Next Level Blog
Simple, practical, applicable
The Week in Tweets April 27 2012 no responses
Every week, I share a recap of some of the best things I’ve seen on Twitter. This week, I’m highlighting tweets and links on how exercise can make you smarter, the difference between competing and inventing, and the relationship between management and marriage, among others.
Are You a Transmitter or a Receiver? April 26 2012 one response
One of the things I love most about leadership coaching is the opportunity to see lots of different executives in action. I get to see them in team meetings, in presentations, in one-on-one’s, and just walking around the plant or office. In addition to the first-hand observations, I usually collect a lot of feedback from the executives’ managers, peers and direct reports. It’s a lot of good data, and I love culling through it for patterns that underlie high performance.
Here’s a conclusion I’ve come to lately. The best leaders spend less time transmitting and more time receiving.
The transmitters are so focused on driving their agenda and goals that people eventually tune them out. It’s sort of like changing the dial on the radio or fast forwarding on the DVR when the commercials come on. You’ve heard it all so much that you just want to ignore it.
The receivers have agendas and goals as well but they do more than just hammer the message home. They stop to learn and observe what’s going on with people. They stop because they think they might actually have something to learn that will help everyone reach or exceed the goal faster and better.
Are you a transmitter or a receiver? Here’s a quick self-assessment:
Now Is the Time for Gen Y Leaders April 24 2012 one response
Here’s a thought experiment for you. Take a deep breath, clear your head and think for a little while about what kind of leadership the world is going to need in the future. Need a jump start? Just think about the rapidity of change in the global economy, global politics and consumer technology in the past five years. Five years ago, most major economic trend lines were up and to the right. There were more entrenched autocrats in power in the Middle East than there are today. The iPad hadn’t been invented yet. A Harvard dropout named Mark Zuckerberg had just started Facebook. Tweeting was something that birds did.
If change continues at its current rate, let alone accelerates, leadership is going to get a lot more complex. It’s going to be less and less about authority and more and more about influence. It’s going to be less about solid lines and more about dotted or maybe no lines at all. Global collaboration will rule because cycle times will demand it and technology will continue to enable it.
Where will we find leaders who can thrive in this environment? One place we should look is to the digital natives. Also known as Generation Y, these are the folks who have been connected their entire lives.
The Week in Tweets April 20 2012 no responses
Every week, I share a recap of some of the best things I’ve seen on Twitter. This week, I’m highlighting tweets and links on our stressful relationship with our smartphones, whether CEOs deserve privacy, the importance of listening, developing your leadership skills and a story of a great comeback.
3 New Leadership Lessons from Yoga April 19 2012 6 responses
So, for those keeping score at home, over the past year and a half I think I’ve become a yogi. Am I on the verge of releasing my own instructional yoga videos? Fortunately for you and the rest of the world, I’m not that kind of yogi. Nah, I’m just a guy who’s showing up for class consistently and learning lots of little things bit by bit. As I’ve written before, it turns out that with hours of practice (still far away from the 10,000 that Malcolm Gladwell recommends) and good instruction, you can change the way you show up.
Apart from the physical and mental health benefits (and learning a few fun party tricks), one of the things I like about yoga is the opportunity it provides for making connections to the rest of the world. As a leadership coach, I’m big into encouraging my clients to practice self-observation so they form and practice the habits that best serve their goals. With that principle in mind, here are three things I’ve observed through yoga over the past several months that I think apply to leadership and the rest of life:
3 Questions They Should Have Asked at the GSA April 17 2012 9 responses
Why is this man smiling? Jeff Neely, the Western Region director of the General Services Administration, is probably asking himself this question. In case you haven’t heard, Neely invoked the Fifth Amendment when he was called before Congress this week to explain why he approved $823,000 in expenses for a GSA management retreat at a Las Vegas casino and resort.
This cheesy photo was taken by Neely’s wife on one of his five government-paid recon trips to Vegas to scope things out before the retreat. She then posted the picture on her Google Plus account. Seriously. (Hat tip to my friends at Government Executive who shared the snap after it was unearthed by ABC News.)
The GSA scandal story has taken off, I think, because most of us cannot believe that any federal manager would approve a budget that included $8,000 for a mind reader, $75,000 for a bicycle building team building exercise and $44 a person breakfasts. Oh, yeah, let’s not forget the $6,000 for commemorative coins and the $8,000 for participant “yearbooks.” (There are recaps of all this everywhere, including the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg BusinessWeek and The Washington Post.)
Maybe I just fell off the turnip truck, but I can’t believe it myself because I know of federal agencies that aren’t even providing free bottles of water or coffee during training events. Honestly, I can’t think of any of my private sector clients that spend the kind of money that Jeff Neely authorized. In a post-meltdown world, it’s just not good form.
So, I won’t venture to psychoanalyze Neely’s motivations in engineering this mess, but I can think of three questions that any leader – public sector or private – should ask themselves before authorizing a mega-bucks budget.
The Week in Tweets April 13 2012 no responses
Every week, I share a recap of some of the best things I’ve seen on Twitter. This week, I’m highlighting tweets and links on how conductors use body language to lead their players, an exercise for being more present, the power of speaking up, the importance of saying no, and a roundup of timeless lessons from Peter Drucker.
Next Level Podcast: Leadership Lessons from Blimpie’s Founder Tony Conza April 11 2012 no responses
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
As one of the founders of Blimpie Subs, Tony Conza helped build the company from a single sandwich shop in Hoboken, N.J., to a chain of over 2,000 stores nationwide. I recently spoke to him about what he learned on his leadership journey. Here are some highlights from our conversation:
- Overcoming the Passion Plateau: At around the 200 store mark, Tony says, he lost his passion for the business. Blimpie’s stock was struggling, and although the company had grown significantly, Tony was close to getting out of the business. Instead, he realized he had to recapture his passion for the business and eventually grew the company to 2,000 stores. That wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t refocused his own energy. “Passion inspires others. … It’s contagious. It’s a breeding ground for success.”
- The Importance of Communication: Tony began sending regular dispatches called “Tony’s Take” to tell everyone in the company about business plans and personal news. “I just kind of wanted to make them feel like I was having a personal conversation with them.” Tony also invited people to voluntarily give him weekly progress reports. “Once you have trust along with passion you can get people to do extraordinary things.”
- Learning to Let Go: As the company grew, Tony says, he had to learn to let go of certain function and accept that others could in fact handle them better than he could. “You want to be involved in everything, in all the details, and you’re afraid to put it other people’s hands. I knew that if we were going to become a bigger company that I had to get beyond that and I had to become a leader instead of a manager, and there’s a big difference.”
In the accompanying podcast, Tony has more to share in his own words about what he learned along the way to 2,000 Blimpie stores.
The Tao of Bubba Watson April 10 2012 12 responses
With a seemingly impossible shot off the pine straw, Bubba Watson set himself up to win the Masters on Sunday. After he sank the winning putt in a playoff, he stood on the green, hugged his caddy, hugged his mom and wept and wept. As has been widely reported, Watson and his wife just adopted a baby boy a few weeks before the Masters started. He’s had quite a run in 2012. As The Washington Post noted, he even bought a copy of the General Lee from his favorite TV show, “The Dukes of Hazzard,” back in January. It was the culmination of a deal he had made with his wife after winning his first tournament.
Bubba seems like a guy who enjoys and savors life. He’s a stark contrast with Tiger Woods, who as he berates himself and is kicking clubs around the course, doesn’t appear to be having much fun. What accounts for the difference in these two guys? I think an answer can be found in Watson’s post-victory press conference. It offers food for thought for leaders or anyone else who think the answer to life’s challenges is to keep grinding and grinding.
Tweets of the Week April 6 2012 no responses
This week, I’m highlighting posts on what it takes to build strong teams, the war for talent, the myth of overnight success, how Buddhist mindfulness can make you a better business leader and one company’s approach to fighting burnout.
- Business Skills and Buddhist Mindfulness
- The No-Hour Workweek: Reinventing Employee Expectations For The Modern Economy
- The Hard Science of Teamwork
- 5 Ways the New War For Talent Will Change the Workplace Forever
- The Dirty Little Secret Of Overnight Successes
What caught your eye this week? Share your favorite links in the comments.
Scott Eblin is an executive coach, speaker and author of 
Recent Comments