Situational leadership in projects

There’s an interesting post worth a read over at ProjectSteps: Communicating with Discretion and Tact - which talks about the need to tailor your approach to communication in line with the audience and the situation.

This is at least partly based on one of the (many) theories of leadership that have been developed over the years - known as situational leadership. The basic premise of this theory is that leadership (and therefore communication) styles have to change to match the situation, and the style is contingent on the ‘readiness’ of the team.

The key to understanding this theory is to realise that it’s not the leader that makes things happen, it’s the team. So a leader that doesn’t inspire their troops is doomed to failure, because no amount of shouting or cajoling is going to lead to full potential. Readiness in this situation refers to the extent to which people are willing and able to carry out a task or instructions. The ability to perform is a function of the team’s capabilities - do they have the necessary skills and equipment to do what it is you need them to do.

So deciding which approach to use is a case of assessing where your team is on two dimensions - ability to carry out the task, and willingness to do so. Having worked that out, there’s a handy 2×2 matrix which indicates which might be the most appropriate style to use in that situation.

If you’re in the ideal scenario of an able and willing team, then you can afford to be fairly laissez-faire about things. The team are capable of undertaking the task, and are prepared to do so - so your role as a leader is a relatively easy one.

If on the other hand you’re dealing with a team that are both unwilling and unable to perform, you’ve got bigger problems. The theory suggests that you need to take a more directive approach - issuing clear and specific instructions. That doesn’t deal with the dilemma of the inability to perform the task so much as it does the unwillingness, but the overall approach is a less-friendly and more-instructive one.

In a case where you’ve got an able but unwilling team, it’s time for a more supportive and participative approach - powers of persuasion to the max. The key here is to understand what the root cause of the unwillingness is, and deal with that - on the basis that it’s not lack of technical abilities that is going to stymie progress.

And in a case where the team is willing but unable, the theory suggests that you will need to be highly task-focussed to compensate for the team’s inabilities, but at the same time work hard on the relationships within the team to ensure that they continue to “buy-in” to your vision in the face of their technical shortfalls.

There’s an intuitive appeal about situational leadership theory, because it acknowledges the fact that leaders can compensate to an extent for the limitations in their team, and considers the importance of the team in the first place. As such, it’s a mainstay of management and leadership training the world over. But intriguingly there have been relatively few studies that provide wholehearted and overwhelming proof that it works.

So while it’s useful as a set of guidelines for approaching a given situation, it’s probably best not to put all your eggs in one basket and use this as the only approach. As the old cliche goes, if the only tool you’ve got is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail.

Further reading:

The two main references for situational leadership are “So You Want To Know Your Leadership Style?” by Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard, which appeared in the Feb 1974 edition of Training and Development Journal; and their later book called Management of Organizational Behaviour: Utilizing Human Resources (Prentice Hall, 1993). Being a popular theory however, explanations in varying degrees of detail tend to appear in most organisational behaviour and human resource textbooks.

Getting commitment Cialdini-style

Another topic in a conversation I had today was about getting commitment to actions - particularly getting them from people who aren’t necessarily that inclined to commit to something, either because they’re reluctant , or because they’re not particularly engaged in the situation. There was a piece of psychological theory that I’d come across which described exactly the technique to help in this situation, and I couldn’t for the life of me remember what it was called.

Quite by chance, I came across this article from Arizona State University, which described almost exactly what I was thinking about:

Consistency, according to Robert Cialdini, can be extremely effective in setting up good rules for people to follow. “The key,” he says, “is to prompt them to make an initial public commitment that is consistent with the rule.”

This leads to the restaurant owner and his dilemma.

The restaurant was having problems with large numbers of patrons who neither honored their reservations nor called to cancel them. Rather than take a dogmatic approach to solving the problem, the owner came up with a simple yet profoundly effective solution.

He had the receptionist change her usual request when taking a reservation over the telephone. Instead of saying, “Please call if you have to change your plans,” she rephrased the statement as a question. She began asking, “Will you call if you change your plans?”

The question caused the patron to commit to calling if he or she could not keep or needed to change their reservation. The no-show rate at the restaurant fell from 30 percent to 10 percent.

The context of the conversation I was having was about getting a project handed over into a support environment once it had been delivered, and the reluctance that a support function often has toward taking over new responsibilities. The specific problem was ensuring that the support function understood how to run the new system - and not being caught out by someone nodding and agreeing, but not actually understanding what it was they’d agreed to.

The implication of Cialdini’s theory is that rather than asking “do you understand that”, you need to frame the question so that their understanding is played back to you - perhaps something along the lines of “so how would you go about doing X?” The same principle gets used in aviation - when an instructor hands over control to a pupil, they’ll say “you have control” - to which the pupil has to reply “I have control” before the instructor releases the controls. There’s an explicit feedback loop in place.

[The book referred to in the article is here.]

Prospect theory and estimation

This is firmly in thinking-out-loud territory, but earlier today I was talking about project timescales, and how we’re generally pretty poor at accurately estimating schedules (that’s a collective rather than royal we).

Then I ran across a post on Metafilter, and picked up one of my old MBA textbooks - and the two things together got me wondering. There’s a concept in psychology and economics called prospect theory, which describes how individuals evaluate gains and losses - basically the idea is that you tend to ‘weight’ losses more than gains, so that tends to make you risk-averse. But the point from which you measure that gain or loss is affected by the ‘frame’ of the decision, or how you subjectively view it. Is the glass half-empty or half-full, that kind of thing.

If this is true for evaluating potential gains and losses, is it also true for evaluating potential durations? Perhaps if the estimation is framed in a sub-optimal way, it will impact on the outcome? And that’s before you start throwing groupthink and confirmation biases into the mix.

Probably not one to be trying to work out in my head at this time of the morning, but worth thinking about further.

Software patents - Microsoft’s Fatal Error

It’s not often that I find myself agreeing with John C. Dvorak - he’s been responsible for some eye-wateringly poor arguments in some of the stuff he’s written. But I think he’s onto something here: Software patents - Microsoft’s Fatal Error

On the surface it looks like the software patent decision in favor of large corporations is ruining any hopes that small fry will succeed in the business. In fact, the opposite may be true, and Microsoft will eventually learn that software patents are going to ruin the company.

Full article here.

Software patents - the Euro MPs respond

I’ve posted several rants on the subject of the ever-so-slightly controversial European Software Patents Directive in the past, and actually got as far as sitting down to write to the last group of people who can do anything about it, my representatives in the European Parliament.

There are six Euro MPs covering this region - two Labour (left-of-centre social democratic), two Conservative (right-of-centre), one Liberal Democrat (left-of-centre and left-of-Labour) and one UK Independence Party (a generally right-of-centre party whose main raison d’etre is for the UK to leave the EU. There’s an irony present in them having Euro MPs in the first place, but we’ll pass on that for the time being.) The two Labour MEPs act in tandem and respond based on geographic divisions, which reduces the number of responses to five. (I’ve mislaid the response from Diana Wallis, the Liberal Democrat, but she was anti-patent.)
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More on Sapient

Having climbed down off my soapbox about the idiocy of Sapient, here’s the opinions of a couple of analysts who take the contrary view:

Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li issued a report in November saying that “blogging will grow in importance companies should monitor blogs to learn what is being said about their products and services.” 

File under clueless

File under clueless: “Blog tech doesn’t live up to blog talk, according to Sapient CTO”

Via InfoWorld, I came across this pearl of wisdom from Ben Gaucherin, CTO of Sapient:

[blogs] are a fad fueled by pop culture’s desperate search for the next big thing. [They are] the digital equivalent of the pet rock.

If you’re not currently working for one of the FTSE100 or Dow 50, you may well be unaware of the existence of Sapient - they’re a high powered consultancy, dedicated to solving the technological problems of their clients with a blizzard of vague adjective-laden statements. You know the type: “We align business, customer, and technology goals to create executable road maps that improve business performance through technology.” And they’ve got the usual rollcall of high-profile clients who are busy executing the roadmaps. So far, so Dilbert.

Not being a high-powered consultancy, we tend to be more interested in what the tools can do - unfortunately we don’t get paid by the adjective. And it seems that Mr Gaucherin’s concerns stem from the ease of use of a blog:

“Unless you are willing to put in place controls over what is being said,” Gaucherin says, “these stream-of-consciousness thoughts might touch on things that they shouldn’t.” As examples, Gaucherin cites the possibility that a company could be liable for a sexual harassment suit for comments made in a blog or that a blog might reveal proprietary financial information.

All of which apply - in spades - to email, for example. And it completely misses the point that every technology has drawbacks and limitations, and completely fails to balance those with the benefits. So by the same logic taken to extremes, we presumably should be adopting executable road maps which remove email from the picture.

I suspect that part of the issue here is that tools such as blogs are just too end-user to appeal to a firm like Sapient. If you’re wrapped up in the world of “using your unique model to help clients solve their most important business and technology challenges”, then you’re probably not going to see the wood for the trees. Blogs are a small-scale tactical solution, and that just isn’t relevant if you’re attempting to justify a seven-figure consultancy fee.

The irony here is that I’m not likely to hear another of Mr Gaucherin’s opinions for a good long while, because the only way he’s got to communicate with his market is through press releases and PR. Whereas if he had a blog, I’d have already subscribed to his webfeed and would be reading his thoughts as often as he posted them. As would many of his current (and potential) customers. His loss, I guess.

Folksonomic cookery

This post from Benblog articulates something that’s been bugging me for a while - that while <sarcasm>folksonomic wittering of the kind beloved of us “social software professionals”</sarcasm> is all very well, it’s still a solution in search of a problem to a large extent.

The idea of tagging recipes with ingredient keywords - so something that contained eggs, mushrooms and falael, say, would be tagged up accordingly - is the best one I’ve heard yet. In fact you could take it further and tag with cooking methods, or presentation style, or complexity of preparation, or any variety of factors. So rather than staring blankly at a cupboard containing a jar of olives, two tins of butter beans and an Oxo cube, I could run a search on all those ingredients and the fact that tonight, Matthew, I’m going to be Gordon F*****g Ramsey - and end up with a relevant recipe.

There are some software applications out there that do similar things (or at least allow you to search on ingredients) but these are limited to the recipes that you’ve keyed in. What would be much more useful would be a folksonomic overlay on top of existing sites like Epicurious. In fact, let’s go one further and have epi.curio.us. One for the Lazyweb, perhaps?

Election blogging

Unless you’re a) not in the UK or b) have been hiding under a rock for the last 24 hours, you’ll have heard the announcements that Tony Blair has been to the Palace and the General Election is underway. Cue a month of wall-to-wall political coverage in the media, and a tidal wave of apathy from the British electorate.

This is the first General Election where blogs have been around to play a part, and it’s going to be fascinating to see if this time it’s a blog that breaks a Jennifer’s Ear story. If it does, then chances are you’ll hear about it through the 2005 General Election blog, the brainchild of Nick Barlow and to which I’ll be contributing.

The major parties seem to be getting on the webfeed bandwagon, with the notable exception of Labour - here are links to the Conservative and LibDem feeds. Of the minor parties, only Respect have a feed - Veritas, UKIP, the Green Party, the SNP and Plaid Cymru don’t seem to have got around to it yet. And I didn’t bother checking the BNP, before anyone asks.

Scary Jargon For Project Managers, Part 2 Of An Occasional Series: the BCG Matrix

Market share large, market growth large

When both market share and market growth are good, the product is a STAR. It’s likely to generate large quantities of cash as well, so it’s likely to be self-financing and have good economies of scale. This is where all products and services want to be.

A good example of a star is the iPod - the market for MP3 players is expanding rapidly, and Apple have a huge market share.

Market share large, market growth small

Over time, the growth of the market will tend to decline as everyone who’s likely to buy the product does so. If you’ve still got a large market share, but that market isn’t growing as well, then the product will tend to be a CASH COW. These products tend to generate more cash than you can reinvest profitably, normally because your unit costs are still falling as a result of economies of scale.

Ideally, this is where you’d like your star products to end up once the market growth starts to slow down. You could argue that an example of a cash cow product is Microsoft Windows - it’s got 90-odd percent of the desktop market, but the overall market isn’t growing as fast as it used to.

Market share low, market growth large

In this situation, you’ve got a potential PROBLEM CHILD. Although the market is growing, you’ve only got a small share of it. Why? Is it because your product is inferior to the competition, or is it because there are lots of products out there? Either way, your product is likely to take more cash to sustain it than it can generate, which is not a long-term success strategy.

Ideally, you’d like to capture more market share so that your product can either become a star if the market continues to grow, or a cash cow if the growth rate slows down. iPod competitors find themselves here - the market for MP3 players is growing rapidly, but Apple have most of the market.

What you don’t want is a situation where market growth slows with a small market share…

Market share low, market growth low

This is a recipe for problems - you’ve got a DOG on your hands. There’s slow market growth and you don’t have a very big share - so you can’t rely on a growing market to increase sales. Instead you’re going to have to grab market share from competitors, which is likely to be expensive if you’ve got to persuade their customers to buy your product.

Mobile operators in established markets are often in this position - everyone who’s going to buy a mobile phone has, so market growth is small - but at the same time, there are lots of competitors.

Where products go

Stars tend to become cash cows, unless you let their market share fall - in which case they’ll become question marks if the market is still robust; or dogs if the market growth slows.

Question marks can become stars if you can boost your share of a rising market; or dogs if the market slows.

Cash cows can become dogs if market share slips.

If market growth is likely to remain low, dogs often tend to be discontinued or divested - but if market growth picks up, they could become stars or question marks.