One-Trick Pony... with a Hammer?

The Merriam-Webster Online dictionary defines the term One-Trick Pony as "one that is skilled in only one area; also one that has success only once."  In this posting we are concerned with leaders that are One-Trick Ponies in that they are only skilled in one area.

We have all been direct reports of people who never establish a relationship with their team but give orders and expect that they are followed.  We have experienced others that build a team and are consensus driven.  Both can be effective in the right organization and environment.  Both can crash and burn if put into the wrong organization and wrong environment.

There have been plenty of executives that have only one style or one approach to management and are very successful.  We believe that a leader can be more effective if the he or she has a few skills and styles and knows how to apply them when that style best fits the circumstances or situation at hand.  This is called Situational Leadership and was developed in the 1970s by Paul Hersey, author of a book entitled Situational Leader, and Ken Blanchard, author of Management of Organizational Behavior. 

Everyone has a dominant style of management and it pays to know what that is.  We also have to know and be aware of the limitations of that dominant style and work to overcome these limitations that we most certainly will be faced with.  We need to compensate by learning a new style that is more appropriate for these, well, situations.  The new style must be learned.  It has to be practiced in the real world until it becomes almost as natural the dominant style is.  When we are able to master a secondary and, perhaps, a tertiary skill we will be better able to manage in the variety of situations we will most certainly face.

When we can accomplish this we will no longer be One-Trick Leaders.

This one trick concept has also applied to process improvement and problem solving for many years.  One must have a variety of tools the tool boxes.  We needs tools for exploring, defining and refining the issues, finding root causes, determining solutions, selecting the solutions, implementing the solutions, and controlling the process to maintain the gains.  We need tools for collecting, sorting, and prioritizing the needs and wants of the customers.  We have to be able to flow chart the process both the AS-IS and TO-BE.  We need to be able to define key points to measure either products or process and have the tools to then get easy, accurate, and repeatable measures to verify improvements and maintain them. 

One cannot have just one tool in the tool box.  One cannot have just one arrow in the quiver.  We used to have a saying in the early days of quality in the automotive industry when the less enlightened were trying to apply either Statistical Process Control or Taguchi Methods to any and every possible situation:

If the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail.