Archive for April, 2010
True Insincerity is Hard to Find April 30 2010 no responses
One of my mentors in high school was fond of saying, “True insincerity is hard to find.” Running for reelection in Britain this week, prime minister Gordon Brown demonstrated what that line is all about. In case you haven’t heard, Brown was out in the neighborhoods talking to the “real people” about their concerns when he struck up a conversation with an older woman who had a list of complaints including her take on British immigration policy. Brown talked with her for five minutes, then left the scene in his motorcade. Unfortunately, he forgot to take the TV network’s wireless microphone off his lapel and, as he was driving away, was caught on tape referring to the lady as a “bigoted woman.”
The conversation with the woman and his off camera remarks can be seen in this clip. It’s about five minutes long with Brown’s gaffe coming around the 4:50 mark. If you’re at all a student of leadership insincerity, I encourage you to watch the whole thing. It’s too rich.
If you want a recap of the overall story including the lady’s reaction when she heard Brown called her a bigot and Brown scrambling to recover from sticking his foot in his mouth, Jon Stewart had a very funny segment about it on The Daily Show:
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3 Dozen Predictable Situations That Executives Will Face in Their Careers April 28 2010 3 responses
There probably aren’t many kids who grow up thinking, “Someday I want to be a Wall Street executive and testify in front of a Senate committee that’s loaded for bear.” Yet, that’s what happened this week for eight or nine executives from Goldman Sachs. Who would have predicted that a few years ago? Probably about as many people who predicted the subprime mortgage crisis that Goldman shorted while selling a lot of their clients the long position. Call me strange if you like, but I spent a lot of the morning listening to the hearing on CNBC while I was working on the second edition of The Next Level (manuscript has to go to the publisher this week, hence the big push). There really wasn’t a lot of light shed on what actually happened but it was interesting to hear all the ways that questions could be asked and not answered. The star of the show had to be Fabian “Fabulous Fab” Tourre, the young Goldman banker who put together a lot of the questionable deals. For the color commentary, check out Dana Milbank’s column in the Washington Post.
The whole issue of predictable and unpredictable situations that executives will face in their career has been on my mind for the past couple of days. One of the appendices in the next edition of the book is an expanded Situation Solutions Guide in which I list a series of situations that executives will predictably face in their careers and provide some tips for how to deal with those situations. As I was thinking through the list last weekend, I put out a question to my friends on Linked In, Facebook and Twitter asking for their take on the situations that executives will likely face. The first person to respond was my blogging friend, Wally Bock at Three Star Leadership. We ended up having a nice conversation and talked through Wally’s experience in advising leaders in how to handle both predictable and unpredictable situations.
So, testifying before Congress is probably on the unpredictable side of the equation. I did, however, hear back from a couple of dozen people with their predictable situations. It’s a really interesting list and I thought you’d want to see it. Here’s my two part request. First, what predictable situation would you add to the list? Second, what’s your best advice for handling one of the situations already on the list? I’d really like to hear from you on either or both questions.
In the meantime, here’s the list. (It’s about a page long. I think you’ll find it worth the read):
Video Book Club: Game Change April 27 2010 no responses
It’s not often when I knock off a 400 page plus book in a week, but that was the case with Game Change
Take a look at the video with my special guest reviewer for more on Game Change:
Taking the Long Term Perspective April 23 2010 no responses
I read a couple of articles yesterday that provided clear explanations of some complex topics – the Securities and Exchange Commission’s fraud charge against Goldman Sachs and the Obama administration’s efforts on nuclear non-proliferation. Before you click away from this post, hang in there with me because there’s a quick leadership point the long term perspective that I want to make.
But first, here’s the set-up.
Five Traits of the Most Admired Leaders April 21 2010 13 responses
Among the many things I like about our group coaching program, Next Level Leadership™, one of my favorites is when the high potential leader participants share with each other what they learned in their senior executive shadow days. Here’s how the shadow day works. To broaden their perspective on the organizational presence aspect of leadership, the participants spend the day shadowing a senior leader in their business. The agenda is simple – be the senior executive’s shadow for the day. Attend her staff meetings, go to her briefings, sit in on meetings she has with the C suite or board members, meet with the customers. The high potential leader is there to observe and learn from whatever the senior exec is doing that day. If the senior executive is responsible for a different part of the organization than the high potential leader comes from, so much the better. It helps broaden the perspective of the high potential that much more.
It’s almost always an eye opening experience for the high potential leaders in the program. The fun part for me is listening to everyone come back together and tell their stories about what they did and saw on their shadow day. We had one of those sessions yesterday in a Next Level Leadership™ program. As we’ve been having these shadow day debriefing sessions in different companies over the past few years, I’ve been keeping some notes about the traits of the senior executives that the group coaching participants admire the most. Here are five traits of the most admired leaders that show up on the list again and again:
Video Book Club: Orbiting the Giant Hairball April 20 2010 one response
In this week’s VBC, I address two compelling questions. What is a giant hairball and why should you consider orbiting one? The answers are contained in the gently subversive classic, Orbiting the Giant Hairball
I share a few of his secrets for doing so in this clip:
Ten Things to Look for in Your Mental Kitchen April 19 2010 4 responses
Where do you go when you really need to think and get some serious work done? If the result of that work is some first rate food for thought, you might think of the place that enables you to create it as your mental kitchen. It’s that place where you can get out of the continuous stream of incoming distractions that redirect your attention every 10 or 15 minutes. It’s the place that enables you to focus your thinking and go deep. It’s almost certainly not your office because your office is full of cues that remind you of all the urgent work that keeps you from going deep on the important stuff that you need to cook up. So where is your mental kitchen? What kind of features do you need for your mental kitchen to be a place of maximum productivity for you?
Those questions are on my mind this morning because I’ve spent the better part of the past six weekends working on the second edition of my book, The Next Level
Leaders, You’re Being Watched (and Recorded) April 16 2010 one response
OK, I’ll admit it. Sometimes when I’m sitting in my office cranking through e-mail responses, I listen to sports talk radio. Dan Patrick’s show is my favorite. Of course, one of the challenges with hosting a three hour radio show is you have to come up with enough stuff to talk about to fill the time. Some of the topics are more consequential than others.
One of yesterday’s topics was less so. It seems that Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones was in a bar with a bunch of guys lately, got a little loose with his tongue and, using some colorful language, started dissing on NFL prospect Tim Tebow and his own former head coach, Bill Parcells. We know all of this because one of the guys that Jones was talking to recorded the conversation with the video camera in his smartphone. That guy sent it to a sports blog called Deadspin which “made it OK” for ESPN and all the other sports media channels to pick up the story. Since this is a PG-13 rated blog, I won’t link to Deadspin or any other sites that are running the Jones video. If you’re curious, you can find it on YouTube. The last time I looked, it had about 130,000 hits.
So, what’s my point? It’s this. As a leader, you are always being watched. That’s what I mean when I write in The Next Level
Right about now, you may be thinking, “Heck, I’m not Jerry Jones. No one’s ever going to record and put me on line.” Really? Think again. Here’s a quick story from a less famous leader about going viral along with a few thoughts about how to deal with the “always on” environment that leaders live in today:
I and It or I and Thou? April 14 2010 one response
This is one of those posts where I have to get some things off my chest. As someone who grew up in West Virginia, the coal mine explosion in Montcoal that killed 29 miners last week has been on my mind and heart.
Over the weekend, the New York Times ran brief obituaries on most of the miners. Looking over those two pages, I said to my wife, “I feel like I knew these people.” I grew up in Huntington, a town on the Ohio River that got its start as a rail and river town moving coal out of southern West Virginia. When I was in high school, I travelled all over the state in a leadership role with the West Virginia District of Key Club. As a young adult, I travelled all over the state again when I worked for the governor of West Virginia and then in six years working for one of the largest banks in the state. In my mid-thirties, as VP of HR for Columbia Gas Transmission, I regularly travelled up and down the pipeline to small towns in West Virginia, eastern Kentucky and throughout Appalachia.
So, in a way, I knew the guys who worked in that mine. I grew up with people like them. They’re good people, who work hard, care about their families and are trying to make a good life for themselves and their kids. It goes without saying that coal mining is hard and inherently dangerous work. Still, the guys who died in that mine last week deserved a hell of a lot more than what they got.
The mine at Montcoal, WV is owned by Massey Energy. As reported in the New York Times, Massey is one of the leading safety violators in the coal industry. Its CEO, Don Blankenship, recently said that “violations are unfortunately a normal part of the mining process.” Blankenship is the same guy who donated $3 million to elect a West Virginia supreme court justice who ruled in his company’s favor on safety violation cases that came before the court. His company is one of the leaders in permanently altering the natural landscape of West Virginia by blowing up the tops of its mountains in a process called mountain top removal mining.
It all reminds me of a small book I read several years ago called I And Thou
I’m not naïve enough to believe that even the best leaders are always going to approach their work from a 100 percent "I – Thou" perspective. So what do we, as leaders, do with this distinction? I think one place to start is to get into the habit of asking ourselves are we approaching our work with an "I – It" or an "I – Thou" approach. Another idea is to get as clear as we can about what an "I – Thou" approach would look like in the real world that we’re leading in. For more on that, I’ll throw it over to you the reader. What sort of leadership behaviors would we see in someone applying an "I – Thou" perspective to their work? What sort of decision making criteria should a leader use in sorting through the "I- It" and "I – Thou" perspectives?
Video Book Club: Wherever You Go There You Are April 13 2010 no responses
One of the things I try to do is be mindful and present in the moment. I’m not saying I’m great at it. I just try to do it. I read somewhere once that your mind is kind of like a puppy. You can tell it to stay and pay attention, but pretty soon it’s going to go skipping off somewhere else. Like a lot of people, I’ve found that meditation is a good practice for training the puppy that is my brain to stay. That, however, is a long term project.
A great resource for that project is the feature of this week’s Video Book Club, Wherever You Go, There You Are
Scott Eblin is an executive coach, speaker and author of 
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