This year, I am writing my “year-end” article early to share some radical ideas for cultural transformation and a whole new level of organizational performance. Read on, but be warned, there is nothing timid about the ideas that follow. Nothing here can be tested with a toe in the water or watered down into a tepid imitation. Enter into these ideas with a courageous heart … or not at all. But if 2020 is your year to break away and reinvent your organization, then gird your loins and read on.

► Create a meritocracy through radical transparency. What if everyone at your organization was not just empowered but systematically encouraged to provide frank feedback to anyone else in the organization, at any time, regardless of seniority or job level? The newest junior recruit could say to the CEO, “I do not think you were adding value in that meeting. You were not prepared, and you were not communicating clearly,” and still be employed at the end of the day.Before you dismiss this as a ridiculous, unworkable new-age concept, you need to know that the champion for this idea is Ray Dalio, co-chairman of Bridgewater Associates, one of the world’s largest hedge funds. The company has automated, continuous, transparent feedback at its meetings and in its decision-making processes, with no regard to title or seniority. Dalio’s firm has used the credibility and accuracy of the feedback (and, by extension, the feedback provider) to drive decisions. To see more about how Bridgewater handles this level of openness to form a meritocracy, go to Ted.org and search for his Ted talk on radical transparency.

► Embrace millennials rather than resisting or complaining about them. If you are one of those managers who loves to rag on millennials, citing everything from their lack of loyalty to their constant use of social media — and even their disdain for American beer, as one manager complained at a recent conference — I have some bad news for you. Based on demographics and the technology available today, things are going to get much worse for you. Post-millennial generations will be far more challenging for the employer who needs the workplace to look like it did in the “good old days.”

Given that 3.5% unemployment will sustain a competitive environment for employees in the near future, what would happen if you focused on embracing millennial mindset and culture in all ways organizationally possible? There are, of course, jobs that require physical presence at an assigned time, a manufacturing shift supervisor for example. But a tech-enabled team can meet and work virtually at 7 p.m. if that is what the team members prefer.

Because they have grown up with tech, millennials are very skilled with networks (far more than with hierarchies), so take advantage of the kind of online collaboration tools that were science fiction as little as a decade ago. (Most are SaaS-based, so they do not require big capital outlays.) In short, since millennials make up the largest bloc of the workforce, how would your organization look different if you went out of your way to leverage their strengths and preferences to get work done?

► Mine for creativity at all levels of the business. Organizational leaders often depend on marketing, process engineering or research and development to come up with new ideas; however, there are most likely people all over your organization who can see opportunities for both process improvement and new products. Your newest employees have not been absorbed into the hive mind that is the modern corporation. Try engaging the least knowledgeable in problem-solving either before or alongside the experts.

Between 2008 and 2010, a unit at Coca-Cola saved a total of $5.5 million based on projects generated by a team of Six Sigma black and green belts working in a business improvement unit. In that same period, they recovered more than $10 million based on suggestions from front-line employees — and at a significantly lower cost for planning and implementation.

While the examples here may seem extreme, they represent opportunities to not only contribute to the bottom line, but also to make your business a place that will attract the most qualified and creative candidates. In a competitive market for talent, shouldn’t that encourage you to experiment with something radical?

And they leave a swath of anger, chaos and destruction in their wake.

They get their results by shortcut, intimidation or by simply ignoring anything they do not consider critical to their current goal. They’re hard to tolerate, and harder to fire. In general, sad to say, they are even harder to reform. They are what one of my visiting Vistage speakers labeled as “terrorists.”

Terrorists get a ton done, but at huge organizational, emotional and financial cost. They are very focused on delivery, but step over cultural norms and business processes they see as unimportant, cumbersome or inconvenient. If you work in a business, you know them. The sales exec who does not think he needs to do the paperwork and finds pre-sale reviews unnecessary. The program leader who cuts corners or purposely forgets to include inconveniences like safety reviews, budget limits or progress reports. In short, they get things done in ways toxic to the larger organization.

These terrorists are a challenge because, on the surface, they look like valuable get-it-done-at-all-costs members of the team. They’re often unaware that their tactics have an organizational and productivity cost that can far outweigh the value of their results. Here are a few examples:

► High turnover: Often the best-performing employees leave an organization that tolerates terrorist behaviors. The A players know they will find work elsewhere (especially with unemployment hanging around 3.5%). They are simply unwilling to tolerate being at the mercy of a terrorist.

►  Sustainability of results: Projects that come together based on the force of will of a single strong, high-control leader often do not have the underpinnings to hold together when scaled up.

What can look like a successful delivery “on time and on budget” will easily collapse over insufficient commitment or support. Also, shortcuts taken by a team more interested in staying out of the boss’s way than creating a sustainable outcome are expensive and prone to failure.

► Culture is eroded: Others in the organization observe the terrorist flouting company values and norms without sanction or correction, making organizational culture subject to derision and cynicism.

► Productivity loss: The angst and anger over a terrorist’s unwillingness to play by the rules creates distraction, resentment and poor performance in parts of the organization that are scrambling to do the cleanup terrorists leave in their wake.

The important thing to know here is that most terrorists are not trying to be difficult. They like seeing a direct line to getting visible results and are simply oblivious to the upset and disruption they cause. Most that I have coached describe it as seeing a direct line to the goal, and that anything that slows them down or takes them off that line is an obstacle to be bowled over, eliminated or ignored.

Unfortunately, the boss is often so focused on the value the terrorist can deliver that a lot of bad behavior is tolerated. A lot of money and energy gets spent offsetting the impact of the terrorist. Perhaps most damaging is when the boss knows about the behavior and puts up with it, sacrificing organizational culture, credibility and trust on the altar of avoiding conflict for short term gain.

When it comes to organizational leadership, it is axiomatic: You get what you tolerate.

Remember this when you consider that rock star sales exec who abuses office staff and is six months behind on paperwork; when your A players leave even though they are part of a plum project team; when you are tempted to look the other way for someone who is delivering wins on the backs of others or making a sad joke of your organizational values: Your employees are watching. And as the boss, you get what you tolerate.

Originally published in Arkansas Business, Barry Goldberg On Leadership, September 23, 2019.

And before you dismiss the pledge as idealistic, look at the companies. Amazon, Walmart, JPMorgan Chase and Apple all signed up for a fundamental redefinition of the reason for corporations to exist — and how their decisions should be made.

I happily applaud this step toward a return to sanity, but it isn’t lost on me that there were no specific commitments or actions, just a recognition that we may have lost our way. And it does, of course, make for good publicity. But the idea isn’t new.

Peter Drucker, an influential business thinker on reasons for business existence, made a similar statement in “The Practice of Management” in 1954. Drucker explained clearly: “Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two — and only two — basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.”

If a company exists to create a customer, and if a company does that well, it’s not a long stretch to imagine that shareholders will come out well. While he was far too early to see the trends ripen, Drucker alludes to both the market and organizational conditions that now ask companies to revisit their focus of attention.

There was a time when businesses organized around customers. Employees took care of customer needs by making, servicing and selling products or services. Managers took care of employees by ensuring that needed skills, tools and supplies, and facilities were at hand.

Executives took care of managers, ensuring that they had strategic resources necessary for operations. Shareholders took care of executives, supplying capital and governance. Customers took care of shareholders by spending hard-earned cash with the business.

All of this created a virtuous and, more important, self-sustaining circle — as long as everyone did their bit.

Somewhere, however, the circle was distorted. As more senior management pay included options, those executives became shareholders. Before dot-coms were a bubble, they were (and remain) a huge lever for creating wealth. That created a laser-like focus on shareholder value, which became the fundamental management mantra in the 1990s. Unfortunately, an asset overused soon becomes a liability. Boards, representing shareholders, became ever more expectant of ever higher returns on capital. Executives responded by demanding ever more in the way of reporting and risk from managers.

Managers’ turned to taking care of the needs of the executive suite rather than the front-line workers. The constant focus on more return to shareholders led production to focus on caring for (or perhaps defending against) management’s need for ever more productivity.

Unfortunately, that left fewer resources for taking care of customers. In fact, customer relationship management (CRM) technology, which could have allowed for far better customer care, became a weapon for cutting costs and, in many cases, did more harm to customer relationships than good. (Anyone feel appreciated as a customer trying to get through your bank’s voice response system to talk to a human being? I didn’t think so.)

In essence, giving management a stake in outcomes encouraged shorter-term (think quarterly reporting) focus and left customers holding the bag. That strategy is efficient, but not sustainable.

I encourage you to map this in your organization. Look at the metrics and accountabilities and ask yourself what groups do they serve? Be specific. If you cannot draw a straight line between a process to how a customer’s life is better, start looking for whom it really serves. Map to see if the wheel it creates really is a wheel, and if it drives sustainable customer loyalty and profitability. (Think about Jim Collins’ flywheel here.)

I certainly do not mean to deride shareholder value, and, if I may be so bold, I do not think the venerable Peter Drucker intended such a slight either. But shareholder value should not be the goal. It is an artifact, a result of a well-run, sustainable entity that can create and keep profitable customers.

Originally published in Arkansas Business, Barry Goldberg On Leadership, August 5, 2019.

I think it’s time that we stop blaming an entire generation for being a product of the world in which they grew up. Instead of pointing a finger at millennials, we need to understand that they are now the workforce we must engage to be successful.

After all, they’re not the first generation to want to work differently than previous generations. Anyone else remember the brouhaha over an entire generation that wanted to wear jeans and tie dye? How about a generation of women who had the radical idea that they could do something besides secretarial work and menial labor? Each generation of leaders has shaken their heads in bewilderment (and possibly disgust), wondering how they would ever be able to run a company with the next generation as a workforce. Boomers changed the workforce by simply working in the way for which their environment had prepared them — as did each previous generation and as will millennials.

So as organizational leaders we have a choice: continue to point a finger at them for being who they are as a group or figure out how to engage with them in a way that makes our organization the place they want to be.

One step in the right direct is to reframe the stereotypes, looking for how they can be turned into positives or used as an advantage in recruitment and retention. Hunter Lott (HunterLott.com), a national expert on HR and a featured Vistage speaker (who will be in Little Rock next month to work with my Vistage groups), puts it very eloquently: “It is a seller’s market for talent. You have to ask yourself, ‘Why would an A player work for my organization?’”

One way to begin to answer that question is to think of what we view as problems in working with millennials as leverage points for getting their best.

• The social media complaint. Yes, millennials grew up forming networks on social media. They are, as a result, far more skilled at navigating those networks than a typical hierarchical structure. So focus on creating engagement in the culture. Use internal social networking and online collaboration tools. Give them a way of getting work done more familiar to them than (possibly) to you.

• The entitlement complaint. Provide a clear and accessible path and process for growth — not just a time-in-grade requirement, but a learning path. Consider a long-term training and development program for higher performers that encourages their focus over a period of months or even years. Be clear about what it takes to move up and honest with feedback about progress and consider creating a structure with shorter term opportunities to earn advancement.

• The purpose complaint. OK, maybe you make steel-bolted widgets and you are not focused on saving the planet. Nevertheless, take time monthly to organize employees into teams that volunteer to clean up parks and empty lots. Instead of sponsoring a baseball team (because baseball was a big part of YOUR upbringing), sponsor regular food drives or health screenings for kids. Actively engaging millennials in organization and staffing these events can make you an employer of choice. Regardless of what your business does, make your organization one that will attract millennials with a purpose-oriented mindset.

There are lots of creative ways to go about attracting and keeping millennial talent; however, they all start with a single very important concept: Get over your finger-pointing and judgment about millennials and figure out how to engage with them at least partially on their terms. Consider the possibility that some of the changes you will have to make are actually good for the business — even if they’re not the way you’ve traditionally done things.

Like every generation before them, millennials have a different idea of what role work should play and how it should look in their lives. That is not new. And like every generation before ours, we have to figure out how to attract and keep the best and brightest if our businesses are going to grow and prosper.

Originally published in Arkansas Business, Barry Goldberg On Leadership, June 17, 2019.

Of course, an effective leader must be able to do both. So the question is not whether to respond to new ideas or integrate disruptive thinking; it is how to recognize the better choice for your organization.

Whether saying no or yes to a new idea, astute leaders are reflective about what is served by the decision. Is the choice a knee-jerk, default position based on personal preference or current focus of attention? Do I understand why I feel so strongly about one direction or the other? Or is this a case of simple inertia — the mass of an organization moving in one direction, or not, that is so potent that other ideas never get to take root?

In my Vistage Peer Advisory groups, we have speakers in eight of 12 months of the year. These are people with deep domain experience in just about any management, governance, business, leadership or executive presence topic you can imagine (and likely some you would not guess).

My members get a three-hour CEO level download with an expectation they will get actionable and important content. So one month it is cybersecurity; the next, CEO dashboards, performance management, asset protection, HR law, culture, talent management and so on. It is a lot to absorb.

While all of it is important, timely and solid counsel, members have to ask which topics they can and should pursue now and which ones can wait or be shelved. One of my members, a health care CEO, has what he calls the three-month rule: “Anything that is not already on our queue, I look at three months later to see if I still feel it is critical or if it can wait.”

Saying no to every new idea to stay exactly on the current course invites getting blindsided by changes in the marketplace. And the need to pursue every new idea that has merit can create a frenetic and scattered culture that often cannot see projects through.

So how does a leader find middle ground? What questions help plot the appropriate path and level of embrace for new ideas? Here are a few thoughts to get you started on your own list:

► How does this idea impact our current commitments to ourselves, our customers, our employees and our investors?

► What projects or ideas would we be willing to let go of or cancel in order to take this new one on?

► What opportunities do we sacrifice by saying no? Where would we be truly vulnerable?

► How will the organization be better for taking this project on? What new skills will we acquire?

► How likely are we to be able to deliver on this new idea or project? (Half of an idea is generally only an expense line.) This is a tough one since we are so often naive about our ability to bring in change projects. Remember, 75% of them still fail to even get over the line!

I have recently added a new and more subtle question to this process. In February, several of my members and I attended the annual Vistage Executive Summit meeting in Dallas. Among the provocative presentations to a room of more than 800 business leaders was an annual update of economic conditions from ITR Economics. Getting both analysis of the external environment as well as a forecast for economic conditions provided the capacity to add this question to those to be asked when starting a new initiative — or not:

► What is the impact on investment and value derived in the coming economic climate?

When all else fails, one strategy for properly vetting new ideas and opportunities is for a leader to foster a culture of open debate at leadership team meetings. Free and enthusiastic debate of ideas, especially the more provocative ones, generates what are often fierce arguments for both sides of a decision. Even if it is not a group call, but solely rests with the boss, at least the boss will have heard the full debate and hopefully be able to decide thoughtfully, based on the merits and the risks.

Originally published in Arkansas Business, Barry Goldberg On Leadership, April 22, 2019.

The participants in a pickup game vary widely in size, skill, aggressiveness and about every other way you could think to classify them. But more to the point, the team makeup changes on a regular basis. Recently, I ended up with an open hour at the last minute and, without planning to do so, spent that hour watching pickup basketball in a gym where four games were going at all times — and there were more players wanting to get into the game than there were spots on the teams.

Pretty much every principle of teams I have studied in works by business writers like Jim Collins, Pat Lencioni and Jon Katzenbach could be observed on the court. But there were other, more subtle patterns that are not often in the big model. They were easy to see and relate to business teams I have coached over the last two decades.

Individual skills and weaknesses are obvious, quickly identified and managed on a team that is focused on their outcome.

When a new team formed, doubtless some of the players were well known to each other, and a couple seemed to be newer. But within a very few minutes, and without any discussion about it, it was easy to see the team’s tactics change to use what they were learning about their new temporary teammates.

The player who took a shot each and every time he got his hands on the ball, never passed and almost never scored started getting marginalized by his teammates in short order. There was no team meeting or counseling session. They just stopped passing the ball to him.

Meanwhile, the less aggressive and vocal player with a talent for 3-pointers often benefited from a timely screen. People figure out who is on the team pretty quickly and adjust accordingly.

Active integration of new members preserves pace and productivity.

One game of teenage boys was very instructive. Mid-game, the parents of two boys (on opposite teams) pulled them to leave the gym, despite the amount of time on the clock still left in the game. Each team picked up a new player from a pool of those waiting. One of the teams took about 30 seconds to talk about who would cover who or where, while the other shot baskets and impatiently waited. It was not long before both teams were back in stride, but the team that actively engaged in integrating its “new guy” hit stride first and was four baskets up before the other team started scoring regularly again.

No amount of blame, finger-pointing or impatience is going to improve a team’s performance.

Tempers flare in pickup games. Some team members are fiercely competitive, and less skilled players can be the target of displeasure and aggression. But since each team is allowed the same number of players, a weaker player who is actively derided or blamed will become a more active detriment.

In one instance, a player became so discouraged about the derision of his poor play that he simply ran up and down the court, ceasing to be a player who could take a clearing pass or could position himself in the way of a drive down the middle. In that way, a weaker player who could contribute somewhat became an empty and unused asset, providing a one-player advantage to the other team.

Teams are dynamic. They constantly respond to change whether on the basketball court or in a business. Agility, focus, clear communications, team culture and mutual accountability all matter. Perhaps the most critical characteristic of truly great teams — researched in depth by Jon Katzenbach, author of “The Wisdom of Teams” — is that wildly successful teams are deeply invested in not only the stated purpose of the team, but in the growth and success of all the team’s members, regardless of role.

Originally published in Arkansas Business, Barry Goldberg On Leadership, March 25, 2019.

But it’s time-consuming and often hard to do. Coaching means letting people make their own decisions. It means staying out of the weeds, allowing them to struggle and even to fail. Since their deliverables are undoubtedly important to the organization, the idea of risking failure can seem counterintuitive and even silly. But like all worthwhile investments, getting a measurable and positive return requires some tolerance for risk.

An organization that wants to create leadership depth and judgment needs to provide opportunities for that kind of risk. Solving problems for a more junior manager may be expedient, but it does not provide a learning opportunity — except in the simplest of situations. So how does a leader balance between using challenge to build capacity and just solving the issue and getting on with it?

Start with some basic “leader as coach” training. Coaching is a skill. Like most skills, success is a combination of instinct, training, desire and practice. The coaching role is often counterintuitive to the leader who is more focused on near-term efficiency than longer term development. Developing a coaching culture requires understanding how to balance these two important organizational needs. Training for executives who want to have access to a more coaching-oriented style — especially those in direct reporting lines — is very different from training for inside staff coaches or external executive coaches. A good place to get a sense of how coaching your directs and staff would work is Michael Bungay Stanier’s very practical book “The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More and Change the Way You Lead Forever.”

Stanier models a simple structure for coaching that can become a regular, informal way of working with staff to develop judgment and leadership depth and yet remain in touch with enough detail to sleep at night.

Ease into it slowly. Creating a coaching culture and sometimes trading the efficiency of simply providing an answer is often a radical departure. Most companies thrive on efficiency, and a desire to move quickly will generally overpower the concept of coaching over direction. And yet a coaching approach may be the very best preventive to what William Onken called “collecting monkeys” in his Harvard Business Review article “Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey.”

A coaching approach leaves the accountability for getting a task or project done with the original owner.

One of the biggest challenges organizations have in making this transition is helping their more senior leaders recognize a coaching opportunity and show a willingness to make developing the next generation of leadership at least as important as getting the project done.

This is not the kind of developmental program to throw a lot of money and internal PR at. Getting senior leaders, including the one in the mirror, to start adopting a coaching stance more often allows the changes to be more organic, more powerful and more specific.

Provide support to leaders who are learning to coach. Coaching is more art than science — even coaching direct reports. Having a resource who can coach the coach provides a platform for developing skill.

A qualified external coach can work shoulder to shoulder with executives, modeling a coaching style and helping the leader to develop his own capacity to coach. Internal coaches and leaders are not held to the standard that a credentialed external coach is; however, the ability to apply coaching skills is a learned behavior. Like any other skill, practice and coaching can help with the transition.

This is the time of year when we personally as well as organizationally are setting goals for next year and making promises to ourselves about personal changes in habit. Want one with leverage on the organization that can simplify your life? Consider forming a coaching habit in 2019.

Originally published in Arkansas Business, Barry Goldberg On Leadership, December 24, 2018.

But organizational culture is often fuzzy. It is too easy to create a lofty, aspirational set of principles that read well but lose their power when it comes to practical day-to-day operations.

That fuzziness is evident in the way most leaders even define culture. Statements like “It’s how we do things around here” may be true and accurate, but they are pretty hard to manage to or enforce. The idea that culture is definable, teachable, reinforceable and clear is core to the work of David Friedman, CEO of High Performing Culture LLC and author of “Culture by Design” who recently came to Little Rock to work with my Vistage peer advisory groups.

In a single morning workshop, Friedman walked our groups through what he calls “the no BS way to get it done.” This practical and actionable approach to culture-building introduced a very different way of defining culture — and sustaining it as well.

I often have seen executives spend long hours wrestling with the articulation of vision, values and culture that end as noble and hopeful ideas that lose their energy when moved into the ranks of the business. When any of those important statements are not integrated into how the organization operates on a daily basis, they morph from lofty ideals into objects of derision and cynicism by employees.

Friedman walked us through two foundational processes that are the key to making culture accessible, actionable, trainable and truly the way things get done. First, he turned the process of articulating culture upside down. Rather than start with an aspirational overarching statement, he suggested starting with behaviors that the owner or CEO believes will drive success in the organization.

While this might look easy, moving from the conceptual to the specific was more of a challenge than might be expected. As a starting place, Friedman shared two of the primary cultural norms from his own business: “Honor commitments” and “Be a fanatic about response time.”

When these are coupled with a short paragraph detailing specifics of the behaviors, it is easy to see how these are cultural norms that can be measured, built into processes, trained for and managed. There is nothing fuzzy or aspirational here. And because these are practical concepts connected to an important business process, these aren’t “bolt on” concepts. That makes including many of these cultural statements to build a high-performance culture possible and practical.

But articulating culture alone is not enough. It is incumbent on a leader to teach and reinforce it — again, as part of how things are done day to day at the organization. Friedman taught the use of a steady, constant and permanent process of discussing the importance, impact and execution of cultural tenets to fully inculcate in all employees at every level. He described a well-executed process of internal marketing to be certain that the behaviors were clearly understood and reinforced at every possible turn. And he was a font of practical ways to both articulate and reinforce those behaviors on an ongoing and permanent basis.

For so many organizations, culture is intangible, conceptual and aspirational. We got a master class in how to make it practical, sustainable and observable.

For more information visit: https://www.highperformingculture.com/

Originally published in Arkansas Business, Barry Goldberg On Leadership, Oct 29, 2018.

One of the main benefits of being out and about (without ceremony or entourage) is that a leader gets to see how things really get done. But if your physical presence is rare — or occasioned only for passing out praise or corrective actions — you are likely training your employees unintentionally.

I recently returned from two weeks in the Galapagos Islands. The park and environmental agencies there work very hard to create access to the natural reserve, and to ensure that the impact is minimized. As a visitor, you may not go near the animals, pet them or feed them, or do anything else that might distract them from whatever they are doing. This creates an experience with them that struck me as remarkable.

We got to see them in their natural habitat, unchanged by our presence. We walked on trails through the nesting grounds of boobies that could have flown away but simply looked at us — or not. We walked around sea lions napping on the landing stone; they looked at us and went back to sleep. Birds involved in courtship rituals, iguanas sunning, tortoises lumbering about — all simply went about their business.

It was our naturalist guide who made it clear. The animals had not been trained to see humans as a source of food (either directly or through trash left behind). We are not natural predators. Because small groups of people show up regularly but never attempted to force themselves on the animals, they simply went about their business. So we got to see them doing what they do, without either putting on a show of it or running away.

It is the least common behavior I see from employees when walking a business with top leaders.

Some business leaders are willing to go on “Undercover Boss” to learn what really goes on in their company, despite knowing that they or their companies will not come out looking all that great. Even Shakespeare’s Henry V had to disguise himself as a common soldier to learn the real heart of his army on the eve of the battle with the French at Agincourt.

The simplest way to understand what is truly happening in your organization is to be visible often enough to be part of the routine. I recently got to take the tour at one of my Vistage member companies (along with the rest of the CEO group that was meeting there that day). It was evident that the boss was there on a regular basis from the way he and employees greeted each other. While workers on the factory floor were clearly curious about our presence, it was not a detriment to productivity.

That CEO has a clear picture of what is happening on the shop floor. His employees have come to expect his insistence on quality of production, but have not been conditioned to either hide or expect to be lavished with praise. His presence is regular: engaged and yet benign enough to only subtlety impact the environment.

On the flip side, I once met a CEO of an organization with more than 4,500 employees who literally pointed at the small conference room table in his office and said, “I run the business from here. Employees do not even know what I look like.” But they clearly did! When we walked the floor for the first time you would have thought we were wearing clown suits based on the loss of productivity we caused.

So, what have you trained your organization to do when you show up? In his classic spy thriller “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” even John le Carre opined that “a desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.”

Originally published in Arkansas Business, Barry Goldberg On Leadership, Jul. 9, 2018.

So why would something so simple and straightforward require two years?

For more than a decade during the dot-com run-up, when CRM systems were coming of age, I had a global practice working with leaders and teams engaged in major organizational and process change. We worked with executive sponsors of major change initiatives, using a methodology that took an enterprise view of both delivery and risk management. Ironically, when I took on my own brand change project, even as a sole practitioner, I ran into the same issues as leaders of change in far more complex global enterprises.

While all project teams run into challenges getting an outcome delivered, the research — and my own recent experience — makes the failure of 75 percent of change projects all too clear. The reasons that change projects take too long, cost too much, do not deliver promised results or never get over the line point to failures in leadership far more often than failures in execution. So before you point a finger at the project team, have a look in the mirror for these leadership challenges:

Clearer on the problem than the desired outcome. I found myself doing exactly what many of my clients did back in my change leadership consulting days. What should have been a straightforward process became way too complicated because I was more focused on what did not work than on clarifying what I actually wanted. Each attempt to create a new, simplified brand met with the challenges of not first clarifying what the new brand should be, instead of what the old Entelechy Partners wasn’t. Often, the biggest issue in a change initiative is a focus on the problem rather than on the outcome.

Bandwidth. Delegation only works if the people you are delegating to have the time, the budgetary authority and the organizational leverage to deliver. While I had all the authority and organizational leverage I needed in my small company, I did not make time for either serious planning or execution. Not until I did a “data dump” with a trusted team and got off the critical path did any real work get done.

Overreach of scope. Most approval meetings I was ever in with clients were predictable. Those meetings may be the roots of what is now an old saw: “Cheap, Good, Fast. Pick two!” Like any other leader of change, I had to settle on what was most important, and what could wait. There will be a phase two to bring over my blog and other content, so the site is not robust, but I am now operating in the new domain. Is it perfect today? No, not at all. It is sufficient to represent what my small company is today. More to the point, it is in production and a foundation for the additional content that can be added without activities that interrupt day-to-day client delivery.

Right talent on — and off — the team. A successful project team of any size needs both people who can dive into and manage detail as well as those who can stay focused on the long-term vision and the external environment in which the project operates. Until I was willing to involve people who balance my natural systemic view, each attempt to deliver the project ran into a wall.

Courage to address what is in the way of success. In years of change leadership consulting, I learned that many of the challenges that were baked into the process had to do with executive sponsors. Too many changes, inability to let the team take charge, an ever-changing charter, budgetary changes and a flavor-of-the-month approach are all toxic to any change project and the team responsible to deliver it.

Originally published in Arkansas Business, Barry Goldberg On Leadership, April 30, 2018.