Will Removing These Leadership Lids Help You?

Not too long ago it was Taco Tuesday at the Livingston home. My wife, Kim, and I were assembling all the ingredients for our tacos: tortillas, ground beef, cheese, lettuce, sour cream, etc. I noticed my wife was struggling to take the lid off of the salsa jar, so I gently gestured for her to give me the jar and proudly assumed the position in heroically twisting the lid off the jar.

It wouldn't budge.

I put forth a little more effort, twisting harder this time. Nothing. I resorted to running it under hot water for a while, then took a towel to dry it before I tried again. Sure enough, the lid finally gave way and the jar was open for salsa to be enjoyed.

Earlier that day, I was talking with a good friend about leadership LIDS. During our conversation, the idea of the lid intrigued me. Yes, the lid is there as a cover, or protection, for what's inside, but it is also a cover, or barrier, keeping you away from what needs to be shared or utilized. Many times it's our own emotions and mentality that hold us back.

I want to focus on four of these potential barriers and consider how we can remove them: Loneliness, Indecisiveness, Defensiveness, and Selfishness.

As you read, think about your own leadership and which LIDS you need to remove. Which of these LIDS is holding you back from sharing what you have to offer?

Loneliness

This could be something you are experiencing in the workplace, or in your personal life. It can creep up when you've physically spent too much time on your own or you feel as if no one can relate to what you are going through or processing. Feeling alone is difficult, and doing alone is even more challenging. As humans, we are designed for relationships. Although alone time can be rejuvenating, we aren't meant to remain there in order to progress or thrive.

Remove this lid: Invite people into your world. Whether it's including them on a project you are working on or asking someone to coffee. If the loneliness doesn't subside and you are having trouble processing or expressing your thoughts, consider talking to a mentor, counselor, or coach.

Indecisiveness

You may say that being indecisive comes from the inability to make a decision because there's seems to be no wrong or right way to go. While that's true, I also see a lot of fear behind decision making. What if I make is the wrong choice? Making a decision is going to keep you moving while indecisiveness keeps you stagnant. How can you lead people if you aren't really going anywhere yourself?

Remove this Lid: Make a decision. Don't let the fear of failure keep you from moving forward. Making a mistake or taking a wrong turn doesn't mean you failed, instead, it's an opportunity to learn and grow.

Defensiveness

In the great American sport of football, the defensive line has a responsibility to keep the other team's offense and quarterback from advancing the field with the ball. They push. They fight. This creates struggle and tension, not to mention it is exhausting as they keep it up until the other team scores or it is their turn to play offense. I bring up this example because we tend to think of defense as protecting, yet the defensive line isn't protecting anything. They are pushing back and preventing advancement. We can often be defensive in our own lives, having the mindset that we are protecting something. This could be our job, our reputation, or more often than not, our pride. In this case, protection is a fallacy and our defensiveness creates a barrier and tension that prevents the advancement of our goals or our team.

Remove this lid: It takes some intentional awareness of your emotions to see when you may be acting defensively. Your heart might start beating faster, your body temperature may rise, you may feel your lips tighten, or you may unconsciously cross your arms. Try to identify what happens when you start to feel defensive, why you are feeling it, and what you might think you're "protecting." How is your defensiveness holding you and/or your team back?

Selfishness

Putting your needs and desires before others is the easiest way to explain selfishness. It is even easier, unfortunately, to get caught up in selfishness if we don't stop to think about what we are doing or behaving. Consider what your priorities are right now. Are you focusing on your own advancements and needs? What about those of your team and followers? Don't get me wrong, self-care is important, as long as it's not at the expense of another person.

Remove this lid: Think about your goals, priorities, and needs. What would it look like if you included your team in those goals, changing "I" statements to "we." Call on your team and followers to find our what their goals and priorities are, then think about how you can help them achieve their goals. Practice humility by stepping back, letting them take lead on a project, and praising them publicly for a job well done. Trust me, their success will be your success.

Homework

Think about our LIDS analogy above and identify one of them that you need to remove. What action steps or conversations do you need to have in order to remove them? What benefits will come to you and your followers when you remove the lid?

2 Effective Tools for Improving Team Health

I recently had the opportunity to facilitate a discussion for a team on how they could become more healthy.

The team by all accounts is high performing. It is made up of “top guns” from the industry. A group whose contact list (Rolodex, for those of you who still own flip phones), goes three and four layers deep into important and influential customers. They have done a remarkable job as a team, pulling their share of the weight for what needed to be done in the organization. Hitting all their yearly goals by the third quarter.

The premise for team health is that there is a synergy that happens where the team can do amazing things that no single member could ever achieve on their own. That when there is team health there is a feeling of invincibility and performance can increase.

On the flip side, when teams are not healthy, like when certain aspects of performance become overemphasized, other parts of the systems that make us human can become damaged. And while it may look like we are performing, the results are short-term. Worse, the synergy that is anticipated never happens.

I was having a conversation with a physician friend recently about this idea of extremes in performance when it comes to human health. This physician is actively involved with athletes in a consulting capacity and recalled a meeting he was in preparing a local community for a marathon race. The race is fairly well known so, as you can imagine, the health of the runners is really important. The people in charge of the race convened a committee of 20 physician marathon runners and my friend chaired the committee. The interesting thing about the group of physician-runners was that all of them were under the age of 55, and that of the 20, about 40% (8) of them had heart stents. High performers in any discipline have to think deeply about all of the systems that go into their performance. Failing to do this will put undo stress on one aspect in the system, ultimately causing a breakdown in the ability to perform.

My Story

The objective given to me by the organization who hired me was clear: The folks on this team needed a perspective that they are leaders in the organization. To achieve this, they needed to learn to better understand themselves and lead themselves as leaders.

Those of you who love to study how organizations learn will recognize the task as one that involves double-loop learning. The group I was working with needed to examine some of the basic assumptions they had about themselves and then how the organization defined performance. Double-loop learning encourages teams to ask clarifying questions about how they identified the problem, what processes they used to understand the problem, what they can learn from the problem, and how they can apply that learning in the future.

To get this team to see performance in a new way, they needed to think differently about what this term means and then to develop some new ways of going about their work.

2 Ways To Encourage Learning

Two ways that leaders can foster learning on teams are by providing opportunities for exploration and advancement.

Exploration stimulates innovation, new ways of thinking, and creative processes to develop new products or incorporate new technology. One of the exercises I took this team through was how to be better listeners. I gave them some guidelines on how to listen better and to focus on the needs of the other person. Then they were given a listening partner and a set amount of time where they were to do nothing but listen to the other person. We did three rounds of these questions where each time the questions got more difficult to just sit and listen.

The idea here was to give the team a new way of thinking about listening. As a leader, it is good to have a perspective or opinion but that the broader organizational teams also have opinions and ideas. The take away for this group is that if they listened with more intensity, then they would understand the perspective of others and be able to create the organizational synergy that senior management was expecting.

Advancement is when teams look for ways to improve existing processes or products while incorporating innovation and creativity. Leaders encourage team learning through experimentation, providing resources, implementing reflective practices, and celebrating victories during the learning process. One of the unhealthy behaviors that had surfaced on this team is that when something did not go their way, rather than engaging in healthy conflict, they internalized and awfulize the issues. So if one of their members was inadvertently left off of a meeting invite list, rather than be more assertive and reach out to the meeting organizer, the team would say, “it is not our place to get invited, if they don’t value our input then that is their fault.” As a team, we worked on understanding our individual conflict styles and then improving processes where they needed to be flexible from their default conflict style.

As a leader it is your responsibility to care for the health of your team. It is my hope you will continually be looking for ways to use Exploration and Advancement to improve the health on your team.

Are Your Goals Making You Sore or Helping You Soar?

Remember back in January when you had that new year motivation and fresh start attitude? You had all of this pent up passion for making something change this year. You had the idea that something was going to be different this year from your previous rut.

Once you identified the “what” you wanted to change, your next step was to set some goals for yourself. For most of us, we set goals for working in the office, traveling, or maybe even working out at the gym.

Do you remember your goals from the beginning of the year? Do you remember where you posted them? Are they still posted in legible form or has the Post-It Note you wrote them on started to curl around the edges with its spotlight position on the refrigerator now covered by last month's grocery list?

Have you made any progress on the goals you set?

You might even have named your goal: BHOG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal), Key Results Area, Performance Management Objective, Personal Development Plan, or some other colloquial term that you or your organization or discipline uses.

It is now July, and it is time to go back and check in on what was important to you at the beginning of the year. Ask yourself, "Have I accomplished my goals or did I get off track?”

It can be quite common for people to not to want to review the goals the set earlier in the year, especially if they know they have not made the progress they hoped. The feeling of discouragement can become overwhelming when we see a lack of progress and know we aren't where we had hoped to be by now when the goal was originally set.

Stay In the Game

Discouragement can be devastating when it comes to goals. In my experience, it can be one of the hardest obstacles to overcome.

The goal had meaning and significance to you 6 months ago, so it's time to start asking yourself some questions as to why you are not making progress. You HAVE NOT failed! You have likely learned a lot in 6 months about the goal and your progress if you just stop and think about it.

An analogy came to me the other day that may have some application.

In January, you set your goal. Let's say you wanted to exercise three days a week for an hour. Think of this goal as getting on an airplane. You are all buckled in your seat and ready for take-off. You know the goal. It is written down and it actually feels comfortable.

The plane starts down the runway, shakes, and surges as it gains speed. All of a sudden, it is February. You likely have taken a couple of steps toward goal attainment. You are gaining speed and you can feel the inertia of the plane starting to lift off. In regard to your goal, maybe you called around to see what gym would best fit your needs. You went out and bought new exercise clothes and maybe some shoes. The feeling and speed of the change feels good.

Then comes March. The plane reaches 30,000 feet, the seat belt sign comes off, the plane levels out. And the exercise doldrums set in. You no longer feel the rush of take-off. You no longer can sense the speed of the plane. This is when goal attainment becomes difficult. When it feels like you are not making any progress at all.

The Feeling Is Not Real

The interesting thing to me is the lie our emotions give us in this context. While the positive “dopamine” feeling of starting may be gone, the important thing to realize is that the plane is still going 450 miles an hour even when you can’t feel it. You are still moving. You are still experiencing progress. Even though Q2 is gone and we have said goodbye to April, May, and June, YOU are still flying. Realize your plane is in the air. You have not crashed. YOU HAVE NOT FAILED!

Instead of assuming that you are way off track and that you've already failed, step back and look at your goal objectively. Think about when you set your goals — were they SMART goals?

Most likely you've heard this acronym, and even used them when setting goals, but it is helpful to use to check up on your goals or even get back on track.

• Was it Specific? When getting specific with your goal, don't just consider what your goal is, but why and how you want to achieve it. Perhaps you want to work on developing young leaders. Your why might be because your want to prepare them for more responsibility in the future and your how will be through professional development workshops or one-on-one mentoring sessions.

• Was it Measurable? Are you able to see where you are right now and where you'll end up? If you are not able to track the progress of obtaining the goal along the way, you'll have a hard time seeing if you succeeded in the end or stay motivated along the way.

• Was it Achievable and Realistic? I feel the A and R in our acronym go hand in hand in some ways. When you figure out your goal, how to do it, and when to accomplish it by, you have to think about the parameters and circumstances that you are working in that will make it possible. This isn't to discourage you from setting the goal, but rather encourage you to think about how you will make sure you complete the goal, and ensure that it's not completely out of reach or asking too much from your team. At this point, something may have come up in the last 6 months that have changed your circumstance and deterred your goal. That's okay. Life happens. Instead of seeing it as a failure or no longer attainable, just think about what changes need to be made to your goal, the plan, or the timeline. Don't be tempted to start from scratch, instead, make less work for yourself by simply re-evaluating and tweaking what's already in progress and steer it back on track.

• Was it Time-bound? Some of you may have set goals that you've already completed, others might feel the pressure of the time ticking away. Use the time as positive pressure to get the work done, not to stress you out. If you feel constrained, give yourself a break and allow yourself more time. If it's a project with a deadline, reach out to your team or manager and see how you can work together to get it completed. Also, consider how you are using your time and what could be distracting you from focusing on your goal. What limits do you need to implement personally to give yourself time and focus to achieve this goal?

Most importantly, remember the why behind your goal and the reasons that motivated you to set the goal in the first place. Visualize what it will look like for you and your team when that goal is accomplished. Write this down and keep it somewhere you'll see it and can read it often. (Perhaps avoid the refrigerator this time!)

Keep yourself in the air and land that goal safely on the ground.

Homework

Take a look at the goal you set at the beginning of the year. Grab a coach, mentor, or trusted advisor and share with them your SMART goal. Listen to any advice they have for you. Be encouraged by the progress you have made (even if it feels like you are flying in circles). Decide with your support system what steps you need to take to land your plane safely. Set up another meeting with them in September for a progress check and December for a celebration of your achievement.

The Question Behind the Question

My daughter, Gretchen, texted me an interesting question the other day that I thought would be an interesting one for us to reflect on together.

The question was this:

“Do you think the average person would rather be bored or stressed? If they had to choose, which would they pick?"

What I found so intriguing about this question is that I had not thought about them on opposite ends of a spectrum before.

The contrast I usually think about for stressed is relaxed. Like when I am running to catch a plane that boards in 10 minutes and I am still in the security line versus when I am sitting by the pool, with an adult beverage, reading a book that has been on my list for months.

Similarly, the opposite of being bored, to me, is energized. Being bored is when I have complete lack of interest in something, like when my wife wants me to sit-down and watch The Bachelor. Painful! Being energized brings excitement and even joy in my life, like playing golf or watching the Cubs sweep the Cardinals in a weekend series in late September. Now that is energizing!*

But Gretchen’s question pitted running to catch a plane that is boarding while I am not at the gate; against watching The Bachelor. To me, just a different kind of painful. I was not seeing the win in the question at all.

In fact, my initial thought was that Gretchen is so smart she was trying to bait me into one of those questions that, as a dad, I wished I had my initial answer back once I heard what was really behind the question.

In a fairly typical response style, rather than answer the question, I thought that I would ask one in return.

So I typed, “It depends on what you mean by stress and what the last 60 days was like.”

It was the best I could do in the moment. And it came off so clinical and teachy. Why did I answer in such an egotistical way, rather than being open and curious?

I think my pride got the best of me. You know, my only daughter is writing to me to get my sage wisdom and advice on something. Even as I write that I can feel myself swell up. That is when I think a lot of us get caught up in our own heads. Our own high level of self-regard comes blaring though without any empathy for the person who is asking.

I so wish I had asked, “Now, that is an interesting question! Why are you asking?”

A much better response. Much more open. Much more curious. Much more about Gretchen than it was about me.

I am so fortunate to have a daughter who looks past my flaws and insufficiencies and offers me grace in the moment. Rather than beating me up about lecturing her or accusing me of always being on my “emotional intelligence game,” she said, “Thanks, Dad! A friend and I were talking about high school jobs and if it was better to have one that was kinda chill but boring, or to have one that was stressful but went by really fast.”

As I read her response I thought man I really blew that one. The answer I gave had nothing to do with the real question.

My Life Lesson

I really have to get better at this. I need to work on shedding my pride and focusing on what the person I am engaged with is really asking me. The first question is often not the real question. The skill for me is to listen to the first question and remain open and curious about what is being asked. Most of the time, I have to admit, I have no idea what is really being asked. So I need to get better at the second question. The question that sits behind the question. That is where the real gold is in relationships.

Gretchen, I am so glad to have you on my team. I truly am honored that you even thought to ask.

Foot note:
*Brandi, I will know if you edited this if the teams are reversed in this example. (Brandi is my assistant and a huge St. Louis Cardinal fan. Should be an interesting October in the life of our company.)

How To Not Be A Mrs. Fidget (A Lesson on Micromanagement)

In his classic work on understanding the four human loves, CS Lewis tells a very interesting tale of a mother named Mrs. Fidget.

The story starts out at Mrs. Fidget’s funeral.

What Lewis writes really caught my attention:

The faces on the members of her family had all “brightened up.”

• The drawn look from her husband’s face was gone and he was laughing again.

• The young, embittered son who caused such havoc it seems was quite human.

• The daughter who seemingly was out all hours of the night, if she ever came home at all, was seen organizing the garden in the middle of the day.

• Another daughter you didn’t even know was around because she was treated so delicately was off taking horseback riding lessons.

• Even the dog, who was never allowed out except on a leash, was seen from time to time wandering around the neighborhood with the pack.

What Lewis describes next is what I found to be so profound and so applicable to our thoughts on leadership today:

“Mrs. Fidget very often said she lived for her family. And it was not untrue. Everyone knew it.”

• She did all the laundry. She did it poorly and they could have afforded to send it out. But she did it. They begged her not to, but she insisted.

• There was always a hot meal for anyone who was around. At all times of the day or night. They implored her not to do it. They even told her they liked cold meals once in a while. The pleaded with her to just make a sandwich once in a while. But no. She insisted. She was living for her family.

• She always sat up and waited for you to “welcome” you home no matter what hour of the night; two or three in the morning. It did not matter the time of day or night, you always came home to that vey tired, weary face awaiting you like a silent accusation. This meant, of course, that you just didn’t go out very often, or if you did you just didn’t come home at all.

• In addition, she was always making things, as she fashioned herself as quite the amateur seamstress. And Lewis says, unless you were a heartless brute, you wore what was made for you. (It was said by the minister at the homeless shelter that her family had donated more clothes on one day than all the other families in town for an entire year…and we all know ministers don’t lie or exaggerate).

Mrs. Fidget was often heard saying she would work her fingers to the bone for her family. There was nothing she would not do for them. In fact, there was so much to do that she needed help.

So, they pitched in and helped.

According to Lewis, “They did things for her to help her do things for them that they didn’t want done.”

At her funeral, the minister said Mrs. Fidget was now at rest.

Lewis laments, “Let us hope she is. What's quite certain is that her family are."

Leadership Application

You probably don’t need my comments after reading the highlights from the story above, but I feel it is my duty. So here goes...

In my executive coaching practice I am called on at least twice a year to work with someone who turns out to be a micromanager.

I am also honored to teach at Concordia University in the Executive Coaching program where I facilitate the Internship course. In this course, students learn the executive coaching process from start to finish, including collecting 360 degree feedback. What I have observed is at least 40% will end up with a client who is in some way a micromanager…A Mrs. Fidget.

As I process 360 degree feedback with my clients and listen to my students stories, there are three pretty consistent themes that emerge:

1. Shock - I think the emotion I see expressed most often is surprise. The person who is seen as the micromanager had no idea that people on the team felt that way. “Who me?” they say…”... I would, and in fact do, sacrifice so much for this team. There is nothing that I would not do for any of them. I am as close if not closer to them than my own family.”

2. Dismay - The emotion that follows the initial shock of the feedback is denial. “No, this can’t be right. Something is missing here because I would never intend to harm or control anyone. I just want what is best for them and to keep them out of trouble with senior management."

3. Overwhelmed - As the emotions continue processing in the feedback session, the micromanager becomes overwhelmed and there is a real sense of loss. A feeling of "what do I do now?” The knee jerk reaction is to control the situation by pulling the team together and coming up with more strategies and tactics that no one is asking for.

4. Embarrassment - As the feedback is slowly processed, the shame starts to set in. This is why you need a professional coach to help process this kind of feedback. People who want to change have to process loss before they can turn and move to a new future.

5. Stuck - "Okay, now what do I do? I don’t want to be seen this way, but obviously my desire to help is being misinterpreted so I feel like I am in quicksand. The more I might try and move to get out, the deeper I sink in.”

What’s to be done?

At the core of micromanagement is a need to give to others. Some may call it control, as that is at times exactly what it feels like. However, the micromanager who has good ethical boundaries rarely has an evil desire to control others. Rather, they have a real GIFT. The gift they have is that they care. They care so much and they have such a strong need to give the gift of caring the only thing they desire in return is that their gift is needed.

Hence the cycle of micromanagement is established:

• Manager has a gift

• Manager needs to give the gift

• Follower doesn’t need the gift

• Follower feels need for peace at all costs

• Follower “accepts” gift

• Manager feels needed as gift is “accepted"

Those on the team end up enabling the micromanagement. This thought of the team having some culpability in enabling the micromanaging behavior is often left out of the solution on how to fix the problem. No one needs the boss hanging over their shoulder telling them exactly what to do and say, but they don’t want to tell them for fear of causing the boss to feel rejected. After all, a rejected boss can be more difficult to live with. With all the passive-aggressive behavior, it is better to just tolerate it. So, the culture becomes one of fear and control and neither the leader or the followers want it to be this way.

It was never anyone’s intention. It is the explicit culture that describes the team.

This is also why those who have strong, independent streaks in their nature, (like the daughter who stayed out all night), will feel like such an outsider on the team. They would rather just stay away than get sucked into the dysfunction.

This micromanager needs to learn that there is a time that the gift they have is valued. And that the proper use of the gift is to put teammates in a position where the gift of control is no longer needed. It is like, in some respects, teaching a child to dress themselves. You teach them, and then you celebrate it when they can do it on their own. You as the parent begin to think about what the next skill is that the person is going to need to be able to be successful in life.

Yeah, But…

But wait…the micromanager says, if they can dress themselves…now what do I do? What about my need to give?

Here are some thoughts for you to consider after you have taught them to dress themselves:

• Get them ready for the future. Turn your face to what lies ahead. Start working with your peers on developing strategies that your organization is going to need in the future. What talent is missing? How can folks on your team start to fill those gaps?

• Coach to their strengths. Find places where you see teammates really shining and celebrate them with everyone.

• Create a culture of delight. Who doesn’t like the feeling of delight? That sense of being pleased to the point of desiring it. Make the place where you lead one that people can’t wait to sign up to work in.

We all have gifts. Why not use yours to become a MacroLeader rather than a MicroManager?

Do you know someone who needs to read this? Why not send them a link and then invite them to coffee for a chat?

What is missing from developing leaders in your organization?

I had a great day last Wednesday!

I was a guest speaker for a client of mine who is working with their leadership team on exposing and overcoming implicit bias. I recently wrote a post on this topic and if you missed it you can click here to get my take.

Wednesday morning, I was one of two speakers. The first speaker was from the organization’s insurance company and he was there to discuss ways to help the organization be the safest at building high quality products.

I am not much of an engineering safety type, but I did find the lecture to be very interesting and applicable to those of us interested in organizational leadership.

THREE MAIN POINTS

There were three main points to the speaker’s presentation:

1. It is vital to measure safety performance.

2. Most safety measurement is historical.

3. What we measure is how safe we are not, and not how safe we are.

What was so interesting to me is that what organizations usually track in the safety world are serious major injuries & minor injuries. His point was that this is not measuring how safe an organization is but how unsafe it is. He made the point that what the organization needs to become better aware of are the “near misses” and “unsafe behaviors.”

He made the point that while not every “unsafe behavior” will turn into a serious major injury, every serious major injury started with an unsafe behavior!

LEADERSHIP APPLICATIONS

As I listened to him speak I asked myself… what about leadership? If I was giving this lecture and using leadership, what would it look like?

1. It is vital to measure leadership performance. While I do think this domain gets overplayed at times, performance is always going to be a part of what leaders are expected to do. At times we are a bit short sighted in what we measure, but it is hard to argue with performance being one aspect of leadership that is vital to success.

2. Most leadership measurement is historical. I think this is true both of performance and of behaviors. In the behavioral world we use things like personality assessments and 360 feedback to show how leaders have behaved in the past.

3. What we measure is when we are “not leaders”, and not what great leadership looks like. Most of the feedback leaders get is trying to nourish (feed) the leader from history. While it is important to understand where you have been, it is just as important to think about where we want leaders to go in the future. Teach them continually what great looks like in your organization.

UNSAFE BEHAVIORS

I think the final “ah ha” moment I experienced was when I turned my thoughts toward wondering if organizations “turn a blind eye” to near misses or allowing unsafe behaviors.

I didn’t have to think too long…

Immediately, I began to think about a client I had coached last year whose career had stalled out because he was seen as being too assertive and not enough of a collaborator to sit on an executive team. I was asked to collect feedback for him so that he could gain some self-awareness around this and hopefully change these behaviors so that he could be considered for the executive team in the future.

As we sat together processing his feedback, he looked up at me from his notes and said, “You know, Scott, for years this organization praised me for my assertiveness. They awarded me for my ability to get things done. I got bonuses for my ability to solve problems and i have made this company a lot of money. Now when it is my time to move to the executive team, the thing that I was applauded for becomes an issue.”

Classic. Really.

What got you here, won’t get you there.

From a leadership perspective, the organization failed to recognize the “near misses” and the “unsafe behaviors.”

In this case, they even rewarded them.

I am very interested in this idea of how we can proactively grow and develop young leaders. How do we help them identify these types of issues that, when in an individual contributor role we applaud, but that as a leader we strive to fix?

Looking forward to continuing this thinking and conversation. I would love to hear from you if you have any thoughts on this idea or topic.

The One Thing That Makes You A Better Leader

Most of you know I do not do any promotion of products or advertising on my blog. The only thing I am interested in is helping you become the best leader that you can be, so this blog dedicates itself to leadership and leadership development ideas.

That said, I am so excited about a new tool that I have been using that I wanted you to all know about it.

The reason I think this tool is so cool is that it would benefit any leader, no matter what point they are in their journey. In fact, I believe in the power of journaling as it pertains to development so much that almost all of the clients I work with in my executive coaching practice will at some point receive an assignment from me to keep a journal.

I find journaling to be such a powerful way to reflect on and organize my thoughts. Leadership Icons such as Teddy Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Abraham Lincoln all kept journals. Journaling for me is very rewarding. I learn a lot about myself and what I am thinking and feeling in the moment. I like having somewhat of a permanent record that I can go back to and review those thoughts and feelings. I am amazed at times how much differently I felt about something 4 weeks ago in my journal versus how I feel about it now.

My journal is really my personal forum for self-expression. You might even call it cheap therapy.

While there are many ways to journal, I have always found writing in a paper journal with a good fountain pen to be the most satisfying and rewarding way to write. However, since I travel so much it is sometimes hard to remember to take my journal with me and even harder to remember to pack my good fountain pen.

I tried typing into a journal for a while on Evernote, but typing just didn’t do it for me. I get lost in all the key strokes and it is not nearly as therapeutic. I even purchased a journaling app about a year ago, but that was even worse than typing on my computer.

New Paradigm

A while back I was sitting with a client and we were talking about journaling. I was a little hesitant to bring it up because his personality type is an extreme Type A. He is a real driver, take charge, get it done kind of leader. Always going, always on the move, and at times completely running over people in his organization. He realized that he needed to slow down his thoughts and just spend some time thinking and reflecting.  

It was great getting him to this moment of awareness that some of his behaviors were not healthy for his organization and that he needed to change. He was ripe for journaling as a way to not only slow him down, but to become more reflective in his leadership practice. 

Even so, I was nervous to suggest the practice of journaling because I have had Type A personalities look at me over the years like I had three eyeballs all planted in the middle of my forehead when I suggested they begin to journal. I even had one client tell me that he just “isn’t much for writing things down”, and asked what else I had in my bag of tricks instead. 

However, in this case, when I brought it up, I got an unexpected response. He said to me, “Okay, great! I just ordered this new gadget called reMarkable and keeping a journal would be so easy.”  After I got over the shock of the immediate agreement to journaling, I asked him to explain what this gadget was. Rather than me explain it, you can watch a quick video about reMarkable here.

Scotts Top 10 Journaling Prompts

Whether you journal with pen and paper, typing on your computer, utilizing an app on your mobile device or tablet, or, if you choose to give reMarkable a try, here are my top 10 journaling prompts that will help get you started:

1. What are the things you are really grateful for in life?

2. What do you need to affirm about yourself? Perhaps your level of confidence or any positive relationships, or positive outlooks you are experiencing.

3. What are your hopes and dreams for the future?

4. How would you describe your leadership style?

5. How do you lead change in your organization?

6. What is your biggest obstacle to improving your performance?

7. What is something you would like to reinvent in your leadership?

8. What is the best leadership advice you have ever received?

9. What puts you in a good mood at work?

10. How do you plan on using your top leadership strengths today?

If you do this journaling exercise please let me know. I would love to hear of your experience.  Also, if you have favorite journaling prompts, please send them my way. I would love to see other topics and ideas that leaders find valuable to reflect upon.

If you decide you want one of the reMarkable tablets for your journaling and other writings, here is a link you can use to order one. They usually take 2 or 3 days to come to you and you can also purchase some neat protective covers.

Happy Journaling!

Are You Using These 2 Factors To Align Organizational Culture?

Last week’s blog post on the 7 Step Organization Culture Checklist created a lot of stir in our faithful readers. If you happened to miss it, you can click here to give it a read before you finish this post.

I received several emails from folks who had some very interesting stories about how the organization they work in has a clear mission and vision, but then there is a seemingly huge gap in how leaders behave. This misalignment puts followers in a quandary. 

They say things like, “We are supposed to be delegating more and taking bureaucracy and senseless meetings out of our work flow. One expectation is that we are to have fewer group meetings. ‘You don’t need to collaborate on everything' is the mantra. Yet what is occurring is that the number of individual meetings I now have with people affected by my work has tripled. We still need to talk with everyone affected by our work, but now instead of getting a group together to do it once, we have three separate meetings with individuals. Then, if the last person I talk with doesn’t agree, I now have six meetings instead of one.”

This is an example of how the guiding principles, those objective structures that guide behavior, can be misaligned when culture is shifting.

Regarding the above example, the previous expectation was collaboration, so the behavior was to get everyone together and decide. The culture shift is toward speed and innovation, resulting in fewer meetings. However, enough of the old culture is still present that people continue feeling the need to collaborate, and change becomes hard. Lack of clarity and surprise are the worst things in a collaborative culture. What an innovative culture needs is speed, so not everyone can know everything.  

2 Factors to Align Organizational Culture

It is not that people do not want to embrace and change to a new way of doing things. More often than not, they really do. But, as creatures of habit, we all know how hard this is.

If you are a leader or have been with an organization for any significant period of time, you have been successful and rewarded for doing things the old way. Your brain, at a neurochemical level, has fallen in love with all the positive endorphins you received doing things the old way.

Enter change.

At the highest level it will start with a new vision and mission for the organization. My experience is that most people get the high level mantra’s, even if only intellectually. “We are customer centric,” “We bring innovation to our marketplace,” “A world without Alzheimers Disease.”

Captivating, aren’t they? Who doesn’t want a world without disease? What a great mission to be on and vision to set. 

Frankly, thats the easy part.

The hard part is understanding how you make this a reality at the behavioral level for everyone in the organization. This is where things like having fewer meetings comes in. While it is a good idea, it does not honor the old culture, nor does it really address the behavior being asked for by the new culture.

Here are two strategies for you to consider as you drive organizational change:

1. Incorporate “I will” statements.  
   
   This blog generally hits people’s inbox on Monday mornings at 6am. I am usually in the office between 8 and 9 to start my day. Last week on Monday, my phone rang at 11:15am. It was an old friend who I had worked with many years ago. He was fired up about the culture post and couldn’t wait to share with me his best tip for assessing and supporting culture change. The idea is simple, but the impact is profound. He relayed to me that in his role he had observed many different shifts in culture over the years. The best strategy he found was to ask people to articulate what they see themselves doing as a result of the change.  He called them “I will” statements. For example, a midlevel manger would say to followers, “I will support you if you get negative backlash for moving forward without checking with all the people you used to check with.”  These “I will” statements are powerful indicators to ensure that everyone in the organization aligns with the new behaviors.  Leaders have to get really good at listening to make sure the I will fits the behavior that supports the new culture. Thanks, Gerry, for the tip!

2. Believe in the person you are coaching.  
   
   Leaders have to realize that most changes we ask people to make take some degree of time to implement. It is not easy to go from being collaborative one day to speedy and innovative the next. A recent article in the Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research really brought home the criticality around the idea of the impact of positive communication practices in coaching. Psychologists call it self-efficacy. The idea is that a person’s beliefs shape how they behave. It doesn’t matter if they are optimistic or pessimistic. High belief in self translates to greater confidence and enabling a person to completely devote themselves to the change. Some researchers believe that high belief in self is the golden ticket to performance. The higher the self-confidence in a given skill, the more effective the person will be.  I happen to think there are other factors that balance self-confidence, such as empathy, but for the most part if a person doesn’t believe they can change, then they likely will not.  Enter coaching, which means having frequent interactions with the person who is in a change process and supporting and believing in them all along. This doesn’t mean they won’t stumble or make mistakes, but it does let them know that as their coach you have their back and that you support them. Who doesn’t want that?

If you have other ideas on this, I would love to hear from you. Send me an email, or better yet, give me a cal - I would love to chat.

7 Step Organization Culture Checklist

I have been thinking a lot about organization culture this week because a client I have worked with for a number of years has been given the opportunity to build an organization from the ground up.  When she asked for my help with this project I was simultaneously excited and terrified.  

I was excited because I have a lot of education and experience in working on organization culture. When I was first named a manager 25 years ago I learned what it was like to be inserted into an existing culture. As a consultant, I have had several projects where I helped leaders better identify cultures they have created, then worked with them to make changes in those cultures.

On the other hand, I have never built an organization of any size from the ground up, and being presented with the opportunity to help do so was terrifying.

At this point I had a choice to make.  

I could see myself as an expert and rely on my experience. Experts have very narrow mindsets. They rely heavily on their knowledge and experience to inform the decisions they are making.

OR

I could take on the mindset of a beginner.  Those who have the mindset of a newbie know nothing, literally nothing, about the topic.

I decided to forget what I know about culture and take on a beginner’s mindset.  To do this I thought it might help for me to experience what it is like to be new at something I know nothing about. 

Playing a Guitar

I have to admit to you all that I literally know nothing about music unless it is how to turn on my TV and watch The Voice on NBC.  Seriously, that’s it.

I thought this fit the definition pretty well for me of having a beginner’s mindset, so I did what most of us do these days when we know nothing - I went to YouTube and searched for “guitar lesson 1.”

The expert I clicked on took for granted way too much for a person who knows nothing! He started talking about using three fingers to make a D note and to not get your fingers directly on the fret and said you count the number of fret’s from the nut.

This is exactly what I wanted! I wanted to experience what it was like to have a beginner’s mindset and experience an expert’s teaching from a level that is too high. My goal was to experience what it felt like to know nothing, struggling to learn something new when you don’t comprehend.

Being a beginner is really humbling. It takes patience, persistence, and a real thirst to learn what it is you are trying to better understand.

Building a Culture

I am hopeful that my approach to learning how to build a culture goes a bit more smoothly than what I am experiencing with the guitar. 

I also realize that many of you are not building a culture from nothing; so I wanted to reframe my search as a checklist you can use to assess how the culture of your team is growing.

As always, I started my quest in culture building in the academic literature. I found a lot of information on organization culture, but surprisingly little on building culture from the ground up. What I did find were ideas on what needs to be incorporated into organizational culture.  

Here are seven of the items that stood out and seemed to flow together for me:

1. Mission: Should describe what you are doing and who your team is designed to serve.

2. Vision: Articulates succinctly your future destination.

3. Purpose: The unselfish reason for being; who you are impacting and how lives are being changed by what you do.

4. Values: The fundamental subjective beliefs that guide behavior through emotional investment giving guidance to right and wrong, good and bad, how to interact with constituents and engage with customers.

5. Guiding Principles: Objective, prescriptive truths around expectations that provide a sense of direction for all involved.

6. Projected Story in 3 segments:

   1. Adventure-Three years from now what do we want to be said about us?

   2. Legend-Seven years from now what to we want emulated by those copying our success?

   3. Epitaph-Fifteen years from now what do we want to be remembered for?

7. Behavior: Observable actions that can be articulated accurately by people

   1. Who are new to the organization

   2. Who just left the organization

   3. Who are outside the organization
      
      These behaviors should ultimately match the first 6 descriptors if we are managing our culture accurately.  

I would love to know what you all think on this topic. Drop me a line and give me some feedback on what you think about this checklist. If any of you use this as a checklist with your teams, I am interested in what you found. Until next week….

Are You Ensuring This Happens After People Are Trained?

I have recently been working my way through a very interesting book by Ben Horowitz called The Hard Thing About Hard Things. It is a very interesting perspective on founding, buying, selling, running, and investing in technology companies. The book is not really steeped in a lot of sound leadership theory, but is more about his own practical wisdom in working and leading in the technology space. 

One of the things that caught my eye was in a small section he wrote about employee retention. According to Ben, during his tenure at one of the tech companies he founded he decided to read all of the exit interviews for the entire company. He was amazed at the amount of money they were spending on talent recruiting, hiring, and on-boarding only to see this open drain on the back end of the company. It seemed they were losing people as fast as they could hire them.

According to Horowitz, when you put the economics aside (I assume he means people who say they are leaving for higher paying jobs that his organization couldn’t compete with) there were two primary reasons why people left:

1. They hated their direct manager. They often cited things like:

   • Lack of guidance

   • No career development

   • Feedback they received

2. They were not learning anything. 

He then goes on to make a case for the importance of training new employees to resolve some of these turnover issues.

Insert Coaching Here

While I am all for making sure that all employees get adequate training in their role, my experience is that training is just not enough. You can’t simply send employees to a training program and expect that your turnover numbers are going to go down. 

Horowitz quotes Andy Grove, the legendary CEO at Intel, who makes the economic case for training by saying that if a manager did a series of 4 lectures for their department, assuming 3 hours of prep for each hour of material, that is 12 hours of work in total. Say you have a department of 10 folks and next year they will work about 20,000 hours for the organization. If you get a 1 percent improvement in performance, the company gains about 200 hours of work as a result. It is easy to see the ROI by inserting a salary for the department and subtracting the managers salary-time.

I would like to take Grove’s ROI calculation one step further and insert coaching after the completion of training. 

Let’s assume that a manager then does two one-one one meetings each month with each of the employees on the team. Half of the time for these meetings is dedicated to coaching the employees after the training.

The manager has had plenty of time to observe the employees, evaluating their use of the training delivered. The manager can now use the observed behaviors to coach any little improvements that will help the employee become more productive.  

Let’s assume that this manager is really not that good of a coach, but is able to eke out another 1% of productivity from each of the employees as a result of the coaching. This becomes another 12 hours of work on the part of the manager (2hrs/month/employee + 10 minutes of prep on what coaching is needed).  Now another 200 hours of work improvement has just occurred as a result. 

Now we see that 4 hours of training (a one hour training session per quarter) and one hour of dedicated coaching to the training results in a net increase in 400 hours of productivity for the organization!

No Time for Training or Coaching

I had a client tell me one time that he just really didn’t have time to train or do one on one meetings with his team. The team had way too many tasks and priorities to take a break from their work to do any of this kind of development.  

The interesting thing to me was that I was hired as an executive coach to work with this person because the turnover rate in his organization was so high that those who were left were forced to take on the projects of the folks who were exiting.

This manager was symptomatically trying to solve his productivity issues by moving projects around on some kind of organizational chess board.

Instead of making the investment in the people to reduce the turn-over rate, the manager just wanted the folks who were left to work longer and harder. 

When I did an interview 360 and talked to this manager’s peers and the folks on his team, he was not very well liked or respected. One person I interviewed told me the manager was often quoted as stating “The workload will stay high until the teams performance improves.”

There was no coaching, no positive feedback, and no feeling of being developed. 

My job as this manager’s coach was to help him see that his unwillingness to invest in coaching the team was the productivity drag on the department. 

How about you?

Do you have 1 hour per quarter to provide a training for your team and 3 hours of follow-up after the training to get a 400% increase in your team’s productivity? 

Or does your team have so much to do that there is no time for training and coaching? 

Stay tuned for next week’s post where I am going to take on the topic of Good Coach/Bad Coach. I think this is a really important topic for those of you who buy into the importance of training and coaching and think you are good at it... Just because you do it, does that mean you are skilled?

Does Your Organization Implement All Three of These Ideas in Developing Leaders?

Even as a guy who loves to read and write about the topic of leadership development, I have some real empathetic understanding for those who do not think the investment in leaders is worth the return on the investment (ROI). While I do not totally agree, I am open to listening to their perspective.

Barbara Kellerman, leadership guru out of Harvard University, has entered into the discussion on the value of leadership development. In her new book, Professionalizing Leadership., she takes issue with the leadership development industry because of the message that it sends; “Take my course, or come to my workshop, or take my executive program, and you too can learn to be a leader.” Kellerman’s main beef with the leadership development industry is that other professions take the task of learning or mastering a field and a particular set of skills much more seriously and much more thoroughly. The main concern as I understand Kellerman’s point is that leadership development is packaged as an event rather than a discipline.

I agree with this summation.

Those of us in leadership development have to get away from positioning our value proposition as an event and start thinking more about how we approach leadership as a life long discipline.

For example, a training course in personality or emotional intelligence can give a leader a self-awareness tool. Nothing more. It is up to the leader to take this information and become a student of how it informs their understanding and approach to the practice of leadership.  

If you are going to lead, you can not just wake up and say “Today I think I will try to instill some vision into the group I am with.” Leadership is a discipline, just like chemistry, finance, or project management. According to Donald Schon in his book The Reflective Practitioner, these professions are “essential to the very functioning of our society.”

No person in any organization can be a leader without some other set of skills. If you want to be a sales leader, then you have to become skillful at sales and at leadership. If you want to be a leader in finance, then you must learn both disciplines, leadership and finance.

Interestingly, what I find in most organizations is that we take those who are most successful in a functional discipline, like finance, and once they show proficiency and skill at financial reporting and the inner workings of EBITA then the discussion turns to giving that person a team to lead. Most often, there is no thought of what the leadership experience or knowledge or education of that person is.

The mistake that is made is in the thinking that because this person has excelled in a particular skill, or because they were number one in their class at an Ivy League School, they must be a leader.

While I am not saying it is impossible for this person who has proven mastery of a skill to be a leader, the mistake is one Robert Sternberg ,in his chapter on foolishness in The Handbook of Wisdom, calls “fallacies of relevance.”

These errors are committed when the premise of an argument has no bearing on its conclusion. For example, just because Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player to ever play the sport does not mean he can coach. 

Sternberg would call this all too common behavior in organizations: foolishness. It means that intelligence is no protection agains bad decisions. 

Let’s say you had an opening in your organization for a financial analyst. A resume comes across your desk for a person  with no education in finance, no knowledge of terms or how financial data fits together, and zero experience in finance. Would you hire this person for your opening and expect them to meet organizational expectations?

No, of course you wouldn’t!

You would be looking for resumes of people who went to school for a number of years to learn the academic ins and outs of finance, then got a job in the field, had some people in an organization show them the ropes, maybe even was assigned a mentor. At the very least, they had the ability to learn from the “school of hard knocks” about what works and what doesn’t work.

Let’s think of it another way. Would you ever hire someone for a finance role who was an organizational leadership major? Let them lead the team and say, “No worries, they will just learn the finance piece.” Outside of an introductory sales or administrative role, I have never heard of this happening!

The Reason for Wrong Thinking In Leadership Development

There are three things I believe those who want to be effective organizational leaders need to focus on when making decisions about who is in a leadership role in an organization:

1. Leadership Education.
   
   Education is about gathering general knowledge as part of facilitating the learning process. It comprises important elements such as grounded theory, core values, accepted beliefs, socially acceptable habits, and proven skills.  A leader should know the difference between transactional and servant leadership and how followers react to each. Basic education is a necessity prior to someone going into training. If you try to train someone without some knowledge they may be able to learn the skill, but will not be able to transfer that learning to complex situations that arise.

2. Leadership Training.
   
   Training is about acquiring skills and behaviors with the goal of improving performance. A leader might go to a training class to learn about personality types and be trained in how to use personality to improve communication. Without some education on what personality theory is, the leader is armed with a tool they do not understand and, therefore, cannot use to the benefit of themselves or the organization.

3. Leadership Development.
   
   Leadership Development is the ongoing use of leadership education and training that is building and expanding the persons capacity to lead. This idea of development starts with the individual and then must expand to the broader organization to ensure healthy organizational growth.

These three very distinct aspects of leadership are all critical to growing leaders in organizations.

Back to the “Is it worth It” Question

While ROI is pretty easy to calculate on an investment like a stock, the calculation gets messy when we start to try and calculate the complexity of human behavior.

While many have offered formulas, the deterministic approach often leaves readers scratching their heads as a small investment in leadership development ends up showing 600% returns. It is so unbelievable that most people just dismiss the numbers out of hand. 

Maybe instead of being so deterministically calculating we ought to rely on another mathematic discipline to determine value of developing our leaders; statistics. More specifically, probability. 

What are the chances that without investing fully in developing leaders that our business will succeed? Before you start developing assumptions to generate your answer, why don’t we turn to logic to answer the question for us?

What are the chances that without investing in the education, training, and development of our finance department that our business will succeed?

I think you have your answer.

Do You Share These Observations Regarding Leadership Momentum?

There are not many folks from about mid-December through mid-January who are wanting to engage in new coaching or training opportunities, so each year I use those weeks for reflection and planning. 

In addition the clients I am currently working with, I am regularly adding new coaching clients into my practice throughout the year. With that in mind, an important area to reflect on as one year ends a new one begins is the future of my coaching practice. How many new clients will I engage this year? Who will they be? What will my coaching practice look like in the coming months? It is important to thoughtfully reflect on these questions in order to determine how I can proactively plan for a successful year for both myself and my clients.

Another area of my professional life that I reflect on is the work my clients have asked me to do with them. I begin by looking at my calendar to observe all the work I did in the past 12 months. I look at all the times I spent teaching, training, facilitating, coaching, creating content, etc. Then, I ask myself a really hard question: Is the work I am doing still relevant? Is it meaningful for those who call on me to work with leaders in their organization?

Finally, I spend time in personal reflection and journaling. Perhaps most importantly, reflecting on how I spend my time, then comparing this data with what I really enjoy doing in my work life.

Momentum

One way to look at whether or not I am relevant is by using the idea of momentum. This is a concept that I borrow from the world of personal investing and finance.

One of the personal finance newsletters I read on a very regular basis is Sound Mind Investing. (You can learn more about them at www.soundmindinvesting.com.)

In the January 2019 newsletter, Matt Bell writes about the concept of momentum. According to Matt:

“A fundamental mistake many investors make is to move too quickly in choosing investments. They read about a hot stock or this year’s best performing mutual fund and jump in. It’s all very ad hoc and reactive.”

Matt goes on to write that “Momentum is the idea that the recent past performance tends to persist-that is, it tends to continue, at least into the near term future.”

This means that what has happened in the recent past is likely to continue into the near future. It is what we know to be true from the world of physics; that an object in motion tends to stay in motion, while an object at rest stays at rest.

Momentum in the financial world becomes an objective measure of what is going on in the marketplace so that the investor can build a strategy based on real data and not just turn on the TV and be moved to buy a stock by some talking head in the moment.

Momentum Analysis

As I analyzed my journaling from this past year, here are 4 things I noticed:

1. Emotional Intelligence remains an important leadership construct. This is true for both the training work I do as well as the coaching. Most of the time when leaders hire me there is some growth desired in this area. I think Dan Goleman got it right when he wrote, “What really matters for success, character, happiness, and life long achievements is a definite set of emotional skills - your EQ - not just purely cognitive abilities…” Organizations put so much emphasis on how smart and skillful people are that they often miss this other very important dynamic of the “how” they work with others.

2. Relational empathy. I don’t know if this is a symptom of our political climate or not, but people have become so polar. They have an idea or a framework for how the world should be and they stick to it no matter how silly it makes them look. Maybe this is a natural outcome of divisions of labor, where those trained in finance wear finance glasses and only see the world through finance. Or, how those who are trained and educated in marketing only see the world through a marketing lens.  As leaders we seem to have lost the skill of trying to understand where the other person is coming from, and, even more important, what it is like to be them. We are so concerned with our own selfish ambition and desires that we have lost sight of the perspective of other ways of seeing and doing.

3. Being flexible in ambiguous times. I was on a call with a potential client toward the end of the year whose organization has been turned upside down. Half of the people have either been laid off or reassigned new roles. There is a tremendous amount of ambiguity about what certain jobs actually are and what people are supposed to do everyday. I was asked to talk with the team about the impact of emotions during times of tension and what to watch for as leaders when working with others. I was interrupted with a question in the middle of my presentation when one well meaning soul said, “Dr. Livingston, enough already about helping people process the loss they have experienced, can you just help us get to a place where things are normal and we can all just get back to work?” My response? “This is your new normal. Learning to be emotionally flexible and helping people deal with where they are in the moment is a new calling for leaders.”

4. Connecting with talent. The December stock market slide, not withstanding the economic outlook and, more specifically, the jobs outlook, is really robust. Senior leaders need to make sure they are connecting with talent, because my sense is that talent is itching for new opportunities. I think senior leaders need to get much better at proactively scheduling time to connect and care about the talent in the organization. Take them for coffee. Schedule a lunch. Learn what is on their mind. You do not need to do another ROI calculation on some process. What you really need to do is ensure you have the talent on your team to turn the future you are planning for into a reality.

How about you? Do you agree with these 4 observations? Leave a comment or send an email. I would love to connect with you to talk about these observations, or your unique observations regarding your organization.

Best hopes for the coming year,

Scott

A Prescription for Being A Wise Leader

Because it is Christmas Eve I am fairly confident that if you are reading this post at all, you are in one of three places:

1. At work regretting not saving one more vacation day this year.

2. Others assume you are working, but that you have scheduled yourself at an “offsite meeting” of undisclosed location.

3. On vacation, but just couldn’t help yourself and had to check your email because it is a Monday morning.

No matter where these thoughts find you this day, I want to note that this post is a little different than my usual organizational leadership musings. So, you have been warned.

Perhaps this is because as I am writing this my own heart and mind are turning to the Christmas holiday and the precious time my wife Kim and I will get to spend with our kids, their spouses, and my adorable granddaughter. However, our time with our family will not start until later on Christmas Day when our daughter and her husband arrive at our home in Florida.

This means that today, on Christmas Eve, if you are opening this post early, Kim and I will be at the gym for our morning workout. If you are reading midmorning I then will be having a brunch meeting with my good friends Bob and Pat who serve in ministry at Campus Crusade for Christ (CRU). Or, if you decided to sleep in and are reading this later in the day, I will likely be off to a matinee with Kim before we head to our Christmas Eve service at church.

I have to admit that one of my favorite church services all year is Christmas Eve. 

One thing I really I love about the Christmas Eve service at almost any church I have ever attended is that it is almost guaranteed that the song “O Holy Night” will be sung.

There is just something about this song that sends a chill down my spine. I get this huge adrenaline rush as the song begins slowly;

 “O Holy Night, the stars are brightly shining. It is the night of the dear saviors birth.”

Even as the song begins I find myself lost in the lyrics. Then the song builds in intensity as it moves along until it hits the crescendo verse still remembering that special night;

“O night divine,” the verse repeats softly and slowly, “O night divine.” 

What I love about this song is that it implores us to remember that night, and not only to acknowledge it but to remember it as something really unique in the history of the world: a savior was born for man to come back into relationship with God.

I have been thinking a lot recently about why that song is so impactful for me, and I think it is because the song takes me to a place in my mind that I do not go to enough…my imagination.

I am so evidence and fact based in my approach to leadership development (and life) that I often miss that creative, imaginative side of who I am.

So, why am I writing this to you as practitioners and gurus in the field of organizational leadership?

Because I don’t want you to miss this very important aspect in leadership that just does not get enough press these days…wisdom in leadership. 

We put so much focus on effective leadership I often wonder if we are missing the boat in doing so. I would argue that perhaps we need to be less concerned with how effective our leaders are and put more emphasis on how wise they are!

So, how do we evaluate wisdom in ourselves as leaders and in those we lead? Here are five things you can use from the wisdom leadership literature as a checklist:

1.  Wise leaders use careful observations and reason to reach better decisions.

2. Wise leaders take into account not only rational and factual evidence, but also non-rational aspects such as emotional intelligence, foresight, and imagination. 

3. Wise leaders value humane and virtuous outcome. 

4. Wise leaders make decisions that are practical and oriented towards everyday life.

5. Wise leaders understand the aesthetic dimensions of their work, are articulate when communicating, and believe in contributing to the good life of all.

Perhaps the most notable in this list is number two, so don’t miss it -- wise leaders take into account both the rational and the imagination.

My hope for you this Christmas season is that you will be awestruck not only by the evidence that you can see, but also that you are amazed this season by your own imagination. And, in doing so, that you would find yourself growing in wisdom as a leader.

Take in every moment this holiday season and let your heart be filled with gratitude and wonder.

Be blessed.

How to Create Excitement In Hiring

I had a quick meeting with a very good friend of mine the other day and the upbeat tone my friend shared really made me stop and think. I was inspired to write down what I was observing and I’m wondering if perhaps you might feel the same way I did by the end of this post.

I saw my friend at the end of a very long day for both of us. I asked a quite boring question, “How did your day go today? Did you do anything interesting?”

Her response was so enthusiastic it actually took me back a bit!

I knew she had delivered an important presentation to her leadership team because she had talked about it the day before. 

“So the presentation must have gone really well,” I said. 

“Oh, the presentation…” there was some hesitation in her voice. “Sure, it went just fine,” she said, but that was almost 9 hours ago! I’m excited because I just got out of the most amazing interview with a candidate we are thinking about hiring. I was asked to sit in on the interview sort of at the last minute so I did not even get the person’s resume beforehand. I was feeling a bit unprepared, and frankly, it was the end of the day and I was feeling a bit tired.”

“Well that doesn’t sound all that exciting,” I interrupted.

“But it was!” she said. “When the young lady walked into the room she had such an air of confidence about her. She stepped right up, shook my hand, and presented me with a copy of her resume. During the next hour she talked about her education and her experiences, which were an exact match for what we needed.”

Then, my friend said those magic words that I love to hear when a leader is making a hiring decision…

“My only regret is that I know she won’t be in the position long. She is just too good! People will quickly see in her what I see and within 18 months she will be promoted!”

I know what my friend is talking about when she says regret.

Not the kind of feeling you get when your dinner companion orders something off the menu that turns out to be way better than what you ordered. 

This kind of regret is a result of knowing that the person will do so well in the role will not have the opportunity to work with them long enough to learn what you could from them. 

I do hope as you read this post you are thinking of a particular person you have hired in the past that has moved on to a higher level. Organizations are like that sometimes. They take away from us some of the best relationships we have ever had and it seems like things will never be the same.

I have two folks in mind that I have worked with over the years and I am going to jump on LinkedIn later today to send them each a message and tell them what a joy it was to work with them.

How about you? Maybe simply sending a note to someone will make their day!

I am so happy for my friend as she hires a person she is so excited about. Is it possible that is really the standard we need to shoot for in hiring?

There are likely many people who can do a job, but if you are hope to form a high performing team, maybe there is more to it than just a competent person. That connection where you know they are the exact right person for the job ought to be considered as well.

For those of us who do some hiring but also have other career aspirations, what do we need to do to be that person who creates such excitement?

If you have thoughts on that, I would love to hear from you!

Does Your Team Need This Lifeline?

A while back, after a much-needed vacation, I scheduled some time for writing and research. During this time, my interaction with my coaching and training clients was limited to text and phone conversations.

About 10 days into this period, I noticed something unusual.

I was starting to get a little down. Not an all-out depression, but I was noticing something declining in my overall mood. I felt like I was sinking. Nothing bad happened, really. In fact, I had just come off a very restful vacation and had plenty of work to accomplish.

Nonetheless, there it was; the feeling of not having enough connections that sustain love for my work.

A lifeline is defined as "a rope or line used for life-saving, typically one thrown to rescue someone in difficulties in water or one used by sailors to secure themselves to a boat." Things can happen to us in our lives that give us a similar feeling of sinking or being stuck. If we don’t have some help to secure us, we can begin to feel alone and hopeless.

From time to time, we all need a lifeline of care and compassion from others.

BASIC HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY

It is fairly common knowledge amongst psychologists that the feeling of isolation can be a key determinant for a wide range of human ailments, from depression all the way through to premature death.

The Wall Street Journal reported there are very few public health initiatives to combat loneliness, even though this state of being is riskier to “health and survival than cigarette smoking or obesity.” 

Loneliness a bigger health risk than smoking or being overweight?

If loneliness is a bigger health risk than cigarette smoking and obesity, then perhaps it is something we as leaders should pay closer attention to. Are there people in our sphere of influence that need a lifeline?

IMPACT ON LEADERSHIP

A very insightful study was published last October in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. Researchers wanted to know the impacts and categories of social contact or lack thereof, that might predict clinical depression. In studying over 11 thousand people over the age of 50, the scientists found that only face-to-face interaction forestalled depression in older adults. Phone calls made a difference to people with a history of mood disorders but not to anyone else. Email and texts had no impact at all.

The lifeline that people need, according to this study, is face-to-face interaction

In the study, the frequency of gathering with friends and family—or not—was the key. What’s more, the researchers discovered the more in-person contact the less likely that depression would occur in the future. Participants who had minimal social contacts had the highest depressive symptom rate, while those who connected with people in person at least three times a week had the lowest. It would seem that the more people gather in person, the better off they are.

What could we as leaders do to become part of the solution?

Mayoclinic.org has some very simple steps for preventing depression. The 5 most relevant to our discussion are:

• Control your stress

• Increase your resilience

• Boost your self-esteem

• Reach out to family and friends (i.e.. grab a lifeline)

• Get help fast

As leaders, we can be intentional with those under our influence. Here is how I would adapt the above list for leader-follower interactions.

• Become attuned to what stress looks like for those on your team

• Meet regularly with your team members at least every 1-2 weeks

• Prioritize these meetings

• Spend most of your time listening and asking questions, rather than being in "solve mode"

• Meet in person, if at all possible. If not, use video chat like FaceTime or Zoom

• Give them some assurances that you believe in them

• Establish a culture that encourages learning from mistakes

• Do spot check-ins in times of high stress

• If a teammate seems down, ask about it early

• Consider frequent mini-sabbaticals as a way to rejuvenate

How often are you connecting with those you lead? How intentional are you in making connections? Who on your team seems a little down and needs to know you believe in them? Your lifeline of care and compassion might be what is needed to help your team reach peak performance.

Stormy Transition? Here’s What to do in the Meantime

Last week we talked about stormy transitions and what the space between looks like before and after. Here’s the LINK if you missed it. This week I’m going to dive deeper in how to work through stormy transitions such as grief and loss.

A storm we can all identify with is living with loss. Let’s face it, loss is really hard. Most of us in the United States do not take enough time to grieve the loss of a loved one, let alone the loss of a job or significant relationship. Many of us are so performance-based that we get caught up in doing something rather than just being with our grief and loss. I am guilty of this myself. My battle cry is often, “Just do something and you will not notice all the pain!” But I am here to plead with you to not do this. If you are experiencing loss, take the time you need to replenish, revitalize, and heal yourself.

I have experienced both the loss of my father and the loss of a job that I really loved. I was fortunate to be able to walk through these times with some wise people who gave me what turned out to be excellent advice. They taught me how to just be, and to not focus on doing…anything.

Here are three things I did during my time of loss. In other words, here’s what to do in your meantime.

1. Allow friends to minister to your soul. Loss often cuts us very deep, to the core of who we are as people. Loss can feel very lonely and isolating. Do not let it be a time when you set yourself apart from others.  Find friends who care about you and will listen to you. Friends who will let you take your time and heal as you need to experience it. Someone who will not try and solve, but just be there with you and listen.

2. Journal your thoughts and feelings. Buy a nice leather journal and a pen that feels good to write with and take the time to put on paper what you are thinking and feeling at the time. There is no right or wrong and this is a judgment free zone. I also want to encourage you to find a friend and read your journal out loud. Explore the meanings and the feelings you are having. This will create a sense of purpose, belonging and compassion.

3. Find a soft place to land. As you are in transition do some exploring. Play with some things that you have always wanted to try. For me I had always wanted to write a book, so I did. I self-published a book on coaching with emotional intelligence. It felt really good to be able to achieve a life goal during this transition. Soft places to land can make transitions both easier and less shocking on your system.

If you are in either a mini-transition or a full-on-life-altering-transition, please, take your time. Allow others to help. Do not go through the experience alone. You will be OK, in fact you may end up being much better off. You may get to accomplish something you only dreamed of.

Go ahead and climb in your cocoon. Sit in it and grow. Then come out and change the world.

I hope you enjoy the support. If you know of someone going through transition, why not send them the blog and encourage them to sign up. I would greatly appreciate it.

Are you in a Mini, Major, or Stormy Transition?

Many of the organizations I work with are going through major transitions right now. Some are growing and expanding while others are experiencing unprecedented contraction. The change seems to be showing up in a couple of very different ways.

Some folks are in mini-transition where they are gaining clarity around their life’s work; like an update of what has been happening in their lives over the past several years. These folks find themselves doing a new job, or on a new team, or maybe even relocating for an opportunity. It is a change they may or may not have been asking for, but alas they find themselves with some new opportunities ahead. While significant, and full of emotion, these mini-transitions keep the person on a similar life trajectory.

Then there are the life-impacting transitions where full-on change is happening in your life. Your circumstances are shifting entirely and rocking your entire world!

• You have lost your job, through no fault of your own.

• You have decided to retire and to give your talents to a local non-profit who really needs your leadership.

• Your spouse has served you divorce papers after 25 years of marriage.

• Or you experience the loss of a child.

Real loss. Devastating loss. The kind of loss that makes life seem like there is no way out.

Frederick Hudson writes, “…many people think of transitions [like this] as a penalty box, a place for losers, for quitters and weaklings-people who can’t take the heat, victims who thrive on self-pity and helplessness.” Many will seek to blame others; a bad boss, a spouse, or more likely God.

When you lose something you love, a job or a person it can seem like life itself is not worth living. Hudson writes, “the acceptance of an ending sounds like termination, humiliation, resignation, and defeat.”

However deep or devastating your transition, please take heart. However disorientating the change you are encountering, this experience is almost always a road to some kind of regenerative growth of you as a person and a discovery of some new and exciting you that is being created.

You really are a butterfly emerging from a cocoon…eventually.

But for now, it might feel like you are a caterpillar who just wants go into the basement, drink beer, and cry!

What to be aware of is how you are experiencing your transformation. Think of it as “The Meantime.”

The Meantime

When I was a kid, my mom used to talk a lot about the meantime. It was always mentioned as a time preparation as a transition was coming. It would go something like this:   

• “Scott your father will be home in about an hour and in the MEANTIME you better get your room picked up.”  

• “Scott you have basketball practice tomorrow morning and in the MEANTIME you better get your gym bag packed.”

• “Eric (my brother) you have your piano lesson tonight, in the MEANTIME you better get practicing.”

As I reflect back when I was a kid the MEANTIME was always a time of storming. You see, I knew dad would be home in an hour, but a kid could play a lot of basketball in 60 minutes. Who in their right mind wants to stop playing ball and clean up there room?

The storm would begin to brew.

My mom would remind me. “You better get on it now. You can play ball when your room is done, but in the MEANTIME you better get moving."

After the second request to clean my room, she would invoke my middle name.

“Scott Robert!”

The pressure would rise with dad’s presence looming on the horizon. The stormy transition was fast approaching.  

We all experience stormy space in our meantime; the space that exists between “how nice it was before the transition” and “what it will be like when the transition is over.”

The question I have been asking myself a lot lately is, “When the meantime comes, how do I show up?”

Leaders, we need to be very aware of how we are showing up during times of transition. We need to ask ourselves what our behavior was like during the stormy transition. Are my actions those of a self-centered protectionist?

Am I becoming so focused on my own unfortunate circumstances that I am missing out on key relationships that could be a vehicle to restore my healing? Can I remain calm and have some clear thinking, vision, and self-introspection as events unfold around me?

Many of you are experiencing change and chaos going like never before. So, over the next several weeks I am going to write about going through these changes with skill and grace. Next week, I’m going to dive deeper in how to work through stormy transitions such as grief and loss.

I hope you enjoy the support. If you know of someone going through transition, why not send them the blog and encourage them to sign up. I would greatly appreciate it.

Don’t Make The Same Mistake I Did

During a recent 360 feedback event, where leaders receive feedback from their supervisor, peers, and direct reports, one of the leaders came up to me afterward. She said, “Scott, my feedback is telling me I need to have better interpersonal relationships, especially with my peers. Can you give me some advice on how I can improve in this area?"

My knee-jerk reaction was to provide advice from my training and experience so I began rattling off my instructions. I gave a step-by-step plan to this young leader what she needed to do to have mutually satisfying relationships. After all, in my training and coaching practice, I have developed a near effortless perspective in this area. As an executive coach with a doctoral dissertation in executive coaching, I assumed I knew what the problem was.

Thankfully, I noticed the blank stare on this young leader’s face. She was completely overwhelmed.

I FELL INTO THE TRAP OF THE LEADERSHIP EXPERT

I stopped mid-sentence, shifted my thinking, and asked, ”When it comes to interpersonal relationships, what doesn’t seem right to you?” The young leader went on for about 3-minutes describing her thoughts and analysis. She explained how she felt spending time on “chit-chat” was not productive in the midst of her busy day. For example, when she had a meeting she skipped pleasantries and got right down to business. She wondered aloud if this was a possible disconnect with her peers.

Asking this woman a simple question allowed her emotional space to verbalize ways she needed to improve her interpersonal relationships. I had forgotten that most young leaders are just beginning their journey. They are still getting used to the language of leadership. They are receiving feedback, many of them for the first time. Where I am in my practice and where they are as young leaders are two entirely different places.

THOSE I LEAD ARE AT DIFFERENT STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT

Scientists claim that it takes at least 10,000 hours of study, experimentation, and practice paired with coaching and advice from individuals in that field before you become an expert in an area.

10,000 hours equals 6 years spent on the subject full-time, 8 hours a day, 200 days per year. Few of us have dedicated this kind of time to a field, so for most of us, it takes 10 to 12 years to develop our expertise.

Have you fallen into the same trap I did? Are you holding young leaders to a high standard of evaluation?

Edgar Schein, in his book Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling, gives leaders sage advice when leadership conversations go wrong.

1. Do less telling.

2. Learn to do more asking.

3. Do a better job of listening.

Here are three suggestions to practically implement Schein’s advice:

1. Do less telling by learning to let go of your need to be heard as an expert. What is driving your need to be right or heard? Replace your directive style with an inquiry.

2. Learn to do more asking by making your questions open-ended. “What doesn’t seem right to you” or “Tell me more about what you are saying."

3. Do a better job of listening by practicing empathy. Give them your full, undivided attention while keeping in mind where they are in their development.

Think of a relationship you have struggled with at work. The next time you are in conversation with this person, give up your expert position and ask some open-ended questions instead. Focus on improving the strained relationship. Let go of the outcome of the subject you are working on and focus on the quality of your questions and your listening ability. By making this kind of investment in others, your work may actually become easier.

If you have some success with this I would love to hear about it. Send me an email or better yet make a comment below so everyone can benefit from the conversation.

Are You Intentional About This?

An old friend recently called me and told me about her work. Her company really values leadership and sees it as a competitive advantage in the marketplace, but they view personal development as the individual's responsibility. Much like how they expect my friend to dress business casual when she comes to work, but they are not going to take her shopping.

You may work in an organization that takes a more proactive approach and provides classes to attend or gives you a budget to spend on yourself for your own development. You may even work in an organization that doesn't care about your development at all, they just want the job done.

No matter what type of organization you work with, planning your own development as a leader is paramount to your improvement. We can not simply hope that we will improve or leave our development to chance.

So, what exactly does development look like? Development is about:

• Growth as a person

• Finding a new skill

• Advancing yourself

• Creating something new and exciting

• Breaking out of the routine so that you become the person YOU desire to be

Perhaps you want to improve your position or your skills, yet you just are hoping that it will happen. Hope is a poor outcome predictor. Instead of hoping something will happen we need to intentionally engage others in our development.

HERE’S AN EXAMPLE

You are conversing with a peer while waiting for a meeting to start. You say, "Hey, I am trying to speak less in meetings, but when I do speak, I am going to try to have more influence. My goal is to draw others to my ideas, rather than beat them into submission with my words. Could you observe me over the next few months and give me some feedback on how I am doing?" Admitting we need to develop something brings us face to face with the reality that if we do not make a change we will be stuck where we are for a long time. This takes courage and vulnerability.

Being intentional with your development allows you to go to other leaders, and even followers of yours, asking them to partner with you in the creation of the more advanced you. This may be scary, but so is skydiving, or running your first half-marathon, or going on your first date. Scary in an exhilarating sort of way. It demonstrates a healthy and respectful fear.

Sharing an aspect of your leadership development plan allows three important things to occur:

1. You are declaring that leading is important to you.

2. You are showing humility.

3. You are saying to others that stagnation is NOT OK with you.

If you are collecting feedback by involving others in your development I want to encourage you to pay attention to the accompanying emotion. Are you feeling sad or encouraged? Are you motivated or discouraged? No matter the emotion you are feeling, focus on what is being said and how you can use it to improve your leadership.

So, how are you involving others in your personal development? I’d love to hear your comments around the topic of intentionally developing yourself as a leader.

How Does Risk Affect Your Team’s Performance?

Do you think risk and reward go together? Or is the reward is an outcome of risk, not a partner in the dynamic interplay of teams? Let's say someone on your team is driven by risk and we suppose they are carefree. Someone else on the team is risk-averse and we categorize them as wary. Now the team has to make a decision on a product or how to put a presentation together. The carefree person wants to go for it. The wary person wants to hold back. Depending on team dynamics, the team may find themselves out of balance or even stuck. As a result, emotions rise, people stop understanding each other and often begin looking for blame.

The stuck feeling the team is experiencing has nothing to do with talent or skill. The team is not performing in the moment because they all have a different tolerance for risk. Risk brings with it, as change does, a certain emotional tone and tenor. We each have a tolerance for risk. As that tolerance becomes challenged, our emotion, anxiety, and fear can all increase. The we feel the less risky something is to us.

There are 8 different types of risk profiles. As a leader, understanding these risk types will help you navigate team dynamics and maximize the risk profiles of each member on your team.

8 RISK TYPES

Excitable

At the root of this is impulsivity and an attraction to risk, combined with distress and regret if things go wrong. This type tends to be passionate and fluctuates between excited-enthusiasm and pessimistic-negativity. Such people are both frightened and excited by their impulsiveness. They are likely to respond emotionally to events and react strongly to disappointment or unexpected moments.

Intense

Those who fall into this dimension tend to be anxious and worrisome. People in this risk type expect the worst, they are high-strung and alert to any risk or threat to their wellbeing. They are emotionally invested in their decisions and commitments and take it personally when things don’t work out. They tend to be very passionate about things, but their mood can swing drastically from day to day.

Wary

Characterized by a combination of self-discipline and concern about risk, these are cautious, organized people who highly prioritize security. They are likely to be alert to the risk aspect of any investment opportunity before pressing into any potential benefits. These people have a strong desire to know exactly what to expect, and, as a result, may find it difficult to make decisions.

Prudent

Those in the prudent risk type have a high-level of self-control. This type is organized, systematic, and conforming. Conservative and conventional in their approach, such people prefer continuity to variety and are most comfortable operating within established and familiar procedures. They are generally very cautious and suspicious of any new ventures and may find reassurance in sticking with what they know.

Deliberate

These individuals have high-levels of calm self-confidence combined with caution. This type tends to be unusually low-key, even in situations where most people would panic. At times, they seem almost too accepting of risk and uncertainty. However, they are often well balanced by a desire to do things in a planned and systematic way. Because they are highly organized, compliant, and like to be fully informed about what is going on, they are unlikely to walk into anything unprepared.

Composed

This type is cool-headed, calm, and unemotional, but at the extreme may seem almost oblivious to risk. Their outlook will always be optimistic. These people take everything in stride and appear to manage stress very well. They are not particularly impulsive but are also not overly organized or systematic.

Adventurous

At the root of this risk type is a combination of impulsiveness and fearlessness. Extreme examples of this type are people who have a disregard for custom, tradition, or convention. They are seemingly oblivious to risk. Their decision-making is likely to be influenced by both their lack of anxiety and their impulsiveness.

Carefree

Those in this category dislike repetitive routine and do not like being told what to do. Such people may seem excitement-seeking and, in extreme cases, reckless. Lack of attention to detail and preparation may cause their intentions and objectives to seem vague. Their impatience, impulsivity, and distractibility sometimes leave them exposed to hasty decisions.

These risk types all come from an assessment that is published by Multi-Health Systems called Compass Risk Type. The tool is designed to assess the individual risk type of each person on a team and then give the team a picture as a whole. As we design workshops around this Compass Risk Type Indicator it is always interesting for a team to look at a current issue they face, and each other’s Risk Type, and work through possible solutions.

There is potential for risk in almost everything we do, and there are many different factors that influence a person’s readiness to take a risk at any particular moment. As leaders, we must be aware of the way those on our team interpret and respond to risk, beginning with ourselves.

The next time your team is stuck in making a decision, look at the list of risk-types and ask if the source of the stall could be attributed to a different approach to risk.