Archive for April, 2011
Five Ways to Survive a Clueless Boss April 27 2011 7 responses
Well, after many years in the job, Michael Scott has left the office at Dunder Mifflin to pursue other dreams. It remains to be seen how things are going to go for the team with the new boss.
You may or may not be surprised how often I hear in my coaching work about senior level bosses who are basically clueless. The cluelessness can show up in different ways – time sucking, pointless requests that come out of left field; no clear direction; much more emphasis on bluster and style than on the substance of getting things done. The list could go on and on. (Feel free to add your own observations on what makes for a clueless boss in the comments.)
As I wrote here a few months ago, leaders can change the weather. If you’ve got a boss who is foggy and cloudy in their approach, it’s pretty easy for everyone on their team to show up foggy and cloudy. Obviously, that’s a pretty dangerous career situation for everyone in that boss’s organization. How do you help yourself and your team survive when you find yourself in a clueless boss induced fog bank?
Here are five things some of my savvy leadership coaching clients have done to survive a clueless boss:
Bossypants: Leadership Lessons from Tina Fey April 25 2011 one response
I did something this past weekend that I rarely do. I read a business book all the way through. (You see, the dirty little secret about most business books is you can get the meat from them with a heavy skim in an hour or less.)
Of course, having read the title of this post, you may be surprised to learn that Tina Fey wrote a business book. Bossypants
If you like Tina Fey’s brand of intelligent, snarky, slightly off center humor (I do), and if you’re interested in what a successful woman has learned about leadership, you’ll like Bossypants
Either way, there are some important leadership lessons from Tina Fey in Bossypants
What Leaders Need to Learn from American Idol April 22 2011 4 responses
If you been reading this blog for awhile, you know that this is the time of year when my corporate friend, Jennifer, and I handicap and kibitz about American Idol in emails we send each other. We both agree that the show is way better than we expected it to be in the post Simon Cowell era. It's actually less stressful and more entertaining to watch without all of the genuflecting toward Simon. That's probably one reason why the ratings are as strong as they've ever been.
So, that's one thing right off the bat that leaders need to learn from American Idol. Hardly anyone is irreplaceable. If you put the right team (who knew Steven Tyler and J Lo could be so entertaining?) and processes in place, your organization can keep rocking forward even if you lose a key player.
Another big thing that leaders need to learn from Idol this year is that people perform better when they're allowed to play to their strengths. Unlike previous seasons when each week had narrow musical themes that forced the contestants to perform outside their comfort zones, the weekly themes this year have usually been broad enough to drive a truck through. For the most part, the contestants who are left know what their strengths are and sing to them. The hard rock guy, James, the jazz driven Casey (who I think might be the love child of Will Ferrell and Zach Galifinakis) and country crooner Scotty are all playing in their power alleys. Once she got past singing Blondie's Call Me, Haley seemed to find her bluesy groove and Jakob is consistently channeling his inner Luther Vandross. The contestant I'm most concerned for now is young Lauren who's really talented but seemed to peak during the auditions and Hollywood Week. She was loose and having fun back then but now seems like she's got a little voice inside her head reminding her she's singing on American Idol and she better not screw it up. She's holding back as a result. Leaders need to quiet their inner critic and show up fully confident when they're on stage.
And that last point leads us to Ryan Seacrest. Am I the only one who thinks he's handling his role on the show better than he ever has? He seems more confident, relaxed and really dialed in. Could it be because he's not so fixated on winning the games of one upsmanship that he got sucked into playing with Simon over the past couple of years? The leadership lesson here is don't get so fixated on your nemesis that it throws you off your game.
So, one thing I learned when I wrote a post called Feedback Do's and Dont's from American Idol a couple of years ago was that lots of people have strongly held opinions about this show. So, let 'em rip in the comments. I'd love to hear any hidden leadership lessons you're picking up from the show but pure fan boy or fan girl comments are cool too. Have fun with it!
The Math of Leadership April 20 2011 2 responses
I have a confession to make. I’m not that great at math. Don’t get me wrong, I can do the basics, but I’m not going to be writing any Google or Facebook style algorithms anytime soon. My math challenges literally go back to first grade when the concept of subtraction just rocked my little six year old brain. It’s always been a struggle and the math skills I have have been hard won.
That’s why I was so interested to read an article called A Better Way to Teach Math by David Bornstein on the New York Times blog this week. Bornstein describes a teaching approach called Jump Math which has been used with 85,000 math students and has pushed the performance bell curve very far to the right. According to the program’s originator, John Mighton, the secret of Jump’s success is that it teaches students math by breaking problems into micro steps and giving the kids time to develop mastery in the basics before moving to more advanced problem solving. As Mighton told Bornstein, “Asking children to make their own discoveries before they solidify the basics is like asking them to compose songs on guitar before they can form a C chord.”
The interesting thing is that teaching math isn’t the only discipline where we tend to move people into situations for which they’re unprepared. The same is often the case with leadership. Think about it. How many times have you seen people put into leadership roles and then fail because they weren’t ready? I’ve seen it so much that I wrote a book about it called The Next Level
The story on Jump Start gave me a fresh perspective on the issue of preparing people for new challenges. Here are a few things I think are important to keep in mind as you prepare leaders for bigger roles:
You Like Me, You Really Like Me April 18 2011 6 responses
One of the most e-mailed articles on the New York Times website the past couple of days has been an article by David Carr on how it seems to be acceptable behavior to text someone else while you’re in a conversation with an actual live person who is in the room with you. Carr, the media reporter for the Times, noticed this in buckets when he attended the annual South by Southwest Conference in Austin this year.
I think Carr’s article has struck a chord because lots of folks are tired of being treated as if they don’t matter. In coaching busy and highly focused executives over the years, I’ve worked with a lot of people who are secretly concerned with whether or not their co-workers and team members like them.
Here’s the magic secret to making people like you. Treat them like they matter. If you’re looking for more details about how to do that, here are five ideas that are relatively easy to do and likely to make a difference.
Five Ways to Get Your Calendar Under Control April 15 2011 7 responses
It seems like I talk with clients about the challenge of taming their calendars at least two or three times a week. In the age of interconnected scheduling systems like Outlook and the continuous push to get more done with less in any given day, more and more leaders feel like Sisyphus rolling that big rock up the never ending hill.
What in the heck can you do to get your calendar back under control and have time to think, reflect, relax, connect, have some fun and a life outside of work? I've been brainstorming that question with my clients lately. Here are five strategies we've come up with that make a difference:
Video Book Club: Onward by Howard Schultz April 13 2011 no responses
After an extended hiatus, I’m back today with a new installment of the Video Book Club. If you’ve ever been to a Starbucks and if you’re a student of leadership, you’ll likely be interested in Onward
In this edition of the Video Book Club, I talk a bit about two leadership qualities of Schultz that really come through in his book and how he used them to drive the remarkable turnaround that Starbucks has had in the past couple of years.
Leadership and Getting 900 College Students to Show Up on a Saturday Morning April 11 2011 one response
OK, this post is going to sound like a dad who’s proud of his son. Well, it is, but there are some serious leadership lessons in it as well.
As I’ve written here before, my son, Andy, is a senior at James Madison University. This past Saturday morning was probably the highlight of his college career. Andy, his co-chair, Cori Kendrick, and their team from Madison Involved registered over 900 JMU students for a day of service called The Big Event in their host community of Harrisonburg, VA.
Andy’s involvement in The Big Event began in the Spring of 2010 when, in response to some off campus parties that got way out of control, he set up a Facebook group called Dukes Helping Harrisonburg for JMU students who were interested in improving the relationship between the town and the University. Within a few days, over 2,000 people had joined the group. The group changed its name to Madison Involved and, with a core committee of 40 students, decided to stage The Big Event as its signature initiative.
There had been previous Big Events at JMU three or four years ago that drew 40 or 50 students. So, how did Andy, Cori and their team get 900 students to show up this year? I asked Andy about that yesterday and learned a lot about planning and leadership in the process.
Here’s a brief video of The Big Event kickoff and, following that, are the planning and leadership lessons I learned from Andy:
Start with the Deliverables, Then Work on the Do-Ables April 8 2011 one response
Back in the days when I was a corporate executive myself, I had the good fortune to work on several occasions with Professor Dave Ulrich of the University of Michigan. Dave is one of the all time great thinkers on how lead and organize people to get results. I learned a lot from Dave in those years, but there’s one idea that stands out the most.
He expressed it in this mathematical statement:
D > d
Deliverables are greater than do-ables. If you want to get results, start with what your organization has to deliver and then work your way back to the things to do that will make the biggest contribution to the deliverables. Another way to think about is that strategy drives tactics.
Unfortunately, it’s pretty easy to get so focused on the tactics and the “have to do’s” that tactics can overshadow strategy.
Here’s an example of what I mean:
How to Get the CEO to Listen to You April 6 2011 3 responses
Last month, I did a customized webinar for about 70 managers in a client company on “How to Build Executive Presence.” To prep the content for the session, we asked about a dozen C suite and direct reports to C suite executives to give us their bullet point answers to the question, “How do you define executive presence?”
When I summarized their responses, the top three answers were:
- Interpersonal engagement
- Concise and clear speaking
- Confidence
I saw some of these behaviors in action recently when I coached a CEO and her extended leadership team through an issue identification and problem solving session on barriers to growth in their company. From my spot as coach and facilitator, I could see whose comments were landing with the CEO and top leadership and whose weren’t as much. The people who nailed it exhibited those three characteristics of executive presence.
Specifically, here’s what they did to get the CEO to listen to them:
Scott Eblin is an executive coach, speaker and author of 
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