One Important Truth and Three Tips On Self-Awareness

This morning started off like most mornings for me when I am home and working from my home office: make my way to the kitchen and fix a pot of coffee.

I have done this exact same thing at least 20,000 times in my life.

Our coffee pot is a simple one consisting of only 3 parts: a glass carafe, the “maker” which essentially boils the water and dispenses it over the coffee grounds, and the filter basket where the coffee grounds sit.

That’s it.

3 parts, of which I am really familiar. In fact, according to Malcom Gladwell in his book Outliers, I am an expert in coffee making 2 times over.

I think you know where this is heading.

This morning I got up, filled the maker with water, put the coffee in the paper filter, put the paper filter in the maker, and turned it on…

Did you notice anything?

That’s right. No filter basket.

Which means that the paper filter with all the grounds in it fell into the large hole in the coffee maker. To say I had a mess is no small statement.

Seeing and recognizing are not the same thing

As I thought about what just happened several ideas came to mind:

• Maybe I was still a bit groggy and half asleep.

• Had my wife put the filter basket back in the coffee maker where it belonged…

• If I didn’t have to walk the dog and make coffee, maybe I would have had more time to focus
  on the task.

Do you hear the excuses?

I know you do, because if you are honest you likely use similar excuses frequently when things don’t go your way. It is easier to put the blame outside yourself rather than to own what is happening in your world. It is easier to blame the environment, other people, or your circumstances rather than own up to what is happening.

• I wasn’t paying close enough attention to what I was doing (even though I am a self-proclaimed coffee making expert).

• My wife had nothing to do with my not recognizing the filter basket was not in the coffee maker.

• I had more than enough time between 6am and my first meeting at 9am to make coffee and walk the dog.

The real problem for me this morning is that I saw there was no filter basket in the coffee maker. I had to have seen it. I have made over 20,000 pots of coffee in my life. Every pot I have ever made uses the same three functional parts.

Oh, I saw it alright...

I just didn’t recognize it.

To me, this is the essence of being self-aware as a leader: Recognizing when things are not quite right.

Three Tips To Be More Self-Aware

• Slow Down Your Routine

  Routines take things we used to have to think about and makes them unconscious. This distinction is what Daniel Kahnemen, in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, describes as making System I thinking become System II. It is taking your “gut” feelings and putting some rational thought behind them.

• Challenge Your Status Quo

  Are the behaviors that have made you successful in the past going to get you where you want to be in the future? Mix it up a bit and learn. This will give you new insights and recognitions, helping you to slow down and think more about what you are doing.

• Find a Friend/Coach/Mentor

  Not that person who always takes your side or tells you what you want to hear. You need someone who can help you move from seeing to recognizing, then help you experiment with new behaviors so that you know what to practice.

My hope for you is a leader is that you become more self-aware so that you can have an inspirational impact on those you lead.

Thats all for now. I have to go make another pot of coffee.

Building Leadership Muscle

My arms are sore.

Not run of the mill sore because my workout was hard, but really sore.

Sore to the point where it hurt just bringing a cup of coffee to my mouth for a sip of coffee in the morning.

So sore that even as I am typing these words, I am having to take a break and stretch my triceps.

600mg of Ibuprofen four times a day and a Biofreeze massage at least three times a day sore.

Achy sore triceps. That is how I am feeling as I am writing this post.

The Back Story

Many of you know I am an avid exerciser. My workout of choice these days is Orange Theory, a heart rate workout where the goal is to be 84-91% of your target heart rate for at least 12 minutes of a 60 minute class.

My usual workout cadence is to take 2 to 3 classes every week. In a typical workout I will burn around 700 calories, but the best thing for me is how I feel about an hour after my workout. I have energy, and that positive happy feeling that only endorphins can provide.

However, I took the month of July off from Orange Theory for two reasons. First, I felt like my body just needed a rest. In addition, we were going to be traveling for some vacation, teaching, and work commitments, so I did not try to find a gym.

I did do some light jogging and played my fair share of golf, but in the month of July really nothing more than that on the exercise front.

Then we got home and I said to my wife, “We need to get back to the gym!” So last Thursday we signed up for a class.

It felt really good to get back into the gym. The workout was a really good one that focused on the tricep muscles and some endurance running. Nothing I had not done before. I did not really use too heavy of a weight, nor did I push myself to any extreme.

But the next day…two… three…four... and five…

Did I mention how sore my arms are?

Application to Leadership Development

This morning I met with a client who completed an emotional intelligence self-assessment in a workshop with me a few weeks ago and he scheduled some time to talk more in-depth about what his report was communicating.

For the most part, my client had emotional intelligence scores on average where most people score. This is a very bright and articulate person who has a good understanding of how emotions impact his relationships and decision making.

He did, however, have one competency that was significantly lower than the other 14 that are measured by the tool.

As I asked him about how this lack of emotional awareness showed up in his leadership life, he shared stories where the skill just did not properly develop. He has been using other emotional intelligence competencies to compensate for the lack of the one deficit, so he gets along well in work and life.

However, he told me that he wanted to begin to work on the area he was not using, so I gave him 2 new exercises to help him begin to develop this new emotional intelligence muscle.

After describing the “workout” to him, we entered into a time of practicing the new behavior. When we finished, I asked him what he thought it was going to be like for him to execute this on his own.

He said,”Honestly, I am a little bit afraid and I know it is going to be painful, but I know that if I can get stronger at this I will be a better leader for my team.”

He had some skill in this area already, he had just not exercised it in a while. So the pain he is describing is the breaking down of, and subsequent building of, muscle.

Everything he needed was in his emotional intelligence package. It just needed to be strengthened.

Indeed some pain and soreness along the way, but in the end, a much more self-aware leader.

I shared a thought with him that I want to leave you with as you consider developing your own leadership muscle:

Most of our fear comes from the exaggeration of bad consequences.

Now, before you finish reading, pause for a moment. Go back and read that bolded sentence again. Let it brew in your mind a bit. See if you can find a place in your leadership life where this is happening.

We play out this story in our minds, imagining the worst possible outcomes of what will happen to us, to the point of being irrational. We make things up in our minds that just are not true, then we work to convince ourselves that we are right.

While you might get a little sore once in a while after working out a muscle that has not been used much, you will live…and you will be stronger for having worked on becoming a better, more effective, and wise leader.

Borrowed from NASA: 3 of My Favorite Team Learning Strategies

For the past 6 years I have been asked to be an instructor for the Doctor of Organizational Leadership program at Indiana Wesleyan University. It has become one of my favorite weeks of the year.

I get the opportunity to engage with a very diverse group of adults who have backgrounds ranging from education and business to non-profit and government intelligence (where you really can not know what they do!)

The one thing they all have in common is the seeking of an advanced degree. As I talked with the students I learned there are a lot of reasons they decided to enter into such a rigorous academic program. Everything from a cure for boredom to career advancement.

The subject I teach for the week is Adult and Organizational Learning; one that both students and practitioners of leadership need to really pay close attention to. I think one of the primary responsibilities leaders have in organizations is to help followers learn. Making sure that there is a safe place for people to learn becomes a critical success factor in successful organization.

Amy Edmonson, in her book, The Fearless, Organization: Creating Psychological Safety In the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth states, "Success requires a continuous influx of new ideas, new challenges, and critical thought, and the interpersonal climate must not suppress, silence, ridicule or intimidate. Not every idea is good, and yes there are stupid questions, and yes dissent can slow things down, but talking through these things is an essential part of the creative process.”

3 Strategies

One of the articles we review in the course I teach is written by Edward Rogers and Mike Ryschkewitsech where they outline six different strategies NASA uses to capture knowledge and facilitate learning. I thought it would be fun to outline 3 of my favorites for you so you can use them as a bench mark for how you are doing in your organization and/or with your team.

1. Pause and Learn - The idea behind this strategy is that not only at the end of an event or mission, but at key times along the way, to have the team STOP and talk about what they are learning as they go. This can be an important benchmark to understanding the culture of the group so that the leader knows what the thoughts are and can decide if any course corrections are needed.

   You really want to be intentional with the “pause” in this strategy. Get a meeting site that is not one where you regularly meet. This is not a time for routine, but putting people in a different context so they can really dig in and think about what it is they need to learn. Then review what was supposed to happen and lay out what did happen. As the discussion ensues, make sure you are getting and recording all the input from every participant. All opinions are valid and needed if the learning is going to be complete. Then have the team organize the thoughts from the discussion and summarize any key actions needed moving forward.

2. Knowledge Sharing Workshops - Successful organizations thrive on learning. Successful leaders will from time to time hold sessions for anyone in the organization to attend to share the good work their team is doing. These meetings can range from 90 minute sessions to full day events and are meant to not only shed some light and learning on what your group is doing, but can also be used as a successful recruiting tool for talent.

3. Case Studies - I realize this is not a new idea, but I certainly think it is under utilized. Cases can be written and shared around seminal events that a team has experienced and then disseminated amongst groups for learning. The main idea is to look at the inputs and decisions that a group had as they worked through problems. Then this learning can be shared and discussed by others in the organization.

One example might be a team who is new formed and built from the ground up writes a case that shows all the inputs and decisions and then makes this available for other teams to learn from as they interview and build teams of their own. Case studies are unique ways to capture organizational learning and sharing in a safe and productive learning environment.

If you have successes with any of these, or other knowledge sharing strategies, I would love to hear from you and learn from your experience. Please reach out to me and share your learning. Maybe we could write some case studies together?

Unless Someone Cares

I came across an interesting piece of research the other day in the International Journal of Manpower that I just cannot stop thinking about.

Carolyn Wiley is a researcher and professor of management at Roosevelt University. In 1995 she repeated a study that had been conducted in 1946, 1980, 1986, and then again in 1992. 

Over 40 years of survey data were analyzed to learn what factors really motivate people to do their best work.

I know what some of you analytical types are saying right now…Scott, that data is at least 25 years old…shouldn’t you write about something a little more current?

Before you stop reading, I would ask you to ponder for yourself; how much has your motivation to do your best work really changed?

Sure, we are all a bit different. The things happening in society when the data was collected was different. But when you look at the data as an aggregate, are things really all that different?

Some popular responses to the motivation question from the survey are:

• Full appreciation of work done

• Help with personal problems

• Job security

• Good wages

• Interesting work

• Personal or company loyalty

• Promotion and growth in the company

• Good working conditions

• Tactful discipline

When studying the 1992 data overall, there are a lot of differences between different groups:

• Part-time workers placed more emphasis on interesting work, while full-time workers placed more value on personal loyalty.

• Women placed greater importance on appreciation for work done, while men placed more value on interesting work.

• There were no statistical differences in motivation by age group. All groups decided on good wages as their first choice.

What I found most interesting is that across the 40 years measured by the study, only one factor made the top two motivators when all of the data is combined. Take a look at the list at some of the top vote getters again and see if you can figure out which one matters most.

Here is the list for you to study:

• Full appreciation of work done

• Help with personal problems

• Job security

• Good wages

• Interesting work

• Personal or company loyalty

• Promotion and growth in the company

• Good working conditions

• Tactful discipline

If you guessed “full appreciation of work done” then you either read the International Journal of Manpower or you are really in tune with what people in organizations want.

I guess that is why the picture in this post really caught my attention.

If I am not valuing and appreciating the folks that I interact with on a routine basis then I am leaving one of the two top motivators for those I work with out of the equation for obtaining whatever business objective I have in front of me.

It is so easy to say to yourself, “of course I do this,” but do you really? Do you really tell those in your organization “thank you" enough?

Perhaps and even better question is, do they feel it? Do they feel it to the point where it is a motivation for them to give their very best?

I will leave you to ponder this for yourself.  Let me know what you think by dropping a comment below.

Your Story Is Worth Reading

A few days before Fathers Day back in June, I was doing some research for an article and I came across this thesis that used journaling as a research component for self-discovery in youth football coaches.

A leadership discovery : enhancing Finnish youth football coaches' effectiveness through the Transformer Research Project

While in this study journaling was a tool and not the primary outcome, I would have to say that as I glanced through the article many of the benefits of journaling came through very clearly to me.

Benefits of Journaling for Leaders

As I have worked with my coaching clients over the years, I have recommended the leader development strategy to so many. Journaling is nothing more than taking some time to be reflective and to write down how you observe yourself showing up.

Because the lack of self-awareness is so prevalent in leadership, journaling is a key way to document what you think and how you feel about what is going on in your world. It really can be used as a stake in the ground to preserve your thoughts and emotions on any given day across a number of circumstances.

Off the top of my head I came up with my top 5 reasons that every leader should journal:

1. Self-awareness: Leaders need to be reflective of how they show up in different contexts and what triggers their emotions. No matter how well we think we know ourselves, we can always learn something new upon reflection.

2. Manage Stress: There is nothing like writing when it comes to lowering levels of stress. Perhaps even better than writing is visual journaling or what Mrs. Carlson, my second grade teacher, would have called “drawing.” In a 2010 study with medical students, Amanda Mercer found a reduction in stress and anxiety when medical students kept a visual journal of how they were feeling.

3. Gain Clarity: I find that when I am faced with issues that have multiple inputs and layers of complexity there is nothing like writing or drawing to help me sort things out. Just taking the time to clear my mind and put it on paper (or my remarkable tablet) really helps me to clarify what it is that I am even having to decide.

4. Prioritize: Life, especially in our Western world, can get really crazy with so many priorities that some leaders find it hard to decide to turn right or left. Journaling can help you prioritize what is important and to stay focused because you have it written down. You put a metaphorical stake in the ground and now have something to come back to.

5. Control Impulses: The other real benefit of keeping a journal is having a place to go to before you act. I like to just go to my journal before I agree or commit to something so that I have that ability to really not be impulsive. Since I can be a bit of a people pleaser at times, my journal is fast becoming that place I turn to before I say yes to a project I should be saying no to.

Mind Blown

Recall that it was a few days before Father’s Day when I was reviewing this article I mentioned above. Then Father’s Day happened. And for Father’s Day my kids bless me with, you guessed it, a journal.

But not just any journal. This is one is called StoryWorth.

As an orientation, here is how StoryWorth works.

• Every week I get an email journal prompt on a memory I have from my past.

• All I do to journal is reply to the email I get. I can write as much or as little as I want on the topic. Usually two or three paragraphs in my case.

• These journal entries are then saved for me and then my kids are are going to turn my journaling into a book.

At he end of 52 weeks, I will have a book of memories to cherish for years to come.

So I guess I would add a #6 to my list of reasons that leaders need to journal: Because your leadership story IS worth reading.

Want to know more about StoryWorth? You can click here to get $10 off your own StoryWorth Journal.

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.

Why emphasize emotional intelligence?

I have been on vacation this last week taking some time for personal reflection and rest. Here are a couple photos from my time in France with my wife, Kim, and some dear friends of ours:

While on vacation, I spent time reflecting on my business over the past 5 years; what has gone well and what needs improved. I also spent some time expressing gratitude for those partners who have trusted me to work in their organizations; serving, coaching, and developing leaders at many levels.

Another area of reflection was actually sparked by a question I was asked recently by one of my students in an executive coaching course I teach:

“Dr Livingston, why do you put so much emphasis on using emotional intelligence in your coaching practice?”

This question lingered with me while on vacation so I allowed myself some time to think more deeply about my answer.

Here are four of the top reasons I emphasize Ei in my coaching practice:

1. Because developing leaders always has three interesting aspects:

   1. The culture they work in

   2. The person they are

   3. The change they desire to make.  
      
      In all three of these aspects, recognition of the impact that emotion has on performance is critical. Leaders often receive feedback on what they are doing well or not so well, but have a difficult time understanding the emotion that is driving their behavior.
      
      

2. Emotional Intelligence has become a fashionable and accepted method to work on things that would otherwise be very difficult. Who likes being told they are seen as rude in certain situations? No one. But to study the results of an Emotional Intelligence self-assessment where the leader sees they are low in empathy can open the door for behavioral changes to occur.
   
   

3. Receiving valid and reliable feedback on Emotional Intelligence is simple and cost effective. For under $100, in less than an hour, a client can receive a self-report of their Emotional Intelligence to provide a framework for their personal and professional development.
   
   

4. Getting certified in a valid and reliable tool to measure emotional intelligence has become easy and cost effective. In 2 days (not counting about 6 hours of pre-work and a post exam) and for under $2500, leaders of all types can become certified themselves in emotional intelligence.

One of the things I have had the pleasure of doing over the last few years is certifying lots of different types of leaders on an emotional intelligence assessment (EQi 2.0 published by Multi Health Systems).  Here are just a few of the types of folks who have taken the time to get certified in the EQi 2.0:

1. HR professionals
   Leaders who want to better understand the emotional intelligence model when a consultant uses such a tool in coaching organizational leaders. Some of these HR professionals are also doing some leader development using the tool in their own organizations.

2. Executive Coaches
   People who are directly involved in leadership development and need a valid and reliable tool to support other types of feedback, such as a 360 interview, or even just to gain better insight into the emotional makeup of their client.

3. Organizational Managers
   These leaders want to better understand the tools that drive organizational performance from a human perspective. The augmentation of individual development plans for those in their reporting structures is one very practical use.

4. Pastors and Ministry Leaders
   These leaders often serve in counseling capacities or in the development of staff. The EI tool gives strong data for individual or team development at a very affordable price, depending on the report selected.

5. Training and Development professionals
   These professionals are seeing the value of integrating emotional intelligence into behavior based training. Certification allows them to better understand the inner workings of an EI model and to work more closely with consultants who specialize in this work.

If you or someone in your organization is interested in becoming certified, please respond to this email and let me know. We offer certification classes every other month or so, with our next one being in June. I am happy to jump on a quick call and answer any questions you may have on becoming certified.

For more information on our Ei certifications, click here.

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!

5 Strategic Inflection Points for Leadership Development

“A strategic inflection point for a business is when its fundamentals are about to change. They are the result of an event which changes the way we think or act.”

- Andy Grove, ex-Chairman, Intel

An awful lot has been written over the years about the growth curve for business. We tend to marvel at the meteoric rise of organizations like Amazon while at the same time wondering what happened to great powerhouses like Sears.  

It is so fascinating that for years before Amazon came on the scene we could order things from Sears and have them mailed to our house. While I understand that Amazon has created a digitized experience, I can’t help but wonder how the executives at Sears did not see this trend and buy Amazon in its first year.

It really is amazing that some of the real organizational giants in our world have struggled, even becoming eclipsed, by small, innovative organizations that captured the hearts and minds of us all. 

I was reading an article recently that tried to give some rationale as to how and why something like this could occur. I mean, who would have ever thought that the powerful General Electric (GE) would be removed from the Dow 30?

But in June of 2018, this very thing happened when Walgreens was added. GE was taken off because it no longer reflected the market, which was going up while GE was going down.

In fairness, GE is still a viable organization with lots of dedicated employees, yet there is no denying it is not doing as well as it had in the past. The reality is they never recovered from the 2009 crash. It took a bailout from Warren Buffet and the government to keep them solvent and they haven’t recovered overall since that downturn. 

Application for Leaders

As I was reflecting I began to wonder… if this could happen to GE, could it also happen to the leaders I interact with and coach?

And the truth is, it could! 

Here are 5 things to consider as you innovate and develop:

1. Find one way to innovate within your current role.
   
   When most of us think about innovation we begin to feel overwhelmed and find it hard to conceptualize. Some consultants tell us to “think outside the box” if you want to innovate. However, Drew Boyd and Jacob Goldenberg recommend just the opposite. They claim in their book, Inside the Box, that more and quicker innovation happens when you think inside the box. Rather than having to create a whole new job for yourself that no one understands, why not just put a couple of Boyd and Goldenberg’s strategies together and innovate your current role?

   1. Option 1: Stop doing one thing in your role that that was likely essential at some point but no longer is. Perhaps you work on a budget every month that no one looks at or makes comment on. What if that task just went away? Would anyone miss it?

   2. Option 2: Unify tasks. Maybe there are meetings you are having with 3 different people that you could combine into one meeting. Or maybe you are traveling to meetings in person and you could be doing it over video conference.

2. What one piece of critical feedback are you lacking?
   
   In a recent experiment people were asked to skip a meal and then entered a room where chocolate chip cookies had been baking. Half of the people were asked to eat 2 or 3 of the delicious cookies and the other half of the folks were asked to refrain from eating cookies and eat 2 or 3 radishes instead. Later all participants where asked to solve some fairly complex geometry problems. Those asked to refrain from eating cookies gave up twice as fast on the geometry problems as their counterparts. The researchers concluded that attention and effort goes into resisting temptation and leaves less energy and attention for other tasks. Douglas Stone and Shelia Heen, in their book Thanks for the Feedback, say this has important implications for our efforts to act on feedback we get and to change behavior. Feedback can be “accurate, timely, perceptive, and beautifully conveyed” (p. 258), but if it involves too many ideas to keep track of or too many decisions or changes, it is too much and nothing will happen. Instead of seeking out complicated feedback and writing complicated development plans, simply get feedback on the one thing you could do better and innovate around that.

3. Read the Organizational Signposts
   
   What are the trends in your organization that are destined to become imminent inflection points? Are you noticing that more emphasis is being put on relating to the customer rather than driving sales? If so, what changes do you need to make to become an innovator in this new behavior? Maybe you were the top performer in whatever you did 3 years ago, but it might not be relevant today unless you continue to innovate and grow.

4. Play Your Strength Card
   
   A lot has been said about this one over the past few years regarding how important it is to be yourself and focus on your gifts and talents. I agree with most of this, but what often gets left out of the equation is how to use these strengths to do the little things really well, better than everyone else, without drawing attention to yourself. I harken back to the great John Wooden, basketball coach for UCLA, who said, “High performance and production are achieved only through the identification and perfection of small but relevant details, little things done well.” How are you using your strengths to do the little things really well?

5. Take a 3 year view on the future.
   
   We all get caught up in the day to day and the quarter to quarter, but I wonder what would happen if we set our pride aside and really asked ourself what might be different in the next three years that could make our career obsolete. What about 5 years or 10 years down the road? At some point, someone is going to come along and do your job better, faster, or cheaper than you are.  I think what my wife is doing right now is a great example. She is an online teacher for VIP Kids, a company that gives english lessons to children in China. Sitting in our home in Orlando Florida at 6:30am she is doing half hour lessons for children in Bejing who have just finished dinner at 6:30pm. Teachers, if you don’t think that your students couldn’t be sitting at home getting the same lesson, I ask you…why not?  All of us need to be ready to upgrade our skills to prepare for whatever revolution is coming our way.

I can remember reading a book by Jack Welch, the former CEO of GE, on the topic of management and leadership back in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. Organizations were changing how they evaluated performance based upon what Jack was doing at GE. After all, between 1981 and 2001 during Welch’s tenure the company gained 4,000% in value. Then 2009 hit and today GE has lost more value since 2016 than it is worth today, only about $88B from an all-time high of around $500B.

If it can happen to GE, Sears, and other icons, it can happen to you, no matter what kind of performer you are currently in your organization.

Start innovating and developing your own career today.

The Cost of Paying Attention

Recently a client of mine received feedback from his organization that he needed to become more self-aware of the impact of his behavior on others.

When I probed for what behavior seemed out of line, he told me that he had been rewarded his entire career for being a critical thinker and deliberate in decision-making. The organization needed to undergo changes to be more responsive in the marketplace and his caution was now being viewed as inflexibility. The feedback he was receiving from the organization was that he needed to be more self-aware of his inability to see things in other ways. He told me, “I need to pay attention to when I am being overly cautious and evaluate if I really am being inflexible or if my caution is warranted."

Paying attention. An interesting phrase…

Paying attention, as it relates to being self-aware, implies that there is a cost involved. When you sharpen your focus on something, you will inherently need to give something up in exchange.  In the example above, if my client is to be self-aware and pay attention to a behavior to elicit change, he will have to give up something in exchange for the attention he is going to give the new behavior.

Here is a simple example, if I go to the grocery store to pick up a banana, a transaction takes place. I give the clerk something of value to me, in this case, money, before receiving the product I desire more than the money I possess, the banana. Pretty simple.

When leaders are told they need to be self-aware of their actions or behaviors, it seems to get a bit more complicated than buying a banana. The process of becoming a self-aware leader requires that we give something up in order to draw attention to what we desire to change or better understand. This change in behavior must have more value to us than what we need to give up in order to obtain it.

When purchasing a banana, I know what I need to give up to own the fruit. In the same way, if I need to pay attention in order to become more self-aware of what is seen as inflexibility. For example, what must I give up in order to obtain this behavior change? To pay attention to this kind of behavior change will require humility to even get the process started. You have to recognize that you desire the banana more than you desire money and be willing to give up one in exchange for the other.

What does it take for you to humble yourself as a leader?

In this context, to be humble is really about having a clear perspective of your place in the context of your situation.  My client had to get to a point where he could be objective when situations arose. It is quite probable that because he had been rewarded (or at least had the feeling of such reward) in the past for his display of caution, that he installed it as a permanent successful behavior. After all, who does not like a positive feeling?

His first step in becoming self-aware had already occurred. He recognized the spectrum of behavior he was trying to distinguish. He had described the poles as being deliberate on one end and inflexible on the other. He gave up the freedom to just behave as he had been rewarded. He had to pay, in this case, his normal feeling of being cautious to precipitate a desired change or even recognize the spectrum that he was asked to change along.

Now he must understand the strength of his deliberateness and the weakness of his inflexibility.

Let me illustrate:

To stay in shape, I like to jog. I started having some knee pain. Once a week I work out with a personal trainer for 30 minutes, so I was telling him about the pain I was having in my knee. One of his thoughts was that I had some muscle imbalance, meaning one of the muscles in my leg had become stronger than another. The tension, caused by one muscle being stronger than another, caused a pulling at the joint and, therefore, the pain.

According to my trainer, this weakness causes an imbalance and puts stress on other muscles to become stronger and overcompensate for the weakness.  According to the National Academy of Sports Medicine there are many reasons that one muscle might be stronger than another, such as past trauma, repetitive movements, lack of core strength, poor training technique, emotional duress, and poor posture. He said, “Scott, you have to pay attention to strengthening all your muscle groups so that you don’t have knee pain."

There it was again, pay attention. What was I going to have to give up in order to relieve the pain? The same is true for my client, and for you.

What do you need to give up when you are working with those who follow your leadership so that you “pay attention” to them? If you are trying to listen better to what your followers are telling you, what is the cost to you? What do you need to give up to become a better listener? Have you identified the cost that may be involved for the change to occur?

Feel free to comment on this question. I would love to know what you are thinking.

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….

An Open Letter on the Leadership Skill of Coaching

“Every now and then, someone asks me for advice on how to become a writer. If I am on my game, I don’t offer advice. Instead, I ask questions in hopes of evoking my conversation partner’s inner teacher, the most reliable source of guidance anyone has.” 
Parker Palmer, “On the brink of everything; Grace, Gravity, & Getting Old”

I really love this quote by Parker Palmer because his world of being a writer is my exact experience of being an executive coach.

Last week’s blog discussed the topic of coaching and helping others see what behaviors they need to change by thinking about what things they need to stop doing, start doing, and continue doing.

I received the following note from one of my readers who is a nursing leader at a rather large hospital system in the midwest:

Scott,
Great timely article!!  You know how each year God seems to pound you with a “word” for growing? Well I would not say this is my spiritual word, (although it could be lol), but I  do believe this is my professional one.  COACHING….  Coaching women is so much more comfortable for me spiritually than coaching my young employees professionally.   

Because they have all have been doing their jobs much longer than I have their knowledge base about standards, compliance, and overall  ambulatory (verses hospital) experience far outweighs mine.  For the first time in my career I feel gun shy on this skill. 

Question:  Should coaching be incognito?  Meaning, do I say “this is coaching”?  When I read the three questions in today’s blog, I wonder… are these my reflection/ assessment of them or are these behaviors that they believe need to change?  

Here was my reply:

Dear Carolyn,

I always love your insight and your interaction with my writing. I want you to know you make me a better writer when you ask probing questions like this.

I actually think "coaching" has become a catch all phrase for interacting with people. So I do think it is important to know how you distinguish coaching from other types of conversations.  I actually had someone say to me one time that coaching is nothing more than what we used to do with friends when we had a deep conversation.  Frankly, I completely disagree with that sentiment!

Coaching is a specific set of skills that allow you to take someone from where they currently are (think behavior or performance) to a place THEY want to be.  It can be formal or informal, but the focus is THEY have to want it. 

The coachee has to see the need to change the behavior and then want help in getting there. 

When deciding whether or not I am going to coach someone, the first thing I must understand is their motivation for change. If they are motivated, then I can help. If they are not motivated, then I will decline the client gracefully. 

I know this is different in my world than yours. You are often asked to coach people who may not (at least at first) want or even see the need for the change.  I am of the opinion then that your task becomes helping them see the need for change.  Not motivating them, but inspiring them to see the change which could be of such great benefit to them. 

The more I am in the field of executive coaching the more convinced I become that if the person is not motivated, then the likelihood of getting any kind of sustainable change is negligible. You can get short-term behavioral compliance when offering extrinsic motivation like more money or time off, but this is transactional and possibly even a bit coercive. At best, it is authoritarian with an obvious power gradient.  As coaches what we want to be is inspirational and transformational for those we work with.

Now to a second element in your question I noticed: experience.  You have more than enough through your long career in nursing and leadership. They may have more functional experience based upon your current assignment, but you have more leadership experience.  

We must start to see leadership (of which coaching is a tool) as a discipline, just like nursing is a discipline.  Just because someone has more nursing experience does not make them a better leader. These are very different disciplines.

Have confidence in yourself that you can lead them and lean on your faith and your experience as a leader. 

This is why when people ask me if someone will be a good executive leader the first question I ask myself is “If I take them out of their functional area as a leader and drop them in another functional area, could they thrive?”

So, for example, could I take someone like you out of nursing and put you in another area in the hospital to lead? Say outpatient Emergency Room (ER). You may not have functional ER experience, but you have leadership. In a short time you can learn the management or functional side of ER.

I may not put you in as an ER nurse, or a nurse unit manager, but I would put you in as a leader. Knowing you like I do, I would have no hesitation in doing this tomorrow.

Finally, a third element you asked about are the 3 questions (Getting people to Start, Stop, Continue behaviors); are they reflections or discussions.  I think the answer is yes! 

As a coach you need to have in mind what behavior someone needs to stop doing. The interesting thing here is you can not ask a human to stop doing something without starting a new behavior.  Think getting people to stop smoking. We can not just ask them to stop, but we need to give them something else, something less harmful to do, like START chewing gum.

The one thing I have learned over my years in coaching is behaviors have to be substituted to get the change desired.

I think a good coach will have reflected on this and then thought through the STOP and START needed. This reflection is vital if you are going to serve the person you are coaching well. Then, after reflection, I think you enter into discussion with the person to gauge their level of motivation and desire for the change you are going to ask them to make.

My Goal

As a coach I want to be more like Parker Palmer.  

The main reason I wrote this post is that I realized after I had hit the send button on my email back to Carolyn that I did not ask her one question about the email she had sent.  I fell right into giving some light advice.  While I will admit that doing this really stroked my own ego and made me feel pretty good that someone in a leadership position like Carolyn would ask me a question about a topic I am passionate enough to write about.

But I quickly realized that I fell right into that old trap of giving advice instead of stimulating Carolyn’s “inner teacher.”

Carolyn, I do hope you will forgive me.

Parker, I will try and do better next time.

7 Steps To Effective Coaching

There are times when I want to start new things but hesitate because I am afraid I won’t know what to do. I felt this way for a long time with Facebook and LinkedIn. Everyone was doing it, it seemed simple and fun, but I didn’t want to look silly if I couldn't figure it out. I didn't know what to do, so I sat on the sideline and watched rather than jumping in and learning. I felt with same way with this blog. For over a year, I wrestled with the idea. Should I start blogging? What would I say? What would other people think about what I had to say? All this negativity swirled around in my mind.

Then one day I listened to a podcast by Michael Hyatt. I remember Michael saying something like, “Stop thinking about it and start doing it." He gave 5 simple steps that I followed to start my blog. And shazam! Here we are today. Those steps gave me the confidence I needed to start something I wanted to do.

This got me thinking; There are probably people out there that have this similar problem. Maybe there are people hesitant to coach others simply because they don’t know where to start. Maybe this is you! If only you had an outline of steps to take that would give you the confidence you need to do it.

This led me to reflect on what I do when I get a coaching client for the first time and outline the major ingredients that go into every coaching engagement that I do. Please enjoy my recipe for a successful coaching engagement in 7 simple steps below and try putting them to practice.

(I think this model is transferable. So if you are a professional coach, a supervisor of employees, or a Mom or Dad coaching a youth soccer team, following these 7 steps can mean the difference for your outcome being successful!)

7 Steps To Successful Coaching

• Begin With an Open Mind Coaching never begins in a vacuum. We all come into coaching relationships with biases. Coaches must come to clients with an open mind. The client must be seen as being a whole and healthy person. While there are times when you will have received information from others, focus on what the client is saying to you.

• Get to Know Your Client It is hard to coach without knowing more information about your client. Find out more about who they are, what they do, their life story, and what they hope to accomplish. Consider putting together a series of questions that could apply to any client you serve. Personally, I use multiple types of assessments with my clients.

• Confirm With the Client It is always important that you validate the collected data with the client. You want the client to be confident that you understand their perspective on what is happening, why the did what they did, or what is the genesis of how they are thinking or feeling.

• Compare the Data to a Standard Once the client agrees with the collected data, you'll compare it to an acceptable standard. The client must agree that the standard is acceptable. If they do not, then the data may become meaningless because the objective of what the data revealed could become irrelevant. For example, I had a client who gave the appearance of being arrogant. The data we collected from others in the organization said this person’s primary objective was to get their own way all the time. This behavior is the polar opposite of what is expected in the organization: being collaborative. Before I can coach the person to a more collaborative style, they have to agree that collaboration is the right standard. Once this happens we can begin work on the arrogance. If collaboration isn’t the mutually agreed upon goal then it is tough to improve the behavior.

• Identify Gaps Gaps are the space that exist between the client's current behavior and the agreed upon standard. They are the difference between where the client is now and where they would like to be in the future.It is useful to talk these gaps out and to get examples of where they have taken place. Coaches should always be looking for gaps between current and expected performance.

• Set a Plan to Close the Gaps When planning with your clients, develop a simple plan that is laser focused on one or two items. When we give people too much we lose focus and the person runs the risk of being overwhelmed. When examining the performance standard I use the Stop/Start/Continue model. Here's how it works:

  • What behaviors do they need to stop?

  • What behaviors do they need to start?

  • What behaviors need to continue?

    • Do not short change the "continue" aspect. Often by stopping and starting a few simple things, people will see dramatic change. Most of the time they are doing a lot of things right, which you want to encourage to continue.

    • Establish a Date to Follow-Up It is my opinion that this step is where most coaching fails. There is no date set to follow-up, no check-in’s to see how the person is doing, and little to no interaction at all once a plan is put in place. Follow-up with those you coach is the most important part of the coaching relationship! I recommend scheduling all follow-up meetings with your client at the end of your sessions together. This will enforce some accountability on their end and help you maintain the relationship.

Coaching is a valuable skill for helping others become the best person they desire to become. Coaching skills are important tools that anyone in a leadership position needs to possess. Whether you have employees on your team or you are responsible for a group of 8-year-old girls on a soccer field, coaching is the transportation vehicle you use to help an idea become a behavior.

Homework

Identify a person in your life who needs your coaching, or better yet someone who is already getting your coaching. Think about whether you have followed all 7 steps to successful coaching within that relationship. Is there any step that you have missed? How can you use these 7 steps to coach yourself to improve your own coaching outcomes? We would love to hear from you regarding what you think about this process. Leave us a comment below!

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?

Coaching Was a Turning Point for Me as a Leader

A few days ago I was on a video conference beginning a new coaching engagement with a client, Robert. In this initial meeting I walk the client through my typical coaching expectations; what Robert can expect from me as well as what I am expecting from him.  

In addition to myself and Robert, his supervisor is on the call, along with someone from Human Resources. It is really important that all of these parties are engaged in Robert’s development so that there is clarity of expectations and organizational support for Robert’s development.

When we had finished aligning expectations I asked Robert if he had any questions. He did not.

I asked if the HR rep had any questions. She did not.

Last, I asked Robert’s supervisor, Sam, if he had any questions. He did not, but he did have something powerful to say: ”I went through some coaching several years back and it was a turning point for me as a leader…” 

I couldn’t wait for Sam to finish the story and tell us all why the coaching he had received was so impactful, but there was dead silence on the phone.  In true coaching form, I waited through the silence, suppressing every urge inside of me to fill the air with noise just so the silence didn’t feel so lonely. 

After what seemed to me to be an eternity, Sam continued in a rather subdued tone that the coaching he received had uncovered that his strength had a dark side to it. 

Sam shared that his strength had always been in understanding and interpreting data. He possessed very strong analytical skills and a belief that the numbers told the story of the situation. He was a very rational thinker and an excellent long-term planner.  In addition to the scientific approach that he brought to his work, he was very self-confident - sure of himself with a strong ability to keep his composure.

Robert chimed in at this point and said, “I can see all of these things in you today. I have never worked with anyone whose analytical skills were as sharp as yours. In fact, there are times where I triple check things before I bring them to you because I want to make sure they are right.”

Sam replied, “And that is a good thing. We want to make sure the data is correct. However, for me, these strong analytical skills also came with a dark side. I was very skeptical of other people on the leadership team. I was distrustful of them and very cynical if they had an idea or wanted to change something without data to support their rationale. My focus on the negative became a real distraction to the point that people would stop coming to me with problems I could help them solve.”

At this point, the call seemed like a conversation between Robert and Sam. A conversation maybe they should have had a long time ago, but this coaching kick-off was giving them the safe space to talk. 

Robert said, “Sam, I don’t sense that in you at all. I do not see you as negative. I see people coming to you all the time to help them solve issues.”

To that, with a bit of pride in his voice, Said said, “Coaching was a turning point for me as a leader.”

What a powerful moment I had just witnessed. 

Sam’s coach was able to help him see how his strengths, while for sure personality assets, had also been holding him back in ways that he just didn’t see.

His coach helped him identify this dark side, or blind spot, then helped him put together a plan to take advantage of his strength while not over playing it to the point of dysfunction.

I am sure most of you can self-identify with Sam in this story. Like Sam, we all have strengths and weaknesses. You may be really confident in what you are good at, but can you identify some places where your strengths are not serving you? Are you overplaying them?

Perhaps you are really good at relationship building, but there are times you are overly cooperative and say yes when you should say no.

Perhaps you are a real risk taker, but there are times where your thrill seeking has landed you in a bad place.

Perhaps you are very colorful and the life of the party, but you walk away from conversations not having heard what the others in the room have even said. (And that is if you even consider there were other people in the room at all.)

One of the great things coaching can do for you is to help you focus on your strengths so that you use them to the best of your ability, but not over play them. I hope you are able to use your coach in this manner. It is one of the true values that coaching can bring to any relationship.

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.