Division8 - Curtainwall Blog

There are many problems you run into as you scale a company.  It is difficult to get qualified people.  Your current infrastructure (computer systems, facilities, etc…) won’t support the amount of people you need.  But the one I see around me all the time is the inability of a company to grow leaders.  A few years ago, I decided to spend some time really working on this problem for myself.  I was struggling.  I had promoted a couple of people to leadership roles and they didn’t work out.  I recognized at that time that this was completely my fault.  No matter how you looked at it, whether they weren’t the right for the role or they weren’t given the right training to succeed, both things were my failing.  So, I decided to go out and see what other people were doing and try to learn this elusive skill.

What I found was a bit disappointing.  Everyone I spoke with was having the same difficulties.  They were trying to expand their operations but were finding it difficult to promote people up and out of the individual contributor role.  In addition, many of the people I spoke to were business owners who secretly confided to me that they weren’t very happy with the people who were their #2 position people.  They had promoted them, mentored and coached them, but were finding them lacking in some way.

So, I decided that there were two problems here.  The first one is understanding the “who” problem.  How do you identify the right person to promote?  The second problem would then be how do you coach and mentor them so they can be successful.

For the “who” problem, I came up with a list of qualities that I would look for.  I thought this might be helpful for other people too.  This is just my list and yours may be very different but it always helps to have a starting point.

1. From the “Speed of Trust” book, I think these are paramount:
   1. Integrity and Intent – Do they have integrity?  Are they a solid honest person who would do the right thing even if it meant it would hurt their career?  Do other people trust them?  Do they accept responsibility for problems and admit when they are wrong? These are qualities that should already be evident.
   2. Capabilities  and Results – Again, these should already be evident.  As an individual contributor, have they demonstrated great skills?  Are they able to get results and deliver on projects?  Do they make their deadlines?
2. Do they have the capacity to be better than me at this job?  – Normally as the company grows, you are trying to move up a step on the ladder.  This means you are vacating other steps you are currently on.  So, you are usually promoting someone to do a job that you yourself are currently doing.  Can this person, given the time and training, be better than you were at this job?  You should be growing the organization not going backwards or maintaining the status quo.  So, if this person can’t exceed your abilities, you aren’t really going to grow in the long term.
3. Are they a continuous learner? – As anyone knows, moving from an individual contributor to a person who leads a team is not easy.  And it is a completely foreign skill set.  Your understanding of what your direct reports do is great, but leading them and helping them grow is a set of skills you are now going to have to learn.  If you aren’t a person who already was taking classes, reading books, listening to podcasts, or otherwise trying to grow and improve, why would you start now?
4. The ability to communicate – This is key.  To be a good leader, you need to be able to communicate your goals and ideas to your team.  If you don’t have good communication skills, you will find it very difficult to get people to understand why they should change and grow.  In addition, you need to be able to communicate well up the chain too.  You need to be able to communicate to me what you are struggling with and what is going on with your team.  Without good communication skills, all sorts of other problems are going to develop.
5. Positive attitude – Are they the person who believes it can be done?  Or the person who throws up all the reasons it can’t?  You need someone who truly believes they can accomplish whatever is in front of them.  No one wants to work for the person who is always pointing out why it won’t work.  I also will find it hard to of  work with someone who is negative most of the time.
6. They don’t ask for the job – This one is weird but it came out of a lot of my discussions.  I’m not even sure if it applies to other companies but in our company, everyone in a leadership role would really rather be doing the work.  We loved doing the work and only moved into these roles because we were asked by the company to step up.  But, the people who want to move into management because they see it as a way to get out of their current role have not been the right people each and every time we have promoted them.
7. Humility – this one is a bit hard to measure but it is essential.  In every career, people start out trying to be the best individual contributor they can.  This is how they stand out and get raises and promotions.  But, there is usually an inflection point where you realize that it isn’t all about you.  Your ability to deliver is great, but your ability to help a whole group of people deliver is way better.  This requires you to get over yourself and realize that as good as you are, all of us is always better than any of us.  Have you made this transition yet?  Can you admit that people on your team are better than you were at that job?  If not, I’m not sure you are ready yet.

This list is not exhaustive, but it helped me a lot to understand what I was looking for.  The second piece is that before I ever offer anyone a position, I always start by having lunch with them once a week for a long period of time.  This allows me the time to truly understand this person better and to see if they exhibit these qualities.  It also gives us both the opportunity to understand the role better and what I’m expecting and if that doesn’t fit, no one knows that they declined the position and they can continue to be a great individual contributor.  At the end of several months, we are either both clearly aligned and ready to make the transition or we just have a much better relationship and I’m looking for another candidate.

Lean is an interesting subject.  As you move along the journey, your thinking continues to evolve.  I wrote about this back in 2014.  I was re-reading that post the other day and thought it would be interesting to post again on what my current thinking is.  I’m sure it will change again, but for today in the middle of 2017, here are my current thoughts…

1. Lean is a system.  At the beginning of the journey, you are learning to solve problems.  First within a group then across departments.  But as you move along the journey, it becomes necessary to create a production system in order to get flow from the beginning of the process to the end.  If you don’t get to this stage, then improvements in one area are bound to create problems in other departments.
2. Lean is about quality.  You have to focus on removing defects from the process.  A fanatical focus on quality in all things.  This is what the Japanese did.  They created a better quality car by driving out the defects in the process.  Then the entire automobile industry changed.  When touring companies in Japan, we saw boards where people had worked for 18 months without one defect!  We toured companies that had furnished millions of parts to Toyota with 15 defects, and these were small scratches that would never be seen.  That same company had a goal to reduce their defect rates!
3. Lean is source control.  This is something we learned from Ritsuo Shingo when he visited our office.  If you solve problems at the source, they are much simpler.  At the source of the stream, you could literally carve a little groove in the mud and redirect the entire stream.  But go a mile down the mountain and try to re-direct the stream and you find yourself staring at a fairly large river and a difficult project.  Fix things at the source where they are small.  As the problem moves through the value stream, it is 10X for each department it flows through.  A problem in the order becomes a larger problem in the shop and a giant problem in the field.  Concentrate on the source first.
4. Lean is a management system.  It changes the entire perspective of how we manage a company.  We get better by having the managers and leaders working at the gemba (where the work is happening) with the people doing the work and helping them solve their frustrations.  As people learn the process and see the progress they start taking ownership of the work and solving their own problems.  We facilitate, coach and encourage.  People do the work, make the improvements, try new ways, fail, try other ways, succeed, etc…  Leave your ego behind.  Admit you don’t know how things really work and get into the process and observe.  It is amazing what you learn.
5. Lean is simple.  But not easy.  Lean is the accumulation of small ideas from everybody.  Lean is a deep attention to each detail.  Lean is small incremental improvements over time.  Lean is a lot of base hits, not home runs.  The accumulation of small experiments, both failures and successes, that teach us the lessons on how to move forward.

Many companies call it the “lean journey”.  At Walters & Wolf, we call it the “lean crawl”.  You feel like your progress is so slow!  You want to see immediate results.  You want to transform your company.  You want to do that in a couple of years, not decades.  But like most things that have value, you need to learn to enjoy the journey.  It takes time for the leaders to grow enough to grow the company.

Attending Autodesk University this week. Here is a sample of a 3d model produced for web viewing.  Needs to be viewed in Chrome for best results although they said IE and Safari should work too.