The Leader Architect: The Right People in the Right Place Doing the Right Stuff at the Right Time

Introduction

This book is the reverse of most business leadership or management books. Instead of exploring the depths of particular theories and structures for success, this book bridges the chasm between what to do and how to do it for senior business executives. It offers ample theoretical foundations for the key management and leadership tasks these executives face, but provides clear and specific guidance about how and when to apply these powerful theories. It is especially for owners and CEOs, whose task is to lead successful growth in the face of a blizzard of advice. For simplicity, we'll use leadership for both leadership and management.

We move beyond advocating for growth alone, looking past earnings and net worth toward the true measure of a business: its value in the marketplace. That value is dramatically impacted by the experience of its customers and employees, which determines its ability to endure.

You haven't read this book yet, in spite of its promise to explore both leadership and improved organizational outcomes—evergreen themes for sure. (When we talk about businesses, we mean any organization of more than six people, where the leader can't keep her hands on all that goes on.) Here's what's different:

A higher measure of success: valuation of the business.

More practical application than theory of what to do.

A deeper focus on what produces success: human behavior, or what the people in the business choose to do or not do.

A carefully selected collection of structures and processes to help people do what success demands.

A pragmatic combination of immediately useful techniques and a range of theoretical templates covering the most vital topics facing leaders today.

This mix offers a faster answer to the perennial leadership question: What can I do with the time and resources available to deliver what's important for our organization? It's a survey course with chops, combining tools and guidelines for immediate application. It's deep enough to be effective, and broad enough to cover most of the prime topics for success. It provides enough theory to apply to most of the organizational situations that a leader will encounter. (Not that you should stop reading, but this will provide a foundation to build your own leadership practice as you raise the targets of your business.)

Chapter 1

The Myths that Ruin Our Businesses

The four Kerry Blue Terriers looked identical. All were out for a walk in an open field with their owner. Three of the dogs bounded joyously about, reveling in the moment. The fourth ran in circles, relentlessly. Why? The owner explained that when he acquired the fourth dog, it had been living in a cage. For years, its exercise was running in a circle limited by the cage. ¹ The cage was long gone, but the dog remained inside it, at least in its mind. That invisible, powerful story guided the dog's perception of reality, and its life. Myth, indeed!

As a leader, how do you change the behavior of the fourth dog on your team?

We are pattern-seekers from birth, making sense of our environment. Doubt it? Videos of days-old babies show pattern-seeking. Crying begins as a hunger reflex, but toddlers shift to crying on demand, having learned that crying produces food, cuddles, attention. Our brains sort billions of stimuli from outside, ignoring most and processing few. More important, what do we do with the things we sort? They become our personal myths!

What is the link from patterns to myths? When we take in a bit of data, we apply our own meaning based on our experience, genetic heritage, and what we learn from reading and other things. Our meanings become our myths.

Now, wait a minute. It doesn't really matter whether our myths are true or not. Truth is not the test, because truth is out there. I see the sun moving from east to west every day, and in spite of knowing that our Earth moves, not the sun, I think (and feel) that the sun moves. Remarkably, that bit of error is a useful myth; it guides everything from which sides of the house require window shades to when we decide to put on sunscreen.

Myths are the guardrails on the paths of our lives. We put them there, often not realizing that we're letting them guide us. We all have myths that help us manage the peril and possibilities of the future.

Starting when I was ten years old, we spent our summers at a cabin in the woods in the Columbia River Gorge in Washington State. The woods were full of plants, bushes, bugs, frogs, and even bears (we found a bear print once and made a plaster of Paris casting of it for proof). We connected with other folks by boat or trail, usually trail, because our parents had first call on the boat. We ran the trail over and over every day, meeting our friends to play Kick the Can, go to the swim dock, play Hide and Seek, and other essential kid stuff. Finally, we found that we could walk the trail at night without a flashlight: signal achievement! We did it by feeling the trail with our feet because it was pitch black outside.

Here's how our myth was built:

Walk the trail hundreds of times.

Notice that we could feel the little holes, dips, roots, and rocks with our feet.

Try it in the dark with a flashlight.

Turn off the light and try it for a bit.

Eureka! We saw without a light.

Where's the myth? The belief that we could see the trail and find our way home in the darkest dark. We did find our way home (it worked), but we didn't see at all.

By now you're starting to see that you carry hundreds of myths with you through your life, adding and dropping them as your experience grows. Experience in our context includes both physical experience and mental experience, because both impact our myths and choices. Your memory of Nelson Mandela from a movie can generate strong feelings much later, perhaps while viewing news of a public riot in the United States. Your memory is a myth built by your mind as you experienced the story of Mandela—despite never meeting him in person.

Why do we hang on to myths?

Powerful emotions are linked to them.

We have a sense of control as we deal with frightening life setbacks.

They are affirmations of important values in a struggle about what is right to do.

They offer protection from confusion and dread as we look into an unclear future.

They offer encouragement to try something new.

We believe in myths because we need them to live our lives. Let's just use the results of intensive brain and behavior study, especially the past fifty years, and call our perceptions myths. These myths, and many like them, lubricate the gears of our life and are reinforced frequently, making them seem even truer. If you begin to observe your perceptions, you'll see the web that allows you to move through your life mostly efficiently: the connective tissue between your brain and the world. Otherwise, you'd get bogged down when you reach for the water faucet.

In our brains, the more a connection between synapses is used, the more we think it's true. Knowledge is synaptic connection in our heads. Sometimes it's scientifically verified by outside data, but other times, it's verified by our feelings.

Sisyphus, Greek king of Corinth (known then as Ephyra), was self-serving, crafty, and deceitful. Zeus, king of the gods, punished him by forcing him to roll a huge boulder to the top of a long hill. Exhausted, he watched helplessly as the boulder rolled back down the hill to the bottom, forcing a do-over. He could never quite make it to the top. Today, we refer to long, arduous tasks (like owning a midsize business) that seem never-ending as Sisyphean tasks.

The myth has lived on for thousands of years because it's a fitting metaphor for a common life experience. If you're the one doing the endless tough work, it can feel so familiar that it seems true. And for you, it is, conjuring up a picture about your life that's rich in detail and feelings.

Myths are superb tools to communicate complex ideas with others who know the myth. A myth is a metaphor on steroids, boosted because it describes an experience and the feelings that go with it.

MOST COMMON AND DANGEROUS MYTHS

The people in your organization, the folks that you rely on to make things work, are as full of myths as you are. And some of their myths are different from yours. And they aren't telling you any more about their myths than you tell them about your myths. And, in fact, most of their actions are driven by those invisible myths. This means that your leadership is mostly about guiding their myths and helping to create new myths in the process. The challenge, however, is that they—and you—carry myths that are both untrue and dangerous to your organization. Even more dangerous, they are seldom mentioned, let alone discussed or tested.

Here are some commonly held and dangerous myths. Each is wrong, and hazardous to your health and your business. Which of these are familiar to you?

Myth 1: Bosses Lie, and They Care Only About Themselves

This is true of some bosses, and smart people leave those bosses immediately. Most other bosses truly care about their organization's success, which helps their people make a living and learn new skills.

A company that I work with hit hard times in 2009, laying off most of its employees and draining the savings of the owners. The owner teared up as he described laying off fifteen-year employees. His face lit up as he described the joy of bringing them back to the company when sales improved. This story is about his face, not the employees. In fact, one of his prime concerns about his kids taking over the business is whether they have the same powerful empathy for their people (employees).

I am an old man now, and I have had a great many problems. Most of them never happened.

—Mark Twain

Myth 2: Process Improvement Beats Teamwork

The genius of process improvement is that process changes are independent of the people doing the work. Workers can be brought in from outside the process, and the process is available for them to implement.

The curse of process improvement is that it depends on the people to do the work the new and better way. Increased efficiency usually requires acute attention to detail, which comes either from years of experience or careful teaching. The reasons that process improvements don't stick are almost always about the people, not the process.

I worked at a loudspeaker manufacturing firm where the team lead turned the idea of process improvement into a game with his people. He played the game with me on my daily plant tour. I'd ask, What's the improvement today? He'd always have one. Always. More remarkably, most of the ideas came from his team, not engineers or outside analysts. I tell you this, not to push the tired meme that the people know (because just as often they don't), but because their leader turned their work into a game that gave them recognition every day. On the days where there was no improvement idea, he'd still ask about it, keeping it alive for the next day. Their work was way past following someone else's process rules; they loved the challenge of finding a better way. Oh, and their quality and efficiency rose to record levels!

Myth 3: Inputs Are More Important than Outputs

Activity untethered to results frequently produces frantic action but no change. The worst example of this was an otherwise skilled production manager growling, I want to see all the machines going up and down for the whole shift. The result was that welders (the second step in the process) hiked all over the plant to find the next pallet of parts to assemble and weld. They were told that their slow welding was making the machines wait! Actually, what made the machines wait was a sloppy work schedule in the first production process in the plant. That process was laser cutting, and the guy leading the laser team grabbed the simplest job in the pile to do next, instead of choosing jobs to optimize plant throughput. When the schedule changed at the laser, the welders stopped walking and went back to welding, which they preferred. Both problem and solution were about the team lead's choice regarding work schedule. It was not about the process.

If people are rewarded for what they do, instead of for their results, it can produce a gauzy happiness with calls made, units produced, orders shipped, and so forth. An e-commerce client found customer call-backs rising, a sign of increasing customer dissatisfaction. Instead of scheduling more folks to handle the call-backs (more activity), the COO adjusted scheduling so that more people were available at peak call times. Callbacks dropped back into an acceptable range without adding people. More important, they took care of customers on time.

Myth 4: Analysis Beats Individual Behavior

Noise about benchmarking and big data obscures the reality that skilled sales people or internal leaders may find an 80 percent solution quickly, and delivering that solution produces progress and a sharper point on the next step to success. Most of the time, analysis feels good but doesn't speed the process of delivering real help to customers. It just reduces stress inside the company. Sometimes a beer is better.

Myth 5: Plans Before Execution Beats Execution to Build Plans

Although there are times that good plans beat execution, usually rapid execution will clarify needed adjustment to plans more quickly and precisely. This approach requires a sensitive balance of listening to customers and a willingness to adjust. It comes by watching customer results, not progress versus plans.

Myth 6: Metrics Provide Accountability

The power of good metrics is focus. Without commitment built on accountability, however, metrics soon lose their punch. A manufacturing company designed new metrics, carefully explained their sources, and posted them daily. One day, I asked the production manager what he thought of the metrics (they were aimed at him). He pointed to the executive conference room and said, It's up to them! His message confirmed that the correct data hadn't laid a glove on him, and he felt no accountability at all. As good as the numbers were, what was missing was the conversation with him about his role in moving the numbers and what it meant to the future of the company.

Myth 7: Exceeding Expectations Beats Meeting Goals

Exceeding expectations is lazy leadership, meant to substitute for crisp objectives about things that matter to employees, suppliers, and customers. The myth is that hefty promises pull top results with them. The reverse is usually the case, as explained by a veteran middle manager in a privately owned production firm: "We never had goals. The owner just said that he knew we could do better, as he called us to ‘exceed our customer's expectations,’ whatever that meant. What it meant to me was that we always