Archive for the ‘Team Building’ Category
How to Lead Massive Change: An Interview with Lockheed Martin CIO Sondra Barbour May 17 2012 no responses
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Sondra Barbour is the chief information officer and senior vice president of enterprise business services at Lockheed Martin. She’s a company veteran and change leader who has taken on increasingly responsible positions over the course of her career. I spoke with her recently about what she’s learned along the way. Some of the highlights from our conversation include:
- Leading Massive Change: When leading change, Barbour focuses on the connection between two key factors: communication and identifying the influencers. She notes that the influencers are “sometimes not the people you think” they would be. Once you find them, you have to establish two-way communication with them.
- Get Comfortable with Mistakes: Leading change means you’re going to make mistakes. Barbour says, “You can’t be right 100% of the time, and if you are then you are not taking enough risk.” When a mistake is made, call it out and let your team know what you’re going to do to correct it.
- Maintaining Your Sanity: Leading massive change can be stressful. Barbour has learned that it’s important to take time for yourself in whatever ways work for you. She’s not a disciple of work/life balance. Instead, she believes fun and fulfillment can and should be had in both arenas.
Barbour has a lot more to say about change leadership in the accompanying podcast.
Next Level Podcast: Leadership Lessons from Blimpie’s Founder Tony Conza April 11 2012 no responses
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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.
How Do You Assess a Candidate’s Leadership Potential? April 3 2012 2 responses
There’s an old saying that if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there. That idea holds true when you’re trying to assess a candidate’s leadership potential. You have to start with a clear picture of what leadership means to you and, more importantly, what it means in your organization.
Many organizations have leadership competency models that purport to describe the key characteristics and behaviors that they seek in their leaders. The problem with many of these models is that they are so full of jargon and clichés that they don’t provide much in the way of useful guidance.
Having looked at dozens of these models over the years, I can make it simple for you. Leadership behaviors fall into one of two broad categories – the behaviors that drive results and the behaviors that build relationships. Both categories are equally important for long-term success. The most successful leaders exhibit both in abundance.
Here are some questions in each of those two categories to keep in mind when assessing a candidate’s leadership potential:
3 Steps to Scaling Your Leadership for Results March 29 2012 no responses
What are you holding on to that you need to let go of? That’s a question I ask a lot when I’m working with leaders who need to get different results. These days just about every leader needs to get different results on a continuous basis. When was the last time you even heard the phrase that “someone is resting on their laurels?” It’s an anachronism. In today’s world, the idea that a leader would rest on their laurels and still expect to be the leader is just silly. There is a constant expectation for new and better results.
To do this, leaders have to learn how to scale. You can’t scale if you’re holding on to things you need to let go of. To get the new results that are expected, you have to pick up on the things that only you can do as the leader. To create the bandwidth to do those things, you have to let go of a lot of the things you’ve been holding on to.
Here’s a simple, three step way to figure out what you need to pick up and what you need to let go of. It’s based on a Coachable Moment called “The 20/80 Analysis” from my book, “The Next Level.”
John Elway for Manager of the Year? March 21 2012 7 responses
While fans of Tim Tebow will likely vehemently disagree, I’d have to put John Elway, executive vice president of football operations for the Denver Broncos, in the running for manager of the year. And not just NFL manager of the year; anybody’s manager of the year. Let me be the first to acknowledge that I enjoyed Tebowmania and Tebow Time as much as anyone. As I wrote here during football season, I thought Tebow and his coach Jon Fox did a masterful job of figuring out how to use his skillset to maximum advantage. For most of their run together, Elway came across as the wet blanket at the party. He was polite but sparing in his praise for Tebow because he couldn’t see a long-term plan for winning with the guy. Elway may have been right or wrong on that call. We won’t know how it plays out for the Broncos on that front because Elway went out and got himself Peyton Manning this week.
In moving Tebow aside for Manning, Elway did what a lot of managers have to do or at least should do. In his assessment, he had a good guy working for him that he didn’t think was going to work out over the long run. Especially with the pressure from Tebow fans in Denver and across the country, it would have been easy for Elway to keep Tim, let it ride and see what happened. After all, things could get better. (How many times have you heard that in performance management discussions?) Instead, Elway decided to make the move and go out and get the best quarterback available for his team.
Here are three lessons from Elway that I think managers should keep in mind for the next time they face a talent management dilemma:
Ken Blanchard and Chick-fil-A’s Mark Miller, on What It Takes to Grow as a Leader March 8 2012 3 responses
Ken Blanchard is the co-founder and chief spiritual officer of The Ken Blanchard Companies, an international management training and consulting firm. One of the most influential leadership gurus in the world, he is the author or co-author of dozens of books, including the international bestseller “The One Minute Manager.” Mark Miller is vice president of training and development for Chick-fil-A. I recently interviewed them about their new book, “Great Leaders Grow: Becoming a Leader for Life.”
In your book, you state that great leaders grow by Gaining Knowledge, Reaching Out to Others, Opening their World and Walking toward Wisdom. In your experience, which of these steps comes naturally for most leaders and which are typically more challenging?
It all depends on the leader. For some leaders, it’s natural to Gain Knowledge, because they love to read and study. Extroverted leaders find that Reaching Out to Others is an easy thing to do. For adventuresome leaders, Opening their World is built into their DNA. Those with a reflective bent find that Walking toward Wisdom comes easily. The point is that all of these practices are vital — not just one or two of them. A great leader stretches outside his or her comfort zone to develop in areas that don’t come naturally.
What’s your best advice for a leader who’s having a hard time getting started with one of the more challenging aspects of the GROW model?
We all have a tendency to limit ourselves by our own assumed constraints. To break through these self-limiting beliefs, try a few of the suggestions in the book that you find challenging. For example, if you believe that you’re a lousy teacher, find an opportunity to give some instruction, either formally in a class or by informally sharing your knowledge with others. This is part of Reaching Out to Others. Perhaps you recognize that you’re strong on giving advice but not so great at taking it. If that’s the case, find someone you admire and respect and ask that person to give you feedback about your leadership. This is part of Walking toward Wisdom. The important thing is to take action — not just to think about it.
Who are some public leaders that you admire who you think demonstrate the GROW approach in action? What do you think the rest of us can learn from them?
What GE Aviation Knows About Inspiring Workers March 6 2012 3 responses
Last week, I wrote a post that asked if your organization is ready for the era of connect and collaborate. Today, I want to go a little deeper on the connection part. In particular, I want to talk about how leaders can accomplish big things by connecting their people with the higher purpose of their work.
You’ve probably heard the story about the traveler in the Middle Ages walking down a road who stops at a quarry to ask the workers what they’re doing. The first person he asks replies that his work is sheer, meaningless drudgery. “All I do, all day long, he says, is pound these rocks into bricks.” The traveler walks a little further and asks another worker doing the same thing the same question. “I am doing the greatest thing a man can do, the second worker replies, I’m building a cathedral to glorify God.”
Pride in your work isn’t limited to building cathedrals. You may have seen the advertisements that have been running lately that show GE Aviation workers talking about their craft. They talk about how much pride they have in their skills, each other and what their product does for the world. As one woman says in the video, the work she does helps make the world a smaller place. At the end of the spot, the GE team travels from their plant in North Carolina to Boeing Field in Seattle to see their engine help lift a new 787 Dreamliner into the air.
Those are real people who are doing real things that benefit other real people. One or more leaders has taken the time to establish that context for them. I’ve been talking a lot about this spot in workshops and speeches I’ve given this year. The question I’ve been asking leaders is what opportunities do you have to connect your people with the higher purpose of their work?
Is Your Organizational Development Plan Ready for “Connect and Collaborate”? March 1 2012 2 responses
I’m about halfway through “How” by Dov Seidman, and I find his overarching point compelling — that in a world of radical transparency, how we do things matters as much as or more than what we do. My big takeaway so far is that organizations and society are shifting from a command-and-control model, toward one that relies on connection and collaboration.
Examples of connect and collaborate replacing command and control are everywhere. Some of those examples, like the Arab Spring protests, involve the highest of stakes and don’t come without resistance from those who’ve had historic control. Other examples are sort of silly, but still telling.
For instance, you might have heard about NASCAR driver Brad Keselowski tweeting from the track of the Daytona 500 earlier this week. A car had collided with a maintenance vehicle and 200 gallons of fuel caught fire. (Amazingly, no one was seriously hurt.) While he was parked on the track, Keselowski pulled out his smart phone, took a picture of the fire and tweeted it to his 65,000 Twitter followers along with commentary about what was going on. When the race resumed a couple of hours later, he had more than 200,000 followers. Did he break NASCAR rules by tweeting from his car? The people in charge, knowing a fan builder when they see one, apparently didn’t care. As someone observed, Keselowski is a “digital native” and completely gets how to use technology to build a community. So did the Google exec and others in Egypt who used social media to organize the Tahrir Square protests.
For those of us involved in supporting leaders in creating the organization of the future, this is a seismic shift. Based on my own experience, I would argue that we’re going to have to look outside our own demographic cohorts to make this work. Here’s why I say that.
Does Your Team Really Know What You Want? February 28 2012 no responses
Stephen Covey shared a lot of smart ideas when he wrote “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.” I must have read that book at least five times when it first came out. One of the habits that has really stuck with me is, “Begin with the end in mind.” Turns out that’s not just great advice for personal effectiveness; it’s also a great idea for team effectiveness.
In working with hundreds of senior executives over the years, I’ve concluded that the most effective are those who are very clear with their teams about the outcomes that need to be achieved. When any new initiative begins, they stop and have a conversation with their team about what a successful outcome looks like and then reverse engineer back from that picture to help the team visualize what it’s going to take to stay on track with the goal.
In this video coaching segment from “The Next Level,” I offer three simple, practical and road-tested ideas for how you can keep your team on track by being clear about desired outcomes.
Don’t forget to read the first three posts in this series.
- How to Get Your Leadership Resolutions Back on Track
- Is Being the “Go-To” Person Holding You Back?
- 3 Tips for Pacing Your Work for Lasting Success
Want more information? Take the free leadership self-assessment, which takes about five minutes and gives you a picture of how you stack up on three key components of leadership presence: personal, team and organizational.
This post is adapted from one originally published on SmartBlog on Leadership. For more business leadership news from SmartBrief, sign up for SmartBrief on Leadership.
How to Coach a Future CEO February 21 2012 no responses
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.
Scott Eblin is an executive coach, speaker and author of 
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