Archive for February, 2010
Three Quick Leadership Lessons from Toyota February 26 2010 no responses
With the ongoing spate of stories about Toyota’s safety recall and this week’s congressional testimony by Mr. Toyoda himself, it’s easy to forget that it was just a few years ago that the company was enjoying a twenty plus year run as a quality leader in the automotive industry. During that time, they expanded their operations in the United States and now, on a direct and indirect basis, employ about 170,000 Americans. In my family, we own two Toyotas and are very happy with them. My guess is the company will recover from its current crisis.
Still, there are some pretty big leadership mistakes that have been made at Toyota lately. I don’t think their mistakes are unique to Toyota. As Jim Collins outlines in his latest book, How The Mighty Fall
Truman Thursdays: The Handler Explains It All February 25 2010 no responses
In this week’s video installment of life on the USS Harry S Truman, Lt. Cmdr. Rodney Mullins explains how he and his team use the “Ouija board” to keep track of everything going on on the flight deck. Lt. Cmdr. Mullins is the aircraft handling officer, otherwise known as the handler. If you liked my post last month on how to keep the plates spinning, you’ll appreciate what Lt. Cmdr. Mullins has to say. He and his team juggle and move at a rapid pace to keep everything with aircraft operations moving safely and efficiently.
Prior to Lt. Cmdr. Mullins, you’ll get a look at the C-2 Greyhound transport plane that took my group from the Norfolk Naval Air Station out to the Truman and a few shots of how things looked from inside the plane right after we landed on deck.
Up next week is the guy who runs the ship’s air traffic control tower, the Air Boss. Stay tuned, it’s a good one.
How Do You Handle It When You’re the Boss and Not the Peer? February 24 2010 3 responses
In case you missed it, there was a terrific profile in the Sunday New York Times on the new CEO of Xerox, Ursula Burns. The article, and her quotes within it, focused on one of my favorite topics, leadership transitions. There’s a lot of valuable perspective and advice in the article. I want to pick up on one particular aspect in this post. How do you handle it when you move from being a member of the team (no matter how big) to the leader of that same team?
The setting as described in the Times is a Xerox sales meeting in Orlando with several hundred reps. Burns is “an old friend to many of them, and there are plenty of hugs to go around for the people she’s grown up with during her 30 years at the company. But there is also a new distance, a new curiosity about what she will do, given that she is no longer just Ursula. She is Ursula M. Burns, the C.E.O.”
That passage describes in a nutshell a phenomenon that many leaders experience at least once if not more in their careers. Whether it’s expected or not, you end up leading people you’ve worked with for years. Earlier today, I was interviewing two women who are senior executives in the financial services and pharmaceutical industries for the upcoming second edition of my book, The Next Level
Here it is:
Video Book Club: The Good Soldiers February 23 2010 no responses
I’m pulling the lens back this week away from a focus on books about leadership skills and towards a focus on a real life story of leadership in practice. David Finkel’s book, The Good Soldiers
What It Takes to Build Leaders February 22 2010 no responses
Last Friday, I heard a presentation on a study that anyone concerned with building leadership as a competitive advantage should take a look at. It was from Richmond Fourney, a senior consultant with Hewitt Associates working on their biannual study of the Best Companies for Leaders. Joining him was Suzanne Danielle, the director of talent management for Lockheed Martin which ranked 16th of the top 25 North American companies for leaders.
You can get a summary of the study from Hewitt (conducted with Fortune magazine and the RBL Group) here. In the meantime, I thought I’d share some high level conclusions from the research along with a bit of commentary.
The research says that there are Four Disciplines that the top companies for leaders follow:
Want to Think Outside Your Box? Get Inside Someone Else’s February 19 2010 no responses
This has been a perspective stretching week for a number of my clients and me. Earlier in the week, I had the opportunity to sit in on a briefing between a client organization and a strategic partner they use for innovation inspiration. The two organizations really couldn’t be much more different. One is large, the other is small. One is pretty conservative, the other is pretty far out there. One goes deep in a particular discipline, the other goes wide on a lot of disciplines. On the surface, the two groups might remind you of The Odd Couple, Felix and Oscar. When you look at their results though, they come up with some pretty cool stuff from partnering together.
Later in the week I led a session on Tools for Next Level Leaders for federal government executives. As I often do in that session, I introduced a couple of basic coaching models and asked the participants to coach each other using those models. Most everyone got some great ideas for action steps out of eight minute coaching sessions using one of the models I shared with them. As a professional coach, I sort of take those models for granted. For most of the executives in the session, it was brand new and perspective shifting.
On the way home from that session I heard an interview on NPR with a shipping company efficiency expert named Matt LeBlanc. His job is to help his company figure out how to make and save more money through process improvement. He’s a pretty entertaining guy and the interview is worth a listen. I’ll admit that I’m not a naturally gifted process person. I tend to run in the other direction actually when someone brings up process. In listening to Matt, though, I realized that my aversion to thinking through process is really based on a lack of knowledge and perspective on my part.
The ah-ha for me was when LeBlanc told the interviewer that when he walks into a shipping facility he’s observing it through the lens of an acronym called Tim T. Wood (transportation, inventory, motion, talent, waste, overproduction, over processing, defects). Now I know what all of the Six Sigma experts reading this are thinking right now – “That was your big ah-ha?!?” Well, yes, actually it was. I felt like LeBlanc was sharing some of his secret sauce with me and could see how that might help me in the same way that the executives in my workshop saw how the coaching model I shared could help them.
Which brings me back to the beginning of this post. The executives at the client company I mentioned like to joke that no matter what problem they’re presented with, their solution is going to include some version of their core discipline. They get bonus points for self awareness. Because they’re aware enough to recognize their blind spot, they seek help and ideas from a group that approaches problems in completely different ways. They get out of their box by getting into someone else’s box.
What problems are you working on that could benefit from a different perspective? Who could you partner with that operates in a completely different kind of box?
What are some of your favorite ways to (as Steve Jobs might say) think different?
Truman Thursdays: How to Launch and Land Planes on an Aircraft Carrier February 18 2010 no responses
Regular readers of the Next Level Blog know that I’ve been sharing some videos from the trip I made last month to the aircraft carrier, USS Harry S Truman.I’ve been running the clips on Thursdays (here’s the first overview video and interviews with the Commanding Officer and Executive Officer of the Truman) and have focused on what different people I met on the ship look for in a leader. I have more of those interviews I want to share with you in the weeks to come. This week, though, I thought I’d go in a slightly different direction.
To successfully launch from the deck of a carrier, a jet or plane has to go from a standing start to about 150 knots in under three seconds. That acceleration is achieved through use of a catapult system. Conversely, a plane lands on a carrier at about 150 knots and then comes to an immediate stop when its tailhook catches one of four arresting wires on deck. The caught wire is immediately retracted so that, when operations are in full swing, a plane can launch from or land on the carrier about every 45 seconds.
Obviously, there are a lot of crew members who have to work together seamlessly to ensure safe and effective aircraft operations. In this week’s Truman clip, you’ll hear from two of them. The first is a sailor who works in the catapult room below decks. The second is a crewmate who works on the system that controls arresting wire number three. One of the things that most impressed me during my Truman trip was the pride, knowledge and responsibility exhibited by the different sailors who explained to us what they do and how they do it. This video will give you a small taste of that.
How to Delegate to Your Team and Manage Risk at the Same Time February 17 2010 2 responses
In a group coaching session with a group of corporate directors yesterday, we were talking about the challenge of delegating actions and decisions to your team while still keeping yourself informed of things that could put either your organization or career at risk. In the course of the conversation, someone brought up a recent interview in the Wall Street Journal with Constellation Energy CEO Mayo Shattuck. Toward the end of 2008, a series of fast moving events almost caused the bankruptcy of Constellation and prompted deals to sell all of part of the company in short order. Here’s what Shattuck said he learned from that period.
WSJ: What did you learn from the crisis?Mr. Shattuck: It has probably led me to have less trust in the delegation of certain things. If you’re the CEO, you want to have a group of superstars running your businesses. But if you get yourself too far removed or delegate too much, you are vulnerable.
I don’t assume anymore that execution will simply happen because they’re all really smart people—which they are—and wait to see the numbers after the fact. Now I question everything. I leaned too heavily on the notion that leadership was setting the vision and motivating people around it. Now I need to balance that with getting dirty with the details.
While none of the people in the group coaching session are managing a multi-billion dollar enterprise (yet), a lot of them could relate to Shattuck’s reaction to his company’s near death experience. We talked over what a leader can do to balance the need to spread the work and develop future organizational leaders through delegation while maintaining the capacity to know what you need to know and be brought in when you need to be. Here are some of the ideas we came up with on that front:
Video Book Club: Choosing Civility February 16 2010 one response
This week’s Video Book Club selection is Choosing Civility
But, to the main point, Forni offers a thought provoking book on 25 rules of considerate conduct. My guess is there won’t be any rules in the book that you haven’t thought of before. Nonetheless, living consistently by all 25 rules sets a pretty high bar of civil behavior.
Give a listen and see what you think.
What’s the rule of considerate conduct that you’d like to see more of in day to day life?
Three Reasons Why Superstars Run Off the Rails February 12 2010 one response
In scanning the headlines this morning, I read in the Financial Times that the CEO of MySpace (remember when it was bigger than Facebook?), Owen Van Natta, has been forced out of his job by a competitor in the parent company, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. Not having paid a ton of attention to MySpace lately, my initial thought was this is probably the same old story about yet another superstar running off the rails. On a closer read, it seems that this was probably not the case. Apparently Van Natta is a bright and well respected guy who ended up on the losing end of a political power struggle in a large organization. Happens all the time. You win some and you lose some.
Still, there are plenty of examples of superstar performers who run off the rails for reasons of their own making. Some make the news (a recent example is the CEO of SAP being let go this week after a couple of years in the job), but most don’t. In my work as an executive coach, I’ve seen my share of derailments. When a train jumps the tracks, investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board examine the scene of the accident to determine the causes. Sometimes I feel like an NTSB investigator myself. Here are three of the most common causes I see when superstars run off the rails:
Scott Eblin is an executive coach, speaker and author of 
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