Coming Soon: A Saturday Serial & A View from the Millennial Perspective
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Leading Change, Leading the Generations, Management Education, Middle Management, Organizational Transformation, Performance, Professional Growth, Social Commentary, Strategy, Surviving Lousy Leaders, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
Note from Art: Coming attractions and new features. Why? Because I cannot stand running in place.
The Power of a Story and a New Saturday Serial:
One of the lessons Rich and I learned in writing Practical Lessons in Leadership, was the power of stories for making points and stimulating good quality leadership discussion.
After writing the narrative for the book, we thought it would be nice to give the leadership content some additional context, and we formed a fictional company, Apex Integrated Technologies, Inc., complete with characters, strategic and operational issues and a lot of people challenges. In other words, it’s just like every other business in the world.
Our intent for including these stories in Practical Lessons was to provide fodder for discussion around the core chapter content. A mini-fable introduces each chapter and the discussions questions tie things together at the end. We also crafted our own perspectives on the questions and situations and make those available as a free download from my website.
According to feedback from readers…particularly companies and managers who have adopted Practical Lessons in Leadership as a tool for their book clubs and leadership development activities, the story approach works. The cases and questions add a richness and an element of reality to the practical leadership content found in the chapter.
It’s time for me to extend this idea to the blog.
The idea of leadership or management fable isn’t new…Lencioni, Goldratt and many others have popularized the approach in book form. My approach will be a bit different, blending an old publishing technique (the serial story) with the simplicity of hitting the submit button on my blog. Think Dickens and Little Nell meet modern publishing techniques!
This forthcoming Saturday series will explore current and vexing leadership issues from the perspectives of a variety of characters working in different but connected (competitors, partners, suppliers, customers) organizations in a mythical business ecosystem. And yes, each episode will end with some key questions about how to deal with the situation. You as readers are the consultants, advisors and coaches we will be looking to for your best guidance.
Life is a series of experiments, and I personally like the feel of this one. While I can write nearly endless posts about the issues of leadership and management, I’m always on the lookout for new ways to make the topics interesting, relevant and engaging. And yes, this is a nice convergence of my passion for management and leadership writing and my desire to write fiction. I’ll be learning how to write narrative on your time here. Thanks for you help! I’ll see you soon with this new Saturday Management Serial.
Coming Attraction #2: The True View from the Millennial Perspective:
At last count, there are at least 476,890 articles about managing, coping with and surviving the younger generation in the workforce, all written by people over 40. I own a few of those articles. (Note: I made the number of articles up, however it feels about right.)
It’s time to shift things around a bit and gain some insights from individuals looking at the word from their own early career eyes, and describing what they are seeing and experiencing. I have a suspicion we will all learn something in the process.
I’m working with a young and capable professional who is busy attempting to navigate his way through the world, and who has some thoughts to share on what it’s like to be living what all the 40 plus pundits are writing about. He’ll lead us off on this mid-week series, and I’m anxious to recruit a few additional “columnists” to help us all learn and grow. It seems like a ripe time to start a healthy dialogue across the generations on this important topic.
Coming really soon!
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As always, your ideas and input are welcomed. Thanks for reading and tolerating my experiments in management and leadership writing!
The July Management Excellence Newsletter & Free Books
Filed under: Career, Innovation, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Leading Change, Management Education, Performance, Professional Growth
The July issue of The Management Excellence e-Newsletter is out, with subscriber-only content.
The current issue includes content on:
- Improving Ideation & Creativity with Your Team
- Surviving and Thriving at the Dreaded Annual Strategy Off-Site
- Ideas for Jump-Starting Your Personal/Professional Development Program
- New Suggestions for the Management Excellence Reading List
- A tasteful promotion at the bottom of the newsletter outlining new beta test opportunities for upcoming Building Better Leaders programs and other services. (Hey, I am in business here!)
If you’re not a subscriber, please consider signing on and gaining access to content and opportunities not covered on my blogs. As always, I will guard your e-mail information with amazing ferocity!
As an incentive, I will send a free, signed copy of Practical Lessons in Leadership to the 1st, 10th and 25th new subscribers (and every 25th after that, until 500) after this post publishes today. This offer is good for 24 hours…and you must have a U.S. mailing address to participate.
You can subscribe at Management Excellence (http://artpetty.com) or Building Better Leaders (http://buildingbetterleaders.com) on the far right column under E-Newsletter Mailing List. And of course, new subscribers will receive a copy of the newsletter and very soon, access to all newsletter archives as well!
I look forward to sharing ideas for development and performance with you in our e-newsletter format!
Happy Reading!
-Art
Want to Lead? Answer These Questions! #6 of 7
Note: the Seven Key Questions for Ambitious, Aspiring Leaders, are presented in the book, Practical Lessons in Leadership by Art Petty and Rich Petro. I’ll explore each question here at Building Better Leaders through individual “Leadership Tip of the Day” posts, offering ideas for investigation and discussion.
The first five questions in this series challenged you to think through issues that are both philosophical and powerfully practical:
- Why do you want to lead?
- Do you understand the true role of a leader?
- Do you understand that the skills that made you successful as an individual contributor are not the skills that will carry you forward?
- Are you prepared to give up your domain expertise as your foundation for results?
- What do you believe are the skills and personality traits that you need to succeed as a leader?
If you’ve made it through the investigation of questions 1-5, it’s time for you to consider your new world of accountability.
Number 6. Do you understand that you will be responsible for the output of your team members, and that you will be judged on this output?
One of the transition challenges that many first-time leaders face is recognizing and accepting the new found accountability for the results of others. You can look left and right, but at the end of the day, you need only look in the mirror to find the person responsible for the output of your team. This issue underscores your need to focus on talent selection and development, creating the effective working environment and doing everything in your power to knock down obstacles so that others can plow ahead on their endeavors. You’ve moved from a “me-centric” role to one that is completely “you-centric.”
Consider your responsibility and new-found accountability very carefully and remember that you will now live by the Coach’s Credo: “If we succeed, it’s because of the team and if we fail, it’s because of me.”
Want to Lead? Answer These Questions! Number 1 of 7
Note: the Seven Key Questions for Ambitious, Aspiring Leaders are presented in Practical Lessons in Leadership by Art Petty and Rich Petro. I’ll explore each question here at Building Better Leaders through individual “Leadership Tip of the Day” posts, offering ideas for investigation.
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One of the fundamental tasks of any leader is to identify and develop his/her leadership bench strength.
In the ideal situation, the leader is watching her associates for signs of effective informal leadership skills, and then providing developmental assignments to those individuals interested in moving into more formal leadership roles. In this case, the aspiring leader gains valuable context for the role and challenges of leading and the manager is able to provide feedback and coaching.
Another scenario occurs when individual contributors or early career professionals recognize the potential benefits of a leadership role (usually it’s about money or title), and declare to their manager that they are ready to lead a team. Ask any experienced leader if they have been on the receiving end of someone walking into their office and making this declaration, and the leader will likely smile.
In either situation, the leader in charge can benefit from some simple but powerful questions to guide the ensuing discussions and activities.
The First Question:
1. Why do you want to lead other people?
This straightforward question can be disarming to the erstwhile leader. Often, well-intentioned professionals have not thought through what it is about leading others that they find appealing.
If the motivation is simply money, title or overall advancement (all reasonable desires), this question provides the opportunity to draw these objectives out and begin discussing the many ways that advancement can occur. Often, this question will clearly indicate that the individual does not have proper context for the true role of a leader, again opening the door for an important discussion.
The aspiring leader or coach/manager of the aspiring leader can use this simple question to encourage exploration and investigation into this heady topic. Try talking about the motivation to lead with other leaders of varying experience levels. A senior engineering manager offered to me that his motivation was very straight-forward: “I can contribute more to the firm by helping a group of engineers, than I can by working on my own.” Another people-savvy manager had discovered that one of her strengths was building coalitions across organizational silos. She found the ability to do this nearly-full time in support of helping people achieve their goals to be a rewarding experience and her primary motivation for leading.
Until the aspiring leader can plainly and genuinely articulate the answer to “Why?” they are unprepared to lead.
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!
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