their jobs, making note of problems that recur or opportunities they sense are not being fully exploited. These are the gems that the alert manager with good listening skills looks for and hopes for.

      At the same time, the manager encourages the sharing of bad news along with the good because he/she knows that responding negatively to the employee who brings the bad news will only discourage others from doing so in the future, which in turn leads to small problems festering into insurmountable crises.

      I fear that the typical team meeting consists of a manager speaking for a short time, concluding his/her remarks and then asking whether anyone has any questions. Hearing none, everyone returns to work. The result is that employees often feel purposeless and a mere cog in a machine, disconnected from the larger operation.

      It is far more effective to allow the team to learn together with the manager posing open-ended questions that force them to think through a challenge or opportunity and arrive at their own answers. They then share those answers and begin a discussion and debate.

      Together, the team learns while often coming up with practicable solutions, or uncovering new ways of looking at and thinking about challenges and opportunities. At the same time, the individual employee becomes more engaged in the business, feeling he/she is an active contributor to its larger purpose, and that his/her voice is heard. It’s all good. It’s effective communications.

Learning Outside Our Comfort Zones

Every business organization consists of people with assignments appropriate to their skills: marketers, engineers, accountants, salespeople, etc. They are hired for their experiences, expertise and talents in their particular field.

      So is there any value in having them learn about specialties outside their own area? Are there benefits for a software company, say, in having its graphic designers, salespeople, and marketers learn how to write computer code?

      The snap answer would be, “No, it would be a waste of time.” But one software company CEO felt differently and began to do just that, launching a program to teach every employee JavaScript programming language, enough so that after a year each would be able to develop a product that could theoretically be integrated into the company’s software.

      To what end? Certainly not to improve or expand the company’s product offering. Why, then?

      Michael Jaconi, CEO of 60-employee FreeCause, explains that he did it because he felt it “would facilitate more efficiency, bring teams closer together, and ultimately make our company perform better.”

      This is not a full-immersion course, intent on creating a back-up engineering team for code writing. Rather, the firm devotes just a few hours each week to lessons, plus lunch-hour “boot camps” led by company engineers. The program expects employees to be knowledgeable and moderately proficient after a year.

      So has this been yielding the expected benefits? Apparently so. According to employees interviewed for a Boston Globe article (“Software company wants all workers to know code,” July 11, 2012), internal meetings now take less time because fewer technical explanations are necessary. Time saved with shorter internal meetings creates “found” time for other more productive work related to one’s expertise.

      One sales executive says that his new coding knowledge enables him to better explain product attributes to clients instead of bringing an engineer into every customer meeting for technical explanations and insights.

Investing “Found” Time

Left unsaid is the fact that, instead of bailing out an uninformed salesman, that engineer is able to devote more time to what he does best – a far better investment of his (and the company’s) time.

      As I read about this and thought about its broader implications, the secondary benefits became obvious. For instance, because technology has become such an integral part of our lives, and continues to expand in that regard, it often creates barriers between technical and non-technical people inside companies.

      The non-technical side of the population, among which I count myself, knows that having a basic understanding of a relevant technical topic goes far in helping us do our jobs more effectively, especially when we have to interact with technical people or clients.

      We also have a better appreciation for the challenges and achievements of our technical colleagues.

      There’s an ancillary benefit for the individual employees, as the article points out. “At the very least, [employees] realize that knowing JavaScript makes them more marketable. ‘It’s another resume builder for me,’ said the director of accounting operations.”

      In addition, learning something new as a group, exploring an unknown field together, creates bonds among employees from different parts of the company, thereby building camaraderie and morale.

      It also gives employees a new understanding of and greater insights into the company’s products. Imagine the value for marketers, charged with creating and building product awareness among target customers. It’s not a leap for them to appreciate the full import and market potential of a new product. Similarly, as marketers, they are better able to talk with technicians about expanded market opportunities that an upgrade or product line extension might yield.

      This needn’t be limited to non-technical people learning technical subjects. Why not the other way around, too? Why not teach basic marketing or some other aspect of the business to the software engineers?

      And it needn’t be limited to software companies and code writing. No matter the product a company sells, there is a technical product research and development side of the business. Helping others in the organization learn the rudiments of the technical side, and vice versa, goes far in breaking down the walls of misunderstanding and ignorance that can develop in most organizations, in turn helping those organizations thrive and grow.

      At its heart, this kind of activity improves internal communications in the organization. And any time people with a common mission are better able to understand one another and better equipped to talk on a range of relevant business topics, it always accrues to the benefit of the business and, by extension, the bottom line.

How Volunteers are Like Managers

In many New England towns, the work of government is done largely by volunteers who serve on school boards, planning commissions and the like. Uniquely in New England, we also have elected representative Town Meetings, which serve approximately as towns’ legislatures, while boards of selectmen provide towns’ executive function.

      For the past several years, I have been a member of my town’s Historical Commission, and have also served as its chairman for some three years (so far). This role is new to me in some ways. But in others, it’s very familiar.

      It is new in the sense that I am learning how local government works, as well as the powers and limits on power of my commission, as well as that of other boards and commissions, and where our roles and functions complement one another.

      On the other hand, the experience is familiar in the exercise of management skills and techniques. The parallels with business are not surprising.

      Just as a company’s department or division manager has general, specific and defined responsibilities, the volunteer town commission chairman must be sure that the necessary actions are taken and promises kept, and that the commission and its many meetings operate smoothly and orderly, according to law. Of course, like business, there are bumps in the road and, sometimes, clashes with peers.

Working in Partnership

Often, we work in informal partnership with one or more complementary boards and commissions, such as the planning board in our case, to achieve objectives of mutual interest.

      Conversely, we must sometimes butt heads with other boards that are working at cross-purposes with my commission. As in business, sometimes we win, sometimes we lose, and other times we compromise and reach accommodation.

      Naturally, personalities can be a significant factor. There are – excuse the term – some pig-headed people who have their ways of doing things and their peculiar views of how the town’s business ought to be managed, approaches and views that may clash with my own and/or the views of several other of my peers. Again, sometimes we win and other times we lose.

      In at least one respect, town government can be a bit tougher than a business environment in that we are all volunteers with full-time jobs elsewhere. To get things done, we work and meet in our spare time, mostly on weekday evenings. Attendance at meetings of my seven-member commission is rarely 100 percent. Some of us have to travel on business or stay late at the office.

      Along those lines, too, is the difficulty of getting volunteer members to find the time that is often necessary to do the due diligence required of the commission doing its job according to state statutes and town bylaws. Additionally, as chairman, I’m often the one who attends the several other commissions’ and boards’ meetings that require the participation and perspective of a Historical Commission representative. Again, just like a business manager.

      The primary role of the Historical Commission is to preserve and protect the town’s historical structures. That means convincing and working with developers to renovate and refresh older buildings, rather than demolish them to make way for larger, newer buildings (that usually carry higher price tags) that damage the town’s cultural heritage.

Case in Point

A current case shows parallels between town government and managing in a business context.

      We are locked in an extended struggle with the school board over the disposition of one of the town’s older, more noteworthy town-owned buildings, a 1904 Art Deco carriage house that, because of its proximity to an elementary school, was ceded to the school department years ago for its own purposes. But it has been empty and unused for some time now, and consequently is suffering disrepair.

      Like all towns and cities these days, ours is strapped for cash and since this carriage house was not deemed critical to the town's infrastructure, it has not received the necessary attention and funding necessary to maintain it properly. Flash forward to now. The schools are eager to be rid of it to make room for an expanded school parking lot.

      So we are at loggerheads over the need to preserve a historical structure versus a desire to create more parking spaces. I trust we will reach a suitable compromise and save this irreplaceable piece of our town’s history.

      This kind of challenge is not unfamiliar to those of us in who have management roles.

      The core similarity here is that in the two positions, both as a volunteer commission chairman and as a manager with P&L responsibilities, you have discretion to take appropriate actions to effect necessary changes. You also have the power of your personality and good will to persuade people to your way of thinking. And, you have responsibility both to compromise and reach accommodation, as well as to understand and appreciate conflicting points of view.

      It’s how the world goes round, whether for businesspeople or for volunteer government officials.

Cultivate Your Internal Champions

Over the years, through numerous client assignments involving a range of industries, company size and business focus, I’ve seen a pattern repeated in virtually every sizable organization for which I've done work.

      In the course of trying to engage employees in the organization’s mission, vision and values, or a new initiative, people can be roughly categorized into one of three types. These types may be familiar to you. You may have different terms to describe them and feel that my percentage breakdown is a bit off, but I trust our views closely parallel one another.

      At the top of the hierarchy are those I call the Eager Beavers, the ones who “get it.” These are the ones you don't need to convince when it comes to enacting the necessary changes to make an initiative succeed. They readily understand the rationale and its links to the corporate mission.

      They know what underpins the organization, the imperatives that are driving it, and how they personally fit into the larger whole. They can readily draw the connection between what they do every day and where the company needs to go.

      Eager Beavers want to do well, and they want to progress in the company because they believe in it. Generally, because of their positive attitude, these people do in fact get promoted.

      Whether you realize it or not, these are the ones for whom you provide the bulk of the information you develop. When their manager explains a new initiative in a group meeting, he/she might refer their team to the company’s intranet where the background information is provided. The Eager Beavers are the ones who invariably go to that web page to learn more.

The Flip Side

Conversely, at the bottom of the hierarchy are the Disconnected. These are the employees you'll likely not reach no matter what you do. They rarely pay attention to a corporate message unless it affects them, such as layoff notices or benefit changes. They don’t care to stay abreast of the outside competitive environment and what’s impacting the company. They’re likely just showing up every day for the paycheck. You know the type.

      In most organizations, each of these two segments is roughly the same size, anywhere from 10 to 20 percent of the total employee population.

      I contend that strategic communications programs will have no appreciable impact on them, either in making the Eager Beavers more engaged – who, frankly, couldn’t be more engaged – or in finally connecting the Disconnected.

      Sure, our messages reach the Eager Beavers, and they likely gobble up every word, while the Disconnected ignore most of it. But even if our communications are lacking, count on the Eager Beavers to find out on their own, while, conversely, your best communications efforts will not reach the Disconnected.

      So our communications efforts should target the Big Middle, the 60 to 80 percent of the people who might be convinced of the value of buying into the new change initiative, the corporate mission, or a new strategy. Our challenge as communicators is finding the right messages and the right media to reach them in a compelling way at the right time.

Aiming for the Sweet Spot

It’s likely your Eager Beavers are your best, most effective means to engage the Big Middle. That's if you can get them to be your champions inside the company, leveraging their personal engagement in the company mission to connect to their peers among the Big Middle. Your communications efforts to connect with the Big Middle will be far more successful that way than if you rely exclusively on conventional internal communications tools and messages.

      The head of every unit in your company and every facility manager can readily identify their own Eager Beavers. They exist in all parts of the organization and at all levels. These are the first people you need to reach with critical messages, and then engage them to be your advocates among their peers.

      Another common characteristic of this employee type is that they are out-going and friendly. They generally have developed a high degree of trust among their peers. Naturally, because they stay well informed, they are the ones to whom others turn for news about company changes. Similarly, they are the ones best equipped to knock down false rumors.

      The Eager Beaver group likely includes a lot of supervisors – likely because their high degree of engagement means that you have promoted them. As a rule, supervisors are the most trusted people in an organization, and the primary source of information for most front-line employees.

      Due to this element of trust and their out-going nature, your change messages and breaking news should target these people. They immediately understand your rationale and are readily able to convey your message of change to their colleagues and to answer their subsequent questions.

      These advocates will rise to the extra attention you give them and appreciate the recognition. That has the added advantage of assuring that they will become your willing messengers. Of course, they are not the only means of communicating with the Big Middle; they are supplemental. But they just may become your most credible link.

      Instead of spending the bulk of their time fretting over the nuances of the punctuation of a particular written message or the effectiveness of the latest new media, communicators would be far more successful if they focused more of their energies on identifying and cultivating their internal champions among their most engaged employees.

Assuming the Mantle of Leadership

In my years of working with organizations – both large and small – and dealing with leaders and managers, I’ve often wondered what makes a leader. Is it something they were born with, something they learn, or a little of both? How do people respond to their new role as leader when it is earned through years of dedicated, hard work? And how does that kind of leader compare with one upon whom the role is suddenly thrust?

            The question of comparison occurs to me as I read Passage of Power, the fourth book in Robert Caro’s planned five-volume biography of Pres. Lyndon Baines Johnson.

            This book covers Johnson’s life from 1958 into 1964, a period when he went from serving as one of the US Senate’s most effective and powerful Majority Leaders, to a stillborn presidential campaign, to a humiliating three-year role as Vice President, to the assassination of Pres. John F. Kennedy, which thrust him into the presidency, a position he had long craved.

            How he responded to the shock of suddenly assuming the world’s most difficult leadership job is a lesson that answers my question – at least anecdotally.

Behind The Scenes

Caro does an extraordinary job, both in writing the story as well as researching it. Certainly, no historical biographer that I’ve read to date can compare with Caro, whose eye for detail and ability to dredge up heretofore-unknown information about highly public people and events is unmatched. Perhaps his most compelling research concerned Johnson’s reactions and actions in the minutes, hours, days and weeks immediately following the assassination, when he assumed the weighty mantle of leadership.

            Lyndon Johnson was a driven man, always on a quest for power. Interviewed about his series and the nearly 40 years he has spent researching the man, Caro said that the books are as much about Johnson’s quest for power as about the man himself.

            Johnson was Senate Majority Leader from 1954 until he became Vice President in 1961. Johnson used the post to its full extent and more, becoming the most powerful Senate leader of the 20^th century, a man accustomed to giving orders and expecting them to be carried out.

            He was enticed into the job of VP believing that, in presiding over the Senate, he could finagle even more power than he had had as Majority Leader. But the Constitutional separation of powers limited the role and assured he would merely be casting tie-breaking votes.

            Once ensconced as Vice President, the power he had known and luxuriated in as Senate Majority Leader was gone. Instead, he became a mere figurehead with little to do. He grasped at roles for himself, but JFK and his coterie of aides and cabinet members, especially Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, nixed any meaningful role for LBJ.

            Johnson’s humiliating three years as Vice President was the most difficult and painful period of his life. And then fate intervened in the person of Lee Harvey Oswald. This is where the story of power and leadership gets interesting.

Passage of Power

Awaiting word of the gravely wounded president’s condition, Johnson, his wife and an aide were put in a heavily guarded private room at Parkland Hospital in Dallas. Throughout the interminable minutes of waiting, Caro writes, Johnson stood with his back to the wall, completely silent and absorbed in his thoughts. The power of the presidency passed to Johnson the moment Kennedy was pronounced dead.

            Initially hesitant, Johnson soon took control. Caro’s narrative describing the re-emergence of his powerful personality is remarkable:

“…His demeanor was very different in moments of crisis, in moments when there were decisions – tough decisions – to be made … in those moments he became … ‘quiet and still.’ He had been very quiet during the long minutes he stood there in the little room… There was a stillness about him, an immobility, a composure that hadn’t been seen very much during the past three years. Though he had been for those years restless, unable to sit still, unable to keep his mind on one subject, unable to stop talking, he wasn’t restless in that little room.

“…the hangdog look was gone, replaced with an expression” described as “set.” … "Johnson’s oldest aides and allies, the men who had known him the longest, knew that expression; the big jaw jutting, the lips above it pulled into a tight, grim line, the corner turned down in a hint of a snarl, the eyes, under those long black eyebrows, narrowed, hard, piercing. It was an expression of determination and fierce concentration; when Lyndon Johnson wore that expression, a problem was being thought through with an intensity that was almost palpable – and a decision made.”

Very quickly, he was giving orders and making rapid-fire decisions of great import.

            For me, as I noted, it is an impressive story of one man’s passage into power. I doubt many people could rise to such an occasion, as did LBJ. The notion of having to succeed a highly popular president on the heels of his sudden, tragic death just staggers the imagination.

            Johnson did it. And he did it with grace, thoughtfulness (for Jackie Kennedy and the Kennedy family), intelligence and tact.

            But he was also aggressive and eager to get himself out from under the Kennedy shadow and mark the presidency as his own. He wasted no time. While he assured the nation he would carry forth Kennedy’s initiatives, he needed something of his own. He alighted on it within his first month in office, designating the “War on Poverty” as his signature cause.

            The central message is this: born leader or otherwise, Johnson had the makeup of a man who knew himself well, his strengths and his limitations, as well as the ability to maximize those strengths and find the right people to make up for the limitations. In other words, a leader.

Walking the Management Tight Rope

Being a manager is to walk a tight rope. It’s about finding and maintaining the right balance consistently, lest you fall and fail.

            By balance, I mean walking that fine line between over-managing people and giving them too much leeway in their jobs. I couldn’t illustrate this better than did Danish author Carsten Jensen in a passage in his well-crafted 2011 novel, We, the Drowned, about generations of seamen from the small Danish port of Marstal:

“Every sailing ship has miles of ropes, scores of blocks, hundreds of square yards of canvas. Unless the ropes are constantly pulled and the sails endlessly adjusted, the ship becomes a helpless victim of the wind. Managing a crew is the same thing.

“The captain holds hundreds of invisible ropes in his hands. Allowing the crew to take charge is letting the wind take the helm: the ship will be wrecked. But if the captain takes complete control, the ship will be becalmed and go nowhere: he strips his men of all initiative; they’ll no longer do their best and go about their work with reluctance. It’s all a question of experience and knowledge. But first and foremost, it’s about authority.”

Of course, modern organizations are not 19^th century sailing vessels. Plying the vast open waters of the world’s great oceans at the mercy of fickle winds, currents and weather, there was an ever-present danger of rogue waves, sudden storms and typhoons, and lapses in judgment that could and often did result in disaster: lost ships, drowned crew, and lost cargo.

            While there may be no such life-and-death dangers in today’s modern office buildings and factory floors, the metaphor works.

Tight Reins Stifle Excellence

Managers who keep a tight rein on their teams, who micro-manage and second-guess their employees’ every move soon create a disheartened workforce. I’ve seen these situations first-hand.

            Employees “check out.” They go through the motions of doing their jobs, waiting for their manager to correct them, admonish them, or figuratively reach over their shoulders and do their jobs for them.

            This approach begs the question of such managers: why do you hire people? And exactly what skills were you looking for when you hired them? Are your people interchangeable? Clearly, by their actions, this sort of manager telegraphs his/her own gross insecurity that often betrays a personal lack of confidence, an innate craving to be superior when, in fact, that is in doubt.

            Conversely, the other extreme can be just as bad. When the manager is hands-off, offering little or no feedback or coaching, employees are cut adrift. They are left to guess what is expected of them, what determines excellence. In their minds, what they do has little meaning. Their errors and mistakes may or may not bring harm to the company, but it’s unlikely they’ll realize it until it’s too late.

            The happy middle ground is a bit of both: mentoring and coaching, nurturing and building the self-assurance of one’s employees until they feel secure and confident in their own abilities. They eventually gain a larger understanding of the team’s challenges, better able to make independent judgments, acquiring the wisdom that comes with experience.

            As Jensen notes, a manager’s role is to exert authority – not by doing your team members’ jobs for them or second-guessing every decision they make, but rather driving them to improve their own individual performances constantly for the betterment of the larger effort. It is coaching them to ask the right questions and to strive for personal improvement in their individual quests for excellence.

            As a manager, it’s your responsibility to leverage your own knowledge and experience to guide and coach your employees toward the acquisition of the same in application to the unit’s and the business’ challenges. It is helping them make the links between what they do every day and the organization’s larger purpose and goals.

Peeking Behind the Ad Agency Curtain

The daily interactions between people that occur in any workplace shape that organization’s culture, and make it a desirable place to work – or not. The daily struggle to create and maintain quality products and/or services is always a push-pull between people with different viewpoints, and sometimes opposing senses of what will work and what won’t.

      This is especially true in an advertising agency, where the sum total of the firm’s worth lies in its ability to operate as a team to deliver strategically targeted, consistently high quality creative work, which in turn must effectively sell its clients’ goods and services.

      “The Pitch,” a new weekly TV series on AMC, attempts to give us an inside view of this world of advertising agencies. My initial impression is that it did an okay job of it within the confines of a one-hour time slot.

      Filmed like most other reality TV shows with ever-present cameras hovering over participants’ shoulders, two ad agencies are pitted against one another in pursuit of a new piece of business.

      There is much truth in the broadcast: the tension, the petty jealousies, the short fuses, the preening egos, and the prickliness. But there’s also the whirlwind excitement of throwing crazy ideas against the wall in the hope that one will stick and ultimately become the killer idea that wins the account. And then there's the jubilation and profound sense of relief that comes with winning the account.

The Human Element

The larger message of the show lies in that human interaction, the quest for the right chemistry, both between the agency and its prospective client, as well as internally within the agency among the people who work long hours under a tight deadline to deliver winning work.

      “The Pitch” does a great job of capturing that tension, the sleepless nights and long days, and the death spiral feeling during the final days and hours leading up to “the pitch.” We’re reminded with on-screen chyrons how many days or hours are left as the creative teams scramble to put the finishing touches on the idea they hope will win.

      The “sneak preview” of “The Pitch,” which ran (appropriately) last Sunday night as a lead-in to “Mad Men,” pits WDCW of Los Angeles against McKinney of Durham, NC, for the Subway breakfast account. (The show’s regular slot will be Mondays at 9:00.)

      The prospective client is headquartered in Milford, CT, so both agencies had to fly considerable distances to meet (jointly, simultaneously and awkwardly) their prospective client who outlines the assignment. They return a week later with hoped-for knock-their-socks-off ideas to close the deal.

      As the story unfolds, Subway has already started serving breakfast, but is unsatisfied with sales. So this assignment targets a younger demographic – 18-to 24-year-olds – which they believe holds the most promise for growth.

      The Chief Marketing Officer at Subway is the guy who will ultimately judge the winner. I don’t envy the competitors because he seems like a tough customer able to maintain a good poker face.

      The sense of panic sets in immediately back in their home shops. McKinney ropes in its younger staff because they’re members of the target demographic. These kids look like they’ve been out of college for a couple of years, at most. Their ideas are rough, but intriguing.

What’s Missing?

A key element of the process that’s missing, probably because it’s not as sexy as the creative process, is the strategizing that always occurs before any creative work can begin.

• Who’s the target audience – specifically and generally?
• What do we know about them and their breakfast preferences?
• What are their media preferences?
• There’s an implicit assumption from the get-go that the creative product will be TV advertising, which assumes the target watches TV. If so, how do they watch: with finger poised over mute buttons at commercial breaks? When do they watch?
• What kinds of peer pressures determine their buying habits?
• What excites them, and what turns them off?

Answering these and related questions guide the media planning and strategy that help center the creative effort and avoid the problem of ineffective advertising down the road. But these agencies apparently just skipped ahead, riding on their assumptions.

      McKinney’s chief creative officer is an unsmiling killjoy who seems to like none of his team’s ideas. While bullying them, he delights in knocking down a lot of plausible approaches while offering no guidance or suggestions. Perhaps that’s his style, but for a business that thrives on good relationships among team members, his method strikes me as cold and counter-productive.

      “The Pitch” spends more time on McKinney – probably because they are the ultimate winners. We get a good flavor of the creative back-and-forth that is the heart of the ad business: the kicking around of crazy ideas in a conference room and the excitement when something feels just right.

      The winning idea involves a rapper, Mac Lethal, who writes a clever rap lyric that the McKinney team videotapes in a local Subway shop. McKinney goes one step further bringing the rapper to the pitch. As they close their presentation, he enters the room, surprises the client, and raps praises for Subway. The client grins for the first time.

      The closing scenes accurately portray the results back at their home offices – the McKinney offices exploding into cheers at the news, while the WDCW team plays basketball and talks philosophically, though not credibly, about not playing to win.

      It’s an entertaining reality TV show, but not the full story. It glamorizes the business, as seems to be its intent, with none of the downside of working in an ad agency: the slow-paying clients and subsequent cash flow problems, the lost accounts, and the impossible-to-please clients. Take “The Pitch” with a big grain of salt and enjoy it.

The Leadership Lessons of George Washington

Given the choice between working for a manager who operates in a top-down fashion issuing orders without benefit of alternative opinions, versus one who seeks a diversity of input, most of us would prefer to work for the latter. I dare say, too, that the latter type is more likely to be successful in the long run, by a number of measures.

      Would you judge George Washington a successful leader? Do we know why he was successful?

      There are few historic leaders that garner as many clichés as George Washington. The “Father of our Country” is credited for winning the American War for Independence, as well as providing the right vision at the right time to help guide the establishment of our Constitution, and serving as our first president, setting the standard for all those that followed.

      But it was a book, Washington's Crossing, by David Hackett Fischer, that really opened my eyes to the man’s truly distinctive leadership qualities.

      In school, we learned the abbreviated and hackneyed story of Washington. I don’t recall delving into the specifics of his character, what made him a great leader.

      Fischer’s book covers a brief chunk of the history of the Revolutionary War, from December 1776 to the following spring. In four to five months, the Continental Army, under the astute and wise leadership of Washington, reversed the fortunes of the Continentals and changed the course of the war. By comparing the leadership style of Washington to that of his counterparts, Gen. Sir William Howe and, more specifically, Gen. Charles Cornwallis, we learn why Washington really was a great leader. 

Shifting to Offense

To briefly recap the story, the British army chased the Americans out of Long Island and Manhattan, into and across New Jersey in the waning weeks of 1776. The rebels’ fortunes looked dismal as they crossed the Delaware River and made winter camp in Pennsylvania.

      As the year approached its end, the British and their Hessian allies prepared to continue its march into Pennsylvania with the goal of overwhelming and occupying Philadelphia, the Continental capital.

      But with a bold and highly risky strategy, Washington took the offensive, taking his ragtag army back across the ice-choked Delaware on Christmas night, surprising and overwhelming the Hessian camp in Trenton the following morning.

      Two days later, they fended off the reinforcing Brits and again went on the offensive by attacking the British stronghold at Princeton. The two successful battles really did turn the tide of the war in at least three important ways.

      First, the victories provided both the Continental army and the Continental Congress with their first major success of the war and an important boost in confidence. Second, they helped recruit badly needed fresh troops while drawing equally critical supplies. Third, British and Hessian armies’ losses badly shook their confidence, from the officer corps to the rank and file, and put them off-balance and on the defensive.

      Their victories put the Americans on the offense, where they would remain for the balance of the war. By the spring of 1777, opposition leaders in Parliament in London began arguing that it was time to pull out of the conflict. Parliament was reluctant to grant Howe’s desperate requests for supplemental troops and supplies.

      Through the winter and early spring months of 1777, Americans continually harassed the opposition in the so-called “forage wars” of New Jersey, preventing the British and Hessians from obtaining critical feed for their horses and thereby reducing their mobility – the equivalent of denying gasoline and diesel supplies to a modern army. 

Superior Leadership Style

Through it all, as the Fischer repeatedly illustrates, it was Washington’s superior leadership style that made the difference. In one passage, he wrote:

“…Cornwallis imposed his plan from the top down, against the judgment of able inferiors, and prepared to attack in the morning. [Meanwhile,] Washington in his council of war welcomed the judgment of others and presided over an open process of discovery and decision that yielded yet another opportunity. In the night, Washington disengaged his forces from an enemy only a few yards away, and an exhausted American army found the will and strength to make another night march toward Princeton.”

You can sense the rigidly hierarchical style of the professional British general, bound up in the traditions of his army, while not brooking any alternative ideas or input from his officer corps, blindly moving ahead with his own plan.

      Washington came from a different stock, with a far more democratic army and officer corps. It would have been anathema of him to ignore or not seek the thoughts and ideas of his senior officers. And when he did, time and again it made the difference between victory and defeat.

      The more effective presidents over the years have been those that assume the role of senior executive – Lincoln, Kennedy and Reagan come to mind – presidents who surrounded themselves with a diversity of viewpoints, and sought the full range of opinions and insights before reaching a conclusive and final decision. The less effective presidents have been those that wasted precious time to build and reach consensus among their advisors. Or, conversely, those that led without benefit of alternative viewpoints and ideas.

      Washington’s is a leadership style that endures and remains highly applicable in a range of modern and conventional challenges. Clearly, in this way, George Washington established the model for the ideal leader, not just in politics, but also in the military and business.

Why Mustaches are like Social Media

Imagine you inadvertently overhear a snippet of your wife’s conversation with a friend. She doesn't like your new mustache, but hasn't said anything about it because she doesn't want to hurt your feelings. But she’s eager for you to get tired of it and shave it off.

      You’ve discovered a painful little truth. You’re “just trying it out” and think it looks pretty good. But you've gained a new insight into your wife’s tastes. You’ll probably shave it tomorrow morning.

      Imagine, too, that you’re the founder and president of a thriving multi-national business. You’ve always assumed that your employees admired you and, for the most part, heeded your counsel about how things ought to be done to assure continued growth and success.

      Recently, your communications team installed a new social media app on the company’s internal network that enables employees to meet and share ideas instantly, regardless of their location or time zone. It’s an immediate hit. Employees are buzzing in the online chat room.

      The head of communications suggests you spend a little time getting familiar with it and asks you to contribute to the conversation. You’re busy and this new communications tool seems a bit frivolous. One evening at home, you have nothing else to do so you check it out.

      Amid the back-and-forth chatter about challenges and opportunities, customers, products, and competitors, however, you discover a few comments about you and your leadership team. Employees are wisecracking about your management style, your directives and your ideas.

      You get angry. The next morning, loaded for bear, you call in your communications VP to talk about it. He advises you to calm down and consider the comments as constructive criticism. He’s right. So you think of them in the same way you do your wife’s feelings about your mustache. You’ve learned something else you didn’t previously know.

      It’s a learning experience. The best organizations, after all, are learning organizations. And what this new social media experiment is doing, you realize, is allowing people to share big ideas and to learn together through means that were previously non-existent.

      People are having virtual conversations about topics that make the business better. Maybe their stray criticisms of your style are justified. Maybe you are a little stodgy in how you see things and how you operate. So your eyes are opened now.

Parallel Worlds

Speaking of having one’s eyes opened… Bob Pearson has written a marvelously insightful book called Pre-Commerce. Though I’m only halfway through it, it’s really opening my eyes about social media’s potential for business.

      The book is about the places where customers and businesses intersect, and how companies can use social media to get ahead of the curve on product development, customer service, and customer satisfaction – all toward improving their customer relationships. The first third of the book sets up the rationale and the opportunity. The rest fleshes out the how-to and follow-through.

      In that first third, I found myself substituting the word “employees” in some of the places where Pearson uses “customers.” For instance, consider the following passage:

“The only way to start rebuilding trust and brand loyalty with the Pre-Commerce customer is to become an effective peer. An effective peer is one who provides the right information at the right place and at the right time. An effective peer doesn’t look for ways to avoid blame or responsibility. He or she corrects problems swiftly and to the satisfaction of the person wronged. And an effective peer constantly works to improve the relationship. That last step, the constant work on the relationship, is the most rigorous…”

While what Pearson has written is certainly true about the relationships a company should cultivate with its customers, those of you who are, like me, students of employee communications know that the words apply equally to the relationships an organization and its managers must have with their employees, and the nature of the communication that sustains those relationships.

      I don’t mean to imply that Pre-Commerce is about employee communications, per se. In fact, it’s about transforming your business from a conventional 20^th century marketing organization into one that leverages social media to listen to, learn from and engage your customers through every stage of the transaction – all toward improved revenues, profits and long-term success.

Engaging Customers

Aside from my word substitution, the other obvious intersection here between the external and internal worlds of business is why it’s critical for employees to engage customers. As Pearson notes, “I can toss out a few examples of innovation and a theory or two, but that doesn’t do anything to change your culture. You need to get all of your 500, 5,000 or 50,000 employees focused on listening to customers more effectively.” Which can be achieved through effective use of social media.

      To come full circle, Pearson’s insights can also be applied to how we engage our employees inside the organization. Which is why the use of social media behind the firewall excites me. It can become a valuable part of a company’s internal communications dynamic.

      While stimulating and increasing productive internal dialogue – irrespective of managers’ and employees’ physical location – these tools also give leaders the opportunity to eavesdrop on and participate in that internal discourse, a productive, relevant conversation that was heretofore very difficult.

      Imagine the potential, especially in the context of what Pearson writes about being an effective peer. The best managers and leaders are those that operate in the manner of a peer, speaking to employees as equals. They understand that their chief role is to help employees acquire the necessary resources to do their jobs – and then get out of the way and let them do it.

      What better way to uncover those needs, to cultivate trust and those critical internal relationships, than to engage in a robust dialogue? And when use of social media tools means that the dialogue can occur whenever and wherever you want, the possibilities for success and greatness are limitless.

Putting the Client Where He Belongs: Front and Center

From its founding, any business’ raison d’être is to provide customers with a product and/or service that improves their lives in some way. When a business consistently does that well, it succeeds and thrives – as well it should.

      Conversely, when a business loses that impetus, when its focus shifts away from its customers’ needs and, instead, concentrates on the money it makes and a desire to make more, its demise is in sight.

      Such appears to be the case with Goldman Sachs. 
      Wall Street (and beyond) is abuzz this week on the heels of a provocative March 14 New York Times Op-Ed by Greg Smith titled “Why I am Leaving Goldman Sachs.”

      In it, this vice president, a 12-year veteran of the firm, explains that the company he came to know and love was a culture that “revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients. The culture was the secret sauce that made this place great and allowed us to earn our clients’ trust for 143 years.”

      Where is Goldman Sachs today, and why is this man so disillusioned that he has decided to leave? What changed? According to Smith, “The firm changed the way it thought about leadership. Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and doing the right thing. Today, if you make enough money for the firm … you will be promoted into a position of influence.”

      He adds, “Today, many of these leaders display a Goldman Sachs culture quotient of exactly zero percent. I attend derivatives meetings where not one single minute is spent asking questions about how we can help clients. It’s purely about how we can make the most money off of them.”

A Common Tale, Alas

Much the same story can likely be told of some of the big marketing and communications agencies today. A lot of the effort they expend seems to be on expanding their service offerings to their clients, not necessarily because the clients need them but because more service means higher retainer fees and greater agency profits.

      The initial assignment, however small, is seen as a foot in the door to sell ever more services that they may or may not need – like the proverbial door-to-door salesman. I know some clients will automatically push back, telling their agency to concentrate on delivering the promised service. And they’re right to do so.

      The correct way to grow an agency’s business with a client is first to deliver the service for which it has been contracted. When the delivered results meet or exceed the client’s expectations, it’s likely the firm will be invited to provide additional services.

      Of course, it’s a delicate dance because, in the course or working side-by-side in the client organization, other client challenges may become apparent, which the agency is prepared and able to address. If the agency’s honest motivation is to help the client deal with the problem rather than to “grow the business,” there’s a good chance it will be invited to do so – often without having to ask for it.

      As Smith knows, a service-oriented business should bring to bear appropriate and necessary additional services to their clients, not principally for the supplementary revenue they might afford but rather to provide those clients with complete solutions to their challenges.

      My experience has always been that when you provide great service to your clients, when you help them achieve or exceed the results they desire, they are more than happy to reward you with more opportunities, and they are pleased to know that you can make a profit. 

      On the other hand, when clients are seen first and foremost as a source of revenue and profit rather than as a firm's core driver, the clients sense it. And frankly, such a firm's ultimate demise is predictable and justly deserved.

Leading by Example

The larger question is whether the right or the wrong attitude is embedded in the culture. When leaders of the firm talk of little else but profitability and revenue streams, those on the lower rungs of the ladder correctly sense where the organization’s priorities lie and, by extension, what gets rewarded.

      Smith understands this truth: “These days, the most common question I get from junior analysts about derivatives is, ‘How much money did we make off the client?’ It bothers me every time I hear it, because it is a clear reflection of what they are observing from their leaders about the way they should behave. Now project 10 years into the future: You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the junior analyst … doesn’t exactly turn into a model citizen.”

      I believe, too, that in 10 years, some of those junior analysts will be vice presidents there perpetuating its poisonous culture – that is, if Goldman Sachs is still in business.

      And that’s the question that emerges from this Op-Ed: will Goldman Sachs learn the wise and timely lesson that Mr. Smith is offering them and survive? Frankly, it’s a pretty simple warning: “I truly believe that this decline in the firm’s moral fiber represents the single most serious threat to its long-run survival.”

      He adds: “It astounds me how little senior management gets a basic truth: If clients don’t trust you they will eventually stop doing business with you.”

      So when a business loses touch with its culture, when its people cease following the guiding beacon that led the firm through 143 years of success, what should it do to regain its footing? Smith advises that it should “…make the client the focal point of your business again. Without clients you will not make money. In fact, you will not exist… And get the culture right again, so people want to work here for the right reasons. People who care only about making money will not sustain this firm – or the trust of its clients – for very much longer.”

      Wise counsel.