The Garrison Report #2010-2

Effective Leadership

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My predictions last month related to the increased use of right-brain thinking, which corresponds to the concepts unfolding under Construction 3.0. You don't have to take my word for it, the facts on what creates effective leadership and how leadership impacts the construction industry speak for themselves.

"We see ourselves having lower skills, fewer capable contactors, and fewer capable people, and the industry is having an image problem. All these things are starting to compound, and leadership is the answer," declares Dr. Kenn Sullivan, assistant professor at Arizona State and deputy director of the Performance Based Studies Research Group. He adds that micromanagement, where one attempts to control every aspect of a process, reduces efficiency. When this occurs, micromanagers attempt to do more work themselves, but this only compounds the problem.

When things go wrong on the job, there is a strong tendency to blame the workers. However, the real problem is not the worker, but the system. Despite this fact, when things go wrong, too many in positions of authority attempt to solve the problem by increasing controls. This is the wrong approach. Leadership isn't about the ability to control, influence or motivate others. Instead it's about the leader perceiving the current conditions and aligning the resources, including the human resources, in the best possible way.

The traditional leadership model attempts to influence, motivate and change people because many believe workers can be influenced. In other words, they believe experience and knowledge can be transferred to others to improve their performance. Professor Dean Kashiwagi of Arizona State reports, "Organizations have built structures to allow more people to influence others, which increases management requirements and leads to larger organizations and bureaucracies." He added that this approach creates three critical results:

  1. It creates an organization "focused on changing, influencing and motivating."
  2. "Performance is constrained by the capabilities of the followers because it relies on followers being able to adjust to the system or the influence of the leader."
  3. It makes a business model that is inflexible and becomes a complex bureaucracy.

 

This approach creates poor results, but the surprise to many is that management is the cause, not the worker. Instead, what's required is a leadership approach of alignment without influence that minimizes the need for management. This makes sense since the idea is to improve overall performance, not increase management.

The old leadership formula focuses on performance standards to identify poor performers; standardizes work to minimize training and monitoring of costs; designs systems to keep workers out of the control loop and directs people to follow, not challenge. In contrast, the new model focuses on best practices to achieve peak performance; allows customization depending on the skill/experience of the worker; allows flexible improvisation; helps people to control their own work and recognizes that systems are only the current best practices, but they can be improved. This approach not only has a proven track record in the short term, but it attracts better people, which bodes well for long-term improvement.

The reality is that the best leadership comes from better perception, or the ability to look into the future. With perception the leader is able to look ahead and align the resources, including human resources, to best address the situation. This concept is consistent with Jim Collins's comments in his best-selling book Good to Great about "getting the right people on the bus in the right seats."

The key to proper alignment is perception. The true leader has the ability to perceive current conditions and align all resources, including human resources, in the best way to deal with the situation. In the perfect circumstances, the leader could perceive all existing conditions of an event and predict the outcome. If the predicted outcome doesn't represent a desired outcome, then the leader could realign the resources or, in essence, modify the initial conditions. The idea would be to realign the initial conditions in such way that the predicted outcome is acceptable and an accurate prediction.

Everyone has different abilities to perceive, but the better someone's ability to perceive, the more complex and difficult a task he can handle. Ideally everyone would rise to the level of his ability to perceive, in other words situations where his perception ability matches the situation. This would maximize an organization's performance. Because all levels of workers are needed, all levels of perception ability are needed to fill those positions.

While an individual's potential perceptive ability is somewhat dependent upon his or her DNA, that doesn't mean an individual's ability to perceive in a particular situation isn't affected by other factors. Knowledge, experience and skills increase a person's ability to perceive in situations where those abilities are relevant. This is what causes problems because often leaders with high perception capabilities find themselves in situations where they lack experience and knowledge to accurately analyze the situation. This results in their perception of the situation not being very accurate.

When people rely on correct data and proven systems, it is easier to perceive existing conditions and make accurate predictions. It's important for leaders to minimize subjective decisions because when they rely on emotion and opinion instead of fact, it results in bad decisions. Effective leaders avoid this situation. Instead the leader should create a system that minimizes both the flow of information and the requirement for management.

The theory states that if someone has 100 percent of the information about the initial conditions of an event, they could predict the outcome. The problem is it's not practical to obtain all the possible information because it would be too costly and inefficient. Much of the possible information is not essential for a qualified person to make an accurate evaluation. Yet how often have we been asked during our careers to provide information that wasn't necessary? Instead the qualified individual knows from experience what data is necessary for him or her to make an accurate prediction. Obtaining or transferring unnecessary information is wasteful and reduces efficiency. This means that one sign of someone who is in over his head is a request for unnecessary information. The effective leader minimizes the flow of information because experience dictates what minimum information is needed to do the job, and that's all that's requested.

The St. Anthony Falls Bridge in Minneapolis, which collapsed on August 1, 2007, reopened for traffic on September 18, 2008. That kind of turnaround time illustrates the need to reduce the flow of information. When I asked the Minnesota Department of Transportation's project manager, Jon Chiglo, how he managed to build a $230 million bridge in 11.5 months, he said that he put everyone, including the owner, the designer and the contractor, in the same room. I asked Peter Sanderson of Flatiron-Manson, as the contractor's project manager, what he thought of Jon's response. He said we could have built the bridge faster if we could have received information faster. Wow! That seems like an amazing response since everyone was sitting right there, but it points out that the passing of information slows down the process, so it's best to minimize the need for information.

In conclusion, the leader model of alignment must create the structure and systems that replace the need for personnel leadership in project management. Leadership is not about influence, but about alignment where perceptive individuals discern the constraints of others and align them in productive positions. When the effectiveness of traditional leadership is compared to leadership by alignment, there is no contest. Alignment leadership is significantly more successful.

 

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