Archive for October, 2011

Parenthood, Leadership and Being On Stage October 31 2011

Over the past week, I’ve been reading Walter Issacson’s new book on Steve Jobs. It’s extremely well written and a compelling read. Even if you’re not reading the book, you’ve likely read some of the highlights in the news. One of the stories that’s been retold a lot already is what Steve Jobs learned from his adoptive father, Paul.

Paul Jobs had been a Coast Guard seaman as a young man and moved to Northern California with his new wife, Clara, after leaving the service. Paul was very good with his hands and had a mind for all things mechanical. Some of the jobs he had over the course of his life drew on those skills; others not so much. Over the years , though, he spent a lot of his free time rebuilding old cars, repairing things in his garage workshop and building things like fences around the house. He usually had young Steve at his side talking with him about the beautiful designs of the cars that they worked on, imparting a high standard of craftsmanship when they built a fence or cabinets together and setting up a personal workbench space for his son in the garage. Years later, Steve told his biographer that those early lessons from his dad set him on the path to demanding the quality and aesthetic craftsmanship that Apple products are known for today.

For good or for bad, parents are leaders. Much like the people who end up in leadership roles in organizations, parents create the environment and teach the lessons that shape perceptions and behaviors. For another example, consider the case of Lynn Blodgett, the CEO of ACS, an 85,000 employee IT business owned by Xerox. In a Corner Office interview with the New York Times this week, Blodgett cited his earliest lessons as coming from his parents. When a health crisis struck one of his sisters, his mom had to figure out a way to contribute to the family income while staying home to take care of her daughter. She leased a data entry keypunch machine, set it up in her daughter’s bedroom and got to work. In the process, she trained her other six children how to do the work. Lynn’s parents eventually grew that operation into a 1,000 person company that he took over as CEO at the age of 27.

Leaders – whether they’re leading at home or in the workplace – are always on stage. Whether they know it or not; whether they like it or not, people are watching and taking their cues from what they see their leaders do. Through what they do and how they do it, leaders shape the future.

If you’re reading this, you’re likely in a leadership role of some kind. It could be formal or informal. It could be paid or unpaid. The chances are good that someone is watching you and that they’re taking their cues from you. It’s what I call in The Next Level picking up a big footprint view of your role.

Who’s watching you? What do you want them to see? What do you want them to take away from what they see?

Nuggets of Wisdom from Leadership Caffeine October 28 2011

My leadership blogging friend Art Petty has a new book out called Leadership Caffeine. It’s a series of essays organized by common challenges and opportunities leaders face. The caffeine metaphor comes into play because, as Art writes, the book is made up of “ideas to energize your professional development. Art is an executive coach and author who has been there and done that. He knows what it’s like to lead in large organizations and approaches the topic with a refreshing mix of realism and humanism.

His book is a fun one to dip in and out of. It’s easy to find little ah-ha nuggets of wisdom in it. Here are a few that made me think that I found this morning:

3 Leadership Lessons from the Netflix Slide October 26 2011

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings must be feeling a little bit like a team that ended up on the cover of Sports Illustrated and then started losing games. Last year, Hastings was on the cover of Fortune as its Business Person of the Year. This year, he’s getting slammed for what he acknowledges are a series of poor decisions and mishandled customer communications. It’s kind of like the dreaded SI cover jinx.

After raising the price for the Netflix DVD and movie streaming package over the summer, Hastings publicly apologized but didn’t change the terms of the deal. Then a few months later, he announced that Netflix was going to be just for streaming movies and a spin off company, Qwikster, would handle DVD rentals. Customers would no longer have a master movie queue online at one site. They’d have to go back and forth between the sites if they wanted both streaming movies and DVD rentals. Customers hated that idea and Netflix killed Qwikster a few weeks later. A lot of customers decided to just bail out. Netflix announced a few days ago that they lost 800,000 customers in the last quarter. The company’s stock has declined by around 35% in each of the past two days.

Hastings has given a couple of interesting interviews to the New York Times this week – one for the Sunday magazine and one for the Business section. I’ve been sifting through those articles trying to come up with some leadership lessons from the Netflix slide.

Here are three lessons that jump out at me:

Trust and loyalty are fragile things:  People loved Netflix because they could keep their movies as long as they wanted for a flat monthly fee. None of those annoying late fees that Blockbuster used to charge. Netflix basically crushed Blockbuster’s business model with that approach. Netflix customers loved and trusted them because the company made their lives a little more enjoyable for a nominal cost. That was the essence of the relationship. The changes the company implemented this year broke that quickly. People trust and have loyalty to other people or companies because they live up to their promises over time. With the changes they made and the way they made them, Netflix broke their promise. Customers walked.

Don’t get blinded by the data. In the interviews with the Times, Hastings talked a lot about how the data showed that DVD rentals had probably peaked and were declining. As he found out, the data didn’t show how people felt. His comments in the interviews suggest that his decisions were largely driven by the data. Leaders have to tune into the people behind the data.

Stay curious. Ask broad questions. Listen. There’s a great story in one of the articles about Hastings sitting in a hot tub with a friend and telling the guy that he was going to spin the DVD rentals out of Netflix and into Qwikster. The guy told Hastings that it was a terrible idea. Hastings ignored his friend because he thought CEO’s shouldn’t put much stock in their friends’ opinions. When the company ran focus groups on Qwikster, all they asked about was what people thought of the name. In the interviews Hastings referred to some of the decisions he’d made as arrogant. That seems fair. One way to avoid the arrogance that can come with success is to stay curious, ask broad questions and listen.

I’m sure many of you are Netflix customers. Are you sticking with the company or have you already left? From a leadership do’s and don’ts standpoint, what else have you learned from the way Hastings has handled things this year?

“I Wouldn’t Want to Be You” October 24 2011

Several months ago, I was in a coaching conversation with a “go to person” leader about the results of her 360 degree feedback from colleagues. Her highest rated behaviors were a strong mix of items that focus on getting results and items that focus on building relationships. In my experience, leaders who have high scores in both of those broad areas – results and relationships – are the ones who are very effective over the long run. They get stuff done without leaving a lot of damaged people in their wake.

So far, so good. Then we turned our attention to her lowest rated behaviors. As is the case with most “go to people”, her lowest rated behaviors were a combination of items related to pacing herself, balancing her priorities, giving her team space to execute and achieving results through others rather than by herself. When I asked her what her take was on the mix of results, she said something I hadn’t heard before.

She said, “I’m afraid that the people on my team are looking at me and saying, ‘I wouldn’t want to be you.’”

How to Be a Really Useful Coach in 5 Minutes or Less October 20 2011

One of the jokes I sometimes make when I’m leading a workshop or giving a presentation is that being a coach is one of the greatest gigs in the world because you don’t have to know anything. All you have to do is ask questions and let the other person talk. Like most jokes there’s some truth behind the joke. Here’s why.

If you have four basic questions ready to go, you can coach anyone in five minutes or less to think through and be better prepared for the most important thing they’re going to do this week. It requires no formal experience or training as a coach. All you have to do is ask the questions, listen and ask the other person to elaborate.

Here are the questions. (Potential follow up questions are in parentheses):

1.  What’s the most important meeting or event coming up on your calendar in the next week?

2.  If that meeting or event is a complete success, what happens at the end? (What do people know, think, do, feel or believe?)

3.  How do you need to show up to make that outcome likely? (What are you going to say and how are you going to say it? What kind of energy, body language, tone of voice and demeanor do you need to demonstrate?)

4.  (What else?) This is the all purpose coaching question because it draws out the extra ideas.

That’s it. You can have a very productive coaching conversation in five minutes or less if you use those questions. I know they work because hundreds of people I’ve had coach each other in workshops tell me they work. The cool thing is that you can easily teach others how to coach you by sharing the questions with them. If you don’t have anyone available, you can coach yourself using the questions.

I often say that one of the most important things I do for my coaching clients is giving them the space to listen to themselves think. With a simple coaching approach like this one, you can get a lot of thinking and preparation packed into a short amount of time.

Give it a five minute or less try with a colleague today and let me know through a comment or tweet how it works for you.

How to Steer Clear of a Workplace Smackdown — Even If You’re Not an NFL Coach) October 17 2011

The most talked about moment from week six of the NFL season was the near-miss post-game smackdown between San Francisco 49ers coach Jim Harbaugh and Detroit Lions coach Jim Schwartz. As you can see in this NFL.com video, when the 49ers eked out a win over the previously undefeated Lions, Harbaugh literally started jumping for joy. By the time he got to Schwartz for the post game handshake, he was really jacked up, grabbed Schwartz’s extended hand and slapped him on the back – hard. As the video was endlessly replayed on TV last night, you didn’t have to have a masters’ degree in lip reading to see that Schwartz was not too happy about the exchange. He was so unhappy, in fact, that he chased Harbaugh 30 or 40 yards down the field to the end zone to, umm, continue the discussion.

I read some of the sports columnists from the San Francisco Chronicle and the Detroit Free Press this morning to get the local angles. While both papers agree that Harbaugh got carried away in his celebration, Schwartz is taking more of the heat for losing his composure.

You don’t have to be an NFL coach to lose your temper at work. It’s even possible that you could get so ticked, you feel like running after someone and throttling them. Not a good idea. That sudden rush of anger is the “fight” part of the fight or flight response that comes from a little part of your brain called the amygdala. When you have a sudden urge to throttle someone, you’re experiencing what emotional intelligence pioneer Daniel Goleman calls an amygdala hijack. The fight or flight response was actually pretty useful when our Flintstones era ancestors never knew if a saber tooth tiger was the next thing coming around the corner. It’s not so useful in a professional setting (even the post-game sidelines of an NFL stadium).

So, with Coach Schwartz as inspiration, here are three things you can do to avoid a smackdown situation the next time you lose your cool.

A Self-Exam on One Piece of Paper October 14 2011

One of the many intelligent things that Socrates said is “An unexamined life is not worth living.” In an era when many professionals are running flat out until they crash, taking time for self examination usually ends up falling into the category of important but not urgent. The downside of that, of course, is that the urgent things end up overwhelming the important things that a little bit of self examination might have identified.

Fortunately, Mike Figliuolo has come up with a simple yet powerful approach to self examination in his new book, One Piece of Paper. The big idea is to boil your personal philosophy on four basic aspects of leadership down to one piece of paper. Mike offers a series of questions and exercises to help you do that. One of his core tools is what he calls the maxim. The maxim is a simple idea that you hold in your head to remind yourself of how to act. An example that Mike offers is “What would my grandmother say?” (As I wrote earlier this year, that question also worked for Tim Sanders.)

To give you an idea of how Mike’s approach works in real life, I’ve considered a few of his questions in the aspect of Leading Yourself and will share my one piece of paper (less than that actually) answers with you:

What Do You Make of This? October 12 2011

One of my idiosyncratic sources of fun is inserting random lines from movies into everyday conversation. Kevin Bacon shouting, “All is well. Remain calm!” right before the riot runs over him at the end of Animal House would be an example. Another one is when the Lloyd Bridges character in Airplane is looking at a report on a big piece of paper and turns to Jonny asking “What do you make of this?” Jonny grabs it and says, “Oh, I can make a hat, or a broach or a pterodactyl.”

It’s amazing how much the Lloyd Bridges question, “What do you make of this?” comes up in day to day life. For instance, when an organization is going through a big change, “What do you make of this?” is a pretty germane question. People’s answers will depend on the framework and context they have. That’s where leadership plays a critical role.

Change usually involves the end of something which usually means that at least some people are losing something that matters to them. The leader’s job is to start some conversations that focus on “What else can we make of this?”

An executive I know was promoted to be the CEO of his organization. He’s following a much beloved leader. Like most organizations these days, they’re facing a tough operating environment. It’s natural that the people there might focus on the downside of losing a leader they love at a time when it’s hard to meet goals. The new CEO is asking the question, “What else can we make of this?” When you ask that question, the possibilities open up. You give people the opportunity to come up with new options and new ways to view the roles they play or could play.

In his book,  Managing Transitions, William Bridges reminds us that before anything new can begin, something else has to end. Leaders need to help their organizations acknowledge the endings and engage them in the new beginnings. Asking “What else can we make of this?” seems like a good way to engage people in reframing their context and getting ready for what’s next.

What do you do to help people focus on the possibilities?

Occupy Wall Street and Post Heroic Leadership October 10 2011

A few weeks ago, I was having lunch with a friend of mine who works for one of the big banks.  If you saw him in his sharp suit and power tie, you’d guess that he’s a pretty big deal and you’d be right.  We were talking about leadership and he said something that both surprised me and made me think.  His take is that we need to deemphasize the trappings of the Presidency in the United States.  His point was that the 30 car motorcades, the theatre of the White House, and all of the attention focused on the President is non-productive because it raises the expectations that one person is going to solve all of our problems.

What my friend is arguing against is the heroic model of leadership.  In that model, people are looking for a savior who will be responsible for making sure that everything turns out great.  It’s what one of my early mentors, Ron Heifetz, at Harvard’s Kennedy School might call “work avoidance.”  His point is that the job of a leader is not to do the work but to help the group define the work that needs to be done.  The group has to do the work. That can be a messy and frustrating process so it’s not surprising that people tend to look for a heroic leader who can make it all better instead of doing the work.

Which brings us to the nascent Occupy Wall Street movement.  As a really interesting article in Fast Company explains, the Wall Street protests started in Lower Manhattan in August in a rag tag kind of way.  By early October, the protests had spread to other cities including Washington, DC.  It seems like one of the most frequently asked questions about the movement, “What do they want?,”  is also the most frequent criticism – “What do they want?”  I think their motto, “We are the 99 percent,” pretty much sums up what they want at the moment.  They want to be heard.

What’s fascinating to me as a student of leadership is that there is no single person who’s leading this.  There’s no Lech Walesa exhorting the shipyard workers in Gdansk.  Instead, there’s this participatory, radical consensus model of leadership organized online, through public events and often long and frustrating group conversations.  There’s no manifesto (yet) or daily talking points that everyone is repeating verbatim.  There are leaders and coordinators in the movement but it looks like they’re letting the group do the work.  It looks like post heroic leadership.

It will be really interesting to see where this goes.  Have you paid much attention to Occupy Wall Street?  What’s your take on what they’re doing and how they’re doing it?  If you were a business leader on Wall Street, how would you respond?  If you were the President, how would you respond?

What We Should and Shouldn’t Learn from the Life of Steve Jobs October 7 2011

Even though it was sadly expected, the news of Steve Jobs’ passing this week hit me like a punch in the gut. Clearly, I was not alone. The outpouring of tributes and remembrances tell us something. He was an especially gifted human being who, in his own ways, helped change the world. Whether it’s explicitly articulated or not, it seems we recognize when we lose someone who was truly an original and feel that loss more acutely.

In the past day, I’ve heard or read excerpts from Jobs’ 2005 commencement speech at Stanford in dozens of stories on his life. It’s a fantastic speech. If you haven’t watched it, you should. The passage that is especially poignant is the one in which he spoke on the value of death and life:

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

That’s a lesson we should all learn from Steve Jobs – make the most of the life you’ve been given and live it fully.

On the other hand, one lesson that would be dangerous for most leaders to take away from Jobs would be to emulate the many stories about how tough he could be on his staff. Even Jobs’ greatest admirers acknowledge that, in his quest for the perfect execution of his vision, he could be brutally humiliating with those who did not meet his standards. As I noted in a post this summer and was reported earlier this year by Fortune magazine, his management style could scare people.

A week or so after Jobs retired in August, one of my senior executive clients opened a conversation by asking why shouldn’t every leader follow the lead of Steve Jobs by holding their staffs’ feet to the fire and demanding perfection. My answer was because most leaders aren’t geniuses. Steve Jobs was a genius and the people who worked for him knew it and trusted it. I’ve been told by people who work at Apple that they were willing to put up with Jobs’ occasional outbursts of verbal abuse because they recognized the unique talents of their leader.

I’m reminded of the tiny type disclaimers on TV commercials when cars are zipping through a crazy course at high speeds. It usually says something like “Professional driver on a closed course. Do not attempt.” As many positive lessons as there are in the life of Steve Jobs, it would be a mistake for most leaders to attempt to emulate the tougher aspects of his style. He was about as close to one of a kind as it gets. Unless you’re truly a genius, you likely need to take a less intimidating approach to leadership.

That’s my take. What do you think? What have you learned from the life of Steve Jobs? It’s stunning to think about how much he did in only 56 years. Just imagine what he might have done with another twenty. What will you miss most about him?