Leadership Off-Sites Are More Than a Boondoggle
There’s a perception that an executive leadership off-site is a waste of time for many different reasons. Some believe it’s simply a party for a leadership team to have a good time at significant expense of the organization. Others believe it’s uncomfortable and why would I spend social time with this group, can’t we just get down to our work together. This weekend I attended an off-site annual board retreat that was almost cancelled for cost conscious budget reasons. I’m glad it went ahead as I believe off-sites are essential to building highly effective teams that trust each other. Going off-site allows you to think differently and is a catalyst to strategic and creative thinking in ways you can’t spark in your regular every day office space. If you want new thinking in the team, you need a new environment.
You might be thinking, OK, I’ll go to the off-site but I’m not doing any “activities” with the team. I’m here to do serious work. The truth is, you’re not that interesting and compelling if people don’t get a chance to get to know you without your collar buttoned up tight. Spending some time together doing something fun allows you to get to know the other people in your team as people, not just co-workers and lets them get to know you. Its this bonding time that brings you together as a team vs. a group of people that happen to work in proximity to one another.
Our off-site included a social hour, meals together, and a Friday evening filled with games including ping-pong, darts, pool and Pictionary with trophies awarded to the winners of the night. These experiences together form strong relationships that allow us to work together without taking ourselves too seriously. We get to see that everyone else in the team has a lot in common with us.
We had some serious fun together Friday night and then got down to the heavy lifting of the work at hand Saturday morning. Stories and comments about Friday night showed up throughout the day on Saturday and lightened up the energy in doing our work. We were able to be braver in challenging ideas and more open-minded listeners. The quality of discussion was balanced with no one over dominating any topic and we had the ability to hear from the quieter people in the room.
To make your next off-site worthwhile, here are a few points to consider:
Carefully structure the agenda with desired outcomes focused on key learning, forward moving actions and decisions.
Plan fun team activities to bring some structure to non-work time together.
Ensure meals are together and even think about who sits where to ensure you mix up the group and help people get to know one another if needed.
Set the expectations with those attending.
A quality leadership off-site requires good planning into logistics, the agenda and desired outcomes. If done right, they can create lasting relationships, effective strategic planning and breath new energy into your team that no standard work environment ever can.
There’s never enough time! Why time management may not be your real issue
We’ve all been there – scrambling to check the “to-dos” off our list, but finding that 24 hours in a day just isn’t enough. “My time just isn’t my own,” is common place in my office as clients describe how they’re being pulled in multiple directions and never completing to their “top priorities.” Stressed, anxious, and frustrated – burned out leaders want to take back their time, but aren’t sure where to start. This begs the question, as a leader, how can you start controlling your time when everyone wants it?
Is it your time…or your choice?
First thing’s first, be truthful about whether it’s a time management issue or a choice management one.
Answer this: if given more than 24 hours in a day, would you complete the tasks you already have, or add more to your list? Ultimately, it’s about making the choices in how you spend your time that allow you to control it.
Once you determine that your choices are the issue, you need to know where you’re spending your time. For one week, track all your professional and personal activities and determine:
Which were proactive or reactive tasks?
Was “it” an effective use of your time? (Remember: being efficient does not equate to being effective!)
Could a task be delegated?
Did your proactive leader tasks (strategizing, critical thinking) take priority?
Were you engaged in all tasks?
How many times did you say “yes” and wish you said “no?”
By answering these, you’ll see how your choices impact whether you are effective or just task checking. The hard truth is that we are often the cause of our own lack of time because of our choices.
Choice Management Strategies
Once you recognize where your time goes, you can start making choices based on your goals, values, and priorities. A great tool I use with clients is the Eisenhower Decision Matrix, made popular through Stephen Covey’s Time Management Matrix. Using this matrix, you sort your tasks into four quadrants:
Do: Important and urgent tasks. Such things include crisis management, deadlines, and solving problems.
Decide: Important, but not urgent tasks. Examples include planning and critical thinking strategies, relationship building, and recreation.
Delegate: Urgent, but not important tasks in relation to your responsibilities such as interruptions, activities, meetings.
Delete: Unimportant and not urgent tasks, considered time wasters.
By understanding where your choices fall on this matrix, you can start to make decisions based on priorities in the Do and Decide quadrants, specifically by:
Delegating tasks
Make decisions that support your priorities and schedule time for these. If there is a task on your list that does not support your priorities, delegate it. If you can’t delegate a specific task, look at the gap as to why not. For instance, do you need to develop a team member prior to handing off these tasks?
Understanding your boundaries
Recognize what your critical priorities are and set boundaries around them. For example, you may need strategic thinking time, but can’t schedule it because you’re running between back-to-back meetings. By zeroing in on what your priorities are, you’re better able to assess which meetings are in line with your priorities, decline those that aren’t, and then schedule strategic thinking time into your now open timeslot.
Setting expectations
Set expectations and give yourself permission to share them. Here, you must look at your priorities in relation to your goals and make decisions around them. To do this well, you must be honest with what your true priorities are. This will resolve a lot of the inner conflict as to whether or not you need to be doing something over another task.
An example of this is my client who had guilt over not being with her family because of her responsibilities as CEO of a prominent marketing company. When she determined her family priorities, such as attending the majority of her son’s basketball games, she partnered with her executive assistant and built her schedule around saying “no” to certain items that fell on game times wherever possible. She allowed herself the freedom to be engaged at his games along with releasing any guilt about being there because she consciously determined which choice was her top priority at that moment.
The biggest shift for my clients when they go from their time mindset to a choice one is that they end up with free time. They now have space to use for proactive thinking or making more choices with how to fill this open time in relation to their priorities. In addition, many:
Let go of outside guilt
Have less anxiety around free time
Become engaged and refreshed in conversations and tasks
Feel they have choice in controlling their time
Are empowered to make changes in what to say “yes” and “no” to
While you can’t control time, you can control your choices and priorities. It can be difficult at first, but by being accountable with your choice management, you give yourself permission to say “no” to things that don’t support your priorities. Choice is about spending your time and energy on what’s important. And while you can’t have it all, you can have the things that matter most to you. Ask yourself: is it really a time issue…or a choice one?
Standards vs. Rules
I watched a presentation once from Coach Krzyzewski from Duke University about his approach to leading some of the world’s best athletes – the US Olympic Team. If you don’t know about Coach “K,” he has more wins than any coach in Division 1 college basketball history. Coach K talked about his first meeting with the team comprised of the following NBA superstars: LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, Carmelo Anthony, Jason Kidd, Dwayne Wade, Chris Bosh, Dwight Howard, Chris Paul and more. Talk about a challenging team to lead! The question was never about talent; the question was whether they could learn to play together. This is a challenge many leaders face on a daily basis: Long on talent – short on team.
In their first meeting, he decided not to talk about offense and defense. Instead, he built the agenda around how the team was going to “live together.” The concept is one the coach learned as a cadet at West Point. Many of you will recognize this as a team norms exercise. Here’s how it played out for the Olympic team.
The coach told the team, “We’re not going to have any rules – we’re going to have standards.” His belief is that people don’t own rules, but they will own standards.
He started the conversation by offering two standards:
Look each other in the eyes when you talk to them.
Always tell the truth.
He then explained why he felt these were important concepts – when combined, they build trust. He asked the team if they could support these two standards. They said yes. Then he opened the floor to see what others would like to add.
Jason Kidd was the first to speak. He suggested the team should be on time. He said to be late shows a lack of respect for your teammates. Everyone agreed – and throughout their time together, no one was ever late!
As the conversation continued, standards such as Be Aggressive and Be Smart surfaced. The team embraced these ideas as well. Then, Coach K offered another one: Never have a bad practice. They agreed.
Dwayne Wade was next, “We need to have each other’s back.” The team felt this was a good idea.
Kobe Bryant added, “Play great defense and rebound.” He was saying he was going to play good defense. The next day, in the team’s first practice, he never took a shot. He wanted to set an example.
As the meeting was about to adjourn, Lebron James was the last player to speak. He said, “No excuses. No complaining – we’re going to win the gold medal.”
The coach closed the meeting by affirming the work of the team. “If we embrace these standards, on we’ll get our gold medal.” And, they did.
What standards has your team established?
Mark Miller is the best-selling author of 6 books, an in-demand speaker and the Vice President of High-Performance Leadership at Chick-fil-A. His latest book, Leaders Made Here, describes how to nurture leaders throughout the organization, from the front lines to the executive ranks and outlines a clear and replicable approach to creating the leadership bench every organization needs.
Six Gifts of Mentorship
Have you ever thought of mentoring a young leader? Have you ever brought in a summer student? Mentored someone earlier in their career? How about a high school student with hidden spark? Mentoring is one of the secret paths to developing your leadership, your relationship skills, authenticity, courage, systems thinking and even your strategic thinking.
When you talk with mentors, its not surprising the mark that mentorship has left on them. They’ll tell you that they have gained more than they feel they have given to their mentees. Yet, mentorship is something few leaders and executives carve out time to engage in. Here are the six gifts that mentors describe receiving from their experiences and why you'll want to make this a priority development activity:
You have an opportunity to help someone see themselves in a new light. You can show them what’s strong, not what’s wrong and help them find the spark that will propel them forward in career and life.
Telling your stories allows you to revisit your past learnings and help you see the wisdom you have inside you. You’ll understand where your wisdom comes from and see new ways to up your own game
You’ll look at the world differently. Young people have a different perspective and ask questions you’ve never thought of.
Young mentees introduce you to new topics, concepts and thinking you couldn’t imagine on your own.
You’ll develop empathy by simply listening and spending time with someone different from you.
They’ll make you want to be a better person because they’ll inspire you.
If you aren’t actively engaged in growing and developing future leaders, you’re missing out on critical self-development. Give a young leader a hand up, and you’ll find a hand up of your own. And, maybe a little spark too!
What will you learn this year?
“Once you stop learning, you start dying.” is a quote attributed to Albert Einstein that I’ve always been fond of. I love learning new things even if I don’t always love the process. Learning can be difficult sometimes! If you find the whole idea of New Years Resolutions curious, you’re not alone. They baffle me and have never been an idea that has resonated with me. Instead, each year I make a decision to commit to learning something new.
Every December and January, I make decisions on my learning and development for the year ahead. Over the year, I keep ideas of what I’d like to learn next and hold off on making decisions until the reflective time of the holidays where I have the mental down time to think about what would be most fulfilling and serve me best.
My goal isn’t necessarily to become an expert, it’s to expose myself to new ideas, get fully immersed and strive for excellence. I may not succeed in becoming proficient and that’s not my aim. My aim is to get engaged in exploring something new and gain new perspectives. To see what sticks and if it really is what I thought it would be. To gain new awareness and if I find it’s as helpful or engaging as I thought my new learning might be, I’ll stick with it.
Whatever I set out to learn, I’ll certainly gain knowledge or skill whether or not I become an expert with it. I can guarantee that there is also unexpected insight or learning that I’ll take away from the process. For example, I may learn I’m more excited about a topic than I expected or that I’m not that interested after all! I may learn about myself in new ways such as my learning style, gain new perspectives on how I interact with others, challenge my beliefs or discover new passions.
This year, I’m working on some exciting professional development with my own coach and exploring training in new concepts and approaches to bring to my clients. On a personal note, I’m doing something terrifying and exciting all at the same time. I’m learning piano. Why? I’ve always wanted to. I know that I can if I put the practice in and put my heart to it. I might not become a great piano player and I can fulfill my wish to learn.
Here’s how to get started on your own learning plan for the year ahead:
Compile a list of the things you might like to learn that would:
Make your job or life easier
Move you ahead in your career
Satisfy your curiosity about something
Make your life more fulfilling “if only you had the time”
Sit on your list for a few days and come back to it.
Circle the ones that resonate with you and choose three:
One that is practical learning for your profession.
One that is creative or strategic learning for your profession.
One that is personal and just for you.
Take action and get started.
Sign up for a course
Find a mentor
Join a club
Get a book, videos or other self study materials
Create a schedule
Volunteer
… Do something, just start.
I’d like to leave you with inspiration from another historical great passionate about learning, Goethe: “Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it, boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”
Do you go out on top?
It’s been 15 years that I’ve been a Formula One racing fan since meeting my husband in 2001. I figure, if you can’t beat them, join them and started watching races along side him in the wee hours of the morning before the advent of PVR’s. I’ve learned along the way that a big part of F1 racing is following the stories about the drivers and there is one big story that shocked everyone on December 2nd. After an intense duel against his teammate, Lewis Hamilton, Nico Rosberg won the Formula One World Championship on November 27th, 2016 at 31 years old and after a 10 year career with Formula One racing. What no one could expect came next was the announcement of his retirement from the sport just five days later, taking everyone by surprise including his long time manager. From 6 years old, Nico had a very clear dream to become the Formula One World Champion and he had now achieved that dream. The sweetest and most emotional part of the win? Seeing his father’s name, Keke Rosberg, inscribed on the trophy from his Formula One World Championship win 34 years earlier in 1982.
At the announcement of his retirement, he spoke about the sacrifices his wife, children and entire family made to support his dream. He reflected on what it took out from him and those who supported him to reach this achievement and recognized he is not willing to make the commitment again for another year and he’s not interested in coming forth and doing it again. He is going to follow his heart and his heart has told him to stop here and call it a day.
Nico raced in F1 for ten years and had the toughest teammate for the last three years and often challenging behind the scenes team orders to "not beat your teammate" but to "tow the team line". As a result, there were great trials and tribulations he went through to win and surpass his teammate, Lewis Hamilton. Hamilton won the World Championship titles in 2014 and 2015 with Rosberg finishing second as his teammate both times. While Hamilton started at the top as a star when he entered F1, Nico had to grind and work hard to earn the title over his ten years sacrificing it all in 2016 and being rewarded.
He walked away at a time when most racers will continue on for many years sometimes achieving World Championship again and many languishing for many years in decline before finally retiring from the sport often at low points of their career. I admire Nico’s courage and self-awareness to step down at this high point in his career when others would continue on. He is celebrating this incredible life achievement with permission to step into new opportunity. What could be a better time to go out than at the top?
As you reflect this time of year on your achievements and what your heart wants, I can’t help but wonder… What opportunity is calling you? What will you walk away for?
JENN LOFGRENDECEMBER 9, 2016
Essential questions for effective delegation
Frustrated, he left the meeting feeling like the last hour was spent spinning wheels again and they were no closer to getting the solution and results. After several meetings with the IT Manager and his team members, the leader was at a loss at how to solve the problem and get the IT Manager to deliver the results he needed. My client was entrenched in owning the IT Manager’s issues rather than holding the him accountable to delivering on the agreed commitments and results. He was trying to solve the IT Managers issues and found himself in a series of technical meetings between IT and his team trying to bridge the gap and spending hours of time with weeks slipping by. When he came to talk with me about the issue, he started digging into the depth of the technical issues and talking about backup scripts and algorithms. I asked him, “What is the problem you’re trying to solve”. Again, he told me about the issues the IT Manager needed to solve but not his own problem that the IT manager committed to fixing for him. My client lost sight of the big picture, what the accountability was, and who was accountable to whom. He got sucked into reacting to the fires that showed up in the process and trying to understand and become an expert in figuring out the path forward rather than coaching those around him to think through their own issues.
This is a common issue for leaders who fail to get clear commitments, maintain boundaries of responsibility or coach for accountability. Instead, they end up owning the problem that they’ve tried to delegate to someone else. How they end up owning the problem is often the result of a roadblock or other unanticipated issue that can’t easily be solved. It requires critical thinking, innovation or strengthening relationships and sometimes all three.
To work through this process, we identified essential questions to coach the IT Manager through their critical thinking and get a clear commitment. Those questions were:
Articulate the problem you need solved and the impact it’s having on you, your team and/or the organization.
What is the goal? Where are you starting from?
What does the gap look like? What needs to happen to close the gap?
What are the timelines? What might get in the way? What support do you need?
What commitments are you willing to make? How do you want me to hold you accountable?
By shifting to these questions, my client moved from several hour long meetings with the IT Manager that yielded more confusion to a 30 minute conversation that uncovered the real issues, identified a path forward, and gained commitment from the IT Manager with clear deliverables and timelines.
The Dark Side of Optimism
I think successful CEO’s are often Chief Executive Optimists and I’ve worked with a lot of these leaders who are charismatic, visionary and able to rally people behind a dream of a compelling future. One of my favorite authors, Simon Sinek, in his book Start with Why tells stories of many leaders and CEO’s who have mastered casting a light on a vision for the future and connecting others to believe in that future. While I believe that optimism is an essential trait that sets the best CEO’s and leaders apart, there can be a dark side to optimism that isn’t often spoken about and it has been a derailer of effective leadership for a number of my executive clients. Optimism is hopefulness and confidence about the future or the successful outcome of something and emphasizing the good parts of a situation, or a belief that something good will happen. It has great advantages as it encourages us to take risks, expand horizons, reach goals, innovate and create. It helps motivate us to pursue and achieve our goals, creates hope, keeps our mind at ease and develops resilience.
In his 1990 book, Learned Optimism, Martin Seligman warned that optimism “may sometimes keep us from seeing reality with the necessary clarity.” According to Tali Sharot optimism can create a tendency to overestimate our likelihood of good events happening and underestimate the likelihood of bad events happening. It can lead you to ignore life and business dangers. And it doesn't mean that we think things will magically turn out okay, but rather that we have the unique ability to make it so. Unfortunately that’s rarely true.
If you are the kind of leader that never wants to talk about hard truths, potential negative outcomes and roadblocks then there are some challenges you may encounter in your leadership:
Approachability Your bias may make you appear unapproachable by some of your team. How do you relate to the defensive pessimists on your team? Do they feel they can share their concerns and ideas with you?
Decision Bias The more optimistic you are, Tali Sharot found “the less likely you are to integrate negative news into your view of the future.” This can lead to bias in your decisions and taking greater risks that you intended and faulty planning. Further, people around you might stop telling you bad news assuming you don’t want to hear it if you gloss over difficult news or dismiss it.
Erodes Trust If you take the stance of “trust me” when talking about the future when those around you want to explore evidence that may prove otherwise, dismissing it erodes their trust in you. And, if you’re not willing to talk about negative outcomes, your team may start thinking “Its worse than I thought if you’re not willing to talk about it.” They become even more worried.
Building Buy-In and Disconnection Failing to acknowledge tough realities can leave some feeling you don’t understand their struggles and are unwilling to listen which creates disconnection. Your push for others to quickly embrace your optimistic view can leave both of you frustrated and limit buy-in.
Overpromise and Under Deliver Those around you can become stressed, worried and frustrated with the potential or perception of over commitment or overly ambitious goals and deadlines.
So how does a leader balance their optimism?
Develop Self-Awareness Tali Sharot tells us that raising awareness of your optimism bias is an essential first step and to come up with plans and rules to counter that bias. Accept that not everyone sees the world as you do.
Acknowledge their reality Talk about hard and ugly truths in the past, present or future and the challenges that you and your team may face on the road to creating the future. This doesn’t mean you have to dwell on them, but it does mean you must acknowledge they exist.
Ask for differing perspectives Allow your team to share their concerns and pessimistic perspectives with you showing you are open to considering all views.
Explain your thinking Explain to others your choice to look past the negative news and outcomes and your belief in an optimistic future and why.
Help Others See Your Perspective Move from convincing others your view of the future is right and paint a picture for them so they can see the potential for the future themselves. You are often a quick thinker and make fast connections. Not everyone around you will do so as quickly as you do. Be patient. Help them see what you see. It’s a process people have to go through.
With a healthy dose of reality checking practices you can move past your bias and leverage the strengths optimism brings to be a leader others believe in and trust.
The Tricky Truth About Trust
Trust is a topic that comes up regularly with my executive coaching clients. Trust in those around them, feeling as though others trust them, broken trust and wanting to build or restore trust. I learned long ago from Patrick Lencioni’s book “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” that trust is the foundation to creating highly effective teams. Without a foundation of strong trust, teams don’t engage in healthy conflict and debate, they don’t feel a strong sense of commitment to each other, they’re less accountable and in the end don’t create great results. In working with leaders for many years, I’ve also learned that trust is the foundation for fulfillment as a leader. Without trust, leaders feel disconnected from their teams, isolated and holding the burden of challenging information and decisions, and without the strong relationships necessary to create the future they desire for themselves, the team and the organization. They can’t sleep at night and some even dread going to work. In his book, Lencioni describes trust as a team’s ability to understand and open up to one another. He says that great teams are not afraid to hold back with one another. They are unafraid to air their dirty laundry. They admit their mistakes, weaknesses, and their concerns without fear of reprisal.
Trust is a small but mighty word that can be interpreted in many ways. Therefore I want to be clear what kind of trust we’re talking about is vulnerability-based trust:
“Common” Trust: a general confidence your team members won’t break accepted laws, norms, policies, etc. You believe they won’t steal if left in the office alone. It’s the type of trust that we extend to each other when driving. We “trust” people know the rules of the road and will follow them. Without “common” trust, it would be very difficult to operate as a company or society. Belonging to the team typically grants you this type of trust.
Vulnerability-Based Trust: a much deeper confidence and belief that you can take risks, ask for help, admit mistakes, or confront and hold others accountable without fear of retaliation, humiliation, shame or resentment. Vulnerability-based trust has to be earned and given.
If you want to earn and give vulnerability-based trust, you need to invest in practice trusting first. To help you do that, its helpful to understand the elements of vulnerability based trust and Brené Brown, author of Rising Strong, gives us the BRAVING acronym to get really clear. In summary, BRAVING is about having and respecting boundaries, doing what you say you’ll do, owing up to mistakes and making amends, keeping confidences, walking your talk, doing the right thing even when its hard, staying out of judgment and assuming the best intentions of others. When any one of these components of trust is missing, trust erodes.
With that understanding, here are the tricky truths about trust:
Truth #1:
The bar is set higher for you as a leader to build trust. It’s your responsibility as the leader to be the first to give trust and to work hard to earn trust.
Truth #2:
Trust is built in small moments over time. Once broken, it can be rebuilt and requires commitment to consistent trust building behaviours. It can take as much or more than seven consistent experiences to help the other person feel you can be trusted again.
Truth #3:
Trust is uncomfortable. It requires you to expose a piece of yourself and risk being hurt. It becomes more comfortable over time when you experience another person taking care of what you’ve exposed to them.
Truth #4:
The greatest trust comes from struggle. When you work through struggle with someone and stick with them to get to the other side of the struggle. This is the process we see with the development of teams forming, storming, norming and eventually performing. Many teams get stuck in storming by avoiding hard conversations and not working through their differences. As a result, they never become high-performing teams because they never truly trust one another.
Creating fulfillment as a leader requires struggle, discomfort, courage and high commitment to building and developing trust.
Believe and Create – How to Lead Onward
“What got you here won’t get you there”. I’ve loved this quote from Marshall Goldsmith for years and often repeat it to myself and share it with clients. It reminds me of the new thinking required of courageous leaders to move themselves, their teams and everyone around them forward into the future. Why? The world is changing. It’s one of the few things we can count on in life and business. Change. Now is a time of significant business and market uncertainty and change in Calgary, so I recently attended a conference called Onward put on by the Calgary Chamber of Commerce to inspire business leaders to take on new thinking and action. The 1000 attendees were asked to choose a word or words to be photographed with that represent what onward means to them. My words are Believe and Create.
When you are in a place of change, it can be unsettling and yet you have ultimate control if you choose it. I believe there are two choices that together bring you that freedom and help lead those around you onward to the future you want:
1. Believe.
To believe means to accept something as truth and feeling sure of that truth without proof. To have faith and confidence. It requires a choice and commitment. Choose to believe in something. It’s vulnerable because you could be wrong. Actively choose to invest your thinking in something new.
2. Create.
To create is to bring something new into existence something that has never existed before. There is nothing more vulnerable than creativity. Creating requires action. It requires you to leave your comfort zone and step into the unknown.
One without the other keeps you where you are. Choosing to believe in an idea without creating leaves you frustrated. I often say, “Hope is not a plan”. It’s like having a strategy without executing or taking action on that strategy.
Creating without believing will also leave you stuck. Without belief you create something without soul and without purpose. It is belief that brings soul into what you create and creation that brings your beliefs into reality. Belief is what makes you and those around you fall in love with what you create.
One of the speakers at the Onward event was international fashion designer Paul Hardy who said “Expectation is just premeditated resentment”. Believing without taking action and creating leads to resentment too. Paul Hardy loved Calgary as his home, but Calgary isn’t exactly a fashion mecca. Paul believed that he could become a world recognized fashion designer right from his home in Calgary and then set about making it happen. Today he is no longer a Calgary based rising star designer but an internationally recognized designer with a wide following in China who continues to invest deeply in the city of Calgary he calls his refuge. As he inspired our belief in what is possible for the future, his parting words he left us with were: Don’t fear leaping. Leap and be the wind.
Believe and Create.
Six Imperatives to Increase Energy
Our goal is to accelerate the growth of leaders and create more readiness. Obviously, different organizations have different results, so we have examined those organizations and their results and come up with six imperatives that will allow any organization to increase the energy for growth. We want energy that feels like excitement. Think of these imperatives as places you can go to increase the energy for growth in an organization as opposed to a step-by-step implementation model. Commit - Adopt acceleration as a real business priority (Is your management team competitive?)
Aim - Define leadership success for your business context (Is your leadership model invaluable?)
Identify - Make efficient, accurate decisions about you are going to accelerate (Are your leaders shrewd and accurate in reviewing talent and identifying potential?)
Assess - Accurately evaluate readiness gaps in people and give great, constructive feedback (Is there a healthy obsession with reviewing data?)
Grow - Make the right development happen and making sure learning and application of learning are both happening (Is there anything happening that ignites the application and practice of the leadership approaches of your business needs?)
Sustain - Aggressively manufacture energy for growth in order to sustain your system (Are your leaders aggressively manufacturing positive growth acceleration?)
You don’t have to be great at everything to be successful. You can choose one of these imperatives and simply be great at that and still see results. Capitalize on any strength or weakness and start at that imperative.
What do these imperatives lead to? What does a real focus on acceleration yield for an organization? Generally speaking, it leads to an dramatic increase in the availability of ready successors for critical roles. Performance of newly promoted leaders will also increase. Success comes in the organizations who choose just a few imperatives, sometimes even one, to really be great at implementing.
Creating energy in the right places in your organization can make a major difference in the bottom-line results that you see. Choose to be great somewhere.
*****
Matthew J. Paese, Ph.D., is Vice President of Succession and C-Suite Services for Development Dimensions International (DDI). Matt’s work has centered on the application of succession, assessment, and development approaches as they apply to boards, CEOs, senior management teams, and leaders across the pipeline. He consults, coaches, speaks, and conducts research around all those topics and more.
Audrey B. Smith, Ph.D., is Senior Vice President for Global Talent Diagnostics at DDI. Audrey's customer-driven innovation and global consulting insights have helped shape DDI's succession, selection, and development offerings, from the C-suite to the front line. She has been a key strategist and solution architect, encompassing technology-enabled virtual assessments and development aligned to current business challenges.
William C. Byham, Ph.D., is Executive Chairman of DDI. He cofounded the company in 1970 and has worked with hundreds of the world's largest organizations on executive assessment, executive development, and succession management. Bill authored Zapp!® The Lightning of Empowerment, a groundbreaking book that has sold more than 3 million copies. He has coauthored 23 other books, including seminal works on the assessment center method.
We need to talk about the big smelly fish
Mention shame and vulnerability and people instantly want to change the subject. Talk about it in the workplace? Not a chance. But, it’s exactly what we need to be talking about. We need to talk about it to create engagement and resilience, develop our people, and take real learning from setbacks and failures. By avoiding these two topics, we are limiting human potential and bottom line results in business. I had an awakening recently when diving deeper into the work of two thought leaders and it was a collision of thoughts that changed everything for how I look at my work as a leadership coach. I want to start with the first thought leader, Brené Brown, a shame and vulnerability researcher from the University of Houston Texas who conducted over 15000 interviews with men and women over 10 years.
She says vulnerability is not weakness. It is uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure. It is the courage to show up and be seen when there are no guarantees. It is the absolute heartbeat of innovation and creativity. There can be zero innovation without vulnerability. To create is to make something that has never existed before. There's nothing more vulnerable than that.
Then there is shame. No one wants to talk about it and we have a visceral reaction to shame. Shame is intensely painful feeling that we are unworthy of love and belonging. It needs three things to grow: secrecy, silence and judgment. The less you talk about it. The more you got it. It’s that big smelly fish in the room no one dares to acknowledge.
Shame sounds like. “Never good enough.” And “Who do you think you are?” Not smart enough, perfect enough, talented enough, educated enough, or powerful enough. Who do you think you are to challenge that decision? Who do you think you are to share your idea?
Now if you express empathy, shame can’t survive because I have be believe I’m alone. Once I share it, I’m not alone. Dousing shame with empathy creates an environment hostile to shame. Shame cannot survive being spoken because empathy is the antidote to shame. The two most powerful words when we're in struggle: me too. We have to talk about it.
Shame leads to limiting beliefs and reactive responses. It leads to controlling, protecting and complying. In a nutshell, it keeps you playing safe, comfortable and small. Just what you want in business right? Maybe not. So, if small and safe isn’t what you want… Vulnerability leads you from controlling to achieving and systems awareness. It’s the path to move from protecting to integrity and authenticity. And from complying to relating and self-awareness.
Not only have I been deeply impacted by the work of Brené Brown, but also by the work of Bob Anderson, the Founder of the Leadership Circle and author of Mastering Leadership. Bob did a little (ok, a lot) research over 20 years and found there’s a strong connection between business results and some interesting factors. He found that when leadership effectiveness goes up, business results go up too.
He found that when leaders became more proactive and focused on creating, their effectiveness went up. Those behaviours included self-awareness, achieving, relating, authenticity and systems awareness. And, when leaders focus on the opposite, the reactive behaviours of controlling, protecting and complying, business results struggled. And, he found the development path from reactive to creative was developed through vulnerability.
What does all this mean? Well, it means that when vulnerability & resilience go up, creative and proactive behaviours go up, effectiveness goes up and results go up. Vulnerability is the path to results. The only way to increase resilience in vulnerability is to talk about our struggles and hardest stories.
I want to leave this thought with you to consider: If you’re not daring to talk about shame and vulnerability, you’re not daring to maximize business results.
How to make a difference people love
Kevin Ames brought tears to my eyes as he shared a story about a school photographer who took on creating impact through her work in a way only someone with her commitment to serving could. It all started with a gift of the book Great Work given to me by Sam Gagnon at O.C. Tanner over a year ago. The book dramatically shifted how I think about appreciation and how leaders cultivate environments that inspire commitment in the people that work with them. After diving into this rich read, I have since shared it with many clients and was reminded of its gifts when I had the opportunity to hear Kevin Ames speak at a conference a few weeks ago. Kevin is a gifted story teller and in our time together moved our group to emotion many times by sharing stories about ordinary remarkable people and helped us see what they do different. He said, “You can’t cause people to get engaged - you can only create an environment where they want to engage”. And he showed us how people choose to engage through committing to the vision, mission and values of an organization through examples of inspirational every day leaders.
Tina was a photographer who’s story Kevin shared. She is a school photographer for children of all ages who understands what it means to deliver a difference and make the lives of those around her better through her work. In his story, Kevin told us about the end of a long day for Tina shooting photos at a school for special needs kids where she noticed an autistic young man who didn’t line up for a photo. She approached him at the end of the session and inquired about him skipping the photo line. He was missing the necessary forms for the photos and the school secretary let her know that his mother would arrive soon.
Rather than waiting for the paperwork or packing up and heading home for the day, Tina suggested that she get started photographing the young man while he waiting for his mom. None of the initial images met with the vision Tina saw for representing the spirit of this young man so she kept shooting until his mother arrived. Once his mom arrived, Tina took the time to show her each of the images one by one and then the special picture came onto the screen. A single picture that captured the essence of what his mom saw in him. Instead of the standard rushed bad picture, this mom finally had a picture that represented what she saw in her son and the love and pride she had for him. It only came to be because Tina was patient with both mom and son to make a difference.
Kevin too knows how to make a difference. The soul he puts into his story telling is inspiring. He tells each story as if it were a story about his own child. The gratitude, joy, inspiration and admiration he has for each person he tells a story about shines through and makes a memorable impact about not only the lead of the story but also the message he’s hoping you’ll take away from the story.
Here are some key insights I took from the story about Tina the photographer, Kevin’s approach to story telling and the book Great Work on making a difference people love:
Reframe Your Role: The role of a difference maker is available to everyone. It is you that must choose it.
Work with what you’ve got: Take something good and make it better.
Ask the Right Question: “What would people love?” Think out on the edge.
See for Yourself: Look for difference making opportunities others may have missed. Be curious. Observe everything.
Get on the wall: Only the mountain can teach us to climb it.
What will you do to deliver a difference people love?
Have you crossed this leadership line?
How do you know you’re an effective leader? What if there was a way to measure how much of your leadership potential is coming through? A few weeks ago, I found myself face to face with the such a measurement of my own leadership that brought me a deep shift in self awareness and an objective look at my leadership development, my strengths and a development road map to become a more effective leader and coach. The assessment was The Leadership Circle Profile (LCP).
I thought I knew my style. I’ve been through lots of assessments in my many years as a coach and I realize now those tools measured my preferences not my development. I knew it before but I know it now in a new deeper way that I couldn’t have known without going through the LCP. The kicker was this assessment presented me all this awareness in one picture, not a thick 360 degree report. This sample of the model shows you a black line for you rate yourself and the coloured areas for how your “raters” scored your development. Quite the picture.
I regularly work with leaders seeking to become more proactive and strategic leaders. Its been a challenge to help those clients get objectively clear on where they are starting from and to identify their development path. The LCP introduced me to looking at leadership from a new perspective - stages of development with a line in between – helping identify areas of development from the Reactive realm and a higher level of development in the Creative (or Proactive) realm.
There are two distinct sides to leadership. Creative and Reactive. One is effective, the other not so much. Reactive Leadership has underlying strengths depending on your style of controlling, protecting or complying. And research conducted by The Leadership Circle shows that Leadership Effectiveness is positively correlated to Business Performance and Creative Leadership is highly correlated to Leadership Effectiveness.
Reactive* leaders sound like this:
I am my relationships. I am my achievements. They define me
Externally validated worth
Self defined from the outside in
Authority vested in an invaluable guide outside of self
Meaning and worth are found in faithful adherence to role. I am either controlling authority or careful follower
Vision defined by others
Defensive when challenged - facts by aggression or withdrawal
Creative* Leaders sound like this:
I am not my relationships or achievements. I have them. They do not have me
Internally validated worth
Independent whole self defined from within
Authority comes from within and is granted to others (shared)
Meaning found in self-expression, responsibility and co-creation
Self-authority capacity for vision and independent action with self-correction
Maintains sense of self in conflict. Inquires into other’s perspective, empathizes and authentically responds.
In this process, I found that there is a big difference in thinking I know where my development is and actually measuring it. As it turns out, I have development on both sides of the Creative and Reactive line and more Reactive than I’d like to admit. Surprisingly, some of it was not what I expected; yet when I reflect deep down, I know its true and I have some work to do and a road map to help me get there.
Change and transformation is life-long. Being a leader isn’t only going through a massive career change, it also asks you to take on a personal transformation in your development as a human being. The work is to see our strategies and the beliefs that run them. It requires us to claim our true gifts and let go of safety and identity. It requires an upgrade of your leadership operating system, an evolution in your thinking through self-awareness and personal development.
What side of the line are you on?
* Source: The Leadership Circle.
Under New Management
Every once in a while there is a book that gets you to question norms and rethink some of the actions that we take for granted as best practices. A few years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting author David Burkus in a workshop that explored The Myths of Creativity, his first book, and was hooked on the out of the box thinking that David was bringing to challenge assumptions we hold in business. Since them, I’ve been a fan of his leadership radio podcasts and articles and today I’m excited to be reading his new book, Under New Management. Under New Management has me rethinking many of today’s norms in business leadership. Through his new book, David uses research, case studies and exploration into a wide range of organizations and industries and turns commonly practiced and ingrained cultural leadership practices on their heads and examines the unintended and often negative consequences that many create. His goal? To reinvent how we think about management and ultimately how companies are managed.
As a leadership coach, I often reflect on and get curious about many of the management processes that businesses use to create engagement and accountability, help people be productive and efficient, and ultimately reach their organizational goals. Most of the practices he explores we take for granted and don’t consider beyond “how its done”. I appreciate David offering insight into the history of how many of our common management practices came to be and the variety of case studies he offers to explore what works and what doesn’t. His case studies range from well-known organizations like Zappos, Netflicks and McKinsey but also lesser known successful organizations. He doesn’t just rely on history and theory either; he gives practical application for how you might apply these new ideas to your organization and recognizes that what works for one might not work in the same application for your company. While the concepts he explores range from outlawing email and putting employees first to paying people to quit, making salaries transparent and closing open offices might seem radical and against the status quo of best practices, he gives real insight and research into why you might want to rethink these practices.
To add the icing on the cake, not only is Under New Management filled with insightful, practical and tactical information, David Burkus has a gift of using story to help engage you and make this a leadership book that’s an enjoyable and engaging read you’ll want to pass on to everyone on your leadership team.
If you want to explore new thinking and learn to implement new ways of enhancing productivity and morale, read Under New Management.
Put Employees First
This original post was inspired by concepts from chapter two of Under New Management. The idea of the customer-focused business is so deeply ingrained in most people’s minds that anything else would seem like madness. However a growing number of corporate leaders (as well as extensive research), is showing that the best way to serve customers is to focus on employees first. Putting Employees First
By David Burkus
"The customer always comes first." We've all heard this mantra, either as part of our jobs or as customers ourselves in the marketing materials of countless businesses. However a growing number of corporate leaders are throwing this once immutable law on its ear in light of extensive research showing that customer satisfaction is more effectively built by first focusing on employee happiness.
The idea of putting employees before customers seems counterintuitive, but it's not entirely new. Over twenty years ago, a group of business professors from Harvard University had been working on a model that validated this concept. James Heskett, Thomas Jones, Gary Loveman, W. Earl Sasser, and Leonard Schlesinger were comparing results from their own studies and synthesizing other research to construct a model to explain the outstanding success of the most profitable service-based companies.
It began with Sasser’s research, conducted with his former student Fred Reichheld. The duo took aim at a long-standing assumption of business — that market share is the primary driver of profitability. If a company can increase market share, the thinking went, it will increase sales while taking advantage of economies of scale to lower costs and thus increase profits. When the pair examined a variety of companies and the existing research however, they found that while market share is one factor in profitability, another factor better explains the most profitable companies: customer loyalty. Based on their research, Sasser and Reichheld estimated that a mere 5 percent increase in customer loyalty can yield a 25 to 85 percent increase in profitability. This finding laid the foundation for the five Harvard professors’ search for the causes of customer loyalty. After studying dozens of companies and troves of research, they created a model that tracked the origins of customer loyalty. They called it the 'service-profit chain.'
The service-profit chain links together several elements of the business model in a linear relationship: Profit and growth are driven by customer loyalty. Loyalty is influenced by customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction is stimulated by a high perception of value of the service. Value is the result of productive employees. Productivity stems from employee satisfaction.
Put another way, profits are driven by customer loyalty, customer loyalty is driven by employee satisfaction, and employee satisfaction is driven by putting employees first.
Employee satisfaction is achieved when companies focus on creating high 'internal service quality' — a term the Harvard professors used to explain the process that some call “putting employees first.” At the core of their service-profit chain was the concept of value. In a service business model, value is as much about perception of the service received as the quality of the product. Therefore, the professors theorized, satisfied and productive employees are better able to ensure that interactions with customers are high-quality and lead to a higher perception of value. The service-profit chain predicts that by putting employees first, customers will be better served and become more loyal and the company will become more profitable.
When their research was first published, the concept of the service-profit chain generated a lot of discussion. It was a theoretical model built on a variety of research, and it led to a wave of even more research seeking to strengthen the link between satisfied employees and satisfied, profitable customers. In a recent study, Steven Brown and Son Lam of the University of Houston synthesized decades of research to firmly establish that link.
Brown and Lam gathered twenty-eight studies on employee satisfaction and customers’ perceptions of quality. In total, these studies examined over 6,600 employees and customers. Brown and Lam’s results showed that, across all of the studies, high levels of customer satisfaction and perceived service quality were related to high levels of employee satisfaction. Frontline employees provide better service to customers when they’re supported and satisfied in their work.
Most interestingly, since Brown and Lam were synthesizing a variety of studies from many different industries, they were able to analyze the employee-customer relationship in two different types of businesses: those in which customers and employees have an ongoing relationship (such as doctor’s offices or IT consulting firms) and those in which the interaction takes place in a onetime transaction, such as in a fast-food restaurant or a retail shop. They assumed that, since ongoing relationships include more frequent customer-employee interactions, the effect of employee satisfaction on customers’ perceptions of quality and satisfaction would be stronger in that type of business. However, they found that this effect did not change significantly with the type of business or the level of interaction with the customer. Employee satisfaction appears to have just as strong an effect on customers whether the employees interact with customers only once or their interactions are frequent and ongoing. These results echo what HCLT experienced when it put employees first and trusted them to take care of HCLT’s customers.
New research also supports the idea of flipping the organization chart. A recent study demonstrated that managers play a significant role in employees’ satisfaction and the service-profit chain. A trio of researchers led by Richard Netemeyer of the University of Virginia collected data from a single retail chain that included 306 store managers, 1,615 customer-employee interactions, and 57,656 customers. The researchers were testing the effect of managers’ performance and satisfaction on employees, and hence its effect on customers’ satisfaction and the overall performance of the managers’ stores.
They found that managers’ actions, customer satisfaction, and store financial performance were indeed linked. These results support the argument that management’s support of employees significantly contributes to what Heskett and his colleagues at Harvard internal service quality, the first link in the service-profit chain. The findings from the research of Netemeyer and his team also suggest that flipping the organizational chart really works. It’s essential that managers understand that their role is to support employee satisfaction and hence customer satisfaction, in no small part because their success in this role clearly has a major impact on the financial performance of their company.
Lessons on Influencing from Chinese Water Torture
Drip, drip, drip, drip, drip. We’ve all heard that sound in the middle of the night to only drag ourselves out of bed and shut off a dripping tap because we can’t bear it any longer. Chinese water torture is a process in which water is slowly dripped onto a person's forehead, allegedly driving the restrained victim insane. I often use the metaphor of Chinese Water Torture when talking with clients about influencing their teams, peers or more senior leaders in the organization. The idea isn’t to drive them insane but to drip in your ideas in a way that makes them easy to support and say yes to. Here are some of the lessons that this metaphor brings to help us learn to influence:
Know your audience
You can’t torture someone without knowing what they care about. You can’t influence someone without knowing what they care about. Understanding who makes up your audience will allow you to carefully plan your message and adapt what you say to your listener.
What’s important to them?
What are their core concerns?
What are their values?
Drip in ideas
Small consistent actions have a big impact over time. A bucket of water dumped on a rock has negligible impact. A drip consistently every few seconds over years will leave a hole in the rock.
Ever hear of “too much too soon”? It means that too much of something is given before the other person is ready for it. We often get passionate about our ideas and present them fully from start to finish and then ask the other person to say yes to an ask to move the idea forward. Surprisingly, “no” is the answer you get instead. Where did you go wrong? Too much too soon is often the challenge. Most often, if your idea is well considered, the “no” you receive may be telling you the other person hasn’t worked through their thinking yet. Dripping your ideas is about helping the other person come along in their thinking as you did when you conceived your idea. One of the best ways to drip in an idea is to ask a lot of questions. Your insight may have been fast or slow to process when it came to you. Recognize that the person you’re presenting to might be slower to process your ideas.
Dripping ideas is about breaking down your ideas into first helping the other person see the challenge you’re looking to resolve. Only once they see the challenge and agree it’s a challenge can you then begin to start dripping in the benefits of resolving the challenge. Next, drip in ideas on how to resolve the issue and how those ideas are meeting the concerns, values and impact your audience cares about.
Timing is everything
Timing is the skill of judging the right moment in a situation to do something.
Spread out your drips and ideas so the other person has time to think about them and come to their own conclusions and allow questions to bubble up. Consideration of other events can greatly influence your desired outcome. Choose the moments you share your ideas and when you ask for decisions and actions. Ask at the right moment. Listen carefully and recognize when your audience is saying yes, yes, yes to what you’re presenting. Now is your moment to ask for buy-in.
Did you know that there is much debate as to the origin of the term “Chinese Water Torture”. It may have never originated from or ever been used by the Chinese. It may have been a torture that came from the Spanish Inquisition or the term may have come from Houdini’s sensational escapes from his “Chinese Water Torture Cell” or from some other origin altogether. Drips of ideas over time through literature and pop culture have led us to this popular term yet no one knows exactly how it came to be. The goal is the same with your ideas. Just drip them in consistently and steward them forward.
Five Tools for Creating the Habits of Resilience
I won’t tell you that I don’t get worried about our economy, my business, my family and my community these days. I do. I’m hearing people talking about waiting for energy prices, the economy and other world events to come around and to hunker down today and wait it out until those events turn around. Time alone doesn’t fix anything, it inevitably makes it worse. Instead of hunkering down, I’m taking action to be innovative and take control of my own situation and in doing so I’m also finding the need to develop resiliency skills (and practice them) to keep me from diving into the negative news that seems to fill the media each day. Psychology Today describes Resilience as:
Resilience is that ineffable quality that allows some people to be knocked down by life and come back stronger than ever. Rather than letting failure overcome them and drain their resolve, they find a way to rise from the ashes. Psychologists have identified some of the factors that make someone resilient, among them a positive attitude, optimism, the ability to regulate emotions, and the ability to see failure as a form of helpful feedback. Even after misfortune, resilient people are blessed with such an outlook that they are able to change course and soldier on.
Resilience isn’t just choosing a state of mind to bounce back of from life changing situations and stressful moments. It comes from having the tools that help you move through the emotions of setbacks and stressful moments and news to process what’s happening and practicing those tools until they become resiliency habits. Resilient people are leaders others look to in tough times. When you’re working through your stuff and keeping healthy both physically and mentally, you become an inspiration others look to for guidance on how they can develop their own resilience habits.
Here are five tools to help you build resilience to get back up and share with others to help them get back up too:
Empathy: Reach out and talk to someone you trust and share your feelings, concerns, worries and tough stories of setback, disappointment, loss or failure. When life gets difficult, it can be tempting to isolate and tough it out alone, yet the path forward to coming back stronger starts with sharing your struggles with someone you trust.
Goals: Create realistic new goals and take regular action to move toward your goals. When you feel like your goal is too big, break it down into the next smallest step you could take. Just like running a marathon, when you can’t go any farther, look for ways to motivate yourself to take just one more small step.
Breathe: Mindfulness is about being present in the moment. Taking a few breaths following this box breathing technique (There’s even an App for that! http://boxbreathing.org)
Journal: Write about your deepest thoughts and feelings related to the struggle, worries or stressful events in your life. Move beyond the facts and write about the emotions that you’re rumbling with. This one can be a hard one if you’re not used to writing about yourself, like it is for me and I can tell you first hand that when I do engage in journalling, it has proved invaluable in moving me out of struggle.
Gratitude: At the end of each day, write 5 things you are grateful for. Do this over a period of 21 days and notice your perspective and outlook when new challenges come your way.
Bonus:
Avoid Comparison: When you’re struggling, avoid comparing your struggles with the struggles with others. We each have struggle and your struggle is no harder or easier than those around you, its struggle and its hard for you. When you compare your struggle and rank it as lower than the struggle of someone else, you lose a little compassion for yourself. Instead take care to recognize that every struggle is unique and cannot be compared.
Developing Your Authentic Leadership
Authentic Leadership has been a leadership theme and approach that has gained popularity over the last decade, but what is it and why should you care? Authentic Leadership is leading others from a place of personal self-awareness, courage, vulnerability, strength, humility, purpose and values. Authentic leaders are what you see is what you get meaning that they don’t act one way in private and another in public. They’re committed to take the personally challenging path and trust the benefits of doing so are exponentially greater than the discomfort they experience on the journey. As the Velveteen Rabbit in Margery Williams’s classic tale experiences, becoming authentic or “real” is difficult, uncomfortable and wholeheartedly rewarding. So why would you want to be an authentic leader? Simply, because that’s who people want to follow. That means more engagement from everyone on your team tapping into what they want to do rather than what they have to do. It means stronger real relationships with your team members, your clients, and everyone you interact with making it easier to move your business and personal goals forward. Authentic leadership empowers everyone to step up and lead and creates strategic thinking and a focus on long-term purpose and achievement beyond day-to-day execution. While some say execution is everything, executing on the wrong priorities is just make-work and won’t create the results you and your team are working so hard for. Creating the right strategy to maximize long-term results requires authentic leadership.
The journey to authentic leadership starts with understanding the story of your life. Such an understanding will provide you with insight into how those events shaped you to become the leader you are today. According to Bill George, author of Discovering your Authentic Leadership, many leaders report their motivations come from the difficult experiences in their lives. Rather than seeing themselves as victims, authentic leaders used these experiences as a source of inspiration and drive to make a difference in the world – giving meaning to their lives. By exploring your story, you’ll find context and inspiration for the impact you want to create in the world. Your life, as you’ve experienced so far, is an important lens that shapes how you look at everything around you, the decisions you make, and the actions you take as a leader in business and anywhere else in life.
To develop your authentic leadership, here are some questions Bill George asks:
Which people and experiences in your early life had the greatest impact on you?
What tools do you use to become self-aware? Do you know your strengths and talents, do you know and embrace your shortfalls?
What are the moments when you say to yourself, this is the real me? When do you feel really alive?
What are your external and internal motivators? How do you balance them?
Who is on your support team? Who is on your personal organizational chart, not just the company chart? How can your team make you a more authentic leader? What diversity do you need to add to your support team?
What does being authentic mean in your life? Have you ever paid the price for your authenticity as a leader? Was it worth it?
What steps can you take today, tomorrow or over the next year to develop your authentic leaders?
Choose courage over comfort. Commit to stepping into discomfort, uncertainty and emotional exposure. Become real like the Velveteen Rabbit. It’s uncomfortable and hard along the way, and the payoffs for you, your team and the bottom-line far outweigh the challenges of the journey.
5 Core Leadership Beliefs that Expand Possibilities
One of my favourite leadership bloggers, Dan Rockwell, wrote a blog recently called: 5 Deadly Beliefs That Limit Leaders and it got me wondering what beliefs open doors and possibilities for leaders. Its important to know what beliefs hold us back and another to know where to focus and what to cultivate. Choosing your beliefs shapes how you approach your leadership and brings intention, perspective and direction to the choices you make. As a result, possibilities expand in new unexpected areas. Here are the top five beliefs that I’ve witnessed that expand possibilities for the leaders I’ve worked with.
Hope - Believing things will work out. Not blind faith, simply faith. Leaders create environments where they believe people are genuinely doing their best, whether or not their best is what you need. Think the best of people including yourself. Hope is as contagious as negative thinking. Choosing hope is making a choice to focus on the positive and believing that you are up for the challenges ahead. If you don’t have hope you can’t install hope in your team. Leaders who choose hope inspire that thinking in their teams and help them see their goals as realistic and possible.
When you stop learning, you start dying - Albert Einstein said “When you stop learning, you start dying”. Learning is the only way to growth. A certain amount of learning can happen pre-decision and we can only know the true outcome of a decision by making a choice and putting it into action. You’re guaranteed learning from every choice that will inform your next choice. Without moving into choice you stay stuck and miss out on precious learning for you and your team. There are no bad choices, just next choices.
No one stands alone - As Brené Brown says, we are hardwired for connection. Believing in community means you cultivate and participate in conversations with everyone around you. You know that if you’re not making progress the best way to move forward is to get people talking and building community on a foundation of trust and honesty. The answers will show up and the team will have the support around them to move those answers forward.
Find and Create Meaning - From our very first years of life, we are driven to ask the question “Why?”. Leaders who search for and create meaning for themselves in their work must also create that connection for those around them. As Dan Pink describes so eloquently in his book Drive, people want to make a contribution to something greater. Money is a de-motivator; doing work that has an impact on the greater good in the world is something we can all rally around. Everyone wants to make a difference and they need to know what that difference is.
Courage over Comfort - Courageous leaders are willing to step into the discomfort of uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure for the sake of moving forward. They know that choosing comfort feels good in the short term and keeps them moving further away from their desired outcomes. Courage requires leaders to ask for what they need, admit what they don’t know, have boundaries, make decisions, stand up for a cause and more. Courage means choosing perseverance over the easy out. It means being all in when its easier to walk away. The courageous leader knows that choosing comfort over courage leads to regret and choosing courage leads to both hardship and the joy of achievement.
In his book, The Art of Possibility, Benjamin Zander tells a story of two marketing scouts to show us the impact of our beliefs on possibility:
“A shoe factory sends two marketing scouts to a region of Africa to study the prospects for expanding business. One sends back a telegram saying,
SITUATION HOPELESS STOP NO ONE WEARS SHOES
The other writes back triumphantly,
GLORIOUS BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY STOP THEY HAVE NO SHOES
Ben Zander also said: “In the measurement world, you set a goal and strive for it. In the universe of possibility, you set the context and let life unfold.” Choose to cultivate opportunity through these core beliefs and possibilities will unfold for you and your team.