Minding Gaps

Three Common Myths of Leadership

 

By Thomas J. Lee

In one way or another, I've been working in the vineyards of leadership for most of my career. I have interviewed senators and presidents. I have worked with CEOs of big companies. More recently, I have taught thousands of managers how to lead people.

Through all these experiences, the subject of leadership keeps getting more and more fascinating. The more you dig into it, the more golden nuggets of truth you find—and the more fool's gold of misunderstanding you find, as well.

Today I'd like to address some of the common misunderstandings around leadership. They are so pervasive that they color everyone's grasp of the subject. You can call them myths. Let's briefly explore just three of these myths.

Myth Number 1: Leadership is a position on the org chart. This belief is so entrenched that The Wall Street Journal and the Harvard Business Review both commonly use the word "leadership" as a synonym for "senior management." Rarely does either publication use "leadership" to describe the hard work that goes into taking people along on a journey of change.

Leading and managing are actually both hard work, but they are fundamentally different kinds of work. Moreover, in both substance and style, different kinds of communication drive the two things. Finally, and this is key, the work of leadership must extend far into the ranks of any company that wants to grow and prosper.

Think of managing as the hard work of ensuring compliance with predetermined expectations: deadlines, budgets, standards, laws, quotas. In contrast, think of leading as the hard work of imagining, describing, and bringing about a new and better tomorrow, often in periods of uncertainty and risk.

Those new and better tomorrows are vital. They mean the world. Companies that don't embrace the challenge of change, that don't continually reinvent themselves, gradually disappear. Look at TWA, Maytag, Gillette, Schwinn, McDonnell Douglas, Oldsmobile, Wyeth, Ameritech, Amoco, and many more. Some of their brand names survive in the marketplace, but all these companies have disappeared in the last fifteen years. Just disappeared!

Few managers regard themselves as collateral leaders of the enterprise, and few executives provide for the professional development of managers into leaders. And because so many successful managers were schooled as managers, hired as managers, promoted as managers, and rewarded as managers, they are trapped in a default state of only managing things.

They even invoke the phrase "change management" to describe what should be the work of leadership. They can do better.

Myth Number 2: Communication for leadership is rudimentary, easy, and simple, and it need not be a strategic concern. After all, senior managers assume, they have been talking ever since they were toddlers, and they have been making presentations since they were management trainees. What could be simpler?

The reality is that clear, credible, compelling communication for leadership in business doesn't come naturally and intuitively to most managers. It involves all kinds of implicit, non-spoken messages that you send by means of decisions, habits, standards, assumptions, attitudes, schedules, and so much more, as well as explicit statements and questions that may inadvertently convey messages you don't intend.

Indeed, your unintentional communication can easily overwhelm your deliberate, intended messages. When you think of communication as only the stuff of PowerPoint presentations or email messages, you miss the impact of most of your communication. That's self-defeating.

Good communication for leadership requires a great deal of time, effort, and skill. Most of all, it requires sensitivity to people. But the investment is worth all the work. It pays huge dividends.

Myth Number 3: The mark of successful leadership is full alignment. Again, not true. The mark of successful leadership is full engagement. Alignment and engagement are not the same thing. In fact, they are almost opposites.

You can think of alignment as the work product, or deliverable, of good managing. You meet the pre-determined expectations that I mentioned a moment ago by aligning people and other resources with results.

Engagement is completely different from alignment. Think of engagement as the work product, or the deliverable, of good leading. It is all about people who are focusing on the right things, who are constantly searching for solutions, who are excited and enthusiastic, and who have the backbone to change themselves and to insist that others change as well.

Thus it is true that the mark of successful managing is alignment, but as we have already seen, the work of managing and the work of leading are two different things.

Companies need both good management and good leadership, and it follows that they also need both alignment and engagement. They need alignment to meet the challenges of today. They need engagement to meet the challenges of tomorrow.

 

Unfortunately, companies often get low marks for engagement on employee attitude surveys, but the companies don't understand engagement well enough to know what to do. So they keep on focusing on managing the company. Next year, they survey employees again, and they get similar scores. Surprise, surprise.

We discuss all this, and much more, in our celebrated Master Class workshops. We have an inaugural, one-day, open enrollment Master Class scheduled for June 26. Call us (at 847-247-2241) today to register.

 
 © Copyright 2012   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Eight Archetypes of Dysfunctional Listening

 

By Thomas J. Lee

Here's an important question: Does anyone really listen to what you say?

Here's another, even more important question: Do you really listen to what other people say? Really, really listen?

Be honest with yourself. For objectivity, ask a colleague, a partner, a spouse. Believe what they say.

None of us wants to admit it, but few of us listens as well as we should. For many readers of MindingGaps, a big part of the problem is your intelligence. When it comes to listening, you can be too smart for your own good. We dealt with the problem of intelligence in an earlier post, which you can read here.

We have identified eight types of dysfunctional listeners. We describe them more fully in our Master Class workshops. Here's a sneak peek:

The Brick Wall. This dysfunctional listener (also known as the "Teenager") is often impassive and shows little eye contact. You really don't know whether he is listening at all. Because he is so detached, he rarely connects with other people, and so he feels isolated and removed. Talking to him is like talking to a proverbial brick wall.

The Donald Trump. The brash, outspoken real-estate mogul is an ideal archtype for another kind of dysfunctional listener. He is a screamer's screamer, constantly peppering people with loud, aggressive questions and never waiting for a thoughtful response. Like his persona on television's "The Apprentice," he is more interested in belittling people than in learning anything.

The Bobblehead. These dysfunctional listeners are eager to convey their interest by nodding their head and interjecting verbal tics ("Hmmm" and "Yes, I see") at the appropriate moment. But ask them what was said or how they feel about it, and they'll find a creative way to have the statement repeated for their benefit. (Note: In the Bobblehead's defense, he is often in conversation with the Auctioneer, described below.)

The Stephen Colbert. Like the comedian's television persona, a Stephen Colbert listener manipulates the words that other people speak to his own needs and expectations. He is quick to interrupt and quick to misinterpret, so that whatever other people say will serve only his own interests. Alas, other people don't have an opportunity to clarify their message. He doesn't have time to really listen.

The Auctioneer. The Auctioneer is really a non-listener because she is talking all the time. She doesn't pause long enough to hear anything that anyone says, except perhaps a single word of confirmation. When she takes a breather, and others are getting a word in edgewise, she may abruptly speak up with a new topic, apparently without realizing that she is changing the subject. That's possible only because she wasn't listening to the conversation before she spoke up.

The Sgt. Joe Friday. Most of our readers are too young to remember Sgt. Friday from television's "Dragnet" series, but even they will recognize his legendary refrain: "Just the facts, ma'am." As dysfunctional listeners, the Sgt. Fridays of our world believe that they know what information they want, and they only want factual data that fits their framework. Thus they don't hear anything unexpected, and they don't hear any expressions of emotion.

The Search Engine. The Search Engine is the person who is a little (or a lot) remote from a conversation until she hears mention of her own name or responsibility. Then she is all ears. Like a Google algorithm, she is programmed to notice only those things that matter to her. That's usually herself or her job.

The Multitasker. This dysfunctional listener deserves its own essay, because it is perhaps the biggest listening problem in business. People are so busy they believe they must do more than one thing at a time to get everything done. When it comes to listening, that is a fool's paradise, because it creates more, and more serious, problems than it solves. Smart executives have stopped trying to multitask in conversation.

There you have it, eight types of dysfunctional listener.

Do you see yourself in any of them?

If so, you now have some idea of how to change.

If not, you certainly aren't alone. In fact, that's the real problem for so many of us.

 

Next: Three Myths of Leadership

 © Copyright 2012   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.