Phil's Leadership Blog

Alan Alda, the curious leader

2009-06-28T17:40:00.005+01:00

Photo credit: Andy Carvin, flickr

There are people designated as 'leaders' in organizations - the CEO and the top bosses usually. There's the politician as 'leader'. And then there are people out there, in the culture, without a formal position in a hierarchy, who never call themselves a 'leader' but people follow them. They set agendas, make us think differently.

The actress Emily Blunt was working with Alan Alda on a new film recently and said in a newspaper article last week, "He is infectious and wise and impossible not to follow around." She and her co-star Amy Adams, says Blunt, just loved to be near him, so much so that he would look up and see them following him and call out: "Leave me alone, I wanna eat my lunch."

I have an Alan Alda quote on my wall. It goes:

"Be brave enough to live creatively.
The creative is the place where no-one else has ever been.
You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition.
You cannot get there by bus; only by hard work, risking and by not quite knowing what you are doing."

Yes, that Alan Alda - Hawkeye from Mash. But, you see, he's also the co-founder of the annual World Science Festival, author of 'Dear Albert', a play about Einstein, and when I switched on BBC Radio 4 recently someone was explaining how particle physics works and I thought "Why does that guy sound like Alan Alda?" Because it was Alan Alda, of course.

He also hosts and facilitates major seminars on subjects like 'What it is to be human?'

Natural leaders just attract and hold our attention with new thoughts, new ideas, a clarity of explanation, a warmth and enthusiasm in Alda's case, that almost defy analysis. It's a form of leadership by curiosity, by asking questions, by wanting to learn.

People like Alda are rare natural leaders. They are, as Blunt says,"infectious" or, as Richard Dawkins would say, "memetic". They are like a human equivalent of the internet - medium, message and amplifier all at the same time. They kind of get your molecules to vibrate a little faster.

Different people need or are attracted to different forms of leadership, I think. All I know is that when I hear Alda's voice or see him on TV, I want to stop what I'm doing and see what he has to say next.

I can't say that happens when I see an official 'leader' on the TV or hear them on the radio.

CEOs hamper the recovery. And the flying bunch of bananas

2009-06-23T09:00:00.002+01:00

Apparently, US consumers are bored with the recession and out in force wanting to spend. (I'm not so sure about that. I think it's the ones who still have their jobs. But, anyway, that's what some US commentators are saying...) But 71% of US CEOs are stuck in last month's or last quarter's mindset and are too timid to take advantage of it. In fact, 71% of American CEOs are helping the recession continue, as they plan more layoffs and to horde cash.

The suggestion that CEOs are holding us back from recovery by being over-cautious shows a marked lack of leadership if it's true. Slipping into 'hunker down recession' mode prolongs the downturn. The argument is put by Forbes' publisher on the company's talkback video site. The link is below. It's an interesting point, weakened, unfortunately by a flying bunch of bananas.

I used to be a press officer many moons ago. And one of the things we always told interviewees going in front of the camera was - beware 'flying bunch of banana syndrome'. That's when your hand suddenly appears on the screen and completely distracts the viewer from what you are saying, as they are instead thinking "Whoa: looks just like a bunch of bananas flying across the bottom of the screen".

Forbes' media advisor needs to have a quiet word with the publisher before he does the next one of these talkback 'to camera' pieces. Those bananas are flying all over the place.

Here's a link to the clip.

Normal service will be resumed

2009-06-22T16:24:00.002+01:00

Well, excuse the interruption to this blog yet again. I juggle work with managing a care team that looks after my wife, who has Huntington's Disease, and with raising a teenager. My wife's illness has taken a nose dive the last couple of months and the care team has struggled to keep up with it. So, I've been frantically trying to reconfigure the care system we have to get back on top of that situation. 24-hour live-in carers look like the option, so I'm pursuing that and should be able to blog more often as that situation gets under control again. That plus a major contract has kept me stretched and away from this blog. Apologies.

What you can learn from comedians

2009-05-21T10:20:00.004+01:00

Interesting article in the Sunday Times, drawing partly on Roger Edwards Jones book 'What Can Chief Executives Learn From Standup Comedians?' It's not about introducing comedy to the workplace - though there is a role for humour that is too often ignored or seen as 'not serious' and therefore unconfident leaders and managers avoid it.

The learning points don't just apply to chief executives. They include:

Preparation. Good stand-up performances appear totally spontaneous, but the reality is quite different. Comedians spend hours honing those routines. The harder you work on a presentation, the more relaxed it sounds.

Less is more. A comic’s messages are not long-winded, but tight and concise. Presentations benefit from fewer, more focused, words.

Confidence. Although they may suffer horribly from nerves, a comedian must exude a natural authority or die. Equally, bosses need to think about the impression they give and may have to project an air of confidence.

Responsibility. The stage is a lonely place. When they bomb in front of an audience, comics know there is nobody to blame but themselves. It’s the same for bosses – but they may not always realise that they have to take the flak for failures as well as the rewards for success.

Courage. Comedians are constantly pushing themselves further from their comfort zone as they progress to bigger performances and new material. All executives can benefit from re-examining their comfort zones and pushing outside it now and again.

You can read the full article here

Roger's pocket book (It's 64 pages) on Amazon.co.uk is here

Keynes was wrong and Obama is a communist

2009-05-18T12:07:00.005+01:00

Well, that's what my Californian friend Janice tells me is the Republican mantra at the moment. Since unfettered free market economics with its unhidden hand - greed - brought us a global market collapse, it's a shame people still line up in opposing camps - pro or anti Keynes. With people choosing a position based entirely on their political dogma.

We're in a different place now, it seems to me. The imagination of the financial idiots savants who came up with derivatives and other complex financial instruments was the equivalent of the warped imagination behind the 9/11 attacks. The unreal, unimaginable, became real. The old rules don't seem to apply. If they ever did.

What theories of economics - including Keynes's General Theory - fail to recognize is that capitalism evolves. We've never been at this stage of capitalism before. Consumer and what might be called post-consumer behaviour isn't predictable. But, some things - on the supply side of the equation - are. It just suits us to look the other way or not believe.

There is massive over-supply in the car industry globally, for example. And there has been for years. I used to write about the car industry and couldn't understand how on earth it could continue disguising the fact that it was making more cars than the world would want to buy.

The big US car giants have been heading towards a cliff for at least five years. Now they've fallen off it. Their business models and plans for continuous growth in the face of too much supply were faulty because they were backward-looking, based on what worked before, patterns of demand and growth that existed before. Where's the surprise that denial failed and reality bit them hard?

Similarly, those who label the public sector pumping money into the private sector as 'communist' are walking backwards into the future: their view of how the world works is shaped by patterns from the past that no longer apply.

Having said that, there is a smart piece in Forbes on 'Why Keynes was Wrong'. I don't agree with it. It still has an 'Obama is a communist' sub-plot lurking in the distant background. But, at least it's smartly argued. And doesn't caricature Keynesian economics. Here it is:

Forbes Magazine: Why Keynes Was Wrong

Disappearing Leadership Hub

2009-05-11T09:17:00.001+01:00

So, Streamline, The hosts of The Leadership Hub, seem to have decided they don't like it and keep killing the link. Something to do with new database servers. If you use The Leadership Hub, sorry about this as it's off at the moment. We are in deep combat with them to try and get it fixed. They say an engineer is onto it...I see a pig flying past the window.

40 years of research into trust and leadership, in a two minute read

2009-05-04T00:20:00.004+01:00

Pardon the interruption in this blog - couple of weeks of launching something for a client coinciding with wife's carers being on maternity leave or away = overstretch.

Trust and Leadership

D. L. Ferrin and K. T. Dirks examined 40 years of published research on trust in leadership and came to the following three conclusions:

1. For organizations to be effective, you need high trust in the leaders. (D’uh, you might think).

2. Trust in you as a leader develops or deteriorates through changes in psychological states – In other words, external worries about the recession, perhaps worries about the future of the company and their own job can have a lowering effect on the trust people feel in their leaders, even if those leaders haven’t acted in an untrustworthy way themselves. "I'm happy and confident, so I trust you more. I'm worried and anxious, so I trust you less." Levels of trust in you can drop through no fault of yours.

3. Increasing complexity and ambiguities puts a strain on trust – The changes we have to go through as an organization to respond to the recession can create ambiguity & uncertainty. So, again, trust is at risk.

So what does this mean for me as a leader?

Basically, the effect of the recession is to erode trust in leaders, which can lead to a dip in performance (see item 1, above – ‘for organizations to be effective…etc.’). So, just when you need an increase in people's performance, as we are trading through tough times, loss of trust can cause that performance to dip.

So, what can we do about it?

The Gallup Organization has researched over 10,000 people's attitudes to their leaders. Gallup says that since the recession began, particularly since people began to worry about losing their jobs and seeing friends lose theirs, leaders have to raise their game significantly if they are to maintain levels of trust, let alone build the trust needed to sustain high performance.

How to lead when you're not the boss

2009-04-05T16:20:00.004+01:00

In flatter hierarchies, people may be leading cross-departmental project teams at certain times, though their organizational structure gives them no formal authority.

Over on Harvard Management Essentials, Christina Bielaszka-DuVernay summarizes the five steps to leading when you're not the boss, taken from the book that was called Lateral Leadership: getting things done when you're not the boss, but in its latest edition is called Getting It Done: How to Lead When You're Not in Charge.

One may seem obvious. Two and Three seem the 'killer apps' in this list, especially Three (conduct mini-reviews and adapt as you go), which I think is the most powerful advice in here. Five (feedback) is hard to do in the way described if the people you are giving feedback to are technically 'above' you in terms of seniority.

1. Establish goals
People accomplish the most when they have a clear set of objectives. It follows that any group's first order of business is to write down exactly what it hopes to achieve. The person who asks the question "Can we start by clarifying our goals here?"--and who then assumes the lead in discussing and drafting those goals--is automatically taking a leadership role, whatever his or her position.

2. Think systematically
Observe your next meeting: people typically plunge right into the topic at hand and start arguing over what to do. Effective leaders, by contrast, learn to think systematically--that is, they gather and lay out the necessary data, analyze the causes of the situation, and propose actions based on this analysis. In a group, leaders help keep participants focused by asking appropriate questions. Do we have the information we need to analyze this situation? Can we focus on figuring out the causes of the problem we're trying to solve?

3. Learn from experience--while it's happening
Teams often plow ahead on a project, then conduct a review at the end to figure out what they learned. But it's more effective for teams (or individuals) to learn as they go along. Anyone who prompts the group to engage in regular minireviews and learn from them is playing a de facto leadership role.

4. Engage others
Suggest writing down a list of chores and matching them up with individuals or subgroups. If no one wants a particular task, brainstorm ways to make that task more interesting or challenging. Help draw out the group's quieter members so that everyone feels a part of the overall project.

5. Provide feedback
If you're not the boss, what kind of feedback can you provide? One thing that's always valued is simple appreciation--"I thought you did a great job in there." Sometimes, too, you'll be in a position to help people improve their performance through coaching....Offer thoughtful suggestions for improvement, being careful to explain the observation and reasoning that lie behind them.

Click here for the full post on Harvard Management Essentials

Get on or get on with - Getting back up

2009-03-30T08:00:00.003+01:00

Who do you get up for in the morning? Strange question. Robert Hogan says we are driven by two desires - to get on (self-advancement) and to get on with (the need to co-operate to get things done). I think there's an obvious third - helping others get on. Or, in the current climate, get up when they can't see a way up.

There's been a lot of trauma in teams and organizations over the past year. And a lot of dashing of personal aspirations of health, wealth and happiness. Well, wealth anyway.

But, the one good thing about a lot of our material aspirations being curtailed by the change in economic conditions is that it allows us to channel our need for fulfillment in what might be called less selfish ways - helping others get up.

Bill Taylor puts it this way: "The answer to ugly times? Do something beautiful," giving a couple of examples of how random acts of kindness at work lift the spirit and remove a sense of powerlessness - both of which are casualties of the recession, and both of which we can do something about as individuals.

Taylor says:

"Now, I'm not suggesting that we can kill this recession with kindness, or that 'senseless acts of beauty' can cure a truly hideous financial mess. But tough economic times have a way of bring out the worst in our companies and ourselves. So let's work hard to bring out the best in ourselves. It may not amount to a stimulus package, but it may make it easier for all of us to get through the day — and eventually get back to prosperity."

There is a leadership essence at work here. Too often, leadership is about self-advancement - Hogan's 'get on' drive. Steve Farber, in his Extreme Leadership blog, reminds us that no matter what level in the organization you are at, leadership is not about you, with his 'Greater Than Yourself' campaign:

"Instead of wallowing in your own despair, pick someone at work to invest in, with the intent of making that person greater than you are. Be a coach, guide, or mentor in the truest, most personal sense of the words by choosing someone to be your GTY (Greater Than Yourself) project, and see what that does to your own predicament, your own state of mind."

The 6 causes of disengagement. And how the recession makes them worse.

2009-03-24T22:44:00.002Z

1. I can't be engaged if I'm overwhelmed

2. I can't be engaged if I don't get it

3. I can't be engaged if I'm scared

4. I can't be engaged if I don't see the big picture

5. I can't be engaged if it's not mine

6. I can't be engaged if my leaders don't face reality*

Those are the six main forces pulling against employee engagement. And you can instantly see that the recession has a direct impact on each of these causes.

Here are six tips for countering those six effects

1. Overwhelm. Yes, people are more likely to feel overwhelmed in a downturn. Doing more with less adds to people's workloads. Don't just divide up the work if people have had to leave. Help people assess the elements that help deliver your core purpose - that are critical to strategy execution - and those that aren't.

2. Don't 'get it'. Yes, people will be disengaged if you don't explain in a compelling way WHAT we are doing to ride out the recession and WHY we are doing it. Repeatedly.

3. Fear. Definitely, people are more scared in a recession. Get out among them and give them as clear information as you can. Uncertainty breeds fear.

4. The big picture. If people don't have a direct line of sight between their own daily actions and the bigger picture - a clear idea of how the things they do every day contribute directly towards your organization staying ahead of the recession - then they won't be engaged. It's up to you to provide that if it's lacking.

5. 'It's not mine'. In a recession, people feel they are not in control of events, that they don't know what's coming next. Admit it: you do, too. Counter that lack of control over external events by giving people control over what they do at work - make it 'theirs'. Provide clear objectives, make them accountable, but let them run with it.

6. Leaders need to face reality. Use the people closest to the market as your ear to the ground and work out with them, with your own bosses, and with peers what you need to change, and what you need to keep the same, to adjust to the new reality in the market.

*The six main forces pulling against engagement are from Jim Haudan, CEO of Root Learning and author of The Art of Engagement. The six tips for dealing with them are from me.

Job Ownership: The Next Level of Engagement

2009-03-23T09:17:00.005Z

Engaging people behind the organization's core purpose is a if not the key role of leadership. Yet, the recession pulls against engagement massively. I'll post tomorrow on the six ways the recession undermines your 'people engagement' work.

The authors of The Harvard Service Profit Chain, Sasser & Hesketh, with their co-author Joe Wheeler of The Service Profit Chain Institute, have just published The Ownership Quotient: Putting The Service Profit Chain to Work for Unbeatable Competitive Advantage.

The authors argue that the next level for putting the chain into practice is to focus on giving people ownership of their jobs. Their new acronym to add to IQ and EQ (Emotional Quotient - Daniel Goleman's phrase for measuring Emotional Intelligence) is OQ - the Ownership Quotient. To what extent do people feel they 'own' their job?

I am absolutely sure they are right. And this is particularly compelling in a downturn, where people feel external forces are out of their control and they need, more than ever, a strong sense of control at work to keep them engaged and confident.

A timely book.

How to lead now. The four things the best companies are doing

2009-03-19T15:42:00.002Z

Q: What will the best companies do during this recession?

A: 1. They'll get ahead of the curve and conserve their cash.

2. They'll take out frills and focus on the core.

3. And then they'll think of how the market will have changed in two or three years and what innovation they will need to have done to compete successfully...

4. ...and they'll do that innovation now.

Source: Ram Charan, the renowned business advisor, talking to Harvard Management Update about how to lead through the recession.

Charan says you need to lead now "Head in, hands on" - fully immersed in operations, and practising what he calls 'management intensity' - as the situation is so uncertain. Basically he's arguing for a stronger focus on execution.

I'd add beware of micro-management, though. So much is out of your control in a recession that the temptation is to tighten control over the bits you can control, as a kind of compensation. It's an illusion. You'll just choke off people's initiative and drive if you do that too much.

The full interview is here.

The incomplete leader: In praise of co-leadership

2009-03-16T22:26:00.005Z

Whisper it carefully: I don't really believe in 'The Leader'. I believe in leadership, yes, ideally distributed and aligned behind a common agreed purpose rather than a person. But leadership embodied in one person - The Leader - only means one thing to me. I used to be a historian. Work it out.

So, I like Pat Ballin's piece on co-leadership over in The Leadership Hub. Pat kicks off his piece by citing Senge and Co's paper in the HBR in 2007 'In Praise of The Incomplete Leader'.

He could do with some examples of complementary leadership teams and David Straker chips in with Hewlett & Packard as one example.

Pat goes on to suggest this co-leadership coda:

High Shared Power/High Shared Trust = Co-leadership
High Shared Power/Low Shared Trust = Power-Sharing
Low Shared Power/High Shared Trust = Good Deputy
Low Shared Power/Low Shared Trust = Factotum

Co-leadership is an interesting form of leadership. But, what really interests me about it is how it breaks the core myth of leadership - that you have to have a single leader at the top, and that leadership somehow emanates from that person.

You can read more from Pat and David on co-leadership here .

Leading in a recession: Absorb their uncertainty

2009-03-03T14:29:00.002Z

I like this, which is an extract from a post by Columbia Business School Professor Rita McGrath. A link to her complete post is at the end of this.

In a downturn, uncertainty freezes people. So, your job is to absorb their uncertainty. Below are five tips to help you do that.

So ask yourself:

1. Am I providing a clear set of assumptions for people to operate on, with the understanding that they may change as more information becomes available?

2. Have I made sure to reach out to people who seem badly affected...?

3. Am I moving quickly enough to help people get past the current situation to focus on the future and what is coming next?

4. Have I made clear to the people who are deeply valued by the organization that they have a promising future?

5. When a decision will affect someone negatively, have I personally delivered the bad news, dealt with the fallout in a fair and transparent way, and made it clear to observers why the decision was made?

Source and read more: The five points are from a piece by Columbia Business School Professor Rita McGrath, called Absorb Their Uncertainty - and get your people unstuck . Click on the title ('Absorb Their etc.') to read her full blog post, which takes about three minutes.

Darwinism and Leadership

2009-03-02T08:54:00.003Z

The BBC has now had three, at my count, TV programs/programmes on Darwin and his legacy, one presented by David Attenborough, one by Andrew Marr and a whole mini-series presented by a French biologist with such perfect English that you found yourself spending the whole time trying to catch some evidence of the evolution of his own language by listening for a hint, even a hint, of French mispronunciation. I didn't find any.

All were excellent, but all told the same story and it does make you wonder about whether left hands knew what right hands were doing.

Anyway, the main thing in our head is often - usually - not the main message in the learning. Between Darwin and popular consciousness some switch is tripped that sends our train off along the wrong track.

So, it is with 'survival of the fittest' that has become a mantra for tough-edged management and leadership in commercial organizations the world over.

It's not about brute-ism and a 'take no prisoners' approach to capitalism.

What Darwin actually said was it's those that are most ready to change that survive, not those that are most rigid.

“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.”

Carmine Coyote has a nice post on this - Management's False Darwinians - over on his Slow Leadership blog.

There is no such thing as a boring job

2009-02-17T11:18:00.012Z

I don't think Ziggy the Dustman, as this guy was nicknamed (he used to dance past my daughter-in-law's bookshop in Chiswick High Road, West London), is doing this for anyone other than himself. We think his real name is Billy, but aren't sure. He's Polish.

If you study the Fish! phenomenon (Pike's Place Fish Market in Seattle) and other places in which people with apparently dull but high profile (in terms of visibility) jobs suddenly turn the whole company from looking mundane to looking, from the customer's point of view, like an exciting, life-enhancing place to do business with, then you can see from Ziggy/Billy that even the most mundane job can be turned into something that inspires and delights.

We learn from extremes. I'm not saying everyone on your front line has to dance. But, can you see the light in their eyes? If not, look at what Ben Zander says (search for him in www.theleadershiphub.com and there are several learning points in there ) about how the leader's job is to allow people to shine, and look at how people like Tony Hsieh, CEO at Zappo's, lead, to learn how to do it.

"People are like stained - glass windows.
They sparkle and shine when the sun is out,
but when the darkness sets in,
their true beauty is revealed
only if there is a light from within."
- Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

It's part of a leader's job to spot the light in someone's eyes and allow them to shine. Particularly in a downturn when it's dark outside and everyone's worried. If the light isn't there or is wavering, then it's a leader's job to help the person find it and release it. I know it's a big ask. What, you think this stuff is easy?

So, how do I action this?

Here's one question to consider asking people at the end of a work day to help with this 'light' thing: "What did you enjoy about today?" If you're really brave, you could write into people's job expectations or job descriptions a three-word expectation "Enjoy your job", and then work with each person who reports to you to figure out what you and they need to do to make that happen.

There is no such thing as mundane, other than we let it become so.

Zappos Culture Book

2009-02-16T16:59:00.005Z

I could have posted this in The Customer Blog just as easily. Zappo's, the online shoe shop with the billion dollar turnover and the great reputation for customer service, publishes its own culture book once a year, written by its employees.

The HR guy, about halfway into this clip, which explains the book, says "What it says for Tony (Hsieh, CEO of Zappos) is that we are all leaders here. It's not up to him to lead us. It's about us leading each other."
That's Distributed Leadership my friends. It's how you get to be a great company today. If you don't understand it, watch the clip. You probably still won't understand it completely, but it's a start.

The 20 Best Companies For Leaders

2009-02-16T16:17:00.004Z

According to The Hay Group and Chief Executive Magazine, these are the 2008 Best Companies for Leaders, with their 2007 positions in brackets.

1. 3M Company (15)
2. Procter & Gamble (2)
3. General Electric (1)
4. Coca-Cola (5)
5. HSBC Holdings (14)
6. ABB
7. Southwest Airlines
8. IBM
9. Hewlett-Packard (10)
10. PepsiCo (7)
11. Nokia
12. Accenture Ltd.
13. FedEx
14. Infosys Technologies Ltd.
15. McDonald’s Corporation (18)
16. Caterpillar
17. American Express
18. Cisco Systems
19. Oracle
20. Intel Corporation

Hat Tip: George Ambler's blog The Practice of Leadership

PS And what do these great leaders do?
"When asked what organizations value the most in leaders, 83 percent of the best in class organizations said “execution.” "

Leaders who rap?

2009-02-12T15:50:00.003Z

You have to admire the, er, energy of the top leaders at the Singapore Media Development Authority. Click on the triangular 'play' button, below, to see what I mean. But, be warned: if you listen to all four minutes of this you won't get the tune out of your head.

If you are viewing at work and your employer's policy is to block access to YouTube, you won't see anything in the panel below. If so, copy and paste this link in an email to yourself and watch it at home or somewhere where YouTube isn't blocked:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksw2UqTyhhc

FREE HBR Papers from Jim Collins, Daniel Goleman, Marcus Buckingham

2009-02-11T22:07:00.006Z

Microsoft are sponsoring Harvard Business Review so that you can download a number of free leadership papers that you would otherwise have to pay for.

They are classics and include:

Daniel Goleman on what makes a leader (EI, he says, not surprisingly)

Jim Collins on Level 5 Leadership

Managers and leaders: are they different? (Before you read this, beware that it's a false polarity. You have to flip backward and forward between 'managing' and 'leading' many times every day if you are doing your job properly. You need to be both).

Why should anyone be led by you? (A damn good question)

Marcus Buckingham on What Great Managers Do

Here's the link. You can download them but don't share them, as that breaches copyright. Just point people at the link as I've done here: FREE HBR Papers, sponsored by Microsoft.

Tough Times Call For Uncertain Leaders

2009-02-09T13:24:00.003Z

One of the (many) paradoxes of leadership is that, yes, a lot of people value certainty of direction in uncertain times and it's a leader's job to harness the collective will to a particular direction - core purpose, prime directive, whatever you want to call it. But (you saw that 'but' coming, didn't you)...

Too many people in leadership positions think they therefore have to show certainty all the time - be a rock in uncertain, turbulent times. Sorry, wrong. Be uncertain. Openly uncertain. Often.

"Of all the qualities in a leader conducive to innovation and initiative, a degree of uncertainty may be the most powerful."

That's from a new clip in Hub TV from Jack Hayhow. The most creative organizations, he says, citing Ellen J Langer's research, have leaders who are confident that the job will be done, but without any certainty about how it will get done.

You can view the 1 minute and 45 second clip on the Home Page here: www.theleadershiphub.com

A Time to Laugh

2009-02-04T09:50:00.005Z

Do people laugh at you? At work, I mean, rather than point and titter as you walk past in the street.

You don't have to follow cricket to appreciate this story: The new captain of the England cricket team was giving a press conference this morning and kept stumbling over the word 'shipshape'. There were gales of laughter from three people at the back of the room.

The three cricketers who couldn't control themselves included the previous captain who had been ousted, and with whom it was widely predicted the new captain would have a hard time. Also, one other former captain was among the gigglers, a precocious talent who sometimes saves the day, sometimes doesn't, depending, apparently on how motivated he feels.

Things must be fine in the England camp, said the commentator in passing. They are laughing at the captain.

Herb Kelleher, when he was CEO of Southwest Airlines, said "I love it when people make fun of me." Take the job seriously but not yourself is a pretty good rule of thumb for leaders to follow.

In case you think that doesn't make him a serious CEO, under Kelleher's watch (and, just as important, after he handed over to Colleen Barrett, too) Southwest Airlines was and is the most consistently profitable airline in US aviation history and, for a large part of its existence, has been worth more than the stock market value of every other domestic US airline added together. That's serious business.

With people losing jobs and worried about the future, this isn't the time for comedians. But, this IS a time to forge closer relationships and a sense of purpose. And nothing does that like laughing together.

Don't forget Victor Borge's memorable line, stolen by Primal Leadership author Daniel Goleman

Q: What's the shortest distance between two people?
A: Laughter

Leaders are Givers, not Takers

2009-02-03T18:12:00.003Z

I can't help myself. I like Dr. Alan Zimmerman's Tuesday Tips. Even though I don't know what he's a 'Dr' in and he hard sells to me in between the interesting bits.

I'm a bit late, but this is an example from last week, with a link to his site at the end:

From Alan Zimmerman's Tuesday Tip

"No person was ever honored for what he received. Honor has been the reward for what he gave."
Calvin Coolidge, 30th U.S. President

I've noticed that people fall into one of two categories: givers and takers.

I've also noticed that the takers are the unhappiest people on Earth. And it's no wonder. When their entire focus is on "What's In It For Me," they're bound to offend their coworkers, customers, friends, and family members and have problems with them.

By contrast, those who experience the most success in their businesses, their teams, and their families are givers.

So I ask you ... "Are you a giver or a taker?"

Abigail Van Buren, the syndicated columnist, gives a great way to answer that question. She said,

"The best index to a person's character is:
a) how he treats people who can't do him any good, and
b) how he treats people who can't fight back."

A taker ONLY treats people well when he's out to get something from them. A giver treats people well ALL the time.

To be a bit more specific ...

1. Takers seldom think about others

They're self-absorbed ... with their interests, their desires, their wants, and their needs.

They're kind of like the father who was asked by a young man if he could marry his daughter. The father asked, "Can you support a family?"

The young man said,"Yes."

"Good," replied the father. "There's six of us."

Alan then goes on to look at leadership styles - givers or takers. Here's the link:

Givers or takers - Alan Zimmerman's Tuesday Tip, January 27 2009

But, is it really urgent? Real urgency versus false urgency

2009-02-02T14:44:00.004Z

It's Manic Monday. It's no doubt frantic at work - people running urgently from meeting to meeting and emailing the hell out of each other. Have you noticed people emailing from home Sunday nights recently, to try and get ahead so they can hit the ground running on Monday? I have.

How much of the frenetic activity is driven by the urgency of the market, and how much by people's anxiety to be seen to be doing something?

When we are all being asked to do more with less, now, more than ever, you need to face down the stupid stuff. Got a regular meeting everyone hates that saps time and energy? Challenge it. That's an act of leadership, no matter what 'level' you are at.

We all accumulate regular 'to dos'. If we all focus on stripping out the non-productive stuff rather than just accepting it, we'll be in a better position to respond to the genuine urgent call of the market.

There's a new clip from John Kotter in The Leadership Hub today, on the difference between real urgency and false urgency. You can find it on the Home Page, top left, under the heading 'Hub TV'. Here's the link: www.theleadershiphub.com .

Go listen to and watch John Kotter. It takes four minutes. If you're not too busy, that is.

Boeing leadership...and the limitations of 'how to behave' lists

2009-01-27T14:37:00.004Z

Michael McKinney, in his Leading Blog on the Leadership Now website, points up Boeing's expected leadership behaviours/behaviors:

"When Ginger Barnes spoke to employees at a leadership development program at the Boeing Leadership Center, she said, 'Leadership is all about leaders teaching leaders and about relationships. We can execute the daylights out of anything, so ‘finds a way’ and ‘delivers results’ have always been strong traits. Where we need to improve is in the areas of ‘charts the course,’ ‘sets high expectations’ and ‘inspires others.’” That probably true just about anywhere you go. To strengthen the culture of leadership and accountability within the company, Boeing defined its expectations for leaders as:

A Boeing Leader:

* Charts the course
* Sets high expectations
* Inspires others
* Finds a way
* Lives the Boeing values
* Delivers results"

I also like the comment, however, left by Allen Adams on Michael's post, that a lot of organizations have similar lists of expected behaviours/behaviors in their leaders, yet typically fail to inspire anyone, leading to Dilbert territory - the cynical, defeatist humor/humour coming from uninspiring people spouting but not living inspiring words.

I'm not suggesting that's Boeing. It was Boeing, after all, that supposedly got 2,000 people in a room (hangar - try finding a room that 2,000 people will fit in) and got them, collectively, to come up with a 'Critical Mass Intervention' to steer the company towards its next big product - The Dreamliner. That 'Wisdom of Crowds' leadership seems to me to be more pertinent today. It's a form of leadership everyone is involved in and can buy into.