Influence & Insight | December 2024

Leadership Story | It’s Never Too Late to Start Leading

A year ago, five senior executives completed an Academy Leadership Executive Leadership Course (then called the Advanced Leadership Course). Typically, company senior executives attending our courses have attended multiple leadership events throughout their careers. Not in this case. In fact, on the third day, the company President proclaimed:

“Jim, we’ve never had leadership training like this and it doesn’t exist in our industry.”

Wow. Candid and also instructive. After the course, 360 surveys were completed for all the executives concluding with one-hour Zoom session debriefings, finishing in early spring. A point of agreement from the 360 reviews was  the need for a stronger coaching culture, or put another way, an open and safe environment for genuine dialog. We’re still working on this.

We completed our third and final in-person team coaching session this past month, and it’s worth reviewing several achievements:

• Executive team reorganization
• Semi annual assessments, which will be increased to quarterly
• Internal assessments lead to goals generation
• Organizational core values drafted, circulated within company, and ready for internal publishing

This is just a partial list, and quite a bit of progress for a company previously devoid of leadership training. Next steps include leadership training for new management team members and likely 1:1 coaching with the company president. It’s inspiring working with already successful professionals who wish to successfully position their company for the next generation.

It’s Never Too Late to Start Leading

The Silo Effect | Book Review

“We live in a world where people are expected to streamline
their careers and become specialists.” (p. 253)

Gillian Tett offers an anthropological perspective, subtitled The PERIL of EXPERTISE and the PROMISE of BREAKING DOWN BARRIERS, of why people tend to form and trust institutional silos.

Start by reading the conclusion, Connecting the Dots (p. 245) first, as Tett captures the key application lessons (pp. 247-250) from her eight shared stories:

1. It pays to keep the boundaries of teams in big organizations flexible and fluid.
2. When employees are rewarded purely on the basis of how their group performs, and when groups are competing with each other internally, they are unlikely to collaborate.
3. For everybody to share more data, and modern computing technology now makes that much easier.
4. It pays if people can periodically try to reimagine the taxonomies they use to reorganize the world, or even experiment with alternatives.
5. It can also pay to use technology to challenge our silos. 

This review suggests that findings from Part I, Silos, are related to lessons learned in The Knowing-Doing Gap, Team of Teams, and Peak; and that findings from Part II, Silo Busters, align well with leadership lessons found in a typical Academy Leadership Excellence Course.

Silos | Managers

Central to Pfeffer and Sutton's The Knowing-Doing Gap is the treatment of knowledge as an active process which should be instantly and comprehensively shared, rather than a specialized, proprietary asset to hoard and hide. Tett shares the story of Sony's rapid growth after the success of the Walkman. Instead of working as a single team, however, each department started experimenting with its own ideas (p. 63). Even worse, was UBS during the financial crisis a generation ago. [UBS] had secretly accumulated $50 billion worth of U.S. subprime mortgage securities on its balance sheet, apparently without any of the top managers at UBS noticing (p. 83).

Stanley McChrystal's Team of Teams story is based on a simple, yet remarkably effective collaboration idea: Ensure that every individual team member know at least one member of every other team. Picture a spiderweb of connections informally sharing knowledge -- thereby crossing the Knowing-Doing-Gap. Territorial UBS managers were quite the opposite: These teams [of risk officers] did not talk to each other very much (p. 99). 3,000 people in charge of managing risk not communicating knowledge. What could possibly go wrong? [They] .... had failed to spot the risks building up in separate desks and departments, because different silos of gigantic institutions did not communicate with each other and nobody at the top could see the entire picture (p. 103).

Tett's historical anthropological research uncovered that psychologists have noted that our brains often operate with so-called mnemonics, or mental markers, which enable us to group our ideas and memories on certain topics to make them easy to remember (p. 29). Her observations mirror those of Anders Ericsson and Robert Poole in Peak: Rather than a supernatural use of short-term memory, the masters are recalling mental representations. These are preexisting patterns of information - facts, images, rules, relationships, and so on - that are held in long-term memory and that can be used to respond quickly and effectively in certain types of situations (p. 61). When we create organizations or groups based on narrow sets of knowledge, trouble may arise. The story of the credit crisis shows that even experts (or perhaps, especially experts) can collectively become very blind when they organize their surroundings into excessively rigid silos (p. 109).

Silo Busters | Leaders

Brett Goldstein's transition from OpenTable to the Chicago Police Department is a terrific example of crossing the Knowing-Doing Gap. Just as the different departments of a company such as Sony or UBS tended to hug data to themselves, so too the different sections of the police, FBI, or CIA tended to hoard information (p. 145). Goldstein quickly put his silicon valley experience to use. His revolutionary application of knowledge sharing collected all the reports about gang movements and put them on a centralized database, launching a technique now known as geospatial and temporal reporting (p. 154).

Facebook's secret to success, since its inception, has been to marry quantitative computing skills with soft analysis about humans' social ties and then turn this into a hard-nosed business plan (p. 169). This brings to mind  Matt Lieberman's seminal 2013 Harvard Business Review article Should Leaders Focus on Results, or People? discovering that we are perceived as great leaders 72% of the time when we focus on both results and people, rather than only 14% or 12%, respectively, when focusing on just one. Facebook's culture likewise embraces contemporary findings on motivation, such as Dan Pink's, highlighting autonomy, mastery, and purpose as the top three motivators in a knowledge-based environment. In addition to validating Lieberman, Toby Cosgrove's empathy epiphany at the Cleveland Clinic embraced revolutionary collaboration. Recall collaboration as the most preferred conflict leadership strategy discovered during our Leveraging the Power of Conflict workshop. It's a combination of high assertiveness (think surgeons) and high cooperation (think nurses).

Tett's BlueMountain Capital story (Chapter 8), is perhaps the most interesting. It's founder, Andrew Feldstein, was particularly interested in how people used classification systems to organize their world (p. 224). It's reminiscent of Boone Picken's betting on the price of oil companies showcased in Daniel Yergin's The Prize. BlueMountain was organized to financially take advantage of pricing distortions between sophisticated financial products. A most interesting application of the Knowing-Doing Gap. Learn the market distortions then act to financial advantage based on the findings.

Summary

By coupling innovation and leadership, anything is possible. Breaking down silos is a good start.

We can either be mastered by our mental and structural silos
or we can try to master them instead. (p. 254)

Coaching Story | Leading is Transformational

A recent Leadership Excellence Course (LEC) graduate, let’s call her Sophie (not her real name), described her experience (via course feedback) as transformational. Now that’s an interesting term. 

We recently completed the first of our three follow-on executive coaching sessions, and Sophie’s enthusiasm level was off the charts! 

A sampling of Sophies’s newly formed best practices:

Setting Leadership Priorities

Sophie first described now using “buckets of organizers.” This includes a weekly to do list, including top priorities, for both weekdays and weekends. This is great especially since Sophie’s kids have recently told her that she’s too stressed out. Her Time Management Matrix (remember Quadrants I-IV?) now includes journaling as a top quadrant II activity. This, in turn, is allowing an increased focus on people.

Creating a Motivational Environment

Sophie is now getting a lot more toward her team’s motivations, even for individuals that she’s known for a long time. For example, one person on the team didn’t seem to have enough to do, so she delegated a “bunch of stuff” to him and is now holding him to account for completion. In fact, Sophie estimated she’s already delegated 75% of prior activities - maybe her kids were right!

Coaching to Develop People

Sophie really took the key finding from Culture Shock to heart: Make sure your managers hold one meaningful conversation per week with each employee. Sophie has started, with a monthly cadence, and she proudly displayed a color-tabbed binder assigned for each person. She already has notes pages for each, along with action items.

Transformational indeed, this all happened in about three weeks. Sophie informed me she is now “Sophie 2.0.” Can’t wait for our next session in January.

Leading is Transformational.

Influence & Insight | November 2024

Leadership Story | Make Gratitude a Priority

Much of this month’s newsletter focuses on setting priorities and getting more important things done each day. In fact, the majority of coaching sessions this month centered on productivity.

However, for many of us this month, especially in the American Southeast, hurricane conditions dominated our thoughts and continue to do so as many of us are actively attempting repair of both lives and property.

I would like to propose gratitude as the operative word of the month. Throughout October, numerous emails, text messages and phone calls arrived from Hawaii, from California, from Europe, and from Australia all expressing support and concern. Simply sending a text to a colleague in a far away place letting them know our family was o.k. fostered gratitude, especially knowing that very nearby others were not nearly as fortunate.

Take a look at this LinkedIn post from Great Southwestern Construction:

I’m grateful that there are people and organizations who Eat That Frog everyday, who focus on the most important things, every day of the week, every week of the month, and every month of the year.

Let’s all make sure we Make Gratitude a Priority.

Eat That Frog | Book Review

“You can get control of your time and your life only by changing the
way you think, work, and deal with the ever-ending river of
responsibilities that flows over you each day.” (p. ix)

Brian Tracy captures well how we may approach the Setting Leadership Priorities workshop on day three of an Academy Leadership Excellence Course. During this particular seminar, participant self-evaluation scores often drop precipitously. A common remark during the workshop self-evaluation: “I’d have a higher score on this question, but there’s nothing I can do about this in my job.” Tracy challenges us to change the way we think, and that’s the same thing I inform audiences. Until we challenge what we can or cannot do about our environment, we are unlikely to improve what we do with our time. Here’s a phrase from my Personal Leadership Philosophy which is my way of saying Eat That Frog:

“Prioritize each day by grappling the biggest issue,
seeking the opportunities particularly within conflict and failure.”

Many of Tracy’s twenty-one rules and principles (nicely summarized on pages 105-108) for getting more done are covered in our priorities workshop:

This review highlights several of Tracy’s rules: ones that may described by The Zeigarnik Effect, ones that we should consider including in our Leadership Philosophy, leading to ultimately operating in a state of flow.

The Zeigarnik Effect

Rules 9, 18 and 21, Prepare Thoroughly Before You Begin, Slice and Dice the Task, and Single Handle Every Task, respectively, stress the importance of starting a task and focusing on a single task until completed. There’s a scientific basis why this is significant. About a hundred years ago the Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik postulated that people remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks. This tendency is called The Zeigarnik Effect. In contemporary terms, we might say that unfinished tasks are ”sticky.”

You’ve probably experienced this effect without realizing it. Recall the last time you went to sleep with an unfinished task still on your mind. Did you wake up with a solution? If you did, it may be The Zeigarnik Effect was in play. Consider combining delegation with this technique. Ask the assigned person to get started, perhaps creating a draft or outline document first. Once that’s done, The Zeigarnik effect is in play.

Personal Leadership Philosophy

Rules 4 and 14, Consider the Consequences and Motivate Yourself into Action, respectively, emphasize taking a long-term perspective and the importance of an optimistic mindset. Think about the most motivational leadership philosophy you’ve heard, or the most inspirational statements you’ve heard. They’re often a positive vision of the future and a leader’s commitment to create an environment where this vision will come true. Elon Musk comes to mind with the statement Making Humanity Multiplanetary posted on the SpaceX website.

Flow

Rule 20, Develop a Sense of Urgency, mentions the state of flow on page 98. This reference merits deeper exploration. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (MEE-hy CHEEK- sent-mə-HY-ee) is credited with the term. His book flow, is subtitled The Psychology of Optimal Experience. If we’re following Tracy’s rules, there’s a good chance we’re experiencing flow. Take a look at Csikszentmihalyi’s diagram:

Let’s look at this two ways: First, as our skills increase, we’ll eventually become bored without an increased challenge. Second, when initially adding a challenge, we’ll feel anxiety until our skills increase. This strongly suggests forming the habit of taking on new challenges as our skills increase and also to embrace the initial anxiety of a new challenge.

Tracy describes the state of flow as feeling elated and clear, feeling happiness and energized (p. 98). Flow is our evidence that we’re employing one or more of the 21 rules and principles well, and we’re also getting a lot more of important things done.

Summary

My leadership philosophy mentions gratitude as the result of using energy coherently, aligning it daily with purpose and strategy. Perhaps this reviewer’s definition of flow.

Optimism is the most important quality you can develop for personal
and professional success and happiness (p. 74).

Coaching Story | Eat That Frog

In the post-Covid environment, Time Management seems the most persistent challenge shared during our three-day Leadership Excellence Courses (LECs).  A recent course graduate mentioned in his LEC feedback that he would have liked to get into more of the specific “how’s” of time management and prioritization. So I mailed him a copy of Work Simply by Carson Tate, which is full of how-to’s depending on one’s individual productivity style. 

During our first follow-on course [via Zoom] coaching session, it was abundantly clear my client was making terrific progress. He held up a daily scorecard with six categories:

Work Objectives
Events
Today/Urgent
Non-Urgent/Important
Delegate Task Follow
Other/Schedule

It was obvious my client was actually using this scorecard because the first two items on his (Wed 16 Oct) Today/Urgent list were already crossed off. It was also nice to see four items listed in the Non Urgent/Important [opportunity] category. However, the delegate task follow section was empty, so that’s clearly an area to work on. Interestingly, the client mentioned the scorecard was like a food log, in that he was learning about himself. Findings included he’s a conflict avoider and that he needs to attack the things he’s avoiding. 

Attacking what we’re avoiding. Sure sounds like Eat That Frog.  The more I looked at Brian Tracy’s 21 rules & principles, the more I noticed alignment with Setting Leadership Priorities workshops, as well as more fundamental concepts such as The Zeigarnik Effect, having a written Leadership Philosophy, and Csikszentmihalyi’s seminal concept of flow. Tracy’s 21 rules & principles will surely aid my client who I expect will certainly benefit from Tracy’s book, or at least this month’s review

Eat That Frog.

Influence & Insight | October 2024

Leadership Story | Leaders See the Big Picture

In Unreasonable Hospitality Chapter 5, Will Guidara describes restaurant smarts and corporate smarts. Restaurant smarts entail autonomy and taking care of customers and corporate smarts entail keeping the business profitable. Guidara credits his father for stressing early learning of corporate smarts and eventually realizes both smarts are required for enduring success.

Here’s another way to think about this duality. Academy Leadership uses Guy Greco’s QuadRed 360 survey tool. The 360 defines twelve evaluation criteria, six leadership competencies and six leadership characteristics:

Leadership Competencies Leadership Characteristics

Vision and Strategy Leadership Image
Job Competence Develop a Following
Industry Knowledge Judgement/Decision-Making
Communication Skills Personal Ethics
Leading Change Coaching/mentoring
Execution Building Teams

Think of the leadership competencies as counterparts to Guidara’s corporate smarts and the leadership characteristics as counterparts to Guidara’s restaurant smarts. The power of Unreasonable Hospitality is Guidara’s realization that both restaurant smarts and corporate smarts, or leadership characteristics and leadership competencies are required. It’s rare when a leader embraces both, especially early in a career. Matthew Lieberman, in his seminal Should Leaders Focus on Results or on People? found that less than one percent of leaders actually focus on both. 

When reading Will Guidara’s Leadership Philosophy statements in the following book review, notice how many of his statements are leadership based, or restaurant smarts based, rather than competency or corporate based.

Leaders See the Big Picture.

Unreasonable Hospitality | Book Review

“The human desire to be taken care of never goes away.” (p. 4)

Will Guidara’s timely work, subtitled The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect, provokes many memories for this reviewer. Like the author, working in restaurants from age 14-17 formed many lasting memories. Guidara believes it’s time for every one of us to start being unreasonable about hospitality, and that this idea can result in a seismic shift if it extends beyond restaurants (p.4)  

“Endeavor leaving any place or situation better than when found,” a significant phrase from my Personal Leadership Philosophy, reflects my years working in restaurants. Guidara includes many similar lessons from his success in the hospitality industry. This review is a compilation of Guidara’s highlighted reflections, in essence, forming his leadership philosophy.

An Unreasonable Hospitality Leadership Philosophy

A leader’s responsibility is to identify the strengths of the people on their team, no matter how buried those strengths might be (p. 66). A leader’s role isn’t only to motivate and uplift; sometimes it’s to earn the trust of your team by being human with them (p. 164). You need to be as unreasonable in how you build your team as you are in how you build your product or experience (p. 83). If your business involves making people happy, then you can’t be good at it if you don’t care what people think (p. 90). It may not be possible to do everything perfectly, but it is possible to do many things perfectly (p. 120). Run toward what you want, as opposed to away from what you don’t want (p. 54).

As a leader, you have to use every single tool in your kit to build morale and keep it high (p. 152). Creativity is an active process, not a passive one (p. 224). Knowing less is an opportunity to do more (p. 78). Language is how you give intention to your intuition and how you share your vision with others (pp. 91-92). No aspect of your business should be off-limits to reevaluation (p. 143). You must be able to name for yourself why your work matters (p. 99). If you don’t create room for the people who work for you to feel seen and heard in a team setting, they’ll never be fully known by the people around them (p. 145).

The way you do one thing is the way you do everything (p. 72). Do less, and do it well (p. 158). Identify moments that recur in your business, and build a tool kit your team can deploy without too much effort (p. 210). Intention means every decision, from the most obviously significant to the seemingly mundane, matters (p. 22). Establish a regular rhythm for giving praise (p. 68). A daily thirty-minute meeting is where a collection of individuals becomes a team (p. 71). Luxury means just giving more; hospitality means being more thoughtful (p. 214). New traditions work only if they’re authentic – if they fill a real purpose and satisfy a real need (p. 146).

Let your energy impact the people you’re talking to, as opposed to the other way around (p. 28). If you take care of your managers and give them what they need to be successful, you put them in a better position to take care of their teams (p. 41). Make sure people who are trying and working hard have what they need to succeed (p. 75). Often, the perfect moment to give someone more responsibility is before they’re ready (p. 110). When that external affirmation comes, direct it to the party responsible (p. 151).

Just because a few regulars love an employee doesn’t mean they should be allowed to erode the foundation of everything you’re trying to build (p. 39). Don’t take credit for other people’s work (p. 150). Sarcasm is always the wrong medium for a serious communication (p. 140). If you’ve corrected a guest because you don’t want them to think you’ve made a mistake, you’ve made a much bigger mistake (p. 128).

Start with what you want to achieve, instead of limiting yourself to what’s realistic or sustainable (p. 238). Manage 95% of your business down to the penny; spend the last 5 percent “foolishly” (p. 46). The value of a gift isn’t about what went into giving it, but how the person receiving it feels (p. 213). You don’t want to have a hundred keys; you win when you end up with only one – the key to the front door (p. 117). Sometimes the best time to promote people is before they are ready (p. 233).

Nobody knows what they’re doing before they do it (p. 220). Don’t cannonball. Ease into the pool (p. 64). You’re going to mess up. When you do, apologize (p. 70). It isn’t the lavishness of the gift that counts, but its pricelessness (p. 209).

The first time someone comes to you with an idea, listen closely, because how you handle it will dictate how they choose to contribute to the future (p. 116). You’re not always going to agree with everything you hear, but you’ve got to start by listening (p. 64). But you cannot establish any standard of excellence without criticism, so a thoughtful approach to how you correct people must be a part of your culture, too (p. 137). Criticize the behavior, not the person. Praise in public; criticize in private. Praise with emotion, criticize without emotion (p. 68). Praise is affirmation, but criticism is investment (p. 140).

Summary

The final takeaway:

As you grow, you can’t lose the very thing
that gave you the opportunity to grow (p. 226).

Coaching Story | Coaches Prefer Solicited Feedback

During the Coaching to Develop People workshop in an Academy Leadership Excellence Course, we introduce seven Guidelines For Effective Feedback:

Solicited vs. Unsolicited
Specific vs. General
Descriptive vs. Evaluative
Timely vs. Delayed
Dosed vs. Bombarded
Verifiable vs. Open to Interpretation
Owned vs. Attributed

Let’s take a closer look at the first pair, as several clients from a recent Leadership Excellence Course, eager for their next promotion, expressed frustration with subordinates. Each one of these clients is highly intelligent and a very capable professional. A common pattern emerged during multiple follow-on coaching sessions, as though the clients were frustrated with how things were being done. When we’re focused primarily on how something is done, or worse, believe that there is only one way to do something, we’re very likely to evaluate others against a single (ours) approach to doing things. This tendency frequently leads to unsolicited feedback, or the impulse to correct and tell someone what they are doing is being done the wrong way (theirs) and they should be performing the task the right way (ours).

Consider a coaching approach, where we start by asking broad questions, such as “How did the meeting go?” or “How is our project coming along?” Notice these are questions exploring what is happening, rather than evaluating how something is being done. By active listening and asking supportive questions, such as “Let me know where you’d like to be doing better?” or “How can I best help you?” most subordinates will share where they may be struggling or simply wish to improve. The subordinate is then soliciting feedback, or asking for help. In addition, we’ve created an environment where it’s safe to ask. We may then stay in coaching mode and find the best means of support. The subordinate may require training, tools, support, or guidance with competing priorities.

When we focus on what is happening, and explore supportive options in a coaching role, increased engagement, innovation, and better results occur.

Coaches Prefer Solicited Feedback.

Influence & Insight | September 2024

Leadership Story | Leaders Leverage Good Planning

On day three of a Leadership Excellence Course, we conduct an exercise called the Numbers Game. In this game, each participant is challenged to circle at least 20 numbers, consecutively, within 30 seconds, on a single page consisting of 90 apparently randomly distributed numbers from 1-90. On the first attempt, very few participants reach the goal of 20, and overall average about 8-10. During a follow-on review participants eventually realize that the 90 numbers are arranged in quadrants, with number 1 in the top left quadrant, number 2 in the top right quadrant, number 3 in the bottom left quadrant and number 4 in the bottom right quadrant. The pattern repeats. Participants repeat the exercise, and the second time all or nearly all participants reach 20 or more (I’ve twice seen participants reach 37!).

The Numbers Game is meant to demonstrate the benefits of planning, and we mention that for every minute of planning, we usually get six times the return in results.

Apparently Canadian motivational speaker Brian Tracy agrees:

“Every minute you spend in planning saves ten minutes in execution.” 

In addition to good planning we offer the Academy Leadership Ten Commitments:

1. Make the important rather than the urgent your priority.
2. Plan one to two hours for each month and five to ten minutes each day.
3. Prioritize each day.
4. Schedule priorities.
5 Record all commitments.
6. Stay on time for all scheduled commitments.
7. Add coaching to your High Payoff Activities (HPAs).
8. Track your progress.
9. Close out each day.
10. Reflect daily in your Leader’s Journal.

Leaders Leverage Good Planning.

Create the Future | Book Review 

“Leaders create the future by the choices they make.” (p. 13)

Subtitled Powerful Decision-Making Tools for Your Company and Yourself, we may think of Rick Williams’ Create the Future (CTF) as a finely detailed instruction handbook akin to Jill Dyché’s treatment in The New IT. Either as a stand-alone how-to manual or for use by an outside facilitator, CTF’s intent is much like an Academy Leadership Focus & Alignment Workshop (FAW).

This review suggests the FAW may be improved by creating additional options, further evaluation of barriers to success, and employing the choosing the future decision-making process – CTF parts four, five and six, respectively. Similarly, the CTF model may be improved with stronger internal values alignment and use of a Personal Leadership Philosophy. Examples of improvements to each model follow.

Focus and Alignment Workshop (FAW) Improvements

Numerous organizations, including Project Management Institute (PMI) local chapters, increasingly focus on change management challenges. Williams introduces four distinct categories of change (p. 129):

1. Little change – mostly maintain current operations.
2. Modest changes/initiatives – easily achievable initiatives and changes.
3. Stretch initiatives – achievable initiatives/changes challenging the organization.
4. Moonshot initiatives – initiatives beyond what is clearly achievable with important benefits if successful. 

In a rapidly changing technical environment, we’re likely addressing the latter two change initiatives. Jim Collins’ terms for moonshot initiatives is Big Hairy Audacious Goals, or BHAGs. There’s a good chance a team of leaders may screen change initiatives eliminating those in the first two categories. 

Let’s suppose our team has selected a stretch or moonshot initiative. Williams offers a three-step process (pp. 149-150) we may think of as a Before Action Review. By asking these questions in advance:

What must go right?
What might go wrong?
What will happen? 

Improved strategy and risk reduction are more likely. The process is similar to the premortem project management strategy.

Williams offers a decision tree CTF example (p. 188) for a commercial organization:
Success: Sell the company.
Goal: Grow the company to a size where it can be sold.
Future Choices: Identify growth initiatives.
Barriers/Assumptions: Evaluate execution risks of the growth initiatives.
Decision: Select the preferred growth initiative with an acceptable level of risk.

We may think of this as an update, with a broader set of options, to the typical large company annual strategic planning exercise.

Lastly, Williams offers a method for profiling the “meaning” of leader team decisions (p. 195):

• What have we learned? Do we need to know more?
• Success, risk, and values.
• Team recommendations – Key assumptions and future choices.
• CTF Team Report – Decision book and decision package. 

It’s similar to Crucial Conversations (3rd edition) dialogue skill 9, Move to Action, whereby we separate dialogue from actual decision making. A good team decides in advance how to decide. Williams goes further capturing the entire exercise in a CTF Team Report.

Create the Future (CTF) Improvements 

A FAW may improve a CTF process, especially Part One, Prepare the Company and Yourself; and Part Three, Imagine Success.

Much of a FAW focuses on examination of organizational culture and values. Or put another way, a FAW emphasizes securing agreement on culture and values first, before attempting strategy. Many leaders include a future vision statement or answer the question “Where are you taking us?” at the beginning of a leadership philosophy.

Imagine a group of business leaders attempting a BHAG, or moonshot initiative without exploring whether or not their individual leadership principles are aligned first. This is probably why many incoming CEOs make fundamental staffing decisions immediately upon hire. Alignment first.

On the second day of a FAW, developing Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, is an iterative exercise, repeatedly employing a vision “roll back” process, ensuring alignment with the organization’s vision and values. For example, a key part of the Core Values Alignment workshop is creating normative behavioral statements, which answer the question “What does this value look like in action?” Once this is answered, we can better answer the question “What does success look like?”

Summary

Both processes are individually very good. A combination of Create the Future and Focus and Alignment Workshops creates a fantastic strategic planning exercise.

“Successful Leaders are both decisive and vulnerable. They are open
to hearing other points of view and are prepared to make decisions.” (p. 75)

Thank you, Rick Williams, for the signed copy of your book.

Coaching Story | Use a Journal to Deliberately Practice

Did you watch Nocola Olyslagers, the Australian who won the silver medal in the high jump? She was doing something different than the other athletes.

From daughter_glass on Reddit:

I was fascinated watching the Olympic track and field tonight seeing one of the high jump athletes, Nicola Olyslagers, running to write in her journal after each jump. Apparently I’m not the only one since I found an article about her and other athletes who journal on the Paris 2024 website. About her journaling she says:

“The notebook is my training diary and my sport psych and I came up with it to bring it into the competition just so I know which areas I did really well in and which areas I need to work on. Once I write it down, it’s like as soon as it is on a piece of paper you don’t have to put it into your mind and can just think about other things."

Like daughter_glass, I found watching Olyslagers mesmerizing. She’s not the first world class athlete we may observe using a journal. Alex Honnold, the rock climber who starred in the amazing documentary Free Solo, also uses a journal. When watching him traverse the Freerider route free solo, it’s easy to focus most on the climbing scenes. However, sitting in his VW bus, Honnold can be seen opening his journal, complete with detailed pictures hand drawn over ten years allowing him to reflect and visualize his climb in advance. 

Both Olyslagers and Honnold are demonstrating the concepts of purposeful practice and likely deliberate practice.

According to Anders Ericsson and Robert Poole in Peak, Purposeful Practice

• Has well-defined, specific goals
• Is focused
• Involves feedback
• Requires getting out of one's comfort zone

Think of the journal as part of the feedback process. 

So let's add two additional tools to purposeful practice, creating deliberate practice. According to Ericsson and Poole, it's different from other sorts of practice in two important ways: First, it requires a field that is already reasonably well developed and second; deliberate practice requires a teacher who can provide practice activities designed to help a student improve his or her performance. More specifically, deliberate practice:

• Develops skills that other people have already figured out how to do and for which effective training techniques have been established
• Takes place outside one's comfort zone and requires a student to constantly try things that are just beyond his or her abilities
• Involves well-defined, specific goals and often involves improving some aspect of the target performance
• Requires a person's full attention and conscious action
• Involves feedback and modifications of efforts in response to that feedback
• Both produces and depends on effective mental representations
• Nearly always involves building or modifying previously acquired skills by focusing on particular aspects of those skills and working to improve them specifically

Given the level of performance achieved, it’s pretty clear Olyslagers and Honnold have been deliberately practicing for years.

Use a journal to deliberately practice.

Influence & Insight | August 2024

Leadership Story | Leaders Embrace Failure

Ben Cohen (behind the WSJ paywall) recently wrote about a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, Sean Jacobsohn, who decided to build his own personal monument to failure.

https://www.wsj.com/business/entrepreneurship/failure-museum-success-silicon-valley-5c7e8f58?mod=hp_featst_pos4

According to Cohen, there are Bear Stearns mugs, several models of BlackBerry and pieces of Bernie Madoff’s stationery. There’s a WeWork thermos, unopened Champagne from Webvan’s initial public offering during the dot-com bubble and, of course, cans of New Coke. There is somehow cologne from both Harley-Davidson and Burger King. There are not one but two Pets.com sock puppets. And there is a Mattel doll, but it’s not Barbie or Ken—it’s Allan.

You see, Jacobsohn developed his own framework to understand why most startups go belly-up. He calls his theory the Six Forces of Failure: Bad product-market fit, shaky finances, ignoring customer feedback, tough competition, poor timing and people—pushover boards, ineffective management, founders who are frauds.

His main takeaway is that failure is an integral, too easily ignored element of success. Anyone who wants to get something right should be aware of the many ways that it could go really, really wrong.

Reading Cohen’s piece made me think about risk tolerance in business and how it may have changed over the years. As a junior Air Force officer in the late 1980s/early 1990s developing spacecraft electronics, the process of transitioning first working engineering samples to qualified flight systems consumed considerable resources, in part to reduce risk. Today we may contrast that approach,  perhaps still in place at Boeing, with Space X, an organization which seemingly embraces failure as necessary for breakthrough innovation.

Jacobsohn’s story, like Maxwell’s stories in Failing Forward, reinforce the power of not just accepting failure, but embracing it with a positive, growth mindset. 

It appears our investor class has figured this out too.

“VCs are not afraid to invest in entrepreneurs who have failed before,” Jacobsohn said.

Leaders Embrace Failure

Failing Forward | Book Review

“The difference between average people and achieving people is
their perception of and response to failure.” (p. 2)

John Maxwell shares numerous stories of successful people, but more importantly, the failures and setbacks each of them had to overcome first. This isn’t a new book, but it seems worth visiting now since so many participants in leadership courses are mentioning failure when composing their Personal Leadership Philosophy (PLP). Recall from our Academy Leadership Leader’s Compass workshop there are eight elements of a Personal Leadership Philosophy:

• What Does Leadership Mean to Me
• Personal Values
• Operating Principles
• Expectations
• Non-negotiables
• Priorities
• Personal Idiosyncrasies
• Commitment

This review selects stories (lessons) from each of the four sections of Failing Forward as examples for inclusion into one or more elements of a PLP, demonstrating how a leader may authentically communicate both positive perceptions and responses to failure.

Redefine Failure and Success

Maxwell offers several terrific sports analogies. He first mentions Tony Gwynn making the 5,113th out of his career 6 August 1999 (p. 11), then also mentions Gwinn achieved his 3,000th hit, cementing his future Hall of Fame entry. On opening day 1954 the Milwaukee Braves and Cincinnati Reds played each other (p. 29). Rookie Hank Aaron went 0 for 5 while Reds rookie Jim Greengrass hit four doubles. Who do we remember today as the legendary hitter?

Gwynn’s story suggests leaders should prioritize what actually matters while Aaron’s may inform a leader expectation for sustained performance over time.

On page 40, Maxwell highlights (with credit to Tom Peters) negative side effects resulting from fear of failure:

• Self-Pity
• Excuses
• Misused energy
• Hopelessness 

Any of these are excellent non-negotiables or negative idiosyncrasies worthy of PLP inclusion.

Change Your Mind

Maxwell declares contentment comes from having a positive attitude (p. 67). It means:

• expecting the best in everything – not the worst.
• remaining upbeat – even when you get beat up.
• seeing solutions in every problem – not problems in every solution.
• believing in yourself – even when others believe you have failed.
• holding on to hope – even when others say it’s hopeless. 

These are fantastic statements which may form our operating principles as well as answering what does leadership mean to me.

Maxwell has observed that our past leads to either breakthrough or breakdown (p. 78) and that the following five characteristics are signs that people haven’t gotten over their past difficulties:

1. Comparison
2. Rationalization
3. Isolation
4. Regret
5. Bitterness

These are excellent non-negotiable candidates or items to minimize via our operating principles or idiosyncrasies.

Maxwell fundamentally defines REAL success in part by turning your focus from yourself and adding value to others. You can do this by (p. 106):

1. Putting Others First in Your Thinking
2. Finding Out What Others Need
3. Meeting That Need with Excellence and Generosity 

Imagine a leadership philosophy targeting a service business. These are outstanding examples of personal values, operating principles, and expectations.

Embrace Failure As a Friend

Maxwell compares two contrasting points of view (pp. 127-128).

Motto of Don’t-Dare-Try-It People

I would rather try nothing great and succeed
than try something great and risk failure.

Motto of Don’t-Dare-Miss-It People

I would rather try something great and fail
than try nothing great and succeed.

A terrific, inspirational statement to start or finish a leadership philosophy.

Maxwell recommends learning from your failures and mistakes (pp. 141-145) by asking the following questions every time you face adversity:

1. What Caused the Failure: the Situation, Someone Else, or Self?
2. Was what happened Truly a Failure, or Did I Just Fall Short?
3. What Successes Are Contained in the Failure?
4. What Can I Learn from What Happened?
5. Am I Grateful for the Experience?
6. How Can I Turn This into a Success?
7. Who Can Help Me with This Issue?
8. Where Do I Go from Here?

If we replace the above instances of ‘I’ with ‘We,’ Maxwell’s approach is much like an After Action Review (AAR), or a commitment to feedback creating continuous improvement.

Increase Your Odds for Success

Maxwell shares a terrific Top Ten Ways People Get In Their Own Way (pp. 154-164):

1. Poor People Skills
2. A Negative Attitude
3. A Bad Fit
4. Lack of Focus
5. A Weak Commitment
6. An Unwillingness to Change
7. A Shortcut Mind-Set
8. Relying on Talent Alone
9. A Response to Poor Information
10. No Goals 

Consider the opposites for each of these ten, then including any of them as what leadership means to me, operating principles, or expectations. Or keep the original forms as non-negotiables.

Summary                                  

It’s all about attitude in the end.

“Your attitude toward failure determines your altitude after failure.” (p. 140)

Coaching Story | Leaders Walk the Talk

It’s incredibly gratifying when a leadership course participant genuinely challenges themself during and after the program. During a first follow-on coaching session, a very talented attendee mentioned that she shared her leadership philosophy with her team. Interestingly, upon hearing her philosophy the team told her “You’re harder on yourself than you should be.” Great feedback. This particular client has a very strong, left brain (dominant red & green) Energize2Lead (E2L) profile, so no surprise so far.

In fact, this is the client’s primary lesson from our Leadership Excellence Course:

My preferred Red/Green style can be dominant if not harnessed appropriately. I should ask more about my team's preferences and expectations, focusing on their motivations and energy. I have an opportunity to rethink how I prioritize my work and ask for what I need to conserve energy. I should also ask the team if they need the structure I think we do, versus assuming what I am feeling as "chaos" is universal. I should build boundaries around my time and priorities to focus on areas of impact. I should communicate for clarity and share my Leadership Philosophy with the team to set a baseline for what they can expect from me and what I expect from them. 

Fast forward to our second coaching session. The first item my client brought up was successfully taking a bit of time off. The interesting part was listening to her describe her very careful planning allowing actual relaxation. What did this client do? She assigned delegates prior to taking time off, which allowed her to actually enjoy her vacation. She mentioned it was “A freeing experience.” Listening to her, this may have been the first time an actual vacation was the priority.

Wonderful.

Recall during our Leader’s Compass workshop we share the characteristics of the worst leaders. Usually there’s a lively discussion about the Workaholic Boss. Not just that a supervisor may be hard charging, but that a boss may create an expectation we must all sacrifice everything for work.

Two coaching sessions and two good examples of living one’s leadership philosophy. First, genuine feedback from the team; second, demonstrating a healthy work/life balance.

Leaders Walk the Talk.

Influence & Insight | July 2024

Leadership Story | Leaders Channel Empathy

In our Academy Leadership courses, we often use the phrase “Leaders walk the talk,” another way of saying lead by example. It’s appropriate to highlight my visit to a Great Southwestern Construction (GSW) distribution crew earlier this month since Empathic Leadership is our reviewed book.

Arriving with a GSW provided protective equipment bag, it was already quite warm at the residential area work site. A routine distribution job: replace seven shorter electrical poles with longer (forty feet+) ones in accordance with safety regulations. Here’s two examples of Brandon Lark’s (GSW’s) empathic leadership in action:

Safety:

The equipment truck was anchored in place and electrically grounded. Everyone (including me) wore highly visible protective equipment. When I asked how long a job like this would take, I was told probably two days. There was no pressure to replace all seven poles in a single long day. An honest days work. Time enough for crew members to make it home safely in time for family. Terrific.

Empathy:

Each replaced pole distributed electricity to one or more individual homes, and in this case the utility customer was home during the job. The GSW crew could have elected to disconnect the electricity to the home at the beginning of the replacement job, allowing the home to rapidly heat in addition to leaving the family without internet or electricity. Recognizing this, the crew left as many wires electrically intact as possible during the job. Only toward the end of the job was the higher household voltage line disconnected, leaving the customer without electricity for minutes rather than an hour or more.

That’s empathic leadership in action. That’s walking the talk.

Leaders Channel Empathy.

Empathic Leadership | Book Review

“Every person you deal with – every single person – regardless of
the outcome, should feel respected by having interacted with you.” (p. 16)

Subtitled How to Build Trust and Drive Results may be thought of as a how-to guide for better negotiation skills, better listening skills, and ultimately a key guide to becoming a better leader. Although the book’s primary authors are Chris Voss, CEO of The Black Swan Group and Brandon Lark, President of Great Southwestern Construction, nineteen additional authors comprise a total of twenty-one chapters, or stories.

Voss’ influence threads through many of the chapters, particularly his method of teaching Tactical Empathy. Brandon Lark’s chapter, Empathy- Driven Leadership in Electrical Construction, showcases a holistic approach to empathy spanning from formative family values to application via safety and training in a high-risk profession. Accordingly, this review showcases Voss and Lark’s contributions.

Tactical Empathy

At the core, tactical empathy is another way to describe trust-building.

Voss describes the Black Swan Method as pairing tactical and empathy as a mechanism to show understanding and to create bonding. Recall in our Academy Leadership Leveraging the Power of Conflict workshop’s Conflict Leadership Strategies, that the superior method is Collaboration, both assertive and cooperative. Likewise, Tactical Empathy is a highly effective application of the two.

Let’s explore cooperation a bit more. Voss believes that Daniel Goleman’s definition of the three types of empathy: cognitive, emotional, and empathic concern (p. 13) are very close to the Black Swan Group definition. In this way, Tactical Empathy informs us to go deeper to understand rather than manipulate.

Voss historically mentions that Carl Rogers would say that empathy is entering the perspective of the other person without fear or judgement. Another way to say this is we should seek to understand others by listening or coaching rather than waiting to speak or evaluation. This concept is one of the key teachable points of view from our Feedback (words haver power) workshop.

Karrie Burns (Chapter 3) concludes:

Investing the time and effort to develop empathy within
your family may turn out to be the most valuable
and rewarding commitment you ever make. (p. 36)

Application | Personal Leadership Philosophy

Personal disclosure: I have known Brandon Lark since 2013 and consider him client, colleague, and friend. Brandon’s chapter 15 contains a section How I Got Here, describing his rural New Mexico childhood and the values instilled in him. Interestingly this description is how Brandon opens his Personal Leadership Philosophy. Two examples are the importance of earning an honest dollar and that one’s word should be stronger than any written contract. Those aren’t simply words, that’s how Brandon approaches both life and business.

Two additional leadership applications worth mentioning. Brandon is a champion of Knowledge-sharing. When we first met years ago, Great Southwestern Construction had a bifurcated employee distribution, largely seasoned veterans and relatively junior employees, often recent high school graduates. Brandon mentions that GSW wants [their] veterans to come alongside the rookies and guide them, much like Spring Training for a championship baseball team (p. 154).

The other application is placing Families First. This is far-reaching, including a holistic, everyday emphasis on safety. GSW goes further. It means having the empathy to get to know individuals, crews, and their families, and how project workloads may affect them. Brandon recalls just a generation ago

It was assumed you’d be married three times
and divorced three times. (p. 154)

GSW is now an industry pioneer, demonstrating that a purposeful, valuable career path is available without requiring a prior college degree, opening up a new set of opportunities for our youth.

Summary

Recall that our Energize2Lead Profile expectations dimension lets others know how we wish to be approached. This is much deeper than the proverbial Golden Rule, which uses our self as a point of reference. Brandon Lark closes his chapter with Austrian doctor Alfred Adler who once described empathy as:

“Seeing with the eyes of another, listening with the ears of another,
and feeling with the heart of another.” (p. 155)

Thank you, Brandon, for all of our shared experiences.

Coaching Story | Leaders Make it Safe

Working with two senior executive teams this past month brought the book and the idea of Crucial Conversations to mind. 

Crucial Conversations is a highly organized and deliberative book, centered around the idea of dialogue, defined as:

The free flow of meaning between two or more people.

Sounds pretty easy doesn’t it? Well, let’s add to the mix ingredients of a typical senior executive team:

• Successful individuals
• Individually established ways of getting things done
• Strong sense of personal self or ego
• Diverse points of view

Now add multiple projects, budgets, schedules, etc. What could go wrong? With both teams, one a set of executive leading a construction company, the other a set of county government information technology (IT) executives, the most important thing that happened in our meetings was making our environment safe. It wasn’t necessarily a declared objective, but in both cases, the teams required an environment conducive for genuine dialogue.

Let’s return to Crucial Conversations. The current, third edition of the book, is largely composed of nine chapters each introducing and describing nine respective dialogue skills. With both executive teams, we employed the dialogue skill Make it Safe, subtitled How to Make it Safe to Talk About Almost Anything. It’s a terrific chapter with numerous skills worth learning and practicing. Here’a a simplified way to remember the entire chapter: According to the authors, we cannot start a crucial conversation without mutual purpose and we cannot sustain one without mutual respect. Often, easier said than done.

For whatever reason, with both groups, we managed to Make it Safe for sustained periods of time, addressing key issues and in several instances, creating communication breakthroughs.

Together, we as Leaders Made it Safe.

Influence & Insight | June 2024

Leadership Story | Leaders Connect

Earlier this month Te-Ping Chen wrote  The Loneliness of the American Worker (WSJ behind paywall) concluding that more Americans are profoundly lonely, and the way they work—more digitally linked but less personally connected—is deepening that sense of isolation.

Interestingly, this isn’t new. Long before Covid or ChatGPT dominated the headlines, Dr. Brené Brown shared in Daring Greatly:

“The most significant problems that everyone from C-level executives to the front-line folks talk to me about stem from disengagement, the lack of feedback, the fear of staying relevant amid rapid change, and the need for clarity of purpose.”

Chen continues: Employers and researchers are just beginning to understand how workplace shifts over the past four years are contributing to what the U.S. surgeon general declared a loneliness health epidemic last year. The alienation affects remote and in-person workers alike. Among 1-800-Flowers.com’s 5,000 hybrid and fully on-site employees, for instance, the most popular community chat group offered by a company mental-health provider is simply called “Loneliness.”

Recall in Culture Shock, the summary message was “Make sure your managers hold one meaningful conversation per week with each employee.”

Chen discovers that some organizations are stepping up. Ernst & Young has asked managers to use the first five minutes of team calls to engage in conversation “as real human beings,” says Frank Giampietro, whose title, chief well-being officer for the Americas, was created in 2021 to help support employees during the pandemic.

Formality isn’t required either, says Jessica Methot, an associate professor at Rutgers University who studies social ties at work. According to Methot, office chitchat, sometimes an unwanted distraction, seems to provide more benefits than many people realize. Recall we explored the power of small talk in Jan Janura’s Turning Small Talk into Big Talk. 

Here’s a couple easy ways to put these findings to work:

• Start each meeting by recognizing something a teammate did that nobody else noticed.
• Rotate the meeting chair each meeting.
• Recognize actions that affirm the values of the organization.
• Create a team identity together.
• Coach everyone at least every two weeks.

Ultimately Leaders Connect.

supercommunicators | Book Review

“Effective communication requires recognizing what kind of conversation is occurring, and then matching each other.” (p. 22)

 In the widely read book Crucial Conversations, the authors share that Masters of Dialogue are very good at watching the content of the conversation along with the conditions. We may think of Charles Duhigg’s supercommunicators similarly as they are as interested in figuring out what kind of conversation everyone wants as the topics they wish to discuss, or focusing on the creation of a learning conversation by (pp. 29-30):

• Paying attention to what type of conversation is occurring.
• Sharing your goals and asking what others are seeking.
• Asking about others’ feelings and sharing your own.
• Exploring if identities are important to this discussion.

Duhigg distinguishes three different conversations: Practical, decision making conversations that focus on What’s This Really About? Emotional conversations which ask How Do We Feel? And social conversations that explore Who We Are? (p. xvii).

Supercommunicators know how to evoke synchronization by encouraging people to match how they’re communicating (p. 21). This review highlights similarities between supercommunicators and Masters of Dialogue and how teachable leadership points of view may further help.

What’s This Really About?

Duhigg posits every conversation is a negotiation. During our Leveraging the Power of Conflict workshop self-evaluation, questions three and four express the desire for a mutually agreeable resolution and asking conflicting parties to state their minimum acceptable and preferred solutions. Duhigg cites that researchers call this process a quiet negotiation (p. 41) first determining what everyone wants and second determining how we will speak and make decisions.

We won’t always be on the same page with others, but both Duhigg and the Crucial Conversations authors recommend we search for alignment first. For example, we can’t start a crucial conversation without mutual purpose, and we can’t continue one without mutual respect according to the book’s authors.

Duhigg reveals through stories that often what people desire from a negotiation isn’t obvious at first (p. 46) and that a good starting point is asking open-ended questions designed to get them talking about their values and what they want out of life (p. 47). The supercommunicator is like a leader as coach, with genuine interest in the other person increasing the likelihood of alignment.

In Crucial Conversations, the authors describe a dialog skill called Move to Action, consisting of four methods of decision-making: Command, consult, vote, and consensus. Imagine an After Action Review, or lessons learned session. The session won’t be effective without capturing the newly gained knowledge and then deciding who will commit to the decided action leading to an improved future outcome.

How Do We Feel?

The key to starting a How Do We Feel? conversation is teaching people to ask specific kinds of questions, the kinds that don’t on the surface, seem emotional, but that make emotions easier to acknowledge (p. 81).

Duhigg’s questions, and the purpose diagram helped me answer the following: What’s missing from many of the leadership philosophies under review? For example, a first draft often shares job expectations, or focus on vocation. That’s fine, but it’s not inspiring. Asking what our role as a leader is really about or who are we can lead to much more inspiring words.  Several current clients are in the construction industry. Imagine a leadership philosophy declaring a passion for building innovative schools inspiring future generations of children to become lifetime readers. Or a mission statement that a company provides essential and reliable electricity to everyone even during the worst weather conditions.

Our leadership philosophy can help us become a better communicator, or supercommunicator.

As we practice our three supercommunicator questions and actively listen, passions, missions, vocations and professions may emerge. Now we’re well positioned to support in our leader role.

Supercommunicators look for common purpose.

Coaching Story | Look For Common Purpose

Reading and reviewing supercommunicators this past month coincided with reading and reviewing many Personal Leadership Philosophy drafts. We may use author Charles Duhigg’s central three questions:

What’s This Really About?
How Do We Feel?
Who We Are?

and apply them to our leadership philosophy. Take a look at the Purpose Venn diagram below:

Duhigg’s questions, and the purpose diagram helped me answer the following: What’s missing from many of the leadership philosophies under review? For example, a first draft often shares job expectations, or focus on vocation. That’s fine, but it’s not inspiring. Asking what our role as a leader is really about or who are we can lead to much more inspiring words.  Several current clients are in the construction industry. Imagine a leadership philosophy declaring a passion for building innovative schools inspiring future generations of children to become lifetime readers. Or a mission statement that a company provides essential and reliable electricity to everyone even during the worst weather conditions.

Our leadership philosophy can help us become a better communicator, or supercommunicator.

As we practice our three supercommunicator questions and actively listen, passions, missions, vocations and professions may emerge. Now we’re well positioned to support in our leader role.

Supercommunicators look for common purpose.

Influence & Insight | May 2024

Leadership Story | Leaders Build Culture

During a Core Values Alignment workshop last fall, five corporate leaders undertook drafting their organizational core values. This was an interesting exercise, since the successful company was formed about 35 years ago. Our workshop experience was similar to Tony Hsieh’s cultural initiative with Zappos. Zappos started with an initial list of 37 values starting with Culture is Everything and finishing with Quiet Confidence and Respect, my client’s initial list contained 38 values starting with Courage and finishing with Wow as Service.

Zappos’ list was eventually shortened to ten core values and my client (still in progress) has shortened their list to four. Both leader teams shared their first list of candidate core values with everyone in the company. Earlier this month during a team coaching session my client shared a  an extensive core values spreadsheet capturing feedback from what appeared to be everyone in the company - fantastic. Now’s the harder part. Having whittled the initial number of values from 38 to four, or about 90%, was something essential lost? Good question. The senior team also came up with several sentences describing each core value, or normative behavioral statements.

We explored further ideas as an action plan for the next two months:

1. Frame the Personal Leadership Philosophy (PLP) for everyone who has completed our leadership course.
2. Create a Leadership SharePoint site.
3. Review and align (where applicable) individual PLPs with the organization’s core values.

Pretty cool. I have assignments too, such as sharing electronic versions of valuable tools such as motivation assessments, goal setting worksheets along with delegation and coaching plans. Cant’t wait until we meet again in June.

Leaders Build Culture.

Culture is the Way | Book Review

“If you want to stand out and win in today’s competitive
environment, you must obsess over building culture and continually
seek ways to improve your leadership performance.” (p. 75)

Matt Mayberry, former professional football player, shares his realization that the same characteristics that distinguish the best football teams are also required to succeed in business (p. 4). It’s a great analogy, as we’ve never seen a frustrated NFL (National Football League) coach run onto the field in the fourth quarter, bench the quarterback and take over.

Mayberry identifies three key lessons from great sports coaches that business leaders at all levels can apply as we move forward on the culture-building journey (p. 5).

1. Develop a burning desire to improve culture.
2. Generate and bring positive energy daily.
3. Don’t just manage people, coach your people. 

A perfect example: Legendary San Francisco 49er coach Bill Walsh (p. 29):

“Champions behave like champions before they’re champions. They
have a winning standard of performance before they are winners.”

The leader role is tumultuous today: Dealing with work/live balance, generational differences, and the pressure of a rapidly changing and competitive technical environment. There has never been a time in history when companies had to balance so many important aspects in how they communicated with their workforce, the resources they offered, and the implications that ensued (p. 17).

This review emphasizes Chapters 5-9, or the five how to steps when building a world class culture.

What Culture Is & Is Not

Simply put, [culture] is how well an organization does everything behind closed doors (p. 22). Or put another way, it’s the sum and results of our actions, not our words. In the leader role, it’s what we do, what we model, that counts.

On page 30, Mayberry provides a list of common practices, often credited with possibly creating a more modern or trendy environment, that actually are not indicators of culture. Here’s a couple favorites:

• Culture is not wearing whatever you want to work, such as pajamas, sneakers, cut-off jeans, sweatshirts, etc.
• Culture is not having ping-pong tables and other fun games in the office.
• Culture is not a separate aspect of organizational and business execution.

Culture is deeper than perks and fun stuff, it’s deeper. Mayberry lists Five Key Elements of a Positive Culture (pp. 31-33.):

1. Employee energy, excitement, and value.
2. Alignment and togetherness.
3. Clear expectations.
4. Accelerate execution.
5. Talent attraction and development.

We can easily relate these five elements to our Academy Leadership Excellence Course (LEC) workshops: Energize2Lead, Aligning & Accomplishing Goals, Personal Leadership Philosophy, Setting Leadership Priorities and Coaching to Develop People, respectively.

Traps & Roadblocks

We’re continuously surrounded by distractions, and there’s no end to short cuts offered us whether the topic is personal weight loss or how to get rich quick. Mayberry shares an honest insight: “If something is hard and the more likely I am to resist it, the more it is usually going to benefit my life and the harder I should attack it.” (p. 41)

Worse than distractions are losing our priorities. Mayberry calls out (so does the Wall Street Journal) Boeing -- once an American business giant known for its safety procedures and fantastic culture in which employees thoroughly enjoyed working (p. 43). There’s no shortage of critical WSJ article comments about Boeing -- ranging from loss of a safety mindset to moving headquarters away from the manufacturing site.

Mayberry’s Antidote: Avoid Culture Dilemma Traps by (p. 47):

1. Don’t underestimate culture.
2. For everything you add, be willing to subtract something. Think of this as a caution when “chasing the next shiny thing,” which may blur priorities.
3. Be ruthlessly clear about your priorities.

Mayberry’s Five Roadblocks to Cultural Excellence (p. 57):

1. Lukewarm Leadership Buy-In.
2. All slogans and No Action.
3. Temptation of Instant Gratification.
4. Distortion and Distraction.
5. Lack of Cascading Change. 

May be compared to Kotter’s Eight Stage Change Process:

1. Establishing a sense of urgency.
2. Forming a powerful guiding coalition.
3. Creating a vision.
4. Communicating the vision.
5. Empowering others to act on the vision.
6. Planning for and creating short-term wins.
7. Consolidating improvements and producing still more change.
8. Instituting new approaches. 

Not how both approaches inform us that alignment and buy-in are critical, genuine change takes time, and it’s a continuous process.

How To Build

Create Your Cultural Purpose Statement

The cultural purpose statement should not be confused with a mission or vision statement (p. 96). When we look at Mayberry’s questions that a cultural purpose statement answers (pp. 99-100):

1. What do we care deeply about as an organization, both internally and externally?
2. Where are we now and where to we want to be?
3. What must happen now to bridge the gap between where we are and where we want to be?
4. What do we want our culture to stand for?
5. What is our culture’s most significant impact area?
6. How would we like our culture to be perceived?
7. What experience do we hope our culture will provide?
8. What mantras or statements best summarize our call to action?
9. Can we, as leaders, live up to this mantra or statement daily?
10. Can this mantra or statement benefit not only our business but also our personal lives?

One might think of normative behavioral statements from our Core Values Alignment workshops. Whether a cultural purpose statement or a normative behavioral description, both are describing actions.

Winning Hearts and Minds for Impactful Culture-Building                                                                                

Improving or successfully changing culture is predicated on the level of commitment from leaders to engage the hearts and minds of all employees (p. 106). This is consistent with Gallup’s Q12 engagement survey, notably Q5: My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person and Q12: This last year, I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow. Over the past several years, leadership course attendees increasingly mention empathy while composing a leadership philosophy. Nice trend.

The Culture Implementation Playbook

If you want to successfully implement and drive culture change at scale, you must shock the organization (p. 133). Mayberry lists four actions in the playbook (pp. 134-140):

1. Drive Alignment Forward.
2. Behavioral Manifesto.
3. Communication Strategy.
4. Culture Rollout Roadmap. 

Mayberry’s actions are very similar to Tony’s Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness Chapter Five, Platform for Growth: Brand, Culture, Pipeline. In this chapter Hsieh describes in detail the unique Zappos culture, or corporate brand. Both Mayberry and Hsieh understand this involves sharing with everyone within the company (rollout) rather than a small group of executives handing out the equivalent of an organizational ten commandments.

Be Fanatical About Sustained Impact

Mayberry quotes Larry Senn (p. 140): “Culture is not an initiative. All initiatives are enabled by culture.” Think of a leader’s routines or habits: A daily stand-up meeting, leadership by walking around, one-on-one sessions with direct reports or a larger annual meeting. Meetings with clients and prospects. Hiring, and firing events. Each of them is an opportunity for showcasing culture, or for culture to inform a decision. When our actions consistently model our culture, over time the behavior is visible.

It’s more about coaching every leader and manager to incorporate
the behavioral manifesto into every interaction with direct reports. (p. 157) 

The Ultimate Differentiator is Leadership

Coaching as a leader is so important that some organizations, such as the WD-40 Company, go so far as to call every manager in the company a coach rather than a manager (p. 181). That’s a nice way to describe leading. For significant promotions at a long-time client organization, an expected interview question is “What have you been able to get done through others?”

Mayberry closes with a Chief Culture Driver Pledge (p. 243). His statements such as For today, I will encourage those I lead to impact the culture in one small way are ideal phrases one may include in a Personal Leadership Philosophy.

Summary

How do we know our culture is progressing in a positive way? Consider using S. Chris Edmonds’ five culture survey questions at the end of each chapter in the culture engine to measure progress of Mayberry’s five steps.

There is an immense opportunity right now for all leaders and
managers to seize the reins to create a world-class culture that
brings out the best in everyone. (p. 227)

Coaching Story | Leaders Grow by Developing Others

During a recent Zoom session with a client, we initially talked about coaching and then veered toward promotions, and the associated increased expectations they come with. 

In the first part, my client shared what appeared a growing supervisory expectation she would provide increasing technical support to subordinates, in what we may call a job leader role. What my client is more interested in though, is overall career guidance, maybe a combination of career coach and/or mentor. Listening to these two distinct roles, Arthur Brooks’ From Strength to Strength came to mind.

Recall his book is for the leader as coach or mentor, or who desires to adopt the third order of life, vanaspratha, with a focus on crystallized intelligence, or the ability to use a stock of knowledge learned in the past which tends to increase with age through one’s forties, fifties, and sixties. My client wants to coach and has a lot of crystallized intelligence worth sharing. On the other hand, there are other more technical, job focused colleagues ready to share fluid intelligence, the ability to reason, think flexibly, and solve novel problems, associated with reading and mathematical abilities. 

The latter part of our session turned to promotional opportunities. My client is very happy, maybe even content, in her current role. Listening to her thoughts reminded me of Kim Scott’s Radical Candor, especially Kim’s definitions of rock stars and superstars. According to Scott, superstars are high achievers looking to the next promotion while rock stars are very competent in their current role and usually happy to continue there. Maybe the two aren’t mutually exclusive. I asked my client what would be the reason for a more senior leader role. Why did I ask her this? Because she wants to grow as a coach. If she continues sharing her crystallized knowledge with others, and consistently creates a motivational environment, her teams with thrive, and perhaps without thinking about it, she’ll be both creating a leadership pipeline and getting a lot done.

Getting more done by developing others is a great reason for a promotion. We’re going to have another session in another month or two. Can’t wait.

Leaders Grow by Developing Others.

Influence & Insight | April 2024

Leadership Story | A Great Leader Changes the World

Many of us watched the film Oppenheimer win seven Oscars at the Academy Awards a few weeks ago. It’s fair to ask what type of leader Oppenheimer was. Ben Cohen explored this question 

https://www.wsj.com/business/oppenheimer-robert-movie-oscars-los-alamos-manhattan-project-7f753525?mod=wknd_pos1

by reading two Pulitzer Prize-winning books, “American Prometheus” by Kai Bird and the late Martin J. Sherwin and “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” by Richard Rhodes.

The authors shared four elements of his success that apply to any sort of project—even the ones that don’t involve gigantic explosions. Let’s take a look at three.

1. Oppenheimer the recruiter

Oppenheimer built a great team.  Cohen shares that Oppenheimer understood that hiring was essential to his team’s success and made it a priority from the very beginning, when he told a colleague they should adopt a “policy of absolutely unscrupulous recruiting of anyone we can lay hands on.” For example, when the physicist Richard Feynman turned him down because his wife was sick with tuberculosis, for example, Oppenheimer found a sanatorium close enough to Los Alamos that he could visit on the weekends. Recall years later when then 67 year old now Nobel Prize-Winner Feynman memorably demonstrated how a simple O-ring failure at cold temperatures led to the Challenger disaster despite pressure to withhold his demonstration. Watching the film, we can see how an elite team, holding each other accountable, and driven to a common purpose, may achieve extraordinary results.

2. Oppenheimer the communicator

Oppenheimer exemplified leading by coaching. Cohen mentions Charles Duhigg who writes about “supercommunicators,” people who are “capable of saying exactly the right thing, breaking through to almost anyone, figuring out how to connect in even the most unlikely circumstances.” Oppenheimer, as it turns out, was a supercommunicator. He wasn’t the smartest guy on the team. Cohen learned that others in Los Alamos were better physicists, chemists and engineers. But what he could do better than anybody there—and maybe better than anybody on the planet—was take scientists with different perspectives and bring them to a consensus.

Oppenheimer listened more than he talked. “He would stand at the back of the room and listen as everyone argued,” Bird said. “Then he would step forward at just the right moment, summarize the salient points that everyone had been making that were in common and point the way forward.” “He would walk in, quickly grasp what the problem was and almost always suggest some leads to a solution,” Rhodes said.

Just what a great coach does. Cohen reveals what set him apart from the other geniuses at Los Alamos was his broad knowledge and breadth of interests, which allowed him to make connections across disciplines and see what others in the room couldn’t. They were specialists. He was a generalist. They were singularly focused on their narrow fields of research. He was curious about philosophy, literature, poetry and the Bhagavad Gita. “He was a good scientist precisely because he was also a humanist,” Bird says.

Oppenheimer was curious, perhaps the greatest trait of a coach. Groves was so impressed by Oppenheimer’s range of interests that he once declared: “Oppenheimer knows everything.” He also could explain everything he knew without condescending, another trait that distinguished him from other eminently qualified scientists who interviewed for the job.

3. Oppenheimer the collaborator

Recall collaboration is the best conflict leadership strategy - truly a win-win outlook. Cohen: Oppenheimer himself was so allergic to hierarchy that he objected to making a basic organizational chart. He was intense but informal, someone who commanded respect without demanding it, and the biggest difference between Oppenheimer and Army generals was how they believed teams should operate. The military relied on compartmentalization. He insisted on collaboration.

Collaboration, or actively sharing knowledge, accelerates crossing the knowing-going gap. Cohen describes that demanding a flatter structure, Oppenheimer might as well have asked the Army if everyone in Los Alamos could have a mullet. In fact, when Groves learned that Oppenheimer was in favor of instituting a weekly colloquium for hundreds of scientists, he tried to shut it down. Oppenheimer prevailed. He understood the value of gathering people from different parts of a project in the same place, encouraging them to discuss their work and combine their ideas.

The team worked hard and played hard. Cohen: They worked six days a week, but Oppenheimer made sure they weren’t only working. On their off days, there was horseback riding, mountain climbing, skiing, hiking and some of the geekiest basketball games of all time. When a local theater group staged a performance of “Arsenic and Old Lace,” Oppenheimer brought the house down with his surprise cameo as a corpse. And he was especially famous for his parties, where Oppenheimer paired his deadly gin martinis with his favorite toast: “To the confusion of our enemies!”

Oppenheimer ‘decided he was going to be the best lab director there ever was,’ said author Richard Rhodes. ‘That’s what he became.’

A Great Leader Changes the World.

Gentelligence | Book Review

Most existing efforts to transform organizational cultures
to appeal to multiple generations focus
exclusively on the layer of artifacts. (p. 166)

Megan Gerhardt, Josephine Nachemson-Ekwall and Brandon Fogel offer a well-researched how-to guide for existing and emerging leaders interested in transforming a widespread organizational challenge into a transformative strategic advantage.

Just as legendary basketball coach John Wooden taught incoming athletes to first tie their shoes, we may think of gentelligence as basic behaviors we must perform to become championship leaders as coaches.  The authors share that that gentelligence champions every generation and is born from intergenerational curiosity (p. 3). In a way, this is an extension of Pfeffer and Sutton’s The Knowing-Doing Gap call to treat knowledge as an active, continuous process. Our mandate: Development and retention require attention to create inclusive organizational cultures where all generations are given a voice and expected to learn from each other (p. 20).

This review centers on Chapters 3 and 4, or things we should stop doing and things we should start doing, respectively. Gentelligence offers a solid historical basis for the following generational identity birth years (pp. 29-37):

Stop Doing These Things

Gerhardt identifies four major roadblocks that prevent the development of Gentelligence: generational shaming, age biases, value perceptions, and knowledge differences.

1. Multiple generations are attempting to work together without a solid understanding of their age-related differences, leading to conflict, miscommunication, and frustration (p. 46). Imagine an Energize2Lead (E2L) Workshop intentionally populated by multiple generations with a specific focus on our expectations dimension. We could explore differences is not only how we want to be approached, but further the generational “why” behind such differences.

2. The authors are struck by how ageism in the workplace seems to be more widely accepted and tolerated when compared to other types of discrimination (p. 50). Perhaps we’ve been conditioned by our traditional concepts of working and retirement – put in your twenty years and collect the golden ring. In Arthur Brooks’ From Strength to Strength, he introduces our Vanaprastha life stage, when we purposely begin to pull back from our old personal and professional duties, becoming more devoted to crystallized intelligence, teaching and faith. This approach may serve as our antidote.

3. Four workplace values have been found to span all generational boundaries (pp. 54-55):

• A desire to feel valued to the organization.
• Competence: being perceived as knowledgeable and skilled.
• Connection: collaborating with colleagues and experiencing mutual trust.
• Autonomy: having the freedom and independence to exercise judgement and make sound decisions.

We can overcome our value differences by creating a motivational environment. Each of the listed four values are genuine motivators, reminiscent of Dan Pink’s identification of Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose (Drive).

4. There are five different types of knowledge that can be valuable to an organization (p. 59): know-what, know-how, know-when, know-why, and know-whom. Whitney Johnson’s S-Curve of Learning provides a terrific way to visualize overcoming and harnessing knowledge differences:

Recall, Whitney recommends 70% of our teams should occupy the engaged state, with only 15% each in the other two. This model also illustrates how our more senior teammates may transfer knowledge mastery, further increasing engagement in younger, less experienced generations.

Start Doing These Things

To break down barriers of intergenerational tension and bias (p. 65):

1. Resist Assumptions
2. Adjust the Lens

To build up the capacity to leverage intergenerational strength and power:

3. Strengthen Trust
4. Expand the Pie

Resisting Assumptions means pushing back against human tendencies to draw automatic connections based on stereotypes about someone’s generational identity (p. 66). Be a leader as coach or resist the temptation to evaluate rather than observe. Listen first, listen more.

Adjust the Lens, aims to better illuminate the intent behind the actions and behaviors of those from other generations (p. 70). Ask someone from a different generation to share their Personal Leadership Philosophy. Explore the differences and the why behind them.

Strengthening Trust is vital to helping people at all levels in an organization see the potential in depending on and collaborating with those across the perceived generation gap (p. 77). Our age related differences are likely captured in our E2L instinctive dimensions, where the requirements for developing trust, safety and security are revealed.

To Expand the Pie, it’s important to cultivate the habit of proactively searching for those win-win opportunities (p. 82). An actively collaborative leadership style or being both assertive and cooperative, serves us well here, minimizing conflict.

Moving Forward

On page 137, the authors summarize a future talent strategy:

Remember one of our primary findings from Culture Shock, that supervisors should have one meaningful conversation per week with each employee. That’s our starting point for increased engagement. To stay engaged, twenty-first century workers across generations will need continuous learning and career-development opportunities (p. 143).

Summary

Much of the gentelligence approach is having the humility to look past our own generation and to understand and embrace the contributions of others. 

We challenge business leaders to unlock the talent potential of our
diverse, intergenerational workforce by proactively attracting
developing, and engaging employees at every age. (p. 187)

Coaching Story | Leaders Embrace the Human Connection

Twice in the past month, clients in coaching sessions have mentioned a colleague requiring support.

In the first case, the client described feeling a bit like a counselor or nurse while addressing a subordinate.

While listening the the client, I imagined a Venn diagram — two overlapping circles. One circle contained the primary roles and responsibilities of a counselor, the second circle contained the primary roles and responsibilites of a leader as coach. Then I imagined the two circles overlapping, leading to the question: What roles and responsibilities are common to both? Perhaps listening, perhaps avoiding evaluation, perhaps expressing appreciation, and perhaps ultimately asking the question: “What can I do to help?”

Interestingly, the client didn’t send the direct report immediately to HR or Counseling. Perhaps instinctively, the client understood a leader’s role is first to listen and understand, driven by both empathy and curiosity. Hats off!

In the second case, a client was eager to share new behaviors practiced since composing an Action Plan created at the end of our recent three-day Leadership Excellence Course.  Turns out one of his subordinates received pretty isolated and even harsh feedback when sharing her project results. The client shared further that when others on the team had similar project results, there was no harsh feedback from the same supervisor. What was the difference? The ones not receiving the tougher treatment were men.

This greatly bothered my coaching client and pretty quickly he reached out to his direct report who informed my client that she was already exploring how to report this behavior internally. Over the next thirty minutes we discussed this and I wanted to let my client know he was not only doing the right thing in supporting his subordinate, he was actually living his leadership philosophy and was aligned with his organization’s core values. Well done!

Leaders Embrace the Human Connection.

Influence & Insight | March 2024

Leadership Story | Accountability Starts With You

“How do you know when accountability is present or not?”

The Meeting After the Meeting.

During Accountability Workshops on the third day of Leadership Excellence Courses, I’ve often shared that my large-company executive experience frequently consisted of attending meetings held immediately after the meeting. At first, sharing these stories felt a bit defensive, as though it was an unusual experience.

How wrong I was.

Susan Lucia Annunzio wrote How Bosses Can Stop the ‘Meeting After the Meeting’ in the Wall Street Journal on January 25th.

Not only is this a common phenomenon, the meeting after the meeting comes in two forms. Annunzio shares:

The first is when participants text or chat with one another while the meeting is still going on, noting that the person speaking has said something inaccurate, or that they disagree with the direction the team is taking. The second type takes place in person or on a separate video call. Typically, a group has agreed on a decision, but after the meeting participants privately call it into question or play down its importance with their own teams, dooming it to failure.

In my experience, both types occurred. If memory serves correctly, we employed the first method using our Blackberries (yeah, it was awhile ago) signaling disagreement or the need for the follow up meeting. When the main meeting ended, non-verbal exchanges (head nods, etc)  confirmed the need for the second meeting as we quickly found an empty room and restarted. Sometimes this led to a third meeting, usually at the local steakhouse over a cocktail and bottle of wine.

You get the idea.

Annunzio offers several suggestions to minimize the meeting after meeting tendency, and her second idea resonates well: Model the openness and honesty by addressing controversial subjects yourself at formal meetings. This could also be launched in the form of a question such as “What’s the most difficult topic we’re not addressing right now?” In both cases,  if we want more accountability among our teams, it starts with us as the leader. Another helpful idea is to evaluate any meeting near the end. This provides an opportunity for additional feedback, especially any topic discomfort or reluctance to bring up the real issues.

Leaders Model Accountability.

Multipliers | Book Review 

“The biggest leadership challenge of our times is not insufficient
resources per se, but rather our inability to access the most
valuable resources at our disposal.” (p. xii) 

Stephen R. Covey

Liz Wiseman’s revised 2017 work serves as a “how-to” guide for any leader interested in increasing engagement levels within their teams or overall organization. She contrasts Multipliers and Diminishers throughout the book and we may also think of a Diminisher as an evaluator or subject matter expert (SME) and a Multiplier as a leader as coach.

The Diminisher’s view of intelligence is based on elitism and scarcity (p. 17), and Wiseman shares five comparative disciplines of Diminishers and Multipliers in a terrific summary chart (p. 23):

Note the fourfold-plus difference in results, or that multipliers create synergistic teams, often performing well beyond expectations. Wiseman believes Diminisher bosses still exist, but like old BlackBerry phones, it is only a matter of time before they become obsolete and people upgrade to newer models (p. xvii). Both Multipliers and Diminishers may certainly be intelligent, but how their intelligence is used is what distinguishes the two approaches. Multipliers applied their intelligence to amplify the smarts and capability of people around them (p. 5), according to the following logic:

1. Most people in organizations are underutilized.
2. All capability can be leveraged with the right kind of leadership.
3. Therefore, intelligence and capability can be multiplied without requiring a bigger investment.

Descriptions of the five types of multipliers, The Talent Magnet, The Liberator, The Challenger, The Debate Maker, and The Investor, form the heart of the book, and this review specifically comments on the practices of each.

The Talent Magnet | Leader as Coach

Wiseman defines Talent Magnets as people who attract the best talent, utilize it to its fullest, and ready it for the next stage (p. 35). The Talent Magnet spawns a virtuous cycle of attraction and the Empire Builder (Diminisher) spawns a vicious cycle of decline (p. 36). Recall in our Coaching to Develop People workshop, what we do with the average performer, over time, becomes our leader report card.

Talent Magnets (p. 43):

1. Look for Talent Everywhere
2. Find People’s Native Genius
3. Utilize People at Their Fullest
4. Remove the Blockers

Fundamentally, Talent Magnets are optimistic, have an abundance mindset and are continuously searching for and developing others. In contrast, Empire Builders, or Diminishers, are often prima donnas, insisting that they get maximum time onstage and that scripts are written to feature them (p. 57). Multipliers aren’t thinking of themselves, the focus is on others or the team. Ultimately, Talent Magnets encourage people to grow and leave (p. 61).

The Liberator | Motivational Environment

Wiseman describes corporate environments and modern organizations as the perfect setup for diminishing leadership [that] have a certain built-in tyranny (p. 66). She’s right. At multiple client sites, remote worker space is now actually separated into hoteling and leadership hoteling, depending on whether the space is a cubicle or an office with a door. Yikes! Wiseman defines Multipliers, as leaders who liberate people from the oppressive forces within corporate hierarchy (p. 67). Liberators are masters at creating a motivational environment, rather than self-centered managers under the mistaken impression that compliance is energizing.

Liberators (p. 77):

1. Create Space
2. Demand People’s Best Work
3. Generate Rapid Learning Cycles

These Multipliers expect a lot from a motivational environment. Liberators create an intense environment that requires concentration, diligence, and energy (p. 72). On the other hand, Diminishers jerk around the organization as they swing between two modes: 1) militant insistence on their ideas and 2) passive indifference to the ideas and work of others (p. 87).

Continuous feedback is required to sustain such a high performance level. Wiseman informs us that Liberators are more than just good listeners; they are ferocious listeners (p. 79).

The Challenger | Expectations

How are your expectations expressed in your Personal Leadership Philosophy? Are you sharing an inspirational future vision? This is what Challengers do. Challenger assumptions seem to be that people get smarter and stronger by being challenged (p. 104).

Challengers (p. 107):

1. Seed the Opportunity
2. Lay Down a Challenge
3. Generate Belief

Notice Challengers are describing what to do, but not how to do it. Their role is inspiration. These Multipliers provide a starting point but not a complete solution (p. 110). They’re masters of delegation. Diminishers stay in charge and tell others – in detail – how to do their jobs (p. 119).

The Debate Maker | Collaboration

Many of us are natural conflict avoiders, frequently unassertive and uncooperative. Our Conflict Leadership Strategies chart (from Leveraging the Power of Conflict workshops) illustrates the best strategy, both assertive and cooperative, is collaboration. We can think of Debate Makers as collaborators, multipliers who don’t focus on what they know but on how to know what others know (p. 132).

Wiseman reveals that Debate Makers (p. 138):

1. Frame the Issues
2. Spark the Debate
3. Drive Sound Decisions

Consider curiosity, or a habit of continuous learning, as an underappreciated leader trait. As leaders, probably the most important role we can play is asking the right questions and focusing on the right problems (p. 139). We may then adopt an After Action Review (AAR) approach focusing on informed forward-looking decisions. The opposite: Diminishers tend to make decisions quickly, either based solely on their own opinions or with input from a close inner circle (p. 148).

The Investor | Performance Coach

Academy Leadership defines Performance Coaching as:

The process of equipping people with the tools,
knowledge and opportunities they need to develop
themselves and become more successful.

Wiseman calls this type of coach The Investor, multipliers who invest in the success of others (p. 159).

Investors (p. 167):

1. Define Ownership
2. Invest Resources
3. Hold People Accountable

Multipliers understand that their role is to invest, to teach, and to coach, and they keep the accountability for the play with the players (p. 163). Just like elite military teams, individuals hold each other accountable. These Investors have a core belief that people are smart and will figure things out (p. 178). Like the subject matter expert boss, the Diminisher operates from a very different assumption (p. 179):

People will never be able to figure it out without me

Summary

Early in the book Wiseman shares Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace study finding that across 142 countries, only 13 percent of people around the world are fully engaged at work (p. xix). That’s what this book is meant to tackle, the upward engagement climb. Be the engaged curious coach.

It is not surprising that the highest-rated [leadership] practice
for Multipliers was Intellectual Curiosity. (p. 122)

Liz Wiseman generously provided a copy of her book for review.

Coaching Story | Leaders Multiply Not Diminish

Highly educated and highly technical Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) attended multiple leadership programs this past month. When we’ve been well trained and become very good at something others rely on us. We get results. It feels good.

But it doesn’t make us a leader. 

In fact, we may become our own worst enemy. In this month’s book review, Liz Wiseman describes two very different type of leaders, Multipliers and Diminishers. She describes five types of Multipliers:

• The Talent Magnet
• The Liberator
• The Challenger
• The Debate Maker
• The Investor

and describes each in detail, and likewise compares them with their opposites, or Diminishers.

Fundamentally, according to Wiseman, Diminishers assume “People won’t figure it out without me” and Multipliers assume “People are smart and will figure it out.”

Several of the SMEs attending courses this past month realized changes would be necessary - not only to become a better leader — in order for their lives and health to improve.

Here’s a way to keep the ball rolling once we make this realization. We can visualize, or think of:

The Talent Magnet  as The Leader as Coach
The Liberator who Creates a Motivational Environment
The Challenger who Sets Inspiring Expectations
The Debate Maker as a Super Collaborator
The Investor as a Performance Coach

Each of the Multiplier archetypes employ one or more of the skills found in our Leadership Excellence Course workshops. Each of us, whether we realize it or not, have Diminisher traits, and Wiseman offers an extra chapter devoted to The Accidental Diminisher. Terrific. As we become a stronger Multipler, evidence of our success will be  a pipeline of continuously developing leaders, those that we invested in and coached.

Leaders Multiply Intelligence.

Influence & Insight | February 2024

Leadership Story | Living a Leadership Philosophy

Years ago the President of a local Project Management Institute (PMI) chapter asked me to give a talk about what it means to live one’s Personal Leadership Philosophy. It was a terrific question and led to an engaging series of talks shared since. While reviewing Culture Shock these past few weeks feelings of deja vu surfaced. In Culture Shock the authors share that a major challenge for senior organizational leaders is the lack of a common culture. 

A recent Wall Street Journal article provides an excellent example of deliberate efforts to improve a common culture by having individuals adhering to a leadership philosophy. Ben Cohen’s recent article about airline safety (https://www.wsj.com/business/airlines/plane-safety-airlines-boeing-never-been-safer-adbe2453?mod=hp_lead_pos9) asks: “How did hurling through the sky in a giant metal tube become this safe?” noting that the biggest U.S. commercial airlines have now gone nearly 15 years without a fatal crash, and is something of a miracle as there have been more than 100 million flights and 10 billion passengers since then.

Pretty astonishing when we look at the numbers. The interesting part though is that this amazing safety record is the result of intentional changes made about three decades ago. The old Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) system focused on explaining accidents after they happened. The new idea, or FAA philosophy, depended on pilots, flight attendants and dispatchers voluntarily reporting safety issues and individual mistakes. Think about that. This required the entire airline industry change the idea of reporting, encouraging everyone to speak up when concerned rather that live in fear of sharing honest thoughts.

Other organizations, not in the headlines, are doing the same. Great Southwestern Construction has been encouraging open sharing of safety concerns for years, driven by a culture of safety and led by company president who lives his leadership philosophy daily. Both the airline industry and Great Southwestern Construction are crossing the Knowing-Doing Gap, or treating knowledge, especially newly encountered safety concerns, as something to be shared immediately and openly in order to strengthen a corporate culture.

Bravo.

Leaders Live by a Leadership Philosophy.

Culture Shock | Book Review

Gallup estimates that low employee engagement costs
the global economy $7.8 trillion in lost productivity
 – a staggering 11% of global GDP. (p. 72)

Jim Clifton and Jim Harter provide extensive Gallup findings about employee engagement in our post-Covid environment. At the core, this is a pioneering work about engagement.

Only about 30% of employees are truly engaged, another 20% are miserable and 50% are just showing up (p. 14). Why improve engagement?

Engaged customers create your growth, earnings, and stock price – your engaged employees create your engaged customers (p. 21). Fundamental findings from our Covid experience: 56% of 125 million full-time workers said they don’t have to be in the workplace anymore (pp. 4-5). We have a skills/training gap worthy of attention:

Fewer than one in 10 managers or leaders have
received training or coaching on how to
manage effectively in a hybrid environment. (p. 151)

This review centers on Gallup’s Q12 (p. 31), highly tested items leading to increased engagement, adding findings from Part 1: What Work and Life Do People Want? Part 2, Future Culture, and Part 4, 70% Manager. Relevant Academy Leadership workshop observations reinforcing the Q12 are also shared.

Q1. I know what is expected of me at work.

Gallup’s findings indicate a preference for autonomy and collaboration. 88% of those in remote-ready jobs reported that they have a mix of independent and collaborative work, and the sweet spot was two to three days in the office [per week], with a slight preference for Tuesdays, Wednesday and Thursdays (p. 47). Our Personal Leadership Philosophy can greatly improve job expectations along with improved SMART (Specific, Measurable, Agreed-Upon, Realistic and Trackable) goals.

Consider delegating to teams what method works best when collaborating, especially in a remote environment. The option most associated with high levels of employee engagement – my work team decides together – was the one companies used the least (p. 48).

Q2. I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right.

If instead of shortening the workweek, employers focused on improving the quality of the work experience, they could nearly triple the positive influence on their employee’s lives (p. 63). Chances are employees experimented and discovered what methods work best when working at home. We can simply ask and learn. Employers should create environments that mitigate high blood pressure, tension, anger, stiff necks, fatigue, lower back pain and obesity (p. 41) associated with long commutes – conditions likely when returning to offices.

Q3. At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.

Engaged employees spent 4x as much time using their strengths compared to what they don’t do well (p. 99). Clifton and Harter enthusiastically promote StrengthsFinder and CliftonStrengths. Their suggestions mirror use of the Energize2Lead Profile, in that we each have preferred energizing activities while others drain our batteries.

The authors offer a useful definition of Self-actualization (Maslow) based on fulfilling your greatest potential through your talents (p. 107). Or put another way, if we stay in our E2L Preferred energy dimension for an extended period we’ll move to the upper level of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

Q4. In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good work.

Eight in 10 senior leaders (81%) say recognition is not a major strategic priority (p. 94). Years of surveying Feedback workshop participants confirm many of us tend to evaluate rather than express appreciation or provide genuine coaching. The authors validate emphasizing evaluation is an energy loser. The one conversation topic that employees perceived as less meaningful was discussing their weaknesses or things that they don’t do well (p. 143).

Q5. My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person.

50% of U.S. employees now want their work and life blended (p. 9). Think of our Life’s Compass Rose from the communication portion or our Feedback workshop. We’re multidimensional entities and don’t want to lose who we really are just because we’re at work. This may make managers uncomfortable, but it seems Covid has forever changed employee expectations of both supervisors and corporate culture. Senior leaders beware: Only 21% of employees strongly agree that they trust the leadership of the organization (p. 137).

Q6. There is someone at work who encourages my development.

The demand for leaders as coaches has never been greater. Great managers know their employee’s strengths and give them a role they can grow in with no limits (p. 29). One client over the years has distinguished between Career Managers and Job Leaders. That’s a good start. Maybe we need to evaluate Career Manager effectiveness based on the frequency and quality of developmental results of those in their charge.

Q7. At work, my opinions seem to count. Q11. In the last six months, someone at work has talked to me about my progress. Q12. This last year, I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow.

Employees want coaches, not bosses. Clifton and Harter report that managers account for 70% of the variation in team engagement (p. 137)! People leave bad supervisors, not companies. Not only do employees want coaches, they want an environment that supports leaders as coaches. Only about one in four U.S. employees feel strongly that their organization cares about their wellbeing (p. 77). So, there’s lots of work to do.

Q8. The mission or purpose of my company makes me feel my job is important.

A major challenge for senior leaders of large organizations is that there is no common culture (p. 138). That’s probably why Jim Collins’ books such as Built to Last are so popular. Rather than simply plan business strategy and goals year after year, we should first create alignment based on values, purpose, and mission. When we’re making decisions based primarily on values, rather than say financial expediency, then others will really notice. The best run organizations build cultures where employees feel like leadership genuinely cares about them (p. 85).

Q9. My associates or fellow employees are committed to doing quality work.

Another way to phrase Q9 could be My associates or fellow employees hold each other accountable. Evidence of such an environment might include lack of repeated mistakes and increased engagement.

Q10. I have a best friend at work.

In-person social time had the largest positive impact on mood – but the total amount of time mattered less than the event itself. (p. 44) Interesting finding. If we don’t know our employees well, we’re likely spending resources on things like recreation rooms without knowing if that’s what employees really want.

Summary

The takeaways: Lead don’t manage. Coach to lead.

Make sure your managers hold one meaningful conversation
per week with each employee. (p. 155)

Coaching Story | Leaders Focus on Engagement

A recent coaching session both made my day and affirmed the power of coaching and promoting engagement. Since this was the second of our three coaching sessions following our Leadership Excellence Course, the client wanted to share progress on commitments made during the first session, or “my homework.” The challenge: Finding out why minimum requirements haven’t been made, a chronic and frustrating issue.

Here’s what the client did: First of all, he compared Energize2Lead Profiles with the individual with the most significant performance issues. Not surprisingly, their profiles were opposite in three colors: Green, red and yellow. In fact under stress the direct report tends to become very quiet and to take a great deal of time and care in making decisions. The client shared these observations and both realized the pair were ignorant of each other’s needs.

This was a game changer. In the past, the client would simply assign a project including deadlines and just hand it over to the team. Now, rather than telling other’s what to do, he’s asking about other’s needs and project development is collaborative. Not surprisingly the client has already noticed performance improvements.

Recall in Culture Shock Gallup has developed a set of 12 engagement factors, called the Q12 — and the client, maybe without knowing, was employing several of them:

• Q01 I know what is expected of me at work.
• Q05 My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person.
• Q07 At work, my opinions seems to count.
• Q11 In the past six months, someone at work has talked to me about my progress.

It’s pretty clear that one of the best ways to migrate from manager (evaluator) to leader (coach) is employing Gallup’s engagement model.

Leaders Focus on Engagement.

Influence & Insight | January 2024

Leadership Story | Deliberate Practice and an Abundance Mindset

Taylor Swift is in the news quite a bit these days.

Ben Cohen wrote a piece on Swift this past month in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), about many of her fears, especially of being average. 

“I’m intimidated by the fear of being average,” she said.

Cohen continues: It sounds like the sort of thing Swift might have said to explain how she became the biggest pop star in the world this year. In fact, she said it when she was all of 16 years old. Swift had just released her self-titled debut album and was sitting across from a reporter who had interviewed every icon of country music from Dolly Parton to Willie Nelson. But if she was nervous for her first major interview, this girl with a twang and tangles of curly hair didn’t show it. Stardom was one thing she did not fear.

Why not? We can look to two terrific leadership traits that Swift adopted long ago.

First, is Deliberate Practice, as defined by Anders Ericsson. 

Cohen continues: She was 10 years old when she decided she was going to be a country-music singer. Before long she was knocking on doors in Nashville with a demo CD of her LeAnn Rimes and The Chicks covers—and a pitch for Music Row.

“Hi, I’m Taylor, I’m 11, and I want a record deal,” she said.

When industry executives made the terrible mistake of not taking her seriously, the girl who described herself as the most competitive person she knew took matters into her own hands.

She returned home to Pennsylvania, learned the 12-string guitar and practiced until her bleeding fingers had to be taped so she could keep playing. She began writing songs after school and before it was time for homework. She scribbled down unforgettable lyrics on the pages of her spiral-bound notebooks and Kleenex tissues. And she came up with the idea for “Tim McGraw,” the first track on her first album, a song that she’ll be playing for the rest of her life, while she was in freshman math class.

Deliberate practice is a highly structured form of practice where one is improving with each session, often short and intense sessions. It seems likely that Swift was deliberately practicing, perhaps instinctively knowing what to do, for many years in her pursuit of excellence.

Second, is an abundance mindset, an optimism fueled by the belief that anything is individually possible - that our dreams can come true.

Cohen: It’s her defining trait. At a time when ambition has become contrarian, there was something not just defiant but inspiring about her fierce determination, the animating force of Swift’s career since the very beginning.

“I’m a big advocate for not hiding your enthusiasm for things,” she said last year in her New York University commencement address. “Never be ashamed of trying. Effortlessness is a myth. The people who wanted it the least were the ones I wanted to date and be friends with in high school. The people who want it the most are the people I now hire to work for my company.”

To understand why she was unstoppable this year, it’s worth flashing back to Swift’s early years—her formative era. Even before she had released a single album, Swift was unapologetically ambitious. She was a teenager who knew what she wanted and how to make it happen.

She also knew that her success in the music business would be as much about her music as her business.

She has combined artistic genius with corporate savvy for as long as she can remember—and even before she was born. Swift has said there are two reasons she was called Taylor: because of James Taylor and because her mother felt it would help to have a gender-neutral name atop her résumé and business cards. Her father was a stockbroker, and when teachers asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, a young Taylor Swift stood out in her classroom of aspiring ballerinas and astronauts.

“I’m going to be a financial adviser!” she declared.

Then she realized some bigger dreams of hers.

She looked fearless.

If one looks at the comments section following Cohen’s article you can readily see many examples of a scarcity mindset, perhaps driven by envy, insecurity or endless comparisons. What’s missing from these comments is any expression of appreciation or support. Wow!

Leaders Deliberately Practice and an embrace an Abundance Mindset

Listen Like You Mean It | Book Review

Being interested is more important in cultivating a relationship and
maintaining a relationship that being interesting. (p. 19)

Ximena Vengoechea organizes her work in a three part format (Set The Stage, Navigate the Conversation, Rest and Recharge) similar to John Boyd’s OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) Loop.

Vengoechea and her colleagues are researchers, continuously interviewing volunteer participants in a variety of settings covering numerous topics. If we think about Team Vengoechea as a group of coaches and their participants or conversation partners as subordinates or direct reports, then we may apply the stories and lessons learned as relevant coaching tips and techniques.

This review both validates Team Vengoechea observations and compares selected stories and techniques with relevant Academy Leadership Excellence Course workshops.

Set the Stage | Observe & Orient

When we stop paying attention to our conversation partner and let our own thoughts and opinions run the show, we miss learning what our conversation partner really has to say (p. 5). When we’re doing this, we’re likely formulating our response, or waiting to speak rather than listening.

Vengoechea distinguishes two types of listening. First, when we fall into a passive state of listening, we partake in what is called surface listening (p. 6). This is similar to waiting to speak. One of the most common – and easiest – listening mistakes we can make is surface listening mode: Projecting our own feelings, ideas, or experiences onto others (p. 7).

The second and recommended form of listening, empathic listening, which at its core is about connection (p. 8). As we learn in our Communication and Feedback workshops, our role as a leader is ultimately about making connections via our words and actions.

Staying present is essential for empathic listening to occur (p. 30). Removing distractions such as smart phones and/or selecting a quiet location for 1:1 meetings are two simple ways to start. Another tip: One of the key ingredients to managing your focus in conversation is to ensure you have the energy to take on the work of staying present (p. 39).

Recall our Brief-Back exercise from our Feedback workshop. Rather than attempting to retain every word our partner says, we can aim to understand the gist, or overall idea, to help us stay present (p. 47). Just as a researcher documents their findings, as coaches we may capture summary ideas and thoughts in a coaching journal. Try reserving time immediately following your conversation to briefly jot down your thoughts (p. 49). It’s also a good time to follow up with any commitments made and to schedule the next coaching session.

Navigate the Conversation | Decide & Act

Each of us has a natural way of stepping into conversation, call this our default listening mode (pp. 95-96). Vengoechea shares eleven (pp. 98-101):

• The Explainer
• The Validator
• The Identifier
• The Problem-Solver
• The Nurse
• The Defuser
• The Mediator
• The Empath
• The Interrupter
• The Interviewer
• The Daydreamer

We may think of these modes as distinct coaching techniques, a tool box for a variety of situations. Consider The Nurse, completely focused on another’s health or The Empath, able to feel what another is feeling. Two powerful coaching techniques.

Rather than having an evaluating mindset, keep a curious coaching mindset. Vengoechea suggests connecting questions -- questions, and sometimes statements, neutrally framed to elicit an open response, without suggesting or biasing toward a particular reply (p. 120). Further, we may express appreciation with encouraging phrases such as (p. 127):

• Say more about that
• Tell me what this means to you
• Walk me through…
• Tell me more
• What else?

Chapter 8, Guide the Conversation, is essentially a call for having mutually agreed-upon objectives established prior to a coaching session. Think of Action Plans created at the end of a three-day Leadership Excellence Course. Vengoechea also mentions that if others are stuck (p. 188) on a particular topic, it’s ok. Recall that dosed objectives are preferred to bombarded objectives in our Coaching workshop.

Not everyone wishes to be coached. In the lab, we may end a session if our participant isn’t a good fit, or if we have all the information we need from them (p. 214). Likewise, an enduring coaching relationship requires chemistry. Vengoechea recommends keeping the line open to energizers, in contrast to takers, who demand more from us than they are willing to return (p. 231).

Summary | Rest and Recharge

Our effectiveness as leaders and coaches is directly tied to our energy levels. Vengoechea finds the same with listening:                   

Empathic listening is a dynamic and active process, calling for
strong self-awareness about what is happening to us
physically, emotionally, and mentally in real time (p. 270).

Vengoechea thinks the key is not to have anything planned right after so that you’re not in a rush, and you can continually process it after with yourself, and not feel like you’re running out of the situation (p. 277).

Coaching Story | Overcoming Imposter Syndrome

The last Leadership Excellence Course (LEC) of the year - ten attendees. Each attendee list their own leadership areas of improvement during the registration process. Additionally during introductions at the beginning of the LEC, each attendee introduces themself to the group, and at the end shares their individual expectations of the three day course. Often the shared expectations align with the listed areas of improvement from the registration process. What is perhaps more interesting is when a theme develops between the attendees as they hear each other share expectations. 

Confidence immediately surfaced as a shared expectation. Six of the ten mentioned improved self confidence as a course goal, expressed in different ways. One mentioned a desire to be more authoritative when speaking. The boldest response, in perhaps a capture statement for the group, mentioned the strong desire to overcome imposter syndrome. Wow!

The good part is we spent three days working on this, and combined with our three follow-on Executive Coaching Sessions, we have a good chance of overcoming leader confidence issues.

Let’s explore this a bit more. If we look up a definition of imposter syndrome we’ll see phrases such as undeserving of achievements and/or the esteem in which one is held. Keep in mind this LEC group of ten are highly educated and quite competent in their respective fields. The group also works at a highly regarded company keen on supporting and developing the many professionals that work there.

Here’s what it looked like to me: While confident in their respective technical fields, or areas of subject matter expertise, most of the group did not feel confident, or worthy of leading others. It’s probably a reasonable assumption that lack of confidence is whey they enrolled in the course. 

But why did this happen? The experience seemed to validate that most professionals put into a leadership, or career management role in support of others, are given no training in how to do it. This doesn’t happen with technical skills though. We’re not going to hear an airline pilot address the passengers:

“Welcome aboard everyone. Just wanted to let you know I have no pilot training but I was just promoted to Captain and it’s a terrific opportunity.”

It’s as though organizations continue promoting professionals into leadership roles without offering training and/or confirming whether or not the individual really wants the leadership role beyond to the promotion itself.

When we read books such as Jennifer Deal’s What Millennials Want From Work, it affirms all these observations. All generations, and especially the younger ones (Millennials, Generation Z), are keen on support and development as they advance within an organization. It appears the development and training gap persists, which explains continued perceptions of imposter syndrome.

Leaders Overcome Imposter Syndrome.