By Thomas J. Lee
What is the value of people engagement?
In terms of dollars and cents, what does it return?
Those questions have long bedeviled organizations of all kinds and their leaders. We got the answer a couple of weeks ago, when Apple Inc. announced its quarterly results. Apple, as you know, is a company with deep people engagement.
The answer is staggering. It is far, far more than any of us — including yours truly — had ever imagined. Far more.
Imagine being able to raise your prices and then sell many more, a great many more, of whatever you're bringing to the marketplace. That's exactly what Apple is doing.
It boosted the price of its iPhones by 10 percent — keep in mind, they were never cheap — and then proceeded to sell more than 61 million units in three months, for an increase of 40 percent from the year-earlier period.
I hope you own some Apple stock. This torrid rate of sales is enabling Apple to boost its dividend by 11 percent and its stock buyback by $50 billion, from $90 billion to $140 billion. You read correctly. Such an incredible feat is possible because Apple is sitting on $193 billion in reserves.
Now, pay attention. We're talking about illions with a B. We're not just talking about measly millions. Billions. Hundreds of billions of dollars of net income in the bank.
You want to know how much $193 billion is? I'll tell you how much it is. According to the World Bank, the United States accounts for 27 percent of the world's economy, or about $17 trillion of goods and services per year.
Our gross domestic product thus works out to roughly $50 billion per day. So the amount of Apple's cash on hand is almost equal to the total GDP of the United States, arguably the wealthiest country in the history of civilization, for four consecutive days.
Or you can size it up another way. You can notice that only about a dozen companies on the S&P 500 boast total market capitalization (the price of a share of common stock times the number of shares outstanding) of more than $193 billion. Needless to say, Apple is the 700 billion dollar gorilla.
Apple's hoard is all the more impressive for three reasons. First, the company was nearly broke just twenty years ago. Second, its phenomenal earnings pace has only increased since the 2011 death of Steve Jobs, whom everyone was crediting with Apple's turnaround. Third, its success represents the triumph of organic growth and its engine, people engagement.
Every business has two potential avenues of growth: inorganic and organic. Most companies pursue the former, inorganic growth, because they don't understand anything else. But the real magic happens in the latter, organic growth.
Inorganic growth is merely a matter of buying something — a patent, a factory, an algorithm, a customer list, a whole company — and grafting it onto your own organization. It's usually expensive and dicey, unless you're very selective and very disciplined.
Organic growth is altogether different. It is growth from within: your own people, your own processes, and your own products, all coming together to innovate. It holds far greater potential for extraordinary success. Look at Apple. From its brilliantly lit stores to its trailblazing iPad to its MacBook Pro to iPods with 10,000 songs to the creation of an entire app industry to its phenomenal customer service, that is what Apple has done so magnificently.
The difference is enough to drop jaws. Last year, in a perfect illustration of inorganic growth, Facebook bought upstart and potential rival WhatsApp for $19 billion, a sum that few observers could grasp. Yet it was only a dime on the dollar of Apple's bank account.
Not to be too facile, but I cannot think of a better reason to go organic.
Now here's the crux: Organic growth is the product of people engagement. Properly understood, the engagement of employees is not so much a matter of morale, or of loyalty, or of satisfaction on the job, or even of alignment. It is rather a function of intense focus, deep curiosity, no-holds passion, and the relentless courage to innovate and change. That is what Apple is. You build that culture of engagement, and you will generate organic growth.
I cannot promise that you will be sitting on $193 billion in twenty years. But I can promise that you will have something that will make you very, very proud.
© Copyright 2015 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.
By Thomas J. Lee
I lost my temper yesterday.
I shouldn't have, and I truly regret it. But the fact is I did.
It is rare for me to go volcanic. It almost never happens. People who have known me for ten years, even fifteen or twenty years, will tell you the closest they have seen me approach it is mild irritation. Fortunately they were not at my side yesterday.
The particulars are unimportant. Suffice to say my inbox overfloweth with emails. One of yesterday's emails, spam from a complete stranger who appeared to be the weakest volt on the Internet, was just the stupidest thing I had ever read. It was idiotic.
Here was someone pretending to be wise who was emphatically insisting that reading literature was a waste of time. Apparently a STEM fanatic, he all but said literature was useless in today's world.
Now, I like to read. As I write these words I am midway through War and Peace. I have learned a great deal from books over the course of my life, and I am convinced that the liberal arts are the best path to a lifetime of wisdom, depth, insight, relational health, and critical thought. You can imagine my ire on reading the email in question.
I dashed off a suitable, polite note expressing a strong preference to be permanently removed from his distribution list. A minute later I received a surly reply. If there's one thing I don't want and don't need before my second cup of coffee it's surly.
So I called the guy, and I let him know that he wasn't the only surly person in the world. Boy, did I ever.
I got my point across, but I truly regret using some harsh language. (No, not profanity, which is a particular irritant to me. But I did use the words "Listen, buddy.")
In the hours since, I have calmed down enough to analyze things. What did I learn?
First, just chill. Of all the problems around the world, whatever is angering you isn't much. In all likelihood it doesn't even register on the angerometer. (Don't look it up. I just coined it.)
Second, think. Ask yourself: What is the simplest course of action at hand to accomplish what you want to accomplish? For me it was clicking on the Unsubscribe link. Did I do that? Of course not. I wasn't thinking, and besides, it wouldn't allow me to let off steam. But I should have.
Third, whenever you have steam coming out of your ears, the telephone is not necessarily your friend. The lack of face-to-face contact creates a sense of anonymity. While that's true for email as well, at least email gives you a chance to express yourself rationally at length without interruption, and tone of voice is immaterial.
Fourth, and this is true for every email you write, enter the addressee's name and email address only after you have finished writing and are ready to send the message. (If it's a reply, erase the name and address before you begin to compose the response.) Enter a descriptive word or phrase in the Subject: line to identify the message in your drafts folder, but leave the address line empty. That way, if you send the email prematurely, it won't go anywhere. That is triply true when you writing to your boss or your team, and it is quadruply true when negative emotion is involved.
Fifth, whenever possible, and it usually is, don't send an email immediately upon completing it. Instead, save it in your drafts folder, at least for several hours and preferably for the next day, so that you can read it with fresh eyes. When you re-read it, do so out loud. Crisply read and pronounce each and every word. Look for misspellings (and do NOT trust a computerized spellchecker), clumsy phrasing, hollow arguments, overlooked facts, and anything else that would ultimately weaken your message.
Sixth, emotional intelligence is every bit as important as intellectual intelligence. By emotional intelligence, I mean genuinely appreciating and invoking such critical relational dynamics as empathy, self-awareness, respect, dignity, safety, affirmation, and self-discipline, for starters. It's one thing to have an intellectual grasp of those dynamics. It's quite another to have them at the core of your personality and character.
Seventh, there's an awful lot of stupid out there, and there seems to be more every day. Just ignore it. The universe will let it settle at the bottom, where it belongs.
Thanks for reading. I feel better already.
I welcome your thoughts in response to these essays. If you have an idea for a future essay, so much the better. You can reach me at thomas.lee@arceil.com.
© Copyright 2015 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.
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 speak your truth, and you must speak 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 always watching you. They 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 and theirs alone. It is not yours. It will rest largely on whether they regard you as a person of noble purpose and integrity, as a person of principle, intellect, competence, high standards, and wisdom, and as a person who has their own best interests in mind and at heart.
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.
© Copyright 2015 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.
By Thomas J. Lee
Think back to the last time you took the family out for a casual dinner. When it came to dessert, chances are the waiters didn't just bring you a simple printed menu.
More likely, they either described the choices in colorful language or, even more likely, brought a dessert cart to show you (and especially your kids) what you could order.
That wasn't by whim or accident. It was deliberate and carefully planned. By describing or illustrating the selections, the restaurant was expanding your possible options and, in the process, making it much more likely you would order that $9 slice of double-chocolate fudge cake.
The same goes for buying a new car. The salesperson is likely to put you behind the wheel and let you take it for a spin. In a few minutes you will have felt what it would be like to own and drive it.
The late Steve Jobs used to tell anyone who would listen, "You have to show people what's possible."
Jobs, a masterful marketer, knew that, unless they saw what it could do, people would never buy an iPad. It wasn't something they could even think about, because it was unlike anything they had ever used.
Further, he knew you had to talk to people in terms they could understand. It was one thing to tell people an iPod had so-many megabytes. It was something else entirely to tell them they could have 1,000 songs in their pocket.
Leadership is like that. It's a lot about Show and Tell. You have to show people what's possible, and you have to tell them about it in words and phrases they will understand and remember.
© Copyright 2015 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.
By Thomas J. Lee
Anyone who watched the Academy Awards the other night — and 36 million people did — had to be struck by the courageous candor of Graham Moore, the 33-year-old writer who won an Oscar for The Imitation Game screenplay.
The movie starred Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing, the brilliant British mathematician who is remembered today as the father of computer science and artificial intelligence. Turing did as much as anyone to win World War II for the Allies by cracking Enigma, the Third Reich's complex, mechanized process of encoding messages.
In spite of his intellectual heroics, Turing was prosecuted for the crime of homosexuality in the early 1950s. He accepted chemical castration in lieu of imprisonment and died a year or two later of cyanide poisoning, apparently by his own hand.
Moore, the young screenwriter, has something in common with Turing, and it isn't, as many people assumed, his sexual orientation. Rather it is a history of depression over self-perceived, felt differences from mainstream society, and an accompanying inclination toward suicide.
After the envelope was opened and his name was read Sunday night, Moore acted on an impulse. He told himself he would rarely have such an opportunity. Staring into the bright lights and the little black circles of the television cameras, he decided to use his 45 seconds of airtime to "say something meaningful." That, he did.
“When I was 16 years old," he declared, "I tried to kill myself because I felt weird and I felt different and I felt like I did not belong.
"And now I am standing here, and so I would like for this moment to be for that kid out there who feels like she’s weird or she’s different or or she doesn’t fit in anywhere.
“Yes, you do. I promise you do. You do. Stay weird. Stay different."
The impact of such a powerful statement is immeasurable but likely huge. Technology is partly to credit, for television brought his message to millions of people. But without Moore's courage, there would have been no message to broadcast. Do the math, and you can measure the impact of his courage. If only 1 percent of the viewers are contemplating suicide, and if only 1 percent of them change their mind because of his words, it's entirely possible that Moore saved more than three thousand lives simply by choosing courage over convention.
The courage it took is the courage of vulnerability: the courage to disclose something self-effacing, self-denigrating, self-critical, or self-limiting that enables other people to find, see, and approach your essential personhood. For most of us, and especially for successful people who are often thrust into the role of leadership, that is counter-intuitive. Everything conspires against it. Few leaders ever muster the courage to go there, and thus they never achieve the full authenticity, strength, and truth of a deep leadership connection with people.
So herein lies a lesson for leaders everywhere: Risk vulnerability. You have nothing to lose but a few barnacles of comfort, and, in emerging as the leader you could become, you and the people you might lead have everything to gain.
You need not go to the length that Graham Moore went. You may want to stop at admitting you are afraid, or you are uncertain, or you are missing something that your peers take for granted, or any of a hundred other things in a similar vein. But take a step, however small, in that direction. Choose courage over convention.
For my own part, convention tells me not to post this essay, for I may be offending the reader who has lost a loved one to suicide, or I may be coming across as dark, or I may be seen as overvaluing vulnerability in a culture that rewards bravado. It is requiring a thimble of courage to proceed. Graham Moore, you inspire me.
For most of us, it will never be a matter of saving three thousand lives, or even three. But we just may touch someone who is walking the road of life alone and wants to be part of something large. That's enough for a day's work, isn't it?
© Copyright 2015 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.
By Thomas J. Lee
Readers of this blog have little in common with one another. You live all around the world. You're young and old. You're rich and poor, man and woman, black and white.
But you do have a couple of things in common. One, you are interested in leadership and in the communication that enables and energizes it. Two, on the whole, you're a fairly bright bunch of people.
But that last thing, that can be a problem.
It's certainly a problem for anyone who aspires to lead people on a journey of change. Why? Simply because intelligence can get in the way of leading. Some of the worst listeners anywhere are really smart people. And because so many leaders are smart, they tend to be worse listeners.
That's right. It may come as a shock, so I will repeat it for emphasis. Leaders, because they are so often smart, have particular difficulty listening to other people.
Why are smart people in general, and smart leaders in particular, poor listeners?
Well, 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—at least 36 of every 60 seconds—for smart people to be mentally doing other things while someone else leisurely finishes her own sentence.
What are you doing for those 36-plus seconds of every minute? Lots of things.
You're thinking about the agenda for tomorrow's meeting. You're sorting through candidates for the staff vacancy. You're remembering to get arugula at the fresh market. You're debating which movie to see tonight. You're wondering why this person is taking forever to make a simple point.
Most of all, you're deciding what to say in response. You're thinking, thinking, thinking. Smart people love to think. You do, don't you?
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 about these things whenever you have a few seconds.
Given the ubiquity of smart phones, you are also likely to be sending a text message or scrolling down your email or checking the progress of Frosty the Snowstorm on weather.com. 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.
Now if you're as smart as you think you are, you'll identify listening skills as an opportunity for self-improvement, and you will do something about it. There are lots of resources out there: books, tapes, videos, coaching. Our Master Class is one of many; we describe four levels of good listening, and we set forth an eight-step process for what we term affirmative listening.
The important thing is to do something. Otherwise people will get the sense that you think you already know everything, and you and I already know that isn't the case. We do, don't we?
© Copyright 2015 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.
By Thomas J. Lee
Was Hitler a true leader?
How about Stalin? Was he a real leader?
And what would you say about Mao? Pol Pot? Idi Amin?
Closer to home, is a CEO who rules by fear and terror a genuine leader? Where do respect, trust, and dignity — by the leader, for the led; and by the led, for their leader — come into play?
Can a dictator ever be a leader? Where do you draw the line between tyranny and leadership? Where, if anywhere, does one begin and the other end?
I teach leadership, both for bright university graduate students and for managers in business. Sooner or later, in almost every class, Hitler's name comes up. Then the other names: Stalin, Mao, ad nauseum.
Quite a few participants in every class say yes, Hitler was indeed a leader. How else can you explain his rapid emergence from obscurity to a merchant of mayhem wreaking tumult throughout Europe and beyond?
But just as many participants say no. They insist that by definition a leader generates a voluntary following, and that to conflate arbitrary fiat with genuine leadership is confusing at best and misleading at worst.
The questions only get tougher: What exactly is leadership, and what, after all, does it mean to lead? Is it always honorable? If it is mere influence devoid of a moral metric, should we think of a carnival barker as a leader? A heroin pusher? An advertising copywriter? A mugger with a gun? A political gerrymanderer? An advice columnist?
Let's stipulate the essentials of both points of view. Yes, leadership involves bringing about a big change in thinking. And yes, leadership involves a voluntary or discretionary following. True leaders have a foot in both camps. Let's also stipulate that mutual respect, trust, and dignity are essential to the leadership bond that keeps the whole thing alive.
Still, after acknowledging all that and after wrestling with all the many troublesome questions, I came to the conclusion we need a way of reconciling morality, for good or ill, with impact. After all, at the risk of sounding like a nihilist, the fact is that Hitler had his adherents. Decades later, he still does. So just how can we square that brutish fact with our thinking about leadership?
My answer was to develop a simple hierarchy, broadly faithful to the variety of leadership we have seen throughout history. It has four archetypes that admit a wide variance.
Each of the archetypes is a broad orientation defined basically by its attitude and disposition toward independent thought, speech, and action.
The most primitive orientation we call the absolute archetype. Its attitude toward independent thought, speech, and action is hostile, crushing. As much as possible, it wants to prevent any such thing. It declares: No, you cannot!
From monarchs to megalomaniacs, history is replete with examples of voluntary fealty to such absolute leadership. At first glance none of it makes much sense. The 20th century is especially confounding, as the world had the benefit of 150 or 200 years of successful democracy to observe and emulate. Still, millions of people came under the seductive siren song of Nazism, communism, and fascism — some by will, some by apathy, some by force. They paid with their lives and reaped only havoc in return.
Wherever such a primitive brand of leadership has taken hold, it has required generations and selfless courage to cast aside. Most of the world has done just that. We have made it to what we now might call the traditional archetype.
Its attitude toward independent thought, speech, and action is not outright hostile, but it is heavyhanded. As much as possible, this archetype wants to control it, to channel it narrowly, to determine who can think, say, and do what. It declares: You must!
Some of us, perhaps most of us, have evolved further to what now passes for conventional management and leadership. We call it the modern archetype. Its attitude toward independent thought, speech, and action is willful. As much as possible, it wants to influence what you think, say, and do. It declares: You should!
So common is this archetype today that you can walk into any bookstore or library, and you will find scores of books asserting that influencing people is the central task of leadership. John Maxwell, a widely published author, goes so far as to assert that leadership is influence and influence is leadership period.
Now, in the 21st century, we are on the precipice of the next orientation of leadership. We can call it the progressive or liberal archetype (terms derived more from philosophy than contemporary politics). Its attitude toward independent thought, speech, and action is hopeful, trusting, confident. As much as possible, it seeks to inspire what people think, say, and do. It declares: You can!
So we have gone from preventing independent thought, speech, and action to controlling it, and from controlling it to influencing it, and now, hopefully, from influencing it to inspiring it.
So where do Hitler and other tyrants come in?
To the extent they build the fealty of others to gain power, they are squarely in the first quadrant: absolute leadership. They were or are indeed leaders, especially in the early going, when they muster support among enough people to account for a critical mass. But that initial and voluntary support is not enough for their all-consuming appetite. They have a visceral need to prevent any independent thought, speech, and action, because their continuing domination of everything within reach depends on it.
Unfortunately, leaders can become tyrants, and in fact some of them do just that. Their leadership fails when, at long last, they lose or abandon respect, trust, and dignity for their followers, and thus for themselves, and when their followers also lose respect, trust, and dignity for the erstwhile leaders. Until then, yes, they can and may very well successfully lead people.
© Copyright 2015 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.
By Thomas J. Lee
Let me tell you a story.
It's the story of my very first experience in grown-up leadership. I was all of 17 years old. The church that my family attended was recruiting a new senior pastor. Inexplicably, the elders asked me to serve on the search committee.
It was a heady experience for such a callow young man. I had never even held a full-time job, let alone hired anyone for a full-time job, and I certainly hadn't participated in any endeavor like this, for goodness sake. Yet here I was with an equal voice and an equal vote in the selection of the church's new leader. I would certainly learn a few things.
In some ways the experience was comical. I had all the executive documents, meeting minutes, and privileged personnel records of the candidates in my room at home. Naturally I was sworn to secrecy, and I was determined to keep that confidence. My mother, however, was pestered by the other ladies of her bridge circle to pry loose my secrets. I refused to budge. Not a peep. But one day I came home from school and noticed that my confidential files had been disturbed. My mother got a scolding! She fessed up, and I swore her to secrecy.
Well, after months of surreptitious Sunday visits to churches hundreds of miles from home, in-depth interviews, lengthy deliberations, due diligence, and multiple rounds of voting, the search committee issued a call to a pastor from southern California, and he accepted. He seemed to be a perfect fit. We wanted a young and energetic man, an eloquent speaker from the pulpit, and most of all a dynamic, charismatic leader. That's exactly what he was.
Forty-plus years later, I still remember the day he and his wife arrived at a cocktail reception the elders hosted to welcome them. (I came straight from school, and I was served Coke.) When the front door opened and the new pastor and his wife stepped in, his powerful physical presence brought forth an energy that immediately refreshed and rejuvenated. All the committee members and their spouses shared in the excitement. The church was heading in a new direction, for sure.
The next year I graduated from high school and went off to the university, and it was a couple of years after that when, on campus, I heard the scandalous news from home. Our young, dynamic reverend was irreverently involved in an extramarital affair with a beautiful widow whom he had been counseling in her grief. The pastor's wife asked him to move out of the parsonage. The church bulletin coyly printed a small item saying the pastor could henceforth be reached at a new telephone number. His ministry no longer tenable, the pastor soon resigned. Payton Place had nothing on my hometown.
Clearly, we had made an abysmal choice. Bedazzled and perhaps bamboozled by outward appearances, we were enraptured by his charisma, charm, eloquence, and energy—even at the expense of the truly important criteria of integrity, character, soulfulness, authenticity, and self-discipline.
Our pastor was scarcely the first leader to go down a dark path. Countless others—in religion and in government, in sports and in the media, on Wall Street and in Hollywood—have done likewise. From peccadillo to peccancy, so many individuals in whom we have placed our trust have profoundly disappointed us.
I have been studying and teaching leadership for a long, long time, and if there is one thing I have learned it is this: Pay less attention to such ephermal things as appearances, magnetism, and charm. Especially beware charisma, for charismatic individuals can be, and alarmingly often are, seductive of their own willpower and character. Instead, pay more attention to discipline, ideas, strategies, resourcefulness, ability, integrity, experience—and to the soulful dimensions of leadership such as vulnerability, empathy, self-awareness, authenticity, respect, and decency.
None of this is to say that interpersonal skills, communication, and relationships are unimportant. To the contrary. They are absolutely vital. But in the long run they depend more on who we are, especially in the face of pressure and temptation, than on mere appearances and charm. That's especially true of individuals whose personality is so enrapturing that they have all but coasted through the real challenge of forging and sustaining resilient, deep personal connection. Throw in wealth, looks, and smooth talk, and you have an explosive combination indeed.
Leaders are people. People are often weak. I'm not expecting perfection. But I am hoping for excellence, and charisma isn't necessarily part of it.
© Copyright 2015 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.
By Thomas J. Lee
How often have you heard someone pay tribute to a business, or to any other organization, by calling it "a well-oiled machine"?
Fairly often, I'm guessing. As metaphors go, it's an oldie but goodie.
You hear it whenever costs come in under budget, whenever something is finished ahead of deadline, whenever a widget's quality clears a standard.
Little wonder. We all appreciate reliability and predictability. We want to depend on things. So we're happy when a promise becomes its own reality. When that happens consistently, we reach for the metaphors. Yes, it sure does look like a well-oiled machine.
But should that apply to all companies and all organizations? Should every enterprise be run like a machine?
Color me skeptical. Maybe I am making too much of a few words, but hear me out.
Machines—even well-oiled machines—are just things. Things can do only what they are intended, built, and programmed to do. Their limits are thus the limits of their design, their technology, their maintenance, and their energy.
Mere machines cannot imagine anything else, anything different. They cannot develop anything new. They cannot notice and wonder. Apart from the most sophisticated diagnostic machines in hospitals and laboratories and the like, few can even identify and solve a problem.
By extension, an organization that runs like a proverbial well-oiled machine is an organization that is doing the same thing in the same way, over and over, every day. For companies that do that, the metaphor is apt. They should indeed strive to operate like a well-oiled machine.
But for organizations that need to grow, for organizations that need to do and be more tomorrow than they are today, the metaphor is inapt. If you want your team to stretch itself, to innovate, to create, to define tomorrow, then you need more than the social equivalent of gears, wires, and lubricant. You need something more and better than a machine, however well-oiled it may be.
What you need are people who think for themselves, who dream, who appreciate and act on core principles, who can adapt to ever-changing circumstances, who will take the initiative to do what's necessary and right in a situation that you never imagined.
That takes leadership. Your leadership. The real work of leadership, which is a matter of thought, word, and deed. Yours.
© Copyright 2015 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.
By Thomas J. Lee
When most people pause long enough to think about courage, their mind goes to physical acts of bravery. They may think of heroic soldiers in combat or cancer patients undergoing chemo. They may think of a tightrope walker or a circus acrobat. Or they may think of a famous person in history: Lawrence of Arabia on camelback in the desert, perhaps, or Rosa Parks on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.
But courage takes many other forms. The presence or absence of courage is often as close as our lips and feet: it is our next word, our next step. It plays an important role in the success or failure in any endeavor, professional or personal. It can determine the health and vitality of our careers, our businesses, even our families.
In addition to raw physical bravery, courage can show up in social, intellectual, and emotional ways. People can muster courage to make the right decision, or not; they can take the appropriate course of action, or not; and they can think the trusting thought rather than the cynical thought, or not.
People can find the courage to speak up, to stand up, and to show up in big and noble ways, or not. They can have the courage to turn away from so-called humor masquerading as racism or sexism, or not.
They can seize the courage to volunteer when no one else is volunteering, to ask a question on everybody's mind that nobody else is asking, to challenge the status quo and the assumptions everyone else is using—or not.
Sometimes, courage is simply a matter of perseverance. Mary Ann Radmacher once observed that courage can be the refusal to abandon hope. "Courage doesn't always roar," she said. "Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day, saying: I will try again tomorrow."
Whenever I recall that quotation, I think of Michael Jordan, perhaps the best basketball player ever. He spoke candidly about his failures and his refusal to give up. "I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career," he said. "I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the winning shot and missed. I have failed over and over and over again in my life, and that is why I succeed."
It seems to me that courage, regardless of whether it is physical or social, whether it is intellectual or emotional, shows up in three different ways: discipline, initiative, and perseverance. Consider their importance. Without discipline, you lack the purposefulness and control you need to govern your thoughts, words, and deeds. Without initiative, you never look at things differently, you never get started on something, and so you have no impact. Finally, without perseverance, the long odds against success always carry the day. You lose because you give up. In effect, the house wins.
Together with strategic focus, curiosity, and passion, courage is an essential ingredient of organic growth. As we have argued before, these four things are the stuff of full, creative engagement in the workplace. Focus is engagement of the eyes. Curiosity is engagement of the mind. Passion is engagement of the heart. Courage is engagement of the will.
With a culture of all four, organizations can accomplish just about anything. Organic growth will come naturally. Without them, success is and always will be a roll of the dice. It may find you, but you won't find it.
Of the four, courage is most evident in its action. While it can take abundant courage to challenge one's own thinking, to reframe issues, to consider new approaches, the action that follows is the embodiment of it. That is what people see and hear, and it is what they remember. It's one thing to intend, to expect, to assume, or to plan differently. It is quite another thing to do it.
In business, we unfortunately see the absence of courage all too often. That has always been true, but it is especially true in the wake of so many mergers and restructurings and so much downsizing and offshoring. When people are fearful of losing a job, they are bound to show less courage. They want to play it safe. That is all the truer in companies that have unwisely chosen the path of repeated, scattered reductions in force—what some of us call "rolling thunder." In those companies, no one knows when or where the next storm will hit, so everyone remains mentally indoors.
Fear is pervasive. Many otherwise good, competent people are fearful of appearing uninformed or inexperienced or unsophisticated. Many are afraid to speak up in a meeting, out of concern that others will later ridicule them. Many are timid about asking a senior executive an important question in a town-hall meeting or a skip-level lunch.
What can you, in whatever capacity you are, do to nurture a culture of more courage? How do you begin?
Here are just a few things you can do. With a little brainstorming you'll be able to add to this list. Ask yourself: How many of these things do you and your peers make a habit of?
Show your own courage, so that you are leading by example. That is true for all four of these touchstones, but it is especially true for courage.
There are many other such strategies you can bring to bear on behalf of passion. We discuss them in our Master Class. Click on the Master Classes tab for more information.
By Thomas J. Lee
Half the things you take for granted wouldn't exist if it were not for someone's deep, consuming passion for them in the beginning.
The things wouldn't be, for the simple reason that no one had the zeal or enthusiasm to create them. Their invention or discovery required passion. The passion was much more important than any immediate potential for profit. Of course, someone else would eventually find a way to scale and monetize them, otherwise they wouldn't be widespread today. But the passion had to be there from the start, or there would be nothing to scale and monetize.
And all that is just passion around computers!
We could talk about the passion that Jon Stewart and Bill O'Reilly bring to their television commentaries, or the passion that BMW engineers bring to each new model, or the passion that environmentalists bring to saving a species like the bald eagle, or the passion that Rotary International volunteers bring to the fight against polio in developing countries.
We could talk about the passion of the United States SEALS, or of the Grateful Dead and their fans, or of the Tea Party, or of local first responders, or of the Metropolitan Opera, or of medical researchers, or of the Harley-Davidson Owners Group (HOG), or of the long-suffering Chicago Cubs fans who have gone a hundred-plus years without a World Series championship, or your own son or daughter's passion for a science fair or soccer game or merit badge or homecoming dance.
We could go on and on. Wherever you look, you find that passion is central, not peripheral, to creative human endeavor. It is at the core of your uniqueness, your soulful individuality. It is who all of us can be on our best day and want to be every day.
Is money involved? Don't be silly. Of course it is. People need to be paid and want to become rich if they can. Eventually, as in an IPO or a labor impasse or a shareholder revolt, money can dominate. But someone's burning passion—in combination with a laser-like focus, endless curiosity, and the courage that shows up as discipline, initiative and perseverance—must have been there from the beginning. It is what got them started and kept them going.
As we have argued before, these four things are the stuff of full, creative engagement in the workplace: focus, curiosity, passion, courage. With a culture of all four, organizations can accomplish just about anything. Organic growth will come naturally, almost inevitably. Without them, success is and always will be elusive.
Now it is an unfortunate fact of life that few companies are truly eager to do the work of nurturing them, and that is especially true of passion, what we call the engagement of the heart. Most companies choose instead to snuff out the passion that new employees bring to the workplace. They subject new ideas to the deadly routine of "devil's advocate." They delay things so much that people tire of offering new suggestions and solutions.
I attribute this instinct to Snapping Finger Syndrome, the tendency of so many managers to snap their fingers and insist on something. It's easy for them to rely on the authority of their position—the stick of their legal, official authority—to exert their will. It's more difficult to use the authority of their person—the carrot of their moral and exemplary authority—to reach people where they are and take them to a different place. The choice of stick over carrot may produce immediate, short-term results, but it is often at the expense of cultural sclerosis.
As a result, in many industries what you commonly see are stagnation and resistance to real and sustainable change. What change you do see is usually concentrated in one or more of five incidental areas: (1) the introduction of a new technology such as ERP or CRM systems; (2) the reorganization or rearrangement of divisions and departments; (3) reductions in force that leave everyone trying to do more with less; (4) the roll-out of new programs with attendant bells and whistles; and (5) the acquisition of other companies or the spin-off or sale of business units. Together we refer to these as the Small Five, not because they are small in scope (an ERP can be huge, for example) but because all five are small diversions and distractions, and because none of the five offers real, organic growth. None is the horsepower that takes a company to a bigger, better, brighter tomorrow on its own.
Let's assume you want to be different. You want organic growth, and you appreciate the importance of focus, curiosity, passion, and courage. In particular, and in whatever role you have, you want to instill more passion in the culture. Where do you begin?
Here are just a few things you can do. With a little brainstorming you'll be able to add to this list. Ask yourself: How many of these things do you and your peers make a habit of?
There are many other such strategies you can bring to bear on behalf of passion. We discuss them in our Master Class. Just click on the tab above for more information.
© Copyright 2013 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.
By Thomas J. Lee
Four score and seventy years ago today, Abraham Lincoln delivered the most famous speech in American history. In it he proved both his humility and his humanity, for, contrary to his prediction, the world immediately noted and long remembered what was said at Gettysburg, in commemoration of the sacrifices in battle the previous summer. Said Sen. Charles Sumner in Lincoln's eulogy eighteen months later: "The battle itself was less important than the speech."
Let's take a moment to re-read Lincoln's 270-odd words and burn them into our heart, to remind ourselves both of the central meaning of the United States of America and of the central importance of words in the work of leadership:
"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
"Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
"But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
Class dismissed.
By Thomas J. Lee
Let's say you have a spare million dollars lying around, maybe under your mattress, not doing much of anything. You decide to put it to work. You find two companies that appear to be well-managed and perhaps worth your investment.
Let's say further that they are identical in every respect but one. Ajax Company is already performing at its peak today, and Acme Company will be performing at its peak at some point in the future.
Which would be the better investment?
Everyone whom I ever asked this question tells me Acme, the company that will reach its peak in the future, and I agree. Why invest in the Blockbusters and Blackberries of the world? The whole idea of investing is to reap the benefits of picking tomorrow's winners today.
The difficulty, of course, is divining the winners and losers of tomorrow while it is still today. People have lost a lot of money trying in vain to do just that. Of course, other people have made a lot of money by successfully doing it.
While I cannot promise you riches, I can point you to an obvious common denominator among the companies that will be more successful tomorrow than they are today: They are looking for and finding new ways to grow organically. They are introducing new products, venturing into new markets, finding new customers.
Doing that requires something that other companies—ordinary companies, average companies—don't have. It requires a culture of extraordinary curiosity.
A culture of extraordinary curiosity values questions over answers. It places more stock in imagination than in knowledge. It prizes wonder-if over know-how. It is more preoccupied with what it doesn't know than with what it does. It is constantly, desperately, urgently seizing on the unknown thing. It is never satisfied with what it knows.
How do you find such a company? You can try examining the balance sheet, but I would suggest looking first and longest at the people and their work. In other words, at the whole pattern of their norms, their expectations, their choices, their conversations, their journey.
A company with a culture of curiosity would hire and promote people who ask good questions over people who dismiss the questions as silly or who answer them too quickly, too certainly, and too dismissively.
A company with a culture of curiosity would invest ever-more time and money in research and development, not snip away at the R&D budget in a fruitless effort to make the numbers.
A company with a culture of curiosity would reward risk and innovation to the point of paying bonuses to people who almost, but not quite, find the right answers.
A company with a culture of curiosity would very nearly become apoplectic at the prospect of answering a question that has been nagging at them. Answering the question, after all, threatens to imperil and stymie the creativity involved in wrestling with it.
But why? Isn't the whole exercise of asking questions all about finding answers? A linear thinker would say so. A lateral thinker would disagree.
As you can see by those two very questions, and by countless others like them, the simple act of asking provocative questions pushes the bounds of what we know. It stretches us. It invites us into mystery. It ushers us through the portal of discovery. It takes us from today and delivers us at tomorrow.
Throughout history, the people who have discovered and invented the future have asked more and better questions than their peers and predecessors asked. They were the Thomas Edisons, the Henry Fords, the Albert Einsteins, and the Bill Gateses of their time.
Moreover, every one of those gentlemen knew it. They all are on record with splendid statements about the miraculous power of curiosity. (Google curiosity and any of their names if you don't believe it.) They understood that whoever asked the best questions would win.
The thing is, you don't just snap your fingers and demand curiosity, and you don't just sit back and wait for it to arrive. Rather, you need to do the hard work of cultivating it.
As we have argued before, strategic curiosity is one of four essential elements of full, creative engagement in the workplace. With it—along with focus, passion, and courage—organizations can accomplish just about anything, and organic growth comes naturally. Without it, success will be elusive.
But few companies do that work. In my own consulting, I see company after company taking undue pride in their employee morale and regarding it as engagement. They think they are ahead of the game, while the likelihood is that are behind it.
Here are just a few things you can do to create a culture of extraordinary curiosity. How many do you and your peers make a habit of doing?
If you doubt for a moment the value of curiosity, just look at all the great organizations that have sprung out of questions, and look at the people throughout history who have blazed new trails—in technology, exploration, business, the arts, government, medicine—on the strength of curioisity. The list is long indeed.
By the same token, if you look at the lengthy list of companies that have shuttered or sold themselves over the last ten or twenty years, you will see the opposite: people who thought they knew the answers, only to find that someone else was still asking questions long after they had stopped.
Be curious, my friends. Always be curious.
© Copyright 2013 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.
By Thomas J. Lee
Regular readers may recall the story I first told in this blog several years ago, about my next-door neighbor who was a wide receiver in the National Football League. One night, while we were both cooking out, we got to talking. He told me what it was like to play football in front of 75,000 screaming fans.
One thing he said during that conversation struck me dumb. I couldn't believe it, but he insisted it was true. Since then, I have confirmed it in conversations with several other professional football players. All of them told me the very same thing.
The astounding thing that all these professional athletes said was this: During the execution of a play, they cannot hear the stadium crowd. They can hear the crowd in the huddle and on the line of scrimmage, indeed so much that the noise can make it difficult to hear the quarterback. But once the play begins, and especially if they have an instrumental role in the particular play, the crowd may as well be silent. It ceases to exist.
My neighbor, the wide receiver, went further. He said that as he is running to catch a pass, and after he catches it and is running with the ball, he can hear his own heartbeat, he can hear his breathing, and he can hear his footsteps on the turf. He can also hear a tackler coming up behind him. He just can't hear the crowd.
I found that absolutely phenomenal, and after sharing the story with a number of business executives, we all had the same reaction: Just imagine what a business could achieve with all its people at that level of focus. Certainly a great deal more than it is presently achieving.
We do occasionally see such focus, if perhaps from a distance. Our kids may have a particularly talented teacher or coach who exhibits it. We may hire a master craftsman and marvel as he polishes his work. We may have occasion to see it in first responders or ER personnel, or in soldiers heading to the front, or in a salesman closing a deal, or in an Oscar-winning performance at the movies. We may see it in a high-school valedictorian, or a Silicon Valley startup, or a victorious political campaign. Tragically, we may also see it in the crazed eyes of terrorists.
The problem is we do not customarily see it at work; we don't even see it often. It is the exception, not the day-to-day rule. In most of our routine experiences in business, we see quite the opposite: neglect of safety precautions, undisciplined PowerPoint presentations, casual inattention during conversations, last-minute workarounds, silly excuses for mistakes, extraneous conversation, interruptions, and a great deal of multitasking—even to the point of texting in meetings, training, and driving.
Strategic focus is too important to be left to happenstance. It is the first of four essential elements of full, creative engagement in the workplace. With it—along with curiosity, passion, and courage—organizations can accomplish just about anything, and organic growth comes naturally. Without it, success will be elusive.
But instead of sowing the seeds for such focus and then cultivating a garden where it can grow, many businesses (and other organizations, as well) seem hellbent on doing their best to reduce or destroy focus. Here are just a few of the things that actually cause or aggravate the problem. How many do you experience?
For any company with dreams of a bigger and better tomorrow, strategic focus is far too important to tolerate this. You want to do everything you can to grow more focus, not to suffer with less. For many companies, it's time to wake up and change.
© Copyright 2013 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.
© Copyright 2013 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.
By Thomas J. Lee
Short of an exhaustive audit, there's really no quick and simple means of objectively evaluating a company's business-strategy communication for employees. Still, it's important to try.
So just how can you take a rough measure of a company's clarity, credibility, and coherence of communication around business strategy and priorities?
One way is to look for signs of dysfunction. It isn't pretty, but it tells you what you need to know.
Here are 15 alarms to keep an eye out for. Each is a flashing red light. If you see any of them in your organization, you have work to do. If you see more than a few, you have lots of work to do. If you see most or all of them, you may want to run for the hills.
Alarm No. 1: The terms "leadership" and "management" are used interchangeably. We have discussed this distinction often here at Minding Gaps (just scroll down), so we won't belabor it again. Less understood is the fact that the difference between management and leadership bears heavily on communication in terms of its purpose, content, style, and tone. Use the wrong one and you get the wrong result.
Management concerns itself with meeting the pre-determined expectations of stakeholders. It seeks the alignment of work with strategy and priorities. It is all about complying with standards. Control and authority are paramount; deadlines and budgets are common metrics. Communication for the sake of management is thus specific, directive, and narrow.
Leadership, on the other hand, is about inspiring change or breakthrough performance through the discretionary efforts of people. It seeks the engagement of people in rising to a big challenge. While framework and direction are important, the real leverage for change is the focus, curiosity, passion and courage of the troops. It follows that good communication for leadership is enlightening, inspiring, and empowering.
Because the distinction is so often overlooked, companies commonly default to directive, commanding communication that can undercut or even stymie innovation and change. That's a loud siren of its own.
Alarm No. 2: Communication is regarded as verbal messages and data only. Everyone knows that "actions speak louder than words" and that "the facts speak for themselves." Yet few companies regard communication with employees as anything beyond words and numbers. Do they honestly think employees are wearing blinders?
A company's internal-communication process should concern itself not just with the "official truth" (verbal messages, as articulated by leadership) but also with "ground truth" (the perceived reality as expressed by policy decisions, visible behaviors of executives and senior managers, cultural forces, the organization's evident purpose, etc.). Otherwise, the company's credibility with its own people will be highly questionable.
Alarm No. 3: There's a tendency for positive spin on negative news. Let's leave spin to the politicians and their handlers. In business, we are who we are. More than anyone else, our employees know it. That's the simple truth. When bad things happen to good companies, good companies acknowledge it. They own up to their own responsibilities, and they get busy. They don't try to pull the wool over everyone's eyes. That's why good companies are good companies—and it's also one reason why good companies are good places to work.
Alarm No. 4: Upward information is stifled and choked. Remember what your mother told you. You have two ears and one mouth for a reason: to listen twice as much as you talk. Why then do we continue to think of communication as the dissemination of information and ideas, not as listening? Why then do we think of good communication skills as the ability to persuade, not the inclination to listen? When was the last time your senior leadership team fanned out on a "Listen and Learn" tour of your facilities? Face it, ground-level personnel usually have a wealth of information about production difficulties, customer preferences, and their own frustrations. Ignore it at your peril.
Alarm No. 5: Your executives and senior managers think they know everything they need to know about communication. In my experience, few do, and the exceptions prove the rule. Most executives and senior managers would do well to undergo advanced training in organizational and leadership communication and then see to it that all managers and supervisors have a similar experience. The time and money invested will pay for itself within weeks and then for months and years afterward, many times over.
Alarm No. 6: Communication is an afterthought, not a forethought. Stephen Covey taught you to begin with the end in mind, remember? In business, that means crafting a strategy with an eye on its execution. That in turn means preplanning the communication of any strategy or strategic initiative. Never leave communication to an afterthought. Incorporate an integrated, strategic communication plan within your overall strategic plan. Devote the resources (time, money, attention) to it at the front end, and you will have fewer emergencies at the back end.
Alarm No. 7: Little or no effort is made to educate employees on the industry and competition. We know from focus groups and surveys that employees everywhere want to contribute more to their company's success. To do so intelligently, they need more information about the industry and the competition. Why not share it? Doing so has a couple of side benefits: It reflects confidence and trust in people, and it creates more readiness for change. All around, it's a win-win.
Alarm No. 8: Silos predominate, and they have missiles. Companies that foster or tacitly condone a kind of sibling rivalry among staff departments or line operations (such as manufacturing plants, sales regions, or service teams) are asking for trouble. Information will invariably be hoarded, and other units will deliberately be kept in the dark. Worse, an environment of hostility will take root. Customers will notice, and they won't like it.
Alarm No. 9: Acronyms and buzzwords obscure reality. Everyone knows this drill. The language of business is buzzwords. But don't be too quick to condemn all of them out-of-hand. Some are helpful as shorthand for complex programs, products or initiatives. The difficulty arises when acronyms and jargon intentionally obscure reality or even distort reality. Remember, you can't fool employees for very long, and you shouldn't ever want to. They are on your team, aren't they?
Alarm No. 10: Useful information is withheld from employees. Just as you wouldn't mislead employees, you should have no need or desire to keep them in the dark. Think of strategic information as currency for growth. Its rapid exchange increases everyone's intelligence. In turn, intelligence increases alignment, and alignment makes customers happy. One more thing: If you keep useful information from ground-level employees, you can expect them to do likewise—from you.
Alarm No. 11: People are doing lots of non-strategic work. Here's another red flag. If your business vision, strategy, and goals are well-understood and widely accepted, then virtually everyone should spend their days and weeks on strategic challenges. If people are doing lots of non-strategic work, either they don't have a full appreciation of the strategy and its attendant priorities, or their time isn't being well-managed.
Alarm No. 12: Your company relies on cascading to "get the word out." There are two things you need to remember about cascading: (1) It doesn't work in organizations of any real size, and (2) it tricks you into thinking it does work. Better to disseminate vital information and messages by group meetings, group voice mail, and group email in one or two steps. Use managers and supervisors to flesh out the implications on day-to-day work and to listen, then listen some more, and finally to really listen (did we say listen?) to rank-and-file employees.
Alarm No. 13: Employees complain about the latest "program of the month." This is a real red flag, and it's a common one. A revolving door of management programs suggests a skittish leadership, eager to jump on every bandwagon that rolls into town, and lacking strategic ballast of its own. How can any company develop intensity of strategic focus when its eyes are jumping from one thing to the next every few weeks? It can't, and without focus, it cannot achieve lasting success.
Alarm No. 14: Publications or web sites gloss over hard reality. If your company's web sites, magazine, or plant newsletter has loads of personal or marginally strategic material (bowling scores, articles on unusual hobbies, classified ads, pictures of the summer picnic, service anniversaries), you're missing a terrific strategic opportunity and reinforcing secondary concerns and priorities.
There's a place for all that stuff, but it's by pull (i.e., something that employees seek out, perhaps through a web portal or on an old-fashioned factory bulletin board), not push (i.e, something sent to everyone). Use the push media for business issues, challenges, and priorities. While you're at it, call a spade a spade. Talk openly about a competitor's strategic advantages. After all, that's how you talk to your peers in management, isn't it? Why should ground-level employees be any different?
Alarm No. 15: Managers communicate mainly by email, even to colleagues in the same office a few steps away. Email has its worthy uses, but it should never be a crutch or a substitute for routine face-to-face conversation and dialogue. Take an otherwise sane, decent human being (even an engineer!), put him behind a computer, and he can morph into a cyberpath.
The quasi-anonymity of our silicon cocoons has an effect not unlike road rage. Simple but important mitigating effects of facial expression, tone, humor, hand gestures, and eye contact disappear. Words lose their supple roundness. They become atonal and harsh. Relationships suffer. Trust, respect and dignity go out the window. Is that what you want?
All these alarms are actually dysfunctional syndromes. They exact a real toll on your organization and its prospects for breakthrough achievement.
To the extent any company tolerates these habits, it erodes its own shared vision and common purposes, it opens itself to turf wars and infighting, it becomes subject to cynicism and denial throughout the organization, and it can paralyze itself with fear. At best, people will just go through the motions, lacking any real commitment to the company's future.
How many of them is your organization tolerating? What are you doing about it?
We can help. Call us. The number is 650-464-1770.
© Copyright 2013 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.
By Thomas J. Lee
Have you noticed what I've noticed?
More and more so-called experts are stigmatizing the words management and managing and manager, in favor of the words leadership and leading and leader.
They look at people who run organizations and see two entirely different species, one of them ancient and the other modern, as if managing is a matter of bossing people around and leading is closer to gently nudging them. They declare or imply that managing is unfashionable — just so 20th century, as the vernacular goes. Be a leader, they're saying.
In reality, both managing and leading are essential to any enterprise that wants to succeed today and grow tomorrow.
Indeed managing is at the very core of leading. The best leaders are excellent managers. They manage others to ensure results, and they manage themselves for the integrity they need to lead others.
Let's pause to clarify our definitions of both management and leadership.
As regular readers know, I define management is the work of ensuring compliance with the predetermined expectations of stakeholders. That is necessary for survival, for if you don't meet the expectations of stakeholders you won't be in business very long.
Some of these expectations are negotiated, as in a contract. Others are imposed externally. The stakeholders range from customers to investors to employees to vendors to agencies of government and even to the general public. They all have their own expectations.
Leadership is different but complementary. It is the work of envisioning, articulating, supporting, and inspiring change. It is necessary for growth, for if you cannot see tomorrow you won't be ready for it when it comes. (As we discussed yesterday, both Wang Laboratories and BlackBerry are case studies in this failure. They were well-managed in their heyday, and yet they soon collapsed for failure to see the future.)
Now instead of complying with pre-determined expectations, leadership creates new expectations. The people who embrace these new expectations may be the same as the stakeholders we just listed, but they are acting differently, because they are thinking about tomorrow, and they are feeling hopeful and optimistic about it.
I like to use the sun as a metaphor. It illustrates the duality of managing and leading that any successful leader embodies.
You'll recall from fourth grade science class that the sun has a core much hotter than its corona, the visible cover. You can think of the internal core as the work of management and of the external corona as the work of leadership.
In the sun, the core is constantly generating energy through the fusion of hydrogen nuclei into helium. In a leader, the core is constantly generating energy through the fusion, as it were, of one's purpose and values into a noble opportunity. If that's a stretch scientifically, it's also a real-world picture of managing at the center of leading.
A successful leader knows that he must make certain that he thinks, speaks, and behaves in a way that conveys his message with clarity, coherence, and credibility. Everything from his sense of self to his physical presence, from his analysis of challenges to his determination of policy, reflects that fusion in his core. It creates the energy that enables him to lead.
It is my hope that you are or will become a leader who is an excellent manager, too.
© Copyright 2013 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.
By Thomas J. Lee
Here's a must-read column by Joe Nocera that ran in the New York Times today. The next time someone in your company belittles the importance of cultural change, remember this article and have the link handy.
Mr. Nocera, who specializes in business and finance, recounts the sad history of two tech giants who came to their knees because of corporate hubris and sclerosis. Both thought they were too good to be humbled by any competitor. Both soon realized they were wrong. By then it was too late.
One company you may have forgotten about, or perhaps you are too young to have known about. It was an early player in the computer business: Wang Laboratories. There was a time when almost every corporation relied on Wang word processors. Today, it is an archival footnote.
The other company is still in business, but it is gasping for air. As much as anyone, it invented the smart phone: BlackBerry, formerly Research in Motion. Less than a decade ago it controlled almost half the market for smart phones. That was before the iPhone and Android. It was before apps. Today, BlackBerry has a tiny share of the market, and it has basically put itself up for sale.
As you read the column, ask yourself whether you would have done anything differently, what evidence you can cite to support that belief, and what challenges you and your organization face today that could be your own undoing, sooner rather than later.
To paraphrase Martin Luther King, the wavelength of the technical universe is short, and it reaches constantly for innovation. Ignore it, and you die.
© Copyright 2013 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.
By Thomas J. Lee
Here's an important question: Does anyone really listen to what you say?
Here's another question, even more important: Do you really listen to what other people say?
Really, really listen?
And here's how to answer that second question: Ask someone close to you, and plead for candor. Ask a loved one. Ask a business colleague. Ask a regular golf partner or hiking companion. Explain that you need the truth as part of your self-improvement plan.
None of us wants to admit it, but few of us listen as well as we should. For many readers of this blog, a big part of the problem is your intelligence. When it comes to listening, you can be too smart for your own good. In fact, most of you are. That's another essay for another day.
We have identified nine types of dysfunctional listeners. We describe them more fully in our Master Class. (Click on the Master Class tab above for more information.) Here's a sneak peek:
The Brick Wall. This dysfunctional listener (also known as the "Teenager") is often impassive and shows little eye contact. You really don't know whether he is listening at all. Because he is so detached, he rarely connects with other people, and so he feels isolated and removed. Talking to him is like talking to a proverbial brick wall.
Mr. Fix-It. This man, and it's almost always a man, listens only for problems and then offers the solution—not a solution, and not a way of thinking about the problem, but the solution—regardless of whether he is asked for advice. The most irritating thing about Mr. Fix-Its is that they just may be right, but their condescension is so odious you don't want to take their advice.
The Donald Trump. The brash, outspoken real-estate mogul is an ideal archetype for another kind of dysfunctional listener. He is a screamer's screamer, constantly peppering people with loud, aggressive questions and never waiting for a thoughtful response. Like his persona on television's old "Apprentice," he is more interested in belittling people than in learning anything.
The Bobblehead. These dysfunctional listeners are eager to convey their interest by nodding their head and interjecting verbal tics ("Hmmm" and "Yes, I see") at the appropriate moment. But ask them what was said or how they feel about it, and they'll find a creative way to have the statement repeated for their benefit. (Note: In the Bobblehead's defense, he is often in conversation with the Auctioneer, described below.)
The Stephen Colbert. Like the comedian's television persona, a Stephen Colbert listener manipulates the words that other people speak to his own needs and expectations. He is quick to interrupt and quick to misinterpret, so that whatever other people say will serve only his own interests. Alas, other people don't have an opportunity to clarify their message. He doesn't have time to really listen.
The Auctioneer. The Auctioneer is really a non-listener because she is talking all the time. She doesn't pause long enough to hear anything that anyone says, except perhaps a single word of confirmation. When she takes a breather, and others are getting a word in edgewise, she may abruptly speak up with a new topic, apparently without realizing that she is changing the subject. That's possible only because she wasn't listening to the conversation before she spoke up.
The Sgt. Joe Friday. Most of our readers are too young to remember Sgt. Friday from television's "Dragnet" series, but even they will recognize his legendary refrain: "Just the facts, ma'am." As dysfunctional listeners, the Sgt. Fridays of our world believe that they know what information they want, and they only want factual data that fits their framework. Thus they don't hear anything unexpected, and they don't hear any expressions of emotion.
The Search Engine. The Search Engine is the person who is a little (or a lot) remote from a conversation until she hears mention of her own name or responsibility. Then she is all ears. Like a Google algorithm, she is programmed to notice only those things that matter to her. That's usually herself or her job.
The Multitasker. This dysfunctional listener deserves its own essay, because it is perhaps the biggest listening problem in business. People are so busy they believe they must do more than one thing at a time to get everything done. When it comes to listening, that is a fool's paradise, because it creates more, and more serious, problems than it solves. Smart executives have stopped trying to multitask in conversation.
There you have it, nine types of dysfunctional listener. Do you see yourself in any of them? If so, you now have some idea of how to change. If not, you certainly aren't alone. In fact, that's the real problem for so many of us.
© Copyright 2013 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.
by Thomas J. Lee
Even for successful, well-run companies, annual employee surveys can turn up festering issues. I know of companies that celebrate their inclusion on lists of best places to work, but whose surveys show that employees are less than fully engaged.
The litany of wake-up calls can be long: a lack of open and honest communication, managers who say one thing but do another, too much micromanaging and too little face-to-face dialogue, never-ending programs of the month, and more.
In altogether too many companies, these alarms ring with yearly regularity. Year after year, the same issues come up. Management always frets and furrows its brow. Then the anxiety passes, and nothing changes. A year later, another survey goes out, and the same results come back.
What should companies do about the results? In a few words, get serious about people engagement and about the systematic, fully integrated, strategic communication that enables and supports it. Recognize the connection between engagement and communication, and then work it.
That goes for all companies, even those on a list of best places to work. The quickest way to lose that vaunted status is to do nothing. It will surely slip away.
Of course, companies with low engagement should be especially concerned. Sooner or later we will move into another cycle of mergers and acquisitions. Companies with low engagement are often the first on the block, and they typically fetch prices that management thinks too low but that shareholders are happy to accept.
Call me biased, but I believe it's important to find external expertise in people engagement and workplace communication, and then to devote the time and money it takes to improving things. Don't wait for the entire enterprise to act. Instead, act locally. Create a reputation for yourself and your team.
At a minimum, take a sober, morning-after look at the survey results. Wean yourself from the natural habit of celebrating the good numbers and pooh-poohing the disturbing data. If necessary, find a bucket of ice water and dump it over your head.
Resist the temptation to compare your company with external norms or your team with internal norms. That's a powerful lure, but what does it really tell you? If you're a little better, it's a balm that reduces the urgency you should feel for continuous self-improvement. If you're worse, you may conclude that the uniqueness of your situation justifies your score. Either way, it's apples and oranges.
Better to compare your organization—be it an enterprise, a division, a site, a department, or a team—to itself last year and the year before. Known as a longitudinal assessment, this alone compares apples with apples, and this alone is an accurate representation of improvement or deterioration.
Then ask yourself a simple question: What is the story these survey results are trying to tell?
It may be a story of confusion, of too many priorities competing for attention. That often happens when management is trying to do too much, or when it's more in touch with fads than with customers.
Customer expectations are usually fairly constant, much the same tomorrow as today, but fads can change by the week. For every new bestselling business book, there's a new fad.
Or it may be a story of anxiety and fear, of managers who intimidate and even threaten. That happens in workplaces without a culture of broad, ground-level participation and involvement. It's especially common in industrial settings with legacies of rigid, my-way-or-the highway management.
It may be a story of exhaustion, of short staffing and minimal support. That happens in companies serving generic markets, where price is the only competitive advantage, or where management is preparing for a formal restructuring.
Or it may be a story of uncertainty, of a revolving door of programs and priorities, here today and gone tomorrow. That happens when management continually adopts new programs and issues new edicts. Employees need a continuity of focus.
It may be a story of frustration, of wanting to contribute in a meaningful way, and only being allowed to do what higher-ups say. That happens in traditional work environments with patterns of infrequent or insufficient innovation.
Or it may be a story of cynicism, of being told one thing only to see quite another in the weeks and months that follow. That happens everywhere.
These are only a few of the many stories that employee surveys tell. The numbers themselves can easily be misunderstood or unappreciated, easily be ignored, and easily be forgotten until the next survey, next year. Stories, not so much.
© Copyright 2013 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.
by Thomas J. Lee
One balmy evening after dusk I was relaxing on the patio with my legs outstretched. Crickets had begun to sing, and Venus was slipping toward the western horizon. I had enjoyed another productive day. Everything was perfect. I wanted nothing to change.
Just then I noticed a small animal of some sort off to the right. It was already dark, so I couldn't quite make out what it was. Slowly approaching me, the furry thing waddled right up to my shoes and stopped.
You can imagine my horror when I realized the animal wasn't a feral cat, and it wasn't a squirrel. Nor was it a raccoon or a possum. It was a skunk, a polecat. I kid you not. For minutes that
seemed like hours, it sat on its haunches just inches from my feet. I was never so perfectly still in my entire life. I didn't breathe. I didn't swallow. I didn't blink.
In an instant I went from wanting nothing to change to wanting everything to change, immediately and radically. Yet I could do nothing. If I had so much as burped, this little beast would have fouled the entire neighborhood. Everything within a quarter mile would have stunk for days. I could only wait it out, in perfect stillness and utter silence.
Eventually the skunk moved on, and I could exhale and blink again. Five minutes later I felt a sneeze coming on, and I prayerfully thanked the heavenly stars that I had not sneezed while my uninvited guest was sniffing at my feet.
This incident occurred several years ago. I recalled it again this week when the subject of change came to mind. I've noticed that, for some people and some companies, the thought of change can bring about such anxiety they react with terror and paralysis.
That isn't a problem in the presence of a skunk, figuratively or literally; the paralysis suits you just fine. But if the challenge you are facing requires that you change for the sake of innovation, or personal growth, or subject-matter mastery, or credibility, or a behavioral correction, or relational empathy, or anything else of importance or value, it most certainly is problematic. Your paralysis is part of the problem.
Regular readers will recall that a couple of my recent posts focused on helping people to identify the need for change and to muster the will to change. Indeed, change is a continuing theme of the MindingGaps blog, for change is the currency of leadership.
One reader objected to those columns. A successful business consultant, and a friend whose tone belies abundant personal warmth, he impetuously dashed off an email to me, which I reprint verbatim:
what the hell is all about this "CHANGE" crap...
why do I need to change ?
I am successful and know what I am doing - why do YOU insist on changing me?
It's like women who hook onto a man and then want to change him? WHY?
I'm satisfied with my life and work and manage my team without being overbearing or micro-managing - I motivate each team member and treat everyone that way I want to be treated.
NOW - my Government wants change ! Why, because they think if they need to change themselves, (because they are screwed up) it might be easier to CHANGE everyone around them first. Kinda f***ed up if you ask me.
Well, that's one viewpoint, I told myself.
On the other hand, in a meeting a few weeks ago with a pair of executives of a large company, one of them asserted that every company wanted to change; no company did not want to change. I had to admit, that's another perspective.
In my own experience, most companies do want to change either their culture, or their operations, or their performance. Yet few actually change as much or as fast as they wish.
It is true that some recognize no need to change, so they never even set out to change. Others say they want to change when they actually do not. Many others genuinely want to change but do not know how. And many, many others seek to control and constrain their path of change, rather than create a culture of self-energizing and self-sustaining change that can redefine their marketplace. Over-engineering change can have the effect of stifling it altogether.
In any case, companies that are most in need of change but refuse to do anything about it are those that most risk being forgotten or marginalized in the years ahead. Anyone my side of 40 can name brands or products that are scarcely known to young people today—CompuServe, the Sony Walkman, Oldsmobile, Pan-Am, Schlitz, the DC-10, Zenith, Gourmet, camera film and slide projectors, DEC computers—and dozens of companies that are now subsidiaries or mere historical footnotes: Maytag, Gillette, TWA, Amoco, McDonnell Douglas, NCR, Ameritech, Warner-Lambert, A.G. Edwards, and so many more.
Even among extant companies, the tales of coulda-woulda-shoulda read like ghosts from a Dickens novel. I think of Xerox, whose share of the copier market plummeted from 90 percent in the 1970s to just 20 percent in the 1980s after Japanese manufacturers began selling better machines at lower prices. I think of IBM, which was so busy selling Selectric typewriters that it took a pass on the operating system and applications for personal computers, and instead let a couple of college dropouts start a cute little company they called Microsoft.
On the other hand, there is Apple, which has changed radically, and there is Google, whose culture is all about innovation, and there is Ford Motor Co., which is leading a resurgence of American auto manufacturing, and there is Amazon, which is becoming an online main street. American Express and Wells Fargo both got their start running stage coaches across the West, and today they are vibrant and dynamic. Even IBM has learned from its mistakes and reinvented itself.
The CEO of a Fortune 25 company put it well in an inspiring 1993 speech to his senior leadership team: "We need to embrace change—not for its own sake but for our sake. We must understand that the world isn't standing still and that we can't stand still either. People and organizations that delude themselves into thinking they do not need to change are on a course of self-absorption and self-destruction. From the British Empire to the Pickett Slide Rule Company, history is full of giants that failed to adapt."
The choice we face isn't merely between changing and not changing. The choice is between changing and dying. Indeed, in these times of rampant mergers and acquisitions, the choice is as much between changing and being eaten alive for breakfast by a competitor.
It's just that sometimes, the mere thought of change is so intimidating, it is paralyzing. I know. I have been there.
(c) Copyright 2013 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.
By Thomas J. Lee
You're familiar, I presume, with those two old chestnuts of workplace wisdom: "What gets measured is what gets done" and "You can't manage what you can't measure."
Both pay tribute to the importance of measuring what we value in our work. And for the most part both have more than a faint ring of truth.
The trouble is that measuring some things is not as simple and straightforward as it sounds. You need a clear conceptual foundation: an understanding and consensus as to what exactly you're measuring. Then you need a gauge or scale or metric that applies sensibly to the thing you're measuring. Then you need a reliable means of measurement. Some things can only be measured subjectively, by perception, and you need a way to measure the perceptions without tainting the results.
That's just for starters.
Of course, measurement is relatively easy if you know what you're measuring and how, and if everything is plainly apparent in the same way to everyone who looks. So if you're counting money in the till at the close of business, or taking an inventory of boxes on a shelf at the end of a quarter, it's a simple matter.
On the other hand, if you're measuring something as ambiguous as, say, employee engagement, you have problems right from the start. People think they know what engagement is, but everyone has a slightly different notion. Moreover, it's hard to measure something we cannot tangibly count. We can only rely on perceptions, and perceptions are notoriously individualistic. What one person notices, another person can easily overlook or undervalue, and vice versa.
Not only are perceptions individualistic, but they are highly sensitive to context and highly subject to hidden bias. The context is vulnerable to slight day-to-day variations in workplace circumstances: perhaps a personal slight or a new, burdensome assignment. The bias has many sources as well, most importantly the innate desire to protect one's job by appearing fully engaged.
One of the most popular engagement surveys in American business, for example, relies (for its core, anyway) on only twelve questions, and some of those questions are just this side of laughable. The most ridiculed question asks employees whether they have a best friend at work. How that affects employee engagement is beyond me.
Many employers who think they are accurately measuring engagement are, in fact, measuring something else, a different aspect of positive mental attitude. They may be measuring morale or job satisfaction, or loyalty, or commitment, or alignment, or general attitude and just calling it engagement. Or they may in fact be measuring the engagement they intend to measure.
At the root of the problem is ambiguity over the term employee engagement. There is no universal consensus as to what it means. Does it mean enthusiasm? Does it mean productivity? Does it mean technical expertise? Does it mean a spirit of can-do camaraderie? Does it mean satisfaction with current compensation and working conditions? The reality is that no one knows.
You can't just look up the phrase in a dictionary, either. It isn't there. If you look up the word engagement, you'll find all kinds of definitions, but none having to do with what you want. You'll find definitions for an agreement to get married, and for military battles, and for appointments or meetings, but none for attitudes in the workplace.
Moreover, to my knowledge, no one has gone to the trouble of drawing a fine line between engagement and its cousins: commitment, dedication, loyalty, morale, satisfaction, and alignment. If we are to know what one of those terms is to mean, we must know what the others mean. Then we must pull ourselves out of the muck of using any of those terms as synonyms for any of the others.
Together all these labels fall under the rubric of positive mental attitude, a phrase coined by the late insurance magnate W. Clement Stone. Having grown up reading Horatio Alger stories, Stone became a rags-to-riches multimillionaire who believed that one's attitude toward work was critical to success. (His name for cold calls was "gold calls.")
Positive mental attitude takes many shapes and forms. Perhaps the best that can be said for most engagement surveys in the workplace is that they're attempting to measure PMA in one respect or another and just calling it all engagement. Even at that, most of them fail.
We would be much better off if we could find some common ground as to what each kind of PMA actually is and why it's important. That way we could zero in on this thing or that thing and obtain some sense of what we should do. As it stands, we don't know.
Near as I can see, there are five different kinds of PMA. Three of them are really-nice-to-haves. The other two are absolutely-must-haves. (Before you come out swinging at the really-nice and absolutely-must taxonomy, read through to the end.) Let's begin with the really-nice-to-haves.
The first really-nice-to-have is commitment and dedication. I cannot see much, if any, difference between commitment and dedication, so I lump them together. I think it's fair to regard them as exceptionally hard work. The definition we came up with is this:
Rising to the level of courage, real commitment and dedication in the workplace is doing whatever it takes, and more, to satisfy the customer (or other stakeholder) within the constraints of safety, the law, and ethical decency.
It should go without saying that commitment and dedication are very, very important. The success of many businesses has rested on their shoulders alone.
The next really-nice-to-have is loyalty. To me, loyalty has to do with remaining at the employer's side, even through adversity, and giving the employer or manager the benefit of doubt. Our definition is simple:
The disposition of employees to continue serving the needs of their employer and its customers in an honest, productive manner in exchange for agreed-upon compensation and security.
In other words, loyal employees don't jump from employer to employer for a small raise. If unionized, they don't file ridiculous grievances. They place a premium on the relationship, and they want to work together. Strictly as a pecuniary matter, that saves an employer money and time (not to mention headaches) by reducing personnel turnover.
The third of the three really-nice-to-haves is morale and satisfaction. I can't see much difference between morale and satisfaction, either, so we also lump them together. Here's our definition:
The degree of happiness or contentment that people derive from their employment, as a function of compensation, workplace conditions, personal and professional relationships, employment security, and opportunity.
Maybe morale and satisfaction doesn't translate into economic benefit as easily as commitment and dedication or loyalty does, but I sure would rather have a lot of happy and satisfied employees than a lot of unhappy and dissatisfied employees. I don't need to measure the value of that.
Good so far? That leaves us with the two absolutely-must-haves: alignment and engagement. These are two different things.
In both cases, these mission-critical forms of positive mental attitude show up as patterns of workplace behavior. It's easy to see them because they are so obvious and so very important. Ultimately, if you go about it in a methodical way, that fact also makes them surprisingly amenable to measurement.
We can define alignment as follows:
The reliable performance of duties necessary for the organization to meet the pre-determined expectations of its known stakeholders.
Most commonly, those expectations belong to customers. They may take the form of product quality, delivery and service requirements, production and sales quotas, and work processes. In return, customers show their approval or disapproval through consumer demand, repeat patronage, recommendations to friends, product returns, and, in the worst instances, defections to competitors or even boycotts.
More broadly, expectations also belong to other stakeholders such as investors, employees, strategic partners, consultants, labor unions, government regulators (such as the SEC, EPA, IRS, and OSHA here in the United States), state and municipal inspectors, vendors and suppliers, NGOs, courts, the news media, landlords, and society at large, whose expectations take the form of laws, cultural norms, and nowadays even trending social media.
Collectively all these expectations are important because they enable us to stay in business. We make various agreements and commitments, or they are made for us and imposed on us, and we must follow through on them. Fulfilling those agreements and commitments is the business of alignment. That's why it is an absolutely-must-have.
Finally, we turn our attention to engagement, which we can define as follows:
A culture of discretionary, positive, extra effort—focus, curiosity, passion, and courage—that employees bring to their work in support and service to the organization, its purpose, and its stakeholders.
If alignment is what enables you to stay in business, engagement is what enables you to grow your business. Think of alignment as the work of today, and engagement as the work of tomorrow. No engagement, no tomorrow. That's why it is an absolutely-must-have.
But the thing is: engagement is fundamentally discretionary. In other words it's entirely up to employees as to whether they will engage. Though an absolutely-must-have, engagement always remains optional to employees, which is why it is so rare and so vital.
Employees who consistently show engagement often climb the ladder of success, but the opposite isn't necessarily true. People who don't show engagement, far from being dismissed, usually manage somehow to retain their jobs, at least until the next downsizing. Even then, cutbacks often seem to target certain units or skill sets or salary bands or demographic cohorts more than engagement profiles.
(Incidentally, another problem with engagement surveys also has to do with the common fact of downsizing. Many such surveys foolishly use first-person questions. Savvy employees are naturally tempted to say they are more engaged than they truly are, if only to avoid being seen as problem children. The supposed anonymity of surveys doesn't help, because employees assume their surveys are identifiable through computer coding or demographic data.)
Finally, you'll also notice four key words in our definition of engagement: focus, curiosity, passion, and courage. We'll address them each in upcoming newsletters.
© Copyright 2013 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.
By Thomas J. Lee
Companies and other large organizations—agencies or administrations of government, universities, non-profits, hospitals, museums, and the like—typically go to great lengths to craft their formal strategic messages.
These organizations appreciate the importance of carefully defining their mission and regularly communicating with key stakeholders like customers, employees, investors, and others who want to be kept abreast of their progress. That's what the formal voice is for.
It can veer off course, however, and sometimes it does. Leaders may neglect or ignore communication outside and beyond the realm of formal messages. Two other voices—the semi-formal and the informal—account for well over half of all the messages that key stakeholders receive. These messages can wreak havoc if left unmanaged.
The semi-formal voice consists of explicit and implicit messaging from the institutional management tools an organization uses to operate: things like budgets, procedures, policies, its hierarchy, agendas, requirements, quotas, and more. For example, who gets hired and who gets promoted send loud signals as to what kinds of behavior are expected and rewarded.
The informal voice (not be confused with water-cooler chitchat) consists of explicit and implicit messaging drawn from workplace experiences touching on integrity, respect, dignity, pride, teamwork, inclusion, trust, and so forth. These experiences define the employee's social relationship with the employer. As a practical matter, they commonly involve the interpersonal relationship with one's manager and with his or her manager.
Like the submerged bulk of an iceberg, the semi-formal and informal voices can sink the ship if they are not managed. For when the formal voice is saying one thing, and either or both the semi-formal and informal voices are saying something else, the formal voice instantly loses credibility. It's never a tie. It's never close to a tie. The ship always lists to the same side.
Moreover, the louder the formal voice is, the more noticeable the erosion of credibility is. That's often the case, because the formal voice alone has the amplification of marketing, publishing, broadcasting, and web presence.
At the risk of mixing metaphors, you can think of an iceberg as the birthplace of cynicism in large, complex organizations. When the semi-formal and informal voices fail to confirm and corroborate the formal voice, the distance between them is a credibility gap.
In the military, the difference between the formal voice and the semi-formal and informal voices is known colloquially as the official truth and the ground truth. Whenever the difference rears its head, the cynicism of the troops is bound to grow. No successful organization can tolerate that cynicism more than minimally.
To ward off such cynicism, it's imperative to include the semi-formal and informal voices in strategic communication planning, and it's imperative to include communication planning for key stakeholders in any strategic planning process.
Think of it this way. You can keep the upper hand by doing your best to manage the communication about your organization—formal, semi-formal, and informal—or you can let unmanaged communication gain the upper hand. Which makes more sense?
© Copyright 2013 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.
By Thomas J. Lee
Are you an introvert?
Or are you, perhaps, somewhat more introverted than most people think you are?
Or are you—don't laugh, the term is well-established—an ambivert, someone in the middle between an introvert and an extrovert?
If you are any of these, and if your job or your aspiration calls on you to lead people to a better and brighter tomorrow, don't fall into the trap of denying yourself the opportunity to lead simply because of your quiet nature.
Leadership is for you, too. In fact, some of history's greatest leaders have been introverts: Lincoln, Gandhi, and Mandela to name just three.
The reality is that extroverts have their own shortcomings. They tend to listen too little, and they often want to seize the limelight too quickly and too much. They may act impetuously. They also have difficulty connecting with introverts like you.
Charisma in leadership is overrated. Many charismatic personalities may initially attract followers, but they often leave things a mess. Even when their judgment is keen, their organization is often incapable of sustaining change when the charismatic leader moves on.
Introverts, on the other hand, often take a more thoughtful, careful approach to change, and their legacy is more affirming and constructive as a result.
By learning to take advantage of your own hidden strengths and talent, you can actually leverage your introverted personality to become a better leader than your outspoken colleague.
In response to queries, we have launched a telephone-based coaching service for select individuals who regard themselves as introverts and ambiverts and who want to lead more effectively.
All conversations are completely confidential, between 45 to 60 minutes in length, and typically take place weekly.
To inquire about this service, just call us at 650-464-1770 or write to us at info@arceil.com.
© Copyright 2013 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.
By Thomas J. Lee
You may be too young to remember the best TV commercial ever. If you’re not, don’t blame me for reminding you of the fact.
As far as we’re concerned, the best TV commercial isn’t necessarily the cutest or the funniest. It isn’t necessarily titillating or provocative. It doesn’t necessarily have terrific cinematic or artistic qualities. It didn't necessarily run during a Super Bowl.
It’s the best TV commercial ever simply because it makes its point so well. As proof of that, just about any American old enough to remember it can, almost 25 years after it first aired.
And it’s the best TV commercial ever because it hammers home a business case for the service it is selling, which, for our purposes, just so happens to reinforce important insights of value to any manager or leader. Even today, you occasionally hear people citing that TV commercial in business discussions. Nothing rivals face-to-face human contact, they’ll say, and they’ll be right.
Here it is, and here is a little background to it. Do you remember it?
The best TV commercial ever was produced by the legendary Chicago advertising firm of Leo Burnett for United Airlines, and it began airing in 1989. It was filmed in dramatic hues of black and white to intensify the warmth of the characters. It featured Ben, a beleaguered manager whose company was just fired by a longstanding and highly valued client.
The spot has Ben, in shirtsleeves and vest, convening a quick management meeting to announce the news. His message is blunt and compelling. The company is losing touch with its clients. It has to reinvigorate its lifeblood of relationships.
An assistant hands Ben a stack of United tickets—back then they were on card stock—and Ben begins handing them out to the individual managers. A manager objects: "But Ben, that's more than 200 cities." Ben is unmoved. Someone asks Ben where he’s going, and he replies: “To visit that old friend who fired us this morning.”
You’re smart enough to draw your own conclusions and applications from this commercial for your work. What are they?
Here are mine: Don’t lose touch with people. Don’t rely on email and telephone. Don’t think of social media as synapses or nutrients of relationships; they are neither. Remember that human beings thrive in community with other human beings. The more you nurture and strengthen that sense of community, the better your leadership will be.
© Copyright 2013 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.
By Thomas J. Lee
Lest any corporate executive, department head, plant manager, team leader, or any other administrator believe they can do whatever they damn well please with no adverse consequences on the engagement of people, consider some stunning correlations turned up by a St. Louis market research firm:
Those are dramatic and determinative correlations. They are well beyond any statistical test of significance.
These numbers do not mean that executive authority must or should shirk difficult decisions that people will find hard to accept. That is not the point.
Rather, they mean that decisions must be accompanied by a great deal of honest and forthright communication, both verbally and behaviorally, explicit and implicit, and, more than anything, decency and sincerity of intent. You cannot and must not assume that people will understand and accept a decision that you haven't explained and justified, morally as well as legally or strategically.
Maybe there was a time when fast talk and double talk could fool people, and maybe there was a time when no talk was acceptable and expected, but that was a long time ago. People are far too sophisticated today, and they insist on being treated with respect.
Always remember that the talent and skills on which you depend are in bodies with legs. Those legs can walk.
© Copyright 2013 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.
By Thomas J. Lee
As most of you are aware, Ronald B. Johnson was sacked Monday as chief executive of J.C. Penney. A retail marketing wunderkind whose high-profile credits included Target and Apple, Mr. Johnson was hired in 2011 to lead a turnaround of the venerable middle American department store.
Instead of turning it around, however, he sent it reeling. In just seventeen months the chain's annual revenue plummeted from $17.7 billion to $12.9 billion, and its net income dwindled from a profit of $1.63 per share to a loss of $4.49 per share. Not surprisingly, the company's ticker teetered and tumbled from the mid-30s in early 2012 to the mid-teens this week—all during a bull market in which its rivals Kohl's and especially Target have been performing quite well.
Now I do not present myself as either a stock analyst or an expert in retail sales, and I do not pass judgment here on Mr. Johnson's turnaround strategy. However, I do know a thing or two about leadership and its challenges in large, complex organizations. One of the things I know is this: When strategy and culture collide, one of them will win and the other will lose. The same one always wins: culture. If there are exceptions to that rule, they are few and far between.
In our Master Class workshops, we put it thus: Culture is the judge, jury, jailer, and janitor of strategy. No strategy, however well designed, can survive a clash with a culture than doesn't embrace it. No amount of shouting and demanding by senior management can change that, either. Instead, senior management must begin with the culture. Ignore that reality and you ask for failure.
Now I am a big fan of both Target and the Apple stores that Mr. Johnson helped create. According to experts on retailing strategy, his approach to reviving the fortunes of J.C. Penney was creditable. He wanted to upgrade the merchandise and make the store something of a first among equals in its category. That kind of a strategy has worked elsewhere.
Mr. Johnson's big mistake seems to be a condescending attitude toward the people of J.C. Penney and their values. He often ridiculed them, and he quickly replaced many of the senior managers he inherited. He never moved to Plano, Texas, the company's headquarters, but instead spent long weekends back in California. Soon the sarcasm that frequently came flowing out of the corner office was volleyed back at it. The strategy didn't stand a chance.
A smarter approach to leadership is to begin with the culture. Initiate a discussion as to who we, the people of this organization, are: what we know to be true, how we think, what we value and believe, and how we behave, especially in times of stress. Explore the legacies we inherited, and build a consensus around our destination. Show everyone what is possible, and then bring them along on a journey of change.
It will take longer, but it will pay huge dividends in cohesion. You can ignore that hard work of leadership, but you cannot expect to reap the benefits without doing the work.
© Copyright 2013 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.
By Thomas J. Lee
A few years ago The New York Times asked the chief executive of a big Silicon Valley company—you have probably bought or sold something on its popular site—what he had learned through all his years in senior management. His answer both startled me and saddened me.
He replied, and I paraphrase, that he had learned an immutable fact of life: Real change was unrealistic because you cannot change people.
His response startled me because, in a curt statement, this CEO revealed himself to be blithely abdicating the hard work of leadership. He was implying that he saw himself not as a leader—rising to the challenge of inspiring big change, market-shattering innovation, and breakthrough performance—but as a manager responsible for meeting budgets, quotas, and deadlines. And in fact, during his tenure, the company has changed little while other high-tech companies continue to reinvent their business and while other whole industries not especially known for innovation do likewise: energy and retail to name but two.
His response saddened me because, after 20 years of working in the vineyards of leadership and communication, I was meeting another executive who just didn’t get it. There are altogether too many of them. They give lip service to leadership and communication, and then they shrink themselves to the quotidian tasks of administration. They are better at saying no than yes, better at rolling out programs and restructuring departments than articulating and pursuing a strategic destination, better at buying companies than bringing their own new products to market, better at maintaining market share than growing a customer base.
Perhaps all this shouldn’t surprise us. Most senior executives were educated and trained to manage, not to lead; and they have always been rewarded and promoted for managing, not for leading. So it’s only natural that they think like managers, not like leaders.
Major business publications like the Harvard Business Review, Fortune, and The Wall Street Journal compound the problem by glossing over the differences between managing and leading, and by broadly referring to senior executives as “leaders” and to the executive suite as "the leadership" of a company, as if leadership were a function of a hierarchy, as if when you get a promotion you suddenly become a leader.
We would do well to take a step back, and we would gain a lot of clarity if we instead understood leadership and management as work—not as people in a pecking order, but as responsibilities, tasks, and, especially, communication.
Up, down and across an organization, anyone with accountability for a team's performance and culture must both manage and lead. Front-line supervisors must bear some responsibility for collateral leadership, and even the CEO has some basic managerial tasks.
The work of management is all about ensuring steady, reliable, consistent performance. A manager who is managing well ensures that a team performs to certain predetermined expectations held by stakeholders such as customers, investors and lenders, regulators and inspectors, senior management, the employees themselves, and myriad others: vendors, recruiters, the courts, visitors, agencies, job applicants, the news media, neighbors—a list of this sort is practically endless.
The predetermined expectations, too, are variable. If an expectation involves spending money, we call it coming in under budget. If it involves completing a project by a specific date, we call it meeting a deadline. If it involves doing or producing something within acceptable parameters, we call it complying with a standard—quality, perhaps, or safety, or emissions. When it involves making or selling or checking or issuing enough of something, we call it clearing a quota. There are many other kinds of similar challenges around production processes, contractual obligations, legal procedures and requirements, ethics standards, cultural imperatives, and more.
When successful, the work of management creates alignment, which is the deliverable or the work product of good management. It is the equilibrium of expectation and performance. Alignment is a good thing; misalignment is bad. But remember: Alignment is not the product of good leadership. It is the product of good management.
The work of leadership is altogether different from the work of management. Leadership is all about change. A leader who is leading well is successfully bringing about a particular big change, either culturally or operationally.
Leadership entails envisioning, articulating, inspiring, and supporting change—attitudinal or behavioral—or a breakthrough performance of some sort, typically requiring the discretionary and self-sacrificing efforts of people, and often in an environment of uncertainty and risk to oneself.
The change or breakthrough may involve launching a new product, or expanding geographically, or merging cultures after an acquisition, or fending off a unionization vote, or adopting a new technology, or meeting the changing needs of customers. There are many kinds of such challenges.
When successful, the work of leadership creates engagement, which is the deliverable or the work product of good leadership. It is the predicate of change. Engagement is a good thing; disengagement is bad. But engagement is not the product of good management. It is the product of good leadership throughout the organization.
Alignment is critical to meeting the needs of the present. Companies and other organizations—associations, governments, universities, charities, teams—make commitments they must fulfill. Alignment is necessary to fulfilling those commitments.
Engagement is critical to meeting the needs of the future. Companies and other organizations must always adapt to changing circumstances, environments, and opportunities, lest they wither and die as so many erstwhile giants that failed to adapt have withered and died before them. Without engagement, organizations cannot survive long into the future.
It is another big mistake to use the tools of one to accomplish the goals of the other. Companies often try that, and they routinely fail, whenever they launch a “change management” initiative while overlooking the need to lead change, which is something entirely different. Similarly, an energetic and charismatic leader without an eye for detail can lose sight of the basics.
Management and leadership differ most dramatically in the purpose, substance, style, and tone of the communication that supports them.
Communication for the sake of managing is authoritative, directive and influencing. It carries an implicit “stick” of accountability. It says don’t worry about tomorrow, just do this thing now or else.
Communication for the sake of leading is visionary, collaborative, energizing and inspiring. It carries an implicit “carrot” of opportunity. It says believe in the future, and come along on an exciting journey that will make everyone better off.
I like to draw two concentric circles to illustrate. I label the inner circle management and the outer circle leadership, to convey the point that good management is at the core of good leadership. That is because good managers must lead themselves, and paradoxically they do so by managing themselves. Good leaders are their own first followers. They show the way so that others know the way.
Many companies and other organizations are well-managed. They meet the needs of the present just fine. But they are not necessarily well-led. Thus they are duly anxious about the future. They are anxious not because they are unable to predict the future—no one is able to predict it—but because they are not ready for whatever it may bring. They are not ready because they know so little about change, about engagement and ultimately about leadership.
Managing and leading are two different things, and so are alignment and engagement. Both are important. Both are necessary. They’re just different. Quite dramatically different at that.
© Copyright 2013 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.
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!)
by Thomas J. Lee
It's natural, perhaps even inevitable, for managers and leaders to assume that they hold the authority in an organization. After all, even a junior manager commonly has the power to hire and fire, and senior management can merge, sell, or even shutter a company. That is real authority.
Alas, it is only one kind of authority: the legal authority to run the company. There are other kinds of authority, distributed throughout the organization, that also bear heavily on whether, when, and how anything gets done and on whether, when, and how anything really changes.
Managers who neglect these informal centers of authority often delude themselves into thinking that their mission or strategy is fully deployed, that people up, down, and across the company are acting in accordance with the strategic direction. The managers are surprised when the results don't bear out the promise of their strategy, and they wonder why things apparently just hit a wall.
Savvy, successful leaders approach things differently. They look for these gates of leverage and then recruit the gatekeepers to support the strategy. They realize that each gatekeeper can determine whether a strategy slows, stops, or proceeds through the gate. The more gatekeepers a leader has in the fold, the more likely the strategy will move through these gateways.
Here are four kinds of authority—each its own strategic gatekeeper, if you will—well beyond the legal authority that managers already have:
Economic authority is the power of the purse. Externally, economic authority rests with customers who decide whether to buy the product of a change. Two legendary case studies in business school are the decisions by Ford Motor Co. to introduce the Edsel in 1958—it would last only three years—and by Coca-Cola Co. to change the recipe of Coke in 1985. In both instances, customers rejected the new products. Internally, it is whoever exercises practical control over spending, which typically depends on the size of an organization, its controls, and its authorization levels. It can reside with the receptionist who holds the key to the petty cash drawer, or it can be the auditors who wave a flag on p-card abuses.
Technical authority resides with holders of any unique competency that a strategy or change requires. It can range from engineering (the design of packaging or manufacturing equipment, say) to supply chain to legal counsel, and more. Any of these gatekeepers can open or close their gate. When it closes, so do the prospects for a strategy or change initiative.
Functional authority belongs to anyone who is in an informal position to close a gate and thereby stymie a change. Some years ago I stopped at a high-tech store—one of a nationwide chain—only to discover a complete absence of sales personnel on duty. Customers were just milling about. The sales team was upstairs in the store manager's office loudly protesting a new compensation system. All afternoon, customers came and went without buying anything, as there was no salesperson to make a sale. The sales personnel were exercising their functional authority. It's little wonder the company declared bankruptcy shortly afterward.
Social authority is informal influence among others that rests on personality, social order, and networks. Some people have outsize influence over the thinking of their peers. When it comes to a business strategy or change initiative, they can put the brakes on without the leader's knowledge. Generally speaking, it isn't the office cynic who has the most influence, as many employees just discount that person's constant quibbling. Nor is it the office cheerleader, whose enthusiasm grates on nerves. Rather it is the sober, thoughtful person in the middle whose voice others seek out and respect.
There are other kinds of authority, as well: moral authority, political authority, and strategic authority, just to name a few. The wise manager is alert to all of them.
The need to recruit these critical gatekeepers comes back to the crucial differences between managing and leading. Managers have official command of their team as a matter of the organization's hierarchy; people are assigned to a team and to a manager. Leaders must earn their influence, because the people they would lead have a choice as to whom they will follow. To lead successfully, leaders must enroll as many supporters as they possibly can.
© Copyright 2013 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.
By Thomas J. Lee
Lao Tzu, the ancient Chinese philosopher, left a veritable canon of wisdom on leadership. Many of his observations and insights are as vital today as they were when he lived twenty-six centuries ago.
Here are a few you will recognize:
The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.
A leader is best when people barely know he exists;
when his work is done and his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.
If you do not change directions, you may wind up where you are heading.
He who does not trust enough will himself not be trusted.
And here is one that may not be familiar to you. It may also puzzle you:
Anticipate the difficult by managing the easy.
What do you think Lao Tzu meant by this?
Take a moment to think about it. Turn the statement over in your mind a few times: Anticipate the difficult by managing the easy.
As you play with these words, you begin to realize that even the most daunting challenges in life are merely a series of easier tasks you already find simple and straightforward. On a macro scale, that was true of sending astronauts to the moon, of inventing the computer, of transplanting the first heart or lung. On a micro scale, it is true of getting a college education, of losing those 40 pounds that came out of nowhere, of raising a family, of managing a team of people.
Once we begin to see the large and complex as just a myriad of the small and simple, we can make real progress. We can anticipate meeting the difficult challenge by preparing to manage it as a lot of easy things.
As a foundation for leading people, this is a penetrating insight. It points us toward the importance of managing ourselves for the purpose of leading others toward something important for us all. It reminds us to be our own first follower.
Let me know what you think. Drop me a line at tom@arceil.com or leave a comment below.
© Copyright 2013 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.
By Thomas J. Lee
There's so much gobbledygook and doubletalk spewing forth from corporations every day, you get in the habit of blithely ignoring it—in spite of the fact that it demeans and insults all the most important stakeholders: customers, employees, and investors, all both actual and prospective.
Thus, when an executive of a publicly traded company has the courage, self-awareness, and humility to tell the truth with self-deprecating humor, it grabs your attention. Just such a thing happened a few days ago.
No, we’re not speaking of Warren Buffet, whose annual shareholder newsletter was published Friday, although Buffet has been refreshingly telling the truth for decades. He is a happy exception to the rule. We expect plain talk from him.
Rather, the executive whose truth telling was startling and invigorating was Andrew Mason, who was deposed Friday as CEO of Groupon, Inc., the e-commerce company he co-founded.
Usually in an executive shuffle, the dearly departed say nothing. They just disappear, and the company’s mouthpiece issues some verbal pabulum to explain the change. The worst of these anodyne comments asks us to believe that the executive wants “to spend more time with his family” or has chosen “to pursue other opportunities.”
Mr. Mason needed no corporate mouthpiece. He could speak just fine for himself. In a farewell letter to employees, he began with a nod to the cliché and then—well, read it for yourself:
After four and a half intense and wonderful years as CEO of Groupon, I’ve decided that I’d like to spend more time with my family. Just kidding—I was fired today. If you’re wondering why, you haven’t been paying attention. From controversial metrics in our S1 to our material weakness to two quarters of missing our expectations and a stock price that’s hovering around one quarter of our listing price, the events of the last year and a half speak for themselves. As CEO, I am accountable.
That alone was refreshing. Mr. Mason went on to pay tribute to the company’s employees and to voice support for both the board’s strategy and the board’s decision to fire him. “It’s time to give Groupon a relief valve from the public noise,” he wrote.
Then he used a metaphor to help people understand. Metaphors are often terrific rhetorical devices. Never underestimate the value and power of an apt metaphor. In this case, he invoked the old video game Battletoads and poked fun at himself:
I’m OK with having failed at this part of the journey. If Groupon was Battletoads, it would be like I made it all the way to the Terra Tubes without dying on my first-ever play through. I am so lucky to have had the opportunity to take the company this far with all of you. I’ll now take some time to decompress (FYI I’m looking for a good fat camp to lose my Groupon 40, if anyone has a suggestion), and then maybe I’ll figure out how to channel this experience into something productive.
He closed by reminding his former employees always to think first of the customer, something that seems increasingly foreign and hostile to the priorities of so many CEOs, who pay obeisance to investors first and everyone else a distant second. Then he said something truly phenomenal.
This leadership change gives you some breathing room to break bad habits and deliver sustainable customer happiness—don’t waste the opportunity!
I will miss you terribly.
Love,
Andrew
Did you see that? He used the L word: love. In a business letter!
Frankly, I have long had my doubts about Groupon and its business model, but now I’m thinking that I will keep an eye on young Mr. Mason. Go lose those 40 pounds, sir, and keep us posted as to your whereabouts.
© Copyright 2013 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.
By Thomas J. Lee
Yahoo’s new chief executive, Marissa Mayer, has moved quickly to turn around the company’s stolid culture and position it for change. Within days of her celebrated arrival last summer she purchased thousands of new iPhones for employees. That was only one of several initiatives intended to make the company more innovative and productive.
So perhaps we should cut her some slack on Yahoo’s new policy regarding remote workers. Like many other large companies, Yahoo has encouraged employees to work part of their time or all of their time from home. That has had a number of people-affirming consequences. It has enabled couples to balance two careers more readily, and it has facilitated child care for working moms. It has also saved corporate funds on real estate.
Yahoo’s support for remote working will end in June, according to reports on All Things D, a website devoted to the technology and digital industry. (You can read the two stories here and here.) Citing the need for more and better collaboration, and in the hope of nurturing more innovation, Ms. Mayer is requiring all Yahoo employees to work physically in offices alongside their their colleagues.
While there is an argument for people to work together in the same space, Yahoo’s new policy strikes me as overreach. I say that for four reasons.
First, any large company has multiple offices—not uncommonly in an array of countries and time zones—and therefore remote collaboration is already a way of life. Yahoo itself has offices in Bangalore and Beijing. The drawbacks of remote working are part of business in the 21st century, and that isn’t going to change any time soon.
Second, a significant number of high-value employees have made major life decisions on the basis of the prior policy. Home ownership, spousal employment, and court-ordered child-care arrangements are not easy things to change in a matter of several months. Moreover, as a matter of simple equity, some employees have undoubtedly left prior jobs and joined Yahoo in part because of the flexibility and freedom of its remote-working policy.
Third, like a layoff or any other management decision with tectonic consequences, this policy shift is likely to divert the focus of Yahoo employees away from business strategy and operations to the policy change itself, at a time when Yahoo can least afford the diversion. In some cases that kind of collateral damage is unavoidable, but when it can be avoided or minimized, it should be.
Fourth, in my own experience, remote working is every bit as productive as office-based working is—perhaps even more so. I personally work with several executives of Fortune 100 companies who maintain home offices, and they are some of the most efficient, productive people I know.
There is some potential middle ground here, and if my voice were heard in Sunnyvale, it would say this: In-office work arrangements are indeed conducive to collaboration and innovation, as opposed to sheer efficiency and productivity, which seem to thrive in remote arrangements. When people work together, they run into one another and share ideas in the cafeteria, washrooms, corridors, and elevators. People also develop more appreciation for one another’s special expertise by working in their presence. All that is good.
But that can be accomplished equally well by bringing remote-working teams together for a few days every month or every quarter, by having regular online conferences in between, by coming together for sophisticated professional-development programs, and by using several new programs and apps to facilitate remote collaboration. As an aside, companies should be budgeting more for airline travel and meetings anyway. That is money and time well spent.
By modifying the new policy, Yahoo can avoid the trauma of forcing high-value employees to choose whether husband or wife is able to keep a job or remain on track for an MBA, and it can demonstrate that new policies need not take the form of Draconian reversals that rattle everyone.
Just my two cents.
© Copyright 2013 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.
By Thomas J. Lee
At this very moment, you are reading this, and therefore you are bright.
I'm not being sarcastic, and I'm not being fulsome. It's true. If you're reading a blog like this, chances are that you're suffering from a condition known as above-average intelligence.
Okay, now that's a little over the top, I admit.
Still, there's some truth to it. Smart people have a lot of advantages, but they also have a couple of large disadvantages. One big disadvantage is the inability to listen as well as people of average or even below-average intelligence can listen.
That's right. It may come as a shock, so I will repeat it for emphasis: The smarter you are, the more difficulty you probably have listening to other people.
Yes, there are exceptions to this rule, but if you're leaping to the conclusion that you are the exception, then you're very likely a worse listener than your peers.
Why are smart people poor listeners?
Well, 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—at least 36 of every 60 seconds—for you to be mentally doing other things while people leisurely finish their own sentences.
What are you doing for those 36-plus seconds of every minute? Lots of things.
You're thinking about the agenda for tomorrow's meeting. You're sorting through candidates for the staff vacancy. You're remembering to get arugula at the fresh market. You're debating which movie to see tonight. You're wondering 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 or to check weather.com. 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.
Now if you're as smart as you think you are, you'll identify listening skills as an opportunity for self-improvement, and you will do something about it. There are lots of resources out there: books, tapes, videos, coaching. Our Master Class is one of many; we describe four levels of good listening, and we set forth an eight-step process for what we term affirmative listening.
The important thing is to do something. Otherwise people will get the sense that you think you already know everything, and you and I already know that isn't the case. We do, don't we?
© Copyright 2013 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.
by Thomas J. Lee
As alumni of our Master Class will recall, we identify three general models of leadership—transactional, transformational, and a hybrid of those two—each with four common faces. One face of the transformational model is the heroic leader.
Heroic leaders do their leading by example and then some. They offer themselves as paragons of discipline, rectitude, or restraint. Their behavior speaks for itself. Note: We’re not asking for perfection here; heroic leaders are fallible like the rest of us. But heroic leaders rise to the challenge of offering a splendid role model in one or more facets of their personality and character. That is the gist of their heroism as leaders.
Some of history’s greatest names were, or are, heroic leaders: Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, Joan of Arc, Mahatma Gandhi, Rosa Parks, Oskar Schindler, Aung San Suu Kyi, George Washington, Liu Xiaobo, and Jaime Escalante, to name a few. Others are less well-known or even obscure. All around, you can find parents, coaches, teachers, and clergy who are genuinely heroic leaders.
Against such a spectacular firmament, it may seem odd to nominate a professional athlete. But I think it is justified, especially in an era when so many professional athletes have compromised themselves and their sport by the scandalous use of performance-enhancing drugs, and in spite of the fact that most of them are extremely well-compensated. The few who succeed by dint of hard work and self-sacrifice deserve the fanfare of trumpets as well as their paycheck, and we can learn from their example.
Tuesday is Michael Jordan’s fiftieth birthday. For the three persons on the planet who cannot place the name, Jordan is the best basketball player of all time. He played for the Chicago Bulls from 1984 to 1998, with three years out to follow a fantasy of becoming a major-league baseball player. On the basketball court, he led the Bulls to six world championships.
Few of us have our first AARP cards so publicly noted as Jordan’s fiftieth birthday has been. Sports Illustrated’s latest edition is devoted to the 50 issues on which he has graced its cover. Blogs, radio, television, and newspapers are similarly preoccupied with this milestone.
The testimonials to Jordan’s work ethic and his devotion to his teammates are legion. A couple of them stand out.
In the National Basketball Association championship series of 1993, the Bulls took a lead of three games to one into the fifth game, at home, but blew the opportunity to close it out right there. The next day they had to fly back to Phoenix for the sixth game and, if they lost again, the seventh game. The coaches and all the other players packed for a four-day trip, just in case. Not Jordan. He boarded the plane with a small valise. “Gentlemen, this is all the clothes I brought,” he told his teammates. “We’re not going to be there long enough for me to have to change.” Sure enough, the Bulls won the sixth game and came right home with the trophy.
Four years later, on June 11, 1997, Jordan awoke with a serious bout of the flu before the fifth game of the NBA championship series. The Bulls were tied with the Utah Jazz at two games apiece. The trainers told Jordan he was too sick to play, but everyone knew that his absence would imperil the team’s chances. Jordan insisted on going in. His presence alone inspired his teammates. Jordan scored 38 points that night, 17 of them in the fourth quarter, including the game-winning three-point shot. At the buzzer he collapsed into teammate Scottie Pippen’s arms. Two days later the Bulls won the next game, as well, to take the championship, four games to two.
Anyone who knew Jordan, or who played with him or against him, seems to have stories like this. I never met the man, but I did watch him play pick-up games with ordinary middle-age men like me at a Chicago gym where I used to work out. He was always a paragon of propriety, always a gentleman.
So yes, athletes can qualify as heroic leaders, and I can think of no athlete who better qualifies than Michael Jordan. Happy birthday, sir.
© Copyright 2013 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.
By Thomas J. Lee
John Kerry, the new U.S. secretary of state, appears to know a thing or two about diplomacy—on the home front. Bosses everywhere should take heed.
According to Politico, the new diplomat-in-chief issued a warning to his team this week. "Thursday is Valentine's Day," Kerry said, "and I want you all out of here" at a reasonable hour. No late meetings!
That was Tuesday. Wednesday, in another staff meeting, Kerry forgetfully suggested a meeting for this evening, Valentine’s Day.
Someone called his attention to it, and he scratched the idea. "Can't break my own rule," he said.
In all seriousness, our work lives would be a lot more successful if we paid just a little more attention to things like being home on the evening of Valentine’s Day.
© Copyright 2013 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.
By Thomas J. Lee (with apologies to James Thurber)
The late James Thurber crafted many wonderful fables with wisdom for the generations.
Here is one of my favorites. It is short and playful. Titled The Weaver and the Worm, it has a sweet moral on communication for leadership. (Note: The word gudda has largely faded from use. It meant nasty or mean.)
The little fable goes like this:
A weaver watched in wide-eyed wonder a silkworm spinning its cocoon in a white Mulberry tree.
“Where’d you get that stuff?” asked the admiring weaver.
“You want to make something out of it?” inquired the silkworm, eagerly.
The weaver and the silkworm went their separate ways for each thought the other had insulted him. We live, man and worm, in a time when almost everything can mean almost anything, for this is the age of gobbledygook, doubletalk, and gudda.
Moral: A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn’t make any sense.
Think of yourself as the weaver, and think of the people in your organization or on your team as the silkworm. Know that what you say and how you say it—especially if you resort to jargon, acronyms, and neologism, and most especially if you don’t know beforehand what you really think or why you think it—runs a high risk of being misunderstood or distrusted, or both, by the silkworm.
The only way around that is first to know what you think, and why you think it, and then to speak in plain, old-fashioned English. Look people in the eye. Take time to understand and be understood. Speak what you truly believe, and explain yourself.
Be empathic. Ask people what they heard, what they think, and how they feel. Listen patiently. Respond with your heart as well as your head. Listen for perspective and purpose as well as simple position.
Speak the essence of your truth over and over again. Explain yourself over and over again. Draw pictures. Tell stories. Give examples. Then start over.
Remember: A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn’t make any sense.
© Copyright 2013 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.
By Thomas J. Lee
“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”
I recalled that wise old aphorism on reading the wonderful Dallas Morning News story of Carole DiSalvo, an American Airlines flight attendant who finally retired two weeks ago after 54 years on the job.
You read correctly. Ms. DiSalvo joined American in 1958 at the age of 20. Only now, at the age of 75, is she turning in her wings. In an era when people commonly have several careers and multiple employers, she remained in a single job with a sole employer for more than one-half century.
When, as a young woman, she began flying, American Airlines had a fleet of airplanes with propellers. Its first jet aircraft, the Boeing 707, wouldn’t be delivered to American until the next year. Non-stop coast-to-coast and trans-Atlantic flights were still in the future. Commercial aviation was heavily regulated: everything from connecting cities to departure times, from ticket fares to pilot salaries, was determined by federal bureaucrats. Flying was a special experience, so passengers wore their best suits and dresses for a flight. They lit up cigarettes after the pilot turned off the no smoking sign, and they got decks of playing cards just for flying.
Flight attendants were called stewardesses in those days. Women had to be attractive, single, and young to be hired. Becoming a wife or a mother was cause for termination. So was reaching the age of 32. Prior to submitting an application to American, Ms. DiSalvo applied for a job with rival TWA, but that application was declined because her nails were too short.
Expecting to marry at some point, Ms. DiSalvo was looking forward only to a couple of years as a stewardess. One-by-one the rules changed, just in time for her to continue working. Her seniority kept rising, so she could lay dibs on better flights. Her final flight, in mid-January, took her to Shanghai, an unthinkable destination for her first fifteen years on the job.
There were good days and bad days in her long career. Her passengers included Richard Nixon, Adlai Stevenson, Marlon Brando, and Neil Diamond, who sang “Sweet Caroline” to her on a short layover. Two tragedies still haunt: the 1979 crash of an American flight on takeoff at O’Hare Airport, and, of course, the hijackings of two American and two United flights on September 11, 2001.
Reading between the lines, we notice something atypical about Ms. DiSalvo. Through most of her career, she was probably working not so much for the financial compensation as for the psychic and social satisfaction. Her husband was a well-paid patent attorney, and she has qualified for both Medicare and Social Security for ten years now. So she was apparently working for the joy of it, and thus she must have brought joy to many.
Now obviously most of us need to earn a living, and work is the honest way to do it. No money, no work. But in the unrelenting urge to make more money, we tend to lose sight of the sheer joy of work. Given a choice of working with someone who is on the job only because he has to be, and who will stay only as long as he has to stay, or working with someone who would be there even if he didn't have to be, I'll always take the latter.
There's something to be said for stability and continuity, and all the more to be said for it in an age of instability and discontinuity; and there's something to be said for psychic satisfaction, and all the more to be said for it in an age of money, money, money and gimme, gimme, gimme.
We take a bow to Carole DiSalvo. Congratulations. You are a paragon for a society desperately in need of paragons like you.
© Copyright 2013 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.
By Thomas J. Lee
You may be a front-line supervisor in a factory, or a mid-level manager, or a senior executive in a large corporation like IBM or Microsoft.
You may be the principal of a school, or the president of a community bank, or the nursing administrator of a hospital. You may be the managing director of a law firm, or a commissioned officer in the military, or the editor of a newspaper. Or you may be the head of a research team at a pharmaceutical company.
You may be the conductor of an orchestra, or the associate dean of a college, or the vice president for manufacturing of a mid-size company. You may be an entrepreneur with dreams of an IPO, or a small business owner who just wants to meet a payroll.
Whatever you do and wherever you do it, if you have responsibility for the performance of other people, you wear two hats.
One is the hat of a manager. The other is the hat of a leader.
That is true regardless of whether you have the word manager or leader in your job title or your job description. You must function as both a manager and a leader. It is even true if you merely aspire to responsibility for the performance of other people. You must learn to manage and lead, both.
Both hats, both roles, are important, but they are important in different ways. It’s imperative that you understand how they differ, lest you make the mistake of doing one when you should be doing the other. If you make that mistake, you can wind up with unintended results.
The two roles, manager and leader, are often confused. In part that’s because of simple-minded slogans. One classic slogan is: "Managers do things right, and leaders do the right thing." Another is: "All leadership is influence, and all influence is leadership." Both are leaky boats.
It's also in part because the two labels, manager and leader, are often mistakenly understood as jobs, as boxes on an organization chart. No less than The Wall Street Journal and Harvard Business Review routinely use the term "management" to refer to an organization’s broad official authority and the term "leadership" to refer particularly to an organization’s senior officers and executives.
By doing so, they place narrow boundaries on the purview of leadership, and that ultimately hamstrings an organization. No wonder so many executives have given up on change—the whole point of leadership—and now just wish everyone would do as they're told. That's an immature, egocentric approach to managing, and it doesn't come close to the magic of leadership. Unfortunately, it's common.
Instead of falling into that trap, think of managing and leading as work, and especially as particular kinds of work. Just that little conceptual shift will bring clarity to the murky confusion.
With this new clarity you will be able to see the path to becoming a better manager and a better leader. For up and down and across any organization, anyone with responsibility for the performance of other people must do the work of both managing and leading. That means wearing both hats, the hat of the manager and the hat of the leader.
Let's go into more detail.
Wearing the hat of the manager, you seek to meet the pre-determined expectations of acknowledged stakeholders. My definition of stakeholder is simple: anyone who can make my life difficul if his expectations are not met.
One stakeholder is the organization's senior executive authority, for it has certain expectations of its own. Other stakeholders can include customers both current and prospective, the owners or investors in a business, employees, certain government agencies and authorities, and, depending on your circumstances, perhaps also labor unions, the news media, subscribers and donors, and vendors and suppliers.
All those stakeholders have present-day expectations, which the stakeholders expect you will meet. The work of meeting those expectations is the work of management.
When management is successful, it creates alignment of people with those expectations. Thus you can think of alignment as the work product, or the deliverable, of managing well.
Wearing the hat of the leader, you are seeking instead to bring about a breakthrough in performance or a change on a large scale. The change may be strategic or tactical. It may be operational or cultural. It may be vertical (as in a hierarchy) or horizontal (as in areas of activity and responsibility).
Here's the big difference: Instead of meeting predetermined expectations, you are identifying new expectations. Instead of replicating something you have done before, over and over again, you are doing something new and different. Instead of valuing reliability and consistency, you are valuing agility and creativity. Instead of seeking compliance, you are seeking innovation.
These are the needs of tomorrow, so leadership is inherently oriented to the future. The work of forging new expectations is the work of leadership.
When leadership is successful, it creates engagement of people. Thus you can think of engagement as the work product, or deliverable, of leadership.
When should you do which?
The answer to that is a little complicated, because you must always be managing yourself in order to lead other people. How you conduct and present yourself—which is to say how you manage yourself—is the beating heart of your leadership. It determines the degree and nature of your credibility as a leader: whether, how much, and in what ways people trust you to do right by them.
Beyond yourself, you must also manage people when the situation calls for meeting those pre-determined expectations we discussed.
Examples abound. You may have a revenue target or a budget to meet. You may have a production quota or a sales quota to meet. You may have a regulatory inspection coming up. You may face a due-diligence process for a pending merger or spinoff. You may be under an order of some sort to do this or that by the first of next month. You may have a design parameter or a quality standard to meet. Whatever the expectation is, if you already know it and you are responsible for meeting it, you are really doing the work of managing.
On the other hand, you must lead people when you are venturing into new territory, and there are no pre-determined expectations are that you must meet.
Perhaps you are designing a new product, and its features are yet to be determined. Perhaps your organization has merged with another, and you must forge a new culture from the legacies of two cultures. Perhaps you are taking over a troubled department, and the people are looking to you for a new vision and energy. Perhaps your organization is moving into a new territory, where you are an unknown quantity. Perhaps something in your community is wrong, and you are speaking up.
In all these and in countless other similar situations, someone must step forward and lead. If that someone is you, the work you face is the work of leading. Do that work, not the work of managing.
For further reading, we recommend these previous posts:
Engagement and Alignment Are Two Different Things on February 12, 2012.
Core Competencies in Communication for Leadership on April 1, 2011.
How Great Leaders Communicate on December 17, 2012.
© Copyright 2013 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.
By Thomas J. Lee
Hundreds of millions of people enjoyed perhaps the greatest Super Bowl ever yesterday. At halftime it looked like a blowout, with the Baltimore Ravens leading, 21-6, over the San Francisco 49ers. Moments later, after the Ravens returned a kickoff for another touchdown to make it 28-6, the New Orleans Superdome lights went out. The blowout was now a blackout.
The lights remained out for 34 minutes, and that gave the 49ers time to regroup. When play resumed the game was altogether different. The 49ers soon caught up. Both teams were playing against the clock. It was a terrific, exciting game down to the final minutes.
I see four good lessons in this game for leaders everywhere.
One, only a prideful fool counts on momentum to continue. Momentum is like lady luck. When you have it, it's great. When you don’t, it is difficult to find optimism.
But momentum, like luck, often turns unpredictably. In sport, a fumble or an injury or a missed block—or an electrical outage—can change everything. In business, a competitor can introduce a new product, or two rivals can merge, or the economy can collapse.
The only thing you know about the future for absolutely, positively sure is this: It will be different from the present. It always is. You just don't know how the future will be different, or when things will change. So never say "if present trends continue." The one thing you know for sure is that they won't.
Two, you are never in control of all the variables. In fact, you typically have much less control than you think. That's all the more true if you have a position of official power.
Moments before the Super Bowl electrical failure, no one would have predicted that the lights would go out. Then they did, and it changed the dynamics of the game in unforeseeable ways. Suddenly the 49ers were playing as if they believed they could actually win. They didn't win, but they certainly came close.
In business and in life generally, you never have the control you want. All kinds of things happen that you cannot control. Don’t assume otherwise, even if you are a CEO or a general or a president. Especially if you are a CEO or a general or a president.
Three, when things go wrong, and they will, people will naturally want to know why. Too often a leader’s first instinct is to explain what went wrong. The what is simple. The why is difficult.
After the Super Bowl blackout, Entergy, the electric utility for New Orleans, offered a classic what explanation: that “a piece of equipment that is designed to monitor electrical load sensed an abnormality in the system. Once the issue was detected, the sensing equipment operated as designed and opened a breaker, causing power to be partially cut to the Superdome in order to isolate the issue.”
Maybe that explanation satisfied an electrical engineer, but it did nothing for the people who were literally left in the dark. For them, it only added to the confusion. It didn't explain why the “abnormality” happened. People want to know why.
Four, as exciting as the game itself was, Super Bowl audiences are always paying attention to ancillary things: to the halftime entertainment, to the national anthem, and especially to the television commercials. This particular Super Bowl also had other human-interest angles, such as the fact that both head coaches (John Harbaugh of the Ravens and Jim Harbaugh of the 49ers) are brothers. All these things diverted attention from the play on the field.
The same thing happens in business and in life generally. People are always distracted and sidetracked by other things: food, money, romance, weekends.
One of the central tasks of leadership is to create and sustain a strategic focus. That is rarely easy. It requires communicating the group's purpose, plan, and priorities repeatedly, energetically, and memorably. In this Super Bowl, it was especially difficult for the coaches to do this during the 34-minute power outage.
There's one more lesson in all this, too. Even when the lights go out, you can keep on learning.
© Copyright 2013 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.
By Thomas J. Lee
Have you ever given a moment’s thought to the imagery of fire in leadership?
Fire comes up surprisingly often as imagery for the work of leaders, especially in business. When I speak of fire, it's the noun for combustion I have in mind—not the verb for dismissal.
In a bad case, you may look back on a busy day of little crises and tell a friend you were “putting out fires all day.”Or you may anticipate stakeholder reluctance by saying you expect “a firestorm of opposition” or "a firestorm of criticism."
In better circumstances, you may come back from a terrific workshop or conference all “fired up” to put some new ideas into practice.
If you are trying to persuade a lot of people to embrace a new product or priority, you may speak of “lighting a prairie fire” of support for it.
I have found two other fire-related images particularly helpful. That is because they draw such a vivid contrast between a popular but ineffectual approach to motivation and a less popular but spectacularly successful approach.
The imagery for the popular, so-so approach is to “light a fire under” a person. Essentially, that refers to motivating someone from the outside in. Follow the logic, and you are soon relying on extrinsic inducements for people: rewarding Jones with a bonus and penalizing Smith by sidelining her for a promotion. Both, of course, are common. But while they may affect the work that people do, they rarely lead to extraordinary and sustained levels of engagement.
The imagery for the spectacularly successful approach is to “light a fire inside” a person. It refers to motivating someone from the inside out. Follow the logic, and you find yourself reaching for intrinsic inducements: the joy of camaraderie, the excitement of working with talented peers, the satisfaction of reaching an ambitious goal, the beauty of work well done.
Now, be forewarned: The better approach does come with some risk. The risk is convincing yourself that the intrinsic reward is real when it isn't, when people don't actually feel the satisfaction but instead feel neglect because they didn't receive any reward, intrinsic or extrinsic. That's an easy error for leaders to commit, so easy it happens almost by default. On the other hand, if the intrinsic satisfaction is genuine, it can be a very, very powerful motivator.
You actually know all this from your own experience, and so do I. Moreover, if you have gone through one of our Master Class workshops, you'll recall that we like to begin by asking everyone to describe the coolest project or team they ever worked on. Nine times out of ten, they describe something that gave them enormous pride and satisfaction. It's rare for anyone to speak in terms of a monetary bonus or a raise or a promotion as part of the cool factor.
Under. Inside. Just two words, two prepositions, themselves unrelated to fire, but when coupled with the imagery of fire, they are enough to separate an uncommonly good approach from a commonly bad one.
Don’t try to light a fire under people. Instead, light a fire inside them. You'll be glad you did, and so will they.
© Copyright 2013 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.
by Thomas J. Lee
I was lucky enough to be first in line at my local public library to borrow Sonia Sotomayor’s new memoir, My Beloved World. In a word, it’s fabulous. After starting it late Saturday afternoon, I raced through it and turned the last page over coffee this morning, scarcely 36 hours later.
Sotomayor, for the benefit of our readers abroad, is the first Latina to sit on the United States Supreme Court. Growing up with diabetes in the hard-scrabble poverty of South Bronx, she found escape in the books and rigorous expectations of a parochial school, and she won a full scholarship to Princeton. She graduated at the top of her class, and she went on to Yale Law School, where she earned a prestigious seat on the law review.
Impressive as all that was, it wasn’t enough for a judicial clerkship or an offer from a white-shoe law firm. So she settled for a job as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan. That turned out to be the proverbial cloud with a silver lining. Soon she had a couple of mentors and several dear friends who taught her important lessons in law and in life. All the while she held her real ambition to herself: She wanted to be a judge. Fortunately, one thing led to another, and today she is at the pinnacle of the American judiciary.
Two of the important lessons she learned as an assistant DA are relevant to anyone who aspires to lead other people. Both involve the art, even the alchemy, of persuasion.
First, she learned that a prosecutor must acknowledge that juries are reluctant to convict a criminal defendant. Jurors realize that a conviction and consequent imprisonment will very likely wreck a family. So they need a powerful reason. Providing that reason requires the prosecuting attorney to see the situation as fluid through the eyes of the jury. Although the law doesn’t demand a motive for conviction of a crime, a jury often does. That means the prosecutors must meet this need, and they must do so in a way that jurors can accept.
Second, she learned that persuasion is as much a matter of emotion as of logic. Perhaps any car salesperson or Madison Avenue copywriter knows as much, but for an attorney whose Ivy League education stressed documented facts and impeccable, linear reasoning, it was a startling revelation. Once the young assistant DA came to these realizations, she never again lost a case. That’s saying something, right there.
I suspect these insights will come as a surprise to many MBAs as well. Quantitative analysis undergirds so many strategies in business that companies regard data-driven decisions as self-evidently conclusive. But strategic decisions aren’t necessarily self-evident to the employees who must make them come alive. People need to feel viscerally the importance of the workplace priority or policy.
My Beloved World is heartwarming, gritty, tender, inspiring, authentic, even eloquent. It is a celebration of family, work, and love in a world of despair, drugs, death, and disappointment. I cannot recommend this book enthusiastically enough. Do, do, do read it.
P.S. I just learned that My Beloved World will break onto The New York Times Bestseller List next Sunday as No. 1. Frankly, that doesn't surprise me in the least.
© Copyright 2013 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.
By Thomas J. Lee
If you, like me, watched football, some more football, and still more football over the last few days, your head is probably swirling with scores, overwrought play-by-play announcers, goal-line stands, instant replays from multiple angles, and silly TV commercials. Mine sure is.
Most of the excitement took place in the college bowl games. But if you saw one pro game in particular, the Washington Redskins defeating the Dallas Cowboys on Sunday evening, you were very likely struck by both the athleticism and the leadership of Robert Griffin III, the rookie quarterback of the Redskins who is fondly known to fans as RG3. The victory was the seventh consecutive win for the Redskins, and it gave them a berth in post-season play beginning next weekend.
Griffin, a first-round draft pick who won the Heisman Trophy as a junior at Baylor, has quickly earned the esteem of his teammates. A few weeks into the season, they elected him team captain, an honor that comes with a C sewn onto his jersey. Surprisingly, it hasn't gone to his head. By all accounts he is as humble now as ever.
Remarked cornerback DeAngelo Hall: ‘‘For a guy to win the Heisman Trophy, be the top pick, the savior of the franchise, (to) come in here so humble—from Day One he came in here working—that’s why he has that C on his chest.’’
This was my first chance to see Griffin play. At one point he almost danced his way into the end zone. Still sore from a sprained knee, he let a fellow rookie, Alfred Morris, get most of the credit by running for three touchdowns and setting the team's all-time season scoring record.
The larger story of Griffin’s impact on the team is off the field. Still only 22 years old, Griffin has already demonstrated a preternatural ability to lead his teammates. Keep an eye on this young man. He is going places.
Now to be sure, the National Football League has a bounty of gifted first-year quarterbacks this season. In addition to Griffin, you have Andrew Luck of Stanford playing for the Indianapolis Colts, Ryan Tannehill of Texas A&M playing for the Miami Dolphins, and Russell Wilson of Wisconsin playing for the Seattle Seahawks. All four are talented throwers and fast on their feet, too.
For readers abroad and anyone else who doesn’t understand American football, the role of quarterback is central to any team’s fortunes. Every offensive play goes through the quarterback, who can choose to hand the ball to a running back, throw it to a receiver, or keep it and run for daylight on his own. More to the point of this analysis, the quarterback is often the de facto leader of a team.
That role has fallen on Griffin's young shoulders. As a rookie, he was joining a team with many experienced players. That created a high hurdle for him. Could he be taken seriously as a leader? How?
"My strategy was to come in and try to lead by example first,” RG3 told a Washington Post sportswriter. “Being a rookie, you don’t want to come in talking right away. You can rub a lot of guys the wrong way. . . . One thing you can’t do as a leader is come out and say you’re the leader."
That is a key insight, and it cannot be emphasized too much. In business, managers have legal and official authority to exercise power. The company assigns people to departments or work teams with the explicit understanding that the manager is calling the shots. When a new chief executive moves into the corner office, everyone assumes he or she is in charge.
But that doesn’t mean the manager, or even the CEO, is a leader. No one can be assigned or told to be led by anyone else. Accepting someone’s leadership is a discretionary act.
Leadership is work, the hard work of encouraging people to accept you as a leader and offering them purpose and meaning for their work. Think of it not as a noun but rather as a verb.
Grammar aside, leadership is a matter of doing and saying certain things that bring people closer and of not doing and saying certain other things that push people away. By doing or by not doing these things, you begin to be known and appreciated as a leader. People naturally want to be led by you.
Most of us have to learn how to do this by trial and error. Every once in a while, someone like RG3 comes along and shows the rest of us how it's done. That, too, is an act of leadership.
© Copyright 2013 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.
By Thomas J. Lee
Mensa, the high IQ society, just lost one of its brightest stars. Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf died this evening at the age of 78.
Schwarzkopf was best known for commanding the Western coalition that invaded Iraq in the Persian Gulf War, which came to be known as Operation Desert Storm. Long before that, however, he was earning a reputation the hard way as an officer who served his men, while other officers expected to be served by their men.
The difference, of course, is huge. It goes to the heart of what we mean when we talk about servant leadership.
The general described his approach to leadership in a memoir, It Doesn't Take a Hero. He recounted an incident in Vietnam that severely tested his commitment to his men.
One day in 1970, on learning that troops in his battalion were pinned down by land mines, he rushed to the scene. There he found soldiers still trapped in the minefield. He urged them to move out slowly, just inches at a time, but one soldier took too big a step, and another mine exploded. Schwarzkopf, a lieutenant colonel at the time, crawled through mines to the men and helped them escape.
Blessed with genius-level intelligence, Schwarzkopf had two character traits in particular that I admired, and neither had anything to do with his intellectual candlepower.
One trait was his appreciation of emotion as a driving force of leadership. For him emotion could cut both ways, occasionally as anger but more often as love.
As anger, it earned Schwarzkopf a reputation for a hot head. As love, it earned him a reputation for genuine accessibility and dedication. He was both a grizzly bear and a Teddy bear. Indeed, he kept a Teddy bear on his Army-issue cot while on deployment in the Persian Gulf, perhaps to encourage himself to err on the side of softie.
The other trait was integrity. In an era when so many leaders disappoint, Schwarzkopf was ever there: a rock when we needed one. He was the epitome of character, always doing the thing that needed doing. Moreover, he spoke the truth regardless of whether you wanted to hear it. At least you knew where things stood: where he stood, and where you stood with him.
If he sometimes saw things in black and white, with no gray hues of nuance, he was rarely if ever misunderstood, for he was plain and clear. He said what he meant, and he meant what he said.
Nor did he brook excuses. "The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do," Schwarzkopf liked to say. "The hard part is doing it."
Indeed it is, and it always will be. Yet in Schwarzkopf we had a living, working model of the hard part, of the courage and perseverance and self-discipline it takes to be the person we say we are, or the person we want to be.
The general may have departed, but his example will live on.
© Copyright 2012 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.
By Thomas J. Lee
A couple of weeks ago in this space we expounded on the fundamental differences between managing people and leading people, and we pointed to corresponding differences between the deliverables, or work product, of management and leadership: people alignment for managing and people engagement for leading.
Now let's turn our attention to the differences between communication for the sake of managing people and communication for the sake of leading people.
These two things, both nominally communication, differ greatly in terms of purpose, substance, style, and tone.
Other differences can also come into play, depending on the urgency of a situation, the sophistication of the people involved, the culture at play, the familiarity of the manager or leader, the degree of opposition to change, and other factors. We don't have the space here to explore all this in depth, but we can offer an overview.
Before we dig in, we should take a moment to recapitulate the differences between management and leadership.
It's very, very important to view them both as work—not as a function of position, title, or status; nor as a matter of traits or attributes; nor as a kind of trophy for success. Both are essentially work, and anyone who does the work of managing or leading can rightly be regarded as a manager or a leader, regardless of their position (chief executive or team supervisor, for example) or their traits (salt-and-pepper temples, an air of self-certainty, perhaps an echoing baritone) or their trophies (the large corner office, say, or the stripes on a uniform).
Managing is the hard work of meeting pre-determined expectations of acknowledged stakeholders: customers, investors, employees, senior officers, perhaps government regulators. These expectations may take the form of quality standards, sales quotas, budgets, deadlines, year-end bonuses, compliance with the law, and more. Managing sets out to ensure predictable consistency. When it is effective, managing creates the alignment of people.
In contrast, leadership is the hard work of inventing or reinventing the future. It articulates an ideal future and inspires people to strive to achieve it, often in spite of uncertainty, self-sacrifice, risk, or even despair. It's all about change, either operational or cultural. When leadership is effective, it creates engagement of people.
With this fundamental distinction in mind, we can proceed to the differences in communication for managing and leading in terms of their purpose, substance, style, and tone.
In terms of purpose, communication for the sake of management seeks to control or influence the day-to-day activities of people, so that the expectations of stakeholders will be met with certainty. Communication for the sake of leadership seeks to excite and inspire people to attempt more than they ever dreamed or thought possible: literally and figuratively to travel to the Moon or abolish apartheid or dismantle the Berlin Wall, or, on a smaller scale, to lose weight or go back to school or give up smoking.
In terms of substance, communication for the sake of management is typically detailed, explicit, static, and pedagogical, inasmuch as it teaches people what they must do to meet the expectations of stakeholders. Communication for the sake of leadership is more general, implicit, dynamic, and homiletic, inasmuch as it encourages people to come along on a journey of change.
In terms of style, communication for the sake of management is all about compliance and constancy, and it is incremental. You are seeking to replicate something you have done well or to refine something you must do a little better. Communication for the sake of leadership is all about large change. Because it depends on the discretionary involvement of people, you set out to build a high level of focus, curiosity, passion, and commitment to a big ideal, for those are the stepping stones to the engagement you need.
Finally, in terms of tone, communication for the sake of management is often impersonal, authoritative, and commanding, and it often uses the second person ("You must do this now.") Communication for the sake of leadership is usually personal and collaborative or collective, and it usually uses the first person plural (though not always: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" is a famous exception).
Both are commonly in the imperative mood, but the imperative differs; for managing, it reflects a looming accountability, whereas for leadership it offers opportunity and hope.
There's a lot more to this topic, and that is all the more reason you and your colleagues should join us for a Master Class.
© Copyright 2012 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.
by Thomas J. Lee
More books have been written and more movies filmed about Abraham Lincoln than anyone else in modern civilization, and for good reason. His life and his presidency offer timeless lessons in leadership, character, and communication. Steven Spielberg’s new, eponymous movie captures it all with color and verve. The film is excellent, and I urge everyone to see it.
Lincoln opens nationwide on Friday, but it is already showing in a handful of cities, including here in Chicago. So a few days ago I took time out of my workday to see it. My commute to the theatre included a Chicago River “water taxi” ride, which floats right past the site of the old Wigwam (on the river at Wacker Drive and Lake Street) where, in 1860, the nascent Republican Party nominated the Illinois prairie lawyer for the presidency. Of course, little could anyone at the time imagine the historic repercussions of the selection.
Like many of you, I have long been fascinated by Lincoln. This year alone I have read two full biographies of him, Lincoln by David Herbert Donald and A. Lincoln by Ronald C. White, both of which are masterful (if you read only one, choose the White volume), as well as three lesser works about his presidency and assassination. Anyone who studies leadership as a calling should devote a great deal of attention to Lincoln.
Spielberg has said he wanted to make a movie about Lincoln for more than a decade, but he didn’t know how to squeeze so much material into a couple of hours. He got his answer when he read Team of Rivals, the marvelous book on Lincoln’s bipartisanship by Harvard historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. The final two chapters of that book focus on Lincoln’s single-minded advocacy, in early 1865 just weeks before his assassination, of the Thirteenth Amendment, which would ban slavery. (As a point of history, the constitutional amendment was necessary because the Emancipation Proclamation two years earlier had been a wartime measure, and therefore it would be of dubious legality after the war’s end.)
But here’s the crux of the matter: Lincoln’s re-election in November 1864 had long coattails. He would enjoy larger majorities in Congress beginning in March 1865. The commonsense thing to do was wait till then, when approval of the Thirteenth Amendment would be easier. Lincoln refused. He insisted on moving quickly. As he declares in the movie (portrayed exquisitely by Daniel Day-Louis), he wanted Congress to act “now, now, now!”
That is one of six insights on leadership that I drew from the Spielberg production: Bring a sense of urgency to the important. If it’s important to do tomorrow, it’s important to do today. Do whatever you can now. Don’t wait, even when waiting would make things ostensibly easier. Do what you must do, do what you can do, and do it now.
Here are five other lessons I took from the Spielberg movie:
Communicate through storytelling, analogies, example, and anecdotes of personal experience whenever possible. Lincoln, like other leaders before and since, relied heavily on storytelling. Stories are powerful tools, because they give people a vivid way to remember a theoretical point. Our ancestors have been telling stories for millennia. We are hardwired to love stories. Lincoln knew it. Spielberg and Goodwin know it. As a leader, you must know it.
Go to the people whose support you need. Listen to them first, and then appeal to their nobility. Do not wait for people to come to you. Do not expect them to come to you. You must go to them, and you must listen before you speak. Then speak to their concerns and issues. As a general rule, when you speak publicly, invoke their values and beliefs. People want to be about something larger than themselves. (It is true, as the movie illustrates, that Lincoln was not above scratching backs for votes. He knew his power, and he used it when he had to.)
Recognize and accept practical limitations, and work within them. “Politics is the art of the possible,” Lincoln’s contemporary Otto von Bismarck would say a few years later. That is not a license to do nothing. Rather, it is worldly acknowledgement that the perfect can be the enemy of progress. In the movie, Pennsylvania Congressman Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones), who knows that people are inherently equal, is forced to say in House debate that he favors equality of legal rights only. Had he claimed more, the Thirteenth Amendment might very well have lost.
Know that ideas have consequences, and the consequences can be grave. The movie is filled with poignant scenes. One of them involves the president’s son Robert watching soldiers dump a barrow of human limbs in a mass grave. Another shows the president on horseback touring a battlefield of human carnage. There are more. For us, too, even in our day-to-day business, even in comparatively modest endeavors, ideas can have consequences from livelihoods to security in retirement to more. Never dismiss an idea as “merely a theory.” Ideas matter.
Abandon the pretense of perfection. We are all human. Few historical figures rival Lincoln for integrity, but even Lincoln was an imperfect man. There is evidence he fudged on an expense account as a congressman, and he could stretch the truth when he wanted. He pulled rank as commander-in-chief to discourage his son Robert from joining the military; and when he lost that argument, he inveigled General Ulysses S. Grant to give Robert a safe sinecure. This is not to excuse or justify such behavior, only to acknowledge the imperfectability of the human animal.
As you watch Lincoln you will doubtless come to your own insights. Please capture them in a note to me (at tom@arceil.com), or click on Comments below and share your thoughts with other readers. Whatever you do, don’t miss this movie. Be sure to take your kids, too, and talk about it afterward.
© Copyright 2012 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.
by Thomas J. Lee
A newspaper reporter called the other day for my thoughts on business executives who have spoken first and thought second, only to regret it, in very public ways. Politicians do that all the time, of course, but they're in the public spotlight all the time. Most executives are in the spotlight only when they seek it, so the ensuing flap seems more sensational.
The comments in question were all widely reported when they occurred, so I won't quote them here. Suffice to say that they all qualify for lifetime membership in the Foot in Mouth Club.
So the question was rather simple: When should a business executive speak out publicly about something, and when should she keep her mouth shut?
I'll tell you what I told the reporter. Generally speaking, leaders should say only what they think, and think all of what they say, which is to say they must believe and feel the truth of everything they 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."
Before you say what you think, ask yourself these five questions:
If it isn't all five of these, you should be asking yourself some tough-love questions as to why you're even thinking such things. They may be toxic to you and everyone else. Before you speak, get your head together.
Executives and other leaders should also remember that they are never the judge of their own comments, any more than they are the judge of their own leadership.
Rather, it is the people with whom they are communicating who cast judgment on the leader’s communication, and it is the would-be, could-be followers who decide whether to recognize or reject the leader’s leadership.
© Copyright 2012 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.
By Thomas J. Lee
By now you're either tired of the U.S. presidential campaign, or you are living abroad, or you are masochistic, or you're just an inert gas of some sort. I cannot imagine an alert, sentient American who is eager for more political campaigning.
Yet here's a paradox: Our elections keep us young. They keep us receptive to change. We know how to hold elected officials accountable, and we know how to vet aspiring leaders. Indeed, we Americans know a lot about leadership. We're always hiring and firing leaders.
Here are six things I believe most Americans know intuitively about leadership that people elsewhere may or may not know or fully appreciate. Few people anywhere actually think about this stuff, but most Americans have a spiritual or visceral recognition of it. (Note to readers outside the United States: I am confining this essay to Americans not because I am disparaging you but because I have lived my entire life in the United States.)
First, we know that successful leaders work for us. The titular leader cannot lead without us, without our assent. The irony is that a so-called leader's "followers" are effectively the real leaders, for they decide how much moral and practical authority a leader has, and whether the leader can truly effect the change she seeks. In public office, of course, voters cast their ballots in elections and thereby determine who occupies the Oval Office or the governor's suite or whatever. In other circumstances—in business or recreation or the commercial marketplace, for example—we don't cast a formal ballot, but we do "vote" inasmuch as we decide whom we listen to and whose vision or priorities become our own.
Second, we know that leadership is about change. In any election, the central question is whether voters favor change or favor the status quo, and if they favor change, whose change they prefer. Any leader worth his salt must be able to answer this simple question: What is my agenda, my purpose, my program? A leader who cannot answer that simple question has a name we will not remember tomorrow. This is as true of leadership outside an electoral system as it is within.
Third, we know that the agenda must be about the well-being of the common enterprise, not about the aggrandizement of the leader. The common enterprise can be a unit of government or of a business, or it may be something else altogether: an army, an orchestra, a hospital, the Red Cross or the PTA. In all cases, the agenda must advance the collective interest of everyone, and it must be perceived in such a way. Otherwise all bets are off.
Fourth, we know that leadership is work. It is not a title or a trait or a trophy. It most certainly is not a snap of your fingers. Just because someone occupies a supposed position of leadership doesn't mean that she can or will deliver on change. She may have been saying what she thought we wanted to hear. She may not be willing to do the hard work of mustering support for change. She may be taken with the accouterments of her office or with her name at the top of the org chart. She may not care what anyone else thinks or how anyone else feels. For uncounted reasons, putative leaders can be unwilling or unable to do the hard work of leadership, and thus they surrender the mantle of leadership to someone else—perhaps even without realizing it.
Fifth, we know that, just as no human is perfect, so no leader is perfect or even perfectible. Whether and to what extent we decide to follow someone will always take into account the chinks in their armor. In the current presidential campaign, for example, voters will choose between an incumbent with a checkered record and a candidate with a checkered background. We all live in glass houses. That is as true for our leaders as for the rest of us.
Finally, we know that our best and brightest moments have always accompanied our best and brightest leadership. Whether it's the founding of our republic, or the abolition of slavery, or the creation of national parks, or victory in World War II, or putting men on the moon, we are at our best when we choose noble leadership and follow the lead that it offers. We are at our best when we call on leaders to call on us.
All this, we know to be true. When we remember it, when we apply it to our own day-to-day leadership, things tend to go well. When we forget it, when we neglect to apply it, things tend not to go so well.
© Copyright 2012 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.