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.
The Three C’s and One D of Great Hiring According to Small Business Owners
Filed under: Career, Making Decisions, Management Education, Organizational Transformation, Performance, Talent Management, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
Experienced small business owners and managers understand the critical importance of making great hires. The right people propel your business and the wrong ones cost you precious time and money. The wrong hires ring up expensive opportunity costs by making less than optimal decisions, inappropriately leading or misleading your teams and not helping you create value and gain a competitive advantage.
There’s an entire industry and ample science and psychology behind the various tools and approaches for assessing personalities, gauging intelligence and conducting interviews that systematically uncover the real individual. That’s all good and important…especially the behavioral interviewing part, however, most small and mid-sized business owners and managers that I know, make key hiring decisions more on gut feeling than on the output of rigorous assessment practices and tools. And while some have finely tuned “hiring guts,” a good number of owners and managers lament the bad calls and the lack of access to help.
I spoke to a number of owners running visibly successful firms and asked for their insights on hiring talent on their teams. The roll-up of their advice is as follows (I paraphrase):
-Understand the nature of the position and your expectations for the individual in that position today and five years from now. Hire people that have the intelligence, acumen and drive to both grow the role and grow with the role.
-A caveat to the first point: don’t be cheap now or you’ll pay for it later. Invest in the right talent today, even if it means paying more than you had hoped for. The right person will pay dividends almost immediately and long into the future.
And importantly, hire for the 3 C’s and 1 D: Character, Critical Thinking Skills, Communication Capabilities and Decision Making Acumen.
-Character: look for evidence through behavioral interviewing and reference checking of core values, handling of ethical dilemmas and commitment to the development and support of others. It’s not hard to discern someone that’s in it for themselves and “win at any costs” versus someone with a more externally oriented focus. One business owner likes to evaluate people by how they compete as part of athletic teams. He’s been known to invite a potential male hires to his weekly basketball game at the Y.
-Critical Thinking Skills: truth be told, the phrase is mine and not one used directly by the business owners that I spoke with, but the meaning is the same. People are looking for individuals that see big pictures or that recognize patterns from the noise in the environment. They make sense out of chaos and are capable of forming plans to exploit the chaos to their firm’s advantage. These are the people that dream up new products, come up with new ways of marketing and selling or see opportunities for gaining efficiencies through improved processes. It sounds lofty, but it can be as simple as the example below.
One manager describes looking for any signs that the individual attacks problems with non-traditional solutions. “I would rather hear a potential sales rep tell me how she landed the deal by investing a business day observing the customer’s team and then tailoring the proposed solution based on what she learned, versus a rep that plays only by the price book. The latter are a dime a dozen.”
-Communication Capabilities: One comment: “I hire people that build credibility every time they open their mouths. I want to be impressed by what they ask and how they answer. It shows me how they think, it provides insight into their character and it tells me whether they have the gray matter that I need to grow my business.”
Another indicated, “I hire great communicators and it starts with how well they listen. If someone proves to me that they are a good listener and that they understand that when someone else is talking, their only job is to understand the real intent of the person talking,” I want to hire that person.
Still another offered that she looks carefully beyond the resume and how an individual expresses himself/herself in writing. “I want to understand the complete communicator, and too often, we forget to look at how an individual presents himself in writing. This is an important indicator of intelligence for me.”
-Decision Making Acumen: Again, my phrase, but consistent agreement. One individual summed it up best: “I look for the individual’s examples of tough decisions. What were the stakes? How did she assess risk? How did she gather her data? Who’s opinion did she seek? How fast did she act?”
Another commented: “It’s important for me to understand how people deal with bad decisions. Some are convinced that they can fix anything and will continue to pursue a clearly bad course of action. Others understand that accepting a bad decision and learning from it is the right next step. If I can find good examples of how someone handled genuine mistakes, I gain great insight into an individual’s approach to business and leadership.”
The Bottom-Line for Now:
You can do much worse than improving your ability to gauge the 3 C’s and a D. Character, communications capabilities, critical thinking skills and decision making acumen are the raw materials required for individual and organizational success. Here’s to your hiring health!
Team Stuck in the Creativity Deep Freeze? Try “Why Not?” to Start the Thaw
Filed under: Career, Innovation, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Leading Change, Management Education, Performance, Surviving Lousy Leaders, Talent Management, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
Without exception, the healthiest businesses that I work with are those that offer a workplace environment and atmosphere that encourage a free-flow of ideas ranging from outlandish to “I can’t believe we didn’t think of that before.” It is the part of the natural culture of these firms to think in terms of “What if?” and “Why not?”
Creativity is part of the fabric of these firms, and you see and hear and observe it on display in all roles and at all levels. Whether by design or more by a natural evolution fed by leaders that share a similar sense of curiosity and a genuine interest in and respect for the ideas of their employees, the processes and practices of creativity flourish in these environments.
Alternatively, the less than healthy firms that I encounter share many failure attributes, including a complete dearth of creativity and no visible signs of creativity-inducing practices and processes. Walk into one of those firms and you sense it immediately. Spend some time there and the silence from the lack of creativity or the quiet compliance in response to leader mandated creativity is simply deafening. It’s the corporate equivalent of being locked inside a sensory deprivation chamber.
If you have the misfortune to be stuck inside one of those unhealthy firms, or, better yet, if you have the good fortune to be stepping in to turn the firm around, you might start with focusing on reacquainting people with the philosophy of “the possible.”
As an aside, I’m convinced that almost every person in a bad business has a store of ideas on improving things just waiting to get out. You can break the spirits of people through lousy leadership, but the brain keeps working and ideas flow internally, usually straight into the brain’s deep freeze bin, waiting for a future thaw.
Suggestions for Waking the Creative Giant Hiding Inside Your People and On Your Team:
- Start by using the two words, “Why not?” Environments where creativity has been bred out of the culture are filled with people used to understanding what they cannot do. It’s your job to seize every opportunity to draw forth even the simplest of novel ideas and the “why not?” approach is a helpful tool. Respond to the conditioned phrases of, “We can’t,” or “If we could,” or my favorite, “That’s not how we do it here,” with this phrase, and listen patiently as people stammer and struggle to come up with an answer to that question that even they believe.
- Follow-up with, “How would you?” and then shut up and listen. Expect some silence in return as neurons start firing and long-dormant brain connections are made and people slowly realize you are asking them how THEY would do something.
- Finish-up with, “What do you need from me?” and expect to suffer through a minor period of disorientation as people process on the reality that you, the boss, the person in charge, the person that is in their minds supposed to tell then what to do, just turned the entire equation around. Expect some surprised smiles.
- Loop-back with positive feedback. Pay attention, offer encouragement, add support where needed, and in this instance, use liberal amounts of genuine, positive feedback blended with selective coaching to support the effort.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
I run into people all of the time that challenge my basic premise that creativity is rocket fuel for firms and leaders. Last week, I raised the specter of an alternative form of leader identification and selection particularly powerful and useful for project teams, and I took a pretty good beat-down here on my own blog. I met last night with a talented group of young professionals and I received some good-natured challenges as to why one might not be able to apply the creative processes of the design firm, IDEO, to almost any type of firm and environment. Thematically in these posts here at Management Excellence, I’m calling for a quiet, professional revolution in how we lead and manage and run our businesses. The “experts: are quick to point out all of the reasons why these ideas might not work.
My response: “Why not?”
If you’ve lost the sense of adventure in business and in leadership to pursue “Why not?” it’s time to get it back or give it up.
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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