Leadership Caffeine-An Effective Leader’s Resolutions are Calendar Blind
Filed under: "To Do" List, Career, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Performance, Professional Growth
I’m as guilty as the next person of finding the impending resetting of the calendar a cathartic cleansing, where the failures of the past year are suddenly washed away and replaced by the empty and unknown space filled with promise and time stretching out in front of us.
There is something remarkably powerful and alluring about the chance to start-over, right wrongs and vow to do things right the next time around.
Resolutions start out as good intentions early in a new year and often end up as regrets later. At some point during the year, we cross a threshold where we mentally give up on the resolutions for now and resolve to succeed next year.
Full disclosure, I live in Chicago, where the saying “wait until next year” (Cubs) is slightly more commonplace than, “vote early and vote often.” Waiting until next year is a part of the genetic make-up for anyone born north of Adams.
Real Time Resolutions are Fuel for Effective Leaders:
As a leader, you cannot afford to fall victim to the boom and bust cycle of annual resolutions. Rather, your challenge is a daily one, requiring you to manage your practices and habits in a program of perpetual self-improvement. Of course, identifying the right improvements requires you to have a real-time feedback system and the ability to keep your ego in check while as objectively as possible processing the daily evidence on your own performance.
While the simple act of even contemplating the need to improve requires a great degree of self-awareness and emotional intelligence on the part of the leader, remember, we are talking about effective leaders. Ineffective leaders are blind, deaf and dumb to these issues.
Effective leaders teach themselves to think and observe with the following questions in mind:
- How am I positively and negatively impacting the performance of my team members?
- What are people telling me (directly and indirectly) about my performance?
- Are people comfortable offering suggestions on how I can help?
- How do people respond to me? Do they shrink or grow in my presence?
- What is the quality of my various interactions? Are we tackling or skirting the tough issues?
- Do people treat me with deference or respect?
- Do my practices stimulate creativity or drive compliance?
- Are there new ideas and suggestions for improvements flowing from the team?
Armed with insights and feedback, the effective leader strives to improve his/her performance daily, creating a kind of Leader’s Muscle Memory where good habits become ingrained and second nature and bad habits are constantly exercised away.
Rather than annual resolutions to improve, the time for reflection is during the drive or plane trip home, at night before going to sleep or in the morning armed with that fresh promise of a new day…not dissimilar from the promise of the new year.
Effective leaders operate with a constant sense of renewal, driven by an intense desire to succeed and to help others succeed. While not every effective leader thinks in the exact language and terms of the questions above, they do think in terms of the same issues: What’s working? What’s not? What can I do better?
The great news about being a leader is that you alone control the ability to do the right things and every day….and every encounter provides the opportunity to improve.
No more “wait until next year” for you. Your next year is right now and every minute thereafter. Resolve to use those minutes wisely and leave no regrets in your leadership wake.
New Saturday Feature-Examples in Effective Top Leadership
For a fascinating discussion on a provocative topic, check out the latest from Bret Simmons in, “What’s Your Experience with Leadership?” Bret kicks off the discussion with the question, “Is leadership at the top really as bad as I think it is?” Grab a cup of coffee, get comfortable and click over to the post and enjoy the great back and forth comments from some sharp people.
One of the thoughts that jumped to mind as I followed the discussion on top leader quality was the fact that I’ve truly enjoyed the opportunity to learn from some remarkable executives during my corporate career.
While the lousy leaders make great blog copy, the great leaders are the ones that shape our own perspectives and practices. As part of my small token of gratitude to these fantastic individuals, I’ll spend what I hope is a long string of Saturdays sharing the lessons learned one leader at a time.
A few ground rules for this new feature:
- I will emphasize the positive examples and great lessons learned. To the best of my knowledge, all of the leaders that I’ve encountered were human and made mistakes. This series will be wholly unbalanced in favor of sharing the positives. That’s the point.
- I will not disclose the names and companies. It’s not my place to call people out in public…good or bad. The names and companies are not the focal point, the good leadership practices are.
- I hope that you feel comfortable sharing your own examples. Your contributions will make this a richer experience for all of us.
Enjoy!
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This “Best Run Company” Reflected It’s Leader’s Sense of Pride in People and the Business
I hesitate to lead off with this example, because it is so rich in content and lessons that I could probably write at least a good chapter in a book. However, I’ll step out of character and provide the short-story here, and save the rest for future posts.
This second-generation industrial manufacturer oozed excellence from the top to the bottom. The first impression was one of “the cleanest company I’ve ever witnessed.” From the spotless factory floor and impeccably clean and tastefully decorated offices to a company cafeteria decorated with pieces and pictures of the company’s past, everywhere you went, people and facilities were pristine.
As I moved beyond my superficial view of the facilities to get to know the employees and managers, I couldn’t help but compare this organization to something straight out of Stepford (The Stepford Wives), where perfect people happily ply their trades producing excellent quality products, remarkably dedicated distributors and fiercely loyal customers. Of course, the year over year over decade results were remarkable. I’ve rarely ever seen so much black ink and so many graphs moving in the right direction.
Over the period of a couple of years, I was fortunate to spend quality time with the CEO as well as a number of his top managers. I also spent a great deal of time in the global facilities. After awhile, I started to see the behaviors and approaches that generated so much success. Without exception, the impact of this leader could be seen and felt from the top to the factory floor worker 6,000 miles away.
The Practices and Lessons of this Successful Leader
- The leader oozed pride in the history of the business and confidence for the future. And while one could imagine pride and confidence quickly turning into hubris, he put that in check by cultivating a fierce sense of challenge and desire to achieve.
- Talent selection was a core competence and this leader took a personal interest in every key hire and a great number that you might not view as key. He hired people that fit the mold in a good way. There was no doubt that he wanted soldiers and officers….not emperor wannabes and he hired buttoned-down, levelheaded, super sharp people that enjoyed following. (Perhaps you will view this as a negative, but it worked in this environment.)
- New leaders were carefully cultivated and developed from inside. This was a key part of reinforcing and perpetuating the culture.
- People genuinely enjoyed their work and their working environment. I rarely ran into anyone with a sour attitude and in a conversation with the CEO, he remarked to me that, “There’s no room for miserable people here. We like to send them to our competitors where they can be miserable all that they want.”
- I’ve rarely observed a team of managers working harder at being excellent in every aspect. The commitment to operational excellence was absolute and failures were tolerated as long as they turned into plans for success. Invariably, they did.
- Top managers worked in the trenches. Constantly.
- No one wanted to disappoint the CEO. While leery that this was a case of Hitler’s officers not wanting to pass along bad news, I came to believe that the motivation was out of pride and respect.
The Bottom Line:
I certainly could share a list of blemishes and flaws and philosophical differences that I saw in this firm and the leadership, but in this case, the positives grossly outweighed the negatives. People loved their work, they loved their firm—an increasingly rare situation, and they respected their leader. The formula here worked, the company was (and is) remarkably successful and thousands of successful careers were built in the process.
Guest Post-More Leadership Lessons Learned the Wrong Way
Filed under: "To Do" List, Career, Leadership, Professional Growth, Surviving Lousy Leaders
Note 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.
Leadership Caffeine: Is Your Self-Confidence In Danger of Burning Out of Control?
Filed under: "To Do" List, Career, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Performance, Professional Growth, Values
Self-confidence is rocket fuel for leaders. Used carefully and ignited under the proper conditions, it propels you and those around you to remarkable heights.
However, beware the narrow tolerance ranges of your own self-confidence. Too little and you act and are perceived as weak. Too much and self-confidence becomes that most destructive of all leadership attributes, hubris.
Self-Confidence & the Early Career Leader:
In my experience, early career and first-time leaders tend to lack self-confidence, generally because they’ve not walked down the path and experienced the many pitfalls and challenges of the leader. Leadership self-confidence is born of experience, and not bestowed by title.
Some early leaders compensate with a command and control style, much like the parent who responds to her child with the self-serving and wholly ineffective explanation of “Because I said so,” to the teenager looking for some rational reason as to why he should change his behavior. I’ll let those of you that have parenting experience highlight why this approach is doomed to failure.
With coaching and some reasonable degree of self-awareness, early career leaders tend to grow out their ineffective ways, both gaining in self-confidence and recognizing the less than effective outcomes of demanding without explaining. However, with the passing of time and some early successes, a new potential problem emerges.
Experience and Success Can Turn Self-Confidence to Hubris. Watch Out!
Borrowing from the excellent, but short read, “How the Mighty Fall,” by Jim Collins, he offers that, “dating back to ancient Greece, the concept of hubris is defined as excessive pride that brings down a hero, or alternatively, …outrageous arrogance that inflicts suffering upon the innocent.”
Perhaps it’s human nature, but as we gain experience and enjoy some victories, it is easy to start believing that we can do no wrong. This false and dangerous belief is often reinforced by the distorted reactions on our own performance that we receive from those who report to us.
It’s amazing how quick people are to tell us that we are brilliant when we’re in charge.
When self-confidence moves out of tolerance towards hubris and arrogance, the fuel that propelled teams and organizations begins to burn in the working environment, distorting reality and destroying objectivity.
The hubris of leaders is the accelerant that once ignited leads to the collapse of careers and companies.
How to Keep Your Self Confidence Within Tolerance:
- Remind yourself daily of your role as a leader. You are there to support, provide help, guidance, coaching and to create an environment for others to succeed in their roles.
- More on your role: repeat and live Deming’s 8th point: Drive out fear, Create trust and Create a Climate for Innovation.
- Focus your calendar time on tasks that support the prosecution of your role.
- Remind yourself that “it’s not about you.”
- Quit asking people how you are doing and don’t pay attention to their unsolicited praise. Instead, ask people what you can do to help them succeed.
The Bottom Line:
It’s dangerously easy to start believing that “you” are the reason for success. Once you buy into that temptation, you’re headed for a dangerous fall. Keep your edge sharp by focusing on what you can do to help others succeed…not on what they can do to once again prove how great of a leader you are.
At the end of the day, you need enough self-confidence to know that the only way to create and sustain success is to choose carefully, support relentlessly and then place your trust in others.
Leadership Caffeine: Take Your Best Practices Viral with Leadership Development Blocking and Tackling
Filed under: "To Do" List, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leading Change, Performance, Professional Growth
One of the interesting observations of writing regularly about developing and reinforcing great leadership habits is that the readership tends to be the group that already gets it.
Trust me, the lousy leaders that haunt our corporate hallways are not spending much time reading and applying the lessons of this blog, or the great work of: Wally Bock (Three Star Leadership) or Dan McCarthy (Great Leadership) or Bret L. Simmons (Positive Organizational Behavior) or Mary Jo Asmus (Intentional Leadership) or Becky Robinson (Leader Talk) and the many other outstanding leadership evangelists.
The people reading these blogs tend to be in violent agreement on the need for effective leadership practices and effective leaders. They might occasionally differ on key points and the “how-to’s,” but we’re having a great deal of fun writing to and preaching to the proverbial choir.
Our issue is truly about taking the people-focused, results-oriented great practices so widely covered and helping them go viral inside our organizations. No small task and one that takes time, dedication and teaching by example.
First, some quick observations about barriers and then my thoughts on catalyzing a mini-leadership revolution inside your organization through good old-fashioned blocking and tackling. And, pardon me if the football tie-ins are starting to show up. I’m excited that we’re quickly moving towards the greatest season of all!
- The slightly cynical, cold-hard slap of reality: there are some people in positions of authority that don’t get it, don’t care, and sure as heck don’t want to be converted. Get over it and get over them.
- I encounter many firms in my travels that are truly ripe for improving their practices but lacking the catalyst to get going. No one is saying “No,” and the issue isn’t that the current leadership class doesn’t care, but more that it doesn’t know what it doesn’t know. I usually find pockets of effective leaders tucked away in these organizations in spite of the lack of a visible leadership development culture.
- The people change, but the excuses for not improving leadership practices are all the same and include words such as: time, money, too-small, no one to coordinate, don’t know where to start, don’t need it, no budget for training and so on. Of course, the reality is that improving leadership practices is not expensive, and the notion of not having time to do the right things to improve the business just ties my brain up in knots!
Actions You Can Take To Start a Leadership Revolution in Your Firm:
- Always strive to set the the example of the effective leader. No one is perfect, but word travels fast through an organization when some one and some team is meeting and beating targets, innovating, problem solving and somehow becoming a magnet for talent from other areas.
- Be a relentless developer of talent: your support of the development of others through coaching, feedback, a supply of increasingly more difficult challenges and your encouragement of risk-taking in pursuit of innovation are all powerful tools at your disposal. You don’t need a budget or a training program to do any of this.
- Encourage your team members to branch out into the organization. The better a developer of talent and the more success that you have at propagating your former team members into roles around the organization, the more likely you are to see your best leadership practices popping up all over the place. The most successful football coach of the 80’s, the late Bill Walsh of the San Francisco 49ers, is given credit for the creation of an entire generation of head coaches and the modern method to run an offense. It’s hard to read an article about a coach that doesn’t track lineage back to this brilliant coach and leader. In this case, one man set about the task of creating excellence and without knowing it, changed the culture of the entire sport.
- Work leadership development into the corporate conversation. Ensure that strategy discussions ultimately encompass talent discussions…because no strategy can be executed without the right talent in place. Once there is broader awareness, encourage your peers to engage in activities that promote discussions and that lead to actions. An example is the simple, low-cost “leadership book club” activity that I’ve seen work so successfully at the senior and front-line leadership levels. Tie development actions to lessons-learned from the reading activities.
- Build leadership development accountability into the organization. Hold your managers accountable for proving that they get it and are living it in the prosecution of their jobs.
The Bottom-Line:
When it comes to leadership development, sweeping corporate mandates and expensive training initiatives are rarely as effective as consistent blocking and tackling. Your own practices are capable of creating a new and next generation of professionals that carry the right approaches and ultimately innovate and improve upon what you did. That’s what it’s all about.
I write everyday with the picture hanging in front of me of the great Green Bay Packers of the 60’s running the one play that everyone knew they were going to run…the sweep. They of course did this with devastating efficiency en route to numerous championships that decade.
The picture (signed!) shows Bart Starr handing off to Jim Taylor with Jerry Kramer and Fuzzy Thurston leading the way as blockers. Coach Vince Lombardi is visible in this picture standing on the sideline, watching his team execute this play as effectively as they understood how to breathe. Relentless practice around relatively simple concepts yielded perfection.
How’s your leadership blocking and tackling training going on your team? Done right, it might just catalyze a revolution!
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