Tag Archives: Issue

How Do You Use Focus and Communication to Strengthen Your Leadership? Three Points

Situation: A CEO is curious about how others have strengthened their leadership skills over time. From discussions with other CEOs she has gathered that focus and communication are important strengths to build. How do you use focus and communication to strengthen your leadership?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Often the process is more important than the actual decision because the process frames how the decision is made.
    • If the process is open to new ideas and approaches, and these are welcomed in the discussion, this can generate both more creative decisions as well as increased buy-in to the ultimate decision being made.
  • One CEO finds that his company is always focused on the outcome. However, he has grown to understand that it is important to frame the decision-making process around your values.
    • Value-based decisions not only generate increased buy-in by all involved, but they strengthen the sense of company culture and values.
  • Another CEO was faced with a personnel issue. She found that by analyzing past decision-making processes company leadership was able to identify a previously unrecognized factors and processes that fed the personnel issue.
    • By addressing the process, the company was able to resolve the issue to the satisfaction of all.

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How Do You Reduce Risk When Outsourcing? Three Points

Situation: A CEO is looking at an outsourcing opportunity in Asia. If a suitable partner is found, this will be the company’s first experience with outsourcing. What is the experience of others who have outsourced either parts or assemblies to a foreign supplier? How do you reduce risk when outsourcing?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Outsourcing to a foreign supplier is not low risk.
    • Find another CEO who has experience in outsourcing.
    • Consider hiring a consultant who specializes in foreign outsourcing.
    • Once a promising opportunity has been identified, select and put in place a trusted individual on-site who can stay abreast of developments and issues and who can alert the company on both potential opportunities and problems.
  • Execute key initiatives by treating this opportunity like a customer’s project.
    • Prioritize.
    • Set project time in percentages or dollars.
    • Allocate an appropriate budget.
    • Institute an appropriate job/project tracking system for outsourced projects.
    • Hold people just as accountable as if this were a project for a customer.
    • The internal “customer” should be just as demanding as an actual customer.
  • Reduce the risk in staffing.
    • Identify requirements.
    • Agree on expectations, then delegate and trust.
    • Two way communication is critical.

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How Do You Say “No”? Four Suggestions

Situation: A CEO has employees who frequently show up in his office with a request that he solves a problem for them. This takes up the time that he needs to solve bigger picture issues. He’s also concerned that employees should be able to solve these problems themselves. What tactics have others used to address this issue? How do you say “no”?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Don’t say “no.”
    • Saying “no” discourages future questions and reduces communication. Instead, answer their question with a question. Help them to see the next step in the process of solving the problem themselves.
  • What questions do you ask?
    • What do you think is the best solution?
    • Have you tried X, Y, Z?
    • Encourage them to use their peers as resources.
    • Focusing on #2 and #3, may give them insight into solving #1.
    • Have you spoken to (name) about this. (Name) may be able to help.
  • Another good response – “I can’t help you right now. Why don’t you try to solve it and I’ll follow-up with you when I can.”
  • It may be difficult to learn how to say no. Instead work on helping others to understand what you know about a particular technology or issue. Just ask questions to show them how to approach the problem, and then let them work through it.
    • This will take more time than “doing it yourself” at the beginning. However, they will rapidly gain more comfort working through issues and options on their own and will also gain both confidence and competence. Long-term it will save you time.

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How Do You Improve Communication and People Management Skills? Three Points

Situation: As his company grows and adds new employees, a CEO wants to improve his skills working with employees as well as managing time when employees come to him with suggestions or issues. Occasionally there is confusion between what is said and how his directions are interpreted. How do you improve communication and people management skills?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • How can one improve conversational skills when meeting others, breaking the ice and establishing a conversational relationship?
    • The easiest way is to ask benign questions. How was your weekend? How are you doing? Actively listen to what they say.
    • Remember their responses. Probe more deeply to prompt them to go into more detail. Show an interest in them. Most people love to talk about themselves and their experiences.
    • If they in return ask about you, give them a pleasant but brief response, and return with a question about them. This is like a tennis volley – keep on returning the ball.
    • The important point is to show an interest in others, and to improve the ability to recall what they have shared. Don’t cross personal boundary lines of what is “too personal.” Others will appreciate this attention and will warm to you.
  • If the concern is confirming understanding, start by repeating what you hear and confirm your understanding before responding.
  • Some individuals come into the office, plant themselves in a seat and just chat to waste time.
    • When one of these individuals comes into your office, stand to greet them with a smile and a friendly question of how you can help them. Do not sit down. Remain standing as long as they are in your office. This will naturally shorten the conversation and prevents them from “settling in.”
    • When you stand up, smile and greet them with a friendly question you are not putting them off. In fact, you are giving them more attention than they have received in the past. As a result, while preventing them from settling in, this is being done in a way that shows them respect.

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How Do You Improve Communications and Quality? Five Points

Situation: A company has a good team to support its projects. They work together well and demonstrate good work habits. However, communication between team members, and between certain team members and management is challenging, particularly when performance issues are involved. How do you improve communications and quality?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • What has been tried?
    • Once a month, The CEO plans an outside event for the team, for example a long dinner in a nice location.
    • During the latest event, the team members started opening up to one-another and to the CEO. They were much more open than they are at work.
  • Are the concerns about communication within teams, between teams, or between teams and management?
    • Several team members are relatively new. A few others are long-term and often fail to perform to standards. This group frequently has issues and it takes their foreman’s time to address these. This frustrates the foreman.
  • How should the CEO deal with this situation?
    • The foreman is a long-term employee who reports directly to the CEO. It is the responsibility of the CEO to develop a solution that serves the interests of the company.
    • For example: the company lives and breathes on customer satisfaction. Any worker with a pattern of substandard work negatively impacts both the image and value of the company.
    • Further, distracting the foreman from his primary responsibilities impacts his ability to complete other work demands.
  • Try the following solution:
    • Explain the problem and the negative impact that this has on the company.
    • Establish a policy that workers are responsible for assuring that work meets standards before completing a job.
    • Establish a list of specific standards for work and checklists to assure that the work is complete and meets standards.
    • Establish and publish a policy that if a Foreman or supervisor finds work performed below standard this will result in a warning to the worker. Continued performance of substandard work becomes grounds for termination. Misrepresentation of work quality is grounds for immediate termination.
    • Ask key managers, supervisors and foremen for input on the policy.
    • Once the policy is finalized, post it, provide all employees with a copy of the policy, and make sure that it is openly communicated to them both verbally and in writing.
  • If any worker currently presenting problems persists in this behavior, the company will have established a policy and procedure for disciplinary action and, if necessary, termination.

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How Do You Manage Growth in a Difficult Economy? Seven Suggestions

Situation: A CEO’s company has struggled due to difficult business conditions during the last year. Top among the challenges has been poor execution in hiring quality people, not because they weren’t available, but due to uncertainty. He is also concerned about infrastructure issues, particularly in IT. How do you manage growth in a difficult economy?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Focusing on IT, a key element for success in IT is having a clear definition of company needs. How does IT serve the company? What are the goals and objectives of the IT system? What kind of load must it be able to handle? What aspects of the system are most critical to company success?
  • Finding quality talent with the necessary experience is a challenge; particularly if solid goals and objectives haven’t been developed.
  • One CEO shared success managing IT. The company hired two IT professionals and had them report to an internal committee. This committee then communicated effectively with management.
  • Another CEO observed that some IT people look at their job as a process rather than a function; they just show up and fix things. Management of IT was improved by establishing clear objectives and holding the IT staff accountable for their performance against these objectives.
  • Another CEO told the story of terminating their IT person due to lack of consistency. IT must operate under management oversight, with clearly defined goals and objectives, and accountability.
  • Outsourcing some IT functions can help if used with care. On-site staff can focus on system maintenance and fight the inevitable fires.
  • IT costs should be thoroughly reviewed. They can be expensive. Look at IT costs as a percent of sales and compare expenditures with others in the industry sector.
  • Take a similar approach with other functions needing attention.

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Who Owns Quality Control? Eight Recommendations

Situation: The CEO of a company has a problem. Quality control is an essential part of the company’s success, but ownership of quality control issues is proving difficult. When more than one department is involved, each blames the other for issues or deficiencies. Who owns quality control?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • At the end of the day the project owner must own this responsibility. This individual can delegate work but not accountability.
  • QC must be embedded within the company’s systems. In addition, someone has to walk in daily to ask what is wrong with this project? What can be done better? A skeptic.
  • Put a skeptic in the QC role – the job is to find what’s wrong, not what’s right – a tactical skeptic.
    • Skeptics are ideal for design reviews.
    • It isn’t necessary to hire someone for this role if there’s already a productive skeptic on staff.
    • This person needs to be vocal and will irritate some of the other staff. Coach staff to tolerate this, because the individual is performing an essential role.
  • It’s impossible to check everything. However, as issues are identified, everything can be documented.
    • As systems are reviewed, look for patterns of problems.
    • Develop solutions as problems are identified.
    • Log issues and solutions on a shared server to facilitate access by project managers.
  • Institute cross-functional design reviews – representatives from different functions offer different perspectives. Formalize design reviews in the early and start-up stages of projects.
  • Work on company culture – build anticipation of challenges into the culture.
  • Build a heuristic of the output of each program. Use this to make sure that inputs, filters and system checks will produce the desired output and the desired level of quality.
  • Ask: where is QC currently working within the company? Why is it working?
    • Operations and testers catch the errors.
    • The issue is distributing the knowledge gained. In complex systems nobody understands the full picture or the impact on the customer.
    • This becomes the responsibility of the project owner.

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What’s the Next Version of Our Business Solution? Four Ideas

Situation: A company that provides personnel services wants to adjust their business model to make it more appealing to employers. They are unique in that they focus on social issues, rather than purely on business services. From the perspective of a hiring Manager, what would you want to see? What’s the next version of our business solution?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • The idea of a social issues-based brand is unique. To some employers this may have appeal.
  • Your obvious differentiator is the tie between existing communities and social networking. Emphasize this.
  • As an employer, the focus is on finding quality employees for the right price. This will always take precedence over other factors for most businesses. In fact, over-emphasis on social issue-based hiring could subject an employer to discrimination issues. It also will not appeal to everyone. How can you address quality employee for the right price through your service? Here are some things to consider:
    • The employers’ challenge is finding good candidates. How do you solve this problem?
    • Employers have specific needs to fill. Help them by identifying and screening candidates so that it makes their job easier.
    • The question for the employer is whether your helper audience can crowd source the screening function. Screening is the challenge of the employer. Solve this and I as an employer want to talk to you!
    • Within your model, instead of asking for monetary contributions from your helper audience ask them to donate time to screen candidates. Not being a recruiter is a plus.
  • Pitch your new ideas to your company insiders – see what they say.

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How Do You Respond to a Regulatory Wild Card? Seven Suggestions

Situation: A company that has been in business for several generations has been approached by a government official with an unexpected regulatory requirement and a stringent timeline for compliance. This was completely unexpected and it will be disruptive to comply. How do you respond to a regulatory wild card?

  • Approach the agency and negotiate an extension of the deadline, or a series of steps that will bring you into compliance but under conditions so that compliance does not disrupt your business and workload.
  • Dig to determine the ultimate reason behind this development. Is it a neighborhood evolution issue where new neighbors want you or your business out of the way? If so, is there a win-win alternative that gives you a new or better location in exchange for moving.
  • Seek legal assistance – local lawyers may be knowledgeable of the officials involved or their superiors, and will know the language to use to ask for the leeway that you require.
  • Circle the problem from every angle – look for other city contacts that can assist.
  • Trade a tax concession for compliance – particularly if the issue is a long-standing situation that has just now been brought forward.
  • Look for a way to turn the problem into an opportunity by solving the problem uniquely in a way that favors you.
  • Consider asking them to help solve the problem.
  • Do NOT respond with an attack. Local officials can be in place for a long time and may hold a grudge.

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How Do You Manage A Late State Private Tech Company? Four Topics

A late stage private high-tech company wants to know what questions are most critical for managing the next stages of growth. This includes factors that can help differentiate good opportunities from poor ones. What questions would you ask about managing a late stage private high-tech company?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Team
    • Never compromise on your team. Is this a team of individuals who will be effective together, and can you make changes where necessary to build and manage the team that you need?
    • There is no room for someone who is not a cultural fit – do the team members work well together and does everyone see and support a win?
    • Who are the key stakeholders, and what drives them? Are these drivers compatible or in conflict? Can you bridge potential conflicts, or will they defocus your efforts?
  • Market & Strategy
    • Are your market projections realistic or fluffed?
    • Will your value proposition appeal to a large enough market to justify the investment of time and resources?
    • Is there a strong, realistic plan?
    • If you do a full SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis, is the net positive?
  • Finances & Capital markets
    • Are the revenue and financial projections done correctly and achievable?
    • Raise money when you can, not when you need it – will the timing of your deal or opportunity, given existing financial markets, allow you to raise the funds necessary to bring the opportunity to fruition?
    • Is there openness to all potential capital or financing options? Financing is a personal relationship – how strong is the relationship?
  • Boards & Governance
    • Investors are investors; don’t overestimate their industry savvy. Are they aligned or in conflict? Are they fresh or tired? Will they support your efforts, and do they have the ability to generate extra funds as required?
    • It is impossible for a CEO or deal to be successful without the full support of the board – will you have full board support for your opportunity?
    • Is there clear differentiation between governance and management?
  • Looking over these questions, is the balance positive or negative? That balance will help you to accurately assess whether a given strategy or opportunity makes sense for the company.

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