Making Waves: 3 Secrets to Becoming a Highly Paid Executive Faster - Part 2

Making Waves: 3 Secrets to Becoming a Highly Paid Executive Faster Chapter 3 www.managementcoach.caTM Mary Legakis Helping leaders and aspiring executives get personal, professional and organizational results – faster. 260350-3175 Secret #2: Find your Big Game This chapter reveals the single most important secret for getting you noticed as a candidate for the next available executive role. People who get noticed for results, get noticed for promotions. Business results matter, and are tied for first with you and your team. Provide business results, and you’ll be abundantly rewarded. As a future executive, you have to show everyone that you can take current performance to extraordinary new levels. This means identifying an area of your role that has the greatest opportunity for improvement and value creation. I call this your BIG GAME. When you win the big game, you get noticed. Like any game, your BIG GAME must have an objective, obstacles to overcome, strategies to win, and a reward for winning. Before we get into how to find and win your BIG GAME, we must first address your mindset. Results Thinking Effective executives are laser focused on results. Most managers are laser focused on execution. It follows then that to distinguish yourself from most managers, you must demonstrate that you can be laser focused on results. There is a significant and meaningful difference between a results thinker and an activity thinker. The activity thinker looks at the high volume and quality of work performed every day and says to himself, “wow, we’re doing great work!” Execution-focused managers tend to be activity thinkers. The results thinker looks at the high volume and quality of work performed every day and asks one key question: “Does the great work we are doing matter to anyone other than us?” Most of you will automatically default to: “well yes, of course the work we do matters to other people.” You will find every possible reason to substantiate why you and your team deserve a pay cheque and recognition for what you are doing. After all, the business hired you specifically for this work. So it must matter to someone, right? Wrong. That is the thinking of the masses of managers who will never make it to the corner office. It is the thinking of the 80% of the company who maintain the status quo while the other 20% produce 80% of the organization’s exceptional results. Your job exists, not necessarily because it matters, but because someone decided it was needed to fulfill some purpose at some point in time. A rare few of you are in roles that still matter, and whose purpose is still relevant in its current form. Unfortunately, most jobs in existence today have outlived their purpose. They exist only because of inertia. Because the managers before you have been too engrossed in activities to see that the job should have somehow evolved or disappeared in favour of other strategic priorities or efficiencies. Most managers do not realize that the volume of activity going ondoes not necessarily correlate with type of business results needed to advance their career. The future executive digs deeper into the question “Does the work we are doing matter to anyone other than us?” He pursues two truths: ,[object Object]

“Are we doing the right work as efficiently as possible?”If you can answer “no” to either question, then you will have found your BIG GAME. The rest of this chapter will show you how to identify potential BIG GAMES for your current role, and then use data to choose the game with the best impact for your career. Identify the potential BIG GAMES within your role that others in the business care about There are several ways to go about gathering information to be sure you choose the right BIG GAME. The two most critical pieces are: ,[object Object]

Find peoples’ pain pointsKnowing your Accountabilities Results thinkers are able to describe the most important accountabilities of their role in less than five short 4-word phrases. These are (or should) describe outputs that: ,[object Object]

Your team has the authority to produce

Your team has the capability to produceFirst think about what the organization relies on your team to produce. Ask yourself “why does my role exist?” And answer that in 20 words or less. Here are examples of two lists of accountabilities. On the left you have the before list, and on the right the final list of accountabilities. Notice how the before list contains a whole bunch of activities meant to produce the outputs of the role. Your job is to be laser focused on the outputs (i.e. results) of the activities, so that you can honestly answer the question “Are we focused on the right work?” You want your list to look more like the right side. Program Manager for an enterprise project ,[object Object],Notice how the accountabilities are crisp, concise, and describe “why” the activities on the left are important. The final list of accountabilities represents outputs. The list is smaller, but the meaning behind the words is far greater than what you see on the left. An executive knows how to distill the most important outputs of their role and communicate them concisely. Here is another example. Sales Manager for a Manufacturing Company ,[object Object],Notice that the accountabilities are a concise reflection of the most important outputs of the role. They also address multiple key stakeholders that the manager may or may not have direct contact with. Use the following list of stakeholders as a guide to make sure you are not overlooking key aspects of your role that the organization relies on. StakeholderWhat They DesireShareholders Profitability and returnsCustomers Quality and valueEmployees Meaningful work and fair compensationRegulatory bodies/agencies Consumer and employee protectionBusiness partners within the company Achievement of their own objectivesVendors Repeat business at fair pricesIndustry Advancement and innovationYour superiorsEffective and efficient results Try listing out all of the accountabilities (or outputs) of your role in only five bullets that answer “why” your team does what it does every day. Remember to take into consideration all the key stakeholders that are relevant to your role: There is only one step left to ensure you know your accountabilities. You must verify your list of accountabilities with your boss. Make sure your boss agrees that these are the most important elements of your role. You need his/her buy-in before you get to the next step of finding your BIG GAME. BIG GAME areas will fall within the accountabilities that need the most attention. If you can identify and win the BIG GAMES, you will catapult yourself to the next level of your career. Your list of accountabilities may start to give you some glimpses into what your BIG GAME might be. For example, if your team is doing work that is not aligned to your accountabilities, then you might have a roles and responsibilities issue that needs to be addressed. The efficiencies to be gained from clarifying their roles might just be your BIG GAME. Find Peoples’ Pain Points Becoming a results thinker is not hard. The hard part is figuring out which are the right results to go after. Once you have identified the most important outputs of your role, it is time to flush out the potential BIG GAME areas within those accountabilities. Find out potential BIG GAMES by finding peoples’ pain points. Finding the pain points involves three essential tasks: ,[object Object]

Hearing from your internal business customers

Assessing the themes and prioritizing“Most books on decision-making tell the reader: ‘First find the facts.’ But executives who make effective decisions know that one does not start with facts. One starts with opinions.” Peter Drucker, Management Master There is a lot more you can do to identify your BIG GAMES. You could ask your external customers, you can ask your boss, you could analyze competitive forces, and you can crunch numbers. The truth is, 80% of what you need to know to identify potential BIG GAMES resides within the minds of your employees and your internal business customers. Don’t waste your time on the rest for now. Just listen closely and get moving on what these people tell you. After all, they will have a lot to do with helping move you into top roles. Best to start with what their interests are! Your Employees There is one very specific question you must ask your employees, and then you must take down every possible answer to the question. If you have not spent at least one hour with your employees on this question, you have not done the job. Show your employees the accountabilities of your role, answer their questions, and then launch into the question: ”What are your pet peeves about how we do our work?” Make sure you write down what they say, and probe to cover all types of topics, including: ,[object Object]

Process efficiency and effectiveness

Customer or business customer service

Anything else they want to raise…Your Internal Business Customers For the vast majority of you, there are a number of people within the business that consume the outputs of your team. Now is the time to schedule one-on-one meetings with the key players and start listening to what they think about your team. To get a good sense of the true and proliferating themes, you should identify anywhere between 5 and 10 people to meet with. Schedule a 45-minute meeting with each one. The question to ask: “What are your ideal expectations of my team and to what degree are we meeting those expectations?” Make sure you write down what they say. Assess the themes and prioritize Next, do some thoughtful analysis of the data. Look at commonalities and differences between what your employees said and what the users of your team’s outputs said. Find the most-mentioned items, or the items that came out most strongly. Pay particular attention to misalignments between the two groups. Those are clues to what the BIG GAMES might be. As you read through the results of the interviews, you should be able to identify two or three issues or opportunities that, if resolved, would take your team’s performance to extraordinary levels. These will be your candidates for the BIG GAME. It should become obvious what the candidates are when you can answer “no” to the two key questions: ,[object Object]

“Are we doing the right work as efficiently as possible?” Here are typical signals that a BIG GAME exists: ,[object Object]

Severe overtime or work-life balance issues. This would suggest lack of focus on a few priority issues and deliverables, which could be inhibiting extraordinary performance on those deliverables.

Slow response or poor communication between departments. This could be an indication of misaligned expectations, and poor collaborative planning. Addressing this big game would help you deliver key results faster.

Unclear roles and responsibilities. This is often an indication that team members are not meeting one another’s expectations of results. They are disappointing each other and conflict exists. When resolved, this game creates efficiency.What if the BIG GAME isn’t in my team’s authority or capability? Very often you will find that conflict exists when expectations between teams and/or team members are misunderstood. The data you collect from your employees and your business partners may show a misalignment of expectations. That is, your team thinks you are accountable for one set of outcomes, and your internal customers have over time evolved their expectations to something else, or vice-versa. In other words, they are looking for you to play games that are outside your authority or capability. Re-aligning expectations can in itself lead to a BIG GAME. Take the data to your boss and have a candid discussion about what the data says. Either or both of two things will happen: ,[object Object]

Making Waves: 3 Secrets to Becoming a Highly Paid Executive Faster - Part 2

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