Leadership Caffeine: Strengthen as a Leader by Developing as a Follower

October 18, 2010 By 10 Comments

A Cup of Leadership CaffeineI grew up to the refrain of “be a leader, not a follower,” and the drive to lead is part of who I am. Part and parcel of that has been a natural resistance through much of my early career to the notion that, “to be a good leader, you need to be a good follower.”

For me, and I know for many others, our ambition is to drive change, right wrongs and challenge the status quo and to advance. Mentally, it’s hard to connect those core professional drives with the passive and even weak sounding notion of “following.”

I didn’t buy the “be a good follower” story for quite awhile in my career, and in discussions with many emerging leaders, they struggle with this concept as well.  A common theme that I hear, emphasizes the confusion around the significant difference between developing as a good follower versus blindly following someone. The two are very different, and serving as a good follower absolutely has nothing to do with suspending your own judgment, stifling your views on right or wrong or becoming visible as that most odious of corporate characters, the “Yes-Man.”

It’s time to put a positive light on followership as a prelude to effective leadership and to offer some guidance for those seeking to advance their leadership careers.

Common Misnomers About Followership:

  • Being a good follower is about nodding your head and supporting your boss regardless of your own beliefs.
  • Following equals weakness.
  • Being a good follower means that you must suspend your own judgment.
  • Being a good follower requires blind and mute obedience.
  • You’re a bad follower if you challenge your boss.
  • Followership is a euphemism for playing politics.
  • Followership requires you to focus on supporting someone over the organizational good.

My reaction to all of the above is a resounding: Wrong!

6 Ways to Grow and Develop as a Follower Without Compromising Your Integrity:

1. Know thy boss. Proactively seek to understand organizational goals and strategies as well as the personal/professional goal and priorities of the people that you work for.  Any gaps between the two are opportunities for you to engage with your boss and others to ensure proper organization, team and individual focus. And your insight into your boss’s goals and aspirations can only help you as seek opportunities to serve as an effective follower.

2. Speak Up! Just do it with tact. Choose the right opportunities to ask questions, seek clarity and professionally and politely challenge assumptions and share alternative viewpoints.  The good leader values these habits in her followers.

3. Apply for citizenship in you manager’s world. A good friend works in “Alan’s World,” where Alan organizes and presides in an attempt to both meet organizational goals and make “Alan’s daily life” a good one. Many a person has failed to pass the citizenship test in “Alan’s World,” and paid a steep price.  Don’t confuse this with compromising your ethics or morals, and do accept it as good common-sense advice. Learn the laws, rules and customs of your society and from time to time, that society is defined by your boss.

4. Accept power, politics and influence as your friends. Recognize that politics, power and influence are not dirty words and that it is naïve to ignore these facts of organizational life. You engage in the activities ethically and professionally, and you feel no shame in building coalitions and using influence to move your team’s and your manager’s programs forward. Of course, you never do this blindly. (See #1.)

5. Don’t let the boss walk around naked. With grace, courtesy and as quickly as possible, tell the emperor when he is walking about sans clothing. No one wants to see that! A good follower is a protector.

6. Seek first to understand the nuggets of gold in poorly delivered feedback. Many managers lack technique and training for supporting your development, and what might come off as unfounded criticism may very well be his or her best attempt at helping you improve. Resist the movement to anger and seek the wisdom behind the muddled message.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

We all follow someone in the workplace, and ignoring the need to become an effective follower is tantamount to shooting yourself in the foot. Your mind says, “Get out of my way and let me lead,” but reality says that you need to coexist.  The challenge is to coexist without compromising your ethics, values and your integrity.  Easy words, and quite often a difficult balancing act.

As you grow as a leader you’ll come to recognize your dependence upon good followers and you will appreciate those that follow with good intentions, untarnished morals and ethics and a fervor to help you, the team and the organization succeed.

Filed Under: "To Do" List, Career, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Performance, Professional Growth, Values Tagged With: , , ,

Management Lessons Learned While Consuming Too Much Hospital Food

October 15, 2010 By 2 Comments

reportcardIf you’ve ever been the parent of the patient in a hospital, you know that you are hypersensitive to everything going on with your child.

Spend a few weeks camping out in the hospital room, and you’ll feel like you’ve earned at least your first semester’s credits for medical school.  I’m now uncomfortably familiar with fluid output levels, white blood cell counts, NG tube placements, bandage changes, wound care and the wonders of all manner of pain killers and various other medicines.

You also become attuned to the flow of information, the conduct and attitudes of the doctors, nurses and technicians. We engage with doctors looking for signs of progress or puzzlement, and we take comfort from the personnel that help the mind and body.

Little things make a big difference when a loved one is ill, and while our filters are tuned to high, doctors and healthcare professionals and hospitals are in the ultimate customer care business, and we as customers are quick to notice great performance as well as the occasional lapses.

The many leadership and customer care observations and lessons are still top-of-mind following our recent experience, and I’ve noted a few below. It’s a fair bet that these lessons apply across disciplines and professions as well.

Leadership Lessons and Other Observations Gained While Consuming Too Much Hospital Food:

1. Leave your ego at the door, please! The doctor that walks in the room and indicates to the patient that during his visit to ICU, HE (the doctor) was the most important person in the room, needs to have his ego and head examined. Frankly, the patient was the most important person in the room.

As the boss, you are never the most important person. First come your customers, then your team members, then your supporting cast…and then everyone else. Then you. Maybe.

2. Initiative wins the day. The nurse that takes the patient’s complaints about the bed seriously and literally scours the hospital on the night shift to find a better bed, and then physically pushes the bed down the hall and makes the change, is someone that I want on my team.  The fact that she checked back the next day (off shift and on her own time) to see if the bed was working out, speaks volumes about this great professional.

Don’t wait for someone to tell you the right thing to do to serve your customer.  Seize the moment, serve the customer and job description be damned. The nurse in this example dramatically improved the quality of the patient’s comfort and is now and forever more a hero in our household.

3. Who’s training your team to be great? After marveling at the generally great attitudes of the nursing staff, I finally met the senior team member that had trained everyone on this floor.  After five minutes of discussion, I understood why the care quality was so high. She set the bar high for excellence in care and conduct, and made people want to jump over that bar. For the one bad incident, she took ownership of the problem and provided constructive coaching to the individual in question.

I’ll think of this professional every time I encounter service providers that appear to be pissed about having to serve their customers. This poor attitude is inexcusable and it’s on the shoulders of management that clearly didn’t care enough to ensure that their employees care.  Think: Cashier at Wal-Mart.  When was the last time one of these beaten down souls bothered to look you in the eye and engage with you as a human?

For all of us, building a great customer care culture is much more than metrics and slogans. It starts with management actually deciding that being great at this is important, and then hiring and developing the people to carry it forward.

4. You are only as good as you are able to communicate. Being in the hospital is frightening for most. Leaving the hospital with new hardware and drainage systems is psychologically brutal.  Helping the patient adjust and adapt to their new world by employing genuine empathy, great psychology and a nearly constant stream of dialogue over the days is priceless.

Our customers are all trying to solve problems, and just the very nature of a problem creates stress, frustration and sometimes fear. How well trained are your team members to relate to the client and metaphorically hold their hands through the problem resolution? Do you have systems in place to make this happen? Does your training support this mentality? Are you hiring people that genuinely give a damn and that take pride in helping?

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Caring for sick and wounded people is something that not everyone is capable of. Those that do it and do it well, likely hear it as a calling.  And while making the hyper-jump from human lives and health to business services and products is perhaps a stretch, there’s much to gain from observing the best of the best at giving care and comfort under stressful circumstances.  If you are in business to solve a problem for someone (and who isn’t?), then make it your calling and hire, train and support those that hear it the same way.

Filed Under: Decision-Making, Leadership, Performance, Values Tagged With: , , , ,

Health Care and Great Customer Service Alive and Well in Peoria, IL

October 14, 2010 By 5 Comments

Thank YouOur family is coming through a challenging period after an unexpected healthcare emergency with our oldest son. Thankfully, all is improving, and our focus is now on helping him convalesce and resume the life of a 21-year old college senior.

With almost a month to observe a great number of healthcare workers, managers and teams at work, I’m much impressed with the care, compassion and dedication of almost everyone that we encountered during this sometimes frightening and always discomforting journey.

And while my focus was on the care of our son, I am wired to look at the management systems and customer care approaches that tell me about the organization, its leaders and its commitment to quality. With a critical eye and some personal investment, I came away from this experience impressed.

Our son was airlifted to OSF St. Francis in Peoria, IL and from the remarkable ICU and surgical team that literally met him at the helicopter pad to the seemingly endless stream of miracle workers otherwise known as nurses and nurse technicians, we are grateful and thankful.  In several weeks of constant, around-the-clock care, I found exactly one individual that missed the memo on what it means to serve and care.

There’s an expectation that the surgical and ICU teams are top notch, and in our case, they exceeded expectations. Their thoroughness and their clarity of communication and their timely follow-up through the seemingly endless small setbacks and new challenges, provided comfort and critical care during some tough moments.    To Dr. Gupta and his team, words cannot adequately share our thanks for your expertise and your care.

And while the doctors are critical, it is the support staff…from the nurses to the nurse technicians, the patient advocates and the special care nurses that are with the patient 95% of the time that truly are the face of the organization.

Almost to a person (one exception), what we observed was a large sample set of health-care professionals genuinely committed to serving and caring for their patients. You could not help but feel the genuineness in their concern for the patient and for the patient’s family members at every encounter.  The concern came through in the focus on the patient, the eye contact, the questions, the soothing tone of voice, the pro-active efforts to increase comfort and the time taken to get to know the patient.

I found myself observing all of the verbal and non-verbal behaviors of the nurses and technicians, and was literally blown away by the consistency in their genuineness as well as their efficiency. Clearly, there are great hiring practices and even better training practices at work at OFS St. Francis on 4-Surgery.

While one might argue that anyone choosing to work in a direct contact role with patients must love people, I’ve been around some other “top-rated” hospitals where the engagement with patients and families was transactional instead of relationship-oriented.

The personal touches of Libby, Missy, Marissa, Sam, Kyle, Jen, Tasha and so many others allowed all of us to navigate a treacherous situation knowing that there were caring, high-quality humans looking after body and mind.  Thank you from the bottom of our hearts!

Management Lessons in Customer Care for All Of Us:

The demeanor and delivery of quality customer engagement is a direct outcome of the leadership and management practices of an organization. So many organizations that we encounter in our daily lives don’t give a crap about how their people engage their customers.  To those organizations, we’re faceless, nameless numbers with credit cards that are best dispensed with as quickly and coldly as possible.  For those leaders and managers that foster and tolerate that environment, you have our collective disdain.

The leaders at OSF St. Francis in Peoria, IL are to be commended for instilling the focus on the patient as an important customer from the top down. Rarely have I encountered an entity that was wired to serve with care, compassion and professionalism at the level of this fine institution.

When considering this issue, I am reminded of Dr. Deming’s perspective on the unknown and the unknowable. He was quick to remind us that the value of a satisfied customer is both unknown and unknowable. The same goes for the dissatisfied customer.  This post is my small part to share my great regard for OSF St. Francis for your remarkable medical and personal care.

Thank you!

Filed Under: Leadership, Performance, Values Tagged With: , , , , ,
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