Leadership Lessons from the High Seas

July 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Note from Art: great friend and valued former colleague, Chris Colbert, graciously supplied this wonderful post following his recent experience with his sons and Scout troop at Sea Base. Chris’s brief bio is included at the end of the post.  

Leadership Lessons from the High Seas, by Chris Colbert

Just over a year ago, a number of Scouts (including my oldest son) in our local Troop decided they wanted to add a “High Adventure” experience to their Scouting careers. Their choice? … a “Coral Reef Adventure” at the Boy Scouts of America’s Florida Sea Base at Lower Matecumbe Key in Islamorada, FL.

After more than a year of fundraising, our two “crews” (eight each) boarded 41ft. sailboats and embarked on an adventure that was to include snorkeling, fishing, and sailing in and amongst one of the nation’s true treasures – the Florida Keys.

Sailing the Bay of Florida and the Atlantic Ocean in the Keys has a profound effect after a few days, and offers a great deal of time to reflect between stints of snorkeling among coral reefs, trolling for a potential addition to daily meals, preparing lunches and dinners during shifts in the galley, and acting as “Chief Photographer” for the crew.What I found during those times of reflection was that one can see a number of valuable leadership lessons to apply to a career – or simply to life in general – in just a few short days. Here are a few of my favorites:

1. “The captain eats first” – An important reminder that he/she who owns the boat (or for that matter the company you’re working for) gets to set the rules. If you don’t like the rules, start swimming.

2. “Planning is everything” – As a self-professed disorganized person, planning a project more than a year in advance is not part of my personal or professional make-up. Find those on your team who are good at building the plan, and support their every move. While the details early in the process may drive you crazy, it sure makes the end result a smoother sail.

3. “Draw on the experience of others” – The staff at Florida Sea Base were great resources for the inexperienced sailors that made up our crews. Search far and wide for the people in your organization who have the knowledge to make your projects successful.

 4. “Make the most of what you have” – With limited storage on a 41ft. sailboat, finding the utensils needed for even the simplest cooking tasks can be a challenge. The same applies to your business. You may not have the perfect IT systems or other business tools, but let your teams improvise and see what they can build – it can be a great lesson in creativity (and a true treat for the palette)!

 5. “Watch out for sharks, they want to eat your lunch (literally!)” – Hook into a tuna and you better reel it in quickly. Same goes with those competing against you in the marketplace or even for resources inside your organization. Make a decision, set the hook, and reel like crazy!

 6. “Give way to a new captain” – Allow the most inexperienced on your team to steer the boat once in a while and watch what happens! The confidence boost will ensure that others on your team will be ready to step up when you need them most.

 7. “The rains will pass” – There may be times in your career that a squall of misfortune, missteps, or matters beyond your control will drench your dreams. Just remember that the rains will pass and you’ll likely get to see a killer sunrise or sunset after that squall. It’s worth weathering the storm. Plus, your team will be tighter than ever.

 8. “Don’t be afraid to dive a little deeper” – Things look great at the surface, but the real payoff is when you dive down to see the details. Dive deep and you may discover something you’ve never dreamed of experiencing.

 9. “Keep your ‘buddies’ nearby” – If you find yourself in three- to five-foot swells in the ocean while snorkeling several hundred yards away from your boat, make sure you keep your snorkeling “buddy” in sight or you’re likely to experience a panic attack! The same goes in your professional life – find those “buddies” you rely on for mentoring, idea generation, or just moral support and use them when you need a “save.”

 10. “Celebrate as a team” – Spending a week in close quarters (especially during the aforementioned squalls during the night!) striving for a single goal has an amazing effect on a team – celebrate even the smallest wins and watch your team grow.

 11. “All hands on deck” – The sail isn’t over until the cleanup is done. While the exciting part of a project may be over and you’re ready to move on to the next big thing, getting your boat in order is just as critical for the next crew.

 12. “The journey is as valuable as the destination” – Anyone who has been involved with a long fundraising project for a community organization like this – or an extended project in the workplace – knows that the real character building comes in the work the team does before ever setting sail. Remind your team members about the experience they’re gaining along the way that they’ll be able to apply to the rest of their careers.

Wrap-Up:

Many of these lessons can be easily lost on a 14- to 17-year-old who simply wanted to try such an adventure because it seemed that it would be “cool.” But there’s little doubt in my mind that this simple weeklong adventure cemented skills that will make our “crews” better contributors for not only our Troop, but along the paths their lives may take as young men and as future leaders.

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About Chris Colbert:

Chris Colbert is the proud father of two Boy Scouts and an Assistant Scoutmaster for Troop 90 in Altoona, WI. He has lead marketing teams in a number of technology organizations, and currently serves as a Marketing Manager for Realityworks, Inc. – the leading provider of experiential learning technology used in educational and public health settings around the globe.

Filed Under: Career, Leadership, Values Tagged With: , , ,

Management Week in Review-January 7, 2011

January 7, 2011 By 4 Comments

Note from Art: One of my professional goals this year is to do a better job sharing insights and perspectives from a broad range of great leadership and management writers and thinkers.  Every Friday, I will share my three favorites for the week.  This week, I’m including content on transforming yourself, testing your strategy and turning some of the disasters of 2010 into great lessons for 2011. Enjoy!

-From David Meerman Scott at WebInkNow: “Transforming Your Business and Yourself in 2011.”

From the post: You don’t have to accept the label others have put on you. You don’t have to limit your company by a label like “B2B” or “auto industry.” Forget terms like lawyer, consultant, writer, singer, graphic designer. What interests you? What do you love to do? Why not make that part of your work too!

Art’s Comment: While the world is filled with “New Year” posts, this one from the gentleman helping to rewrite and educate us all on the new rules of marketing, is particularly relevant for many of us. David describes his own multiple professional transformations and he offers some great additional examples from others who have done the same.  Check out the post, and subscribe for regular marketing stimulation!

-Mckinsey & Company published an important article based on extensive survey work, entitled, Have You Tested Your Strategy Lately?” (registration may be required)

From the article: “Ultimately, strategy is a way of thinking, not a procedural exercise or a set of frameworks. To stimulate that thinking and the dialogue that goes along with it, we developed a set of tests aimed at helping executives assess the strength of their strategies.”

And:

“Most companies’ strategies pass fewer than 4 of the ten tests.”

Art’s Comment: Yikes. Four out of ten? Double-Yikes.  For a concise summary, check out “10 Tests to Assess Your Strategy“ at Baldrige.com by Steve George. (If you are not familiar with Steve and his site, spend some time checking out the powerful content and resources!)

-From Rosabeth Moss Kanter, writing at the Harvard Business Review blogs: “Five Lessons from 2010 Worth Repeating, Without Repeating 2010.”

From the post: “Before 2010 is dumped into the dustbin of history — and it was a year when cleaning up after disasters was not just a metaphor — it’s worth finding the gems among the trash.”

Art’s Comment: Ms. Kanter consistently provides illuminating and thought-provoking commentary on a wide range of topics in leadership and management.  This particular post helps translate some of the disasters of the past year into golden learning opportunities.  I’m good with learning from disasters!

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OK, that’s a wrap for this first working week of 2011. Congratulations, you made it!

The next issue of Leadership Caffeine will be posted Monday, and stay tuned for the launch of what is shaping up to be a blog-based leadership and management soap-opera, complete with audience involvement!

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Art develops and delivers powerful and pragmatic workshops and programs on leadership, professional development and building high performance teams. Contact Art to discuss your needs for a program or keynote. And whether you are an experienced leader seeking to revitalize and develop as a professional, or, a new leader looking for guidance on starting up successfully, check out Art’s book with Rich Petro, Practical Lessons in Leadership at Amazon.com.

Filed Under: Professional Growth, Strategy Tagged With: , , , ,

Two Great Blogs and a Best of Leadership Caffeine post

December 27, 2010 By 3 Comments

Note from Art: I’m taking a few days off over the holidays to focus on family and recharge my writing batteries. I plan on completing the second round edits of my next book, aptly titled, Leadership Caffeine, and I’m preparing a few other blogging surprises for the new year. However, if you happen to be hungry for stimulating content, here are a few suggestions to help you through this typically quiet week. Enjoy!

Two Great Blogs to Check Out:

1. Sramana Mitra-if your interests range from high technology and strategy to entrepreneurial considerations on a global basis, this incredibly smart professional has some great posts, guest posts and interviews for you. I keep tabs on Sramana’s writing as a way of keeping in touch with one of the leading entrepreneurial and business strategy thinkers on the plant.

2. Lead Change Group blog: (note: I am a member of Lead Change)…this new organization is dedicated to promoting character-based leadership and offers up several fresh posts per week from some truly thoughtful and inspired leadership writers and thinkers.

And finally, in case you need your weekly jolt of Leadership Caffeine, here’s one timed to help you think long and hard about pushing yourself in the new year: In Pursuit of Your Potential

Filed Under: "To Do" List, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine Tagged With: , ,

Two Voices-Humility and the Effective Leader

October 28, 2009 By 11 Comments

Note stepsfrom Art: One of the true joys of my blogging experience comes from meeting and collaborating with some remarkable people.  Mary Jo Asmus is one of those remarkable people.  She writes an outstanding leadership blog offering powerful and relationship-focused perspectives on all things leadership.  I don’t miss a post of hers and encourage you to check out her site and make certain to subscribe.  We collaborated a few months ago for Two Voices on: The Words of a Leader, and enjoyed the experience and the reactions so much that we vowed to do it again.

Well, we’re back.  Mary Jo reached out to me a few weeks ago and raised the topic of “Humility and the Leader,” and we were both so interested in exploring this issue that we went off to our separate corners and the output is reflected in the two posts below.  While the posts don’t necessarily reflect a point-counterpoint perspective, they do bring two unique perspectives to what turned out to be a challenging issue.  My gut indicates that we might even elicit some interesting feedback from the many thoughtful readers that frequent our respective blogs.

OK, enough of my blathering and time to get to the posts. Thanks, Mary Jo for your inspiration!

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Humility and the Effective Leader-Mary Jo’s Thoughts

So often, when we think of leadership, we think in terms of the charismatic leader, or the bold leader. We think of leaders as bigger than life, exuding confidence and perhaps, arrogance.

For most, “humility” isn’t a word that comes to mind when considering the leaders we think we know. This is unfortunate, because the best leaders I know have been able to stay self confident without crossing the line into arrogance through the simple act of remaining humble. It isn’t easy, especially for leaders who’ve had big success.

When we are humble, we understand and invite the gifts that others bring to our effective leadership.

When we are humble, we invite participation by others.

When we are humble, we are open to new learning.

When we are humble, we have empathy and compassion.

Arrogance breeds behavior that isn’t inclusive, diverse of thought, creative, or enlightening. We know that we are not humble when we’ve become arrogant.

How do we know when we’ve crossed the line into arrogance?

Be vigilant. Listen to yourself. You’ve crossed the line into arrogance when:

  • You take all the credit: real leaders know that their success is a group effort. When we are humble, credit goes to all who share in your success.
  • You are the smartest person in the room: learning has ceased. You feel as if you have nothing new to learn from those around you. When we are humble, we are in a state of inquiry; not knowing all the answers, which allows us to continually learn.
  • You judge those around you as “less” than yourself: you’ve put yourself on a pedestal. Nobody can do anything better than you can. It’s not important where you are in relation to everyone else. What is important is that we push our own edges outward to continually evolve.
  • You’ve lost empathy and compassion: you just can’t seem to identify with those in a tough spot or feel sympathy for those in sorrow. When we are humble, we can walk in the shoes of others and we can reach out to them.

Are you staying humble, or have you crossed the line into arrogance? Spend some time thinking about this question and asking for feedback from those you trust on what they are observing in your behavior. And if you’ve crossed the line, call your executive coach to help you get back to humility.

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Humility and the Effective Leader-Art’s Thoughts

I concede the dictionary war to all of you that will turn to the word “humility” and see a definition that says, “a modest or low view of one’s own importance; humbleness,” or, something as profound as “the quality or state of being humble.”

These are not definitions and words that you tend to associate with successful leaders, and yet, I cannot help but observe that many of the most impactful and successful individuals that I’ve worked with and around have an element of humility in their demeanor and an approach that exudes a quiet but positive self-confidence.

Is humility one of the secret ingredients of successful leaders?

To me, humility in a leader is best described as having the self-confidence borne of experience to be comfortable in your own leadership skin, without having to project to the world that you’re on top and in charge.

To be humble as a leader does not mean that you are weak, but rather that you are thoughtful, considerate and confident in the people around you and their ability to solve problems and learn and solve more problems.

It takes time and experience and self-awareness and raw courage to develop and project humility and confidence at the same time.  Both are essential.

We generally don’t come into the leadership world with a sense of humility.  Many of the mistakes of early leaders stem from a misguided belief that To Assert = To Lead.

Unfortunately, many carry this belief in assertion equals leadership with them as they climb the ladder.  The earlier over-stated and over-projected self-confidence often evolves into arrogance and then hubris. The collateral damage from the leaders that follow this evolutionary path is huge.

The path towards confident humility is considerably more difficult and is filled with its own opportunities for derailment. Those that act humble may be misperceived as weak or uncertain.  The To Assert =To Lead crowd likes to hire their own kind in some form of twisted Darwinian practice that ensures the survival of their kind, fully understanding that they may very well be hiring the individual that steps on their back in the climb up the ladder.

Alternatively, I submit that humble leaders are never weak.  Like some martial arts experts, they have the skills to strike and defeat, but choose to use them only to defend or to fight for what is right.  Fighting or striking out is the last resort of the incompetent who lack the wisdom and intellectual tools and substance to fight fair over concepts and ideas.  One of the strengths of the humble leader is that everyone knows that he or she is capable of fighting and winning. This “walk softly and carry a big stick” approach buys the ability for the leader to cultivate his or her humility.

Like so many difficult tasks in life, there is no magic pill or simple guidance that anyone can offer on becoming an effective leader.  You learn by doing and YOU choose your own style.  I regard leadership both as a profession and as a journey and I encourage people that when they come to the fork in the road on choosing a leadership style, to turn away from the To Assert = To Lead path and start down the more difficult road and spiritual journey that focuses on others over self.   I also encourage them to keep their eyes wide open and carry a big stick.

The Bottom Line:

Never underestimate the ability of the quietly confident and slightly humble leader to inspire others to move mountains.

Filed Under: "To Do" List, Career, Leadership, Professional Growth, Values Tagged With: , , , ,

Guest Post-More Leadership Lessons Learned the Wrong Way

October 6, 2009 By 10 Comments

Fresh ideas sign in the skyNote from Art: It’s always fun when a post strikes a chord and compels someone to comment or even put hands to keyboard and crank out a guest post.  Last week’s “Leadership Lessons Learned In a Crane and Sitting on a 5 Gallon Pail” drew upon some of my own early career memories and the formative lessons learned the hard way and served as inspiration for some interesting comments and today’s guest post.

Joe Zurawski is back with us today serving up a nice post on one of the early career experiences that shaped his own leadership development. You may recall that Joe joined us here a few months ago with his take on “Things I Wish I Knew When I Became a Leader.” Joe, welcome back and thanks for sharing!

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Why I’ve Vowed Not to Be Like Glen, by Joe Zurawski

How does this sound for your first job out of college: starting salary above most of your friends, five weeks vacation plus 15 holidays, 8:00-4:30 days with 90 minute lunches, and a 2:1 matching 401(k)!  Why would anyone ever leave?!

As a newly minted, 21 year old mechanical engineer out of Marquette University, I was ready to go conquer mechanical stuff.  This job at a U.S. Department of Energy research facility, where physicists were making new discoveries every year, seemed liked the perfect place to put my education to the test.

My first real assignment was to work with visiting professor from Cornell University to design and build a new type of device to support his research.  It had everything an “engi-nerd” could want: an all-new device with gears, motors, lots of stainless steel, and some extreme environmental conditions.  Also, I would have the chance to learn from the most senior person in the group (“Glen”) who had worked at the facility since it was a pristine prairie with no buildings nearly two decades earlier.  He literally built the facility from ground up and knew every piece of equipment inside and out.

You can maybe guess what happened.  Instead of being coached on how to design my first machine, I was handed a stack of machine design magazines and told to read them (and to take my time…).  Not being the patient type, I plunged ahead and created my design by talking to lots of people, asking for help, and just taking my best shot.  Glen did not want to be bothered by a junior know-nothing.

As the design took shape, I had my college textbooks spread out on the table and diligently worked calculations and triple checked the math.  When I thought it was ready, I presented to Glen, ready to hear how great it was.  Instead, he quickly said it wouldn’t work and I should design it like so. When I asked him why, he said that because of all his experience doing these things, he knew a key area of my design just wouldn’t work right.

Crushed, I went back to my table and went back through all my calculations again.  It had to work – everything that could go wrong was accounted for in the design.  With the blessing of the department manager, I moved ahead on my approach. Glen wiped his hands of the project and blew me off.

During this time, I had made a point of getting to know the factory fabricator guys and asking their perspective on how to build the device.  It turns out they didn’t care for Glen and were eager to help me show him up.  Glen never asked for their help; he just told them how it had to be.

When the device was finally installed, I had a few nervous days as the Cornell professor tested it.  The results were in: it worked perfectly! As for Glen, he literally never said a word about it to me.

The Bottom Line

I have carried that lesson with me my entire career.  A super experienced engineer was completely closed to the perspective that a young kid could have a good idea.  He was closed to learning and displayed an attitude that there was nothing that I could teach him. As I am now the older person in the room, every time I get the sense of “I’ve been there and done that and know the answer,” I force myself to pause and remember not to be like Glen.

  • There is always something to be learned from everyone, including the most junior associates
  • As a leader, get good at asking challenging questions to help your associates consider the unexpected and see how they answer.  Have they really thought through it?
  • Don’t miss the chance to have a positive impact on a young professional by actively coaching and mentoring.  They will learn more, and you just might learn more.

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About Joe Zurawski: Joe is a strategy and innovation executive  with a career that has spanned strategy development and execution, whole lifecycle product innovation and management, demand generation marketing, and global alliances.  He has worked in electronics companies (including Motorola), software (Firstlogic/Business Objects, SPSS), and spent several years in management consulting at Ernst & Young. You can reach Joe at jzurawsk@chicagobooth.edu.

Filed Under: "To Do" List, Career, Leadership, Professional Growth, Surviving Lousy Leaders Tagged With: , , ,
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