Archive for March, 2010
What Fashionable Leaders Are Wearing March 31 2010 no responses
If your house is like ours, there are certain movies that you watch again and again. The test of a movie like that is if you’re flipping through the channels on TV and you see a favorite movie and you start watching it all the way through from that point forward. I have to confess that Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby is one of those for me. I like really stupid humor. However, one that my wife and I can both agree on is The Devil Wears Prada with Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway. It’s a fun movie on a lot of levels not the least of which is Streep’s performance in which she sends up the real life editor of Vogue magazine, Anna Winotur. If people in real life are as scared of Wintour as people were of Streep in the movie, then she must have a lot of power. From what I’ve read, Wintour’s power comes from her control over Vogue which, historically, has set the agenda for the multi-billion dollar fashion industry.
So, it was with the Prada movie in mind that I read an article in the New Yorker last night on a web site called Polyvore. The simplest way to describe Polyvore is that it’s an online destination for over 6 million visitors a month to cut and paste clothes they see elsewhere online into sets of items that they think look good together. As someone in the article said, it’s like the cyber version of playing with paper dolls.
For me, the article was interesting because of the larger implications it held for leaders in the digital age. Not to oversimplify, but it seems like the command and control leadership style exhibited by Streep/Wintour in the Prada movie is a relic of the analog age. The people behind Polyvore seem to have figured out what it takes to engage and lead people in the digital age. Here are a few of the ways I think they’re doing it:
Video Book Club: Managing Transitions March 30 2010 3 responses
If you’re a leader, you have to deal with change on a regular basis. If you’re a leader, you need to get your own copy of William Bridges’ book, Managing Transitions
In this week’s Video Book Club, I share a couple of my favorite lessons from my dog eared, marked up copy of Managing Transitions.
If you’ve read the book, what’s your favorite or more useful take away from it?
Talent Management Lessons from the Road to the Final Four March 29 2010 one response
This was a bit of a rough weekend for my brother, Steve. His beloved, number one seeded Kentucky Wildcats lost their bid for the Final Four. Since Steve was a student manager for the UK basketball team during one of their Final Four runs in the 1980’s, he maybe took this weekend’s loss a little harder than most. As the Cats game against WVU wound down on Saturday night, I sent Steve a text message saying I was sorry they were losing. He wrote this back in response, “Hate it. Maybe some of the freshmen will decide to stay now.”
That got me thinking about how the tournament has gone this year and a broader lesson about talent management. For the most part, the teams that have made it to the Final Four or who exceeded expectations earlier in the tournament have top scorers who are more experienced players. Take a look at the Final Four. The top three scorers for both Duke and Michigan State are two juniors and a senior. For WVU, it’s a senior and two sophomores. For Butler, it’s a junior and two sophomores. When you look at the stats for the two big Cinderellas of the tournament, Cornell and Northern Iowa, there are five seniors and one junior making up the top trios of those teams. In contrast, Kentucky’s top three was made up of two freshmen and a junior.
The point I’m trying to make is that great teams need time and experience to gel. So, with that in mind, here’s a quick list of talent management lessons that can help keep your team from being “one and done.”
My Favorite 9.62% of the Rules of Thumb March 26 2010 4 responses
Earlier this week, I was with a group of business owners in the training and performance industry. As you might imagine, it was a pretty energetic and creative group of people. Someone at the meeting shared with us a list of rules that comes from a book called Rules of Thumb
Webber offers 52 Rules of Thumb for life in his book. I’ve reviewed the list several times now and thought I’d share my five favorite (or 9.62%) of Webber’s 52 rules. Here they are:
Rule 1: When the going gets tough, the tough relax.Rule 10: A good question beats a good answer.
Rule 18: Knowing it ain’t the same as doing it.
Rule 32: Content isn’t king. Context is king.
Rule 47: Everyone’s at the center of their map of the world.
Webber wraps things up by encouraging you to come up with your own 53rd Rule of Thumb. Here’s mine:
It’s important to understand the difference between what should be and what is.
What’s yours?
Truman Thursdays: How to Launch a Fighter Jet March 25 2010 no responses
It’s been almost two months since my overnight visit to the USS Harry S Truman. Since then, I’ve posted video clips on Thursdays that feature some of the leaders of the ship and offer a look at life on board an aircraft carrier. Based on the stats from You Tube, the three most popular posts in the series so far have been:
- What I Learned on an Aircraft Carrier
- Executive Officer John Meier on What He Looks for in a Leader
- Commanding Officer Joe Clarkson on Leadership
There are other great clips that you can find on the Next Level Blog by entering “Harry S Truman” in the search box.
In this next to last week of the Truman Thursdays series, you’ll get an up and front and personal view (from around 20 feet away) of what’s involved with launching a fighter jet from the deck. I shot this clip about an hour after we arrived on board and, surrounded by safety crew members, were escorted out onto the flight deck. Our group was positioned between the two catapults on the bow of the ship.
In this three minute video, you’ll see an EA-6B Prowler lower its wings and then move into position to be locked into the catapult. After some safety and system checks, the jet goes from 0 to 150 knots in under 3 seconds as the cat launches it from the deck. It’s a pretty amazing experience to be standing so close to that much power and energy. I hope the video will give you a sense of what it’s like.
How to Give a Pep Talk March 24 2010 6 responses
Whether you’re for or against the health care bill, it’s pretty clear that the passage of the bill by the House will be one of the bigger stories of 2010. In all of the coverage of the debate, one clip I saw made a broader impression on me. It was President Obama’s speech to the congressional Democratic caucus on the day before the vote. I’ve been on West Coast time this week and when I got back to my hotel room on Saturday night, I watched the speech on C-SPAN. (That probably says a lot about what a wild and crazy time I have on business trips.) Anyway, the speech struck me as an interesting example of how to give a pep talk.
Sooner or later, every leader is faced with the challenge of rousing the troops to go out and do something hard. One of my favorite examples is the “Band of Brothers” speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V. For a highlight of that speech, check out this clip of Kenneth Branagh as Henry V psyching up the troops at Agincourt.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not comparing the President’s health care speech with Henry V sending troops into battle. Still, no matter which side of the health care reform bill you come down on, I think there are some fairly salient pep talk learning points to be gleaned from the structure of the President’s remarks. You can watch the speech here. What follows are some of my takeaways that might be food for thought in preparing your next “fire them up” pep talk.
Video Book Club: Leaders Make the Future March 23 2010 one response
OK, I’m doing something different with VBC this week. I’m recommending a book I haven’t read yet. It’s called Leaders Make the Future
Bob is a futurist and his forecast for ten years out is essentially more of what we have today. Bob calls it VUCA – Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity. Sound familiar? It should since that pretty much sums up the world we’re living in. In his book, Bob offers ten skills that leaders will need to master to make the future.
I’m not going to get into those in this post. Instead, I’d like for you to get a copy of Bob’s book and let’s start a conversation about the skills that leaders are going to need for the future. I’ll be reading Bob’s book over the next few weeks. I hope you will too and that we can swap some ideas.
In the meantime, here’s a quick taste of Leaders Make the Future
How Leaders Can Prevent “Sudden” Fractures March 22 2010 one response
I’m in Phoenix this week for a meeting of companies that provide leadership and organizational development consulting and coaching. It’s a nice opportunity to learn from colleagues and I want to share with you a useful analogy I picked up today.
Our opening speaker was Dennis Bonilla, a managing director with General Physics Corporation. In talking with us about overcoming organizational fatigue in a tough operating environment, Dennis drew a comparison with metal fatigue. He asked us to think of what happens when you take a coat hanger and bend it back and forth until it breaks. The process is known as metal fatigue and it happens in three predictable phases that are analogous to what happens in organizations that are under pressure:
Truman Thursdays: A Look at Night Flight Operations March 18 2010 no responses
At this risk of reading like the opening line of a really bad novel, this post begins with the phrase, “It was a dark and stormy night.” The thing is, it actually was. On my January trip to the USS Harry S Truman, we had the opportunity to observe nighttime flight operations from the flag bridge. The weather that night was terrible. There was a complete cloud cover with no moonlight, rain blowing sideways and choppy seas that had the deck rolling from side to side. In the midst of those conditions, Truman pilots and crew were launching and landing F-18 fighter jets about every 45 seconds.
Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to work with some Navy admirals and talked over lunch with a couple of them who were carrier based pilots earlier in their careers. We were talking about night ops and one of the admirals made the point that it’s not something that anyone really enjoys. Because it’s dark, you lose your normal visual references and only have a few lights in the middle of the ocean to line up on when you land. When you’re flying night operations in bad weather, it gets even more tense and complicated.
Needless to say, as you watch this video you’re going to see a lot of darkness. Look closer though and you’ll see the reflective clothing and signal lights of the crew on deck. Think for a few moments what it would be like to be on a rolling flight deck in the wind and rain while jets are taking off and landing a few yards away from you. Look closer still and you’ll see planes moving off to the edges of the deck after they land. Imagine what it would be like to be sitting in the pilot’s seat of an F-18 and following the signals of the young guy on deck who’s waving you to keep moving your plane forward so the nose is hanging over the edge of the deck as they get you positioned to park. All of that takes a lot of systems, processes, competence and trust.
In the first 3:30 of the video, you’ll see two jets take off and one land. The last 40 seconds is an additional segment that I inserted so you can see how cool it looks when a pilot fires his afterburners when launching in the middle of the night.
They Can Handle the Truth March 17 2010 no responses
When I’m conducting feedback for a client one of the things I really like to hear from the direct reports is something like, “My manager shares information with us that other managers don’t share with their teams. That helps us make better decisions and do better work.” The flip side of what makes me happy is that every direct report should be singing the praises of their manager sharing information with them. When you treat people like adults, they usually respond like adults. Most people can handle the truth and resent it when they feel like they’re being played.
Sharing information and telling the truth came to mind in reading a couple of interviews over the past few days. The first was in the New York Times with the CEO of the Container Store, Kip Tindell. If you’re looking for a leader who believes in treating people like human beings, read the whole interview. For the purposes of this post on the benefits of sharing the truth and the information that people need to do their jobs, read this passage:
The way we create a place where people do want to come to work is primarily through two key points. One of our foundation principles is that leadership and communication are the same thing. Communication is leadership. So we believe in just relentlessly trying to communicate everything to every single employee at all times, and we’re very open. We share everything. We believe in complete transparency. There’s never a reason, we believe, to keep the information from an employee, except for individual salaries.
I always make it a point to give the same presentation I give at the board meeting to the staff, and then that trickles down to everybody in the company. I know that occasionally some of that information falls into the wrong hands, but that’s a small price to pay for having employees who know they know just about everything.
That quote tells you a lot about why the Container Store is consistently near the top of the list of Fortune’s list of the Best Companies to Work For. In scanning the 2010 list, I don’t see any airlines which is not that surprising given the challenges facing that industry. Still, I admire what I read in a profile on in the Financial Times on the new CEO of Continental Airlines, Jeff Smisek.
Here’s how Smisek, a 15 year veteran of Continental describes his communication approach:
I never pat staff on the back and tell them everything is going to be OK if it is not. You could say I am a little blunt but . . . it comes with integrity and honesty… I am a huge believer in the work culture here. We call it 'working together' but what I like to say is that we treat people 'like your momma taught you to' – as we would like to be treated. I understand [workers] want more out of life here and they deserve more out of life here. But no matter what you want and deserve, unless there is money to pay you, there is no money to pay you.
No sugar coating there. It’s a much different tone than the Container Store’s CEO but it’s a much different business and situation. There is one thing that both of these leaders seem to have in common, however. They respect their people enough to share the truth with them. When people have enough information to fully understand the business, they can make better decisions and produce better results.
What could you do this week to raise the level of knowledge and understanding in your organization? Is there information you haven’t shared yet that would raise the overall level of business literacy?
Scott Eblin is an executive coach, speaker and author of 
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