Author Archives: Tom Foster

About Tom Foster

Tom Foster spends most of his time talking with managers and business owners. The conversations are about business lives and personal lives, goals, objectives and measuring performance. In short, transforming groups of people into teams working together. Sometimes we make great strides understanding this management stuff, other times it’s measured in very short inches. But in all of this conversation, there are things that we learn. This blog is that part of the conversation I can share. Often, the names are changed to protect the guilty, but this is real life inside of real companies.

Commitment to the Work

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“What do you mean, make it necessary?” Max looked confused. “We know what we were supposed to do in that handoff meeting. What more should I do, as the leader, to make it necessary?”

“Three things,” I replied. “First, what is the vision, what does that handoff meeting look like, feel like, taste like? Your vision of the paperwork is NOT a big checkmark across the page. Your vision of the paperwork is individual checkmarks on specific line items. More important is the discussion between the estimator and the project manager about each line item. So, what does good look like.

“Second. Does the team, the estimator and the project manager, have the capability to understand the decisions and problems, and the capability to make those decisions and solve those problems? Max, you are the leader. It is your judgment I depend on to assess their capability and make the necessary resources available.

“Third. Are they committed to the work? A checklist looks like compliance, but compliance isn’t good enough. You, as the leader, need commitment to the work. It is your role to create the circumstances for that commitment to exist. If you just needed compliance, you could do that with pizza. But, pizza doesn’t create commitment.”

Skip the Detail

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“We understand handoffs,” Max agreed. “That handoff between estimating and project management is so critical that we have a hard agenda, 150 boxes to check. Now, most projects only have, maybe, 50 critical items, but we go through the checklist just the same.”

“And why do you use the checklist?” I asked.

“What we found was that the output from estimating, I mean, it was a great estimate, but sometimes it wasn’t what the project manager needed. Sometimes, we estimate in one unit of measure, but install in a different unit of measure. So we mapped a checklist to make sure that the output of estimating matched the input requirements for project management. It’s all about outputs and inputs.”

“So what went wrong? You identified a problem with the handoff meeting that didn’t get discovered until you were in the field. What happened with the checklist?” I wanted to know.

“I looked at the paperwork. Both the estimator and the project manager just got lazy. Instead of checking all the items, there was just a big checkmark that covered the page. They got busy and skipped the detail. They were trying to save time.”

“And saving time turned out to cost time,” I nodded. “Why didn’t they slow down and take the time?”

“That’s the $64,000 question,” Max replied.

“No, it’s a really simple question. They didn’t examine the detail because you didn’t make it necessary to examine the detail. Often, things don’t get done, because we don’t make them necessary.”

Scale This Thing Up

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“You made it halfway through the year. You should have your numbers by now. How did it go?” I asked.

Max grimaced. “You know we have done pretty well in the past, so we wanted to see if we could scale this thing up. We had a firm target, and we were firing on most cyclinders. But we only made 75 percent of goal. I can’t put my finger on one specific thing, seems like a bunch of little things.”

“Let’s start with sales,” I said.

“Sales were good, contracts in hand, but a good portion of the projects sit in backlog. We just couldn’t get the work finished so we could bill it.”

“So, let’s look at project management,” I nodded.

“That’s where some of the problems began. There were mistakes in the handoff meeting between estimating and project management. We didn’t discover the mistakes until we were in the field. We were short some materials. Man hours were estimated too tight, so we had crews that got stuck on one job, when they were supposed to start another job. Once the schedule started piling up, we got further behind. Then a permit didn’t come through. None of this is dramatic, but it all adds up, and so here we are.”

“One of the biggest problems in a company trying to scale is handoffs,” I nodded. “You can have one or two core systems that do great, but you have to get ALL your systems in sync. Work moves sideways through the organization. First place to inspect is the handoffs, where work moves from one function to the next.”

Practice

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“But, we sent him to training,” Marjorie was disappointed.

“Just exactly what did you expect him to learn from the training?” I asked.

“His role in the company requires a very specific skill set. Without this technical knowledge, our engineers will bulldoze him over.”

“Is it possible,” I wanted to know, “that your disappointment has little to do with technical knowledge and more to do with the application of that knowledge? What you are expecting may only be learned by doing. Like riding a bicycle. Most training works only on the technical knowledge part, not the application part. And, the application must be practiced, over and over, before you see progress.”

What Changed?

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“But, this has worked, over and over for the past ten years. I am not sure why this project failed,” Jordan explained.

“First of all, the idea that originated ten years ago is not the same idea that has worked all along,” I replied. “You have modified and tweaked that idea each time there was a subtle shift in its application.”

Jordan was complaining. In this case, at this time, he would rather complain than consider a new idea he didn’t like.

“Each time you tweaked the idea,” I continued, “the shift was so subtle that you hardly noticed. And, your idea worked until it didn’t. Something has changed. Something has changed internally, externally or both. What was it?”

The Distraction of Advice

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Al Ripley believed, for every management problem, there was a management consultant. As issues surfaced in meetings, Al would look down his nose, over the top rim of his glasses, and ask the inevitable. “Don’t we know a consultant that can help us with that?” Outbound Air.

Consultants may be necessary and provide helpful direction, but a consultant will never lead you to the promised land.

The lower the capability of the team, the more consultants, the more tools will be purchased to offset. Those temporary measures can only be hurdled by building the capability of the team. Success can only be achieved with the right tools and guidance in the capable hands of your team. It has less to do with the guidance and tools and more to do with the capability of the team.

Best of Intention

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The intention to become a high performance company, or the intention to become a high performance team will not attract high performers. It may attract curiosity. It may attract attention to your attempts, but you will not receive commendations for trying.

The only measure of performance is performance.

You will only attract high performers when you are in a state of high performance. And, that starts with you. Yoda says, “Do or do not, there is no TRY.”

Little Boxes All Look the Same

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Most companies read all the books and hire all the best consultants so they can pursue the path to be the best. When I visit the offices of most CEOS, they have the same books on the shelf, the same slogans on the wall. It looks like a desperate attempt to be be as good as everyone else.

Your company can’t be high performing AND be like everyone else. To be a high performing company, you have to be different. What are the important differences between high performing and everyone else? What are the important differences that matter?

Good and Bad Advice

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Who do you listen to for advice? There is good advice and bad advice. Some advice leads to abject failure, some advice leads to success. What is the difference?

Between failure and success is average. What advice leads to average success? Action that leads to high performance is different than action that leads you to average performance.

If you know the difference between good advice and bad advice, maybe you don’t need advice at all. Perhaps you need an analytical process that allows you to truly understand the problem, to understand the drivers of the problem. Part of analysis is to determine what you want, what the best outcome could be. In the middle is the collection of alternatives. And somewhere in there is the best alternative, one that avoids the contributors to failure and opens a pathway to a reasonable chance of success.

In an Interview, How Can You Tell?

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From the Ask Tom mailbag –

Question:
I just finished your TimeSpan101 online course and have a question.
When interviewing, is it possible to assess potential capability? I imagine that one can listen if applied capability is at current role’s stratum or above? Although this technique doesn’t allow for one to assess an individual’s ability to learn.

Response:
You managed to jam about three questions into one. First is the issue of capability assessment and its methodology. How does one assess capability? The method is somewhat counterintuitive, but extremely reliable. The counterintuitive part is to NOT focus on the individual. Attempting to assess a candidate’s capability is most often outside the interviewer’s skillset. I will almost guarantee an 50 percent failure rate, which means you could flip a coin and do just as well.

The focus, instead, should be on the work. With some familiarity with timespan, it is relatively easy to calibrate the level of work in the role. Examine the function of the role, tools in the role and problem solving in the role. Those three clues will lead you to a very accurate understanding of the level of work required in the role. In that role, what is the work?

Example – if the role is an accounting manager, the function will be to create and maintain an effective accounting system. The tools will be flowcharts, sequence and planning. Problem solving will be root cause analysis. This all points to S-III level of work.

Now, describe the work, define the work. If the candidate is any good at the work, then it follows they likely possess S-III capability.

The next part of your question parses the difference between current capability and potential capability. I will never make a hiring, or promotion decision based on anything other than evidence. No hopes, no wishes, no crossing of fingers. But potential hasn’t happened, so how can we be sure? If a person has potential, there is usually evidence of that potential. Two things I look at are error rate and deadline. If a candidate has a low error rate in current tasks and always meets their deadlines, I have evidence of potential. If a candidate has a high error rate and never meets deadlines, not so much.

The third part of your question specifically asks about learning. Behavioral interviewing requires that we look at past behavior. No future based questions, no hypothetical questions. Simply ask about the past.

  • Tell me about a project where, in your role, you were required to learn a new skill?
  • What was the project?
  • What was the purpose of the project?
  • What was your role on the project?
  • What was the new skill?
  • What was the degree of difficulty in learning that skill?
  • What technical knowledge, what did you need to know about the skill, in terms of its sequence, outputs and constraints?
  • How long did it take you to master what you needed to know?
  • How did you apply your knowledge to the skill in terms of practice?
  • What was your frequency of practice? depth of practice? accuracy of practice?
  • How long did it take to master the skill in terms of both technical knowledge and practiced performance?