It’s Always a Good Time to Practice Your Speaking Skills!
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Management Education, Marketing Yourself, Professional Growth, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
The irony wasn’t missed by me that as I was packing up today to head to a speaking engagement, my college freshman son called to let me know that he was on his way to deliver a speech in class.
The only thing that separated us for the moment was 30 years and a few thousand presentations. Oh, to be young again! How do you tell an 18-year-old that he would be well-served to embrace learning the art of speaking versus fighting it like so many people do throughout their lives?
Not everyone remembers Speech 100 as fondly as I do. Some people still turn pale at the mention of having to get up in front of a group and present. The relief at finishing that class for many was palpable. “Yep, never have to do that again!”
Wrong!
I’m a bit of a broken-record on this topic (how many years until no one gets that metaphor?), but there are few skills that will take you further and help you more than developing your speaking skills. Your writing skills are a close second.
Individuals in the world of work will form a perception of you not only by the quality of your work, but by how well you carry and present yourself. A little confidence goes a long way. It’s good to be able to articulate effectively when the VP or CEO corners you in the elevator on the latest project issue or you’re invited to a command performance in front of the executive committee.
Leaders communicate. While listening and asking questions are core to a leader’s communications arsenal, when you talk, people listen. Make it count by being comfortable, confident and concise!
More and more roles inside organizations serve as informal leaders. If you don’t think it’s important to be a competent speaker in front of a group, ask a project or product manager.
Nothing to Fear but Fear Itself:
While you can hide and some people do get away with dodging the speaking bullet, I’m not sure why you would want to. The fear is overblown and developing a level of competence takes effort and practice, a lot like working on your serve in tennis. OK, maybe that’s a bad example, because I’ve yet to master that stroke, but hopefully, you get the point.
My advice:
- Seek out some easy opportunities to practice. Departmental or team updates can be fairly non-threatening. Alternatives include community events, classroom visits, or school committees.
- Ask your boss and peers for specific feedback on your speaking. What should you do more of? Where do you need to improve. Don’t settle for, “that was great!” No one gets better by being told they were great.
- Search on “Toastmasters” and find a local chapter and join!
- Reference a good book. My favorite is: “The Exceptional Presenter” by Timothy Koegel.
- Find a coach. While the price is often not cheap, the impact is priceless!
- Read the book, listen to your coach, practice and video record yourself. You’ll be shocked, but at least you will be seeing and hearing what everyone else is seeing and hearing.
- Volunteer for other opportunities. Yep, you heard me. After a lifetime of dodging this bullet, you’ll find that embracing it is exhilarating.
The Bottom Line:
Public speaking, like leading is only learned by doing. Practice, feedback, coaching and more practice are the ingredients of success for both. It’s time to quit hiding from the speaking monster and to practice and develop it into submission.
Oh, and those of you managing early career professionals. What a great developmental opportunity! Hint, hint.
Leadership Caffeine: Is Your Self-Confidence In Danger of Burning Out of Control?
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leadership Skills, Life and Business, Management Education, Performance, Professional Growth, Talent Management, Values, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
Self-confidence is rocket fuel for leaders. Used carefully and ignited under the proper conditions, it propels you and those around you to remarkable heights.
However, beware the narrow tolerance ranges of your own self-confidence. Too little and you act and are perceived as weak. Too much and self-confidence becomes that most destructive of all leadership attributes, hubris.
Self-Confidence & the Early Career Leader:
In my experience, early career and first-time leaders tend to lack self-confidence, generally because they’ve not walked down the path and experienced the many pitfalls and challenges of the leader. Leadership self-confidence is born of experience, and not bestowed by title.
Some early leaders compensate with a command and control style, much like the parent who responds to her child with the self-serving and wholly ineffective explanation of “Because I said so,” to the teenager looking for some rational reason as to why he should change his behavior. I’ll let those of you that have parenting experience highlight why this approach is doomed to failure.
With coaching and some reasonable degree of self-awareness, early career leaders tend to grow out their ineffective ways, both gaining in self-confidence and recognizing the less than effective outcomes of demanding without explaining. However, with the passing of time and some early successes, a new potential problem emerges.
Experience and Success Can Turn Self-Confidence to Hubris. Watch Out!
Borrowing from the excellent, but short read, “How the Mighty Fall,” by Jim Collins, he offers that, “dating back to ancient Greece, the concept of hubris is defined as excessive pride that brings down a hero, or alternatively, …outrageous arrogance that inflicts suffering upon the innocent.”
Perhaps it’s human nature, but as we gain experience and enjoy some victories, it is easy to start believing that we can do no wrong. This false and dangerous belief is often reinforced by the distorted reactions on our own performance that we receive from those who report to us.
It’s amazing how quick people are to tell us that we are brilliant when we’re in charge.
When self-confidence moves out of tolerance towards hubris and arrogance, the fuel that propelled teams and organizations begins to burn in the working environment, distorting reality and destroying objectivity.
The hubris of leaders is the accelerant that once ignited leads to the collapse of careers and companies.
How to Keep Your Self Confidence Within Tolerance:
- Remind yourself daily of your role as a leader. You are there to support, provide help, guidance, coaching and to create an environment for others to succeed in their roles.
- More on your role: repeat and live Deming’s 8th point: Drive out fear, Create trust and Create a Climate for Innovation.
- Focus your calendar time on tasks that support the prosecution of your role.
- Remind yourself that “it’s not about you.”
- Quit asking people how you are doing and don’t pay attention to their unsolicited praise. Instead, ask people what you can do to help them succeed.
The Bottom Line:
It’s dangerously easy to start believing that “you” are the reason for success. Once you buy into that temptation, you’re headed for a dangerous fall. Keep your edge sharp by focusing on what you can do to help others succeed…not on what they can do to once again prove how great of a leader you are.
At the end of the day, you need enough self-confidence to know that the only way to create and sustain success is to choose carefully, support relentlessly and then place your trust in others.
New Leader Identification: Exploration Before Promotion!
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Management Education, Middle Management, Performance, Professional Growth, Talent Management, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
I talk with a great number of leaders at various levels and stages of their careers about their own experiences in “becoming a leader,” and I’m constantly fascinated by their start-up stories.
Fascinated, that is, the way many drive past a car wreck. Shocked and curious at the same time.
Many describe their initial promotion into a formal supervisory role as one of “time, place, and opportunity.” Someone left or was fired and the manager needed help and offered a battlefield promotion.
An overwhelming majority of this “Opportunistic” crowd, describe their first leadership experience as horrendous. Several used the term “nightmare” to communicate the essence of that experience.
Another group I call the “Fast Trackers.” These individuals indicate actively pursuing promotion into a leadership role in the drive to increase earnings and gain entrance to the “fast track” in their organizations.
A follow-on question for this speedy group highlights that many of the individuals report working in environments where the “system” required you to lead others and manage budgets in order to earn higher job grades and compensation.
Similar to the “Opportunistic” group, the reflections of the “Fast Trackers” on that early experience are often less than happy.
“We Select Randomly and Try to Train Our Way Out of the Problem!”
Most report getting some training as part of the promotion, but few describe being part of anything formal or informal that helped them (and their managers) assess whether leadership was a good fit.
Talk about a breakdown in the quality system! It’s no secret that the costs are high when we put the wrong people in roles that they are ill suited for…especially leadership roles. Everyone suffers, including the errant leader, the team being poorly led, the manager that mishandled this promotion, internal and external customers and the broader organization.
And yet, we do this over and over again.
Training after promotion is no substitution and no cure-all for poor selection!
Exploration Before Promotion-A Real World Example:
A simple solution is for the manager to ensure that he/she is looking for and talking to prospective first-time leaders about the role, and importantly, providing them low-risk opportunities to try it on for size before buying.
One of my favorite examples comes from the world of software development, where people tend to become software developers because they are creative and want to ply their creative talents in this exciting and ever-changing medium.
Leading others is rarely (if ever) the motivation for becoming a software developer, and as a consequence, large technical teams struggle to develop leadership bench strength. It’s common for an experienced developer to find himself/herself thrust into a management role, more out seniority than anything that resembles desire or capability. The consequences are often as expected.
This Manager Gets It!
One creative Group Director recognized this as one of her core challenges and set about actively identifying those on her team that seemed to do well in helping groups solve problems and identify and implement improvements. She talked with these individuals about career aspirations, raised the “L” word, and for those interested, she collaborated in designing some informal opportunities to get a feel for the work and role of a leader.
What I loved about her approach was how she started small and based on observation and expressions of continued interest from the aspiring professional, she would ratchet up the informal leadership challenges to provide more experience and exposure and more time for observation and coaching.
Her stepped approach might include having the individual help organize the department’s quarterly meeting and then later chair a problem-solving team. Again, if the results were positive and interest remained, she would provide a capstone challenge such as leading a strategic development team as an informal leader (project manager).
At the end of this period of leadership exploration, and based on feedback from many parties, she would work with the aspiring leader on creating a forward looking development plan, schedule formal training and begin the movement into the first official leadership role.
Of course, at that point, her job as a mentor and coach was just starting, but that’s a topic for another post.
The Bottom Line:
The manager in that very real anecdote understood the benefits of getting leadership identification right and the costs of mucking it up. She created and managed that program without the benefit of a formal company-mentoring program, and she didn’t use training as the crutch of the lazy manager. The idea of promoting first and training later was not something this manager would ever consider.
Exploration before promotion. Try it and let’s break the back of our propensity to make the same leadership identification and development mistakes over and over again.
Management Excellence Audio Interview: The CEO Perspective on Product Management
Filed under: Career, Fresh Voices, Leadership, Life and Business, Management Education, Marketing Yourself, Middle Management, Organizational Transformation, Product Management, Surviving Lousy Leaders, Talent Management, management excellence audio interviews
Notes from Art: I recently mentioned that I would be kicking off the Management Excellence Audio Interview Series, and I’m thrilled to be doing it today with Mike Mulcahy, a technology industry executive that has served as a CEO, a Founder of his own start-up and a Business Unit Leader inside one of the world’s largest organizations. Oh, and Mike just happens to be one of the best sales professionals that I’ve had the privilege of knowing.
Mike is also one of those all-too-rare top executives that consistently champions the cause of product management inside his organizations. I know this first-hand, because it was Mike that provided me with an early opportunity to build a product management organization from the ground up.
We recently reconnected and Mike highlighted his on-going challenges in supporting the development of great product management and great product managers on his teams. I invited him to share his thoughts and perspectives with the community in this inaugural interview program, and he graciously agreed.
A few last comments and then on to the interview.
- The audio recording tools that I used are new to me and there are some sound quality issues. Bear with me as I improve those in future interviews. Fortunately, the issues in this one are that Mike is very audible, and I’m a bit quieter. At least we got that part right!
- I took the opportunity to poll the very active pm community out on twitter (#prodmgmt) and asked what they wanted to hear from the CEO. I received some phenomenal questions and based on the volume was only able to tackle a few here during the interview. I’ve included the full listing of the questions below…and encourage all interested parties to share their thoughts on these important issues. They are great content for future posts and interviews as well.
- Last and not least, Mike has graciously volunteered to field specific questions about the audio interview here on the blog via the comments. Ask away.
With no further adieu, here’s Mike Mulcahy for 17 minutes offering his very experienced perspectives on product management.
–
Summary List of Questions from Product Managers for “the CEO” Via Twitter (#prodmgmt)
Note: some great content for comments, questions and follow-on posts. Thanks!
- What is the most compelling problem the CEO faces that he believe a pm can help solve?
- How does the ceo believe he best connects with the pm team?
- Does the CEO see prod mgmt becoming commoditized?
- What metrics does he use to determine if PM is performing well?
- Does he trust PM to stop development on a dead product?
- His view on relationships between pm and company/depts.
- What are the driving metrics he seeks from product mgmt?
- How does he encourage continuous learning from product management?
- What is product management’ss role w. development if the company is using agile?
- Do you view product management as product focused or more product marketing?
- Is product management really the Voice of the Customer?
- Does product management have a seat at the leadership table?
- I am interested to know how he feels about compensation based on product revenue.
- What innovation initiatives/practices do they have in place? What is the role of PM in them?
- How important is domain vs functional pm expertise?
- How has he positioned the PM function in his org? i.e. VP level, stand-alone or within marketing or development?
- Does PM own the product /line of business at a P& L level?
Looking for A Framework to Rebuild Your Business? Think Baldrige
Filed under: Crisis Leadership, Current Affairs, Customer Service, Leadership, Leading Change, Management Education, Management Excellence Tips for Tough Times, Organizational Transformation, Performance, Quality Systems Management, Strategy, Talent Management, Values, Your Professional Development "To Do" List, voice of the customer
My own personal observation is that the Baldrige National Quality Program is one of the most misunderstood, unknown and poorly marketed great programs for organizations seeking a framework for business performance improvement.
Cash for Clunkers, it ain’t! We would all be better off if it got one-tenth of the airtime of that well documented automobile sales promotion.
What’s the first thing that you think of when you hear Baldrige? Of course, quality jumps to mind and specifically, thanks to advertising, many people think of automobile quality. If you’re like most people, you’ve seen pictures of the actual glass award in commercials and you might have even viewed a clip of one of our Presidents shaking hands with the CEO of a Baldrige winner.
I recently asked a small group of professionals what they knew about the Baldrige program and one person asked whether it wasn’t a quality award for winners of the JDPower survey! At least she was partially right, as quality is an important component.
OK, and in my opinion, that’s the other misnomer. Certainly the program has its roots in Quality (with a capital Q), but it’s much more comprehensive than the many other very good programs and frameworks that focus specifically on quality and process improvement.
Baldrige is a comprehensive framework for organizational performance excellence, focusing on seven core categories (the criteria):
- Leadership
- Strategic Planning
- Customer and Market Focus
- Measurement Analysis and Knowledge Management
- Workforce Focus
- Process Management
- Results
From the Baldrige website: ‘The criteria are designed to help organizations enhance their competitiveness by focusing on two goals: delivering ever improving value to customers and improving overall organizational performance.’
This is much bigger than measuring defects. This is much bigger than a glass trophy.
Resources You Can Use Immediately:
I encourage business professionals at all levels to become familiar with the Baldrige program and the treasure trove of incredible materials…many of which are either free or low cost.
Read: The Criteria for Performance Excellence. It’s better than a month of MBA courses on understanding the criteria in detail and what factors are considered when evaluating high performance in those areas.
Download and Use: the two great surveys: “Are We Making Progress” and “Are We Making Progress as Leaders”. These are free, and you are encouraged to use, copy, distribute and employ these surveys inside your organization. (Note to my many leadership blogging/consulting/training friends, this content is golden!) Even outside of the umbrella of formal pursuit of the Baldrige Award, these survey instruments can prove remarkably helpful for any firm attempting to assess where it is at on many levels.
Review: the Judges Survey of Applicant Satisfaction presentation summarizing the survey results on what prior participants have to say about the program. Most joined for the purpose of driving improvement…not to win an award. The participants also indicate areas of improvement for the Baldrige process and examiners.
Purchase and watch: for $35 plus shipping and handling, the detailed Award Recipient DVDs. While there is a bit of program hype, mostly you’ll gain context on how some now pretty impressive small and large companies have used the program to dramatically improve their organization’s performance. These live case studies are priceless.
Talk: to a Baldrige program award winner or an examiner. The program and participants are remarkably open to inquiries and to sharing experiences and highlighting what to expect if you decide to pursue the process. Watch the videos and place a few calls and you’ll have some remarkably fresh insights and ideas on the program and how it might help your business.
Consider: applying. While there is ample material on what is involved and there will be time required to apply…and of course to assess, you gain access to some of the best, low to no cost business performance consulting on the planet through the Baldrige examiners. Again, don’t underestimate the commitment required to benefit from the process, but don’t run away from it because of that either.
The Bottom Line:
It’s time to shake our misperceptions about Baldrige. It is a powerful framework for business performance improvement. I’ve dealt with many CEOs that behind closed doors admit to not being certain about where to start and what to focus on to fuel results.
Before you call on the expensive consultants, take a few hours and investigate Baldrige. You might just find some great starting points.
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