Leadership Caffeine-Improving Your Leadership Effectiveness on the Fly
Filed under: Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leadership Skills, Management Education, Middle Management, Performance, Professional Growth, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
It probably comes as no surprise that the primary excuse that many leaders cite for not focusing on important priorities like coaching, feedback and development is, “ lack of time.”
I’ve heard this “excuse” over and over again in workshops and mentoring sessions. And while there’s little argument over the importance of engaging in these and other positive leadership behaviors, many individuals shrug their shoulders, admit guilt, express frustration over their inability to carve out time and cite administrative, transactional and span of control issues as impediments.
I’ve attacked this from a number of approaches ranging from preaching the virtues of getting this right (I gain agreement but little behavior modification) to various approaches including re-orienting calendars, rethinking attendance at many meetings and taking advantage of lunch, opportunities to grab coffee, early mornings etc. Many have reported achieving some progress by reorienting their priorities, but almost all indicate a desire to do more.
What’s a harried, over-worked, time-stressed leader to do?
6 Ideas for Improving Your Leadership Effectiveness On the Fly:
We all have a finite number of minutes in our lives and days and while one important approach to consistently improving performance is to carefully select the use of those minutes (meetings, meeting length, downtime, task priorities), another is to find the way to use every minute more effectively. While the description here may sound subtle, the impact can be profound.
1. Prepare your attitude to be a real-time leader. Walk in the door intent ready to solve issues and create value for your team members on the fly. This is a very different attitude than walking in the door, strapping ourselves into our seats and firing up our calendars and then navigating the day according to other people’s priorities.
2. Don’t bank (save up) feedback-spend your feedback in real-time. A thoughtful, behavioral sidebar after a meeting or instant guidance in a one-on-one setting makes great use of your contact time.
3. Respond to “can we meet?” questions with, “Can I help you now?” answers. For some reason, many employees feel compelled to meet as part of their attempt to gain support, persuade or highlight a vexing issue. A manager’s tendency to say “sure,” and then pull up the calendar forestalls an opportunity and reduces effectiveness.
4. Use my “3 Key Questions” early and often. What’s working? What’s not? What do you need from me to help you make it work? Then do it.
5. Teach your team to focus on the core. Structure your communication activities with your team members (groups and individuals) to constantly emphasize business priorities and to encourage people to “just say no” to issues that are not core to achieving priorities. Of course, you should create mechanisms to capture feedback, gauge performance, identify and communicate lessons learned and capture innovative ideas. Nonetheless, emphasize focus on the core.
6. Teach and delegate decision-making. I’ve written on this extensively, and an effective decision-making culture that facilitates making the calls close to the action is critical for improving real time performance. One of your best responses in this process to inquiries on “What to do?,” is, “What do you think you should do?”
The Bottom-Line for Now:
While I am always reluctant to encourage a transactional culture, if the quality of the transactions improves, you are doing your job. This approach to “leading in the moment” doesn’t preclude the need to find deep-thinking, big-picture group and one-on-one time, but it does challenge YOU to be more efficient every possible minute.
There’s little chance we’ll find more hours in a day, but you absolutely have the ability to make each and every minute count just a bit more.
My Personal Journey Towards Building Better Leaders
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Management Education, Middle Management, Performance, Professional Growth, Talent Management, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
Note from Art: I’m taking time out from my usual blogging activities today to share with you a bit about the background and approach of my new program and website: Building Better Leaders. Back tomorrow with regularly scheduled content!
My Personal Journey Towards Building Better Leaders:
To understand the genesis of today’s launch of my new Building Better Leaders service and website today, you have to understand just a little bit about my personal-professional journey to this point.
I had a stellar corporate career and was fortunate to work for great organizations and great people every step of the way. I earned my first promotion to a supervisory role 18 months out of college and other than a short stint as a corporate staff member in an industrial conglomerate and the past few years on my own, I’ve always been responsible for teams and people and results. Yeah, I learned how to lead with the pain of a million mistakes! However, with my best humble voice, the teams and businesses that I was fortunate enough to be a part of consistently won in the market by all reasonable financial and customer measures. Hey, people truly are the difference makers!
After we sold the last company (from turnaround to market leader) and I came home to be with my family through my mother’s illness, I decided to reinvent my career and focus in the one area that provided consistent joy and challenge, developing early and mid-career and front-line and mid-level professionals.
Step one was writing the book, Practical Lessons in Leadership with Rich Petro (thanks for joining Rich!) and then step two involved honing my skills as an educator and content creator. Again, long story short and several thousand people through dozens of classes and training programs and keynotes later, the following issues and needs started jumping out from comments and feedback and inquiries:
- Motivated professionals are hungry to learn and develop and often frustrated with the lack of time, money, access or even availability to the type of developmental support that will make a difference now and in the future.
- Traditional models for training don’t offer a sustaining component, including workplace assignments, feedback and mentoring.
- Coaching is often out of reach for those earlier in their careers.
- Time and cost are issues for everyone.
Enter Building Better Leaders:
After conducting more discussions than I can count with professionals in product management, project management, marketing, new first-time leaders, those interested in leading, technical professionals thrust into leadership, I decided to create something that would solve the problems of: practical content, cost, access, sustainability and guidance.
And then I spent a year trying to figure out the technology pieces to the puzzle…as well as creating the initial programs (twice) to learn. Note…a key component of the puzzle was the distance learning delivery platform. I discovered the great folks and offering from Digital Chalk and they are truly enabling me and other professionals to serve up great programs on demand.
And that brings me to today. Paraphrasing liberally from Guy Kawasaki, build it, get it to market, take feedback and keep improving, and that’s what I’m doing.
Here’s the Commercial:
Building Better Leaders consists of:
- Executive and senior practitioner developed, practical content for specific audiences. This is the type of practical, battle-proven material backed by years of hard won experience that is hard to find in traditional education or training settings.
- A series of lessons delivered over 45 to 60 days as structured, on-demand multimedia programs highlighting core issues, examples and approaches.
- Action Guides for every lesson reinforcing core objectives and detailing practical workplace assignments.
- Executive mentoring (from me or other program developers)…typically 2-3 hours per program of personal distance mentoring.
- Unlimited e-mail access on course concepts and applications with the program creator/mentor.
- A price point that doesn’t break anyone’s budget.
The right content plus mentoring plus developmental activities plus access, plus affordability. In many regards, this is a new approach to filling critical skills gaps and allowing people to take charge of their own career development.
The first two programs are core leadership programs: Considering the Move to Leadership-What to Expect and How to Prepare and Succeeding as a First Time Leader.
We will move quickly into audience specific programs with Leadership for Technical Professionals and High Performance Event Management for Marketing Professionals in January.
Oh yeah, and did I mention that I created a new Building Better Leaders blog. I’ll be focusing on blocking and tackling and professional development related content…and will strive to keep it different than the material here at Management Excellence. I hope that you’ll join me in this new blog.
And the Dirty Little Secret of Building Better Leaders:
Supporting the development and advancement of great professionals is the focal point of Building Better Leaders. However, I also expect that this will serve as a powerful collaboration platform for me to work with other great professional trainers, coaches and executives interested in serving their audiences using this format. Whether I’m involved helping others create programs or simply enabling them to move their programs into this format, I look forward to some outstanding new collaborative adventures!
The Bottom Line for Now:
The grandest cathedrals start with vision and a single stone. Great careers start with that first step and first hard-won lesson. The vision is there, the first stone is set in place and there are careers and leaders and great professionals to be created. Let the work begin.
Leadership Caffeine: Five Simple Suggestions for Minimizing Management Myopia
Filed under: Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Management Education, Management Innovation, Middle Management, Organizational Transformation, Performance, Professional Growth, Strategy, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
Participate in or monitor enough management team conversations and you will invariably conclude that it’s darned hard for these teams to spend quality time discussing external issues.
The gravitational pull of internal “stuff” is overwhelming and resists all attempts to move the conversation to topics outside of the firm’s four walls, preferring instead to keep managers focused on the nuances of their own operations. The result is a self-fulfilling management myopia where the view on the world is grossly limited to the immediate surroundings…and ranges as far as the eyes can see outside conference room windows.
Myopic firms miss market moves and focus incorrectly on improving yesterday’s systems and products and services while customers are looking and moving forward in search of new solutions to emerging vexing problems.
Overcoming this myopia requires extraordinary effort on the part of key leaders to train and enable their teams to move outside of the four walls and to build a more comprehensive market view that is constantly in the process of being refreshed.
5 Simple Suggestions for Minimizing Management Myopia:
1. Start by scheduling regular forums where the only items discussed are external in nature. Create a series of core questions that challenge team members to show up prepared to talk about what’s going on with customers, competitors and other industry ecosystem players. Resist the urge in these forums to move towards actions and internal items with one exception.
2. The one exception to the “no internal discussion rule,” is to teach your team members to end their discussions of external forces/factors/changes with “What this means for our firm is… .” Capture these notes.
3. Charge team members with the task of monitoring specific competitors and industry participants and providing regular updates to the group as well as instantaneous updates as conditions change. Remember, that the insights must always be accompanied by, “What this means for our firm is…” statements. Rotate assignments periodically to keep people fresh.
4. Interview customers. Regularly. It’s interesting to sit around and speculate on what customers are doing or thinking, but it’s much more compelling and actionable to truly understand what’s on their minds. Again, create a simple customer survey script and charge your key managers and contributors with keeping tabs on specific customers. I’ve done this with development resources, product managers and of course executive managers, and it gets people on your team connected to someone in the market. Bring the findings into your “external forums” and share.
5. If your team is internally focused such as IT or an internal support group, make certain to forge relationships with external facing colleagues and departments. Invite members of these groups to join your meetings and to share updates on current market issues. Pay attention for opportunities to better tune your function’s activities and priorities to issues and opportunities that your external facing colleagues see in the market.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Inevitably the best outcome of good external awareness is the reflection of insights in program, product and service improvements that create value for customers and profitable growth for your firm. You will need to develop a good mechanism for translating external awareness into internal execution, however, that’s a post for another day.
For now, set a goal to increase your team’s external IQ and try the suggestions here on for size. And be certain to double-back and share with us your own suggestions. After all, your input is part of my program to stay externally aware!
Leadership Caffeine: A Leader’s List of Thanks-Giving
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Life and Business, Management Education, Middle Management, Values, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
Note from Art: I’m getting a jump-start on my Thanksgiving post in the hope that you have the opportunity during this holiday-shortened work week to reach out and say “Thanks” to those that you have the privilege of leading and serving.
The Leader’s List of Thanks-Giving:
- Be grateful for your unique chance to serve others.
- Be thankful for the patience and forbearance that your colleagues and team-members show as you learn over time and through trial and error what it truly means to lead.
- Give thanks for your chance to learn from others.
- Pay honor to those that came before you and took the time to pass along their wisdom…even if you didn’t realize how valuable it was until much later.
- Be in awe of the opportunity that you have in front of you to positively impact lives in ways that few other jobs or professions provide.
- Be inspired to motivate, coach and teach those that invest valuable time in their lives and careers with you.
- Give thanks for the opportunity that you have to create value for your organization. You might not engineer new products or services, but the people that work for you enable others to perform their jobs creating or building or supporting at high levels.
- Be grateful that you were given or developed the patience to cope with the daily stresses and strains of leadership and to keep reminding yourself that it is all worth it in the end.
- Give thanks for your chance to participate in the journey of a lifetime.
- And most of all, just give thanks by speaking up and remembering that a well-placed, heartfelt “Thank you” is one of the most powerful and important of all leadership tools.
And yes, please accept my sincere Thank You for your readership and conversation. I am truly grateful for you.
-Art
Leader, Who’s Sitting at Your Table?
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Management Education, Middle Management, Organizational Transformation, Performance, Professional Growth, Talent Management
Once again, Mom is proven right. You become the company that you keep.
Surround yourself with intelligent, aggressive individuals comfortable in professionally articulating their perspectives and taking accountability for both their words and their actions, and you will flourish.
Have the self-confidence to bring together groups of extremely capable individuals with varying skills and divergent views and you will be challenged to raise your game every day and on every key issue. This type of an environment sharpens your skills, keeps you honest and ensures that you focus on your job…creating the environment for others to do theirs.
Show me a troubled organization and I’ll guarantee you that I’ll find leaders that failed to remember and heed Mom’s advice.
Instead of the super-charged professionals in high performance organizations, I’ll find Yes-Men (and women) or individuals of questionable character and even more questionable motivation.
It’s certainly not new news that many less than effective or overly paranoid leaders view it as important to secure their power by surrounding themselves with individuals less capable and if you’ll pardon the term, weaker than themselves. It’s an ancient story, and a tactic that is both visible to all and horribly flawed.
I’ve built winning teams in global giants and in small, troubled and ultimately successful firms, and I’ve yet to experience a case where an organization was worse off because I found the smartest people that I could and put them in positions to do what they do best…drive positive change and create value. There was remarkable joy and success in watching and supporting these people tackle challenges that I could not master on my best day.
The Bottom-Line:
If you don’t have the self-confidence to hire people smarter and stronger than you are, it’s time to get out of the leadership profession.
If you are preoccupying on fixing people’s weaknesses instead of leveraging their strengths, it’s time to get out of the leadership profession.
If you can do better, then take time to assess what potential mix of strengths plus values will help you and your firm, and don’t rest until you’ve put those people in place. Then start leading by doing everything in your power to help them succeed.
Oh, and once you’ve set this new table with talent, be prepared to find out how great and what a privilege it is to serve others. And last and not least, remember to thank Mom.
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Art Petty
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NEW: Art Petty's Building Better Leaders offers distance education PLUS personalized mentoring for motivated professionals. Executive-developed and delivered programs to fit your schedule and budget and boost your career.
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