Leadership Caffeine-It’s Time to Get Serious About Learning from Your Twenty-Somethings
Filed under: Current Affairs, Innovation, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leading the Generations, Management Education, Management Innovation, Social Commentary
One of the recurring themes in my writing and teaching activities is the importance of blending the generations in the workplace. I’ve been a cheerleader for this cause for the past few years and I truly believe that good managers everywhere must find opportunities to leverage the unique perspectives of experience, pragmatism and idealism available from this fascinating mix of time travelers.
I’ve now moved beyond my polite encouragement for managers to find ways to adapt and cope with what seem to be the foreign habits and foreign viewpoints emanating from the more youthful in the workforce. It’s time to get serious about learning and benefitting from this younger generation. What has been treated in the media as a mostly fun topic that describes the foibles of “Helicopter Parents” and the endless flood of childhood “Participation Trophies,” is now a critically important issue and opportunity.
Consider:
- We now live and work in a networked, always-on and increasingly virtual world. For those of us with experience, this is new and exciting, yet in many instances, we struggle to make sense of it, particularly as we seek to develop strategies based on yesterday’s thinking in a world that we no longer recognize. Alternatively, the generation that is coming of age right now understands this world as their own. They are comfortable in its complexity and “virtualness” and capable of moving and navigating seamlessly through it, focused on their mission and not awestruck by its complexity and speed of change.
- Experience is a powerful teacher for all of us, and yet, we are tackling tomorrow’s challenges with yesterday’s solutions. And yes, those that don’t understand history are doomed to repeat it, but we face all new problems that demand newly created solutions using technologies and approaches that have no historical equivalent.
- From the school of the obvious, in yesterday’s world, you could choose to ignore much of the globe. Alternatively, today’s world is filled with unimaginable perils and nearly infinite possibilities. Technology brings the people of the world closer together and there is no group of people better prepared to leverage the new tools and work across cultures with others to solve problems, create new offerings and serve customers. Remember, this young generation plays video games with their friends around the globe, understands how to manage complex social networks in real time from the tips of their thumbs and has grown up in an always-on environment. Talk about some great training for success!
- And while I hesitate to offer social commentary, I can’t help but observe after spending a few years in classrooms with both graduate students and undergraduates in several great institutions in Chicago, that the biases and prejudices of our parents and grandparents seem to be melting into the past. One can hope that I’m right in this observation. I see no evidence of the youth that I work with caring about color or creed. It is my observation that they care about people and each other and evaluate each other on merits and insights and skills. This is as it should be.
Challenges and Opportunities:
- We are running today’s business and dealing with tomorrow’s problems with yesterday’s management approaches. The science and art of management must advance to both cope with the challenges and take advantage of the opportunities of this new world. As a side-note, ask a twenty-something to design the style of organization that will work best in this emerging world, and I’ll guarantee that it won’t include functional silos.
- Age and experience count, but those fortunate enough to have both don’t necessarily have all of the right answers. However, with age and experience comes wisdom, and this valuable resource when combined with the fresh perspectives of youth should be a dangerous combination for solving problems and creating opportunities.
- In my opinion, much of the training that needs to take place is not for the twenty-somethings, but rather for the tremendous number of 30 to 60-somethings that are fearful of or paralyzed by new technologies and new social conventions. If you are old enough to remember life before e-mail, you are also old enough to have lost your edge in learning to leverage new tools. I’ve written this before, but if you don’t know what twitter is, don’t read or write blogs, think social networking is a cocktail party, and have no idea why anyone would play a video game on-line, then you need help. Stat.
The Bottom Line for Now
It’s time to quit talking about the trophy kids and the oft-repeated stereotypes that are dogging the millennial generation. It’s up to those of us that currently hold the reins of leadership to recognize this opportunity for what it is and to get on with the business of preparing to turn over those reins. Judging by the condition of things in the world today, this group has arrived just in the nick of time.
The Powerful Business and Career Advice of “Tell Me a Story”
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Life and Business, Professional Growth, Social Commentary, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
For anyone that caught the special tribute aired recently on 60 Minutes to the late Don Hewitt, the show’s creator, you will recognize the four words, “Tell me a story,” as Hewitt’s self-described secret to success for this now 40-something year old news magazine.
In case you missed the episode or are not familiar with Hewitt, he was the founder of 60 Minutes way back in 1968, coming up with the idea for this program when he was pushed out of his role running the CBS Evening News, reportedly for being too much of a pain in the ass for management to deal with any longer.
He was given what’s known in the corporate world as the “special projects” assignment, something that is usually a code phrase for your career here is over. The episode offered a fascinating character study of this driven-man, and his four words are still resonating with me days after viewing the episode.
In support of his “tell me a story” mantra, one of Hewitt’s fascinating insights and in his opinion, a secret to the show’s remarkable success was (I paraphrase) that people don’t want to hear about issues, they want to hear the stories of individuals impacted by the issues. There’s a subtle but profound lesson for all of us in life and in business in his messages.
The Power of Stories and Storytelling:
Humans love stories. See also human history for supporting evidence. This is a timeless issue and reflected in our culture from cave paintings to oral narratives (think Odyssey and Illiad) to the development of the written word and all forms of entertainment and art.
Stories educate. It’s much easier to make a point with a great supporting story than it is to make your point naked…with no context for how it might impact a person.
Stories engage. We get caught up in the characters and their travails. As Dickens disembarked on his American tour, the shouts from the harbor workers were reportedly, “Did Little Nell survive?”
Stories motivate. The best advertising tells a story of someone solving a problem or overcoming adversity or improving life experience with a product or service.
Stories make us think about the possible. Steve Jobs has this one down cold.
Stories inspire. We love examples of success in spite of overwhelming odds, whether in battle, love or athletics.
Six Ideas to Use Stories to Improve Your Career and Your Business
1. Rewrite your firm’s core message to tell powerful stories. Right after reading this post, click over to your website and ask yourself whether your message is about you or about your customers. Many (OK, most) websites are collections of self-serving, ego-centric messages with passing or superficial references to customers. Your goal must be to know your customers well enough so that when they visit your site, they immediately see themselves solving a problem with your offering. You do that with relevant, engaging stories.
2. Develop business plans and proposals around people and stories. I’ve listened for too many years as well-intentioned professionals, including many talented product and marketing managers regaled executives with exotic descriptions of why their “must finance” business plan would vault firms to the top of the market on the back of a revolutionary approach to a new seamlessly integrated, distributed architecture that deploys in the cloud. Oh, and don’t forget scalability and real-time virtualization. (OK, I made that up, but it sounded something like that.)
Give me a break. Tell me how your product is going to make someone’s dreams come true and better yet, let me hear some stories about/from some real people and your batting average on gaining support will go way up.
3. Entrepreneurs pitching business plans…see the point above. Tell your prospective financiers stories that allow them to easily imagine the use of your product and the size of the market and you will be miles ahead of your powerpoint-toting, scalable and seamless integration spewing counterparts.
4. Want a job? You best show up to interviews prepared to back your claims of greatness with some compelling stories that showcase you ability to present yourself and substantiate your membership in the club of competent people. Of course, don’t make the common messaging mistake that firms make on their websites. Your carefully crafted stories need to be based on serving someone, helping teams and people solve real problems and ultimately about creating value through working effectively with others. The best answers to the tough interview questions involve carefully crafted, genuine stories.
5. Want to sell something? Don’t tell me about your features and great prices. Tell me how people like me are improving their lives and businesses with your offering. Too much sales-speak reflects it’s close cousin, marketing speak, and emphasizes content guaranteed to make prospects wonder why they agreed to talk with you.
6. Need to motivate someone or some team? I’m willing to bet that coaches aren’t whipping out their powerpoint slides at halftime and running through the “Ten Reasons Why We Need to Win this Game,” presentation. The most inspirational tales and motivating speeches are steeped in stories.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Tell me a story and you’ll capture my attention. Become great at telling stories in your work and you might just capture the attention of a great number of people. Thanks, Don Hewitt for telling your story so well for all of these years and entertaining and educating us along the way.
Team Stuck in the Creativity Deep Freeze? Try “Why Not?” to Start the Thaw
Filed under: Career, Innovation, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Leading Change, Management Education, Performance, Surviving Lousy Leaders, Talent Management, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
Without exception, the healthiest businesses that I work with are those that offer a workplace environment and atmosphere that encourage a free-flow of ideas ranging from outlandish to “I can’t believe we didn’t think of that before.” It is the part of the natural culture of these firms to think in terms of “What if?” and “Why not?”
Creativity is part of the fabric of these firms, and you see and hear and observe it on display in all roles and at all levels. Whether by design or more by a natural evolution fed by leaders that share a similar sense of curiosity and a genuine interest in and respect for the ideas of their employees, the processes and practices of creativity flourish in these environments.
Alternatively, the less than healthy firms that I encounter share many failure attributes, including a complete dearth of creativity and no visible signs of creativity-inducing practices and processes. Walk into one of those firms and you sense it immediately. Spend some time there and the silence from the lack of creativity or the quiet compliance in response to leader mandated creativity is simply deafening. It’s the corporate equivalent of being locked inside a sensory deprivation chamber.
If you have the misfortune to be stuck inside one of those unhealthy firms, or, better yet, if you have the good fortune to be stepping in to turn the firm around, you might start with focusing on reacquainting people with the philosophy of “the possible.”
As an aside, I’m convinced that almost every person in a bad business has a store of ideas on improving things just waiting to get out. You can break the spirits of people through lousy leadership, but the brain keeps working and ideas flow internally, usually straight into the brain’s deep freeze bin, waiting for a future thaw.
Suggestions for Waking the Creative Giant Hiding Inside Your People and On Your Team:
- Start by using the two words, “Why not?” Environments where creativity has been bred out of the culture are filled with people used to understanding what they cannot do. It’s your job to seize every opportunity to draw forth even the simplest of novel ideas and the “why not?” approach is a helpful tool. Respond to the conditioned phrases of, “We can’t,” or “If we could,” or my favorite, “That’s not how we do it here,” with this phrase, and listen patiently as people stammer and struggle to come up with an answer to that question that even they believe.
- Follow-up with, “How would you?” and then shut up and listen. Expect some silence in return as neurons start firing and long-dormant brain connections are made and people slowly realize you are asking them how THEY would do something.
- Finish-up with, “What do you need from me?” and expect to suffer through a minor period of disorientation as people process on the reality that you, the boss, the person in charge, the person that is in their minds supposed to tell then what to do, just turned the entire equation around. Expect some surprised smiles.
- Loop-back with positive feedback. Pay attention, offer encouragement, add support where needed, and in this instance, use liberal amounts of genuine, positive feedback blended with selective coaching to support the effort.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
I run into people all of the time that challenge my basic premise that creativity is rocket fuel for firms and leaders. Last week, I raised the specter of an alternative form of leader identification and selection particularly powerful and useful for project teams, and I took a pretty good beat-down here on my own blog. I met last night with a talented group of young professionals and I received some good-natured challenges as to why one might not be able to apply the creative processes of the design firm, IDEO, to almost any type of firm and environment. Thematically in these posts here at Management Excellence, I’m calling for a quiet, professional revolution in how we lead and manage and run our businesses. The “experts: are quick to point out all of the reasons why these ideas might not work.
My response: “Why not?”
If you’ve lost the sense of adventure in business and in leadership to pursue “Why not?” it’s time to get it back or give it up.
Leadership Caffeine-Create Success by Managing Your Response to Failure
Filed under: Career, Crisis Leadership, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leadership Skills, Management Education, Performance, Professional Growth, Talent Management, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
No one wants to fail. It’s not something that we typically seek out as part of our personal and organizational character building experience. However, from a distance, we tend to mythologize failure, especially in the context of achieving future success.
Run a web search on some phrases built around failure, and you’ll come up with quite a few reflecting a very true statement, “Failure is a teacher.” Our histories and leadership legends all benefit from the context of understanding the final outcome of the story, but the telling of the story doesn’t adequately capture the powerful emotional forces that occur at the moment of failure.
Certainly, the stories are right and the lessons instructional. They inspire us to persevere, but the failure-leading to-success legends don’t guide us how to respond and cope in the moment.
In my own experience (personal and as a leader supporting others), the moment of failure is filled with a swirl of emotions ranging from anger to frustration to a deep depression-like funk. In particular, for individuals that have experienced only success in life and career, and yes there are those that enjoy mostly charmed existences due to their skills and perhaps some good fortune, the moment of failure feels much like being transported to an alien landscape where suddenly everything is not as it should be.
As a leader seeking to help team members through a dark point in time, or perhaps dealing personally with your own failure disorientation, here are a number of suggestions to help light the way.
Five Ideas to Help You and Your Team Members Cope with a Setback:
1. Speed is of the essence. The faster you can help everyone move from “what just happened?” to “what next?” the faster you pass through the cold, alien landscape of failure. Linger too long on an extended self-pity party and you might as well set up camp and become a permanent resident. Your goal must be to move through this phase or process in a hurry.
2. Don’t get caught up in blaming the world. Does it really help to blame everything and everyone else for the failure? Once again, attempt to move quickly to “what next?” or you risk an extended stay in the land where “yelling into and shaking your fist at the wind” is a national pastime. It might feel good for a moment, but eventually, it’s just dumb.
3. Beat yourself with a wet noodle and move on! If the failure is personal, resist the urge to blame your lack of ability. The destructive “I’m not smart enough/good enough” mentality likes to attach itself to your frontal lobe and take root, ensuring a growing problem with self-doubt. Instead, admit that you made mistakes, that you failed to exert enough effort to properly see or deal with the issue and once again, jump on the “OK, I won’t make those mistakes again…what next?” train.
4. Failures are often not performance problems. Don’t confuse the two Leader, please don’t make failure a punishable offense. Individual or team failures are different than performance problems and you should treat them as such. Too many leaders allow untreated performance issues to infect team environments, and then they attack the team, not the root cause of the underperformer. Don’t misdiagnose and mistreat here or the failure disease will spread.
5. Your time and asking the right questions will help your team members start moving forward. For individual failures, it is essential for you to create some one-on-one time and allow the failure/grieving process to unfold. Your role here is to listen and ask questions such as:
- What went wrong?
- What did you learn?
- How can you prevent this from recurring?
- What are your ideas for moving forward?
- How can I help?
Remember to set a follow-up discussion to ensure that the individual is back on track and focus on the challenges looking forward instead of the issues that are increasingly distant in the rear-view mirror.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Dealing with adversity is one of the core challenges of the leader. Developing a coping strategy for yourself and your team is essential for success. The legends and myths of failure are right…they do provide critical learning opportunities and teachable moments. Nonetheless, the fact that you or your team members are benefitting from one of these “priceless” moments offers little help or comfort at the moment of failure. Understanding how to leverage the emotions and the energy of the situations will help you create your own legends and examples. It will also reduce the unhealthy fear of failure that stifles so much creativity.
You don’t have to embrace or smile at failure. Instead, kick it in the teeth and use the emotional energy to propel you and your team forward.
Just a Little Tongue In Cheek-In Search of a New Model for Leader Selection
Filed under: Innovation, Leadership, Social Satire, Surviving Lousy Leaders, Talent Management
Note from Art…hey, these can’t all be deep! Have some fun with the idea and maybe we’ll start a revolution in leader selection in the process.
I cannot claim this as an original idea. I was re-reading Tom Kelley’s outstanding book, The Art of Innovation, based on his experience with design and innovation firm, IDEO, and I was particularly enamored by the part where Kelly describes the process of IDEO’s project teams picking their own leaders. The leaders serve at the discretion of the team.
Hmmm. Maybe, just maybe, the rest of us have been going about this all wrong for all of these years.
Thoughts on a New Model In Leader Selection:
It might take a leap of faith to delegate leader selection to the employees, but based on the nearly endless supply of horror stories that I hear from readers, workshop participants and MBA students, I don’t think we’ve cracked the code yet on consistently selecting quality and qualified leaders.
In attempting to identify the potential flaws in my “employees pick the leaders/inmates running the asylum” idea, it helps to think through my assumptions.
Why This Might Work:
- The proper alignment of incentives and compensation with goals and results serves as a check against selecting chuckleheads. If the members of a team or even an entire company have their livelihoods on the line, their own best interests are served by choosing the best-qualified individuals.
- This approach practically guarantees that the “role of the leader” will quickly orient towards a “True North,” that emphasizes serving the team, knocking down barriers, encouraging innovation, and finding and developing even more talent.
- This one may put me way out on a limb with some readers, but here I go. Most people are inherently good and I believe (perhaps naively so), that they would opt for ethical, capable leaders versus those that may be more charismatic but significantly less capable. (Yeah, even writing that makes me believe that I’m moving towards naïveté on this one. Nonetheless, I’m sticking to it.)
The Success Will Be in the Details:
There are a few kinks in this plan that I’ve not yet worked out, including how to keep leaders from constantly seeking a vote of confidence, how to boot out leaders that aren’t performing, who defines what it means to perform and how to make sure that strong values and positive ethics guide everyone along the way.
Long story short, I’m still working on my checks and balances.
Nonetheless, it would be nice to shift the burden to the people to ensure the best and brightest are in place and serving. After all, it works so well in Washington!
And If This Model Doesn’t Work…
OK, if this idea doesn’t hold water, I’m already working on adopting my Jeffersonian-model of leader selection. Jefferson was of the mind that anyone that wanted to hold political office should not be allowed, and that our elected officials should be drafted from the citizenry and serve for a limited period of time. Same here. If you want to lead, there’s clearly something wrong with you, and you are automatically barred.
What say you? Is it time for a new method of leader selection, and how can you help frame a new Leader’s Constitution and an Employee Bill of Rights?
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