Archive for November, 2009

How to Take a Personal Leadership Offsite November 30 2009

One of my coaching clients is taking his leadership team to Phoenix next week for an offsite planning meeting.  (He invited me to come and help out, but my schedule wouldn’t allow it. Too bad, Phoenix is nice this time of year!)  If you’ve been around as an organizational leader for awhile, you’ve no doubt participated in leadership team offsites. Whether they gather at a nice hotel in a warm place or someplace less exotic, it’s a good idea for an organization’s leaders to periodically change the scenery and step back to reflect on what’s happened and look ahead to future goals.

Here’s my question for you. When was the last time you took a personal leadership offsite?  I ask that question regularly of my clients and groups that I’m speaking to. Occasionally, someone will say that they’ve had one recently, but most people have not. This trend reminds me of the old line about the shoemaker’s children having no shoes. Leaders tend to give so much time and attention to the development of their organizations that they often leave little space for their own development.

I’m not exactly sure how we decided to start, but my wife, Diane, and I have taken an annual Fall/Winter retreat for the past 15 years. The first couple of years were at a $25 a night one room cabin on a farm in Pocahontas County, West Virginia. Since then, we’ve held it at some places that are a little less rustic.  Whether it’s a rural or an urban setting, we’ve come up with a routine that works for us. Since this is the time of year when people are beginning to look back on the past 12 months and look ahead to the next 12, I thought I’d share some of our lessons learned about how to take a personal leadership offsite.

How to Lead in the Age of the Multi-logue November 24 2009

Have you seen the new smart phone commercial where the guy is standing in the middle of the desert and all of the thousands of people in his information stream are rushing at him? It’s from Motorola. It’s 30 seconds long and worth a quick look.

It’s funny because it’s true. We recognize ourselves as that guy. The information is washing over us like a flood and we just want to strain out the things that matter most. It’s a challenge for everyone, but I think it’s a particular challenge for leaders. 

There may have been a time long ago when leadership looked like a monologue. Think of the great orator in the town square delivering a long speech to people who were actually listening. Over time, leadership evolved to include dialogues. Effective leaders learned how to have conversations with individuals or groups to identify and work on the most important issues. In 2009, I think we’ve seen the emergence of the multi-logue. The rapid adoption of social media like blogs, Facebook and Twitter has created an environment in which a countless number of conversations are going on at anytime.  (See this post on the social media explosion for a quick primer.)

How does one lead in a mutli-logue age?

If I Was Coaching Goldman’s Lloyd Blankfein November 20 2009

One of the big responsibilities of an executive coach is to help the client step back to a broader perspective and observe how what he’s doing connects or disconnects with the results he’s trying to get.  It’s helping the client move, as Harvard’s Ron Heifetz would say, off the dance floor and onto the balcony. I don’t know for sure, but based on recent reporting, I’d have to guess that no one is providing that kind of support to Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs. As the Financial Times  thoroughly summarized this week, Goldman finds itself the subject of an unexpected shift from headquarters of the masters of the universe to object of universal scorn and anger over the $17 billion bonus pool it has set aside one year after taking billions of dollars in Federal assistance. Not content to fly under the radar screen (which wasn’t really possible in the first place), Goldman CEO Blankfein recently gave a long interview to the Sunday Times of London in which he said, among other interesting things, that he’s just a simple banker, “doing God’s work.”

Talk about pouring gasoline on a fire. If I was coaching Lloyd Blankfein, there are three basic questions I’d want to ask him to help him reframe his perspective and better align his actions with the results required in this new situation. Ideally, we would have talked through these questions about a year ago. It may too late for them to do any good now, but here they are:

Slow is the New Fast November 18 2009

If you happen to have 100 million Euros (about $150 million) to spare, you might be in the market for the yacht, The Why, pictured to the left. Yes, that’s the stern of a boat that was featured in the House & Home section of a recent edition of the Financial Times Weekend. 

As described in the FT, The Why is a one of a kind yacht with 3,400 meters of guest space and an optimal cruising speed of only 12 knots. (You can see more pictures of The Why at http://www.why-yachts.com .)

I’m taking a wild guess here, but I’m doubting that very many of my readers are in the market for a $150 million boat. (I know I’m not!  Not in this lifetime, anyway.)

So what’s the point of all this in a leadership blog?  It’s this excerpt from the FT quoting Pierre-Alexis Dumas, one of the designers of the 12 knot yacht:

The Six Factors That Drive Confidence in Leaders November 16 2009

For the past four years, the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership has conducted an annual public opinion poll to determine the sector leaders in which Americans have the most and least confidence and the factors behind those confidence levels. The 2009 results have just been released and there are some pretty interesting conclusions.

First, the sectors where the confidence level in leaders are up in a statistically significant way over last year are the military, the executive branch and business. Those that showed a significant decline are medical, nonprofits and charity, state government, the news media and Wall Street. Based on an index where 100 indicates a moderate amount of confidence the only three sectors that scored higher than that level were the military, medical and nonprofits and charity. Of those three, the military is the only sector to score well above 100 on the confidence index with a score of almost 120.

According to the study, there are six key factors that have the greatest impact on Americans’ confidence in their leaders. These factors are:

The Difference Between What Should Be and What Is November 13 2009

Something appeared in my inbox this week that sparked an opportunity to follow up on a post from last week – Feedback:  Why You Need It and What To Do With It. As an alumnus and faculty member of the Georgetown University Leadership Coaching Certificate Program, I’m a member of a Yahoo list serve in which all of us in the community share resources and get advice from each other. It’s a wonderful ongoing conversation from which I learn a lot.

Yesterday, one of our members put out a question about how to deal with an executive coaching client who has received some clear developmental feedback from colleagues that doesn’t square with his self-image. As my colleague described it, his client spent his energy in the feedback session comparing all of the constructive comments to his own standards and arguing that everyone offering the feedback should be more like him.

By definition, executive coaches coach executives. Most executives have become executives because they’re smart and focused and driven to succeed. Sometimes, their track record of success reinforces a self-perception that they’re right all or most of the time and that everyone else should get with their approach and program.

Needless to say, it can be really difficult for executives who fit this profile to accept feedback that suggests they’re less than perfect. Here is what I think I’ve learned over the past 10 years about coaching an executive who argues with the clear consensus point of view in their feedback and spends all of their energy arguing about how people should be acting or thinking: It’s important to understand the difference between what “should” be and what is. The fact of the matter is that if, when given the chance to provide anonymous feedback, 10 to 20 people have a consensus point of view on what you need to change to be a better leader, that’s what is. Their perception is your reality. If you get tough feedback and you want to keep your team engaged and on board, you’re going to have to change your behaviors to change their perception.

So what do you do if you’re in that situation?  Here are four simple steps that, if you’re serious about dealing with what is, almost always work:

1. Acknowledge and thank people for the feedback.  Give them a couple of headlines on what you heard that you appreciated and a couple of headlines on things you want to change.
2. Ask colleagues for their best ideas for anyone who is trying to change whatever it is you’re trying to change.  Write down their ideas in a list.
3. Pick one or two action steps from the list that you want to incorporate into your regular routine.   The simpler, the better.  Tell people what you’re trying to do. (e.g. “I’m trying to not interrupt people so much.”) 
4. On an ongoing basis, ask them how you’re doing.  If you keep it on your radar screen, you’ll change for the better.  By following up with them, they’ll recognize that you’re actually changing.

There are a lot of leaders and coaches who read this blog.  What’s your best advice for leaders who need to get past what should be and start dealing with what is? 

A Few Tips for USAID’s Rajiv Shah and Anyone Else Leading a Turnaround November 11 2009

Earlier this week, President Obama appointed Rajiv Shah to head the US Agency for International Development. The appointment comes after a 10 month vacancy at the top of the Agency and a 40 percent reduction in its full time staff over the past 20 years. Since the effective deployment of foreign aid is a critical component of the United States’ diplomatic and security strategies, it’s important that Shah get off to a fast and successful start in his job.

In spite of his relatively young age of 36, Shah has a background that seems perfectly suited to the role.  He’ll be moving to USAID from the US Department of Agriculture where he has played a number of roles including overseeing USDA’s participation in the global food security initiative. Prior to USDA, Shah worked at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as the director of agricultural development and manager of the Foundation’s $1.5 billion vaccine fund. Shah has an MD from Penn, a masters in health economics from Wharton, an undergraduate degree from Michigan and spent time at the London School of Economics.   It’s pretty hard to argue with those credentials.

Still, Shah is stepping into one of the tougher challenges a leader can face which is leading the turnaround of a highly visible and critical organization. Especially in a political environment, it’s important to get off to a fast and successful start in this situation. What you do in the first weeks and months on the job largely determines the path for success or failure over the longer run. With that in mind, here are a few tips for Dr. Shah or any leader getting started on a turnaround:

Five Change Leadership Lessons from the Five Dollar Foot Long November 9 2009

First, let me apologize for implanting Subway’s Five (five dollar), Five Dollar Foot Long ear worm in your head for the rest of the day. I hope that you’ll agree with me that it was worth it to learn five lessons about winning support for change from the top leaders in your organization.

The lessons were inspired by a story in the current issue of Business Week on Miami Subway franchise owner Stuart Frankel. He owns a couple of Subways close to Jackson Memorial Hospital and five years ago was tinkering with ways to boost his sales on Saturdays and Sundays. From that, the original five dollar foot long was born. Since then, the sandwich has generated $3.8 billion in sales for Subway and put the company on pace to surpass McDonald’s in worldwide store locations.

So, you’d think it would have been easy for Frankel to win everyone over to such a great idea, right?  Not so fast, my friends. Even though he was raking in the dough (bad pun intended), Frankel had to work hard to convince the top brass at Subway that the five dollar foot long was the way to go. In reading between the lines of the Business Week article, I’ve come up with five (what else?) lessons for anyone who is trying to convince senior leadership to take a good idea and run with it. 

Here they are:

Feedback – Why You Need It and What to Do with It November 6 2009

One of the things that I’ve come to count on over the past couple of years is that my blogging friend, Dan McCarthy of the Great Leadership blog will write consistently grounded and practical posts on how to be a better leader. His latest post, 10 Ways to Get the Most from a 360 Degree Leadership Assessment,  is the most recent example of the contributions he consistently makes. If you care about leadership, you need to subscribe to his blog.

As an executive coach, I read through a few hundred 360 degree assessments a year in my company’s Next Level Leadership™ group coaching program. From that experience and the experience of being the subject of six or seven 360’s in the 15 years that I was a manager and executive myself, I know that Dan’s advice is spot on. I also know from talking with my clients and HR professionals that have been around the block a few times that it’s often the case that not much happens when someone gets a 360. From the standpoint of your leadership development and your credibility in the organization, you’re almost better off to not get any feedback at all if you’re not going to communicate and act on what you learned from the feedback. It can be hard to admit to your colleagues that you’re not perfect, but guess what, they already know you’re not perfect. All of us have something we can improve on. By asking for feedback, telling people what you learn and then visibly acting on it, you get better and your organization gets better.

 So, with that in mind, I want to pick up on three particular points that Dan made and add a little bit of my own coaching perspective and advice to the mix:

Leadership Questions Raised by the 2009 Elections November 4 2009

The morning after election day 2009 was probably not a particularly fun one in the White House. As noted in a first rate summary by John F. Harris and Jonathan Martin in Politico, the outcomes of the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races and even the New York City’s mayor race didn’t really go the President’s way. As an historical analysis by Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post points out, it’s important to not over interpret the results,  but one thing about the 2009 election results does seem clear. Voters who identify themselves as independents are looking for  leaders who seem to address the issues that are most important to them. 

As an example, since I live in Virginia, I had a pretty direct line of sight into the governor’s race here.  The winner, Bob McDonnell, ran a very effective straight down the middle campaign centered on jobs, transportation, taxes and government spending. His opponent, Creigh Deeds, seemed to never get any traction on explaining exactly what his priorities would be if he was governor. (See Dan Balz's post election analysis in the Washington Post for more on this.)

In connecting the dots on the different races, I find myself looking for some common denominator lessons we can learn about effective leadership communications.  After all, that’s what a campaign is ultimately about.  In reviewing this week’s results, I’ve come up with four questions that I think leaders need to address either implicitly or explicitly if they hope to win over their followers. These strike me as important questions for any leader – not just political candidates – to address when they’re attempting to mobilize people in a challenging situation. Here are the questions: