Leadership Caffeine-Churchill on Overcoming Adversity

August 15, 2011 By 2 Comments

You’re to be excused if you feel like you live in a world under siege. From wars and violence to natural disasters and man-made financial and governing catastrophes, these are most definitely challenging times.

Winston Churchill, the remarkable wartime leader of Great Britain, served as a source of strength and motivation for an entire nation with his dogged determination to survive and ultimately succeed in the face of incredible adversity.  And while perhaps today’s situation doesn’t quite rival that of the early 1940’s, a little dose of Churchill seems appropriate at this interesting point in time.

Churchill on the Need for Forward Movement:

“If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

Fear and frustration overwhelm individuals, teams and organizations. While it might seem appropriate to just plop down and call it a day, the only way out of the mess is to march forward. There is no chance of success without movement.

Politicians Take Heed:

Of course, action without context and understanding can just be wasted energy. In particular, our politicians will be well served to heed his advice here:

“Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak. It’s also what it takes to sit down and listen.”

And again for our politicians, Churchill’s unyielding faith in Americans was balanced with a clear sense of reality:

“You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve tried everything else.”

On Attitude:

“A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”

The most successful people I know look for the opportunity in every problem. The world has enough whiners…it needs more people with the fortitude and tenacity to keep marching towards solutions.

On Determination:

As his nation stared at likely extinction, he offered the following to Parliament:

“We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land, and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be.”

Good words of inspiration to remind us of the need to face up to our economic, social and governing challenges.

On the Thought of Giving Up:

“Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never — in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Get up, keep marching, take time to listen, keep fighting and don’t for a second think of giving up.

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About Art Petty:

Art Petty is a Leadership & Career Coach helping motivated professionals of all levels achieve their potential. In addition to working with highly motivated professionals, Art frequently works with project teams in pursuit of high performance. Art’s second book, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development, will be published in September of 2011.

Contact Art via e-mail to discuss a coaching, workshop or speaking engagement.

 

Filed Under: Crisis Leadership, Leadership Caffeine Tagged With: , , ,

Leadership Caffeine: In the Face of Strong Headwinds, Learn to Tack

May 2, 2011 By 2 Comments

Note from Art: Thanks to Jesse Lynn Stoner and Ken Blanchard in their latest edition of, “Full Steam Ahead” for reminding me of the tacking maneuver of sailboats. Stay tuned for my podcast interview with Jesse about this delightful and valuable book in the next few days.

If you’ve ever sailed, you know that the only way to succeed against a headwind is to turn the bow of a boat through the wind and move in a zigzag pattern towards your ultimate destination. This maneuver is called tacking, and it is repeated frequently, requiring constant adjustments and careful monitoring of wind and sail angle to ensure forward progress without wasting precious time and energy.

The Best Leaders Tack Frequently Without Losing Sight of the Destination:

We face dozens of moments every day where instinct tells us to turn straight into the wind and apply brute force to solve problems, resolve squabbles and keep people moving. Sometimes, our instinct is wrong.

Instead of offering a quick solution or mandating an end to squabbling, effective leaders adjust their course by learning to tack. Much like catching the wind at precisely the right angle to fill the sails, effective leaders turn obstacles into energy, motion and progress.

John spent a great deal of time during his first few years as a manager feeling like he was working hard without making forward progress.  He did what he could to accommodate the people and personalities on his team, and he dutifully stepped into problems and provided quick solutions.

It took a new boss…someone who had learned the power of tacking against headwinds to show John that while he was managing issues on a daily basis, he wasn’t truly leading.  John quickly learned that accommodating people simply to keep the peace and stepping in to solve every major problem resulted in momentary compliance but little forward progress.  As John changed his style, he marveled at what a difference it made for him and for his team members, as he helped them discover how to solve their own challenges.

Success Rarely Occurs in a Straight Line:

Too often, we develop our strategies and investment plans with the assumption that once implemented or released, life will be good, customers will line up to give us money and competitors will bow and back away, awestruck at our ability to out-think and out execute them.  Ha!

The reality is that our project flounder, our assumptions often crumble and the paper plans that were so precise and elegant in theory prove brittle and incomplete once they are put into play.  Instead of an unfettered straight line to victory, success, if it comes at all, is only achieved by constant learning based on skillful navigation through crises and chaos.

Elizabeth was charged with responsibility for opening up a new market with a “game-changing” new product.  Unfortunately, the only game that was changed was one that no customers were interested in playing, as measured by initial sales.

Instead of conceding defeat and giving up, Elizabeth and her team went back into the market to find out what had gone wrong.  It turned out that their assumptions on the ease of implementation and the need for on-going support were way off.  The team worked with customers to define a service offering to simplify the start-up phase, and they developed a dedicated support line to help quickly solve customer issues.  As word spread on the value of the new offering and the great support from the firm, sales began to climb.

5 Ideas for Learning to Tack When Your Destination is Straight Into the Wind:

1. Learn to effectively defuse emotionally turbo-charged situations. Emotions create strong headwinds in the workplace. Learn to let people vent and then help them move into the mode of designing their way forward.  This tacking in the face of emotional headwinds helps turn the negative energy into a positive force for forward progress.

2. Resist the urge to provide all of the answers. Remind everyone of the ultimate destination and then teach your team to develop, test and refine the solutions.  Be quick to support learning and slow to criticize efforts.

3. Recognize your own tendency to fight the forces head-on. For example, consider that organizational politics is best handled like fine china…delicately and only when necessary.  I’ve observed otherwise capable people flame out after engaging in one too many extended firefights.  Chances are your political adversaries have something to teach you.  Listen, learn and respond from a position of right and a position of strength.

4. Remind yourself that your customers don’t care about your goals, quotas or targets…they only care about their own priorities and problems. The best way to your destination is by adjusting your course to align with the one your customers want to be on.

5. Quit chasing competitors or you’ll exhaust yourself getting nowhere. By the time you catch up to where they were, they’ll be long gone.  Set your own course..and perhaps they’ll end up trying to chase you.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

We face all sorts of headwinds in our personal and professional lives. If you feel like you are constantly heading into the wind, it’s probably time to adjust your course and put the wind to work for you.  Just don’t lose sight of your final destination.

Filed Under: Career, Crisis Leadership, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Performance Tagged With: , , ,

In the Battle for Change, Attacking the Culture Usually Proves Fatal

March 2, 2011 By 3 Comments

Real-Time Lessons in Leadership

Jody Weis relinquished his role as “Top Cop” here in Chicago, after what was a tumultuous and a productive three-year run in this thankless job.

Weis was a controversial appointment by Mayor Daley. He was an outsider…a product of the FBI, and someone who hadn’t earned any street cred with the powerful cultural force that is the rank and file of the Chicago Police Department.

He stepped into an environment where scandals and corruption were front-page and YouTube news. He was given a mandate to eliminate corruption, and he attacked the job with a ferocity that alienated him from the rank and file and the powerful union. He changed out most of the top leaders and he went after the scandals and the scandalous, including two cases with officers plainly visible on video beating citizens (one a woman in a bar, the other, a man handcuffed to a wheelchair.)

Adding insult to injury from the perspective of the feet on the street, Weis cemented his poor relationship with his organization by wearing a police uniform to various functions. It was widely viewed as an unearned honor since Weiss did not come up through the ranks on the force.  Another major annoyance included adding some highly compensated administrators to his staff at the same time he was shrinking the number of police out on Chicago’s streets.

Add all of this up, and Weis was excellent political fodder for the recent mayoral election, where the candidates all pledged to not renew his contract if they were elected. This, in spite of the fact that the measures of success…major crime statistics generally improved (some substantially), and the number of scandals declined during his watch.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

As a new leader joining from outside the team or organization, the biggest challenge you face is how to cope with culture. If your mandate from those that sign your checks is radical cultural change, your instinct is to begin wrestling the beast from the start. Unfortunately, you cannot change the culture on your own, and in most cases, you cannot do it simply by trading out the leadership (every new leader’s knee-JERK reaction.)

If change is in order, you had best learn the culture, find ways to show your genuine respect for the culture, and captivate the minds and hearts of those inside the culture that are interested in creating a new day. You might have to break some eggs along the way, but at least you will have a team helping you cook and clean as you go.

Filed Under: Crisis Leadership, Leadership, Leading Change, Performance Tagged With: , , , ,

Management Week in Review for February 11, 2011

February 11, 2011 By 3 Comments

Note from Art: every Friday, I share three thought-provoking management posts for the week. Fair warning: I take a broad view of management, so my selections will range from leadership to innovation to finance and personal development and beyond.

This week’s selections feature content on corporate struggles in a changing world, ideas on creating organizations that drive remarkable commitment from their employees and customers, and a buffet of great leadership reading options at the February Leadership Development Carnival. Enjoy!

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop’s “Burning Platform” Memo as reported in the WSJ Blogs and many others. If you’ve not had a chance to read the full text of Elop’s “Our Platform is Burning” memo, this is must reading for all students of management, leadership and strategy. Nokia is a prime example of how not to cope with, respond to or leverage the global pressures in our world, and Elop pulls no punches in highlighting his firm’s transgressions. Read this…think about it and re-read it again. Then go spend some time looking around your organization and check to see if your platform might be burning (or require burning).

From the Memo: “Over the past few months, I’ve shared with you what I’ve heard from our shareholders, operators, developers, suppliers and from you. Today, I’m going to share what I’ve learned and what I have come to believe. I have learned that we are standing on a burning platform. And, we have more than one explosion – we have multiple points of scorching heat that are fuelling a blazing fire around us. For example, there is intense heat coming from our competitors, more rapidly than we ever expected.”

and

“The battle of devices has now become a war of ecosystems, where ecosystems include not only the hardware and software of the device, but developers, applications, ecommerce, advertising, search, social applications, location-based services, unified communications and many other things.”

From John Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing, “The 7 Verbs of Commitment.” John raises some compelling questions and offers his considerable expertise on what it takes to create that culture and company that drives remarkable commitment from all of the players in the ecosystem…customers, partners, suppliers and of course employees. This post is all about capital “M” Marketing, and raises issues that should keep all of us…especially CEOs awake at night.

From the post: “In the end, what every business seeks is commitment – from our customers, our staff, our partners, and our entire collaboration universe. Commitment erases friction, creates momentum and drives substantial profit. But in a world where most everything our companies offer can be acquired somewhere, perhaps even from our own company, for free, how do you create the kind of company, product or service that drives people over the edge to commit…?”

Hosted at Inflexion Advisors by Mark Stelzner, The February Leadership Development Carnival-A Love Story. Heres a buffet of fifty of your soon to be favorite leadership bloggers sharing some of their favorite recent posts. The Leadership Development Carnivals are coordinated by my good friend and great blogger at the aptly named, Great Leadership blog, Dan McCarthy. This month’s episode was produced by Mark Stelzner, and I can assure you that you will not be disappointed by spending some time checking out the sweet leadership treats just in time for Valentine’s Day.

From the lead-in to the Carnival: “The emotions attached to February 14th range from wide-eyed hopefulness and heart-pounding anticipation to downright disdain and overt hostility. As many attribute the same feelings to their organizational leadership, I thought we’d focus this month’s Carnival on our favorite Hallmark holiday. That’s right, it’s the leadership development carnival of love featuring fifty of the sweetest posts from the past few weeks.”

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OK, that’s it for the week. Enjoy your weekend! I’ll be back Monday with a fresh cup of Leadership Caffeine.

–

About Art Petty: Art coaches high potential professionals and develops and delivers  workshops and programs on leadership, professional development and building high performance teams.Contact Art to discuss your needs for a program or keynote.

And whether you are an experienced leader seeking to revitalize and develop as a professional, or, a new leader looking for guidance on starting up successfully, check out Art’s book with Rich Petro, Practical Lessons in Leadership at Amazon.com.

Filed Under: "To Do" List, Crisis Leadership, Leadership, Professional Growth Tagged With: , , , ,

“Hey, What if One of Our Ships Gets Stranded?”

November 10, 2010 By 5 Comments

Note from Art: this intrepid reporter has spared no effort to observe at least three or four news reports on this topic. And note to executives and managers everywhere: get your act together on assessing, planning for and responding to customer catastrophes!

By now, most of us have seen or heard news footage of the Carnival Splendor stranded at sea after suffering an engine room fire and a subsequent loss of core systems including most power and importantly, the plumbing. Thankfully, no one was reported injured, but that’s about as good as the news gets in this situation.

The fact that something went wrong at sea on one of those floating Mall of Americas is not surprising to me. Thanks to my wife, I’m a veteran of a good number of these trips, and I’ve increasingly found myself looking beyond the surface trappings of the experience and wondering just what might go wrong. It’s a lot like making a mental note of where the fire exit is on your hotel floor, except the conclusion here is that if something bad happens, there’s no ground floor escape option.

What is surprising and disconcerting about the situation, is the apparent complete and utter lack of a risk response plan by the company that is in business to float people around on these palaces and feed them until they can barely waddle off the gangplank.

From the chronology indicated by the Carnival, it appears that fire took place in at 6:00 a.m. on Monday, with a subsequent loss of power and plumbing. The information indicates that by 8:15 p.m. that evening, toilet service was restored, as was cold running water. While I wasn’t a math or biology major, let’s look at the variables in this situation:

  • 6:00 a.m. fire and plumbing failure
  • 3,300 passengers well fed from the day before
  • No bathroom service for 14 hours

Here’s hoping that the risk response plan included something really creative for this particular human issue.

Beyond the biological challenges, the Cruise Line required airlifting of Spam (the food, not the e-mail kind) by the U.S. Navy to feed the passengers and crew. Right about now, your olfactory senses should be battling with your gut to contemplate the smells on board this sweltering sweatbox sans air conditioning and plumbing, as well as the sight of sweaty meat or a meat-like substance being served in the sun.

Last and not least, one gets the impression that there was no clear idea on how to move the becalmed vessel from its stranded location to something resembling civilization. For a great while the ship just sat there while it appears that company officials scrambled for someone, anyone that could help them rescue their passengers from this Gilligan’s Island debacle.

What Part of the Risk Management Plan Didn’t Consider This Situation?

Much like we are hearing finally from BP (or at least its former CEO), it appears the oil company was not prepared for the calamity it faced at the Deepwater Horizon.  We certainly are to be forgiven if we raise an eyebrow at Carnival’s response to their own Deepwater debacle and conclude that these people didn’t have a clue and a plan to deal with something as fundamental as a ship getting stranded.

The Bottom Line for Now:

There’s no doubt it’ a non-trivial task to deal with a floating object two times as large as Titanic with thousands of people aboard. However, given the nature of the firm’s business (entertainment, fantasy) it is reasonable to expect lightening fast effective response to a problem of this magnitude. To those of us viewing this via the media, the clueless and seemingly uncoordinated response seems all too familiar. We’ve seen this movie before and the ending sucks.

Are you prepared in your firm to respond effectively to catastrophes with your customers? You may be in the entertainment business, Carnival, but this is not the type of entertainment that will help your cause.

Filed Under: Crisis Leadership, Decision-Making, Leadership, Performance, Project Management Tagged With: , , ,
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