Archive for November, 2009

Over the years, I`ve managed to come up with my own beliefs about leadership. They are constantly changing and in flux as I work with clients and observe leaders who are present in other aspects of my life. This post is my way of making my own current beliefs explicit, and possibly starting a conversation with you about your own beliefs.

Leadership is not a position on an organization chart, although it can be. It is “a way of being”, which means that leaders can be found anywhere in our organizations and communities. Most of us lead and most of us follow at different times ?€“ and the flow between leadership and followership is a dance that is seamless at its best.

Deciding to lead should be, when possible, a conscious choice. There are leaders who are “naturals” at it, and have not been conscious of their choice to lead. For the majority, however, leading is an intentional act that requires constant reflection, action, learning, and adjustment to be the best.

Healthy relationships built on mutual respect are the foundation for great leadership. When respect is present, strong relationships can be built. This process builds followership, a necessary ingredient for taking action to achieve goals.

Leaders who focus on the needs of others, assisting them to develop and grow, will reap more benefits than they can possibly imagine. Strong followers who are appreciative of the efforts to provide opportunities to get better at what they do are a great outcome of this learning.

Leadership is contnually learned as new opportunities and situations present themselves. If this weren’t true, there is no hope.

Great leadership is a journey. It is personal and begins within the individual and radiates outward to others. It is not easy, but it can be extremely gratifying.

Great leaders can be a catalyst for possibility when all doors appear closed. They know that even in the toughest situations, there is always a solution. But they also know that they may not have the best solution, so they are willing to invite participation from others to find the answers.

Great leaders bring clarity of purpose to their organizations and communities. They know that their followers are struggling to find meaning in the work they do; the best leaders are able to catalyze the discovery of that meaning.

Great leaders are human. Even the best make mistakes but they apologize, accept forgiveness, learn from their errors, and move on. We need more leaders who are in touch with their humanity in this way.

Leadership is a privilege and a responsibility. It is the wise leader who understands the impact they have in the smallest of actions. Great leaders treat this impact with great reverence.

What do you agree or disagree with in this list? What woul you add about your beliefs?

Warning: part of this post may bring up unpleasant thoughts of gore. Ignore them, and enjoy the warm fuzzy feelings you get as you remember some of the best relationships you`ve formed in times of adversity at work.

Do you need to wait to block off time for an “off site” or a “team lunch” to spend time developing relationships with your team? Don`t wait!

When I first stepped out of college with a degree in biology, I was hired by a large pharmaceutical company to do research in a laboratory. This laboratory was screening for anti-atherosclerosis drugs in quail (this bird mimics human atherosclerosis development closely). However, I was brought in to do solo research to screen for anti-obesity drugs in laboratory rats. Much of the time I worked on my own.

Work Can be Lonely

I am an extrovert who gets her energy through interaction with people (not rats). Although I shared an office with the Ph.D. who ran the laboratory, he was an introvert who preferred to stick to himself most of the time. The solo work left me hungry for human contact.

Little did I know that I would enjoy the human contact on Quail Tuesdays as much as I did. Our laboratory and the one next door would gather first thing that morning to collect blood and dissect arteries in quail (yes, birds!) who had been on a high-cholesterol diet and dosed with drugs that might eventually combat atherosclerosis in humans. This was unpleasant work at best for a biologist who is also an animal lover. I may have been just as happy to sit Tuesdays out.

However, the unpleasant activity of dissecting quail provided the chance to sit around a table with the other biologists and have casual conversations. The work was routine, but requiring many hands to get it done, so we were able to talk and learn about each other while we worked.

The science of our work was also a topic, making Quail Tuesdays a team learning activity. I learned to love Quail Day and couldn`t wait to get to work on Tuesdays for the opportunity to learn about my colleagues as well as to learn what they knew about the science of atherosclerosis!

Developing Relationships Helps with the Work

If it weren`t for Quail Tuesdays, I wouldn`t have known the people I was working side by side on a personal level. Those days also provided us with an important connection to the work and what it could eventually mean to thousands if we discovered THE drug (we didn`t, but it was a great dream that we often discussed).

Intuitively, I knew that Quail Tuesdays were important to the overall productivity of our laboratory. Interpersonal connections are similarly important to any organization`s productivity.

In these times when your staff may be working harder and longer, good relationships and connections can make the work easier. Conversations are a part of what makes work life enjoyable and productive. What are you doing to foster great relationships in your workplace? What could you be doing that could be done together as a team, allowing time for the relationships to develop?

I love leaders who see the possibility and potential in the people they lead. Yet the methods many use to “change” those employees who aren’t performing up to their potential are ineffective:

“I wish you would……(fill in the blank)”

“I don’t like the way you……(fill in the blank)”

“I want you to change…….(fill in the blank)”

We spin our wheels when we apply the illusion of control to the people we lead. We think we can make them into something more to our liking, more like us, more like …….whatever.

If there is one thing that we cannot control, it’s the people we lead. We might be able to (to some extent) control our schedules, control our work, control other parts of our leadership better – but people are wonderfully complex, diverse and unpredictable. So stop trying to control them, and put your efforts into motivating and influencing them by changing yourself:

• Include them in your decisions and thinking. They want that. Help them to be a part of the solution. If you have a team that is interested in reaching consensus, read this practical post at Great Leadership on “How to Maximize Collaboration and Reach Consensus in Under One Hour”
• Listen to them more than you can ever imagine you would. Highly underrated as a skill set for leaders and more difficult than you think, listening (I mean really listening, not pretend listening) is one of the least used skills by leaders. Or anyone.
• Respect them and if you can’t, find somewhere, anywhere else that their talent can be used. If you can’t respect those you lead, either you don’t deserve to be a leader or they don’t deserve to be a follower.
• Appreciate them out loud when they are on the right track. Appreciating them is great, but you get to reinforce the behaviors you want when you genuinely let them know what they are doing right.

Stop spinning your wheels and change YOURSELF by changing how you behave toward others. Including, listening, respecting, and appreciating are infectious. Try these instead of trying to change others, and who knows what might be possible?

• the employee who just doesn’t “fit in”
• the areas of disagreement with other departments
• the customers who just can’t understand the products or services

Mr. Isaac states that we must look for coherence first – before we make judgments. This is the art of appreciating the whole, that helps us to learn to inquire into what is, not to constantly produce what we think should be. This kind of wholistic thinking also helps us to see that all of these individuals are a part of our world, and the way they see things makes sense for them – and possibly us as well.

This kind wholistic thinking has the potential to change a divisive situation into curiousity. When a leader follows their curiousity by using inquiry, the possibiliy of creating solutions that are bigger, better, and more collaborative.

When you feel those judgments (“violent thoughts”) bubbling up, be curious:

• How are these “different” ideas part of a larger whole?
• How might these ideas serve? What benefit can be derived for my leadership and our organization?

With deliberation and discipline, turning “violent” thoughts into inquiry as a way of opening up to differences can be the beginning of the innovation that most organizations seek today.

I am delighted but not surprised at today’s guest post written by Rick Chambers; it reflects what I know about him well. Rick has been a long-time colleague and friend, and one of the most insightful and generous people on the planet. You will see his fine character shining right through his writing. He’s also a humble leader and will, no doubt, be embarassed at my saying these (true) things about him.

Rick is a director of Worldwide Communications for a Fortune 500 who has worked in the public relations field for more than 22 years. An award winning journalist, he is also a published author and an award-winning short-story writer. Rick is a native of Kalamazoo, Michigan. You can find out more about him on his LinkedIn profile.

Orville was a generous, engaging man, quick with a smile, a firm handshake and a boisterous greeting. I rarely saw him in casual attire and never in a foul mood.

Knowing all this made it much tougher to see him on his deathbed.

On one of my last visits with Orville, I took my teenage son along. As you might imagine, forcing him to give up an hour of video games for an hour with a dying old man did not earn me “Dad of the Year” honors. But along he went, surly attitude and all.

The welcome we received at Orville`s bedside was unexpected. Rather than a weak wave and a gasped “hello,” he nearly came out of his bed. His voice was as strong as ever, his smile just as bright. Within minutes, he had my son sitting on the edge of the bed, hand on his arm, listening to the boy`s hopes and dreams and encouraging their pursuit.

On the drive home, the surliness was gone. My son spoke with enthusiasm about the visit. I sensed, as dads sometimes do, a teaching moment.

“What you did tonight,” I said, “meant the world to a man whose life is ending. And what did it cost you? Nothing.”

I believe that experience offers insight for leaders.

Leadership is many things. It`s visionary. It`s administrative. It`s intellectual. It`s determined. It`s steady-minded. It`s focused. It`s performance-oriented. And on and on.

But what some leaders don`t think about often enough are elements like compassion. And sacrifice. And charity?€”not in the modern sense, as in writing a check to your local nonprofit, but in its ancient meaning, that of embracing the value of others and basing your life and behavior on it. (The word for “love” in I Corinthians 13, that favored biblical passage at weddings, was originally rendered as “charity.”) In short, it`s about living and behaving with the needs of others lifted above your own.

When a colleague interrupts my work to share a personal concern, what does it cost me to stop and listen? When a co-worker faces job loss, what does it cost me to sympathize and encourage her? When someone down the hall makes a big mistake, what does it cost me to gently point it out, suggest an alternative and accept an honest apology? What does it cost me to treat others as I want to be treated, even in the face of my own flaws and failings?

Nothing.

So I encourage you, as leaders, to do nothing, too. Watch the profound difference it makes in the lives of others?€”and in yours.

I had some fun thinking about what the job description for a “thriving leader” might look like after reading the wonderful guest post on Dan McCarthy’s blog about Getting Beyond Survive to Thrive at Work. I took some liberties and added many of my own thoughts. What do you think? What would you add?

Job Title: Thriving Leader

Job Purpose: Lead others in the organization in such a way as to release the potential they may be holding back (even if they are unaware that they are doing so).

Duties:

• Must know yourself: what`s important to you? Your values, your purpose, your ways of being a leader.
• Must be able to express the above to your followers.
• Must be able to let go of having all of the answers. Understand that your followers` knowledge is important.
• Next, get to know your followers personally. “Followers” are not strictly limited to your employees, but inclusive of your manager, your peers, your customers, your vendors, etc.
• Understand what others need from you and then give it when you can. Follow through on the commitments you make.
• Become strategic about your relationships: who can help you? What can you give back?
• Communicate more than you think you need to, and in more ways than you thought possible.
• Be visionary. Communicate the vision. Then do it again and again.
• Listen to others to the point of disappearing.
• Become curious, and ask powerful questions “What do you need from me to get the job done?” “What are the barriers to achieving your full potential”?
• Keep working at all of the above. Don`t stop when the going gets tough or stress is high; in fact, you must step up your efforts in these times.
• Meet the organizational goals for your position. You already know what they are, and by using the above competencies, go above and beyond them.

Primary Objectives:

• Genuinely create and foster relationships within the workforce that are positive, healthy, focused on using the talents of each and every individual in the organization in order to inspire, influence and motivate all to meet business objectives.
• Intentionally assure your own self-development and the development of every individual around you.
• Assure that the greater good is served by serving those around you.

Empathy is an important trait for leaders to have, important enough that it is one of the competencies on the LEA 360, the survey that I use. It was one of the things that drew me to becoming certified in this survey. Empathy is dismissed in the work world, but is key for leaders be able to have and express. In fact, a recent Towers Perrin survey of 90,000 worldwide employees featured and summarized by my friend Steve Roesler, showed that the #1 thing that employees want at work is to believe that senior managerment cares about them.

Leaders may find empathy to be one of the most difficult competencies to increase, and I have had my share of clients who could use a little (or more) dose of empathy. These leaders are often the ones who have hit a brick wall with their leadership – they know how to get the work done, but they are pushing too hard uphill. Often technically brilliant, some of them have been able to thrive by being visionary, goal oriented, loyal, and driven. But at some point in their career,a lack of empathy (and often other interpersonal skills) catches up to them.

I like what the resource guide for the LEA 360 has to say about some of the ways to increase empathy:

• Draw on your own past experiences. We all use empathy in different parts of our life. Learning to transfer this empathy to your work setting may help.
• Make it personal. Put yourself in other’s shoes and show an active – and real – concern, while rising above your private agenda and entering their world.
• Volunteer. Find an activity where you can volunteer to work with those in need.
• Show up and chat with the people in your organization – especially if you are a senior leader, and they are several levels below your level in the organization.
• Understand the pressure and emotional risks people in your organization face every day (i.e., salespeople getting the door slammed in their faces). Provide them with support.
• Ask people how they want to be supported.

And one of my own: some of my clients have found that deep listening (the “Level III” kind: listening beyond the words, intuiting, observing body language and emotions) can really help to increase understanding and empathy.

What has worked for you?

Several times a year, I facilitate a workshop called “Coaching for Breakthrough Performance” to leaders in government and private organizations. This workshop provides participants with a set of tools to coach their employees to release their “latent potential” (even the best are holding back unknowingly). It is highly experiential, with much of the day spent practicing the skills with fellow classmates, so participants have a real taste of how powerful and difficult it can be to really coach others.

After conducting this workshop over the years for hundreds of leaders, I`ve realized that not everyone will be a believer that coaching will work for them. There are a few in every class who challenge the learning (and the facilitator, which I actually enjoy). The reasons that they don`t believe coaching will work for them are pretty consistent.

The top four excuses for not being a coaching leader, and my responses:

• Coaching takes too much time: I agree that coaching your employees takes more time than other communication tools (giving orders or criticisms), so save coaching for your better performers. Coaching those who are, or should be, on a performance warning will only work if these underperformers realize that THEY are RESPONSIBLE for their own improvement. Your better performers will lap up the attention you give them, and will flourish under your skilled coaching. Yes, it takes time. It will pay off, and you must be patient.
• My employees are just “putting in their time”: What is your responsibility, as a leader, to do something here? You are being paid to find ways to help your employees do more than “put in their time” and coaching them to discover and use their strengths is one way to do that. If that doesn`t work, do you really want employees in your organization who are taking up space?
• My employees expect me to tell them what to do and how to do it: Really. (Warning: heavy sarcasm here). Do you enjoy being “told what to do and how to do it”? (The answer is always “no”).What makes you think they do? Your shoulders must get really heavy, with all that knowledge to impart. Coaching will help your employees “learn how to learn” in order to free up your time to do the leading you should be doing (and maybe get that promotion you have your eye on).
• Coaching won`t work in our culture: If you haven`t tried it, how do you know? Even if your organization`s culture is one of heavy top-down directives, could there be situations where it may release that performance that your better employees are holding back? What have you got to lose by trying it? (Then I might remind them that their management is paying me to teach them these skills for a reason. Could it be that their management wants to change the current culture by using coaching as one of the tools to do so?).

As we become a more global economy, if we can`t find ways to release the latent potential of our employees, we lose. Your good employees will head off into the sunsets of other organizations where they can use their smarts and skills to really make a difference. Why not keep those smart, skilled employees right where they are by coaching them? When have you avoided doing something before when it became too hard?

In all of it’s glory, I’ve provided an example of a professional action plan that illustrates the previous three posts:

• Ghoul or Goal, the Key to Your Action Plan
• Your Professional Development Action Plan: Planning the Action Steps
• Deciding on Measures and Target Dates for your Professional Action Plan

I apologize for the look of this action plan as my skills with WordPress are still evolving, and cutting and pasting tables wasn’t working too well for me.

There is one additional column that I like to use in my action plans that I couldn’t fit into the tables below due to width of this post. This column is called “Potential Business Impact”, and is used to help define the business impact if each goal is achieved or if it is not achieved. Although this is not typical of most action plans, it does help to connect the goals of the individual to the goals of the organization.

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT ACTION PLAN

Name: ___________________________________________

Position:_________________________________________

Briefly summarize the 360/other strength and gap feedback you’ve received:

Identify 1-3 Competencies you will work on (from your 360?° results):

Specific Actions: What action steps can you take to achieve your goals?

1. Create a delegation philosophy to choose what elements are delegate “able”
2. Choose 1-2 objectives with quarterly targets for top 2 management potentials
3. Find two opportunities to promote my successes and help my area
4. Work with a specific Business Group on an initiative to help assist my “selling up” goals

I hope that the previous posts on setting goals and planning the action steps helped you to create two foundational pieces for your written professional development plan, or to coach someone else in creating their plan.

Many great professional development plans get lost and forgotten in the minutia of everyday work life. It helps to have measures (“metrics” is another term, but may be too exact to be useful in this context) and target dates to achieve the actions ?€“ otherwise, what use is planning?

Measures

Some of the actions in a professional development plan can have pretty “hard” metrics or measures; but usually, they will be “soft”. If an individual who is being coached is responsible for an organization that can measure increase in sales (for instance), it may well be that using this as a measurement of effectiveness and success would make sense. However, if you consider the kinds of behavioral goals listed in the post on goal setting, you will see that, given the goal examples listed, it would be difficult in most cases to come up with hard numbers to measure. I`m fine with that, and I find that most of the people and organizations I work in understand this.

The most common ways of “measuring” a behavioral change for an individual that I use:

• Oral feedback obtained from those who work with/for the individual can be obtained and consolidated once the goal is acheived. This can be done by asking targeted questions based on the goals and actions of the individual.
• A 360 can be re-administered and the results compared to the original 360 if at least nine months to a full year has passed since the original 360.
• The effects of the behavioral change can be observed in the individual or in the individual`s team by asking some questions such as: is this individual doing what they said they`d do? Is the team that reports to the individual more effective? Are the employees more engaged and responsive? Are deadlines being met that weren`t met previously?

Target Dates

Each action needs a target date. If new behaviors are being “tried on”, the target date might be a range from the date the behavior is first tried to the final date that it becomes a habit. I find it surprising that my clients can articulate well when they think a new way of communicating or interacting becomes “habit”. They seem to know, intrinsically, when they no longer have to think so hard about doing something differently.

I encourage you, and those you coach, to make the target dates reasonable, yet challenging. High achievers enjoy the challenge of a target date that is a bit of a stretch.

Next: I`ll do my best to defy the will of WordPress technology and upload an example of an action plan (if any of my clients are reading this, not to worry ?€“ it won`t be yours!). Wish me luck.