An Epiphany in Cambodia

Keys Critical To Successful Management
Accountability, Leadership, Coaching, Mentorship and Alignment

Towards the end of 2009 we found ourselves in Cambodia, and I attended Rotary in Phnom Phen. It was a memorable experience. Here’s a country desperate for coaching in nearly any and every area. I hadn’t really come face to face with the devastation Poll Pot reined upon them until I walked the killing fields, and the streets of Phnom Phen. He killed nearly a third of the population! And with it, he destroyed nearly all of the country’s written history. By the time the Vietnamese ended his reign there were nearly no people of any age, education or technical skills left alive. He destroyed records; there were no birth records, no property records and little recorded history. So now we have a country literally re-inventing itself, and anxious to learn the lessons visitors are willing to share with them.

The Phnom Phen Rotary club asked me to come back to discuss management philosophy and methodologies in the US with them. As I began my discussion with my new friends and fellow Rotarians, I pointed out that enlightened executive management has a number of facets to it, including leadership, coaching, mentorship, and alignment along with accountability.

It occurred to me as we talked that in the United Sates the pendulum has moved too far toward analytics and metrics. We’ve all heard the phrases: “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” and “accountability requires measurable goals” and “you need a dashboard of key metrics to successfully run the business”, and other similar pronouncements. To be sure, accountability is a key performance criterion. It assumes the implementation of a set of achievable goals and objectives, holding those assigned the responsibility, accountable for achieving them on time and within budget. And it presumes analytics and metrics as its basis. Goals and objectives should never be assigned without having the ability to generate a corresponding progress report card. The responsibility accountability brings with it, is to be able to define and measure success for those reports having tasks assigned to them.
But it doesn’t end there. It also requires leadership, which is not the same as being able to direct the activities of others. Leadership is developing a vision for the business, and then being able to reduce that vision to achievable goals and objectives for the organization and to be able to effectively communicate them with the employees. The conceptualization is worth little without a corresponding effective call to action that the staff can and will enthusiastically embrace. Too many executives fail to concentrate on this aspect. They assume if they say it, it will be done.

Successful managers are good coaches. Coaching means being able to tactically develop employees, improving specific performance, so that they grow with the organization, and do not get left behind, causing disruption and turnover. And being ”left behind” is arguably the single largest reason for turnover in the organization. People don’t just suddenly stop performing , but one day management realizes they can’t contribute to the level necessary and/or the employee realizes he’s no longer achieving success and it becomes a job verses the exciting and rewarding career it once was, and then we have turnover! Expensive, disruptive turnover.

Good management also requires mentoring, which largely means both living and re-enforcing the core values of the company in every way every day in action, behavior and decisions, thereby continuing to grow the employees professionally.
Finally, it means being able to achieve alignment of the employees with the vision, the core values and the goals and objectives of the organization. This begins as early as the interview and on-boarding processes where we often focus on areas that will have the least impact such as legacy performance which we expect will be an indicator of future performance, even though it’s a whole new environment, culture, set of products, etc. Then we often impose demonstrable industry knowledge as a condition of employment. The only thing prior industry knowledge does is speed the on-boarding process. It also serves to eliminate potentially great hires! And then we fail to focus on cultural alignment virtually at all in too many interview processes. And cultural/values alignment is a critically important criteria and indicator of success, perhaps the most important one.

It takes skill in each of these five distinct areas to lead an organization today, and an executive must focus on each of the five to successfully negotiate the business environment and grow the firm. Took me a 14 hour flight and a very foreign environment to recognize how far off kilter we are in emphasizing one of the five all too often and all too much, occassionally to the exclusion of the other four!