Archive for August, 2009

Leadership Lessons Podcast: Tony Award Winner Michael Cerveris August 31 2009

And for this latest edition of the Leadership Lessons Podcast, something completely different. I’m talking today with the Tony Award winning Broadway star Michael Cerveris. Since his Broadway debut in 1993 as the lead in The Who’s Tommy, Michael has been nominated for four Tony Awards including best actor for Sweeney Todd and winning best actor for his role as John Wilkes Booth in Stephen Sondheim’s The Assassins.  His credits are too numerous to mention here but you may also know him as The Observer in the Fox series, Fringe.  This Fall he’ll be appearing in the new film, The Vampire’s Assistant with Salma Hayek and John C. Reilly and, beginning in October, will open at Lincoln Center as one of the leads in In The Next Room.

An impressive career to be sure, but why is Michael doing a Leadership Lessons Podcast? Here’s the deal. Michael and I have been friends since we were third graders back in Huntington, WV. Earlier this year, we got together for a visit when he was in the DC area to appear at a cool program for aspiring high school drama students called ArtSpeak. It was a combination of a performance and a conversation similar to what James Lipton would do on Inside the Actor’s Studio. In listening to Michael that evening, I was struck by how many things he said that relate directly to the practice of leadership. I wanted to share his insights with you and he graciously agreed to do a “best of” conversation for this blog.

Here are some of the parallels between actors and leaders that we cover in the conversation:

• Dealing with the gap between your expectations and the current reality.
• The importance of showing up centered and how to prepare for that.
• Overcoming stage fright by redirecting your focus.
• What leaders can learn from the best and worst directors about how to get the most from your people.
• Keeping yourself grounded when you have very visible success.

It’s a pretty fascinating conversation if I do say so myself so I hope you’ll give it a listen.  I can practically guarantee you that it will be awhile before I have another guest with a resonant voice like Michael’s. Enjoy!

The Life of Ted Kennedy: Two Lessons I Haven’t Read Elsewhere August 28 2009

Most Americans alive today cannot remember a time when a Kennedy of the generation of John, Robert and Ted was not playing a major public role in the life of the nation. The passing of Ted Kennedy this week literally marks the end of an era and is, I think, one reason why his death has moved so many people.  It is the clear end of an era in all of our lives.

There have been so many perceptive and thoughtful commentaries and remembrances written about Ted Kennedy in the past few days that it feels somewhat redundant on my part to add to the mix. Still, there are three quick things I want to address in this post.

First, I want to point you to some of the columns on Kennedy that I’ve found most thought provoking.  They include David Broder’s in the Washington Post, David Brooks’ in the New York Times and John F. Harris’s and Alexander Burns’ on Politico.com. 

Second, I want to share a couple of leadership lessons from Kennedy’s life that I think are important and that I have not seen clearly stated elsewhere (with complete acknowledgement that they may have been. I haven’t read everything.)

Ben Bernanke: An Indispensable Leader? August 26 2009

In my presentations and group coaching work, I’m fond of quoting Charles DeGaulle’s observation that,  “The cemeteries are full of indispensable men.”  The point I’m trying to make with that line is that while every leader has unique opportunities and responsibilities in their role that only they can do, no one is personally indispensible.  President Obama’s renomination of Ben Bernanke for another term as Chairman of the Federal Reserve has me thinking that Bernanke may be the exception that proves DeGaulle’s rule. As Robert J. Samuelson writes in the Washington Post today, Bernanke, with his unique background as one of the world’s foremost experts on the Great Depression and his willingness to take decisive and innovative action to restore faith in the credit markets, could merit a Time magazine cover headline as “The Man Who Saved the World.”

While the praise for Bernanke’s reappointment is just about unanimous among economists, there are two basic criticisms of his performance to date. The first is that he didn’t see the crisis coming (who, in a position of authority, did by the way?) and, second, that along with then Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and then President of the New York Fed, Tim Geithner, he allowed Lehman Brothers to fail thereby taking the global economy to the brink. Fair enough, but what gets me about these criticisms is they come with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. It’s easy to see the impact of Lehman ‘s failure in retrospect. You have to wonder if anyone else would have done a significantly better job of managing all of that at the time.

The great thing about Bernanke as a leader is that while the global credit markets began to freeze, he didn’t. He drew on his technical knowledge of the Great Depression and immediately pivoted to exercise what two of my mentors, Harvard leadership experts Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky would call adaptive leadership.  (Check out their new book, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership.)  He didn’t just stick with the traditional Fed response of lowering interest rates, he recognized that completely new solutions were needed to keep the credit markets alive and, with his team, came up with new “liquidity facilities” that pumped $1 trillion into the system. Much of the rest of the world’s finance chiefs followed his lead and, today, the global economy appears to be on its way back.

It’s interesting to think about how a guy whose previous leadership responsibilities were primarily within the faculty of Princeton University pulled all of this off. Looking through the lens of leadership presence that I outline in The Next Level, I would say that Bernanke demonstrated strong performance in the three main categories of personal presence, team presence and organizational presence.  In the category of personal presence, he demonstrated confidence when the world desperately needed him to and, as I wrote here in March, he stepped far out of the mold of his predecessors to custom fit his communications to vastly different constituencies such as the American public, Congress, business leaders and global finance ministers.  In the category of team presence, people I know who work at the Fed have told me that morale there is high because Bernanke is the kind of leader who seeks out input from his team and looks to them to solve problems. Finally, in the category of organizational presence, Bernanke is someone who clearly gets the concept of interagency and global collaboration, takes an outside-in view of the problems that needs to be addressed and who has taken unprecedented steps to exercise his leadership footprint in a constructive way.

As this week’s renomination suggests, Bernanke’s work is far from over.  He now has to unwind a lot of what he and his team created to avoid a devastating period of inflation.  It’s going to be a tough job, but if he continues to lead in the way that he has, I’m optimistic.

Finally, one thing I’ve learned from blogging about topics like this is that my readers have strong opinions and often radically disagree with me.  So, let’s hear it.  What do you think of Bernanke as a leader?  What can we learn from both his positive and negative examples?

Middle Managers: The Meat in the Sandwich August 24 2009

A lot of the clients I work with in our group coaching program are middle managers. They’ve moved beyond the level of front line leaders and supervisors, but have not yet reached the ranks of the most senior executives. They’re the directors, senior directors and vice presidents in the private sector and the GS-15’s and SES – 1’s in federal government. And, based on my experience in working with them over the years, I would say that more and more they are the meat in the sandwich. By that, I mean they’re constantly squeezed from pressure above them and below them in the organization.

Over the weekend, one of my colleagues from the Georgetown Leadership Coaching program, Marijo Puleo, shared a McKinsey survey report, Leaders in the Crisis, on the alumni list serve. In that same daily digest from the list serve there was an extended conversation sparked by another colleague who has a client in crisis. Like a lot of people these days, this client simply has too much work to get it all done and still have a semblance of a life. About ten coaches responded to that issue and said they’re seeing the same thing with their clients.

How much more evidence do we need that middle managers are the meat in the sandwich? The McKinsey survey had some interesting results that illustrate the point. Here are a few factoids for you.  Middle managers, compared to the top execs surveyed, are:

• Less committed to staying with their organizations
• Less enthusiastic about their work
• Less satisfied with their own performance and
• Far less satisfied than the seniors with how their bosses are doing. (Ouch!)

Does anyone else see a problem here? These are not just the people responsible for keeping things running during the current economic challenges, these are also the leaders that organizations are counting on for long term growth and success. The stakes around keeping this group engaged are pretty high. Here are a few ideas based on the McKinsey research about how to do a better job with that.

What Leaders Can Learn from a Doctor About How to Deliver Bad News August 21 2009

One of my favorite sayings about leadership is that it’s a two part job. The first is to define reality. The second is to offer hope. The challenge is to strike the right balance between the two in a given situation.  It’s hard to get it right. Some leaders go long on reality and short on hope. Others, perhaps because it’s more fun and energizing to focus on the future, don’t spend enough time and attention on defining reality.  

Of course, another factor in avoiding the discussion of reality is because it often involves delivering bad news. Unless they have some sort of pathology, delivering bad news is not something that most leaders enjoy or look forward to. As a result, a lot of leaders aren’t particularly good or effective at delivering it.  In a time of great change and upheaval, as this one is, leaders will frequently find themselves in a situation in which defining the new reality requires delivering some bad news. It’s important to develop some skills in this domain and that’s the point of this post.

What got me thinking about this topic was an article in Thursday’s New York Times by Anemona Hartocollis called, “At the End, Offering Not a Cure but Comfort.”  Her reporting focuses on Dr. Sean O’Mahony who, as a palliative care specialist, informs and counsels patients facing the end of their lives.  The article is informative, instructive and beautifully written.  I highly recommend it to you.

Dr. O’Mahony spends his days delivering bad news and, as the article makes clear, he is highly skilled at that. He strikes a fine balance between establishing connection with the patient while maintaining a level of detachment that he needs to protect himself so he has the emotional reserves to serve the next patient. While many leaders do not have to deal with literal issues of life and death, if you lead long enough at a certain level or above, you’re almost guaranteed to have to deliver bad news. It could be firing someone, closing down a division, disappointing someone who was expecting something they’re not going to get or any number of other situations. How well you handle these situations will determine how well things go for you and the organization after you deliver the bad news. As a former executive myself and now as a coach, I’ve had a lot of direct and indirect experience with delivering bad news. I know how hard it is. There’s a lot that leaders can learn about how to deliver bad news from how Dr. O’Mahony does his work. Here’s a list of the lessons I noticed in the Times article:

What Leaders Can Learn from Lab Rats: Five Tips for Beating Stress August 19 2009

Have you ever noticed that the more stressed you get, the more likely you are to keep doing things that aren’t that productive (e.g. waste another 10 minutes surfing the web or eat that second piece of cake)?  Well, I don’t know if this will make you feel any better, but it turns out that lab rats do the same thing.

As reported in the New York Times this week, new research out of Portugal shows that chronically stressed rats keep doing the same thing over and over (like compulsively pressing a bar for food they’re not going to eat), because they’re too stressed to do anything more productive. Of course, you might be stressed too if, like the lab rats, you had to live with dominant bully rats or periodically got zapped by a mild electric current. (Come to think of it, that doesn’t sound a whole lot different than getting buzzed by your Blackberry 200 times a day.)

But, don’t despair; there is good news in Rat Town. It turns out that when the rats got some time away from their stressful environment they came back with all kinds of innovative problem solving and coping skills. Researchers concluded that some time to recharge allowed the synapses in the prefrontal cortex of the rats’ brains to grow stronger while the dendrite weeds in the habit forming parts of their brains were pruned back a bit. (I guess the researchers must have some rat size MRI’s that they’re using.)

So, I know what you’re thinking. “Lucky rats. I’d be more productive too if I got some time away.” That’s right, you would be. Vacations are a good thing. But, you don’t have to take a week off to give your brain a chance to recharge and come up with some more productive behaviors. Over the past few years, I’ve seen dozens of high potential leader clients in our Next Level Leadership™ group coaching program increase their overall effectiveness (as measured by feedback from colleagues) by building in some simple recharging routines into their days.

Here are five routines from my clients that stand out:

1. Leave your Blackberry in your office: Several clients have made a commitment to themselves that they will leave their Blackberry in their office when they’re attending meetings. As a result, they’ve found that they’re more present and productive in the meetings and back in their office.

2. Schedule planning and review time: Some of my clients have had great success by scheduling an hour of planning time on Monday and an hour of review time on Fridays. Others have taken a different approach by doing the same thing daily with 15 minutes at the beginning and end of the day.

3. Start doing something you used to love to do: One of my clients used to love to swim when she was in high school and college.  When we went through the Life GPS® planning process as part of the group coaching program, she realized how much she missed swimming. She started swimming at 7:00 am every morning instead of logging on to her email. Six months later, she had lost 25 pounds and was thriving in a new role at work.

4. Go out for lunch: Lots of people either skip lunch or grab something to eat at their desk.  A client who lived a few minutes from his office decided he would go home for lunch a couple of days a week to visit with his wife.  If you don’t work close to home, then find some places you’d like to go where you can think about something other than work during lunch a couple of days a week.

5. E-mail free time: It’s all too common to let the e-mails intrude on personal and family time.  A number of my clients have set some boundaries on this by setting blocks of time each evening when the computer is turned off and the Blackberry is put in a drawer. Some of them use this time to hang out with the family and others have used it to work out.  One guy lost 15 pounds this way. (I think I’m going to start an executive weight loss program.)

So, those are five simple yet effective ideas for taking a break from the stress that can lead to non-productive habits.  What’s worked for you on this front?

Three Leadership Lessons from Health Care Reform August 17 2009

As I wrote last week, the health care reform debate is, unfortunately, full of important lessons for leaders on how not to drive change. Admittedly, it’s a lot easier to observe what seems to be going wrong when you’re watching the process instead of being in the middle of it. Still, it seems like President Obama’s reform process is running off the rails. The White House spent last week playing defense on the health care reform town halls and the latest example is this morning’s confusion (as reported on Politico ) about whether or not a public insurance option is still on the table.  

How did we get here?  I think there are three lessons from how the President and his team have handled this that anyone who is responsible for leading dramatic change should pay attention to. 

Leadership Inspiration from Les Paul August 14 2009

If you’ve read this blog for awhile, you know that I’m fascinated and inspired by what people do in and with their lives.  I started this week by blogging about Julia Child and I’m going to end it with some thoughts about Les Paul who died Thursday at age 94.

If, like me, your musical formative years were in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, you probably know Les Paul best from all of the rockers who played the guitar that bore his name. Let’s go down the list a little bit: Jimmy Page, Eddie Van Halen, Keith Richards, Pete Townshend and, yes, I have to acknowledge the guys from Kiss, Ace Frehley and Paul Stanley (some of you, no doubt, picked up on the Kiss reference in the Shout It Out loud reference in my last post). A pretty impressive list of guitar heroes for sure, but we might not have heard of any of them if it wasn’t for the person called Les Paul.

As documented in these obits from the New York Times and the Washington Post, Les Paul basically invented the electric guitar and a lot of the other technology that made rock and roll possible. The man was passionate about music and innovation and combined those passions to great effect. After a childhood piano teacher wrote his mother a note that said, “Your boy, Lester, will never learn music,” Paul had learned to play the harmonica, guitar and banjo by the time he was a teenager. His first invention apparently came at age 10 when he made a harmonica holder out of a coat hanger so he could play the harmonica and guitar at the same time. (Somewhere right now, Bob Dylan is feeling very grateful.)  A few years later, Les put a phonograph needle wired to a radio speaker inside his acoustic guitar so the crowd at the local drive-in could hear him play. He kept tinkering and eventually came up with what he called “the log” which was basically a board with two pickups attached to a guitar neck. It was the first solid body guitar. He got so much grief over the way it looked that he put a traditional guitar body around it purely for cosmetic reasons. Oh, and by the way, he also played a key role in inventing multi track recording. (No multi track recording, no Sgt. Pepper.)

You can see the results of Les Paul’s vision and passion in this short clip from a TV show that featured him and his wife Mary Ford. (Without multi track recording is there any way she could sound like this just singing in her garden?)  In addition to showing off his technically wizardry, this clip also shows that Les Paul was one heck of a guitarist. Take a look.

Shout It, Shout It, Shout It Out Loud: Lessons for Leaders from the Health Care Town Halls August 12 2009

You’ve no doubt seen the videos of members of Congress such as Arlen Specter and Claire McCaskill conducting (or, more accurately, trying to conduct) town hall meetings on health care reform. This seems to be rapidly turning into the summer of the shouters. My friend and blogging colleague John Baldoni picked up on this trend and posted a solid piece this week on how speakers should deal with an unruly crowd. My concern is that with all of the cable TV coverage of the health care shouters, leaders in other domains may soon face more of this behavior in town hall meeting type settings. The health care town halls feel like the latest example of how the bar for what passes as civil discourse in our country keeps getting lowered.  

So, with the goal of prepping you for leading and communicating effectively the next time you face a contentious group, I want to recap John’s good advice, see what we can learn about what not to do from Senator Specter and share with you a lesson I learned when I had to defend a tax increase to a bunch of beer fueled construction contractors twenty years ago.

What I Learned from Julia Child on Friday Afternoon August 10 2009

 My wife, the healthy food blogger (www.thewholegang.org), and I played hooky from work last Friday afternoon and went to the 1:10 pm showing of the new movie, Julie and Julia. (We were there with all of the retired folks and I concluded that that looks like a pretty sweet gig.)  Anyway, it’s a great movie – two thumbs way up from both of us. Anytime you have Meryl Streep (as Julia Child) and Stanley Tucci (as her husband Paul Child) acting together you’re well on your way to a great movie.

In case you’re not familiar with it, Julie and Julia tells the story of two women, Julia Child, who revolutionized cooking in the United States with the publication in 1961 of Mastering the Art of French Cooking and Julie Powell, who in 2002, made a name for herself by cooking and blogging her way through the more than 500 recipes in Child’s cookbook in one year.

A lot of the reviews I’ve read of the movie (like this one from Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post) love the Julia Child parts and hate the Julie Powell parts. The basic argument of the critics is that it is so much fun to watch the passionate, talented and humorous Child create herself that the segments that focus on the self absorbed and whiny Powell aren’t as entertaining or compelling by comparison.

Looking through my leadership lens (as is my wont), I think those criticisms miss one of the more subtle points of the movie.  That point is that world changing success takes time and a motivation that goes beyond the desire to be famous. In his New York Times review, A.O. Scott notes that with Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Child changed 20th century culture in her domain in the way that Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care and Dr. Seuss’ Cat in the Hat changed theirs. Julie and Julia does a wonderful job of showing the joy, resilience and sense of mission that Julia Child took first in learning the craft of French cuisine and then in the eight years that she and her partners put into creating a book to share what they had learned with an American audience. As the movie shows, Julie Powell’s motivation in blogging her way through the cookbook was to stand out in some way and make herself feel better in comparison to her seemingly successful friends. In terms of motivation and life purpose, the two just don’t stack up against each other and neither does the impact of the two women’s work.

For my wife Diane and me, a critical moment in the movie was when, during his State Department assignment in post-World War II France, Paul asks Julia, “What is it that you really like to do?” She laughingly replied, “I like to eat!”  From that realization sprung her passion and ambition to immerse herself in French cooking.  And from that passion and ambition sprung the greatness of her life’s work. 

Do you want to be happy? Do you want to make a difference with your life and your leadership? Get someone you trust to ask you that question, “What is it that you really like to do?” Pay attention to and trust your answer and then look for ways to act on it. You may not come up with Mastering the Art of French Cooking but I’ll bet what you do come up with will be great in its own right.