Minding Gaps

Leadership Is for Introverts (and Ambiverts), Too

 

By Thomas J. Lee

Are you an introvert?

Or are you, perhaps, somewhat more introverted than most people think you are?

Or are you—don't laugh, the term is well-established—an ambivert, someone in the middle between an introvert and an extrovert?

If you are any of these, and if your job or your aspiration calls on you to lead people to a better and brighter tomorrow, don't fall into the trap of denying yourself the opportunity to lead simply because of your quiet nature.

Leadership is for you, too. In fact, some of history's greatest leaders have been introverts: Lincoln, Gandhi, and Mandela to name just three.

The reality is that extroverts have their own shortcomings. They tend to listen too little, and they often want to seize the limelight too quickly and too much. They may act impetuously. They also have difficulty connecting with introverts like you.

Charisma in leadership is overrated. Many charismatic personalities may initially attract followers, but they often leave things a mess. Even when their judgment is keen, their organization is often incapable of sustaining change when the charismatic leader moves on.

Introverts, on the other hand, often take a more thoughtful, careful approach to change, and their legacy is more affirming and constructive as a result.

By learning to take advantage of your own hidden strengths and talent, you can actually leverage your introverted personality to become a better leader than your outspoken colleague.

In response to queries, we have launched a telephone-based coaching service for select individuals who regard themselves as introverts and ambiverts and who want to lead more effectively.

All conversations are completely confidential, between 45 to 60 minutes in length, and typically take place weekly.

To inquire about this service, just call us at 650-464-1770 or write to us at info@arceil.com.

 © Copyright 2013   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

What Leaders Can Learn from the Best TV Commercial Ever

 

By Thomas J. Lee

You may be too young to remember the best TV commercial ever. If you’re not, don’t blame me for reminding you of the fact.

As far as we’re concerned, the best TV commercial isn’t necessarily the cutest or the funniest. It isn’t necessarily titillating or provocative. It doesn’t necessarily have terrific cinematic or artistic qualities. It didn't necessarily run during a Super Bowl.

It’s the best TV commercial ever simply because it makes its point so well. As proof of that, just about any American old enough to remember it can, almost 25 years after it first aired.

And it’s the best TV commercial ever because it hammers home a business case for the service it is selling, which, for our purposes, just so happens to reinforce important insights of value to any manager or leader. Even today, you occasionally hear people citing that TV commercial in business discussions. Nothing rivals face-to-face human contact, they’ll say, and they’ll be right.

Here it is, and here is a little background to it. Do you remember it?

The best TV commercial ever was produced by the legendary Chicago advertising firm of Leo Burnett for United Airlines, and it began airing in 1989. It was filmed in dramatic hues of black and white to intensify the warmth of the characters. It featured Ben, a beleaguered manager whose company was just fired by a longstanding and highly valued client.

The spot has Ben, in shirtsleeves and vest, convening a quick management meeting to announce the news. His message is blunt and compelling. The company is losing touch with its clients. It has to reinvigorate its lifeblood of relationships.

An assistant hands Ben a stack of United tickets—back then they were on card stock—and Ben begins handing them out to the individual managers. A manager objects: "But Ben, that's more than 200 cities." Ben is unmoved. Someone asks Ben where he’s going, and he replies: “To visit that old friend who fired us this morning.”

You’re smart enough to draw your own conclusions and applications from this commercial for your work. What are they?

Here are mine: Don’t lose touch with people. Don’t rely on email and telephone. Don’t think of social media as synapses or nutrients of relationships; they are neither. Remember that human beings thrive in community with other human beings. The more you nurture and strengthen that sense of community, the better your leadership will be.

 

© Copyright 2013   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved. 

When Strategy and Culture Collide

 

By Thomas J. Lee

As most of you are aware, Ronald B. Johnson was sacked Monday as chief executive of J.C. Penney. A retail marketing wunderkind whose high-profile credits included Target and Apple, Mr. Johnson was hired in 2011 to lead a turnaround of the venerable middle American department store.

Instead of turning it around, however, he sent it reeling. In just seventeen months the chain's annual revenue plummeted from $17.7 billion to $12.9 billion, and its net income dwindled from a profit of $1.63 per share to a loss of $4.49 per share. Not surprisingly, the company's ticker teetered and tumbled from the mid-30s in early 2012 to the mid-teens this week—all during a bull market in which its rivals Kohl's and especially Target have been performing quite well.

Now I do not present myself as either a stock analyst or an expert in retail sales, and I do not pass judgment here on Mr. Johnson's turnaround strategy. However, I do know a thing or two about leadership and its challenges in large, complex organizations. One of the things I know is this: When strategy and culture collide, one of them will win and the other will lose. The same one always wins: culture. If there are exceptions to that rule, they are few and far between.

In our Master Class workshops, we put it thus: Culture is the judge, jury, jailer, and janitor of strategy. No strategy, however well designed, can survive a clash with a culture than doesn't embrace it. No amount of shouting and demanding by senior management can change that, either. Instead, senior management must begin with the culture. Ignore that reality and you ask for failure.

Now I am a big fan of both Target and the Apple stores that Mr. Johnson helped create. According to experts on retailing strategy, his approach to reviving the fortunes of J.C. Penney was creditable. He wanted to upgrade the merchandise and make the store something of a first among equals in its category. That kind of a strategy has worked elsewhere.

Mr. Johnson's big mistake seems to be a condescending attitude toward the people of J.C. Penney and their values. He often ridiculed them, and he quickly replaced many of the senior managers he inherited. He never moved to Plano, Texas, the company's headquarters, but instead spent long weekends back in California. Soon the sarcasm that frequently came flowing out of the corner office was volleyed back at it. The strategy didn't stand a chance.

A smarter approach to leadership is to begin with the culture. Initiate a discussion as to who we, the people of this organization, are: what we know to be true, how we think, what we value and believe, and how we behave, especially in times of stress. Explore the legacies we inherited, and build a consensus around our destination. Show everyone what is possible, and then bring them along on a journey of change.

It will take longer, but it will pay huge dividends in cohesion. You can ignore that hard work of leadership, but you cannot expect to reap the benefits without doing the work.

 

 © Copyright 2013   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

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.

Lao Tzu and an Ethic of Leadership

 

By Thomas J. Lee

Lao Tzu, the ancient Chinese philosopher, left a veritable canon of wisdom on leadership. Many of his observations and insights are as vital today as they were when he lived twenty-six centuries ago.

Here are a few you will recognize:

 

The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.

A leader is best when people barely know he exists;

when his work is done and his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.

If you do not change directions, you may wind up where you are heading.

He who does not trust enough will himself not be trusted.

 

And here is one that may not be familiar to you. It may also puzzle you:

 

Anticipate the difficult by managing the easy.

 

What do you think Lao Tzu meant by this?

Take a moment to think about it. Turn the statement over in your mind a few times: Anticipate the difficult by managing the easy.

As you play with these words, you begin to realize that even the most daunting challenges in life are merely a series of easier tasks you already find simple and straightforward. On a macro scale, that was true of sending astronauts to the moon, of inventing the computer, of transplanting the first heart or lung. On a micro scale, it is true of getting a college education, of losing those 40 pounds that came out of nowhere, of raising a family, of managing a team of people.

Once we begin to see the large and complex as just a myriad of the small and simple, we can make real progress. We can anticipate meeting the difficult challenge by preparing to manage it as a lot of easy things.

As a foundation for leading people, this is a penetrating insight. It points us toward the importance of managing ourselves for the purpose of leading others toward something important for us all. It reminds us to be our own first follower.

Let me know what you think. Drop me a line at tom@arceil.com or leave a comment below.

 

© Copyright 2013   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Yahoo's New Remote-Work Policy Needs Flexibility

 

By Thomas J. Lee

Yahoo’s new chief executive, Marissa Mayer, has moved quickly to turn around the company’s stolid culture and position it for change. Within days of her celebrated arrival last summer she purchased thousands of new iPhones for employees. That was only one of several initiatives intended to make the company more innovative and productive.

So perhaps we should cut her some slack on Yahoo’s new policy regarding remote workers. Like many other large companies, Yahoo has encouraged employees to work part of their time or all of their time from home. That has had a number of people-affirming consequences. It has enabled couples to balance two careers more readily, and it has facilitated child care for working moms. It has also saved corporate funds on real estate.

Yahoo’s support for remote working will end in June, according to reports on All Things D, a website devoted to the technology and digital industry. (You can read the two stories here and here.) Citing the need for more and better collaboration, and in the hope of nurturing more innovation, Ms. Mayer is requiring all Yahoo employees to work physically in offices alongside their their colleagues.

While there is an argument for people to work together in the same space, Yahoo’s new policy strikes me as overreach. I say that for four reasons.

First, any large company has multiple offices—not uncommonly in an array of countries and time zones—and therefore remote collaboration is already a way of life. Yahoo itself has offices in Bangalore and Beijing. The drawbacks of remote working are part of business in the 21st century, and that isn’t going to change any time soon.

Second, a significant number of high-value employees have made major life decisions on the basis of the prior policy. Home ownership, spousal employment, and court-ordered child-care arrangements are not easy things to change in a matter of several months. Moreover, as a matter of simple equity, some employees have undoubtedly left prior jobs and joined Yahoo in part because of the flexibility and freedom of its remote-working policy.

Third, like a layoff or any other management decision with tectonic consequences, this policy shift is likely to divert the focus of Yahoo employees away from business strategy and operations to the policy change itself, at a time when Yahoo can least afford the diversion. In some cases that kind of collateral damage is unavoidable, but when it can be avoided or minimized, it should be.

Fourth, in my own experience, remote working is every bit as productive as office-based working is—perhaps even more so. I personally work with several executives of Fortune 100 companies who maintain home offices, and they are some of the most efficient, productive people I know.

There is some potential middle ground here, and if my voice were heard in Sunnyvale, it would say this: In-office work arrangements are indeed conducive to collaboration and innovation, as opposed to sheer efficiency and productivity, which seem to thrive in remote arrangements. When people work together, they run into one another and share ideas in the cafeteria, washrooms, corridors, and elevators. People also develop more appreciation for one another’s special expertise by working in their presence. All that is good.

But that can be accomplished equally well by bringing remote-working teams together for a few days every month or every quarter, by having regular online conferences in between, by coming together for sophisticated professional-development programs, and by using several new programs and apps to facilitate remote collaboration. As an aside, companies should be budgeting more for airline travel and meetings anyway. That is money and time well spent.

By modifying the new policy, Yahoo can avoid the trauma of forcing high-value employees to choose whether husband or wife is able to keep a job or remain on track for an MBA, and it can demonstrate that new policies need not take the form of Draconian reversals that rattle everyone.

Just my two cents.

 © Copyright 2013   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Related articles

Silicon Alley Insider: Why Marissa Mayer Told Remote Employees To Work In An Office ... Or Quit (YHOO)

'A giant leap backward': Yahoo boss Marissa Mayer under fire for banning employees from working from home

No more remote work at Yahoo

On working remotely

Yahoos Can No Longer Work From Home

Master Class: Communication for Servant Leadership

 Venue for Master Class: Communication for Leadership

 

 “Communication is the real work of leadership,” says Harvard Business School dean Nitin Nohria. We emphatically agree.

We have been saying it for years: Successful leaders communicate their vision or concern or priority with clarity, with coherence, and with credibility. People know what the leaders think, what they feel, and what they believe. There is no doubt, no confusion, no vacillation.

Think of Ronald Reagan at the Berlin Wall. Think of Martin Luther King Jr. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Think of Abraham Lincoln himself at Gettysburg. Think of Nelson Mandela emerging from 27 years of imprisonment. Think of England's legendary King Henry V, memorialized by Shakespeare, rallying his outnumbered and outgunned troops at Agincourt.

Think of any coach or teacher, any sibling or parent, any doctor or writer, any volunteer or political candidate, any manager or entrepreneur, anyone at all who influenced and ultimately inspired you to want something or do something or become something more.

Think of any influential, inspirational leader—at any time, in any place—and you will probably envision that leader in the act of speaking with conviction, clarity, and credibility.

Successful leaders communicate with whatever mechanism they can. They have a message they passionately believe in, and they speak it. Their message is one of aspiration, of need, of confidence. They describe, they declare, they demand. They cite examples. They tell stories. They ask questions, a litany of them, one after another on a single theme. They craft memorable aphorisms, little ditties, or clever quotations. They cajole. They persuade. They needle.

More importantly, they engage in dialogue—lots and lots of dialogue—and they repeat themselves over and over and over again.

Finally, and most importantly, they live their message. They are their message. They offer themselves as a working example of the leadership they preach. Their behavior and their decisions are part and parcel of their communication. They become their own first follower. 

It's for this very reason—the fact that communication, both explicit and implicit, both verbal and non-verbal, sometimes even latent, is the real but difficult work of leadership—that we throw such a bright spotlight on communication in our Master Class workshops, and it is why we offer a system to ensure that your leadership messages are clear, compelling, and credible.

 

*          *          *

 

Master Class: Communication for Servant Leadership is a sophisticated, high-level look at the real energy of leadership. Far from typical training, it delves deep into relationships: the live-wire connection that makes leadership possible. Appropriate for any experienced manager or executive, regardless of level, it will reawaken and reignite the leader in you.

What makes Master Class stand out?

First, it approaches leadership not as a position on the org chart, and not as a function of static traits, but as hard work that anyone with responsibility for the work of others should do. The hard work focuses on the clarity, credibility, and cogency of communication—its substance, its style and tone, its frequency, its practical applicability, and its stickiness, or memorability.

Second, Master Class recognizes communication as anything that conveys information or creates meaning for people. That includes many kinds of silent, or behavioral, communication, as well as conventional, verbal communication. It’s up to every manager to manage not just the messages he or she is sending, both spoken and silent, but also the metamessages that people are receiving. As any manager knows, they may or may not be the same.

Third, Master Class takes a close look at people engagement. If there is one thing that enables a company to define the future, it’s the full focus, curiosity, passion, and courage of employees. That's engagement, and it is NOT the same thing as alignment, morale, loyalty, or commitment. Engagement is the deliverable, or work product, of leadership. You must know how to cultivate and grow engagement if you are to lead people to a new and better tomorrow.

Fourth, Master Class introduces and explores the powerful concept of servant leadership: the doctrine that leaders lead best by serving first, as opposed to expecting to be served. We call it 5th Degree Leadership. Modeled on the late Robert K. Greenleaf's trailblazing work, Master Class broaches difficult challenges of empathy, humility, self-awareness, vulnerability, and more. We're no longer surprised that this chapter is among the most memorable and well-received of the entire session, even among technically trained managers such as engineers and scientists.

Fifth, Master Class shows the hidden differences between communication for the sake of managing people and communication for the sake of leading them. The two differ profoundly in terms of their purpose, their content, their style, and their tone, yet few leaders understand or appreciate it. Use the wrong kind of communication, and you get the wrong result. This is a common phenomenon in business, and it goes a long way toward explaining why so many change initiatives fall flat on their face.

Finally, Master Class is filled with case studies and practical examples that will rivet your attention. People tell us they remember our stories for years and years, and that they share the stories with friends, colleagues, and even relatives. One of the highest compliments we receive, and it comes to us surprisingly often, is that our course even helps families come closer together. That isn't our strategic intent, but we're glad to be of help.

Master Class is taught by Thomas J. Lee, an expert on leadership communication who has been working with companies of all sizes for more than twenty years. A former journalist and executive speechwriter, he has benchmarked nearly 30 major corporations for their best-practice secrets. He has spoken and taught throughout the United States, across Canada, and in a dozen other countries in Europe, South America, and Africa. He blogs at www.MindingGaps.com.

Master Class has been a staple of corporate training programs at many Fortune 500 companies. Now, on a trial basis, we are offering it by open enrollment. You can register by yourself, or you can sign up several of your colleagues as well, for a fast-paced, two-day immersion or for a three-day session with a special chapter on leadership for introverts.

We have seats available in Master Class sessions scheduled for the following dates:

• July 24-25, 2013 (two-day immersion)
• August 7-8, 2013 (two-day immersion)
• September 11-12, 2013 (two-day immersion)
• October 15-16, 2013 (two-day immersion)
• October 22-23-24, 2013 (three-day with a special unit on leadership for introverts)

In addition, we occasionally schedule executive briefings over breakfast to introduce the program to corporate executives. Reserve a place or two at the next breakfast by calling us at 650-464-1770.

All sessions (including the executive briefings) take place in a charming, old Tudor-style hotel in an affluent, lovely North Shore suburb of Chicago. It's as far-removed from a cookie-cutter chain hotel as you can imagine, and we have negotiated favorable lodging rates just for you. The site is easily accessible by car or commuter train from the Loop, and it is just 45 minutes from Chicago's O'Hare Airport or 60 minutes from Milwaukee's Mitchell Field. Registration for Master Class includes continental breakfast and lunch both days, so you'll have additional opportunities to get to know your peers at other organizations.

Take a moment to read this course description of Master Class. Then let us know (by emailing us directly at info@arceil.com or by telephoning us at 650-464-1770) how many places we should hold for you and on which dates.

The two-day Master Class immersion has these benefits:

Bottom Line Value. Research shows that between 2.1 and 2.5 percent of an organization’s revenue is lost to the active disengagement of people. That’s as much as $2.5 million for every $100 million of revenue, and it is just for active disengagement. (Passive disengagement is more pervasive and adds still more to the cost.) Recover it, and it goes straight to the bottom line. Few such professional-development programs pay for themselves so easily. This one clearly does.

Big Ideas, Big Impact. Leadership and management are two different things. So are engagement and alignment. The communication that drives leadership and engagement is different from that which drives management and alignment, too. Use the wrong one, and you get the wrong result. Master Class brings clarity and explanation to these critical distinctions. Executives will come to understand the importance of distributive leadership—after all, no one can be everywhere—and managers will learn why they must stand as collateral leaders of the enterprise.

Case Studies. We have scoured top-tier companies for best practices, and we bring them to you. You will see practical examples from companies like Harley-Davidson, Levi Strauss, Nordstrom, Starbucks, Hewlett-Packard, Lockheed Martin, BP/Amoco, Federal Express, and many others. You'll remember the vivid stories for years to come.

Analysis of Engagement. Master Class identifies five levels of engagement—creative engagement, active engagement, passive engagement, passive disengagement, and active disengagement—and then analyzes each for its consequences, behaviors, and antecedents.

Simple, Powerful Models. Our flagship models, the Rainbow and the GearBox, have been used by major companies to get a fix on their level of staff engagement. The Rainbow Model identifies unintended, and previously unnoticed, credibility gaps: mixed messages, muddled messages, mute messages. The GearBox serves as both a structure and a self-assessment tool at the intersection of strategy and employee engagement. We guarantee you will find them both enlightening.

Managing the Metamessage. Master Class acknowledges the obvious: what people hear you say isn't necessarily what you said. It's one thing to choose your words carefully, and you certainly should do that. But if you neglect to manage your implicit communication, you still have a problem, and you haven't begun to address it. We'll show you how you are communicating 24/7 through your semi-formal and informal voices as well as your formal voice.

Quantitative Data. Master Class presents hard, factual, quantitative data to explain the power and value of communication around business strategy. You and your managers will get facts and figures on change, trust, engagement and disengagement, perceptions of managers by employees, ROI, message clutter, employee frustrations, rumors, and so much more. Most importantly, we realize that data always tells a story. Discerning the stories in the data is critical.

Trust in Leadership. Remember trust? Everyone pays lip service to it, and yet compromises to trust are all too common. Surveys show that senior management teams routinely and dramatically overstate the level of trust in their organizations. For leaders, trust is the product of their personal and institutional honesty, their professional competence, their presence and accessibility, and the affinity that people on their teams perceive in terms of common interests, needs, and concerns.We'll show how tenuous all these factors can be, and what you can do about it.

Practical, Proven Strategies. We have distilled our teaching down to neat lists of strategies and tactics. They all make abundant good sense, but many of these strategies never occurred to managers beforehand. Master Class puts them in your hands.

 

Our alumni include executives and managers from top-tier companies whose products you see and use every day. Evaluations of these workshops are consistently high. After sitting in a class for two or three full days, more than 95 percent of participants recommend Master Class for their peers and superiors.

Here’s what past participants have said about Master Class:

 

“This was a top-notch program directly geared [to] the success of managers. It was a continuing education program among peers.”

—a senior manager of a Fortune 100 consumer-products company

“I have worked for this agency for 25 years, and I have never had a day of in-service training as valuable as today’s.”

—scientist, agency of the U.S. government

“Excellent presenter, measured pauses, superb, enthusiastic, thought-provoking, excellent material, first-rate, will definitely recommend.”

—a guest participant

“I have gone through a lot of leadership training. This is one of the two best. The other was at Carnegie Mellon, and this workshop is more applicable to my day-to-day work.”

—senior engineer, aerospace company

“Tom is terrific! Original, enthusiastic, motivating . . . the lessons are applicable, useful, and real.”

—senior manager for an international food and beverage company

 

Tuition for the two-day programs is just $1,695 per person (or $1,495 by the early-bird deadline, 30 days prior to a class); add $500 for a three-day session. Registrations are non-refundable but fully transferable to a later date or to a colleague. We offer substantial scholarships for schools, for non-profit organizations, and for small businesses and entrepreneurs. Also, be sure to ask about our attractive packages, which offer substantial discounts for groups of five or more registering at the same time (they may attend different sessions).

Call us (at 650-464-1770) or write to us (at info@arceil.com) to indicate your interest, and we'll get back to you right away. (Note that payment can only be made by credit card over the telephone, as our web presence is not yet secure.)

 

When Should You Manage, and When Should You Lead?

 

By Thomas J. Lee

You may be a front-line supervisor in a factory, or a mid-level manager, or a senior executive in a large corporation like IBM or Microsoft.

You may be the principal of a school, or the president of a community bank, or the nursing administrator of a hospital. You may be the managing director of a law firm, or a commissioned officer in the military, or the editor of a newspaper. Or you may be the head of a research team at a pharmaceutical company.

You may be the conductor of an orchestra, or the associate dean of a college, or the vice president for manufacturing of a mid-size company. You may be an entrepreneur with dreams of an IPO, or a small business owner who just wants to meet a payroll.

Whatever you do and wherever you do it, if you have responsibility for the performance of other people, you wear two hats.

One is the hat of a manager. The other is the hat of a leader.

That is true regardless of whether you have the word manager or leader in your job title or your job description. You must function as both a manager and a leader. It is even true if you merely aspire to responsibility for the performance of other people. You must learn to manage and lead, both.

Both hats, both roles, are important, but they are important in different ways. It’s imperative that you understand how they differ, lest you make the mistake of doing one when you should be doing the other. If you make that mistake, you can wind up with unintended results.

The two roles, manager and leader, are often confused. In part that’s because of simple-minded slogans. One classic slogan is: "Managers do things right, and leaders do the right thing." Another is: "All leadership is influence, and all influence is leadership." Both are leaky boats.

It's also in part because the two labels, manager and leader, are often mistakenly understood as jobs, as boxes on an organization chart. No less than The Wall Street Journal and Harvard Business Review routinely use the term "management" to refer to an organization’s broad official authority and the term "leadership" to refer particularly to an organization’s senior officers and executives.

By doing so, they place narrow boundaries on the purview of leadership, and that ultimately hamstrings an organization. No wonder so many executives have given up on change—the whole point of leadership—and now just wish everyone would do as they're told. That's an immature, egocentric approach to managing, and it doesn't come close to the magic of leadership. Unfortunately, it's common.

Instead of falling into that trap, think of managing and leading as work, and especially as particular kinds of work. Just that little conceptual shift will bring clarity to the murky confusion.

With this new clarity you will be able to see the path to becoming a better manager and a better leader. For up and down and across any organization, anyone with responsibility for the performance of other people must do the work of both managing and leading. That means wearing both hats, the hat of the manager and the hat of the leader.

Let's go into more detail.

Wearing the hat of the manager, you seek to meet the pre-determined expectations of acknowledged stakeholders. My definition of stakeholder is simple: anyone who can make my life difficul if his expectations are not met.

One stakeholder is the organization's senior executive authority, for it has certain expectations of its own. Other stakeholders can include customers both current and prospective, the owners or investors in a business, employees, certain government agencies and authorities, and, depending on your circumstances, perhaps also labor unions, the news media, subscribers and donors, and vendors and suppliers.

All those stakeholders have present-day expectations, which the stakeholders expect you will meet. The work of meeting those expectations is the work of management.

When management is successful, it creates alignment of people with those expectations. Thus you can think of alignment as the work product, or the deliverable, of managing well.

Wearing the hat of the leader, you are seeking instead to bring about a breakthrough in performance or a change on a large scale. The change may be strategic or tactical. It may be operational or cultural. It may be vertical (as in a hierarchy) or horizontal (as in areas of activity and responsibility).

Here's the big difference: Instead of meeting predetermined expectations, you are identifying new expectations. Instead of replicating something you have done before, over and over again, you are doing something new and different. Instead of valuing reliability and consistency, you are valuing agility and creativity. Instead of seeking compliance, you are seeking innovation.

These are the needs of tomorrow, so leadership is inherently oriented to the future. The work of forging new expectations is the work of leadership.

When leadership is successful, it creates engagement of people. Thus you can think of engagement as the work product, or deliverable, of leadership.

When should you do which?

The answer to that is a little complicated, because you must always be managing yourself in order to lead other people. How you conduct and present yourself—which is to say how you manage yourself—is the beating heart of your leadership. It determines the degree and nature of your credibility as a leader: whether, how much, and in what ways people trust you to do right by them.

Beyond yourself, you must also manage people when the situation calls for meeting those pre-determined expectations we discussed.

Examples abound. You may have a revenue target or a budget to meet. You may have a production quota or a sales quota to meet. You may have a regulatory inspection coming up. You may face a due-diligence process for a pending merger or spinoff. You may be under an order of some sort to do this or that by the first of next month. You may have a design parameter or a quality standard to meet. Whatever the expectation is, if you already know it and you are responsible for meeting it, you are really doing the work of managing.

On the other hand, you must lead people when you are venturing into new territory, and there are no pre-determined expectations are that you must meet.

Perhaps you are designing a new product, and its features are yet to be determined. Perhaps your organization has merged with another, and you must forge a new culture from the legacies of two cultures. Perhaps you are taking over a troubled department, and the people are looking to you for a new vision and energy. Perhaps your organization is moving into a new territory, where you are an unknown quantity. Perhaps something in your community is wrong, and you are speaking up.

In all these and in countless other similar situations, someone must step forward and lead. If that someone is you, the work you face is the work of leading. Do that work, not the work of managing.

For further reading, we recommend these previous posts:

Engagement and Alignment Are Two Different Things on February 12, 2012.

Core Competencies in Communication for Leadership on April 1, 2011.

How Great Leaders Communicate on December 17, 2012.

 

© Copyright 2013   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

What You Can Learn from the Super Bowl Blackout

By Thomas J. Lee

Hundreds of millions of people enjoyed perhaps the greatest Super Bowl ever yesterday. At halftime it looked like a blowout, with the Baltimore Ravens leading, 21-6, over the San Francisco 49ers. Moments later, after the Ravens returned a kickoff for another touchdown to make it 28-6, the New Orleans Superdome lights went out. The blowout was now a blackout.

The lights remained out for 34 minutes, and that gave the 49ers time to regroup. When play resumed the game was altogether different. The 49ers soon caught up. Both teams were playing against the clock. It was a terrific, exciting game down to the final minutes.

I see four good lessons in this game for leaders everywhere.

One, only a prideful fool counts on momentum to continue. Momentum is like lady luck. When you have it, it's great. When you don’t, it is difficult to find optimism.

But momentum, like luck, often turns unpredictably. In sport, a fumble or an injury or a missed block—or an electrical outage—can change everything. In business, a competitor can introduce a new product, or two rivals can merge, or the economy can collapse.

The only thing you know about the future for absolutely, positively sure is this: It will be different from the present. It always is. You just don't know how the future will be different, or when things will change. So never say "if present trends continue." The one thing you know for sure is that they won't.

Two, you are never in control of all the variables. In fact, you typically have much less control than you think. That's all the more true if you have a position of official power.

Moments before the Super Bowl electrical failure, no one would have predicted that the lights would go out. Then they did, and it changed the dynamics of the game in unforeseeable ways. Suddenly the 49ers were playing as if they believed they could actually win. They didn't win, but they certainly came close.

In business and in life generally, you never have the control you want. All kinds of things happen that you cannot control. Don’t assume otherwise, even if you are a CEO or a general or a president. Especially if you are a CEO or a general or a president.

Three, when things go wrong, and they will, people will naturally want to know why. Too often a leader’s first instinct is to explain what went wrong. The what is simple. The why is difficult.

After the Super Bowl blackout, Entergy, the electric utility for New Orleans, offered a classic what explanation: that “a piece of equipment that is designed to monitor electrical load sensed an abnormality in the system. Once the issue was detected, the sensing equipment operated as designed and opened a breaker, causing power to be partially cut to the Superdome in order to isolate the issue.”

Maybe that explanation satisfied an electrical engineer, but it did nothing for the people who were literally left in the dark. For them, it only added to the confusion. It didn't explain why the “abnormality” happened. People want to know why.

Four, as exciting as the game itself was, Super Bowl audiences are always paying attention to ancillary things: to the halftime entertainment, to the national anthem, and especially to the television commercials. This particular Super Bowl also had other human-interest angles, such as the fact that both head coaches (John Harbaugh of the Ravens and Jim Harbaugh of the 49ers) are brothers. All these things diverted attention from the play on the field.

The same thing happens in business and in life generally. People are always distracted and sidetracked by other things: food, money, romance, weekends.

One of the central tasks of leadership is to create and sustain a strategic focus. That is rarely easy. It requires communicating the group's purpose, plan, and priorities repeatedly, energetically, and memorably. In this Super Bowl, it was especially difficult for the coaches to do this during the 34-minute power outage.

There's one more lesson in all this, too. Even when the lights go out, you can keep on learning.

 

 © Copyright 2013   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Why You Shouldn't "Light a Fire Under" Anyone

 

By Thomas J. Lee

Have you ever given a moment’s thought to the imagery of fire in leadership?

Fire comes up surprisingly often as imagery for the work of leaders, especially in business. When I speak of fire, it's the noun for combustion I have in mind—not the verb for dismissal.

In a bad case, you may look back on a busy day of little crises and tell a friend you were “putting out fires all day.”

Or you may anticipate stakeholder reluctance by saying you expect “a firestorm of opposition” or "a firestorm of criticism."

In better circumstances, you may come back from a terrific workshop or conference all “fired up” to put some new ideas into practice.

If you are trying to persuade a lot of people to embrace a new product or priority, you may speak of “lighting a prairie fire” of support for it.

I have found two other fire-related images particularly helpful. That is because they draw such a vivid contrast between a popular but ineffectual approach to motivation and a less popular but spectacularly successful approach.

The imagery for the popular, so-so approach is to “light a fire under” a person. Essentially, that refers to motivating someone from the outside in. Follow the logic, and you are soon relying on extrinsic inducements for people: rewarding Jones with a bonus and penalizing Smith by sidelining her for a promotion. Both, of course, are common. But while they may affect the work that people do, they rarely lead to extraordinary and sustained levels of engagement.

The imagery for the spectacularly successful approach is to “light a fire inside” a person. It refers to motivating someone from the inside out. Follow the logic, and you find yourself reaching for intrinsic inducements: the joy of camaraderie, the excitement of working with talented peers, the satisfaction of reaching an ambitious goal, the beauty of work well done.

Now, be forewarned: The better approach does come with some risk. The risk is convincing yourself that the intrinsic reward is real when it isn't, when people don't actually feel the satisfaction but instead feel neglect because they didn't receive any reward, intrinsic or extrinsic. That's an easy error for leaders to commit, so easy it happens almost by default. On the other hand, if the intrinsic satisfaction is genuine, it can be a very, very powerful motivator.

You actually know all this from your own experience, and so do I. Moreover, if you have gone through one of our Master Class workshops, you'll recall that we like to begin by asking everyone to describe the coolest project or team they ever worked on. Nine times out of ten, they describe something that gave them enormous pride and satisfaction. It's rare for anyone to speak in terms of a monetary bonus or a raise or a promotion as part of the cool factor.

Under. Inside. Just two words, two prepositions, themselves unrelated to fire, but when coupled with the imagery of fire, they are enough to separate an uncommonly good approach from a commonly bad one.

Don’t try to light a fire under people. Instead, light a fire inside them. You'll be glad you did, and so will they.

 

© Copyright 2013   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

How Do Great Leaders Communicate?

By Thomas J. Lee

A couple of weeks ago in this space we expounded on the fundamental differences between managing people and leading people, and we pointed to corresponding differences between the deliverables, or work product, of management and leadership: people alignment for managing and people engagement for leading.

Now let's turn our attention to the differences between communication for the sake of managing people and communication for the sake of leading people.

These two things, both nominally communication, differ greatly in terms of purpose, substance, style, and tone.

Other differences can also come into play, depending on the urgency of a situation, the sophistication of the people involved, the culture at play, the familiarity of the manager or leader, the degree of opposition to change, and other factors. We don't have the space here to explore all this in depth, but we can offer an overview.

Before we dig in, we should take a moment to recapitulate the differences between management and leadership.

It's very, very important to view them both as work—not as a function of position, title, or status; nor as a matter of traits or attributes; nor as a kind of trophy for success. Both are essentially work, and anyone who does the work of managing or leading can rightly be regarded as a manager or a leader, regardless of their position (chief executive or team supervisor, for example) or their traits (salt-and-pepper temples, an air of self-certainty, perhaps an echoing baritone) or their trophies (the large corner office, say, or the stripes on a uniform).

Managing is the hard work of meeting pre-determined expectations of acknowledged stakeholders: customers, investors, employees, senior officers, perhaps government regulators. These expectations may take the form of quality standards, sales quotas, budgets, deadlines, year-end bonuses, compliance with the law, and more. Managing sets out to ensure predictable consistency. When it is effective, managing creates the alignment of people.

In contrast, leadership is the hard work of inventing or reinventing the future. It articulates an ideal future and inspires people to strive to achieve it, often in spite of uncertainty, self-sacrifice, risk, or even despair. It's all about change, either operational or cultural. When leadership is effective, it creates engagement of people.

With this fundamental distinction in mind, we can proceed to the differences in communication for managing and leading in terms of their purpose, substance, style, and tone.

In terms of purpose, communication for the sake of management seeks to control or influence the day-to-day activities of people, so that the expectations of stakeholders will be met with certainty. Communication for the sake of leadership seeks to excite and inspire people to attempt more than they ever dreamed or thought possible: literally and figuratively to travel to the Moon or abolish apartheid or dismantle the Berlin Wall, or, on a smaller scale, to lose weight or go back to school or give up smoking.

In terms of substance, communication for the sake of management is typically detailed, explicit, static, and pedagogical, inasmuch as it teaches people what they must do to meet the expectations of stakeholders. Communication for the sake of leadership is more general, implicit, dynamic, and homiletic, inasmuch as it encourages people to come along on a journey of change.

In terms of style, communication for the sake of management is all about compliance and constancy, and it is incremental. You are seeking to replicate something you have done well or to refine something you must do a little better. Communication for the sake of leadership is all about large change. Because it depends on the discretionary involvement of people, you set out to build a high level of focus, curiosity, passion, and commitment to a big ideal, for those are the stepping stones to the engagement you need.

Finally, in terms of tone, communication for the sake of management is often impersonal, authoritative, and commanding, and it often uses the second person ("You must do this now.") Communication for the sake of leadership is usually personal and collaborative or collective, and it usually uses the first person plural (though not always: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" is a famous exception).

Both are commonly in the imperative mood, but the imperative differs; for managing, it reflects a looming accountability, whereas for leadership it offers opportunity and hope.

There's a lot more to this topic, and that is all the more reason you and your colleagues should join us for a Master Class.

 

© Copyright 2012 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.

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.

The Constant Peril of Slipping Backward

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Even for the best companies, it is always easy to slip back into mediocrity. They just stop embracing change. Soon they are no longer ahead of their peers. They're only keeping pace, if that.

It is always much more difficult to continue moving forward into the unknown. That requires real leadership—and not just at the top of the organization but up, down, and across it.

Leadership is essential because its work product, its deliverable, is the full engagement of people throughout the organization. Getting that engagement, keeping it, and building it requires a deliberate focus of its own. That deliberate focus is the stuff of leadership.

© Copyright 2012   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

University of Illinois President's Stormy Tenure Is A Sad Case Study

by Thomas J. Lee

Michael Hogan's stormy tenure as president of the University of Illinois, and his resignation yesterday after only twenty months on the job, offers yet another case study on the importance of humble, servant leadership and on the critical role of respectful, mutual communication as its energy and light.

Here are a few articles for background: the Chicago Tribune's account of the resignation, the Chronicle of Higher Education's report, and the Chronicle's earlier piece (from March 8) on Hogan's communication problem with faculty at the University's flagship Urbana-Champaign campus. It is a sad case study indeed.

My main question is intended to spark more intellectual curiosity than anxiety, but I cannot help expressing it with a tone of frustration: Just when will leaders learn?

If anyone should have had some sensitivity to the challenge of real leadership, you'd think it would be a historian of diplomacy like Hogan. But no, even he committed some of the most egregious blunders we have seen in quite some time. Read the three articles to see for yourself.

Last month the University's faculty protested. More than a hundred of its senior professors, the big names the University of Illinois cannot afford to lose, called for his ouster. Their complaints were classic: micromanaging, arrogance, bullying, insularity, and more. Above all, the complaints zeroed in on a profound lack of respect and empathy for the people Hogan sought to lead. Like too many leaders, he seemed to think it was all about him.

The situation boiled over this week. Hogan said he had had enough, and he decided to quit.

I fear that many putative leaders in business are in similar situations, but in their case, people don't speak out for fear of retribution in an uncertain economy. (The senior professors who called for Hogan's resignation are protected by academic tenure.) 

Hogan, and leaders everywhere, would do well to heed the words of Benjamin Disraeli, the 19th century British leader: "I must follow my people," Disraeli said. "Am I not their leader?"

 

© Copyright 2012   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

More Employers Ask Job Applicants for Facebook Passwords

by Thomas J. Lee

I am not the least surprised, but I certainly am flabbergasted, that more employers are asking job applicants for Facebook passwords.

It isn't surprising, because many companies have long misunderstood the concept of trust in the workplace. They have assumed that employees should just naturally trust them, without themselves first earning the trust of employees or first investing the same kind of trust in employees.

Life just doesn't work that way. Trust is and always has been a two-way street. It must be earned, and it must be shown. He who doesn't trust is only rarely and briefly accorded any trust. That is as true in our professional lives as in our personal lives.

Trust is far too precious and far too tender to be treated as if it can be presumed or commanded.

If not surprising, these policies are nonetheless flabbergasting. They set the tone for brazen disregard for employee dignity. What company would want employees who are so deferential, so servile, as to tolerate that? 

If I were in charge of the hiring at these companies, I might actually ask for a Facebook password just to see which job applicants would refuse to provide it despite expecting that it would cost them the job. Those are the applicants I would be inclined to hire. In the long run, they will stand up for integrity and for their own dignity. How refreshing.

Give me an employee who knows right from wrong, smart from stupid, trust from mistrust, decent from indecent. I can build a fine company with people like that.

 

 © Copyright 2012   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Engagement and Alignment Are Two Different Things

 

By Thomas J. Lee

There's a lot of confusion, even among senior executives and their advisers who should know better, around engagement and alignment in the workplace.

Everyone speaks approvingly of both engagement and alignment, of course. But many executives and consultants use the terms interchangeably—though in fact they are very different—and don't see the particular nature of their own work as producing one but not the other.

So let's carve out their distinguishing features. To understand these two terms, you need to begin with basic distinctions between leadership and management.

It is only when we unpack leadership and management from each other that we can see the unique challenges, tools, and rewards of each. It's also only when we unpack leadership and management that we begin to understand engagement and alignment as two different, but complementary, things.

For starters, companies make a big mistake when they use the words leadership and management to refer to positions or levels in a hierarchy. We would gain a lot of clarity if we instead understood leadership and management as work—not as persons in a pecking order but as responsibilities, tasks, and especially communication. They do different things, though they certainly leverage each other.

Up, down, and across an organization, anyone in authority must do both. 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 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.

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.

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 substance, style, and tone of the communication that supports each of them. Communication for the sake of managing is authoritative, directive, and influencing. It carries an implicit "stick" of accountability. Communication for the sake of leading is visionary, collaborative, energizing, and inspiring. It carries an implicit "carrot" of opportunity.

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 lead the way so that others can follow.

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—everyone is unable 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.

Two different things they are, managing and leading; and two different things they are, alignment and engagement. In both cases, both are important. Both are necessary. They’re just different. Quite dramatically different, at that.

 

(c) Copyright 2012     Arceil Leadership Ltd.     All rights reserved.

The Work Product of Leadership Is Engagement

by Thomas J. Lee

You can easily tell the difference between a manager and a leader in business.

Managers are striving for alignment. They are concerned first and foremost with consistency. They want to make sure that the people on their team or throughout their organization are getting things done to such-and-such a standard, on time and within budget, and by various other constraints such as process controls, laws, safety precautions, quality parameters, and so forth.

Moreover, because managers naturally want to avoid or prevent any shortcomings, they are on the lookout for negative deviations from the norm. They want to spot problems early, so they can intervene and correct them before they explode. It follows that managers are just a little on the pessimistic side, ever watchful for anything that may signal an issue.

Now every business worth its name needs good, solid managers. Businesses make commitments to stakeholders such as customers, investors, employees, and suppliers, and to third parties such as regulatory agencies, communities, and so forth. They must honor those commitments. The better the managers they have, the more commitments they will keep, and the fewer disappointments they will experience.

But any business that wants to grow and prosper in the future cannot settle for good managers. It also needs leaders—and not just in the corner office or the C-suite but completely up, down, and across the organization.

Leaders are different from managers. Leaders strive not for alignment but for engagement. They are concerned first and foremost not with consistency but with change and commitment. They want to make sure that the people on their team are bringing everything they can muster to the challenge at hand, which is typically so big that it demands significant risk and perhaps even sacrifice amid great uncertainty.

Common scenarios for this kind of commitment may involve merging two companies, spinning off part of one company as a stand-alone enterprise, restructuring an organization in such a way that its teams and reporting relationships change, introducing new products to the marketplace, adopting a process modification, expanding or consolidating or restructuring territory, facing down a new competitor or product, integrating a new technology, and any number of others. Just look at companies such as Ford, Kodak, IBM, Virgin, and many others. You will quickly see the degree of change they have undergone and continue to undergo.

Now because leaders are focusing not on consistency but on change, they're looking to their people for full involvement—physically, intellectually, emotionally, viscerally. They're on the lookout for positive deviations from the norm: ideas, suggestions, thought-provoking questions. The leaders themselves see their role as supporting, not controlling, the people who may or may not rise to the challenge. Thus the disposition of leaders is just a little optimistic, in the belief that people can contribute more with the right kind of support.

Companies need managers to meet the demands of the present. They need good leaders to meet the opportunities of the future. Anyone in any position of authority should view himself and herself as both manager and leader, and every company should equip its managers with the skills and tools to lead as well as manage.

 

Next

The Paradox of Respect

 

 © Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Leaders Must Know and Respect Internal Gatekeepers

by Thomas J. Lee

It's natural, perhaps even inevitable, for managers and leaders to assume that they hold the authority in an organization. After all, even a junior manager commonly has the power to hire and fire, and senior management can merge, sell, or even shutter a company. That is real authority.

Alas, it is only one kind of authority: the legal authority to run the company. There are other kinds of authority, distributed throughout the organization, that also bear heavily on whether, when, and how anything gets done and on whether, when, and how anything really changes.

Managers who neglect these informal centers of authority often delude themselves into thinking that their mission or strategy is fully deployed, that people up, down, and across the company are acting in accordance with the strategic direction. The managers are surprised when the results don't bear out the promise of their strategy, and they wonder why things apparently just hit a wall.

Savvy, successful leaders approach things differently. They look for these gates of leverage and then recruit the gatekeepers to support the strategy. They realize that each gatekeeper can determine whether a strategy slows, stops, or proceeds through the gate. The more gatekeepers a leader has in the fold, the more likely the strategy will move through these gateways.

Here are four kinds of authority—each its own strategic gatekeeper, if you will—well beyond the legal authority that managers already have:

Economic authority is the power of the purse. Externally, economic authority rests with customers who decide whether to buy the product of a change. Two legenday case studies in business school are the decisions by Ford Motor Co. to introduce the Edsel in 1958—it would last only three years—and by Coca-Cola Co. to change the recipe of Coke in 1985. In both instances, customers rejected the new products. Internally, it is whoever exercises practical control over spending, which typically depends on the size of an organization, its controls, and its authorization levels. It can reside with the receptionist who holds the key to the petty cash drawer, or it can be the auditors who wave a flag on p-card abuses. 

Technical authority resides with holders of any unique competency that a strategy or change requires. It can range from engineering (the design of packaging or manufacturing equipment, say) to supply chain to legal counsel, and more. Any of these gatekeepers can open or close their gate. When it closes, so do the prospects for a strategy or change initiative.

Functional authority belongs to anyone who is in an informal position to close a gate and thereby stymie a change. Some years ago I stopped at a high-tech store—one of a nationwide chain—only to discover a complete absence of sales personnel on duty. Customers were just milling about. The sales team was upstairs in the store manager's office loudly protesting a new compensation system. All afternoon, customers came and went without buying anything, as there was no salesperson to make a sale. The sales personnel were exercising their functional authority. It's little wonder the company declared bankruptcy shortly afterward.

Social authority is informal influence among others that rests on personality, social order, and networks. Some people have outsize influence over the thinking of their peers. When it comes to a business strategy or change initiative, they can put the brakes on without the leader's knowledge. Generally speaking, it isn't the office cynic who has the most influence, as many employees just discount that person's constant quibbling. Nor is it the office cheerleader, whose enthusiasm grates on nerves. Rather it is the sober, thoughtful person in the middle whose voice others seek out and respect. 

There are other kinds of authority, as well: moral authority, political authority, and strategic authority, just to name a few. The wise manager is alert to all of them.

The need to recruit these critical gatekeepers comes back to the crucial differences between managing and leading. Managers have official command of their team as a matter of the organization's hierarchy; people are assigned to a team and to a manager. Leaders must earn their influence, because the people they would lead have a choice as to whom they will follow. To lead successfully, leaders must enroll as many supporters as they possibly can.

 

Coming on Friday

Climbing Ice-Covered Mount Rainier

 © Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

How to Manage Yourself (Part 4 of 4)

  

(Fourth of Four Parts)

by Thomas J. Lee

We come to the end of the our series of essays on how leaders should manage themselves.

Regular readers of Minding Gaps are familiar with our basic distinction between managing and leading, and with our argument that good managing is at the core of good leadership.

We define both managing and leading as a function not of position but of work. For both, their nature derives from their purpose. But that is where the similarity ends.

You can think of managing as the hard work of ensuring performance to the expectations of stakeholders. Typically it involves meeting deadlines, coming in under budget, complying with standards or procedures or requirements, or producing or selling a sufficient number and quality of something.

Leading is quite different. You can think of it as the hard work of bringing about big change or a breakthrough performance—first recognizing and identifying the need for it, then envisioning it, then championing it, then supporting it, and then driving it.

Now to lead successfully, you must first be able to manage, and no one is more important to manage than yourself. That's right: you.

Only by managing yourself can you lead others. That's because only those leaders who embody the change they advocate will be taken seriously by the people they wish to lead. Wannabe leaders who cannot or simply do not embody the change will be unable to lead. Their would-be leadership will be lifeless.

In this four-part series, which we began on July 11, we have broken down the day-to-day implications of managing yourself. The first installment was on managing your words: what you say, how and where and when you say it, and what you choose not to say. The second installment was on managing your thoughts. The third installment was on managing your attitude and energy. For the final piece, we turn to managing your own behaviors.

 

*     *     *

Last week we asked you to imagine a big circle in the sky with three equidistant points at 2 o'clock, 6 o'clock, and 10 o'clock. You were to label the 2 o'clock point Attitude, the 6 o'clock point Behavior, and the 10 o'clock point Consequences. Along the rim of the circle, we asked you to draw curving arrows between the points clockwise, such that Attitude points to Behavior and so forth.

We initially used this model to highlight the importance of attitudes. Today we will use it to throw a spotlight on your own behavior. Everything you do sends a message of one sort or another to other people.

Here's an example from one company, certainly not atypical. Senior executives have gone hoarse talking about the importance of safety. They are genuinely concerned about the physical well-being of employees. But they have also maintained aggressive financial and operational targets. That sets up an inevitable conflict.

One senior manager told me how it plays out. Mid-level managers, knowing they will be held to account for their performance, tend to cut corners to save money and speed production. Those corners can impinge on safety. A common scenario in such circumstances is directing a worker to use broken equipment, perhaps having been set aside and waiting to be repaired, "just this once" in order to complete something on time and under budget. Workers have a right to refuse such assignments and to blow the whistle on the manager, but in practice few do so. They don't want a reputation for whining.

Similar conflicts can arise over all kinds of cultural and operational vectors: product quality, customer service, process improvements, innovation, design, and so much more.

Here are some strategies to use in managing your own behaviors on the job:

• Translate your business strategy to actionable behaviors that apply to everyone, and to behaviors that also apply only to managers, and to behaviors that also apply only to executives. Make certain you are visibly and consistently demonstrating those behaviors, especially when you are in a hurry and tempted to neglect them "just this once."
• Scrutinize your day-to-day behaviors for the implicit messages they send, especially messages that run counter to formal and verbal strategic messages that establish direction, norms, and priorities. Neglecting to do examine your routine behaviors is all but inviting to be perceived as a hypocrite, though that's the last thing you want to be or to think of yourself as.
• Pay particular attention to patterns of incidental behaviors, such as showing up late for meetings, frequently going to lunch with the same colleagues, rolling through stop signs, and so much more. These things can be grist for griping by the people on your team. Violating rules is never permissible simply because someone of high rank is doing the violating. Think goose and gander. 
• Adopt a new rule for yourself: no multitasking when it involves anyone else's time, voice, or dignity. That means not checking your email in anyone else's presence, and it means not searching for anything online while someone else is speaking. You must be careful about even taking notes on a computer, as it will appear to others as though you aren't paying attention.
• Consider challenging cultural conventions in your organization to send an implicit message that you appreciate doing things differently. For example, if you are a relatively senior manager, and subordinate managers always go to a senior manager's office for meetings, switch it around. Better yet, commit to spending most of your day out and about rather than closeted in your office.
• Make strategic communication a routine, day-to-day priority rather than a weekly, monthly, or quarterly event. After all, if the people throughout your team or operation don't know what you're thinking, how can you possibly expect them to act on it?
• Control your temper. Yes, work is stressful, but that is never an excuse to lose it. If you have frequent difficulty with this, get some help. If you don't, it can derail your career or worse. In the 21st century, even the frequent use of profanity is out of place.
• Be sure you are present and accessible physically (that's the easy part), intellectually (that's more difficult), socially (that make require a personality transplant for some of you), and emotionally (that's especially difficult for many of us). You must show up for work as a complete person, simply because it is easier for other people to relate to a whole person than to an empty suit.
• Remember that the single most powerful means of communication you have is the decision. Which decision, you ask? That one. And that one, and that one, too. Every decision you make defines your character in the eyes of other people.

Gandhi's essential message for posterity was: You must be the change you seek in the world. Any leader who wants to leave a legacy of change must take the first steps. That means managing himself.

 

Coming on Friday

Ralph Waldo Emerson on Hypocrisy

 

 © Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Be Your Own First Follower

by Thomas J. Lee

On any given day, the people you seek to lead may or may not hear, understand, believe, remember, or appreciate what you have to say. Nevertheless, you must say what you believe, and you must say it often.

On any given day, the people you seek to lead will always notice, observe and remember what you do and how you do it. Never forget that people are constantly comparing what you do and what you neglect or decline to do with what you say and what you said. That's accountability, and you like accountability.

Finally, on any given day, the people you seek to lead are determining for themselves whether to follow your lead. The decision is theirs alone. It is not yours. It will rest largely on whether they regard you as a person of noble purpose and integrity, and as a person of principle, intellect, competence, standards, and wisdom.

So speak up, and speak up often, about what matters most, and then be your own first follower. To show the way, you must first go the way, for leading is all about following first.

Coming on Monday

How Leaders Must Manage Themselves

(First of Four Parts)

 © Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.