From all accounts, it appears that it is going to become more and more difficult in the future to stay ahead of your competition if your team is not the best and the brightest in your industry. Intellectual horsepower includes not only IQ (many people believe that an IQ of 130 is needed today to be a top player) but includes transferable skills, the ability to understand and break a complex situation into logical steps and being super sharp, agile and a quick study. Intellectual horsepower also includes being able to embrace paradox and ambiguity and being adept at functioning effectively in the midst of opposing ideas or forces.

If you go back and consider the blog post Is Your Company Truly Designed for Innovation and the topic of mapping the job the customer needs to get done, you will be able to identify the skill deficits in your organization. Each time a customer voices a success, ask yourself “Who worked with this client, and what skills were at play to make this customer experience outstanding?” On the same note, if a customer’s job is not getting done, it’s time to step back and ask “What skills are missing from this process that we need in place?” From there, you can provide your team with the training and development needed to create outstanding customer experiences. Once you have trained your employees, if you have someone on your team who just doesn’t “get it”, then it’s time to replace that player with someone who can “get it” and get it quickly.

I also recommend looking closely at Executive Intelligence. This article from HBS spells this out nicely.

I was talking with a young woman yesterday who recently left a company after she was written up for “walking too fast”. She told me this, and I thought I had heard her incorrectly. I said “Can you say that again?” She then said “I just left XYZ Company, and a part of their culture is to walk slowly to reduce stress, and I was reprimanded for walking quickly”.

She then proceeded to tell me that she was hired to do a job for which she was highly skilled and then was actually assigned another job (70% of her day) and that the job she was assigned was one of her biggest weaknesses. She was given high marks on the 30% of her job for which she was highly skilled and low marks on the job that was her weakness (duh?). And, supposedly she told them upfront that this particular skill was not her job and, the company did they tell her that “walking slowly” was a part of the culture (this woman is very fast moving and highly energetic, and any person with a brain could see it a mile away).

Why is it that we continue to do this to people in our companies? I hear this constantly, yet many leaders don’t stop to consider the consequences of blindsiding people on the job. Leaders get employees quickly to fill a position, feed them a bunch of bull during the interview and then blame them when things go wrong! Come on! Stop it!

My question for today is “Are you leading in a blaming organization? Or are you working for one?”

If you are, some of the behaviors might include:

1) Shooting the messenger

2) Squelching employee’s opinions

3) Saying one thing and doing another

4) Passing the buck up or down when you encounter a mistake

5) Closed-mindedness to new ideas

6) Poor training (or you are providing training one time a year in a classroom thinking this will do the job)

I believe that we can change this blaming organization to an organization which thrives on responsibility, respect and support. We can all start by implementing these steps:

1) Deploying talent (putting people on the right job where they can thrive and succeed).

2) Shifting our language “he or she did it” to “I take full responsibility for this incident” (if you are a leader or a manager involved in an accident [notice I don't use the word mistake], then you are ultimately responsible).

3) Listening and appreciating your employees’ opinions by saying “Thank-you for your idea. I will sleep on this.” Then, get back to them on your thoughts around their suggestion.

4) Under-promise and over-deliver. If you tell an employee they are being hired for a certain job, don’t give them another job or make promises you cannot keep.

5) When you get bad news, sit down, take a deep breath and stop talking! Just listen, take it in, step back and calmly thank the person for the news.

6) Start providing on the job training and coaching on a daily basis. The best way to stop the blame game is to train people well on each and every step of the process and then make yourself and them accountable to their success (yes…you are accountable for your followers’ success. If they don’t get it after great ongoing training and coaching, then it’s probably time for them to move on).

We encourage your comments on this subject.

The article dates back to January of 2007, but it’s relevance is still quite strong:

Keeping Leadership and Research at Home

“Nine leaders offer their opinions on what the U.S. should do to hold onto its braintrust and stay on the cutting edge of innovation”

Even though the article discusses strategies specifically for the United States, the focus on education and continuing education is something that I find many seasoned leaders take for granted in their organizations.  There seems to be an assumption that people are “skilled enough” or that training offered one time a year will keep employees inspired and competitive.  Quite frankly, I don’t believe this position is going to get anyone very far into the future.  Ongoing education (both formal and informal) is not only going to be required for employees, employers are going to be asked to develop a first in class ongoing training and development program which keeps members of the organization one step ahead of the rest of the world.     This article shares some very cutting edge suggestions (Example:  “Open Source Education”).

As we move into the next 3-5 years, this article is a must read for any leader in any corner of the world.

One of the best articles I have read in a long time appeared in the March issue of Harvard Business Review: Is Yours a Learning Organization?

If you are a leader (please remember, if you are leading 1, 2 or 50,000 people, you are a leader), I highly encourage you to pick up this issue or at least purchase a copy of this article. We are in the age of the knowledge worker, and the article starts off clearly stating the assumption many leaders are making today: “Leaders may think that getting their organizations to learn is only a matter of articulating a clear vision, giving employees the right incentives, providing lots of training. This assumption is not merely flawed — it’s risky in the face of intensifying competition, advances in technology, and shifts in customer preferences.”

I am not going to tell you about the rest of the article, but there are three critical building blocks presented in this article. For more information on the article, check out the article here: Is Yours a Learning Organization?