March Leadership Development Carnival at Great Leadership
Filed under: Career, Current Affairs, Leadership, Leadership Carnivals, Leadership Skills, Life and Business, Professional Growth, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
I’m still chuckling over Dan McCarthy’s creativity with his Special Academy Awards Edition of the Leadership Development Carnival! In addition to great content from so many Red Carpet bloggers, Dan has me doing the opening musical and dance number. He clearly forgot to consult with my wife who would have informed him that I have two feet…both left, and my best songs are truly the ones that no one can hear outside of the range of my shower!
Thanks to Dan as always for doing a great job with the Carnival and for adding a fun twist to some great material! If you are looking to continue the festivities as you move through your work week, and you need a little inspiration along the way, the March Leadership Development Carnival is your ideal destination!
Friday Leadership Highs and Lows
Filed under: Leadership, Leadership Skills, Life and Business, Professional Growth, Social Commentary, Values
The High with a Leadership Low: Leaders, Have You Seen Your Humility Lately?
One of the highlights for me of the past few academic years has been the invitation from Sarah Sullivan, a Lead Business Instructor at McHenry County College to guest speak in her Creative Leadership class. Sarah teaches this class in the school’s Academy for High Performance, and as the name implies, it is filled with highly motivated, experienced adults that are hungry to learn and not afraid to question.
What makes this guest speaking experience particularly enjoyable is the fact that Sarah has used my book (with Rich Petro), Practical Lessons in Leadership-A Guidebook for Aspiring and Experienced Leaders, as part of the class, so I’m on tap to both explain the genesis of the book and to support the premise that leadership is a profession and expand on the additional guidance that Rich and I serve up over our 200 pages.
This week’s session included two highlights. The first was the opportunity to re-engage with an outstanding group of professionals that survived my class in Global Business late last year. I’ve rarely encountered a sharper and more engaging group of adult learners!
The other highlight was a comment at the end of our session that should make all of us stop and pause. While I don’t remember the exact wording, this insightful individual offered that she understood the emphasis in leadership writing and speaking on great leaders as humble leaders fiercely committed to their firm’s success and the success of their team members, (think Jim Collins, Level 5), she found herself wondering where all of these leaders were. In her opinion and based on significant experience, she had observed that the oversized egos of most leaders get in the way of any genuine humility.
I suspect that her observation can serve as a safe generalization for the experiences of many individuals in the workforce. Sad but true.
How Low Can You Go: Milton Bradley (the baseball player, not the game company), Your External Locus of Control is Showing.
I tend not to comment on sports or athletes here for a number of good reasons, including the fact that almost everyone knows more about sports and current events in sports than I do. Nonetheless, the local Chicago television news this morning continues to trumpet a story on former Cub, Milton Bradley…a highly paid player that the Cubs brought to Chicago for a King’s Ransom of a salary, only to watch this player turn in a miserable year and earn the media label: Clubhouse Cancer. While I’ve not heard that phrase or label before, it doesn’t sound positive!
Now that he is no longer part of the Cubs, he has lashed out with a line of reasoning to the effect that he had been good in prior years, he did not do well in Chicago and therefore it must be Chicago’s fault.
Ponder.
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Enjoy your weekends! I’ve got to get a jump on next week’s Leadership Caffeine post. Monday is not far behind!
Beware Contracting “I’m Right, You’re Wrong” Disease?
Filed under: Leadership, Leadership Skills, Management Education, Professional Growth, Surviving Lousy Leaders, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
It’s time to add another malady to the long list of things that bedevil the many lousy leaders walking unencumbered through our workplaces. It’s called, “I’m Right and You’re Wrong” (IRYW) disease, and while it’s not fatal, it’s clearly annoying to people and debilitating to performance.
Frankly, leaders that suffer from IRYW disease just piss other people off, while stifling creativity and innovation and casually squashing the souls of everyone they encounter.
IRYW sufferers take on many forms, depending upon how far along the disease is in warping their personalities. You might recognize it in one of the following forms:
- The boss that encourages input but never takes it. Ever.
- The boss or co-worker that gets visibly angry when someone disagrees with him/her.
- The manager that habitually throws dissenters under the bus.
- The manager or co-worker that always has to have the last word.
- The leaders that look at you as if you’ve grown two heads when you gather up the courage to share an idea or offer an alternative option.
Unfortunately, we run into this malady in our personal lives as well. We almost all have the relative or friend that is the self-anointed expert and this can be particularly problematic in households when it is a significant other or even an in-law. Feel free to offer up your own coping strategies from these examples…we’ll all learn in the process.
How You Can Avoid Catching “I’m Right, You’re Wrong” Disease:
-Take a daily dose of humility. Remind yourself when you walk in the door that your role is to help others to succeed, not to show everyone how smart you are.
-Set up an early warning system. While granted that it takes a fair amount of emotional intelligence to recognize that this is good, many brilliant and successful leaders cultivate peer relationships where they encourage feedback, including the “quit acting like a jerk” kind. I’ve had two of these colleagues for years, and their occasional clubbing over the head has been remarkably helpful.
-While it’s cliché, hire people smarter than you. Do this right and you’ll not only gain the benefits of their considerable intelligence, but you’ll double your efforts to help them and earn their respect, as you certainly won’t be able to play and get away with IRYW.
-Stay out of environments where you might be tempted to incorrectly assert yourself and damage the group dynamics. Some bosses have no business in group brainstorming sessions. If you’re one, find something else to do.
Surviving a Boss with “I’m Right, You’re Wrong” Disease:
-Recognize that for this individual, it’s really important to feel like they are right. Since were not psychologists here, we’ll have to pass on analyzing childhood issues or assessing other compensating factors and fous on developing some patience.
-A fair number of IRYW sufferers are harmless. They revel in their own seeming brilliance, but their survival instinct allows them to accept ideas and input…especially if they think they prompted the ideas. Again, we’re not psychologists, but you should use some psychology here. Hey, if you are as smart as you think you are, this one should be easy!
-For those that are in the advanced and more dangerous stages of IRYW, this is truly a challenge. I have no qualms attempting to give my boss quality feedback, even if I’m politely telling her that she is an ass, but in these lean job times, many will shy away from that tactic. Either develop moral courage, developing a coping strategy or start looking.
-If this boss provides you latitude to do your work, stay out of his/her way, execute, provide clear, formal updates and if you face a controversial decision, ask for input. Your very professional demeanor may have a neutralizing affect (to some extent) and your asking for input is a reasonable form of managing upwards in this case.
If you as readers have any other advice, we’re all ears!
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Make no bones about it, my emphasis is on working with good people wanting to become great. The failing in all of the writing and talking about effective leadership is that the lousy leaders rarely pay attention and definitely don’t recognize themselves. To those non-readers, enjoy your life For those of you aspiring and growing as professionals, take this as a polite reminder that you don’t need to be right all of the time. If you suddenly finding everyone agreeing with you, you may want to phone a friend and ask for a quick attitude adjustment.
Personal Responsibility and Success: Quit Shooting Yourself in the Foot!
Filed under: Career, Life and Business, Making Decisions, Performance, Professional Growth, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
I’ve been harping on personal responsibility at least once per week recently, and can’t quite get it out of my system. I’m bombarded daily with too many examples of people that fail to take responsibility for their actions and in the process, often stop one step short of success.
One of my as yet unresolved points of personal inquiry (and wonder), involves those individuals in businesses and in graduate and undergraduate classes that are seemingly armed with their fair share of intellectual gifts and raw capabilities, but that still manage to metaphorically shoot themselves in one or both feet with alarming regularity. Or, if you prefer this visual, they regularly snatch defeat from the jaws of victory!
My question: “What’s up with you people?”
My advice: “Cut it out!”
Jim Collins, the author of Good to Great and most recently, How the Mighty Fall, suggests that greatness is not a function of circumstances, but rather the result of a series of conscious choices. While Collins is referencing organizations in his point, the same shoe fits for individuals. Or at least the shoe would fit, if people didn’t have their feet wrapped in bandages from all of the foot-shooting going on in the workplace and in classrooms.
All Too-Common Examples:
- Adult students everywhere that don’t show up on time, don’t complete work and don’t participate. What are you paying for? What do you hope to get out of the experience? Jump in, do the work, participate and you’ll learn a lot more and you actually might find the experience enjoyable.
- Individuals that believe that bigger forces are working against them. I hear some remarkable excuses from otherwise smart people. The excuses generally have nothing to do with their own personal failings, and everything to do with a series of events that conspired to defeat them for the task in question. You sound like an idiot making these excuses. Give it up.
- Everyone in the business environment that has 20:20 vision that allows them to see with remarkable clarity the faults of their team members and colleagues. It seems like a big mirror is in order here. If these people don’t start looking in it first before looking around for those to blame, perhaps someone should “metaphorically” hit them over the head with it.
- The Apologists that actually seem to accept personal responsibility and apologize profusely for their transgressions. Every week. Over and over again. And again. Hey, guess what. After the first apology, we all know that we’re dealing with a serial apologizer who uses this tool as part of their survival strategy. Given a little time, you become transparent to all of us.
The Bottom-Line:
You are in control of your own actions. You decide every day and with every activity to be successful or to fail. I respect your right to decide to fail, but don’t blame fate, the forces, everyone else and for crying out loud, quit apologizing every time you decide to fail. And if the failure track is getting old, why don’t you decide to succeed next time…and then do what it takes to make it happen. It actually takes less energy and feels a lot better than all of the other failure-coping approaches that you apply.
Embrace Ambiguity and Grow With It
Filed under: Career, Innovation, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Performance, Professional Growth, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
Another one of my nearly endless and on-going leadership experiments deals with ambiguity in all of its forms and fashions. Many of my exchanges sound like the following, where I annoyingly (to the questioner) dodge giving the answer.
“What do you think I should do?”
Me: “I don’t know, what do you think?”
“How do you want the presentation formatted?”
Me: “Format it so that it clearly communicates your key points.”
Same person: “How many pages should the report be?”
Me: “I don’t know. How many will it take to concisely and clearly communicate your key points?”
What should we do?”
Me: “I’m going to go get a cup of coffee. What are you going to do?”
My wife: “Where should we go out to eat?”
Me: “I don’t know honey, where would you like to go.”
OK, the last one usually doesn’t fly, but the other ones are all valid. These questions come from students and direct reports, and I’m willing to be that you hear variations of these from time to time as well.
Many people fear ambiguity and/or they don’t trust their own ability to create or solve a problem, so they respond with a question that delegates the thinking to someone else. That’s a bad habit, and if the workplace or college classrooms were refereed events, those “you do my thinking for me so I don’t have to be creative or take a risk” questions would be infractions.
The Power of Silence as a Teaching Tool:
One of my own favorite lessons in ambiguity occurred a few years ago in an executive workshop at Kellogg. It was day one of the program on “Reinventing Leadership,” and a group of executives ranging from Director to CEO had just concluded presenting the results of our first breakout and case. I noticed that the two instructors were fairly critical of the less than creative problem-solving and uninspired presentations, and after some coaching with an edge, they proceeded to the next case. We broke back out into our work groups and came back in the room to run the teach-backs, and this is where everything changed.
After the first few report-backs, the instructors quit responding. They sat there and glowered at the room in silence. No other groups were called and you can imagine the fidgeting and palpable increase in tension in the room. Several people tried asking questions and were met with stern, stone-faced glares.
After what seemed like an eternity, one CEO stood up and said, “This is B.S., I’ve got better things to do,” and grabbed his papers and jacket and started to leave. Another participant stopped him and said, “Let’s figure this out…don’t let these guys beat you.” That statement was the turning point.
Slowly people came to life and recognized that we were being played…deservedly so, for delivering uninspiring solutions to vexing issues in our cases, and that the message here was dig deeper and do better.
Instead of reverting to our prior work groups, a new social order emerged with several people taking charge, organizing work teams, clarifying the problems and objectives and others joined in to facilitate solutions. Before you know it, the room was humming with creativity as the instructors continued glaring at no one in particular. Basically, we ignored them.
The exercise continued as each new work group presented suggestions and through another round of integration of ideas, we came up with what we all agreed was an inspired, novel set of do-able solutions for the problems at hand. No instructor involvement required.
Now it was our turn. We all sat down and silently stared back at the instructors. And finally of course, they broke their vow of silence with big grins, apologies and their heartfelt praise. The lessons were powerful and plentiful from that example, not the least of which was how to turn brutal, crushing ambiguity (the silence) into a creative outcome. This week-long program continued with other powerful exercises, but none that left such a strong impression as the few hours of silence.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Whether you are a leader or a contributor, recognize that ambiguity is an invitation to pursue creativity. If you are fortunate enough to work for a boss that encourages free-thinking and that doesn’t mandate explicit compliance on tasks, take advantage of this environment to see what you are capable of creating. If you are the manager, quit answering these questions and teach people to think for themselves.
One of the joys of working is the opportunity to create and the benefits derived from the powerful learning experiences that accrue in the process. Quit asking, start thinking and you’ll surprise yourself.
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