Archive for Leadership

I spent some time yesterday staring at my arm and writing down what I saw.

I know that probably sounds strange, so perhaps I’d better explain.  I recently signed up for a virtual writing class, something to keep me sharp and to teach me how to come up with new ideas whenever I feel the specter of writer’s block hovering just behind me. For this particular exercise, we were instructed to look at our arm and write whatever comes to mind. At first I thought, “Huh?? It’s my arm!” My arm, after all, has been attached to me since I was born. It swings into view on a regular basis. What could I possibly see that I hadn’t seen before?

Was I surprised!

The first thoughts that came to me were simple, shallow ones, generating words that I’m sure you would expect:  length, width, markings, color – the words that would describe the surface, what I can easily see when I glance at my arm.  “Hmmm, new freckle,” I thought to myself. “Need to keep a watch on that. And my hand is beginning to show it’s age a bit….” Those types of things.

Then something happened. I began to see my arm in a new way.

This was the limb that held my child as he grew up, that cradles my dog when she’s afraid. It helps me grab onto a tree and pull myself up a steep terrain when I hike and wraps around my husband’s neck to let him know that I care. My arm, over the years, may have changed in the way it looks, but it continues to give back to me in ways that I probably took for granted.

How often do we see our employees that way, the way I initially looked at my arm, as something that’s always been there but never really, deeply seen? Perhaps they’ve been working with us for a long time and we don’t really notice them as they were or as they’ve grown. If you were to really look at your employees – beyond the surface features like their tenure, skill, and ability – what would you see? What largely unseen—but deeply important—qualities do they have that, when you reflect on them, you appreciate and value, perhaps couldn’t or wouldn’t want to live without?

Take a moment and look at your employees with simple appreciation. What do they inspire that you may have overlooked?

We hear a lot these days about employee engagement – how to make sure your employees are fully engaged with their work, with their team, and with their managers.  And it’s a noble and valuable thing that we remain focused on employee engagement. Examining how we, as organizations and leaders, are ensuring that our employees are engaged with their work is a vital step towards retention, productivity and innovation.

Still, regardless of how much attention we in HR pay to the issue, it continues to warrant concern.  A recent survey from the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) found that only 52% of employees felt “plugged in” at work.

But, is that the end of the story? What’s going on with other 48%?

Years ago my husband worked for the CEO of a small company who had a mantra of sorts around employee engagement.  “You can quit or you can stay,” he would say, “but you can’t quit and stay.”  That phrase has stuck with me all these years.  So: what about those employees who appear to be staying and working and engaging, but, underneath it all, have at least a few toes already crossing the exit door’s threshold?  How do we identify those signals and, more importantly, work to create what I like to call a “Stay Culture?”

Here are the three clues I often advise others to look for:

1. Connection – How connected is the work that your people are doing with what’s important to them? These days, more and more Gen Y’ers actively voice their opinions about the need for meaning in their work, for a sense of connection between what they do and what they value. You could be pumping out widgets, but if the end result is that those widgets are being used for purposes that speak to core values, then your employees’ connection to their work will be deepened.
2. Contribution – How do you and your employees “show up” at work? (notice I said “at” work and not “to” work) This is less about the time on the clock – although a willingness to go above and beyond is often a sign of engagement – and more about stepping up to contribute in ways that go outside the job description. There is a balance, of course, but when you see your folks raising their hand to volunteer to learn about something new or taking on a leadership role for a project, this is a staying sign.
3. Conversation – How many times do your employees strike up a conversation with you, trying to get to know you more, trying, in fact, to engage? How open and inclusive is your culture of feedback and engagement? Sometimes employees actually try to engage but are turned back. The reasons may be valid—deadlines, urgencies, customer issues—but we should pay particular attention to these attempts to reach out. Ignoring such attempts can easily result in employees who “quit and stay.”

There may be other factors that could be at play that help to create a “stay culture”. What have you experienced in your organization that helps to create an engaged “stay” mindset?

It’s in the ether. We’re hearing it in the news, reading about it in the newspapers, overhearing chatter in the streets. People are feeling more positive about this coming year. The jobs report had an uptick last week (with over 200,000 jobs created) and organizations are beginning to gear up for hiring and reorganizing to meet a growing economy.

I’m not a political or economic expert, but what I am able to do is notice what’s happening with my clients. There’s a slight and steady surge in preparing to lead new teams with new leaders—and that’s exciting! A new generation of leadership offers us all a new opportunity to embrace possibility for growth and innovation; it’s what our nation is all about.

And with this shift comes a need for focus.

The leaders who are emerging need our help to be able to take on the upcoming challenges of growing our economy and leading our organizations. Perhaps they’ve just graduated from college or they are high-performing, individual contributors ready to step into a leadership role. Either way, all emerging leaders need guidance and partnership to grow and learn how to lead in ways that enable and empower others.

Here are three important things that we should focus on to help our emerging leaders:

1)   Help them to become servant leaders. We know, and have had experience with, two types of leaders – the autocratic leader and the servant leader. Research and experience informs us that those who view their leadership as serving others – their employees, customers and stakeholders – are leaders who gain long-term and deep seated trust and followership. Servant leaders who view their work for the sake of others’ growth, development and empowerment will develop into the leaders who are able to shepherd their organizations through thick or thin, deliver news – good or bad – and secure the understanding and loyalty of those around them.

2)   Help them to empower others. If there’s one thing my experience has shown can guarantee an impact on organizations, it’s this – an empowered organization will get things done quickly and innovatively. Period. Once a leader has embraced letting go and empowering their team to make decisions and take action, their way of leading and their team’s way of working is boundless.

3)   Help them become conversational leaders. Conversations are at the core of building authentic relationships and, as a result, our emerging economy and growing organizations can benefit greatly from leaders who encourage and promote active, engaged conversations. I’ve observed organizations come through some really hard times unscathed due to the integrity, frequency and encouragement of conversations they held as an operating and behavioral norm. Leaders who embrace this notion are leaders who develop relationships with their teams and, as a result, pave the way for sustainable performance.

There are more things that we can model and embrace as leaders. If we start with these three, we are well on our way to developing a strong, cross-generational and emerging leadership capability. What other ways can you suggest?

It’s New Year’s Eve day and many of us will write, read and share posts, notes and tweets that focus on traditional resolutions for the upcoming year. We’ve all seen or made them before – promises to eat better, exercise more, talk less – and they’re always made with the best of intentions. Yet they are driven by little more than timing. I mean, it is the New Year, right?

This post is not about that.

What I’d like to offer is an invitation to think about “right now,” to step back and reflect upon what’s most important to you today, at this moment. Ask yourself that question – What’s most important?

Perhaps right now the most important thing that you could be doing is to take a nap or a walk. Perhaps what would make your moment would be to eat that last piece of chocolate layer cake for breakfast (I’m all for that!). What is the one thing, the one “do” or “be” that will shepherd you into a place of well-being and contentment?

So often we hold ourselves hostage by the promises we make to ourselves. I’ve been there myself, caught in a loop of trying to lose the same [fill in the number] pounds for the last six years. If it was the most important thing – really…the MOST important thing – then I would have accomplished it some time ago. Other concerns, or goals, or distractions have moved up the ranks somewhere along the way and have made themselves more important.

What’s most important?

It’s a question I often use to begin a coaching session. Of all the things leaders encounter each day, there’s always a “most important” that trumps all others. Focusing on that usually opens the way for other concerns to fall away or slip in prioritization. But after we unpack it, examine it and address it—that most important item—there often comes the sense of clarity needed to get to the other stuff.

There will be plenty of posts today and over the next couple of days that will invite us to plan and make new goals for ourselves, and I look forward to reading them. Goals, too, are very important. Goals are good. We need goals to propel us forward.

This is more about pausing.  This is about awareness and, more importantly, self-awareness. It’s about taking a moment to fully understand what you can be doing or being right now.  What’s most important?

My wish is that we will ask ourselves that question over and over again in 2012.

In my last blog post (which you can read here) I revealed my oft-used habit of “counting loose change,” my term for procrastination (or, as I like to think of it, “the art of not doing what I should be doing when I should be doing it but don’t want to”). In that post I offered up four simple ideas for how to quickly prioritize your time.

Sometimes, though, there’s simply more to manage than a few simple guidelines can handle.  Perhaps your work to-do’s and your home to-do’s have started overlapping and you’ve found yourself (as I sometimes do) working on a Sunday morning to finish a report or missing an evening dinner with my husband because I’m on a conference call. Or perhaps you’re suddenly faced with a burst of emergencies that only you can handle.

When that starts to happen I often lean on a model I learned several years back.  It’s a simple four-box matrix developed by Steven Covey that addresses a way to manage to-do’s and discern what is urgent, important or trivial.  (He outlines the model quite well in his book, First Things First.)

Covey’s quad-graph provides guidance and language for determining where your time goes by having the reader place tasks in one of four buckets:

• Urgent/Important – those things that are at crisis mode or deadline-driven,
• Not urgent/Important – those things that fall into leading, planning, relationship-building and empowerment,
• Urgent/Not important –those nagging little things that feel like word balloons on the old VH-1 show “Pop-up Videos” — interruptions, some phone calls, some emails, many popular activities (I’d much rather be doing that!) and most of the so-called “pressing matters,” and, finally,
• Not important/Not urgent – trivia, busy-work, junk mail, some phone calls, and escape-luring, counting-loose-change activities.

And, if you think nothing will ever end up in the Not important/Not urgent bucket, my guess is you’ll be very surprised at how much actually lands there.  Go ahead; try it.  Then let me know what you find out.  My guess is that—like me—you may have spent a bit more time than you’d like counting loose change!

There’s a saying that I learned some years back that captures the essence of unfocused activity: “counting loose change.”  It means this:  I could be, or should be, doing something much more important or of higher priority right now, but I’ve decided instead to pour my efforts into the most mundane, unimportant tasks that I can find—like counting the loose change scattered at the bottom of my kitchen junk-drawer. The exercise often ends with me wondering where the time went, and then cursing myself for not accomplishing anything….

Perhaps you can relate.

Over the years, as I’ve worked with leaders at all levels; I’ve heard a repeated lament:  I don’t have the time to complete my to-do list! Their anguish appears genuine and, in most cases, causes them to question their ability to be a good leader. When I hear this oft-repeated complaint I invite them to step back and take a new and fresh look at their calendar. What’s there that is urgent? Important? What’s there that might be delegated or pushed out to a later date?

In my coaching practice, the wish to explore more ways to manage time comes up frequently. On the one hand, leaders often feel that if they delegated more, their staff would feel more pressure. On the other hand, these same leaders know the importance of keeping a strategic stance and not getting pulled into the weeds. What to do?

The simple answer is to pay attention.  Note when you’re “counting loose change” and avoid it when you can.  Then, think seriously about prioritization.

Here are four things that you can do to immediately prioritize your time:

1.    Plan your work and work your plan:  organize and prioritize your to-do list each morning by placing your most urgent and important tasks at the top.

2.    Relationship-building and planning are important, but not urgent. Plan for lunches or coffee-chats with folks with whom you want to build relationships. Send an invitation for the next two weeks. Done.

3.    Call your staff together and delegate those tasks that fall into the urgent, but not important bucket. Who can represent you at a meeting? Who might take a stab at drafting the report that’s due by the end of the week? This is a great opportunity for developing your employees.

4.    Don’t do or pay attention to anything that isn’t urgent or important. (Or, as an alternative, toss them into your kitchen junk drawer. You can count them later on!)

One final note: it’s not always a bad idea to keep an eye on your “loose change.”  Sometimes it piles up and, when it does, needs to be dealt with.  The key is balancing and creating a productive environment for you and your team.

Recently my husband and I visited our local CSA farm for the last time this season.  Several people were there, some picking up turkeys, others picking up the final batch of beets, turnips and greens.  One after another we all said the same thing.

Thanks.

Later that same day I received an email from one of my clients, a woman I’ve been coaching for the past few months and who recently made a significant breakthrough in her relationships with those around her.  Her message started off with that same word.

Thanks.

It’s such a simple word, taking so little breath to deliver. And of all the words that leaders extol, it’s the one that can quickly and authentically engage an employee and raise in them a sense of well-being.  The word is powerful beyond its single syllable, its six letters.

Psychologists tell us that, by focusing on the positivity that is occurring around us we can build up, within ourselves, an enrichment of repeated positive outlook and response. The same works for our employees and our clients. By focusing on their strengths, what they are doing “right”, our leadership presence is reinforced and our employees seek out ways to build on those strengths. It’s a two-way win.

G.K. Chesterton, the famous writer, philosopher and apologist, had this to say about thanking others: “I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”  As we take the time to celebrate with our family and friends during this season of gratitude, let’s find ways to show our gratitude to our employees, team members and clients. Acknowledge their strengths, their value, and the ways in which their contributions provide you the opportunity to grow as a leader.

We live in uncertain times. The economy remains anemic and jobs are hard to come by, and for those of us who do have jobs, we worry if they’ll last, or if we’ll be stressed to the breaking point as we’re asked to do more with less.  In many cases we have little knowledge of what the future may hold, leading to a level of personal uncertainty that we’re unused to, and that remains very uncomfortable.

But we’ve experienced uncertainty before, in other times and in other ways. I’ll bet if each of us were to reflect on our lives and careers we could easily pinpoint several times when we felt this way, when something in our lives shifted us to an uncertain place. That uncertainty often leads us to question the motives of others or to make assumptions about what might happen—even when we lack the facts to support those assumptions.  If, during those uncertain or out-of-control moments, we attach ourselves to what might happen rather than what is happening, then we’re way too high on the ladder.

That “ladder” is The Ladder of Inference, a model developed by Chris Argyris and presented by Peter Senge in his book, The Fifth Discipline.

The model is one of the most powerful tools in my practice. Its core principle teaches that, when we get attached to a belief, make unsubstantiated assumptions, draw conclusions about someone or something and then take action based on those assumptions, we reinforce a false belief system within ourselves. That belief system then becomes the lens through which we see the world around us, where we falsely substantiate our blurred vision of reality. These “high on the ladder” meanderings affect our relationships, our emotions and our ability to see things as they really are. Instead, we use these assumptions to build ourselves a story that, at best, is untrue and, at worst, is harmful.

So what can we do when we find ourselves high on the ladder?  How do we take those first steps toward grounding ourselves?

First, ask yourself if there’s another way of looking at the situation, another perspective. Give yourself a few, calming minutes to see what’s really there, the real evidence of what is before your eyes.

Secondly, try to verify what you do and don’t know.  Have you come to an unfounded conclusion? Take a deep breath and go talk with your manager. Ask for feedback; ask for an explanation. Continue to build upon the relationships that help to create and deepen trust.

And finally, ask yourself if this is a time for action. Actions carry consequences, and if you’re high on the ladder, those consequences are likely not to be what you intend.

Ladders can be precarious, and the higher you climb the greater the risk of falling. Just one misstep can lead to long-lasting bruises. Perhaps gingerly stepping back down and taking a walk on solid ground will provide a different outlook, a different outcome.

I would love to hear situations when others have been “high on the ladder.”  Please share in our comments section.

I read obituaries.

I’m assuming that half of you are appalled and the other half are nodding your heads in knowing collusion.  It turns out that reading obituaries isn’t that unusual.  Marion Roach Smith, in her small and priceless book, The Memoir Project, admits to doing the same thing and she doesn’t seem particularly weird to me! And I suspect that those of you who share my guilty pleasure aren’t all that strange, either.

In fairness, I also read the wedding announcements. Sipping my coffee and slowly spooning a bowl of Irish oatmeal on any given Sunday morning, I pour over these rites of passage in the Sunday New York Times.  I imagine first how a particular couple met, perhaps broke up briefly, then wrote letters and exchanged phone calls until they eventually came together and began a new life’s journey filled with newness, expectation and possibility.  The obituaries, in contrast, often describe a life of marvel, contribution and grace, a life that, for all intents and purposes, will be remembered by few, but in that simple commitment of ink presents us with a gift of life as story and compass. I come away from reading those columns both hopeful and humbled.

The wedding–obituary continuum made me think of how teams could benefit greatly if they gave themselves the opportunity to experience and understand their own rites of passage, an intentional depiction of a team’s life, its lessons and learnings.  As I thought about it, I came up with three ideas that teams might find useful as they go through their lives:

1-Respect the beginning:   Relationships take time and are the foundation of getting real work done. Make that time. Let the team members learn about each other, allowing trust to become the platform for working through differences and conflicts. Allow them to share their stories, learn from each other and fully wed themselves to the team’s success.

2-Respect the marriage:  As often as I hear my clients complain about being “meeting’d to death,” I also hear how valuable it is to come back together for the purpose of the team members reminding each other of their purpose, the reason they formed in the first place. Just as a wedding is not the last time the couple has to be intentional about their purpose, the team start-up should not be a “one and done” gathering. Maintaining relationships takes work.

3-Respect the end:  When a team has fulfilled its purpose and reached its end, give the team the opportunity to “write their obituary.” Make it a time of celebration and reflection. By doing so the team establishes its legacy – small gems of understanding that can be bequeathed to another team, one that then begins its own cycle of rites.

These rites of passage create narrative, a story of the team and its purpose, its successes and struggles and, ultimately, the relationships of which such stories are made.  And out of such relationships, such stories, come strengths and partnerships that will benefit everyone throughout their careers.

In early 2011, I facilitated a one-day leadership offsite for a group that all worked together in the same organization – some for several years – and were dependent upon each other for achieving revenue targets and meeting organizational goals.  The objective of the meeting, as directed by the Sr. VP, was to have the leaders work together to create cross-functional objectives for the upcoming year.

The offsite flopped.

People didn’t understand how to move from granular group objectives to cross-functional objectives, and couldn’t easily articulate (or necessarily admit) that obvious dependencies even existed.  The twenty or so leaders sat in a room for much of that day wrestling within themselves. They struggled, argued, fought and, finally, declared the effort a complete waste of time. People were angry – mostly at me – and wanted their day back. The HR Manager generously declared the day a “false start.”

Upon reflection I realized that, although these leaders had worked together in some important ways,  they hadn’t ever really taken the time (or been given the time) to really get to know each other, to build relationships and trust. Therein was the problem and, as a facilitator, I should have pushed back from the very beginning.

I called a “do over.”

Here’s what we did: We scrapped the idea of building cross-functional objectives for the year. Instead, we built a plan for the leadership team to dedicate time, away from the office, aimed at building relationships and trust, understanding their interdependencies, and engaging in solving problems together.

1.    First, we created a “design team”  comprised of one leader from each of the functional areas.  This team, under my guidance, had a series of meetings aimed at a new offsite scheduled for a few months downstream. This process created a “core of trust” and started the path to working together across functions.

2.    Based on that core of trust, the leaders were able to use the next major gathering for a specific exercise we use with many of our clients, one we call Customer-Supplier Mutual Relationship Mapping ™. This exercise has each function see themselves both as “customers”, allowing them to declare their “needs,” and then as “suppliers”, allowing them offer their “gives” to the other functions. The teams matched their needs and gives, and then identified where gaps existed. Eyes opened, light bulbs lit up! This exercise opened the door for authentic conversation and understanding across the functions. We captured the matches and gaps and decided to use the outcome of the exercise as a living document for the next major meeting three months later.

3.     In this next meeting, a new design team developed and facilitated the agenda and activities by themselves, with my role primarily as an observer.  The meeting resulted in a deeper analysis of dependencies and roles. Most importantly, I observed great dialogue, strong agreements, and team-based problem solving with very little input or guidance from me. It was clear that the team was moving to functioning as a high-performing team. A new design team volunteered to take the reins for the next meeting and the team and I agreed that my role was no longer required.

As we closed out this third offsite and I looked back at the time we had spent bridging what at first seemed to many like “a complete waste of a day,” I realized how far we had come. The next step?  A suggestion was made for a next meeting topic in Q1 2012: to use the time and create cross-functional objectives, ones that will ensure that the functions are tightly aligned and integrated.

And, so they grow…