REALITY CHECK
"Leadership is not magnetic personality--that can just as well be a glib tongue.It is not 'making friends and influencing people'--that is flattery.Leadership is lifting a person's vision to high sights, the raising of a person's performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations."
--Peter F. Drucker

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MANAGEMENT & LEADERSHIP THEORIES DO NOT WORK
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When it comes to management and leadership there are no "silver bullets." Just look at what happened to management by objectives (MBO), participative management (PM), total quality management (TQM), downsizing, rightsizing, reengineering and the latest Six Sigma. For the most part they did not work. Nohria and colleagues, in a major study of what does work, reported in the July 2003 issue of the Harvard Business Review, found that "most of the management tools and techniques we studied had no direct causal relationship to superior business performance." Based on what I have learned from my clients most interventions provide disappointing results for two major reasons.

The first, as I explained in my book Winning Management: 6 Fail-Safe Strategies for Building High-Performance Organizations, is because managers have not built a solid foundation. Here is what I mean. Let's say you want to build your dream house so you buy the best of everything--the best lumber, the best bricks, the best roof, and so on. Then you proceed to build your dream house on quicksand. Will it last? Does it matter that you bought the best of everything? Of course not! However, that is how most managers go about building their organization. They buy the best, or at least the latest, of everything and begin the implementation without a solid foundation, without getting their own heads screwed on right, without changing their basic belief system (especially as it relates to people), without clearly defining their philosophy and core values, and without changing the organizational culture. As a result, just like the dream house built on quicksand, the management model will work for a while, but then it will crumble or even implode. The result is that instead of building a high-performance organization, employees feel used or even abused; they become cynical and strengthen their basic defense mechanisms so that they can remain sane. The outcome is lowered performance and productivity and resistant employees who have mastered the art of playing the "let's pretend" game, who have hardened their protective shells just a little bit more so that they can survive the next management "solution" that will be coming along very soon.

The second reason that management models fail is that U.S. managers are too impatient. (That's an understatement.) They want results yesterday. It reminds me of the person who has been overeating for thirty years and one day steps on the scale only to realize: "I'm fat." He immediately begins his search for a magical diet and, having found it, goes on it right away. And if that diet does not work in thirty days, the diet is "no good" and the search for another "magic bullet" starts all over again! Effective long-term changes in weight can only come about as a result of a change in behavior! And changing one's behavior, as any mental health professional will tell you, takes time…lots of time.
Changing the behavior of many people, which is what management models attempt to do, takes even longer--at least three to seven years. (Read that again!) Of course, during that time several "new" management (dare I say the F word?) "fads" come along, which cause managers to jump ship. After all, it's tough to stick with an "outdated" management model when all your colleagues and competitors are doing the "in thing."In short, what I'm saying is--please listen up this is a big one--that just about any management or leadership model works if you build a strong foundation and if you have the guts to stick with it over the long term!

Of course the next question is: what should I stick with? The answer, at least as it relates to building your business, is get back to basics, as demonstrated in a powerful multiyear study of more than 200 management practices applied in 160 companies in over ten years. The study shoots a whole bunch of sacred cows, and identifies what practices do produce superior results. Nohria and colleagues found that companies that outperformed their industry peers--they called them "winners"--rigorously practiced four basic, somewhat non-sexy, management practices:

Primary Practice #1:
StrategyIdentify and practice a clear and focused strategy based on market needs that are consistently communicated to employees, customers and shareholders.

Primary Practice #2. ExecutionBe totally committed to disciplined operational execution.

Primary Practice #3. CultureBuild and maintain a high-performance-based, ethical culture.

Primary Practice #4. StructureDesign and maintain a flat, flexible and fast--3F--organization structure.

In addition, the researches found that the winning companies supplemented their relentless practice of the four basic strategies with any two of the following secondary strategies. And surprisingly, it did not matter which two they excelled in, nor did it give companies a competitive advantage if they excelled in more than two. So pick two of the following and get on with it.

Secondary Practice #1: TalentAggressively recruit and retain talented employees

Secondary Practice #2: InnovationDevelop industry changing products and services and internal improvements

Secondary Practice #3: LeadershipFind and develop leaders with excellent people skills and the ability to anticipate opportunities and solve problems

Secondary Practice #4: Mergers and partnershipsSupplement growth with relatively small mergers and partnerships, which support the core business

The power of this research is that "a company who consistently follows this [4+2] formula has a better than 90% chance of sustaining superior business performance." (Nohria, p.44.)

So what are you waiting for, start practicing the smart steps that follow and increase your chance of achieving dramatic improvements in performance and productivity.

SMART STEPS
--Stick with any new leadership or management model for at least three years.
--Starting this month build a business strategy that is based on your customers needs and is focused on your core business.
--Aggressively communicate your strategy to your employees, customers and all other stakeholders.
--Push all decision making down to the lowest level so that team members can respond to customer needs.
--Set a goal to eliminate all forms of waste to achieve productivity improvements of 5% per quarter until you are the most productive in your industry.
--Talk less, execute more.
--If in doubt, do the right thing.
--Establish a compensation system that ties external and internal rewards to performance.
--During the next three months conduct an employee satisfaction survey and then act on the findings.

SOURCE: Based in part on Chapter 2 of my new book Don't Oil the Squeaky Wheel and 19 Other Contrarian Ways to Improve Your Leadership Effectiveness, recently released by McGraw-Hill. Take advantage of my special offer that follows.