Archive for December, 2011
Leadership Lessons from 2011 December 30 2011 one response
Wow, what a year this has been for good, bad, maddening and inspiring examples of leadership. In his column today, the Washington Post’s David Ignatius makes the case that historians will look back on 2011 as a “hinge” – a year in which momentous events set the stage for major changes in the future. The challenge in writing an end of year recap on the leadership lessons to be learned for a year like this is deciding what not to write about.
On the list of things I’ve written about this year but won’t be writing about today are the reaction to the shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords and other victims in January, the killing of Bin Laden in May, the scandals at Ohio State and Penn State, the end of Anthony Weiner’s career in Congress, the News of the World phone hacking scandal and the death of Steve Jobs. When stories like those don’t make the final list, you know it’s been a big news year.
What’s on my mind most on this penultimate day of 2011 is what’s behind Time magazine naming the Protestor its person of the year. As the year unfolded, the Arab Spring spread from Tunisia to Egypt to Yemen to Libya to Bahrain to Syria. In the late Summer and early Fall, the Occupy Wall Street movement spread from Zucotti Park to cities around the U.S. and the world. As the year drew to a close, more than 50,000 Muscovites rallied in the streets to protest Vladimir Putin’s intent to name himself president of Russia for another decade or so.
2011 has been a rough year for autocrats and plutocrats. It’s been the year when followers have banded together and organized themselves to shout out, “Enough!” One of the images from this year that sticks with me most is an Egyptian in Tahrir Square holding up a sign that simply said, “I Am a Man.” This was the year when hundreds of thousands organized themselves to be heard and acknowledged as human beings. The technology of the smart phone, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook have enabled these movements to grow and spread at breathtaking speed.
As the customer relations debacle at Netflix earlier this year showed, this desire and ability of people to be heard as never before has implications for leaders across the board. Perhaps the biggest of these is that if you’re in a leadership role you have to listen and pay attention. The demonstrated lack of that is likely why most Americans are so disgusted with Congress. Taking the country to the brink time and again as illustrated in the debt ceiling debacle shows a leadership class that doesn’t get it.
If 2011 has anything to teach leaders, it’s that if you don’t pay attention to what matters most, the people will make sure that you do and either vote with their feet or replace you if you don’t. There’s an old quote that’s been attributed to a number of people including Gandhi that seems to apply as never before. “There go my people. I must follow them for I am their leader.”
It will be fascinating to see where the people lead their leaders in 2012 and how the leaders respond.
What are your predictions?
You Can’t Lead Through Text Messages December 19 2011 7 responses
Last Thursday night, I had the opportunity to moderate a panel discussion on leadership at a celebratory dinner for Eagle Scouts past and present. The panelists were all accomplished people and had a lot of interesting reflections and insights to share.
One comment from the dinner that I’ve kept thinking about came from retired Rear Admiral John Butler who’s now an executive with Lockheed Martin. The last question I asked the panel was, “What do you think has changed in the practice of leadership over the past 10 years? What changes do you predict in how leadership will be practiced in the next ten years?”
Looking back at the past ten years, Butler has noticed the emergence of what he calls a “kinder, gentler” approach to leadership. His recollection of the 1980’s and 90’s was that it wasn’t uncommon for leadership to be about how loud you could yell and how close you could get to somebody’s face while you were doing it. He’s noticed that the practice of leadership has become much more collaborative over the past ten years and believes that’s a good thing. (See Tom Friedman’s recent column in the New York Times for a similar point of view.)
Looking ahead to the next ten years, Butler is concerned about a lack of human connection in the practice of leadership. While text messaging is the preferred form of communication for millennials (replacing the email that Gen X and Baby Boomers have preferred), it’s not a great leadership tool. As Butler said, you’re not going to convince a young soldier to lead a dangerous assault through a text message. Or, for that matter, you’re not going to get a team fired up and committed to do something challenging at work through a text either. Leadership in both situations requires voice if not face. To do difficult things, followers need to hear and, preferably, see the credibility and commitment that their leader is bringing to the table.
If I were to sum up the Admiral’s points on his look back and look ahead about leadership, the common denominator is connection. The practice of leadership is evolving from the top down, do it because I tell you to do it model to an approach that engages followers (collaborators may be a better word) mentally and emotionally. You can’t do that through a text message.
What about you? What do you think has changed about leadership in the last 10 years? What do you predict about the practice of leadership in the next 10 years?
Leaders, Throw Your Lines in the Water December 16 2011 4 responses
Today, I want to share a quick story with you that is a different way to think about the challenges, conundrums and problems you bump up against as a leader. It comes from Tim Hurlebaus, who’s a vice president with CGI, a leading IT services provider in the U.S. and around the world. Tim has been with CGI in the U.S. and Europe in lots of different leadership roles in different parts of the business over the past twenty years. He’s a problem solver and knows how to lead a team to accomplish things.
He shared some of his lessons learned yesterday as a guest speaker in a Next Level Leadership® session I was conducting for some of CGI’s high potential leaders. One that stood out for me was an analogy he drew from his days as a competitive sailor racing boats in the Chesapeake Bay.
Tim told us that when you’re sailing the lines (that would be ropes for us landlubbers) of the boat can get tangled on the deck. Stopping to untangle the lines can take vital minutes that could be spent on more important tasks. The quickest way to deal with tangled lines, Tim told us, is to throw them into the water. Nine times out of ten, the forward momentum of the boat in combination with the resistance of the water will untangle the lines. When you pull them back in, the problem is solved.
Tim has found that the same approach often works with tangled up problems in business. In a complex, multi-variant project, little knots of problems come up all the time. Tim has taught his teams to not get hung up on every problem that arises. Instead they throw the lines in the water and keep moving forward. They’re not ignoring problems, they’re just giving themselves time to do more and learn more so that they gather the information and insights needed to circle back and solve the problems when they’re easier to solve.
What’s your experience with leading teams in solving knotty problems? Do you tackle all of them head on? Do you defer for awhile by throwing the lines in the water? How do you sort out which approach to take in a given situation?
5 Steps To Infuse “Magic” in Your Leadership Style December 14 2011 3 responses
This guest post was written by Jason Monaghan with University of Notre Dame Executive Online Education. Jason works with the faculty and staff at Notre Dame Online to develop skill sets for the leaders of tomorrow in Negotiations, Leadership and Management and Business Administration.
As any seasoned business leader can tell you, creating an exemplary team takes knowledge, perseverance, and a little leadership magic. The “magic” of a great leader is developed over time and through years of professional awareness. The qualities that make a good team a great one depend largely on the leader’s ability to create an environment of complete engagement. When you are in the presence of a team that functions extraordinarily well, you can feel the difference. Here are five tips that go beyond the curriculum of management training; tips you can use to unleash a little magic in your own leadership style.
1. Show Gratitude
Authentic gratitude for a job well done is a powerful motivational tool. Setting the tone for a team to recognize and reward one another with positive words and written comments builds ongoing rapport. Gratitude should be expressed in accordance with how the recipient is most comfortable receiving it. Extroverts generally appreciate public attention, while more reserved team members would generally prefer one-on-one recognition. Knowing and respecting each person’s differences is another way to show your gratitude for individuality. While gratitude is often expressed during the yearly review process, excellent leaders communicate moments of gratitude all year long.
2. Exercise Forgiveness
Perfection is an ideal which can help teams push toward excellence. In order to be an excellent team, a certain amount of risk and drive to push change and try new solutions is necessary. Sometimes in the process of driving for excellence there are road bumps and team members (including leaders) make mistakes. Listening to the employee and encouraging the “teachable moment” in a mistake is part of the patience that makes a great leader. While remaining clear about accountability, you can still move the conversation in an action-oriented team driven problem solving direction with the intent of restoring trust and confidence. This practice is effective leadership in process and goes a long way in building team loyalty and overall synergy throughout your team.
3. Cultivate Rapport
Building communication with each team member and knowing them well enough to have connection with them individually will help you orchestrate a more cohesive think tank among them collectively. Set the tone for authentic candor in your group meetings. Take the time to learn the most effective communication strategies for your team members. Some people need time to process a conversation before responding; some people enjoy thinking aloud; others need time to jot down notes as part of their thinking process. When team members are encouraged to understand and work in harmony with communication styles, then you will receive more authentic ideas and more well developed solutions. Online communication profiles and questionnaires exist to help you with your rapport building strategies. Rapport is a give and take; if you want honest connections then you have to find ways to connect honestly with you team.
4. Mindfully Construct Challenge
Part of being a thoughtful, skilled leader is spending time mindfully constructing attainable challenges for your team. Involve the team in setting the parameters of the challenge and involve them in the ongoing assessment. You want your team to have the intellectual stimuli of a solid challenge, but you do not want to set them up for defeat with unrealistic time lines and too many goals. If you are managing a team that has been together or at a company longer than you have been on board, consider asking them for input and take their ideas into careful consideration. Teams work harder and produce better results when each individual feels personally invested in the process.
5. Actively Give Support
Highly experienced leaders know the details of each team member’s job description and also have taken the time to understand what each team member juggles on a daily basis. This not only helps when a team member takes a vacation or is out ill, but also for understanding where support is needed. Sometimes the team needs a morale booster like a sponsored lunch, or a guest speaker. Support might mean knowing the cultural and religious differences on a team and allowing flexibility around significant holidays. Perhaps there is a piece of older equipment that is a source of constant team frustration. Although you may not immediately be able to address all needs, just knowing that you are aware of them and actively engaged in the process of resolving what you can is a strong leadership skill. If you have built honest respectful rapport, then team members will feel comfortable talking with you about areas of support. Maybe an adjustment in the project is needed, or an adjustment in work groupings is in order. Taking the time to seek out ways to support your team not only in training but also in the qualitative experience of team work will create better trust in your leadership acumen.
Conclusion
Part of becoming an excellent leader is having the leadership skills and knowledge to effectively manage a team of individuals as one cohesive force. In order to create exceptional teams, a leader also needs a touch of what looks like magic from the bystanders who witness team greatness. Paying close attention to the softer skills needed to complement your management training will create a more holistic leadership style which in turn might generate a little magic all its own.
Tim Tebow: A Leader Who Inspires, Puzzles and Scares People December 12 2011 7 responses
It’s not often that I write about the same subject twice in less than a month on this blog. Even though I wrote How to Set Your Tebow’s Up For Success just three weeks ago, I’m making a brief exception this afternoon. After the Denver Broncos made yet another comeback yesterday in the last two minutes of regulation and then overtime against the Chicago Bears, Tim Tebow has moved from a national sports story to just a flat out national news story.
For as many people who are inspired by Tebow’s leadership, story and faith, there may be as many who are puzzled by him or are scared of him. I say that for two reasons.
First, from a pure football standpoint, there are a lot of professional commentators who are having their faith in their conventional wisdom challenged. As I noted in the November post on Tebow, to set a guy like him up for success, you have to challenge the conventional wisdom. In any field, not just sports broadcasting, the people who have a lot invested in the conventional wisdom will get angry and scared when it’s challenged. It takes a lot of leadership to go up against that successfully. Kudos to Denver coach Jon Fox and Tebow for doing so.
Second, there aren’t many people who are more upfront about their religious faith than Tebow. When the announcers on yesterday’s game were saying things after the Broncos win like “if you weren’t a believer before this game, you almost have to be now,” I kind of wondered if they were talking about football or faith. The inexplicable can certainly puzzle people. From a pure football standpoint, what Tebow and the Broncos have done the past couple of months is rather inexplicable. It does feel bigger than football. What is it exactly? I thought Frank Bruni gave as good an answer as anyone in the New York Times yesterday when he wrote:
“For Tebow that state of mind comes from his particular relationship with his chosen God and is a matter of religion. For someone else it might be understood and experienced as the power of positive thinking, and is a matter of psychology. Either way it boils down to stubborn optimism and bequeaths a spark.”
Whether you love him, hate him or are scared of him, it’s almost impossible to deny that Tim Tebow is a leader who gets results. What’s your take on how he does it?
What to Do When Your Boss Says Something You Regret December 9 2011 4 responses
There’s an interesting article in the New York Times today for anyone who has ever had to improvise madly when their boss makes an unexpected public commitment. The subject is Dan Akerson, who’s been the CEO of General Motors for 15 months. Akerson is not a “car guy.” He made his bones in telecommunications and came to GM from the world of private equity investments. He’s had a lot of successes in his career and is fond of speaking his mind. That’s not what they’ve been used to at GM the last couple of decades and he’s shaking up the company’s culture.
The latest example is when some potential problems developed with the battery in GM’s showpiece hybrid, the Chevy Volt. Here’s how Bill Vlasic of The Times described Akerson’s response to the Volt situation:
“The problems with the Volt are a case in point. A few days after the conference call, Mr. Akerson went well beyond the discussion that day and told The Associated Press during a visit to New York that G.M. was willing to buy back Volts from concerned owners. Back in Detroit, company officials scrambled to explain the offer as a gesture of good will to its customers, denying that Mr. Akerson was setting policy on the fly.”
That’s a pretty interesting response on the part of the company officials. It sounds like they placed as much emphasis on the fact that their CEO wasn’t setting policy on the fly as they did about generating good will with customers.
If you’re a senior manager or executive in your organization, perhaps you’ve been in a similar situation where your boss says something that you regret. How do you handle that? My thoughts might surprise you.
5 Ways to Deal with the First No December 7 2011 13 responses
A couple of days ago, I had lunch with a friend who’s a senior leader in a well known organization. He’s in charge of the communications function and recently led a team that put together a very successful first time event that got a ton of positive national media attention. We were talking about what he learned from leading that process. While some of the details of our conversation were off the record, he gave his permission to share his biggest lesson on the Next Level Blog.
It all comes down to what do you do with the first no?
Leaders who are trying to do something unprecedented are invariably going to hear the word, no, a lot. It may not be as direct as that. It might be softened as, “We don’t do things that way,” or “Sorry, that’s impossible.” My friend heard a lot of responses like that as he and his team worked to turn their big event idea into a reality. Looking back on a successful outcome, he realizes that the critical element in making it happen was how they dealt with the first no.
I asked him what his options were for dealing with the first no. Here’s what he had to say:
There’s an App for That December 5 2011 5 responses
Geek Alert Warning: This post will only appeal to busy managers and leaders who use a smartphone.
We’re approaching the time of year where you might be receiving a gift card for the iTunes store or some other online outlet where you can buy apps for a smartphone. So, if you’re lucky enough to receive an app store gift card, what can you download that will at least make your life a little easier if not totally and radically change it?
I’m an iPhone 4 user and here are five apps that I find myself using all the time (Which of these are favorites of yours? What’s not on my list that absolutely should be?)
Evernote – This is a note taking app that works with text, voice, and camera inputs. All of your notes go to the cloud and are completely searchable. In addition to their smart phone app, Evernote offers apps for tablets and an application for your PC or Mac. I’ve used it for all of my note taking over the past year and love it. I’m terrible at filing and organizing documents. Because I can search my entire Evernote database for any related word in a few seconds, I don’t have to worry about where I put the notes from that meeting a couple of weeks ago.
LinkedIn – You’re no doubt familiar with LinkedIn, the business oriented social network. Here’s the slickest use I’ve seen so far of their iPhone app. Earlier this year, I had a meeting with someone I hadn’t met before. About a half hour before the meeting she sent me a LinkedIn invitation which I accepted. I showed up for the meeting and just after we said hello, she said, “I see we both know so and so.” I was a bit taken aback and asked her how she knew that. Simple. She had used the LinkedIn app to check out our shared connections.
Flight Track – If you travel by air, you’ve got to have FlightTrack on your phone. It uses the same system that the information screens in the airport use to relay gate information, flight status and such. It’s nice to have that information in your pocket because flight information changes all the time these days. Flight Track is also probably the quickest way to figure out what your options are to get where you’re going when your original flight is delayed or canceled. Not that ever happens.
Flashlight – This is one of the many apps that are available that allow you to use the LED flash on your camera phone as a flashlight. Sure, it’s not a business app per se but how many times a week do you find yourself wishing you had a flashlight to help read a menu or find something in your briefcase or (man) purse? It’s also very handy for that last dog walk of the day. (‘Nuff said about that.)
Shazam – In addition to being a smartphone geek, I’m also a music geek. When I find myself sitting in a restaurant waiting on someone to arrive, I’ll start zoning out on the music they’re playing on the sound system. Sometimes, I’ll hear a great song for the first time or one that I know but can’t remember the artist. That’s where Shazam comes in. You open the app, tap the button and it listens to the song for 20 seconds or so and tells you the name and artist. Again, not a business app, but it’s a nice diversion in a crowded day.
I could go on, but those are five apps that I find myself using a lot and make life a lot or a little easier. What’s on your list? Share your wisdom in the comments.
Their Perception is Your Reality December 2 2011 6 responses
As an executive coach, a big part of my job is helping my clients adjust their behaviors so that they get different results. Since my clients are executives, they are, by definition, dealing with other people. Since that’s the case, it’s not enough for my clients to adjust their behaviors when it would make a difference to do so. They also have to manage the perception others have of their behaviors.
If you’re a leader, the simple fact is this. Their perception is your reality. Whatever the perception is that people have of your leadership effectiveness creates the reality you’re operating in.
Let’s say, for instance, that you’re not a great listener. You interrupt people, talk over people and ignore the input of other people. You get feedback that all of that is killing productivity and engagement. You hire a coach and start working on changing your ways. You become really conscious of not interrupting people and even start keeping score for yourself in meetings about how often you’re doing that. After a couple of months of this routine, your numbers are way down. Then, about a hundred days into the process, you have a bad day. You walk all over your team members in a staff meeting, cutting them off right and left.
So, even though you’ve had 99 days in a row of improving your behavioral performance, what are they thinking on day 100? Here’s what they’re thinking – “Same old, same old.” You’re not going to get much credit for the past 99 days and, even worse, you may have set yourself back with the group by falling off the wagon on the hundredth day.
Is the answer that you have to be perfect once you start on a path of behavioral change and never show any regression? Fortunately, no. It’s not even possible to do that. What you do have to do, though, is help your colleagues change their perception of you while you’re changing your behavior.
Here’s a simple plan for doing that that works for my clients:
Scott Eblin is an executive coach, speaker and author of 
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