Management Matters Blog

How To Delegate for Success

By Mike Myatt, Chief Strategy Officer, N2growth

--If you desire to become a top CEO it will be essential for you to master the art of leveraging down. Think of any top performing CEO and you'll find that to the one, they possess an uncanny ability to focus on highest and best use activities. While most executives that have reached the C-suite level understand the importance of scaling via delegation, far too many CEOs struggle with the effective implementation of the concept. To this day I'm amazed at how many CEOs still own tasks, roles, projects, and responsibilities that should be delegated to others. So, in today's post I'll share two tips on deciding which tasks, and to whom, should be leveraged down in the organization…

As a CEO it is critical to develop a keen understanding of your value to the enterprise, and to further develop an awareness of activities that are dilutive to said value. The main role of a CEO can certainly vary based upon skill sets, stage of corporate maturation, and the talent level of the rest of the executive team. That being said, it is nonetheless safe to say that CEOs who find a way to focus their efforts on values, vision, mission, strategy, team building, networking, and branding will be the CEOs who achieve the highest and most sustainable levels of success.

One of the first things you need to understand as a CEO is what your time is worth relative to others in the organization. There is a simple short-cut which allows you to quickly extrapolate an hourly rate from a total annual compensation figure that I find useful for quick comparative purposes. The calculation works like this: if you make $350,000 per year, just eliminate the last three zeros of your annual compensation figure and divide 350 by two. This will give you an hourly rate based upon a 40 hour work week and a 50 week year. In this example the hourly rate of a CEO who makes $350k is $175 dollars per hour. So if you run the same calculation on a $100k employee you find a $125 dollar per hour delta between your hourly rate and theirs. Therefore any items that don’t constitute $175 dollar an hour work that can be leveraged down to someone with a lower hourly rate provides positive arbitrage both in terms of cost savings and time recovered for higher and better use activities.

Another simple rule of thumb that allows you to maximize the equation mentioned above is to leverage down to the lowest level of talent possible while still insuring an acceptable level of execution. For instance, rather than leveraging down to the $100K talent in the example above, if you drive down further to let’s say a $30k individual, you increase your organizational leverage factor by almost 30%. The most productive, high-performance organizations have the ability to deliver fairly complex solutions and complete difficult tasks at the lowest levels within their organization.

Now that we’ve made the economic case for what and to whom you should leverage down to, let’s discuss what does and does not merit the attention of a CEO based on non-financial analysis. In Stephen Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” he put forth a simple decisioning framework that helps to distinguish between those activities that are truly priorities and those that just appear to be priorities. Basic human nature is such that each individual believes that his/her problems and challenges are truly important, and therefore should constitute an emergency on your part. Your job as the CEO is to quickly be able to distinguish between the true emergency and the perceived emergency. In Covey’s classic illustration below, you’ll find a simple chart (click to enlarge) to use as your guide:                 

The moral of the story is this…Focus on making the lower echelons as competent and productive as possible, driving all decisions down to the lowest possible level in the organization possible without suffering an unacceptable increase in delivery risk. The tips mentioned above will help you build a formidable organization, make better use of your time, and insure operational performance gains across the enterprise.

Movies Can Teach Leaders Cannes-Do Attitude

By Mike Myatt, Chief Strategy Officer, N2growth

--The best leadership movies...you're likely thinking right now, "can anything about leadership actually be learned by watching movies?" You bet. I was recently asked for my opinion about which movies I felt were the top leadership movies of all time. After thinking about my answer for a few minutes, I realized that, while not all leaders are fans of cinema, all leaders can certainly learn valuable leadership lessons by watching movies with a critical and discerning eye.

You've probably surmised by now that this week's column is not going to be a real brain-teaser. However, it will nonetheless offer you the opportunity for leadership development. While the most natural leaders possess a large number of innate qualities and characteristics, the best leaders refine their leadership skills over time through a variety of learned behaviors, experiences, and activities.

There are certainly more academic, substantive, and challenging ways to acquire leadership insights, but you’ll find few methods of learning more enjoyable than popcorn and a movie. I must confess to being a bit of a movie buff, so when it came to putting together a list of top leadership movies it didn’t take too long to come up with the following list of favorites (in no particular order of preference):

1. Braveheart 
2. Remember The Titans
3. 300
4. The Last Castle    
5. Schindler’s List
6. Lord of the Flies     
7. Apollo 13
8. We Were Soldiers
9. Pistol Pete
10. Miracle
11. Saving Private Ryan
12. Amazing Grace
13. Hoosiers
14. Chariots of Fire
15. To Hell and Back
16. The Alamo
17. The Last of the Mohicans     
18. K19 Widow Maker
19. The Mission
20. The Green Berets
21. Dead Poets Society
22. Glengarry Glen Ross
23. Mr. Holland’s Opus
24. Glory Road
25. The Shawshank Redemption     
26. Twelve O’clock High
27. Band of Brothers
28. Ben-Hur
29. Blackhawk Down
30. Rocky
31. The Longest Day
32. Rudy
33. The Lion King
34. Passion of Christ
35. Men of Honor
36. The Last Samurai
37. Deliverance
38. The Patriot
39. Bridge Over The River      Kwai
40. The Guardian
41. The Ten Commandments     

If you feel something has been left off the list, which I’m sure is the case, please let me know and I’ll add it. Enjoy!

 

How to Become a Great CEO

By Mike Myatt, Chief Strategy Officer, N2growth

--What does it take to become a great CEO? Much more than it did even 5 years ago to be sure. The rapidly changing global landscape and the evolving complexity of business makes the job of CEO something that is only well-suited for a rare few. For these reasons sustainable success at the C-suite level is an elusive thing in today's business world. With the average tenure of a CEO being less than 5 years it is critical for executives to understand what it takes to beat the odds. In today's column I'll examine the characteristics that a CEO must posses in order to maintain his or her position and remain in control for as long as they choose.

The job of CEO is all about managing expectations. Put simply a CEO’s shelf life will be equal to their ability to align vision with execution. A CEO must be able to focus on deploying the necessary resources at the right time to achieve to desired results. By exhibiting strong leadership skills a good CEO will manage talent, performance, change, innovation, influence, rapport, and messaging to consistently drive an enterprise forward regardless of circumstances. In my book “Leadership Matters…The CEO Survival Manual” I offer more than 200 pages of insights for CEOs, but if you don’t have time to read the book and still want to insure longevity as a CEO, work towards a mastery of the following characteristics:

1. Integrity: Always do the right thing regardless of sentiment and never compromise your core values. If you cannot build trust and engender confidence with your stakeholders you cannot succeed. No amount of talent can overcome illegal, immoral or otherwise ill-advised actions. A leader void of integrity will not survive over the long-haul.

2. Excellent Decision Making Skills: As a CEO you will live or die by the quality of the decisions you make. When you’re the CEO good decisioning is expected, poor decisioning won’t be tolerated, and great decisioning will set you apart from the masses.

3. Ability to Focus: If you cannot focus you cannot perform at the level necessary to remain in the C-suite for very long. The ability to do nothing more than understand, and lock-onto priorities will place you in the top 10% of all executives.

4. Leveraging Experience: Inexperience, a lack of maturity, needing to be the center of attention, not recognizing limitations, a lack of judgment, an inferior knowledge base, or any number of other common mistakes made by rookie CEOs can cause your house of cards to fall. If you don’t have the experience personally, hire it, contract it, but by all means acquire it. Great CEOs surround themselves with tier-one talent and the best advisors money can buy. They don’t make uniformed or ill-advised decisions in a vacuum.

5. Command Presence: Great CEOs possess a strong presence and bearing. They are unflappable individuals that never let you see them sweat (unless of course it serves a purpose). Everything from how they carry themselves to how they speak and dress messages that they are in charge.

6. Embracing Change: Great CEOs have a strong bias to action. They don’t rest upon past accomplishments and are always seeking to improve through change and innovation. In today’s fast paced and competitive environment those CEOs who don’t openly embrace change will often be shown the door prior to the expiration of their initial employment contract.

7. Brand Champions: Great CEOs understand branding at every level. They seek to build not only a dominant corporate brand, but also a strong personal brand. CEOs that are not well branded on a personal basis, or who let their corporate brand fall into decline will not survive. 

8. Boundless Energy: Great CEOs have a boundless amount of energy. They are positive in their outlook, and their attitude is contagious. A low energy CEO is not motivating, convincing or credible.

9. Business Acumen: Great CEOs have a deep understanding of the business and a strong orientation toward profit. Great CEOs possess what often appears to be a sixth sense or an almost instinctive feel for what the company needs to do to make money and remain competitive.

10. People Acumen: Great CEOs have a nose for talent…They understand how to recruit, develop and deploy talent while focusing on applying the best talent to the best opportunities. They also know when it’s time to make changes and cut losses as needed.

11. Organizational Acumen: Great CEOs know how to engender trust, know when and how to share information, and are expert listeners. They develop strong and positive corporate cultures driven to performance by aligned motivations. They can quickly diagnose whether the organization is performing at full potential, delivering on commitments, and whether the company is changing and growing versus just operating.

12. Curiosity: Great CEOs possess a powerful motivation to increase their knowledge base and to convert their learning into actionable initiatives. They question, challenge, confront and are never accepting of the status quo.

13. Intellectual Capacity: Great CEOs are also great thinkers both at the strategic and tactical level. They are quick on their feet and know how to get to the root of an issue faster than anyone else. I’ve never met a great CEO who wasn’t extremely discerning.

14. Global Mindset: Regardless of the geographical boundaries of the current business model great CEOs think globally. Limited thinking results in limited results. Whether global thinking is applied to capital formation, supply-chain issues, business development, strategic partnering, distribution, or any number of other areas, those CEOs who don’t grasp the importance of thinking globally will not endure. Great CEOs are externally oriented, hungry for knowledge of the world and adept at connecting developments and spotting patterns.

15. Never Quit: Great CEOs refuse to lose…They have an insatiable appetite for accomplishment and results and while they may reengineer or change direction they will never lose sight of the end game.

Engaging Your Employees Essential

By Mike Myatt, Chief Strategy Officer, N2growth

--Long gone are the days where the executive leadership of a company can remain sequestered in their offices with an internal focus on hard metrics. It is the soft metrics of customer centricity and employee engagement that will create sustainable growth in revenue and brand equity. In this week's column I'll examine the need to have a fully engaged work force.

Before you read any further, I want you to stop and ask yourself the following question: How many of your employees are truly passionate about your company, its vision, its mission and the role that they play within the organization? Don’t fool yourself. Conduct a harsh, critical analysis and come up with a true head count of the passionate employees within your organization.

Your answer to the question above should be a very telling sign about the overall health of your business. Are people just showing-up and punching the clock to collect a paycheck, or are they personally consumed and committed to achieving the company vision? Are your employees’ corporate evangelists serving as a motivating force to be reckoned with, or do they gather in small groups to gripe and complain about all the things wrong with the company and its leadership?

The key to having an engaged workforce is to have a passionate workforce. And the simple truth of the matter is that no single person in the company can instill passion in the ranks like the CEO can. Despite the consensus recognition that employee engagement matters, the enormity of its impact on the company’s bottom line still appears to be misunderstood by most CEOs. I rarely talk to a CEO that doesn’t understand this principle in concept, but yet I rarely see chief executives who put theory into practice…

So it begs the question, why are CEOs listening but not taking action? The answer seems to be that CEOs continue to allocate considerable effort and resources toward engineering the corporate strategy, yet they seem to be unaware of what forces can prevent it from being delivered successfully…Not surprisingly; employee engagement is often the critical missing factor.

As the CEO you must also become the chief engagement officer. Operating in a vacuum and being out of touch is never a good position to find yourself in as the CEO. I have consistently espoused the value of walking the floor, dropping in on meetings on an impromptu basis, taking employees of all ranks to lunch, and any number of other items that focus on raising your internal awareness and creating a passionate workforce.

It is your passionate employees that are the franchise talent (regardless of position) that you should be building around. If you can’t get employees to see the light and become passionate about the company and their contribution then seek to replace them as quickly as possible. Just as passion is a positive, contagious trait so are apathy and dissatisfaction. Passionate employees are productive, energized, committed and loyal assets. Apathetic employees quickly become disenfranchised liabilities that will hurt both productivity and morale. To drive home the point of how much I value passionate employees, I would take a moderately talented but passionate employee over a very talented but complacent employee eleven times out of ten…

Truly great companies are built around passionate employees. When you walk into a dynamic, thriving company you can sense the passion…you feel a certain buzz and fervor that pervades everything. Contrast this with a company that feels as if it has no pulse…If you’ve ever walked into an organization that feels like rigor-mortis has set in you know what I’m referring to…

As a leader you need to understand that your employees not only want to be led, but they want to be led by a passionate leader. Ultimately employees want to be passionate about what they do; in fact, they’ll go to the ends of earth and sacrifice tremendously if passionate about the endeavor. Think of the employees that started off with Gates and Allen at Microsoft, or those that worked with Phil Knight in his garage before Nike even had a name, or those employees that endured the early days with Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google…it was their passion and commitment that helped change the landscape of business, not their starting salaries.

To build an extraordinary company, you must light the “fire in the bellies,” of your workforce…You must get them to feel passion about your organization and to connect with your vision. You must get your employees to engage. As the CEO your ability to transfer your passion to your employees is the essence of being a great leader…So much so that if you can’t accomplish this, you simply can’t be a great leader. Think of any great leader and while you’ll find varying degrees of skill sets, intellect and ability I challenge to name even one that did not have passion.

 

The Name Game: Part 3

By Mike Myatt, Chief Strategy Officer, N2growth

--This is the third and final piece in this series on naming. The first column dealt with how to select a naming firm, the second one addressed the components that go into creating a great corporate name, and this final piece will deal with other venues within the naming field.

A lot of focus and attention is brought to bear on the topic of corporate naming as this is the most visible high impact area of naming. However naming applies to products, services, projects, reports, books and publications, newsletters, microsites, blogs, intellectual property, business practices and a long list of other areas that often receive less attention.

Unlike corporate naming, which receives everyone’s attention, the smaller naming genres are often left to individual brand managers or staff members. Regrettably these people often operate with a singular focus or agenda, outside of best practices, and without a global perspective. This focus at the granular level can sometimes have the opposite effect of what is being sought after in the way of desired results. I have seen many a product or service name actually dilute brand value as opposed to increase it.

Every company should have a naming strategy and process that is consistent with corporate vision, and as a subcomponent of the overall brand strategy. Naming should have an integrated process across the enterprise to insure that an individual naming effort doesn’t detract from the overall brand strategy and dilute brand equity.

Brand guidelines need to specifically address naming conventions and protocols such that cross product, business compatibility, color pallets, phraseology, font style and sizes, and other criteria are considered in the process. The keys to ensuring a proper outcome across business units and product lines is having continuity, clarity, and consistency in your naming conventions. Each new name created and implemented should add value to the overall brand by enhancing and strengthening the preexisting names.

So rather than pushing  naming down, I would suggest that most firms would be better served by elevating all naming up the chain of command, along with engaging an outside naming firm for advice and counsel. The time spent giving naming the proper attention and focus will lead to a stronger brand and solid return on investment.

I hope this series on naming has been of benefit. Good luck and good branding!