There are business units at companies all over the world right now circumventing their Project Management Offices and/or Project Managers.  Sometimes they just form projects within their departments and try to do it themselves; other times it’s more radical.  I have actually been involved as a vendor to a Fortune 100 where a business unit cut IT out of a million-dollar software project by outsourcing the bulk of the work to us and hiring us to manage it.  This wasn’t done as outsourcing, per se- just a complete and outright circumvention of IT.  The reasons given behind the scenes were that IT’s standards were too strict and that IT took too long.

Given the number of projects out there that overrun budgets and/or timelines, the idea of business units cutting out the Project Management Office, IT, or any other subject matter experts within your company are frightening.  Even if the project succeeds, consider that the vast majority of projects require maintenance and management once they ‘go live’.  This will either be done by the very staff that was cut out of the original project (if the business unit turns to IT), by business team folks whose jobs are actually to be doing something else (if the business unit tries to run it themselves), or by the vendor (thus setting you up with a permanent dependency on the vendor- your business unit did know to check out the vendor’s long-term viability, right?).

This kind of thing is just trouble in so many ways its not funny for any business out there.  Usually this sort of thing going on in your organization is a result of some problems you haven’t been paying attention to.   The question is, how do you quell these things?  First, I recommend addressing your problems leading to this practice, for one, and providing strong vision and leadership can help as well.  Vision and leadership will inspire trust, and a lack of trust in the status quo that others can meet the business unit’s needs is always what leads to these sort of rogue ops.  Second, find a way to embrace the project.  Instead of shutting them down, say “How can I help?”  Get involved. Don’t get in their way; that’s why they are circumventing you in the first place.  When you need to do course correction to get things more supportable or compliant with your corporate regulations (or any legal regulations you must comply with), communicate.  Help them understand why the extra bits are necessary.  Be a partner, not a roadblock.  If you can help people understand that you are there to help, and you show that you can be a help, they’re more likely to come through the right channels next time.

Still, I’d love to hear what other folks thoughts on this.  Any comments?  Can anyone comment on how their organizations are handling this problem?

Sometimes in our quest to get those who are not motivated to do their jobs, we can destroy the motivation of our loyal employees, those who does want to do their jobs. Here’s three big mistakes people make:

1) Big Brother is watching
The power of IT has made monitoring both popular and easy- monitoring web traffic, email, putting in cameras for physical security, guard stations, badges, biometrics… the list of things we do to watch our employees and protect our assets goes on and on.  There is a fine line you must walk, however.  When you watch your employees, they feel untrusted.  Showing a lack of trust in others usually leads them not to trust you in return.  They will suspect your motives.  What are you up to?  Why do you keep watching them?  Why don’t you trust them?  If you don’t trust them, why don’t you just fire them?  Are you looking for reasons to fire them?  Going overboard with monitoring is a quick way to an unhappy, high-turnover workforce.

2) Which way does the wind blow today?
Consistency is a key in leadership.  People only follow people they trust.  They must believe in your competency and ability to achieve goals.  This includes having the self-assuredness to stay the path.  If you took a cab, and the driver kept changing his mind on which way to go to get to your destination, you’d quickly suspect something was wrong, wouldn’t you?  Would you even trust him to get you there?  Even if you did, would you think he was getting you there the best way possible?

Inconsistency in logic, goals, rules, or even just daily behavior can undermine people’s trust in your leadership.  If a leader appears not to be leading consistently towards a single goal, odds are that the leader’s followers think he doesn’t know how to get to that goal.

3) Forgetting the little people
If you have hired well, your staff probably has a lot of knowledge on board.  Some of the people you hire to be specific experts in an area, like developers, systems admins, and such, while others have knowledge because of their experience.  Customer service personnel often hear things about what the customers think of a product that your business analysts will never get the customer to say in a focus group.  The people in the trenches will always have perspectives that can’t be found in amongst your design teams.  Always include the perspective of others in decisions, especially if it is their job to know something about what you are deciding.  Excluding experts makes them feel like their opinions are not valued and question their value to the company.  If your job is to be an expert in a subject, and you feel that your opinion is not valued, then you feel like you are not valued.

If you do not show your employees that you value them, they will quickly lose respect for you. How can you lead people effectively if you have no respect for them? How can they trust you to look out for them and the things they want to accomplish?

All three of these things boil down to one thing: achieving credibility and respect with your employees.  You cannot lead them without their respect.  You cannot motivate them without credibility with them.  Protect and nurture the respect of your employees. Work to earn it.  If they will respect you, they will follow.

It can also lead your employees to sneak out the back stairwell fifteen minutes early every day.  To provide customer service that leads customers to look elsewhere.  To steer their talented friends away from your company and instead solicit them for job leads to getaway  from you.

One key to morale is having the respect of your employees.  Here’s ten important things to build your employee’s respect for you:

 1.  Give Credit.  When your employees bring you ideas, always give them credit.  They believe their ideas are important.  They also believe that their ideas are tied to their career advancement.  If you take credit, then in their mind you are stealing from them and robbing their careers.  You’ll be branded untrustworthy in an instant.

 2.  Reward hard work.  This should be a corollary to item #1.  People feel what they do is valuable.  Prove to them that it is, and they’ll keep giving you more of it.

3.   Keep your promises.  If you don’t exhibit integrity, don’t expect your employees to do so.  This is especially true when it comes to pay, benefits and advancement.  Remember, we all come to work ultimately to gain something for ourselves.  Take that away and you take away their reason to keep coming.

 4.  Respect time off.  Days off from work are about our personal lives.  What we need in our personal lives are what keeps us coming back to work.  Don’t disrupt vacation days, weekends, and holidays unless you absolutely must.  If you have to, be frank and open about the business reason you have to do it, and be equally frank and open about exactly what you, and in turn the company, is going to do to ensure it doesn’t happen again (then see #3).

5.  Don’t push unreasonable deadlines.  Your employees know how long it takes to do their jobs.  That means that they know a deadline is unreasonable the minute it comes out of your mouth.  They know you’re asking them to work long hours from now until that deadline comes.  And they have from now until then to fume about it as well.

6.  Don’t Micromanage.  It’s vital to keep up with your project schedule and deadlines.  It’s not vital to know what percentage complete your team members are at on day two of a two month project.  It’s also not vital to know what they’re doing from minute to minute.  If you watch over their shoulders, they believe that you do not trust them.  That means they won’t trust you.  Take a deep breath and keep your eye on the goals.

7.  Stand back and let them work.  Either your employees know their jobs well, you did a lousy job providing them with the training they need, or you did a lousy job hiring.  Do you trust yourself or not?  If you’re watching them and interfering with how they do things constantly, then guess what the answer is.  Guess what else?  They don’t trust you either. 

8. No favorites.  Your team is your team.  It may have stars, but it doesn’t have favorites.  If coaches only played players they liked personally, can you imagine what professional sports would be like?  Treat your employees equally.

9.  Keep work about work.  This is a corollary to #8.  Keep your personal life out of the workplace at a reasonable level, and allow your employees to do the same.  Also, don’t ask your employees to run personal errands for you.  You wouldn’t pick up their dry cleaning, why should they get yours?

10.  Never discuss one employee with another.  People’s problems are personal.  That includes problems that they’re having with their jobs.  Don’t air their dirty laundry.

1) a reliable web server
2) reliable power for the web server
3) reliable physical location for the web server
4) reliable network connection to the web server
5) failover capability in the event that the web server fails
6) reliable backups in case the server crashes
7) physical colocation of servers in the event that one server site is damaged in a disaster
multiple network connections in the event that a network connection fails
9) personnel who are experts on each individual component of your website (available 24/7)

and so on, and so on…

See what I mean? Unless you have the budget and manpower to support a 99.999% uptime, you are wasting paper if you set that as your SLA goal. In fact, if your business falls too far short of the goal or the goal sounds too unrealistic to your people, then I guarantee that eventually your staff will become pessimistic about it. The uptime will become an unhappy point with them, an inside joke in your company, and it will tarnish the reputation of anyone who was foolish enough to sign off on it.

This line of thinking applies to other goals in your company as well. It is important to think high and stretch your people. Challenges make your people stronger. They make your company better. If you are not stretching your people, you may risk your competitive edge. Setting too unrealistic goals, however, will simply set your people up for failure- and they will remember you for it. Being set up for failure is demotivating.

For that matter, setting too many ’stretch’ goals is just as bad if not worse than setting one unrealistic goal. Your people will get sick of every single win being a struggle to the finish. They will start to whisper things like “Who does he think we are?” and “Sure, just pile on more to the load, I’m stretched too far now anyway!”. Do you want to be thought of that way by the people you lead? Or, to be more specific, do you think your people will follow someone who they think these things of?

Never set goals that you or the people you manage do not have the resources- time, money or otherwise- to reach. Stretching is good for your business. Jumping off cliffs without a parachute is not. Others can see whether or not your goals are reachable given the resources available. Your people may see this as lack of respect for them (”He thinks we’re miracle workers!”), lack of ability to plan (”He doesn’t care how many hours we work!”), or a lack of knowledge (”Doesn’t he know that can’t be done with what we have?”). They will mistake it for incompetence, and your credibility with your people will take a huge hit that your ability to lead them may never recover from.

Right?

This is a trend I’ve seen in many places.  The project manager fights for their project to a fault.  They get the money and resources they need.  They win the battle of conflicting priorities for shared resources.  They take no prisoners and get things done.  While in the process of doing it, though, sometimes they rob other projects and processes of resources, and that ultimately hurts the company significantly.

As a project manager, you can never lose sight of the fact that you work for the company, not the project.  When there is a scheduling conflict, you have to ask questions and find out what the conflict is and what the importance of the other item is to the company.  There are ultimately times when you should stand down and let the other people through.

Your stakeholders can sometimes make this a delicate balancing act.  They will not always agree that the other project should be let through.  Not everyone thinks in terms of the Company as a whole.  You should take the time to explain yourself, though, and if you find yourself and what you believe is the correct thing to do in conflict with your stakeholders or, worse, project sponsor, take the time to escalate.  Don’t do it in a contrary manner; simply consult the right authority in the company and ask which choice takes priority.  Once you do that, report your findings and acquiesce to it.  Refer to the higher decision and seek help from leadership in explaining things if necessary.

Doing the right thing for the company is not always good for your project, but ultimately it is the right thing to do for your career. Demonstrating to leadership that you can think globally about the company will ultimately help your career.

If you want to delegate well, don’t set your delegatee up for failure.  Set expectations.  Define the task completely.  What is the expected deliverable?  What is the due date? What is the budget?  What resources are available to help?  Supply a template, example, or even a simple sketch to help identify your goal.

If you don’t explain what you want, how you want it, and when you want it by, then don’t expect what you asked for to be delivered.  Every PM knows this.  Put it to use in your every day life.

Consider this question: If you have made yourself indispensible to your company, in the position you are in right now, how can you ever be promoted?

There are two ways to handle this. The first (and the more commonly taken road) is to document what you do each day and cross-train others to your job if possible. This is a good first step. If you were hit by a bus tomorrow, the company would be covered, which is another good reason to do this, and a good reason for your company to support you doing this.

The second way to do this is to eliminate your job. That’s right, I said eliminate it. Most jobs involve a large number of repetitive tasks. Find better, smarter ways of doing what you do every day. Work towards finding a way to streamline things so that you and the people involved in the workflows that you are involved in have to do less to accomplish what they do today.

If you can’t automate, at least simplify. Document what you do with decision-making flowcharts and procedures. Between automation and documentation, you should be able to reduce your own workload. Now you can go to your boss, point out what you’ve done to make things easier, and ask for more responsibilities. While you’re at it, work your way towards being allowed to delegate the most simple of the processes you do each day. By simplifying, delegating and eliminating the lowest 20% of your work constantly, you should be picking up a new 20% that has more challenges and responsibilities all the time.

If you don’t like your new tasks, accept the challenge of making them so simple that you can automate or delegate those, too. Keep working your way upward through responsibilities. Pretty soon, you will get noticed by those higher than you in the company food chain.

You might even get promoted… and whether or not they can replace you will never come up when they consider promoting you.

POSTED BY Stacey Douglas

Here’s some advice: if you don’t know why things are the way they are, ask questions. If you don’t agree with the answers you receive, don’t be afraid to challenge the policy. Challenge it until you either get a good answer or get the changes needed for the business.

The rules that make up your company’s policies were written by and are owned by employees of your company, employees just like you. If confronted with good reasons and solid evidence why the rules should be different than they are, it is very possible that whoever is responsible for making that policy will rewrite and improve it. It’s possible that there may not even be an owner anymore; sometimes “We’ve always done it this way” is a terrible enemy. Even if you don’t get the change you seek, you may get it waived in certain cases where it no longer makes sense and get your work through faster. The change to the rules that you spark may improve the company overall.

What if you find out that the rule had a good point? Did you waste your time bucking against bureaucracy? Not at all. The explanation of the rule will teach you more about the business. It may explain processes in a context that you’ve never considered. They may teach you something about the company and about business that explains why the rules are the way they are. The change in your work as a result of this new understanding will be worth the effort.

Never be afraid to challenge. One way or another, you have everything to gain.

Most organizations hire full-time employees based on full-time work. That is, if you can prove that there is a constant 40 hours a week of work for a given position, you may have the position. If the work is temporary, i.e. project-based and will end when a project ends, it’s much harder to hire. You know at some point the project will be over, and when it is, you will not (in theory) have work for that person.

If your company validates positions in this way, you should consider the basis of the work that your company or department does. Is it primarily project-based, or is it more standardized? If your IT department is like most IT shops, for example, you have some people who are responsible for continuous tasks- supporting applications, for example, or systems administration, and you have some people who are responsible for completely project-based work. The project-based people are constantly executing one project after another. The work they do on a project ends in time, so they are temporary, yet at the end of that project there is always another project. You also probably have some people who do a percentage of each- some routine work, some project-based.

If this is the case, you should be careful to examine how you are justifying time when you hire people. If the nature of what the position does will consist of 50% project-based work, include that. Fight HR and anyone else you have to in order to stick to this, but do so. If you hire all your people to fulfill tasks that must be done, then you will always be overrun when the temporary, project-based work comes around. Resources will always be too tight. Project deadlines will always be threatened. Management will become a group of competitors jockeying for resources to finish their projects instead of working together as a team. You will create overworked labor that resents their bosses and their conflicting priorities, a management team that competes with each other to get what they need to do their jobs rather than helping each other, and an executive team that looks inept from the ‘trench’ view because they have failed to plan labor right and appear to demand the impossible from their employees without providing enough resources to accomplish things. Your company is a team competing with other companies- don’t let your hiring processes reduce it to competing with itself.

Just as you don’t want a car fixed by a disgruntled mechanic, your customers will not want a product built by disgruntled employees. Unhappy people tend to focus on their unhappiness and fail to focus well on the task at hand. Worse, sometimes they focus their unhappiness on that task, messing it up on purpose. Even when they mean well, they work slowly, and they make mistakes.

What does all this add up to for you as a manager? Morale matters. One of your jobs as a manager is to lead people in performing activities quickly, effectively, and efficiently. Unhappy employees do none of these things. You should take an active role in motivating your team. When problems arise, take an active role in solving them. When an employee is beyond your help, though, you must recognize this and react to it. This may involve shifting responsibilities temporarily, or it may involve taking more permanent action. Either way, morale matters. Raise it when you can, deal with it when you cannot.

It’s worth repeating and thinking about because, simply, every one of us forgets this sometimes.  You have a big, complex problem and next thing you know there’s a whole committee of people in a room holding a meeting and beating the issue to death- in the mean time, no one’s working on anything.  90% of the time, the actual solution is find the first step of solving the problem, set someone to work on that, then pull a plan together to solve the rest of the problem- in the smallest, easiest to solve pieces as are possible.

I recommend that, if you have anything in your office to remind you of something you should think about every day, this should be it:  when in doubt, eat the elephant one bite at a time.  Remembering this daily will help save you months and months of work over your career.

I’m not terribly much on politics, although I find myself becoming more interested as I grow older.  I haven’t paid a lot of attention to Arnold’s governorship off in California.  I couldn’t tell you, for example, if he’s doing a good job or a bad job.

Reading the article, though, I realize that I do admire him for one thing- the unbounded confidence.  The human way he seems to be engaging people.  When he had to make hard decisions that would affect people negatively, he brought them in to talk to them personally.  Whatever his political reasons for doing it, I guarantee those people appreciated the opportunity to be heard and to have input on the decisions and the courtesy of Arnold to talk to them face to face about his reasons for his decisions.

He makes an effort to engage and involve people.  He shows confidence.  He uses the tools at his disposal, and his strengths, to his advantage.  Many people in his situation would try to seperate his ‘Ahnald’ acting persona from his political career.  Arnold uses it for what it is- a strength that he had, and a powerful and valuable tool that can contribute to the succcess of what he’s doing.

There’s a number of things I think we can learn from the article:

• Be straight and honest with people.  Give them a chance for input.
• Try to make people feel included.
• Challenges are something that you face.  There’s no need to fear them.
• Your decisions are something you make the best you are able based on what you know.  There’s no need to have guilt about them.
• Take action and keep taking action.  If you must do things other people’s way, so be it.
• Family matters.  Balancing your personal life and your job is a must.  Guilt over either will affect the other.  Do whatever you must to be happy at both.
• Use your strengths to your advantage, even when others see them as a weakness.  Especially if others see them as a weakness.
• Be who you are.  It’s the only way to maintain your confidence.
• When your decisions have led you to an unpopular place, however right you were in them, stand firm.  Joke about it, smile about it, and acknowledge what you’ve done.   Keep standing by your decisions that led you there with confidence.
• You can will your way to success.  It is one of the greatest forms of confidence, and that confidence will carry you and your team.
• Speaking of confidence, show confidence.  Always.  It is your greatest tool as a leader.  That, more than anything else you do, affects and strengthens the people who follow you.

There’s many more lessons you can take away from the article.  Whether you agree with what Arnold’s doing as a governor or not, read the article and think about what it says about his leadership style.  Take the lessons to be gained there to heart.

This may sound jaded. You may say that things aren’t done that way at your company. You may be right. However, in most places, this is the way things happen. You need to know this for several reasons:

1) Understanding how things work help you function in the political arena of your company.
2) Understanding how things work can help you influence how things happen in your company.
3) If you are having too many meetings where no decisions are made, perhaps you should consider using these tactics yourself. Get the decisions made outside, then leverage the meeting to create agreement.

The third note may sound underhanded and overly political. If you do it well, it isn’t. Talk to everyone on your team individually. Get a feel of what they want. Gather facts from them. Use these facts to answer questions for others. You will find that if you talk to everyone and help them to get a perspective before the meeting happens, everyone will likely have reached a similar conclusion well before the meeting, resulting in a smooth, simple, quick meeting where everyone arrives and reaches quick understanding. If not, they are at least armed with more and better facts to discuss the topic.

Rule 1:  Submersion

When a company or project is failing, take it below the radar.  What does this mean to a business or project?  Quite simply, if you’re making headlines, you’re going to be wasting time answering questions about those headlines rather than fixing the trouble that you’re in.  Troubled times require notice, but you have to mitigate and control this as much as possible if you want to be able to devote enough time and effort to righting the ship.

Rule 2:  Mediation

Negotiate whenever possible.  Encourage people with problems to work it out among themselves.  The solutions that will be arrived at by two or more parties in contention will often be better for both parties, and the negotiation process itself will force them to work together enough that sometimes future problems can be avoided.

Rule 3:  Consensus

If you want your company or project to succeed, you must show its value to constituents.  Not just the project or business itself, but the people who represent it.  You must put up a positive, helpful front.  Your team and its attitude and behavior is a reflection of your product.  People who show themselves to be good and of value will be trusted to do good and to provide good services and products.

Rule 4:  Keep God on your side

This goes hand in hand with rule 3.  Good people are trusted to provide good things.  I liken this to the Google business mantra:  “Do no evil.”

Rule 5:  Be Politically Flexible

Stand up for what’s truly important to your company, but understand the needs of others and support their needs as well.  Lend your influence to ideas you believe in, serve your project and company, and be politically flexible where needed to ensure the survival of your business venture.

Rule 6:  Reinvention

In the face of failure, reinvent.  Distance yourself, your project, and your company from past failures.  Learn from your mistakes and make that learning public.  Mistakes and failures lose trust.  Trust is the currency of business just as much, if not more so, than cash in today’s world.

Rule 7:  Modesty

Be humble.  If you build the greatest company in the world or complete a project that completely transforms your company, you still have only done your job.  Nothing more.  That is your job, isn’t it?  Did anyone ever get promoted to run a so-so company or to manage a project ‘adequately’?  Someone has to be the best.  If that happened to be you, that means two things:  1) you did a great job!  2) no one else happened to do a better job- that doesn’t mean that they can’t, or that they won’t next week.  Humbleness is not only good for you to keep sight of things, but it makes you more approachable and followable by others.  It will make you a better leader.

I’m intrigued enough by the article (which I suggest reading) that I’m going to try the book (Boss of Bosses: How Bernardo Provenzano Saved the Mafia).  Expect to hear more review in coming months.  Anyone out there read it yet?

The thing is, we as managers and executives often see it exactly in that light because we survived it.  Just because we survived it, that does not mean that it’s something that people should have to tolerate.  There was a time that outhouses were something to be tolerated too, after all.

An article on Live Science recently brought to light the significance of workplace bullying.  According to recent studies, workplace bullying is more damaging to the workplace environment than sexual harrassment.

This sort of behavior in your organization cannot be allowed.  It damages morale and sucks up resources.  If nothing else, consider the hours that you are losing because your employees are standing in back hallways grousing over the poor treatment they receive, nevermind all of the other problems- higher turnover, poor job performance, increased HR incidents, even increased time loss due to stress and stress-induced illness.  Take steps to deal with this sort of management in your organization now.

This happens for many reasons. As the business grows, people have to deal with larger and larger groups of people working for them, so reports become a way to keep up with things. More and more unexpected problems appear, so reports, meetings and processes come into place to handle those. Meetings are held to discuss reports. Often, these sprout other meetings to discuss the reports that were used to create the report. On and on it goes.

The older an organization gets, the larger its bureaucracy tends to become. The corollary to this is that the more the paperwork increases, the less product is delivered per dollar. This hurts your bottom line and cuts into your competitive edge. What can you do?

First, fight the urge to create bureaucracy to deal with problems. Hold your people accountable. Don’t go on a firing frenzy, but holding people responsible for doing the right things and finding out the right facts before taking an action is a reasonable way to manage. If you examine your organization today, odds are many processes exist solely to eliminate the need for people to ‘make the right decision’ for themselves. You may end up having to replace some people in order to make this happen. If you do, though, is that so bad for your organization? You need the right people in the right place. Your other employees can spot those who can’t handle their jobs just as easily as you can, perhaps easier. They would respect you more if you show that you see that problem and do something about it.

Secondly, look around at the bureaucracy you already have in place. What part exists for good reasons? What part exists simply to prevent mistakes? How can you change things to allow people to have the right information to make decisions and trust them, rather than having them do things in ways that prevent them from wielding responsibility?

Empower your people. Get the bureacracy out of their way. They will love you for it. Hold people who mess up or are not capable of handling that empowerment accountable. People will respect you for it. Best of all, your bottom line will thrive, and all your stakeholders will love you for that.

This is a great idea for startups, but it’s also a great idea for keeping direction in general examples include:

1) Finding direction in projects
At some point early in a project, you must decide what question your project is answering. It could be anything from “how can we share spreadsheets better?” to “How can we get orders to customers faster?”. This is the core of your project. Never lose sight of this question. You will write a scope to your project that defines what you intend to do in your project. When you develop that scope, it better answer your initial question. When you write requirements, they better trace back to that question. When you build the prototype, it better offer an answer to your question… you get the idea. If your project ever reaches a point at which you aren’t answering that original question anymore, then you’re off-track. You better fix it or start over.

2) Finding direction in product lines
“The question” can also drive the development of your product line over time. How many times have you seen this: you’re on a project, it completes successfully, everyone is happy, then a thousand ideas pop up for how to ‘improve’ the product. You have manpower to do maybe five of these things over the next year. How do you choose what to do? Simple. Look at the question you set out to answer. Which ideas support that? Which ideas move you away from it? Ditch the ones that move away; if you follow those, you may undo all the progress you made. Go with the ones that support your original goal. Repurposing a product is very practical, but if you change the purpose of the product in the process, you’ve lost the solution to your original question.

3) Maintaining and marketing your Brand
If you have a brand, it means something. It answers a question. When I think “How do I find what I need to know?” I think “Google it”. The google brand answers questions for users. When I think “Where do I get coffee?” I think Starbucks. See? Brands answer questions. They become associated with very specific ideas in a customer’s heads. A customer can usually associate and recall about as many things with a brand as they can keep in short term memory easily- that is, five to seven things. Get outside of this, and your customer has to stop and think about it before they can decide what your brand means to them, and you’ve diluted your brand too far. Therefore, you should develop a question that your brand answers, and stick with that question. When you decide how to expand your brand, stay close to that question. Starbucks would seem like they didn’t do this with putting music CDs in their stores, right? Ahh, but no. When I think of Starbucks, I think of drinking coffee, sitting in a coffee house, reading, relaxing, and listening to good music- which begs the question: why doesn’t Starbucks sell books? Probably because they locate some shops inside book stores, and that would be biting the hand that feeds them. Book stores need more space than a Starbuck’s does, anyway.

See the point? A single question drives so many things in business. It brings focus. Find your question to answer, and it will help you keep focus in what you do as interruptions, new ideas and distractions pop up in your day each day.

“Look, you have everyone’s opinion, and it’s obviously split on this.  You need to make the call.”

“Yeah, but twenty thousand dollars is a lot of money.  I think we need to make an informed decision.”

“You better make it soon.  You’ve spent ten thousand dollars in manhours studying it.”

After a quick discussion of the cost per hour of the people involved, he saw I was right.  He made the call the next day.

Another, similar scenario that I’ve seen many times is the ‘hanging decision’.  Everyone knows that the company needs something, but there’s more than one solution to the problem, so the company studies the options.  And studies.  And studies.  The worst is when there’s more than one right answer.  People lose faith in leadership’s ability to lead, because leadership can’t make the call.

Research has shown (here, for example) that firm decisions are better in the long run for your own morale.  It’s better for your people and your company as well.  Will it be the right decision always?  No.  But keeping things in motion is important.  If a decision is important enough, study it, but always remember that the clock is ticking.  People come to work every day and get paid every day, whether they are working to implement your new idea, taking the next step in your project, or waiting around the coffee machine, gossiping over when the boss (that’s you) is finally going to decide something.

There’s been a few things like this in my new job- things that were set aside and considered nice to do’s, that I’ve been deferring.  Last week, I bit the bullet and started calling teams together to take action on all of it.  The response so far is phenomenal.  People are volunteering to work extra hours to implement things that apparently they had been waiting for leadership to take action on for years now, but no one had said the word.  Morale is soaring.  The workplace is getting better instantly.  All because I stepped up to the plate.  If any of the calls I’m making are wrong, the team is still behind it, and we’ll simply revise and cope with it.

Be careful, study things, avoid risk, but do something.  People want leaders to lead, not ponder.  If you have two right options to choose between, pick one and do so with confidence.  If it turns out to not be the best decision, own your mistake, take action to correct it.  People will admire you more for making mistakes but owning them and leading with authority than they ever will for waffling and being indecisive.

The end of the business quarter typically marks a reporting milestone for the accounting and finance folks. For better or worse, it’s become a time when the measuring sticks come out. Businesses have come to measure progress in 90-day sprints. Think about some of these goals we end up saddling ourselves with:

• Close the sale before end of quarter! -why?  Will the money be worth less next week?
• Wrap up the project so we can get the billing in on this quarter  -again, I ask, why?  Does money become worth less next week?  If it shows up this quarter, doesn’t that just take away from next quarter?
• We need to make a buy decision this quarter, because we have budget now  -aha, maybe this is it, if money magically has a shelf life of 90 days…

Some of these decisions do, I realize have real financial implications to the accounting and finance world, so please don’t fill the comments with explanation.  My point is this:  too many times in business we make decisions or we hurry work and get sloppy results, not because there’s a business imperative, but because there’s a perceived financial imperative driven by the need to look good on paper.

This happens in projects as well.  Sometimes something comes up in a project that warrants changing the schedule or cost- the company’s future is at stake on the project, and it can’t be done wrong- and yet PMs will escalate and try to force the hand of the people doing the work because they don’t want to look bad by having a note on the PMO’s executive summary for that month saying that they’re off-schedule or over budget.

My point is this:  is it ever a good decision to allow how you look on a report drive cutting corners and hurrying processes?  Of course you can’t just ignore reports.  They’re there for a reason, and it’s a good reason.  Still, you must consider trends over time and how you will be judged long-term.  If a sale or project close out after the quarter mark, yes, it robs this quarter, but didn’t you get a nice bump in the next quarter as a result?  Even if you cross fiscal years, is that really so wrong?

Don’t let pressures to look good drive you to make poor long term decisions- not for your department, your company, or your project.  Keep your eye on the long-term ball and stick to strategy and delivering successfully.  Delivering a shoddy product early has never been a successful strategy with customers- delivering the right solution at the right time does.  They don’t care about your quarterly report; they care about receiving quality.  Companies succeed over years and decades, not 90 day sprints.

For a company to succeed, it needs three things.  The first is Leadership.  With a capital L.  There must be people in the organization of such influence and ability that others want to follow them.  Second, there must be Vision.  A vision is a driving goal or goals that stretch and improve the company.  People must be working towards something that they believe in, that customers will want to buy, that Wall Street and investors believe in, that will grow the company in a positive way.  The third is of course execution.  If you are leading people towards a vision, but you aren’t executing, you’re actually on a death march towards a vision.

For these three things to be truly effective, there must be a mix of people at the top that have all of these qualities:  true leadership, the ability to execute, and a living, breathing, growing vision for the company.  Contrary to popular belief, the company CAN have too many people like this.  The company has a limit to its resources; if you have more leaders with visions than you have resources, you have contention, that contention will cut into the growth of all of the seperate visions, and you will stunt your company in the long run.  It’s a fine balancing act.

For every person with vision, you need many managers.  Managers are usually where execution come in.  People with vision and leadership point the direction and inspire people, but they cannot always handle all the details of the journey.  Managers, and possibly more leaders who support the vision, are needed in order to get these visions accomplished.  The company is better off if your visionaries can spend their time evangelizing and expanding their visions than if they’re managing the process of implementing their visions.  All of the great explorers of history, for example, had visions- to discover a new world, to find gold, whatever, but they had a vision, and they had enough leadership that men followed them.  Those who succeeded not only had a vision and leadership, they had enough management skills to not starve, to not get hopelessly lost, to not freeze to death, and so on.

Interestingly enough, the visionary leaders in your company may not be executives.  Most executives have other jobs than to have Visions.  Your CEO, for example, is likely responsible for gaining funding from Wall Street and evangelizing your company’s vision to investors; this does not always leave time to create a vision or to share it internally.  CFOs are usually money men.  CIOs and CTOs are usually responsible for the technologies that make other people’s visions work.  In fact, sometimes the vision and leadership comes from the lower levels of the company- individual project managers, analysts, and different types of business folks.  These people push their ideas up, eventually find executives who will support their ideas and make them company priorities, and then things grow from there.  The ability to recognize and nurture visions is just as important in an executive as the ability to have a vision.

You’re probably wondering where I’m going with this.  Why does this matter to you?

It matters to you in the same way it matters to me.  At some point in your career, you must ask yourself:  am I a Manager, or a Leader?  Am I a Vision person, or no?  None of these questions will limit your career.  Like I said, many C’s are Managers or Leaders but not visionaries, and this is in no way a detriment- companies need a mix.  Why you need to ask this of yourself is that it will help you decide in what ways you should be growing your skills and focusing your time.  It will help you understand what jobs to apply for, what situations to look for, what thinks you are best at.  It will even help you understand how to build your team better.  Teams need an evangelist for your project, for example.  If that’s not you, then you’ll need to recruit one.  If you have a great idea but are not a planner, you need to find and add people to your team who can handle the details of execution.

Knowing and understanding your strengths and your role in the organization and your goals for your role will help make you better at it.  In the long run, it will make your career grow faster.