Author Archives: shevat allon

6 questions that new (technical) leaders need to reflect on

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One of the services that I provide is working with people who have superb technical skills to develop their leadership capabilities.

In my experience, people with superb technical skills respond much better to one on one coaching than to learning with a group of people since in a group, they have often learned to be heroes and/or excel by leaning on one limited set of skills with people prone to worship technical talent.

When I do intake before I start the work itself, I ask 15 questions in a 2 hour session. Here are 6 of the questions that I ask before we start to work to begin to understand who I am working with.

  • What are the major assumptions that you have about what makes leadership “happen”?
  • What can’t leaders do?
  • What is the added value that a leader should provide towards clients, boss’ and peers? Direct and indirect reports?
  • What events detract from a leader’s influence?
  • What are some of the reasons you can think of why people would not follow you?
  • What are some of the main reasons that you followed and did not follow people who have led you?

Follow me @AllonShevat

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Four questions to determine if a candidate has global literacy.

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Several times each month, I interview people who are candidates for roles which have a large degree to of global exposure to vastly different cultures. Clients ask me to provide an assessment of the candidate’s global literacy and a suggested coaching plan where relevant.

I generally ask 12 questions. I will share 4 of these questions with my readers. For these interested in what I consider “global literacy”, here is a link to another post.

1) Describe what you think are the biases of your own culture, and how do they impact the way you manage conflict, communication and teamwork.

2) Describe 2-3  behavioural patterns of other cultures which you find most challenging to deal with and explain.

3)  Respect is a term that many cultures use, yet often it means different things to different people. Explain how you would show respect, differently, to various populations that you work with.

4) How do you go about establishing trust in a society with an insider-outsider dynamic?

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After a reorg, nothing changes

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I have witnessed hundreds of reorganizations which have resulted in either no change, or a change for the worse.

The goal of this post are to point out why reorganizations fail.

At face value, reorganizations are implemented to improve the organizational ability to adapt to changing circumstance.

Another unspoken but very real reason for a reorganization is that senior management needs to buy time, and what buys time better than a reorganization, which can often result in a year of grace from pressure from above.

Yet another reason for a reorganization is that it is “doing”, which serves as a message that the status quo is untenable. And management often believes that doing “something” now is better than taking time and figuring out what needs to be done.

Change management and industrial engineers have promulgated a myth that reorganizations are more manageable than they really are, so managers feel more certain that reorganizations can be well controlled, and thus use the reorganization medication frequently.

There are many reasons why reorganizations fail. Here are the top three which come to mind.

  1. Most people have been through many reorganizations, and have learned the defence mechanisms necessary to protect themselves. So structure changes but individual behaviour becomes more self protective, resulting in a reduction in efficiency and effectiveness.
  2. Paralyzing processes, poor products, unskilled/demotivated engineers and a shitty cultures (pardon me)  are not cured by a reorganization.
  3. In order to support structural reorganization , massive investment goes into promulgating instant stability!. Massive investment is made in definitions,  new processes and re-freezing. Yet far too often, these massive efforts does not impact what makes a reorganization fail: politics,  poor leadership, incompetence and poor teamwork.

The type of OD work which is necessary to support reorganization  is not serving as  the CEO’s Vaseline with pre-packaged OD products, as it were, which purport to “manage the change” .

In a reorganization mode, OD needs to focus on ensuring that something else changes, not only the structure. Most time, reorganizations are merely turf grabs, as Terry Seamon notes below in his comments.

But only the best CEO’s want to expose themselves to this type of hardball OD in the first year of a reorganization.

Most CEO’s prefer to use the year of grace, freed from the prattle of an OD consultant whose input creates “noise” by focusing on abstracts like politics and trust.

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4 factors that impact the ability to integrate an Israel based start up

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The art of post merger acquisition is difficult regardless of cultural differences. When the culture of the Israel start-up is factored into the equation, the challenges of post merger integration become daunting.

This post will focus on 4 factors that will impact the ability to integrate an Israel based start up after its acquisition.

1) The Israel market has a crushing demand for top talent. So it really does not matter what type of stay bonuses are put in place after acquisition, there is a good chance that top talent will be lost. And because Israel start ups have so few processes and so much “oral law”, the chances are that not only talent will be lost, but also unrecoverable knowledge .

2) Israel is a very modern society and appears very western in its cultural accoutrements.. But Israel is not Western at all: relationships are more important than process, the “old buddy” network is impregnable similar to the Chinese old friend clique, and the communication style within the inner circle is very different than the communication with the outer one. Very few non Israelis get into the Israeli inner circle within the first 3-5 years acquisition.

3) Transparency is a rare commodity Like the Chinese, Israelis believe that transparency maybe foolish, especially when it gives HQ the possibility to screw you.

4) Israelis argue all the time about everything, both with one another and with their bosses. This is very time consuming when doing anything, large or small, because one cannot give “marching orders” to the Israel based manager and assume that things will happen. Corporate directives often encountered with the fiercest resistance due to lack of discipline and rugged individualism, the same rugged individualism and lack of discipline  that enabled the innovation to begin with!

My next posts will address what is to be done when acquiring an Israeli company.

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Dealing with the cynicism encountered with managers from Former Soviet Union (FSU)

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In my previous post, I pointed out some of the characteristics I have encountered in managers from the FSU with whom I work .

In this post, I will provide 3 tips on how to deal with the cynicism, which can be tough to take for western yes-we-can OD consultant/manager.

1) There is no need to counter every cynical remark that is made. Just listen to  these comments as “this can be tough”. It’s often no more than that.

2) Use these cynical comments as a springboard to work out a rational set of risk mitigation tactics.

3) When a very, very cynical person comes your way (and they do exist), use a paradoxical intervention, such as “So there is nothing to do, we need to avoid wasting out time”. I have been surprised at how well this has worked.

I train managers and consultants to better manage folks from FSU. Lot of what you need to do can be counterintuitive, so it takes time.

If you succeed, you will generally have a hard working and dedicated resource on your team, albeit cynical.

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Working with managers from the Former Soviet Union (FSU)-revised

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This post will describe my experience is working with people from the former Soviet Union. I do not suggest that I describe anything more than my experience. Every pattern has exceptions, we all have met worldly Americans, disorganized Germans, loud Thais and humble Israelis. But there are patterns of culture.

I have worked with about 120 people from the FSU in intensive consulting relationships. Over time, I began to see things that repeat themselves despite different types of business, different ages, and a different time frame for having left the FSU. The people I have worked/work with are based in Germany, the UK, the US, Canada and Israel.

I certainly stand against political correctness. However, the goal of the following list is to characterize, not stereotype,

1) Relationships start from deep mistrust, then migrate to trust very slowly.

2) There is a lot of cynicism, and most of it is healthy. Cynicism is the parallel of the American yes-we-can, except it is no-we-can’t. However, it is a starting point from which to move on to: how can we do it anyway.
This stands in sharp contrast to yes-we-canners, who suddenly develop cold feet.

3) There is a lot of compassion and true caring, masked by toughness. The talk is  hard and the heart is compassionate.

4) There is a lot of passion, a lot of investment in problem solving, and a lot of emotion. 

5) Organizational life is about details, not high level abstractions. There is very low tolerance for sloganeering. It is all about pragmatism. Idealism and Utopian ideas are severely scorned.

6) Transparency is viewed with deep suspicion; it is often viewed as pure stupidity. People need to protect themselves.

7) Things are thought out and thrashed through in informal meetings with trusted people. Formal meetings are more ceremonial.

8) Communication style is slightly dour with little place for humour in formal setting, although informally, the dourness melts away!

9) Win win is seen as a western quirk. If I win, you lose. If you win, I lose-is far more prominent.

10) There is a deep pride in professionalism. There is far more respect for experts than for branding, to be sure. And certainly there is more loyalty to maintaining one’s reputation as an expert than managing one’s career.

11) Political correctness -forget it.

12) When something goes wrong, there is more focus on solving the problem than fixing the process or lessons learned. People accept that shit happens.

My satiric Gloria blog has an absurd character called Comrade Carl Marks. Many former Russians love this colourful character, yet Americans/Canadians have told me that Comrade Carl is a bit insulting. Very telling difference. (By the way, readers of the Gloria blog as me if I speak Russian. I do not. But I do know about 200 swear words).

And finally, I LOVE working with this population. It is very hard to break in and gain access to trust, especially for someone with some semi -Anglo like type like me, but once you break it, things get done.

bhm

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Missing Montreal; je me souviens

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In my long career as an OD consultant, I have had the opportunity to work in Montreal about a dozen times.

I used the time in Montreal to visit my parents and grandparents graves, meet with old friends, ski at Mt Chevreuil  and speak as much French as I could. I also walked for hours and hours on the mountain.

Today, of all days, I have been inundated by pleasant memories from Montreal. Today, Montreal has been visiting me today. Today, Montreal chose what I remember.

  • The Montreal snow has a very squeaking sound when underfoot. I loved walking in the extreme cold, and few things in life are as piercing cold as the Montreal winter.
  • The 17 bus used to take me to Parc Belmont Park in Cartierville  The driver called out all the stations along the way in French and English. Finally:  “Parc Belmont-Belmont Park. Tout le monde descend svp, please get off the bus.”
  • My grandfather owned  a boxing ring at the Medical Arts Building on Sherbrooke and Cote de Neiges. When I was a boy, I would visit him at the gym.  In those days, telephone numbers had a name as a prefix. The telephone number of his gym was Fitzroy 4022. This was in 1957.
  • When the Metro opened in Montreal, I learnt all the names of the stations by heart. And I remember the smell of the rubber tires on the Metro. I worked at the Worlds’ Fair in 1967 at The Human Cell, La Cellule humaine. My supervisor, Art Laurent, was French Canadian. We used to talk a lot after work in French. I learnt more French from old Art than from all the years in the Protestant School Board’s schools that I attended.
  • I spent many summers at Lac-des-Écorces far north of Montreal.  In the evenings, I used to go either to Val Barrette or Mont Laurier to eat. And believe you me, that was a very good way of learning French. I miss having French all around me.
  • Garland Terminus was a bus interchange station.The trip to the dentist entailed 3 buses: 116, 17 (change at Garland) and 62. Everyone interchanged at Garland.

Sorry to have bored you all. Next time, back of OD. Promise.

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OD’s fate is “signed and sealed”

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According to Jewish tradition, one’s fate is signed on New Year’s Day (Wednesday evening, Sept 24th) and one’s fate is sealed on the Day of Atonement, which falls the week after New Year’s. The days between the signing and the sealing of one’s fate are the Days of Awe, when supposedly the verdict can be overturned. (For those of us who resent having religion rammed down our throats, this is a punishing time to live in a semi-theocracy.)

However, while I am agnostic and I spend these “holy” days at the beach doing non-holy activities, the tradition and metaphor are useful.

OD’s fate is signed and sealed. There are many reasons why OD is rotting away. Follow this link if you want the gory details. The grisly execution of OD has been in progress for the decade. Unlike the executions we all see on TV as of late (which happen in my liberal neighbourhood), the dying process of OD is prolonged.

So what is there to atone about?

Well, universities and colleges and other institutes of learning are pumping out OD consultants as if the demand for OD is insatiable. This is an absurdity because there is very little work in OD for the new generation of OD “technicians”, unless they want to work for some canned-training company or support degenerative BPRs which are the very antithesis of OD.

Students spend years and years learning a disappearing profession which is self-destructing and being cannibalized. I must get 50 calls and emails a month asking me “if I need an assistant” or “where can I find some work, anything”. My message to these people is loud and clear-you chose the wrong profession. Go get retrained.

Yes there is plenty of work if you have been on the road as long as I have and have built up a reputation and areas of domain expertise (in my example global organizations, new product introduction and mergers). But there is almost nothing around for the newcomer, who wants to do OD the right way, not as an order taker for “3 workshops on people skills, medium rare”

And the universities need to atone for misleading thousands of people who have made the wrong career choice. Probably they cannot, because universities themselves are trapped in their own paralysing paradigm.

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Creating Value and large scale change via being Eclectic

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The dumbing of OD has led to use of tinned OD solutions, superimposed on complex organizational situations. Management via IT process and the need of managers  to look great as soon as as possible has led to massive use of these tinned solutions. When these tinned solutions fail, the vendor can be blamed and another “vendor” hired.

There is another much better of doing things however, as this post illustrates. I will illustrate a complex project based on a totally eclectic approach.

A large corporation hired me to work on a prolonged crisis between the central HQ-based Technical Presales Team and the various RSTs, i.e., Regional Sales Teams in South East Asia, Japan, China, Europe and the Americas.

There had been turf wars between the HQ-based function and each of RSTs, yet the reasons for the turf wars were different. Ideally it would have made sense to decentralize Technical Presales, but due to the lack of product experts, it was impossible.

A well-known consulting firm had just failed in this very endeavour, leaving behind a bible filled with process flow, roles and responsibilities, and what have you. My mandate was to `create uniformity“ so that everyone `works to processes”. I turned this mandate down, and suggested a more eclectic approach.

My point of contact was a very competent HR manager, very unlike my Gloria character. The HR manager and I agreed that the solution may not be uniform, and the starting point will not be the bible of processes, rather, we will do whatever works, with a very eclectic approach.

Quickly I discovered that there was huge variance in the HQ Technical Presales –RST interface between regions.

·      In some countries, the sales force was equipped only with `connections“ and after clients’ doors were opened, the RST expected that technical pre sales do everything else, including signing the deal and legal work.

·      In other countries, the RST was highly technical and all they wanted from Technical Presales was promotional marketing material!

·      In another set of countries, the Technical Presales Team was seen as “bunch of spies for corporate“ serving as an unneeded gate to prevent selling of customization of the products to local needs. Thus, the RST did everything alone, bypassing Technical Presales; however corporate could not build the customizations that the RSTs sold.

My work did not focus on all RSTs at once. First, I did a show case project with one area (Europe) and the change was very positive. The CEO and senior executives bragged about the `turn-round“ between Europe RST-HQ Technical Presales in several senior forums. Eventually, my project expanded to each RST and a 3 year effort was crowned as a major success.

The solution in each RST looks very different. In some RST`s, we worked on trust and communications, in other RST`s, we worked on mutual expectations. In yet other RST`s, we needed to replace managers with negative political agenda. In the Technical Presales team, there was a 10% increase in headcount and a massive investment in travel and personal effectiveness coaching.

The procurement department in this company had recommended not hiring me. There was no scope of work I was willing to commit to a priori, I could not estimate budget, and my travel expenses were high.

Three months into the second year of the project, the Head of Procurement told me that he heard that `the results are worth the investment, even though you (Allon) did not handle the initial  negotiation “appropriately”. And he has a point.

All thru the project, HR provided me with air cover, promoting the eclectic approach of tinkering, seeing what works and solving the problem.

No workshops or OD pre-packaged modules were used.

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Don’t ignore the underworld of poor team work.

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No other discipline can deliver results as powerful as can OD in the domain of teamwork.

This having been said, too many OD practitioners look at teamwork out of context and proceed to work with organic teams or “cousin groups”  to develop team effectiveness before examining the context in which the team operates.

This post will focus on what an OD practitioner needs to both look at and deal with in order to create a context for team work, regardless of the specific team.

1) Does the organization have an expectation that clearer defined roles and responsibilities as well as adherence to process are essential to team work?

Because the truth is:  teamwork’s added value is that it compensates for the inability of process and total role clarity to enable the work flow. Often poor team work is a result of overdosing on process and clarity  to control work flow.

Creating a context for teamwork entails working on teamwork as a compensation for the system in order to get it to work.

2) Does the organization recruit team players at the top?

Because if the organization is led by people who maximise their subsystems. there “ain’t gonna be no teamwork”.

Creating a context for teamwork entails working on the optimization of subsystems at the top of the organization.

3) Does the organization fund face to face interaction?

No amount of technology can compensate for the alienation inherent in the global configuration of organizations. People who do not meet face to face will not be able to work well as a team, especially if the issues at hand are complex and need a lot of healthy heated interaction to solve.

Creating a context for teamwork entails insisting that face to face dialogue is budgeted.

4) Does the organization overcommit to its customers?

If the organization has hallucinatory  commitments to its customers, the entire organization will be covering their ass to show that they are not guilty for the inevitable slips that will occur in both schedules and costs. Teamwork in over committed organizations is a critical success factor, but very rare.

Creating a context for teamwork entails removing the “blame game” and working on the over commitment, not just the team work.

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