Archive for the ‘Personal Presence’ Category

How to Coach a Future CEO February 21 2012

If you’ve been reading this blog for awhile, you know I’m a fan of Ford CEO Alan Mulally.  He started in the top job at Ford about five years ago and, he has led the company to quarter after quarter of profitable growth.  He’s accomplished that through any number of ways.  Probably one of the biggest is by changing the culture of the company’s leadership team.

Of course, you change a culture by inspiring people to think, feel and act differently.  It’s a process of winning hearts and minds.  As the New York Times reported this past weekend, Mulally just turned 66 and is expected to retire in the next couple of years.  The front runner to succeed him is an executive named Mark Fields who runs Ford’s business in the Americas.

In reading the story on Ford and Fields, I was struck by the evidence that Fields has changed his style as a leader over the past five years.  Of course, that’s concurrent with Mulally’s time at the company.  Prior to Mulally’s arrival, Fields was a high flier (literally and figuratively) who had gotten himself in trouble when it was revealed that he was using Ford’s corporate jets to fly back and forth to his Florida home at the same time that he was cutting thousands of jobs at the company and shutting down manufacturing plants.

As Fields himself said, “There was a ‘dead pool’ about me.  People were saying, ‘When is Fields going to get shown the door?’ ”  Five years later, however, he’s a poster dude for what great coaching and role modeling can do to turn an executive’s career and life around.

3 Tips for Pacing Your Work for Lasting Success February 14 2012

There was a vastly underrated road trip movie last year starring Zach Galifianakis and Robert Downey Jr. called “Due Date.” Downey plays an uptight businessman and Galifianakis plays a goofy but lovable stoner. They take a cross-country trip together. Hilarity ensues.

Whenever Downey’s character would explode in rage, Galifianakis’ character would say, “Hey, you better check yourself before you wreck yourself.” It’s one of my favorite catchphrases ever. Not sure why I love it so much. Part of it was Galifianakis’ delivery, I guess. Part of it is the rhyme. The biggest reason it sticks with me is because I think it’s a great mantra for most leaders today.

Here’s my evidence for that. For the last seven years, I’ve run 360-degree surveys and self-assessments based on the leadership model in “The Next Level” with thousands of executives and managers. The lowest-rated item across that group for the past seven years has been: “Pace(s) myself/himself/herself by building in regular breaks from work.”

In the 360 surveys, the colleagues usually rate the leaders low on that behavior, and the leaders’ self-assessments are even lower than those of their colleagues. By the way, the scores have gotten lower every year.

What’s going on? Here’s what I see.

Wondering ‘Am I a Good Leader?’ Take the Sheryl Sandberg Test February 10 2012

Ever wonder if you’re a good leader?  If so, I have a simple three question test that will help you answer the question.  I call it the Sheryl Sandberg test.

OK, I know that some of you are thinking “Is it really fair to compare myself to the COO of Facebook  - the same woman who spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos the week her company did an IPO that took her net worth past $1.6 billion?”  I’ll be the first to acknowledge that there aren’t many of us who can compete with Sandberg’s calendar and bank account.  That said, there’s a lot that leaders of any station can learn from Sandberg.

When Sandberg left Google to join Facebook in 2008, the social networking site had 70 million users and no profit-making business model.  At the end of 2011, Facebook had over 850 million users, revenue of over $3 billion and profits of just over $1 billion.  It’s not too big a stretch to conclude that Sandberg has some leadership skills that might be worth emulating.

Over the past six months I’ve read a number of profiles on Sandberg and, based on what I’ve learned about her, have come up with three questions that can help determine if you’re a good leader:

• Do I have followers?
• Do I have a cause bigger than myself?
• Do I get stuff done?

Here’s a bit on how Sandberg has answered those questions and what you can learn from the answers.

Is Being the “Go-To Person” Holding You Back? January 31 2012

A big part of my work as a coach involves working with high-potential leaders in workshops, keynotes and webinars. One of my favorite questions to ask these audiences is, “How many of you think of yourselves or have been referred to by others as the ‘go-to person?’ ” Usually, about every hand in the room goes up. I asked that question as a flash poll in a webinar recently, and 98% of the 400-plus managers and executives on the line affirmed that they are the go-to people.

It’s not surprising, really. Most people who end up in leadership roles have built a reputation for being go-to people.

So what’s wrong with that? Nothing at all when you’re on your way up. Being the person who’s known for getting stuff done is a great way to build your reputation and career. Chances are, though, that you’re eventually going to reach the point at which operating as the go-to person is simply no longer sustainable. The scope of work gets too broad and complex for one go-to person to take things over and heroically save the day.

To grow as a leader, you have to let go of being the go-to person and pick up the profile of being the person who builds a team of go-to people.

3 Bad Habits of Fake Leaders — and How to Avoid Them January 26 2012

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:

How to Get Your Leadership Resolutions Back on Track January 18 2012

A new year brings with it the promise of change, but desire quickly gets crowded out by reality. Lists of resolutions are made and then fade.

Part of the problem is the length of the lists themselves. When it comes to making meaningful change in how you show up as a leader this year, less is more.

You can improve your odds of success by reducing the number of items on your leadership improvement list down to the one or two things that would make the biggest difference. For now, forget about the other eight or nine things that might have been on your list. Practice what the Japanese call kaizen – continuous improvement through small steps. Or as the great basketball coach John Wooden said, “When you do little things each day, eventually big things occur.”

How do you decide what you should focus on?

One way to get started is to complete the free leadership self assessment based on my book The Next Level: What Insiders Know About Executive Success. The self-assessment will take you a little over five minutes to complete and will give you a picture of how you stack up on the three key components of leadership presence – personal presence, team presence and organizational presence.

Once you’ve taken the self assessment, take a look at this video coaching segment from the Complete Next Level Self Assessment Report. In it, I’ll tell you how to focus your improvement efforts on the vital things that are relatively easy to do and highly likely to make a big difference.

Over the next two months, I’ll be sharing more ideas and video coaching segments about how to become a better leader in 2012 by taking little steps that make a big difference.

6 Leadership Communication Lessons from Martin Luther King Jr. January 16 2012

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

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

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:

10 Resolutions That Will Improve Your Presentations This Year January 5 2012

A senior executive friend of mine spends a lot of time listening to presentations. A few weeks ago, he sent me an e-mail from a two-day conference he was attending. After 10 or 12 hours of bad presentations, he began to take out his frustration by using his iPad to write a set of rules for presenters. He then sent it to me for a sanity check.

The good news is he’s totally sane. His rules make a lot of sense and can serve as a list of resolutions for presenters who want to improve their craft in 2012 (or any year for that matter).

I asked him if he wanted to byline a guest post on this blog, but he concluded that probably wasn’t his best career move right now. He was OK, however, with me sharing his plaintive pleas for presenters.

Here’s the list: