DDI’s Talent Management Intelligence

When It Comes to Leadership, All Conversations are Crucial

By Mark Busine

In the four decades leading up to 2010, perhaps the most significant change in the corporate landscape was the transition from an economic society based on physical and tangible assets, such as plants and equipment, to one based on intangible assets, including customer relationships, brand, ideas, and innovation. It is now estimated that intangible assets account for more than 80 percent of an organization’s value and knowledge workers more than 40 percent of the workforce.

In recent years, McKinsey and Co. has explored the relationship between workplace interactions and the productivity of knowledge workers, believing that the key to improving knowledge worker productivity lies in organizations’ ability to identify and address the barriers workers face in their daily interactions. This research, for which McKinsey examined several knowledge-based organizations, focused on the broader barriers (physical/technical, social/cultural, contextual, and time) that inhibit effective workplace interactions.

While these barriers are important, this view overlooks a significant reality: leaders spend a significant portion of their time engaged in interactions, and the quality of these interactions, including informal discussions, has a significant impact on the performance and productivity of both the individuals and the organization.

Consider for a moment the amount of time wasted in poorly managed meetings. Or worse, the lost productivity when somebody leaves a discussion frustrated and disengaged. If organizations were able to quantify the financial impact of poor conversations, they would quickly conclude that improving the quality of workplace interactions must be a priority for both the organization and individual leaders. Indeed, one might conclude that the ability to effectively manage interactions is at the heart of successful leadership.

The Common Interaction Traps

Through our research and our work with thousands of leaders all around the world and across all levels of the leadership pipeline, we at DDI have identified seven common interaction traps that inhibit leader, team, and organizational effectiveness.

1. Going straight to fixing the problem. 
   Leaders, who have often been rewarded and promoted for getting things done and fixing problems, can jump too quickly to presenting the solution. In doing so, they fail to understand the context of a situation and miss opportunities to include all parties.
    
2. (Mistakenly) believing one size fits all.
   Over time, people develop a preferred style and/or approach to interactions. In their comfort level with how they prefer to do things, they can be oblivious to the impact their approach has in certain situations and on certain individuals. They may also struggle to accommodate different perspectives.
    
3. >Avoiding the tough issues.
   Many leaders struggle to address the tough issues, in particular performance issues. They lack the skills and insight to diffuse uncomfortable situations and/or tackle sensitive topics. As a result, issues can go unresolved, leading to even greater tension and more serious problems.
    
4. Inconsistently applying skills.
   Leaders often adopt a different approach when confronted with different situations and contexts. As a result, they may readily apply skills to some interactions while not applying them to others—an inconsistency that can breed confusion and feed a perception that the leader is ineffective.
    
5. Influencing through the facts only.
   As leaders move through the ranks, they increasingly need to influence through personal rather than position power. Too often leaders rely on logic and rationale to position an argument or point of view when they would be better served by a “softer” approach that will allow them to build strong networks and appeal to the unique needs and circumstances of individual stakeholders.
    
6. Spotting opportunities for change but forgetting to engage others.
   Leaders often recognize opportunities for improvement in areas such as products and processes but struggle to include and engage others in the change process. They don’t proactively encourage their team members and peers to develop ideas; they oversimplify the issues surrounding change and show little appreciation for the impact change can have on people.
    
7. Coaching in the moment.
   When they need to coach direct reports, leaders often struggle to provide coaching in a timely fashion—when it’s needed most. Furthermore, the conclusions leaders reach about their team members’ development needs can often be superficial, causing them to miss opportunities to fully investigate and understand the underlying performance gaps.

Improving Leadership Interactions

In the field of electronics a circuit breaker is an automatic electrical switch designed to protect an electrical circuit from damage caused by an overload or short circuit. Its core function is to interrupt an otherwise damaging electrical flow. When leaders have and apply the skills they need for effective conversations with their team members, peers, and other key stakeholders, the skills act as a sort of circuit breaker to prevent damage to critical relationships. At DDI, we refer to these critical skills as the Interaction Essentials because they are the foundational behaviors that make leaders effective. They include:

• Maintain or enhance self-esteem.
• Listen and respond with empathy.
• Ask for help and encourage involvement.
• Share thoughts, feelings, and rationale (to build trust).
• Provide support without removing responsibility (to build ownership).

The Interaction Essentials also include interaction guidelines that form a five-stage process (Open, Clarify, Develop, Agree, and Close) leaders follow to ensure that interactions achieve their intended outcomes. These skills may sound like common sense, but our research has shown that leaders often lack them. The good news is that these skills are developable. With the right training, practice, and continual application, any leader can acquire these skills and become adept at conducting effective and successful conversations that serve to strengthen relationships and drive engagement and results.

Conclusion

In many organizations people typically are moved into leadership positions based on their strong technical knowledge and skills. In fact, the promotion into a leadership role is often a “reward” for having demonstrated technical excellence. However, the assumption that people with strong technical skills make good leaders is simply not true. The functions and skills of leadership are quite different and require a fundamental shift in the way one thinks and operates.

The transition to a leadership role is difficult. It’s challenging but also achievable. Acquiring core skills such as interaction skills is possible for anyone willing to try new behaviors and new ways of viewing themself and their work.

Mark Busine is the general manager of DDI Australia.

Download your copy of DDI Australia’s latest white paper, Driving Workplace Productivity through High Quality Interactions. Also, get a copy of The Essential Guide to Interaction Essentials and learn more about DDI’s Interaction Management^®: Exceptional Leaders (IM: ExL^SM) series by visiting www.ddiworld.com/imexl.

How Foster Wheeler Keeps Their Facilitators Sharp

By Craig Irons

Foster Wheeler, the engineering and construction company and power equipment supplier, is building something critically important—a global talent pipeline. The centerpiece of this effort, a program called Learning to Lead, is being used to develop frontline leaders around the world.

In the most recent issue of GO magazine, I uncover the details of Learning to Lead’s origins and the importance of influence, collaboration, relationship-building, and sharing in driving its acceptance around the world—an approach Beth Sexton, Foster Wheeler’s senior vice president of HR, describes as “global strategy, local implementation.”   

As I learned when I interviewed Beth, the 29 internal facilitators who deliver the program worldwide are especially critical to Learning to Lead’s success. 

Beth shared the following for how she and her team ensure that these facilitators stay fresh, engaged, and effective.

• Stress the need to keep improving. “Even though we have exceeded our expectations on the scores and feedback we’ve been getting from our managers, we are still committed to continuous improvement,” says Sexton. “That’s why we think it’s so important to identify and share best practices.”
• Help them connect.  To help them make and maintain that connection, Foster Wheeler’s HR team created an internal facilitator network that provides a forum for facilitators to discuss shared challenges and new ideas, and examine the metrics associated with the delivery of the courses.
• Keep them sharp. The Foster Wheeler HR team launched a “facilitator sustainability” initiative where a master trainer will co-deliver courses with facilitators and also use the Development Accelerator tools built into DDI’s new Interaction Management^®: Exceptional Leaders series to help keep the facilitators’ skills fresh. This is especially valuable in helping facilitators transition back and forth between their primary job roles and the facilitator role they need to fill when delivering a course.
• Emphasize personal development. “I think our own HR people would tell you that this is one of the best things that happened to them, and to their careers,” says Sexton. “I feel like we’ve been able to help them look at this as a big part of their own personal development, and it’s been a homerun in every direction.”

I invite you to read more about Foster Wheeler’s Learning to Lead program and explore the entire current issue of GO. 

Craig Irons is Managing Editor of GO magazine.

Stop Monkeying Around in the Middle

By Verity Bisset-Powell

Early this month it was reported that researchers in Liverpool and Manchester (UK) had observed Barbary macaques for almost 600 hours, and found that "middle hierarchy" monkeys experienced the most amount of stress. Dr. Susanne Shultz, a research fellow who oversaw the study, said: "What we found was that monkeys in the middle of the hierarchy are involved with conflict from those below them as well as from above, whereas those in the bottom of the hierarchy distance themselves from conflict. The middle-ranking macaques are more likely to challenge, and be challenged."  

Swap out references to “monkeys” in that quote. Replace with “managers”. The sentiment would hold true. In the recent recession, the role of the middle manager has never been so imperative. The organisations that have successfully surfed through the tidal wave of economic devastation, have been able to do so because they have responded with quick, engaged agility – decisions and changes cascading with ease through company structures. These middle managers played a pivotal role in influencing improvements both up and down the organisation, responding to practical and personal reactions from all directions. Not every organisation has had such a rosy time however, as documented in the HCI Mid-Level Managers research which states that “Even today, as the economy moves into recovery, only 14 percent of respondents see their mid-levels as fully engaged. The ramifications are serious. If mid-levels aren’t managing with energy and optimism, it follows that neither will staff who look to their leaders for strength and guidance, especially during tough times.” So what about the other 86% of respondents, whose managers are not fully engaged? The below list represents some of the challenges that these mid-level leaders will struggle to address within two years of role:

1. Leading change
2. Making tough decisions
3. Executing work priorities
4. Developing talent
5. Networking / partnering with others

Those 5 trials are not going to be innately resolved simply due to a job title. Managers are not born, they are made. Such a simple and logical sentence – yet so easily disregarded. DDI completed a survey which asked leaders to rank a list of life’s challenges in order of greatest difficulty. Making a transition at work (promotion) soared above moving house, managing teenagers, becoming a parent, and getting married. Like the monkeys; the middle managers experience extreme stress with activities such as navigating politics, achieving through others, and making high-risk decisions;  causing peak anxiety…when not provided with the right support. Prior to, or upon promotion, middle managers should receive specific developmental guidance including blended learning areas such as those shown below:

• Formal: Classroom workshops on topics such as executing strategy, driving innovation, developing organisational talent, or operating with a global lens.
• Informal: Diagnostic tools for personality awareness, and behavioural perception. Community / CSR projects. Internal networking sites such as SharePoint discussion boards.
• On-The-Job: Development planning and sustained coaching from manager / mentor. Individual or peer projects to test application of skills. Peer networking with example sharing.

With this level of development, middle managers in your organisation are more likely to land in the 14 percent engaged leader category, rather than just swing aimlessly and cause damage to your organisational branches. Middle managers make a huge difference in your organisation; socially and economically. So don’t just give them bananas – invest in robust, actionable, behaviour-based development. Can you really afford not to?

Verity Bissett-Powell is a Business Development Executive at DDI UK.

Harnessing Social Media for Leadership Development - Part 2

By Aviel Selkovits

In part 1 of our series, we discussed how social media is currently being used in leadership development and the benefits that social media offers. In part 2, we'll explore barriers to success and how to set our leaders up to succeed.

I Built It, But They Won’t Come

We asked those organizations that are using social media for leadership development if they are having success, and what seemed to be the biggest barriers. Before looking at the data, we hypothesized the biggest reason might be on the technology implementation side. What the survey told us was that the single biggest barrier to implementing social media tools as part of leadership development is that the leaders are not comfortable or familiar with the tools.

So we first need to train our leaders on how to use these tools–if they have not been offered any training or best practices on how to post to a discussion board, what kinds of questions are appropriate, or how to respond to (or write an original) blog entry, they will be hesitant to use it. When it comes to social media, there is nothing more daunting than a blank forum or blog. If you simply put these tools out there to be used . . . they won’t be!

This may be why the next most common barrier is the amount of work it takes to implement social media options. It requires the facilitators, trainers, and implementers to be the experts in the best use of these tools. While many of them come with low or no cost, it takes a significant amount of time to become experts and to drive leaders to them in a way that is value-added and meaningful to their ongoing development or application of newly-developed skills.

Any platform and IT support must go hand-in-hand. One of the struggles organizations have is where to drive leaders to use these tools. Should it be on an LMS? Or should they purchase a platform? The answer to this question may be different in every organization depending on internal technology infrastructure and relationship with IT, but it’s an important question to answer before you start adding in these technologies.

How Can We Set Ourselves—and Our Leaders—Up for Success?

There are a number of steps organizations can take to better position themselves. We mentioned earlier that leaders are not as comfortable with how to use these tools, but we also need to assess how comfortable we are, as training & development professionals, with using them. We need to ensure that we have a strong understanding of how to use social media, when the best time to use it is (for example, would a discussion forum work better before formal learning, or after the session?), and then we can help our leaders understand as well.

We asked some questions to get at the heart of some of these processes and found many organizations have not yet put them in place. Start with your strategy. Most organizations now have policies or guidelines in place for how associates can use social media as it pertains to their work, but many organizations have not defined a strategy around social media as it pertains to leadership development (or other HR practices). This is a great place to start because it will help incorporate other best practices, such as understanding whose job it is to hold leaders accountable for using the tools, how you plan to measure the tool’s effectiveness, or what skills the development team needs to have in order to implement and support leaders' use of these tools.

*Rated 1 to 5 on a scale of Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree

Take a look at the items above–how many would you agree with when you think about your organization? These will get you started as you think about your social media strategy. Thinking through these questions will help you assess how ready you are, where some potential implementation gaps exist, what barriers you may come up against, and also where you have the greatest opportunity for early wins.

Aviel is a DDI Senior Marketing Consultant.

For more information and best practices on using social media as part of a winning leadership development initiative, register for our upcoming webinar. The Law of the Hammer in Training is on March 13 from 1 to 1:30 pm ET.

Harnessing Social Media for Leadership Development - Part 1

By Aviel Selkovits

Social media has become a wonderful resource for recruiters both to source candidates, and to help build an employment brand. In this two-part series, we'll discuss how to use social media as part of your leadership development initiatives. In this first post, we'll look into how social media is currently being used in leadership development and the benefits that social media offers. In Part 2, we'll explore the barriers to success and how to set your leaders up for success. 

Recently, we surveyed 181 HR executives to learn more about how they were using social media for leadership development. We asked why and how organizations are using social media, what internal processes they had worked through to ensure these new tools would deliver a return on training investment, and whether their leaders saw value in taking time to engage with the new technologies and activities. So what is the state of social media and leadership development?

Is Anyone Even Using This Stuff?

Yes and no. The survey revealed that about one-half of responding organizations are not yet using social media as part of their leadership development initiatives. And those who are utilizing tools aren’t using them in a blended manner. This is not surprising at all–while many social tools have been around for some time, their value is still unproven when it comes to leadership development. And there aren’t really a set of best practices around how to effectively use these tools in a way that delivers value.

However, there are a number of survey respondents who have been successfully incorporating social tools for other kinds of development such as knowledge transfer, or to connect internal communities of practice. These can also be housed on many internal systems and often do not require the purchase of any external technologies (Microsoft SharePoint has the ability to create blogs, wikis, and discussion forums, for example.) Blogs and internal streams are also tools that have been growing in popularity. Again, with the low- or no-cost technologies it is easy to get access to these tools. While these tools have proven to add value in the world of knowledge management, their effectiveness is still largely unproven when it comes to leadership development initiatives.

Why Should We Even Consider These Tools?

There are a number of benefits that these technologies present in terms of driving more sustainable leadership development. They help connect geographically dispersed learners, reconnect learners for application sessions after formal, in-person learning events, and facilitate learners reaching out to one another to share leadership successes and struggles. The chart below shows the division of how organizations are currently using these tools.

In fact, most organizations are using social media to drive continuous learning in one form or another (connecting in between events, or driving a culture of continuous learning). A smaller portion of respondents are using it to match generational learning styles–and here is an area of caution. While younger generations (Gen Y especially) have “grown up” with these tools, and may have a level of savvy that others might not, that does not mean they understand the value that social media technologies have for their professional development. In fact, in DDI’s special report Generation Next: Ready to Step Up, or Step Out?, we found that Gen Yers felt that coaching (either with a manager, or other internal or external coach) was the most effective form of development.

Aviel Selkovits is a DDI Senior Marketing Consultant.

Turning Doctors into Managers

Healthcare’s new physician leader calls for someone who, figuratively, holds a dual-major in medicine and leadership.

By Debra Walker

Doctors become doctors because they’re interested in the art of healing, so promoting doctors into leadership roles needs to balance the hands-on practice of medicine with the demands of a leadership role.

So how can talent management professionals successfully transition doctors into managers? Define the role, diagnose a physician’s leadership readiness, and develop them to be the leaders your organization needs.

Define: What you are looking for in your physician leaders?

You must first define what to look for scientifically by clarifying the role of a physician leader. This includes the combination of knowledge, experience, competencies, and personal traits that is required for a leader in your organization to be successful.

Diagnose: What is needed for a physician to make the leadership leap?

Next, you have to measure physicians against the profile to determine their readiness to step into a leadership role, whether they have the personal attributes to be a leader, and if they have demonstrated solid performance in their role.

Develop: How can a physician acquire or improve their leadership skills?

Now determine those areas that can easily be developed—specifically areas like communication, coaching, delegating, and managing others, versus those more personal attributes that are more difficult to develop. Physician development has to be relevant to them for them to justify spending the time on it.

Debra Walker is a member of DDI’s Healthcare Practice.
 
Read the full article, Developing Physician Leaders, for more on how you can define, diagnose, and develop with your physician leadership audience.

Executives Under the Microscope: What leaders CAN do is not always what they WILL do

By Matt Paese, Ph.D.

Excerpted from
Leadership Insights—How Executives React:  Behavior amid Challenges

When business leaders step into new assignments, or are suddenly presented with new challenges, what do they do, specifically? How do executives react? In Part 1 of our Leadership Insights series, we look into the data to answer the following question: 

“Which specific behaviors most frequently characterize the responses of executives as they take on new and challenging assignments?” 

With startling regularity, organizations give tremendous responsibility to leaders whose track records suggest that they can be successful making the jump to a more challenging assignment, only to learn (the hard way) that what a leader CAN do is often very different from what a leader actually WILL do on the job. 

If one thing characterizes the challenge of executive leadership, it is the ability to adapt.  Surprises occur almost constantly, requiring leaders to react instinctively without training or preparation.  The question so many organizations struggle to answer as they plan for the future is, “How will our leaders react when surprised by the business challenges we will soon face?” As we will see, that struggle may be due, in large part, to the fact that many aren’t looking closely enough at the specific behavior patterns that leaders display when responding to challenges.

The only true way of knowing what someone will do when presented with a new situation is of course to watch him or her do it.  But since we don’t have a low-risk way to watch leaders perform in jobs they haven’t yet assumed, we must find other ways of getting as close to what they will do as possible. Interviews that examine prior experiences and accomplishments are useful measures of what one did do in the past, and tests and inventories of personality, cognitive ability, or other stable internal attributes are helpful measures of one might or can do. But for complex assignments like executive leadership roles, these measures take us only part of the way to will do. 

Read all of Leadership Insights: Part One by visiting www.ddiworld.com/leadershipinsights, where you can also follow the series. Share your comments, questions and observations by posting a comment in this blog. 

"The Law of the Hammer" in Training - Part Two

By: Pete Weaver

Part Two

There are three general principles that should guide your plans to leverage social technology, particularly for leadership development and other “soft” skills:

1. Formal Learning is Still Important.

Our experience is that most interaction and leadership skills are actually best acquired and honed in a formal, intentional learning experience that includes lots of time for controlled practice and feedback.

Social media tools should never serve as a replacement to formal learning! Rather, they are ideal for surrounding and enriching the formal learning events. Social media technologies are best suited to:

• Setting the stage for learning.
• Helping extend the learning.
• Keeping learners focused on applying their skills.
• Enhancing networking opportunities within a cohort of learners.

It is our firm belief that while the social tools sometimes seem magical, the true magic remains in the optimal mix of learning experiences.

2. Test to Learn—Adapt to Perfect.

There are two major arenas to pilot and test before you take social learning technology wide and deep: 1) people and 2) technology. Don’t underestimate the challenges with either.

Use focus groups, test cohorts, feedback surveys, and anecdotal hearsay to test and refine your approach with your people. Seek help from technical partners (internal and/or external) to shake out the new technology in your environment, on your devices, in your software mix, and through your firewall.

3. Don't Cut Communication Corners.

When an organization chooses to use social media to drive learning and development, it should take care to devote the same communication and orientation resources that it would for any major change initiative. There are no smart shortcuts to introducing technology for something as personal as learning. Be sure to plan and execute a thoughtful approach to communication and implementation suited to your culture and objectives.

Sometimes Pliers Are a Better Option

While there are numerous social media types and platforms available, some are more appropriate than others for learning and development in “soft skill” areas like leadership. We need to match the tool to the need; some social learning tools are better pliers than hammers. Each technology provides a different array of benefits, but no technology will work across all organizations or implementations, nor will it suit every type of content or topic.

Remember to seek an effective and balanced mix rather than putting the full training burden on just one approach, to test for both people and technology compatibility, and finally to thoroughly communicate and execute the strategy.

My father taught me at an early age two important things about household and automotive tools—1) having the right tool for the job is one key to success, and 2) knowing how to use it is equally important. Our craft in learning and development is no different. Matching the right mix of solutions for each situation is more important than conjuring up as many ways to use our “hammer du jour” as we can contrive.  

To learn more about integrating development tools and activities before, during, and after formal learning events, register for DDI’s Accelerating Development Beyond the Classroom webinar on February 12, 2013 from to 1-1:45 pm.

Patterson S. (Pete) Weaver is DDI’s Senior Vice President, Leadership Solutions.

"The Law of the Hammer" in Training

By: Pete Weaver

Part One

In 1996, Abraham Maslow quipped that “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” What does this have to do with business and training? Recently, I have become concerned that the “hammer du jour” in our metaphoric trunk is high technology.

First, let me say that this post is not a Luddite rant against technology per se. This new millennium has brought to our training tool boxes a host of promising, wonderful technologies like web-based training, virtual instructor-led classrooms, simulations, gaming, and social media, to name a few. These technology-based tools make it easier to deliver training to more learners, less expensively, more consistently, and across broader geographies and time zones.

However, there is a tendency for people to use these technologies like the proverbial hammer. Some organizations have pushed forms of e-learning into cultures with little online learning interest and/or infrastructure. Others have insisted on taking an exclusively “high tech” approach to teaching “high touch” skills like coaching and conflict resolution.

More recently, the universal technology panacea in some quarters seems to be the application of new social media technologies to learning (a.k.a. “Learning 2.0”). The notion that most people learn better and enjoy it more in a social environment is inarguable. For that matter, the traditional classroom (when led by an interactive teacher or facilitator) can be a very social milieu within which to learn, particularly if the learning objectives are focused on human skills, such as leadership skills.

The Downside to Harnessing New Training Tools

The social media buzz, meanwhile, is about technology-based interactive experiences like blogs, chat rooms, and discussion forums, not to mention the wildly successful commercial social platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Yammer. Clearly, these new tools could be harnessed within our organizations to make learning more interactive, involving, and spontaneous, while also spanning geography and generations and capitalizing on the collective wisdom of groups.

But, some of these platforms can be risky for organizations in terms of security and legal liability. Technology can sometimes be surprisingly difficult and inconsistent. Corporate firewalls can be fussy about what they let through. And technology is always changing, which is good for progress but frustrating for infrastructure investments.

In addition, corporate cultures differ, just like people do, and what is easily adopted in one organization may be ineffective in another. And finally, there are regional and international variances in uptake, technology, and governing laws and institutions. Thus, the promise of social media is tempered by the complexities and uncertainties experienced by organizations to varying degrees.

Force-fitting Social Learning Tools

Unfortunately, some learning and development professionals have tried to force-fit social learning tools and platforms into topics and cultures whether or not they are necessarily well-suited. And regardless of the tools in our tool box, a few maxims about effective learning systems haven’t changed:

• What is the desired and necessary learning outcome? Is it awareness, knowledge, basic skill, or skill mastery?
• What is the nature of the content? Is the learning conceptual and/or kinetic in nature? Is the content sensitive or proprietary?
• What is the nature of the learner population? How do they best learn the type of content needed? What is their prior learning and technology experience? Are their learning styles homogeneous, or do learners come from different backgrounds, experiences, and generations?
• Is the environment around the learner conducive to the learning delivery modality being considered? Will the learners be able to be available, focused, and responsive?
• Will the learner’s managers and colleagues support the investment of time and money? Do they know how to reinforce—and do they value—learning in the workplace?

These tenets of learning system design apply regardless of the tools and technologies being used. In fact, the thoughtful application of these considerations can help any modality or approach shine when used in the situations for which they are best suited.

On the flip side, new technologies can suffer guilt by association when imposed improperly into circumstances ill-suited to their strengths. Let’s not kill promising young technologies with ill-conceived overuse and misuse.

To learn more about integrating development tools and activities before, during, and after formal learning events, register for DDI’s Accelerating Development Beyond the Classroom webinar on February 12, 2013 from to 1-1:45 pm.

Look for Pete Weaver’s follow-up post titled How to Leverage Social Technology in Training.

Patterson S. (Pete) Weaver is DDI’s Senior Vice President, Leadership Solutions.

Scooby Don’t: Lessons Learned from the Leadership Failures of Mystery Incorporated

Note: For e-mail subscribers, please click on the title to access the full article

By: Bradford Thomas

Recently, I spent some time performing a highly complex case study of a well-known international entity to better understand leadership failure.  Mystery Incorporated, a division of the Hanna-Barbera conglomerate, is a private investigation firm with five employees (well, four if you want to contend that a canine member of the team is not legally employable) based in Crystal Cove.  Mystery Incorporated has received international notoriety from a series of documentary films about their investigations, including "Jeepers, It's the Creeper," "Spooky Space Kook," and "Which Witch is Which?"

Although Mystery Incorporated has a perfect track record with their clients, a thorough analysis of the documentary films reveals serious failures in the organization’s management—in particular, supervisor Fred Jones.  This case study will examine some of the negative leadership behaviors exhibited by Mr. Jones and their impact on the employees and clients of Mystery Incorporated.  

The devil—or swamp witch—is in the details.  Mr. Jones is quite effective at analyzing a situation and coming up with a plan to uncover the identities of perpetrators.  His plans tend to involve complex, multi-phase designs that require each member of his team to work in unison with precision.

Unfortunately, Mr. Jones’ plans are seldom executed without a problem, invariably due to individuals on his team not fully understanding their roles and responsibilities.

Like many leaders, Mr. Jones would see better results if he were to check for understanding with each member of his team.  An effective way to do this is to ask each team member to provide a summary of his or her responsibilities prior to initiating action.  

Scooby snacks are not an effective influence strategy.  Mr. Jones often has a difficult time convincing two of his direct reports—Norville "Shaggy" Rogers and Scooby Doo—to perform their basic job responsibilities.  When Mr. Rogers and Mr. Doo refuse to do their assignments, Mr. Jones resorts to offering them culinary incentives—typically in the form of Scooby Snacks.  What started out as an occasional incentive has escalated to the point where Mr. Rogers and Mr. Doo will not do any assignment for less than eight Scooby Snacks.

Bribing Mr. Rogers and Mr. Doo with Scooby Snacks reinforces their behavior while eroding Mr. Jones’ credibility with the rest of his team.  To fix this Mr. Jones needs to adjust his influence strategy so that it directly appeals to their needs and motivations.  If he determines that their motivations are ultimately in conflict with the job assignment, he may need to reevaluate their suitability for employment.

Help them “see” a better way.  The documentaries show that Mr. Jones is also ineffective in dealing with persistent negative behaviors within his team.  For example, Mr. Jones has made no attempt to address Velma Dinkley’s habit of losing her prescription glasses during critical moments in the investigation leaving her blind to her surroundings.  Even worse, not only does Mr. Jones not make an attempt to coach his employee, Ms. Daphne Blake, to be more careful about stumbling into traps set by perpetrators, he goes so far as to encourage the rest of the team to make fun of her clumsiness by calling her “Danger-Prone Daphne.”

Though these ‘meddling kids’ persevere, they waste valuable time and resources due to leadership inefficiency. Supervisors are responsible for addressing negative behaviors—such as persistent tardiness or falling into the clutches of the Ghost of Redbeard—before they become established habits that adversely affect the morale and performance of their teams.  Those in Talent Management should realize the opportunity to help leaders like Mr. Jones realize their weak spots, and address them. Effective supervisors seek input from the employee into why the behavior is happening, ask the employee for ideas on how a change could take place, secure a commitment on the change, and offer ongoing support—while maintaining the employee’s self-esteem throughout the discussion. For a leader like Mr. Jones, we’d prescribe a comprehensive assessment and follow up development. And, in Mr. Jones’ case, perhaps a better selection system (one that ensures new hires are, you know, human) would be beneficial, too.