Leadership in the Age of Pivot Fatigue (Guest Julia Becker Collins, COO Vision Advertising)
SHOW NOTES:
Contact and Connect with Julia Becker Collins: Instagram - Linkedin
Vision Advertising - Website - Facebook - Instagram - Twitter - Linkedin - Vision University
Ruth Bader Ginsburg - Supreme Court - Films about her life
Books: How to Be a Great Boss - Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It
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Zeitzwolfe Accounting: Website - Facebook
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Leading The Right Team, The Right Way
After recording this episode, I was inspired to go to my bookshelf to dive deeper into the subject of leadership. Two books caught my eye. How to Be a Great Boss co-written by Gino Wickman who wrote the groundbreaking business book, Traction. The second book was Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It, written by Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson. Although the books, on the surface, have different approaches on handling employees, they share the following key elements; hiring the right person for the right job, trust, clear goals and expectations and accountability
There’s a tool in How to Be a Great Boss, where you analyze your staff and job applicants by how they demonstrate your company’s core values. This is a trademarked tool so you’ll have to buy the book for all the juicy details. But through their score you can see if they are the right person for your organization and the right fit for the job. This tool can also help you determine, if they’re the right person, but they need to be in a different role.
The book also emphasizes having a predictable meeting rhythm to keep everything on track. I can tell you from experience that meeting with your staff on a regular basis builds stability. You might be thinking, I HATE MEETINGS. That’s probably because the meetings you attend are inefficient and a waste of time. But if they’re run correctly, then they can be the foundation for your staff to connect and collaborate. I think regular meetings are even more important with a distributed workforce.
Another key element in the book is as a boss your expectations must be clear and driven by four areas – roles, core values, goals (which they call rocks) and measurables. This method allows you to easily sift out the wrong-fit employees, because the ones who can’t live up to these expectations generally quit. This book has a lot of great process and systems you can implement in your business. If you’ve read Traction, then this is a good companion piece to dive deeper into this subject. If you run an agency, you probably run your firm with an emphasis on at least some of the measurables listed in the book, especially the one’s around time, such as billable hours, utilization and overtime hours.
What if I told you that tracking time is totally bonkers and attending meetings should be optional? What if your employees were allowed to come in at noon, check their email and then catch an afternoon movie?
This sounds sort of nuts, right? Like something out of Office Space.
What if your employees were free to do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as their work got done?
In the shockingly titled, Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It the use of time, tied to performance is the antithesis of their method known as ROWE, which is an acronym for Results-Only Work Environment. As someone who has come to despise tracking my time, this totally appeals to me. But being an accountant who uses time to calculate labor, efficiencies, and pricing, this borders on chaos. As a business owner, if you have a labor force, whether it’s contractors or employees, this book may seem extreme, but keep an open mind.
This episode we are joined by Julia Becker Collins who is the Chief Operating Officer at Vision Marketing, a female led, full-service marketing agency founded in 1999. On this episode the focus is on leadership and the challenges of leading a team during the age of pivot fatigue. Through the ups and downs during the pandemic, leaders and their teams have had to be nimble, supportive and dedicated. Our guest Julia Becker Collins lived this firsthand. Part of her success was due to her ability to lead, but the secret sauce, was having a dynamic team that she could count on, especially when Julia discovered she had cancer. On the show, you’ll hear how Julia was able to inspire and lead her team, despite the uncertainty in the world and the status of her health.
Heather, our host, shares her thoughts on leadership and building teams. She examines the books How to Be a Great Boss and Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It and discusses the similarities between the two and the qualities needed for nurturing the right team.
Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE)
If you gave your employees complete control over their own time, would you feel comfortable doing so? If not, why? Is it a trust issue? A training issue? Or a “that’s just not how it’s done” issue?
Perhaps you already have a flexible work schedule; according to this book that’s an oxymoron, because when using the ROWE method there are no schedules. Here’s how they break it down. With a flexible work arrangement, permission is required, the employee has limited options, they’re still controlled by management, they must abide to the policies and guidelines, there is a focus on time off, and their workload is high demand with low control. But in a results-only work environment, it breaks down like this – no permission is needed, options are unlimited and fluid, employees manage themselves. However, there is an emphasis on clear goals and requires accountability, the focus is on results and their workload is high demand, yet they have high control.
See how ROWE majorly different from the typical workplace model. In a results-only work environment, people are no longer paid for activities, instead they are paid for outcomes. Rather than paying your staff for a chuck of their time, you’re paying them for a chunk of work. Expectations must be crystal clear on what needs to be done daily, weekly, monthly and yearly. Then it’s up to the employee, with coaching and guidance of management to meet the goals. Its key to note that the employee is not left high and dry with ROWE, in this model management acts more like a mentor than a dictator.
One of the major benefits of ROWE is that people feel less stressed out. For instance, if they come in at 10:30 in the morning, because they took their kid to the orthodontist or leave on a Thursday afternoon to drive to the coast for the weekend, nobody cares. Because they control their time, instead of wasting it, workers are more efficient. In this model, workload is transparent, everyone knows what others are working on, what they’re trying to accomplish and what they’re being measured on. Open communication is key.
For employees ROWE way seem like utopia, but for management this may feel more like dystopia. But, as leaders, if you’re open to this concept, I believe you can implement this in your company if you’ve created the right foundation for ROWE to thrive. Just like in How to Be a Great Boss, one of the key elements is to find your right-fit employees who align with your core value and are in the right job position.
What do you think about the ROWE method? Does it seem like a dream? Can you picture it as a reality in your business? Obviously, ROWE isn’t for everyone.
But if you’re interested in exploring ROWE for your company, we can dive into this together through a strategy session with me. Just follow the link in the show notes to set up a time. In our session, I will provide an objective view, while examining your situation. We’ll tackle the pros and cons for your firm and discover if your company has what it takes to move towards implementing ROWE.
Now that you’ve heard about the two books, here are the titles again: How to Be a Great Boss and Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It. If you’ve read either of these books, I’d love to know your thoughts and opinions. You can DM me, I’d love to know – my Instagram account is in the show notes along with the links to these books.
