Minding Gaps

The Problem With Engagement Surveys in the Workplace

 

By Thomas J. Lee
 
You're familiar, I presume, with those two old chestnuts of workplace wisdom: "What gets measured is what gets done" and "You can't manage what you can't measure."
 
Both pay tribute to the importance of measuring what we value in our work. And for the most part both have more than a faint ring of truth.
 
The trouble is that measuring some things is not as simple and straightforward as it sounds. You need a clear conceptual foundation: an understanding and consensus as to what exactly you're measuring. Then you need a gauge or scale or metric that applies sensibly to the thing you're measuring. Then you need a reliable means of measurement. Some things can only be measured subjectively, by perception, and you need a way to measure the perceptions without tainting the results.
 
That's just for starters.
 
Of course, measurement is relatively easy if you know what you're measuring and how, and if everything is plainly apparent in the same way to everyone who looks. So if you're counting money in the till at the close of business, or taking an inventory of boxes on a shelf at the end of a quarter, it's a simple matter.
 
On the other hand, if you're measuring something as ambiguous as, say, employee engagement, you have problems right from the start. People think they know what engagement is, but everyone has a slightly different notion. Moreover, it's hard to measure something we cannot tangibly count. We can only rely on perceptions, and perceptions are notoriously individualistic. What one person notices, another person can easily overlook or undervalue, and vice versa.
 
Not only are perceptions individualistic, but they are highly sensitive to context and highly subject to hidden bias. The context is vulnerable to slight day-to-day variations in workplace circumstances: perhaps a personal slight or a new, burdensome assignment. The bias has many sources as well, most importantly the innate desire to protect one's job by appearing fully engaged.
 
One of the most popular engagement surveys in American business, for example, relies (for its core, anyway) on only twelve questions, and some of those questions are just this side of laughable. The most ridiculed question asks employees whether they have a best friend at work. How that affects employee engagement is beyond me.
 
Many employers who think they are accurately measuring engagement are, in fact, measuring something else, a different aspect of positive mental attitude. They may be measuring morale or job satisfaction, or loyalty, or commitment, or alignment, or general attitude and just calling it engagement. Or they may in fact be measuring the engagement they intend to measure.
 
At the root of the problem is ambiguity over the term employee engagement. There is no universal consensus as to what it means. Does it mean enthusiasm? Does it mean productivity? Does it mean technical expertise? Does it mean a spirit of can-do camaraderie? Does it mean satisfaction with current compensation and working conditions? The reality is that no one knows.
 
You can't just look up the phrase in a dictionary, either. It isn't there. If you look up the word engagement, you'll find all kinds of definitions, but none having to do with what you want. You'll find definitions for an agreement to get married, and for military battles, and for appointments or meetings, but none for attitudes in the workplace.

Moreover, to my knowledge, no one has gone to the trouble of drawing a fine line between engagement and its cousins: commitment, dedication, loyalty, morale, satisfaction, and alignment. If we are to know what one of those terms is to mean, we must know what the others mean. Then we must pull ourselves out of the muck of using any of those terms as synonyms for any of the others.

Together all these labels fall under the rubric of positive mental attitude, a phrase coined by the late insurance magnate W. Clement Stone. Having grown up reading Horatio Alger stories, Stone became a rags-to-riches multimillionaire who believed that one's attitude toward work was critical to success. (His name for cold calls was "gold calls.")

Positive mental attitude takes many shapes and forms. Perhaps the best that can be said for most engagement surveys in the workplace is that they're attempting to measure PMA in one respect or another and just calling it all engagement. Even at that, most of them fail.

We would be much better off if we could find some common ground as to what each kind of PMA actually is and why it's important. That way we could zero in on this thing or that thing and obtain some sense of what we should do. As it stands, we don't know.

Near as I can see, there are five different kinds of PMA. Three of them are really-nice-to-haves. The other two are absolutely-must-haves. (Before you come out swinging at the really-nice and absolutely-must taxonomy, read through to the end.) Let's begin with the really-nice-to-haves.

The first really-nice-to-have is commitment and dedication. I cannot see much, if any, difference between commitment and dedication, so I lump them together. I think it's fair to regard them as exceptionally hard work. The definition we came up with is this:

Rising to the level of courage, real commitment and dedication in the workplace is doing whatever it takes, and more, to satisfy the customer (or other stakeholder) within the constraints of safety, the law, and ethical decency.

It should go without saying that commitment and dedication are very, very important. The success of many businesses has rested on their shoulders alone.

The next really-nice-to-have is loyalty. To me, loyalty has to do with remaining at the employer's side, even through adversity, and giving the employer or manager the benefit of doubt. Our definition is simple:

The disposition of employees to continue serving the needs of their employer and its customers in an honest, productive manner in exchange for agreed-upon compensation and security.

In other words, loyal employees don't jump from employer to employer for a small raise. If unionized, they don't file ridiculous grievances. They place a premium on the relationship, and they want to work together. Strictly as a pecuniary matter, that saves an employer money and time (not to mention headaches) by reducing personnel turnover.

The third of the three really-nice-to-haves is morale and satisfaction. I can't see much difference between morale and satisfaction, either, so we also lump them together. Here's our definition:

The degree of happiness or contentment that people derive from their employment, as a function of compensation, workplace conditions, personal and professional relationships, employment security, and opportunity.

Maybe morale and satisfaction doesn't translate into economic benefit as easily as commitment and dedication or loyalty does, but I sure would rather have a lot of happy and satisfied employees than a lot of unhappy and dissatisfied employees. I don't need to measure the value of that.

Good so far? That leaves us with the two absolutely-must-haves: alignment and engagement. These are two different things.

In both cases, these mission-critical forms of positive mental attitude show up as patterns of workplace behavior. It's easy to see them because they are so obvious and so very important. Ultimately, if you go about it in a methodical way, that fact also makes them surprisingly amenable to measurement.

We can define alignment as follows:

The reliable performance of duties necessary for the organization to meet the pre-determined expectations of its known stakeholders.

Most commonly, those expectations belong to customers. They may take the form of product quality, delivery and service requirements, production and sales quotas, and work processes. In return, customers show their approval or disapproval through consumer demand, repeat patronage, recommendations to friends, product returns, and, in the worst instances, defections to competitors or even boycotts.

More broadly, expectations also belong to other stakeholders such as investors, employees, strategic partners, consultants, labor unions, government regulators (such as the SEC, EPA, IRS, and OSHA here in the United States), state and municipal inspectors, vendors and suppliers, NGOs, courts, the news media, landlords, and society at large, whose expectations take the form of laws, cultural norms, and nowadays even trending social media.

Collectively all these expectations are important because they enable us to stay in business. We make various agreements and commitments, or they are made for us and imposed on us, and we must follow through on them. Fulfilling those agreements and commitments is the business of alignment. That's why it is an absolutely-must-have.

Finally, we turn our attention to engagement, which we can define as follows:

A culture of discretionary, positive, extra effort—focus, curiosity, passion, and courage—that employees bring to their work in support and service to the organization, its purpose, and its stakeholders.

If alignment is what enables you to stay in business, engagement is what enables you to grow your business. Think of alignment as the work of today, and engagement as the work of tomorrow. No engagement, no tomorrow. That's why it is an absolutely-must-have.

But the thing is: engagement is fundamentally discretionary. In other words it's entirely up to employees as to whether they will engage. Though an absolutely-must-have, engagement always remains optional to employees, which is why it is so rare and so vital.

Employees who consistently show engagement often climb the ladder of success, but the opposite isn't necessarily true. People who don't show engagement, far from being dismissed, usually manage somehow to retain their jobs, at least until the next downsizing. Even then, cutbacks often seem to target certain units or skill sets or salary bands or demographic cohorts more than engagement profiles.

(Incidentally, another problem with engagement surveys also has to do with the common fact of downsizing. Many such surveys foolishly use first-person questions. Savvy employees are naturally tempted to say they are more engaged than they truly are, if only to avoid being seen as problem children. The supposed anonymity of surveys doesn't help, because employees assume their surveys are identifiable through computer coding or demographic data.)

Finally, you'll also notice four key words in our definition of engagement: focus, curiosity, passion, and courage. We'll address them each in upcoming newsletters.

 

  © Copyright 2013   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

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.

Trust Is Foundational to People Engagement

 

By Thomas J. Lee

Lest any corporate executive, department head, plant manager, team leader, or any other administrator believe they can do whatever they damn well please with no adverse consequences on the engagement of people, consider some stunning correlations turned up by a St. Louis market research firm:

• Among people with strong trust in the management where they work, 63 percent would be happy to spend the remainder of their careers with that organization; among employees with weak trust, only 7 percent would.
• Among people with strong trust in management, 51 percent would invest their own money in the organization if they could. Among people with weak trust in management, the corresponding figure is only 6 percent.
• Among people with strong trust in management, 50 percent look forward to coming to work every day. Among people with weak trust in management, only 3 percent do.

Those are dramatic and determinative correlations. They are well beyond any statistical test of significance.

These numbers do not mean that executive authority must or should shirk difficult decisions that people will find hard to accept. That is not the point.

Rather, they mean that decisions must be accompanied by a great deal of honest and forthright communication, both verbally and behaviorally, explicit and implicit, and, more than anything, decency and sincerity of intent. You cannot and must not assume that people will understand and accept a decision that you haven't explained and justified, morally as well as legally or strategically.

Maybe there was a time when fast talk and double talk could fool people, and maybe there was a time when no talk was acceptable and expected, but that was a long time ago. People are far too sophisticated today, and they insist on being treated with respect.

Always remember that the talent and skills on which you depend are in bodies with legs. Those legs can walk.

 

 © 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, and what we believe, think, and value. 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.

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.)

 

After 54 Years on the Job, She Is Finally Retiring

Carole DiSalvo

 

By Thomas J. Lee

“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”

I recalled that wise old aphorism on reading the wonderful Dallas Morning News story of Carole DiSalvo, an American Airlines flight attendant who finally retired two weeks ago after 54 years on the job.

You read correctly. Ms. DiSalvo joined American in 1958 at the age of 20. Only now, at the age of 75, is she turning in her wings. In an era when people commonly have several careers and multiple employers, she remained in a single job with a sole employer for more than one-half century.

When, as a young woman, she began flying, American Airlines had a fleet of airplanes with propellers. Its first jet aircraft, the Boeing 707, wouldn’t be delivered to American until the next year. Non-stop coast-to-coast and trans-Atlantic flights were still in the future. Commercial aviation was heavily regulated: everything from connecting cities to departure times, from ticket fares to pilot salaries, was determined by federal bureaucrats. Flying was a special experience, so passengers wore their best suits and dresses for a flight. They lit up cigarettes after the pilot turned off the no smoking sign, and they got decks of playing cards just for flying.

Flight attendants were called stewardesses in those days. Women had to be attractive, single, and young to be hired. Becoming a wife or a mother was cause for termination. So was reaching the age of 32. Prior to submitting an application to American, Ms. DiSalvo applied for a job with rival TWA, but that application was declined because her nails were too short.

Expecting to marry at some point, Ms. DiSalvo was looking forward only to a couple of years as a stewardess.  One-by-one the rules changed, just in time for her to continue working. Her seniority kept rising, so she could lay dibs on better flights. Her final flight, in mid-January, took her to Shanghai, an unthinkable destination for her first fifteen years on the job.

There were good days and bad days in her long career. Her passengers included Richard Nixon, Adlai Stevenson, Marlon Brando, and Neil Diamond, who sang “Sweet Caroline” to her on a short layover. Two tragedies still haunt: the 1979 crash of an American flight on takeoff at O’Hare Airport, and, of course, the hijackings of two American and two United flights on September 11, 2001.

Reading between the lines, we notice something atypical about Ms. DiSalvo. Through most of her career, she was probably working not so much for the financial compensation as for the psychic and social satisfaction. Her husband was a well-paid patent attorney, and she has qualified for both Medicare and Social Security for ten years now. So she was apparently working for the joy of it, and thus she must have brought joy to many.

Now obviously most of us need to earn a living, and work is the honest way to do it. No money, no work. But in the unrelenting urge to make more money, we tend to lose sight of the sheer joy of work. Given a choice of working with someone who is on the job only because he has to be, and who will stay only as long as he has to stay, or working with someone who would be there even if he didn't have to be, I'll always take the latter.

There's something to be said for stability and continuity, and all the more to be said for it in an age of instability and discontinuity; and there's something to be said for psychic satisfaction, and all the more to be said for it in an age of money, money, money and gimme, gimme, gimme.

We take a bow to Carole DiSalvo. Congratulations. You are a paragon for a society desperately in need of paragons like you.

 

 © Copyright 2013   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

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.

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.

Leadership Lessons From Rookie Quarterback RG3

By Thomas J. Lee

If you, like me, watched football, some more football, and still more football over the last few days, your head is probably swirling with scores, overwrought play-by-play announcers, goal-line stands, instant replays from multiple angles, and silly TV commercials. Mine sure is.

Most of the excitement took place in the college bowl games. But if you saw one pro game in particular, the Washington Redskins defeating the Dallas Cowboys on Sunday evening, you were very likely struck by both the athleticism and the leadership of Robert Griffin III, the rookie quarterback of the Redskins who is fondly known to fans as RG3. The victory was the seventh consecutive win for the Redskins, and it gave them a berth in post-season play beginning next weekend.

Griffin, a first-round draft pick who won the Heisman Trophy as a junior at Baylor, has quickly earned the esteem of his teammates. A few weeks into the season, they elected him team captain, an honor that comes with a C sewn onto his jersey. Surprisingly, it hasn't gone to his head. By all accounts he is as humble now as ever. 

Remarked cornerback DeAngelo Hall: ‘‘For a guy to win the Heisman Trophy, be the top pick, the savior of the franchise, (to) come in here so humble—from Day One he came in here working—that’s why he has that C on his chest.’’

This was my first chance to see Griffin play. At one point he almost danced his way into the end zone. Still sore from a sprained knee, he let a fellow rookie, Alfred Morris, get most of the credit by running for three touchdowns and setting the team's all-time season scoring record.

The larger story of Griffin’s impact on the team is off the field. Still only 22 years old, Griffin has already demonstrated a preternatural ability to lead his teammates. Keep an eye on this young man. He is going places.

Now to be sure, the National Football League has a bounty of gifted first-year quarterbacks this season. In addition to Griffin, you have Andrew Luck of Stanford playing for the Indianapolis Colts, Ryan Tannehill of Texas A&M playing for the Miami Dolphins, and Russell Wilson of Wisconsin playing for the Seattle Seahawks. All four are talented throwers and fast on their feet, too.

For readers abroad and anyone else who doesn’t understand American football, the role of quarterback is central to any team’s fortunes. Every offensive play goes through the quarterback, who can choose to hand the ball to a running back, throw it to a receiver, or keep it and run for daylight on his own. More to the point of this analysis, the quarterback is often the de facto leader of a team.

That role has fallen on Griffin's young shoulders. As a rookie, he was joining a team with many experienced players. That created a high hurdle for him. Could he be taken seriously as a leader? How?

"My strategy was to come in and try to lead by example first,” RG3 told a Washington Post sportswriter. “Being a rookie, you don’t want to come in talking right away. You can rub a lot of guys the wrong way. . . . One thing you can’t do as a leader is come out and say you’re the leader."

That is a key insight, and it cannot be emphasized too much. In business, managers have legal and official authority to exercise power. The company assigns people to departments or work teams with the explicit understanding that the manager is calling the shots. When a new chief executive moves into the corner office, everyone assumes he or she is in charge.

But that doesn’t mean the manager, or even the CEO, is a leader. No one can be assigned or told to be led by anyone else. Accepting someone’s leadership is a discretionary act.

Leadership is work, the hard work of encouraging people to accept you as a leader and offering them purpose and meaning for their work. Think of it not as a noun but rather as a verb.

Grammar aside, leadership is a matter of doing and saying certain things that bring people closer and of not doing and saying certain other things that push people away. By doing or by not doing these things, you begin to be known and appreciated as a leader. People naturally want to be led by you.

Most of us have to learn how to do this by trial and error. Every once in a while, someone like RG3 comes along and shows the rest of us how it's done. That, too, is an act of leadership.

 

 © Copyright 2013   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf: Grizzly Bear or Teddy Bear?

 

By Thomas J. Lee

Mensa, the high IQ society, just lost one of its brightest stars. Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf died this evening at the age of 78.

Schwarzkopf was best known for commanding the Western coalition that invaded Iraq in the Persian Gulf War, which came to be known as Operation Desert Storm. Long before that, however, he was earning a reputation the hard way as an officer who served his men, while other officers expected to be served by their men.

The difference, of course, is huge. It goes to the heart of what we mean when we talk about servant leadership.

The general described his approach to leadership in a memoir, It Doesn't Take a Hero. He recounted an incident in Vietnam that severely tested his commitment to his men.

One day in 1970, on learning that troops in his battalion were pinned down by land mines, he rushed to the scene. There he found soldiers still trapped in the minefield. He urged them to move out slowly, just inches at a time, but one soldier took too big a step, and another mine exploded. Schwarzkopf, a lieutenant colonel at the time, crawled through mines to the men and helped them escape. 

Blessed with genius-level intelligence, Schwarzkopf had two character traits in particular that I admired, and neither had anything to do with his intellectual candlepower.

One trait was his appreciation of emotion as a driving force of leadership. For him emotion could cut both ways, occasionally as anger but more often as love.

As anger, it earned Schwarzkopf a reputation for a hot head. As love, it earned him a reputation for genuine accessibility and dedication. He was both a grizzly bear and a Teddy bear. Indeed, he kept a Teddy bear on his Army-issue cot while on deployment in the Persian Gulf, perhaps to encourage himself to err on the side of softie.

The other trait was integrity. In an era when so many leaders disappoint, Schwarzkopf was ever there: a rock when we needed one. He was the epitome of character, always doing the thing that needed doing. Moreover, he spoke the truth regardless of whether you wanted to hear it. At least you knew where things stood: where he stood, and where you stood with him.

If he sometimes saw things in black and white, with no gray hues of nuance, he was rarely if ever misunderstood, for he was plain and clear. He said what he meant, and he meant what he said.

Nor did he brook excuses. "The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do," Schwarzkopf liked to say. "The hard part is doing it."

Indeed it is, and it always will be. Yet in Schwarzkopf we had a living, working model of the hard part, of the courage and perseverance and self-discipline it takes to be the person we say we are, or the person we want to be.

The general may have departed, but his example will live on.

 

  © Copyright 2012   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.

Imagine If Everyone Were As Focused as This Young Man

by Thomas J. Lee

My old next-door neighbor was a wide receiver in the National Football League. One evening, while we were both grilling out, he and I got to talking about football. He began describing for me what it was like to play professional football before thousands and thousands of people. Then he said something I will never forget.

Carl had so honed his craft, so thoroughly ingrained it, that when I asked how it feels to catch a pass in a game, he had to take himself physically through the motions to be able to respond. It was comical in a way.

At one point, standing on the patio, he had his arms outstretched, as if he were catching a pass over his left shoulder. He remarked that, as he is running to reach the pass, he cannot hear the stadium crowd.

That just stunned me.

I found that incredible. Think about it: Fifty thousand, sixty thousand, maybe seventy thousand fans in the stadium, most of them screaming their throats dry, and he cannot hear them.

Carl went on. He said he can hear his own footsteps, and he can hear his own breathing. But he cannot hear the crowd. As the ball falls gracefully into his arms, almost in slow-motion, his only focus is on wrapping his fingers around it, pulling it in and keeping it close, and then reaching the goal line with it. Those are the only things that matter. Everything else, including the crowd, ceases to exist. It just isn't there.

Now that's focus.

Imagine, just imagine, if the dozens or the hundreds or the thousands of people in your organization all had such extraordinary intensity of focus around your business goals and strategy. Most certainly they, and you, would be performing at a level you have only dreamed about.

There are tools and techniques to build that kind of focus. But the master key that unlocks it is your own focus. For you cannot ask of others what you have not demanded of yourself. If you yourself, as a leader, are not truly focused on strategic imperatives, no one else will be.

Begin with this simple question, and answer with a bucket of ice-cold honesty: What is it that you are most concerned about? Let's agree to net out the personal stuff: your kids, house repairs, aging parents, weekend plans. As you come to work each morning, what is it about the business that is most on your mind?

If you're like many managers, and probably most, execution of the business plan isn't front and center. Nor is realizing a long-term vision. Living out the company's values isn't close. While your monthly nut and year-end bonus are probably right up there, chances are your day-to-day focus any given morning is on a personnel issue, or a conference call at 9, or a dysfunctional staff department, or a draft marketing plan, or an OSHA inspection, or performance reviews, or squeezing another 1 percent from next year's budget, or any of a thousand other things that compete for your time and attention. That's the reality of life in management.

Because your focus is on these front burners, it is only natural to put truly strategic issues on the back burner. We quietly tell ourselves it is only for a day, only for the week. We'll get to the important stuff next week, next month.

Meanwhile, anyone and everyone with whom we come into contact immediately senses our real priorities, our real focus. We cannot hide. Every question we ask, every comment we make, betrays our real interest, our real concern. Because our real priorities and real focus are something other than the organization's strategic vision and long-term goals, the vision and the goals slip to second place, and then to third, and then off the grid altogether.

We all know that the hardest person to manage, and the hardest person to lead, is one and the same. You say hello every morning in the mirror. Only you can change that person's priorities, and therefore it is you who must.

Tomorrow morning, and for just one day at a time, shift your focus. Throw a spotlight on the strategic. Let the little things fall into place on their own. They will, after all.

For just one day, focus on the truly important things. Govern your questions and comments so that most of what you say, all day, creates energy around your strategic imperatives. Don't neglect or even diminish the lubricants of human relationships, of course. But let any substantive remark about the business revolve around the organization's vision and strategic intent.

Imagine you are Carl, running out and in. Reach out your arms. Look for the ball. Run to it. Listen to your own footsteps, your own breathing. Let the ball fall into your arms, as if no one is watching. It's just you, the ball, and the goal line.

Chances are the game will change.

 

  © Copyright 2004-2012   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Servant Leadership: The Secret Sauce of Extraordinary Cultures

 

By Thomas J. Lee

The concept of servant leadership has been around for more than a generation now, but too few businesspeople understand and embrace it. That's a shame.

I like to think of servant leadership as the secret sauce that accounts for the towering differences between shopping at Macy's and shopping at Nordstrom, between flying on United and flying on Southwest, between having lunch at McDonald's and having lunch at Chick-fil-A.

Nordstrom, Southwest, and Chick-fil-A have all publicly declared servant leadership as a pillar of their cultures. They have woven it into their leadership fabric. So have SAS, Wegmans, AFLAC, Zappos.com, Marriott, the Container Store, REI Outfitters, U.S. Cellular, Yum Brands (KFC, Taco Bell, A&W), Herman Miller, Kaiser Permanente, Darden Restaurants, and the U.S. armed forces, among others.

In a nutshell, servant leadership turns the tables on the relationship between leaders and the led. It moves from command to collaboration, from control to stewardship, from narrow accountability to broad opportunity. It lights a fire not underneath people but inside them.

Perhaps the best way to approach servant leadership for the first time is to recall President John F. Kennedy's famous words in his 1961 inauguration address: "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country."

Now tweak those words just a little. Substitute your people or your employees for your country: "Ask not what your people can do for you. Ask what you can do for your people."

Servant leadership will admittedly rub old-school, 20th century managers the wrong way. They will bristle at the thought of it. They will regard it as an abnegation of their rights and duties as managers.

In fact just the opposite is true. I have had the pleasure of working for a couple of genuine servant leaders over the course of my career, and I can attest to its power. Because they were serving me, I was able to accomplish things that otherwise would have remained beyond my grasp. The companies grew and prospered as a result, while our competitors were stagnating.

The 21st century is not the 20th century. Times have changed. People are different. They want different things. Companies that don't realize this core truth, and respond to it, will continue to have difficulty finding the right people and attracting them to their organization.

Our new Master Class features a robust introduction and overview of servant leadership in business. Scroll down three posts (or just click on Master Classes above) for more information, and then join us on June 26 for a special one-day seminar.

 © 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.

A Simple Process for Better Listening

 

by Thomas J. Lee

A week or so ago we explained why smart people have more difficulty listening.
In a nutshell, it is because you process information rapidly, you are usually thinking critically, you render judgments frequently, and you are often juggling multiple demands on your time.

It all adds up to what I call a conspiracy of cacophony. There's so much stuff rattling around your head, and it is making so much noise as it rattles, you cannot hear anything else.

Here's the good news. You can discipline yourself to become a deeper, better listener; and you should. People will appreciate it. It's actually a straightforward process. To get started, recognize the four levels of good listening.

The most basic level is simply alert listening. This is just being seriously ready and willing to listen. (Some of my coffee klatch friends will tell you I am often not even at alert listening, but that's before 480 milligrams of caffeine have begun coursing through my body.) If you cannot take time for a conversation when someone approaches you, say so, and agree on a time when you can.

The next level is attentive listening. Here you are in the conversation, and you are deliberately seeking and absorbing information. It requires an investment of determination and sincerity. You cannot fake it, and multitasking is toxic to it. Clear your mind and expect to grow.

Beyond that is active listening, a rigorous process for ensuring that two parties to a conversation fully and accurately understand each other. It was introduced in 1955 by Carl Rogers and Richard Farson, and it is still standard operating procedure in many organizations. Though a little on the laborious side, active listening is an especially good tool for taking the heat out of negotiations, disputes, and other tense relationships.

Finally we arrive at affirmative listening, where you are demonstrating your real commitment to a full, candid, guileless exchange of information, insight, and intuition that honors and affirms everyone. Here you are determined to make that happen, and you are doing so with a nobility and innocence of purpose.

At the risk of appearing "graceless and manipulative," as Richard Farson later put it (in Management of the Absurd: Paradoxes in Leadership), by "analyzing those special moments when we are enriched and exhilarated by someone's listening to us," I offer this eight-step path to affirmative listening:

1. Have a predisposition toward learning and acting on what you learn. Your default state is probably speaking and controlling, so you must change your default state. First, recognize that you can learn something of value from almost anyone you meet. Expect the best idea this year to come from someone you least expect, and look for it in the next five minutes. Next, convince yourself that you will probably have to act on the information you're about to learn, so you'd better get it right. Finally, tell yourself you have less than half the information you need to make a prudent decision, and the other half is in the mind of the person right in front of you. She may be reluctant to share it with you, so you have to tease it out.
2. Turn away from distractions. Be fully engaged in this conversation. I know: You're busy. We all are. No one will blame you for wanting to do as much as you can in the time you have. But that doesn't mean you can, and it sure doesn't mean you should, be thinking or doing anything else while carrying on a substantive conversation with someone. You must concentrate on the conversation. Research has shown that subsequent ability to recall data depends heavily on how attentive a person is during the conversation. So focus, focus, focus.
3. Suspend evaluation and premature judgment. Sincerely grant good faith. Evaluation and premature judgment are the twin bogeymen of poor listening. You may be smart, but you cannot listen openly to what someone is saying while you are also evaluating and judging it. You will have plenty of time for that later. For now, just listen with an open mind, and concentrate. It's one thing to have an open door, quite another to have open ears, an open mind, and open arms to embrace an idea you didn't come up with. Don't bother with the devil's advocate. Instead, be an angel's advocate.
4. Calmly probe for detail, and seek real-world examples. Before you reach for conclusions, take the intermediate step of listening for details and examples. Ask for stories or anecdotes that convey a linear progression of events you can see in your mind's eye. The colorful detail and stories are relatively easy to remember, and together they bring life to the matter at hand.
5. Absorb and synthesize the information. Square it, if you can, with other information, with your intuition, and with other insight you have already developed along the way. Here is where your inductive reasoning comes into play. A moment earlier you were deliberately not listening at a conceptual level; you were listening for memorable detail. Now you must broaden things by looking for the governing idea, the principle, the thesis. (Note: It's fine to compare what you are hearing with your own experience. However, for now you should be reluctant to interject your own experience, as that can divert the conversation away from the other person's concern and leave the impression that "it's all about you.")
6. Ask relevant, open questions. Then stop talking. Let silence do the heavy lifting of a conversation. If you are always rushing in to fill the uncomfortable silence, others will never have the opportunity to speak their piece. Be sensitive to the asymmetry of power in any organization; if you're the boss, the people on your team may feel intimidated or anxious in your presence, so don't be the first to speak (unless, of course, it's an emergency and people need to act fast). Generally favor open questions over closed except when you're in the muck of details. Closed questions (often beginning with do/does, is/are, who, when, where, and how much or how many) elicit only specific, discrete bits of information: a yes or a no, today's date, an age, your hometown, whether it's raining or not. Open questions (typically beginning with what, how, and why or why not) elicit richer descriptions, preferences, reasoning, explanations, questions, ideas, observations, insights and the like. For a great example of the latter, just watch a real pro like Oprah Winfrey or Charlie Rose interview someone. You won't hear many closed questions.
7. Clarify meaning, and translate implications. This is the labor of active listening. You clarify meaning by repeating what another person has said to that person's satisfaction before you get to reply substantively. Then you reason through the implications in dialogue and collaboration with the other person. Use words like we and let's. Make sure the two of you (or three, or however many) are in agreement as to what comes next.
8. Promise and deliver a response by a certain date. Any salesperson worth her commission will tell you she never departs a prospect's office until she has a date and time to talk next. The same goes for any substantive conversation. Don't just leave people dangling in mid-air. After you do leave, make sure you follow through on time. If you cannot, get back to the person to update him on your progress and your new expected time line.

Just get into the habit of using these eight steps, and people will notice. They may even decide that you do care, after all.

 

Next: Eight Archetypes of Poor Listeners

 © Copyright 2012   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Are You Smart? Then You Are Probably Also a Poor Listener!

 by Thomas J. Lee

Are you fairly bright?

I figured so. After all, you're reading this!

Seriously, our mailing list consists largely of successful managers. So there's a real reason for me to believe that, yes, you are indeed intelligent.

Unfortunately, that means you have a problem, and it is a problem you probably haven't really appreciated and understood.

It is just this: You are a poor listener. Generally speaking, the brighter that people are, the poorer listeners they are.

It stands to reason. By definition, intelligent people absorb information fast. Researchers have found that intelligent people think at the rate of 500 to 700 words per minute. Even fast talkers speak at only 175 to 200 words per minute. That's a lot of time—more than 36 of every 60 seconds—for you to be mentally doing other things while people leisurely finish their own sentences.

What are you doing all that time? Lots of things. Remembering what to get at the grocery store. Reminding yourself to see a new movie this weekend. Figuring out why this person is taking forever to make a simple point. Most of all, you're deciding what to say in response.

Bright people also tend to make judgments—lots of them, in rapid fire. So as another person is talking, you are making judgments about her intelligence, her knowledge, her diction, and maybe a few other things we won't go into here.

Finally, smart people are typically busy people. You probably have a lot of issues and decisions you need to address. It is tempting to think through these things whenever you have a few seconds. Given the ubiquity of smart phones, you may also be itching to send someone a text message or to scroll through your email. You may even think you can multitask successfully. Hey, we're all a little delusional.

The big problem with all this is that people do notice it. At this very moment some of them are silently complaining to themselves that you don't listen. They may even be complaining aloud to one another. From that, they easily conclude that you don't care about their ideas.

Next: A Simple Process for Better Listening

 © 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.

A Case Study in Poor Executive Communication

Here is an unfortunate but instructive case study on executive leadership that underestimates and undervalues the challenge of communication as the energy of leadership.

It involves the troubled president of the University of Illinois, and it appeared in the Chicago Tribune today.

U. of I. president says he did poor job of connecting with faculty.

 

The Three Essential Components of Any Leader's Credibility

by Thomas J. Lee

Back in the 1980s a onetime IBM salesman and singing cowboy by the name of Robert Fulghum wrote a little book that became a worldwide sensation. All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten stayed atop the best-seller lists for two solid years. It was translated into 27 languages and sold in more than 100 countries.

As the title suggests, this marvelous book asserted that the really important verities of life we learn as young children. Perhaps nowhere is that more true than in communication, especially for the sake of leadership.

Consider what we learned about communication as youngsters on the playground:

• Thou shalt not lie.
• Practice what you preach.
• Actions speak louder than words.
• Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me.
• Seeing is believing.

In other words, we learn early on that credibility is the currency of communication. We learn that we cannot get away with just saying whatever we want, when we really don’t mean it. Other people resent and dislike that, and they will resent and dislike us.

As we grow into adults, we come to appreciate the significance of this. We realize that all the fast and fulsome talk in the world cannot buy the allegiance and dedication of people: our kids or our employees or our constituents. Only our credibility as leaders can do that. Without credibility, our communication is like counterfeit money.

Moreover, we realize that the measuring rod of credibility does not belong to us as leaders. It rather belongs to the people we seek to lead. They and they alone measure our credibility. If they find it in our leadership, we and they can go anywhere. If they don’t, we and they can go nowhere.

Those of us who think a little longer about the challenge of credibility also realize that, when we begin to assert ourselves as leaders, credibility becomes more elusive and difficult. It begins with simple trust, for sure, but it also seems to demand more than trust alone. It also requires respect and affinity with people.

By trust, we have in mind a high regard for the veracity of one's word. People who trust someone believe the person is telling the truth. The truth that he tells may be a factual depiction of reality. Or it may be a sincere statement of intent, or a frank and honest description of his opinion, values, or perspective. Whatever path it takes, it must square with reality.

By respect, we're referring to a high regard for the leader's command, control, and competence: his ability, energy, initiative, resources, and perseverance—in short, his authority. In the colloquial, this quality is often referred to as "street cred." People must recognize and respect a leader's capacity for situational authority in order to believe he is capable of accomplishing that which he is setting out to accomplish.

By affinity, we mean a high regard for a common bond of interests, needs, and concerns. Apart from someone under the hypnotic spell of a cult, no one willingly follows a leader whose purpose runs counter to their own well-being. Rather, people look for nobility of intent: an honorable purpose that aligns with their own well-being. What is important and valuable to the leader must be, or must become, important and valuable to the people she would lead, and vice versa.

One or even two of these three cornerstones is not enough. Respect and affinity in the absence of trust leaves a residue of doubt. Affinity and trust in the absence of respect leaves a residue of skepticism. Trust and respect in the absence of affinity leaves a residue of opposition. Leaders need all three: trust, respect, and affinity with people.

Now most of us didn’t actually learn this part in kindergarten. Those who never learn it at all will never capture the hearts and minds of people. They will never lead.

 

 © 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.

{Numbers} New Managers Get Little or No Training in Leadership

 

Numbers, a twice-monthly feature, regularly presents business data that is noteworthy, puzzling, alarming, widely misunderstood or misinterpreted, or otherwise deserving of explanation, comment, or clarification. We accompany it with thought-provoking questions or commentary for reflection and discussion. It appears on the first and third Monday of each month.

Since its inception two years ago, Numbers has presented data on a wide variety of issues: employee engagement, organizational culture, trust in business and in management, information overload, strategic communication, CEO compensation, layoffs, job satisfaction, Internet usage, nonverbal communication, fear in the workplace, and many other variables.

You can read any or all of those posts (and hundreds of other short essays, as well) whenever you wish, just by scrolling through the archives. For a particular subject, use the search button atop the right column.

by Thomas J. Lee

American companies have not consistently been rising to the challenge of cultivating the next generation of leadership, it appears.

According to a nationwide survey sponsored by CareerBuilder, promotions to management usually come with little or no formal training, and many managers continue to flounder in their new roles.

Some 26 percent of managers said they were not prepared to take on their new challenges, and 58 percent said they received no training at all to meet the responsibilities of leadership.

Managers identified their biggest challenges as resolving issues between co-workers on their team, motivating team members, and reviewing employee performance.

Primary concerns that employees have about their manager are playing favorites (23 percent), not delivering on promises and not listening to concerns (both 21 percent), not providing feedback (20 percent), not motivating (17 percent), and providing only negative feedback (14 percent).

 

Coming on Wednesday

Leaders Must Know and Respect

Other Kinds of Authority

©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

Of Champions and Leaders

Two years ago in this space we waxed eloquent on the amazing final holes of the British Open. Any weekend duffer who has ever pretended to hear the roar of the gallery while approaching the 18th green will recall the thrill that ageless Tom Watson, then 59 years old, gave us that July weekend in 2009. Here is what we wrote:

by Thomas J. Lee

If love like youth is wasted on the young, as Sammy Cahn wrote, so perhaps is sport. Yes, everyone savors the thrill of victory. Yes, everyone feels the sting of defeat. But only the properly aged among us can bask in the warmth of an ever-flickering candle of one more time, just one more time.

For anyone of a certain age or better, watching 59-year-old Tom Watson on the final holes and then in the playoff of the British Open at Turnberry, Scotland, today was to indulge in a little reverie.

Watson had earned his first Open championship in 1975, years before some of the other professional golfers of today were born. But here he was again, where he wasn’t supposed to be. Hadn’t he graduated to the senior tour a decade ago?

In the end, Watson squandered a one-stroke lead on the 72nd hole to end the four rounds in a two-way tie. Then, in a four-hole playoff, he drove into the rough and finally lost to Stewart Cink.

The victor is a relatively unheralded American, but he is no youngster himself. Winning his first major championship today at the age of 36, Cink is already three years older than Watson was when he won the last of his eight majors, 26 years ago.

Nevertheless, the story of the day belonged to Watson, still in the hunt after all these years.

“It would have been a helluva story,” Watson said afterward. “It would have been a helluva story, but it wasn’t to be.”

The spectacle took me back to a triathlon in St. Petersburg, Florida, several years ago. I was competing in the 40-something age group. Having swum a mile in Tampa Bay and ridden the 25-mile bike course through the streets of old St. Pete, I was running strong only a couple of miles from the finish line.

My legs still felt fine, and I was thoroughly enjoying the experience when a pretty young woman, probably half my age, pulled up alongside me. For a few minutes, our banter made me feel as if I were in my 20s again.

Then she casually remarked, “You know, when my dad gets to be your age, I sure hope he is in your shape.”

Her well-intended words were like a brick wall in my path. Could I actually be older than her dad?

Nah. You don't think, do you? Suddenly I felt like walking, or crawling.

My legs slowed. I felt weak. Keeping the same pace we’d both been running a few seconds earlier, she sprinted ahead.

Age, it now seems to me, is permission to reflect and appreciate in ways we couldn’t, or just didn’t, when we were rushing headlong into life. Tom Watson seems to know that intuitively.

Reflecting aloud today in the clubhouse after the last hole, he asked himself what impressions or insights he would take away from the week’s experience. He thought a moment and answered: “A lot of warmth, a lot of spirituality.” It was scarcely the answer of a brash young man.

The ageless golfer is a gentleman who knows what it means to be a gentleman. He has always let his integrity do the heavy lifting of inspiration.

No one should forget his courageous decision in 1990 to resign from a Kansas City country club after it refused membership to a Jewish couple. He explained his reasoning only privately, but when the club reversed its policy, he rejoined immediately and publicly. There was no loud grandstanding, and yet there was no mistaking the message.

Stewart Cink won the British Open today, and my hat is off to him. He deserves to be congratulated. But in my book Tom Watson is the real champion. Thank you, Mr. Watson, for a marvelous weekend of golf, and thank you for the splendid example you continue to give to us all.

 

*     *     *

Two years later, Tom Watson, now 61, is competing in the British Open again this weekend, and as of today he is only nine strokes off the lead at Royal St. George in Kent, England. [He would finish the tournament eleven strokes off. The winner was 42-year-old Darren Clarke of Northern Ireland.]

Of equal note, Watson was coincidentally paired with his namesake, Tom Lewis, a 20-year-old amateur whose parents so loved golf and so respected Watson they named their newborn son after the golfing legend. Imagine the thrill it must be for the youngster to be sharing the fairways with him.

Some things get better with age, and Mr. Watson is one of them. 

 

Coming on Monday

{Numbers} Trust in Management

 

Coming on Wednesday

How Leaders Must Manage Themselves

(Third of Four Parts)

 © 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.

The Irony of Seeing and Believing

 

by Thomas J. Lee

On any given issue, people may or may not hear what their leaders say. But they will always see what the leaders do, and seeing is believing.

Does that strike you as true? It certainly does me.

And yet there's a problem with such a facile analysis: The opposite is also true.

Believing is seeing, too. That's right. Just as seeing is believing, so is believing seeing.

Think about that. We're not just playing with words here. It's an important if complicating point for leaders and for anyone who counsels leaders on communication.

Not only do people believe what they see with their own eyes (that's the seeing-is-believing part), but they tend to see mainly that which they already believe (the believing-is-seeing part).

Their eyesight—yours and mine, too—is naturally selective. We see things first, notice things most, and remember things longest that conform to our own perspective and that confirm our own judgment.

It's certainly no secret that two intelligent, reasonable persons can experience the same event—a concert, a movie, or a dinner in a restaurant, say—and come away with sharply divergent impressions.

How often have you and a friend read the same book and disagreed on it? Listened to the same political debate and disagreed on the candidates? 

The fact is that each individual processes new data through his own lens of preconceived expectations, needs, experiences, opinions, and concerns. This frame of reference changes slowly, if at all.

That basic dynamic holds as well for news and announcements about the workplace. What people already know and believe bears heavily on their reaction to additional information and messages.

Does that make leadership communication in the workplace pointless? Not really, no. It does make it more difficult though.

As a practical matter, it underlines the need to educate employees constantly on the company's strategic reality. The more that people know, the more likely their beliefs will reflect the company's real-world environment.

Moreover, it reminds us that, as the best comedians and orators have long understood, we are always speaking to an audience of one. Never to a crowd, but always to each individual person in the crowd.

The distinction is critical. Ever notice how a riveting speaker works a room? She fixes her eyes on one person at a time. Afterward, almost to a person, people say: "I felt as if she was talking just to me." That's what we mean.

What are the implications of all this for business leadership? Even in the largest organizations, any leader must keep uppermost in mind who it is that he is hoping to lead, and must address their issues as they see them.

He should ask: How much do people already know about the situation, the direction for the future, the organization's progress? What do they think of it? What is their emotional state? Exactly what are they worrying about, fearful of, concerned about, hopeful for?

That—even more than the nuts and bolts of the message—is the most important consideration in leadership communication. In it lies the secret of great communication. Speak to the human heart and what lies inside, and you cannot go wrong.

So just remember this: It is always, always the who before the what. Never the other way around.

 

Coming on Friday

Be Your Own First Follower

 © Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

A Vision of Parades and Fireworks

 

After the thirteen colonies declared independence from the British crown 235 years ago, the American patriot John Adams wrote to his beloved Abigail back in Massachusetts:

“I am apt to believe [the anniversary of the declaration] will be celebrated by succeeding generations . . . with pomp and parade; with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations; from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward, forever more.”

Now that, we can all agree, was an extraordinary leadership vision.

 

 

Today is the Fourth of July, the official anniversary of the declaration and the quintessential American holiday. Lo these many years later, we continue to celebrate our independence with parades, flags, cookouts, and of course fireworks.

Lest you ever wonder whether a vividly articulated vision is worth the effort, look skyward after dusk tonight, and see for yourself.

Celebrate exuberantly but safely today, and enjoy a glorious Fourth of July.

 

Coming on Wednesday

The Irony of Seeing and Believing

 © Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

The Eight Habits of Highly Effective Listeners

 

We have been on our annual study and renewal period throughout June. During this time we have reprised some of our favorite posts of the preceding twelve months. Now that we're turning the calendar to a new month, we'll return with all-new essays beginning on Friday.

 —TJL                         

 

by Thomas J. Lee

For most managers, listening to people is a significant challenge.

Part of the problem is you are just so busy. You have so much on your plate, and you have so many accountabilities, that you often just want the information you need—"the data that matta"—right here and right now. Any further explanation feels burdensome. A long, rambling conversation is like a Sunday stroll in the park when the temperature is 105 F. and dark thunderheads are gathering on the horizon. You just want people to get to the point and, frankly, to get out of your way so that you can get some real work done.

But that's only part of it. Another big part of the problem is your own intelligence. That is true, and I am not being patronizing. By and large, managers are bright people. But here's the rub: Smart people are worse listeners, not better listeners, than most people are.

That is because smart people process information faster than other people do. Smart people think approximately three times faster than most people talk. You take in more information, you churn it faster, and you come to more conclusions. Then you look for more information to churn, and the process continues.

Now you may think that someone who absorbs information so fast and so well would be a terrific listener. But smart people are constantly evaluating and judging others. You yourself do so much evaluating and judging, and you do it so routinely and so instinctively, you don't even notice. You have already been doing it about me and about this very essay less than 250 words into it. (You're thinking: Gotcha! It's "fewer than 250 words into it!")

Listening is something I myself struggle with. My friends will tell you that I often drift into what they call a zone. To become a better listener, I am using an eight-point checklist to remind myself of some basic requirements of deep listening.   

Here's the eight-point checklist I have been using. Maybe it will help you, too:

1. In any conversation of any sort, have a predisposition to learn something of importance and consequence. Avoid thinking of conversations as random, purposeless activities that just clutter your day. Rather, look at everyone as a potential teacher, and regard yourself as an eager student. The fact is that everyone does have something worthwhile to teach you.
2. Turn away from all distractions. (This is a particular challenge for me personally, as my friends will tell you.) Thrust yourself into the conversation with the entirety of your body, mind, heart, and soul. Be fully engaged. By body, I mean making full (but not scary or intimidating) eye contact, and having a pleasant disposition of your physical bearing. Do not multitask here. By mind, I mean being intellectually curious. By heart, I mean acknowledging the decency of the other person. And by soul, I mean having a constructive, affirming purpose for the community of persons in the conversation.
3. Suspend evaluation, and grant good faith to everyone involved in the conversation. Be on their side, and let them be on yours. Assume they have entered into the conversation not for their own advantage but for the sake of creating value for everyone. For the next few minutes, everyone is an angel, and everyone's purpose in angelic. That includes you: Do not play the devil's advocate, even for a moment. Instead, be the angel's advocate.
4. Probe for detail, and seek real-world examples. It is one thing to discuss a situation at a theoretical level, quite another to notice how it plays out in real life. Here is where the data that you usually seek takes on situational context and greater import. Notice what has actually happened, how people have reacted or coped, what the antecedents or causes were, what the effects and consequences were, and so forth. Don't overlook what hasn't happened that you might surmise would happen in such circumstances.
5. Absorb and synthesize information, intuition, and insight. Notice the presence or absence of connections to important concepts and doctrines (such as your company's values and mission or purpose). Remember the examples as illustrative of the larger ideas. Use them as grist in the future. Remember, data will always tell a story. You just need to be open enough and alert enough to read the narrative before your very eyes, as it is, which may or may not be as you want it to be.
6. Ask relevant, open, and constructive questions—and then stop talking. For the uninitiated, a closed question seeks a specific fact: a date or an age or a name, whether the flight is on time, when the meeting begins, who your brother is marrying. In contrast, an open question doesn't preclude the range of responses. It often begins with how, what, or why. Craft your questions in such a way as to build more potential intellectual capital. Then, after asking each relevant and open question, be quiet. Enjoy the stillness of the moment. Let your silence lift the conversation to a higher plane. Then think about what has been said. Record any important observations or reflections in a journal you carry with you for that purpose (and keep its content clear of day-to-day minutia like telephone numbers, reminders, and so forth). 
7. Clarify the meaning of it all, and translate the implications. Figure out where the conversation has taken you. What have you learned? What didn't you learn that you might have? What additional information do you need, and where might you get it? Does the situation require action? If so, immediately or at some point further in the future? Are there issues of personal safety and security here? Is there a question of ethics? Of business strategy? Are the data coherent and cohesive? What matters and what doesn't?
8. Promise and deliver a response by a certain date. Do not, do not, do not offer a substantive reply of which you are not certain. Do, do, do take the time you need to get whatever additional information or authority you need to respond with credibility and clarity. Resist the temptation to go to closure unless it is something you definitely want; unnecessary closure can be a roadblock to continuing exploration and even greater understanding. Give the other individuals a sense as to when you will get back to them, and be sure to follow up.

That's my list. Surely you can improve on it. Send your additions and refinements to tom@arceil.com or telephone me at +1-847-247-2241. I enjoy hearing from Minding Gaps readers.

 

Coming on Friday

Ron Tidwell on Primitive Communication

 © Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Intelligent People Have a Problem

 

We are on our annual study and renewal period through June 30. During this time we are reprising some of our favorite posts of the preceding twelve months. We'll return with all-new essays beginning Friday.

 —TJL                         

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Most of our regular readers are successful business managers, and they, which is to say you—you regular reader, you—are smarter than the average dormouse. If you aren't necessarily a card-carrying member of Mensa, you certainly aren't a member of Densa, either.

What you probably don't realize is that your above-average intelligence—the sheer power of cognitive discernment that helped get you this far—is a problem for you. Yes, a problem.

That's because your intelligence interferes with your listening. It is quite a paradox, but it is true. Intelligent people have greater difficulty, not less difficulty, in listening to other people.

Why is that? By definition, intelligent people are quick to absorb and process information. The brighter you are, the more you tend to think analytically and evaluatively.

Strictly as a quantitative measure, you can listen intelligently at the rate of 400 to 500 words per minute, perhaps even more, all while analyzing the message you are hearing and evaluating the speaker.

Meanwhile, the speaker is in the slow lane. He is probably speaking at 125 to 150 words a minute, or 175 to 200 words a minute if he is talking fast. The bottom line: Listeners are always faster than speakers, and smart listeners are especially fast.

That isn't good. It means you are probably missing some or perhaps even much of the robust information, the subtlety, the emotion, and the crosscurrents of what is being said. You're reading the headlines and maybe the first couple of paragraphs, and then you're psychologically turning to the comics page.

In coaching leaders, I nudge them toward what I call intellectual patience. Be slow to understand, I counsel. Be very, very slow. You will find yourself more reflective, more appreciative, and more nuanced, and therefore wiser than you otherwise would be.

Intellectual patience is just a predisposition of cautious, deliberate exploration and discovery. Imagine yourself walking in the dark, as if you have awakened in the middle of the night and are stumbling to the kitchen for a glass of water. Without a night light, you need to walk slowly, lest you trip over a child's toy on the staircase (as I once did, seriously). 

That is how you should listen. Be quiet. Pay rapt attention. Do not preoccupy yourself with judgments about the speaker or with your own list of things-to-do. Don't interrupt. Don't think of what you are going to say next. Just listen.

Listen patiently, and let the speaker finish, even if you are busy. Enjoy the balm of silence on your psyche. Reflect before asking a good, thoughtful question, and then let silence work like yeast. Finally, given a choice between interpreting a message harshly or generously, let yourself be big.

Maybe, just maybe, your intelligence will get out of your way, and you will actually hear what the other person is trying to tell you. You may even understand and accept it.

 

Coming on Monday

Eight Habits of Highly Effective Listeners

 

(c) Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

A Great Tool for Collateral Leaders: Microvision Statements

 

We are on our annual study and renewal period through June 30. During this time we are reprising some of our favorite posts of the preceding twelve months. We'll return with all-new essays on Friday, July 1.

 —TJL                         

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Many of us regard vision statements as the province of the CEO and the board of directors. That's only natural, as vision statements set forth an ideal future state for their entire enterprise. 

But collateral leaders throughout the organization can use microvision statements to advance their own leadership, too. By microvision statement, we just mean a vision statement with a tight field of view. It paints a vivid picture of an ideal future for only a part of an organization.

Any leader at any level of any organization can use a microvision statement to describe an ideal future state for a subset of the enterprise, be it a division, a department, a team, even an individual—perhaps for the leader himself or herself.

Don't confuse microvision with micromanagement. Microvision is useful and conducive to leadership, and the best people on your team will generally appreciate the effort. Micromanagement—a manager's overbearing and distrustful meddling in the day-to-day work of individuals—is destructive and corrosive to leadership. The best people on your team will resent it.

Micro or macro, a good vision can be worth gold. While the worst vision statements are riddled with clichés and rhetorical flatulence, the best are noble, inspiring, even glorious. They are very, very powerful, too.

For one thing, a well-crafted vision statement brings everyone together on the same page, and it gives everyone a mental image of success. That imagery enables people to order their work around a crystal-clear picture that energizes and directs them. It's like having a compass, a battery pack, and a talking map all in one.

A good vision does more than that though. It gives you a means of testing your stated values against a picture of the future. Does your vision rest on the bedrock of your values as applied in the real world? It should. If it doesn't, then it's just counterfeit currency.

Moreover, a good vision lets you deduce the appropriate strategies and tactics that can make the vision a reality, and it inspires you and your colleagues to go to extraordinary lengths on its behalf. Finally, it serves as a useful landscape for milestones that help you measure and assess your progress.

To do and be all that, a vision must be specific to its business and social context. It must get beyond the boilerplate that so many organizations settle for. It must reach for the stars, but more than that, point to the North Star as a beacon. That is true for macrovision and microvision statements alike. 

Microvision statements need not be florid or evocative, and they most certainly should not be replete with clichés, as many of their bigger siblings are. Indeed, these small-bore vision statements may not be narratives at all. They may come closer to a matrix, a little spreadsheet, or even a Gantt chart than to a descriptive narrative.

To begin thinking about a microvision for just a piece of the enterprise, take the bigger enterprise vision statement (the macrovision) and extract its essence. List its key phrases and translate them to real day-to-day work. Look for parallels here to the work you and your team do or can be doing. Then imagine, or envision, what the result of that work would be. Describe it in detail. Now give some thought to exactly how you and your team make it real. In other words, what does the enterprise vision become in your hands?

See? It's easier than you thought.

Before you go too far, make sure you understand the difference between a vision, a goal, and an objective. To borrow a metaphor from sports, the vision is tantamount to the visual image of players hoisting a trophy and parading down Main Street after winning the championship. In contrast, a goal is winning more games than the other team. The objective is winning today's game or even just scoring a point.

Now some of you may prefer a structure to the traditional narrative of a vision statement. That, too, is fine. Here's a structure you can use for a microvision.

On a single sheet of paper, draw a 3x3 matrix with each of the nine cells large enough for 25 to 35 words. Across the top, label the three columns with years. Choose the years that make sense for you and your team. Young people and mature organizations (trust me, that isn't the paradox it may appear to be) will want long-range years—say five, ten, and twenty years out. Older people and startups or turnaround companies will want short-range years—perhaps one, two, and three years out.

Down the left side, label the three rows Have, Do, and Be. Thus the top row captures what you or your team want to have (that you do not already have) by each of the years you listed. The middle row describes what you want to do or be doing (again, that you have not already done) by each year. The bottom row identifies who you want to be (that you are not yet) by each year.

Invest a lot of thought in this. Let it evolve. Give yourself permission to change it over time. As it does change, however, be sure to think critically about why you are changing it. Is it because you are growing? Because you have shrunk from your challenges? Because your interests have changed? Because other people have come into your personal life or joined your team at work? Because new opportunities have opened up?

One final point. Allow your vision, even a microvision, to be large. Let it be big. Let it be grand. That is what a vision should be and must be so that it can inspire. Small things are just small, but something big must be reckoned with. It demands to be.

Just be sure to do the work that follows, the work of bringing your vision down to earth. Give it legs. Then get on with the work of making it real. 

 

Coming on Monday

The Special Problem That Intelligent People Have

 

Coming on Wednesday

The Eight Habits of Highly Effective Listeners

 

© Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Emotion Is Central to Leadership and Thus to Change

 

We are on our annual study and renewal period through June 30. During this time we are reprising some of our favorite posts of the preceding twelve months. We'll return with all-new essays on Friday, July 1.

 —TJL                         

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Have you ever noticed the difference in tone between a company's marketing communication and its leadership communication on business strategy? Especially in the consumer-products sector, but elsewhere to an extent, it can be dramatic.

Advertising is often unabashedly emotional. TV commercials for new cars, for example, commonly appeal to the pride of ownership and, at the holidays, even the joy of giving. They play down or ignore things like horsepower or trade-in value. Advertising for life insurance tugs at the heartstrings of family, and 30-second spots for beer invoke friendship and fun.

In contrast, a company's employee communication on business strategy is typically straightforward, sober, and matter-of-fact. There is little emotion. Yes, you see sporadic articles and photographs in newsletters on dedicated employees or extraordinary service. But the fundamental purpose of business is often reduced to quarterly goals, and the bulk of information is on new procedures and controls.

Canadian neurologist Donald B. Calne observes: "Reasoning leads to conclusions. Emotion leads to action."

Conclusions are important. Facts and logic have an important role. But action is essential. If emotion brings us to the brink of action, then it is an essential component of employee communication. We neglect it to our peril.

Always be mindful of the fact that people find a great deal of motivation in positive, affirmative appeals of emotion. Employees need straight information, of course. But they also need to hear the emotional cause for working hard, doing the right thing, persevering through adversity, scratching the creative itch, and taking risks. They need to hear of pride, service, loyalty, and so much more. Anyone who has ever succeeded at anything knows the importance and the truth of this.

 

Coming on Friday

Microvision Statements for Collateral Leaders

 

(c) 2011 Arceil Leadership Ltd.  All rights reserved. 

The Business Case for Communication on Change

 

We are on our annual study and renewal period through June 30. During this time we will reprise some of our favorite posts of the preceding twelve months. We'll return with all-new essays on Friday, July 1.

 —TJL                         

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Over the last few days I have been involved in two discussions—one as an observer in an online forum, the other as a participant in an exchange of emails—regarding the necessity for communication in support of leadership and change.

It appears some people out there are not yet convinced that communication matters.

Frankly, I find that astonishing. The factual basis is so solid, and the logic is so compelling, that I cannot understand why any serious business executive has any doubt. The evidence is both quantitative and qualitative, and it is conclusive.

Surely we can stipulate that the world is always changing. Technology changes. Economies grow and shrink. Older people retire, and younger people with new ideas come along. The market for goods and services changes as consumers and businesses decide they want and need different things. Companies merge and spin off. Trade barriers come down. Management fads come and go. Innovation creates new competition. Companies form and enter the marketplace. Always, things are changing.

Now, follow along with me. Wouldn't you agree that:

• Companies cannot control the changes around them, but they can control (a) whether and how they initiate change and (b) whether and how they respond to external change. Both the direction and the pace of their own change are variable, and both are controllable.
• Organizations that fail to change will invariably become irrelevant. Then they will whither and die. From the British Empire to the Pickett Slide Rule Company and AOL, history is filled with the bones of giants that failed to adapt.
• If what made you good is alone enough to make you great, you would already be greater than you are. In fact you will always need new ideas, new competencies, and new practices to grow and meet the demands of the future. That's life, and life is change.
• The work of leadership is largely the work of envisioning, articulating, and supporting change, commonly requiring discretionary effort and even self-sacrifice by many people, often in a state of uncertainty and risk. That fairly describes the business world of the 21st century, doesn't it?
• Communication is the energy of leadership and thus of change. You know this to be true because all of history's great leaders, those individuals who have brought about the greatest change in the most trying of circumstances, have consistently been articulate and inspiring communicators. Think of Winston Churchill and Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln and Nelson Mandela. The reason this is true is equally obvious: People cannot act in concert with a leadership vision and agenda unless they have the big ideas, the information, and the incentive to do so, and they get all that through communication.
• Every organization is always communicating with itself—thinking out loud, as it were. People talk. Rumors spread. Leaks occur. The communication may be managed well or poorly or not at all. It may be clear, credible, compelling, constructive, collaborative, continuous, civil, and concise, or it may not be. The degree to which it is managed well and purposefully is the degree to which the organization can change in accord with the leadership vision and agenda and thereby determine its own destiny. 

Now forgive a little hubris, but executives who choose to deny these propositions are denying some very obvious truths, perhaps because it is comfortable for them to remain in denial. After all, it is easier to deny the need for communication than to assume responsibility for communicating and perhaps even to confront some long-festering professional competency gaps.

Executives who acknowledge these facts, and we hope this includes you and your colleagues, will properly ask what they should do first. I would suggest they consider the possibility that a systematic process of integrated strategic communication just may be the missing piece of the puzzle. At the very least, they should get moving on a needs assessment to better understand their situation and the opportunities it presents. Remember, every problem in life is an opportunity.

Call us. The number is +1-847-247-2241. We can help if you call, but not if you don't.

 

Coming on Wednesday

The Role of Emotion in Leadership

 Coming on Friday

A Great Tool for Collateral Leaders

(c) Copyright 2011 Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Suddenly, a Great Need for Immediate Change

 

We will be on our annual study and renewal period through June 30. During this time we will reprise some of our favorite posts of the preceding twelve months. We'll return with all-new essays on Friday, July 1.

 —TJL                         

 

by Thomas J. Lee

One balmy evening after dusk I was relaxing on the patio with my legs outstretched. Crickets had begun to sing, and Venus was slipping toward the western horizon. I had enjoyed another productive day. Everything was perfect. I wanted nothing to change.

Just then I noticed a small animal of some sort off to the right. It was already dark, so I couldn't quite make out what it was. Slowly approaching me, the furry thing waddled right up to my shoes and stopped.

You can imagine my horror when I realized the animal wasn't a neighbor's kitten, and it wasn't a squirrel. Nor was it a raccoon or an opossum. It was a skunk, a polecat. I kid you not. For minutes 

 

that seemed like hours, it sat on its haunches just inches from my feet. I was never so perfectly still in my entire life. I didn't breathe. I didn't swallow. I didn't blink.

In an instant I went from wanting nothing to change to wanting everything to change, immediately and radically. Yet I could do nothing. If I had so much as burped, this little beast would have fouled the entire neighborhood. Everything within a quarter mile would have stunk for days. I could only wait it out, in perfect stillness and utter silence.

Eventually the skunk moved on, and I could exhale and blink again. Five minutes later I felt a sneeze coming on, and I prayerfully thanked the heavenly stars that I had not sneezed while my uninvited guest was sniffing at my feet.

This incident occurred two or three autumns ago. I recalled it this week when the subject of change came to mind. I've noticed that, for some people and some companies, the thought of change can bring about such anxiety they react with terror and paralysis.

That isn't a problem in the presence of a skunk, figuratively or literally; the paralysis suits you just fine. But if the challenge you are facing requires that you change for the sake of innovation, or personal growth, or subject-matter mastery, or credibility, or a behavioral correction, or relational empathy, or anything else of importance or value, it most certainly is problematic. Your paralysis is part of the problem.

Regular readers will recall that a couple of my recent posts (here and here) focused on helping people to identify the need for change and to muster the will to change. Indeed, change is a continuing theme of the MindingGaps blog, for change is the currency of leadership.

In my own experience, most companies do want to change either their culture, or their operations, or their performance. Yet few actually change as much or as fast as they wish.

It is true that some recognize no need to change, so they never even set out to change. Others say they want to change when they actually do not. Many others genuinely want to change but do not know how. And many, many others seek to control and constrain their path of change, rather than create a culture of self-energizing and self-sustaining change that can redefine their marketplace. Over-engineering change can have the effect of stifling it altogether.

In any case, companies that are most in need of change but refuse to do anything about it are those that most risk being forgotten or marginalized in the years ahead. Anyone my side of 40 can name brands or products that are scarcely known to young people today—CompuServe, the Sony Walkman, Oldsmobile, Pan-Am, Schlitz, the DC-10, Zenith, Gourmet, camera film and slide projectors, DEC computers—and dozens of companies that are now subsidiaries or mere historical footnotes: Maytag, Gillette, TWA, Amoco, McDonnell Douglas, NCR, Ameritech, Warner-Lambert, A.G. Edwards, and so many more.

Even among extant companies, the tales of coulda-woulda-shoulda read like ghosts from a Dickens novel. I think of Xerox, whose share of the copier market plummeted from 90 percent in the 1970s to just 20 percent in the 1980s after Japanese manufacturers began selling better machines at lower prices. I think of IBM, which was so busy selling Selectric typewriters that it took a pass on the operating system and applications for personal computers, and instead let a couple of college dropouts start a cute little company they called Microsoft. I think of Blockbuster and Sears and Border's, whose stores today are almost empty.

On the other hand, there is Apple, which has changed radically, and there is Google, whose culture is all about innovation, and there is Ford Motor Co., which is leading a resurgence of American auto manufacturing, and there is Amazon, which is becoming an online main street. American Express and Wells Fargo both got their start running stage coaches across the West, and today they are vibrant and dynamic. Even IBM has learned from its mistakes and reinvented itself.

The CEO of a Fortune 25 company put it well in an inspiring 1993 speech to his senior leadership team: "We need to embrace change—not for its own sake but for our sake. We must understand that the world isn't standing still and that we can't stand still either. People and organizations that delude themselves into thinking they do not need to change are on a course of self-absorption and self-destruction. From the British Empire to the Pickett Slide Rule Company, history is full of giants that failed to adapt."

The choice we face isn't merely between changing and not changing. The choice is between changing and dying. Indeed, in these times of rampant mergers and acquisitions, the choice is as much between changing and being eaten alive for breakfast by a competitor.

It's just that sometimes, the mere thought of change is so intimidating, it is paralyzing. I know. I have been there.

 

Coming on Monday

Finding Strength in Uncertainty

 

© Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

{Numbers} Who Works the Longest Hours?

 

Numbers, a twice-monthly feature, regularly presents business data that is noteworthy, puzzling, alarming, widely misunderstood or misinterpreted, or otherwise deserving of explanation, comment, or clarification. We accompany it with thought-provoking questions or commentary for reflection and discussion. It appears on the first and third Monday of each month.

Since its inception two years ago, Numbers has presented data on a wide variety of issues: employee engagement, organizational culture, trust in business, information overload, strategic communication, CEO compensation, layoffs, job satisfaction, Internet usage, nonverbal communication, fear in the workplace, and many other variables.

You can read any or all of those posts (and hundreds of other short essays, as well) whenever you wish, just by scrolling through the archives. For a particular subject, use the search button atop the right column.

by Thomas J. Lee

Who works the most?

You may be surprised by the answer.

If you assume it is the hourly laborer who racks up the most hours, you would be wrong.

According to Gallup, almost half of self-employed Americans (49 percent) work more than 44 hours a week, compared with only 38 percent of Americans who work for companies or the government and 30 percent of those who work for non-profit associations and institutions.

But across all those categories, it is people who earn more than $75,000 a year and people with advanced degrees who work the most. Some 53 percent of each group report that they work more than 44 hours a week.

 

Coming on Wednesday

Ten Tactics and Tips for Better PowerPoint Presentations

 

©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

A Leadership Lesson from Elvis

 

We will be on our annual study and renewal period through June 30. During this time we will reprise some of our favorite posts of the preceding twelve months. We'll return with all-new essays on Friday, July 1.

 —TJL                         

 

by Thomas J. Lee

I'll take a lesson in leadership wherever I can find it. The other day, I found one while listening to a golden oldie on my iPod, and it came from Elvis Presley.

The song was "Suspicious Minds," written by Mark James, who also wrote "Hooked On a Feeling" for B.J. Thomas and "Always On My Mind" for Willie Nelson. Of course, Elvis burned "Suspicious Minds" into our collective consciousness. It is one of the truly great popular songs ever produced.

You can probably sing the lyrics from memory:

 

Why can't you see

What you're doing to me

When you don't believe a word I say?

We can't go on together

With suspicious minds

And we can't build our dreams

With suspicious minds. . . .

 

Now, plainly these lyrics have to do with a rocky romance. But with a little imagination you can see striking parallels to a dysfunctional corporate culture, too.

In many industries, the collapse of the implied contract after decades of widespread downsizing and offshoring, along with sporadic instances of financial malfeasance and chicanery, has decimated the trust, confidence, and affinity in business that everyone took for granted a couple of generations ago. (Other institutions, particularly government, have fared even worse. That's another issue altogether.)

Perhaps your industry and your company have emerged relatively unscathed. Nonetheless, the social carnage that other companies have left in their wake is problematic for you. All companies find it difficult to enlist the enthusiastic support of employees who suspect they are getting, or who expect to be getting, the short end of the stick. (Note: Whether or not employees are actually being shortchanged is irrelevant, for perceptions and expectations are everything. The only objective reality is someone's subjective reality; the perception or expectation of distrust is the fact of distrust.)

Any organization whose culture is characterized more by suspicion than by trust, confidence, and affinity is not likely to succeed for long at much of anything. In a strong economy, it can float on a rising tide. But when times turn difficult, or when competition or innovation redefines the marketplace, the same company will very likely encounter more than its share of difficulty.

Further, for a couple of very compelling reasons, a culture of suspicion can readily grow out of the managerial process itself. It's a little like noxious weeds sprouting in a well-tended garden of rich, fertile loam.

For one thing, good managers will focus on meeting pre-determined expectations: a budget, a quota, a deadline, or a standard. So they are usually on the lookout for any early sign of failure, in order to correct it in time. But their constant, anxious vigilance can be seen by employees as doubt or even distrust in them. Some employees will take it personally and return the volley with doubt and distrust of their own. Their distrust can become a contagion.

For another thing, many managers rely on the legal authority of their position, and the asymmetrical power it reflects, for their moral authority. These managers are often disinclined to invest the extra time and attentiveness it takes to nurture relationships with subordinates, especially at the ground level. Goodness knows, managers are already too busy. But the absence of frequent, casual, authentic face-to-face conversation is another dynamic that can breed a sense of distance and suspicion among employees. Again, what goes around comes around.

Managers and employees alike would both be better off to acknowledge the difficulty but also the enormous value of trust in the workplace. As the song goes, you can't build your dreams with suspicious minds. In a culture of distrust, everyone loses.

Elvis may have left the building, but his voice is ever echoing off the walls.

 

(c) 2011 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.

Four Rules for Growing Engagement

 

We will be on our annual study and renewal period through June 30. During this time we will reprise some of our favorite posts of the preceding twelve months.

 —TJL                         

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Here are four important rules any organization can follow to build a culture of engagement, so that employees welcome change and can break on through to the next level:

• Make sure everyone on your staff knows and understands the strategic direction, customer expectations, competitive pressures, operating sensitivities, and day-to-day priorities. Insist on clear line of sight between everyone's job and the organization's strategies. Use the word "customer" only in reference to the ultimate, external customer, and make certain that the customer's reasons for choosing your organization over a competitor in the marketplace are clear. Share metrics and strategic information promptly and directly.
• Create an atmosphere of critical and creative thinking about the business. Encourage collaboration and the open, free exchange of ideas and suggestions. Be certain there is a safe harbor for tough questions that can even strike you as impertinent. Ask deep, probing questions about the business, and invite everyone to a dialogue around them. Above all, avoid any implication of punishing the messenger for the message.
• Recognize that people find motivation both in reasons that reach their mind and emotions that touch their heart. Communication that enables an organization to meet its commitments is usually the stuff of prose: dry, factual, logical. Communication that enables people to reach their full potential is often the stuff of poetry—not of poems per se, but an inspiring and evocative narrative that celebrates and encourages ordinary people to go to extraordinary lengths for something important to the soul. People want and need this.
• Prize fresh thinking. Maintain a safe harbor for suggestions and tough questions about the business and even your own leadership. Welcome unorthodox ideas. Teach everyone how to build on someone else's kernel of creativity. Ask not just why something should be done by why it couldn't or shouldn't be done. Encourage people to experiment. Remove barriers to the casual, quick exchange of information and insights. Always be looking for the next big thing.

By following these four rules, you will find yourself creating much more focus, curiosity, passion, and courage in the workplace. That's important, for, as we have said over and over in this space, nothing of much significance has ever been achieved, and nothing of much value has ever been invented or developed, without a lot of focus, a lot of curiosity, a lot of passion, and a lot of courage.

 

Coming on Friday

A Leadership Lesson from Elvis Presley

(c) 2011 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.

The Irony of the Non-Essential Boss

by Thomas J. Lee

Whenever a snowstorm paralyzes the U.S. capital, the word goes out that non-essential government workers should stay home.

That begs a few questions. What makes an employee non-essential? Why is the government even employing anyone who isn't essential? And how does it feel to be labeled anything less than essential?

I can't imagine it feels very good. Even recognizing that the non-essential workers plainly get the better part of the deal on a snow day—they can take their kids skating and sledding—who would want to be labeled non-essential?

Isn't that akin to be called trivial? Unimportant? Insignificant?

Here's the irony for managers and team leaders in the private sector—or, for that matter, in the public sector and the social (or non-profit) sector. Managers and team leaders should actually strive to be non-essential. They should take pride in becoming non-essential.

For a manager or a team leader, becoming non-essential means that the people on their team have the priorities, competencies, attitude, and initiative to do what their manager or team leader would want them to do anyway. There is no difference in the work they do. It is the same as if the boss were present. If anything, it is even a tad better because it is more adaptive to new circumstances.

That doesn't mean the managers or team leaders are suddenly irrelevant. To the contrary, they are all the more vital to the process, because they are using their own position and leadership more comprehensively and more proactively. They are free to think and work more strategically, too.

So if you're a manager or a team leader, commit yourself to becoming non-essential. You will be doing your people and your organization a big service.

 

Coming on Wednesday

Why Do Memes Matter to Leaders? 

©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

A Surprising Insight on Influence

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Most leaders see the essence of leadership as influence, and that is understandable. People who follow in the footsteps of a leader have generally been influenced by the leader to think, speak, or behave in a certain way.

Ironically, leaders can be far more effective by first allowing themselves to be influenced, both by others and by themselves.

First, just by seeking out and listening to others, the leader conveys the important message that she sincerely appreciates the experience, knowledge, and perspective of the people she would lead. When genuine, and only when genuine, this reciprocity renders people more receptive to her influence than they might otherwise be.

Second, by influencing herself, she serves as a walking example of the message. She becomes, to paraphrase Ghandi, the change she seeks. People can watch her model the message, and they can emulate it. They will watch and emulate her, too, in ways she cannot possibly imagine beforehand.

Look back over your own life and career. Think back to the individuals you have held in high regard: teachers, parents, coaches, perhaps even peers. Notice how many instances you tried to be like those persons you so respected.

Inasmuch as leaders lead by example, they transcend the act of influencing people to the beauty of inspiring people. That is the real power, even the magic, of leadership.

 

Coming on Friday

Fear and Doubt, the Hobgoblins of Change

 ©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

Does Accountability Actually Thwart Your Potential?

by Thomas J. Lee

Probably every business manager regards accountability as an invisible but veritable whip, which ensures that people actually do what they're supposed to do.

Without accountability, the assumption holds, managers would have no way of enforcing standards of any sort. Things would be a big mess.

That certainly seems logical. But what if we were to substitute an ethic of opportunity for our reliance on accountability? What if we were to make more use of the carrot and less use of the stick?

On a large scale, what if we were to think and talk more about our potential and less about our problems? If we were to get away from "the burning platform" and instead dream more of "the promised land"?

Would people necessarily ignore deadlines, budgets, blueprints, recipes, parameters, or instructions of any sort? Would they refuse to change?

For now, it's just a hypothetical. But give it some thought.

My instinct, and perhaps yours, is that it would indeed create some real headaches. It would complicate and confound things.

But here's the thing: My experience is different. I have a hunch my instinct is wrong.

In my experience, people want to be about solutions. They are drawn to big opportunities. Daniel Burnham once declared: "Make no little plans, for they have no magic to stir men's souls." That does indeed seem to be true, and it holds important lessons for anyone who aspires to lead.

In the workshops I run, we always ask the managers in the room to describe the coolest project or team they ever worked on. They are free to cite any example from their entire life, as long as it is true. It can be something in business or something in their personal life.

Their examples are fascinating. Most of them are from business, but some are from coaching Little League teams, or singing in a church choir, or starting a business of their own, or raising up a child, or earning an advanced degree, or serving in a military conflict or on an emergency rescue.

The thing that all the best stories have in common is a large, quasi-spiritual reward, a huge emotional return that people experience from accomplishing an ambitious goal, or from being of service to the community, or from finding an inner fortitude they didn't realize they had, or from simply working on an important project with other dedicated, talented people.

They remember these experiences in detail forever. Forever!

Moreover, few managers use negative words to describe the experience. Few dwell on the problem they encountered and set out to solve. Nor do they cite the application of technical expertise or the availability of ample resources. They don't talk about those things. It would be too small, too mundane.

Rather, they choose to speak of the achievement itself, of the resourcefulness or creativity or perseverance of the team, or of the collaboration they experienced on something so big.

Maybe, if we were to focus more on opportunity and less on accountability, we would all go a lot further together. Just maybe.

 

Coming on Monday

25 Years of Incredible, Exhilarating Change

 

©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

What We Measure When We Measure Engagement

by Thomas J. Lee

As companies come to recognize the importance and value of the full engagement of their employees, they are increasingly inclined to measure it, chiefly by means of surveys.

However, unless and until they agree on a workable definition of engagement that ties it to their strategic priorities, companies cannot be certain just what it is they are measuring. That must change.

I favor a four-part definition of engagement as the discretionary effort—the focus, the curiosity, the passion, and the courage—that employees may or may not bring to their work in support and service to the organization's purpose and its customers. Further, I regard engagement as the deliverable, the work product, of good leadership.

Thus, when we measure engagement properly, we are measuring the extent to which the people of an organization:

• are recognizing, acknowledging, and focusing on a leadership direction
• are exploring, thinking through, and grasping the implications and repercussions of that direction on their work
• are embracing and championing that direction, and
• are adopting it as their own responsibility, their own mission, their own opportunity, and eventually their own legacy.

Ultimately, we are thus measuring the extent to which the people of an organization are engaged in the strategic work of the enterprise.

To my thinking, a survey instrument that doesn't return data on these four variables isn't really doing the heavy lifting that a company needs. Just my two cents. 

 

Coming on Friday

Accountability versus Opportunity

 ©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

Precisely What Is Employee Engagement? And What Isn't It?

by Thomas J. Lee

Many companies have begun to take the engagement of their employees as a serious strategic imperative, and that's a good thing.

I fear, however, that quite a few companies regard engagement as just another kind of "positive mental attitude," in the words of the late American insurance magnate W. Clement Stone. These companies are not yet perfectly clear as to just what people engagement is, how it resembles and differs from other kinds of PMA, and why it is so very, very important.

Until we gain clarity around the definition and singular importance of engagement, the imperative of engagement won't sink its roots deep into the work and ethic of leadership. Rather, it will be widely regarded and marginalized as "soft" stuff, not truly material to the company's success. It will likely be seen as the next closest thing to a fad, and it will be in danger of fading as quickly as it arrived. That will be tragic.

So as a public service, we are here to clear up the confusion. Today we will distinguish between engagement and other kinds PMA—all of which are better than their opposites, of course. In particular, we will distinguish engagement from commitment, loyalty, morale, satisfaction, and especially alignment. They're all good things, but they aren't the same.

Trumpets, please:

• You can think of real commitment in the workplace as doing whatever it takes, and perhaps more, to satisfy the customer and therefore the enterprise within the constraints of safety, the law, fairness, and ethical decency. People who demonstrate commitment make sure they follow through. They do what they say they will do—no excuses.
• In contrast, loyalty is the disposition of employees to continue serving the needs of their employer in an honest, productive manner in exchange for agreed-upon compensation. It is the unwritten workplace contract. Employees who are loyal are generally not devoting much time and energy to looking for new opportunities, unless they have a reason (a pending merger or staff reduction that imperils their job security, for example).
• For our purposes, employee morale and employee satisfaction are synonymous; if there is a distinction between them, it is so subtle as to be meaningless. We think of both morale and satisfaction as the degree of happiness or contentment that employees derive from their employment. That may be a function of their compensation, benefits, workplace conditions, stress, personal and professional relationships at work, employment security, and the opportunity to learn new skills and take on more responsibility. It may also reflect their personal circumstances such as financial security, home life, health, activities, spirituality, and fitness.
• By employee alignment, we mean the reliable performance of duties necessary for the organization to meet the expectations of its customers, most commonly in terms of product quality, delivery and service requirements, production and sales quotas, and work processes. We think of alignment as the deliverable, or work product, of good management.
• Finally, we define people engagement as the discretionary effort—the focus, the curiosity, the passion, and the courage—that employees may or may not bring to their work in support and service to the organization's purpose and its customers. When we see commitment in action, we often call it "going the extra mile." We think of engagement as the deliverable, or work product, of good leadership. Often, and most significantly, the work of leadership involves asking and inspiring employees to mount this discretionary effort in times of great uncertainty and in circumstances of considerable risk to the employee's personal security and well-being.

To grasp fully the distinction between alignment and engagement, we recommend you read our February 16, 2011 post. You will find it here, or just scroll down a few pages.

To appreciate the importance and value of building employee engagement, we recommend you read our posts on March 7, 2011, on January 14, 2011, and on September 3, 2010. 

 

Coming on Monday

Leadership Lessons of I Love Lucy

 

Coming on Wednesday

What We Measure When We Measure Engagement

 ©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

Microvision Statements for Collateral Leadership

by Thomas J. Lee

Many of us regard vision statements as the province of the CEO and the board of directors. That's only natural, as vision statements set forth an ideal future state for their entire enterprise. 

But collateral leaders throughout the organization can use microvision statements to advance their own leadership, too. By microvision statement, we just mean a vision statement with a tight field of view. It paints a vivid picture of an ideal future for only a part of an organization.

Any leader at any level of any organization can use a microvision statement to describe an ideal future state for a subset of the enterprise, be it a division, a department, a team, even an individual—perhaps for the leader himself or herself.

Don't confuse microvision with micromanagement. Microvision is useful and conducive to leadership, and the best people on your team will generally appreciate the effort. Micromanagement—a manager's overbearing and distrustful meddling in the day-to-day work of individuals—is destructive and corrosive to leadership. The best people on your team will resent it.

Micro or macro, a good vision can be worth gold. While the worst vision statements are riddled with clichés and rhetorical flatulence, the best are noble, inspiring, even glorious. They are very, very powerful, too.

For one thing, a well-crafted vision statement brings everyone together on the same page, and it gives everyone a mental image of success. That imagery enables people to order their work around a crystal-clear picture that energizes and directs them. It's like having a compass, a battery pack, and a talking map all in one.

A good vision does more than that though. It gives you a means of testing your stated values against a picture of the future. Does your vision rest on the bedrock of your values as applied in the real world? It should. If it doesn't, then it's just counterfeit currency.

Moreover, a good vision lets you deduce the appropriate strategies and tactics that can make the vision a reality, and it inspires you and your colleagues to go to extraordinary lengths on its behalf. Finally, it serves as a useful landscape for milestones that help you measure and assess your progress.

To do and be all that, a vision must be specific to its business and social context. It must get beyond the boilerplate that so many organizations settle for. It must reach for the stars, but more than that, point to the North Star as a beacon. That is true for macrovision and microvision statements alike. 

Microvision statements need not be florid or evocative, and they most certainly should not be replete with clichés, as many of their bigger siblings are. Indeed, these small-bore vision statements may not be narratives at all. They may come closer to a matrix, a little spreadsheet, or even a Gantt chart than to a descriptive narrative.

To begin thinking about a microvision for just a piece of the enterprise, take the bigger enterprise vision statement (the macrovision) and extract its essence. List its key phrases and translate them to real day-to-day work. Look for parallels here to the work you and your team do or can be doing. Then imagine, or envision, what the result of that work would be. Describe it in detail. Now give some thought to exactly how you and your team make it real. In other words, what does the enterprise vision become in your hands?

See? It's easier than you thought.

Before you go too far, make sure you understand the difference between a vision, a goal, and an objective. To borrow a metaphor from sports, the vision is tantamount to the visual image of players hoisting a trophy and parading down Main Street after winning the championship. In contrast, a goal is winning more games than the other team. The objective is winning today's game or even just scoring a point.

Now some of you may prefer a structure to the traditional narrative of a vision statement. That, too, is fine. Here's a structure you can use for a microvision.

On a single sheet of paper, draw a 3x3 matrix with each of the nine cells large enough for 25 to 35 words. Across the top, label the three columns with years. Choose the years that make sense for you and your team. Young people and mature organizations (trust me, that isn't the paradox it may appear to be) will want long-range years—say five, ten, and twenty years out. Older people and startups or turnaround companies will want short-range years—perhaps one, two, and three years out.

Down the left side, label the three rows Have, Do, and Be. Thus the top row captures what you or your team want to have (that you do not already have) by each of the years you listed. The middle row describes what you want to do or be doing (again, that you have not already done) by each year. The bottom row identifies who you want to be (that you are not yet) by each year.

Invest a lot of thought in this. Let it evolve. Give yourself permission to change it over time. As it does change, however, be sure to think critically about why you are changing it. Is it because you are growing? Because you have shrunk from your challenges? Because your interests have changed? Because other people have come into your personal life or joined your team at work? Because new opportunities have opened up?

One final point. Allow your vision, even a microvision, to be large. Let it be big. Let it be grand. That is what a vision should be and must be so that it can inspire. Small things are just small, but something big must be reckoned with. It demands to be.

Just be sure to do the work that follows, the work of bringing your vision down to earth. Give it legs. Then get on with the work of making it real.

 

Coming on Friday

My Love-Hate Relationship with Wikipedia

 

© Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

The Hidden Barriers to Change

by Thomas J. Lee

Many business leaders have convinced themselves that real and sustainable change is impossible, that people just won't change.

Fortunately, they are wrong. People will change. They do change.

The evidence is all around. Any of you who are parents of high-school seniors know just how eagerly they were awaiting word on admission to their first and second choice of colleges last month. Any of you who have found yourselves a little chubby weeks before a class reunion are familiar with that four-letter word d-i-e-t. Any of you who have fallen in love have looked forward to your wedding day.

People take up new hobbies and sports. They take out 30-year mortgages for a house. They earn graduate degrees in the evening and on weekends. They quit smoking. They buy used cars. They have children. They sign up for Facebook.

That doesn't mean large-scale change in business (or other organizations, for that matter) is easy. It does mean that change is possible and even within reach.

Still, there are hidden barriers to change. So very often, those barriers lie within us.

They are the reluctance to let go, to delegate, to trust. They are the refusal to listen to unpleasant information. They are overweening confidence, bordering on arrogance. They are the inability or unwillingness to manage ourselves in such a way that we authenticate the change we have articulated.

If, and when, we identify and overcome these hidden barriers, we will finally be able to connect with people and engage them on a journey of change. We will, that is to say, finally be able to lead. 

 

Coming on Wednesday

Microvision Statements for Collateral Leaders

 

© Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Are You More Controlling or Collaborating?

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Some of you are the type of managers who want to make sure everything is just so. You know better than anyone else, or at least think you do, how things should be, and you insist on making them just that way. Nothing out of place. Nothing awry. Everything perfect.

Others of you are the type of managers who recognize you cannot possibly attend to every detail, and you cannot possibly know everything about every situation anyway. You make sure other people know your vision, your values, and your priorities. From there you trust them to use their good judgment.

If you put the first type of manager at the left end of a spectrum, and the second type of manager at the right end, which are you closer to?

What does that say for the impact and resilience of your leadership?

 

Coming on Wednesday

Golf and Other Bad Metaphors for Business

 

©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved. 

{Numbers} A Quantitative Look at Collaboration and Teamwork

 

Numbers, a twice-monthly feature, regularly presents business data that is noteworthy, puzzling, alarming, widely misunderstood or misinterpreted, or otherwise deserving of explanation, comment, or clarification. We accompany it with thought-provoking questions or commentary for reflection and discussion. It appears on the first and third Monday of each month.

Since its inception in mid-2009, Numbers has presented data on a wide variety of issues: employee engagement, organizational culture, trust in business, information overload, strategic communication, CEO compensation, layoffs, job satisfaction, Internet usage, nonverbal communication, and fear in the workplace, among others.

You can read any or all of those posts (and hundreds of other short essays, as well) whenever you wish, just by scrolling through the archives. For a particular subject, use the search button atop the right column.

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Many companies use the term "individual contributor" to refer to employees who do something other than manage or supervise the work of others. Over the last ten or fifteen years, however, the term has become something of an oxymoron, or the next closest thing.

According to research by Kroll Inc. and Steelcase, the office furniture maker, 82 percent of knowledge workers partner with their colleagues, almost half of them constantly.

The ideal size of a team is three persons. Only 9 percent prefer groups of two and 27 percent prefer groups of four or more, while 54 percent prefer groups of three.

An interesting gender-based and age-based dynamic surfaces. Women more than men (51 percent to 40 percent), and younger people more than older people, enjoy working in groups to learn from others. Men more than women (36 percent to 25 percent), and older people more than younger people, prefer working in groups to complete tasks.

 

Coming on Wednesday

Golf and Other Bad Metaphors for Business

 

©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

Core Competencies in Communication for Leadership

by Thomas J. Lee

For years now, many large organizations have devoted the time and money it takes to figuring out just what successful leadership looks like to them. They have carefully listed, described, and in some cases also determined the metrics and value of particular traits and activities they believe account for success as a leader.

I have looked over quite a few of these leadership competency frameworks, and to my thinking they come up short on a key variable: communication. Many of them reduce everything that goes into effective communication to a single, curt phrase. They define it in colorless, prosaic terms, and they gloss over the specific challenges, talent, and even the soulful sensitivity it demands. Astonishingly, some leadership competency frameworks ignore communication altogether. They don't even mention it.

Good communication is the very life energy of leadership. Take away communication, and leadership withers and dies. Leaders can accomplish nothing without clear, compelling, credible messages that inform, influence, inspire, and involve people.

Moreover, as most of us intuitively know, communication is far more than speeches and PowerPoint presentations. Many of the most important messages in an organization are unspoken, implicit, and behavioral. They reinforce or undermine what the leader is saying verbally. They are also commonly unintended, entirely inadvertent, and therefore unmanaged. Still, they are powerful. So if we are going to take communication seriously, we need to address the subject comprehensively.

Finally, as any self-aware leader fully understands, communication that energetically engages people around a coherent vision is very, very difficult. Many try; few succeed. If it were easy, there would be no such thing as Dilbert comics, and companies would routinely report employee engagement scores at levels they only dream of. The pervasive reality of mixed, muddled, and mute messages would be the exception rather than the rule.

For all these reasons, I am offering here a fuller list of competencies that together account for effective communication as the all-important energy of leadership. You should know that I am thinking mainly of leadership in the context of business, but my framework would probably apply just as well in a governmental agency, a nonprofit association, a fraternal organization, a political campaign, a sports team, or something like a museum or orchestra or military battalion.

You will notice that certain competencies on our list go well beyond conventional, verbal communication. That's because of something we have learned over and over in focus groups with rank and file employees.

These workers repeatedly told us that they derive important messages from what they observe and experience firsthand, and that they are constantly on the watch for clues to the sincerity or hypocrisy of their leaders. The old adage that actions speak louder than words is never truer than in leadership communication. So we treat these clues, these implicit messages, as very real communication, and we regard the ability to manage them as a competency itself.

I list the competencies by level—basic, intermediate, and advanced—reflecting not the hierarchy of leadership in an organization but rather the maturity and depth of leadership typically associated with a particular competency.

Regular readers will recall two convictions I have written about in the not-too-distnt past.

One, I argue that any organization needs good leadership up, down, and across its management, not just at the very top. Few have it. Most organizations need to develop solid collateral leadership in their secondary ranks of supervising authority: middle management and the front line.

Two, I assert that leaders cannot be perfect, and that we err in insisting on strict accountability for perfection. That's just unrealistic. So the framework that follows is an ideal. The closer you get to it the better. But don't be yourself up for falling short. We are all on a journey.

I welcome your comments; please address them to me at tom@arceil.com.

 

Basic Competencies

All leaders should demonstrate these basic competencies:

Nature of Leadership. Knowing how the work of leading and the work of managing resemble and differ from each other. Accepting the opportunity to both manage and lead as necessary. Seeing engagement as the deliverable or work product of leadership, and seeing alignment as the deliverable or work product of management. Choosing an appropriate style and determining the appropriate substance of communication for optimal engagement.

Value of Communication. Understanding and appreciating communication as the energy of leadership. Devoting the time and resources necessary to communicate the strategic vision, direction, priorities, and progress to that part (or whole) of the organization for which you are responsible.

Intellectual Patience. Regarding effective communication as a richly collaborative dialogue. Refraining from interrupting others and from multitasking while others are speaking. Making appropriate eye contact in conversation. Listening to other viewpoints before volunteering your own opinion to avoid intimidating or pressuring others into voicing a similar view.

Affirmative Listening. Listening with the sincere intention to learn and take action. Encouraging subordinates to speak up without fear of favor or reprisal. Granting good faith to people bearing a challenge to authority. Concentrating on what is being said even in chaotic circumstances.

Dignity and Respect. Conducting yourself with dignity in all circumstances. Acknowledging presence of others, even in passing. Initiating conversation whenever possible and appropriate. Showing respect for diverse viewpoints. Delivering unpleasant or unfortunate news with candor, dispatch, and sensitivity. Avoiding or objecting to humor at the expense of demographic minorities, underprivileged, or otherwise challenged people. Never ridiculing other people inside or outside the organization.

Balanced Temperament. Being slow to anger and quick to praise. Thinking carefully before reacting to bad news. Never blaming the messenger for the message. Demonstrating equanimity in the face of provocation. Maintaining composure in trying situations.

Ethical Compass. Speaking and behaving in accord with the organization's values and with commonly accepted norms of decency. Refusing to take shortcuts that compromise or appear to compromise ethical principles. Giving credit where credit is due, even when it is due to competitors or stakeholders with opposing priorities. Assuming more than your fair share of accountability when things go wrong.

 

Intermediate Competencies

Maturing leaders should increasingly demonstrate these intermediate competencies as well as all the basic competencies:

Immediate Relationships. Building, nurturing, and sustaining close working relationships with immediate colleagues and direct reports to ensure frequent, prompt, and candid feedback. Appreciating the courage required to speak truth to power. Receiving criticism as an opportunity to refine your style and enhance your impact as a leader.

Straight Talk. Favoring substantive straight talk over common "talk traps" that leaders often fall into: small talk, sunny talk, scare talk, sweet talk, smart talk, simple talk, song and dance talk, slick talk, snarky talk, or self talk. Showing confidence in the dedication and decency of the people in the organization by treating them as the colleagues they are and as fellow employees who, like any good leader, want the best for the organization.

Robust Credibility. Appreciating that the credibility of leadership is large because the commitment a leader asks of people is large. Embracing a threefold construct—the intersection of authentic trust, organic respect, and the bond of affinity—of credibility lest the flame of leadership begin to flicker.

Implicit Communication. Recognizing that many leadership messages are perceived by people as implicit and often inadvertent. Managing time, visible behaviors, day-to-day decisions, and other elements of the informal voice as important implicit communication that bears heavily on the judgments, perceptions, and conclusions of people. Recognizing that yours own day-to-day choices reveal your genuine priorities and are at the heart of leading with integrity and impact.

Presence and Accessibility. Appreciating importance of physical, intellectual, social, and emotional presence and accountability. Frequently making yourself visible and available to people for casual and spontaneous conversation. In group settings, making sure that large numbers of people can approach you.

Focused Inquiry and Dialogue. Initiating dialogue with stakeholders that brings attention to high-priority strategic issues. Asking creative questions to drive broadly collaborative thinking. Demonstrating receptivity to ideas from anyone. Listening patiently to diverse points of view. Freely giving credit to worthwhile ideas and observations regardless of their source.

Style and Substance. Understanding the differences between the work of leadership and the work of management, and seeing engagement as the deliverable of leadership and seeing alignment as the deliverable of management. Recognizing the differences in both style and substance between the kind of communication that works for leading people and the kind of communication that works for managing people.

Empathy with Constituents. Demonstrating keen sensitivity to the organization's impact on others. Assuming sincerity and decency of other people regardless of their place or orientation on issues. Eagerly soliciting feedback. Avoiding assumptions that marginalize and minimize others. Reaching out to offer support. Asking open, reflective questions. Allowing for silence to give people time to think deeply.

Servant Leadership. Searching out problems and opportunities to provide support or remove barriers to high performance. Regarding a leader's highest calling as service to others. Striving to serve more than to be served. Constantly looking for ways to enable people to perform better, to identify a rich future for themselves and the organization, and to make them feel better about themselves.

 

Advanced Competencies

Veteran leaders should demonstrate these advanced competencies as well as all the basic and intermediate competencies:

Healthy Culture. Nurturing a healthy culture of communication that prizes clear, credible, coherent, constructive, candid, civil, and concise discourse. Recognizing the importance of robust credibility requiring high degrees of trust, respect, and affinity as support for a leadership vision.

Inspiration. Regarding leadership not merely as influencing people to behave in a predetermined way, but as inspiring them to think for themselves and to act constructively on behalf of a central purpose without frequently consulting with management.

Visualizing the Future. Imagining a different, bigger, and better tomorrow. Describing the vision in colorful, visible terms that people can see and embrace. Avoiding clichés and boilerplate rhetoric that reduce the vision to banal platitudes.

Narrative, Metrics, and Metaphor. Constructing an overarching narrative for the organization that first identifies its unique principles and fundamental purpose, then charts a path to realizing those principles and purpose, and finally makes choices for their application. Using creative metaphors to convey the narrative with impact. Identifying metrics to measure progress. (Note: Financial gain is never part of the narrative's fundamental purpose and should not be a metric. It is rather a result that is necessary to sustain the fundamental purpose. Go deeper than material considerations here.)

Eloquence and Oratory. Being able to speak with confidence, grace, and clarity before sizable groups, both internal and external, especially under pressure. Responding to interruptions and antagonistic questions without losing composure.

Importance of Emotion. Appreciating affirmative emotion as conducive to change and action. Presenting a leadership agenda in terms of its emotional as well as its factual and rational appeal to people.

Humility and Self-Deprecation. Balancing your own dignity with humility and self-effacing tribute to others. Taking yourself and yours work with utmost seriousness but also occasionally laughing at yourself. Selectively and gently offering yourself as a case study in development.

Distribution and Inclusion. Recognizing that an organization of any appreciable size and complexity requires collateral leaders throughout. Eagerly sharing the role and responsibilities of leadership with others. Working to create a culture of inclusion. Remembering that your success depends on people more than their success depends on you.

 

Think of this as a working paper. I expect to modify it from time to time, so it may not be precisely the same when you check back weeks or months from now. Feel free to suggest any additions, deletions, or refinements. I will take all suggestions under serious consideration.

 

Coming on Monday

{Numbers}  We Have the Data on Teamwork

 

Coming next Wednesday

Golf and Other Bad Metaphors for Business

 

© Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

March Madness and a Structure for Leadership

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Two days ago, using the coincidental timing of March Madness, we discussed the importance of structure as a means of framing and anchoring so many aspects of life. You can read that column here.

In particular, we established that the work of leadership and change in business needs a coherent structure to help leaders make sense of it. Unless and until they apply such a structure, it is hard for leaders to put their hands on the levers of change.

Regular readers are familiar with the GearBox, a conceptual and visual scaffold we have developed that you can use as a structure for leadership and change. It is a simple but powerful analytic model that imposes a straightforward structure on the work of leadership to build engagement for change or breakthrough performance.

The GearBox consists of a 4 x 5 matrix. The four column headers—Awareness, Understanding, Acceptance, and Commitment—refer to dimensions of employee orientation and disposition toward  an organization’s success and growth. The five rows represent levels of alignment around leadership vision and strategy.

The best level is at the top: strategic focus, curiosity, passion, and courage. The worst is at the bottom: alienation, denial, cynicism, and resistance. In between are three middling levels, the higher the better. Here it is:

 

	Awareness	Understanding	Acceptance	Commitment
Overdrive	Focus	Curiosity	Passion	Courage
Drive	Attention	Clarity	Trust	Cooperation
Neutral	Acquaintance	Familiarity	Ambivalence	Inertia
Park	Distraction	Confusion	Apathy	Neglect
Reverse	Alienation	Denial	Cynicism	Resistance

 

Think of the top level as creative engagement. For casual reference, we have dubbed it Overdrive. We regard this as an operational definition of engagement in the work place: employees in a state of strategic focus, curiosity, passion, and courage.

This is where you find high-engagement organizations like the Mayo Clinic, Apple Computer, Nordstrom, Google, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, championship sports teams, victorious political campaigns, and the legendary Skunk Works R&D operation of Lockheed Martin.

The next-best level appears one level down. Think of it as active engagement. For the sake of the metaphor, we call it Drive. We regard this as basic employee support: attention, clarity, trust, and cooperation. It is hard to imagine a cohesive, competitive work force in a dynamic market without this basic support.

Importantly, any organization competing on the basis of innovation, service, technology, creativity, culture, research, speed, or quality must minimally be at active or creative engagement. Anything less runs the risk of abrupt defection of key customers or employees and the sudden erosion of market share.

The middle level is Neutral. You can think of it as passive engagement. It is really mediocrity. We regard it as a sense of affiliation, not much more. The descriptors we chose for this level are: acquaintance, familiarity, ambivalence, and inertia. A work force at this level may be enough to survive in commodity or generic markets, but it is inadequate for competing on turf any more demanding than price discounting.

Another level down is Park. Think of it as passive disengagement. It is inferiority, a state of internal, corrosive disregard. Here you will find distraction, confusion, apathy, and neglect. It is dangerous territory. Unfortunately, all too many organizations find themselves here after years of treating their people like depreciable assets. From here, it is imperative to climb out and up, lest you stagnate or even slip further down.

The very worst level we call Reverse. Think of it as active disengagement. We regard it as an operational definition of toxins in the work place. It consists of employees (or even the executive suite, as in the cases of companies whose management was corrupt) in a state of alientation, denial, cynicism, and resistance.

Only the saddest organizations find themselves here. This is where non-represented labor forces are actively seeking to organize, where unions threaten to strike at any perceived offense, or where particularly venal employees engage in sabotage or other demonstrations of contempt. It is possible to climb out—indeed, I have seen it—but it does require a sustained and concerted effort.

 

*           *           *

 

For professional application of the GearBox,

contact us by email at info@arceil.com.

 

 

Coming on Friday

Core Competencies in Communication for Leadership 

 

© Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

A Leader's Robust Credibility Requires Authentic Trust

 

 

(Part Four of a Five-Part Series on Robust Credibility)

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Now we come to the issue of trust. As we have already seen in this series, trust is not the whole of leadership credibility. Two other cornerstones of credibility—organic respect and a bond of affinity between leader and led—are also critical.

(We addressed the bond of affinity last Friday, March 18, and we addressed organic respect last Wednesday, March 16. Just scroll down for both.)

We call the intersection of all three cornerstones robust credibility. It recognizes that the credibility of leadership is larger than everyone else's ordinary, garden-variety credibility, simply because the commitment a leader is asking of people can be so great. It isn't enough that people believe their leader. They must also believe in their leader—in the leader's ability and in the leader's nobility. Otherwise, the spark of leadership goes out.

But just because respect and affinity play key such roles does not mean that trust is unimportant. To the contrary, trust is the granddaddy of all three cornerstones. It enables the other two to be of consequence.

In a sense, trust is a little like the Golden Rule. Both are all-purpose bromides that everyone pays honor to, and well they should, but that sooner or later everyone also honors in the breach.

For most of us, the violations are few, sporadic, mundane, and incidental. We miss a deadline or exceed a budget or run late for a meeting—that kind of thing. Even these misdemeanors can be problematic, however, for they may be a harbinger of relational difficulty, and they may be perceived or regarded with outsize significance. Remember, the first and final judge of trust is always the person who was made vulnerable by trusting, never the person who was emboldened by an investment of trust.

For some other few, and fortunately only a few, the violations rise to the frequent, the routine, the material, the notorious, or even the criminal. These are profiles in deceit, their names familiar headlines of the last decade: L. Dennis Koslowski, Jeffrey Skillings, Bernie Madoff, Richard Scrushy, Joseph Nacchio, Bernard Ebbers, and too many others.

Certainly in the bruising battles of board rooms, trust can inadvertently be the first victim of a power play. Management, after all, must do what it must do, and managers are naturally concerned first and last with their own self-preservation.

The same is true in politics. Rare indeed is the politician who fulfills every campaign promise. (The last U.S. president to do so was James K. Polk, who made only four promises on the 1844 campaign trail—yes, the 1844 campaign trail.) Instead, candidates and officeholders promise what they need to promise, regardless of whether they mean it and regardless of whether they can fulfill it. In contemporary American politics, we would remind Republicans of Medicare Part D and Democrats of Guantanamo.

Moreover, anyone who has been close to the action at a senior level, in either business or government (or, for that matter, any other sector), knows all this to be true. Often, the clash of interests leaves someone else to clean up the mess, and it isn't unusual for that person to walk straight into one of the five classic talk traps. 

So let's bring some clarity to the challenge of trust—first as a general notion, then specifically with regard to leadership.

Generally speaking, trust is just a high regard for the veracity of one's word. It is the confidence and belief that someone is telling the truth. The truth may be objective or subjective; but in either case it must be real. It may be a list of facts about something, or a straightforward description of something. Or it may be a candid statement of intentions and capabilities, or it may be a frank and honest expression of opinion, values, or perspective. Preferably, it is consistently all this.

With regard to leadership specifically, trust is an open window to the soul of the leader. It reveals where the leader is coming from and where the leader is going. It anchors the purpose of the leadership, and it gives real meaning to the work that people are doing. It strips away the mask of command that so many ersatz leaders wear, and it takes everyone, including the leader, to a place of authenticity, humility, empathy, and reality.

Getting to trust is not always easy, for a wide array of pressures conspire against it. Some of them are in the environment: insufficient information, cultural constraints, procedural or legal requirements, poor training. But others, as for Brutus, are in ourselves: pride, greed, shame, fear, insensitivity, arrogance, expediency.

How often have you retreated from speaking truthfully because you didn't want to hurt someone's feelings? Or because you didn't want to reveal your true motive? Or because you sensed duplicity in yourself? Or because you pitied a person? Or because you feared losing face or authority? Or because you didn't want to take the time to explain complex reality? Or because you didn't believe it necessary to justify yourself to someone your junior?

So you paraphrased, you reached for euphemism, you danced the old two-step, you retreated to silence. If there is comfort in numbers, take solace, for you are not the only one.

No leader is perfect, and none has perfect trust. We err when we expect any leader to have it. At best, we merely tease ourselves into believing that a leader who commands our support does have it.

It is especially easy to look past the flaws of leaders with a charismatic appeal: a John F. Kennedy or a Pierre Trudeau, for example. By the same token, it is easy to dwell on the flaws of leaders without that charismatic appeal—a Lyndon Johnson or a Richard Nixon, for example—in spite of the fact that both Johnson and Nixon proved their mettle as leaders by compiling records of prodigious accomplishment, even as both proved morally wanting. 

Organizations and their leaders can go a long way toward building or rebuilding trust by following a few simple precepts:

• Demonstrate trust in the first place by realizing that employees can handle the truth, prefer the truth, and want the truth. So give them the truth. (Another contemporary case study: New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, whose straight talk is popular YouTube video.)
• Recognize that, for yourself as for all of us, the first and biggest step toward relationships of trust is a brutally honest self-examination and commitment to change oneself.
• Abandon the level-by-level cascade of information through the organization, and put the dissemination of strategic information on autopilot. Better yet, at the risk of really mixing metaphors, prefer a rain forest of constantly sharing incremental information so that the work force is always well-informed and always expecting to learn truths about the business from the mouth of senior leadership.
• Appreciate the importance of implicit as well as explicit communication. By implicit communication, we do mean nonverbal messages, but body language is the least of it. Rather, acknowledge the powerful messages implicit in decisions, behaviors, routines, priorities, schedules, agendas, budgets, and so much more.
• Question the smooth talk of any consultant or advisor who suggests you say things that are not completely true. Almost always, you will find yourself or your company in greater difficulty by choosing gentle evasion over hard truth.
• Express yourself and train managers throughout the company to express themselves with simplicity and directness. That is not to say you must dumb down information before sharing it. But certainly remove unnecessary jargon and ambiguity.
• Make few promises, but do everything humanly possible to keep promises that you and your predecessors have made. (Yes, a promise made by your predecessor is your burden to keep.)

Finally, if you are accepting all this as banal, but telling yourself the real problem is the other guy—the CEO, the labor union, the regulatory agency, the news media, the clamor of investors, the recalcitrant employee, the cheap customer—then you have found the real problem, and you have found the one person who is most responsible for the real problem.

You can begin an important conversation with that person first thing tomorrow morning. And we do mean first thing tomorrow morning: gentlemen, when you shaving; ladies, when you are applying your makeup. Be sure to speak up, and be sure to ask the tough questions.

 

Addendum on Friday, 25 March 2011:  A reader in Copenhagen, Denmark wrote to ask whether there was any kind of trust other than authentic. Wasn't "authentic trust" redundant? I replied: "You would hope authentic trust would be redundant, but to so many companies, trust is something they think they can buy through public relations, advertising, media spin, catchlines, smooth talk, etc. I have heard executives say their companies are "trusted by millions" because millions buy their products. Well, yes, but that doesn't mean their leadership is trusted by employees. So that's where I am going with 'authentic.' "

 

Coming on Friday

Why Robust Credibility Requires All Three Cornerstones:

Organic Respect, a Bond of Affinity, and Authentic Trust

 

© Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.