Part II of Our Exclusive Interview with Alex Hiam
Author of “Making Horses Drink—How to Lead and Succeed in Business” (Entrepreneur Press, 2002)

AMA’s Shari Lifland recently spoke to Alex Hiam, author of “Making Horses Drink—How to Lead and Succeed in Business,” about the state of leadership and employee commitment today. Part I of the interview focused on how his metaphorical use of the “leading a horse to water” fable relates to a leader’s role and responsibilities to employees. Part II presents the action steps leaders need to embrace to help their employees—and through them, their organizations—thrive and succeed.

AMA: What do you think is the #1 challenge faced by business leaders today? If you could give them just one bit of advice, what would that be?

Hiam: It is my contention that we are going to look back on this busy period in history and see in it a difficult and uncertain but ultimately successful effort to reinvent management. My advice is not to sit on the fence. It’s uncomfortable up there.

So-called Old Economy businesses—including the U.S. Postal Service and the old AT&T—were products of a relatively predictable and slow-paced economic environment. Businesses do well in this Level I environment by using traditional command-and-control management, with centralized thinking and planning and hierarchical execution.

Today we are seeing the emergence of faster-paced, unpredictable economic environments. Businesses have many and varied competitors, and the need to embrace new technologies, foreign markets, diverse and fast-changing customer preferences and other changes. The management practices needed in this Level 2 context are quite different. Unfortunately, most organizations are mired in a kind of hybrid of Level 1 and Level 2 practices, creating an unhappy marriage of conflicting approaches to management.

I think the biggest challenge right now is to complete the journey between Level I and Level 2, to truly reinvent our management methods and to reinvent our workplaces and the nature of work itself.

AMA: What are some of the specific ways managers can help their employees to function more productively?

Hiam: Everyone needs some personal recognition and, even more fundamentally, consideration. Polite treatment creates a civil, warm workplace where people feel comfortable. Great leaders do little things like asking people how things are going and then taking a moment to really listen. Or they share a clipping about something they know an employee is interested in. They give negative feedback professionally and informatively, always balancing it with encouragement and recognition of good efforts and results.

I don’t know about other trainers, but personally, I’ve begun to include self-management in all supervisory and management courses, because I believe good management of others has to be built on a foundation of self-management.

AMA: You include lots of wonderful quotes from business people in your book, including one from Jim Scott, CEO of The CFO.com: “In my opinion, a bad leader never gets bad news.” What are some basic ways a leader can keep the lines of communication open so that he gets the information—good and bad—that he needs?

Hiam: Face-to-face interactions are the most likely to generate honest, genuine input. Make a practice of posing open-ended questions to employees. When you are in a position of power it’s easy to find yourself following the custom of dominating and directing most conversations and meetings. Also, nurture multiple channels of communication to make sure you can pick up weak signals: suggestion systems, discussion groups, an open-door policy, breakfast meetings with groups of employees, surveys, e-mail requests for ideas or information, etc. The more ears you open, the more you’ll hear.

AMA: Let’s face it—even the most stimulating job has its boring, but necessary routine tasks. How can a leader keep his/her people from falling into a mind-numbing rut?

Hiam: Well, the first and most important step is to make a solemn vow to yourself that you will not permit anyone to be bored for long in your workplace. Because if you think about it, nobody is going to do a good job if they are bored.

With the emergence of the last great innovation in management, the production line, we embraced the idea of dumbing down individual tasks until they were simple and repetitive. Any idiot could build a car at minimum wage, managers reasoned, if he only had to master one very simple part of the overall job. I don’t want to go over the history of how Toyota’s and other foreign competitors’ discovery of the Kan-ban system, quality control and quality teams engaged production-line workers more fully and reaped tremendous productivity and quality gains. But the most important lesson is simply that if people are bored you are wasting your most important asset! We haven’t really tackled that implication yet in many workplaces, but we need to.

The simple solution to the boredom problem is to tackle it with things external to the work design—like rotating people more often, mixing up tasks or changing schedules, training in new skills, throwing a party or doing other things to break the routine. Or, you can tackle the boredom problem with job redesign, job enrichment, and the introduction of new challenges for employees. Fundamentally, every employee needs to not only be doing productive work, but also thinking about how to cut costs, improve outputs or design the next generation of productive tasks.

AMA: In your chapter on innovation you write, “The two most powerful engines of creativity are the questions, ‘Why?’ and ‘Why not?’ Unfortunately, they are asked far more frequently in the average kindergarten than workplace.” That’s a great quote. So how can leaders learn to ask more “why” questions and how can they encourage their workers to do the same?

Hiam: It is important to recognize that businesses must cycle between explorative creativity, at one extreme, and routine production, at the other. You make money when you can systematize and replicate something—in other words, do it over and over. But in today’s economy, you can’t expect one system, one formula, to work for very long, so you also have to nurture the ability to recreate it. I think of this as constructive creativity (in contrast to the “creative destruction” ideal of Enron’s top brass which destroyed that company in the end).

To make sure you and your employees are practicing constructive creativity, work out what the ratio of questioning to doing ought to be. Specifically, how many hours is it okay to work efficiently using an old system before you should take some time to think about it creatively?

One foundational action for the leader is to make a practice of being extremely inquisitive and curious. Model the behavior you want and you will spread it naturally. Maybe you could start by carrying an idea notebook in which you enter at least one “Why?” and one “Why not?” question each day, then collect employees’ answers to those questions. If even one out of twenty of these notebook pages yields a useable insight, your time will have been well spent. And employees will soon pick up the habit of asking the proverbial “dumb questions” and start generating even greater returns.

Member Bonus: Click here to read Alex Hiam’s “Commitment Checklist,” from his book “Making Horses Drink—How to Lead and Succeed in Business.”

For more information about “Making Horses Drink—How to Lead and Succeed in Business” go to www.alexhiam.com or www.streetwisemotivation.com

About Alex Hiam: Hiam is CEO of the corporate training firm Alex Hiam & Associates and the author of a dozen business books, including The Vest Pocket CEO, Marketing for Dummies and Motivating and Rewarding Employees. (He is already working on his next book, Motivational Management, which will detail some of the techniques he covers in his executive workshops. It will be published by AMACOM this fall.)