Archive for the ‘Current Affairs’ Category
3 Bad Habits of Fake Leaders — and How to Avoid Them January 26 2012 15 responses
There was an interesting movie that came out last year called “The Adjustment Bureau” starring Matt Damon and Emily Blunt. In it, Damon plays a rising young congressman named David Norris. He’s headed for a big victory in a campaign for the U.S. Senate until a picture comes out of him mooning his fraternity brothers at a college reunion. He loses big and starts giving his supporters the big, inspirational, we’ll-be-back concession speech. He says things like, “Where I grew up, it wasn’t that you got knocked down, it was about what you did when you got back up.”
The crowd initially cheers loudly, but then settles down when Norris tells them what he just said was total BS. They didn’t say that in his neighborhood. His pollsters told him it would play well. Same thing with the striped tie he was wearing and even the amount of scuffing he had on his dress shoes. He pulled back the curtain on how the game was played. It was about learning how to fake being real.
As we enter the height of the political season in the U.S., that speech comes to mind. All of the candidate debates and speeches seem to offer a symposium in how to fake being real. Here are three common habits I’ve noticed so far:
- Put your game face mask on. When you enter the debate arena or step up to make that big speech, never let them see you sweat. Get that alpha dog body language going and smile so they see all your teeth. Above all else, don’t show any vulnerability.
- Stick to the poll research. Touch all the bases that appeal to the base. Cover so many things that nothing means anything.
- Follow the formula. There’s an accepted and expected formula for giving the big speech, so stick to it. At this point, you’ve done it so many times you could do it in your sleep. Of course, there’s a pretty good chance that your audience is asleep with their eyes open. If you’re lucky.
Needless to say, I’m not seriously advocating those techniques. I do, however, see a lot of them showing up in leadership settings outside of politics. Here are three ways to avoid showing up as a leader who’s only pretending to be real:
Gabrielle Giffords: The Courage and Wisdom to Step Back January 23 2012 3 responses
This past weekend, I watched one of the more moving and inspirational videos I’ve seen in awhile. It’s this two minute announcement from Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords that she is resigning from Congress this week. It’s been just over a year since a gunman shot Giffords in the head and almost killed her at a constituent meet and greet outside an Arizona supermarket. Since then, her recovery has been beyond remarkable.
The video clearly shows how far she’s come.
As reported in the Washington Post, there was a lot of speculation and hope that Giffords would run for reelection or perhaps even run for the Senate. Her fundraising was strong and the polling suggested she could have easily kept her seat in Congress.
She sorted through all that and concluded that her ongoing recovery was her first and most important priority. She had the courage to say no and the wisdom to step back from short-term opportunities to devote her time and attention to the longer term. When you watch the video, it’s clear that she intends to return to public life at some point. I hope she does. For now, though, I have enormous admiration and respect for a leader with remarkable courage and the wisdom to act on her priorities.
Early Contender for Worst Leader of 2012 January 20 2012 13 responses
Based on the observable evidence, passenger accounts, his own statements and audio transcripts with an Italian coast guard officer, it sure looks like Capt. Francesco Schettino is a very strong early contender for worst leader of 2012. By now you’ve probably seen the pictures and read the stories of the tragedy with the Costa Concordia cruise ship just off the Italian coast. The Captain ordered the early evening maritime equivalent of a fly-by just a few hundred yards from the coast to impress the citizens of a local town. The ship hit a rock which tore a gash in the hull and within an hour it was laying on its side. It took him an hour to send a Mayday signal and when the authorities called him after hearing from panicked passengers, he denied anything was wrong. Dozens of passengers either died or are still missing.
Far from going down with his ship, let alone organizing an evacuation, Schettino was in a lifeboat while hundreds of passengers were still trying to get to safety. The UK’s Daily Mail offers an extensive summary of all the events including a link to the audio recording of an outraged Italian coast guard official ordering Schettino to get back on board and take care of his passengers. He never did. In a basically unbelievable story, Schettino said a few days ago that he ended up in the lifeboat because he slipped and fell off the Concordia and into the lifeboat.
Like I said, unbelievable.
The whole story has had me thinking all week about the responsibilities of a leader. For some situationally specific guidance, I turned to a copy of the U.S. Navy’s Watch Officer’s Guide
It certainly would have been a good list for Captain Schettino to absorb. It’s actually a good list for any leader who bears responsibility for the safety and welfare of others.
Here it is:
6 Leadership Communication Lessons from Martin Luther King Jr. January 16 2012 4 responses
On this Martin Luther King Day, I’m going into The Next Level Blog archives for this post on what we can learn from the speaking virtuosity of this great leader.
Several years ago I was given the gift of the recordings of the sermons and speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. The sermon set is called “A Knock at Midnight,” and the speeches set is titled “A Call to Conscience.” There are companion books of the same title for each set. Over the course of a couple of weeks, I listened to every sermon and speech in the recordings. I learned a lot about King from that experience and came to some conclusions about what made him an effective speaker.
As we take today to recognize King’s life and its impact on the world, I thought I’d share six qualities in his speaking that I think all leaders should emulate. If you’re pressed for time as you read this, you can skip ahead to the list. If you have a few minutes more, watch the You Tube clip of King’s “I Have a Dream” Speech. Most of the six qualities that I identified in listening to his recordings are illustrated in this clip.
Here’s a quick synopsis of some of the qualities that King had as a speaker along with some questions to get you thinking about your own opportunities to be a more effective communicator.
3 Things Injured Yogis and Injured Leaders Might Have in Common January 13 2012 7 responses
For the last two weeks, an article called How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body has been one of the top 10 most e-mailed articles on the New York Times website. When I checked this morning there were 734 comments on the article on the Times’ website. With approximately 20 million yogis in the U.S., the article has definitely struck a nerve (pun somewhat intended).
As many of the commenters point out, there are flaws in the way the article was reported. At the same time, as the article illustrates, you can get injured doing yoga. (This just in, you can also get injured running, lifting weights, doing Jazzercise or just about any other form of exercise.)
As I’ve written here before, I’ve been a regular yoga student for a little over a year now. Happy to report that I haven’t injured myself. To the contrary, I feel a lot better than I did before I started. Still, I can see how you could injure yourself doing yoga. Interestingly enough, some of the root causes of yoga injuries are the same ways you can injure yourself “doing leadership.”
Here are three things that can get you into trouble both on the yoga mat and in your leadership role:
3 Ways to Avoid Taking the Wrong Job — and What to Do About It When You Do January 11 2012 3 responses
You may have missed the story with all of the coverage on the New Hampshire primary, but White House chief of staff, Bill Daley, resigned this week after just about a year on the job. Daley is a high profile example of the oft cited statistic that anywhere between 25% and 40% of newly hired or promoted executives don’t last in their jobs for more than 18 months.
As it happens, a senior executive friend of mine recently let me know that she had left a new job less than three weeks after accepting it. Now, that’s fast! Intrigued by her news, I asked her if I could interview her for the Next Level Blog to learn more about what she thinks she missed during the hiring process, how she figured out so quickly that she had taken the wrong job and how she gracefully extracted herself from it.
Obviously, to protect her confidentiality I’m not going to get into all of the details of her situation, but there are some good lessons here for any manager or executive who’s considering taking a new job:
3 Questions to Guide Your Year January 3 2012 one response
I was away for a few weeks over the holidays. It was a nice break and it’s good to be back. One of the good things about being back is reconnecting with friends I haven’t seen in awhile. One of those is a friend from yoga. We gave each other a hug hello at class the other night and she said, “Well, here we are.” My response was, “Yeah, 2012, it’s the only year we’ve got.” (Unless, of course, the physicists at CERN figure out time travel this year.)
So, for now, this is the only year you’ve got. What do you want to do with it? I don’t have any idea what your answer is or should be. Only you do.
What I can offer is three questions to guide you this year that have worked for me, my family, friends and clients over the past 15 years. They make up the core of a personal planning model that my wife, Diane, and I developed for ourselves called the Life GPS®. Each of us complete a new Life GPS® every year around this time. Like the GPS app on your smart phone or the GPS system in your car, the Life GPS® is a great tool for setting a destination and making the adjustments along the way that you’ll need to get there.
Using the Life GPS® will be the subject of a book I’m writing this year. You can also read more about it in the chapter on Picking Up Regular Renewal of Your Energy and Perspective and Letting Go of Running Flat Out Until You Crash from my first book, The Next Level
For now, though, here are the three questions that comprise the core of the Life GPS®. Before things get absolutely bananas for you this year, I encourage you to take a little time to consider these questions and write down your answers on a single sheet of paper. If you refer to that sheet on a regular basis this year, I think you’ll like the results you get.
Here are the questions:
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?
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?
Leadership Lessons from the Eurozone Crisis November 30 2011 2 responses
If you haven’t been paying much attention to the Eurozone debt crisis, now might be a pretty good time to start. A relatively small crisis that started with Greece not being able to repay its debts, has spread to Italy and Portugal and it looks like Spain and even France are at risk. It’s a complicated story but it makes a big difference because a lot of the big banks around the world hold a lot of European debt. If they have to write that debt off their books, then they have to cut back on lending. It’s a lot like the subprime mortgage meltdown of 2008 only bigger. The Eurozone could break up as a result leading to even bigger problems.
All eyes are turning to Germany as the only European economy big enough and sound enough to provide the financial assistance that could stop the bleeding. As New York Times columnist Joe Nocera eloquently explains, the Germans don’t want to do that because they feel like they’ve been prudent with their economy and should not have to bail out the countries who were partying on their credit cards. That’s understandable but will lead to a terrible outcome for everyone including Germany. Its economy is driven by exports and if its primary markets collapse, it’s going to get squeezed hard too. In a sign of how nervous people are about all of this, the Polish foreign minister said this week that for the first time in his life he was more worried about Germany not taking action than taking action.
If you take out the scary implications for the global economy, what’s happening between Germany and the rest of the Europe happens in organizations all the time. One or more parties make bad decisions that lead to bad outcomes while another party plays it by the book and is then asked to step in and fix everything. It doesn’t seem fair and it’s usually not. It’s understandable that the party that played it down the middle would like to just let the offending party fend for itself. The problem with that, as is the case in Europe right now, is that the let them fend for themselves approach can bring down the entire organization.
It takes a lot of leadership to make the moves that place effectiveness at a higher level of value than being right. Being right can feel good, but what’s the point if everything else blows up? The best leaders understand they and their teams are part of an ecosystem. Sometimes, for the good of the whole system leaders need to suck it up and help out the people who screwed up even if it doesn’t feel fair.
What are your thoughts and experience on this? Have you ever had to hold your nose and do something as a leader that just didn’t seem fair to some of the people involved? What factors and messages did you consider when you did?
Scott Eblin is an executive coach, speaker and author of 
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