I spend a lot of time helping leaders with succession planning – essentially, helping them develop other leaders. What’s interesting is what happens just before the ‘developing’ begins.

Truth is, leaders aren’t developed from scratch. What happens instead is that someone is first recognized as a potential leader – then the development begins.

So what is it that leaders look for in those they think might have the potential for leadership? How are future leaders recognized? By a lot of things, obviously, many of them idiosyncratic to the corporate environment within which they will work.

However, when I help senior executives make this decision, one thing comes up frequently: How the leadership candidate conducts themselves in group situations – and specifically, how they contribute to group discussions.

There are three phrases in particular, variants of which I hear remarked upon time and again when they’re used appropriately and wisely in group and team situations:

1. I have nothing to add. You know the person who simply has to contribute to every single item under discussion, irrespective of whether or not they have anything of note to contribute? Don’t be that person.

Doing so shows only fear (that you might be outshone by someone else if you don’t speak to every point) or bumptiousness (you believe you actually do know something about everything under discussion, however esoteric).

Be confident in your own potential leadership abilities to simply state you have nothing to add when, um, you have nothing to add.

2. I don’t understand what you mean by… Don’t want to seem stupid in front of colleagues? Fearful that if you don’t know the meaning of every acronym thrown around that you’ll be dismissed as not ‘with it’? Get to the back of the succession line.

Potential leaders talk like six year olds when necessary. “I’ve never heard that phrase in this context before – could you help me understand what you mean by it?” won’t get you laughed at (unless you work with jerks, in which case, you have deeper problems) – it’ll get you recognized as genuine and trustworthy.

3. I recommend that we… There’s a type of team member who will avoid making any statement that involves some risk on their part. Whether it’s being asked to express an opinion or make a recommendation, they’ll wiggle like a trapped squirrel rather than be definite about their own views.

This usually comes out of a fear of being wrong (sometimes its genuine shyness, but that’s rarer than you’d think), and people who are afraid of ever being wrong don’t make good leaders.

I don’t suggest that you start throwing around your opinions on every matter under the sun (see point 1 above), but if you want to be considered for future leadership, I do recommend you fully think through those issues in which you are involved, and make your recommendations clearly and without vacillation (opinions can come later – share them if and when you’re asked).

Want your leadership potential to be recognized? Try using these three phrases – or whatever version of them you’re comfortable with – next time you’re working in a group or team.

Download a free chapter from the author’s book, “The Synergist: How to Lead Your Team to Predictable Success” which provides a comprehensive model for developing yourself or others as an exceptional, world class leader.

Every good leader possesses a heightened sense of awareness – an ability to read situations in which they find themselves, and act accordingly.

Great leaders take this one step further. They are not only aware, they are also self-aware. They know much about themselves. Perhaps not everything (who of us knows ourselves entirely?), but more than most.

Driven by innate curiosity, passion and a desire to improve what they do you, can also be sure that a truly committed leader knows more about themselves today than they did a year ago.

The range of things about which a leader can develop self-awareness is of course enormous: Temper, resilience, intellectual and cultural blind-spots, risk profile…these and many more are both important and useful to know about – and also form a lifetime’s study. But if you want to start building your self-awareness in areas that will yield immediate (positive) results in how you lead, start with these three:

Do you typically undershoot or overshoot? Watch a golfer have a bad day on the putting green and you’ll notice one thing: they’ll tend to be chronically short with their putts, or persistently too long.

The single most immediate area for self-awareness improvement I see in most leaders is to gain a clear understanding of how they set goals (formally and informally). Again and again I work with leaders unaware that they are consistently playing small ball (setting goals that are way too conservative given their talents), or forever over-reaching (setting goals they won’t achieve, causing disappointment for themselves and exhaustion in their team).

You can perform a self-analysis by using this routine: Grab a legal pad, write out the last five or six leadership goals you set yourself, and jot down whether or not you undershot or overshot. See if you can decipher a pattern. Not sure? Ask colleagues. Still not sure? Keep a running log for a month or two.

Once you know which is your tendency, the key of course is to re-calibrate your goal-setting: Set your goals higher, step by step, if you’re undershooting; lower them, little by little if you’re consistently over-shooting.

Once you’ve hit your sweet spot, and are consistently hitting near or at the goals you set, you will of course want to start edging those goals upward. Nothing wrong with that – pushing goals based on a record of consistent success is a good thing.

Is your tendency to analyze, fix or delegate? The second area I see leaders gain the biggest advantage from understanding is in knowing how they respond when things go wrong.

Broadly, there are three possible responses: analyze what just happened; ‘just fix it’; delegate responsibility for fixing it to someone else. (These broadly map to the Processor, Operator and Visionary styles of leadership, respectively.)

Try the same exercise as before: take a yellow pad, list out the last five or six things that have gone wrong on your watch, and jot down what you did in response. If in most cases you responded with a mixture of all three possible responses (some analysis, some direction and some delegation) then all is well. If you consistently responded by going straight to one option (analyze, fix or delegate), then you have a challenge ahead – you’re taking a knee-jerk, and hence blinkered, approach to problem-solving.

Try slowing up the time you take to respond when faced with decisions like this. Force yourself to consider all three options: Do I need more information here before making a decision about what to do?; Do I need to intervene here directly?; Is there someone else who could fix this better and quicker than I?

Do you usually say yes or no? This last one is easy to analyze, but just as profound: do you consistently say ‘Yes’ to everything that comes your way, causing you to over-commit and under-deliver; or do you consistently say ‘No’, building a reputation as a stick-in-the-mud and missing opportunities to innovate?

You don’t need the yellow pad this time – just go ask folks who know you. If you have a tendency toward one or t’other, believe me, they’ll know.

The answer? Well, sometimes the answer even to a leadership challenge is a no-brainer. As one of my earliest mentors said to me when I explained a behavioral problem I was having: ‘Just stop that. Now.’

If you enjoyed this article you might benefit from downloading a free chapter from the author’s book “The Synergist: How to Lead Your Team to Predictable Success” which provides a comprehensive model for developing leadership self-awareness.

Below the fold, it’s wall to wall Julie Wilson. You’ll understand when you get there.

More later!

Say ‘Hello’  Meet our new Head of Coaching, Julie Wilson I’m delighted to announce that on June 15th, Julie Wilson takes up the position of Head of Coaching here at Predictable Success. You can read more about Julie here, and listen to an interview with her here. For reasons that become clear early in the interview, this is a particularly challenging and exciting appointment for both of us. Read about Julie here, & listen to my interview with her here.

Can we help? How to know if coaching is right for you Coaching individual leaders and executive teams constitutes about one third of all that we do here at Predictable Success. Now, with the appointment of Julie Wilson as Head of Coaching, our coaching capacity has increased by 50% – meaning that if you think coaching might be right for you, we’d like to talk. Read here to see if coaching might be right for you and/or your team.

Team dynamics are complicated, and only a charlatan would claim to be able to diagnose the underlying causes of a team’s dysfunction instantaneously.

One exception stands out, however. It’s a cause of team dysfunction I’ve seen in practice so often that not only is it instantly recognizable, I’ve given it a name: The Time Warp.

Here’s how it works: Most groups and teams – certainly high performing ones – are able, when in session, to easily and regularly shift their time horizon when needed.

So, for this agenda item there may be a need to look back and perform a brief autopsy – to ask ‘what?‘ and ‘why?‘ and ‘how?‘; for the next item, the team may be required to peer into the future, to brainstorm, or estimate, or project not-yet-realized events and outcomes; and for a third issue, the team may find itself in the here-and-now, discussing current activities and present-day challenges. Some topics may involve the team in switching back and forth between two, or even all three, time horizons – considering in turn and as needed, the past, present and future.

Not so for a team trapped in The Time Warp. Such teams are perennially stuck in one time zone, rarely if ever breaking free of it, and rapidly retreating back to their ‘comfort’ time zone on the few occasions when they do.

Here are the three types of Time Warped team – recognize any?:

1. The Bickering Undertakers. Teams who get stuck in the past usually do so because of an unrelenting need to find and apportion blame.

Crippled by passive-aggressive office politics and/or personal agendas, bogged down by unending autopsies of recent and not-so-recent mishaps, dropped balls and outright catastrophes, this team can’t dwell on anything current or future for five minutes without someone turning the dial back to the past.

“Huh. Remember the last time we tried that?“, says George when a new idea is proposed (accompanied of course by a pantomimed eye-roll). Cue a return to a dead-horse discussion of a past screw-up that already had the lifeblood hammered out of it many meetings ago.

“I’m not surprised the results are poor, given the way we set this up in the first place” says Juanita during a discussion of a current marketing initiative (while looking pointedly at Dave, making clear where she believes the problem originated). Viola! – the team is dragged back to yet another go-round of an already done-to-death debate about the parameters of the initiative, and away from a here-and-now consideration of its actual results.

2. The Grind-it-out Tacticians. Being relentlessly stuck in the present is usually a result of a misbalance in the team profile – specifically, having too many Operators and Processors, and no (or not enough) Synergists and Visionaries.

This results in a highly data-driven and/or action-oriented team – one that is overly focussed on real-time execution at the expense of being able to either learn from the past, or to prepare with adequate flexibility for the future.

You’ll know you’re in such a team when the focus from the first minute of every meeting is to get to the action points and finish; when any attempt to learn lessons from past results or events is universally dismissed as ‘paralysis by analysis’, or if attempts to blue-sky or brainstorm around possible future scenarios is met with eyebrow-raising and looks of condescension.

3. The Blue-sky Optimists. Sometimes, teams get stuck in the future – and the results are just what you might expect.

Addicted to might-be’s, could-be’s and shiny new ideas, this team produces a seemingly endless pipeline of projections, proposals and scenarios, all compelling in their way – and some of them even implementable.

Trouble is, the team’s energy, momentum and enthusiasm is so fully consumed by the kinetic fireworks display of brainstorming and innovating that there’s nothing left to focus on present-day implementation – let alone calm, considered review of the past.

While pretty to watch at the outset – and invigorating to be involved with, at least for while – this lack of ability to produce actual results in the here-and-now means that Blue-sky optimists tend to be the most short-lived of the three Time Warped teams.

Did you recognize any of these teams? Think you might be in one?

Fixing dysfunctional teams isn’t easy (believe me – I do it for a living), but for a Time Warped team, there is a simple, mechanical practice you can begin immediately which will at least give you a fighting chance of getting out:

Set a time limit for discussion in any one time zone: 5 minutes, 10 minutes, an hour – whatever seems reasonable. Experiment. Tweak the times to reflect reality (some topics will need the team to spend quite a while in the past, another may need more emphasis on the current or future state).

This won’t fix your Time Warp problem on its own – but it will provide some training wheels for you to make a start.

If you enjoyed this article you might benefit from downloading a free chapter from the author’s book “The Synergist: How to Lead Your Team to Predictable Success” which provides a comprehensive model for realigning dysfunctional teams.