Taking Charge!

Introduction

To reach the senior levels of leadership and be successful in the long term, you must be able to excel in three primary areas of basic business management.

First, you must be able to plan and manage your organization’s operations – that’s a given. It’s table stakes, and you must be skilled, capable, and competent within your industry segment. You must know where your industry segment has been, where it is now, and where it is going. You must understand where your company fits into your industry segment, who and where your competition is, what your organization’s strengths and weaknesses are as well as those of your key competitors. This is important whether your company has 50 employees or 500 – knowing your playing field – and being known for knowing your playing field – is the first step in moving up the corporate food chain. Because of the wide diversity of industries and markets out there, it isn’t practical to spend a lot of time in this book on managing operations. That’s a discussion for another time.

The second skill you will need is to be able to locate, hire, develop, and lead high performing people. Somehow executives develop the thought process that as you move up the ladder, you can do it all by yourself and that people will instinctively and automatically respect you and your position to follow you to the ends of the earth. While this may be somewhat true in the military, for the most part it isn’t true in the civilian workplace – particularly in the post-COVID world we live in now. Also, remember that employees may respect your position because of its authority but may have reason not to respect you. That’s a problem, and we will spend some time on how to develop those leadership skills that so many executives either don’t think they need as an executive or simply don’t think enough of their people to develop.

KEY THOUGHT

More executives fail because of leadership and people skills – or lack of them – than with deficiencies in the financial or operating areas.

The third skill you will need at the top is to be able to think and plan strategically and manage capital. Strategic planning and managing money sounds fairly simple, but it gets complicated in a hurry. If you expect to grow your company as an executive – or fix it if your company is in trouble – you’re going to need a good strategic plan and more money available to you beyond what you receive each month just for paying the bills and meeting payroll. You’re likely going to be looking for money to fund internal, organic growth as well as to fund potential acquisitions. You will need to understand what an investment banker can do for you, what it means to take money from a private equity group, and how to invest your company’s financial assets prudently and properly to achieve the greatest return. Knowing the numbers and what they tell you is vital in an executive position, and unless you are coming up through the ranks in accounting or finance and have a CPA, your financial background probably is inadequate for an executive position. My early career was spent in technology sales and sales management. I was a whiz at figuring pricing, margins, commissions, and discounts, but with important business ratios that would tell me what I need to be doing – not so much. I had to make a conscious effort to shore up my financial acumen when I took on General Manager and, later, Chief Executive Officer responsibilities.

KEY THOUGHT

Master the fine arts of managing operations, leading and developing people, and strategic thinking and planning while properly managing capital, and you will be ready for an executive title and a corner office.

Part I:

Hiring, Leading, and Developing Your People

Chapter 1:

Precious and Scarce Resource

The first rule of leading and developing people is to value them as a precious and scarce resource. Many businesses think of employees as necessary evils that must be hired and are, for the most part, expendable. They tend to hire with low expectations and are never disappointed. Their attitude is that employees are basically interchangeable commodities who will do as little as possible to collect a paycheck – and they treat them accordingly. The reality is that without good people, your business will fail over time. It may take months, or even years, but your business will deteriorate unless you truly value your employees and act accordingly.

Getting and keeping employees engaged in the organization’s business is vital. I spent my entire career in telecommunications and broadband services which is very capital intensive and highly automated. Many of the larger, national companies in this space have long ago closed down customer service centers, laid off technicians, and exported their technical support overseas – all in the name of cost control. The problem they now have is that they can no longer be responsive to their customers – their needs or their wants. Their employees are not valued as in previous years and, not surprisingly, are much less engaged than in times past. This lack of employee engagement shows up in all facets of their business and creates customer churn, dissatisfaction, and poor customer reviews. I spent my last two decades in a regional broadband company which was highly focused on its customers. We offered all the online features and functions, but people still enjoy talking with people so we made it a point to staff local offices and offer personal and friendly service. It made a huge difference in our sales and customer satisfaction.

Our geographic service area is known for hurricanes, and we had a bad one every 2-3 years with minor ones more frequently. I remember with Hurricane Dolly in June, 2008, how we were back up and fully operational within 4-6 hours after the rains stopped. Now to contrast that recovery scenario, had we lost our people, it would have taken months to stabilize our business, and we would have lost many, many customers during that time. The recent pandemic gave us a little taste of what that would be like. With schools and businesses closing due to the pandemic, students and workers started working from home – and of course that meant beefing up their broadband services at home. Our demand for services went up 40% during the pandemic, and we constantly had to deal with technicians being exposed to a COVID-positive person and then quarantined for up to two weeks. So with a 40% increase in demand and an average of 15-20% of our techs off the job being quarantined at any given point in time, our service installation intervals slipped out from 1-2 weeks to 5-6 weeks. It was an awful experience, but it solidified my conviction that a business cannot be a successful business without good, loyal, engaged, and well-managed employees.

KEY THOUGHT

The message here is that an executive must have a genuine concern for the organization’s employees and be sure they get everything they need to do their jobs well. The role of an executive as a leader is to provide direction, resources, and a supportive environment where employees can become fully engaged and highly motivated to achieve the goals and objectives at hand. Said another way – you must have a heart for people to succeed in the long run.

Chapter 2:

Management and Leadership Styles

Many books have been written over the last few decades about management and leadership styles. They are available for your reading pleasure on Amazon, Microsoft, Goodreads, and many other sources. Many of them are tied to formal assessment vehicles that typically categorize leaders by their assertiveness and analytical orientations. These are all great tools to learn more about yourself and how you might react to certain situations or circumstances, but they really don’t often give you much practical advice on growing as a leader and executive. The term practical advice to me has always meant – what am I learning that is actionable, i.e., what will I do differently next Monday morning when I get back to my office? I learned that if I couldn’t translate the training theory into day-to-day action back on the job, the training content would never become useful to me.

One of the more actionable management style grids I have seen is not new – it was originally developed decades ago but is still very relevant and applicable in today’s world. It is the Robert Blake-Jane Mouton¹ grid developed by two professors at the University of Texas in Austin. It maps concern for production against concern for people, i.e., the organization’s employees. While our focus here is on senior management, the Blake-Mouton grid and philosophy can apply from the boardroom to the mailroom.

The grid looks like this:

Key: The axes on the grid are concern for production and concern for people respectively. The numeral 1 indicates low concern while the numeral 9 represents a high concern. The first numeral represents production; the second numeral represents people.

Various management styles according to the Blake-Mouton Management Grid studies:

The 9/1 Manager

The 9/1 manager is the authoritarian dictator who cares only about production at the expense of concern for people or relationships. This environment is usually always a lousy place to work. People are taken for granted and viewed solely as a resource. Engagement and loyalty are low, turnover is high, and production is rarely optimized – no matter how much the boss threatens and yells at the crew. The objectives will usually always be met, but the workplace will always be a sweatshop. Innovation is non-existent.

Another problem with 9/1 leaders is that their peers typically don’t like them any better than their employees do. Peers often have to work around a 9/1 leader because he/she missed a deadline or opportunity because one of their employees got fed up and quit at a critical time. 9/1 types tend to stand out in an organization and not in a favorable, positive way. You will find a lot of 9/1 types in the military – and they typically move up the ladder with a high cost to their units. During the sales and sales management phase of my career, I had way too many of these types of bosses, and I was always glad to get transferred away from them.

Because they are solely focused on production, the 9/1 manager, when faced with sagging profitability typically takes the easy way out and moves to cut costs rather than to improve revenues. Since payroll and its related expenses are usually well over half of the average organization’s expenses, they are quick to lay off and furlough employees. While this may obtain a short term benefit, layoffs typically lower customer service and care unless the organization’s business model is fundamentally changed to operate as or more efficiently with less people. Typically this does not happen – employees are simply terminated to lower costs and obtain better profitability while service levels deteriorate, service quality suffers, customer satisfaction suffers, and customers find other providers. The 9/1 manager often will mortgage the future of his/her organization to achieve a quick turnaround without pursuing improving sales and obtaining new customers.

The 1/9 Manager

The 1/9 manager is the country club manager who cares about people, relationships, and a positive work environment at the expense of production. This organization is focused on being a friendly environment and easy tempo but can never reach its potential and will be lucky to keep the doors open. Predictably, the turnover rate is low, and the employees love to come to work! Feedback and growth is minimal in this environment.

You will often find a 1/9 manager in a government position or a non-profit where results are not measured in the conventional manner. The goal of 1/9 management is stability and maintaining a pleasant work environment. When these types of leaders get into the business world, they will typically not be found in key leadership positions but rather in support and other less visible roles. They are out of balance with their needs for approval and are still focused on being liked