Leadership Caffeine: Teach, Don’t Tell
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leadership Skills, Performance, Talent Management, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
I discovered a long time ago that I was much more effective as a leader and as a father (a much harder job to get right!) if I adopted an approach that emphasized teaching over telling.
While there are circumstances where telling is appropriate…the battlefield, the operating room, perhaps the football field and a few others that I’m sure that I would think of if given enough time, most people prefer to learn, not to carry out orders.
Learning engages the senses, opens the mind, creates new neural connections and challenges us to push beyond our routine thoughts and actions.
Good leaders develop an approach that incorporates teaching while emphasizing performance. The two are not only, not mutually exclusive, they are complementary.
Consider:
- The sales manager that observes and coaches her sales representatives will win out every year over the manager that berates poor performers and then demands performance at the end of a metaphorical gun barrel.
- The CEO that consistently and respectfully asks tough strategic and execution questions is teaching his team members how to focus on the important issues of value creation and performance.
- The shop floor supervisor that asks for input on solving quality problems is teaching people that their ideas count when it comes to making improvements.
- The journeyman carpenter that teaches by showing and then leaving the apprentice alone to try the same task, is inspiring by showing confidence and encouraging independent effort.
5 Rules for Teaching Leaders to Live By:
- Recognize that the additional time investment that you make in teaching will come back to you in dividends many times over.
- Resist the urge to bark an order even if you know exactly what needs to be done.
- Use questions as powerful teaching tools.
- If you must “Tell,” provide an explanation. Proper context for a “do this” ensures that some learning takes place.
- Mistakes are teachable moments. Resist the urge to pounce and strive to help all parties extract the lessons.
And as a parent, try doubling or tripling the amount of time that you spend teaching and please resist the urge to pull out the infamous, “Because I said so.”
The Bottom-Line for Now:
The old model of command and control leadership falls on rebellious and increasingly deaf ears in a workplace of boomers reinventing themselves, millennials finding their way and all of us striving to deal with the new complexity that is our world. It’s time to step up and teach.
I am reminded of a comment attributed to the late and great jazz trumpeter and band leader, Maynard Ferguson, who devoted an incredible amount of time to teaching and inspiring aspiring band students around the country. While I’m certain that I’m grossly paraphrasing his comment, it went something like, Why would you do anything else, when you can teach? His band members of course referred to him as The Boss.
It’s time to quit telling and start teaching. Why not start today?
Leadership Caffeine: It’s Vuja De All Over Again
Filed under: Innovation, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leadership Skills, Performance, Professional Growth, Talent Management, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
With apologies to Yogi Berra for borrowing and twisting his classic phrase, a little Vuja De in your daily leadership life might just be the prescription to turbocharge team and individual performance.
I’m re-reading Tom Kelley’s outstanding book, “The Ten Faces of Innovation,” based on his experience with design firm IDEO, and came across his wonderful use of the term, Vuja De (the opposite of that feeling we call Déjà vu) in the chapter on acting as an anthropologist to observe people’s true behavior.
With attribution for the concept ascribed to the late comedian George Carlin, “Vuja De is a sense of seeing something for the first time, even if you have actually witnessed it many times before.” Kelly goes on to describe how anthropologists develop the ability to see what’s always been there but has gone unnoticed—what others have failed to see or comprehend because they stopped looking too soon.”
In my experience, too many leaders give up on the power of observation once they’ve formed initial impressions. They stop looking for opportunities and start managing based on perceptions and all of the inherent biases that go into forming these perceptions.
Stop looking too soon, and you’re liable to miss some remarkable opportunities.
It’s time to walk into your workplace with a freshly scrubbed mind in search of new opportunities and insights. While it is admittedly difficult to flush personal experience and opinions from our minds, imagine the power of walking into your office today without all of the perceptions, preconceived notions and outright biases that govern your behavior towards others.
If you were seeing your team members for the first time, you would not have the bias baggage that weighs us down as we come to know people. You would have a fresh start, and you would not assume that Bob was a lousy negotiator or that Mary was the rising star or that Sam’s tattoos reflect values that you don’t support. Instead of the negatives and the biases guiding your decisions and interactions, you would look for the talents and importantly, the opportunities.
12 Questions to Ask Yourself as a Leadership Anthropologist:
- How do people interact?
- What obstacles do they have to navigate around to get work done?
- How comfortable are they being creative?
- How do they deal with each other when it comes to performance on teams?
- How do people deal with their bosses?
- Where do ideas come from?
- How do new ideas turn into solutions?
- Who is respected and not respected on the team? Why or why not?
- What motivates people?
- What activities suck the life out of people?
- What work goes on that seems to contribute to nothing?
- How many things are done because “they’ve always been done.”
The Bottom-Line for Now:
From an article in Fast Company, “So if you want to find untapped innovation opportunities, watch the world around you with “fresh eyes.” Go for a sense of Vuja de, and then ask yourself why things are the way they are.”
As a leader, you can practice this same “innovator’s secret,” and periodically challenge yourself to step back and assess why things are the way they are on your team. And again, I don’t doubt the difficulty of this assignment, however, the alternative is for you to continue leading from a shrinking and grossly biased view of your workplace and the people around you.
Remember, it’s your job to create success, not manage to minimize failure. Just for today, quit talking too much, start asking, listening and importantly, start observing. What you see might just surprise you.
Leadership Caffeine: Be Careful How You Value Your Time-15 Minutes Can Make a Big Difference
Filed under: Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leadership Skills, Life and Business, Professional Growth, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
As leaders, we all know that it’s the little things that count. A word of encouragement might just be rocket fuel for one person while a constructive suggestion serves as the same for another. Alternatively, ignoring or paying superficial attention to a topic that an employee deems important is a guaranteed way to demoralize and deflate a person.
It’s never the volume of time that you put into supporting someone, but the fact that you put in enough time to show that the person counts. Sometimes, all it takes is your decision to use fifteen minutes to make or break a relationship and impact a person’s life.
I’ve long believed that some of the key leadership missteps are caused by poor decisions on how to use time. As people move up the ladder as leaders, their sense of the value of their time as well as the quantity of available time changes dramatically. To many leaders, time is constantly in short supply and the value of their attention is at a premium. Don’t bother them with trifling issues, because they are busy people.
Be careful how you evaluate issues and conclude that they are not important enough to earn their way on to your schedule.
A Cautionary Tale:
A colleague of mine lamented his own misuse of time recently. A good employee was facing some tough personal challenges along with a professional choice to move into a new role. This move had been delayed by a few months due to work and personal factors, and now the employee was staring at the need to make a decision. The passage of time had blurred some of her enthusiasm for the role and she requested fifteen minutes of my colleague’s time to reset on the role and next steps. She had communicated that it was possible that she didn’t want to proceed.
Instead of engaging in the discussion, my colleague dismissed the request to talk and told the employee to think carefully about the role and to let him know if she was going to proceed. While he wasn’t face-to-face with the individual after indicating that there would be no more talking about the job and next steps, he realized that he had made a mistake just by the sound of the person audibly deflating on the other end of the phone.
The employee quit the next morning.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
In hindsight, my colleague reflected that his primary reason for pushing off the conversation was that he sensed it would be filled with all sorts of personal baggage. He could tell that there were issues other than the position at play, and he decided that he didn’t want to play life counselor. In his time since the incident, he now understands that he completely whiffed on handling the situation.
It would be nice to never have to deal with personal baggage, but on the other hand, every one of us brings our own personal baggage along with us to work everyday. It’s who we are, and we don’t check that bag at the front-desk on the way into the office and then pick it up again on the way out.
While there are lines that are easily crossed where the leader should advise the worker on sources for help, those personal/professional conflicts that swirl in people’s minds at the point of a decision are fair game and worth investing your valuable time in as you plow through your day. And remember, as a leader, your time is much more valuable to others than it is to you. (Yeah, I know this seems counter-intuitive, but it’s true.)
Spend the extra fifteen minutes today to help someone sort something out. You’ll both be glad that you did.
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.
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.
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