Musings at Altitude

MBWA.

Management by walking around.

I can’t remember a time when it wasn’t mentioned as an imperative for effectiveness of any business leader.

But is it important today?

In this age of ubiquitous communications – video, voice conferencing, texting, chat rooms, instant messaging – is it still important to MBWA?

Back in 1999, I led my team of 20 people in 8 countries using instant messaging.

Back in 2001-2003, I sold innovative technology 7×24 (at least it seemed that way) using conference calls, emails, and instant messaging (and lots of meetings at Starbucks).

Back in 2003-2005, I led a team of hundreds of people by meeting frequently at corporate with everyone, visiting as many sites as possible, but communicating with most folks through email or phone calls.

From 2006 till now, as I’ve focused in roles that are closer to business development than company leadership, I can tell you first hand that face to face, walking around, traveling to remote sites, and shaking hands with as many people as possible is the only way to establish trust, create memorable relationships, and deliver against the real promise of any specific mission objective.

MBWA is alive and well.

MBWA is still an extremely important imperative for any effective executive.

MBWA applies to both those in the offices immediately surrounding you and all over your building as well as the most remote person on your team.

Get out and walk around.

You’ll be amazed at the comments you hear!

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Have you listened to the whispers in the hallways or at the proverbial water cooler lately?

What are you hearing?

Who is doing the talking?

Who is doing the listening?

How are they responding?

How often is it happening?

How loud are they talking?

How long does it linger when they leave the “chat room” and head back to their desks to get back to work?

If you don’t listen, you don’t really know the culture of your organization.

If you listen and then do nothing about what you hear, then you don’t really care about the culture of your organization.

If you listen and act on what you hear in a measured and meaningful way, then you not only care, but you have the opportunity to greatly impact the culture of the organization.

When folks are excited, people don’t whisper.  They talk loudly.

When folks are anxious and worries abound, the volume of the water cooler chat goes down inversely proportional to the rise in the anxiety.

Listen to the whispers.

Act on what you hear.

Impact the culture in a positive way.

Then smile when things get loud around the office!

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At every stop in my military and business career, someone up my chain of command gave me at some particular time that very much appreciated and very timely career advice. Typically, that advice was a clear path and plan. Always, it was the traditional requirements to achieve the oh so normal but highly sought after career progression.

If I had followed their advice, lots of things would never have happened:

• I wouldn’t have married my wife because I wouldn’t have gone back home for training at the base where I grew up
• I wouldn’t have traveled the world doing technical evaluations of communications systems because I wouldn’t have gone to the base I chose for my first assignment
• I wouldn’t have been the youngest officer in communications at the Pentagon because I would have gotten a degree instead that I never would have enjoyed getting
• I wouldn’t have served in the space launch business and had more fun than anyone ever should be allowed to have because instead I would have been doing the traditional communications job at a next-stop-on-the-career-ladder base
• I wouldn’t have gone to school at just the right time for just the right mental recovery before doing that next challenging thing
• I wouldn’t have served at the White House and experienced three years of the highest pucker factor anyone could ever want to experience
• I wouldn’t have left the active Air Force and entered business to follow my entrepreneurial instincts
• I wouldn’t have started my own company and led teams around the world during the intense and incredibly exciting build out of the internet
• I wouldn’t have sold out and jumped to a Silicon Valley start up and then shared the struggle of a post 9/11 startup
• I wouldn’t have leaped at the chance to be a CEO of an “on the verge of something big” small company and challenged a team to make it bigger, faster than anyone could ever expect

Advice is certainly important, but advice should never be construed as direction.  If that advice perfectly fits your passion, then jump on it.  If  instead that advice causes you great pause rather than instant excitement, thank the advisor profusely and follow your heart.

I did.

And I still smile at who I met and what I did on that road that all my advisors said not to take!

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Several years ago, an incredibly wise-for-her-age-and-experience intern gave me some interesting feedback. She said, “You communicate a lot, but in reality you’re not communicating much at all.” She went on to point out that lots of stuff was flowing, but there was no sustained dialogue which would have led to meaningful understanding and relevant progress.

I thought about that for a long time. I’m obviously still thinking about it several years later.

She’s on to something very important.

Business leaders spend an enormously large amount of their time in meetings. Actually, everyone part of business bureaucracies spend an inordinate amount of their time in meetings. Lots of business information is shared. Sometimes, decisions are made in those meetings.

But then, all the participants split up and rush back to their already existing “to do list”, and the stuff that was learned and the information that was shared disappears almost instantly. The ones that delivered the “launch and leave” information smile because they checked the block that said, “communicate with your team”. The ones that received the information also smile because they checked the block that said, “let the boss communicate with you.” Both feel great, and neither feel any desperate desire to leverage what was communicated to accelerate any particular result.

As I learned from our intern, the secret to meaningful communications is sustained dialogue.

Whatever is discussed must be readdressed frequently enough to provide context, establish importance and ultimately create accountability.

I’m convinced that sustained dialogue is the difference between just yapping and actually communicating.

I’m also convinced that young people when asked for feedback can deliver incredible nuggets of wisdom that defy their youth!

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What’s harder, being an entrepreneur working for a bureaucrat or being a bureaucrat working for an entrepreneur?

What’s harder, instilling bureaucracy in a very entrepreneurial organization or seeking entrepreneurialism in a very bureaucratic organization?

What’s harder, recruiting and retaining people in a very immature organization that is desperately seeking maturity or doing the same in a very mature organization desperately seeking a little bit of immaturity and entrepreneurialism?

What’s harder, being what you are or seeking what you’re not?

Every successful organization has a personality and a style that got them to where they are today, and each of those organizations have seen things that need to change and then instilled some form of change on that previously existing tone and tempo of growth.

Rarely does that change positively impact growth; instead, it acts like a restrictor plate on a stock car, reducing the organizational power and limiting the maximum speed of an organization to whatever that speed may be which is acceptable to the newly defined risk profile for the business track the cars are racing on.

In a big company, it’s certainly a lot easier to limit growth rather than to accelerate growth.

And that in itself provides clues to the most appropriate answer to the questions above.

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Not so coincidentally, my Bible reading this morning took me into the book of James.

James 2:14-17 says:

“What does it profit, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can faith save him? If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of daily food, and one of you says to them, “Depart in peace, be warmed and filled,” but you do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit? Thus also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.”

Faith is belief in things unseen, and thus believing in the invisible.

Works are those very important things that make the invisible – our faith – very visible!

What a great reminder to start my day!

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What’s invisible in your business?

The real cost of administration?

The real cost of revenue capture?

The return on a particular investment?

The actual utilization?

One of the toughest things to do in business is make the invisible visible. The invisible things can cost you dearly during the tough times when every penny needs to be perfectly spent. The invisible things can challenge you dearly by increasing the water cooler chat and amplifying the rumblings within. The invisible things can hurt you dearly by the unexpected consequences of making decisions without having all the needed information.

Great leaders make the invisible visible.

Great leaders make it perfectly acceptable for the invisible to be visible.

Great leaders encourage their teams to leverage the invisible in accomplishing the very visible!

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What determines productivity?

How many hours you put in?

How many places you visit?

How many lengthy emails you write?

How many phone calls you make?

How many tasks you complete on your “to do” list?

How many hours a day you spend in meetings?

To me, it’s simple.

Did you take another major step towards your destination?

In some cases, all of those things above could possibly, maybe, potentially contribute to productivity.

But ultimately, the things that really matter are those things that advance a cause, achieve an objective, fulfill the mission, win the prize or capture the dream.

Otherwise they’re distractions that delay, deter, or deny progress.

Optimum productivity is maximum progress.

Optimum progress is maximum productivity.

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Fourteen months ago, in one of those very frustrating yet passionate moments in business, I penned this post about “just do your job”. The personal frustration I was feeling at that time has eased significantly, but the challenges in any company of maturing the bureaucracy in an effective manner still remain.

I hope you enjoy this revisit!

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January20th, 2009

A year or more ago when I was at max frustration with the internal politics of our billion dollar bureaucracy, I mentioned to a very good friend that wouldn’t it be cool if our motto was JDYJ – “Just Do Your Job” – and every time any inside-the-company shenanigans occurred, we quickly popped JDYJ.

A couple months later, JDYJ showed up on my office wall and I reminded myself every time I walked in the office that I personally needed to JDYJ.

Appropriately, the Captain of the plane that landed in the Hudson River is attending the inauguration at the invite of the President-elect. That Captain is a great hero for saving the lives of the 155 people on his plane. BUT, that Captain has announced time and time again since the heroic landing, “I was just doing my job.” Our President-elect picked up on that and said something like, “wouldn’t it be cool if everyone just did their job.”

In honor of that pilot, I’m committing myself once again to JUST DO YOUR JOB. I’m committing myself to eliminating the hallway chatter and water cooler talk that can debilitate an organization. I’m committing myself to candor and honesty in my conversations so those that I depend on and those that depend on me will never question what I’m thinking or saying. I’m committing myself to prioritizing my efforts to those most needed by those that expect things from me, and I’m committing myself to delivering beyond expectations in every single thing that I do.

That is after all, MY JOB. And if at some point, just because I did my job, someone smiles, that will make me smile. And if, just in doing my job, I can bring many, many smiles to those that work with me, that will be heroic in today’s tough environment. Obviously, it won’t be heroic on the scale of saving 155 lives with decisiveness and skill beyond belief. But, certainly heroic in a time when so much despair and anxiety exists and people across this country are changing their lives or having their lives changed for them based on the decisions of others.

JDYJ. Yes indeed.

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I’ve been blessed to have many extraordinary moments in my business career – in every job, at every location, with every boss, and with widely varying teams. The best of my bosses had an uncanny knack of recognizing extraordinary efforts being given by ordinary people, thus making those ordinary people, extraordinary in their own rights. The best of the teams had an even more uncanny ability to recognize their ordinariness and by working together achieved extraordinary results. But the best of the best in both cases recognized the extraordinary nature of very ordinary acts and by excelling at those ordinary acts, extraordinary success occurred!

It’s so easy today to be caught up in the awe of impossible feats being achieved by superstars on a team. Even worse, it’s very typical today that those superstars who achieve their sometimes accidental moments of fame ride that celebration to great reward and incredible near term advancement. But buried behind every one of those superstars are very ordinary people that went to extraordinary levels for that obviously overwhelming event to occur.

The best of the best see beyond the superstars and realize that the extraordinary nature of their otherwise very ordinary team is equally as important to success as any of the superstars. The best of the best bring into focus the contributions of all those other ordinary people on their team doing extraordinary things and raise those extraordinarily ordinary people to an equally applauded level.

Unfortunately, we live in a pedestal seeking and pedestal watching world, and the pedestals that we have created have only enough room for one or maybe two of our self-defined (and sometimes self-ordained) pedestal deserving people. And while those on the pedestal bask in the glory of the adulation and receive an overwhelming amount of praise for their pedestal achieving accomplishments, the truly extraordinary yet very ordinary team that through their efforts provided the steps for that pedestal topping performance of the superstar are already back at work providing very ordinary yet extraordinary support to the next spectacular moment that will yield another pedestal topping performance!

The best of the best recognize the heroics of the superstars and yet build a pedestal big enough to allow all of those extraordinarily ordinary team members to share momentarily in that special moment, because the best of the best know that those ordinary yet extraordinary members of their team don’t work to be on that pedestal, but work to deliver extraordinary support to the journey to get to that pedestal!

I’m very thankful for those extraordinarily ordinary people that I’ve been blessed to know on every team in every job at every place I’ve ever worked! They won’t want it, but they certainly deserve a tremendous amount of the glory!

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