When executives coach, they commonly make the mistake of downplaying their role as the boss. Confusion occurs with the associate and coaching fails.

To be clear, a boss is the one who holds people accountable for results. A coach helps people increase their skills to achieve the results. 

When executives coach, they usually downplay their team’s accountability for results because as a coach, they want to develop their skills. They use coaching to get them to do what they want. That’s wrong.

Coaching is not a substitute for performance management. You have to do both and develop clarity with each endeavor. Ensure each team member understands their performance expectations AND coach them to accomplish those performance expectations. It’s a dual role — don’t mix them up.

Communicate your expectations and ensure you get full commitment.

1. Make sure they understand their goals. Get them to break down each goal and to identify the Who, What, Where, When and Why. This process will allow the How to appear. Steer them when they go off-course and ensure they will deliver EXACTLY what you expect. 

2. Get them to mentally commit to their goals. Ownership is key — if they see these goals as yours and not theirs, all will fail. Impart clear accountability — if goals fail, it’s their head, If the goals succeed, they get the accolades. It’s that simple. If they are stuck or don’t know how to do this, I show them how I do it.

3. Give them space to take initiative to reach their goals. Now be a good boss, step back, and give them space. This is a critical time where bosses tend to crowd their team members — give them adequate real estate to reach their goal.

Coach to keep them focused, on track, and to increase their performance.

1. Put yourself in their place and understand their challenges. Each team member has their own strengths and weaknesses. It’s your job to understand what they are and where the possible road hazards might occur along the process. Once this is done, you will know approximately where each tipping point will occur and be available to coach them through it.

2. Work with the associate so they can plan all their steps. Get each associate to come up with a process comfortable to them to easily track their progress. The process of planning together allows you to step out of your ‘boss’ role and to help guide their progress as a coach. Remember it’s their plan, not yours.

3. Actively coach them through the process. Develop regular meetings to discuss issues, concerns and opportunities along the way. If they are getting frustrated, help them solve each obstacle by asking questions. Do not attempt to help — this will only move the responsibility from the associate to you. Provide regular tracking to measure where they are and how much farther they have to go. Finally, help break bad behavior patterns along the way — this will help them accelerate and grow during the process.

How do you coach your team?

Or it’s not good or bad — just boring. You watch the clock and pray for 5 PM to roll around.

Welcome to the club. We all have days like this. Here’s a little secret: The difference between 1-2 bad days a month and every day being a bad day lies right in your lap.

It’s called PERSPECTIVE. Most of the time, we are a huge influence on how we interpret and absorb our environment. If we have a crazy weekend and then have to look forward to the workweek, I know, it sucks.

Here’s one rule which works for me and for many of my clients: Add Pizazz to EVERYTHING you do.

What does it mean? From attending a status meeting to delivering a major project — figure out how you can do it better. Make it sing. Go the extra mile to make it stand out.

Now you’re probably saying you’ve done your best. You probably have — but I know you can do a little bit better. Look at all of your areas of delivery and see if you can add a little pizazz to your offering.

It might be offering an additional piece of information during a meeting or re-doing a promo box on your web site. Do Something.

Why does this work? It keeps you at a higher state of consciousness, performance, and focus. You are no longer wandering through your work — you’re looking for opportunities to always IMPROVE.

And here’s the best part — it’s infectious. Your superiors instantly see it — so you get the great projects, the promotions, the spotlight. Your team members feel it — they start performing at a higher level — making you look better. Your peers observe a sea-change in you and it makes them jealous (always a good thing).

Bottom line — adding pizazz to everything you do will not only change your perception about your environment — it will change your career — and your life.

Try it, you’ll like it.

Have you ever taken a step and added pizazz to the things you do? What happened?

This has been another installment in my ongoing series, “Are You A Catalyst?” — today’s focus is adding Pizazz to everything you do.

Image provided by Nina Matthews Photography at Flickr.

Another Incredible Story By Derek Sivers at http://sivers.org.

I met Kimo Williams when I was 17 – the summer after I graduated high school in Chicago, a few months before I was starting Berklee College of Music.

I called an ad in the paper by a recording studio, with a random question about music typesetting.

When the studio owner heard I was going to Berklee, he said, “I graduated from Berklee, and taught there for a few years, too. I’ll bet I can teach you two years’ of theory and arranging in only a few lessons. I suspect you can graduate in two years if you understand there’s no speed limit. Come by my studio at 9:00 tomorrow for your first lesson, if you’re interested. No charge.”

Graduate college in two years? Awesome! I liked his style. That was Kimo Williams.

Excited as hell, I showed up to his studio at 8:40 the next morning, though I waited outside until 8:59 before ringing his bell.

(Recently I heard him tell this same story from his perspective and said, “My doorbell rang at 8:59 one morning and I had no idea why. I run across kids all the time who say they want to be a great musician. I tell them I can help, and tell them to show up at my studio at 9am if they’re serious. Almost nobody ever does. It’s how I weed out the really serious ones from the kids who are just talk. But there he was, ready to go.”)

He opened the door. A tall black man in a Hawaiian shirt and big hat, a square scar on his nose, a laid-back demeanor, and a huge smile, sizing me up, nodding.

After a one-minute welcome, we were sitting at the piano, analyzing the sheet music for a jazz standard. He was quickly explaining the chords based on the diatonic scale. How the dissonance of the tri-tone in the 5-chord with the flat-7 is what makes it want to resolve to the 1. Within a minute, I was already being quizzed, “If the 5-chord with the flat-7 has that tritone, then so does another flat-7 chord. Which one?”

“Uh… the flat-2 chord?”

“Right! So that’s a substitute chord. Any flat-7 chord can always be substituted with the other flat-7 that shares the same tritone. So reharmonize all the chords you can in this chart. Go.”

The pace was intense, and I loved it. Finally, someone was challenging me – keeping me in over my head – encouraging and expecting me to pull myself up, quickly. I was learning so fast, it had the adrenaline of sports or a video game. A two-way game of catch, he tossed every fact back at me and made me prove I got it.

In our three-hour lesson that morning, he taught me a full semester of Berklee’s harmony courses. In our next four lessons, he taught me the next four semesters of harmony and arranging requirements.

When I got to college and took my entrance exams, I tested out of those six semesters of required classes.

Then, as he suggested, I bought the course materials for other required classes and taught myself, doing the homework on my own time, then went to the department head and took the final exam, getting full credit for the course.

Doing this in addition to my full course load, I graduated college in two and a half years – (got my bachelor’s degree when I was 20) – squeezing every bit of education out of that place that I could.

But the permanent effect was this:

Kimo’s high expectations set a new pace for me. He taught me “the standard pace is for chumps” – that the system is designed so anyone can keep up. If you’re more driven than “just anyone” – you can do so much more than anyone expects. And this applies to ALL of life – not just school.

Before I met him, I was just a kid who wanted to be a musician, doing it casually.

Ever since our five lessons, high expectations became my norm, and still are to this day. Whether music, business, or personal – whether I actually achieve my expectations or not – the point is that I owe every great thing that’s happened in my life to Kimo’s raised expectations. That’s all it took. A random meeting and five music lessons to convince me I can do anything more effectively than anyone expects.

(And so can anyone else.)

I wish the same experience for everyone. I have no innate abilities. This article wasn’t meant to be about me as much as the life-changing power of a great teacher and raised expectations.

A professional musician (and circus clown) since 1987, Derek started CD Baby by accident in 1998 when he was selling his own CD on his website, and friends asked if he could sell theirs, too. CD Baby was the largest seller of independent music on the web, with over $100M in sales for over 150,000 musician clients. In 2008, Derek sold CD Baby to focus on his new ventures to benefit musicians, including his new company MuckWork where teams of efficient assistants help musicians do their “uncreative dirty work”. His current projects and writings are all at sivers.org.

It’s hard to be a leader in today’s economy. Add that you need equal parts of courage, vision, empathy, and reality (Peter

1. You move from confident to cocky.
There is a fine line between confidence and cockyness — my definition:

Confident - fully comfortable in their skin, able to hold their own in most situations, but always willing to learn from others to better oneself.
Cocky - fully comfortable in their skin, able to hold their own in most situations, knows it all – and let’s everyone know that fact.

Be more humble — keep your mind open to new ideas. This leads me to my next reason:

2. You speak more than you listen.
Pontification is a rampant disease of leaders. Candidly, as you move from communicating to pontification, you slowly lose the attention of the very people that you are speaking to. Communication is a two-way street — so feel free to let your people know what you are thinking and impart key information, but please fit in a bit of listening to complete the circle. It will go miles whenever you communicate with your team.

3. You care more about your performance than your team’s performance.
This primarily affects new managers than accomplished ones, but it does creep in sometimes when times are hard for the company. We all fall back on touting our own laurels rather than bringing up the rear with stories of the real performers of your company — your team. Try to pick one person and one action every so often and message it to the people that matter. It will pay dividends in exposure and good will from your team.

4. You manage upwards significantly more than downwards.
A corollary to the previous reason — when we focus on ourselves, we tend to manage upwards to hone impressions of our performance. When we spend time doing this, we tend to forget that our job is to manage our people — which is quite easy to do:

a. Give them the information they need to do their job.
b. Motivate them when required.
c. Help them get rid of any obstacles.

If you spend more time on your people, everything else will fall into place. If you would like to read more on leadership, read this.

5. You care more about where you’re going than where you are.
Everyone becomes enamored with shiny objects — add to that a bit of executive ADD, and you tend to look elsewhere for better vistas. I’m not saying not to do this (it’s always good to keep your options open), but you also need to pay attention to where you are. Too many executives come onto the scene, make a big splash, pull in a big client or coup, and then immediately get distracted and look for other shores to conquer. Slow down, enjoy the accolades and see if there are bigger beasts to manage where you are — it might pay off in the long run.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year . . . Yes — it’s that time to prepare for annual reviews. Most leaders look at this as a frustrating zone between a rock and a hard place (is this you?).

Why? On one hand, you’re responsible for accomplishing the goals and objectives of the organization — for making sure the job gets done. On the other hand, you have to get that job done with and through other people. And those people have agendas of their own — agendas that sometimes run counter to the goals of the business and your personal expectations.

Add in that everyone thinks that they’ve done a spectacular job. Mix in the unrealistic expectations of the business (no big raises) and you have a volatile stew of emotions to quell each time of the year. So here’s how you do it.

STEP ONE:
Schedule all your reviews to occur in one day (this is usually the hardest step). Odds are you should have between 5-7 direct reports (any more and you are not really managing them correctly — a future blog post topic) — so make them 1 hour each — more than enough time. Most executives tend to procrastinate on this step — so get out your calendar and do it! If you can, try to meet offsite so you are not interrupted. I find that office reviews are easily interrupted and that disrupts the entire effect of the review — your personal one-on-one with your direct report.

STEP TWO:
Meet with finance/HR and understand exactly how much money you will be working with in 2010. This will allow you to clearly define exactly how much you can increase your team’s salaries (and their team’s salaries). In larger companies, there usually is a matrix (which I hate) — I feel that the delivery of merit should come from the manager, not HR. At the end of the day, you need to know how big of a bag of money/benefits you have to work with.

STEP THREE:
Develop a prioritization schedule of your team — this includes criteria to rank them. I break them up into three areas:

Outstanding Performers (OP) – Your “top of the line” people. They not only get everything done, they surpass your expectations. They are your right hand people (you would be SOL if they left tomorrow). You need to recognize them accordingly.

REVIEW: Keep them happy. Give them the kudos they deserve (and broadcast it to the rest of the team), give them the money (but not too much), and increase their responsibility and exposure in the organization (this is the most important area). Studies show that executives are motivated more by being in on things, exposure, increased responsibility than getting more money. Of course, money is good, but it wears off quickly.

Performers (P) - They do their job. Some do it better and surprise you, some make mistakes that infuriate you. But overall, they get their job done and cause minimal problems. If they left, it would be difficult, but not impossible, to find a replacement.

REVIEW: Your goal here is to turn this opportunity and move these people to Outstanding Performers. This is where the money comes in (show it to them). Acknowledge their work so far and give them more responsibility outside of their area. Recognize their accomplishments and discuss their misses. Your goal is to show them the map to move upwards.

Performance Problems (PP) – They are missing the mark in one way or another. It could be technically — not doing their job correctly OR socially — not communicating, managing, or playing well with others. They could be serial screw-ups, not in the right position, or not doing their job (lazy). They should be reorienting their vision upwards or you will be showing them the door.

REVIEW: These are the most critical. They are either moving up or out. They need to understand what they are doing wrong and show them how to rectify it. These people need to be managed closely — you need to be stern with them (no side conversations). No money — and a possibility that they might lose some money. Usually, PP executives walk away with a task to come back with a plan to do better. Candidly though, this should not come as a surprise to them – if you’ve been managing them correctly, they should have seen this coming for months. If not, don’t wait until the annual review to dress them down.

STEP FOUR:
How do you do your reviews?  It’s easy (I did this for years and it works like a dream):

Outstanding Performers (OP) - You do these. It’s important that YOU personally recognize their performance.

Performers (P) - They do their own. And then you edit accordingly.

Performance Problems (PP) - You do these. It’s important that YOU personally provide discipline verbally and in written form.

STEP FIVE:
Facts. Facts. Facts. Leave emotion at the door. Every review should focus on three areas:
1. What was expected of them.
2. What they accomplished.
3. How they accomplished it.
That’s it.

Feel free to add emotion after the review to either congratulate or discipline. My prescription is to increase the congratulations as much as possible and rein in the discipline as much as possible. Just my two cents.

That’s it — if you have any questions or comments — let me know!

CIOs are under more pressure than ever. The job is incredibly challenging. Despite recent arguments to the contrary, we believe information technology is at the heart of corporate strategy. IT must deliver more systems faster and operate them in a fail-safe environment. Being successful as a CIO requires an unusual combination of technical know-how, business acumen, and organizational leadership skills. It’s a job with a sometimes short life cycle, and it takes a seemingly superhuman to do it effectively.

I read this great article in InformationWeek from Dr. James Cash and Dr. Keri Pearlson. Hope you enjoy it!

Why does this characterization sound so familiar? Partly, we suspect, because you’ve heard it before-and continue to hear it over and over. Observers have been spouting generalizations and hyperbole about the challenges of IT management for well over 30 years, or as long as the job has existed. The job certainly is difficult, and many otherwise capable managers have foundered in the role of CIO. The questions we want to address in this article are how the job really has changed, and what it takes to survive and even succeed as a CIO today. Our conclusion is that, spurred in large part by the business implications and opportunities of information technology, the CIO job has become much more complex and more business critical than ever. This is a mixed blessing. CIOs who fail to understand the new reality may find themselves both overpromising and underdelivering. They may well be setting themselves up for high-profile failure.

Successful CIOs today are far more than IT strategists and functional managers. They see themselves as business strategists and change agents. In most large companies, the CIO is expected to play a strong leadership role-and not just about technology architectures and capabilities. They’re actively involved in exploring new business opportunities, in advising line managers on how to launch IT-dependent business ventures, and in defining priorities for fundamental organizational transformation. Most businesses simply can’t succeed without a strong IT function. The stakes for CIOs and their organizations couldn’t be higher.

The “New” CIO Role
Our research and conversations with dozens of CIOs and business executives has confirmed that the successful CIO today in most large companies is a different creature than even five years ago. Here are a few of our findings:

The business and technology contexts surrounding the CIO are substantially different than ever before. The job has become far more complex at the same time that the critical nature of information systems has gone up by an order of magnitude in virtually every business. To compound matters, there’s an unprecedented urgency to develop and implement IT capabilities-an urgency that often flies in the face of what has traditionally constituted good IT management practice.

CIOs are struggling to manage this complexity, and meet the expectations of their bosses, peers, and subordinates. Life in this fast track may be exciting, but it can also be stressful and lonely.

Too many CIOs continue to spend most of their time with their internal staff. They spend very little time interacting with outside customers, in spite of the growing importance of IT in supporting customer information and interorganizational processes.

IT organizations are facing enormous pressure to accelerate the delivery of services. Virtually every other functional area in business has become significantly more dependent on IT. And the Internet and the new business models it has spawned have created a widespread expectation that information systems can be developed and implemented very quickly.

While some industry analysts have been heralding the “demise of the CIO,” we believe exactly the opposite is true. The CIO role has indeed become more complex, and the full gamut of CIO responsibilities may need to be shared by several individuals. But our research suggests that the CIO’s strategic importance is greater than ever.

CIOs see themselves playing five primary roles: business strategist, IT strategist, IT functional leader, technology advocate, and change agent. This configuration is new and represents a significant shift in emphasis from the past. Indeed, the best role model for a CIO may be the CEO, who must balance a wide variety of priorities and influence a very diverse group of managers and specialists to achieve tangible outcomes.

Unlike many other functionally focused managers, successful CIOs operate as true general managers and senior business executives. They often have a varied career history that includes graduate-level education in business and management, significant periods of time working outside IT, and-surprisingly-they often have substantial experience managing overseas operations.

There’s no simple or single job description of the CIO role. We’ve identified four distinctively different CIO job types: corporate CIO for operations, corporate CIO for functional leadership, business unit CIO, and regional CIO. But even within those categories there are major variations from one company to another in job requirements, business priorities, and organizational challenges.

CIO Of The Future
To ensure future success, you should start with a deep and thoughtful look at yourself and your situation. What are your personal strengths and limitations? Do you thrive on complexity, on rapid-fire decision making, on life in a fishbowl? Can you operate as a true general manager, holding both your staff and your peers accountable for IT performance? Do you have a clear vision of the future of IT in your company in terms of both its strategic role and the IT functional organization needed to build and deliver the required capabilities? Can you commit to dramatic change and ensure that others do what’s needed to accomplish that change-even if that means overhauling staff and skills, offshoring, outsourcing, or having to confront peers in other areas of the business? Do you truly understand what your companies’ customers want and need? Do you spend at least 20% of your time listening to and talking with customers? Can your IT organization deliver new, highly reliable application functionality in 90 days or less? Do you have full accountability for IT investments and architectural decisions? Is your IT organization delivering systems at the pace and with the bulletproof quality your company needs? Have you delegated responsibility for IT operations and freed your time and energy to focus on the business opportunities and performance of IT?

If you can answer these kinds of questions confidently and affirmatively, welcome to the future! If not, you may need to reassess your role and your ability to fill it. A CIO today must be focused on customers, on the business, and on the future. If your workweek is consumed with IT management issues rather than with business leadership and innovation, you probably won’t succeed as a CIO.

Key Recommendations
Faced with this complexity and urgency, the CIO must balance his or her time and priorities among a number of competing but equally critical goals. Individual CIOs must make choices: what to focus on, who to spend time with, what to learn, and what to do. Your personal agenda depends on your own situation-as a CIO, you must first be very clear about the business imperatives and the personal issues you have to focus on. There’s no simple way to operate IT in the future. However, there’s a large set of tactical actions that a CIO can take to deal with the core dilemmas of IT leadership and accelerate the way the IT organization operates. While none of these tactics is revolutionary or even new, taken together they have the potential for dramatically accelerating the delivery of IT services:

• Simplify the operating environment, governance, work processes, and task priorities that form the context for IT work.
• The first step in simplification is to establish a standard business and technology architecture and use it as the basis for all IT technology decisions and vendor selections.
• Move toward a simpler organizational structure for IT, centralizing infrastructure responsibilities and decentralizing application development and implementation responsibilities wherever possible.
• Be very clear about your own organizational situation and the business requirements that must be satisfied. Establish an explicit short list of goals and stick to it.
• Focus your time and energy outside the functional IT organization. Spend as much time as possible with external customers or suppliers (choose them based on strategic importance). We recommend at least 20% of your time, or one day a week, on average.
• If your internal staff isn’t strong enough for you to delegate most of your operational responsibilities, then devote a reasonable amount of time to strengthening the IT organization. (For most organizations this must be accomplished in six to nine months.) As the organization matures, shift your emphasis to spending more time with business clients and external customers.
• As CIO, think of yourself as the CEO of an IT products and services company, regardless of whether you have a large staff or have outsourced all of your operations. Focus your time and attention on strategic issues, on external relationships, and on the future.
• To accomplish this strategic leadership role, think of yourself as a storyteller and an entrepreneur, not as a controller. Adopt a marketing mind-set and introduce marketing processes into the IT organization to complement (not replace) the engineering disciplines that currently characterize the IT profession.
• Establish clear, explicit goals for shortening IT decision and development cycles. Focus the entire IT organization on accelerating all of its core business processes.
• Find the right balance for you personally, and for your organization, between fostering organizational change and exploiting the potential of IT, on the one hand, and ensuring the discipline to produce highly reliable, bulletproof systems and infrastructure, on the other.
• Manage your own time and personal agenda carefully-and explicitly. Be sure to reserve enough time for reflection, learning, and peer-to-peer networking. Adapt your leadership style to match the needs of your organization, combining collaborative problem solving with task-focused direction setting to produce a cohesive, committed organization.

Dr. James I. Cash recently completed a 27-year career as a professor and senior associate dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. He’s a member of InformationWeek’s Editorial Advisory Board. Dr. Keri E. Pearlson is a research director with the Concours Group. Numerous graduate programs use her book, “Managing And Using Information Systems: A Strategic Approach,” to train future IT leaders.

The U.S. economy is not only shedding jobs at a record rate; it is shedding more jobs than it is supposed to. It’s bad enough that the unemployment rate has doubled in only a year and a half and one out of six construction workers is out of work.

By Roger Lowenstein From The New York Times Magazine.

What truly troubles President Obama’s economic advisers is that, even adjusting for the recession, the contraction in employment seems way too high. As one administration official said, “This has been a very steep job loss.” One proof, he added, is that the country is deviating from the standard (among economists) jobs predictor known as Okun’s Law.

In the 1960s, Arthur Okun, a prominent economist, claimed to have discovered a mathematical relationship between the decline in output (that is, goods and services produced) and the rise in unemployment. It held up pretty well until recently. But this time around, although the decline in output would have predicted a rise in unemployment to 8 percent, the actual jobless rate has soared to 9.5 percent. So this recession is killing off jobs even faster than the things — like automobiles, houses, computers and newspapers — that jobholders produce.

The Federal Reserve now expects unemployment to surpass 10 percent (the postwar high was 10.8 percent in 1982). By almost every other measure, ours is already the worst job environment since the Great Depression. The economy has shed 6.5 million jobs — nearly 5 percent of the total, far outstripping the 3 percent that were lost in the early ’80s. Economists fear that even when the economy turns around, the job market will be stagnant. Keith Hall, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, sums it up as “an ugly picture out there.”

Explanations for the collapse of the great American job machine begin with the marked absence of what is called labor hoarding. Usually during recessions, firms keep most of their employees on the payroll even as business slows, in effect stockpiling them for better days. In the current downturn, hoarding seems to have gone into reverse. Not only are firms laying off redundant workers, but they seem to be cutting into the bone. Hall says the absence of hoarding means that firms do not expect business to pick up soon. This is supported by other evidence, like a doubling in the number of involuntary part-time workers (there are nine million of them) and the shrinking workweek, now 33 hours — the shortest ever recorded. Presumably, before companies start to rehire laid-off workers, they will ask their current employees to work more.

Those who hope for a rebound argue that employers, frightened by the financial shocks and the credit crisis of last fall, effectively panicked. That is, they cut deeper than necessary. And that may be.

But layoffs are only part of the story. The problem isn’t just that so many workers have received pink slips but also that companies are failing to hire. And this, unfortunately, has been a trend for most of the past decade (unnoticed, perhaps, because the mortgage bubble was papering over latent weaknesses). At the end of the Clinton era, which also marked the end of a decade-long boom, companies that were opening or expanding operations added nearly 8 workers for every 100 already on the payroll. During the recession of 2001, the figure dropped to 7 per 100: optimistic firms were a bit less optimistic. The surprising fact is that when the recession ended, the percentage stayed at 7. “We never got our groove back,” asserts Mark Zandi of Moody’s Economy.com. In the current recession, the rate has fallen to 6 per 100.

It’s hard to give a definitive explanation for this trend, but among the reasons are a decline in innovation in the aftermath of the tech boom, leading to fewer new businesses, and the aging of the population. More people have dropped out of the work force, and a smaller work force tends to dampen job totals. The percentage of adults who are working has fallen from 64 at the end of the Clinton era to only 59.5 now. Some of those dropouts are retirees, but some may be responding to the economy’s declining dynamism. Traditionally, it was a mark of Americans’ resiliency that, when times were tough, they relocated from state to state and region to region. Now, according to the Census Bureau, mobility is at an all-time recorded low. Perhaps people with underwater mortgages cannot afford to move. Perhaps the areas they used to move to, typically the Sun Belt, are too devastated by foreclosures. But the vaunted ability of the U.S. economy to renew itself seems a little tarnished. Maybe it’s no accident that this time around, folks on the unemployment line are staying there longer.

In terms of its impact on society, a dearth of hiring is far more troubling than an excess of layoffs. Job losses have to end sooner or later. Even if they persist (as, say, in the auto industry), the government can intervene. But the government cannot force firms to hire. Ultimately, each new job depends on the boss’s belief — or hope — that sufficient work will materialize. It’s a bit of black magic also described as confidence. Over the years, it is why America has not only attracted immigrants (whose arrivals are now slowing) but also generated more opportunities and — favorite word of politicians — hope for those born here.

The administration’s tilt toward so-called sustainable new jobs, in green energy and such, shows that it understands what is at stake, both for the country and for its political fortunes. Whether its plans will bear fruit is, of course, another matter. Along with double-digit unemployment, the country is facing a second potential scare headline: falling wages. Even during recessions, businesses don’t like to lower pay, because it reduces morale. But layoffs are also a downer. And in this recession, employers ranging from the State of California to publishers (including this newspaper) have cut back on pay. In effect, job losses have been so severe that businesses have been forced to spread the pain. In June, overall wage growth was zero. Zandi thinks the United States could see negative wage growth.

How would Obama, not to mention Congress, respond to declining employment and falling wages? The pressure for another stimulus (and greater deficits) would be intense. So would that for demagogic solutions like trade barriers. Robert Reich, the former labor secretary, says most lost jobs are not coming back. The huge question is when — or whether — new ones will take their place.

Roger Lowenstein, an outside director of the Sequoia Fund, is a contributing writer for the magazine.

That’s my mantra. And I make all my clients tattoo it on their arms. Why? Because it works.

It all comes down to ACTION
You can plan all day — and that’s a good thing. But planning isn’t everything. In fact, most executives do have some type of plan — either zipping around in their head or on a piece of paper buried on their desk. Unfortunately, execution is the real culprit. They are afraid or they don’t know how to take that first step to begin the process. That’s where I come in:

Make It Happen
Take the first step. Do Anything. It really doesn’t matter what you do first — what does matter is that you do something . . . immediately. I liken it to entering a pool for the first time — you can go in slowly and get used to the water (we all know how that feels) or just jump right in and the shock of the temperature is gone within seconds. If you need to do a series of informational calls to key executives, call one right now! Don’t wait to plan — don’t procrastinate to build a talk track — ring them up and start talking! You will surprise yourself.

Get It Done
Check it off your list — complete it. So many people take a half-step into an activity and decide that it’s too hard, will take too long, or it takes them too far out of their comfort zone. Here’s where my coaching comes in — stop being a baby. You are an adult — with adult responsibilities. You must get it done. You are not in school anymore where a teacher will say “it’s okay – you don’t have to do that”. You HAVE to do it. And the faster that you get it done, the faster you can move on to the next step.

And here’s the best part: Once you start down this path, it gets EASIER. Trust me, it always happens.

Not moving forward? Get It Done. Make It Happen. No Excuses.

Great leaders translate vision into decisive action — a skill that’s especially vital in tough times. But what are those skills? Do you have a blind spot? Should you be doing more?

First off — great leaders do three things — no more, no less:

1. They motivate their people.
2. They deliver information when required.
3. They help their people with obstacles.

That’s it. As a leader, if you find yourself doing anything else, you’re doing too much. Now let’s look at each one:

They motivate their people.
The most successful leaders are those with the best people skills, especially during the most difficult circumstances. Poor communication and interpersonal relationships routinely thwart leaders who are otherwise technically competent. In order to succeed, leaders must be fully engaged with the individuals who make up their organization. This means an array of capabilities like coaching, mentoring and how to give constructive feedback which reinforces the behavior and motivation of your peak performers. The best tool to learn how to motivate is Dale Carnegie’s: How to Win Friends and Influence People.

They deliver information when required.
What does this really mean? Incredibly efficient two-way communication. And the cruel joke is that most leaders had the chops to make their way up the ladder and succeed — now the skills that got them there (getting things done) have no place in leadership. You now have to communicate to your team to get things done. This is where most C- and VP level executives fail – you need to lead with greater impact by applying emotional intelligence to manage your team. The best tool to effectively communicate is Daniel Goleman’s: Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ.

They help their people with obstacles.
Here’s the mistake all leaders make. When their people come to them with a problem — they spend time helping them brainstorm, choose and sometimes execute a solution. I’ve seen this happen time and time again. Great leaders ask their people to come to them when they have a problem, but they also require their people to come with a solution too. 80-90% of the time, that solution is usually the best one and the team member is further empowered to make those tough decisions. On the off chance (that 10-20%) that your people might be wrong, you’re there to help them investigate other options. For optimal delegation, seek out Michael Abrashoff’s: It’s Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy.

At the end of the day, you need to build a leadership style that creates trust, sets a clear vision and guides your entire team toward greater performance and profit. Give me a call (203.500.2421) — talk to me for 30 minutes — I can help.

Presenting Part Four of a Ten-Part Series on The Future of Work from Time Magazine.

By Laura Fitzpatrick at Time.

On the worst days, Chris Keehn used to go 24 hours without seeing his daughter with her eyes open. A soft-spoken tax accountant in Deloitte’s downtown Chicago office, he hated saying no when she asked for a ride to preschool. By November, he’d had enough. “I realized that I can have control of this,” he says with a small shrug. Keehn, 33, met with two of the firm’s partners and his senior manager, telling them he needed a change. They went for it. In January, Keehn started telecommuting four days a week, and when Kathryn, 4, starts T-ball this summer, he will be sitting along the baseline.

In this economy, Keehn’s move might sound like hopping onto the mommy track — or off the career track. But he’s actually making a shrewd move. More and more, companies are searching for creative ways to save — by experimenting with reduced hours or unpaid furloughs or asking employees to move laterally. The up-or-out model, in which employees have to keep getting promoted quickly or get lost, may be growing outmoded. The changing expectations could persist after the economy reheats.

Companies are increasingly supporting more natural growth, letting employees wend their way upward like climbing vines. It’s a shift, in other words, from a corporate ladder to the career-path metaphor long preferred by Deloitte vice chair Cathy Benko: a lattice. (See pictures of cubicle designs submitted to The Office.)

At Deloitte, each employee’s lattice is nailed together during twice-a-year evaluations focused not just on career targets but also on larger life goals. An employee can request to do more or less travel or client service, say, or to move laterally into a new role — changes that may or may not come with a pay cut. Deloitte’s data from 2008 suggest that about 10% of employees choose to “dial up” or “dial down” at any given time. Deloitte’s Mass Career Customization (MCC) program began as a way to keep talented women in the workforce, but it has quickly become clear that women are not the only ones seeking flexibility.

Responding to millennials demanding better work-life balance, young parents needing time to share child-care duties and boomers looking to ease gradually toward retirement, Deloitte is scheduled to roll out MCC to all 42,000 U.S. employees by May 2010. Deloitte executives are in talks with more than 80 companies working on similar programs.

Not everyone is on board. A 33-year-old Deloitte senior manager in a southeastern office, who works half-days on Mondays and Fridays for health reasons and requested anonymity because she was not authorized to speak on the record, says one “old school” manager insisted on scheduling meetings when she wouldn’t be in the office. “He was like, ‘Yeah, I know we have the program,’” she recalls, “‘but I don’t really care.’”

Deloitte CEO Barry Salzberg admits he’s still struggling to convert “nonbelievers,” but says they are the exceptions. The recession provides an incentive for companies to design more lattice-oriented careers. Studies show telecommuting, for instance, can help businesses cut real estate costs 20% and payroll 10%. What’s more, creating a flexible workforce to meet staffing needs in a changing economy ensures that a company will still have legs when the market recovers. Redeploying some workers from one division to another — or reducing their salaries — is a whole lot less expensive than laying everyone off and starting from scratch.

Young employees who dial down now and later become managers may reinforce the idea that moving sideways on the lattice doesn’t mean getting sidelined. “When I saw other people doing it,” says Keehn, “I thought I could try.” As the compelling financial incentives for flexibility grow clearer, more firms will be forced to give employees that chance. Turns out all Keehn had to do was ask.

The hallmark of a great leader is effective delegation. Effective delegation develops people who are ultimately more fulfilled and productive. Managers become more fulfilled and productive themselves as they learn to count on their staffs and are freed up to attend to more strategic issues.

However, there are basic approaches to delegation that, with practice, become the backbone of effective supervision and development. Thomas R. Horton, in Delegation and Team Building: No Solo Acts Please (Management Review, September 1992, pp. 58-61) suggests the following 9 general steps to accomplish delegation:

1. Delegate the whole task to one person.
This gives the person the responsibility and increases their motivation.

2. Select the right person.
Assess the skills and capabilities of subordinates and assign the task to the most appropriate one.

3. Clearly specify your preferred results.
Give information on what, why, when, who, where and how. Write this information down.

4. Delegate responsibility and authority.
Assign the task, not the method to accomplish it. Let the subordinate complete the task in the manner they choose, as long as the results are what the supervisor specifies. Let the employee have strong input as to the completion date of the project. Note that you may not even know how to complete the task yourself — this is often the case with higher levels of management.

5. Ask the employee to summarize back to you.
Ask to hear their impressions of the project and the results that you prefer.

6. Get ongoing non-intrusive feedback about progress on the project.
This is a good reason to continue to get weekly, written status reports from all direct reports. Reports should cover what they did last week, plan to do next week and any potential issues. Regular staff meetings provide this ongoing feedback, as well.

7. Maintain open lines of communication.
Don’t hover over the subordinate, but sense what they’re doing and support their checking in with you along the way.

8. If you’re not satisfied with the progress, don’t immediately take the project back.
Continue to work with the employee and ensure they perceive the project as their responsibility.

9. Evaluate and reward performance.
Evaluate results, not methods. Address insufficient performance and reward successes (including the manager’s).

Over the course of the life of this blog, other authors will approach this different ways. I convinced my supervisor at a wireless telecom company (this was in 2005) to let me become a workshifter for three out of five days a week. It wasn’t easy, but I found several keys that got me the freedom to work out of a coffeeshop, and the flexibility to do more with the two hours a day that shift brought me.

By Chris Brogan at Workshifting.com

Get On the Boss’s Side of the Fence
If you’re going to convince your supervisor to let you workshift, it’s not going to be because they really want you to enjoy an extra cup or two of coffee in the morning. Start the process by identifying what’s in it for the boss. In my case, my commute was over an hour each way, so I told him that giving me a few days to work remotely would add two hours of productivity per day. Showing him the benefit up front gave him a chance to wiggle his eyebrows on what six hours (2 hours x 3 days) would give him each week: practically another working day!

Get Accountability Figured Out Right Away
The biggest shift I encountered in workshifting was that my boss (like many supervisors) was still considering me productive as measured by “hours spent with butt in chair.” Yes, sadly, with all the world has brought us in technological advances, it’s human nature to equate physical presence with productivity.

The truth of the matter was, because of my position, people often sought me out at my desk to discuss technology changes and work-related issues. I pointed out to the boss that we had some fairly tangible deliverables to my work, and that if wasn’t turning things in promptly, it would show pretty quickly, and he could reassess whether I should be a workshifter. He bought this reasoning, and I endeavored to deliver ahead of time as often as I could.

Touch: the Art of Presence Management
When you’re out of the office, silence on your part is always met with frustration and concern. It’s again a matter of human nature. The cure? Connect with your supervisor often through electronic means. Send a brief email every hour or so with some work-related piece of information. If your company is cool enough to use something like Socialcast or Yammer, that would be the very best tool for the “touch” job.

Another point on this: brief emails with very succinct needs listed are better for you (and your boss) than longer emails that bundle things together. It would seem that bundling things is better, but most times, this serves two purposes: it allows you to properly thread pertinent conversations, and it keeps your supervisor abreast of situations. Is this the best? No. Does it ease tensions? Yes, indeedy.

Be Very Available and Flexible
Early on in my workshifting efforts, I found myself suddenly saddled with lots of local chores. Because I was down the street at the local coffeeshop (I prefer to work out of the house, because if I stay home, I play with the kids too much), I’d be tasked with things like picking up prescriptions or all the other various family-related things. This was okay, but it meant that I had to stay very available.

Simple things like answering the phone as often as you can when the boss calls go a long way towards easing relationship tensions and management concerns around workshifting.

Sometimes, the boss might need you to come in on your “away” day. As long as this doesn’t become a habit, I’ve taken the stance that it’s still a job and that onsite is still the primary way of doing business. As a concession, you might ask for a different day that week. That said, be attentive to whether or not your supervisor might be potentially abusing your agreed-upon experience. Tread gently here, but be firm. It may be a sign that things aren’t working out.

Chris Brogan is President of New Marketing Labs, a new media marketing agency, as well as the home of the Inbound Marketing Summit conferences and Inbound Marketing Bootcamp educational events. He works with large and mid-sized companies to improve online business communications like marketing and PR through the use of social software, community platforms, and other emerging web and mobile technologies.

In an unpredictable world, trying to be right can lead managers terribly astray. So what do we do during uncertain times of business?

by Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian C. MacMillan at MIT Sloan.

Many leaders of mature organizations don’t have the right mind-set or practices to help their organizations survive. Their management practices are suited to an age with higher entry barriers, greater transaction costs, fewer capable competitors, growing and increasingly affluent markets and far less information. Today’s environment is less predictable, more complicated and more volatile.

The result is that many core businesses – involved with mainstream, mature products we all take for granted – are themselves becoming more uncertain. The good news is that there are other more suitable approaches – those that successful fast-growth companies, entrepreneurs and corporate new business development groups use to navigate unpredictable, resource-constrained environments.

One of the great ironies of business is that good performance tends to dampen the desire to invest in new opportunities and businesses right at the time a company can most easily afford to do so. When a business is healthy and generating profits, it’s easy to overlook the weak signals of performance decline. But when a company realizes it needs to invest, it’s often when resources are in short supply. The time to invest in reinvigorating your business is before you’re forced to.

Why are managers so often in denial about the health of their core businesses? Because no one has the incentive to step back and question the fundamental assumption that their business is healthy. To address this, people must realistically frame where they believe their business will be in, say, three years. Successful entrepreneurs do that. They don’t ask how big the market is. Instead, they want to know if the market is big enough for their aspirations. You need an idea of the concrete results that would constitute success before beginning to assess whether your core business can get you there.

Consider E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Co. For decades, the chemical company had delivered steady, reliable earnings growth with few surprises. But in 1999, then-CEO Charles Holliday and his team realized that while the company had been making significant productivity gains, its revenue increases were lagging. In fact, throughout the 1990s, DuPont’s revenue growth averaged only 0.6%.

Without growth in commoditizing and highly competitive markets, the company’s long-term sustainability was in doubt. Management believed that the core business couldn’t realize the company’s growth ambitions. And recognizing that, DuPont executives set a revenue growth target of at least 6% annually. Then the technical parts of the company were charged with generating 33% of sales from products less than five years old.

Once management acknowledges that the core business is in trouble, the next challenge is to determine which projects, initiatives and other activities can drive the company’s growth ambitions. The more specific a company can be about which kinds of initiatives will support its future strategy, the more momentum it will create.

DuPont addressed that challenge by creating five “growth platforms” – each charged with delivering specific growth targets. The company aimed to steer away from commoditized product-based businesses and into growing, knowledge-intensive new businesses.

As the effort began, DuPont spun off its still-profitable textile business and entered more uncertain businesses with better growth prospects, such as bio-based materials and organic light-emitting diodes. The company also began a major expansion into emerging markets, where now it’s enjoying a compounded growth rate of 16%.

Most complex organizations are designed to protect and preserve the status quo. Consequently, serious efforts to renew core businesses almost always require organizational change. Being forward looking and honest about your company’s prospects, and being prepared to reconsider fundamental business assumptions, will help you weather the currently unpredictable business climate.

This article is adapted from “How to Rethink Your Business During Uncertainty,” by Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian C. MacMillan, which appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review.

Malcolm Gladwell is one of today’s most innovative ‘connectors’ of knowledge. His most recent New Yorker article again proves he is the master.

Gladwell again uses history to reinforce his argument that with the proper planning and doing something different — something that your opposing team (i.e., competition) isn’t expecting — even though you are the underdog — You Will Succeed.

Enough of my blather — go read this great article!

A reader recently asked me, “How do you deal with an incredibly full inbox that makes you feel like a jerk?”

By David Silverman at HBR

I’m happy the question asks, “how do you deal.” An inbox is as personal a space as an underwear drawer — we all have one and are all embarrassed by both its organization and contents. Thus to tell someone how to manage their inbox could be perceived as an intrusion into their undergarments.

And that would be inappropriate.

What is appropriate to share is my own principles of inbox management:

1. No scrolling. The inbox is my task list. I can fit about 20 emails in the message viewer in Apple Mail, which means 20 tasks. Any more than that and I feel like I’m losing control. Nothing spurs me to action like the need to get rid of the scroll bars.

2. Read, take action, and delete or save. Small task or big one, if it’s in the inbox, I do it. If not, it doesn’t exist (as my wife can tell you about any time we make vacation plans).

3. If it’s a task for someone else, file it. I find it hard enough to keep track of my own to-dos. Keeping tabs on other people’s through emails in my inbox would triple the number of messages and lead me down the road of micromanagement via the dreaded forwarded email that begins with, “Hey, have you had a chance to look at this yet?”

4. One email per topic. If there’s a chain of email on a topic, only the most recent gets to sit in my inbox. Everything else is filed.

5. Save everything that isn’t pure junk. Which email is important and which is not? It can be hard to tell. The email with a dancing banana? Probably safe to toss. But will I need an email with the details of my cat’s last tooth cleaning? Possibly. And with gigabytes of storage on my hard drive, as easy to save as not.

6. Have very few file folders. Almost everything saved goes into a folder called “saved.” With too many folders, the time it takes me to sort and organize emails is prohibitive — and it often requires just as much time on the other end to locate the message I want. Instead, I rely on my email’s search feature. (Just now, it was easy to uncover from my “sent mail” folder the information that veterinary dental work costs a terrifying $450 per feline.)

7. Daily scrubbing. I brush my teeth twice a day. And every day, I run through every email in my inbox to see if I can get rid of it.

8. Nothing older than a month. I’ll let something molder in the inbox for a up to a month if I’m not sure what to do with it — or if it’s something I’d like to do but never seem to get to. But after a month, it’s clear I’ve got to do it or delete it.

What are your tips for email management? Do you disagree vehemently with any of mine?

David Silverman is the author of Typo: The Last American Typesetter or How I Made and Lost 4 Million Dollars (Soft Skull Press, 2007). He has worked at brand-new start-ups, Fortune 500 companies, and a few places in between. A business writing teacher, he grapples with the way we use words at work—to make it easier for the rest of us. If you have questions about how to manage a problem at work related to communication, please contact David at dsilverman@harvardbusiness.org.