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ARE YOU A LEADER?
Acquiring and fine-tuning leadership skills will enhance your career trajectory, whether you manage people or not. Check out the new blog from CÆDENCE Consulting. We’re sharing real-life stories highlighting advice, strategies, tactics, and tips for new and aspiring leaders. Facilitating your success is our only job.
Welcome! If you’re ready to take your career to the “next level”, you’ve come to the right place. Leaders are people applying leadership skills and behaviors to get results (regardless of their job role or title). Leaders inspire, leaders empower, leaders influence, leaders make good stuff happen! In this blog, we’ll be sharing stories to highlight the approaches, strategies, tactics, and tips learned over our decades of experience managing people, projects, and businesses. Our goal for each brief post is to provide an engaging story highlighting a practical nugget of wisdom that you can apply immediately to enhance your performance and your team’s results. We want you to become the kind of leader people want to work with and for, who people will go the extra mile for, and who’s teams consistently deliver beyond expectations. Our mission is to facilitate your success.
In some posts we will be referring to leaders in the formal sense (e.g., those people with the title of “manager” or “director”), but most of the time we’ll be talking about leaders in the more general sense (those applying leadership skills and behaviors to get results, regardless of their title). Even if the story in a particular week’s post revolves around a particular job title, the lesson learned will be applicable to leadership generally.
Throughout our posts, we’ll do our best to be consistent in the use of the following terminology:
Leader:
Anyone applying leadership skills and behaviors to get results, regardless of their formal title or role. Leaders may be managers, project managers, directors, or individual contributors. Leaders may or may not have others directly or indirectly reporting to them.
Manager:
Someone formally recognized as being in charge of a team who is responsible for developing the talent on the team and evaluating performance of team members. Managers typically have 4-18 direct reports.
Project Manager (PM):
Someone formally recognized as being in charge of one or more projects who is responsible for project execution and achieving project deliverables. PM’s generally do not have any direct reports.
Director:
Someone formally recognized as a department head, responsible for the overall functioning of one or more disciplines or services within an organization. Directors may have up to 100 people reporting to them indirectly, typically through a staff of 3-10 direct reporting managers.
Danger is lurking around every corner in a new product development / new product introduction project. Avoidable risks wind up blindsiding teams, always at the worst possible moment. Risks blow up into problems because teams misjudge their nature and origin, and lack the right tools and processes to effectively identify, assess, and mitigate them. Let CAEDENCE introduce you to a systematic approach and toolkit for managing and reducing risk in new product development and introduction
There are dozens of tools for reducing risk in new product development and introduction. We know because we've used them to successfully launch dozens of new products in highly demanding industries like automotive and aerospace. Let CAEDENCE show you a few of our favorite tools that you can use immediately to dramatically reduce the chances of disaster on your next NPD/NPI project.
Risk is inherent in new product development and introduction. Regardless of your personal risk tolerance, it's critical to understand that unmanaged risk could ruin your business. We're not saying "don't take risks". We're saying "take risks with your eyes open". Let CAEDENCE introduce you to a systematic approach and toolkit for managing and reducing risk in new product development and introduction.
Many risks in NPD & NPI are visible. New process steps that must be implemented with caution and back-up plans. Unique product features that are challenging to accomplish. But there are other risks lurking. Things that can derail your project before you even realize. A bit nervous now? You should be! But, don't worry. Let CAEDENCE introduce you to a systematic approach and toolkit for managing and reducing risk in new product development and introduction.
Successful new product development and introduction projects require carefully balancing dozens of critical parameters, any one of which could sink the ship. At the end of the day, each of those dozens of NPD/NPI success measures relates to an aspect of just 4 main stakeholder care-abouts: Launch timing, Project budget, Product margin performance, Quality / delivery (customer experience). Learn the systematic method to reduce risks in your new product developments.
CAEDENCE has decoded decades of business experience to reveal the intuition and practices of top performing teams and individuals to radically accelerate people and teams toward excellence. We know the theory, but we've also lived everything we teach and honed best practices for decades. This arms us with tons of real-world examples to engage students and clarify techniques. We often help clients out of crisis situations, but our passion is preventing crises from occurring in the first place. This means (a) establishing robust systems, (b) empowering leaders, and (c) upskilling teams.
We challenge our problem solving classes to play “20 questions” – can we guess a randomly selected word using just 20 yes/no questions? Engineers often say it’s impossible. But, 99 out of 100 times, we find the word! How? There’s no magic: what’s on display is the power of binary decision making, what we call “splitting the dictionary”. And you can apply it to all sorts of real-world problem-solving scenarios. “Splitting the dictionary” is a problem scoping technique of asking the right questions to eliminate as many incorrect possibilities as you can, thus focusing your root cause search in the right area. Effective scoping is key to efficient problem-solving. Once the problem is clearly defined, think of the root cause as a needle in a haystack. Before you start examining hay, first ask “Am I on the right farm?”, then, “Which haystack should I search?”, then “Which portion of the chosen haystack is most likely to contain the needle?” Scoping out the possibilities with a simple tool or test can radically acc
Many teams and companies struggle to get the most out of structured problem solving methodologies because they make one or more of the common mistakes shown, and they don’t even realize they’re doing it! (We’ve shown the 8D process here, but whether your company uses 8D, Six Sigma DMAIC, PDCA, A3, or another paradigm doesn’t matter.) The issue is HOW any of those methodologies are used by real teams in real time in the real world.
“The people we nominate to help in this situation are either going to be the chicken or the pig.” The room went silent. The “chicken or pig” comment came specifically in response to resistance someone had to sending some people to the remote site. After a pause, the executive went on to explain “when you are making breakfast, the chicken contributes, but the pig is committed”. We weren’t going to resolve this problem with remote and part-time help. To get the job done, we would have to send people truly committed to working hands-on and to staying abroad for weeks until the job was done. “chicken or pig” became team shorthand for level of commitment. Next time your team is faced with a big challenge, I strongly encourage you to reflect - are you and your team sufficiently committed for the team to succeed? Are you going to be chickens or pigs?
When trying to improve or optimize a business or manufacturing process, there is one main rule: your actual process is never what you think it is. You need to "walk the process" (literally follow and watch every step of the process) to understand every step and detail. This will reveal steps and activities that are non-value added or causing significant pain. In addition, when working with teams, if people see that you’re really listening to them, they will be open to listening to you.
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