Minding Gaps

Can Managers Ever Manage Change? Is Change Even Possible?

 

By Thomas J. Lee

A few years ago The New York Times asked the chief executive of a big Silicon Valley company—you have probably bought or sold something on its popular site—what he had learned through all his years in senior management. His answer both startled me and saddened me.
 
He replied, and I paraphrase, that he had learned an immutable fact of life: Real change was unrealistic because you cannot change people.
 
His response startled me because, in a curt statement, this CEO revealed himself to be blithely abdicating the hard work of leadership. He was implying that he saw himself not as a leader—rising to the challenge of inspiring big change, market-shattering innovation, and breakthrough performance—but as a manager responsible for meeting budgets, quotas, and deadlines. And in fact, during his tenure, the company has changed little while other high-tech companies continue to reinvent their business and while other whole industries not especially known for innovation do likewise: energy and retail to name but two.
 
His response saddened me because, after 20 years of working in the vineyards of leadership and communication, I was meeting another executive who just didn’t get it. There are altogether too many of them. They give lip service to leadership and communication, and then they shrink themselves to the quotidian tasks of administration. They are better at saying no than yes, better at rolling out programs and restructuring departments than articulating and pursuing a strategic destination, better at buying companies than bringing their own new products to market, better at maintaining market share than growing a customer base.
 
Perhaps all this shouldn’t surprise us. Most senior executives were educated and trained to manage, not to lead; and they have always been rewarded and promoted for managing, not for leading. So it’s only natural that they think like managers, not like leaders.
 
Major business publications like the Harvard Business Review, Fortune, and The Wall Street Journal compound the problem by glossing over the differences between managing and leading, and by broadly referring to senior executives as “leaders” and to the executive suite as "the leadership" of a company, as if leadership were a function of a hierarchy, as if when you get a promotion you suddenly become a leader.
 
We would do well to take a step back, and we would gain a lot of clarity if we instead understood leadership and management as work—not as people in a pecking order, but as responsibilities, tasks, and, especially, communication.
 
Up, down and across an organization, anyone with accountability for a team's performance and culture must both manage and lead. Front-line supervisors must bear some responsibility for collateral leadership, and even the CEO has some basic managerial tasks.
 
The work of management is all about ensuring steady, reliable, consistent performance. A manager who is managing well ensures that a team performs to certain predetermined expectations held by stakeholders such as customers, investors and lenders, regulators and inspectors, senior management, the employees themselves, and myriad others: vendors, recruiters, the courts, visitors, agencies, job applicants, the news media, neighbors—a list of this sort is practically endless.
 
The predetermined expectations, too, are variable. If an expectation involves spending money, we call it coming in under budget. If it involves completing a project by a specific date, we call it meeting a deadline. If it involves doing or producing something within acceptable parameters, we call it complying with a standard—quality, perhaps, or safety, or emissions. When it involves making or selling or checking or issuing enough of something, we call it clearing a quota. There are many other kinds of similar challenges around production processes, contractual obligations, legal procedures and requirements, ethics standards, cultural imperatives, and more.
 
When successful, the work of management creates alignment, which is the deliverable or the work product of good management. It is the equilibrium of expectation and performance. Alignment is a good thing; misalignment is bad. But remember: Alignment is not the product of good leadership. It is the product of good management.
 
The work of leadership is altogether different from the work of management. Leadership is all about change. A leader who is leading well is successfully bringing about a particular big change, either culturally or operationally.
 
Leadership entails envisioning, articulating, inspiring, and supporting change—attitudinal or behavioral—or a breakthrough performance of some sort, typically requiring the discretionary and self-sacrificing efforts of people, and often in an environment of uncertainty and risk to oneself.
 
The change or breakthrough may involve launching a new product, or expanding geographically, or merging cultures after an acquisition, or fending off a unionization vote, or adopting a new technology, or meeting the changing needs of customers. There are many kinds of such challenges.
 
When successful, the work of leadership creates engagement, which is the deliverable or the work product of good leadership. It is the predicate of change. Engagement is a good thing; disengagement is bad. But engagement is not the product of good management. It is the product of good leadership throughout the organization.
 
Alignment is critical to meeting the needs of the present. Companies and other organizations—associations, governments, universities, charities, teams—make commitments they must fulfill. Alignment is necessary to fulfilling those commitments.
 
Engagement is critical to meeting the needs of the future. Companies and other organizations must always adapt to changing circumstances, environments, and opportunities, lest they wither and die as so many erstwhile giants that failed to adapt have withered and died before them. Without engagement, organizations cannot survive long into the future.
 
It is another big mistake to use the tools of one to accomplish the goals of the other. Companies often try that, and they routinely fail, whenever they launch a “change management” initiative while overlooking the need to lead change, which is something entirely different. Similarly, an energetic and charismatic leader without an eye for detail can lose sight of the basics.
 
Management and leadership differ most dramatically in the purpose, substance, style, and tone of the communication that supports them.
 
Communication for the sake of managing is authoritative, directive and influencing. It carries an implicit “stick” of accountability. It says don’t worry about tomorrow, just do this thing now or else.
 
Communication for the sake of leading is visionary, collaborative, energizing and inspiring. It carries an implicit “carrot” of opportunity. It says believe in the future, and come along on an exciting journey that will make everyone better off.
 
I like to draw two concentric circles to illustrate. I label the inner circle management and the outer circle leadership, to convey the point that good management is at the core of good leadership. That is because good managers must lead themselves, and paradoxically they do so by managing themselves. Good leaders are their own first followers. They show the way so that others know the way.
 
Many companies and other organizations are well-managed. They meet the needs of the present just fine. But they are not necessarily well-led. Thus they are duly anxious about the future. They are anxious not because they are unable to predict the future—no one is able to predict it—but because they are not ready for whatever it may bring. They are not ready because they know so little about change, about engagement and ultimately about leadership.
 
Managing and leading are two different things, and so are alignment and engagement. Both are important. Both are necessary. They’re just different. Quite dramatically different at that.

 

 © Copyright 2013   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Important Reading on Servant Leadership

 

By Thomas J. Lee

I don’t often use this space to trumpet articles from the general news media, but this is an exception.

For any and all of you with an interest in servant leadership, this article is must reading.

In our Master Class workshops, we devote a great deal of attention to servant leadership. As a closing summary, I like to ask each class how many people like to think of themselves as go-getters. Invariably, almost everyone raises a hand.

Servant leadership challenges that ethic. Instead of championing go-getters, it celebrates go-givers. It recognizes and rewards the act of giving, especially among managers to and for the people on their team.

The linked article, by Susan Dominus, will appear Sunday (31 March 2013) in the magazine of The New York Times. Do read it, and let me know what you think. (Then, sign up for Master Class!)

 

 

Sonia Sotomayor Offers Powerful Insights on Persuasion

 

by Thomas J. Lee

I was lucky enough to be first in line at my local public library to borrow Sonia Sotomayor’s new memoir, My Beloved World. In a word, it’s fabulous. After starting it late Saturday afternoon, I raced through it and turned the last page over coffee this morning, scarcely 36 hours later.

Sotomayor, for the benefit of our readers abroad, is the first Latina to sit on the United States Supreme Court. Growing up with diabetes in the hard-scrabble poverty of South Bronx, she found escape in the books and rigorous expectations of a parochial school, and she won a full scholarship to Princeton. She graduated at the top of her class, and she went on to Yale Law School, where she earned a prestigious seat on the law review.

Impressive as all that was, it wasn’t enough for a judicial clerkship or an offer from a white-shoe law firm. So she settled for a job as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan. That turned out to be the proverbial cloud with a silver lining. Soon she had a couple of mentors and several dear friends who taught her important lessons in law and in life. All the while she held her real ambition to herself: She wanted to be a judge. Fortunately, one thing led to another, and today she is at the pinnacle of the American judiciary.

Two of the important lessons she learned as an assistant DA are relevant to anyone who aspires to lead other people. Both involve the art, even the alchemy, of persuasion.

First, she learned that a prosecutor must acknowledge that juries are reluctant to convict a criminal defendant. Jurors realize that a conviction and consequent imprisonment will very likely wreck a family. So they need a powerful reason. Providing that reason requires the prosecuting attorney to see the situation as fluid through the eyes of the jury. Although the law doesn’t demand a motive for conviction of a crime, a jury often does. That means the prosecutors must meet this need, and they must do so in a way that jurors can accept.

Second, she learned that persuasion is as much a matter of emotion as of logic. Perhaps any car salesperson or Madison Avenue copywriter knows as much, but for an attorney whose Ivy League education stressed documented facts and impeccable, linear reasoning, it was a startling revelation. Once the young assistant DA came to these realizations, she never again lost a case. That’s saying something, right there.

I suspect these insights will come as a surprise to many MBAs as well. Quantitative analysis undergirds so many strategies in business that companies regard data-driven decisions as self-evidently conclusive. But strategic decisions aren’t necessarily self-evident to the employees who must make them come alive. People need to feel viscerally the importance of the workplace priority or policy.

My Beloved World is heartwarming, gritty, tender, inspiring, authentic, even eloquent. It is a celebration of family, work, and love in a world of despair, drugs, death, and disappointment. I cannot recommend this book enthusiastically enough. Do, do, do read it.

P.S. I just learned that My Beloved World will break onto The New York Times Bestseller List next Sunday as No. 1. Frankly, that doesn't surprise me in the least.

 

 © Copyright 2013   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln" Has Big Lessons on Leadership

 

by Thomas J. Lee

More books have been written and more movies filmed about Abraham Lincoln than anyone else in modern civilization, and for good reason. His life and his presidency offer timeless lessons in leadership, character, and communication. Steven Spielberg’s new, eponymous movie captures it all with color and verve. The film is excellent, and I urge everyone to see it.

Lincoln opens nationwide on Friday, but it is already showing in a handful of cities, including here in Chicago. So a few days ago I took time out of my workday to see it. My commute to the theatre included a Chicago River “water taxi” ride, which floats right past the site of the old Wigwam (on the river at Wacker Drive and Lake Street) where, in 1860, the nascent Republican Party nominated the Illinois prairie lawyer for the presidency. Of course, little could anyone at the time imagine the historic repercussions of the selection.

Like many of you, I have long been fascinated by Lincoln. This year alone I have read two full biographies of him, Lincoln by David Herbert Donald and A. Lincoln by Ronald C. White, both of which are masterful (if you read only one, choose the White volume), as well as three lesser works about his presidency and assassination. Anyone who studies leadership as a calling should devote a great deal of attention to Lincoln.

Spielberg has said he wanted to make a movie about Lincoln for more than a decade, but he didn’t know how to squeeze so much material into a couple of hours. He got his answer when he read Team of Rivals, the marvelous book on Lincoln’s bipartisanship by Harvard historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. The final two chapters of that book focus on Lincoln’s single-minded advocacy, in early 1865 just weeks before his assassination, of the Thirteenth Amendment, which would ban slavery. (As a point of history, the constitutional amendment was necessary because the Emancipation Proclamation two years earlier had been a wartime measure, and therefore it would be of dubious legality after the war’s end.)

But here’s the crux of the matter: Lincoln’s re-election in November 1864 had long coattails. He would enjoy larger majorities in Congress beginning in March 1865. The commonsense thing to do was wait till then, when approval of the Thirteenth Amendment would be easier. Lincoln refused. He insisted on moving quickly. As he declares in the movie (portrayed exquisitely by Daniel Day-Louis), he wanted Congress to act “now, now, now!”

That is one of six insights on leadership that I drew from the Spielberg production: Bring a sense of urgency to the important. If it’s important to do tomorrow, it’s important to do today. Do whatever you can now. Don’t wait, even when waiting would make things ostensibly easier. Do what you must do, do what you can do, and do it now.

Here are five other lessons I took from the Spielberg movie:

Communicate through storytelling, analogies, example, and anecdotes of personal experience whenever possible. Lincoln, like other leaders before and since, relied heavily on storytelling. Stories are powerful tools, because they give people a vivid way to remember a theoretical point. Our ancestors have been telling stories for millennia. We are hardwired to love stories. Lincoln knew it. Spielberg and Goodwin know it. As a leader, you must know it.

Go to the people whose support you need. Listen to them first, and then appeal to their nobility. Do not wait for people to come to you. Do not expect them to come to you. You must go to them, and you must listen before you speak. Then speak to their concerns and issues. As a general rule, when you speak publicly, invoke their values and beliefs. People want to be about something larger than themselves. (It is true, as the movie illustrates, that Lincoln was not above scratching backs for votes. He knew his power, and he used it when he had to.)

Recognize and accept practical limitations, and work within them. “Politics is the art of the possible,” Lincoln’s contemporary Otto von Bismarck would say a few years later. That is not a license to do nothing. Rather, it is worldly acknowledgement that the perfect can be the enemy of progress. In the movie, Pennsylvania Congressman Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones), who knows that people are inherently equal, is forced to say in House debate that he favors equality of legal rights only. Had he claimed more, the Thirteenth Amendment might very well have lost.

Know that ideas have consequences, and the consequences can be grave. The movie is filled with poignant scenes. One of them involves the president’s son Robert watching soldiers dump a barrow of human limbs in a mass grave. Another shows the president on horseback touring a battlefield of human carnage. There are more. For us, too, even in our day-to-day business, even in comparatively modest endeavors, ideas can have consequences from livelihoods to security in retirement to more. Never dismiss an idea as “merely a theory.” Ideas matter.

Abandon the pretense of perfection. We are all human. Few historical figures rival Lincoln for integrity, but even Lincoln was an imperfect man. There is evidence he fudged on an expense account as a congressman, and he could stretch the truth when he wanted. He pulled rank as commander-in-chief to discourage his son Robert from joining the military; and when he lost that argument, he inveigled General Ulysses S. Grant to give Robert a safe sinecure. This is not to excuse or justify such behavior, only to acknowledge the imperfectability of the human animal.

As you watch Lincoln you will doubtless come to your own insights. Please capture them in a note to me (at tom@arceil.com), or click on Comments below and share your thoughts with other readers. Whatever you do, don’t miss this movie. Be sure to take your kids, too, and talk about it afterward.

 

© Copyright 2012   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Two Leadership Lessons from "Invictus"

by Thomas J. Lee
 
There's a marvelous scene in Invictus, the Oscar-nominated 2009 movie chronicling the remarkable come-from-nowhere victory of the South African Springboks in the World Cup of rugby in 1995. It's a true story, and all the more riveting for the light it sheds on leadership.
 
The Springboks of 1995 were a mediocre team, as always. In fact, the only reason that South Africa was competing in the World Cup is that it was hosting the tournament; the host team always gets a free pass. Everyone expected the Springboks to bow out early.
 
Alas, because the team symbolized the country's white minority, the millions of recently liberated black South Africans didn't care about the outcome of the tournament. That is, with one exception: South African President Nelson Mandela. To him, the Springboks were a potential tool for cultural reunification.
 
If you have never seen Invictus, pick a night soon to stay home and stream it. It is a moving film. Even if you have seen it, you may want to watch it again for the powerful message on leadership it offers.
 
At one point in the movie, Mandela (portrayed magnificently by Morgan Freeman) invites the white Springboks captain François Pienaar (Matt Damon) to his office for tea. Mandela asks Pienaar a provocative question: What is his philosophy of leadership? Pienaar replies that he likes to lead by example. Mandela agrees, but he pushes for more. He wants to know how Pienaar inspires people to overcome long odds, to accomplish the seemingly impossible.
 
I won't spoil it for you; suffice to say that the answer to Mandela's question forms the crux of the whole movie. Exactly how do leaders inspire people? What role does a leader's example play? How far can you take it? How does power affect it? How can a leader go beyond the immediacy of example, to reach for the stars? What repercussions can all this have on ordinary people?
 
In business, largely because of traditional tools of management, and also because of asymmetric power structures, there's a tendency to rely heavily on the legal authority of position. Your boss tells you to do something and you do it.
 
But no one feels inspired or led in such a situation. Motivated by the threat of a kick in the pants, yes. Motivated by an ennobling, inspiring vision of the future and the opportunity to help make it happen, no. Not at all. Not close.
 
Managers in business typically shy away from the emotion inherent in inspirational leadership. It's one thing to see passion in the depiction of products in advertising, quite another to see it in the demeanor of a company's management.
 
Moreover, power and example are often at odds in leadership. There is a tension between them. Managers face a basic choice: Do you lead by the example of power, or do you lead by the power of your example? Can you do both?
 
Leaders are often in a situation where they must exercise power. What they rarely appreciate is the fact that the very exercise of power can reinforce their impact as a leader, or it can do just the opposite: it can compromise it, even undermine it. Which it does depends on context, intent, and clear, compelling, credible communication.
 
Everywhere and always, people will resent and reject the wanton example of power when exercised for selfish or reckless or ignoble ends. But everywhere and always they will notice, heed, and remember the deliberate power of a beneficent, purposeful, honorable example.

 

 © Copyright 2012   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Goldman Sachs Replies to Mr. Smith

 

Here is a response from Goldman Sachs to the essay by Greg Smith published in this morning's editions of The New York Times and referenced in my own blog post (just scroll down).

Backlash Against Goldman Sachs Op-Ed Writer Begins in Earnest - Business - The Atlantic Wire.

In the interest of fairness, I recommend reading it as well as Mr. Smith's essay.

TJL

Greg Smith's Very Public Resignation

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Until today, Greg Smith was executive director and head of the U.S. equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa for Goldman Sachs.

He resigned out of disgust—that isn't too strong a word, as you will see—with Goldman's culture of putting profits before customers. Moreover, he submitted his letter of resignation to The New York Times, which obliged him by printing it today. Online and in print, it's fair to say that millions of people will ultimately read it.

You can read it for yourself here: Greg Smith resigns from Goldman Sachs. Don't miss it.

Reasonable people can debate whether Mr. Smith should have gone public with his thoughts. The fact is he did. It's done, and his thoughts are out there.

In his shoes I wouldn't have done the same thing, but if it compels Goldman and other large investment banks to rethink and change their culture, then it may be worth it.

Here are some questions for any business leader to think about:

• Do you think Goldman's senior management has viewed its culture the same way Mr. Smith describes it?
• Do you think Goldman's executive team regards the firm's culture as "the secret sauce" of its success, to use Mr. Smith's phrasing?
• How important is your own firm's culture? How would you describe it, and how do you think others in the company describe it? How do customers describe what they see of it?
• Does your organization truly put the customer before the profit? In what ways do you see this as the reality?
• How should you change the culture of your organization? How can you?

 

 © Copyright 2012   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

What Is a Meme, Anyway? And Why Should Leaders Care?

by Thomas J. Lee

Yesterday I was going through a cardboard box of old clippings, which I was saving for a very important but (ahem) very forgotten reason, when I came across an 11-year-old Wall Street Journal article headlined "The Words of Tomorrow." It offered definitions for words and phrases that we would need to survive in the 21st Century.

Some of these words and phrases have rapidly come into common use in the decade since: identity theft, time suck, and Frankenfood. Others were near misses: blosphere, for what we now refer to as the blogosphere. Still others deserve wider usage, such as voice novel, for an endless voice-mail message, and 404, for clueless (from the Internet error message). Of course, the article could make no mention of words or phrases that were yet to be coined—app, smart phone, or social media—that would become part of our vernacular with lightning speed.

One entry caught my eye. It is a word I see with irritating frequency online, usually on sites devoted to technology and media—but only online. I have never seen the word in print—on paper, that is—other than in this Wall Street Journal list. Apparently that is because I never read Richard Dawkins's 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which is now on my Kindle wish list, and which introduced the word to readers who apparently saw no particular need to adopt and use it. Thirty-five years later, maybe they still don't.

The irritating word is memes, which the Journal's glossary defined as "building blocks of culture, similar to genes but passed on by imitation, not heredity." The Journal cited examples of memes such as "tunes, ideas, catch phrases." A meme may be technology (a way of building arches, for example) or a belief (in life after death, for example), or any other concept, preference, habit, or what have you—in other words, it is anything that can be copied from one person's mind to another's person's.

For a long time, whenever I came across this word online I winced. Though short and arguably useful, it struck me as pretentious and obnoxious. Maybe that's because it was never accompanied by a brief definition. It was just there, an ugly verbal scar. I didn't quite understand it, and I saw no need to try.

I have gotten over that, and I now do see some use for this word. Not that I will begin using it—especially without defining it—but I do think it can be useful in certain contexts, one of which is gaining insight into leadership.

For anyone interested in the management and leadership of large organizations, applying the concept of memes to leadership helps us understand the importance of leadership development up, down, and across an organization.

Altogether too many people, many of them managers and leaders themselves, are walking around with an outdated meme of leadership. They think of leadership as the sole responsibility of executive-level administration, and conversely they see management as the province of middle tiers and front-line supervision. This coarse distinction shows up even in the pages of the Harvard Business Review.

The outdated meme creates two problems. First, it tends to remove senior management from the gritty, day-to-day reality of the company. Not that all senior managers become remote, but many of them do. Second, it absolves the middle and lower tiers of a company's administration from active responsibility for change, for they are likely to see themselves not as engines of change but as mere cogs on the gears.

A newer and better meme of leadership is to think of it not in terms of a hierarchy or a pecking order at all, but rather as work—as responsibilities, as tasks, and especially as communication. The rival responsibilities of leadership and management leverage each other, but they are fundamentally different.

In this meme, the work of management is all about ensuring steady, reliable, consistent performance. A manager who is managing well is ensuring the performance of a team to certain predetermined expectations.

If the expectation involves spending money, we call it coming in under budget. If it involves completing a project by a specific date, we call it meeting a deadline. If it involves doing something or producing something within acceptable parameters, we call it complying with a standard—quality, perhaps, or safety. When it involves making or selling or issuing enough of something, we call it clearing a quota. There are many other kinds of similar challenges around production processes, contractual obligations, legal procedures and requirements, ethics standards, cultural imperatives, and much more.

When successful, management creates alignment. Alignment is the deliverable or work product of good management. It is the equivalence of expectation and performance. Alignment is a good thing; misalignment is bad. But remember: Alignment is not the product of leadership. It is the product of management.

Further in the same meme, the work of leadership is altogether different from the work of management. Leadership is all about change. A leader who is leading well is successfully bringing about a particular, big change, either culturally or operationally.

Leadership entails envisioning, articulating, inspiring, and supporting change—attitudinal or behavioral—or a breakthrough performance of some sort, typically requiring the discretionary and self-sacrificing efforts of people, and often in an environment of uncertainty and risk to oneself.

The change or breakthrough may involve launching a new product, or expanding geographically, or merging cultures after an acquisition, or fending off a unionization vote, or adopting a new technology, or meeting the changing needs of customers. There are many kinds of such challenges.

When successful, leadership creates engagement. Engagement is the deliverable or work product of good leadership. It is the predicate of change. Engagement is a good thing; disengagement is bad. But engagement is not the product of good management. It is the product of good leadership throughout the organization.

This, then, is the new meme of leadership we need to spread: Good leadership creates people engagement. Good management creates people alignment. Both are important. Companies need engagement to change, and they need alignment to fulfill their commitments. Clarifying and exploring that distinction, it seems to me, should be the first task of any leadership development initiative.

 

For the few of you who want to read more on the concept of memes,

here is the Wikipedia entry, and here is a link to amazon.com, where you can buy

a copy of Richard Dawkins's 1976 book, The Selfish Gene.

 

Coming on Friday

 When Leaders Just Cannot Speak Clearly

©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

Have Your Brain Waves Call My Brain Waves

 

by Thomas J. Lee

We're all familiar with the children's experiment of using two empty tin cans tied together by a string. Supposedly the tin cans can carry a conversation by vibrating in sync as they capture sound waves at one end and then reproduce the same sound waves at the other end.

It turns out that something similar happens between people. You can think of each tin can as a primitive human brain. Just as a can absorbs and produces sound through vibration, so the human brain creates and receives sound waves as brain waves. The waves are the embodiment of information—everything from facts to emotions, from observations to ideas, from names to arguments.

Researchers at Princeton University recently discovered that, in good communication, a speaker's brain waves closely resemble a listener's. MRI scans of the two brains show them to be in sync. In poor communication, the opposite is true; the brain waves are not in sync. Thus, the power of communication is the power to bring brain waves into alignment.

Interviewed in the new issue (December 2010) of Harvard Business Review, Princeton Professor Uri Hasson says the connection between two persons who are communicating well is "almost visceral." He calls it coupling, and it seems to have emotional implications. We have all experienced it, when we are able to complete someone else's sentences, or vice versa, when we feel at odds with someone we don't quite understand.

"There's nothing mystical about this," Professor Hasson told HBR. "It's not a Jedi mind trick. This is what communication is. It is what humans do best, and it's unique."

Researchers have a great deal of work ahead of them, for many questions remain to be answered: Why do some pairs of people lean more to alignment than others? Can an individual's will, or resistance, facilitate or block her from coupling with another individual? What actually occurs during miscommunication? How do children learn to communicate?

I find the research especially tantalizing, for it raises all kinds of further questions about the physics behind leadership communication: What happens during the process of influence? Of inspiration? Does anything special occur in the presence of eloquence? What does the presence or absence of credibility do to brain waves? Of repetition? Or propaganda? How does the written word or imagery or implicit communication create brain waves in the absence of sound? The good professor at Princeton cannot get back to his lab fast enough for me.

In the meantime, my brain waves thank your brain waves for reading today.

 
(c) 2010 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.

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Nonsense on Nonverbal Communication

 

Minding Gaps is taking some time for a respite to rejuvenate, write, and plan. During our absence, we are reprising some of our own favorite posts from the past year. Today's post is on the widespread nonsense and common misconceptions about nonverbal communication. 

We will return with all-new essays next Monday, September 27. 

 

 

— Tom           

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Over and over, in books and journals and speeches and videos and websites, some of the most well-known and widely respected experts on communication make the same error. Unintentionally, but nevertheless irresponsibly, they casually misunderstand, misinterpret, and misrepresent certain research data on nonverbal communication and body language.

They get the data correct, but they distort and exaggerate its significance. Their mistake is so common, the misstated information is all but a cliché. Even more troubling, perhaps millions of otherwise intelligent and discerning people have just accepted the mistake at face value, and they repeat it as gospel. So the error, like a viral pathogen, grows and grows into a disease of misinformation.

Everywhere you turn, you read and hear about Albert Mehrabian’s research on nonverbal communication. Mehrabian, it is said, found that only 7 percent of a message is conveyed verbally—through words. The other 93 percent is conveyed nonverbally—38 percent by tone of voice and 55 percent by body language.

Before I go any further, for the benefit of readers who only glance at the first few paragraphs of an essay like this and then move on, I must state with perfect clarity that the foregoing description of Mehrabian’s research is false. It is wrong, and anyone citing the data in such a way should stop and correct what they have previously stated. That’s a lot of experts.

It’s impossible to list all the authors and publications citing Mehrabian’s work in error. Brian Tracy, who has few peers among professional speakers, makes the error in his popular book Speak to Win. Tonya Reiman does likewise in a website on body language. So does Carol Kinsey Goman, an author and consultant, in her recent book The Nonverbal Advantage. Peter Block’s otherwise masterful Flawless Consulting cites the data in error. Daniel Goleman refers indirectly and wrongly to the study in his classic work, Emotional Intelligence. The list goes on and on, and it includes some very good company indeed.

Now common sense tells you the data cannot be true as described. If true, you would have no trouble communicating in a foreign land without knowing the local language, for 93 percent of the intended meaning would be clear. You could watch television without the sound. You wouldn’t bother listening to talk radio or a podcast. A game of charades would be over in seconds.

You would dare not sign a contract, as only 7 percent of the mutual commitments would be on paper. Historic documents and speeches like the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, and the Gettysburg Address would be almost meaningless. Laws would be unenforceable. Email? You certainly wouldn’t go there. And why would you ever read a blog like this or surf the Internet? Why, indeed, would you bother reading anything? Mehrabian's research itself, which he published in two books, would be unintelligible!

The fact is that words account for much, much more than 7 percent of a message. While tone of voice and body language undeniably carry some meaning, they rarely account for nearly as much impact as words. Indeed, many other aspects of nonverbal communication—such as punctuality, patience, courtesies, logic, attentiveness, inquiry, creativity, relevance, authority, accuracy, wisdom, sincerity, depth, research, etiquette, dignity, and interpersonal regard—are vastly more important than posture and a handshake.

The research itself was legitimate. Albert Mehrabian, now retired, was a professor at UCLA when he conducted two studies in the 1960s. The studies were quite modest, and their scope was very narrow. He found that, in personal relationships, a message of emotional commitment could easily be confused by conflictive vocal tone and facial expression. That’s the extent of his findings. Period. End of story.

In the decades since, his findings have been repeatedly construed more broadly. Today his name is virtually synonymous with the urban myth that words generally convey only a tiny fraction of meaning. Mehrabian himself has been frustrated by the misrepresentations, and also by the extrapolated meaning. He counts those two studies as a minor part of his decades of academic research, and he is quick to point out their narrow scope.

“Whenever I hear that misquote or misrepresentation, I cringe,” Mehrabian said emphatically in a 2009 interview on BBC. “It should be so obvious to anybody who would use any amount of common sense that that’s not a correct statement.”

Mehrabian cited an everyday example of giving directions. “If I were to tell you that the pencil you are looking for is upstairs in the desk drawer of the bedroom, three drawers down, I couldn’t do that nonverbally,” he said. “I mean, I could try to point, but that would hardly locate the pencil, whereas I could do that very precisely with words.”

He concluded: “There’s no question you can’t extrapolate my findings to communication in general.”

So there. Have we cleared things up? I certainly hope so.

Memo to "experts": Stop saying this!

(c) Copyright 2010 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.

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Strunk and White Can Teach Us All Something About Clarity

William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White knew a thing or two about clear writing. Their book, The Elements of Style, remains the classic primer on expository writing. If it isn’t already on your bookshelf, it belongs there.

Strunk was an English professor at Cornell when, in 1935, he laid down a list of simple rules and guidelines for English composition. Though the professor died shortly after World War II, one of his students, E.B. White, went on to write Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little. In 1959, a publisher asked White to revise and update Strunk’s primer for publication. The slim volume has since sold more than ten million copies, several of them to me. The names Strunk and White are now eponymous with clear writing.

Never ones to mince words, Strunk and White bemoaned verbal confusion and ambiguity as “a destroyer of life, of hope.” For too many leaders, in both business and government, that is just what happens when acronyms, euphemisms, jargon, and evasion pass for communication.

Just why so many companies and governments prefer to beat around the bush remains a mystery, but there’s no denying they do. They seem perfectly unable or unwilling to say things in a simple way. The more they talk, the more they confuse matters. Ordinary people naturally conclude it is a deliberate attempt to sidestep accountability. In particular, corporate rhetoric around layoffs is infamous, as if soft pedaling Draconian news will ease the blow of a lost paycheck.

Strunk and White have compelling advice to anyone in a position of leadership and anyone who helps leaders communicate: “When you have said something, make sure you have said it. The chances of your having said it are only fair.”

Indeed.

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What Can Business Leaders Learn From Politicians?

I have just finished reading Game Change by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, their chronicle of the U.S. presidential campaigns of 2008. As a onetime political reporter myself, I have long been convinced that leaders in business have plenty to learn at the well of successful politicians. (The opposite is also true, though for policy reasons, not political.)

Some of those lessons are vividly described in Game Change. This book is one of the best political analyses I have ever read. It is jam-packed with insights on leadership, not all of them in the affirmative.

Two character faults that consistently prove detrimental to leadership are hubris and self-delusion. In 2008, probably no candidate suffered from more hubris than John Edwards. His wife, Elizabeth, though a sympathetic figure for the cancer she was battling, was similarly afflicted with it.

According to the Heilemann and Halperin account, Elizabeth Edwards was frequently and loudly abusive to her husband and to the campaign’s staff. For his part, of course, John Edwards manifested his own hubris by flagrantly carrying on an affair with a campaign worker—this, even as he was asking donors for their money, volunteers for their time, and the Democratic Party for its nomination.

Self-delusion also exacts a toll. Several of the candidates suffered from it, in varying degrees. Again, Edwards was the poster child. For example, long after he had shuttered his campaign and even after his affair became public, he continued to entertain the notion that the victorious new president would appoint him as attorney general. He refused to believe aides who insisted he was being unrealistic.

I won’t give away any more. If you are serious about developing your capacity for leadership, I encourage you to read Game Change. 

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A Surprising Leadership Lesson from Vince Lombardi

A business trip this week took me to Green Bay, Wisconsin, home of my beloved Green Bay Packers. The hotel where I stayed was just down the street from Lambeau Field on Lombardi Avenue.

Outside the stadium, there are two statues. One statue is of Curly Lambeau, who founded the Packers in 1919 and brought the team into the fledgling National Football League two years later. The other statue is of Vince Lombardi, the legendary coach who took over the worst team in pro football in 1959 and, in just two years, made it into the best team in pro football. Lombardi never had a losing season. He coached the Packers to five world championships in the 1960s. I snapped this picture of his statue to show you.

Lombardi, for whom the Super Bowl trophy is now named, was a non-nonsense kind of guy. He would have winced at the term “employee engagement.” But he had few coaching peers, then or now, who knew as much—or who did as much—to fully engage the players on a team.

At the time Lombardi coached, professional athletes were not the cosseted depreciable assets they are today. Salaries were so modest—often just $15,000 to $20,000 a year, which even then wasn't much—that most players found it necessary to hold off-season jobs as salesmen, teachers, or restaurateurs. Their primary compensation on the playing field was fun and glory. Their incentive was to perform as individuals, not as a team.

In the marvelous biography of Lombardi by David Maraniss, When Pride Still Mattered, the offensive-line tackle Bob Skoronski recalls a pep talk that Lombardi once gave to the team.

Lombardi began by asking an unusual question—so unusual it was probably never asked before, and has probably never been asked since, by any football coach in any pep talk anywhere. The extraordinary question Lombardi posed that day was this: “What is the meaning of love?”

Yes. What is the meaning of love?

He was serious. There was a method to his madness. He explained: “Anybody can love something that is beautiful or smart or agile. But you will never know love until you can love something that isn’t beautiful, isn’t bright, or isn’t glamorous. . . . Can you accept someone for his inabilities?”

Now keep in mind, this was Lombardi, the leonine coach who also made famous the statement: "Winning isn't everything. It's the only thing."

According to Skoronski, the great coach then proceeded to connect the dots. Lombardi explained to the players that any of them may not regard any particular teammate as equally talented or equally capable. But a loving commitment to the team and to all the teammates would enable a better player to help a lesser player.

Skoronski explained the import of the question. “He didn’t want us to be picking on each other, but instead thinking: What can I do to make it easier for my teammate to help us win the game?"

If, today, more of us would concern ourselves with helping out our own teammates, our working lives would be a lot more satisfying, and our customers would be a lot more happy.

Instead, many of us persist in playing a zero-sum game of personal advancement. For too many of us, especially in management, business is a game of who comes out on top. Lombardi would tell us that's the wrong game to be playing.

My questions for you: What are you doing to make the work of your colleagues easier and better? How are you helping them? What did you do yesterday to help? What are you doing today? What will you do tomorrow?

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Quote / Unquote: John F. Kennedy on Lies and Myths

Quote / Unquote is a feature that appears irregularly but frequently. It offers a simple, noteworthy quotation on some aspect of leadership, communication, or business. In most cases we also provide context, comment, or questions to stir discussion.

On a recent weeklong business trip to a client’s site in New England, I took the better part of a Saturday afternoon to tour the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. It is a magnificent place, and I recommend it to anyone visiting Boston.

President Kennedy is the first president I can vividly remember; for me, the day of his assassination is like an old newsreel in my memory. Though history has since revealed his flaws, he unarguably had a poetic and even inspiring command of the English language—so much so that it has long been iconic to leaders everywhere, of all disciplines and all political ideologies.

Visitors to the JFK Museum view a 20-minute video that captures the highlights of his life and brief presidency. At the start of the video, there is a quote that I had never come across beforehand. It is from a commencement address the Harvard man gave at Yale University in 1962:

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the deliberate, contrived, and dishonest—but the myth: persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought. Mythology distracts us everywhere—in government as in business, in politics as in economics, in foreign affairs as in domestic affairs.

Think about this statement. Then, in reflecting on it, ask yourself:

• Do you find it a compelling truth?
  
  
• Where in your own affairs do you find it?
  
  
• Where in your thinking are you accountable for tolerating or even perpetuating myths?
  
  
• What are the costs of laboring under the weight of myths in business?
  
  

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"We Have Met the Enemy, and He Is PowerPoint"

 
 

The New York Times carried a front-page article yesterday that is mandatory reading for anyone concerned about leadership and its energy: clear, credible, compelling communication.

The article reports on a debate in the high command of the U.S. Department of Defense over the use of PowerPoint.

That’s all I’m going to say for now. Just read the article for yourself. When you finish, come back here and leave a comment.

Here’s the article.

 

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Three Generations of Motivation

I have just finished reading Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink. It is a fascinating look at the scholarly research in human motivation, especially as it applies to business and organizational performance. I tore through the book in two evenings.

Drive picks apart a lot of conventional wisdom around motivation in general and around goals and rewards (i.e., compensation) in particular. You’ll never think about management the same way.

Pink sets forth three generations of motivation, which he labels 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0. The first worked for most of our existence. Then it gave way to the second generation. Now we’re entering a third generation.

Motivation 1.0 represented the survival instinct. Our ancestors had to find the means to their own sustenance, and they did whatever they had to do to fend off predacious animals and plundering invaders. This paradigm worked well through much of humankind’s early existence, when our survival as a species was a matter of foraging and finding food, keeping warm, and defending ourselves. By and by, it also brought us into community (i.e., villages and tribes) with one another, to trade food for clothing, arrows for horses, and so forth. As it did, we came to realize that we needed to control our own urges, so that we could survive and prosper. Pink argues that Motivation 1.0 worked well for thousands of years, until it didn’t.

Motivation 2.0, which took its place, reflected our evolving human aspirations: We are more than the sum of our biological drives. Once our survival and security became largely a matter of routine, we sought to enlarge our sphere of satisfaction, to avoid physical pain and ensure material comfort. Over the last two centuries the singular achievement of Motivation 2.0 has been the harnessing of electricity and technology to build huge industrial enterprises, thus providing for the comfort of millions. Motivation 2.0 continues to work for many people in many situations, but as we enter the 21st century it is giving way to yet another paradigm.

Motivation 3.0 is more than a matter of avoiding pain and ensuring comfort. It is the higher levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: soulful self-actualization, work for the pleasure of work. It captures the self-motivating drive, the desire to master a skill, and the autonomy of singular purpose that describe so much cutting-edge activity today. More than two out of every three new jobs comports with this new motivational thinking.

Pink offers this simple example. Fifteen years ago, if you were asked to predict which model of an encyclopedia would be more popular in 2010, would you choose one that had the solid capitalization, marketing channels, and professional expertise of Microsoft behind it, or would you choose one that had only the efforts of unpaid, unmanaged, and unedited volunteers? For the record, Microsoft pulled the plug on Encarta four years later, in 1999. You have probably used Wikipedia in the last few days, if not hours.

Similarly, look at the proliferation of apps for the iPhone, iPod, and iPad. Look at Firefox, Linux, and Apache—all open source products available free. Or look at the explosion of sole proprietorships and other one-person businesses; in the United States alone, there are 18 million of them. Or look at the now-common phenomenon of telecommuting, which would have been unthinkable in an environment dominated by Motivation 2.0.

Motivation 3.0, the author argues, captures the intrinsic motivation that already characterizes much of today’s economic productivity and that will only increase in the years and decades ahead. Extrinsic motivation isn’t dead, but it is much less significant than it was twenty or even ten years ago. Its demise is especially evident in what behavioral scientists refer to as heuristic endeavors, which require mainly right-brain, creative, and collaborative work, in contrast to algorithmic tasks, which require adherence to a specific procedure or protocol. Heuristic work, whether in product development or the fine arts, accounts for most of our economic growth.  

Pink believes that Motivation 2.0 relied on and fostered extrinsic motivation: the system of rewards and punishments that came to define business management, which he labels Type X. That system is ill-suited to Motivation 3.0, which will nurture the kind of intrinsic motivation we are already seeing in so much of the economy: everything from Post-It Notes to Gmail, which he labels Type I. The author devotes much of the book to practical insights and principles that you can use to make sense of, and make the most of, Type I in your own workplace.

All in all, Drive is a fascinating read. I have included it in my list of recommended business books (in the column to the right), and I urge you to read it and reflect on it. Let me know what you think.

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A Leonine Biography of Andrew Jackson

I have just finished reading Jon Meacham’s bestseller, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House. If you seek a deeper understanding and appreciation of bold leadership as a nuanced art—or if you just enjoy historical and political biography—you will like this book.

Officially, Jackson was the seventh president of the United States. In some important ways, however, he was the first president. He created the modern presidency. What you and I think of as a president—conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat—was the invention of Andrew Jackson.

Until his election in 1828, presidents were deferential to the Congress. They spoke to the nation only though proclamations and messages to Congress. As far as the confederate firebrand John C. Calhoun was concerned, that was as it should be. Jackson would have nothing of it. He took his campaigns and messages directly to the people.

Moreover, until Jackson came along, it was uncommon for a president to veto legislation. The first six presidents vetoed only nine bills altogether, and only on gravely constitutional grounds. George Washington talked openly of having signed legislation with which he disagreed. Jackson was the first to veto bills on account of policy. He did so twelve times. 

Jackson's nickname, Old Hickory, hints at his strength of character, which was tempered and tested in wartime, but also errantly suggests he was stoical. Truth is, as a general, he demonstrated such loving dedication to his troops that it became legendary among the populace at large. That alone was largely responsible for his popular-vote victory in 1824 (in a four-way race, he failed to win a majority of the electoral vote, and the House of Representatives gave the White House to John Quincy Adams) and for his election in 1828. He was re-elected in 1832.

Jackson also created the constancy of political turmoil that Americans of today generally find distasteful. Meacham, who is editor of Newsweek magazine (and a regular guest on the daily MSNBC television show Morning Joe, with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski), tells us the 1828 election campaign began about eight months after the 1824 election was finally settled. The 1828 campaign especially was filled with vile charges and vindictive claims, including the charge that Adams, as a minister to Russia, had procured a prostitute for Czar Alexander I. 

Of lasting import, it was Jackson’s fierce resistance to Southern notions of nullification that kept the union together in its infancy. Ironically, even as a slaveholder, he was an outspoken unionist whose opposition to secession laid the intellectual foundation for Abraham Lincoln’s presidency, and built the muscular resolve for the nation's perseverance thirty years hence. The complexity of the man is alone fascinating, and his importance in America's history is difficult to overstate.

It isn't only Old Hickory who comes to life in the pages of American Lion. The congressional triumvirate of Calhoun of South Carolina, the flamboyant Henry Clay of Kentucky, and the eloquent Daniel Webster of Massachusetts also lives on, along with a host of others, including Jackson's predecessor and successor in the White House, respectively, the junior Adams and Martin Van Buren.

American Lion doesn’t have quite the humanity of David McCullough’s magisterial biography of the second president, John Adams. Still, it gives Jackson his historical due, it colorfully captures the simmering tumult of the 1830s, it offers vivid portrayals of Jackson's contemporaries, it lucidly explains the debates over the Bank of the United States and over nullification, and (in my words, not Meacham's) it presents Jackson as arguably the last of our founding fathers, whose legacy is nothing less than the American presidency itself.

 

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By the Numbers: The Tradeoff Between Income and Job Satisfaction

Two months ago we introduced a weekly feature, By the Numbers, which leads off each week (or most weeks, anyway) with a relevant statistic that is noteworthy, alarming, misunderstood or misinterpreted, or otherwise deserving of explanation, comment, or clarification. We accompany it with thought-provoking questions or commentary for reflection and discussion.

Thus far, the data appearing in this feature have explored the explosion of information in the media, the role of front-line supervisors in building strategic engagement, the degree of trust that Americans hold in business, the extent of candor and honesty in supervisory communication, the economic impact of employee disengagement in U.S.-based companies, the nature of disengagement in the workplace, the frequency of projects that fail, the link between employee disengagement and absenteeism, the myths around the impact of nonverbal communication, and the fear of recrimination in the workplace.

Today we examine public opinion on tradeoff between income and satisfaction on the job.

According to research by Frank I. Luntz that appears in his new book, What Americans Really Want . . . Really: The Truth About Our Hopes, Dreams, and Fears, Americans overwhelmingly prefer job satisfaction to economic prosperity.

Some 84 percent of Americans say they would prefer making “a lot less money” in a job they love to the converse. Only 16 percent of Americans say they would prefer making “a lot more money” in a job they hate.

As you reflect on this, consider these questions:

• What correlation, if any, do you see between job satisfaction and the execution of a business strategy?

• How important do you believe job satisfaction is to customer satisfaction?

• In your position and role, what can you do now to leverage the importance of job satisfaction?

• What have you done recently?

• How has the economy compounded the difficulty of ensuring job satisfaction?

• What steps can you take to improve job satisfaction in spite of a lackluster economy?

To Be of Use

In observance of Labor Day in the United States, we offer this poem as a paean to work. Titled To Be of Use, it was written by Marge Piercy and first published in Lunch magazine in 1972.

 

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who stand in the line and haul in their places,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

Toxic Cultures for Leadership

Not every company naturally warms to the art of cultivating the next generation of leaders. Indeed, some companies do an appalling job of it.

Take a look at this article in the September 3 issue of Business Week magazine. The article focuses on companies that headhunters actually avoid, because the managers who emerge from those cultures are said to lack the broad acumen for leadership to succeed elsewhere.

Moreover, the article dishes enough dirt on toxic corporate cultures to be powerfully instructive on leadership development in general.

I cannot vouch for the article’s assessments of any of the companies it cites. Nor can I knowledgeably dispute them. I simply present the article as it is and ask you to read it and think about it.

Here are some discussion questions:

• How would a headhunter—or any outsider, for that matter—describe your company’s leadership culture?

• How would employees characterize the company's leadership culture?

• How, if at all, do you distinguish between leadership and management? By level in the organization? By responsibility? By the purpose of the work that each entails? By their results? 

• What systems and processes do you have in place to develop new leaders?

• How do you measure leadership talent?

• Why does the work of leadership matter to you?

• Irrespective of your level in the organization, in what respects does your own work involve managing, and in what respects does it involve leading?

• To which do you devote more time, energy, and creative thinking?

As a Man Thinketh

There is a little book, first published more than a century ago, that you should read. It just may change the way you think and therefore who you are.

Written by James Allen, an Englishman who was perhaps the intellectual forebear of Napoleon Hill, Dale Carnegie, and Earl Nightingale, As a Man Thinketh asserts that we are what we think. Our thoughts determine our character, for better or for worse.

In its whole, the book is just fifty-seven little pages, perhaps ten thousand words from cover to cover. By way of comparison, that is appreciably less than the posts in this blog for August alone. You can easily read it on an airplane flight. And yet, in such modest dimensions, Allen manages to capture wisdom of the ages.

He writes: “A man’s mind may be likened to a garden, which may be intelligently cultivated or allowed to run wild; but whether cultivated or neglected, it will bring forth. If no useful seeds are put into it, then an abundance of useless weed-seeds will fall therein, and will continue to produce their kind.”

A little later, he builds on the theme: “Good thoughts and actions can never produce bad results; bad thoughts and actions can never produce good results. This is but saying that nothing can come from corn but corn, nothing can come from nettles but nettles. Men understand this law in the natural world, and work with it, but few understand it in the mental and moral world.”

Viewed a century later, As a Man Thinketh is anachronistic in some respects: it applies “man” to everyone, and it has rhetorical flourishes that can seem as quaint as a grandmother’s embroidery. In the century since its publication, we now have the benefit of neurological science to call into empirical question such broad claims as Allen’s, too. Nevertheless, the little volume is a clarion call to chart and manage your own destiny, and that is a very good thing indeed.

After you read it, and you are reflecting on its message, ask yourself these questions:

• How might you apply Allen’s thesis to an organization?

• What conclusions can you reach about yourself as a leader? About your organization?

• What is the role of leaders is setting the intellectual boundaries of an organization?

• How might a leader go about that?

• What would be the value of that work? Would it justify itself?

 

Barnes & Noble, Inc., brought out a new version of As a Man Thinketh in 2007.

The price is just $10.00. The ISBN numbers are 978-1-4351-0037-4 and 1-4351-0037-9.

Why Is Genuine Leadership So Scarce?

Seth Godin, whose books and blog are a delight to read, has another winner. His new book, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, is just terrific.

Here’s a little excerpt from Tribes in which Godin explains why genuine leadership is so rare:

Leadership is scarce because few people are willing to go through the discomfort required to lead. This scarcity makes leadership valuable. If everyone tries to lead all the time, not much happens. It’s discomfort that creates the leverage that makes leadership worthwhile.

In other words, if everyone could do it, they would, and it wouldn’t be worth much.

It’s uncomfortable to stand up in front of strangers.

It’s uncomfortable to propose an idea that might fail.

It’s uncomfortable to challenge the status quo.

It’s uncomfortable to resist the urge to settle.

When you identify the discomfort, you’ve found the place where a leader is needed.

If you’re not uncomfortable in your work as a leader, it’s almost certain you’re not reaching your potential as a leader.

While I’m at it, I recommend you visit Godin’s web site at www.sethgodin.com. You’ll find lots of resources there.

By the Numbers: The Truth on Nonverbal Communication

Last week we introduced a new regular feature, By the Numbers, of the Minding Gaps blog. We’ll start each week (or most weeks, anyway) with a statistic that is noteworthy, alarming, misinterpreted, or otherwise deserving of explanation, comment, or clarification. We’ll accompany it with thought-provoking questions or commentary for reflection and discussion. Today, we present data on nonverbal communication that many otherwise intelligent people believe is true—but isn’t.

Over and over, in books and journals and speeches and videos and websites, some of the most well-known and widely respected experts on communication make the same error. Unintentionally, but nevertheless irresponsibly, they casually misunderstand, misinterpret, and misrepresent certain research data on nonverbal communication and body language.

They get the data correct, but they distort and exaggerate its significance. Their mistake is so common, the misstated information is all but a cliché. Even more troubling, perhaps millions of otherwise intelligent and discerning people have just accepted the mistake at face value, and they repeat it as gospel. So the error, like a viral pathogen, grows and grows into a disease of misinformation.

Everywhere you turn, you read and hear about Albert Mehrabian’s research on nonverbal communication. Mehrabian, it is said, found that only 7 percent of a message is conveyed verbally—through words. The other 93 percent is conveyed nonverbally—38 percent by tone of voice and 55 percent by body language.

Before I go any further, for the benefit of readers who only glance at the first few paragraphs of an essay like this and then move on, I must state with perfect clarity that the foregoing description of Mehrabian’s research is false. It is wrong, and anyone citing the data in such a way should stop and correct what they have previously stated. That’s a lot of experts.

It’s impossible to list all the authors and publications citing Mehrabian’s work in error. Brian Tracy, who has few peers among professional speakers, makes the error in his popular book Speak to Win. Tonya Reiman does likewise in a website on body language. So does Carol Kinsey Goman, an author and consultant, in her recent book The Nonverbal Advantage. Peter Block’s otherwise masterful Flawless Consulting cites the data in error. Daniel Goleman refers indirectly and wrongly to the study in his classic work, Emotional Intelligence. The list goes on and on, and it includes some very good company indeed.

Now common sense tells you the data cannot be true as described. If true, you would have no trouble communicating in a foreign land without knowing the local language, for 93 percent of the intended meaning would be clear. You could watch television without the sound. You wouldn’t bother listening to talk radio or a podcast. A game of charades would be over in seconds.

You would dare not sign a contract, as only 7 percent of the mutual commitments would be on paper. Historic documents and speeches like the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, and the Gettysburg Address would be almost meaningless. Laws would be unenforceable. Email? You certainly wouldn’t go there. And why would you ever read a blog like this or surf the Internet? Why, indeed, would you bother reading anything? Mehrabian's research itself, which he published in two books, would be unintelligible!

The fact is that words account for much, much more than 7 percent of a message. While tone of voice and body language undeniably carry some meaning, they rarely account for nearly as much impact as words. Indeed, many other aspects of nonverbal communication—such as punctuality, patience, courtesies, logic, attentiveness, inquiry, creativity, relevance, authority, accuracy, wisdom, sincerity, depth, research, etiquette, dignity, and interpersonal regard—are vastly more important than posture and a handshake.

The research itself was legitimate. Albert Mehrabian, now retired, was a professor at UCLA when he conducted two studies in the 1960s. The studies were quite modest, and their scope was very narrow. He found that, in personal relationships, a message of emotional commitment could easily be confused by conflictive vocal tone and facial expression. That’s the extent of his findings. Period. End of story.

In the decades since, his findings have been repeatedly construed more broadly. Today his name is virtually synonymous with the urban myth that words generally convey only a tiny fraction of meaning. Mehrabian himself has been frustrated by the misrepresentations, and also by the extrapolated meaning. He counts those two studies as a minor part of his decades of academic research, and he is quick to point out their narrow scope.

Just last week, in an interview on BBC Radio 4, “More or Less” host Tim Harford asked Mehrabian whether words accounted for only 7 percent of meaning. “Absolutely not!” Mehrabian replied emphatically. “Whenever I hear that misquote or misrepresentation, I cringe. . . . It should be so obvious to anybody who would use any amount of common sense that that’s not a correct statement.”

Mehrabian cited an everyday example of giving directions. “If I were to tell you that the pencil you are looking for is upstairs in the desk drawer of the bedroom, three drawers down, I couldn’t do that nonverbally,” he told Harford. “I mean, I could try to point, but that would hardly locate the pencil, whereas I could do that very precisely with words.”

He concluded: “There’s no question you can’t extrapolate my findings to communication in general.”

So there. Have we cleared things up? I certainly hope so.

Memo to "experts": Stop saying this!

 

"You Are What You Think About"

Earl Nightingale died twenty years ago, and yet the wisdom of his message is as relevant and timely today as ever.

Nightingale created the art of motivational speaking and, in the golden years of radio, brought it to the masses. His commentary was broadcast regularly on WGN Radio, Chicago, whose signal was (and is) strong enough to reach two-thirds of the nation. Millions of people read his books, listened to his broadcasts, and took his advice.

Here is an excerpt from perhaps his most famous talk. Set aside eleven minutes and view it in its entirety. Then devote some more time to thinking rigorously about its message, and apply it to yourself. I am doing just that for myself.

Beware Thine Assumptions

I want to pass along a splendid article that reminds us to question our assumptions.

Often we take for granted what we think we know. Even more often, we take for granted the conventional wisdom that everyone else has acknoledged as true long ago. Neither is constructive or helpful.

In this article, one of the late Peter Drucker's early graduate students reminds us to be cautious. Bill Cohen, a retired Air Force general and the author of A Class with Drucker: The Lost Lessons of the World’s Greatest Management Teacher, blogged this at www.humanresourcesiq.com.

Let me know what you think.

What Does It Take to Lead?

Exactly what does it take to lead people? And what do successful leaders do that unsuccessful leaders don't?

These two questions—simple in their phrasing but complex in their answers—are at the fault line of a discussion in the blogosphere this week.

The discussion focuses on CEOs, but the sum and substance of the discussion can apply to leaders everywhere. If you are attempting to bring about change through the discretionary effort of other people, in any organization anywhere, you will do yourself a favor by listening in.

After years of research on the real characteristics and abilities of CEOs, three business-school professors published their findings in an academic journal last summer. Perhaps someone, somewhere, was paying attention. But no one talked about it until Tuesday, when New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote about the treatise and several hundred readers quickly fulminated in response

In a nutshell, the professors asserted that successful CEOs were more likely to be coolly analytical than fervently emotional, more likely to be aggressive and hard-charging than social and collegial, more likely to be loners than team players, more likely to be self-absorbed than self-aware. Indeed, the authors come close to saying that the post-modern executive who looks and sounds like a cheerful politician is likely to be ineffective as a CEO.

 

President Coolidge, Meet Detective Callahan

Now this portrait of a cross between Calvin Coolidge and Harry Callahan in the corner office may hardly surprise you. But it flies in the face of two decades of important work by trail-blazing thinkers such as Jim Collins in Good to Great; John Kotter in Leading Change and The Heart of Change; Daniel Goleman in Emotional Intelligence; Warren Bennis in On Becoming a Leader, and Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner in The Leadership Challenge, not to mention all those writers (most notably Robert K. Greenleaf and John C. Maxwell) who champion the magical power of servant leadership.

To one degree or another, all of them have found an emotional aspect of leadership, a common search for meaning, and an exploration of purpose and intentionality to be profoundly powerful. That is all the more true now, in a cynical age.

In his column, Brooks blithely ignored all these writers and unquestioningly endorsed the research as he summarized and presented it, which was scarcely the whole of it. Moreover, he then took liberties in a further interpretation that just wasn’t sustainable. Fortunately, many bloggers and even Thursday’s letters to the editor in the Times demonstrated that the public isn’t so easily cowed.

Beware Biases Clothed As Research 

On purchasing and downloading the entire study, I found it self-limiting in key respects, though duly decorated with pages of regressions and factor analysis. I have learned that academic studies often fall on the sword of their own design, which may well be flawed or small or both. 

First, as the study’s authors acknowledge but Brooks ignores, the research was confined to the CEOs of privately held companies with a recent infusion of venture capital or private equity. That probably biases the findings in favor of small-cap and mid-cap companies without well-defined cultures and typically with short time frames for hard returns to investors or at least positive trend lines.

Second, unless I missed something, there is no analysis of characteristics and abilities associated with poor performance. We are left to presume that the absence or opposite of the identified traits will necessarily lead to failure, but we have no data or explicit conclusions in that direction. A personal friend of mine was CEO of two high-tech companies, both of which went bust. She had the traits the authors describe in spades. Granted, that is merely singly experiential and anecdotal, but it raises a question of negative correlation.

Third, the definition of high performance presumably has only the one dimension of profitability. Nothing is said to the contrary, that I could see. It is axiomatic that every company must be profitable, but to judge a CEO's performance by that metric alone begs some pretty big questions. As Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton argue in The Balanced Scorecard, using profitability as your sole measure of success is a little like flying an airplane with only a single gauge—say, for air speed, and no indicators for fuel or altitude or location or air pressure.

Balancing the Scorecard

In the Twenty-first Century, to the chagrin of Milton Friedman and perhaps even the frustration of Peter Drucker, companies cannot focus on profitability to the neglect of everything else. Other financial metrics such as revenue growth, return on equity, inventory turns, debt ratios, and more are critical measures of performance.

Moreover, companies have many other stakeholders beyond equity investors. Apart from financial metrics, companies are judged by the quality of their products and by their treatment of employees, their service to customers, their compliance with the law, their respect for diversity and privacy, their engagement and retention of staff, their advertising and packaging, their lobbying and public policy, the safety and cleanliness of their facilities, their research and innovation, and ultimately their transparency and contribution to society. All that was true a decade or two ago, but it is especially true now.

Missing the bar on any of these metrics, and especially on several or more, is enough to send a CEO home for good, as many of them have learned over the last five or ten years. By extension, we can hypothesize that leaders must operate in multiple frames of reference.

Having watched and worked with senior leaders quite a bit, I can attest to the fact that the most successful among them are fully realized human beings. Those who aren't send powerful signals to stay away.

My guess is that the scholars who produced this research may be on the right track, but only as far as they looked. They just didn’t look very far, and they certainly didn’t think very deeply. As for the columnist, whose work I generally respect, he should have taken a little more time on this one.