The Problem

A good friend, John Reynolds, has eloquently commented on a subject near and dear to my heart: Leadership.  More specifically, Project Leadership vs. Project Management:

My job lets me work with talented programmers and business people all over the world.  These folks all know their jobs – the programmers know how to write good code and the business folks know how to run their business – but when you bring them together they often can’t get a project finished.

The objective of all projects is to deploy Business Solutions. Requirements grow up to be Plans, Plans grow up to be Projects, but many Projects just don’t grow up to be Solutions. Like the Energizer Bunny, these Projects just keep going and going and going… but they never get anywhere.

I blame a lack of leaders.

John has captured the essence of the problem.  The projects that become successful solutions have leadership.  And this is something we’ve written about quite a bit. BPM especially requires leadership because you’re asking different constituencies to play nice together, despite the fact that the changes wrought by BPM will have uneven benefits and consequences.  The leader can coerce, cajole, persuade, confront… and can bring the resources and willpower to the project to get it done.

Leaders: Born or Made?

I fear that leaders are born, not made (although training certainly helps improve them).  When a project is stalled, a hero can’t just “take charge” and get a project back on track.  Leaders aren’t leaders without followers.

There have been many variants of this debate with regard to athletes, entrepreneurs, CEOs, leaders.  I come down on the side of nurture more than nature.  I’ll not deny that we are each born inheriting our own gifts, bestowed by our parents.  But how we develop and hone those gifts and shore up weaknesses it what makes us the adults and professionals we grow to be.

A Solution?
How do we develop leaders?  We might first ask, how do we develop heroes?

Step 1: expose your high potential team members to people you consider to be heroes.  Let them work in the proximity of great contributors to learn what it means to be a great contributor.  Try to awaken in them an awareness of what it is that makes the hero admirable, and an awareness that they, too, could be a “hero”.  Work with them to leverage their strengths.  Let them learn by following the example set by your heroes. Give them opportunities to succeed AND fail.

If I can distinguish between a hero and a leader – a good hero “leads by example” – not by consciously thinking about leading, but by doing all the things that we would want others on the team to do.  They work hard, they are focused on what’s good for the team, the project, the company.  They care about their colleagues and will help them.

The first step in evolving a leader from a hero, is to create self-consciousness (let me explain).  We have to wake in the hero, that self-awareness that they can lead intentionally, rather than unconsciously.  The key difference is intention.  A leader intends to have the effect of leading others.  A hero may lead others but isn’t intending to do so, and may even be alarmed and uncomortable when it happens.  There is a fear of responsibility, fear of failure, fear of letting others down.  If you want to foster that leader, give them the opportunity to succeed and fail.  And invest in teaching what you expect from leaders, and what their team will expect.  It takes a fair bit of coaching or self-awareness, but people can learn to lead.  I’ve seen it happen, and I’ve seen it happen even within our own projects among the customers we work with.  Soon, someone walking the path to becoming a leader, acting with intention, will learn from the feedback loop of consequences.  They’re on the path.

This is important because, for BPM to continue to grow and succeed, we need a lot of leadership.

John has a few more important points to make:

What we need are Project Leads… People who command the respect of both the Business and Technical folks.  We need people who have met both Business and Technical challenges in their careers, and who can show all of us “how to get there”…

That’s why we lack leaders for our projects.  There simply aren’t many Business people in the world who are respected by Techies, and not many Techies in the world who are respected by Business people.

This is not by any means an easy problem to solve – but if we want success for more of our projects, we need to find more of these leaders.

This is why, at BP3, we have tended to focus on developing our technical heroes into leaders who care about business.  But we also try to make sure that they understand the value that business leadership brings to the table, so that we’re ready to embrace it when we find it within our team or within our customers’ and partners’ teams. I agree with John: not an easy problem to solve, but sometimes the ones that are worth solving aren’t easy.

Ann All poses the question: “Is CIO the Right Person to Champion Process Improvement?” on the ITBusinessEdge Blog:

I’ve written about this idea several times. It’s hard to argue against the need for a chief process officer. Yetmany organizations do not designate a specific function for process improvement. What’s less clear is who is best positioned to fill this role. Vizard writes it “may be the chief operating officer or even the CIO.”

I think a good case can be made for the CIO. Because IT touches the entire business, the CIO has a high-level, cross-functional view of the organization shared by few other executives. IT also tends to have more hands-on experience modeling and mapping processes than other areas of the business. CIOs clearly recognize the need for process improvement. They named business process improvement their top priority for 2010 in Gartner’s annual survey.

Honestly, I’ll take anyone at the C-level or just below who is passionate about process improvement and empowered to make a difference.  Having *someone* take the lead is better than no one at all.  And in some organizations, which are heavy on IT to support the business, the CIO may be particularly well positioned (as his or her staff may know many of the business processes as well or better than the business folks who use the software, because the processes are already “encoded” in legacy systems).

However, Ann goes further in her post:

Samir Gulati, vice president of marketing for business process management software provider Appian, is another believer that a CIO or other senior IT executive is the right person to champion BPM throughout an organization. Business leaders tend to focus narrowly on the needs of their own divisions and opt for point solutions, he said when I interviewed him recently.

A lot of software companies prefer for BPM to be led by IT.  Why? Because when it is led by IT they can go for the strategic sale:  buy this software and you can apply it to all of your processes that come up!  Many IT organizations look at this a bit like setting up a utility:  we’re providing “electricity” (BPM), so that the business can turn on the lights, computers, etc (improve process). Its a comfortable relationship for software folks to build with IT organizations.  Speeds and Feeds, features, bells and whistles.  Comfortably avoiding too much discussion of business-oriented ROI.  Proving that the current topic is an emerging meme, Mark McDonald of Forrester has written about this subject as well, advocated for an expanded role for the CIO:

Well because no other executive is responsible for the long term operating model and no other executive has the resources that determine company productivity in the long run.  IT is now a significant source of leverage across the enterprise as information spans operational groups and fuels processes, communications connects people and processes and technology offers new service channels and methods. and throng time.

But this doesn’t mean that the CIO is the ideal candidate in most organizations to lead process improvements.  First of all, the most important criteria are not which three letters make up the title.  The most important criteria are specific to the person:  passion, empowerment, and capability.  Put another way, the most important criteria is leadership, and these three elements tie into the ability to lead an organizational change.

I believe a broader study of BPM would support the empirical data that we have at BP3 that organizations that lead BPM initiatives from the business generally yield higher ROI, tackle more processes, and roll them out more quickly.  Perhaps the secret sauce is that the projects are initiated out of such a close relationship to a business need, combined with accountability to that same business organization.

Having said that, we will take leadership on process over none at all any day.  And if the right person happens to be the CIO, COO, CMO, President, CEO, VP of Sales – it matters not as long as they have the passion, empowerment, and capability.

Update: Even before publishing this, Ann has added to her own thoughts on her original piece:

Of course not just any CIO can lead a BPM effort. It would have to be a CIO who is well-versed in the overall business, not one suffering from technology tunnel vision. In addition, he or she will need great communications and change management skills, since introducing BPM requires folks to make fundamental changes to the ways they work. A CIO without those skills shouldn’t be the go-to person on BPM. But guess what? A CFO or COO lacking those skills probably won’t fare any better.

Like most questions, I think there might be no one right answer to who should lead a BPM effort. lt will vary from organization to organization, depending on the skill sets of their executives.

This sounds much more in alignment with our own thinking at BP3.

Read a fantastic article on the business insider about leadership, as written from the perspective of two gentlemen who served in Iraq as infantry officers in the Marine Corps.

The quick highlights:

1. Respect your people, your team.  But then they go on to give actionable advice as to how to demonstrate the respect you have for your team.
2. Honor performance, and performers.  When you send the message that people don’t matter, or can’t excel, then you’ll find that no one excels.
3. Listen.  But then they go on to explain this in an eye opening way- “Listen aggressively”.
4. Know how to give an order.
5. Don’t be afraid to lead.
6. Inspect what you expect from your team.  This is a bit like the measure what you want to improve axiom of process improvement.
7. Be clear about what you want.
8. Get over yourself.  You’re not THAT great.
9. Stand by the changes you implement, to make sure that they “take”.
10. Develop subordinates who understand the same things.

Good stuff.  The anecdotes that go with these points are well worth the read. We are constantly reminding people that the biggest requirement for BPM success is leadership.  It takes leadership to effect change.  It takes leadership to get any project to the goal line.  So many of the common reasons that people cite for IT, or BPM, failures, really just boil down to leadership, experience, or both.