Archive for April, 2010

Every Thursday, we provide you with a thoughtful way to coach yourself – something all leaders need to do. So take five – enjoy the inspirational quotes or and reflect on the questions that follow. 

“The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he’s always doing both.” James A. Michener

• What is your personal definition of the art of living?
• What is your vision of excellence?
• How will you pursue excellence?
• Where will you start? What small first step can you take?

The leaders I speak with often feel overwhelmed with a new challenge – whether it’s personal or professional. They are working long hours and may feel as though are neglecting important things already. One more thing to do just feels overwhelming. “No time”, they say. Sometimes the very thing they have “no time” for is the thing that will make a profound difference in their life.

If time is getting in your way of doing something, then you have to consider that it may not be a priority. Let’s assume that this new challenge is a priority; it’s important to you. What if you could chunk up that new challenge that feels like “one more thing”, even though it’s something you really know is important? Taking one small step could be the beginning of magic that will allow you to step into that challenge that may just make a big difference for you.

The first step leads to more

Taking that first small step often propels us forward. Like a child starting to walk – who doesn’t stop after taking its first steps. That child goes even further the next time. In favor of walking, the child will eventually say “no” to crawling. Walking takes precedence. Likewise, that first step you take will help you to understand that we can find time to fit this challenge into our life, even if it means saying “no” to other things.

All of a sudden that new challenge doesn’t feel so big, so overwhelming. Some real life examples of new challenges my clients are working on and how they are chunking them up:

Organizing: Many clients want to start their day with a clear idea of objectives for that day. How about coming into work ten minutes early and (first thing) making a list of that day’s most important “to do’s” before the phone starts ringing? For many, this simple habit actually saves a lot of time in their day by placing focus on the daily objectives and not allowing other things to waste their time.

Exercise: Many leaders are realizing the importance of exercise to their vitality and effectiveness. Yet many of are overwhelmed and blocked by the amount of time it takes to exercise. So we don’t do anything. What if you could start by exercising for a few minutes twice a week? Or, walk your dog for ten minutes. Vacuum the floors briskly for twenty minutes. Go to the gym and use the treadmill for 15 minutes. That’s a start. After each exercise period, reflect on how (much better) you feel. Eventually you may be motivated to increase the time you spend exercising.

Meditation: Some of my clients have expressed interest in meditation and the benefits it can provide in their daily lives. When they ask about how long I meditate, I tell them twenty minutes twice daily. And then they say, “I don’t have time for THAT!”. No problem. Chunk it up. How about starting with five minutes twice a day, or ten minutes once a day? If you can stick with it for awhile, you may realize the benefits and decide to increase your time with it.

“Chunking up” the big things makes them seem less overwhelming. Taking action, one small step at a time, helps us to see the benefits of that action. When that new, important challenge comes along, ask yourself: what’s the first small step I can take?

One of the hallmarks of a great leader is their ability to truly “see” viewpoints other than their own. They may not agree with these viewpoints, but they can learn to understand them. Learning to understand is the first step toward resolution and reconciliation.

It’s unfortunate that many of us allow someone else’s viewpoint (different from our own) to prevent a productive relationship that can ultimately benefit our organization or community. From the beginning of the realization that someone thinks differently, decides differently or is different, we shut out their ideas. We may, avoid, ignore or openly (and loudly) oppose them. Either way, this does great damage to our ability to lead well. The crevasse between our way and their way will just get wider.

Who are you avoiding or opposing?

Who might you be avoiding or openly opposing at work? This could be an employee, peer, customer, or  your manager. It could be an entire division or business unit. Take a second to think about where the opposing viewpoints are in your organization; most of us have someone or something in our organization or community that we have avoided or verbally opposed without resolution.

Before things become completely and irreparably broken in this non-relationship, consider what it might be like if the relationship was as it should be – healthy and mutually beneficial for the greater good of your organization, your community, yourself and the those you don’t see eye to eye with.

Then schedule a conversation with the opposition.

What are your intentions?

Make sure the conversation, on your part, is intentional. To be intentional in the conversation doesn’t mean that you will control the outcome; it means that you set your intention for how you will show up in that conversation. This is not about changing the other person’s viewpoint or behavior (remember, you can’t change others). However, it will be about what you will accomplish in terms of understanding their side and possibly  finding some common ground.

Here’s a start on what your intentions might be:

To set ego and judgments aside: I will have a better chance of understanding the viewpoint of the other person if I set my own ego and judgment aside. When I am not striving to achieve an outcome that works only for me (ego) and I avoid judging the worth of the other’s beliefs, I’ve created a space for a true melding of our minds.

Be curious: I will be curious about the opinions of the other person in this conversation. This gives them permission to be open and explain their viewpoint; it also allows me to discover where we might agree. I will ask open ended questions that help us to explore viewpoints and keep the conversation engaging and creative.

Listen: I will go beyond just hearing the words. I will turn off my mind-chatter and listen deeply to what the other has to say. This kind of listening brings me a step beyond trying to figure out what I need to say next (in an effort to get my own point across).

Seek common ground: I will seek to find points of agreement. When I find them (and I will), I will acknowledge (out loud) that we agree on these points. I will look within this common ground for understanding as well as for possible collaboration.

Taking the time to reflect and write out your intentions is essential.

Setting your intentions for seeing another’s viewpoint is the beginning of healing in the relationship and is the right step for your organization too. What intentions will you set for that upcoming tough conversation?

Every Thursday, we provide you with a thoughtful way to coach yourself – something all leaders need to do. So take five – enjoy the inspirational quotes or and reflect on the questions that follow. 

“If you are a leader – of a company, a department, a division, or any group of individuals- you will leave a leadership legacy. It won’t be a record of how you behaved or a report card of your company’s performance (although that is how it might be summed up by the press). Instead, your legacy will be revealed in how your colleagues, employees, and others think and behave as a result of the time they spent working with you.”  Robert M. Galford and Regina Fazio Maruca, in Your Leadership Legacy

• Describe the legacy you wish to leave in six words. What is it? Commit it to memory.
• How do you want others to think and behave as a result of your legacy?
• What can you do today to begin acting on your legacy?
• What can you do tomorrow? Next week? Next year?

I was quite young in my career and my life when I discovered that our CEO was a special human being. At the time, I was working as an assistant to the Vice President of Discovery Research when his manager asked me if I would plan a trip for several VP’s and the company CEO to take our private corporate plane into the USSR for a meeting with several individuals and groups there, up to and including some high level Soviet government officials.

The Cold War between the U.S. and the USSR was thawing and the USSR was starting to break up. The Soviets continued to be wary of outsiders, particularly Americans. But they were open to considering mutual business interests; our company CEO saw an opportunity to create some alliances. I had no idea what I was getting into when planning this trip, and felt a lot of pressure for a successful outcome.

I worked through an intermediary to the USSR that would slice through Soviet red tape and allow only the second-ever private jet into the USSR (after Armand Hammer’s) since the changes in the country started taking place. Complicating the trip was the fact that our company’s leadership had several meetings to schedule once they arrived, so would want to be able to travel from place to place within the USSR via the corporate jet and the Soviet rail system (I learned later that this was a first).

Planning was painful

Planning this trip was a six-month project because at that time, the bureaucracy of the Soviet Union was beyond compare and the USSR was beginning to unravel. Every time I thought we moved ahead on this a little, something came along to knock the timing of the trip back again.

Close to the scheduled date for takeoff, some of the paperwork to allow the entry of the pilots (who were company employees) had been delayed. Even though we had a date for the flight, the Soviet bureaucrats told us not to worry, the paperwork would come through before takeoff.

The morning that our executives were scheduled to fly, the paperwork for the pilots was still not cleared.  So off I went to get the CEO out of a meeting to tell him the bad news (you can imagine how much I wanted to do that!). The corporate executives were cleared for entry into the USSR, but the pilots would have to remain behind at the Moscow airport for the entire ten days of the trip.

Care for “The Team”

Upon learning this news, the CEO said to me, “Those damn Russians!” (I still chuckle about his comment today) and said he wouldn’t leave the pilots behind for ten days to languish at the airport. He considered them part of the team. So, I started the trip planning all over again (another six months!). The second time around was a charm and the trip went off without a hitch.

I’ll remember this CEO as a person who thought it was important to treat the pilots as part of the “team”. Several years later, I flew on the corporate jet with the CEO through a harrowing thunderstorm. I observed firsthand the respect he extended to the pilots as we bounced and dipped, and his concern over my own nausea.

For what it’s worth, the CEO enjoyed a long career at our company, and passed away a few years later while still officially in the CEO position. He was so beloved that there were very few employees who didn’t mourn openly the day his death from cancer was announced.

Me too.

Last night my husband and I enjoyed watching the first episode of Mad Men. For those of you who don’t know, this series is set in the highly competitive world of Madison Avenue advertising in the early 60’s – run primarily by men (thus the title – “Mad” for Madison, and “Men” for….well, Men).

The lead character is Don Draper, in a predicament about a major cigarette account. He’s having a tough time finding a creative way to advertise smoking when the Attorney General has come out with an announcement that cigarettes are responsible for a fatal disease (called lung cancer). How do you advertise cigarettes and get the customer interested in purchasing something that can kill you? Don was stuck (but got lucky with an idea at the spur of the moment as the client was angrily walking out the door of the ad agency).

We American business leaders are a proud and independent people; we expect to be able to figure stuff out for ourselves. When we’re stuck, we believe in pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, dusting ourselves off, and carrying on.

Sometimes though, a leader really gets stuck, and doesn’t see a way out. We all occasionally get into a spot where the path to unstuck-ness eludes us. We just can’t see that first step that is necessary to move beyond whatever barriers are in our way (p.s., sometimes the barrier is ourselves!). And we’re often too proud to ask for help.

There are several ways to find insight into that first step. Once you are willing to admit that the answers aren’t coming to you without help, consider the following:

Ask a “stakeholder”: who can you request some assistance from? Consider your mentor, your manager, your peer, your employee, your friend or your coach. How about a customer? Depending on the nature of your stuck-ness, one or more of these might be appropriate.

Find a support organization within your company: Human resources, the strategic planning department, organizational development, and IT are a few of the possible resources that might help with specific issues.

Take a time out: When you aren’t under the immediate pressure of time, it often helps to let things simmer. A time out, up to an including a real vacation away from the office (sans Blackberry!)  can help many of us to come up with ideas that get us beyond stuck.

Every single one of these ideas requires us to admit that we don’t have all of the answers. All three of them require the assistance of others (even the third one requires others to fill in for us when we’re out of the office).

Many of us need the assistance of our own ongoing “board of directors” to help us think through things on a regular basis. I belong to two Mastermind groups – one with colleagues who do what I do, one with colleagues who do different things. They both serve a purpose, and I need them both to get unstuck at times.

So I’m curious. What’s worked for you to become unstuck?

Every Thursday, we provide you with a thoughtful way to coach yourself – something all leaders need to do. So take five – enjoy the inspirational quotes or and reflect on the questions that follow. 

“Most of us believe at some level that we must fix things or change people in order to make them reachable. Dialogue does not call for such behavior. Rather, it asks us to listen for an already existing wholeness, and to create a new kind of association in which we listen deeply to all the views that people may express. It asks that we create a quality of listening and attention that can include – but is larger than – any single view.”  ~William Isaacs, Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together

• What would you start if you could be the catalyst for wholeness in your organization? 
• Your followers are anxious to be heard. Are you listening?  
• What might be created if all views were included in your organization?

Biggby Coffee just celebrated its 15^th year in business and is the fastest growing coffee franchise in the Midwest. There are two Biggby cafés nearby my office, and I love going there – for the coffee and (more importantly), for the conversations the employees engage me (and all the customers)in. I can’t think of another retail restaurant where the interaction is so positive.

I met the Biggby CEO Bob Fish, aka “Biggby Bob” (@BiggbyBob) through Twitter recently when he “retweeted” (re-sent) a complaint he’d received from a customer. What this means is that his retweet had the potential to be viewed by a lot more people (including me) than it might have if Bob hadn’t re-sent it.

I was fascinated – why would he let more people know about a customer complaint? With what I already knew about how Biggby employees interacted with customers in the stores, I figured there must be a story that connected the “Biggby Way” and the success of the company. So I asked Bob if he would be willing to be interviewed for my blog. He agreed and this post is the result.

P.S. interestingly, the first thing Bob asked was about me and my business, even though our call was set up to interview him. Hmm….he caught me off guard (in a good way) and this added to my thought that he is a leader who models the behaviors he wants to be demonstrated in Biggby cafés.

What would I experience at Biggby Coffee that I wouldn’t experience at one of your competitor’s places?

When we opened in 1995, we wanted to make it more of a positive experience than the other café’s. We see coffee houses as the “fence we lean over” at a time when many of us don’t know the people who live next door. Even our coffee drink names take some of snobbery away from the way most people view  “coffee houses” – names like Caramel Marvel and Butter Bear have a sense of fun to them.

Our stores are highly socially engaged with customers and we invest in training our people about how to engage customers in conversations. We teach them the things that they can’t learn anywhere else, like the importance of maintaining eye contact and asking open ended questions.  

I noticed on Twitter that you retweeted a customer complaint so that even more people could see the complaint. Most CEO’s wouldn’t do that. What were you thinking?

I was thinking it was the right thing to do. Social media is without filters – if I just retweet the stuff that is complimentary, I’d get called out on it. If we fail for a customer in some way, it’s okay – it shows we’re human.

Relationships, whether on Twitter, through other social media sites, or in person, are paramount. And I’ve found that if you “get naked” and let your guard down, you can accomplish almost anything because it makes you believable and fallible like any human being.

What is your biggest challenge as the leader of Biggby Coffee?

My challenge has been learning how to herd chickens – my description of the difficulty of communicating in a way to get all franchises moving in the same direction. Since our franchises are all individually owned, this is a unique challenge. I’ve learned that communication is a huge thing, and that even when the message is consistent, recipients will hear it in their own ways. So it means that we have to be ever cognizant of how we frame the message and how it’s received.

Your blog chronicles your travels to all 100+ franchises. What are you learning on these visits?

Spending time in the stores allows me to get close to the customers. It’s like a focus group on steroids; when I am there in person, they tell me what they like and what they don’t like. It allows me to undo the “Ivory Tower Syndrome” and watch how The Biggby Way and our cultural values play out.

MJA note: Bob told me that “The Biggby Way” isn’t explicitly articulated but it always comes down to the experience of fun. The cultural values, communicated within the organization, are:

Be Happy

Have Fun

Make Friends

Love people

Drink Great Coffee

Doesn’t Biggby sound like a great place to visit? Oh, and the coffee is good, too!

I have a lengthy list of things in my head that leaders avoid doing; here are the top ten. I also hear plenty of excuses for not doing them. Time to remind you of what’s important. What’s your excuse for not doing these?

Developing: It’s is your responsibility to prepare your team members for their next step; it may be your job. And they won’t be ready. Who on your team needs to be stretched and how will you coach them?

Delegating: You’re running ragged because you are the only one who can do some things (or so you think). Meanwhile, your staff would love to be challenged. What can you delegate and challenge them with?

Giving: Your best employees want and need your feedback. Give it to them. What do they need to know?

Reflecting: This allows you to process what you need to do, what you are doing well, and what you need to change. Blowing through your day, crisis by crisis is no way to get better at what you do. When will you start?

Trusting: There are people that you are avoiding and working around because you don’t trust them. Have a dialog and lay it on the line and from the heart with these people. What do you need to say?

Building: To be your best at leading, you must look beyond your daily relationships and find ways to network with others whom you can learn from. Take a small step and start today. Who do you need to know better?

Recognizing: Stop and consider the good things that your employees are doing. Who needs to be recognized and thanked?

Celebrating: An act of omission, you forget that an essential part of your leadership is helping others to rejoice in their successes. What’s going well and how will you celebrate with them?

Balancing: You aren’t taking care of yourself as you should. You work long hours with lots of stress. Your physical, spiritual, and emotional health are neglected. What small thing can you begin to do to take care of yourself today?

Aligning: You are making money, but it may not be enough. Aligning your values and passion with your work are essential. Spend some time reflecting on what’s not aligned for you at work. What do you need to start or stop doing?

At least one of these has been tapping you on the shoulder to be remedied. The things we avoid drain our energy and make us less effective leaders. Choose one to work on, and take a small step toward resolution today!

Every Thursday, we provide you with a thoughtful way to coach yourself – something all leaders need to do. So take five – enjoy the inspirational quotes and reflect on the questions that follow.

“Power is of two kinds. One is obtained by the fear of punishment and the other by acts of love. Power based on love is a thousand times more effective and permanent then the one derived from fear of punishment.” ~ Ghandi

• When you think about leading with the power of love, what comes to mind?
• What acts of love are you extending to your followers now?
• What acts of love can you extend in the future?
• What small first step can you take to begin acts of love in your workplace?
• When will you start? Who can help?