30 Finish and Implement Your Action Plan

We last addressed your leadership action plan at the end of the review of lectures 11-16. If you are a diligent student you have been very busy working on the actions you defined for yourself up to that point. That is why you have not been asked to update your plan as you studied lectures 17 – 29. Now it is time to go back to your plan.

First, conduct an assessment of how well you are doing implementing your action plan. Are you making reasonable progress on every item? If so, you deserve a pat on the back. Are there planed actions that you have found difficult to implement? If there are, go back to the lecture that gave rise to the difficult actions and review the lecture to see if you are missing anything in your implementation efforts. Are there any actions you have dropped? Reevaluate your reasons for dropping these actions. It may be that you just deferred some actions to put more effort on others. It may be time to pick such actions up again. It may be that you decided you didn’t really need to work on some actions. Think again about these actions and see if you made wise decisions. After asking and answering these questions assess whether you are ready to implement more actions or if you need to continue on your current plan for a while. If you conclude you need to work on your current plan longer before adding more actions then schedule a time when you believe you will be ready to add more actions and put it on your calendar.

Now you are ready to continue to build your plan. Finish your plan now even if you aren’t going to work on new actions for some time. Finishing your plan now helps ingrain what you have recently studied. It is also easier to do when the material in the final lectures is fresh in your mind. A list of 21 questions relating to the material in lectures 17-29 follows to guide you in finishing your plan:

1.     Does your organization compete on a national or global basis?

2.     If so, have you committed to developing an organization with the skills and experience to prevail in competition at this level?

3.     Are your recruiting and training processes robust enough to build the quality of organization you need?

4.     Do you know if your worker’s strengths are well matched to their jobs and if you do, are they?

5.     Are you developing your successor?

6.     Are you managing your time effectively with time allocated for the physical, mental and spiritual aspects of your life?

7.     Are you scheduling your time by the week and following your schedules?

8.     Are you dictating instead of typing where it makes sense?

9.     Are you being effective with people and efficient with other work processes?

10.  Have you learned to listen empathically to your workers, your boss, your family?

11.  Have you structured your organization’s meetings so that you have effective communications with your workers without wasting their time?

12.  Have you organized the work in your organization so that you do not have highly paid workers doing work that could be done just as well by lower skilled and lower paid workers?

13.  Are you managing risks effectively using sound risk management methods in all your organization’s work?

14.  Have you read Goldratt’s books on Theory of Constraints and reviewed your organization’s major processes to ensure the theory isn’t being violated?

15.  Have you committed to self-study of statistical process control or to attending a training course?

16.  Have you committed to training all of your workers in process improvement techniques? (If you are already doing Six Sigma only selected employees need to be fully trained.)

17.  Have you committed to yourself to empower your workers to control and improve their own processes once they have been properly trained? (Be careful with this if your process improvement strategy is Six Sigma and you are training only part of your workers.)

18.  Have you begun continuous process improvement in your organization?

19.  Are you practicing how to think statistically?

20.  Have you stopped asking for explanations of common cause variation in processes in your organization?

21.  Have you stopped inventing explanations for common cause variation in required reporting to your superiors?

By the time you have finished reviewing these questions and adding to your leadership action plan as indicated by your answers you should have a comprehensive plan. It is likely to take several years to fully implement your plan, depending on the state of your management maturity and your organization’s maturity. This is a lot of work but it is well worth it. If you are working in a stable environment and in a culture that allows you to implement your plan you will achieve an organization that is 20 to 30% more effective than when you started. You will be better able to prevail in today’s highly competitive and stressful work environment. You and your workers will be spending less time on crisis management and more time doing high quality work. You will have the time to effectively lead your organization in achieving strategic objectives rather than having to divert time to resolve daily crises. Nearly all will be enjoying their jobs more.

Get busy on your plan and make it work.

If you have completed the study of each posted lecture you may wish to have a hard or electronic copy of this material close at hand. You can buy the book “The Manager’s Guide for Effective Leadership” in hard copy or for Kindle at:

http://www.amazon.com/Managers-Guide-Effective-Leadership-Organizations/dp/1449000673/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1346946310&sr=8-2&keywords=Joe+Jenney

or hard copy or for nook at:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/Joe-Jenney?keyword=Joe+Jenney&store=book

or hard copy or E-book at:

http://bookstore.authorhouse.com/Products/SKU-000269270/The-Managers-Guide-for-Effective-Leadership.aspx

10 Review and Effective Action Planning

Review of Lectures 2-9

If you have been a diligent student you have spent two or more weeks on the first nine lectures and associated exercises. By now you may have encountered many things that you need to change in your management practices. Therefore it’s a good time to stop, review the material covered so far and begin to develop a plan to put into practice those changes in your behavior that you now know are necessary. If you wait until the end of your study to start implementing changes either you will be overwhelmed or you will have forgotten many essential items. This review is brief, but you should spend several hours or even several days working on the planning called for in the exercise.

Two claims were central to the first nine lectures:

–       Managers must increase worker motivation and apply process improvement to achieve high organizational effectiveness

–       An effective leadership approach is to integrate Theory Z (participative management in a MBO environment) with a proven process improvement approach

The bulk of the material presented so far dealt with motivating your workers. Key points included:

–       People are at different stages on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs

–       Managers must deal with people according to their needs

–       People are happy when moving up the hierarchy and most productive at the self-actualization level

–       Theory X,Y,L & Z managers address people’s needs differently and their styles influence an organization’s effectiveness

–       Most of today’s workers are knowledge workers

–       Understanding and managing knowledge workers requires that they be treated as individuals.

–       Theory Z management style is best for knowledge workers but should be modified according to situations and individual worker’s needs.

–       Theory Z managers should deal with workers with a directing, coaching, supporting or delegating approach depending on the situation and the type of worker.

If any of these points are foggy you need to review the lectures until these points are engrained in your consciousness.

Exercise

Now is the time to retrieve the draft plan you made at the end of Lecture 6 for improving the motivation of workers in your organization, along with any additions or modifications you made after Lecture 7. Review this plan; add any steps you think are needed from what you learned in Lectures 8 and 9. The result is the first phase of your leadership action plan. It’s time to begin implementing your plan but first let’s review your plan to see if it’s an effective plan. I’ll outline a process that leads to an effective plan. Check your plan against this outline.

Developing an Effective Plan

Use what I call the Super Bowl Metaphor for developing an effective plan that has three levels: a goal, measures of effectiveness, and actions. If a coach’s goal is to win the Super Bowl then first he must define the seven or eight measures that if fulfilled will likely result in a win. These measures are such things as turnover ratio, pass completion percentage, yards gained per rush, yards yielded by the defense per rush, etc. Then he examines his team’s recent performance and his organization to identify which of the measures must be improved if the team is going to be a Super Bowl contender. Then he defines the actions that must be taken in order to improve the measures selected. For example, if pass completion percentage needs to be improved then there are many possible actions that might be called for; such as recruit a new quarterback, develop new passing plays, train the offensive line in pass protection, trade for new receivers, recruit a new receiver coach, etc. It is from this third level of actions that the right plan is developed for his team and his organization.

Step 1 Define your goal

Now, examine your plan. Your goal at this point in the course should be to improve the motivation of your organization’s workers. You can modify your goal as you progress in this course and progress in motivating your workers.

Step 2 Develop metrics

Next you should define metrics that you can track to determine if your plan is working. (The term metric is often used for the quantitative or qualitative measure of progress toward a goal.) The most relevant metric is the percent of your workers that have achieved self-actualization.  If you are very good at assessing people you might estimate where each employee is on the Maslow hierarchy and track improvements as your plan is implemented. If you are not naturally good at directly assessing where people are on Maslow’s hierarchy then develop other measures that are representative of the motivational health of your organization. Think about other measures that indicate whether people’s needs are being satisfied; e.g. the number of complaints you hear or hear about each week, the number of positive or negative remarks you hear each week, the amount of questionable sick time or personal time being taken, or the number of persons resigning or requesting transfers each month, or some similar measure. The metrics should be something you can easily record on a 3 x 5 card in your pocket or in a checklist on your computer or smartphone. Strive for two or three simple metrics that are meaningful for your organization and for you. These metrics are used to track your progress, just as a coach uses the measures defined in the Super Bowl metaphor to track a team’s progress.

Step 3 Identify Root Causes

Next assess the reasons for your organization’s motivation level not being as high as it could be. You must look for “causes” that can be fixed. Think of parallels to the actions described in the Super Bowl metaphor, except in your case recruiting new workers or trading workers shouldn’t be high on your list. Reread Lecture 6 if you have trouble identifying the causes of low motivation. When you have a list of causes analyze them by treating each to a series of “Whys”. This means taking each cause in turn and asking why this cause exists. Write down your best estimate of any underlying causes for the observed cause and continue this analysis until you satisfy two criteria. The final causes should be root causes, i.e. there are no more underlying causes that result from asking why and the root cause must be a cause you can address. Root causes that are due to organizational culture or the business environment that are outside your control should be deferred to a later time after you have addressed the root causes you can control.

Step 4 Develop Solutions

Now ask what you can do to fix each root cause. It may be to change your management style, e.g. to adapt your style to the needs of each of your knowledge workers, or it may be to make changes in business processes in your organization. For now concentrate on the ones that involve your management style, job assignments, career development and similar personnel or philosophy related actions. You can add business process changes later after we have discussed effective ways to improve processes.

Step 5 Define Actions

The final step in your planning before you begin implementing your action plan is to define the top seven or eight most important actions necessary for you to take. Trying to implement a dozen actions all at once is too hard to do in parallel with the other responsibilities you have. It’s alright to have less than seven or eight but don’t take on more. You have to think about how you will take action and you must make sure you are consistent. Finally, you must be patient. Don’t expect your organization’s motivation to jump the first month or even first quarter after you have begun your plan. People are cautious when they see different behavior in a manager. They wait and watch to see if the behavior is consistent.

Step 6 Execute the Actions

Now you have an effective plan and have thought through how you are going to implement it and measure progress. Put your plan in action.

If you find that the pace of blog posts isn’t compatible with the pace you  would like to maintain in studying this material you can buy the book “The Manager’s Guide for Effective Leadership” at:

http://www.amazon.com/Managers-Guide-Effective-Leadership-Organizations/dp/1449000673/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1346946310&sr=8-2&keywords=Joe+Jenney

or hard copy or for nook at:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/Joe-Jenney?keyword=Joe+Jenney&store=book

or hard copy or E-book at:

http://bookstore.authorhouse.com/Products/SKU-000269270/The-Managers-Guide-for-Effective-Leadership.aspx