Can Bureaucracies Be Creative?

Can bureaucracies be creative? Yes.

Will they? Well, that's another matter...

We have to remember that bureaucracies aren't designed to be creative. Instead, they exist to make sure that repetitive tasks that need to be done the same way each time get done repetitively, the same way each time. This is why creative people often avoid working in bureaucracies.

But even bureaucracies sometimes need evolutionary and revolutionary change. Evolutionary change, as the name implies, happens over time as the organization adapts to small-scale things. This might include changing some internal processes because of budget reductions, or meeting new legal requirements ("Yeah, did you get that memo about the new cover sheets for the TPS reports?"). Often times this can be handled by the bureaucrats themselves, though suggestion programs or "empowering" the employees.

Revolutionary change, on the other hand, comes about when a massive shift in your environment (usually external to the organization, and usually out of your control) takes place. In that case, the whole reason for your organization's existence may change, and your priorities and values may need to shift quickly as well. A private company may face extinction if it doesn't change, and even government agencies may face irrelevance and accompanying budget cuts, even if they're safe from going out of "business." When the shift from mainframes and workstations toward desktop computers started picking up steam, IBM was faced with a need to change its focus. When the Cold War ended, the US military needed to find a new role and claimed it was undergoing a "revolution in military affairs."

In this case, the repetitive-minded folks who are buried in your bureaucracy might not be in a position to see the need for change -- very often, all they see is their own little piece of the world. You need someone else to look at your group's role in the broader world and see what needs to change. You need someone educated, someone open-minded, someone interested in doing great work without worrying too much about exactly what that work is...you need a Creative.

And preferably, more than one.

Smart bureaucracies have these people. They might call them "Strategic Planners" or a "Red Team, or some other term to show they have a different role than the rank-and-file. They aren't better, they just have a different function. And it's a necessary one.

The organizational culture of bureaucracies is naturally resistant to change, so leading Creatives in a bureaucracy presents some unique challenges in terms of communication of new ideas within the organization and defining your vision for the future, as well as in terms of morale when your Creatives feel nobody's listening to them.

Still, while there are challenges to overcome, overcome them you must. A large company needs its Creatives to help them adapt to the little changes and survive in the face of the big ones. A government bureaucracy needs Creatives to help it understand how it's role changes so it can serve the public's needs. Creativity in a bureaucracy can be tough, but at times, it's vital. And with the right people, it's possible.

About 10 years ago, when I was working in a government agency, a friend complained about how hard it was to get new ideas through the system. Our boss said, "You're frustrated because you know you're doing work, yet it's hard to get it approved. But think about this: what if you were stupid...and it was EASY to get things approved?" We agreed that would be worse, but that still didn't make him feel better.

Planning Assumptions

Last week we discussed describing the facts of your situation as one of the first steps in the planning process. We talked about how important it is to know what you know. This week, let's add to that "starting status" by knowing what youthink.

In addition to the facts -- the things you know to be the case -- it's also important to lay out your assumptions for the present and the future. The idea is to figure out what things you can reasonable expect to happen that haven't happened already. The purpose behind this is to create a plan that's firmly grounded in reality. There's no sense in making a plan, hiring new people, budgeting resources, and blowing off other opportunities if your plan would only work if the laws of physics were suddenly reversed.

Let's try to visualize how this works. Let's say there are a lot of options open to you that use various combinations of money and time, and you could plot all those combinations on a graph:



Then let's say you identify certain facts, like "Our review board has a minimum of three days to examine each phase of the project," or "If our employees work more than 40 hours a week we have to pay them overtime." Such facts will limit your options because they affect the time and money available to you. On our graph, the limitations created by the facts are represented by blue lines:



But to maximize the reality of your plan, you need more than just the things you're sure of, you also need to consider the things you're pretty sure will happen. For example, assuming "Interest rates will drop so we can get cheaper financing" has an effect on your available money. On our graph, these assumptions are represented by red lines:



See how we've gone from a lot of options down to a smaller set? These represent the options that are within our known, and expected, capability.

Because they limit solution sets, assumptions should be few in number, and they should only be for the important issues. As you'll notice, the more limitations you put on yourself, the smaller and smaller the number of options becomes. It's important to be realistic, but it's also important to leave yourself some courses of action, so be careful about saddling yourself with unnecessary limitations.

With that in mind there are a few criteria you should consider for your assumptions:

First, they should be logical. Simply wishing something was the case doesn't make it so. Remember what we mentioned earlier about changing the laws of physics? Ain't gonna happen, so don't assume it.

Similarly, they should be realistic. You should have some evidence to back it up. If there's been a behavior trend among your clients up until now, don't assume that's going to change without some effort on your part. If you need it to change, maybe that needs to be part of your plan.

Finally, they should be essential. Each assumption has the potential to reduce your possible courses of action, so make 'em count. Consider it this way: if you make an assumption, and it turns out your wrong, and that would wreck your plan, then it's essential. If a bad assumption wouldn't have any effect on your plan, then it's not that important and you should leave it out.

One of the biggest criticisms of strategic planning is that all too often it takes place in a fantasy world completely disconnected from reality. That's especially problematic in creative fields where your employees are trying to think beyond limitations. Unfortunately, it's your job as a leader to occasionally bring them back down to Earth, and then encourage them to focus their energy on the things that really are possible.

Do You Really Want to Be a Leader?

The traditional way of business is "up or out." That is, if you don't advance up the food chain, moving from employee to manager, well, you must be be doing something right.

But in the creative fields, it's time to rethink that philosophy.

Consider this: you've spent years going to school, practicing your technical skills, learning about what works and what doesn't, developing new ideas, building a reputation...and now you're going to watch other people do that while you manage the budget. Is that really what you want to do?

For many people, it is. Leadership is a challenge, and many people who get a taste of it -- whether by being in charge of a team working on an ad campaign, or maybe having fond memories of being a Boy Scout patrol leader when they were 14 -- want more. Truthfully, leading other people is one of the most challenging things you can do in business. You can still have the chance to use your creative skills but now you can also use your experience to help others grow. If you're one of those employees who says "if I were in charge, things would be different," this is an opportunity to put your ideas into practice. It's a way to continue learning and growing in a new way, and if you're someone who gets bored easily then maybe doing something new is exactly what you need to stay excited about your chosen line of work.

But if you see yourself going into a leadership role simply because you feel you HAVE to, then you're making a mistake. If this isn't something you really want to do then don't do it, because it takes a commitment to do it right, and if you don't feel that, then you have the opportunity to screw up in a big way. I mean, if you're a solo employee you could mess up your own work and have an impact on, say, a single project, but as a leader you have the chance to screw up EVERY project. And if you're high enough up in the hierarchy, you could even bring down the business. So don't get into it unless you really want to.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with staying in your field as a creative expert rather than as a leader. Lots of stylists are content not to own their own salon, plenty of interior designers are only too happy to have someone else handle the budget while they go out and design. If you want to commit yourself to your craft, then do it.

Now, there may be a price to pay: in many traditional business models the leadership gets paid more because of the increased responsibility. If you're in that environment then recognize you might not make as much as you otherwise could. But if you make more money while making yourself unhappy, is it really worth it? If you're willing to accept less money in return for enjoying your work more, that seems like a fair trade.

Some businesses are getting smart and moving away from that model. They realize that the rules for pay should be different for different specialties. Rather than encouraging someone to leave behind what they love and what they're best at, the smarter creative firms will reward their Creatives who become amazing at their craft while leaving the leadership to those who are more interested in that. With such a model they're more likely to end up with leaders who want to lead and Creatives who want to create.

Bottom line: before becoming a leader, ask yourself, "is this really what I want to do?"

Keep Meetings in Check

Last week I suggested you should use meetings to communicate more effectively. And I meant it. But people, there's a limit.

Meetings are very important for getting information out to your employees and clearing up any confusion so they can focus on their creative work instead of on whether or not the company's about to go under. But don't fall in love with the idea that these folks are sitting at your feet waiting for great wisdom to spout forth from you...they just want to know about the latest benefits package, or something. It's easy to fall into the trap of calling meeting after meeting after meeting, and letting them drag on and on and on, but DON'T DO IT.

Some bosses have meetings because they don't know what else to do, and if they can go home at night and say "wow, my day was just crammed with meetings," then they can feel like they accomplished something even though they probably didn't. And of course, some employees like to sit in meetings because it beats working. How often have you sat around listening to someone talking about what they should be doing instead of actually doing it? Try not to be that person, OK?

Work rarely gets done in a meeting. They are designed to pass information and to discuss issues, not to get things done. There are exceptions, of course, like when you have a team project and you need to come together to make some decisions or finalize a project, but most meetings are designed for information transfer. So go into a meeting with low expectations for getting work done.

I had a government boss who was deputy director of our division. We had meetings every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for an hour at a time. This was so he could be updated on the work we were doing, which of course we hadn't we hadn't done much of...because we were sitting in meetings. Do the math: 3 hours (sometimes more) in meetings is nearly 10% of a 40-hour work week. That's a lot of wasted time.

After a year and a half with this supervisor, working in a very bureaucratic division, he and some of the rest of us broke out and created a strategic planning group with him in charge. Finally, we'd gotten out of the mundane, inbox-to-outbox world and stepped into some long-range thinking. What was his first decision? "We're going to have meetings every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for an hour at a time." Uh uh. I told him "you can have as many meetings as you want, but pick the ONE you really want me to come to and I'll be there." (the advantage of a government job is it's really tough to get fired for talking back to your supervisor) Oh, and these were just the "administrivia" meetings -- we'd also be having "focused sessions" to explore different issues. I told him that when I needed other people to sit around and talk about my project instead of working on their own, I'd let him know (once again, thank goodness for job security).

One other point about this boss and then I'll move on: he used to answer the phone during his meetings. Never never never never never do this. Do not waste your employees' time by calling them for a meeting and then conversing with someone who's not there. Trust me, we were NOT impressed by how important he was. If possible, turn off the ringer on your phone. If you really don't think you can ignore the phone or e-mail for very long, well, there's your incentive to wrap this up quickly. Personally, I like the attitude of a law firm in suburban New York that has banned electronic devices, including Blackberries, during important meetings (which makes me wonder: if the meeting is unimportant, why have it in the first place?). Get in, get it done, get out, and then worry about other stuff.

If it seems I'm opposed to meetings, I'm not. I'm opposed to unnecessary meetings, to meetings that last too long, and to people sitting around talking about work but never actually doing any. If you're working in a factory or in some bureaucratic office, people might enjoy going to meetings because it gets them away from the mundane work they're doing, but if you've got creative people who are excited about their work, the last thing you want to do is derail that enthusiasm with two hours of stories about your latest vacation.

The first collection of Dilbert comic strips was called Always Postpone Meetings With Time Wasting Morons. If you can, let this book be your bible.

Where Do Creative Ideas Come From?

I came across the following article by Darren Rowse at Problogger. This is a great blog and back in 2007 he had a few posts specifically on nurturing creativity. As you try to develop your creative employees you should consider encouraging these ideas as ways to come up with new ideas. Some of these involve breaking old ways of thinking and they are likely to require some practice, but as you develop these skills in you and your workers you'll move ahead of your floundering competitors.

1. Evolution

When new ideas come as a result of building upon previous ones. This is very much a step by step process where at each step the progression in ideas very small but where over time it is significant.

A great blog related example of this has been the evolution of most blogging platforms, like WordPress which periodically updates it’s features - building each time on what they previously had.

Most bloggers enter into this evolutionary process every day with their blogging - taking previously expressed ideas (both their own and those of others) and extending them.

A good question to ask yourself when entering into this evolutionary process is - ‘how could I improve (insert thing to evolve here)….?’

Evolution isn’t the ’sexiest’ of the methods that I’ll talk about here - but it’s probably the most common way of creating new ideas.

2. Reapplication

When you look at something old in a new way.

The exercise that I did with participants in my presentation to illustrate this point was to give each person a fork and to tell them to come up with as many new uses for a fork as they could in 2 minutes.

Most people start that type of exercise somewhat paralyzed by their previous boxing of forks - but breaking outside the box can lead to some interesting (and sometimes useful )discoveries.

A question to ask - ‘how could I do XXX differently?’

3. Synthesis

Where two or more existing ideas are combined into a third new idea.

This is one of my favorite ways of being creative. I like the challenge and possibilities that it can bring.

This is what happened that fateful day that someone wondered what would happen if they combined the idea of a theatre and a restaurant together - theatre restaurant.

It’s this Synthesis that I think we’re seeing more and more of in the blogosphere at present as people combine blogs with other types of websites (forums, video, audio, job boards, chat rooms etc).

A question to ask when entering into synthesis - ‘how could I take the benefits of XXX and combine them with the benefits of YYY’?

4. Revolution

Where a completely new idea that is markedly different from a previous one is developed.

An example that comes to mind is of a blogger that I recently met who used to be an email newsletter marketer. He found that his newsletter lists were becoming less and less effective so decided to move from newsletters to blogs - reinventing (and enlivening) his business in the process.

His goals didn’t really change but his methods did considerably.

A question to ask - instead of asking ‘how can I make XXX better’ one might ask - ‘what could I do instead of XXX to achieve the same goals?’

5. Changing Direction

Where there is a complete change of focus.

This is a fairly radical process for a business or individual to take and generally involves wiping a slate clean to rebuild from the ground up.

A question to ask in this case - ‘if we could start over - how would we do things differently?’

I’m sure there are other ways to be creative (and I’d be interested to hear your suggestions below) but the above five might make a good place to start.

We often think that people are either creative or they aren't, but that's not entirely true. While there is certainly some innate talent, like any talent it improves with training and practice. Find ways to develop these attitudes in your employees and watch their creative skills improve.

Minimizing Drama

Put a group of creative people into a room. Challenge them to do outstanding work. Demand that they use all of their skills. Give them a tight deadline. Provide some guidance, then step out of the way.

If you've got a good group of people you'll get some really good results. It'll be tight, it'll be what you wanted, it may be better than you hoped for.

But along with good results, you'll probably get a lot of drama on the way.

Why is that? Why is it that when you put a bunch of skilled, creative people together you end up with catfights, gossip and innuendo, and occasionally some screaming and hair-pulling? Where do all the drama queens come from? It's so common that we expect it...no one sees the interpersonal conflict on Project Runway or America's Next Top Model and says "oh, that's SO unrealistic." But the only way to deal with it is to understand where it comes from.

First of all, consider that the really good people are going to set high standards for themselves. As a result, they probably expect everyone around them to meet the same standards, and when that doesn't happen, conflict erupts. (I know I'm guilty of this a lot) Also, if anyone does anything that might keep them from meeting those high self-standards, then that person is viewed as a problem and is dealt with accordingly.

One reason people feel comfortable setting high personal standards is because they think highly of their own skills. So if there's any critique of those skills, any hint that someone else thinks they aren't as good as they thought, the defenses go up immediately and instead of listening to something that may be constructive (or might not have even been a critique) you get two people either talking without listening to each other, or not talking at all (it's tough to tell which is worse).

In a lot of cases you bring together people with a mix of skills. That's obvious in something like website design, where you've got coders, designers, content providers, ad people, and so on. But even in a hair salon you're likely to have people who specialize in color vs hair, or in mens' cuts vs women's, and they will all have their own view on how things should get done based on the perspective they bring. If those various opinions differ, well then, you get conflict.

Not only do your employees bring different skills, they also have different options available for using them. In a bureaucracy, where everything will get done tomorrow the same way it got done yesterday, you don't have a lot of choices to make. But in a creative environment where things could get done many different ways there will be as many opinions as there are options. When someone's path doesn't get chosen you've got the opportunity for some drama right there.

And of course, people are often drawn to creative endeavors because they have a particular temperament that's suited for it, and one aspect of that is often a flair for the dramatic. Alas.

So how do you deal with it? How do you keep the drama to a minimum? Well, you need to realize it's pretty likely to occur and deal with it in advance, before behavior patterns get established, feelings get hurt, people storm out, lawsuits get filed, etc.

Bring your employees together and see how well they mesh.

Try to keep people who despise each other away from each other.

Help them learn about each other's strengths, and about individual work styles, so they don't get surprised later.

Nip the problem in the bud by making it clear during hiring interviews that this is a drama-free zone.

Have an opportunity for feedback and constructive dialogue so people can vent their frustration in a less confrontational way.

Discourage (but don't prohibit) inter-office dating.

Given that enclosed spaces can lead to high tensions it can be tempting to think that having remote distance workers will solve your drama problem. On the one hand it can reduce the face-to-face screaming, but it can increase the behind-the-back whispering (or texting). You also miss out on the bonding that can occur between colleagues which can reduce friction, and further, you can limit the opportunity for people to learn about and understand each other's particular talents, which could also help minimize the conflict.

Whatever happens, do your best to keep your drama away from your customers. That's not what they're paying for and they don't want to hear it. Be honest, do YOU want to hear a cashier complaining about the long hours he's working or a flight attendant going on and on about how horrible passengers are? Does it inspire confidence in a client to hear the hairstylist say "I could just kill everyone in here right now!" while holding a pair of recently-sharpened shears? No no no no no. Whatever internal issues are going on, once the client walks into the room it's time for smiles on everyone's faces, or else a quick boot out the back door.

And finally, don't be afraid to let people go if they are more trouble than they're worth. At the same time, bear in mind that if they're worth it, you may have to put up with some screaming and hair-pulling. Such is life.

Bottom line: drama is a part of life but it's not inevitable, and it CAN be managed. And if all else fails, maybe you can just work them so hard that they're too tired to complain about anything.

Just the Facts, Ma'am

When Sergeant Joe Friday of the Los Angeles Police Department responded to a new case, all he wanted were the facts. He needed to know what really happened, not what the witness thought happened. Once he knew what was real he had his starting point for working the case.

As you begin your strategic planning you need to know the facts. They tell you the rules of the game. Trying to play football on a basketball court doesn't really help you. Identifying the facts about your company, your market, and your whole operating environment gives you an idea of what paths are open to you and what tools are available for your use. If you're trying to figure out how to get from "here" to "there," you first need to know where "here" is. The facts help you identify the point where you're beginning.

What do we mean by "facts?" Well, these are the things that are true about your operating environment. They involve what is happening now, not what might happen in the future. They are things you know, not things you assume. They are an observation of reality, not a description of your ideal world, so you need to include inconvenient and unpleasant truths as well as those you think are helpful.

These might include such things as:

- laws
- available resources during a particular period
- existing technologies
- current size and skills of your workforce
- existing inventory
- contractual agreements
- current organizational structure

These are the things you take as a given...for now, anyway. Some of them might be changed -- inventory, for instance, or the size and skills of your employees -- and those changes, if you want to make them, will need to be addressed in your plan. Others, such as laws or contracts, are things you may be stuck with, depending upon the time frame of your plan...if you're looking beyond the length of your contracts then changing them in the future may be an option but if you're looking to a shorter term, you have to work with what you have now. The unchangeable facts will, in many cases, form the outer boundaries of your set of available option...you can look inside that set for courses of action, but looking beyond them is a waste of time and effort.

Your more experienced employees play a critical role here because they know your history and the limits under which they operate. A potential problem with them is that they may be so used to working under certain conditions that what they call a "fact," thinking it to be an immutable force of nature, may instead be something changeable that has simply been around so long that they can't imagine life without it. Newer employees are useful for challenging those statements of "fact" that in reality may be perceived limitations that can be easily ignored.

The more creative your workforce, the more facts you will uncover if you turn them loose upon the problem. This is a good thing, not because it creates more limitations, but because it better defines the limitations that are there whether you see them or not. The better you understand your operating environment the more you'll be able to shape that environment to best suit your needs and create the most profitable opportunities through your planning efforts.

Knowing your facts helps you best refine your mission and start thinking of ways to accomplish it. Just as Sergeant Friday needed his facts to get the ball rolling, so do you. The difference is, he managed to get his work done in 30 minutes (with time for commercials) whereas you'll have a little more work to do.

Know Your Employees...and Yourself

Last month the president of a large public university stepped down after two years in the job. The first unusual thing about that was the timing...that's a job most people keep longer, and he even suggested he'd intended to stay in it for at least four years. The second thing about it that caught my attention was that the university president in question was a retired four-star general from the US military. Going from a highly regimented, intensely bureaucratic organization like the military, to a much more creative, idea-driven place like a university, is quite a challenge, one that a lot of folks simply aren't up to.

He recently sent a letter around explaining his reasons for leaving, but reading between the lines suggests a few more reasons than what he offered.

Now that the smoke has settled, I keep getting asked the question "Why are you leaving"? Nobody asked me to leave; we have arguably had one of the best years in the school's history, and there's plenty more to do. One of the main reasons I have chosen to move on is the success we have had over the last two years - and the inevitable and predictable ache that change has caused. I thought it would take four years to get where we wanted to be in most areas. We did it in two years.

What he's saying is that he's leaving because he finished what he set out to do. But I've spoken with some professors from that school and they suggest a different reason. They told me that in many ways he was still acting like he was a general, surrounded by people that were legally required to follow his orders, instead of like a real leader who had to motivate people but not get in the way of their work. This caused some clashes between the faculty and the school administration and it's a lot easier to replace one president than to replace a bunch of professors.

But change is hard - and somebody has to initiate it and somebody had to take the heat for it. That's me. This university needed a hard turn. Now it's time for somebody else to make the next round of changes and set a new standard.

Yes, change can be hard, but it doesn't have to be. With a good leader who is open about what he's doing and who communicates that down the line, the difficulty of change can be managed. However, generals don't have to explain what they do, so maybe he's not used to that.

We needed a process to quantify and define our research goals and the strategy to reach those goals.

Hmmmmm...yes, you need defined goals, but do they HAVE to be quantified? He seems to be focusing specifically on measures of performance you can count, rather than just on developing measures of performance that could be either objective or subjective. That's a very military attitude -- how far did the troops advance today, how many push ups can you do -- that doesn't necessarily fit a more creative environment where less stringent metrics might be more appropriate.

No doubt there is more to do...But it's time for someone else to move us forward. It only took two years – vice four - to achieve what I set as goals for myself.

"what I set as goals for MYSELF" Interesting. He seems to be focusing on his own progress, rather than on the university's. When it comes to moving ahead as an individual - -say, working your way up the ranks to general -- maybe you need to focus on your own performance, and in a bureaucracy with standardized procedures it's easy enough to measure that progress.

Going from the military to the civilian world is a real shock, so moving from a senior position like he had to one where you actually have to play well with others must be incredibly difficult. This may be why you don't see many retired generals being successful in politics, given all the compromise and negotiating that must be done there. By the same token, walking into a creative environment like a university without adapting your style based on your new employees simply won't work.

Don't misunderstand me...I have worked with many of the most senior generals out there today and, as a group, I respect them highly. But when it comes to being civilian leaders, many of them have trouble making the transition. One general I knew in the 1990s retired and went on to be president of a railroad. He left in part because he still insisted on being called "General" while the people around him preferred to call him "John." Another retired four-star went on to run a major non-profit group and finally left because of clashes with the board, based somewhat on his expectation that when he said he wanted something done, it would automatically get done with no questions.

It's critical that, when you step in as a leader in a new organization, you get the lay of the land and figure out what leadership style will work there. It needs to be something you're comfortable with AND that's appropriate for the situation. Don't expect that something that worked in your old job will also work here...after all, this is a different place. Going from a rigid, bureaucratic organization to a creative one is going to require some extra effort on your part to fit in. If you can't do that, if you can't change your style, then you're better off not coming over in the first place.

Top-Down Communication

A lot of the discussion this week has been about getting everyone together on the same sheet of music (which is a pretty bad cliche, if you think about it...how many orchestras only use one sheet of music? Wouldn't it get horribly crowded around that single music stand? But I digress.). It's important to understand where you want your company to go, what position you want it to occupy in broader society, what you want your employees to do and how well they should do it...all of this is critical.

But it doesn't do any good if nobody else knows about it.

In my doctoral dissertation I studied how some parts of the US military had trouble adjusting to the end of the Cold War. What I found was that very often the senior leaders knew what they wanted to do, but those grand ideas never made their way down to the soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who were supposed to carry them out.

So you need to talk to your employees, not just about the "big picture" stuff but about the "little picture," too (how came no one ever uses the term "little picture?"). There are a lot of ways to do this. You can use e-mail, of course, which is a pretty proactive method that creates an "information push" rather than an "information pull" culture. There are other, less direct ways to communicate down the line through, say, company wikis or internal blogs or a discussion forum, but those might be less effective: your employees have to seek out that information (rather than having it pushed through to their desktop via e-mail) and you may also lose control of your message as others discuss and debate it. And of course, you could also just talk to people.

And this brings us to the subject of meetings.

Actually talking to people, in a somewhat structured environment rather than just a casual conversation in the hallway, has a lot of benefits. You can be sure that you convey whatever message you want, whether it's an evolution in the company's mission or the planning for a whitewater rafting trip. You're in a position to answer any questions that come up so you don't create more confusion than you're resolving. You can get immediate feedback, or provide folks an opportunity to come talk to you later after they've thought about things, just in case the idea you're presenting is, you know, dumb. And maybe, just maybe, you can have donuts.

As an added benefit, if you have employees scattered about working remotely, this is a good chance to bring them together and make sure they all get the same message, assuming you're on the same continent. If you're not, then there are plenty of web-based ways to bring folks into a virtual meeting or a teleconference, though of course time zones get to be an issue with that. I have a friend who works in Germany, with colleagues in Korea, and their headquarters is in Washington DC. The only people having their meeting during a normal time of day is the DC crowd, but in the end it's beneficial for everyone.

If you're going to bring everyone together for a meeting, there are a few things you can do to get the most out of it:

Let everyone know about it in advance Don't be one of those people who calls a last-minute meeting. Just don't. You'll be missing more people than you normally would plus you're likely to pull your employees out of a creative fog. Let them prep for it with some warning.

Have an agenda You, and everyone else, should know why you're having a meeting. This doesn't need to be overly formal, with set times for discussing each topic...just make sure everyone knows why they're there.

Have an ending time Don't let it drag on (and on and on and on...) especially if the same stuff is getting repeated. Know when it's going to end and then end it. If you need to follow up later, set a time to do that.

A lot of people trash talk the idea of meetings, and usually for good reason. But even though you don't want to interrupt your creative employees' work for the mundane task of sitting around discussing things, the reality is you need to communicate with them. Sometime, like it or not, the thing to do is just bite the bullet and call a meeting.

And seriously, do think about bringing some of those donuts.

Tying Employees' Objectives to Your Mission

You want to get the most out of your employees, and they want to develop their skills while doing something meaningful. If you think about it, those are pretty complementary ambitions, so you should find a tool that satisfies them both. Setting objectives for your employees that are tied to your firm's mission helps you keep them focused and allows them to see where they're improving and what they still need to work on.

First, let's talk about why you want to set objectives in the first place. You've got a collection of free-thinking, idea-spouting folks working for you, and that's great. But in terms of your profitability, you need to keep that creative energy focused. It may be a pretty broad focus, but still, you need to keep them moving at least in an appropriate direction. By giving them some guidance about what they should be doing, at least in the short term, they have a pretty good idea what they should be thinking about when they come to work.

That "short term" stuff is key...their objectives are likely to change over time, especially as they start accomplishing them, because that's what you do when you meet objectives: you set new ones. This is how businesses grow, by improving their employees' skills and increasing the quality of their product while reducing the cost of creating it. Whether that "product" consists of marketing campaigns, original academic research, hairstyles, lines of code, or whatever, you should be able to measure improvements in your employees' performance.

Measuring performance is another reason for setting objectives: how can you tell if your employees are doing well or not if you don't say what they should be doing well at? Performance feedback shouldn't be random and it shouldn't be a big surprise to your employee. You should never hear someone say to you, "I didn't know you wanted me to do THAT." If you're measuring your employees against one set of standards and they think they're supposed to be doing something else, then somebody's done something wrong, and chances are, it isn't them.

Your employees want objectives because they also want to know how well they're doing. They want to see their own progress, and there's a good chance they'll be a harsher critic of themselves than you are. They also want some focus...how many times have you heard someone say "I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing!" (hopefully, never) A group of people sitting around unsure of what to do is a bad idea.

Bottom line: you want your folks to have some focus and be working to improve and increase their skills, and that's pretty much what they want, too. So where do these objectives come from?

Well, what does your company do?

This is where you look at your firm's mission statement, and consider what's realistic and what's out of reach for right now, and create a set of objectives that helps you reach the goal you've set for your firm. They might be related to output (for example, completing a certain number of storyboards each week) or maybe linked to appropriate improvement (say, earning a particular certification within 6 months). Since your concern is on profitability, you need to focus your employees on those objectives that help you achieve that. Then use these objectives when you give them performance feedback, and be sure to highlight the link between what they're doing and the overall direction of the firm.

Your workers, of course, would like to see the company be profitable, because then they get to keep their jobs. But they also want to know that they're doing something worthwhile. When I was teaching college I often heard older professors comment that Gen X (which, incidentally, included me) and the Millennials were groups of slackers. I never believed that...instead, I saw people who weren't going to waste their time doing something useless (that's where the "slacker" impression came from), but rather, would work hard at something where they can make an impact. If you tie your workers objectives to the firm's mission, and they can easily see how what they're doing matters, then they're a lot more likely to work hard on what you want them to do than to take off in their own direction.

And if you have trouble...then work with your employees to set the objectives rather than doing it yourself in isolation. that way everybody understands and accepts them. And in the end, that's a lot more useful.

Transparency

Keeping secrets from your competition makes sense.  Keeping secrets from your employees makes problems.  Keeping secrets from your creative employees makes for some drama.  And that's not good at all.

As a leader you need to be open about what you're doing. With few exceptions, the time for secrets is over.  Forgot the passive aggressive manipulation, forget playing Jack off of Jill, forget your plans for total world domination...you've got a business to run and all of that, ALL of it, simply slows down your progress.  Leaders who play a game of "I've got a secret" lead their people into trouble.  Trying to do things in secret really explodes in your face once people find out what you're doing...and they will.

In my last government position I was in what was supposed to be the creative cell within a larger bureaucratic body.  Our division was called Strategic Plans and Initiatives...the acronym, of course, was SPI.  When I saw the devilish grins on my boss and some of my co-workers I knew we were in trouble.  "ooooh," they said, "we're the SPIs...quick, close the door!"  They were very impressed with their perceived role in the world and were pretty sure we needed to be operating behind closed doors so other divisions wouldn't learn about what we were doing.  Why we didn't want other divisions knowing what we were doing was never fully explained, but that set the tone for all of our daily activity.  

Why is transparency so important for a leader?  Well, first of all, you need to provide people a common focus.  As we discussed before, your creative employees may well go off in completely different directions without some common goals, so setting your goals and keeping them to yourself isn't going to help. I had a government boss once who told me, "I don't see why people want plans to be written down...I already know in my head what it is I want to do." Yeah, that's not helping the rest of us, because we haven't been to mind-reading class yet. If you want your employees working together (and you DO), then they need the same information, and keeping plans and issues to yourself isn't going to help.

While it's true that everybody likes surprises, it's also true that nobody likes surprises. What I mean here is that everyone (well, except for grumpy people) likes opening a present on their birthday, nobody likes opening a budget and seeing their resources got cut because of some priority they never heard of. People like to know what's going on and if they feel they're being cut out of things they're going to resent it professionally and personally. My SPI boss had someone working on a wiki-based information sharing system while the Research and Analysis division was working on integrating databases in a couple different agencies to try to achieve a similar result. But the wiki-work was being done in secret, even though the two efforts could have complemented each other, and because some good effort was divided, and everybody got mad when the "secret" project was revealed in the budget meetings, neither project ended up going anywhere. A bunch of drama in the workplace doesn't help, and that's exactly what you'll get from a creative bunch of folks who spend their time coming up with good ideas and hate seeing them wasted.

Yes, in many businesses you face inter-office politics, and that's usually the justification for a lack of transparency. But the impact that different groups in your organization will have on each others should lead to more transparency, not less. Chances are you need to get buy-in from other divisions to encourage cooperation and reduce friction in budget plans and such. Maybe your employees' work is only going to matter if it's done in conjunction with others, and so you need cooperation rather than competition. Try to overcome the problem of politics rather than feeding it.

Having said all of this, there ARE some things you need to keep quiet. Personnel matters, for instance...not everyone needs to know who's making how much money or which employee has only 3 weeks to show some improvement before being let go (THAT employee needs to know, but you shouldn't broadcast it to everyone). Private matters and problems at home shouldn't be advertised...if you know one of your folks is having trouble at home and it's going to affect their work, find another way to explain that impact in the office without giving all the private details of your employee's life. Remember, "transparency" is not the same as "feeding the gossip machine."

If the reason you limit transparency in the office is because you don't trust your employees -- maybe you're concerned they'll go to a competitor, or perhaps use the information to take your job and get ahead -- that's a sign of a bigger problem. Why do you have people working for you whom you don't trust? If you really and truly don't trust your employees and peers, then the best thing to do is to go elsewhere, because this is a company destined for BIG problems.

Mission Analysis

We've talked about having a vision for your company and the importance of having a mission statement, but how do you understand what your vision and mission are? These aren't things you just sit down and scratch out after 5 minutes of sitting in Starbucks (well, at least, they SHOULDN'T be). If they're going to be meaningful, if they're going to help you lead your employees, and if they're going to help you with your planning, then they need to be grounded in the real world and have some real applicability to what you want to do. If you just pull them out of nowhere then that's exactly where they'll lead you. But if you put some thought into these, then they will serve as the bedrock of your strategic planning process and help you figure out what your employees should be doing and what resources they need to do it. And in the end, you should be far more successful.

Mission analysis should be the first step in any strategic planning process. Whether you are writing your initial business plan or preparing for a transformation of an established company, you need to understand what you want and the basics of how to get there. there are some things you have to accept in this world and there are other things you can change...we'll talk a bit more about those in future weeks but for now just understand that you really need to know what it is you what to achieve and how that fits into the environment where you'll be achieving it.

First, you need to have some guidance from the top dog in your company. If YOU are the top dog, well then ask yourself why you started all this in the first place. Write down all the things that occur to you. Knowing all of the rationales for having this creative group of employees will help shape the set of "acceptable options" for your vision and mission statements.

Look at the state of your competitive field. Are you all alone, so unique that you have no direct competition? Or are you in a field that is already pretty filled up, which might require you to create your own niche, or maybe take up the excess demand that exists in your market? Understanding what's already out there will give you an idea of what goals will be realistic, and what's needed in the industry. Are you going to provide a service to any potential customer or only to those with particular needs? How broad, or how narrow, will your vision be? Only by understanding the competitive market will you have an idea what you should be doing.

Take a look at the industry's history to understand what works and what doesn't. There's no sense in aiming for a goal that has been proven unattainable. Santayana said "those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it." So don't be like those guys. At the same time, if something's been tried before and failed but the circumstances are different now, then it may be time to go for it again and see what happens. If you're going to jump into an industry, know what you're jumping into.

Consider your own history too, of course, with "your own" being defined as both yours and your firm's. If you're leading the firm then think about your own demonstrated skills and resources. Whether you're at the top or not, give some thought to what your firm has tried before, what's worked and what hasn't, what opportunities seemed out of reach in the past. Is your firm ready to evolve into something new, maybe growing bigger or expanding into a new field? Or do you perhaps have enough on your plate for now, and maybe just some tightening up of your business processes is all you should really attempt for now? In order to have a firm grasp on where you are and where you want to go it helps to understand how you got here.

If you're able to articulate your own desires, and the limitations and possibilities presented by the environment, then you're in a position to define you vision and mission. This is the first step in your strategic planning and if you take the time and do this well it will make everything that follows SO much easier, and much more useful, too.

What's Your Mission?

What do you do?

Seriously, when you come to work in the morning do you ever ask yourself, "why am I here?"

A lot of people go to church to answer this question, but for our purposes, giving it a little thought in the office can do wonders for you.

When you're making decisions about your business -- such things as what jobs you want your employees to perform, what skills they need, how many people you have, how to spend your money -- all of this should be designed to support your mission.

But what do we mean by "your mission?" Well, if you identified your firm's vision, then that tells you what you what the world to look like. Your mission is what you do to get there. It's the main function that you perform, and everything your employees do should either advance that mission or support those who do.

Unlike vision statements, which we said last week should be involve more nouns than verbs, mission statement should be more "verby." These are action statement, they say what you DO, not what you WANT. For example, let's say you're in a public relations firm. Your vision statement might be something along the lines of "Our clients can walk into any room of their choosing and everyone there knows who they are." Your mission, then, is to create that environment. Your mission statement could be something like "we use every available medium of communication to put our clients' names in the forefront of the public's mind," which says you see your purpose as creating public familiarity with your clients. Or maybe, "we tout our clients' successes while allowing them to learn from their mistakes in private," suggesting that your function is to promote the good news stories while keeping quiet those things that will hurt your clients' reputations so the public has good feelings about them.

Your mission statement should be specific enough to get you to your vision while being broad enough to encompass all you do. It doesn't need to identify every specific task performed in your company, but every specific task should fit within the broad outline you've described. We'll talk more tomorrow about how to create your mission statement.

The most important outcome of defining your mission is that it gives your employees some focus. In a bureaucratic environment where the mission is pretty well understood -- "we'll do the same things tomorrow we did yesterday" -- it's easier for employees to absorb that focus by immersing themselves in the organizational culture. But when it comes to more creative enterprises, especially those in fast-paced, changing environments, your employees are going to be thrown into a mixing bowl at high speed and they'll need some direction to keep them moving forward and avoid the blades of this really bad metaphor that I just decided I don't like. OK, here's the thing: you get a bunch of talented, free-thinking, creative people together and they will come up with great ideas that may have nothing to do with your business. Ten people could easily go in ten different directions if you don't have something that ties them together. That's what a mission statement does for you.

It's easy to just pencil-whip these, crank out something that sounds high-minded but is devoid of any real meaning. "Quality is Job #1" was a statement used by Ford Motor Company for many years -- I'm not sure if they intended it to be their mission statement but it was on banners and everything, so maybe it was. But it didn't give any direction to employees, except perhaps to say "don't make mistakes," but really, the mission of Ford isn't to not make mistakes...it's to make money. So why not have describe your mission in such a way as to help you get to that?

Something to keep in mind: if you're doing something, and you can't figure out how it relates to your mission, then maybe, just maybe, you shouldn't be doing it. If you come across something like that, and you're afraid to make a change and stop doing it, well, just accept that you're spending resources on something that doesn't really matter, which translates into "wasting time and money." That's not good. When we talk about being creative, we don't mean "find a creative way to go out of business."

Understanding why you're here is important. Gaining that understanding isn't always easy. But with a little thought you'll gain a lot of focus, and that will keep you moving ahead of your competitors, and also help your employees understand why, exactly, they should show up for work each day.

Management by Wandering About

Back in the day there emerged a concept called Management by Walking Around. The idea behind it was pretty sound: you can't lead people from behind a closed door, but instead need to get out there and see what they're doing, listen to what they have to say, and so on. It's a motivational tool and also a way to keep information flowing and communication open. This works better than an "open door policy" because honestly, that's a pretty passive thing for the boss. You're waiting for employees to come to you and one problem with that is, by the time they DO come to you, it's often because a problem has gotten big, a problem that could have been dealt with sooner.

Anyway, Management by Walking Around is a very useful idea. It gained popularity in a time before e-mail, so some might say that now information and communication can flow electronically without the need for personal contact. I think that's wrong. First, your employees need to know you're interested in what they're doing, and getting out from behind your desk demonstrates that. Plus, they might be doing some pretty specialized tasks, and that's simply not going to translate in an e-mail. And of course, if they're having trouble producing, you'll have a better idea why if you've actually been out there interacting with and observing them.

But there's another way this could go...what I call Management by Wandering About. And this one's not so great. For me there's a big difference between this and Walking Around. Walking Around is all about 2-way interaction with your employees so you can create a better workplace and a better product. Wandering About is all about self-gratification, cornering your employees so they have to listen to you. It's about walking into people's cubicles with your coffee and interrupting the flow of their work. Too often, it's about walking in and regaling them with tales of your time in the French Resistance, or this great restaurant you found in Kuala Lumpur. Ultimately, you end up abusing your authority -- because really, people can't just tell the boss to piss off -- by making people listen to you even when they have better things to do.

The worst, of course, is when you wander into people's work and tell them how to do what they're doing when you don't have any real expertise or knowledge of what they've done before now.

If it sounds like I have experience with a boss like this, I do. And you probably do too. My last boss in government was a really good guy whom I respected. He was a good leader and this was the only truly annoying habit he had (well, other than preferring Holiday Inn while the rest of us liked Hilton) so we could certainly forgive him that. Unfortunately, after 40 years of government service around the world he was full of stories which were occasionally interesting but which also ran on and on and on and on (and on and on). And these were one-sided stories -- as soon as you mentioned something of your own that would remind him "of that one time" and he'd be off. Interesting though it might have been, he really gave his employees the idea that he didn't view what they said as very important because he was always cutting people off in favor of his own tales. And of course, he interrupted their work, which in a creative field can be a little tricky since once people start running with a good idea it's often best to let them keep going.

So don't be that guy. Get out there, yes, and talk with your employees, but that's talk WITH, not just talk TO. Communication goes both ways. And if you get the feeling that by strolling around the office you might be annoying your employees rather than motivating or helping them, you're probably right.

Mentoring

Mentoring someone is a lot of fun, very rewarding, something you can be proud of. And if you do it wrong, you can really screw someone up for life.

When we talk about mentoring we mean something more formal than just giving someone advice, but less formal than a manager-employee relationship. In fact, it’s probably best if you don’t mentor the people whose performance reports you write or whose pay you control. This can lead to problems I’ll touch on in a moment. That’s not to say you shouldn’t help develop the people who work directly for you, but if you’re offering guidance on how to deal with problems in the workplace, it’s best if you aren’t one of those problems.

Mentors tend to be someone in a similar field with a bit more experience and a desire to share that experience with someone else. If the person you’re going to mentor is a potential competitor of yours in the workplace, you might want to think twice…mentoring and career sabotage don’t mix well. Instead, find someone with similar interests, maybe someone who reminds you of you when you were “that age” (though they might only be a couple years younger), and who is going to follow behind you on the career track, or maybe on a parallel or somewhat divergent path. Your experience needs to be relevant to be useful.

You should have regular meetings with your mentee. This doesn’t need to be formal, doesn’t need to be documented, and can happen with a regularity of your choosing…some people prefer weekly, others look for monthly chats, but whatever the frequency there should be some consistency. It might be good if afterwards you wrote some notes to yourself so you can follow-up on isssues later or get answers to any questions that arose, but nothing that would be stuck into an employee’s personnel file. If possible, do it away from the workplace…and, if your work doesn’t involve a workplace, try to keep it in a neutral spot to avoid any sense of “employer-employee”-ness creeping in.

Mentoring is a great opportunity to take the lessons you’ve learned and help someone else apply them. One thing to avoid, though, is too much of the “if I knew then what I know now” syndrome. Don’t take someone 10 years junior to you and try to make a clone of who you are now. You got where you are through your collected experiences, and they need to do the same. Explain mistakes you made, discuss opportunities you wish you’d taken advantage of, but don’t try to re-live your life through your mentee. Help them take advantage of the opportunities open to them, help guide them around and over the challenges they face…their life is different from yours and you need to give them the tools, not try to build a replica of your house for them.

Oh…and, don’t try to date your mentee. Seriously. Bad karma.

Seeing Your Vision

How do you want your world to look?

When you say your business is successful…what do you mean?

If everybody does what they’re supposed to do, what have they done?

The answers to these help you find your Vision. For many large companies and government agencies, “Vision Statements” are nothing more than something to print on a poster and hang everywhere, or stick on a website so your clients think you “get them.” But if it’s just a slogan, or if it’s designed to fit on a coffee mug in a pleasing font, then it isn’t going to help you at all. On the other hand, if you really put some thought into it, it’ll help you drive your business toward success, and it will offer some focus to all those wild-eyed dreamers, and squinty-eyed accountants, working for you.

If you're going to do some planning -- and you should - - you need to have some idea where you want to go. You really need to know where this business should be heading before you start worrying about budgeting, personnel, where do buy the coffee, key things like that. And as you're trying to lead your employees, you should be able to communicate your Vision to them to give them a target to shoot for. As for you, your leadership style and the techniques you use should be based on what it is you're trying to accomplish. So don't just pencil-whip it. Your Vision Statement should be the result of some real effort.

A good Vision Statement should be descriptive, using lots of nouns and not a whole lot of verbs. It’s not so much what you want to do -– that comes later -– it’s what you want to be, what you want to create, what you want your clients or customers to do or have or get. This should be the first step in any serious planning you do because it allows you to define success and puts a goal out there around which everything you do should revolve. If you don’t know where you’re going, how will you decide how to get there? For that matter, how will you ever know you’ve arrived?

It really shouldn't be the result of just one person's thinking. I mean, if you're the creator of a new firm, you probably have a pretty good idea where you want it go. But as you grow, you'll want to include others in that discussion and decision. Why? Because the discussions you have about your Vision will help you know if you've got a collection of like-minded team members or if you have 20 people going in 20 different directions (hint: that's not so good)

You need to make your Vision Statement realistic, but remember that “realistic” and “likely” are different words. It’s like the difference between “possible” and “probable” – the former is adventurous, the latter is safe. Realism depends on the time frame of your planning…if you’re only looking a year down the road you’re likely to be stuck with the resources you have, but if you look five years away, a lot more options (and challenges) occur.

When I wrote my doctoral dissertation I discussed how government agencies change (or not) when the world around them changes. One of the things I emphasized was the need for a good Vision that was communicated to, and accepted by, the members of the organization. One of my advisors said she thought government agencies spent too much time writing Vision Statements and then ignoring them, and she's probably right. But she was wrong when she said they were unimportant...if done right, they're one of the most important tools to help you lead your business.

Consider some of these:

“We create companies we’d be proud to have our children work for.” (Trium)

“A free and democratic Iraq.”

“We focus on our clients’ outer beauty so they can focus on their inner beauty.” (Hair by Mulan)

“Maximum shareholder value.”

These don’t tell you how they’re going to get there or where the money’s coming from to get there, but they DO tell where “there” is. With that in mind you’re in a better position to recruit the right people, obtain the right resources, and develop the best courses of action. It will also let you figure out if you’re biting off more than you can chew.

And if it fits on a coffee cup…that’s cool too.

It's Not the Plan, It's the Planning

A well-developed business plan, with lots of PowerPoint slides, appendices, bibliographies, all wrapped up in a nice shiny binder, is a great thing.  For example, it makes a great doorstop.  It can be used to prop up the corner of a crooked desk.  It makes a great place to set your coffee. One thing is doesn't provide, though, is a guarantee of success.

Does that mean you shouldn't bother with a plan?  Of course not!  A good plan, whether for your long-term business, your management in the office, or a who-woulda-thunk-it contingency, is a useful thing to have.  It provides a starting point...sure, things will change, but it helps to have something to change from, rather than just standing around slack-jawed waiting for someone to come up with an idea when the world starts to change around you.

The real benefit, though, isn't in the plan...it's in the planning.

A good planning process starts with questions.  What is the world around me like?  What resources do I have?  What do I want to accomplish?  What are my obstacles and opportunities?  How do I get from Point A to Point B?  Do I even want to be at Point B?  These questions help you define your world and determine not only how to make it look like you want, but what it is you want it to look like in the first place.

Once you start answering these questions, the impossible (or at least, the improbable) often becomes possible.  You start to see what's important and what's not, you see new avenues open up, you consider connections and networks that weren't obvious before.  You may find that where you really want to be is far different from what you originally thought.  Or maybe it's the same.  The thing is, you won't know until you ask...and start answering.

It's not enough to just dream about what could be...a good planning effort forces you to be realistic, but also helps you redefine "realistic."  The simple act of putting things down on paper forces you to really think, to debate ideas, to divide up your resources and match them to your goals.  In short, it gets you away from talking about all those things you should be doing and moves you in the direction of doing them.

This last point is critical.  "Talk talk talk" does not good if not followed by "act act act"."  For many of us in the creative fields we like to explore new possibilities, consider what we could do "if...,"  and talk long into the night about great opportunities.  A popular ad campaign in the 1980s said, "At Hewlitt-Packard, we never stop asking 'what if?,'" but some follow-on action is necessary to turn "what if?" into "sweet!"