Minding Gaps

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.

Ozzie Guillen's Foul Ball on Fidel Castro

by Thomas J. Lee

Every business manager, government official, and aspiring entrepreneur should sit up and pay rapt attention to the ordeal that Miami Marlins manager Ozzie Guillén is going through this week—and then remember to choose her words very, very carefully.

A native of Venezuela, where he still has a home, Guillén has enjoyed a long and successful career as a baseball player and manager. He managed the Chicago White Sox to a World Series championship. After leaving the White Sox last autumn, he signed with the Miami Marlins, who have just built a shiny new stadium in the Little Havana section of Miami. The city's million-strong community of Cuban Americans is the heart of the Marlins' fan base.

After only five days as Marlins manager, Guillén is interrupting a road trip to fly back to Miami and apologize after telling Time magazine of his admiration for Cuba strongman Fidel Castro. Guillén had gone so far as to say he loved and respected Castro for remaining in power so very long. No mention of machine guns, firing squads, 30-year prison terms, or anything of the sort.

You can read all about it for yourself in these dispatches from the Miami Herald, Bloomberg, and the Associated Press.

Regular readers of the Minding Gaps blog know that I generally advise leaders in business, government, and any other sphere to "say what you think, and think what you say."

However, there are five important boundaries on that advice. I call them the 5Rs. You should speak only when your thoughts are "5R Ready."

So before you say what you think, make sure it is:

• real, which is to say based on observable facts and familiar experience;
• relevant to the challenge at hand;
• respectful of people and their feelings;
• relationally constructive, not destructive; and
• reasonable and rational, by which we mean both within the bounds of reason and logically derived by reasoning.

If it isn't, you should be asking yourself some tough-love questions as to why you're even thinking such things. They're toxic to you and everyone else. Before you speak, get your head together.

Ozzie Guillén's remarks to Time magazine met none of these five tests. They didn't come close.

If I were advising Guillén, I would suggest not going before a bank of microphones. Rather, he should be sitting down with Miami's ex-pat community and just listening to its voices. Then, after coming to a better understanding of Castro, he should apologize without using the words "if I have."

Maybe, just maybe, he can survive. No bets though.

 

© Copyright 2012   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Quote / Unquote: Ralph Waldo Emerson on Hypocrisy

 

Recently we resumed publishing a feature we call Quote / Unquote, which offers a simple, noteworthy quotation on some aspect of leadership, communication, change, or engagement in business. In most cases we also provide context, comment, or questions to stir discussion. Occasionally, however, the quotation stands alone.

Previous posts in this category have included, among others, Peter Drucker on regarding employees as volunteers, Charles Osgood on responsibility, Margaret Mead on teams, Jim Nordstrom on employee engagement, Andre Agassi on decisions, Carl Jung on accountability, Albert Einstein on curiosity, Bejamin Disraeli on the great paradox of leadership, Charles Dickens on electronic communication, and Eric Hoffer on change. For any of those posts, or for any of the other 400 essays in our archives, just enter a keyword in the search box to the right.

Our quotation today comes from the leading voice of American Transcendentalism in the 19th century. The wisdom of this quotation is as valid and as relevant today as ever.

by Thomas J. Lee

Ralph Waldo Emerson, along with Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, laid the cornerstones of Transcendentalist thought in the United States. A reaction to both stolid religious doctrine and objective intellectualism that found no room for intuitive faith, Transcendentalism offered a path for spirituality that resided in the individual's heart and mind. It required no confirmation from either ecclesiastical or academic authority.

A prolific essayist and frequent lecturer, Emerson had a silver tongue for aphorisms, many of which have survived more than a century since his death in 1882. You may recall one from ever-present dorm posters in college: "Do not go where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path, and leave a trail." You can easily find many others in a quick online search.

One of my favorite Emerson quotations speaks to every business manager and, for that matter, any leader in any walk of life:

 

What you do speaks so loud I cannot hear what you say.

 

We have often used this venue to explain that words count, for they set expectations, but that decisions and behavior count even more as communication, for they either validate or invalidate the words.

Moreover, we have asserted that nonverbal communication is far more than it is conventionally thought of: body language, facial expression, and vocal intonation. It is actually the totality of what you think and do. 

To our thinking, many companies (and even more so, politicians) are preoccupied with what they say—to employees, to customers, to shareowners, and to regulators—at the expense of what they intend and do to bring meaning and import to their words. All too often they devote more time to crafting just the right words than to committing themselves to following through.

Take a few moments to reflect on Emerson's quotation, and then consider the following questions:

• Why is it so common to say one thing and do another?
• What are some inherent difficulties in seeking to speak with authority and influence?
• Why can it it be especially problematic to say the "right thing"?
• How often do you fail to live up to your own words? Who is usually the first to notice it? Do you sometimes not notice it at all?
• What built-in constraints can you identify to talking? (You may wish to refer back to our essay of May 20 on ten talk traps.)
• When you think of nonverbal communication, do you think mainly of body language? Facial expression? Vocal intonation? Or something bigger?
• What other kinds of nonverbal communication communicate far more?
• What does your own nonverbal communication say about you? In what ways?
• How are you working to lead with more integrity?

Coming on Monday

Data on Leadership Training

Coming on Wednesday

Types of Authority

 © Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

How to Manage Yourself (Part 4 of 4)

  

(Fourth of Four Parts)

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

*     *     *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Coming on Friday

Ralph Waldo Emerson on Hypocrisy

 

 © Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

How to Manage Yourself (Part 3 of 4)

 

(Third of Four Parts)

by Thomas J. Lee

Minding Gaps is midway through a series of essays on how leaders should manage themselves.

In order to lead successfully, you must first be able to manage, and no one is more important to manage than yourself. Only by managing yourself can you lead others. Pretenders who cannot or do not manage themselves will be discounted and discredited by the people they seek to lead. As potential leaders, they will be lifeless.

In this four-part series, which we began last week, we are breaking down the day-to-day implications of managing yourself. The first installment was on managing your words: what you say, how and where and when you say it, and what you choose not to say. The second installment was on managing your thoughts. Now we turn to managing your own morale: your attitudes toward yourself and others.

 

*     *     *

Imagine a big circle in the sky with three equidistant points: one at 2 o'clock, another at 6 o'clock, and the third at 10 o'clock. Label the 2 o'clock point Attitude, the 6 o'clock point Behavior, and the 10 o'clock point Consequences. Along the rim of the circle, draw curving arrows between the points clockwise, such that Attitude points to Behavior and so forth.

The clockwise direction is important. It makes plain that attitudes do have consequences. It also establishes that behaviors are a critical link between our attitudes and the consequences we experience, and it acknowledges the force of consequences on our attitudes.

We use this simple A-B-C construct as a template for identifying the drivers of performance, both in terms of building people engagement in a team or enterprise and in terms of managing one's own performance. We'll use it today in the latter sense, as we analyze the role of managing your attitude. So we will home in on that 2 o'clock point on the circle.

To get started, think first of the broad categories of attitudes you can have in the workplace. Probably the most obvious category is attitudes toward your own boss. Another obvious category is attitudes toward your peers. Still another obvious one is attitudes toward the people on your team.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Here are some others, a little less obvious: your atttitudes toward your work, toward travel and relocation for your job, toward work-life balance, toward customers, toward competitors, toward your accomplishments, toward the missed opportunities of your career to date (don't kid yourself, we all have them), toward personal and professional growth, and toward the future.

Perhaps the least apparent of all attitudes is your attitude toward yourself. Are you ashamed of yourself? Proud of yourself? Is your attitude toward yourself closer to recrimination or forgiveness? Closer to applause or humility?

Together, all these attitudes can define us through the day-to-day behaviors that they naturally bring about. An attitude of gratitude leads us to say thanks. An attitude of greed leads us to demand more.

Attitudes even have an effect on our health. An attitude of patience lowers our stress and hence our blood pressure, while an attitude of impatience increases both.

One of the critical fulcrums of attitude is empathy: the degree to which we understand and appreciate the perspective and point of view of other people unlike ourselves. What are they thinking? What are they feeling? Are they inclined to trust or distrust us? To be patient or impatient with us? To believe or disbelieve us? To give us the benefit of the doubt, or insist on zero-tolerance accountability? Then we can ask the same questions of ourselves toward them, and we can apply the Golden Rule or ignore it. Big differences in all these.

As you reflect on attitudes, you may wish to wrestle with these questions:

• Just what are your most common attitudes in the workplace toward your boss, your colleagues, and the people on your team?
• Is your atttitude toward your work one of pride or disappointment? Toward its requirements and impositions one of burden or opportunity?
• Do you view your career to date mainly with pride or regret?
• How do you regard your customers? Do you see their requests as interruptions of your work or as the purpose of your work? Are your customers more often irritating or satisfying?
• What about competitors? If you could, would you want to drive them out of business?
• Do you regard your company's professional-development requirements as a burden or an opportunity? Do you think of the future as basically exciting and potentially glorious, or as basically depressing and potentially disastrous?

 

Coming on Wednesday

How Leaders Must Manage Themselves

 (Fourth of Four Parts)

Publisher's Note:

We'll be off Friday and Monday for a family wedding.

We will return on Wednesday the 28th.

 © Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

How to Manage Yourself (Part 2 of 4)

 

(Second of Four Parts)

by Thomas J. Lee

As regular readers know, Minding Gaps defines managing and leading in terms of the work they involve, not in terms of positions on an organization chart. Anyone with responsibility for the work of the other people wears the hats of both manager and leader. That's especially true in an organization that recognizes the need for and embarks on a course of change, growth, or improvement.

As we explained a couple of days ago, the two roles are different but closely related. Managing is the hard work of ensuring performance to the expectations of stakeholders. Leading is the hard work of bringing about big change or a breakthrough performance—first recognizing and identifying the need for it, then envisioning it, then championing it, then supporting it, and then driving it.

In order to lead successfully, you must first be able to manage, and no one is more important to manage than yourself. Only by managing yourself can you lead others. Pretenders who cannot or do not manage themselves will be discounted and discredited by the people they seek to lead. As potential leaders, they will be lifeless.

In this four-part series, which began Monday, we are breaking down the day-to-day implications of this concept. The first installment was on managing your words: what you say, how and where and when you say it, and what you choose not to say. Now we turn our attention to managing your thoughts.

 

*     *     *

 

As we explained Monday, the first thing you must manage is your mouth: your words. The second thing you must manage is your mind and the access to it. What you think has a powerful bearing on what you say and do. People who pollute their minds with cynicism, falehood, scorn, and prejudice invariably emerge as pitiful. No one admires them, and few follow them of their own accord.

My late grandmother had a pillow with this aphorism in needlepoint:

Mind your thoughts, they are the words you say;

Mind those words, they are your deeds from day to day;

Mind those deeds, they are your habits, hard to break;

Mind those habits, they are the soul you ‘lone make.

There's truth as well as rhyme in this verse.

Here are some specific suggestions for managing your mind:

• Cultivate intellectual curiosity. Just as Albert Einstein valued imagination over knowledge, so we should value curiosity over insight. It is more important and of more value to ask good questions than it is to know and remember things, simply because imagination and curiosity are critical to the knowledge and insight of tomorrow. (If you're still not convinced, ask yourself whether you would rather own shares in a company that makes slide rules or a company that makes tablet computers.) Encourage your colleagues and staff to probe deeper and to challenge one another, including yourself.
• Set a good example; question your own assumptions constantly and relentlessly. Assume that you have less information than you need to come to the conclusion you are already at. Ask yourself what additional information you should have and where you can find it. Also, think rigorously about your reasoning process. You can find plenty of online resources that will teach you about errors in logic and reasoning.
• Challenge yourself to think at a higher plane. Sports and hobbies are good and even important parts of your life, but find time also for serious reflection and conversation. I favor journaling. You'll rarely find me without my leather-bound journal within reach. I reserve it for serious observations, thoughts, excerpts and quotes, ideas, and questions to which I want to give more thought. I also keep a date-ordered Word file that functions as a chronicle of my business life. 
• Give yourself regular intellectual nourishment. Read books, serious books—biography, literature, essays, history—as well as magazines like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, and Vanity Fair. Make a point of reading the editorial and op-ed pages of at least one well-regarded and internationally recognized daily newspaper.
• Especially if, like me, your Myers-Briggs score tilts the N side of the iNtutive/Sensory scale, be skeptical of the ideology you bring to any issue. Question your beliefs and the framework of assumptions and expectations you have. Search for data that either supports or undermines them. All of us weave a narrative about people, institutions, and issues. If yours is bereft of objective, provable facts to support it, then it's probably a product of your presumption—or perhaps of someone else's agenda.
• When you feel yourself rushing toward a conclusion, stop and ask yourself (a) what you know for sure about the situation, (b) what you think you know but aren't quite certain, (c) what you have been told but have no independent reason to believe, and (d) what you don't know at all. By thinking a little about those four questions, you'll slow yourself down and refrain from jumping to conclusions.
• Take pride in having not just an open door but an open mind. Make it easy for anyone at any level of the organization to approach you with information or a perspective that challenges your thinking. When someone does approach you, pause to admire her courage, and be predisposed to accepting and believing the information or point of view, if only for the time it takes to investigate.
• Finally, exercise regularly, eat right, and drink moderately. The healthier your body, the healthier your mind.

Just as Grandma Lee's needlepoint suggested, our thoughts are powerful precursors to our words, and our words largely determine our actions and the actions of others within our sphere of influence. Bring a high standard to your thoughts, and the rest of your job suddenly becomes much, much easier.

 

Coming Next Monday

{Numbers} Trust in Management

 

Coming Next Wednesday

How Leaders Must Manage Themselves

(Third of Four Parts)

 © Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

What Really Matters

 

This is too good not to share with you. I am borrowing it from the Character Counts program, which has been embraced by many schools.

                     —TJL                       

 

 

What Really Matters

by Michael Josephson

 

Ready or not, some day it will all come to an end.

There will be no more sunrises, no minutes, hours or days.

All the things you collected, whether treasured or forgotten, will pass to someone else.

Your wealth, fame and temporal power will shrivel to irrelevance.

It will not matter what you owned or what you were owed.

Your grudges, resentments, frustrations and jealousies will finally disappear.

So too, your hopes, ambitions, plans and to-do lists will expire.

The wins and losses that once seemed so important will fade away.

It won’t matter where you came from or what side of the tracks you lived on at the end.

It won’t matter whether you were beautiful or brilliant.

Even your gender and skin color will be irrelevant.

 

So what will matter? How will the value of your days be measured?

 

What will matter is not what you bought but what you built,

not what you got but what you gave.

What will matter is not your success but your significance.

What will matter is not what you learned but what you taught.

What will matter is every act of integrity, compassion, courage or sacrifice that enriched,

empowered or encouraged others to emulate your example.

 

What will matter is not your competence but your character.

What will matter is not how many people you knew,

but how many will feel a lasting loss when you’re gone.

What will matter is not your memories but the memories of those who loved you.

What will matter is how long you will be remembered, by whom and for what.

 

Living a life that matters doesn’t happen by accident.

It’s not a matter of circumstance but of choice.

Choose to live a life that matters.

 

How to Manage Yourself (Part 1 of 4)

(First of Four Parts)

by Thomas J. Lee

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

We define both managing and leading as a function not of position but of work. But that is where the similarity ends.

Managing is the hard work of ensuring performance to the expectations of stakeholders. It usually involves meeting deadlines, coming in under budget, complying with standards or requirements, or producing or selling enough of something.

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

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

Only by managing yourself can you lead others. That's because only those who manage themselves effectively will be taken seriously as leaders. Those who cannot or do not manage themselves will be discounted and discredited by the people they seek to lead. As potential leaders, they will be lifeless.

But what does managing yourself mean in practical, day-to-day terms? What exactly are we saying when we are urging you to manage yourself?

In today's post and three more than follow this week and next, we'll break it down for you.

 

*     *     *

 

The first thing you must manage is your own mouth. It is not true, and never has been true, that you should feel free to say anything that occurs to you. Nor is it true that your role as a manager anoints you as an expert in all things, that your opinion should trump everyone else's.

Sometimes, and probably rather often, you, like anyone else, are wrong. Keep that in mind before you offer your opinion as if you enjoyed the divine right of kings and anyone who would dare disagree is a knave or a jester.

It then follows that you should:

• Develop a judicious sense as to what requires your voice. Speak up on the important things, both strategic and personal, especially when remaining silent would implicitly convey a false or a counter-strategic message. On strategic matters, it's especially important to speak up often on the fundamentals: the organization's core purpose, strategic intent, values, vision, and operating priorities. On personal matters, it's especially important to acknowledge (sometimes privately, sometimes publicly) life-changing events such as a surgery, a graduation, and the like.
• By the same token, recognize the value of stifling thyself. You don't have to be the first to speak and the last to speak. You don't have to talk louder than others. You certainly shouldn't interrupt. Get in the habit of letting others enjoy the spotlight. 
• On the other hand, do use casual conversation as a social lubricant that can break down barriers and bring people together. The weather, vacations, sports, movies, hobbies, and recipes all reach across the hierarchy. Never pass anyone in the hallway without greeting, unless you're passing them constantly and it would be awkward to greet them repeatedly. 
• Apart from an appropriate level of casual conversation, minimize diversionary topics that compete for strategic focus. Most workplace communication should involve work processes, product quality, customer expectations, improvement suggestions, scheduling changes, and so forth. Use this formula: 5/95, or 5 percent of conversation for non-business matters, 95 percent for business-related topics.
• Especially if you live or work in a small or midsize community, remember that you are constantly on display. If you are curt with or dismissive of someone in a service capacity—a waitress or grocery clerk, for example—you can expect to be noticed by someone you don't recognize but who knows who you are.
• Refrain from uttering anything of a cynical nature, regardless of the target. When someone else waxes cynical, call them on it. Here's what I say: "If you have evidence of wrongdoing, by all means offer it up. Let's see it and examine it." (If it's evidence of criminal wrongdoing, it should be presented to the authorities.) "Otherwise let's grant people the benefit of the doubt. Isn't that the Golden Rule at work?"
• Stop rumors in their track. Don't pass them along. Let people learn over time that they can expect to hear reliable, strategic information from you first.
• Avoid subjects that demean people or that polarize them for no reason. Don't bring up politics, religion, or any hint of sexuality or sexual orientation. Don't even think personally or professionally disparaging thoughts, in either content or tone. It goes without saying that adolescent behavior, such as off-color humor or mimicry of ethnic accents or disabilities, is absolutely verboten.
• As a general rule, offer praise in public (unless something about the environment tells you otherwise) but criticism only in private. Even then, seek out details and attenuating circumstances before criticizing, and keep your criticism brief and tightly focused.
• Learn to rely more on questions than commands, but make certain your expectations are clear and agreed upon. Favor open questions—typically how, what, and why—over closed questions. Avoid short-circuiting discussions by offering your own opinion too early.

Not infrequently, the comment that most damages your reputation is a loose, thoughtless, impulsive remark that reveals the character at the core of your being. I'm not asking you to pretend to be someone else. I am asking you constantly to be the best of the person you are. Bring the best you to the party.

Coming on Wednesday

How Leaders Must Manage Themselves

(Second 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.

Quote / Unquote: Rod Tidwell on Primitive Communication

 

It has been a while since we published a feature we call Quote / Unquote, which offers a simple, noteworthy quotation on some aspect of leadership, communication, change, or engagement in business. In most cases we also provide context, comment, or questions to stir discussion. Occasionally, however, the quotation stands alone.

Previous posts in this category have included, among others, Peter Drucker on regarding employees as volunteers, Charles Osgood on responsibility, Margaret Mead on teams, Jim Nordstrom on employee engagement, Andre Agassi on decisions, Carl Jung on accountability, Albert Einstein on curiosity, Bejamin Disraeli on the great paradox of leadership, Charles Dickens on electronic communication, and Eric Hoffer on change. For any of those posts, or for any of the other 400 essays in our archives, just enter a keyword in the search box to the right.

Today we turn to Rod Tidwell, the fictional National Football League wide receiver in the 1996 Cameron Crowe movie "Jerry Maguire," which starred Tom Cruise in the title role, along with Cuba Gooding Jr. as Tidwell and Renée Zellweger as Dorothy Boyd. To my thinking, "Jerry Maguire" should have won the Oscar for best picture that "The English Patient" did win.

by Thomas J. Lee

In "Jerry Maguire," the 1996 movie that Cameron Crowe both wrote and directed, Cuba Gooding Jr. plays Rod Tidwell, a self-centered professional football player, to Tom Cruise's Jerry Maguire, his agent.

Crowe gave Tidwell several powerful lines, one of which is among the most memorable in the history of movie making, for it was Tidwell who said: "Show me the money!"

But another of Tidwell's line's in the same movie is even more relevant to the subject of this blog and to your work as a manager and a leader: 

 

Talking is just a primitive form of communication.

 

One of the fundamental points we have made repeatedly in Minding Gaps over the years is that your words count, but your intent, behavior, and decisions count as much or more. They are your identity, your character. They are you.

Moreover, nonverbal communication is far more than it is conventionally thought of. It is the totality of what you think, say, and do.

To our thinking, many companies (and even more so, politicians) are preoccupied with what they say at the expense of what they intend and do to bring meaning and import to their words. 

Reflect on Tidwell's line about primitive communication, and then consider the following questions:

• Why does he call talking "primitive communication"?
• What are the limitations of talking in business? (You may wish to refer back to our essay of May 20 on ten talk traps.)
• When you think of nonverbal communication, do you think mainly of body language? Facial expression?
• What other kinds of nonverbal communication communicate far more than body language or facial expression?
• What does your own nonverbal communication say about you? In what ways?
• Is it deliberate or accidental?
• How specifically are you working to improve your nonverbal messages?

Coming on Monday

The Vision of a Celebration

 © 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.

Ten Talk Traps Every Leader Must Carefully Manage

Editor's Note: In the past we have presented lists of three and five talk traps. Some of you suggested additional kinds of talk traps, so we grew the list. Here is a revised and larger version incorporating your suggestions. Thank you!

 

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Business leaders are supposed to value communication.

But not all communication is created equal. In tone or substance, the wrong kind of communication often backfires. We all know that, because we have all been there.

Here are ten kinds of "talk traps," along with a bonus. Some have their place and their moment when they serve you well, but at the wrong place or the wrong moment, they gravely compound problems. Others are always ill-advised.

In every case, they are tricky. They can easily send the wrong message or confusing and contradictory messages, and their patronizing or presumptuous attitude can alienate employees or other constituents.

Lots of leaders unwittingly fall into these traps. So here is a little guide.

• Small Talk is useful for exchanging pleasantries and greetings, of course. As a social lubricant, it is usually harmless, and occasionally it can be informative. Be sure you don’t neglect it. But if small talk is the totality of your communication as you wander about the workplace, you’re missing a great opportunity. Small talk is no substitute for relevant, substantive information about the company’s direction and decisions.
• Sunny Talk, also known as Sunshine Talk or Pumping Sunshine, is the tendency to paint a rosy, simpleminded picture on an unrosy situation. As a leader, you’re supposed to be optimistic and resolute. Just don’t be a Pollyanna. Employees who hear an endless stream of Sunny Talk eventually stop listening. Who can blame them? Everyone knows the real story is rarely if ever so wonderful. The problem with Sunny Talk is its patronizing assumption that employees need to be manipulated in order to be influenced. How sad.
• Scare Talk is just the opposite. It constantly paints a picture of woe. It, too, can cause all kinds of problems. Just as the future is never entirely pretty, it’s never completely dismal. Employees know that. By the same token, a leader should have the courage to share unhappy news, as, for example, the reason a big customer is jumping to a competitor. It can be just what’s needed to help sharpen the edge of customer service, product design, or service quality.
• Sweet Talk, also known as Smooth Talk, seduces people into taking shortcuts they probably shouldn't, or to accept a deal or situation that is not in their best interest or the company's best interest. Managers under pressure to meet deadlines, budgets, or quotas are often to blame. At its worst, Sweet Talk can result in shipping goods of poor quality, overlooking safety precautions, violating labor agreements, or disappointing customers—any of which can do severe damage to the company's reputation and cost customers or even human life.
• Smart Talk is the tendency, all too common in both business and politics, to let words substitute for action. You will often see it when someone is trying to sound smarter than he actually is, or when he is pretending to have information or answers that he doesn't have. It backfires when the real information becomes available, which, in the 21st Century, is invariably sooner than the smart talker anticipates. You will also see Smart Talk in action—or, more aptly, inaction—when organizations are averse to the change they must undertake. They find it easier to talk about change than to actually change. They are in a state of paralysis by analysis.
• Simple Talk underestimates, ignores, or glosses over the nuances, uncertainty, difficulty, or general complexity of a situation or challenge. It offers iron-clad directives in spite of frequent circumstances that cry out for exceptions. As a result, it leaves people feeling like cogs rather than individuals, as units rather than persons, as a machine rather than a team. People are inclined just to shrug their shoulders rather than exercise discretion and judgment, and then to blame their management. Often customers will sense the air of resignation. Not good.
• Song and Dance Talk is full of excuses. Any veteran manager or frontline supervisor has heard his share of Song and Dance Talk from underperforming employees. When managers themselves indulge in the same thing, employees quickly realize they are working for a can't-do management team and a never-will company, and they begin looking for the exit.
• Slick Talk is an effort to distract someone from a legitimate concern or to mislead someone about something of legitimate concern to them. It takes its name from high-gloss, high-polish production values that call attention to themselves such as an expensive video, a lavish meeting, a slide presentation with brilliant graphics, or such extensive collateral documentation that a reader doesn't know where to begin. Spin often accompanies it.
• Snarky Talk or Surly Talk frequently rears its ugly head in pressure-cooker situations when patience is wearing thin. This is just the uncivil, demeaning treatment of people. It may consist of only a single word, such as "Brilliant" or "Genius," uttered in a scornful, mocking tone. Or it may consist of extensive unnecessary background information that is implicitly condescending. It may even be a sneering, if looks could kill facial expression. Managers who frequently resort to Snarky Talk are often intellectually intelligent but emotionally unintelligent, perhaps narcissistic and sometimes even belligerent.
• Self Talk is perhaps the most difficult of them all, for no one else ever hears it—but everyone can see its consequences in your choices, behavior, and regard for others. Think of it as covert communication: what you are saying, and how you are saying it, to yourself. What happens to your outward dignity when you are alone in your thoughts? What are you explaining away in a mean-spirited way? How much vitriol do you heap upon yourself? Do you curse yourself? Or are you critical of others for things you excuse or overlook altogether in yourself? Are you ever privately racist or sexist in your thinking? How do you account for personal slights to your ego?

Here's the bonus, though I hesitate to use the same nomenclature. If I did, I suppose it would be Snarl Talk. Like the snarl of tangled cords behind your television or stereo, it refers to the tendency to pack too much information and too many themes into a presentation, publication, or report. Anyone on the receiving end senses a data dump and usually shuts down for want of a tighter focus.

Yet another kind of talk is the leader’s most valuable tool: Straight Talk. But all too often, leaders think they’re talking straight when they aren’t necessarily.

 

Post Script: I couldn't resist using the picture. For the record, I am not suggesting that business leaders are like this caricature of a used-car salesman. Well, a few are, but fortunately only a few. 

 

 

Coming on Monday

Why Is Straight Talk So Difficult?

 © Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Like It or Not, You Are Your Message

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Ralph Waldo Emerson once remarked: "What you do speaks so loudly I cannot hear what you say."

Probably all of us react knowingly to that insightful statement, yet all of us are its intended target, as well.

If you think it is only apt for the other guy, think again. It is you, and I, and he, and Emerson himself, whom Emerson had in mind. We are all our walking message.

Some of the work I do involves communication troubleshooting. Typically, a company will ask me to determine why it has so much misunderstanding or so many rumors. Or it will bring my methodology to bear on issues around open and honest communication. Or it will ask me to work
with eight or ten or twelve particular managers whose technical expertise is great but whose communication skills are not.

On arriving at the scene I often find complicating factors. The process of disseminating information may be creating all kinds of problems. Not uncommonly, the communication competencies of the senior executives who hired me also contribute to the problem. Their own messages may not be entirely clear or credible or cogent, and that leaves other people wondering what they meant or even whether they are serious and sincere.

You can hardly blame the others, then, for interpreting a message for themselves, or for patching it together on the basis of what they think they know to be true.

One common problem is something I call rogue communication. These are just the messages that we send implicitly and usually obliviously. They can be verbal or non-verbal. Typically we are clueless that we are sending them at all. But they are no less powerful because of that. They can have severe consequences, even derailing or prematurely ending a career.

Here are a couple of real-life examples. A former colleague was meeting with the chief executive officer of a Fortune 100 company. The CEO leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on his desk. A moment later, my colleague did the same thing. That was a mistake. Deliberately or not, he was communicating his own sense of parity with the CEO, and the executive most certainly did not share it.

Come to think of it, I wonder whatever happened to Ben.

Another time, the board chairman of a major corporation made some unprepared after-dinner remarks to a weekend retreat for the company's senior executives. Afterward the executive vice president rose to cap the evening's proceedings and send everyone on their way. In referring to the chairman's remarks a moment earlier, he said: "I think what John was trying to say was . . . " A few weeks later Fred decided to retire early.

More commonly, we send messages day in and day out about our priorities, concerns, and values. Calling someone or not calling someone can send such a large message to that person that it overwhelms whatever was said on the call. Positive messages such as a token of friendship or appreciation, a gentle word of reassurance, a note of gratitude or consolation, or an appropriately light tough on the elbow can be remembered for years.

By the same measure, unfortunate messages such as a sharp tone of voice, delays without explanations, an ill-timed smirk, offensive humor, a pattern of excuses, evasive eye contact, the hurried neglect of etiquette, or an appearance of boredom can all send messages that are taken very seriously. They are rarely thoughtful and intended, and they may not even be real. But their mere perception makes them real.

Here's the thing: The people who are doing the reading, listening, or observing get to decide what the message is. For all intents and purposes, the message as sent is immaterial. The message as received is what counts.

All of us are, as Emerson observed, what we do as well as what we say. When the two collide, what we do speaks the loudest. And all of us—you, I, and the other guy—need to keep that in mind.

 

Coming on Friday

Beware These Ten Talk Traps

 

©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

{Numbers} Effective Managers Repeat Themselves

 

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

Ever since the pioneering work of Frederick Winslow Taylor a century ago, managers have been trying to do more with less. Efficiency is good.

For many managers, that is certainly true of communication. They want to say something once and be done with it. Especially in a time when we are all assaulted daily by thousands of messages—emails, advertising, announcements, complaints, questions, Google searches, conversations, requests for this and that, the news—brevity is the soul of clarity as well as wit.

There's just one nagging issue: Does it work? Can we truly say something only once to someone and seriously expect to communicate well?

The answer isn't so simple.

In some circumstances it can work. Probably all of us remember hearing some particularly pleasant or hurtful words on the job: "We want you to start work next Monday" or "You have to go to Fresno again" or "We won the Smith account" or "Everyone has to take a pay cut."

On the other hand, when I am troubleshooting poor communication, one-off instructions often emerge as a problem. For routine information, saying something once is tantamount to never saying it at all. People don't remember hearing things that they were told just last week.

Now comes intriguing new research on the importance of redundant communication. A study reported in the current (May 2011) issue of Harvard Business Review found that managers who deliberately repeat themselves are significantly more effective than managers who don't. The key word there is deliberately.

The researchers noticed that the effective managers were building redundancy into their communication plans. Even before they communicated the news the first time, they were planning how to do it a second and even a third time.

The pattern was especially pronounced among managers without formal authority. These days, that includes more managers than ever before, as companies form ad hoc project teams for special assignments and limited periods of time.

The study of six companies shows that 21 percent of managers without formal authority routinely sent redundant messages—for example, following up a face-to-face meeting or a telephone conversation with an email—while only 12 percent of managers with formal power did likewise, according to Paul Leonardi of Northwestern University and Tsedal Neeley of Harvard Business School.

The powerless managers got things done faster and with fewer hiccups, presumably as a result of the redundant messaging, the professors said. Meanwhile, managers with official power tend to rely on their authority. They apparently assumed that employees would just follow their directions, and they believed that communicating once was enough.

"We’re so bred to believe that clarity is the key to being a better communicator," said Leonardi. "The literature says pick the best medium for the [message], and anything else is wasteful. This research suggests that’s not true. You need to use multiple media.

"It’s not necessarily just about clarity. It’s about making your presence felt. Employees are getting pulled in many directions and reporting to lots of people and getting tons of communications. So how do you keep your issues top of mind? Redundancy is a way to do that."

For many of you, this will confirm your lingering suspicion and our intuition. You know from your personal lives the importance of repetition. After all, how many of us are content to hear our spouses say "I love you" only once?

If there is anything I have learned over the years, it is that people are not robots, and that business is all about people. As advertisers and politicians seem to have known all along, managers should repeat themselves. I say:  Managers should repeat themselves. I say . . .

 

Coming on Wednesday

Rogue Communication

 

©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

When Leaders Just Cannot Speak Clearly

 

 

by Thomas J. Lee

A client who truly understands the energy that clear, compelling, credible communication brings to leadership has a memorable way of explaining it.

"A funny thing happens to leadership in the absence of communication," Charlene likes to say. "Nothing."

That sums it up fairly well.

Sometimes, though, a leader comes along who has many other important qualities—passion, resolve, intensity, vision, knowledge—but who cannot articulate his thoughts in a coherent sentence. Similarly, sometimes a leader has a knack for saying things that are unintentionally funny, in the manner of Yogi Berra.

Anyone who has lived in or near Chicago for the last 22 years is familiar with the phenomenon. Richard M. Daley, the city's mayor since 1989 who will leave office on Monday, regularly manages to mangle and tangle the English language out of all recognition. Often you don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Consider some of the things Mayor Daley has said:

Insisting to reporters that public scrutiny doesn't bother him: "Go scrutinize yourself! I get scrootened every day, don't worry, from each and every one of you. It doesn't bother me."

In the heat of debate over the obligation of railroads to make street crossings safer: "They have a responsibility, they can't get away with it. I mean, they stole the land from the Indians. They took all that land. They got it free from us."

Responding to appeals for a business casual dress code in City Hall: "If somebody takes their tie off, I'm not going to take my tie off. If somebody takes their pants off, I'm not going to take my pants off."

Asked to clarify his position on capital punishment: "I'm pro death! I'm a death-penalty opponent!"

In the wake of concerns about poor sanitation in restaurants: "If a rat is on your sandwich, you hope to know it before. If a mouse is on your salad, it's common sense."

Replying to complaints about police brutality to protesters: "It's just a group of people, yuppies and yippies and hoppies or whatever they call them, I don't know. Who are they? Are they worried about the moon coming out or something? The sun is changing and I don't know. This is unbelievable."

There are countless more.

Daley's father, the late Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley—they were not Sr. and Jr. as their middle names differed—was similarly afflicted. He was legendary for saying: "The policeman isn't there to create disorder. The policeman is there to preserve disorder."

And: "I resent insinuendo." And: "No man is an Ireland." And: "We will reach greater and greater platitudes of achievement."

The thing is, few Chicagoans ever doubted either mayor's loving commitment to the City of Chicago. I didn't live here when the elder Daley was mayor, but I have been here throughout the tenure of the younger Daley. This city is far cleaner, far prettier, far safer, far nicer, and generally far better now than it was 22 years ago. I invite all of you to visit and see for yourself. You'll love it.

I tell business managers: You need not be eloquent, but you must speak, and the more clarity, cogency, and credibility you can bring to your communication, the more energy your leadership will have.

Every rule has the exceptions that prove it. Somehow, both Mayors Daley managed to wreck the English language with abandon, but no one ever doubted what they meant or how much they cared.

 

Coming on Monday

{Numbers}     Repeat Thyself. Repeat thyself. 

©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

Counterfeit Currency of Leadership

by Thomas J. Lee

Just as money is the medium of exchange for any transaction, so communication is the medium of exchange for any transformation in business.

Apart from barter, no transaction can take place without money. Apart from fiat, no transformation can take place without communication.

Moreover, just as the money that enables a transaction must be credible and legitimate, so the communication that enables transformation must be credible and legitimate.

In either case, anything that is not is counterfeit.

For leaders, counterfeit currency in communication buys only alienation, denial, cynicism, and resistance. That's a bad deal at any price.

 

Coming on Friday

Precisely What Is Employee Engagement?

 ©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

{Numbers} Silicon Valley CEOs Work in Glass Houses

 

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

Glassdoor.com compiles data on compensation, cultures, and chief executives at companies around the world. Anyone can access the data for almost any company of significant size.

Oddly, the employee approval ratings for CEOs of high-tech companies are the only ones that regularly make news. That creates public accountability for one industry. However, it leaves employees, investors, and customers of companies in other industries to do their own research. You can do it, but it's laborious.

In the most recent period, outgoing Google CEO Eric Schmidt ranks highest among his Silicon Valley peers: 96 percent of Google employees approved of his performance as chief executive. Apple CEO Steve Jobs, on medical leave, is right up there, too, at 95 percent.

In contrast, Steve Ballmer at Microsoft came in at only 40 percent, a decrease of six points from his approval one year earlier.

Yahoo's Carol Bartz saw her approval drop the most, from 77 percent to just 50 percent. John Donahoe of eBay improved the most, from 24 percent a year ago to 46 percent now.

A few questions to reflect upon:

• How would well-publicized employee approval ratings of leaders in your company affect their leadership?
• Have you checked your CEO's approval rating on glassdoor.com?
• Should leaders make decisions in fear or favor of employee approval? 

 

Coming on Wednesday

Counterfeit Currency of Leadership

 

©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    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.

Sydney Lumet (1924-2011) and My Favorite Movie

by Thomas J. Lee

Sidney Lumet, the legendary Hollywood director whose 12 Angry Men is nothing less than an American masterpiece, died today at the age of 86. His passing gives us the occasion to comment, once again, on a magnificent movie that should be studied by everyone with an interest in leadership.

I have watched 12 Angry Men dozens of times, owing to the fact we often use it in a workshop on leadership communication. Even after so many viewings, I continue finding more nuances and insights on leadership whenever I watch it again. It is my favorite movie of all time.

Regular readers may recall my 2009 essay on 12 Angry Men. Of the 400-plus essays residing on this blog, it is easily the most frequently accessed of all. Every day, people all over the world read it.

Allow me to quote myself: 

To my thinking, no film captures the challenge and opportunities of leadership better than 12 Angry Men, especially the original 1957 black-and-white movie, based on the play by Reginald Rose, directed by Sydney Lumet, and starring Henry Fonda and a cavalcade of other stars: Martin Balsam, Ed Begley, Lee J. Cobb, Jack Klugman, E.G. Marshall, and a half-dozen more.

This taut drama—from start to finish, it runs only 96 minutes—is set entirely in a sweltering jury room of the courthouse in a big American city. The story itself is thrilling, and the acting is masterful. But best of all, 12 Angry Men is a case study in Socratic leadership—in other words, leadership by means of asking provocative, probing questions that compel people to rethink their assumptions and beliefs. . . .

The movie is all about leadership through effective communication. Indeed, many organizations use it to facilitate discussion around these issues. (One shortcoming is the exclusively white male cast. At the time this movie was filmed, U.S. trial juries were commonly so selected.) I strongly recommend viewing it.

When you watch the movie, notice that Juror No. 8 has no official authority beyond that of the other jurors. He isn't even the foreman. Yet he persuades his peers to reconsider. That is a good reminder that leadership doesn't require a title.

Then observe that the strength of his argument arises not from overbearing, omniscient certitude but rather from intellectual humility. What he doesn’t know is every bit as important as what he does know. His earnest reservations, rather than his earnest presumption of guilt, give energy to his argument and cause the other jurors to think more critically. His rhetorical technique consists largely of questions. We term this approach “inquiry-led dialogue.” It comes to leaders as a counterintuitive but powerful tool.

Lumet's production of 12 Angry Men is especially compelling for its illustration of empathy, an underappreciated but critically important instrument of leadership. Empathy enables a leader to understand the position, perspective, and ultimately the purpose of people who may choose to acknowledge and follow a leader—or not. It is no exaggeration to say that the deepest connections between leader and led absolutely require empathy. 

Lumet knew that the first duty of any moviemaker was to entertain, and he did that splendidly. But he also preferred to produce movies that went "one step further," as he put it. They are movies that force viewers to examine their own conscience in search of greater truth. No one did that better than Sydney Lumet.

Do, do, do watch 12 Angry Men again soon, and if you have never seen it, do, do, do make it a high priority.

 

Coming on Monday

The Hidden Barrier to Change

 

© Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

The Road from Obligation to Opportunity

by Thomas J. Lee

Whenever you feel burdened by an obligation, simply reframe it as an opportunity.

Set aside your misgivings about the obligation. Disregard any questions as to whether this obligation really belongs on your shoulders.

Instead, view the situation as an opportunity to make a lasting impression, to lend a helping hand, to rise to the occasion, to be someone special, to make the world a better place for us all.

You will find it to be a liberating experience. It removes the oppressive weight of must, and it lifts your spirit with can.

Suddenly, as if by magic, the burden and weight of obligation disappears, and a bequest, a fortune, of glorious opportunity presents itself. You quickly realize that the world is indeed a better place, in no small part because of you.

 

Coming on Monday

The Hidden Barrier to Change

 

© Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

The Masters, Golf, and Other Bad Metaphors for Business

by Thomas J. Lee

This week the best golfers in the world converge on Augusta, Georgia, to compete in The Masters. It is a special event in sports. You need not be a golfer—I myself haven't swung a driver in 22 years—indeed, you need not even enjoy sports to find special beauty in the magnolias, dogwoods, and azaleas of the Augusta National Golf Course and in the glorious traditions of The Masters.

There's just one problem with major golf tournaments and with golf in general. They give license to so many executives to use this wonderful game as a metaphor, absurd though it is, for business performance.

Sooner or later almost every manager will find himself in a town-hall meeting or a skip-level luncheon or an after-dinner speech when a senior executive—his own boss, perhaps—begins to wax eloquent on golf as the perfect comparison for business. Maybe the speaker will even step away from the lectern and pretend to size up that 20-foot putt for a birdie on the 18th hole, and then go on to expound on the parallels between golf and business. That's what we mean by using golf as a metaphor for business.

By metaphor we are not referring to clichés, which are another problem altogether. A cliché is just an overused and typically tin-sounding word or phrase that has lost whatever zest it once had. Business is full of clichés, too: walking the talk, win-win solution, thinking outside the box, synergy, paradigm shift, pushing the envelope, today's highly competitive marketplace, proactive, a perfect storm, leverage—and we're just getting started. There are hundreds of them, Lord help us all.

In contrast, metaphors can be good or bad. A metaphor (and its like-as cousin, the simile) is a comparison for the sake of shedding light on something. Executives who use golf as a metaphor for business success are trying to be creative, and that is fine. We like creativity.

Some common metaphors in business work well. Low-hanging fruit refers to easy, early solutions. A well-oiled machine suggests an operation running smoothly. Tip of the iceberg conjures up a superficial observation. What these metaphors lack in creativity they make up in clarity and color.

Golf, however, is a perfectly awful metaphor in business. It is awful because there are no real parallels between performance in business and performance in golf. What matters in business has nothing to do with what matters in golf. Looking for parallels between business and golf is like looking for similarities between mollusks and molecules. 

I do realize that millions of people enjoy golf, and that is certainly their privilege. They may think of it as a social sport because they golf in twosomes and foursomes, and afterward they enjoy lunch or drinks and dinner. Moreover, many parents (including my own) have taken delight in teaching their children to golf, and it becomes a wonderful family activity. All good.

But the sport of golf is a solitary enterprise. It requires intense concentration, hushed silence, and perfect form, and it is so very leisurely. It isn't noisy or messy, and it certainly isn't fast. It does not require collaboration or innovation or engagement or teamwork or agility or communication of any sort—all of which are essential components of business performance. Conducting an orchestra comes closer to running a business than golf ever can. For that matter, a Saturday night jazz quartet is more like a business than a Saturday morning foursome is.

Another bad metaphor is "human capital." Companies commonly refer to the people who work for them as human capital. Please.

I understand the different kinds of capital: economic, physical, intellectual, social. But something repugnant, thoroughly repugnant, happens when we juxtapose the words "human" and "capital."

Substitute the word "chattel" for the word "capital" and you begin to see it. Then take another small step to "indentured servitude" and—well, you can see where I am going with this. As every youngster in the United States learns in school, the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment were supposed to put an end to thinking of people as capital. It's about time business caught up.

Similarly, many companies think they are saying something good and decent and noble when they tout employees as "our most important asset."

I am all in favor of declaring that people are important, but they are not and never can be an asset. An asset is something you own and control. No business owns its people, and when a company thinks it can control people, it is in for a rude surprise.

The fact is that any employee can quit and go to work for the competition any day of the week. A machine or a forklift or a trademark cannot do that. They are assets. People are people. People have legs and pride and souls, and they can walk across the street. They do, too.

One other metaphor, so innocent and even noble in its intent, is actually problematic as well. It is likening the people of a business to a family. "We're just like a family around here," so many CEOs are in the habit of saying.

This metaphor has the same issue as golf has: It just isn't true. An office or a factory may feel like a family because you spend so much time with the same people, and perhaps everyone even has everyone else's back. That is fine as far as it goes, but sooner or later the similarities end.

Here's the bucket of ice water: Families are forever. Companies are not. Families thrive on love and devotion. Companies thrive on revenue and income.

It is true that divorce can ruin a family just as bankruptcy can ruin a business. But companies must make tough but honorable decisions that can have devastating repercussions for some employees. Families make tough but honorable decisions so they can stay together, laugh together, love together. The two are not and cannot be the same.

I probably sound like a curmudgeon today, and that is not my intent. I applaud anyone who struggles with articulating a vision or values or the essence of a workplace. It isn't easy, I know.

But all four of these metaphors are bad because they are emphatically untrue or because they inadvertently undermine the dignity of people or because they promise something they cannot always deliver. With just a little more thought, you can do better.

So enjoy The Masters this week. Enjoy as much golf as you can this summer. Just don't think of this wonderful sport as a metaphor for anything in business, especially performance and success. And the next time someone uses one of those other metaphors, give him a link to this blog.

 

Coming on Friday

From Obligation to Opportunity

 

© 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. 

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.

Robust Credibility Requires Respect, Affinity, and Trust

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

 

by Thomas J. Lee

By now you understand that the challenge of building leadership credibility goes well beyond walking the talk. Simple credibility—doing what you say you will do—is enough for most people, but not enough for anyone who aspires to lead.

Leaders must reach for something greater: robust credibility, or the intersection of authentic trust, organic respect, and the bond of affinity. Over the preceding ten days, we have explored each of these three cornerstones in greater depth; just scroll down to read those essays.

Robust credibility acknowledges that the credibility of leadership is large because the commitment a leader asks of people is large. It isn't enough that people believe their leader. They must also believe in their leader—in her ability and in her nobility—lest the flame of leadership begin to flicker.

To appreciate the importance of all three components—trust, respect, and affinity—ask yourself what attitude would predominate in the absence of each. So visualize a big Venn diagram in the sky with three circles that partially overlap. In the middle, where all three circles converge, we see the robust credibility that is the product of all three. One or even two of these three cornerstones is not enough. Leaders need all three.

Let's take a moment to review these three fundamental components briefly.

By trust, we are thinking of just the veracity of a leader's word. If you trust someone you believe that the person is telling the truth. The truth may be a factual depiction of reality. Or it may be a sincere statement of intent, or a frank and honest description of one's opinion, values, or perspective.

By respect, we have in mind a high regard for the leader's command, control, and competence: his ability, energy, initiative, and perseverance. 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. This shared well-being takes the form of mutual interests, needs, and concerns. What is important to the leader must be, or must become, important to the people she would lead, and vice versa.

Now in the absence of trust, people who would otherwise be inclined to follow a leader are left in a state of doubt. In the absence of affinity, they are left in a state of opposition. And in the absence of respect, they are left in a state of skepticism.

Many organizations have such weak and ineffectual leadership that they are running low on all three. Thus their people are in a state of full rebellion: doubt, opposition, and skepticism. In the last few weeks alone, I have worked with three companies that recently received low engagement scores on employee surveys. When we begin digging into those surveys, I wouldn't be surprised to find a lot of doubt, opposition, and skepticism.

But even just one of those three is a reflection of less than robust leadership credibility. It alone can stymie the force of leadership, and it often does. Leaders require robust credibility: trust, respect, and affinity, and they cannot get any of it by ordering people to show it.

 

Coming on Monday

March Madness and Leadership Communication 

 

© 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.

A Leader's Robust Credibility Requires 'Organic' Respect

 

 

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

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Probably everyone of a certain age (ahem) can remember the late comedian Rodney Dangerfield for his on-stage persona—"I can't get no respect, I'm tellin' ya"—and probably everyone who has ever aspired to lead can relate to it just a little, too.

As a leader, you know that your team or organization must change to meet the demands of the future. You naturally want to show the way. You believe you are speaking truth, and you are confident that you have the best interests of your people at heart. Still, it can seem as if no one is hearing and heeding your call.

Part of that may be just a matter of time and place, but part of it may also be insufficient respect. Not respect as in esteem or admiration—yes, we know you are an awesome dude—but organic respect, or the recognition by others, on their terms, of your good judgment, your seriousness of purpose, and your capacity to make things happen.

In this sense, organic respect is one of the three cornerstones, along with authentic trust and a bond of affinity, of the leader's robust credibility. In the colloquial, it is often referred to as "chops" or "street cred." In more elevated terms, it is akin to what people mean by the term "gravitas." It is the credibility of being taken seriously.

Think of this organic respect as a high regard for the leader's command, control, and competence: ability, energy, knowledge, experience, initiative, judgment, and perseverance, all of which add up to situational authority. People must recognize and respect this situational authority in order to believe a leader is capable of accomplishing whatever he is setting out to accomplish. Otherwise they would be foolish to put themselves on the line for the leader.

The leader's capability, at the foundation of this organic respect, may be a matter of legal or other official authority, or of a demonstrated track record, or stirring oratory, or technical skill, or political clout, or negotiating savvy, or adequate resources brought to bear, or a compelling theory, or personal influence, or a bedrock of values, or even raw power.

Whether, and if so to what extent, people accord you this respect is up to them. They have an open choice of whether to follow any leader and, if they choose, of which leader they will follow. Because it is up to them, because it is completely discretionary, and because it cannot be wished into being, we call it organic respect.

The sources of this organic respect are largely functional. They include mastery of subject matter, a solid reputation, the ability to speak at length with deep insight and without extensive notes, perhaps public or professional recognition through honors and awards, the dedication to a cause, and productivity and sheer hard work.

It is probably also true that personal attributes come into play here. Reputable academic research has demonstrated that people are more likely to acknowledge expertise and commitment among other people who visibly resemble themselves. That is consistent with my own experience, but I frankly find it sad.

All leaders encounter great barriers to this respect, and they must work their way around each one. The barriers include the natural inertia of people before a leader emerges, the welter of cynicism that has accumulated because of inadequate leadership in the past, and the technology that keeps us apart from one another and unable to look at each other in the eye—and that is just for starters. Leaders must work around all those barriers.

You must also avoid putting any more barriers of your own in your path. These self-induced barriers can include such things as rash decisions, thoughtless comments, off-color (and so-called) humor, taking all the credit for oneself and placing all the blame on others, any violation of professional standards or of the law, risky or dangerous or abusive behavior, favoritism, shortcuts around requirements of a process, and double standards. Avoid all that stuff. It's toxic.

Organic respect by people for your leadership is absolutely essential to your success. Any leader disregards it at her peril. Recognize it and nurture it, and it will pay dividends for a long time to come.

 

Coming on Friday

A Closer Look at Affinity

 

© Copyright 2011   Thomas J. Lee   Arceil Leadership Ltd.

Just What Is Executive Bearing, and Why Does It Matter?

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Have you ever noticed an odd thing about highly successful leaders? A great many of them have something in common. Not all of them, certainly, but enough of them to be noticeable.

A curiously high percentage of senior executives, retired generals, three-term U.S. senators, judges, network television anchors, Cabinet secretaries, college presidents, law-firm partners, diplomats, and McKinsey consultants just seem to have the ineffable bearing of leadership.

They may not have the drop-dead good looks of Jon Hamm on Mad Men, or the gentility of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., or the captivating beauty of Julianna Margulies on The Good Wife, or the silver hair of U.S. Senator Dick Lugar, but they definitely stand out.

Something about them proclaims they aren't typical. Women and men alike, many of these leaders just stand an inch closer to the polished, the classy, perhaps even the distinguished.

Whatever it is that sets them apart, it is much more than appearance or posture or anything else so insubstantial. By bearing, I have in mind a sense of being that reaches for something profound, something important. After all, anyone can put on a neatly pressed suit and a polished pair of shoes, but not just anyone can invoke values, describe a necessary future, and inspire people to do the extraordinary. What so many highly effective leaders have in common is a way of talking, behaving, and relating to other people that enables, drives, and sustains their impact as leaders.

Before we go any further, let's stop and quickly admit the obvious. I am not suggesting that these leaders are perfect or even uncommonly close to it. No leader is, and in any case that is not the point. Indeed I have argued previously that the popular expectation of perfection in leaders is unrealistic. We need to back away from it.

Moreover, it is equally true that thousands of good leaders lack this bearing, so it must be a nice-to-have thing, not a must-have. For every Mitt Romney stepping out of the pages of a Brooks Brothers catalogue and striding to the board room, you can find a Mark Zuckerberg in T-shirt and jeans and in need of a comb. We know that.

Still, this executive bearing is seen so often that only the cynical and the blind among us would deny it. So let's explore it. Here are nine cornerstones of executive bearing that I believe set the highly effective leader apart from the rest:

 

• Communication (Verbal). Communication is the energy of leadership. Nothing is more important than the ability to speak with clarity and to listen with interest and sincerity. Regardless of position, a putative leader who lacks this capability is merely keeping the chair warm. You cannot expect people to read your mind, and you cannot expect to read anyone else's mind. You need not be as eloquent as Ronald Reagan or Winston Churchill, but you must learn how to express yourself and how to listen with genuine concern, intensity, and curiosity.
• Communication (Nonverbal). By nonverbal communication, we are referring to far more than body language and facial expression. They can send messages, for sure, but they pale in comparison with the nonverbal A-B-C-D-E communication of attitudes, behaviors, character, decisions, and empathy. Every leader must become fully aware of the myriad ways she communicates implicity and unintentionally, every day, all day long. Behaviors so incidental as where and with whom you eat lunch are apt to send important social cues that ricochet through your organization.
• Appearance and Image. This part is about the visual, insubstantial as it may be. The basics are good grooming, neat and clean attire, generally looking nice enough to meet with the CEO. Impeccable manners are elementary, too. For gentlemen, that entails opening doors, yielding on entering and exiting elevators, even pulling out chairs. And don't even think of disrespecting or disregarding anyone in a position of service: waiters, chambermaids, customer-service personnel, custodians. To the contrary, be sure to greet everyone with a smile and pleasant acknowledgement. This is the ethic of recipocity as it applies to leadership.
• Conviction and Confidence. Leaders deal with complexity in many forms: ambiguity, nuance, multiplicity, change, and uncertainty. A leader's self-confidence helps followers cope with that complexity. While there is a fine line between self-confidence and arrogance, the former is a strength when borne of conviction to core principles, whereas the latter is a severe character flaw that has doomed leaders for millennia. The thing to recognize and remember is the importance of core principles as the only true foundation for conviction and confidence.
• Respect and Humility. Leaders have to be accountable for the work of the organization they lead, but no leader deserves full credit for the organization's success. Indeed, without the earnest support of your people, no leader is a leader. It follows that any leader worth the title must fully respect the work of the team. You can accomplish just about anything as long as you accept all the blame and give away all the credit.
• Congruence and Authenticity. It's one thing to pay rhetorical tribute to lofty values, another thing to think through their implications and then honor those values consistently. Take diversity. Does it merely mean putting an African-American on the cover of your annual report or in your TV commercials? Or does it mean making certain that your senior management team has diversity of color, gender, and nationality? Still better, does it extend also to project teams, promotions, succession planning, and restructurings without regard to age, educational pedigree, current assignment, employment grade level, shift, and so much more? 
• Presence and Accessibility. There are four types of presence and four types of accessibility: the physical, the intellectual, the social, and the emotional. Leaders need to understand and appreciate all four. Each of the four conveys powerful messages of inclusion or exclusion.
• Clarity of Purpose. In the private sector, most senior executives will tell you their primary purpose is to ensure a substantial return to investors. That is an essential thing, needless to say, but the organization's purpose must be viewed through the lens of the customer, not the lens of the investor. It must drive the repeated decisions of customers to start or continue to do business with this organization. Without that, the return to investors is moot.
• Support and Servancy. Unfortunately few managers are familiar with the concept of servant leadership. It is the notion that the leader serves the followers, not the other way around. It is President John F. Kennedy's famous dictum—"Ask not what your country can do you; ask what you can do for your country"—applied to leaders with regard to the people they would lead. 

There's more to the puzzle, of course, but these are the cornerstones. Devote time and attention to these nine attributes of executive bearing, and you will be well on your way to greater impact as an exceptional leader. 

 

Coming on Friday

Our Growing Attention Spans

 

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

It's Raining Like Cats and Dogs . . . and Alligators and Bears

   

by Thomas J. Lee

Here is a little hierarchy for prioritizing issues you face, either personally or professionally. We use the order of the alphabet—D, C, B and A—and the imagery of four animals. We list them in reverse order of their urgency.

Dogs, the least urgent of the four, are issues that don't seem to be issues at all. Think of old Fido, curled up on the rug in front of the fireplace or greeting you with a slobbering kiss when you come home from work. He doesn't demand much attention, but if you don't take him out for a walk when he wants to go out for a walk, you'll have to clean up the mess on the living-room carpet. As issues, dogs remind you that you must look after the basics.

Cats are issues that would be evident if you ever saw them. You don't see them, because they would just as soon hide from you on the basement window sill. As issues, cats remind you that you must always be vigilant for what you don't see and don't know. That can be far more important than what you do see and do know.

Bears are issues that will overtake you if you are going downhill. As long as you are going uphill, you have the advantage. As issues, bears remind you to take on the big challenge, to think bigger than the competition is thinking, and always to be moving upward and forward. Remember, a grizzly is nothing to mess with.

Alligators, the most pressing of the four, are issues that are constantly nipping at your feet. Their snouts can reach your hands and arms. Moreover, alligators cannot regurgitate, so once they grab hold of you, you're finished. As issues, alligators remind you to keep a constant lookout and always be a step ahead.

Now here's a little exercise. First, list the issues that are confronting you and your organization. Then put each of them into one of these four categories.

Now ask yourself: What do you you realize that you didn't realize before?

 

Coming on Wednesday

 Executive Presence and Why It Matters

 

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

Leaders Need Followers More Than Followers Need Leaders

 

by Thomas J. Lee

The popular revolt across the Middle East—from Tunisia to Egypt to Bahrain to Yemen and now to Libya—holds a compelling lesson for leaders everywhere, in business no less than government.

It is just this: As a leader, you need followers. Indeed, you need followers more than they need you. Without followers, you cannot lead.

Think about it. A leader without followers has no one to lead. Therefore she is not able to lead, and thus she is not a leader in any meaningful sense of the word. She may retain the official title of leader—chief executive officer, general manager, site leader—and she may have the compensation and perquisites of the office, but she has no functional consequence as a leader, because no one is choosing to listen and to heed her.

Let's personalize this for you. If your own putative followers decide to follow someone other than you, then the person they begin to follow—another executive, a junior manager, a Six Sigma black belt, perhaps even a union steward or organizer—becomes their de facto leader. You become irrelevant. Leadership, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

All this means that leadership itself is a matter of work, not position. It is what you do. It is not the title on your business card. Your position or title does not make you a leader. Your work does. Not the work that earned you a promotion, but the work of connecting with people.

Moreover, to lead successfully, the work you do must predominantly be the work of reinforcing, sustaining, and energizing your connection with the people you seek to lead. If the connection is weak, the relationship is weak, and if the relationship is weak, then there is no real recognition of you as a leader.

That in turn means you must relate to people effectively as a leader—informing them of core truths, influencing them to think differently, inspiring them to want something more, and instilling them with the courage and drive to get it.

If you are unable to do that, you will never be able to touch the hearts and minds of people, and you will never be able to change anything.

It's pretty much that simple.

 

Monday

A template for prioritizing issues

 

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

Facebook and Force Multipliers

by Thomas J. Lee

Those of us in the United States, Europe, and the Commonwealth take Facebook for granted. We use it mainly for social banter and individual expression. We post our whereabouts, family pictures, interesting articles or videos, and occasionally a political sentiment. We find old friends, and we keep in touch with far-flung relatives.

But in countries with despotic governments, Facebook is that and much more. There it is also the equal of Tom Paine's printing press. People use it seriously, frequently, even predominantly for political expression and organization. We certainly saw that in Tunisia and Egypt over the last few weeks, and it appears we are also beginning to see it in Bahrain, Libya, and Yemen.

All this says something wonderful about the security of our freedom and hopeful about freedom elsewhere, but also something unsettling about our own lack of appreciation for all that we enjoy. And it says something that ought to be worrisome to despotic governments everywhere.

Military parlance has a term for the effects of phenomena like Facebook: force multiplying. It refers to the outsize impact of anything that leverages something else. Force multipliers need not be social media or even technology. Commonplace force multipliers are the weather, logistics, topography, espionage, training, communication lines, morale, timing, missionary cause, strategy and tactics, and more.

You can use this metaphor to identify and cultivate force multipliers for your own leadership, in whatever context (a business enterprise, a neighborhood or homeowners association, a church, a social organization, a Scout troop, PTA, athletic team or club, a political campaign).

What force multipliers are already leveraging the impact of your leadership and engagement? What potential force multipliers could you use to enhance your leadership?

Conversely, and coining a term, what are some force divisors in your environment that threaten to, or that actually do, interfere with and undermine your leadership? 

 

Monday: The Shrinking Office Cubicle

(c)  Copyright 2011   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 advisors 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.

 

Friday: Facebook and Force Multipliers

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

Be Slow to Understand—Be Very, Very Slow

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, and they think analytically and evaluatively.

Strictly as a quantitative measure, they can listen intelligently at the rate of 400 to 500 words per minute, perhaps even more, all while analyzing the message they 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.

 

Monday: Romance in the Office

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

Newton's Laws of Motion and Your Leadership

 

by Thomas J. Lee

You studied Sir Isaac Newton's laws of motion in school. More than four hundred years after Newton published them, they continue to explain our physical world.

They actually do even more than that. They explain something about our social world at work, too.

The First Law of Motion declares: A body at rest tends to remain at rest, and a body in motion tends to remain in motion.

The Second Law of Motion asserts: The momentum of an object in motion is equal to its mass times the acceleration upon it. (It's actually a little more complicated, but that will do for our purposes.)

And the Third Law of Motion states: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Notice those three words: equal and opposite.

Now think in terms of people at work and your own leadership.

Surely we can all agree that teams of people at work tend to continue doing what they have been doing. That's the First Law. It offers the potential for leadership in the first place.

We can probably also agree that a larger organization is more difficult to change course than a smaller organization, and vice versa. That's the Second Law. Applied to leadership, it suggests that you can readily do things working with an individual that are much more difficult when you are working with a large group.

Finally, you know from experience that when you push someone to do something, his natural reaction is to push back at you. It is an equal and opposite reaction, isn't it? But if you pull someone along in the direction you are already going, he comes along with you. That's the Third Law as it applies to people.

As you reflect on this, ask yourself:

• What experiences have you had as a leader that are consistent with these three laws as they apply to people?
• What policies and practices in your organization are futile because they ignore these three laws?
• How can your leadership improve out of recognition of these three laws?
• What does the Third Law in particular mean for the challenge of leading by example?

 

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

How Do Great Bosses Communicate?

 

By Thomas J. Lee

Have you ever thought about differences in communication style between really good managers and really bad ones? Between managers with an excited, eager team of people, on the one hand, and managers with employees who are anything but excited and eager, on the other hand?

Here is a little exercise. It first appeared in this space almost two years ago. Recently a reader asked us to tweak it and republish it.

Take out a sheet of paper, and make two lists. Headline one list Best Boss. Headline the other list Worst Boss.

Now think back over your entire work history. Take it all the way back to your first part-time job as a teenager. Bring it forward to the job you have today. Zero in on the boss or bosses you have had for each job. Of all these bosses, pick your best boss of all time, and pick your worst.

Visualize them both. Remember everything you can about them and about your experience of working for them. Recall details, conversations, casual remarks, decisions, and explanations, if any. Recall your feelings, your productivity, your efficiency, and the quality of your work.

Now think about the level of trust and engagement on the team. Recall the amount and depth of information you had, where it came from, and how quickly you learned news. Recall your emotions as you arrived at work each day. Recall how you felt about yourself and your future.

Finally, think about your willingness to take risks, to volunteer opinions, to ask tough questions, to make observations unseen by others. Recall anything that fleshes out the boss’s temperament, judgment, leadership, and integrity.

Next, for the best boss and for the worst, answer these questions and briefly record your recollections on each list, respectively: 

• What adjectives would you use to describe each boss?
• What did the best boss know about leading people, and what did the worst boss need to learn? How were their paths on leadership development similar or dissimilar?
• How did the best boss listen, and how did the worst? (Describe their physical posture and expression, their verbal cues, their curiosity, their recollection, and their application of insights.)
• What was each boss’s attitude toward sharing strategic business information?
• How much did the best boss care about you as a person, apart from your role as an employee? How much did the worst boss? What evidence and feelings do you recall to support your conclusion? Were there any consequences of the difference?
• Did either or both have a vision for you and your future in the organization?
• What were each manager's expectations for you and the quality of your work?
• To what extent did each boss teach and mentor you?
• How much was each manager’s day-to-day behavior congruent or incongruent with his or her stated values? What examples can you cite?
• Did you sense that either boss or both bosses had favorite employees with whom they consulted and collaborated, more so than with others on the team?
• How would you describe the social environment of trust on each team? Who trusted whom? How much?
• How candid was each boss? How candid were you with each boss?
• What was your own level of engagement with each?

And one more question, as a bonus: To what extent did the variability between these bosses contribute to the performance of the respective teams and of the larger organization?

Finally, look over the two lists. Reflect on them, and ask yourself the $64,000 question: How would people who have worked for you describe you and their experience of working for you?

Ponder these questions, your own responses, and your anticipated responses of people who have worked for you. If the spirit moves you, capture your learning and write to me at tom@arceil.com. If you prefer to talk by telephone, provide your contact details so that I can reach you on the run. (I strive to be accessible.)

I think you will find the exercise very, very worthwhile.

 

For professional facilitation of this exercise,

call us at +1-847-247-2241.

 

(c) Copyright 2011   Thomas J. Lee   All rights reserved.

The Best Way to Change Is Just to Change

by Thomas J. Lee

Throughout the Upper Midwest at this time of year, you will see groves of several species of tree—pin oaks, white oaks, and immature beeches—with dry leaves still clinging to their twigs, like infants hugging their mothers at the knee, long after brisk autumn breezes have brought down the leaves of other trees to the ground.

I walk past just such a grove of pin oaks, lean and shivering against the steel-gray sky, on my way to coffee with friends almost every morning. Until recently, I hadn't really noticed. Now, thanks to a fellow blogger, Michael Hyatt, I not only see these particular leaves, but I also appreciate a parallel between them and the prospect of change for so many people. Let me explain.

You already know that trees generally fall into two broad categories; evergreen and deciduous. Evergreens like the pine, cedar, and spruce replenish their needles continually throughout the year. They are always shedding some needles and quickly replacing them with new growth, but they are never naked to the sun. In contrast, deciduous trees like the ash, maple, and elm shed their leaves in a blaze of autumn glory. Then they are barren for months until springtime.

What I had never fully recognized was a subset of deciduous trees. Like other deciduous trees, these few species lose their leaves annually. But unlike other deciduous trees, they retain their leaves for months after the leaves stop growing, lose their chlorophyll, and turn first a burnt crimson and then a rusty orange.

These trees are known as marcescent (the first c is soft, as in incessant). Marcescent trees keep their leaves all winter, until the warming sun of spring. Even powerful gusts of arctic air sweeping down from Canada week after week through a Midwestern winter cannot pry the leaves loose. But finally, new buds emerge. The growth of buds literally pushes last year's leaves out of the way. Only then do the old leaves fall to the ground.

Here's the parallel to change and people. As the great Earl Nightingale observed, we are creatures of habit. We will do tomorrow what we are doing today, and we are doing today what we did yesterday. Like the leaves on those marcescent trees, dysfunctional behavioral patterns will persist—unless and until we recognize them and act decisively to change, like new buds emerging from twigs.

Now the thing is, the change we undertake must be constructive. It must reflect an affirmative alternative. People don't just stop doing things, even things that are hurtful and destructive, without an alternative. They can try, but they will usually fail; they will usually lapse back into the old pattern.

Rather, to be successful, we must substitute something else. Only by replacing one behavior with another do we stand a realistic chance of changing once and for all.

As a young parent, I experienced this phenomenon with my daughter. At one point her grades weren't what they should have been, only because she wasn't completing her homework assignments and preparing for tests. Instead, night after night, she was playing video games.

Her mother and I intervened. We forcefully substituted a productive activity for an unproductive activity. It worked. She turned her grades around. (Years later, I can report to you that she has graduated from the University of Chicago and is midway through Northwestern Law School.)

For people, as for marcescent trees like the pin oak, the old way persists until a new way replaces it, because until then the new is not fully present and real. The lesson here is to underscore the importance of identifying an alternative behavior and arranging for it to replace the previous behavior. Otherwise, people will probably never find their way out of the rut they are in.

Questions: What behavioral pattern are you in that you must replace with something else? What will you replace it with? When?

 

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

Loudmouths Can Be Intimidating, But They Are Rarely Influential

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Few of you are screamers or shouters, but many of you know someone or work with someone who is a screamer or a shouter. Those screamers and shouters need to read this.

Discerning leaders know that screaming and shouting get them nowhere. So even when their patience runs thin, they restrain themselves. Persons of less discernment take longer to come to the same realization, and some never get there. They erupt whenever they feel like it, which can be often.

That's a headache for other people, but the screamers and the shouters are the ones who lose. The fact is that loudmouths can be intimidating, but they are rarely influential. Their screaming and shouting is just more din, and everyone else either ignores it or leaves. The screaming and the shouting are all for naught.

For the most part, influence belongs to the person who listens carefully, thinks critically, and offers his point of view with clarity and conviction but also with humility and self-restraint.

Indeed, there's probably an inverse relationship between the usual volume of your voice and your real influence as a leader. If you feel you must shout to get your point across, then your point is weak to begin. Decibels won't make it any stronger.

Like any rule, to be sure, this one has its occasional exception. When you actually do see a wolf that no one else sees, it's a good idea to cry wolf at the top of your lungs. On those few occasions, go ahead and scream or shout. But that doesn't happen very often, does it?

Now it isn't always easy for us to see ourselves for who we are. So ask yourself a few self-diagnostic questions to determine if this applies to you:

• In a typical conversation in which you participate, who speaks the greatest number of words?
• Whose voice is loudest?
• How often do you interrupt others?
• Do you use pejoratives to refer to other people, even jokingly?
• When you are in the room, do others retreat to silence?

The unfortunate thing about a self-diagnostic like this is that the people who need it the most are least likely to find it on their own. Feel free to forward it to them. If you receive it, consider it a big favor that took a lot of courage, and regard it as a growth opportunity.

 

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

Quote / Unquote: Carl Jung on Causation and Accountability

 

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

 

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Carl Jung (1875-1961) was a pioneering Swiss psychiatrist whose work has had an impact on virtually everyone who reads this blog. If you have ever taken a Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator profile, you have met the good Dr. Jung.

Jung's 1921 opus, Psychological Types, is the foundation of the MBTI profile. The MBTI, as most of you know, recognizes 16 general personality types based on binary data on each of four metrics: extraverted (E) versus introverted (I), intuitive (N) versus sensing (S), thinking (T) versus feeling (F), and perceiving (P) versus judging (J).

(For the record, I have taken the MBTI three times over a span of fifteen years, and each time my type is just slightly different. I am on the cusp between I and E, always extremely N, somewhat to the T side, and again on the cusp between P and J. My I/E and P/J scores waffle just a little. But because I am at the fulcrum of each, and the assignment of type is binary, it is enough to give me different scores.)

Jung was also a fountain of incisive, deep, Zenlike quips and quotes. It was he who said: "That which we resist persists." He also observed: "Your vision will become real only when you look into your heart. He who looks outward dreams. He who looks inward awakens." There are many others like these two.

I have long thought that business leaders especially can grow by reflecting on this little gem from Jung:

 

That which we do not bring to

consciousness appears in our lives as fate.

 

A quotation like this can seem elusive, ambiguous, airily theoretical. In the day-to-day rush of business it can seem irrelevant and even useless.

But take a moment to think about it. Devote some serious reflection to it, perhaps with a pen and a journal at hand. Ask yourself:

• What aspects of your professional life do you ascribe to fate or destiny? In what ways could you take accountability for them? How might you bring them to the surface?
• What aspects of your personal life do you ascribe to fate, or to luck, for better or for worse? In what ways should you throw a spotlight on them and take accountability for their presence?
• What aspects of our public and civic life do we tend avoid taking responsibility for? In what ways should we? What are the consequences of not?

What other questions might you ask? What insights of your own can you offer?

 

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

Leaders Must Earn Their Keep

 

We appreciate your patience with our absence last week. As joyous as the holidays always are, they also impose burdens that cannot be postponed. Something had to give. This year it was Minding Gaps. But we're back now, if only by reprinting a few of our favorite posts. We will return in full force, with completely new essays, on Monday, January 10, 2011 (Come to think of it, the next day will be 1-11-11. It will be a good time to begin anew.)

Thomas J. Lee

Leadership, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Followers, potential or actual, determine whether they will follow anyone, and, if so, whom. They follow at their own discretion. No one can be ordered or required to follow anyone else. Choice is fundamental to leadership.

As a manager, you can enjoy one promotion after another throughout a long career. You can earn your MBA with highest honors. You can manage productive teams for twenty, thirty, or forty years. You can rise from manager to director to vice president and beyond. You can become the chief executive and chairman of the board.

But none of that means you are actually leading anyone, unless people believe you, respect you, and appreciate you. While the company designates you as a manager, you are a leader only if you have followers. It is the followers, not the company, that anoint you as a leader, by dint of their decision to follow.

Thus, anyone aspiring to lead other people must earn the mantle of leadership. That requires communication—clear, credible, cogent communication—and lots of it, for communication is the energy of leadership. Without it, leadership dies before it is born.

 

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

How Civil Is the Communication in Your Organization?

(Ninth in a Series.)

by Thomas J. Lee

Three weeks ago we introduced the concept of a culture of communication. (Click here to read the November 24 post).

Then we explored each of the eight hallmarks of a healthy communication culture: clear, credible, compelling (or cogent), constructive, continuous, collaborative, civil, and concise. (Click here to read the November 26 post.)

Over the past couple of weeks, we've been offering diagnostic questions a company should ask itself to gauge its culture on each of the eight hallmarks.

Today we take up civil. Here are some of the questions I like to ask to get a sense of the civility around the communication of strategic direction and work-place priorities:

 

• How much infighting is there between departments?
• Do they withhold information in attempts to embarrass one another?
• Does the organization have a reputation for being exceedingly polite, even to the point of reticence about real issues that need to be aired?
• How candid are people with one another?
• Is it common for people to feel there is an "elephant in the room" that no one wants to address?
• Is the "hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil" phenomenon present?
• Are managers reluctant to say that "the emperor isn't wearing any clothes"? 
• Is there a tendency to elevate minor issues to higher levels of management?
• Is dysfunctional communication—acrimony, spite, insults—expected or accepted?
• Is profanity commonplace?
• Do people often go to silence—retreating from the responsibility to raise issues—or to violence—expressing themselves with verbal or even physical violence?
• Do managers blame subordinates for their own shortcomings, or do they take full responsibility?
• Are "jokes" at the expense of women and minorities tacitly condoned by consensual laughter?
• Do front-line supervisors brazenly address people with pejoratives?
• Are strategic messages delivered with an appropriate air of seriousness and dignity?
• Do employees speak up and share their experiences and observations? Or do they deny that information to management out of spite?

 

We would be happy to help your organization assess and improve

its culture of communication. Just call us at +1-847-247-2241

 or write to us at info@arceil.com. 

 

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

Edison Peña, Running In Defiance of 'Destiny'

 

by Thomas J. Lee

In need of a little inspiration today?

Look no further than Edison Peña, one of the Chilean miners trapped underground for two months. All the miners are paragons of endurance, to be sure. But among them, Peña stands apart: not only through the 69 days of imprisonment that he shared with the other miners, but in his own dauntless courage and in the sheer resilience of his own human spirit.

Yesterday this 34-year-old man ran the New York City Marathon, its 26.2-mile course wending through the five boroughs before ending in Central Park. Running a marathon is a big achievement for anyone. Running a marathon after training on 3-mile and 6-mile runs through dark tunnels a half-mile underground, with every reason to doubt his own survival and only a miner's lamp to light the way, is just this side of phenomenal.

For the first 17 days of the miners' ordeal, Peña did no running. There was little point, for there was little food and little hope of survival. He curled up in a fetal position and waited to die. But when the first drilling bore reached the miners and brought more food, he was able to recapture hope. So he did what a runner would do: he trimmed a pair of work shoes and began going for daily runs.

"I ran to forget I was trapped," he told the New York Daily News last week. "I became two people: the weak person who wanted simply to give up and the person who chose to be strong, to run and survive. Eventually, I chose to live."

Asked what he thought about during those runs in the mine, he offered a sentiment that could very well serve as a mantra on a beleaguered day for any of us: "What I thought about as I ran in the mine was that I was going to beat destiny. I was going to turn the tables on destiny. I was saying to that mine, I can outrun you. I'm going to outrun you. I'm going to run until you're just tired and bored of me. And I did it."

On hearing of his daily runs underground, marathon officials invited him to New York as their guest to ride in a pace car. He replied he would actually prefer to run in the marathon. He did just that. Though he needed an ice pack at mile 20, he finished more than an hour ahead of his goal to the cheers of thousands of spectators. The cheers were nice, but he was already on top of the world, quite literally.

There is a mighty lesson for all of us here. It is altogether too easy to prostrate ourselves on the doorstep of destiny, to tell ourselves that whatever our lot appears to be is meant to be. So let us take a little inspiration from Edison Peña and his fellow miners.

Let us stare down whatever destiny looks to have in store for us, and just say No thanks. Let us rise up and go for a run today, as if in miner's shoes through dark tunnels. Let us finally and defiantly cheat destiny of all its dark and dreary doomsaying, just as Edison Peña did, and one day we, too, will emerge to the cheers of throngs and taste the sweet sunshine of a different destiny, a destiny we create for ourselves.

Thank you, Señor Peña, for your inspiration to us all.

 

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

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A Lesson in Leadership from Robert Frost

 

 

by Thomas J. Lee

A discussion among Facebook friends the other day sent me back to the famous verse by Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken, written in 1915. Take a moment to read it slowly and carefully:

 

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

What wisdom do you find in these lines? How might it apply to the work that leaders and managers do?

At the behest of Don Bates, a professor at George Washington University, I pored over this poem. Just as he suggested, I found it simple on my initial readings and then more and more profound. The words are austere, the imagery familiar. But the message is deep.

"Reading serious poetry requires disciplined scrutiny," Bates wrote. "The truest interpretation is usually discerned from between the lines, and irony is often a key to unlocking the greater meaning."

Thus, a good poem often speaks to us implicitly as well as explicitly. That is certainly true of this one. Peeling back its levels, we can ask what Frost means by a yellow wood. We can ask what the two roads symbolize. We can ask what the poet isn't saying.

Frost's verse doesn't explain the difference that taking the other road made. He says only that the two roads diverged; they were different. More importantly, he doesn't say one road was absolutely or plainly good and the other absolutely or plainly bad. He doesn't even say that either road was better. The other road was only just as fair.

Frost says a couple of other things, as well.

He says that he must choose, that abstaining is not an acceptable alternative, lest he stand forever in the yellow wood, a thicket of decisions. The reader can imagine a setting sun or a waiting rendezvous, or even a chill that signals the approach of winter, something that pushes the hiker forth this day.

Frost also makes plain that the choice is his. Although some scholars believe he is implicitly referring to a companion with whom he frequently hiked, the poem itself is silent. He further suggests the choice can only be intuitive, without a map or a guide or local lore or even trampled grass to point him: in leaves no step had trodden black. The hiker is on his own. He must trust himself, and he will live with the consequences, for he will be one traveler.

Finally, the poet says that he doubts he will ever come back, that taking the other road is a risky and a final, determinative choice. He hints that he will regret the choice: I shall be telling this with a sigh.

Applying all this to the challenge of leadership, we can think of the two roads as imperfect or gray or roundabout alternatives. We can think of Frost's fork in the road as a dilemma: a choice between alternatives of equal value or insubstantial difference. We can think of the traveler as a leader trying to retain her integrity as she finds her way through ambiguity.

Leaders and managers are always facing such choices. In business as elsewhere, it is rare that choices are perfect and stark; and when they are, the issues are usually small or so basic as to be rudimentary. On the big and consequential decisions, one can typically choose only between marginal or flawed alternatives. That's life as we know it.

But here's the thing: Just recognizing this fact is liberating. It humbles us from our pride as leaders. It enables us to explore alternatives that were previously hidden from sight. It brings us to greater comfort with uncertainty and thus to greater collaboration with the people we would lead. It frees us to embrace paradox: to move from "tyranny of the or" to the "genius of the and." And it opens us to a palette of creative thinking that is so valuable in times of confounding ambiguity.

Organizations and society in general put so much faith in leaders, we almost seem to beg for the arrogance that is the bête noire of true leadership. We need rare and extraordinary individuals to step forward and lead us, but we cannot tolerate the smug, self-certain hubris that brings leaders to the brink of paralysis or defeat. That, of course, is what we so often get.

Life's most vexing choices, the old New England bard seems to be saying, are always nuanced and always imperfect, but they are not necessarily always bad. We just need to make them, for they will be made. And we must recognize that the perfect choice rarely presents itself, that usually we face only choices that are scarcely even better and worse. Still, we must choose, and choosing will indeed make all the difference.

 

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

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By the Numbers: How Employees Regard Their Managers

 

By the Numbers is a bimonthly feature presenting 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.

Since its inception a year ago, By the Numbers has explored numerical aspects of a wide variety of issues: employee engagement, organizational culture, trust in business, information overload, strategic communication, CEO compensation, layoffs, job satisfaction, Internet usage, the productivity of meetings, 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 in the right column.
 

 

by Thomas J. Lee

In the wake of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, the vital relationship between employees and their bosses has become quite strained.

According to the 2010 Spherion Bosses Day Workforce Survey, nearly half (45 percent) of all employees say the recession affected the relationship. Three-quarters (74 percent) of that subset said the recession had weakened the relationship.

Transparency and respect are at the heart of any relationship, and in the workplace they have suffered. One out of four workers (25 percent) said their boss is "somewhat or very dishonest" about job security, and more than half (53 percent) feels professionally disrespected by their boss.

Moreover, a substantial minority of workers (37 percent) said their boss has "thrown [them] under the bus" to save himself or herself, and an even larger minority (45 percent) say their boss has unduly taken credit for their work.

The survey also found that 46 percent of workers said they couldn't discuss issues of workplace ethics with their boss, and that 44 percent said they couldn't confide in their boss.

 

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

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The Easiest Way to Change, Just for Today

 

by Thomas J. Lee

The easiest way to change yourself is simply to change one thing at a time, one day at a time.

You can begin today. Don't worry about tomorrow or the next day. Just focus on whatever it is that you want to change about yourself, and change that one thing today.

The one thing may be punctuality. If it is, just for today, be on time everywhere you go, all day. In fact, be five minutes early. Don't underestimate the time it takes to walk from here to there, and don't underestimate the traffic on the way to work. Give everyone a conservative estimated time of arrival, and then beat it, just for today.

Or perhaps the one thing is courtesy. If it is, just for today, go out of your way to be kind to everyone you come across, all day. Smile and greet people pleasantly. Open doors. Let other people go before you. Assume that everyone knows who you are, and, for the sake of dramatizing the importance of little courtesies, assume also that everyone thinks you are a self-absorbed jerk. Just for today, prove them wrong. Surprise people with your sincerity and your courtesies.

The one thing may be listening better. If it is, just for today, concentrate on what other people are saying. Suspend your evaluation of others while they are talking. Avoid thinking of what you are going to say next. Indeed, take more delight in what you hear than in what you say. As you listen, show your interest and intellectual and emotional appreciation. Don't interrupt; put your lips together and keep them that way. Let the other person finish. Pause after she stops talking; relax and allow for the balm of silence, and think before you respond.

The single thing you most want to change about yourself can be anything. It can be a matter of your attitude or your behavior. It can be a matter of your learning or your relationships, either professional or personal or both. It can be a matter of priorities or energy. It can be a matter of your health or community or spirituality or parenting.

Whatever it is, just make a point of doing it, or of refraining from doing it, for just one day. Then do it or refrain from doing it again, in the same manner, tomorrow, and again the next day, and again and again, just one day at a time.

Research shows that if you continue like this for three or four weeks, you will develop the new attitude or behavior or what have you into a pattern and it will just naturally evolve into a habit.

So change yourself for the better, just for today. Change one thing, one day at a time, and you will be on the road to reinventing yourself, and the world.

 

 

(c) 2010   Arceil Leadership ltd.   All rights reserved.   Technorati Claim Code WUU227Z6455M 

How to Cultivate the Art of Intellectual Patience

 

by Thomas J. Lee

There’s an odd thing about leadership.

Successful people are typically smart, and, by definition, smart people learn fast. They are quick studies.

That is actually unfortunate. Yes, unfortunate.

It is unfortunate because haste in understanding often leads to callow and shallow understanding—to misunderstanding, that is—and misunderstanding often leads to stupid decisions. It is almost as if smart people are determined to find their way to stupidity.

Wise leaders, on the other hand, are deliberately slow to understand. They restrain their cognitive impulses. They can be very slow, even agonizingly slow. They are determined to understand things correctly, and they know that correct understanding may take time. They are disciplined in their listening and in their learning.

If you lack this discipline, you can acquire it. Force yourself to say nothing when you next learn something that comes as any kind of a surprise. Bask in a moment of silence. Just be quiet and wait for more information. Then, slowly and carefully, think of the best questions (they are usually open questions) to ask. After you ask them, be quiet again, so that you can fully hear, understand, and appreciate the response.

This is the art of intellectual patience. It is an important part of leadership.

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Decoupling Leadership and Management

 

Minding Gaps is taking a few weeks of respite to rejuvenate, write, and plan. During our absence, we are reprising some of our own favorite posts from the past year. Today's post explores disengagement that is hiding in plain site. We will return to this space with all-new essays on Monday, September 27.

— Tom      

 

 

by Thomas J. Lee 

It is essential to distinguish the work of management from the work of leadership.

 Anyone in any position of authority in any organization has the burden—and the glorious opportunity—for both.

But it is only when we unpack the work of leadership and the work of management from each other that we can see their unique challenges, tools, and rewards.

The work of management is all about steady, reliable performance. The manager ensures 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.

When successful, management creates alignment. Alignment 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. The work of leadership is all about change. It entails envisioning, articulating, inspiring, and ensuring change—often attitudinal or cultural—or a breakthrough performance of some sort, typically requiring the discretionary and self-sacrificing efforts of people.

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 a good thing; disengagement is bad. But engagement is not the product of good management. It is the product of good leadership—up, down, and across 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 a 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 another “change management” initiative while overlooking the need to lead change, which is something entirely different. Similarly, an energetic 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. Both are important. Both are necessary. They’re just different. Quite dramatically different, at that.

 

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

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Nonsense on Nonverbal Communication

 

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

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

 

 

— Tom           

 

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Memo to "experts": Stop saying this!

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

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How BP Can Change Its Safety Culture: A Case Study in Leadership

A Special Report and Comment

BP’s new chief executive, Robert Dudley, states that his top priority is changing the company’s culture around safety. That’s a tall order. Behemoths the size and complexity of BP don’t change overnight.

Fortunately, Mr. Dudley has a remarkable, highly successful case study in his own company’s archives. He should dig out the musty file and look it over.

One of the companies that BP purchased in its heady 1990s expansion was Chicago-based Amoco Corporation, itself the product of a 1950s merger of Standard Oil Co. (Indiana) and the American Oil Co. of Baltimore. Indeed, Mr. Dudley cut his professional teeth at Amoco. He worked there from 1979 until BP acquired Amoco in 1998.

Amoco once faced a grave safety problem of its own. Through a comprehensive intervention, in which I played a role, that company dramatically changed its safety culture. If Amoco can do it, so can BP. It won't be easy, but it can be done.

Amoco's Safety Challenge

As a matter of public record, from 1986 to 1996, Amoco lost 121 lives of employees and contractors worldwide. That's an average of one death per month.

For most companies in most industries, such a rate of fatalities is unimaginable and intolerable. BP’s numerical death toll over the last five or six years is roughly similar, though BP is larger than Amoco was, so its rate is somewhat less.

For a long time, Amoco's management looked the other way. Eventually, however, the senior leadership got fed up with the drumbeat of fatalities. Larry Fuller, the company's change-minded CEO, finally declared that creating a new culture of safety was his No. 1 priority.

He formed a cross-functional team to address the issue. The team was headed by Richard Spies, who subsequently worked with Mr. Dudley in BP Russia. As an internal consultant, I lent support to the Amoco team. (I have never had a connection to BP.)

The first thing the team did was to examine the causes of all 121 fatalities. That was important, because oil industry lore held that many fatalities were inevitable due to the flammability and lubricity of its products.

As one executive told me, “You have to remember that almost everything we make is fully designed and intended to explode sooner or later. We just want it to explode inside an engine.”

The inevitability assumption was a balm to the conscience of executives. But it didn’t hold up to scrutiny. The team’s rigorous analysis showed that only a minority of the 121 fatalities worldwide were even the nominal result of explosions or fire. Most, by far, were actually the result of carelessness. Undoubtedly most employees were usually working carefully, but the tragic toll pointed to serious problems.

The Real Causes Come to Light

In fact, the analysis found the real culprits to be a pattern of haste, neglect, and flagrant disregard for safety. More than anything, there was a pervasive and wrong-headed culture that gave priority to production over people. The company never intended to create that culture. It just happened. 

Day in and day out, too many employees and contractors were failing to take routine safety precautions: attaching fall-protection equipment, tying down ladders, locking out and tagging out valves, buckling seat belts, insisting on hard hats and steel-toe shoes, respecting no-smoking areas, and even simply obeying traffic laws.

In focus groups with employees, we came across vivid anecdotal evidence that gave color and immediacy to the problem. The conclusion was inescapable. To altogether too many managers, other things mattered more than safety. A litany of their day-to-day decisions said so.

The analysis and its conclusions were bracing but not shocking. As a company, we had given only lip service to workplace safety. Our ongoing business conversation back then was all about exploration, production, and marketing. The prevailing message to employees, both explicit and implicit, was straightforward: Success was measured in dollars.

A Comprehensive Approach Was Essential

None of that would do any longer, and we knew it. Looking for solutions, we took a bold, comprehensive approach. In ways large and small, we set out to create a new culture that would truly put safety first. We were successful.

Words had to come first, but words alone would not suffice. In a three-page letter to staff signed by all the company’s top executives, senior management emphatically said that financial results would henceforth take a back seat to safety. The leadership had to be just that blunt; otherwise, employees would continue to believe the opposite. In a culture dominated by engineers, the company also appealed to an engineer’s ethic of process control. They imposed individual goals and plans for safety performance.

Then came resources. The company created a process-driven safety management system. Thousands of managers underwent training in the system, so that everyone was on board. It included an in-house investigative agency, modeled after the U.S. government’s National Transportation Safety Board. Our trained experts, deployed around the world, would speed to the site any serious mishap, fatal or not. They would determine the fundamental “root cause” and share it with management.

The final ingredient was the visible commitment of leaders. Employees wouldn’t believe the new culture until they saw it, so they had to see it, day after day after day.

Here, management pulled all kinds of levers. Executive promotions would rest heavily on safety records. All operations around the world were to stand down so that personnel could focus on safety issues. In a company that lived in meetings, every agenda of every meeting was henceforth to begin with discussion of workplace safety—even the meetings of the board of directors and the annual shareholders meeting. 

Many other interventions and policy changes reinforced the central message. Together, all these things sent a powerful, persuasive message that safety finally did matter more than anything else.

The Happy Result . . . Until Things Changed

In the months and years that immediately followed, the company's safety performance improved noticeably. Fatalities and injuries plummeted. Today, we can confidently say that somewhere, people are alive because of the work we did.

I left Amoco in 1997, prior to its acquisition by BP. For a while afterward (BP also acquired ARCO about the same time), the toll of fatalities for BP as a whole was approximately what Amoco alone had been experiencing in the 1980s and early 1990s. It continued declining for several years.

Then, something at BP changed. I don’t know what. It does appear to be systemic, as evidence of serious problems long predated the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe this spring.

Persistent issues with the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, a crisis on another Gulf of Mexico platform known as Thunder Horse, and the disastrous explosion at the Texas City refinery in 2005 are corroborative.

(Just last week, BP was fined $50.6 million for safety violations at the Texas City refinery in 2009, four years after the 2005 explosion that killed 15 workers. The company has also committed to spending $500 million on safety at Texas City alone.)

Plainly, the safety culture that Amoco went so far to establish in the late 1990s is long gone. It desperately needs to be brought back.

Recognizing and Applying a Best Practice

If, as former Shell USA president John Hofmeister maintains, the industry has “earned the right” to continue drilling in the Gulf of Mexico by dint of its 30,000 successful wells over the course of decades, it will absolutely require a culture that truly values safety above production. For the sake of human life, nothing else is more important.

Turning around the BP safety culture will plainly be a formidable challenge. It won’t happen soon or quickly. But, as Amoco’s experience convincingly shows, it can be done. Mr. Dudley should just ask around.

— TJL          

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Should Hewlett-Packard's Board Have Fired its CEO?

Hewlett-Packard’s board of directors demanded and received the resignation of CEO Mark V. Hurd last week after an internal investigation, prompted by a complaint of sexual harassment from a vendor, uncovered irregularities in his expense account.

The allegation of sexual harassment proved unfounded, and the amount of money in question for the expense reimbursement was reported to be between $1,000 and $20,000. Mr. Hurd said an assistant had prepared his expense vouchers, but he took responsibility and offered to reimburse the company for the difference. The board insisted he go.

By all accounts, Mr. Hurd was performing very well as chief executive of HP since 2005, when he took over from ousted CEO Carly Fiorina. Investors enjoyed an average annual total shareholder return exceeding 25 percent. Many employees were chafing, however, under his cost-cutting regime. Pay cuts were the order of the day even as the company was making a great deal of money.

A few more complicating details: Under terms of his contract, Mr. Hurd is walking away with a stipend of $12.2 million; counting stocks and options, his total package may approach $40 million. The company's employees are, for the time being, without a leader. Investors suddenly lost billions of dollars in valuation, perhaps temporarily, as the stock plummeted. The woman who filed the complaint turns out to have a checkered history, and she has stated publicly it was not her intent to have Mr. Hurd dismissed. Shortly before she filed the complaint, HP had decided not to renew her contract.

Here is a report from The New York Times that describes the board’s decision making. The article points out that the board was primarily concerned with public-relations damage control. Here is an Associated Press account, and here is another report, from Venture Beat, a Silicon Valley newsletter.

There are two schools of thought here.

One school is zero tolerance. It holds that the CEO must set the ethical tone for the entire organization. Any deviation from propriety—indeed, any appearance of impropriety—condones ethical laxity. This perspective argues that it’s unreasonable to hold other employees accountable for standards that senior executives only wink at. By this thinking, the board was fully justified in firing Mr. Hurd. Indeed, any other course of action would be unimaginable.

The other school of thought is minimal deviation. It recognizes that all people are imperfect, and it acknowledges ambiguity and complexity, so it expects rigid perfection from no one. It still expects leaders to set the moral example, but often in a gray cloud of uncertainty. By this thinking, the board should have taken into account the complexities of the situation. Instead of dismissing the chief executive, it might instead have imposed a penalty of some sort, taken the reimbursement, and perhaps responded in other ways as well, short of dismissal.

Jack Welch, the iconic CEO of General Electric in the 1990s, had the practice of using a 2 X 2 matrix for evaluating managers on both their demonstrated values and their business acumen.

For those managers in the northeast quadrant, who consistently both honored the values and performed well, Mr. Welch said the future was clear and bright: onward and upward. For those managers in the southwest quadrant, who did neither, the answer was equally obvious, if not so pleasant.

The difficulty came in the northwest and southeast cells: managers who did one but not the other.

Mr. Welch suggested that managers who honored the values but didn’t perform well should be given a second chance in a different role, perhaps even a third chance. If they consistently failed to perform, they would have to leave on that reason alone.

He further suggested that managers who performed well but ran roughshod over the values be counseled as to the importance of the values. If, over time, they continued to flout the values, then they, too, would have to leave for that reason alone, in spite of their good business performance.

In the case of Hewlett-Packard and Mark Hurd, one could argue that a serious financial penalty coupled with intensive values-based coaching might have served the company and its stakeholders better than outright dismissal.

Mr. Hurd’s friend Larry Ellison, founder and chief executive of Oracle, was quoted yesterday in The Times as essentially taking that point of view. He was critical of the Hewlett Packard board. But Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, professor of management at Yale University, argued just the opposite. He applauded the HP board's decision last week, though he also had harsh words for the contract that Mr. Hurd negotiated with the board.

What do you think? Why do you think the way you do?

Here are some questions to ponder:
 

• Have we created a kind of third rail in business, such that any chief executive demonstrating errant judgment is automatically dismissed, with a large payout to boot?
  
  
• Should the company's public image in a situation like this be the board's most important concern? If not, why not?
  
  
• Can we reasonably expect perfection from any leader?
  
  
• What ethical transgressions do justify a zero-tolerance policy? What issues require something less?
  
  
• What do you think of executive contracts that provide for substantial payouts on dismissal?
  
  
• Should the executive's business acumen and performance be taken into account here, at all?

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