Leadership Caffeine: The Noble Pursuit of Power and Influence
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leadership Skills, Life and Business, Management Education, Product Management, Professional Growth, Project Management, Surviving Lousy Leaders, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
Note from Art: no ethics or morals were harmed in the making of this post.
Power and influence are not dirty words. Both are components of every organization’s environment and both must be carefully cultivated to succeed as a formal or informal leader.
Power and influence provide the motive power behind organizations and initiatives and the lubrication that keeps the parts and people from binding and grinding and self-destructing.
Nothing happens without the application of power and influence wielded by those that have carefully cultivated these qualities. And while the notion of someone actively pursuing power might seem reprehensible or dirty or immoral to some, I’m not sure why.
Frequently Overheard:
“I don’t want to play the games.”
“I’m sick and tired of politics”
And the always colorful and image evoking, “He must have pictures…”
We’ve all heard those statements and perhaps nodded in agreement. Yet the presence of humans in the working environment guarantees that there will be those that are more effective at connecting, engaging, motivating, and ultimately getting things done through others. And these aren’t necessarily the smartest people or the hardest workers, but they are more than likely the smartest workers.
Intelligence is More than I.Q.
Those that cultivate power and influence work hard on managing themselves. They are emotionally intelligent. These power-pursuers also are innately aware of the impact that they have on others, and they draw upon well-honed skills to manage external perceptions and to adapt to changing situations. They are socially intelligent.
Personal Branding & Building Respectful Relationships:
Those with power and influence have carefully thought through their own personal brand and value proposition, and work hard reinforcing this brand through their actions and behaviors. Their focus is on getting work done through others and asserting their agenda, and to do that, they must forge respectful relationships, build strong social networks and guiding coalitions and they must support others more often than they ask for support.
And my informal observation on those that successfully cultivate organizational power and influence is that they are masters at managing upwards. This is different than sucking up. It’s understanding your boss’s agenda and priorities and helping her succeed, and it’s leveraging those priorities to grow visibility, get involved with key projects and to curry support.
Backroom Dealers and Dirty Politicians Need Not Apply:
While the bad eggs in the corporate world grab the headlines and the cool orange prison garb that’s been so executive fashionable for the past decade, the gross majority of people in organizations do not resemble those characters.
I’ve worked in and around companies with hundreds to hundreds of thousands of employees and while there have been some blog post worthy lousy leaders, they are the exception not the rule.
From top executives to truly powerful individual contributors that serve as influencers on key strategic choices and projects to those leading from the middle, there are great collectors and noble users of powers almost everywhere.
The abusers and the abusive exist and their tactics are reprehensible. I don’t have an easy answer if you are victimized by one of those creatures, other than to indicate that if you improve your cultivation of power and influence, you will be better able to deal with or avoid the situation and person the next time.
6 Reasons Why Pursuing Power and Influence is a Good Career Move:
1. Productivity. Those with power and influence get more done. You can print this and put it on a bumper sticker!
2. It’s honest, hard work. The pursuit of power and influence in an organization involves figuring out how to stand out from the crowd. This is generally best accomplished by some combination of darned hard work, great ideas, building good social networks and helping your boss succeed. Nothing wrong with those pursuits!
3, It’s about supporting your brand authenticity. The act of pursuing power is in large part a personal branding activity. You have to decide what you stand for and you need to communicate and substantiate your value proposition through your actions. Professionals should take responsibility for their personal branding, and the pursuit of power and influence requires that you live up to your stated value proposition. People are generally not naïve and can smell a hollow value proposition and an inauthentic leader a few miles away.
4. You cultivate critical growth skills. Gaining power and influence requires great people skills…great social intelligence. Part of cultivating great people skills involves understanding how you are perceived by those around you, and this means that you must be alert and open to feedback and to making the effort to improve based on the feedback. This growing power and influence stuff is honest, hard work!
5. You create a multiplier effect. As you cultivate power, you have the ability to extend your good across the organization. It’s easy to talk about how you wish things would work. Those with power and influence are able to define how things truly work and extend their vision across teams and entire organizations.
6. You create demand for you. Your senior leaders want to see people with ambition, commitment and an interest in doing more. As long as your approach to growth doesn’t involve stepping on the heads and hands of those that you are scrambling over, we really like aggressive people that are willing to help in the good fight.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
The pursuit of power and influence is noble. Given the choice between an individual self-confident enough to cultivate power and one not interested in “playing the game,” I know where I’m going every time. The real “game” is about winning by serving customers and stakeholders and legally beating the snot out of competitors.
What’s your strategy to grow your power?
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Coming Tuesday: the latest episode of the Management Excellence Book Series, featuring a podcast interview with Jocelyn Davis, co-author of Strategic Speed. Also, in case you missed it, check out the prior episode with Bob Sutton, author of Good Boss, Bad Boss.
Finding Time to Focus or, Speed Kills
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Leading Change, Making Decisions, Management Education, Organizational Transformation, Performance, Social Commentary
More observations on business and culture from an unofficial leadership anthropologist.
The lot of professionals inside many organizations can easily be characterized by a series of endless status meetings, hurried hallway conversations and messages quickly dispatched on a pda while walking, ignoring the meeting in process or consuming a protein bar on the run.
Space aliens observing from afar might get the sense of a hive type atmosphere with a seemingly endless amount of activity, but almost no perceived vector. Clearly people fawn over those with power, but the output of all of this fawning and excessive movement might not be visible to these distant observers. Nonetheless, work gets done, customers are served and growth often created. I do however, worry and wonder about the human costs and the cost to the organization in lost-ideas, missed opportunities and a much more superficial existence.
If you work in one of these fast-paced cultures, the issue of finding time to focus on people and strategic priorities is a true struggle. The problem is compounded if you get caught up in the common notion that success equates to being perceived by the right people as busy.
Beware the Micro-Transaction Trap:
I’ve noticed a tendency for some in hive type cultures to get caught up in achieving a maximum number of touches per day. The goal becomes one of earning attendance to meetings where you need to “be seen,” and minimizing the amount of time that you spend on any one topic. Deep thinking is not promoted, because you are too busy engaging in micro-transactions. These are quick sound-bite type engagements where surface topics are covered and conversations on deep issues forestalled for another time.
Another Way:
I contrast the micro-transaction or hive style culture with my own experiences working and partnering with a number of different U.S., Asian and European organizations, where thinking time is valued, and discussions are typically allowed to run a useful course…one not dictated by the next entry in an Outlook calendar.
While I cannot say conclusively whether these more deliberate organizations are more successful than their hive-like counterparts, they are all market leaders and they do well retaining and developing employees.
What I can say from personal observation and interaction is that this more deliberate style certainly seems more humane, more enjoyable and to me, one heck of a lot more productive on the right issues. Strategic issues are tackled, learning takes place and coaching and nurturing of talent is a focal point.
5 Reasons Why Lack of Focus Extracts a Toll Personally and Organizationally
1. Speed drains and kills. Constant movement and micro-transactions draw upon instinct and adrenaline. Survival is the goal, movement is required and it becomes habitual. There’s no deep processing going on in this constant sense and respond environment. Frankly, I want some deep thinkers on my team.
2. Excessive focus on pace squeezes out good leadership practices. A key to successful leadership is finding time to focus on others. While sometimes the army is engaged, and sense and respond are required for a period of time, eventually, there must be an opportunity rest, reflect, learn, plan and reset. An always on, micro-transaction culture is a formula that promotes leadership ineffectiveness and rapid troop burnout.
3. All activity, no vector equals poor or suboptimal results. A lot of activity and no vector is a huge waste of physical and mental energy. Strategy sets the vector, and unless this strategy is clear to all, the motion is for show, not for go or dough. Lack of focus extracts huge opportunity costs from an organization.
4. The criteria for getting ahead are off-key. If it’s required to be constantly visible to the people in power to succeed, frankly, the leadership is fatally flawed.
5. Unbridled speed accelerates mistakes. Speed is a powerful motivator and a false god. Speed creates waste and allows mistakes to run further faster. The effective use of speed is a different story. (I have a great podcast interview coming up with Jocelyn Davis, one of the co-authors of Strategic Speed, where this notion of effective speed is shared in detail.)
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Speed kills, and so does inaction compounded by over-analysis. There must be a happy medium or at least a workable balance of speed and activity with the slow, thoughtful dialogue that leads to new ideas, performance improvements and effective coaching. If you live and work in a hive type atmosphere, you’ve got a tough task, but one worth fighting for on a daily basis. Learn to slow down and focus at least once a day.
Leadership Caffeine-Give Your People Room to Run
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Management Education, Middle Management, Not-For-Profit Leadership, Surviving Lousy Leaders, Talent Management, Values, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
Overheard: “If I don’t stay on top of my people, nothing gets done.”
If lousy leadership were a crime, the owner of the quote above might just merit a short stretch of quality alone-time to reflect on the implications of his statement. There are so many things truly wrong with the style of leadership that the statement connotes, that I’m not certain where to start.
I regularly run into examples of leaders operating on the frontlines and even the top-lines that equate leading with policing and oversight. In sessions where I poll on the behaviors of great and lousy leaders, the horror stories of micro-managing bosses and inspector and critic style managers are so plentiful that it’s often difficult to rein in the discussions.
The perception that being boss involves constant policing has not yet been bred out of our culture.
There are certainly core issues that demand oversight. Issues of ethics, legal compliance, and discrimination all merit constant vigilance. And maintaining appropriate operational control is absolutely a leader’s responsibility. However, there’s a line that is crossed when the boss extends intense vigilance to the day-to-day and sometimes minute-to-minute work effort of team members. Move too close to this line or, cross it, and you guarantee a tense working atmosphere, a loss of initiative and a deficit of creativity. What should be a creative and productive experience becomes more like a prison experience.
Gaining compliance is not leading. Any two-bit despot can gain compliance by inducing fear through excessive oversight.
In conversations with individuals describing leaders that they admire, commonly referenced behaviors are they exact opposite of the overbearing and over-the-shoulder manager:
Doesn’t micromanage me
Let’s me do my job
Asks me how she can help
Sets clear expectations and then lets me go
Doesn’t jump all over me when I make a mistake…but rather, he asks me what I learned.
We need more leaders that generate those types of comments from their team members.
11 Reminders that Your Job as a Leader is About Building, Not Guarding:
1. Focus on the working environment! You own the responsibility to create and sustain a positive working environment. You cannot do that by micro-managing.
2. Create the right type of oversight by creating a culture of accountability for the values and norms in that environment.
3. You are a teacher. Teach and train. And then teach some more.
4. You are a coach. Observe and provide timely constructive AND positive feedback. Everyday.
5. Be approachable, but don’t spend all of your own time approaching. Give your team room to run.
6. Create context, not confusion. Clarify and communicate. Create context for key organization strategies and goals.
7. Expectations and accountability drive performance. Set clear and challenging expectations for individual and team performance. This is not micro-managing, it is good management.
8. Remember, you’re there to help, don’t hinder. Knock down obstacles and free your people to run.
9. Defend, don’t distract. Learn to shield team members from distractions. Keep your people free to run, part 2.
10. Stay out of the way. You are a distraction most of the time. See the prior item.
11. Assert only when you need to. Don’t assert often. If you have to assert often, review the prior 11 items.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
We’re all responsible for developing the next generation of leaders. Let’s get this right and help educate and train the micro-managing boss out of existence.
Management Excellence Book Series Kicks Off Featuring Good Boss, Bad Boss
Filed under: Career, Fresh Voices, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Life and Business, Management Education, Management Excellence Book Series, Middle Management, Professional Growth, Surviving Lousy Leaders, Talent Management, Values, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
For as long as I can remember, books have played a major role in my life.
I still recall the day my Mom took me to the Hild Library in Chicago for my first library card. And I remember distinctly the scene a few months later, when she engaged in a vigorous discussion with the library staff on my need for an Adult card. I had consumed everything worth consuming in the Children’s section and needed to move on. Mom prevailed, and the rest for me is reading history.
This preoccupation with reading continued through my summers as a child, including one memorable, slow, hot season reading the World Book from A to Z. While it wasn’t Britannica, it was what we had in our apartment in Chicago. And yes, I read more than the cool transparent overlays. I read the complete text. Every entry. It was a little like work, but I was on a mission. As a result, I have a remarkable store of trivial knowledge on everything that happened in the world up until 1973. Beyond that, I’m a bit fuzzy.
Fast forward a few decades, and books are still a major part of my life. I’ve authored one, I’m working on another and I consume content in history, business and science in an unquenchable thirst to learn more. Given this preoccupation with the written word, it’s fitting and about time that I extend my love of books and regard for the hard work of authors to a feature here on the blog. Thus, welcome to the first post and first interview for the Management Excellence Book Series.
About the Management Excellence Book Series:
First, I’m not a book critic, I’m a book lover. You’ll never find a negative review here, because, if I don’t like the book, I won’t write about it or interview the author. It is my intent to offer a resource with this series that extracts and shares insights and introduces you to new or time-tested great ideas.
I intend on using a mix of audio interviews (podcasts) and posts with transcribed interviews to share ideas and learn more from management book authors that have labored long and hard to help us learn and grow. My mission is to search for the pearls of wisdom, the fresh ideas or the classic ideas that help us all make a difference.
While my audio interview skills are clearly in need of practice, there’s no reason not to start. We are living in a period of time rich with the flow of information and ideas, and I’m excited to help all of us gain just a little bit more insight and context from great management thinkers for use in our professional and personal lives.
I look forward to sharing with you via the interviews. Enjoy!
Art Interviews Bob Sutton About Good Boss, Bad Boss
Art Petty Interviews Bob Sutton on Good Boss, Bad Boss [33:49m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
Art Petty Interviews Bob Sutton on Good Boss, Bad Boss [33:49m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | DownloadGood Boss, Bad Boss by Robert I. Sutton, Ph.D.
Just about everyone is familiar with Bob’s prior work, The No A**Hole Rule! Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One that Isn’t. That great read talked about what many of us have been thinking, and even made the “A” word acceptable business meeting and cocktail party discussion fodder (in the context of the book, of course!).
Bob is back with a tremendous new book, Good Boss, Bad Boss-How to Be the Best and Learn from the Worst, available for pre-order from major booksellers now, with a scheduled publication date of September 7th.
His emphasis in his latest work is on describing the good habits of great bosses, and once again, Bob is saying what many of us are thinking or, living through in our working lives. In this era of the seemingly “disposable worker,” and after a decade of corporate scandals and a great number of bosses doing the “perp walk,” Bob focuses squarely on what the best bosses do day-in and day-out. He contrasts the great habits of good bosses with the equivalent lousy habits and approaches of bad bosses, providing anecdotes and vignettes that we can relate to or anguish over. We all know a few of the bad bosses. Let’s hope that our good boss experiences outweigh those others.
I had the great fortune to connect with Bob recently on a phone call/interview, and our scheduled 10-15 minutes turned into 30 minutes of fascinating insights about the book, and about Bob’s work as a professor and consultant. He was a delight to interview and I sincerely believe that you will find his insights and anecdotes as fascinating as I did. Enjoy the interview and enjoy the book!
And finally, this section from the preface of his book sets the tone well:
“The best bosses don’t ride into town, save the day with a bold move or two, declare victory, and then rest on their laurels. There is no final victory. The main reward for success is usually that you get to keep doing a damn hard (but often satisfying) job for a while longer. Despite the horseshit spewed out by too many management gurus, there are no magic bullets, instant cures or easy shortcuts to becoming a great boss. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar. The best bosses succeed because they keep chipping away at a huge pile of dull, interesting, fun, rewarding, trivial, frustrating, and often ridiculous chores. …Devoting relentless attention to doing one good thing after another-however small-is the only path I know to becoming and remaining a great boss.“
Nine chapters of pure boss gold! Thanks, Bob!
Note from Art: Bob supplied me with a pre-release copy of his book for this interview.
Art’s Updates and Coming Attractions
Filed under: Career, Current Affairs, Leadership Skills, Management Education, Professional Growth
Note from Art: this is a Saturday update on new programs, blog features and some of my latest offerings. Thanks for letting me share!
This has been a productive period for my development of new programs and information offerings. While we all write and talk about the impact of great people on our organizations, it is truly palpable when you are on the receiving end of that help. Thanks to two outstanding young professionals, Eric and Amber, that are busy helping and holding me accountable to getting my work done, we’re adding new programs, tuning up prior offerings and extending our line-up of information products.
Just a few highlights:
The Management Excellence Book Series:
On Tuesday, I will launch the Management Excellence Book Series, where I will regularly connect with leading, new and experienced authors and share their insights and perspectives. I couldn’t be more thrilled to have Bob Sutton as the lead-off interview, where we focus on his forthcoming book, Good Boss, Bad Boss. Next up, I’ll share some insights from Jim Murphy on his book, Inner Excellence, and the September and October schedules are building with:
- The authors of Strategic Speed
- Gary Harpst on his book, Execution Revolution
- Scott Eblin on his upcoming new release
The format will emphasize sharing and gaining insights from the authors. I’m less interested in reviewing the book, and instead, I’m focused on gaining and sharing insights that can help all of us. While I suspect that my audio interviewing skills need a lot of development, I plan on having fun with this exciting new program. I hope that you’ll join us.
And yes, if you’re an author that would like to get involved, drop me a note.
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The August Management Excellence e-Newsletter
This is the 3rd issue of this new offering, featuring subscriber-only content. The August issue offers up a bevy of suggested management resources, including:
- A feature article on honing your leadership skills to cope with a very new and different emerging business world
- A nod to the late management thinker, C.K. Prahalad in my article, “Overcoming the Dominant Logic of Teams and Executives.”
- Comments on must read books and links to some great blogging resources
- Access to the archived issues of the e-Newsletter
- And a few promotional opportunities from me. (Remember, we’re all in business!)
To sign up for the Management Excellence e-Newsletter, you can subscribe at either the Management Excellence or Building Better Leaders sites (right column, e-newsletter subscribe field).
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Updates and New Building Better Leaders Programs:
I love the feedback that I’m receiving on my on-line leadership and management offerings, and our growing team is both tuning up existing programs based on client feedback, and adding new items. These programs are ideal for individuals or groups and depending upon your selection, they include mentoring and non-mentoring options.
In the spirit of Back to School, there are some new pricing options, and look for the early September release of the program, “How to Deliver Feedback.”
“How to Deliver Feedback,” will include 5 on-line lessons (and one bonus lesson on positive feedback), plus developmental assignments that you and your team members can complete on your own time and at your own pace. This self-guided (un-mentored) tutorial on how to improve at this critical leadership power-tool will be available for early enrollees for just $55. Contact me to pre-enroll or discuss group options.
Look for additional program announcements during September.
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Thanks for letting me share and thanks for your input into my programs and involvement here on the site. Back Monday with the latest Leadership Caffeine post!
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