The Manager - Edition 40 - Giving hope, careful communication and delivering on what you say - by Rob Lambert

Cultivated Management Newsletter

Howdy Cultivated Managers and welcome to this week’s newsletter. I hope you’ve had a solid weekend and looking forward to the week ahead. 

It’s all madness at Lambert Towers as the kids are now all at school and the regular school term routine starts. Scouts, cubs, swimming, football, food shopping yada yada yada. Life can sometimes seem a little tedious and repetitive.

It’s the same with management, especially when you inherit a team and attempt a digital transformation. That’s what I’m doing right now. 

The history and experiences that people go through in dysfunctional organisations results in distrust of yet another initiative. They are initiative fatigued. They are tired of yet more change that never lasts. They are wary of promises that are rarely held. They are unsure about what the future looks like. They are fed up with the tedious repetition of change that happens but never really happens.

To do digital transformation (or any transformation) well you need to be very good at communicating to the team. 

You need to provide hope. Hope that things will be better.

You need to paint a careful and considered picture of what the future will look like. And it must be a future that people can realistically put faith in. I see too many change agents pretend that the future will be utterly amazing - without really stopping to understand whether the system they work in will ever support that reality. People want to have faith in a brighter future when doing change. They want to be sure that if they invest the energy in the change, they will come out of the other side with something worthwhile. 

You then need to acknowledge and communicate the current problems. What problems are stopping you achieving this bright future? Be realistic about where you are. Too many managers ignore this stage and crack on with the techniques, ideas and processes that support their bright future - without realising some of that is not possible due to existing problems that need addressing.

You then need to make sure you build the team to get it done. This means telling people what the standards are - and set those standards high. Then tell people where they are against these standards using evidence of behaviours. You then need to help them get to the standard - and go beyond it - through coaching, feedback and learning plans. You also need to identify the next level of succession planning, give people more responsibility, identify leaders, put people to their strengths and minimise people’s weaknesses - this all takes time and effort and relationships. And of course, sometimes you have to address low performance.

With these three things in place you can start to build habits of productivity, whether this be Kanban, Agile, Waterfall, GTD or anything else - and trust me - not one of them is better in ALL situation than the others - despite what practitioners of each will tell you. I always talk about Releasing Agility - the ability to move quickly with minimum frictions. The actual methodology or framework is helpful only when it is indeed helpful. And they aren’t all successful otherwise every company that adopted them would be winning - and they’re not. It’s about communication more than it is about anything else.

During all of this the key aspect is to learn and reflect. So, step 5 is to build in root cause analysis, problem solving, reflections, retrospection and learning. We, and our people, must always be getting better.

After this is in place, and it can take years to get here, you should start to be seeing great results from a digital transformation. 

The challenge you have as a manager is to get a handle on the problems you face and be sure that communicating the bright future doesn’t start too early. If things don’t change quickly people will lose their hope. It’s why it’s important to communicate often and be sure you don’t promise too much in the first stages. It’s a fine balance between making it clear where you’re heading - and delivering on those results to keep people interested and on-board.

Rob
 

Stuff To Click On :

1 - Moore's law has always been something that the geekier range of my friends and colleagues talked about. The growth of microprocessing and the patterns of time it would follow. The death of Moore's law is right here apparently.

2 - Usual high brow writing and insights from Brain Pickings - this time about Elizebeth Friedman - the legendary code breaker. Good article.

3 - 10 Habits of organised people. 

4 - Why people believe in managers, or not.

5 - The life of a manager can be pretty intense. You have your own life problems, work tasks and deliveries, but you also end up supporting and helping other people with theirs. It can be tiring. I've found Tai Chi to be amazing at supporting body and mind. I just need to make sure I stick to my habits. 

6 - Short article from the person who invented iPhone's autocorrect and why it's hard to predict what people are about to type. 

7 - Why we overact at work sometimes. 

8 - I burned out. This framework would have been useful. 

9 - I mentioned last week that I was writing a new book about how a group of greedy and dysfunctional Squirrels ruin a business. As such I've been researching Squirrels all week, outlined the chapters, defined the characters and listed out the many ideas to include. In my research I found this - nothing to do with management but a few funny pictures of animals. And yes - there is a squirrel on there. The book is essentially a children's book for the corporate world. 

10 - Long but interesting read about the activist who took on Silicon Valley about data privacy. 

11 - "A comms strategy alone achieves little. It’s how a team makes use of the strategy as a reference point throughout the year that can deliver tangible benefits to the organisation" - If you have to build a communication strategy - and as a manager you really should have one - this article may help to set the scene about what one is. 

Thanks for reading this week's edition of The Manager. 

Thanks
Rob..