The February Leadership Development Carnival is Up

Dan McCarthy’s Great Leadership blog has February’s Leadership Development Carnival up! It includes our Amy’s post: Obama: a Level 5 Leader?

 

Dan’s Leadership Development Carnival is a monthly feature where top postings are brought together, consolidating diverse, high-quality thinking about Leadership topics into a concise format to help readers in wrestling with Leadership challenges. Be sure to check out the carnival!

Are you worried about the wrong stuff?

I’m probably not alone in the need to remind myself that the problems I’m worried about most, are usually me looking at the small problems.

A great example was given on the Daily Show (yes, I get my news from the Daily Show and my humor from Fox News and/or MSNBC these days, but that’s an entirely different blog post) interview of Lawrence Lindsey . 

Lindsey gave some excellent examples about how our outrage at waste in the economic bailout, while important morally and ethically, is not substantive to the actual solution.   In other words we are focused on the small (1%) problem and not the big one.

So time to ask yourself what about in your own life?  Are you putting your energy on the big things or are you focused on the 1% noise?  I have to go old school on this one, and suggest to you that you listen to Bill Murray when he explains to you that it just doesn’t matter.  Honestly. 

Time to put your energy on the stuff that matters and let go those battles you cannot win.  When you decide what matters be sure to make sure that you’ve considered your perspective.  Narrow thoughts lead to narrow solutions.  Time for big thinking people.

Obama: a Level 5 Leader?

It has been many years since I read Good to Great by Jim Collins – an excellent book all around. The part of the book that has stuck with me most is the findings on Level 5 Leadership. Every single company that made its way from a good company to a great company (only 11 based on Jim and team’s criteria), had a CEO with a similar set of traits. The leaders were humble, disciplined, and had a will for the company’s success not their own.

The findings were completely counter to conventional wisdom at the time. The headlines were filled with stories of charismatic celebrity CEO’s and their achievements. Think Lee Iacocca.

I find myself thinking about level 5 leadership quite a bit – looking for these traits in leaders I encounter, hoping to find glimmers of them in myself on occasion. I can’t help but consider our new president and his level 5 leadership potential.

At first glance, he has some work to do. He’s extremely charismatic (republican congressmen gush over him) and there’s no denying he’s a celebrity (2 million people stand in the cold to hear him speak). In fact, I was just at the bookstore and spotted Obama action figures on the shelves. No, these were not for sale, per se, but ready for pick-up, dressed in anticipation for the lucky people who thought to pre-order!

Yes, some work to do. However, there is a passage in the book that gives me hope. Collins claims that the serious folly of the charismatic leader is the unwillingness of those around him/her to give bad news. Apparently, no one wants to disappoint the charismatic; whereas if you’re shy and awkward, let ‘er rip! However, it is possible to overcome one’s charisma. Winston Churchill, for example, recognized this weakness in himself and hired people specifically to tell him bad news. I can’t help but wonder if Obama’s “team of rivals” strategy is his way of keeping himself humble by surrounding himself with naysayers. Let’s hope!

How is an Airliner not like Shrek?

"We know you have a choice in ogres, and we thank you for choosing us."

Yes, it is true. Snide comments about cabin smells and passenger attitudes aside, the list of differences is probably fairly lengthy.

 

If you haven’t been following the saga of the Boeing 787 “Dreamliner,“ the short version is that Boeing’s strategy and the fit of the 787’s Dreamliner design to that strategy initially appeared to be a good call. In addition, its main competition, the Airbus A380, was plagued with production delays and it looked like the 787 would come out the winner.

 

However, the last couple of years have had more and more news about 787 production delays and periodic status updates from Boeing that delivery of the 787 would be delayed to (increasingly frustrated) customers. Many have observed that these problems coincided with, among other factors, the laying off of many experienced employees in tandem with the outsourcing of large sections of an incredibly complex supply chain. The rationale behind these actions was to reduce costs in addition to navigating sensitive geopolitical considerations when trying to land deals with foreign airlines.

 

What does this have to do with talent? It’s interesting to see in an article from BusinessWeek, via Evolving Excellence, that Boeing is now reversing some of those decisions (although it is a delicate process in that the geopolitical concerns have not gone away.) In addition, some of the thinking behind the original decisions have come to light:

 

Union officials say past executives at Boeing used Hollywood as a model as they developed their plans to outsource production on the 787. Moviemakers bring together independent contractors—actors, camera operators, publicists—on a project basis for many films, avoiding the expenses of having all such staffers constantly on the payroll. By treating planes as such projects, advocates of outsourcing figured they could do the same in producing aircraft.

 

Of course, this claim is coming from people with a huge vested interest in keeping work in-house, so we should take what’s being said keeping the source in mind. Nevertheless, the actions taken by executives did occur and the consequences of those actions have cost the company over two years in delays and billions in revenue. The upshot of course, is that building jets is not at all the same as making a movie. With aircraft production, there is constant back and forth between design and production as assemblies and subassemblies turn out not to quite fit, or constraints about flow on the assembly floor are not factored in, requiring changes, and so forth.

 

As Evolving Excellence eloquently put it, “But the real bottom line is that Boeing has apparently woken up to the reality that making a 787 isn’t exactly like making Shrek.”

 

Indeed. Boeing has suffered both in terms of longer delays getting production issues resolved (let alone the inevitable delays that come from assembly providers that in turn are delayed by their part supplier delays, etc.) but as they pull more production back in, they are finding that the talent they need, but was previously laid off, has to be hired back.

 

So the question is: are companies carefully weighing the risks of how much and who they lay off to reduce costs, whether it’s to get a bump in stock price or to make payroll? Are companies just digging a deeper hole for themselves by single-minded layoffs based solely on salary cost, when that could mean losing the most experienced and therefore perhaps the most productive employees who hold the key to a turnaround? We’ve recently witnessed the collapse of Circuit City, and although the causes are likely numerous and stretch back to various mistakes over several years, many have already linked its demise to the recent layoff of experienced workers in an attempt to reduce payroll costs.