management Virtues…
Interviewing for my last “real” corporate gig, I was to the round with leaders who would be my peers. One of them had been in a startup that the company had purchased. He was clearly different than the others, and we hit it off pretty quickly. He shared some learnings from that experience, and after I started, he was one of the first people I took out to lunch. He was venting about his team – and how they were not “leading” like he wanted them to. I wasn’t a coach – officially yet – but asked what seemed obvious … “Well, have you told them what you expected?”
…he cut the lunch short… so he could go back and write down his ‘expectations’ of leaders, which he promptly published to his team. I, of course seeing excellent work, stole it. Laziness is a core Virtue of mine 😉 To me, the keyword in the definition of Virtue is “behavior” – as in, what you do matters way more than what you say. Particularly as a manager of people, twisting the line from St. Francis works: Preach (whatever); use words only when necessary. If you say it, particularly publicly, you better do it... and make sure they catch you doing it. Similar to parenting, any disconnect there causes what are politely called “management Alignment issues” …
… your plans need a “score”…
Great music, like me stealing ideas, shows up in the best possible places. I found a list of the top 10 Bach songs, and today’s was on the list. Being raised in the 70s, I knew this piece was PERFECT to pair with manage. Stealing a title from Woody, I could write an entire week on What I needed to know about management I learned from Rollerball. I was hoping to find something pithy about the writing of it – only to find a wiki page that goes on for pages. A couple of fun tidbits: this may or may not have been written by Bach, it may or may not have been written on a violin first, but has become the de facto “horror” theme since films of the 30’s 😉 Tell me they’re wrong. In the first few bars, your hair stands up (if you have it), and you look behind you.
While not precisely Virtues, most organizations have “Values” – often expressed as “Competencies” and an entire industry is out there about what they could and should be. Suffice to say that whatever is there is worth embracing systematically. We had them on the wall of every conference room – RAPID, which stood for something that most people, 10 years in, couldn’t remember. By that point, I had figured out that having my own – declaring what I valued, and what I expected – helped me manage new teams. It enabled them to deliver faster (normally why I was there…). For this gig, I focused on ensuring that all hiring, bonuses, conferences, and ratings were explicitly tied to them… after getting my directs to define them as a Team exercise jointly, another key Virtue. Teams matter…
… you can’t manage them “by ear”
Virtue is an “eye of the beholder” opportunity. It is where many of the things we talk about all come together. First, you have to know what they are – for you. Many never really sort that out and are frustrated by… something they can’t articulate. In the same setting, I ran a Task Force on “hiring top talent”. We eventually got to a basic question – “Who Fits?”: who has been hired that has worked out well, and we want more of? Most of the insights sadly came from… those who hadn’t, who had been kicked to the curb by, using Rollerball terms … a checker, or a motorcycle, never scoring. And – rarely understood what they did or didn’t do – other than “fit.” And the saddest thing was that the senior leaders were most often at fault – for not defining what Virtues or Values or Competencies mattered. Success was assumed to look – just like them. As with my peer, until it is written down and communicated, Rollerball is often played around you, so you better learn the rules… with or without Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor.
