Q. What were some early management challenges for you?

A. At a school in Massachusetts where I once worked, we managed early on through consensus. Which sounds wonderful, but it was just a very, very difficult way to sort of manage anything, because convincing everybody to do one particular thing, especially if it was hard, was almost impossible.

Q. How big a group was this?

A. There were about 25 teachers and instructors and others. And very quickly I went from being this wonderful person, “Geoff is just so nice, he’s just such a great guy,” to: “I cannot stand that guy. He just thinks he’s in charge and he wants to do things his way.” And it was a real eye-opener for me because I was trying to change something that everybody was comfortable with. I don’t think we were doing a great job with the kids, and I thought we could perform at a higher level.

It was my first realization that people liking you and your being a good manager sometimes have nothing to do with one another. And I really like people to like me. I was always the kind of person who was a team player. Then I found out that that worked in theory just fine, but it made no sense when you were trying to do difficult things.

Managing under those circumstances became difficult because I think it’s one thing to manage when people are rooting for you. It’s different when people really aren’t rooting for you, and they want your plan not to work to prove that they were right and you were wrong.

Q. What other takeaways did you get from that experience?

A. Convincing people to give your way a try will work if you neutralize — and sometimes you have to cauterize — the ones who really are against change. They’re the kind of person who, if you tell them it’s raining outside, they’ll fight you tooth and nail. You take them outside in the rain, and they’ll say, “But it wasn’t raining five seconds ago.”

I spent a year trying to convince those people to change and give me a chance. Then I realized that was a wasted year. I’d have been much better just to simply say O.K., thank you, difference of opinion. Go do something else with your life. Let me work with this group of folks and move forward. And then you can rebuild that relatively quickly.

Q. And so, your approach now?

A. Now I am very clear with people that I will respect your opinion, and I will listen to the range of issues on the table, but once a decision is made, even if you don’t agree with it, it is your job to make me right. That’s just how it goes. Then, in the end, if it turns out that we’ve worked as hard as possible and I’m wrong, I’ll just say, ”O.K., so let’s change.” I’ve also been convinced of some paths we should go down when people make a reasonable case. You want to encourage the kind of risk-taking behavior that keeps organizations moving forward.

You have to drive folks to innovate. The tendency in lots of large organizations is to try and find a comfortable place where you think you can get measured rewards for measured work. In other words, they say to themselves, “I know how much I’m going to get if I do this much, and then my life is in balance.” I just don’t think you get a lot of innovation under those circumstances. You want people to figure out how to do things better, to figure out a smarter way. When that’s a constant process, you start seeing things innovate. It’s not because someone comes up with some brand-new idea where you say, “Oh, no one’s ever thought about this before.”

Q. Other thoughts on innovation?

A. Innovation sticks for about 18 months. So let’s say you put a great innovative program in place. You put the right people on it, you get everything organized, and then if you don’t come back and do anything with it for 18 months, that program’s half as good as when you started it. They just start decaying.

And I think one of the challenges for us in this business, in management generally, is that nobody wants to keep going back and doing the same thing over and over. Everybody wants to get this brand-new idea and really get it going, instead of paying attention to the other things that are fundamental to our business. If you don’t go back and check on a regular basis, those things begin to decay, and you end up constantly having to reinvent something that you already did. Getting a team of people who really understand how essential that is to staying great is one of the real challenges.

Q. What are some other leadership challenges that you deal with?

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/business/geoffrey-canada-of-harlem-childrens-zone-on-remembering-basics.html?partner=rss&emc=rss