Sometimes we take relatively simple concepts and make them too complicated.  This is my conviction about the subject of personal productivity.  When something hits my “inbox”, regardless of its source: email, cell phone, mail, interruptions, there are only four possible things I am going to do.

DELETE—If it is not important, I immediately kill it as fast as possible.

DELAY—If if is not urgent that it be done now, I file it for later.

DELEGATE—If it is something someone else can do as well or better than I can, they own it.

DO—If the first three options do not work, then it has to fit into my daily plan.

I will admit this is a very simple process with the exception of one phrase:  IS IT IMPORTANT?

Technology  and productivity may increase your efficiency but they cannot tell you if what you are doing should be done at all.  Only your character and core values personally and professionally can do that.

I always feel to some degree as a leader that I have failed when we finally get to this point.  I want to make absolutely sure that I have given this person the right amount of leadership, specific feedback and the necessary resources and training to be successful.

After this due process, how do you know the timing is right?  The two questions that are listed in Good to Great offer some incredible perspective.

 The first is would you hire this person again?  If the clear answer is no, then you know it is time to act.  The second is if they were to go on their own would you be disappointed or relieved?  If the answer is relieved, then you know what you need to do.

Leaders must have the character to act and make the hard calls.  There is clearly one thing worse than  having to deal with an appropriate termination.  The later realization that your entire team had reached this  same conclusion six months ago and were beginning  to wonder why you could not see it.

In his book Meatball Sundae he writes, “New marketing leverages scarce attention and creates interactions among communities with similar interests.  New marketing treats every interaction, product, service, and side effect as a form of media.  Marketers do this by telling stories, creating remarkable products, and gaining permission to deliver messages directly to interested people.”

One of his incredible insights is that Old Marketing was all about interrupting people with ads that may have no interest whatsoever to the person involved.  Can I hear click the remote control?

New Marketing is about connecting people with similar interests so that when they get your information there is already a high degree of buy in because of the products and services involved and the relationships that already exist within the community.

As a matter of fact, the relationships within the community will initially be a stronger selling point than any brand loyalty to your company.  Failing to see the power in this human dynamic will position you with a competitive disadvantage the in new economy.

Marketing has always been about knowing what people want and providing them a way to get it. That basic dynamic will probably never change.  What has changed forever is how and when people get their information and what they do with it to make sure their friends know about it as well.

The process was started with a specific job description and then you would try to find a person with an educational and experience background that matched that job assignment.  Their character was a factor but just not the main one.

In the new Information Age character has now clearly moved to the top of the list.  Today you find the right person that will be a good fit for your team and over time you know they will find their right seat on the bus.

Jack Welch had three major things he was looking for at General Electric with all new executives.  Two of these criteria related to character and only one to competency.

The first test was integrity because he wanted to know they would keep their word and tell the truth.

The second test was for intelligence because it takes smart people to compete in today’s complex global economy. 

The third test was for personal maturity which means they can handle the stress and setbacks with equal parts of joy and humility.

The major reason for this significant shift in hiring priorities is that people now have to know how to work well in a highly participative environment.  In this culture the mutual goals of the group are the target and not just personal success.

Everyone must have the mindset that what matters is that we succeed regardless of who gets the credit.  Competency will always play a part in the hiring decision but today personal character clearly separates the winners from the losers.

The feedback after both of my sessions confirmed everything I have been reading on this subject.  There is very little honest and clear communication taking place between key leaders and their teams on an ongoing basis.

The challenge for most corporations today is that the majority of senior management positions are filled by baby boomer age leaders who know nothing but a positional model.  They were trained that way academically and that is the only system that has been a part of their entire career.

The new workforce is made up of generation x employees that have an entirely different world view that impacts how they view their career.  They are highly motivated and want to be a part of interactive team where they can actively be a part of the process.

If we do not provide the critical situational leadership skills that both generations need then we are creating unnecessary leadership cultural wars that destroy moral and diminish productivity.  The result of any lack of relevant training is that the older generation think the younger are too aggressive and the younger are convinced that the old guard will simply not let go and delegate.

This type of conflict resolution will do nothing but add to the problem and ultimately destroy your leadership credibility.  When anyone hears you making destructive comments about another person who is not there, they too realize that one day they will not be there either.

The principle that I have adopted is that if I have something negative to say to another person I will go directly to them and talk about it privately.  If it is not a big enough deal for me to go and talk privately then it should not be a big enough deal to talk with others.

This one discipline has eliminated at least seventy-five percent of my need to make negative comments  to other people and almost completely stopped the destructive habit of public personal criticism of others.  Now when I do need to talk with someone about a real performance issue my motives are right and my methods are positive.

Marshall Goldsmith is one of the top Executive Coaches in the market. His latest book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There is a great read for all leaders who want to reach their maximum potential.  He identifies twenty habits that can completely destroy your influence as a leader.

The amazing thing that he confirms for all of us is that the most critical problems related to executive leadership have very little to do with core industry specific competency or even the expected qualities of productive leadership.

The overwhelming majority of smart, disciplined, experienced and passionate leaders are failing in the one major area of basic people skills.  They do not relate well to their superiors, peers, subordinates and sometimes even customers.

They do not listen, make negative comments about people when they are not in the room, and always tend to punish the messenger when bad news is delivered just to list a few.  Almost always these potential fatal flaws are obvious to everyone but the leader who does not even see them as an issue.

An absolute necessity for any effective leader is to establish a culture within their organization where the truth can be told and they will get the feedback they need or these extremely negative blind spots will never be revealed.

People in the industrial age were primarily paid for what they did.  In the information age they will be primarily paid for what they know and in the idea age how well they think.

Add to this mix the power of technology and the rise of the ever changing and highly competitive global economy and you get the new realities for leaders in the 21^st century.

The real tragedy is that most corporate cultures today are still leading and managing from an old positional leadership model rather than a new participative one.  Under this model the leaders at the top make all of the decisions and the followers at every level simply carry out their instructions.

These old models are designed around preventing failure rather than ensuring success.  The process is trusted and valued more than the people within the organization.

This core belief about leadership results in trying to manage people with a carrot and stick mentality instead of leading them as the most valuable part of your team.

All effective leaders in the 21^st century will prioritize hiring great people and then empowering them to make decisions and take risks or they will absolutely fail in this new global economy.

It also means that as a leader you are by nature a change agent.  You want to deal with the brutal facts facing your team and find new solutions to old problems.

In some situations the people that you report to are not as open to change.  This is where your character must lead you to deal with this situation in the right way.

The right way is to approach you boss directly and openly share what you are recommending to do and why.  The absolute wrong way is to talk about your superiors to someone else in any negative way that would be disloyal.

If after a long period of respectful dialogue you are not sensing any openness to change within the culture of the organization then your decision is clear.  What you must not do is to try to change your boss, that is not in your job description.

A players realize one fundamental truth about organizational culture.  You will over time help be a part of a team effort that will change it for good or if you stay too long in the wrong culture it will change you.  That is an unacceptable price to pay and that is why it’s time to leave.

The major goal of the company culture at the end of the day was to prevent failure.  Therefore if you had a problem with two people that were chronically taking too long for lunch breaks then you would design a system where everyone would have to sign out and sign back in.

Then it became some middle managers job assignment to monitor the system until it became a part of the new and improved culture for the company and that would solve the problem with lunch breaks.  This cycle was repeated over and over again and the best people in the organization were always assigned the duty of cleaning up the mess produced by the worst ten percent of workforce.

Today you better have your best people working on your biggest opportunities or you competition will eat your lunch and you will not need to sign out and in anymore.  You must move from a culture that tries to prevent failure to one that ensures success.

This means that you define success not by how the process is managed by what type of results your people are achieving.  The leaders number one responsibility now is to hire great people and set the vision for the organization.

The winners will take care of the strategy and it will produce results but you will probably have to live without your weekly employee lunch report.  You will not need it any more they fired the two people.