Archive for December, 2008
Holiday Gratitude December 19 2008 one response
This is the time of year when a lot of folks take a week or two of vacation. I’m very happy to report that I’m one of them. Barring an unconquerable urge to blog in the next two weeks, this will be my last post of 2008.
Thanks to everyone who has become a regular reader of The Next Level blog in the past year. I really appreciate your positive feedback, encouragement, comments and sharing the blog with your colleagues. One of my goals this year was to establish a broader community of leaders who are committed to learning and growing as leaders. Thanks for being a part of the community.
I was talking with a client this morning and made this suggestion which I’ll offer to you (and intend to do myself). In no more than a page, write down the things that you accomplished and feel best about in 2008. On a second page, take the perspective of December 2009 and write down what you accomplished and feel best about in 2009.
This little exercise (which is great to do after you’ve had a few days to unplug and renew) will do two things for you. The first page will remind you of how much you really did this year and what mattered the most. With the pace we all keep these days, it’s important to take a breath now and then and celebrate the wins. The second page will help you clarify your most important goals for 2009. I’d encourage you to save it in a place where it’s easy to review every few months next year as a means of keeping yourself on track.
So, happy holidays to you and yours. Have a great one and a safe one. Looking forward to reconnecting in 2009.
Leadership Advice from an Investment Analyst December 17 2008 no responses
Wall Street investment analysts have a front row seat for observing executive presence in action when they participate in quarterly earnings calls with corporate CEO’s and CFO’s or attend investor presentations. The recommendations they make based on these executive performances can swing a company’s market value hundreds of millions of dollars in either direction.
In the current issue of Chief Executive magazine, long time Wall Street analyst Stephen McClellan offers his advice on what he’s learned in 32 years of listening to and watching senior executives. Reading through his article, I’ve boiled it down to three leadership traits that can create economic value:
Fairness: McClellan notes that analysts really resent favored treatment for those that “cooperate” with the company and the blacklisting of those that are critical. As he writes, “Impartial, evenhanded executive treatment of all analysts indicates outstanding management quality and character.”
Accountability: Executives who dodge accountability for poor performance by blaming the “headwinds” of the economy do not win points with analysts. McClellan writes that the subprime lending crisis is the current excuse du jour for poor performance.
Humility: Executives who take personal credit for every success while avoiding the blame for failures drive analysts crazy. Visible ego indulgences such as heavy media coverage, excessive compensation packages and corporate jets tend to lose the analysts as well. (Along with everyone else lately. Why do you think we’re still hearing about the auto execs flying their corporate jets to Washington for the first round of bailout hearings?)
So, what strikes you about this list? I’ll tell you what lands with me. If these characteristics were more common, we perhaps wouldn’t be in the middle of an enormous economic crisis. Things didn’t just happen. The current crisis is a result of a series of poor leadership decisions that stemmed, in part, from a lack of fairness, accountability and humility.
What’s your take? What would you add to the list?
Getting “Them” to Listen December 15 2008 no responses
Once we’ve built a level of trust with each other, it doesn’t take very long in a conversation with a group of high potential leaders before someone brings up “they.” Once the dam is breached, everyone else chimes in with stories about how “they” don’t get it and “they” aren’t focused on the right things. The obvious question, of course, is “Who are they?” “They” always turns out to be senior management. “They” don’t pay attention and “they” don’t listen.
This is the point at which I usually ask this question, “What’s your reaction when someone on your team comes to you and says, ‘Hey Mary, there’s a problem we’ve identified, but we think we have some solutions for fixing it,’ or ‘Bob, we think we’ve identified an opportunity and we’re developing some plans to act on it.” A year or so ago, one woman in our group coaching program summed it up for all of her peers inside and outside of her company when she said, "Oh, my gosh, it’s like manna from heaven when that happens.”
Agreed. My response, then, is if you love it so much when that happens, why should “they”, (the people you report to) be any different? Interesting point, isn’t it?
Part of the problem, perhaps, is not knowing how or what to present. That’s where my blogging buddy, Dan McCarthy at Great Leadership, comes to the rescue. Over the weekend, he put up a great post on 10 ways to get management to listen to your ideas. Among his tips are these gems:
2. Go in with ideas they’re likely to care about (raising revenues, decreasing expenses, capturing new business are all likely candidates).
3. Be prepared to give it up. I’m not talking about something lewd here. The point Dan is making is you have to prepared to let go of it being “your” idea. The whole point is to put something out there that top leadership gets excited about and builds on.
Check out Dan’s list and then let both of us know, “What’s worked for you in getting “them” to listen?”
What Are You Thinking? December 12 2008 2 responses
OK, just in the last hour, I’ve seen or heard stories on the potential bankruptcy of GM, the $50 billion Ponzi scheme that’s just been uncovered and new stats on rapid declines in consumer spending. Terrible stories all, but can I do anything about them? Nope. About the only thing that any of us can control is what we think about and the actions that flow from those thoughts. I’m not saying we should all climb under a rock until the economy recovers. We have to have situational awareness. That said, we don’t have to overdose on it.
As for me, I’ve been noticing that dynamic in myself a lot lately. Earlier this week I was on a flight to Boston to deliver a presentation on Wednesday afternoon. I was having a great day, feeling good and was looking forward to reading through a few newspapers on the plane. That’s just what I did. Plowed through the Times, the Journal and the Post. By the time we landed at Logan, I was depressed heading towards hopeless. I had overdosed on the news.
What snapped me out of it was when, as we were pulling up to the gate, my Smart Phone started buzzing as my e-mail downloaded. Checking it, I saw a note from a prospective client letting me know that his company wants to run a pilot of our group coaching program in the first quarter of 2009. Immediately, I felt better.
Why? Well, the obvious answer is it’s nice to land a new client. The bigger and more universal answer, though, is that my thinking and attention turned on a dime from bad news that I couldn’t control to good news that I had a hand in creating. Your thoughts control your feelings. From those feelings spring actions and those actions lead to results. The results can either be positive or negative and you can reverse engineer back from the results to the actions, the feelings and the thinking. In the current economic environment it is vitally important to monitor the quality of your thinking.
The Apostle Paul wrote this advice to the Philippians: “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is fair, whatever is pure, whatever is acceptable, whatever is commendable, if there is anything of excellence and if there is anything praiseworthy-keep thinking about these things.” There used to be a law in computer programming, garbage in, garbage out. It’s the same principle with our own output.
What are you doing to monitor and improve the quality of your thinking these days?
Going Long on Hubris December 10 2008 no responses
A few months ago, when the financial crisis began in earnest, I thought about writing a post that I was going to call, “The End of Hubris.” The point was going to be that the sudden collapse of major institutions such as AIG and Lehman Brothers was the wake up call that was going to bring leaders around the world back to the idea that no amount of self-perceived brilliance can overcome the “laws of gravity.” You know, I’m glad I didn’t write that because, boy, was I wrong.
Let’s just take yesterday as one example. The Wall Street Journal reported that Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain suggested to his board that he receive a $10 million bonus this year after he received push back on his earlier lobbying for a bigger number. Recalling that this was the year in which Merrill basically had to sell itself at fire sale rates to Bank of America, the board has declined to pay Thain and his top team any bonuses for 2008. (The beginning of an emerging trend for this year, apparently.)
In Chicago yesterday, real estate magnate Sam Zell acknowledged that his takeover of newspaper publisher Tribune Company (home of the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times) had failed when the company declared bankruptcy. Left holding the bag on that are the employees of the company who got equity stakes from Zell when he used their pension fund to finance the sale. In his article this morning, Washington Post business columnist Steve Pearlstein laments the propensity of business leaders like Zell to blame their failures on a “perfect storm” of events. As Pearlstein writes, “The only perfect storm to hit the Tribune was the one that resulted from the collision of Zell’s ego, his arrogance and his utter ineptitude in running a media empire…”
Pearlstein provides a nice synopsis of other poor uses of the perfect storm explanation including the auto companies and the government sponsored mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. What seems to be missing on the front end and the back end of so much of what’s going on these days is humility and accountability. As Pearlstein pointed out this morning, GM took a belated step in that direction this week when they took out a full page ad in several publications to apologize for the mistakes they’ve made along the way. Legg Mason fund manager Bill Miller showed both humility and accountability in this morning’s Wall Street Journal when, in acknowledging the 58% drop in his Value trust fund said, “The thing I didn’t do, from Day One, was properly assess the severity of this liquidity crisis.”
Bravo, Mr. Miller. One of my favorite definitions of leadership is that it’s a two part job. The first is to define reality. The second is to offer hope. In his comments to the Journal, Bill Miller acknowledged reality and perhaps offered some hope to his investors by demonstrating that he gets it. You can only do that when the ego and hubris factor is under control. Let’s hope we see more of that going forward.
A Failure of Imagination December 8 2008 no responses
In his latest post, Seth Godin writes about the economic opportunities he missed out on in the early days of the Internet. He recounts that he didn’t just ignore the Web, he actively ignored it and spent his time writing The Smiley Dictionary. How could a really smart guy like Seth Godin miss it so big? As he explains, “the rules of this new business didn't match the rules of my existing business.”
Seth’s post reminds me of an episode from one of my favorite television series, Tom Hanks’ “From the Earth to the Moon,” which is the story of NASA’s Apollo program. One of the tragedies of the race to the moon occurred in 1967 when three astronauts died in their space capsule as a flash fire consumed the space craft during a launch pad test. The space program came to a halt as investigations conducted by their fellow astronauts were organized to determine the cause of the fire. The episode comes to a climax when astronaut Frank Borman is called before a Senate committee to explain what happened and why the Apollo program should be allowed to continue. His answer was that the ultimate cause of the fire was “a failure of imagination.” The astronauts and engineers at NASA had prepared for any eventuality that might occur in space. They never imagined that there could be a fire on the launch pad.
Of course, they came back from that and, a little over two years later, Neil Armstrong was walking on the moon.
It’s easy to see how failures of imagination got us to where we are today. Not enough people imagined that housing values might actually decline instead of going up, up, up. So here we are. The interesting point here is the very trait that will get us out of this mess is imagination. At the macro and the micro levels, all of us as leaders need to act with imagination to come up with the solutions that will get us back on track sooner rather than later. Sure, we need to be smart with our resources, but we also need to innovate.
What can you do this week to help your team to better understand the new rules and imagine what the options and the possibilities are?
How Would You Vote on This Week’s Bailout? December 5 2008 one response
So, if you were a member of Congress, how would you vote on the auto bailout? After all, the auto CEOs are only asking for $34 billion (up 36 percent from their failed request of two weeks ago). I mean, come on, these guys are asking for less than 5 percent of what the banks got in the initial $700 billion package for the financial sector. Given the amount of jobs, physical and intellectual capital at stake, it should be a no-brainer, right?
And yet, there is a lot of push back and skepticism, not just from Congress but from the public as well. In spite of the more detailed plans that the auto execs brought to the table this week, there still seems to be this nagging sense that they just don’t get it.
In the current issue of the McKinsey Quarterly, UCLA business professor Richard Rumelt offers a framework and perspective that I think gets to the heart of all the bailout proposals and debates and likely gets to the heart of how you need to think about your organization as well.
Rumelt argues that the economy is not just in a down cycle, it’s in the midst of a structural break. As Rumelt says, “during structural breaks in hard times, cutting costs isn’t enough. Things have to be done differently, and on two levels: reducing the complexity of corporate structures and transforming business models.”
In a structural break, the organizations that come out strong on the other side are those that focus and simplify now. Rumelt offers a lot of good advice for leaders in his article. Here’s a sample of some questions that he suggests business leaders ask themselves right now:
• Which information flows can you omit? Information that doesn’t inform value-creating decisions is a wasteful distraction.
• How can you work with customers, suppliers, and the government to simplify their processes so that you can simplify yours?
I was listening to some of the auto industry hearings in the Senate yesterday as I was driving back from a meeting. One of the senators was asking the execs if they had thought about making light buses. You know, that’s not a real comfort builder is it? Do we really need the members of Congress making new product suggestions? I’d argue that they start with the kinds of questions Professor Rumelt is suggesting. If I was a congressman and could get solid answers to questions that suggest that the auto execs are serious about a fundamental change in the way they do business, I’d vote yes on the bailout. Otherwise, we’re just facilitating more of the same.
What’s your point of view?
Get Me an Emotionally Intelligent Doctor, STAT! December 3 2008 no responses
You can find leadership lessons in some unlikely places, such as yesterday’s Science section of The New York Times. Laurie Tarkan reports on a recently conducted survey of health care workers in over 100 hospitals. Sixty seven percent of the respondents believe there is a link between disruptive behavior by physicians and medical mistakes. Eighteen percent could point to specific mistakes that occurred because of an obnoxious doctor.
What exactly do the responding residents and nurses mean by “obnoxious doctors?” On one end of the spectrum, it’s being belittled, insulted or yelled at in front of colleagues and patients. On the other end, it’s ducking flying scalpels thrown across the O.R. by angry surgeons. Sometimes failures of leadership literally mean the difference between life and death. In one case, a resident at a University of California hospital noticed a problem with the fetal monitoring strip on a woman in labor. As the Times reports, “He was afraid to contact the attending physician, who was notorious for yelling and ridiculing the residents.” The baby died.
For most of us, the stakes are not that immediately apparent but this article got me thinking about the unmeasured impact of abusive and arrogant leaders in the workplace. Over the years, I’ve concluded that leadership skills can be boiled down to two big categories: those that deal with getting results and those that deal with building relationships. What the Times article points out is the impact of physician leaders who over index on getting results. Particularly in high stress situations (Been through any of those lately?), it’s easy for high achieving, high potential leaders to bear down on the results so hard that the relationships that lead to sustainable results over time are ignored or abused.
The good news on the health care front is that medical schools are now emphasizing communications and leadership as two of the six core skills taught to new physicians. As Dr. Michael Kahn wrote in a sidebar article for the Times yesterday, a lot of what’s needed now is plain, old fashioned good manners. As an example, he offered this simple check list for doctors entering a patient’s room for the first time:
- Ask permission to enter the room; wait for an answer.
- Introduce yourself; show your ID badge.
- Shake hands.
- Sit down. Smile if appropriate.
- Explain your role on the health care team.
- Ask how the patient feels about being in the hospital.
As Dr. Kahn put it, “My doctor may be tired, preoccupied or not that interested in me as a person; but I should still expect him or her to treat me with the kind of attentiveness and respect I recently received from a ‘genius’ at the local Apple store.”
OK, everyone, it’s gut check time. How have your manners and emotionally intelligence been showing up lately in these stressful times? What would your personal version of the simple etiquette list that Dr. Kahn offers look like? Where and with whom do you need to apply it? How about the leaders who work on your team? What kind of coaching on this front might you need to provide to them?
Let’s start a conversation that all of our readers can benefit from. Leave a comment that shares your thinking on any or all of the questions above.
How to Avoid Derailment December 1 2008 no responses
Over Thanksgiving weekend, I took some time to catch up on my reading. It’s probably a bit of self-selection, but I’m seeing and hearing a lot on previously successful companies and executives running off the rails. It raises the question at both the macro and micro levels, how do you avoid derailment?
The current issue of Fortune magazine provides what may be the ultimate case study of derailment at the macro level in its cover story, GM: Death of an American Dream. Written by the magazine’s longtime auto industry reporter, Alex Taylor III, the article is a succinct but sad summary of what went wrong at GM. The cause in three words or less: way too comfortable. In even the largest organizations, success or failure always comes down to leadership. While complimenting GM executives as “modern-day Eagle Scouts,” Taylor goes on to diagnose the core leadership dynamic that has caused GM to derail:
I’ve written here before that one of my favorite quotes to use in presentations is one that comes from a New York Times profile on Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, last year:
Success breeds failure because we become comfortable and confident continuing to do what has worked for us in the past. It’s as true at the micro (individual) level as it is at the macro level. In a brief podcast interview, Doug Ready, visiting professor of organizational behavior at the London Business School, notes that the reason so many executives derail when they take on bigger responsibilities is that they just can’t stand the discomfort that comes with making the needed behavioral changes to become successful enterprise 
leaders.
This is the central idea behind the research for my book, The Next Level, and a white paper my company has just released on new prescriptions for executive success. Change, whether it’s driven by a changing external environment or a promotion to the next level, requires getting used to picking up new behaviors and letting go of others even if they’ve made you successful in the past. That’s how you avoid derailment.
How do you know if you’re succeeding in making these changes? If you’re not uncomfortable, you’re not making the changes.
Scott Eblin is an executive coach, speaker and author of 
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