Minding Gaps

When Strategy and Culture Collide

 

By Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 © Copyright 2013   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Important Reading on Servant Leadership

 

By Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Master Class: Communication for Servant Leadership

 Venue for Master Class: Communication for Leadership

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

*          *          *

 

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

What makes Master Class stand out?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The two-day Master Class immersion has these benefits:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

—scientist, agency of the U.S. government

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

—a guest participant

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

—senior engineer, aerospace company

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

—senior manager for an international food and beverage company

 

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

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

 

Servant Leadership: The Secret Sauce of Extraordinary Cultures

 

By Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 © Copyright 2012   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Three Common Myths of Leadership

 

By Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 
 © Copyright 2012   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

A Simple Process for Better Listening

 

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Next: Eight Archetypes of Poor Listeners

 © Copyright 2012   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

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

 by Thomas J. Lee

Are you fairly bright?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next: A Simple Process for Better Listening

 © Copyright 2012   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

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

 

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

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

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

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

 

Coming on Wednesday

Leaders Must Know and Respect

Other Kinds of Authority

©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

If Open and Honest Communication Is a Problem

  

(To read all our posts on leadership, communication,

change, and engagement of employees, just scroll down.)

 

 

You may work in a high-performance organization. Perhaps your company is already on a list of best places to work, either locally or nationally. Perhaps your employee survey scores are above the norm. Perhaps you are an employer of choice.

Or you may work in a challenging environment. Perhaps you have a rumor mill that moves at warp speed. Perhaps you have front-line supervisors who are openly cynical. Perhaps your employee surveys come back with low marks for "open and honest communication."

Or—and more likely—you may work at an organization, large or small, that is good but could be a whole lot better.

Wherever you are on this continuum, you and your managers can benefit hugely from our Boot Camp in Strategic Leadership Communication. High-performance companies can move to the next level. Struggling organizations can begin to get their act together. Middle-of-the-road companies can identify their next opportunities for improvement.

A great deal is at stake. Because the competition is always changing, no organization can remain where it is. Always, you are either improving or worsening relative to competitors. Product quality, personnel costs, employee engagement, and ultimately customer satisfaction and your profitability are on the line. At the very least, as our economy recovers, every company must worry about retaining the loyalty of its talent.

We have a solution: our Boot Camp in Strategic Leadership Communication, an intense, sophisticated, on-site workshop that changes the way managers and supervisors communicate business strategy and information, manage their own priorities, and build affirming relationships of mutual dignity and respect.

Here are just some of the benefits of Boot Camp:

Bottom Line Value. Research shows that between 2.1 and 2.5 percent of an organization’s revenue is lost to the active disengagement of people. That’s as much as $2.5 million for every $100 million of revenue, and it is just for the active disengagement. (Passive engagement adds still more to the cost.) Recover it, and it goes straight to the bottom line.

Big Impact. Leadership and management are two different things. So are engagement and alignment. (Remember this: “Assign to align. On page to engage.”) The communication that drives each is different, too. Use the wrong one, and you get the wrong result. We bring clarity and explanation to these important distinctions. Executives will understand the importance of distributive leadership—after all, no one can be everywhere—and managers will understand why they must stand up as collateral leaders of the enterprise.

Practical Examples. We have scoured top-tier companies for best practices, and we bring them to you. Your managers will see practical examples from companies like Harley-Davidson, Levi Strauss, Nordstrom, Starbucks, Hewlett-Packard, Lockheed Martin, and many others. Your people will remember the vivid stories for years to come.

Quantitative Data. We present hard, factual, quantitative data to support our argument on the power and value of communication around business strategy. You and your managers will get facts and figures on change, trust, engagement and disengagement, perceptions of managers by employees, ROI, message clutter, employee frustrations, rumors, and so much more.

Simple, Powerful Models. Our flagship models, the Rainbow and the GearBox, have been used by such iconic companies as Pfizer, Anheuser-Busch, Harley-Davidson, Royal Dutch Shell, FMC, John Deere, Northwestern Mutual, and the legendary Lockheed Martin Skunk Works. The Rainbow Model identifies unintended, and previously unnoticed, credibility gaps: mixed messages, muddled messages, mute messages. Another model, the GearBox, serves as both a structure and a self-assessment tool at the intersection of strategy and employee engagement. We guarantee you will find them enlightening.

Robust Credibility. Any leader is communicating constantly, often (and most especially) when he is least aware of it. We hammer home the point that communication is anything—verbal or nonverbal, explicit or implicit—that either conveys information or creates meaning. That forces managers to rethink their routine, their habits, and their own unnoticed behavioral ticks, for those nasty, inadvertent messages they didn’t intend to send—but did, more than once.

Talk Traps. The work of leading people isn’t easy. If it were, anyone could do it well. But we have been around long enough to know the landscape of difficulties—and talk traps are a big one. Inexperienced or unskilled leaders often run into the classic talk traps: small talk, sunny talk, scare talk, sweet talk, smart talk, simple talk, song and dance talk, slick talk, snarky talk, or self talk. What they should rely on is straight talk. But even that isn’t easy. We’ll take your team through the challenge of straight talk, so that they can do it right.

Healthy Culture. Good communication of business information in a company is more than a process. It is a culture. In a healthy culture, communication is clear, credible, compelling, constructive, continuous, collaborative, civil, and concise. For each, we have powerful diagnostic questions that will open eyes, minds, and hearts to change.

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

 

Boot Camp is available in a one-day or two-day format. It can be customized to your industry, your strategy, and your legacy. Leading companies in manufacturing, technology, finance, retail, and service industries have made it a staple of their professional development.

Evaluations of our workshops are consistently high. After sitting in a windowless room for a day or two, more than 95 percent of participants recommend the experience for their peers and superiors. Here’s what past participants have said:

 

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

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

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

—scientist, agency of the U.S. government

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

—a guest participant

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

—senior engineer, aerospace company

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

—senior manager for an international food and beverage company

 

Call or write now for best availability.

 
+1-847-247-2241
info@arceil.com

 

Six Reasons Why Straight Talk Is Difficult

by Thomas J. Lee

A few days ago in this space we explored ten “talk traps,” or conventions of communication that managers often fall into. Some of them can work in the right place and the right time, but don't work in the wrong place or the wrong time. Others are ill-advised all the time. Each of them poses its own challenge, and they all are tricky.

The talk traps are Small Talk, Sunny Talk, Scare Talk, Sweet Talk (or Smooth Talk), Smart Talk, Simple Talk, Song and Dance Talk, Slick Talk, Snarky Talk (or Surly Talk), and Self Talk. We identified an eleventh, too: Snarl Talk. You can click here or scroll down to read all about talk traps.

By far the best overall approach to communication in business is Straight Talk: just speaking the truth—gently and respectfully, of course—and letting the chips fall where they fall. But even it is difficult, and occasionally it, too, can backfire.

I can think of six powerful reasons why Straight Talk is often difficult.

First, it isn’t always clear what the "facts" are. What you see often depends on what you’re looking for and on what you have seen before. Moreover, the facts of a situation can change rapidly and repeatedly, nowadays with blinding speed. What was true yesterday isn’t necessarily true today or tomorrow.

Second, it isn’t always easy to distinguish between fact and opinion. Again, where you stand often depends on where you sit. For example, try to find some factual ground that politicians on the left and right both acknowledge to be true. Not so long ago, my older brother, whom I have always admired, and I got into a little tiff over the telephone because we happen to disagree on politics. It happens.

Third, the facts can be very unpleasant, to the point that you may not want to face them. Probably all of us have something or someone in our life that we are avoiding. Unfortunately, ignoring or neglecting these simmering problems just lets them fester. Eventually, they are bound to explode like Mount St. Helens.

Fourth, not all facts have an equal claim on your judgment. The facts that you think mitigate your own decisions and behavior are usually, and systematically, ignored by others, and vice versa. It is an unfortunate aspect of human nature that people can excuse themselves for a mortal sin but rush to condemn others for every venal sin imaginable.

Fifth, the facts can force you to confront your own vulnerabilities: perhaps a professional competency that you should have mastered, or a relational skill that has proved elusive, or a loose command over your own time and resources that threatens to undercut your effectiveness. In those situations, it is tempting to look the other way, isn't it?

Sixth, the facts can challenge and bring into question the values you claim, and even undermine your integrity as a leader. No leader exercises such total and abject control over an organization that it fully lives up to the leader’s aspirations. But when the organization falls short, everyone looks to the leader for an explanation or accountability. For the leader, those moments are not enjoyable.

Not only can Straight Talk pose difficulty, but it can backfire. Wednesday, we’ll explore some of the ways it backfires.

Coming on Wednesday

When Straight Talk Backfires

Coming on Friday

Ten Strategies for Talking Straight

 © Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Does Accountability Actually Thwart Your Potential?

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They remember these experiences in detail forever. Forever!

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

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

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

 

Coming on Monday

25 Years of Incredible, Exhilarating Change

 

©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

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.

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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The Gettysburg Address in PowerPoint

 

Here’s a lighthearted post for a listless Friday afternoon in late summer, as the kids go back to school and our colleagues drift home from vacation. Created by Peter Norvig, director of research for Google, it is a brilliant riff on what the Gettysburg Address would have sounded like if Abraham Lincoln had used PowerPoint.

It has been on the net for years, and you may have seen it before. Frankly, I will never grow tired of it. As you view it, click the NEXT button to move through the deck of six slides.

Before anyone writes to remind us of the sanctity of Gettysburg National Cemetery, be assured we are appreciative. A few years ago we spent an afternoon at Gettysburg, and we recommend it to every American.

Trumpets, puhleeze.

 

"And now please welcome Mr. Abraham Lincoln, president of these old United States of ours."

"Good morning. I said, Good morning!

"Just a second while I get this connection to work. Do I press this button here? Function-F7? No, that's not right. Hmmm. Maybe I'll have to reboot. Hold on a minute.

"Um, my name is Abe Lincoln and I'm your president. While we're waiting, I want to thank Judge David Wills, chairman of the committee supervising the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery. It's great to be here, Dave, and you and the committee are doing a great job. Gee, sometimes this new technology does have glitches, but we couldn't live without it, could we?

"Oh, is it ready? Okee-dokee, here we go:

 

Gettysburg Cemetery Dedication by Abraham Lincoln

 

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Leaders Need Followers

Following always gets such a bad rap. Over and over, you are told to be a leader, not a follower.

But think about it.

If no one is following, can anyone truly be leading? After all, good leaders need good followers.

The trick is to appreciate the necessity and importance of following and to follow legitimate and wise leadership, but also to offer leadership of your own as necessary. That involves seeing the need for more, better, or new leadership, and knowing when and how to break out yourself and chart a new course of leadership.

There is no shame in following. The shame lies in failing to muster the will and the capacity to lead when the need for your leadership is real and pressing.

 

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The Invisible Ink of Disengagement

When you were a kid, maybe you had a science kit with invisible ink.

You could send secret messages to friends. You could imagine you were a spy.

That was a long time ago. But invisible ink is still very much a part of your life as a manager and a leader.

Some of the most important messages your employees send to you are in invisible ink. You can't read them until you can see the print, if you ever can.

These are often messages of disaffection and disengagement. They may as well be in an intergalactic foreign language—Klingon, say, or Na'vi.

Now many of the worst cases of disengagement are plain to see. They are written in visible ink: employees who are habitually late for no good reason, who lash out at authority, who come to work without a good night's sleep or with drugs or alcohol in their system. Those cases are easy to see and relatively easy to deal with.

But many other situations, equally troubling, are not so plain to see. We say that they are written in invisible ink. They are usually hidden from view. They are typically far more numerous, too.

Sometimes it is an attitude, a quiet resentment, perhaps at customers. Sometimes it is fear, perhaps borne of ridicule from a peer or a superior. Sometimes it is heedlessness and haste, the short cut that endangers coworkers and even customers—a short cut you don't notice until it explodes, sometimes literally—or the short cut that compromises quality and undercuts your promise to customers.

There's a lot of that.

Even managers can be disengaged at times. We have all known the distracted manager who is weary under the strain of long hours or many months without a vacation. We have all known the manager who won't hear an employee's suggestion, who takes any question as a challenge to his own authority.

We have all known the manager who threatens and intimidates. Or the manager who refuses to communicate the sum and substance of a strategy or a priority. Or even the manager who blames subordinates for his or her own shortcomings.

Little of this can you see.

Finally, and of particular import in an economic recovery, there are managers and other high-potential, high-value employees who will use the greening economy to look for better opportunities. In today's economy, this is perhaps the greatest concern of all. You won't see this disengagement until you're reading the resignation letter.

Maybe you cannot blame these people, given what they have been through these last 18 months. But piggy-backing on their departure will be intellectual property, trade secrets, strategic knowledge, and wisdom that was years in the making.

All this is the invisible ink of disengagement. You can begin to look for it now, begin to see it, and finally begin to manage it. Or you can let it continue to manage you.

A Lawsuit for Our Times

 

Anyone interested in business communication and employee engagement should make a point of following the arguments and decision in City of Ontario v. Quon, a lawsuit that has just been accepted on appeal by the U.S. Supreme Court.

At issue is whether employees have a right to privacy in using electronic devices supplied by their employers. The high court will rule on the case by the end of this term in June.

Police Sgt. Jeff Quon and three other officers had sued the City of Ontario, California, after their superiors read personal text messages the officers had sent on the city-owned devices. The city had an explicit policy in place that employees had no guarantee of privacy.

Nevertheless, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th District ruled last year that the officers did have a “reasonable expectation” of privacy, because a supervisor had told the officers they could use the devices for personal communication, so long as they paid for any excessive use.

One of the judges on the three-judge appellate panel, Kim McLane Wardlaw, said the city’s formal policy was marginalized by the “operational reality” of the supervisor's informal policy.

If nothing else, the case serves as a salient reminder that employers must have clear, consistent policies—and then follow those policies to the letter. At a minimum, that entails detailed training for all supervisors, lest the supervisors give mixed or muddled signals to employees. As for employees, it would be wise for them to remember that digital messages often find unintended audiences.

You can read more here.

 

Note: Minding Gaps will be on holiday break beginning tomorrow. We will return on Monday, January 4, 2010. Have a wonderful holiday season and a terrific new year’s celebration. Good luck to the Wisconsin Badgers in the Champs Sports Bowl on December 29 and to the Northwestern Wildcats in the Outback Bowl on January 1. Celebrate safely, everyone!

 

By the Numbers: Communication and the Bottom Line

By the Numbers is a weekly feature presenting business data that is noteworthy, 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 usually appears on Monday.

Since its inception last summer, By the Numbers has explored issues of quality, job satisfaction, information overload, employee engagement, trust in business, nonverbal communication, and fear in the workplace, among others.

Today we take a look at data on organizational communication and economic performance.

According to a new study by Watson Wyatt Worldwide, effective employee communication is such a powerful driver of employee engagement that it is a leading indicator of economic performance. Companies that are highly effective communicators had 47 percent higher total returns to shareholders over the last five years compared with firms that are the least effective communicators.

As you reflect on this, ask yourself:

• How much do ground-level workers in your organization know about the competitive situation and strategy?

• What does your organization do to train managers for their role and responsibilities in communication?

• What are the expectations on communication for managers and supervisors?

• What excuses does your organization make around communication?

By the Numbers: Front-Line Supervisors Fail to Communicate

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

To date we have explored the economic impact of employee disengagement in U.S.-based companies (scroll down to the September 21 post), the extent of disengagement in the workplace (September 14), the frequency of projects that fail (August 31), the link between employee disengagement and absenteeism (August 24), the myths around the impact of nonverbal communication (August 17), and the fear of recrimination in the workplace (August 10).

Today we explore the lack of candor and honesty in supervisory communication.

Probably most companies still rely on the front-line manager or supervisor as their mouthpiece in the workplace. In those companies, the supervisor is supposed to convey key strategic information and messages to employees who do the work.

We will return to the question of whether that is the most appropriate role for front-line supervisors in the 21st century, with the ubiquity of communication by BlackBerry, text, Twitter, and good old-fashioned email. Today, far more and far faster than in the 1990s and before, electronic communication reaches everyone in an organization by leak and by rumor. (Those of you who participated in my webinar last Thursday know that I have a perspective on this issue. We’ll come back to it here in Minding Gaps in a few days.)

For now, let’s concentrate on how well front-line supervisors communicate. They appear to need some help. According to research by Towers Perrin, only 38 percent of employees of global corporations say their managers communicate openly and honestly. As for the other 62 percent, we can only speculate.

It’s hard to imagine that employers or the managers in question would agree with that perception, but communication, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. It is the listener’s judgment that counts. If the listener perceives half-truth or untruth, or if the listener perceives double talk or fast talk, then that is what it is. You have to deal with the perception, because perception is reality.

Here are some questions to frame your thinking on this challenge:

• What roles and responsibilities with respect to communicating business strategy and priorities do managers and supervisors in your organization have?

• What particular skills and competencies are necessary to carry out those roles and responsibilities?

• To what extent does the organization assume those skills and competencies are inherent in anyone with the normal and overall qualifications to work in management?

• To what extent are they, truly?

• What training in strategic communication—that is, the communication of business strategy—is provided to the new front-line manager or supervisor? How well and how often is that training upgraded and renewed?

• What does the training say about clarity and honesty?

• What is the process of support in strategic communication for the front-line manager or supervisor? In particular, how does the organization funnel strategic information to the front line?

• What accountabilities for strategic communication does the front-line manager or supervisor face?

• Does your organization have a review process, involving the people who report to the front-line manager or supervisor, to assess each manager’s and supervisor’s communication of business strategy?

Feel free to respond to these questions by leaving a comment. Comments are subject to review by the blog’s editor, who may edit them for grammar and clarity and may leave a response of his own. Comments with abusive, promotional, or profane language will not be published. 

Leadership Is In the Eye of the Beholder

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. 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.

Fleshing Out Differences Between Management and Leadership

Regular readers of the Minding Gaps blog know that we bring not just a scalpel but a meat cleaver to distinctions between management and leadership.

We define them both not by position or level in an organization but rather by the work, the purpose, the energy, and the communication that differentiate them. Anyone in a position of authority in any organization carries the burden and opportunity of both; the CEO manages as well as leads, and the front-line supervisor leads as well as manages. 

Briefly, we think of management as the work of ensuring a group’s performance of a task to a predetermined standard of some sort. If the standard involves money, we call it making budget or making the numbers. If it involves time, we call it beating a deadline. If it involves quantity, perhaps in terms of sales or production, we call it exceeding a quota. Often it involves anomalies in product quality or a linear process such as manufacturing, and there we refer to it as quality control or process control.

Conversely, we think of leadership as the work of bringing about change, either cultural or operational, through the discretionary (or optional) and often self-sacrificing efforts of people. That requires knitting together disparate people as a coalition or community, identifying and describing a threat or opportunity, developing and offering a cause (or solution) that addresses the concern, modeling the behaviors appropriate to that cause, campaigning for the cause, and finally meeting the rewards of success or the penalties for failure. All of that is in orbit around the connection between leaders and the led.

It is important to emphasize that we define and compare these two concepts as work, not as levels of responsibility or as positions in an organization. The nature of the work is what counts.

Prior posts in Minding Gaps have explored, and future posts will continue to explore, particular aspects of this model. Today, I want to devote some attention to differences in style, disposition, and communication serving the purposes of management, on the one hand, and the purposes of leadership, on the other hand.

Consider this framework:

Aspect	Work of Management	Work of Leadership
Nature of work relationship	Legal, official, structural	Intuitive, perceptual, fluid
Source of authority	Power, employment	Insight, conviction, shared values
Presumption of manager	Atypical knowledge	Atypical wisdom
Best-case scenario	Influence for meeting expectations	Inspiration for realizing a vision
Orientation	To the task	To the person, the relationship
Thrust	Accountability, dependability	Opportunity, innovation
Consequences	Rewards or penalties	Satisfaction or dissatisfaction
Language, rhetoric	Directive, commanding, “I”	Inviting, collaborative, “we”
Process	Iterative, corrective	Exploratory, adaptive
Peril of insufficiency, too little	Purpose, motivation	Attention to detail
Peril of excess, too much	Micro-managing, self-execution	Leeway, loss of focus and drive
Need for empathy	Of marginal, occasional importance	Of great, constant importance
Attitude toward exceptions	Fear of deviation (snafus)	Hope for deviation (ideas)
Motivational energy	Requires external impetus	Potentially self-sustaining
Systems, training required	Typically already in place	Typically needs deployment

As you look over this chart, ask yourself these questions:

• What makes immediate and obvious sense here?

• What don’t you quite grasp?

• What is most challenging to your own style?

• Do you see how the work of management and the work of leadership are complementary?

• What aspects of your own business require the steady hand of management?

• What aspects of your business can benefit from less management and more leadership?

• What kinds of leadership should your extended management team do more of?

• How are you supporting the leadership work of your middle managers and front-line supervisors?

Feel free to telephone us at +1-847-247-2241, or write to us at info@arceil.com, for more explanation. And, yes, we do offer workshops in leadership development (apologies for shameless plug).

Our Philosophy

Now that have you had a chance to get to know us at Minding Gaps, we would like to set forth more fully our philosophy and purpose.

Minding Gaps reflects a philosophy of leadership and communication. In brief, our philosophy holds that:

• Leadership and management are two different things. Individuals who are good managers are not necessary good leaders. Management concerns itself with organizing and ensuring performance to a predetermined standard. Leadership, on the other hand, concerns itself with envisioning the future and inspiring people to go to extraordinary lengths to achieve that vision.

• Good communication—clear, credible, compelling—is the energy of leadership. Words are powerful, for they mold attitudes and identity and bring people together behind a concern and a cause.

• Communication for the sake of management is different from communication for the sake of leadership. The former is detailed and directive, and its essential message is accountability. The latter is general and inspiring, and its essential message is opportunity.

• Leadership is essential to change, and therefore enduring change is impossible without leadership. The single most important change that most companies can make is a dramatic increase in the engagement of their people.

• Many organizations have solid management but few have dynamic leadership and sufficient levels of engagement. Consequently, few organizations are able to marshal change.

• Leaders need followers more than followers need leaders. Leaders must connect with followers so as not to leave them behind, and leaders connect best with followers through a systematic process of integrated, strategic leadership communication*.

Our purpose is simple and straightforward. We want to make leadership and change simple, natural, and as close to inevitable in your organization as we possibly can. We think you will like that.

Offered by Arceil Leadership Ltd., Minding Gaps is written by the firm's founder and president, THOMAS J. LEE, who is solely responsible for its content. Mr. Lee is president of Arceil Leadership Ltd., a niche consultancy at the crossroads of leadership, communication, and change. He works with management teams of large and medium-size companies to enhance their leadership credibility and impact. An alumnus of the University of Chicago and of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, he is formerly a Fortune 25 corporate speechwriter and a newspaper journalist, serving as political editor and editorial columnist.

A dynamic and popular speaker, THOMAS J. LEE has lectured, consulted and led workshops throughout the United States, across Canada, and in nearly a dozen other countries in South America, Europe, and Africa. He has benchmarked organizational communication in nearly 30 major corporations, including Starbucks, 3M, Hewlett-Packard, Shell Oil, DuPont, Levi-Strauss, Nordstrom, Walgreens, Federal Express, Chick-fil-A, Motorola, and Harley-Davidson, among others. His first book, Mind the Gaps: The Three Voices of Leadership, is nearing completion.

What We Can Learn from "12 Angry Men"

by Thomas J. Lee

Housebound with a mid-summer head cold—a hacking cough and a raw throat—I spent the weekend gargling with warm saltwater and watching old movies. Thankfully, the cable networks obliged me with a marathon of Henry Fonda classics.

They were some of his gems, for sure: First he was a principled presidential aspirant in The Best Man (directed by Franklin Schaffner, 1964) with Cliff Robertson, Shelley Berman, and Lee Tracy. Then he played an innocent man, falsely accused as an armed robber, in the true-life story The Wrong Man (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956) with Vera Miles as his disturbed wife.

Next, in Advise and Consent (Otto Preminger, 1962), Fonda portrayed a controversial presidential appointee, with Charles Laughton and Walter Pidgeon as cantankerous old warhorses of the U.S. Senate. Finally, he took the role of parolee Tom Joad in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, 1940).

In some of his best roles, Fonda often portrayed wise but embattled leaders. You can learn a lot about leadership from watching these movies.

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.

As the story opens, all but one of the jurors hastily fall in line to convict the defendant, a young Puerto Rican, on charges of murdering his father. Juror No. 8, played by Fonda, is the lone holdout.

The jury’s deliberations take us through an astounding and seismic shift. One by one, the other 11 jurors feel compelled to revisit and re-examine their initial judgment through the lens of their own character and the crucible of their own lives. The harder the life, the harder the re-examination.

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.

Writing about 12 Angry Men as an pedagogical device for business leadership, John K. Clemens observed:

“Persuasion—convincing strangers to consider new perspectives, new insights, new goals—is a fundamental, challenging task of leadership because it requires a deep investment of personal character, mental stamina, and a capacity for emotional insight perfectly balanced with the ability to reason. Logic and abundant feeling combine to persuade.

“What’s tricky about persuasion—and it’s this point that 12 Angry Men clarifies so thrillingly—is discerning the difference between getting others to think as you do, an obnoxious and risky use of power, and getting others to investigate themselves to discover common truths and facts—truths that transcend preference, prejudice, fear, and competitive jockeying. The courtroom drama, as a result, is usually a loud wake-up call as well, a reminder that there are such common truths.”

I have watched 12 Angry Men dozens of times, owing to the fact we use it in a workshop on leadership communication. Even today, I continue finding more nuances and insights on leadership with each new viewing.

In our workshops, we spoil the plot beforehand; we want everyone to watch the movie for its underlying insights more than for the drama of its plotline. So we encourage participants to be on the lookout for both the use and the effects of listening, accountability, reasoning, humility, open questions, and especially empathy.

As you watch it, pay special attention to Juror No. 8's ability to discern the behavioral signals of people—their often subtle but very real concerns, needs, orientation, and disposition. This is what we mean by empathy. Researchers have hypothesized—and found evidence to support—a positive correlation between this cognitive “sixth sense” and effective leadership. In short, leaders who are more empathic are better able to reach the fulcrum of their followers’ judgment.

Then ask yourself these questions:

1. What did you notice about the styles of communication among the jurors? Which styles were most effective? Least effective?
2. How would you describe Juror No. 8's leadership style?
3. In addition to Juror No. 8, who showed leadership credibility and how? Who didn’t?
4. Who showed respect, honor, and trust for others? Who didn’t? How did it appear as visible behavior? Did it weaken or strengthen leadership? What were its benefits? Its costs?
5. Who showed empathy? How did it appear as behavior? Did it weaken or strengthen leadership? What were its benefits? Its costs?
6. How would you describe the leadership of the nominal leader, the jury foreman (Juror No. 1, played by Martin Balsam)?
7. What assumptions did some of the jurors make? In what ways did these assumptions demonstrate the presence or lack of respect, honor, and trust?
8. Whose courage grew as the deliberations wore on?
9. Contrast the perseverance and persistence of Juror No. 3 (played by Lee J. Cobb), Juror No. 4 (played by E.G. Marshall), Juror No. 8 (played by Fonda), and Juror No. 10 (played by Ed Begley). What do you learn about courage?
10. Who nurtured dialogue? Who relied mainly on lecturing? What was the difference in their impact?

 

© Copyright 2009   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

 

The Critical Link of Change

A conference producer called in a state of some anxiety last week. It seems she had lost one of her speakers for an August 4-5 conference in Chicago, and she was wondering if I could fill in.

I agreed. If you’re interested in the subject of strategic engagement and alignment, by all means, contact me and I will point you in the right direction.

Here is the précis of my presentation, on the morning of August 5:

The Front-Line Supervisor: Critical Link in Employee Engagement

Two out of every three change initiatives collapse in failure, and a clear majority of employees in U.S.-based companies admit they are disengaged. Why is that? How can we finally make big change and deep engagement a reality?

The answer involves the front-line supervisor. Typically overlooked by communicators and the senior management team alike, front-line supervisors are, in fact, a critical link in the execution of any business strategy, change initiative, operating priority, or rebranding campaign. Supervisors are uniquely positioned to translate the implications of the strategy or initiative to the day-to-day work that employees do on the factory floor, in the front office, on the loading dock, in the research laboratory, at the call center, or in face-to-face contact with the customer.

And yet far more often than you may assume, front-line supervisors are not onboard with a strategy or initiative, and they don’t believe it will last more than a few months. They feel safe dismissing it and ignoring it. Consequently, business strategies and initiatives are often DOA long before senior management realizes.

It doesn’t have to be that way. In this session, you will learn how to enroll front-line supervisors as champions of your next business strategy, change initiative, operating priority, or rebranding campaign. In particular, you will see:

• How front-line supervisors may starve a strategy or initiative to death even before it can achieve anything.

• How you can manage implicit as well as explicit communication around a strategy, initiative, or brand.

• How you can win the hearts and minds of supervisors, so that their initial disposition is to support senior management.

• How your communication planning can benefit from a continuing dialogue with front-line supervisors.

If this interests you, and you can be in Chicago on August 4-5 (I am also offering a half-day workshop at the same site on August 6), just write to me at tom@arceil.com or telephone us at +1-847-247-2241.