Great Leadership

Welcome to Great Leadership!

noreply@blogger.com (Dan McCarthy) — Thu, 04 Feb 2021 16:00:00 +0000

Welcome to Great Leadership!

This blog is retired and no longer publishing new content or accepting guest posts. However,
there are over 1200 posts in the archive that can be accessed chronologically or via the search box on the sidebar.

You can also purchase an ebook with over 40 of my best posts organized by chapters. See top tab.

- Dan McCarthy

How to Cultivate Leadership Presence in a Remote Working World

noreply@blogger.com (Dan McCarthy) — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 13:00:00 +0000

Guest post from Sarah Rozenthuler:

In our rapidly changing world, new pressures are emerging. To navigate more demanding customer expectations, an acute distrust of business and so much remote working, leaders need to find new ways of operating. Cultivating leadership presence is foundational for this to happen.

With deeper presence, a leader is able to remain centred when facing unexpected disruptions, be open to new directions and build trusting relationships. People follow people. Leaders who are grounded in who they are, what they stand for and what really matters take others with them.

What leadership presence is

When was a time that you became so immersed in what you were doing that you lost a sense of time? You might have been reading a novel, talking with a colleague or writing a report; any activity that requires focused concentration can take us there. Already you’ve had a taste of this capacity.

When we operate from a sense of our presence, we are in a state of absorbed relaxation. There is a feeling of spaciousness or ‘flow’ inside us. Afterwards, when we look back, we realise that we’d been totally ‘there’ and in touch with our best self.

When we are present, we are right here, right now. All our attention is focused in this moment. If we’re in a meeting, we’re attentive; we’re not thinking about our emails, ‘to do’ list or other distractions. We stay in contact with what’s happening in the room, as well as what’s going on inside us. We don’t try to control or manipulate others but allow them space to be themselves, just as we are being ourselves. Other people are attracted by this expansive energy and want to draw closer.

Why developing presence matters

There are several benefits to cultivating presence and building trusting relationships is chief among them.

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, attributes the sustained success of the company to its operating principle of ‘values create value’. In an interview for Fortune, Benioff states: ‘If trust isn’t your highest value, the employees will walk out… Customers will walk out, investors will walk out and leaders will walk out, and you’re seeing more of that everyday.’[1]

Deepening presence reduces the risk of ‘acting out.’ When a leader yells at others or humiliates them, it damages relationships. Retrenchment after the event can lead to feelings of shame or, at the other extreme, stubbornness that “I was right!” Wasted energy and lost potential are the result.

Dealing with reactivity is key. Whilst lashing out at others provides a short-term release of pent-up energy, it pollutes the atmosphere. No one wants to work for a leader who ‘throws their toys out of the pram’ or withdraws into a sulky silence. When a button inside of us gets pushed, it’s an opportunity to pause, reflect and search inside ourselves so that the button loses its charge.

How to become more present

With the intensity of working online, it is particularly important to find ways of consciously managing your attention. Here are some things to try (whether on Zoom or in person) so that you stay energised as well as engage your co-workers.

1. Before a meeting

Take a few moments to become present. Find a quiet space where you can close your eyes, scan your body and notice what you’re feeling. Pay particular attention to any signs of stress that you sense. Breathe into this part of your body to help to release any tension.

Put away your phone (unless you need it to be logged onto a meeting or for a call.) Keep it out of sight so that you’re less likely to swivel your attention in its direction. The people you’re with will feel more valued if they’re not competing for your attention.

2. During a meeting

Stay in touch with your own body as you interact with others. Feel your feet on the ground, your backside in the chair and your spine sitting upright.

Notice yourself breathing in and out. If you’re able to, lightly place your hand on your stomach to help you to stay connected with this “belly breath.” When you notice that you’ve “jumped” out of yourself or lost touch with you sense of self, focus again on your breathing.

Maintain eye contact when another person is speaking. On screen, move your eye gaze between looking directly at the camera (so that the other person feels you’re looking directly at them) and looking at their image on the screen. This conscious ‘shuttling’ helps to keep your mind from wandering. It communicates to the other that they have your full attention.

If you’re not able to give other people your full attention, say so. It is better to say, “I know you need to talk with me and I’m interested, but I want to give you my undivided attention” than to be in a semi-distracted state. Take care of what you need to and then return to the conversation.

3. After a meeting

Carve out whatever space you can between meetings rather than rushing from one to the next. Even a short break of a few minutes helps to clear your mind and reduce “attention residue” (continuing to think about one issue when you need to pivot to the next.)

If it’s possible to stand outside or open a window, even for a few seconds, the fresh air will help to keep your attention focused in the here-and-now.

At the end of a meeting, jot down any actions or decisions that were taken so that these don’t remain as ‘open loops’ in your mind, which have been shown to consume a disproportionate amount of energy. Close your ‘loops’ from one meeting before you head to or log into the next.

In closing

When we are present, we see opportunities and identify risks that we miss when we’re only half there. In a state of presence, we are open to fresh insights and ‘action impulses’ that take us forward.

Our presence – so simple, so basic and yet so rare – is what creates the most impact when someone walks into the room, whether in person or on Zoom. Great leaders have it and you can too. Presence is available to us each moment. Cultivating presence will greatly enhance the quality of your leadership and life.

Sarah Rozenthuler is a chartered psychologist, leadership consultant and pioneer of purpose-led leadership. She has over 15 years international experience consulting to many different organizations including BP, Spencer Stuart, Standard Chartered Bank, IUCN and the World Bank as well as numerous SMEs and not-for-profit organisations, including Choice Support and Booktrust.

As the author of How to Have Meaningful Conversations: Seven Strategies for Talking About What Matters Most (Watkins, 2012), Sarah’s work has been widely featured in the media including the Huffington Post, the Sunday Times, the FT, Guardian, Psychologies Magazine and the BBC Business online.

Sarah works with CEOs and leaders who want to create positive change by having the conversations that matter most. Increasingly these conversations are all about purpose. She founded Bridgework Consulting Ltd in 2007 to enable leaders to engage and energize their people around great work, with the intention of transforming organisations to become a force for good in the world.

“It’s Not My Fault” – Six Imperative Rules of Management

noreply@blogger.com (Dan McCarthy) — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 13:00:00 +0000

Guest post from Ruth King:

How many times have you heard “It’s not my fault” from an employee when it really IS that employee’s fault? He is making excuses about why he didn’t do his job. If he really can’t do the job either training is necessary, or a career readjustment is necessary (my euphemism for firing someone). He has to do what he was hired for or you don’t need that employee.

Employees must be personally responsible for their work. This is one of the toughest things to teach employees because most of them have grown up not taking personal responsibility for anything…and the media promotes this!

In addition to employees not taking personal responsibility for their actions, managers being friends with employees also drives me nuts.

Welcome to the world of management. Here are six things managers MUST remember and manage by:

1. You can’t be friends with the employees who work with you.

This is probably the toughest lesson to learn. If you’ve promoted from within or a new manager is hired from outside the company, the manager must be friendly but he can’t be friends. If he goes to lunch with an employee, he has to go to lunch with all of the employees on his team. No favorites.

Managers must be objective and once fellow employees see that someone is promoted they will treat him differently. This former friend has hiring and firing authority over him. They won’t tell this person the mistakes they’ve made or complain to him anymore.

New managers, if they are working for the same company, often have to develop a whole new group of friends. And, it is very lonely at first.

2. Bad news doesn’t go away.

Many times, people do not like to deal with the difficult things. They think by ignoring it, the problem will go away. A new manager must learn that he has to deal with the problems immediately. If he ignores them, they usually get worse. So, he has to deal with the tough issues first.

When you give a person the responsibility, authority, and accountability, the accountability is the tough part…many times there are negative things to deal with in accountability. He has to learn to confront the issues quickly and resolve them!

3. You don’t have to be nice. You just have to be fair.

A manager has to do things that are fair for everyone. Some people will like the actions. Some will not. However, your decisions must be good for the group as a whole. A manager cannot make a decision that will favor one person over another. For example, if a good employee demands a raise and says that he will quit if he doesn’t get one, many times it is better to let that person quit. If he gets a raise, everyone will know that they can threaten to quit if they want a raise. This is not the environment you want.

4. You have to return telephone calls.

If you have an unhappy customer, you must deal with it and resolve the issue. Letting messages sit only makes an unhappy customer even more unhappy. An issue that was small could escalate into a major problem.

Make sure that the customers are taken care of and solve their problems. Try to return telephone calls immediately and resolve problems within 24 hours. After all, customers write your paychecks.

5. You have to make the hard decisions…which are sometimes unpopular.

Managers and owners get the privilege of seeing the whole picture. If things aren’t going well, then they get the privilege of dealing with them. So, it is important that managers and owners see the total picture so they can make informed decisions. If this means no overtime for a while, shorter hours, layoffs, etc. then they make and implement those choices. If it means firing someone who isn’t doing their job, then they have to do it.

6. Behaviors don’t change by wishing they would change.

If you need to change someone’s behavior (or a group’s behavior), then you have to clearly communicate the desired end result and the rewards for changing (or consequences if they don’t change). Often this is a slow, long term process. However, with patience and continuous follow up, changes in behavior can be made. If someone absolutely refuses to make the desired changes, maybe that person doesn’t need to be working for your company. This is one of those unpopular decisions that you have to make at times.

These are six things that all managers must manage by. If you don’t, the great employees won’t put up with poor management. They will leave and find other jobs. You will be stuck with bad employees who will stay.

Profitability Master Ruth King has been helping companies get and stay profitable for more than 40 years. She is the #1 best-selling author of The Courage to be Profitable and just released its #1 sequel, Profit or Wealth? You can reach Ruth at www.ruthking.info.

Values are Worthless Without These Four Things

noreply@blogger.com (Dan McCarthy) — Thu, 14 Jan 2021 13:00:00 +0000

Guest post from Beth Miller:

Values are more than a list of words on your website or a poster in your office. For values to benefit an organization they need to be lived by everyone and fully integrated into a company’s processes and decisions. Without a focus in your values, a clear definition of each value, and integrating your values into your hiring and performance management system, your values will remain hollow words.

Focus

I remember many years ago going to visit a new client. Upon entering the lobby, I couldn’t help but notice the very large poster with a listing of company values, in fact there were 18 of them! When we got back to his office, I asked him with curiosity “I noticed your list of values out in the lobby. I’m curious can you name all of your values?” The fact is that he couldn’t, and neither could his employees.

So, if you have more than 7 values, it’s time to bring your team together and narrow your values down to the top 7 or less of your most important values. One technique I recommend is from the book Traction, by Gino Wickman. Identify the 3 people in your organization you would want to clone and then start describing the characteristics and behaviors which make them special. This will provide you with an initial list you can narrow down.

Meaning

In recent years companies have realized they should focus on the important values which make their company standout from the crowd of their competitors. Company values are your company’s DNA. They are the beliefs and principles which drive your decision making and actions for your business, and your values impact the experience your employees, customers, and partners will have with your company.

But what do your values mean? Values are abstract while behaviors can be observed and explained with more clarity. The specific actions and behaviors that demonstrate your company values need to be defined. The best way to define your values is to revisit those 3 people you want to clone. Identify 3-5 behaviors for each of your values you observe with these 3 employees.

Here’s an example of the value “Working Together”. The behaviors which you observe with your 3 employees on a consistent basis are:

1. Works with and supports other team members to drive results

2. Builds two-way relationships with employees and customers

3. Understands and respects other people’s priorities

You now have behaviors that you can use in your hiring and performance management.

Hiring

Since you now have a definition of each value and the specific behaviors and actions an employee should be demonstrating for a value, you need to integrate this information into your hiring process.

Start by creating behavioral interview questions to uncover a candidate’s values. Do they align with your values? You don’t want someone joining your team who won’t live your values. Values misalignment is a deal breaker when it comes to hiring.

Behavioral questions are designed to uncover past actions and behavior and determine both culture and values fit. Here are tips to design behavioral interview questions:

1. A good behavioral interview question should first be open ended starting with “What” or “How”. Open ended questions encourage discussion and require people to think and reflect, they aren’t recall questions. And the very best questions are really a request, “Tell me about a time…” “Share an example of…”

2. The question/request should be designed to not “lead the witness”

3. Understand what a good answer sounds like. Listen for the pronoun “I”. If you hear “we” being used, you will need to clarify what exactly the job candidate’s role was.

For example, let’s use the behavior “Works with and supports other team members to drive results”. A good behavioral interview question would be:

“Tell me about a time that you had to deal with a difficult team member on a project.”

If I had adjusted the question “Tell me about a time that you had to deal with a difficult team member to successfully complete a project”, I would have been leading the witness and assuming that the project was completed successfully. Instead, give the candidate the opportunity to share how the project turned out.

Performance Management

The behaviors and actions of your employees should be part of the performance conversation. Too often I see managers focused on goals and results i.e. what needs to get done. When you include how a result was accomplished you are measuring against your company values.

The first step to take is to make sure the behaviors which support your values are part of all job descriptions. These behaviors can be measured as part of your performance conversations and can serve as the foundation for your ongoing 1-1 conversations with your employees. The more you relate an employee’s behaviors to their results, the more you will reinforce to the employee what you value.

You can also use a 360 assessment to measure performance. The 360° assessment uses collected anonymous feedback from direct reports, managers, peers, and sometimes business partners, as well as a self-assessment, to identify areas where employees can strengthen their skills in order to progress effectively. It is designed to measure the core competencies (behaviors and skills) associated with a person’s position.

Make sure that your company is living your values by understanding the behaviors behind your values, hiring the right people, and measuring their performance through both their behaviors and results.

Beth Miller is an accomplished author, speaker, and solution provider; her insight and expertise make her a sought-after leadership influencer. A serial entrepreneur and executive coach as well as a former Vistage Chair of 13 years, Beth is featured in numerous industry blogs and publications including Entrepreneur, Leadercast, and TalentCulture.com. Her book, “Are You Talent Obsessed?,” compiles her best practices for business leaders.

Change Your Habits

noreply@blogger.com (Dan McCarthy) — Thu, 07 Jan 2021 13:00:00 +0000

Guest post from S. Chris Edmonds

Every leader can improve their team’s performance and the team’s values-alignment by changing what they pay attention to.

Most people pay attention to what’s right in front of them. We track performance data, customer satisfaction, and the like. As leaders, we pay attention to what’s right in front of you. So, you need to put the right stuff in front of you.

What Do You Pay Attention To?

In my work with senior leaders and executive teams across a wide variety of industries, one of the most important questions I ask is to learn what those leaders pay attention to. Most of them tell me that they spend most of their time looking at performance indicators

- Summaries of key metrics

- Spreadsheet data

- Other dashboard tools.

Monitoring performance metrics is a good thing. Yet sometimes internal systems present metrics that are easy for us to monitor but aren’t the right things for us to monitor.

Here’s an example. A few years ago a printing plant client installed a new $20M high-technology press which could deliver speeds of 50,000 impressions an hour. The dashboard built into the press software kept careful track of impressions per hour.

However, if the color scheme was off by just 2%, the printed matter would not meet their customer’s standards. The press’ dashboard did not monitor color requirements perfectly – only a human could do that.

A run of one million pages/impressions wasn’t uncommon. Every job was easy to monitor with the dashboard metrics. Systems and incentives were created to meet a certain target of average impressions per hour. Yet if the color balance was off, the job would have to be run again (creating waste and higher costs for the job)! It was vital to monitor – and incent – both impressions per hour AND adherence to the customer’s color palette.

You can see that what is easy to measure might not give you an accurate picture of reality.

Here’s What Leaders Must Pay Attention To

1. Strategic Clarity – leaders must constantly assess how well their organization’s strategy is understood across operations staff. Communication and reinforcement of the declared strategy will lead to a clear understanding by all staff.

2. Goal Alignment – Once strategic clarity is reached, leaders must constantly assess the degree to which projects, goals, tasks are aligned to your organization’s declared strategy.

3. Expectations Clarity – Next, leaders must ensure that everyone in the organization has formalized end goals (performance standards) and means goals (values defined in behavioral terms). Also, leaders must ensure that all staff proactively commit to their performance and values goals.

4. Consistent Accountability – leaders must hold all staff accountable, day in and day out, for meeting performance expectations and values expectations. Accountability means the prompt application of POSITIVE consequences (when folks do the right things the right way) and NEGATIVE consequences (when they don’t).

S. Chris Edmonds is a sought-after speaker, author, and executive consultant. After a 15-year career leading successful teams, Chris founded his consulting company, The Purposeful Culture Group, in 1990. Chris has also served as a senior consultant with The Ken Blanchard Companies since 1995. He is the author or co-author of seven books, including Amazon best sellers The Culture Engine and Leading at a Higher Level with Ken Blanchard. Learn from his blog posts, podcasts, assessments, research, and videos at http://drivingresultsthroughculture.com. Get free resources plus weekly updates from Chris by subscribing here.

Culture is Not Enough

noreply@blogger.com (Dan McCarthy) — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 13:00:00 +0000

Guest post from Thomas Steding:

Slowly, almost inexorably, culture has big become almost top of mind as a key factor in effective leadership. From the Harvard Business Review “Strategy and culture are among the primary levers at top leaders’ disposal in their never-ending quest to maintain organizational viability and effectiveness.” In the high tech industry, the emergence of culture as a critical factor has been greeted with a sense of relief, a respite from the reductionistic venture investor sole focus on numbers. As a result, Peter Drucker's alleged comment that “Culture eats strategy for lunch” has become popular in our collective memory.

The problem remains, however, that leaders declaring the culture is a critical factor in their thinking is akin to one wetting one’s pants in a dark blue wool suit: It may give you a warm feeling, but it doesn't show very much. The issue is that few people can define what they really mean by culture. One venture capital colleague was heard to talk about the importance of culture yet was unable to define what he meant. Another CEO colleague told me that his company had a wonderful culture described in detail in his company presentation. Upon examination, I discovered it contained in a series of typical bromides like “We don't do politics” or “Be passionate” or “Go for the best” along with a promise for pizza on Fridays. A subsequent HR benefits survey across 1500 employees included questions about the company culture. It revealed that a vast majority of the employees actually hated the culture. I suggested to the CEO that he pour himself a glass of wine and sit in a quiet corner to review the results. I never learned his reaction to the survey, but the company stock eventually went from $95 to $2.

To understand an effective culture you need to start in a different place. If you define the Cultural Layer as the de facto patterns of behavior between members on the team you can define the Mindset Layer as the de facto patterns of thought between the ears of the key leadership. The Mindset Layer, therefore, sits below the Cultural Layer and determines its outcome. We have defined the four archetypal (“original model or prototype”) dimensions of the Mindset Layer. These are the underlying, universal factors driving mindset. Over more than a decade, we have found that understanding where an organization resides along these dimensions provides a powerful predictor of organizational outcome and is critical to establishing an effective underlying culture.

The four dimensions are Courage, Relatedness, Awareness, and Agility. Each of these dimensions has a dual, or complementary, aspect, typically along intellectual versus emotional dimensions. Courage is facing danger and fear with confidence and resolution. Courage includes the capacity to take bold and fearless action in the marketplace, but also to be willing to hear and process unwelcome input from the team that could have a redeeming effect on organizational outcome. Relatedness implies an intellectual understanding of staying connected with customers, but also insists on respecting the emotional connections across the team. Awareness implies a thorough understanding of the company’s markets, technologies, and strategies. It also implies a close understanding of the emotional life of the team. Agility is nimbleness of thought and action. It means the ability to change direction and turn on a time due to changing conditions in the market or industry conditions. Emotional agility, on the other hand, means the ability to hear and consider another person's perspective even in the case that you hold an opposing point of view ex ante.

A balanced state among these four Mindset dimensions provides a defense against organizational dysfunction. The inferior Mindset dimension is the gateway for dysfunctionality to penetrate. At the same time, it can offer an effective roadmap for organization improvement. For example, a team was stuck in the process of making a fundamental product development decision for six months. Clearly, their inferior dimension was Courage—in this case, courage to make a product decision, get the product out, and determine its viability. The lack of team courage lead to dysfunctional behavior, such as gossip, blame shifting, and, obviously, schedule slippage. Their dysfunctional behavior cost their firm market leadership.

Hence any conversation, or program, addressing culture has to start with the Mindset Layer. Misalignment between mindset and culture leads to the all-too- frequent case where the behavior in the room bears no resemblance to the code of ethics on the wall. Authentic culture must reflect who the company and its personnel are authentically. Going through the intellectual process of specifying the culture without understanding underlying mindset is like building a structure starting on the second floor. So, we add: “Mindset eats culture for breakfast.”

Dr. Thomas Steding is a senior corporate executive with an excellent track record in founding and growing successful businesses based on complex, leading edge technologies. He has been CEO of over 12 high tech companies and active chairman of several others. His new book is called Real Teams Win: What Smart Leaders Need To Know About Achieving Performance.

Great Leaders Attract Great Talent

noreply@blogger.com (Dan McCarthy) — Thu, 24 Dec 2020 13:00:00 +0000

Guest post fromSusanna Camp and Jonathan Littman

As a leader, you shape the ideas, provide the direction, set the goals. You’re great at focusing the journey and laying a course, especially when winds are uncertain. It can be a long, strange trip indeed – and your success depends on attracting the right talent.

Entrepreneurs, corporate executives and managers know from experience that the best teams sport a rare mixture of friction, freedom and alignment. Diversity and complementary skill sets are key. So how do you assemble a great team?

We spent many years interviewing and writing about talented people and teams for our new book The Entrepreneur’s Faces: How Makers, Visionaries and Outsiders Succeed. Our biggest takeaway? Talent comes in many different flavors, and the best startups and companies recognize the benefits of building a kind of superhuman tensile strength in their teams.

We call these talents archetypes. We’ve met so many entrepreneurs that we can usually identify someone’s type in a few minutes. How do we know? They master challenges with a characteristic approach, and echo the habits of renowned innovators and entrepreneurs. What’s perhaps most valuable about understanding someone’s type is how their behavior plays out in the dynamics of a team. We all know the conflicts that upend teams. Dueling leaders or visionaries throw obstacles in the path to success. The opposite happens when you achieve superior compatibility. A human-centric approach to designing high achieving teams begins with filling out your squad with a healthy cross-section of talent and mindsets. And that starts with learning to recognize patterns.

In The Entrepreneur’s Faces, we present ten archetypes. When you build your team, make sure you have a good mix. Here are the top seven types leaders need to know.

Step One: Start with the idea generators

1. The Outsider: This is person who finds novel opportunities in industries and markets you might not normally target. They master the “beginner’s mind.” Defy the experts. We believe every team needs at least one Outsider. The global crisis has made this role even more essential. When trends and habits change overnight, the Outsider is even more attuned to dig up emerging possibilities.

2. The Visionary: The future is coming, and it helps to have someone on your team who sees its first. This type brings a different kind of focus, based on their uncanny ability to see months and years ahead. What makes them so valuable is that they are practical. They map “from now to then.” They understand how the future will build on present realities, and start taking key steps to get there.

3. The Accidental: This may sound surprising, but you want someone on your team who will run with ideas that seem long shots. Google and many other firms have officially recognized this entrepreneurial type with a 20 percent or 10 percent rule, allowing staffers to pursue their own project ideas on company time (this has led to Gmail, Google Maps, and Google AdSense, among other G-Suite products). Accidentals bring passion to your company and that energy can be contagious. The Accidental infuses a project or company with authenticity.

Step Two: Round out the team with the problem solvers and doers

4. The Maker. It’s key that your team has someone with an aptitude at finding new ideas and opportunities. But you need Makers to put them to the test. Makers dive right in. They find a way to do an experiment or a test. They’re great at designing prototypes to provide quick feedback. And they learn fast from small, inexpensive failures.

5. The Collaborator. Every leader could use a few Collaborators. They excel at analyzing how everyone and everything fits together. Collaborators keep their own ego in check, knowing they’ll rise farther by connecting others and bridging ideas. They are the glue connecting the whole team.

6. The Evangelist: Even the best of products and services need a story to catch fire. Evangelists bring an uncanny ability to fan interest. They’re naturals at creating the story behind the product, and know how to strike just the right points to touch hearts and move minds.

7. The Athlete: This is the type that loves a contest and a challenge. Athletes relish preparing for the... unexpected. During tough times you couldn’t ask for a more robust, versatile staffer. They love to work. Adapt, recover, pivot is their mantra. Athletes figure out the connections between seemingly diverse activities, building new processes and opportunities on the fly.

Smart Choices Make Strong Teams

Who you choose depends a lot on the kind of team you want to create. There can be a world of difference between a startup of four or five individuals and a corporate squad of ten or more. You’ll also want to consider where you stand on the seven-stage journey we call the Entrepreneur’s Arc. Are you just getting started at the Awakening and Shift? Midstream, approaching the Launch, or hitting do-or-die time, at the Test.

We think you’ll find these archetypes and this team question of diversity and compatibility valuable. Building out your team starts with self-awareness. To learn more about all ten types and take our diagnostic quiz, please visit our website at theentrepreneursfaces.com.

Of course, share the results with your friends and networks!

Jonathan Littman and Susanna Camp are the authors of The Entrepreneur’s Faces: How Makers, Visionaries and Outsiders Succeed. Jonathan Littman collaborated with IDEO on
the bestsellers The Art of Innovation and The Ten Faces of Innovation(more than 650,000 copies sold worldwide in 12 languages). The author of ten books, five of his works have been optioned for films. His award-winning journalism has appeared in Playboy, the LA Times and Forbes. Follow Jonathan on Twitter. Susanna Camp is the Editor-in-Chief of SmartUp.life. A journalist specializing in emerging technology, she was an early team leader at Wired magazine, and has also been on the staff of Macworld, PCWorld and Outsidemagazines. Follow Susanna on Twitter.

Great Leaders Nurture

noreply@blogger.com (Dan McCarthy) — Thu, 17 Dec 2020 14:13:00 +0000

Guest post from Barbara Bruno:

Would your current team or new hires describe you as a leader who supports, teaches, and encourages them? This type of nurturing often determines whether the members of your team become engaged and retained employees or end up as a costly turnover statistic.

Technology has changed the way we communicate however a combined high-tech and high-touch communication style is most effective. Nurturing plays a significant role when it comes to a new employees’ view on the leadership and vision of their new employer. Nurturing helps them adapt to their new role, feel comfortable, essential, and appreciated in their new workplace.

As new hires understand the significance of your vision, it allows them to develop working strategies which align with your vision. It also helps build self-confidence, knowledge, and the drive to succeed. By helping smooth the transition to their new role, you deepen your relationship with your employee that continues well beyond your onboarding process.

To assist your nurturing efforts, consider the value of mentorship on new hires as well as your current employees. Mentorship is also extremely effective for employees who may be working remote. Modern mentorship programs are designed to support both the mentor and the mentee with a high-touch approach. A strong mentor-mentee relationship will help new hires learn from an experienced employee. It also provides solutions and approaches to accomplish objectives from the fresh perspective of your new employee.

Mentoring also demonstrates to the new hire the benefits of an open culture where employees share knowledge, generate ideas and work together to build a successful company. Benefits of being a mentor include development of leadership and management qualities, increased recognition, a sense of fulfillment and personal growth.

Another benefit of nurturing is increased referrals of top talent. When your new and current employees have a great experience working for you, they are more likely to refer others. Nurturing is an important element to your internal employee referral program and can dramatically reduce your cost per hire.

Take time to review the new hires you have made in the past twelve months. If a majority were not the result of referrals, it may be time to upgrade your onboarding, nurturing, mentorship, or employee engagement efforts. Your employees are either your army of recruiters enticing others to work for you, or they are being recruited away.

Too often employees are only interviewed twice, their initial job interview and their exit interview, when it is too late to resolve their issues. Consider conducting regularly scheduled stay interviews, where you ask your current employees why they enjoy working for you and your company. A stay interview will reveal what you are doing well but, will also identify areas that may need improvement.

Stay interviews are much more effective than the high-tech approach of utilizing online employee satisfaction surveys. They are a high-touch conversation where both you and your employee can ask questions and then set a specific date to follow up on any action items discussed.

When your employees are happy, they become more engaged, productive and will help you attain your goals and objectives. In any type of relationship people want the answers to three question: Do you care about me? Can I trust you? Will you do what you promise? When you nurture your team members throughout their career, the answers to all three questions will be yes.

Barbara Bruno, author of HIGH-TECH HIGH-TOUCH RECRUITING: How To Attract And Retain The Best Talent By Improving The Candidate Experience, is an internationally recognized recruiting expert who has a proven track record of helping recruiters and talent acquisition professionals become more successful and less stressed. She has created several popular LinkedIn Learning courses and is president of Good As Gold Training, HR Search, Inc., and Happy Candidates.

Leadership Insights for Moving from Burnout to Breakthrough

noreply@blogger.com (Dan McCarthy) — Thu, 10 Dec 2020 13:00:00 +0000

Guest post from Eileen McDargh:

In May 2019, the World Health Organization placed burnout in its International Classification of Diseases diagnostic manual. While not calling it an “illness,” it classified burnout as an occupational hazard.

Indeed, the global statistics in 2019 were enough to consider burnout a global pandemic. From massive stress-related losses in North America ranging between $120 to $300 billion; to European countries revealing high burnout rates among health professionals and educators; to Chinese media reporting that about 600,000 Chinese citizens a year die from working too hard; to Australia reporting some $34 billion being spent on burnout incidents. The list is almost endless.

And then COVID-19. Everything we thought we knew about workplace engagement, stress management, and on-site health and wellness programs vanished. In its place, leaders now struggle with managing remote teams, developing widely different strategies for disrupted marketplaces, and dealing with uncertain economics.

Ironically, the oft-reported desire to have some flexibility to work on occasion from home has been smashed. Employees are feeling more burnout than they did prior to COVID-19. Lines are blurred between work time and home time. Output to prove productivity has skyrocketed, leaving employees exhausted and tense. A feeling of being estranged from the organization and team members results in loneliness. Job uncertainty haunts many dreams.

The process of moving from burnout into the breakthrough that allows employees to recharge and handle these emotions can be greatly aided by a wise, compassionate manager who employs these practices:

Be a more-than-clear communicator about expectations and accountabilities. Then, step back to ask team members where these expectations are unrealistic or need to be broken down into smaller achievable goals. Are resources needed? Are some of the “normal” workplace systems now outdated? It’s a great time to streamline and adapt.
Be human. From children at home to caring for an aging parent, everyone’s world is very different. Ask each team member what constraints they have and when are the best worktimes. Share that information. Without creating Zoom overload, bring all team members together -- as much as possible -- to check in on a personal level FIRST, not a productive level.
Avoid email diarrhea. Email can stand for escalation and error. Have people talk in real time with each other with the leader as a facilitator.
Beware of micromanaging. Let people know you trust them and that working 12 hours a day is not expected unless there is some emergency. (Don’t create that emergency either!)
Express appreciation. There’s no need to wait until some project is completed 100%. Say thank you along the way. As I have always told my clients: “An inch is a cinch. A mile takes a while.” We need encouragement for the inches. Let employees know the difference their work is making for the team, the customers and the business.
Help employees create work/life boundaries. Even before COVID-19, The Boston Consulting Group had a standard practice that NO email was to be answered on the weekend.
Create a best-practice free-for-all. In a virtual gathering, encourage everyone to share something that is working for them (personal or professional) in this new world of work. Have a way of celebrating each report.
Encourage and support physical activity through the workday. Getting away from the desk and computer is essential for well-being. Prioritize time off. Ask each team member how they are doing with this.
Provide ongoing virtual training in resiliency skills, mindfulness, communication and technology (if the latter is needed).
Laugh! Laughter is the shortest distance between people. When we laugh together, we bond. We create a community. Whether sharing funny signs , animal videos, parodies, whatever -- allow people to laugh.

This is by no means an exhaustive list. The single thread that consistently runs through these actions is that a leader has empathy, a keen ability to listen deeply, a desire to help their team grow and flourish amid disruptive times. The leader themself acknowledges their own journey and insights in moving from burnout to breakthrough. In these more-than-crazy times, the burnout flame will come again. But with practice, it will no longer be a massive bonfire but rather a spark from a match.

Eileen McDargh has been called a hope merchant although she says she has been put on earth for comic relief. She’s an internationally recognized keynote speaker, master facilitator, and award-winning author with expertise in resiliency and leadership. In 2020 Global Gurus International, a British-based provider of resources for leadership, communication and sales training, also ranked her 5^th of the World’s Top 30 COMMUNICATION Gurus following a global survey of 22,000 business professionals. Her articles have appeared in countless publications and two of her seven books have been awarded national recognition. Her latest book, Burnout to Breakthrough: Building Resilience to Refuel, Recharge, and Reclaim What Matters, launches in August 2020. To learn more Eileen, you can visit her website here.

A Systems Approach to Leading Through Transfomation

noreply@blogger.com (Dan McCarthy) — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 21:10:00 +0000

Guest post from Brendan P. Keegan, CEO, Merchants Fleet

One thing all great leaders have in common is that they understand that transformational growth doesn’t happen without a willingness to change. When I joined Merchants Fleet as CEO in 2018, I knew I was joining a team of some of the most experienced professionals in the fleet industry. However, with all of that experience, habits were inevitably inherited along the way. In order to achieve our lofty goals, we had to be willing to change.

By asking ourselves “How can we do this better?” we were able to build upon many of the old habits and traits that had worked in the past to quickly transform into the fastest-growing company in our industry. To make this happen, we put a system in place with six key focus areas:

1. Create a Clear Vision, Strategic Direction and Communicate It Constantly. In my years serving as CEO I have made it a priority to build a living, breathing strategic plan. A big part of that is having a simple vision that teams can rally around and a strategic direction that leaders can buy into and articulate easily throughout the organization. At Merchants we have a simple yet powerful vision—to enable the movement of people, goods & services freely—and a well-documented strategic direction that we revisit regularly and communicate to the broader organization on a constant basis so that everyone understands their part in achieving it.

2. Align and Refine Core Values. Employees want to be part of something meaningful, and it’s the leader’s job to articulate the values of the organization and hire people who align to them. At companies I have led, we did exhaustive exercises to uncover the values of the organization. Sometimes, it was refining what the company already had, and other times we built them from scratch. The values are in the company already, you just have to listen for them. At Merchants, through our FleetIQ program, we seek individuals who align to our values and have strong industry backgrounds. Our values are also widely visible—on the walls and printed on employee ID cards—so that everyone is reminded on a daily basis to live and breathe them.

3. Organize Around the Client and Simplify the Offerings. After developing a clear strategy and setting its direction throughout the organization, we quickly evaluated our operations and moved to reorganize around the client into one company. Merchants, to its credit, has always been an extremely entrepreneurial company. Because of this, there were a number of “micro-businesses” throughout the organization that had been created to answer a need but had not been fully integrated. Through our strategic approach, we aligned the micro businesses into the larger business to provide the best experience for clients.

4. Involve Everyone and Encourage Collaboration. Setting a lofty strategic direction and pursuing a truly synergistic experience across our whole company required collaboration. Previously, the leadership team had only met on a monthly basis. We established a weekly standing meeting and during the pandemic have had daily team meetings at some points—focused meetings with real decisions and tangible action items. Establishing a culture of feedback and collaboration has inspired shared learnings and led to new opportunities. Moreover, this approach has cascaded down through the entire organization, which means we are collaborating more and driving more value.

5. Drive Culture from the Top. Most companies have accidental cultures. Culture is one of those things that you can’t really put on a piece of paper, but you know it when you’re in it. We can consciously build culture, but it requires investment and commitment from the top. First, I had to align our leadership team to drive the service-oriented, flexible and innovative culture. Next, we implemented formal and informal leadership development for our most influential leaders to instill the culture and teach others the way. Finally, I believe in fun—fun drives culture. So we celebrate all kinds of wins, we reward our employees, hold events on a regular basis, and make sure our employees have a transparent understanding of what we are doing.

6. Make Innovation Everyone’s Job. For most organizations, innovation sits as a separate entity in the makeup of the org chart—or it doesn’t exist at all. As a leader, I think innovation is a fundamental skillset that should permeate the entire organization, and not be locked into one particular area or group. It’s about giving employees the tools and training to innovate for themselves, while also having a process designed for the larger innovations. We call the little innovations “Little i’s” and the big innovations “Big I’s”. By providing the communication and tools, we have seen employees across all areas of the business implementing highly successful innovative ideas, and we reward those ideas on a quarterly basis.

I’m an engineer by training, and through my experience have seen that systems work, when practiced regularly and planned purposefully. The best practices I have listed above are one of the many systems that I have developed and implemented over my career as a CEO. If you find yourself in a transformation situation—one where you are implementing quite a bit of change or experiencing rapid growth—these six steps can be extremely powerful and help guide your thinking and the organization at large. Systems work because they keep us organized, give us a playbook to run from, and provide a starting point from which we can be creative. Sometimes having a playbook is all it takes to remove the fear of leading and inspire you and your teams to incredible heights.

Brendan P. Keeganis Chief Executive Officer at Merchants Fleet. Under Brendan’s leadership Merchants has become the fastest-growing fleet management company in North America, earning a spot on the Inc. 5000 list. An award-winning, six-time President & CEO of companies ranging in size from 500 to over 10,000 employees, Brendan is the author of more than a hundred articles on leadership, strategy, and technology. He is also a frequent speaker at conferences across the financial services and technology sectors.

Gauging an Employee’s Emotional Well-Being in a Virtual World: Warning Signs and Ways to Help

noreply@blogger.com (Dan McCarthy) — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 20:21:00 +0000

Guest post by Guy Casablanca:

Much has been written lately about how leaders can gauge productivity and performance in a virtual world. Beyond these two metrics, we have asked the question, “How can a leader tell when an employee is struggling emotionally in a virtual world?”

In a short span, a lot has changed in the world, and how we work, socialize, and lead. The impact of COVID-19 has altered the very nature of every human interaction. In the work environment, Zoom sessions have replaced conference room meetings, and email exchanges have replaced in-person interactions. In our personal lives, concerts have become podcasts, and even funerals are now webcast and have become virtual gatherings for the grieving. Replacing our familiar interpersonal experiences and sense of connection, all this virtual-based interaction has left us feeling detached, isolated, and despondent.

It can be challenging for a leader to keep contact levels high when all communication must happen via the web. It is even harder to interpret the reality of someone’s well-being when we only have an email or an image on a screen with which to interact. Body language is limited. Technology obscures the subtleties that we detect in a person.

So how do we know when an associate is struggling with grief in a virtual world? What is a compassionate and concerned leader to do?

Here are some warning signs that may help you recognize employees who are dealing with the effects of emotional trauma or grief in a virtual environment:

Tardiness: Emotionally traumatized people often fall into a state of distraction. They operate in a fog, unable to focus or concentrate. Deadlines come and go without them noticing. Procrastinating is common. A typically prompt person who begins to run late habitually could be an early warning sign of trouble.

Lack of Participation: It is hard to keep attendees of a virtual meeting interested. I know that when I am attending a virtual meeting, I make a deliberate effort to type a comment or response now and then, just so my boss knows I’m fully engaged. Even a mere on-camera “thumbs up” sends the signal that my attention is undivided. Lack of participation may indicate despondence more than disinterest, especially if the lack of involvement is unusual for this team member. An emotionally distracted or depressed person will find it difficult to concentrate and participate.

Fidgeting, Stepping Off Camera: Someone who is emotionally distracted, overwhelmed, grieving, or aggravated by having to be “seen right now” may exhibit signs of the “fight or flight response.” Squirming, constant movement, and stepping out of the shot may indicate someone’s patience is reaching a breaking point, and they just want to get away! Maybe they just need a bathroom break, but it may be a sign of something deeper going on in the person’s life. Be sensitive to the signs of those who obviously want the session to end.

Emotional Outbursts or Fits of Anger: Those struggling with emotional trauma or grief are subject to emotional outbursts. When the cause of their distress gets overwhelming, the person begins to question why things like work even matter. These feelings can lead to a lower than usual emotional boiling point.

Absenteeism: A person experiencing emotional trauma rarely wants to expose their psychological state to others. Even more so than in real life, “virtual absence” can be a red flag for emotional duress. Not wanting to go into work is one thing, but an inability to make the commute from the bed to the laptop in the living room is a whole new level of emotional incapacitation.

“Camera off” moments: My 4th-grade son, while experiencing technical glitches during his on-line schooling, was quickly falling behind the rest of the live class. In a panic, he began to cry out of frustration. To avoid being seen in tears by his classmates, he went “camera off” and muted his audio. This threw his teacher into a panic because she could not tell if he was safe or not. Little did she know what he was experiencing was a grief-induced breakdown that he didn’t want others to witness. “Camera off” moments can be an indicator that someone is struggling emotionally.

Now that we have an idea of what grief and emotional stress looks like virtually, how should leaders adapt? Here are three important action steps:

Be aware: This is harder than it sounds. The virtual world masks many of the queues a good leader will be sensitive to “in the room.” The virtual world requires even more focus on the part of the leader.

Engage and communicate: When a leader suspects there may be a deeper issue behind the behaviors they are witnessing, they should engage and communicate as early as possible. This engagement should take place privately and as in-person as possible. Never by email.

Be vulnerable and listen: That may sound counterintuitive, but if the leader does not acknowledge the struggles they are having, neither will their people. A person silently suffering through emotional trauma or grief needs a compassionate leader who is willing to listen and be supportive. The only way the person will respond is if the leader is vulnerable enough to demonstrate they genuinely care.

The office environment has changed. The subtle points of contact leaders usually have at their disposal have diminished. It takes a deliberate and concentrated effort to compensate for the lack of interpersonal opportunities to connect with your people. You won’t pass that grieving person in the hall to give them a pat on the back. You won’t see them sighing their way through their tasks. You won’t witness them skipping lunch to cry in their car. As their leader, you must be the consummate communicator, and in a virtual world, you must be constructive, creative, and consistent.

Guy Casablanca and Anthony Casablanca are the cofounders of GriefLeaders, a training and consulting organization devoted to educating leaders on how to help grieving employees excel at work. Guy is a dually licensed funeral director and mortician, highly experienced at facilitating healthy grieving processes, who has owned two businesses, consulted for corporations, and led teams of managers. He currently manages a funeral home in Loveland, Colorado. Anthony is a senior executive with 30-plus years of experience and a proven track record of purpose-driven leadership. He has held several leadership roles with Batesville Casket Company, the world’s largest funeral service products provider, and was named the 2009 Human Resource Executive of the Year for Indiana. Brothers, Guy and Anthony Casablanca are the coauthors of The Dying Art of Leadership: How Leaders Can Help Grieving Employees Excel at Work. Learn more at https://griefleaders.com/who-we-are/about-the-book/.

How the Best Place of Work Became A State of Mind

noreply@blogger.com (Dan McCarthy) — Thu, 12 Nov 2020 16:11:00 +0000

Guest post from Jonas Altman:

Matt Mullenweg’s company had a plush office at Pier 38 in San Francisco’s Embarcadero. It was only a five-minute walk from his apartment, but his preference, like many in the company, was to work from home.

More than three years ago they shut their office and the company continues to flourish. If ever there was living that giving workers flexibility and control over their life works - it’s Wordpress. Mullenweg the founder of Automattic (the parent company) explains, ‘In the future, [companies] will either be distributed or be taken over by companies that are - because the smartest people in the world are going to want to work this way.’

Indeed, one of the biggest obstacles to getting great work done may still be the physical office. Many of these dire places rob inhabitants of their focus (and soul for that matter), through a constant stream of distractions. In some ways, COVID waved a magic wand, enabling many employees to change their work environments overnight.

A Far-Out Vision

When it comes to engagement, creativity, and productivity - there’s an intricate tango to strike between people and place. A far-out vision for achieving this harmony in work is that of architecture professor David Dewane. His Eudaimonia Machine has the lofty goal of helping workers reach their full potential.

Featuring a series of five distinct rooms, each is dedicated to a specific mode of work: the gallery for inspiration, the salon for conversation, the library for research, the office for light work, and my personal favorite, the chamber for deep work. There are no hallways so you move through each room, sequentially edging towards your most concentrated work. All that’s missing, it seems, is a dedicated space to recharge, which may just entail decamping from the office altogether for some fresh air.

Some companies hire architects, interior designers, workplace strategists, psychologists, and even mathematicians to design the perfect office for their particular needs. But for many, work is something you feel empowered to do, not necessarily somewhere you need to be.

The precise destination of work tomorrow, whether geographic or virtual, will be an arbitrary concern. Because great work can, and will, continue to happen anywhere. It happens in those temporal places that cater best to the technological, creative, and intellectual needs of the individual and team.

The Magic Number

One reason why midsize family businesses have flourished throughout history is because they’re nimble, with typically less than 150 employees. There are strong bonds and good communication between workers. It’s these businesses that account for a whopping 60% of global employment. Military units are often capped at this magic number of 150 because when lives are on the line, it’s helpful if everyone knows each other’s name.

That’s not to say that you can’t grow bigger and still maintain a great culture. Squarespace, a technology company with nearly 1,000 employees, has been voted New York’s best place to work countless times.

While their Manhattan office may be static, how they work is anything but. They live their values by respecting, inspiring, and challenging workers and encouraging them to be their most creative–wherever that may happen to be. Many workers make the journey to the office because they say it’s a place where they love to work and ‘hang out.’

A State of Mind

That special something businesses are looking for–fostering the right energy–comes from people. And since humans, like businesses, evolve over time, the healthiest work environments change in concert with their occupants and the general state of the world.

‘There are companies that are finding new ways to work, that allow people to set their own hours, have more flexibility, live wherever they want in the world and they’re going to attract the best people,’ declares Mullenweg. He should know, the unassuming billionaire’s company has less than1,200 employees yet astonishingly powers 37% of all sites on the web.

For way too many, there’s a disconnect between the company culture that managers first set then strive to realize, and the culture they experience every day when they come into work. Creating a great place to work means truly understanding the ongoing interplay of worker bees within a complex system. When there isn’t a clear goal or a shared language, it’s near impossible for a culture to gel. And when workers don’t have the tools and support they need, eventually they’ll up and leave.

We can view work for what it’s becoming; an experimental practice to evolve. It now occupies a psychological space as much as a physical one. Turns out, the best place to work isn’t a place after all; it’s a state of mind.

JONAS ALTMAN is the author SHAPERS: Reinvent the Way You Work and Change the Future (Wiley, Sept 2020). He is a speaker, writer, and entrepreneur on a mission to make the world of work more human. As the founder of award-winning design practice Social Fabric, he creates learning experiences to elevate and grow leaders at the world’s boldest organizations.

How to Solve Your Most Difficult Leadership and Talent Challenges

noreply@blogger.com (Dan McCarthy) — Thu, 05 Nov 2020 16:50:00 +0000

Guest post from Stephen Shapiro:

To find better solutions to your most difficult business problems, paradoxically, you don’t want o focus on solutions.

Instead you want to make sure you are asking the right questions. Changing the question changes the range of possible solutions.

Changing Just One Word Can Change Your Solutions

If your challenge is, “How can we hire the right talent?”, you might put your energies into time-consuming campus outreach programs, complicated recruitment campaigns, or expensive technology.

But changing the question to, “How can we retain the right talent?” may shift your focus to internal motivation and performance management strategies.

Simply changing one word yields a completely different set of answers.

You could change it again to, “How can we develop the right talent?” Now we are looking at leadership opportunities that might not have been previously considered.

Before investing in developing solutions and strategies to your problems, first make sure you are moving in the right direction.

Be More Specific to Reduce Waste

When problem-solving, it is common to start off with an opportunity that is too broad. When we ask broad questions, we invite a lot of wasted energy. When asking the question, “How can I improve the business?”, (the default question associated with most suggestion boxes), you could get literally hundreds or thousands of possible answers.

In fact, over 99% of the ideas submitted to most suggestion boxes are low value and are not implemented. This wastes the time of those who submit the ideas and those who have to evaluate the duds.

But if you make the problem statement more specific, you focus people on what matters most.

Going back to the original statement: “How can we hire the right talent?” What does “right” mean? Maybe the question could be, “How can we hire for unique skills that make our products differentiating?”

This now focuses your efforts on a specific skillset. Of course, it might lead you to ask the question, “What differentiates our products from the competition?” Answering this gives you deeper insights into your business and the people that are required to support it.

Sometimes Being More Abstract Can Increase Creativity

Although we often start with broad problem statements, there are times when we are too specific. Either our focus is so specific that it limits our ability to find solutions. Or in some cases our questions are really just solutions masquerading as questions.

I remember a client who was focused on, “How can we use 360-degree feedback to improve performance?”

Their myopic focus on this one tool limited their ability to “see” other leadership development solutions.

The broader question might be, “How can we improve performance?” 360-degree feedback was too specific.

This then forced them to ask, “What is the performance issue we need to solve?” After some analysis, they determined that the issue was a silo mentality within the company. When they shifted the question to, “How can we break down silos in our organization?”, they found a wider range of solutions. As it turns out, 360-degree feedback was not part of the approach.

Our Best Solutions are Often Invisible

The questions we ask impact the solutions that are visible. Subtle changes to the problem statement can reveal solutions that were previously hidden.

Or to paraphrase a quote that is attributed to Albert Einstein, “If I had an hour to save the world, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute finding solutions.” From my experience, most organizations are spending 60 minutes solving problems that are unimportant or irrelevant.

When everyone in your organization learns how to powerfully reframe business problems, you will get better results, faster, with lower risk. It’s the simplest tool you have to find the best solutions that will grow your business.

For over 20 years, Stephen Shapiro has presented his provocative strategies on innovation to audiences in 50 countries. During his 15-year tenure with the consulting firm Accenture, he led a 20,000-person innovation practice. He is the author of six books, including his latest: Invisible Solutions: 25 Lenses that Reframe and Help Solve Difficult Business Problems. His Personality Poker® system has been used around the world to create high-performing innovation teams. In 2015 he was inducted into the Speaker Hall of Fame.

How Your Late Employees Improve Your Competitive Advantage

noreply@blogger.com (Dan McCarthy) — Fri, 30 Oct 2020 12:43:00 +0000

Guest post from Grace Pacie:

We’ve all heard the story that lateness costs the country billions in lost productivity - it’s claimed that lateness costs American businesses more than $3 billion dollars a year, but can that figure be trusted? Are late people a liability or an asset in the business world?

Punctuality issues are very often combined with a bundle of behaviours which I have christened “Timebending” in my new book ‘LATE! A Timebender’s guide to why we are late and how we can change’. Timebenders do not work in a linear way – they get deeply absorbed in their work and can lose all track of time, which can result in them being late. However, Timebenders are not always late – on the contrary, they are highly motivated by deadlines, and when facing a tight time limit on an important task, they are able to concentrate extremely effectively, and often produce their best work. On the other hand, employees who arrive early for work and meetings typically work at a steady pace, allow time for every eventuality, and lose the ability to think clearly when they are under deadline pressure.

According to a YouGov survey, 19% of the US population are late for work at least once a week. But does an employee who regularly arrives late, actually work fewer hours than one who arrives early? Lateness tends to attracts universal condemnation, particularly from the ‘time anxious’ who are obsessive about punctuality. Yet the people who arrive late for work are usually the last to leave, because they can get lost in their work, and are less focused on the clock. Lateness for meetings also deserves closer examination. While there is no doubt that someone who is late for meetings can hold everyone up, there is another side to the issue. People who arrive early for meetings and events are typically less productive than those who arrived a few minutes late, since the Timebenders are likely to have been working right up to the deadline on their previous task.

Is Time Management the Answer?

Time Management courses are designed to improve workplace efficiency -, typically advising employees to prioritise their tasks, schedule their time and avoid distractions. However, these are only successful strategies in an environment which has a predictable and stable workflow. In businesses which need to be responsive to client needs, and where priorities might need to change at short notice, a workforce of punctual timekeepers who work at a steady pace and cannot deal with interruptions will be a liability rather than an advantage. Timebenders may often be five minutes late for work, but they are also flexible, not easily stressed, calm in a crisis, and will squeeze extra tasks into a tight time schedule.

The Time Management model fits a traditional manufacturing environment, but can be counter-productive in the new world of flexible working and responsiveness to client needs.

Creative agencies and consultancies who need their staff to come up with original solutions to problems, often at short notice, know that timekeeping is a very low priority on the skills list. A deadline doesn’t just force Timebenders to get the job finished – it can stimulate them to perform certain tasks better. There are numerous examples of outstanding work achieved under pressure. Martin Luther King famously added the words “I have a dream” to his speech just as he was standing up to make his address. Bill Clinton, Lewis Carroll, Aaron Sorkin were all ground breakers and also famously for lateness. Did they unconsciously realize that the last minute was when they did their best work?

Punctuality Around the World

If you are working in international business, don’t assume that expectations of punctuality will be the same in every culture. In Germany, South Korea or Japan, if you’re not 10 minutes early, you’re seen as late, whereas in Saudi Arabia lateness is a mark of seniority, and it is highly offensive to consult your watch during a meeting. In Russia and China, attitudes to punctuality match those of Brits and Americans, whereas Southern Europeans, South Americans, South-East Asians and Africans tend to work on the principal, “If everyone’s late then no-one’s late”.

Where Are We Headed?

The concept of Time Management is now a century old, invented at a time when productivity and efficiency were keys to competitive advantage. Today the world is a very different place- the future is less certain than it has ever been, and the Timebending traits of flexibility, adaptability and responsiveness will be vital weapons in the fight for economic security. Maybe in this post-COVID world, your most effective employee might be the one who arrives 10 minutes late every morning, but is the last to leave at night. Perhaps ‘Sorry I’m late’ should be the words you most want to hear when your staff arrive at work tomorrow morning.

Grace Pacie is a strategic business consultant specializing in international buyer behavior. She has a BA and MBA, and is qualified in Myers Briggs, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Emotional Freedom Technique, Hypnotherapy, and Marketing. Her new book, ‘LATE! A Timebender’s guide to why we are late and how to change’ is published as an ebook and Amazon paperback, and will shortly be released as an audiobook.

Three Classic Negotiating Mistakes

noreply@blogger.com (Dan McCarthy) — Thu, 22 Oct 2020 12:00:00 +0000

Guest post by Clint Babcock:

Recently I was teaching a class on negotiation for salespeople. I set up a buyer–seller role play scenario and I asked two participants to work through the scenario in front of the rest of the class. Both were provided with the pertinent information they needed to secure a good deal; all they had to do was negotiate the price. I specifically narrowed this role play down to this one issue; neither one of them knew what they were selling. Such a scenario allows participants to focus on how best to work through the money issue.

The point of doing an exercise like this is not the end result. It’s observing the process that people go through, the great moves they make and/or the mistakes they fall prey to. Analyzing the process used is what creates learning and growth opportunities for everyone, including the observers. Whenever I do an exercise like this, and lead the discussion afterward, I’ve noticed that there are three mistakes that always seem to present themselves. As I predicted, all three showed up during this role play.

Mistake #1: Talking too much. This is the single most common mistake. Salespeople, I’ve noticed, tend to defend and justify their solution, apparently under the impression that the more they say, the better the solution looks. They pile on the features and benefits of working with their company. As you might imagine, the stream of words they unleash gets them nowhere, because the prospect already knows all of this. If they didn’t, why would they be negotiating? A better approach. Don’t talk about your features and benefits. Focus on the pains that your solution will solve by asking questions about how they see the solution solving their problems. Become inquisitive and curious as to their position; keep in mind that the more information you uncover, the deeper your understanding of the situation will be – and the better positioned you will be to reinforce your position as the right choice for them.

Mistake #2: Offering or agreeing to concessions immediately. All too often, salespeople fail to recognize that they are even in a negotiation, and they volunteer a concession. For instance: The buyer asks for a better price, or better terms, and the salesperson’s knee-jerk response is, “What were you looking for?” Very often, we have not prepared for this all-too-predictable moment. We fail to process the reality that we may well be dealing with a strategic negotiator, someone who has prepared and planned for this negotiation and who has created leverage they can use against us. Giving up something without getting anything in return is a no-no! A better approach: Instead of encouraging the other side to ask for concession after concession, do your prep work. Recognize that you will be in a negotiation at some point in your sales cycle. Identify what, specifically, you will ask for in return when someone asks you to make a concession. Hold onto concessions for as long as you can; don’t give them up until late in the sales or negotiation process, and plan to get something in return, such as a firm commitment to do business. Preparing ahead of time is the key to ensuring you don’t simply react, but instead respond appropriately to a request for a concession.

Mistake #3: Believing that money is the only issue. A lot of sales and business negotiations focus on money. Remember: The best negotiations have little or nothing to do with money. The best negotiation discussion is about finding the best fit solution. Yes, people want to pay as little for that solution as possible. But if we make it all about money, we both lose. A better approach. Even if buyers try to make the discussion about money, you need to stand your ground, and make it about solving their pains and issues with your solution. Yes, this takes practice! But what’s the alternative?

Most companies and sales organizations have no idea how often their teams make these mistakes during a negotiation process. Why? Because negotiation is rarely trained or practiced. What ends up happening after a long series of negotiating errors is that senior. leaders are brought into the process – because they know how to handle these situations. This is not an efficient solution. With guidance and practice, salespeople can learn to avoid these common mistakes.

Clint Babcock is the author of NEGOTIATING FROM THE INSIDE OUT: A Playbook For Business Success. A Sandler trainer based in Florida, Babcock has over 25 years of sales, leadership, and negotiation experience; he has worked with senior executives at companies in a wide range of industries to help them strategically build their sales forces. For more information, please visit https://www.sandler.com/resources/sandler-books/negotiating-from-the-inside-out/.

It’s Great to Lead with Smart Experiments

noreply@blogger.com (Dan McCarthy) — Thu, 15 Oct 2020 20:35:00 +0000

Guest post by Steven K. Gold, M.D.:

Leadership is all about decision and action. As leaders, our goal is to make the best decisions

that lead to the most productive actions. As the world becomes less certain, even highly unpredictable, how do we go about optimizing our chances for success?

Fortunately, we have a group of experienced leaders who have been grappling with the challenges of uncertainty for many years: successful entrepreneurs.

For over 20 years, I have studied entrepreneurs. As an academic and as a thought leader, I have conducted studies of thousands of entrepreneurs of all kinds, on three continents. This has included embedding myself within various accelerator programs to observe the daily (and even moment-to-moment) decisions and actions of successful and unsuccessful entrepreneurs. This led to the idea of Smart Experiments.

Experiments are investments of a first set of available resources that produce a second (hopefully more valuable) set of resources. I use the term “resources” broadly, and they include human connections (networks), knowledge, experience, expertise, and ability to influence others, among many others. Resources are the foundation of experiments.

Experiments – like everything else in life – can be done poorly or well. Despite this, most of us have never been taught how to do an experiment in a way that predisposes to success. Expert entrepreneurs, on the other hand, have developed and mastered a particular process that I refer to as a Smart Experiment.

Smart Experiments are done in an ongoing cycle that includes four steps:

1) DESIGN. Entrepreneurs always look around to assess their available resources. What resources do I have – human connections, material, knowledge, experiences, expertise, finances, etc. – that I can combine in creative ways to design a possible experiment? Entrepreneurs make formal and informal lists (referred to as Opportunity Registers) of all of their possible experiments, based on the resources they have at hand. Expert entrepreneurs like having many opportunities, and options.

2) DECIDE. Given a long list of possible experiments, entrepreneurs categorize them. They do this continuously, and are always reassessing their resources in light of the results of ongoing experiments. Any possible experiment that has been Designed in Step 1 can be placed into one of four categories: a) do it now, b) do it later, c) find a partner, or d) forget about it. This prioritization determines what happens next.

3) DE-RISK. Before embarking on the “do it now” experiments, entrepreneurs de-risk their experiments. This means that they identify the most likely potential causes for failure, and prepare for them in advance of doing the experiment. This step recognizes that certain easily predictable and fixable issues can make a big difference, and they are addressed up front. This predisposes any given experiment to success.

4) DELIVER. Only then do entrepreneurs do the experiment, which almost always involves a series of small steps. Since every experiment is an investment of resources intended to secure (more valuable) resources, expert entrepreneurs harvest all of the value that results from any given experiment. They do not leave value on the table.

We can each choose to do our experiments poorly or well. Doing Smart Experiments – and helping others to do them properly – increases chances for successful outcomes. The best entrepreneurs encourage everyone around them to do Smart Experiments.

Here are a few take-away lessons for leaders:

First, Smart Experiments involve thought and action. Entrepreneurs rarely get stuck in “analysis paralysis” because they break down risky activities into less risky, small steps. Instead of jumping across a room, they take it a step at a time. By taking a step at a time they increase the likelihood that each step will go well, and they are much more likely to make it across the room – even if they encounter an obstacle. Obstacles (representing uncertainties) are easy to walk around, and much harder if you fly right into them. This is one way that expert entrepreneurs deal with uncertainty.

Second, the best entrepreneurs understand that succeeding and failing are two sides of the same coin. Smart Experiments, using prioritization and risk mitigation, mean that our failures become smaller. That said, failures do occur, and are expected to occur. If an entrepreneur is not failing at least a good portion of the time (remember, they are taking small steps and so these are relatively small failures – or learning adventures), this means the entrepreneur is probably not trying hard enough.

So why is it great to lead with Smart Experiments? First, understanding resources is the best way to understand the value you have to invest. The more you have to invest, the more you are likely to reap greater returns. Second, Smart Experiments prioritize those actions that make the most sense – to do now, do later, partner, or not do at all. Smaller steps that make up Smart Experiments are also easier to get started with, and to make successful. When things go awry, as they often do in uncertain environments, smaller steps lead to smaller failures, which protect resources. All of this predisposes to a higher probability of success, which has a dramatic compounding effect.

Leading with Smart Experiments means one more thing: prioritizing intelligent action over results. If people are empowered to do their best, to do their best experiments, then they are pursuing their potential. They will succeed much of the time, and fail at other times, both of which are indicators of effort. With this in mind, celebrate Smart Experiments. Teach Smart Experiments. Be a role model for Smart Experiments.

Steven K. Gold, M.D., is the author of HOW WE SUCCEED: Making Good Things Happen Through The Power Of Smart Experiments. He is Chairman of Gold Global Advisors, a firm that advises leaders and teams in the science of sustainable success. For more information, please visit https://www.stevenkgold.com/.

Accountability Under Pressure

noreply@blogger.com (Dan McCarthy) — Thu, 08 Oct 2020 19:47:00 +0000

Guest post from Helen Horyza:

Under pressure, when you have been disappointed or your direction has been ignored, do you
lose your temper? Do you attack the person who made the mistake? It can happen in a split second. Unfortunately, the memory of your behavior will linger much longer in the hearts and minds of your employees. Over time, you create a culture of fear and mistrust.

So, how can you take an “accountable perspective” it the heat of a stressful moment? The answer lies in your values. Ask yourself the following questions:

· What is your why?

· What are your leadership values?

· What principles guide you at the deepest level?

When you answer these questions, you have the basis for choosing accountability under pressure.

Here is a real-life example. Dave, a former client of mine, was a Chief over about 700 people. He was working hard to create a healthy work culture. As part of this effort, Dave held a multi-day off-site meeting including both middle and top management.

On the second day of the event, one of Dave’s senior-staff members (without consulting Dave) sent middle management home to save travel and hotel costs. When Dave found out, he was livid. His entire motivation for the event was to include everyone. He was ready to attack.

I happened to be presenting at the front of the room that day and could see Dave rocking back and forth on his feet, clearly agitated. I walked to the back of the room and stood next to him. I asked him what was wrong. He explained the situation, red faced and irritated.

His anger was intense. He needed to be grounded. I asked Dave what his top three leadership values were. He looked at me like I was insane. How dare I ask such a stupid question at a moment like this? With some effort, he pulled himself together and answered.

“HIT” he said. “Helping Others, Integrity and Team Work.” I looked at Dave and calmly suggested he handle the situation based on those values. I walked back to the front of the room and continued teaching.

Several days later I checked in with Dave to find out how he resolved the offsite debacle. “I didn’t do anything” he said. “What was done was done. My values helped me remember the bigger picture. Confronting or blaming was not going to change anything. It was a mis-communication.” He now had a tangible life experience to fuel his efforts to be accountable under pressure.

Choosing accountability allows you to clear your emotions and focus on what you want to accomplish and preserve relationships. Take a few moments to identify your top three or four values. Write them and post them where you can see them every day. Practice filtering your choices through your values, driving you, and the people you lead, towards accountability.

Helen Horyza is the President of Elevate Your Career Inc., and a recognized leadership and career development expert, Helen@HelenHoryza.com. Helen integrates psychology, talent management and employee engagement to elevate organizational culture. Her most recent book is Elevate Your Career: Live a Life You’re Truly Proud Of.

The Three Main Organizational Drivers

noreply@blogger.com (Dan McCarthy) — Thu, 01 Oct 2020 12:00:00 +0000

Guest post from S. Chris Edmonds:

Is your company primarily power-, profit-, or purpose-driven?

Approaching a meeting with the CEO of his organization, one of my culture clients (a senior executive of a major retailer) said, “I’m going to ask him whether he thinks we are a power-driven company, a profit-driven company, or a purpose-driven company.” I’d not heard about those differentiators, so I asked him to define them for me.

Organizations are not exclusively driven by a single one of these approaches, but their primary drivers are not that difficult to diagnose. An organization’s plans, decisions, and actions provide very clear indicators of their core interests and drivers.

Power Driven:

A company that is primarily power-driven

● seeks to be a standard-setter, a “big player” in their industry that others must work with to gain a foothold in their marketplace.

● seeks to make profits, but their primary actions are designed to increase their influence, their market share, their breadth.

● exhibits behavior that can be seen as self-serving and arrogant.

Based on these criteria, I see Microsoft as primarily a power-driven company. (Full disclosure: I’m running Microsoft 365 on my Macs & iPad. I’m as culpable as any other Microsoft product user for helping them extend their power.)

Profit-Driven:

A primarily profit-driven company:

● seeks to create organizational wealth, first and foremost.

● analyzes potential products, services, and markets carefully to identify the most profitable avenues, then pursues those avenues for as long as the profits meet expectations.

● exhibits behavior that can be seen as self-serving and manipulative.

● are known to take advantage of existing rules and/or laws to create profits.

Based on these criteria, I see pharmaceutical companies as primarily profit-driven. (Full disclosure: I’m a big believer in Western medicine. I take prescription medications daily to keep my heart healthy and my knees working smoothly.)

Purpose-driven

A primarily purpose-driven company:

● seeks to engage employees and customers in helping the organization’s service vision to become a reality.

● often promote social responsibility and demonstrate service to their communities regularly.

● employees typically are very vocal about their organization’s purpose and community benefit.

Certainly, purpose-driven companies must be profitable to continue their good works; profits serve a purpose, rather than being the primary desired outcome.

A few years ago, socialbrite.org celebrated four terrific examples of corporate social responsibility. Based on these criteria, I believe that Newman’s Own, the late Paul Newman’s charitable organization, is a purpose-driven company (they’ve given over $300 million to charitable causes since 1982). (Full disclosure: I LOVE Newman’s Own products, particularly their black bean & corn salsa. Amazing quality & taste, and I’m helping community organizations every time I inhale a jar of it.)

The Rest of the Story

I connected with this client after his CEO meeting, and he said the conversation was a rich one. “He thinks we’re a profit-driven company that wants to be a purpose-driven company,” he related. “I like that – it means we’re not ‘done,’ that we can evolve to the kind of purpose-driven company I think we can be.”

I’m optimistic, as well. Creating a purpose-driven company is more art than science, pulling together key pieces that make a cohesive, vibrant whole. This client has the heart, skills, and commitment to help his organization evolve.

Playbook for a New Leader’s First 90 Days on the Job

noreply@blogger.com (Dan McCarthy) — Thu, 24 Sep 2020 15:18:00 +0000

Guest post from Kristin Harper:

The first 90 days of a leaders’ tenure set the foundation for their future success. Below are five time-tested approaches for new leaders to get off to a fast start. I’ve written about these and other crucial tools for helping leaders improve relationships, gain executive presence and succeed in my new book, The Heart of a Leader: 52 Emotional Intelligence Insights to Advance Your Career.

1) Focus on Learning and Listening

Prior to starting a new role, read as much as you can, for as far back as you can about the business, strategy, plans, performance, people, opportunities, and challenges. Meet with your predecessor and other stakeholders to ask questions that seek to understand and not judge. Forming conclusions and making decisions too early in your role can be disastrous. Marry your independent research with insightful conversations to accelerate your on-boarding and business mastery.

During your first 90 days, absorb as much information and insight as possible. Besides periodic questions aimed at deepening your understanding of the organization, business, people, and processes, most of your time should be spent listening. Capture your hypotheses, ideas, and observations in a journal. As you meet more people and learn about the business, validate or invalidate your hypotheses, which will become the basis of your future vision, strategies, and/or operational plans.

2) Establish Yourself as both a Person and Leader

Change of any magnitude naturally causes anxiety. Ease your new team’s worries by hosting a Day 1 meeting. This is your first opportunity to establish your personal brand. Demonstrate self-awareness and authenticity by sharing the following content, which will help build trust, establish expectations, and accelerate relationship development with your new colleagues:

A summary of who you are as a person and leader, what you believe, how those values and beliefs guide your actions, and how you operate

- Why you accepted this role

- What you are committed to for the team, business, organization, and culture

- Address questions and concerns

- Team introductions plus an interesting fact or icebreaker

- Paint a picture of the next few weeks

- Close with your optimism about working with this team

- Consider telling stories, which demonstrate vulnerability, emotional intelligence, and can help create connections that translate to a more motivated team.

3) Build Multiple Relationships

Within your first week on the job, host 1-hour on-boarding meetings with each of your direct reports. Within the first two months, host a 30-minute 1:1 meeting with team members across multiple levels in your organization plus cross-functional colleagues. In preparation for these meetings, review the organizational chart, form a cursory understanding of their roles and projects, and read their last performance review and résumé, if they’re on your team.

Onboarding meetings are one of few meetings without much two-way dialogue. Send the following questions as a preview, then listen and take notes as they share:

Tell me about your background.

2) What motivates you?

3) What are your professional goals?

4) What should we Start/Stop/Continue?

Be cautious not to rush to judgment about talent during 1:1 onboarding meetings. Give yourself 60-90 days to determine if you have the right mix of talent to achieve the goals and objectives.

4) Stay Connected

Engage with your team through impromptu conversations, team meetings with direct reports, 1:1s with direct reports, all-team meetings, annual skip-level meetings, quarterly development conversations and end-of-year performance reviews. Monthly all-team meetings help build camaraderie, and provide a forum for recognition, to discuss business performance and key projects. These meetings also provide an opportunity for your team to demonstrate their talent, and for you to demonstrate inspirational leadership.

5) Reflect and Envision

After 90 days, reflect on what you’ve learned, key observations, and early wins. Share this information with your manager as a head start to your performance review. Reflect on what changes could make the biggest differences in the outcomes, performance, and culture of the business and team. Then develop your vision, objectives, strategies, goals, measures, action plan, and solicit feedback from your direct reports, wise council, cross-functional colleagues, and manager.

Once you’ve secured buy-in, cascade the vision and measurable goals throughout the team. Be cautious about change fatigue. Changing too much at once could overwhelm your team, dilute the impact, and put them on the defense if not done thoughtfully.

Creating a culture of trust, open communication, accountability, recognition, and commitment to a common vision is the #1 job of a leader. These strategies and tactics will help you engage your team, develop healthy relationships, and build a healthy culture that delivers stronger results.

Kristin Harper is CEO of Driven to Succeed, LLC, a leadership development company that provides brand strategy consulting, market research, and keynote speaking on leadership and emotional intelligence. She is also author of The Heart of a Leader: 52 Emotional Intelligence Insights to Advance Your Career. www.DriventoSucceedLLC.com.

5 Tips for Inspiring Leadership

noreply@blogger.com (Dan McCarthy) — Thu, 17 Sep 2020 12:00:00 +0000

Guest post from Karlin Sloan:

As a leadership development consultant, I have spent my career with people in business, NGOs, government, and not-for-profits who are focused, competent, talented and who have a
deep sense of their personal power to impact those around them. Recently, those same people are having doubts. They doubt their ability to lead their companies through increasingly challenging times. They doubt their ability to protect their loved ones in a world experiencing ecological, health and social crises. And they doubt our collective human family’s ability to solve the problems facing us on a global scale.

Our organizations, both large and small, are facing the need to adapt to rapid change that is not predictable or particularly controllable. If those who lead us are in doubt, then who can we turn to to inspire us, to calm our fears, and to build a path to a better future? How will we effectively address immense changes as individuals, groups, organizations, and as a world community? There is no more important time for inspiring leadership.

Inspiring leaders are those who practice ‘alignment’. They are leaders who cultivate personal and organizational openness, adaptability, and meaning. They are leaders who practice confidence in our ability to create a positive outcome no matter what the circumstance. They are the ones who will get us there. They are capable of aligning themselves to their higher purpose and inspiration, aligning others to a shared goal, and to aligning resources to get the job done.

Here are five tips to create alignment in yourself and your organization, with the goal of being a truly inspiring leader:

Tip #1 - Accept Reality and Focus on the Future

Accepting reality and focusing on the future is sometimes easier said than done. “Jamie” is a successful entrepreneur who I’ve known for many years. During the first three months of the Covid-19 shutdown, she’s had to cope with some very difficult realities, including the fact that her booming events-based business was in deep trouble.

Tip #2 - View Challenges as Opportunities

Reframing is the capability to look at your reality from new frames of reference. If you viewed the challenges of present circumstances as an opportunity for the future, what would it look like?

Tip #3 - Build Relationship and Community

The most inspiring leaders know that we all need each other, and that during times of stress and change we need to feel connected and part of something larger than ourselves. Despite social isolation we need to be ever more present to each other. Part of the leader’s role is to reach out individually and collectively to boost morale and allow people to express their concerns and their ideas.

Tip #4 - Practice Physical and Mental Discipline

In order to cultivate peak performance we need discipline. Regular daily practices keep us grounded, focused, positive, and healthy. These may be as simple as taking a short morning walk, listening to music that inspires you, reading or working out. Anything that you can establish as a healthy ritual optimizes your performance in other areas of life. My favorite ritual I’ve heard this week - say no to doing something at least once per day.

Tip#5 - Remember a Bigger Purpose

Every organization has a core purpose for being. Every brand that is driven by purpose has the capacity to connect directly to a customer need. As a leader, it’s your job to bring people back to why they are working in the first place. What is most important about the services or products you provide? What is important about each and every team member’s contribution?

Times of change bring out the best and the worst, and inspiring leaders focus on the best of themselves and others.

Karlin Sloan is a global leadership & development coach, CEO of Sloan Group Internationaland author of new book, Inspiring Leadership for Uncertain Times.

What Makes a High-Performance Leader?

noreply@blogger.com (Dan McCarthy) — Thu, 10 Sep 2020 12:00:00 +0000

Guest post from Rob Hartnett:

“What is a high-performance leader?” a leader asked me in a Facebook Live session. One of the many I have done since Covid-19 as we pivot to new ways of working.

A high-performance leader is one who is intentional about their leadership. They are not a leader because their position entitles them to be; they see leadership as a verb, a skill to continue to develop and hone. High-performance leaders operate with a growth mindset and are great communicators. A growth mindset means they operate with:

1. Agility

2. Curiosity

3. Persistence

From my research and experience I have observed high-performance leaders look to instill these traits in their people as well. The reason they do this is high-performance leaders understand that their number one goal is to create more high-performance leaders so they can move up to their next position and create more value. They operate with an abundant, as opposed to a scarcity, mindset.

“Titled Leaders” operate from a scarcity mindset. They are only intentional about protecting their role, their title and see all others as a threat to their current role. When you have too many leaders like this you have a fixed mindset, scarcity culture and that is not good for anyone.

Let’s dive a little deeper into the words high-performance. High Performance does not mean they are demanding, relentless, egotistical or high “D” people if you are familiar with DISC behavioural styles. What it means is that a high-performance leader operates like anything that operates at a higher performance than the norm.

I have grown up around high-performance sport. Motorsport in cars and motorcycles and more human powered endeavours in sailing and cycling. High-performance in the context of sport covers a process that goes like this.

Practice – Event – Learning – Rest – Practice – Event – Learning – Rest and so on. Each time a Formula One race or MotoGP bike finishes a race the data is downloaded from both driver/rider and machine, learnings are gathered, the machine is then stripped down and rebuilt ready for the next round of practice and event with the new learnings included. The process is then repeated with the aim of improved performance and stronger results. It is the same in every sport where high-performance is the ticket to the dance.

It is no different with leadership. One of the most important things you can do is create margin for yourself and margin for your team. Margin is the difference between what you can do and what you are doing. If they're exactly the same level you have no capacity, you are run off your feet, you're not going to think strategically. If you are doing more than you are capable of for too long this will result in burnout and no one benefits from a burned out leader. How do you create margin? You must break your time into three sections.

Section one – what you do on a daily basis with your people. BAU if you will.

Section two – Time for you to do what leaders need to do and only leaders can do. Still BAU.

Section three – Time for you and you only to think strategically, grow, invest and upskill.

As a leader it is also important you model the way for your people and carve out the same regime for them as well. One highly successful global leader I know carves out 20% of his month for section three and holds his team accountable for the same splits.

High-performance leaders are also very strong on accountability and discipline (routine and process).

Let’s now discuss a growth mindset. Despite Professor Carol Dweck’s groundbreaking book “Mindset” and numerous TED talks I still think most leaders don’t fully understand it. The most common misconception is that we are either growth or fixed mindset people. We are not. It is true that we have a leaning one way or the other but we can be growth, fixed or even mixed about different things. For example I have a growth mindset about my career but I have a fixed mindset about the upsides of parachuting from a perfectly flyable aeroplane! I also have a mixed mindset regarding certain economic strategies, meaning that I am fixed in my mindset but if the right circumstances presented themselves I would be willing to consider my fixed mindset approach. Overall, I am a growth mindset person however at times I do slip into fixed mindset until my growth mindset subconscious or an external coach snaps me out of it. This leads me to defining a growth mindset. My explanation is this – having a growth mindset means:

I believe with the right strategy, effort, coaching and persistence I can achieve whatever is important to me. With a growth mindset I seek feedback as this accelerates my learning and I see not succeeding as experimenting and learning on my way to achieving my goal.

A fixed mindset believes that no matter what strategy or effort I apply I won’t succeed, I will look like a failure and therefore it’s not worth trying. I was born in this circumstance and nothing can improve it. Feedback simply reinforces my view that I can’t do it.

Mixed mindset says that I don’t believe I can do it, I don’t believe it is possible however if these factors changed or I was in this position I might be persuaded to try again.

For those of you who believe you are growth mindset oriented through and through try this question on. Have you ever gone into a one-on-one review with one of your team, for whom you already had the opinion that they were not going to be successful? And you were only coaching them as you had a monthly KPI to do so? I think we have all done this. This means we had a fixed mindset about their potential. How might our coaching session go if we went in with a growth mindset?

Coaching, mentoring and accelerated learning is all part of a growth mindset and it can achieve remarkable results. A recent example from Hollywood was the successful remake of “A Star is Born” driven and starring Bradley Cooper. Cooper not only starred in it, he also directed it and was a co-producer of that movie. Six months before they started filming, he couldn't play guitar, couldn't play piano and couldn't sing. However, working with experts in these fields such as Eddie Vedder, Lucas Nelson and Lady Gaga, combined with a solid routine of effort and persistence, resulted in an award-winning movie, a best song award at the Grammys and the best original score award at the BAFTAs.

Microsoft has done probably the biggest shift in growth mindset at a global corporate level. Led by Satya Nadella, their CEO, they had to change the game, and change their culture quickly. Chris Capossela their CMO said "We went from a culture of know-it-alls to a culture of learn-it-alls." Which means they had to ask, "Who's doing stuff better than us? What programmers, coders, what businesses? Who do we need to partner with next?" This is a significant shift for an organisation that had been incredibly successful in the past by being inwardly focused.

Don’t forget that high-performance leaders fundamentally need to inspire. Leadership gets the team going and management keeps it going. That's the difference. You need leaders and managers and sometimes that hat swaps many times during the day.

There is a saying that “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, get a team”. I disagree with this. I say if you want to go further and faster than your competition you will only do it with a team.

Maybe my cycling has proven that to me. As a leader whether you are leading a Fortune 500 business, a new team, even your family you need to know how to inspire them and this comes from your ability to communicate. Every high-performance leader I know has excellent communication skills. The emphasis being on skills. People are not born communicators. It is a skill that can be developed and must be developed if you wish to cross the chasm from manager to leader. Great communication makes people feel something, it connects and it’s authentic. For example, we all know it was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who said "I have a dream” in a powerful live speech. Please note he did not say “I have a dream and it’s in Slack with a 72 page PowerPoint deck you can read.”

When you want to inspire someone, when you want to get them to do something different, three things you need to ask yourself are:

What do I want them to Feel?

How do I want them to Know?

What do I want them to Do?

I believe we all have the capacity to be high-performance leaders. I believe leadership is a skill and therefore something that can be developed and continually enhanced. You may not be a high-performance leader yet… but with a growth mindset, agility and persistence it is well within our reach.

Rob Hartnett has worked in senior management roles at global organizations such as Apple Computer, Publicis Mojo, Hewlett-Packard, and Miller Heiman Group. Hartnett is an independent Executive Director in Leadership with the John Maxwell Team as well as a Certified DISC Facilitator & Advisor. For more information, please visit www.robhartnett.com.

Unwrapping and Managing Difficult Employees

noreply@blogger.com (Dan McCarthy) — Thu, 03 Sep 2020 12:00:00 +0000

Guest post from Beth Miller:

We’ve all been challenged with at least one difficult person at work. Why do they have to be so rude, dismissive, abrasive, etc.? Difficult employees aren’t the person who has a bad day and acts out in appropriately, they are the ones who have gained a reputation for being difficult.

And, if they are spreading their bad behavior to others and having a negative impact on the team, then they are more than difficult, they are toxic.

Why are they so difficult? This is the first question that you need to ask yourself. Experience has shown me that there is often an underlying reason for the person’s unwanted behavior. Schedule 1-1 time with the employee, as soon as you notice a pattern of bad behavior. Not addressing the behavior in a timely manner is just an initiation for more of the same thing.

Get curious first. Is it the job? Is it a personal issue? Are there team members that are causing stress? Or, is it just who they are?

If you find that there is a reason behind their behavior and not just their personality, then it’s time to help.

Coach

Once you understand the underlying reason for your employee’s bad behavior then it’s time to coach. Coaching your difficult employee to understand the impact they have on others and themselves is your first step to mitigating the problem behavior. The next step is getting them to commit to change and taking action.

Explore with them how their behavior is impacting them and their performance by asking these questions during a 1-1 meeting:

How do you think people react when you are __________ to them?

How can their reactions to you potentially impact you negatively?

How does this this behavior show up outside of work?

How does this behavior help you?

What triggers this behavior? A person, a task, a situation?

What do you think will happen if you continue to behave this way?

Once they agree that their behavior isn’t benefitting them or others around them, then it’s time for them to put a plan together to change. Ask these questions:

What steps can you take to decrease this behavior?

How would you know these steps are working?

When do you plan on resolving the situation?

How committed are you to changing on a scale of 1-10?

What would it take to increase your commitment by 1 point?

Communicate Clearly

For some individuals, asking questions to get them to self-reflect may not be enough. This is when you have to give your feedback to them. Give them concrete examples in a timely manner of what you’ve observed. A great technique to use is by starting with “Can I share an observation with you?” I have never had someone answer no to this question. And answering yes gives you permission to share your feedback.

Define for them what behavior is acceptable moving forward, what changes need to occur with measurable goals. Then jointly create a development plan with a specific timeline. I recommend a 30-60-90 day plan. You want to see some immediate small changes that will incrementally become larger over time. Be prepared to have additional 1-1 meetings with the person during this time.

Explain the Consequences

Once you have coached and provided then with direct feedback, they need to understand the consequences of not meeting their commitment. Generally, a loss is more of a motivator than a gain. Determine what will motivate them. Is it a loss of privileges to work remotely, an upcoming bonus, or rescinding a high-profile project?

There will be some people that either can’t or won’t change their bad behaviors and you need to be prepared to part ways with them. Make sure in these cases that you document all the conversations, so you have established a pattern of behavior and the steps taken to address the situation, and the employee’s failure to change.

And remember through all of this, that dealing with negative employees can distract you from more important issues. Don’t spend all your time and energy on the difficult person, just enough to know that you provided the person with the opportunity to make the needed changes. If you ultimately let the employee go, don’t look back. Just learn from your experience.

Leadership Accountability

noreply@blogger.com (Dan McCarthy) — Thu, 27 Aug 2020 12:00:00 +0000

Guest post from Vince Molinaro:

Publilius Syrus was a Latin writer who lived from 85 to 43 B.C. He wrote, “Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm.” He got it right way back then. Anyone can lead when times are good, when the world is stable, and the sea is calm. It takes real and accountable leaders to lead in today’s and tomorrow’s world.

No truer words have ever been spoken and now in a world gripped by a global pandemic, all leaders will need to be stronger than they have ever been to lead us through the uncertainty and ambiguity we all face. In today’s complex world, leaders are being asked to step up in dynamic and unexpected ways.

But there is a problem. At a time when we need leaders to be stronger, they are not. Many leaders that I work with today tell me they are overwhelmed, disengaged, and underprepared for their roles and the challenges of these unprecedented times.

Unfortunately, many leaders are not equipped with the tools they need to lead under pressure. As a result, they fail to serve themselves and their employees effectively, and put the future of their entire organization at risk.

I conducted a LinkedIn poll a few weeks after the COVID-19 virus shut own the world. I was curious to learn about the experiences that leaders in my network were having. The top two challenges that came out on the top of their list was dealing with ambiguity and uncertainty and coming to the realization that they would have to make some difficult business decisions. Ones that would impact the lives and careers of their employees. As the weeks and months have gone by, it seems these two primary challenges remain for leaders.

So how do you lead when your world has been upended?

I believe that the way forward is to focus on leadership accountability. It is and will always be what sets the truly great leaders apart from the rest.

There is a dual response that will be required: individual and organizational.

At a personal level, you will need to embrace leadership accountability. This means you will need to step up and demonstrate personal ownership for your leadership role. You will need to be deliberate and decisive in the way that you lead. You will also need to bring a sense of urgency, courage and resilience in how you lead every single day.

But there is more. You will need to go beyond yourself to hold others accountable for being leaders. You will need to build truly accountable teams. You will also need to play a role within and across your organization to build a strong leadership culture and community of leaders.

At an organizational level, you must work to make leadership accountability a priority within a company. Senior leaders will need to define clear leadership expectations for all their leaders. They must also do the hard work to sustain their momentum in building a both strong leadership culture.

Finally, they must invest the time to help leaders create a sense of community across the entire organization.

Vince Molinaro, Ph.D., (Oakville, Ontario, Canada) is Founder and CEO of Leadership Contract Inc and is an author, speaker, leadership adviser and researcher. His most recent book, Accountable Leaders: Inspire a Culture Where Everyone Steps Up, Takes Ownership, and Delivers Results, came out in June. Molinaro has helped create one of the leading brands in the Human Capital industry, working in several key sectors including energy, pharmaceutical, professional services, technology, financial services, and the public sector. He is the author of four successful books, Leadership Solutions, The Leadership Gap, The Leadership Contract, and the Leadership Contract Field Guide. His work has been featured in many of the world’s leading business publications, including The Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Inc. Magazine, and The World EconomicForum.

How To Ask Remarkably Better Questions To Encourage Great Ideas

noreply@blogger.com (Dan McCarthy) — Thu, 20 Aug 2020 12:00:00 +0000

Guest post from Karin Hurt and David Dye:

You’ve asked your team for their great ideas.

You have an open door.

You’re also committed to MBWA (or in today’s pandemic-constrained world, Management By Clicking Around- MBCA). But if you’re like most leaders in our Courageous Cultures research, you’re still not getting all the great ideas you need.

Why?

In our research conducted in conjunction with the University of North Colorado, despite all the asking leaders think they’re doing, 49% of employees said the reason they’re not sharing their great ideas (to improve the customer experience, efficiency in a process, or employee engagement) is because no one asked.

Laura’s story

Laura, an IT Vice President at a mid-sized energy company, was excited to spend some time with her teams, hold a few skip level meetings, and see their new system in action. Her team had been holding user-experience calls every week and all the feedback had been positive. She hoped to collect some great stories to share with the CEO about how the new system was making things easier for the customer service reps and, ultimately, for their customers.

Before her first meeting, Laura sat down with a customer service rep and asked the rep “Can you show me your favorite part of the new system?”

The rep attempted to pull up the first screen. But after five minutes they were both still staring at an hourglass and waiting for the page to load. The rep looked apologetically at Laura and said, “I’m sorry to waste your time. This usually takes a while.”

Laura’s jaw dropped. The vendor had promised the new system would be seven times faster – not slower. “Can you show me another page,” she asked.

She sat through another slow load time. She turned to the rep, “Is it always like this?”

“Oh, yeah. We’re used to it at this point, but the system has some other nice features.”

Laura thanked the rep and hurried to a quiet conference room where she could call her team. After ten minutes of testing, they realized that the center’s server didn’t have the capacity to run the new system. Hundreds of reps had been suffering through a ridiculous wait that wasted their time and their customers’ time.

Week after week, supervisors had sat on user experience calls, fully aware of the issue, and hadn’t said a word. No one had ever raised the issue.

After replacing the server and ensuring everything was back on track, Laura went back to the reps on the user experience team and asked why they had never brought this up.

“Well, no one ever asked us about the speed. Our boss told us that we needed to be “change agents” and role model excitement for the new system – no matter what. Under no circumstances were we to be negative. So, we just smiled, sucked it up, and dealt with it.”

Laura’s situation is far too common. The “no one asked” reply might be frustrating, but it is one of the most frequent obstacles to a Courageous Culture.

How to Ask Your Team For Their Great Ideas

If you want your teams great ideas, you need to do more than ask questions. That helps, but it’s not just that you ask. In Courageous Cultures, leaders ask regularly and skillfully. You ask in ways that draw out people’s best thinking, new ideas, and customer-focused solutions. Everyone knows that when you ask, you sincerely want to know and are committed to taking action on what you learn. Three qualities distinguish how leaders ask questions in a Courageous Culture: they are intentional, vulnerable, and action-focused.

Intentional

Cultivating Curiosity starts with intention: you must ask—a lot. Your leaders have to ask more than might seem reasonable. This kind of asking goes way beyond an open-door policy. In fact, most open-door policies are a passive leadership cop-out. “I’m approachable. I have an open door,” puts the responsibility on the team, not the leader. That’s a problem because most of the ideas you need will never walk through your open door. There’s too much friction to overcome: time away from their normal work, not knowing how their manager will respond, or not even realizing they have an idea to share.

Vulnerable

Have you ever watched a leader ask for feedback and then defensively justify their decisions and shoot down objections? When you ask questions that assume something needs to improve, you are more likely to get an honest response.

“What’s one thing that’s ticking off our customers?”

“What’s one policy driving everyone crazy?”

Action-Focused

We’ve sat through strategic planning sessions and focus groups where leaders asked questions and everyone in the room knew that the answers didn’t matter. Sometimes, even when the leaders had good intentions, they lacked the ability or willingness to act on what they heard.

Your employees need to know that you will act on what you learn. Action takes many forms. It might be that you implement the idea, that the feedback informs your decision, that you take it all in and then respond with next steps, or maybe it’s simply releasing the team to take action on their ideas.

Karin Hurt and David Dye help leaders achieve breakthrough results without losing their

soul. They’re the founders of Let’s Grow Leaders, an international leadership development and training firm. They're the award-winning authors of Courageous Cultures: How to Build Teams of Micro-Innovators, Problem Solvers, and Customer Advocates and Winning Well: A Manager’s Guide to Getting Results Without Losing Your Soul. Karin is a top leadership consultant and CEO of Let’s Grow Leaders. A former Verizon Wireless executive, she was named to Inc. Magazine’s list of great leadership speakers. David Dye is a former executive, elected official, and president of Let's Grow Leaders. Karin and David are committed to their philanthropic initiative, Winning Wells - building clean water wells for the people of Cambodia.

The Call of “Not Knowing”– How Uncertainty is Still the Test of Leadership

noreply@blogger.com (Dan McCarthy) — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 12:00:00 +0000

Guest post by Randall P. White:

American leaders are rising to the occasion.

You just have to look a little deeper. There have been great examples of leadership in our multiple crises of the moment.

Mayors, governors, even some sheriffs and police officers, are showing how it’s done. People who are otherwise obscure on the national scene are now showing up in news feeds and quenching a yearning for sanity, direction and confidence.

Such as? Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta relating to us as a parent and an executive, saying enough is enough and here are things we’re doing about it. Sheriff Chris Swanson in Michigan who “protected and served” protesters, by joining their march. Dr. Anthony Fauci laying out both what he knows and what he doesn’t know. Even without a definitive answer, we know he has a process based on data and rationality with a goal of public safety and avoiding death.

In all of this, it’s not about being a better person. It’s about knowing how to be a conduit for solutions—and creating a safe space to listen to ideas and try the best one’s out—searching for viable solutions in an uncertain world.

Crisis leadership is a crucible and it’s natural for us to be inspired by what it can produce.

We are seeing that leadership is a calling and it’s often more geeky than macho and certainly not authoritarian. Well-developed leaders are piqued by “not knowing” and motivated by the challenge to find out. They enjoy learning and they don’t mind mistakes as long as the mistakes are the kind where we learn and grow and ultimately leapfrog us forward to a viable solution.

Then there are leaders who really are geeks: Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk. They’re lucky to have more of a sandbox than a crucible. Gates, Dorsey and Musk are like brainy action figures of leadership. Fascinating and fun to watch. Who doesn’t like seeing a reusable rocket back its way down to a landing pad for the first time?

Yet, Bottoms, Fauci and Swanson are a little more compelling right now, by being less preordained. Not nationally known. Less expected. And more attainable examples of leaders. Each rose to the occasion. Each has to rally followership—but they are believable and approachable and so, they are relatable in how they approach seemingly impossible situations in an ever-increasing complex environment of crisis atop crisis.

Real leaders, regardless how they come packaged–gender, ethnicity, nationality– aren’t afraid of what they don’t know. They run toward the danger and the unknown so that their people are energized to solve important problems, whether it’s racism in a police department or landing a first stage rocket on a stationary platform at sea. Each is very difficult.

They’re the people who come forward in a crisis that grab our imagination, like Churchill or Franklin Delano Roosevelt rose to their wholly unknown occasions during World War II.

In contrast to the current president they are not caught up in themselves. They show up for the followers, knowing that they have a calling to represent the best of the followers and to help them be successful by creating a space where they can try their best to solve the problems at hand.

So we see in our tumult that leaders are okay with being uncertain. That’s what they signed on for. Leadership has always been about bringing people through “not knowing.”

Not knowing we’d be where we ended up six months later, I wrote a new chapter to Relax, It’s Only Uncertainty in September thinking it was time to re-release the title, after 19 years.

My now-retired colleague Philip Hodgson and I authored Relax as a field guide for leadership–the culmination of a decade studying how people manage ambiguity and its attendant uncertainty. This work also resulted in The Ambiguity Architect, a 360 to assess a person’s ability to tolerate or master uncertainty. The instrument has consistently suggested that high performers do well on this scale. And our experience suggests that dealing with uncertainty successfully can be learned and improved.

The basic lessons of Relax, first published as Y2K faded into the rear-view mirror, remain relevant and are taught in global business schools’ leadership curriculum.

They’re also demonstrated by our public sector rising stars.

With Covid-19 and mass civil disobedience we see leaders calling on traits like “being motivated by mysteries,” future scanning, simplifying and enthusiasm (to name half of the book’s eight Enablers for managing uncertainty).

We can observe this in new leaders to the fore like Bottoms, Fauci, and Swanson. They break complex, nuanced and sometimes abstract situations into simple statements we all can share: citizens don’t trust authority, we can’t overwhelm our health care system, and the chaos needs to stop for everyone.

As a business professor, I have to ask how can business leaders learn as we watch these ascending leaders in society? Chaos, ambiguity and uncertainty bring opportunity for good leaders to not only emerge, but also invent new solutions, new competitive advantages. And a better workplace, in which learning is constant, inclusion is an advantage and imagination is allowed to thrive.

Randall P. White, PhD., is a social psychologist, executive coach and managing partner of the Executive Development Group. He is Co-head of Leadership at HEC Paris and author of Relax, It’s Only Uncertainty.