University of Dayton- Emerging Leader Program - Coaching for Performance

My December session was on Coaching for Performance and was kind of a mix between a self-review and a "how to" workshop. Interesting review of personal behavior using the DiSC DImensions of Behavior approach by Inscape Publishing, Inc. While the review of this personal behavior didn't reveal any surprises about myself, it certainly helped me to take a look at how that style / behavior may be viewed by others. It also helped me to recognize different behavior by others and how I might translate my message to get through to them.

I came out as a D or Developer Pattern = goal oriented, gets bored , strong willed individualist continually seeking new horizons. Opportunities for advancement and challenge are important to them. Sometimes seen as less than empathetic by others.

No surprise there...

The other half of the session was on providing performance feedback, understanding how different cohorts desire, receive and process this and things to avoid. As in "Hi Bill, you are doing a great job BUT..."

I used it right away to provide feedback to my team and am beginning year end reviews. Very helpful. I caught myself wanting to use the "but" during them and thankfully was able to avoid it!

A very timely session!

University of Dayton Emerging Leader Program - Business Simulation

Taking time to get caught up on my last couple sessions in the program....

I was able to attend only one of the two day sessions in the business simulation segment. Overall it was a helpful, game-style simulation around forming a company, setting a strategy, attracting employees and finding customers. The process revolves around matching people to your strategy, seeking customers in that category and generating your financial results.

For example, our team chose to go with a low debt structure, a small but highly trained team of people, specialized / niche type customers and to "stick to our guns". We led for the first 4 years of the simulation but found (as many niche type strategies do) that we literally ran out of room. We found that there were not enough niche customers willing to pay the higher service rate that our team was capable of providing. Our debt strategy held for the first four years as well until we had to reinvest in some money in higher training costs, etc. Our highly trained team could perform great work but we opted to retain 100% of the staff and ran out out of lower associates to take on more basic assignments.

We would have been better to take a loan earlier on (say in year 3) and bring on some lower associates in order to build capacity. This would have given us a larger range of people skills at various salary levels capable of generating an ever-wideing circle of revenue.

I was dropped into the team on day 2 and had to catch up quickly (just like the real world). Overall a great experience and I was able to take away some quick points to use at work.

Enjoying the program so far!

University of Dayton Emerging Leaders Program - Strategic Business Development

This week I experienced a very good session in my program - Strategic Business Development. The session was given by a well-seasoned teacher / facilitator / consultant and focused on how to overcome thinking patterns that block business growth, learn various strategies and use simple financial analysis to understand these strategies.

Overall a good session and I particularly liked the case studies. Often a failed case study can teach you more about something than a successful one. Several were reviewed in several industries with an emphasis about how people define their markets ( their available and playable markets). This emphasis could lead (in one example) from a soft drink company redefining their market from "soft drinks" to "liquid refreshment" and reclassified their market share as "share of stomach".

One overlooked concept in this session is that as a mid-level manager I'm forced to implement someone else's strategy (rather than setting it myself). Perhaps when I get to senior levels, I'll be able to use this more fully.

My favorite part of the session was the discussion around corporate strategy alternatives.

1. Stability strategies

2. Organizational renewal strategies

3. Growth strategies

Often I find someone who says "We want to grow, we are using a growth strategy" but upon review, it clearly is NOT a growth strategy but rather a restructuring or a profit-maximization or resource-stripping one. Resource-stripping is my term to describe setting up a business for a harvest or divestment strategy. I outline them below.

Resource-Stripping
1. Reduce / eliminate new product work, product line extensions, etc.
2. Trim product offering to "just the basics", rationalization of old SKUs and so forth.
3. Reduce people / time commitment to the business - lowering the cost to serve.
4. Push up pricing on low volume specialty products - driving the demand to fewer package sizes or more standard products (one size fits all).
5. Closing production sites, branch offices or warehouses.
6. Reducing marketing expenses to low or non-existent levels.

I've lived through the above scenario myself...


Overall a good session with healthy debate.

University of Dayton Emerging Leader Program - Marketing Essentials

I'm catching up again as my company brick (the Dell) boots up on my most recent session of UD's Emerging Leader Program. This one was on Marketing Essentials and was a high level view of marketing and the various components of it.

Lots of discussion around the target customer (at the center) and then the 4 P's ( product, price, place, promotion) as well as environmental scanning and SWOT. These often seem like generally accepted practices but we discussed many companies that do not follow this properly.

Due to the volume of information given, we did not complete marketing plans during our session but this would be an area of improvement. We did review the plan structure but did not touch on one that I feel gets short shrift- FUNDING. The best marketing plan in the world is just a dream until it receives the proper amount of funding to make it happen. Research, ads, direct mail, trade shows, marcoms all take money. A lot of it!

Another common misconception about marketing plans is that they all must be measured in sales $. That is not allways true - often a plan is simply designed to build awareness or drive traffic to your trade show booth or website or storefront. Getting key organizational people to agree on this is quite difficult. Clarity should rule the day.

Overall a fun topic for me and I could go on 24/7/365 about it. More posts on my next sessions planned for later this month.

University of Dayton Emerging Leader Program - Operations Management

Just waiting for the company brick to boot again so I'm taking a few minutes to update here on my Operations Management session. While there is no danger of moving into supply chain any time soon, it was a healthy session on various "greatest hits" of Operations Management. Of particular interest were some discussions about processes important in the past that no longer hold value - and how many companies cling to them out of memory.

Can you say " We've always done it this way"?

I had found a similar response to asking my team to give up a monthly report format recently. Everyone was complaining about having to do them yet when I gave them the "out" and streamlined the format - lots of pushback. Seems it was that comfortable yardstick people felt they could measure their performance with. Unfortunately that is like driving through the rear view mirror - always looking in the past.

So the session was a refresh of concepts I learned in graduate school but had a healthy dose of "actual" versus "theoretical" concepts. Funny too were the comparisions to real life where senior managers scream "my people stand around half the time" and how time studies don't always show that is a bad thing.

Enthusiastic professor - did a good job of delivering what could have been very dry content.

University of Dayton Emerging Leader Program - Finance

While I'm waiting for my company brick ( the Dell) to reboot, I'll take a few minutes to catch up on my current program.


Well I had my first session as part of the University of Dayton's Emerging Leader Program. I jumped in on the Finance session. Overall the focus was on Finance for non-financial managers and leads students through the usual parade of balance sheet, income statement and statement of cash flows. Usually many managers (myself included) don't need to prepare such statements (finance department does that) but we need to interpret the data.

A key "take away" from the session was the use of financial ratios and a working exercise where we evaluated the effect of certain changes in these and the +/- effects. An example was on inventory turnover ratio and if it improved a slight amount it would clearly have a positive effect on inventory dollars. The fact we ran through many of these and worked it out in our teams allowed us to more completely understand the exercise.

I'm thinking I'll draw up a similar exercise for my work team and see if we can achieve a better understanding of our internal initiatives.

Overall a positive session that reinforced many concepts I've learned before (both in company finance training and my MBA) but a nice, clear, short - format session.

More to come - training session with my mentor next week.

University of Dayton Emerging Leader Program

This fall I will begin a 12 month executive education program to brush up on my skills. Since I completed my MBA just about 1 yr ago, I find I really missed that intellectual stimulation. I'm hoping this upcoming program will be be a chance to look at things in a fresh, new way.

The program is called the University of Dayton Emerging Leader Program and it covers lots of ground. Some of the topics are:

Leading Change
Marketing
Strategic Business Development
Coaching
Leadership
Management communication

I'm really looking forward to it since I earned my marketing degree at Dayton some years ago. As the program kicks off, I'll be posting my experiences and comments about it. Wish me luck!

Help Those Who Help Themselves?

I am continually confounded by people who think someone "owes" them something ( a career path, a new job, a chance at some project or something). This strikes me as terribly 1970's union thinking.

These days it is all about value.

Value creation - New products, new markets, new customers, new sales, new people, etc.

OR

Value savings - Cost savings thru six sigma, downsizings, product rationalization efforts, streamlining business proceedures and so on.

So it seems to me that if you can work on either of these two paths, you begin to make yourself more valuable to your employer ( and to any group you associate yourself with). There are plenty of opportunities to do this - most people just don't seem to be able to take that first ( or more critical -2nd ) step.

Perhaps instead of people thinking about "participating" but rather "leading" efforts in these areas then they can rise above the herd. Everyone loves a problem solver. Even if it is a small problem.

Which brings me back to my original train of thought...If someone is willing to stretch themselves, take continuing education classes, go beyond their job description or function, offers to lead projects- THAT is the person I want.

Blue Sky Budget or Negotiated Settlement?

Well it is that time again, budgeting starts for the next year and I was reminded of an article that I read that described budgets as one of two approaches.

1. Blue Sky - Reaching for the stars here - what could you do if you had no boundaries?

OR

2. Negotiated Settlement - The boss wants 25% and you want 10% so you settle on 15%.

The problem with both of these is neither one seems entirely rooted in reality. If you set a blue sky budget and then the organization can't ( or won't) deliver the amunition to fight the battle ( new products, more people, technical or marketing resources) then it ends up being an empty shell of a number that there is no reasonable chance to hit.

But if you choose the negotiated settlement route, you are accused of sandbagging or possibly underperforming ( or worse - just plain lazy).

Both are problematic at best but perhaps the solution lies halfway in between both approaches? I'm working on ones now and I have to dream big but also temper that with what is achievable ( will I have the resources?) against the backdrop of the market.

Time will tell.

marketing VS Sales?

Recently I was finishing a strategic review where we are delving deeply into a particular market.  This task involved the review of the market, identifying trends and things all the way up to beginning to develop sales plans from the opportunities.

What I discovered was a tremendous disconnect between our strategic marketing folks and the sales folks - what a car wreck.

So I set about benchmarking this little divide and found that it exists almost everywhere. That struck me as very unusual as I feel sales and marketing are two very close departments.  In some companies, they are the same department.

I'll be researching this issue more in the weeks to come.  Right now I'm reading "On Marketing" - great stuff.  

Career Development Roadblock?

I was always certain that a good manager was supposed to be a "Roadblock Remover" for their team. In the functional things that a team must do ( grow sales, develop products or whatever) this seems very straightforward. Unfortunately when it comes to careers, it is much more difficult.



For example, to achieve a certain career goal, often one must be very good at what they do. Unfortunately this creates the problem of now that the person is so good, why would I want to let them go on to something else? I found this has happened to me several times in the past.



I don't want that to happen to my team. In fact, I would consider it fantastic if those on my team could grow, develop and move on to head up teams of their own someday. Hopefully I can continue to remove roadblocks for them ( those that want to move on). I don't want to end up as the "Roadblock" for my team!

People ultimately want to get certain things out of a career. There are times where the company must come first - but if that is always the case then "my career" really isn't mine anymore.

Stay or go? Don't know............

Rules for a Turn-Around - (the Drucker Suggestions)

I'm reading "The Daily Drucker" for 2008. It is 365 days of various comments, suggestions and introspective things from the late Peter F.Drucker.

Here is what he says about Turn-Around efforts (I seem to be drawn to them)

1. Abandonment of the things that do not work, the things that have never worked, the things that have outlived their usefulness and their capacity to contribute.

2. Concentration on the things that do work, the things that produce results, the things that improve the organization's ability to perform.

3. Analysis of the half-successes, the half-failures.

Drucker, P. (2004) The Daily Drucker. New York: Harper Business.


I see these as pretty self evident. Unfortunately organizations seem to hang on to the battles of yesterday, the memories of the past and all the meetings and organizational structure that go with it!

I'll post more on this subject later.

Development Plan - Critical or Waste of Time?

Currently I'm working on some career development items and I kept bumping into the fact that we have no formal long-term career development plan proceedure. This really surprised me because I always created my own ( what I wanted to do and how I would achieve it). So I set out to do some research on the subject.

There is quite a lot of information out there on the subject but all was pretty "over the top". I finally settled on creating my own format again based off these ideas. It seems many companies have job rotation programs or "experienced commercial leadership program" formats for a select few. But none of these answer the question of what happens to a person who is eventually identified as having potential but is not a part of any such formal job rotation program (none exist at my company)?

So I began sketching out this plan and it really opened my eyes to the dirty little secret these days. Once you get someone good on your team you don't want to promote them ( so that they go on to someone else's team!). Companies are so tapped for people in this era of downsizing that nobody wants to give up their best people. I experienced this firsthand. Well, I'm going out on a limb here because holding someone back can't be good for the business - I've just got to put this person on a faster track. The company will benefit even if I have to work without them. I've heard people continually preach that "you invest all this time in them and then they go and leave". I am convinced that some people deserve even more investment. Companies shouldn't look at it as money wasted but rather money invested ( and returned while that person works here). Ultimately if your company stinks and the person moves on - who is the bad guy? He or she for moving on or you for not improving your company to make it attractive to talented workers?

That is a tremendous risk but ultimately in a knowledge-intensive industry like mine ( engineered / formulated chemical systems ) people are the assets that generate all the return! Products don't invent themselves nor do they make or sell themselves. People do. Good people.

I'm banking on it........I'll post more on the subject when I get it finished.

Is the world flat?

I'm trying to get back into the posting routine but things keep tearning me away. I've been traveling a great deal for work and working my way through some good books and podcasts while at my second home ( that would be in airports!).

These days I'm reading Thomas L. Friedman's book "The World Is Flat". It is pretty good and since I work for a global chemical company, I can really relate to many of the trends. Since my market segment focuses on the prototype and design fields, I see the power that technology has given to people in this decentralized world we live in.

In fact, I work in virtual teams with people I've never actually met ( or met only once or twice perhaps). That is going to be the "Norm" as far as I can see for the future. In fact, my MBA classmates all connect virtually as well.

I think technology as a "flattener" is completely underrated by most companies. Perhaps there is a lesson in that for all of us?