Thursday 19 April 2012

Welcome back from your Easter breaks, if you had them and thank you to those who were here keeping the ship afloat.

During my week off, between the rain, I was reading some of Dan Rockwell’s thoughts – he writes a blog under the pseudonym of Leadershipfreak. It’s excellent and thought provoking. I thought I would share some edited highlights with you because it really made me think about what I spend my time doing at work, particularly at a time when so many of us are working very hard.

When Working Hard isn’t Working

It doesn’t matter how hard you work if you’re working on the wrong things. Managers and leaders are the hardest working people I know. Working in your organisation is necessary but dangerous.

You work “in” when you do your business. Farmers milking cows, accountants accounting, preachers preaching, teachers teaching, and doctors doctoring are all working in their business. Working in is dangerous because it:

1. Captivates attention.
2. Consumes energy.
3. Distracts from a powerful concern – working on your business.

 This get’s you stuck - I know I sometimes feel very stuck.

 Your passion and ability to focus on getting jobs done blocks you from:

1. Creating or enhancing systems.
2. Defining long term objectives.
3. Identifying, leveraging, and enhancing the strengths on your team
4. Offloading present work so you can focus on the future.

Working IN prevents you from working ON. This is dangerous.

Getting things done works for the short-term – soon it drains – but, eventually it destroys you and your effectiveness. Constantly working in your business without working on it:

1. Defeats your innovative spirit.
2. Saps vitality
3. Restricts growth.
4. Limits your potential.

So we somehow need to breakthrough to working on:

Evaluate the use of your time. How much is spent working in rather than on? Breakthroughs materialize when you alter dead-end habits.

1.  Create a weekly “working on” appointment with yourself. Identify and take a next step.
2. Make small adjustments. You’ll never shift toward working on your business in onegiant leap.
3. Find new eyes. Discuss systems, strategies, and vision with experts outside your field.
4. Listen. Many leaders and managers owners have too many answers and too few questions.
5. Try something. Waiting for stunning success prevents progress.
6. Delegate more even if it takes longer at first.
7. Follow-up and follow-through. Frustrations inspire conversations regarding improvements but follow-through changes things. Perhaps some form of accountability would help?

 How can we as managers and leaders work on our business or organization?

 For daily updates, discussion, personal opinion, comment or just to connect or keep in touch you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/drcarltonbrand.

 Thanks for reading - talk again in a week or so.

 Carlton

Thursday 5 April

Last week we took Cabinet and CLT through the detail of our Systems Thinking work. Some call this lean. Cabinet were very supportive of the approach, as they have been for the five years we’ve been using it, and the performance improvements seen in the increasing number of services that are now adopting it. We currently have 11 services undergoing their reviews. So far, we have trained over 180 people in the method to enable them to experiment and improve their services as systems. We are committed to this approach to continuous improvement and the number of staff trained will approach 300 by the end of the year.
Systems Thinking is all about designing services around our customers and communities. To do this we seek to understand the purpose of the system from the customer’s perspective. We then seek to understand the type and frequency of customer demand and the flow of work through our processes. We redesign this flow to enable us to do only that work that adds value to our customers purpose. We try and eliminate any waste in our work flow.

This got me thinking about the skills and knowledge that team leaders, managers and directors need to undertake such work.

Managers and leaders need to understand systems thinking. They must show-up in the work and ask these two questions:

• “Show me the measures you use to understand and improve the work?”

• “What help do you need from me to remove the causes of waste in the system?”

I wonder how many of us could answer these questions with definitive evidence and data?

This leads me to the question of how will we run our organisation in this manner?

For me, the new competencies for managers and leaders in the future are:

1. The ability to think in terms of systems and knowing how to lead systems

2. The ability to understand the variability of work in planning and problem solving

3. Understanding how we learn, develop, and improve; leading true learning and improvement

4. Understanding people and why they behave as they do

5. Understanding the interaction and interdependence between systems, variability, learning, and human behaviour; knowing how each affects the others

6. Giving vision, meaning, direction and focus to our work across the organisation

These competencies are all embedded in our new behaviour and values framework.

If this has made you curious and you haven’t attended one of the courses run by John Rogers, please apply to do so. It really is one of the most enlightening sessions you’ll ever experience.

For daily updates, discussion, personal opinion, comment or just to connect or keep in touch you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/drcarltonbrand.

Thanks for reading. I’m taking next week off on holiday so we’ll talk again in a week or so. Have a very happy Easter.

Carlton