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The Power of One: You're the Boss
The Power of One: You're the Boss
The Power of One: You're the Boss
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The Power of One: You're the Boss

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A Power of One leader has all the skills necessary to guide and motivate employees to achieve an organization’s objective. The skills to make work a place employees find rewarding. The skills to create jobs for the community, to generate wealth for employees, investors, and local businesses. The skills to be respected and admired as a role model. The skills are all composite skills of knowledge and behavior that include a global context. They are skills that will permit a boss to guide and motivate their teams to a more promising future in the world at large. Skills that will prepare a boss to maximize stakeholder value by continuously building marketable, innovative products for the most attractive target markets. Skills include: motivation, conflict resolution, leader behaviors, strategy, finance, economics, marketing, laws and regulations, human resource management, quality management, information technology, corporate governance, and integrity – all with a global context.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateDec 13, 2012
ISBN9781301033249
The Power of One: You're the Boss
Author

Kathleen Brush

Kathleen Brush has a Ph.D. in management and international studies. She has more than 20 years experience as a senior executive (CEO, GM and CMO) for companies of all sizes, public and private, foreign and domestic. Fifteen of those years were spent as a corporate turnaround executive. She has written numerous articles and three books on management, strategy, and marketing. She has also taught international business and leadership at the university level.

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    The Power of One - Kathleen Brush

    The Power of One: you’re the boss

    Kathleen Brush

    Copyright 2012 by Kathleen Brush

    Smashwords Edition

    ISBN: 9781301033249

    Table of Contents

    Forward

    Every leader plays a powerfully important role in society. Some will exert their power over a few, others over many. Some will play a powerfully positive role. Many will play a powerfully negative role. This some-positive, many-negative ratio is terrible.

    One of the book’s reviewers asked that I add more positive anecdotes. That made me smile. While I have changed the names of people and companies in the anecdotes in this book, they are not spun from yarn. They are derived from decades of experiences and the analysis of dozens of companies. I write about what I see. I don’t see a lot of managers playing powerfully positive roles. I see what looks like an epidemic of partially skilled managers haunting the workplace.

    It’s not a new epidemic. I’ve been aware of it since I began working. For twenty years I was on the receiving end. For six years I was on the giving end, before stepping back. I didn’t like being a bad boss, but I didn’t see how I could become a fine boss with bad managers as mentors. It’s not that there isn’t good learning in knowing what not to do, because there is. My problem was my managers and their managers all had the same skills. Who was I to judge people who were obviously more successful than I was? Still, I could see that their skills and behaviors were demotivating employees because they wasted employee’s time with bad decisions, their communications were inconsiderate, or they came from the do-as-I-say-not-as-I do-school. I repeatedly watched the conversion of smart hard-working employees into yes men, and others who did what was required to collect a paycheck.

    In 1994 I decided to see if there were better ways to lead employees. I traded in a nice income for some big tuition expenses, a doctoral management program, and the chance to fill a dream of becoming a leader that motivates rather than demotivates and a leader that plays a powerfully positive role.

    Armed with my new skills I was now equipped to know just how bad managers could be and why their decisions and actions were damaging and wrong. It’s one reason I can now detail the anecdotes of my experiences with bad managers, and say without reservation, don’t do this.

    Many reviewers told me that they saw themselves and their bosses in the anecdotes in this book. However, until they read about their situations they had been able to pretend that they were making good decisions, or making reasonable mistakes, just like their mentors. They said they pretended even when they could see outright or collateral damage from their decisions. One said he labeled all of the bad outcomes as par for the course of being a boss who has to make hard decisions. He now realized how dumb this rationalization was, but he had learned this response from his mentors.

    Some say my experiences are biased because I was a turnaround executive for many years. Sure, I did a number of turnarounds but many of my experiences were not in companies being turned around. They were instead turnarounds in waiting. That’s the status of every organization with partially skilled managers. Mind you the leaders of these turnarounds in-waiting were offended at this designation. Many of them denied this status even when their firms were reducing staff, declaring bankruptcy, closing offices, or being sold for a song. I feel sure it is more difficult to get a boss to admit they have wealth-destroying skill deficiencies than to get an alcoholic to admit they have a problem.

    My experiences in turnarounds (and those in-waiting) have though biased me in another way. I can’t be ambivalent when I see bad managers in action. I know the powerful and negative role they play on the employees they oversee, the organizations that employ them, and the stakeholders they serve. Some may see bad management decisions and actions as innocuous, ordinary, and acceptable. I can’t. Even if an organization can recover from an adverse outcome here or there, they’ll never know the chain reactions these little innocuous mistakes inspire. Besides maximizing stakeholder value is not something managers do on sunny days.

    Managers that exert negative power are not playing the powerfully important role in society that they are meant to play. That’s why this book was written. The world needs more leaders and role models that play a powerfully positive role in society.

    Chapter 1: Introduction

    What if you had the power to make work a place employees found rewarding -- even enjoyable? To help others build their skills – even advance their careers? To lead the completion of projects that make people feel proud? To grow a business that creates jobs for the community? To generate wealth for employees, investors, and local businesses? To be respected and admired as a role model? If you think it would be ideal, step up to the plate and become a boss that is skill-equipped for the job.

    What is a skill-equipped boss? For starters, it’s a boss who knows how to create and execute plans that can’t lose – not today and not tomorrow. It’s a boss who knows how to inspire employees A, B, and C to complete those plans in good times and bad. A boss who is prepared to manage the myriad of issues that arise from working within an organizational system, filled with interdependent departments, which is regularly affected by local and non-local industry and environmental forces. A boss who knows that each and every day she must demonstrate the skills that will earn her the respect of her team.

    Maybe, though, you’re content with missing a skill here or there. Perhaps you’re fine with employees who dream about nothing but leaving at the end of the day because that is what employee’s do. Maybe you’re a boss who thinks there is nothing that can be done to motivate an unmotivated employee. Perhaps you’re okay with not knowing why some products sell well and why others do not. Maybe you care about results, not respect, as though they were mutually exclusive. Maybe 30,000-foot views of the environment, like a new political administration in China, or 10,000-foot industry views, like new low-cost foreign competitors are just too obscure for you. Maybe you just don’t believe that a few skill deficiencies mark you as a manager who will exhibit the negative power of one.

    The Power of One: you’re the boss aims to arm any boss (or an aspiring boss) with essential globally oriented skills that can earn him the admiration of others as a competent leader leaving positive marks on his patch in the world. It also aims to arm the reader with enough anecdotes on the negative power of one that it becomes evident that a partially skilled leader should not be content with his abilities and it is nothing to aspire to be.

    Chapter 2: The Skill-equipped Boss

    Hard, soft, and composite skills. Management skills have traditionally been categorized as hard or soft. Hard skills are skills of knowledge. Soft skills are behavioral. Which are more important, skills of knowledge or behavior? It’s a silly question, similar to asking if it’s better for a leader to fail because she is missing hard skills or soft skills. And fail she will. Leaders must have the requisite knowledge to do their jobs and they must have the requisite behavioral skills to apply this knowledge.

    Take Lester the know-it-all behaviorally deficient supervisor at Powell Motors. Lester was seated in his boss’ office; it was performance review time. Before the manager could open his mouth, Lester said: Look I know my people skills suck, so let’s not even go there. Let’s stick with assessing what I know. His manager though had to go there. The productivity in Lester’s department was abysmal. His team produced $75 in revenue for every $100 spent on wages and benefits. Lester’s knowledge of marine engines may have been recognized in his field but it was irrelevant to the performance of his team. Lester’s manager made it crystal clear to Lester that he didn’t distinguish between skills of knowledge and behavioral skills (what Lester called people skills) when evaluating anyone’s performance. He evaluated results. Results came from people who had composite skills -- from people who had the behavioral skills to effectively apply their skills of knowledge.

    Lester thought his days as a supervisor were over. He knew he could learn anything, but he was saddled with some behaviors that employees just didn’t like. He felt like another example of the Peter Principle. Lester, though, was wrong. He had not been promoted into a position where he was destined to be incompetent. He simply had to learn some new behaviors, which he could do by acquiring skills in organizational behavior (OB) and integrity. Lester would though have to accept that the knowledge imparted in OB would probably indicate that he needed to do some unlearning to purge behaviors that were antithetical to being a leader that consistently delivered results.

    Partially skilled Sergio. Sergio had no problems with people skills. Early on he became a disciple of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. Best decision of his life. He had a vast network of friends at work, and he had become his employer’s top salesman.

    When charismatic Sergio applied to be the boss of new products, it was his. He had great experience with customers, had traveled globally, and he knew how to sell the company’s products. Best of all, everyone agreed that he had what it took to be a leader that people naturally followed.

    In his new position Sergio had no problem persuading employees to work on an ill-defined product idea that he could feel in his bones was going to change the company in some meaningful way. When employees sought directions he would churn out inspirational words and provocative thoughts, but never a concrete plan to guide them. When they sought help on sizing a market opportunity, selecting a new country to target, building a pro-forma income statement, or deciphering environmental and industry forces, he would encourage them to talk to colleagues and use their social networks to locate expert advice. In the end, the products flopped. In time Sergio’s ability to persuade his employees to burn the midnight oil on one of his murky ideas faded as employees realized that their charismatic leader was completely incompetent.

    Sophia, Sergio’s boss, pulled him aside. She told Sergio his employees were ready to mutiny, but they had to get behind her because she was pulling rank. She wanted Sergio to tell her why the company’s portfolio of products was weighted toward aging products. At first, Sergio was confused and needed clarification on what she meant by a portfolio weighted toward aging products. To him, there were just as many new products as old. Sophia said, Sergio, tell me what the revenue is for the old products versus the new products? Sergio’s face turned red. He didn’t know, but he was pretty sure if he did know, it wouldn’t change his present situation.

    Sergio began pointing fingers everywhere. Marketing promotions weren’t reaching the right buyers. IT had saddled him with systems that the employees found counterproductive. Economies in Europe were tanking. There was unrest in the Middle East. The idea for one new product came from a board member, another from the CEO. He assumed that his job was to turn their ideas into products. Then there were the under skilled, lazy employees that never stopped asking him for advice on subjects he knew nothing about.

    Sophia stayed calm. Sergio was not the first manager that was a problem child. She said to Sergio, Are you telling me you think your terrible performance is anyone’s fault but your own? Until that moment he actually did. Then she said, Tell me Sergio, what are you responsible for? He wanted to say new products, but at this moment that felt like a suicidal response. Finally, he said, I’m not sure.

    Sergio’s situation is not an isolated one. People with good people skills are promoted into management all the time. When they happen to be missing a few skills, suboptimal outcomes similar to Sergio’s are common. Charisma isn’t the only false gauge for promoting someone into management. People that are persuasive communicators, no non-sense project managers, have money to invest, hold an MBA, have a recognized family name, are multi-lingual, skilled politicians, well travelled, team players, great sales people, or brilliant engineers land in management all the time. For some reason they are anointed or viewed as management material, but they don’t have the skills that are required to be a leader, let alone a great leader. Just as badly, they don’t even know what these skills are.

    The department-specific-skilled-manager. The super salesman promoted into management, the polyglot promoted to manage international sales, and the brilliant engineer that secures a supervisory role in R&D are all common occurrences. If departments lived in silos or on isolated islands, and teams were fraternal, these managers might do fine with their department-specific skill sets. But they don’t. They exist in an organizational system filled with interdependent departments and employees who are heterogeneous. Because of this, department-specific-skill-set managers end up struggling with cross-functional projects, discussions, and initiatives; unwelcome employee responses; motivating distinct employees; and strategic issues. This can invite any number of costly and needless errors.

    Sandy, a gifted engineer at Gymno Technologies, was promoted to director of engineering a year earlier. Today she was receiving her first performance review as a manager. Sitting across from her boss, Buddy, she suspected it might not be a positive review. Buddy began reading from a long page of notes. "In January you diverted resources to build a product for a country where per capita income makes it impossible for customers to buy our products. In February you announced the development of an innovative product that didn’t meet a market need. In March you delivered a product for an industry with competitors that could squish us like a bug.

    "In April you pushed and pushed to get wage increases when the economy was in a recession and wages were frozen. In May you terminated an employee who had made outstanding contributions to Gymno for ten years because her performance was unsatisfactorily. But you never even addressed the problems with the employee. In June you caused quite a stir by demanding that a purchase order be approved for a budgeted item, when the company’s cash on hand was low due to some outstanding receivables.

    ‘In August you caused a stink with the IT manager because some new application of information technology was causing problems for your team’s productivity – but you had approved acquiring it. In September you threw a fit when the company announced opening a new foreign office because you couldn’t even get a little purchase order approved. In November you sought the help of HR because employees were snickering at you when you gave them directions demanding urgent action. In December Gymno was lucky because you took vacation."

    Sandy figured she was being fired so she said, Was I supposed to know that my decisions and actions were wrong? Buddy said, That was our hope. But we are not giving up on you. Not yet. Next week you will start attending Gymno’s management training program. It’s is obvious that you should have gone there before becoming a manager.

    Essential skills – no department is an island. Sandy enjoyed the training program. It expanded her skills beyond engineering to include relevant concepts from organizational behavior, strategy, finance and accounting, marketing, human resource management, corporate governance, information technology (IT), quality management, and integrity. She had also learned how to leverage the skills of organizational behavior and integrity to develop composite skills. A mantra in the program was, skills of knowledge must be applied with the right behaviors to have value.

    Sandy was relieved to know that she was better equipped to handle actions and decisions that required interdepartmental skills and some challenging employee issues. These were the areas where she performed so poorly in her first year as a director. However, it wasn’t long before Sandy saw the limitations in her new composite skill base. Gymno had to deal with a number of issues related to a multi-country recession and she felt woefully unprepared.

    The recession was hitting four of Gymno’s target markets: Libya, France, the United States, and Japan. The first shoe to drop was instigated by rising unemployment in Libya. Repressed people with idle time inspired widespread social unrest, which eliminated Libya as a current viable target. This caused revenue forecasts for Libya to be cut back, schedules to be changed in research and development (R&D) and manufacturing, and cash to be crimped because Libyan customers weren’t or couldn’t pay their bills.

    In France left leaning political parties rode into office on a platform of taxing rich corporations and people. This forced Gymno to close a newly opened office in Paris and incur unplanned for and costly severance payments. Some of their French-based suppliers also closed operations in France. These actions caused disruptions in manufacturing and dislocations in company-wide processes.

    Gymno’s leaders were now forced to implement austerity measures. The reduction in force created festering employee conflict over reporting relationships and responsibilities. Cuts to marketing, and R&D left the organization with a sales lead deficit and without a future product strategy. Meanwhile a new Chinese competitor decided to double R&D investments in a bid to secure Gymno’s position as the leading innovator.

    Government regulators in the US went on the hunt to punish the perpetrators of the contraction. This caused some customers to put purchase decisions on hold until they gained clarity on possible regulatory changes. Many customers in France, the US, and Japan canceled non-essential purchases, which included products from Gymno. Customers in Germany and Holland whose businesses relied on exports to Libya, France, the US, and Japan also lowered purchases from Gymno.

    The cuts to marketing expenditures and reduced purchases in targeted markets did not lessen the pressure to make Gymno’s revenue target. This ended up encouraging excessive risk taking by sales people, including engaging in a little bribery-as-usual to secure a contract in Russia. Pressure to also hit the profitability target resulted in managers company wide trying to crack a whip to drive productivity from employees who were unhappy with the combination of a wage freeze and a reduction in force that had increased their workloads. The whip failed. Employees produced even less.

    Sandy found these situations overwhelming. Her only source of solace was that her colleagues who were all graduates of Gymno’s management training program were similarly overwhelmed. The managers all agreed that their training program had one giant omission. It didn’t prepare them to handle the numerous demands that are driven by forces external to an organization.

    The need for global context. Gymno was not unique. Company leaders commonly see their organizations as independent islands filled with internal challenges. The regular arrival of up-close-and-personal internal challenges can be so consuming it can be easy to miss the reality of an organization living in a global archipelago filled with challenge-dispensing industry and environmental forces. The industry forces include those derived from competitors, suppliers, customers, technologies, and regulators. Environmental forces are those derived from changes in regulations or politics, such as a new political administration entering office; social cultural forces, such as social unrest; and economic forces, such as recessions.

    Not my job? The managers at Gymno were guilty, just like so many others. They knew that 10-000 foot industry forces and 30,000-foot environmental forces were occurring. But, they viewed them as some higher-up’s problem to solve. Some even maintained that position while they watched their employees struggling mightily with the sea level-related issues of being unable to fulfill orders, trying to sell products that people weren’t buying, and trying to cope in offices filled with demoralized colleagues. Bosses pointing their fingers at higher ups were little consolation to employees who couldn’t finger point because they had to deal with some very weighty issues without much help from their leaders.

    It is important for every manager to accept that no team lives in a protective bubble. Every 10,000-foot and 30,000-foot event has the potential to pack dozens of punches at sea level, and the buck stops with the boss. The only protection a team has is a boss who has the skills to manage his responsibilities operating in the world at large.

    The leaders at Gymno may have belonged to the not-my-job camp during the last recession, but not anymore. The up close and personal experience of helplessly standing on the sidelines watching their teams struggle with the knock on effects from a multi-country recession was a wake-up call. They now knew that dealing with jumbo external forces were indeed their job. They also knew that Gymno’s management training program would have to be expanded to include additional skills that would prepare them to handle the forces. There was one thing, however that they did not know – not yet. Providing protection for their teams required more than managing the numerous possible industry and environmental threats. It required seizing opportunities too. This is because products and markets that are today’s stars are tomorrow’s has-beens.

    How fast can a star become a has-been? That depends on the occurrence of those 10,000-foot industry and 30,000-foot environmental forces and leader abilities, or lack thereof, to prepare and respond to them. Suffice it to say that a manager who is unprepared to respond can find that in no time at all he has become the leader of has-been products and markets who offers no protection to his team at all.

    In order for Gymno’s managers and all managers to keep an organization’s portfolio of products and target markets healthy they have to be aware of and seizing new opportunities. This is not just because an organization is only as good as its latest products and markets, but also because today’s missed opportunity is tomorrow’s threat. Let’s take the common scenario of a leader taking a pass on opportunities in developing countries. It seems like a reasonable thing to do. After all, the challenges managers face when trying to target developing countries are very different from those faced when targeting developed countries, like the US, Canada, and countries in Western Europe. However, when a leader takes a pass on opportunities, say in developing-country China, she yields these opportunities to competitors. Inadvertently she may also yield the future competitive hand in South, East and Southeast Asian markets. Should this occur, she may have yielded the future competitive hand in the Middle East and North Africa, and then Sub-Saharan Africa, and then …the world.

    If this type of domino effect doesn’t seem all that compelling because company leaders are focused on North America and Western Europe, it should be useful for these leaders to know that in the 21st century many opportunities will come from uncustomary countries complete with uncustomary challenges, like China, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and 157 other developing countries. According to the IMF, between 2011 and 2016 there will be $27.3 trillion in economic growth through 2016. Eighty-seven percent will occur outside the US and most of it in developing countries. The IMF’s growth forecast for developing countries is 300% higher than that for developed countries during this period.

    Proctor & Gamble (P&G) and Unilever are the world’s largest providers of household and personal care products. In 2007 P&G, whose primary markets are the developed countries in North America and Europe, was soaring while Unilever struggled. In 2012 the tables were completely reversed. Unilever exerted a concerted focus on developing countries where it drove 56 percent of its sales, while P&G drove less than 40 percent from developing countries.

    Still unconvinced? In 2011 the average per capita income for the thirty-two developed countries in the world was about $37,560 and $2,817 for developing countries, or just 7.5 percent of developed countries. According to Carnegie Endowment, the average per capita income in developing countries will be 60 percent of developed countries in 2050. That speaks to two trends: high growth in developing countries, and lackluster growth in the developed countries with their aging populations and enormous debt levels.

    In 2011 developing countries were responsible for 47 percent of exports and 42 percent of imports. Twenty years ago it was half this amount. In 1995, 4 percent of Global 500 firms were from developing countries. In 2011 it was 19 percent.

    Essential skills – no organization is an island. In the 21st century opportunities and threats (O&Ts) will arise from customary and uncustomary industry and environmental forces anywhere in the world. For Gymno’s managers and any other managers to be prepared for the O&Ts inspired by these forces they will need to augment their skill sets to include: (1) the skills of economics, and laws and regulations; and (2) an augmentation of all skills to have a global context.

    A manager’s strategy skills, for example, must prepare him to analyze global O&Ts as they relate to selling, sourcing, outsourcing, regulations, and delivering products. Take India. This is a land of opportunity filled with inexpensive labor and a growing middle class, but unreliable logistics and uninviting labor laws must be managed for this opportunity to bear fruit.

    A manager’s skills in finance must include, for example, knowing the status of banking and finance in targeted countries. Getting paid is important. In some countries this is a simple act, in others it isn’t because the finance and banking sectors are underdeveloped. Even credit cards can be hard to come by.

    Human resource management (HR) skills must include, for example, knowing the availability of (or lack of) protected freedoms like speech, religion, and gender equality and knowing the effect this will have on HR policies. In some countries, organizations have policies not to discriminate based on sex, race, religion, or sexual orientation. In some countries there are no such policies. In still others these types of policies could be heresy.

    There is also a requirement to have knowledge of local labor regulations and practices. In the US it’s relatively easy to hire and fire. In some countries firing requires government approval and costly severance payments. In some countries many if not most businesses operate outside the legal system to avoid draconian labor regulations. How can firms that must operate in the formal economy, complete with draconian labor regulations, compete with firms in the informal economy? It won’t be on the costs of labor.

    There are also challenges that must be accommodated in the hiring process. In some countries checking a candidate’s credentials, such as, where they went to school, what they actually studied, where they worked, or if they had any brushes with the law is routine. In other countries record keeping can be sketchy and privacy laws can hinder what can be checked.

    Then there are other laws and regulations. The skill-equipped

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