SEE Connect-The Blog of Soaring Eagle Enterprises

2011-09-09T10:44:00.001-07:00

How CEOs Do Engagement-From Cheife Executive.net

2011-04-28T09:40:00.000-07:00

Note: This was published on Chief Executive.net and written by Susan Scott. We could not link to the original article so the contents are included below:

Step one, stop talking about inclusion and engagement and start doing it. Step two, conduct "beach ball meetings"(instructions follow). Step three, look beyond hard-wired assumptions and, yes, listen.

By Susan Scott

In early February, Engadget published an internal memo written by Nokia's CEO, Stephen Elop, in which he likens the once-dominant Finnish phone manufacturer to the oil worker trapped by a fire in the dead of night on the burning platform of a rig in the North Sea. He had seconds to consider the 150 foot drop into the ocean, the knowledge that there was floating debris and burning oil on the surface of the water, and that if the fall didn't kill him, he would die of exposure in 15 minutes. His only option for survival was to ignore what he had been told never to do and jump into the icy waters of the North Sea, a situation in which Nokia now finds itself after having made a series of poor decisions. Elop conveyed it this way:

"There is intense heat coming from our competitors, more rapidly than we ever expected.

The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don't have a product that is close to their experience. They changed the game, and today, Apple owns the high-end range.

Android came on the scene just over 2 years ago, and this week they took our leadership position in smartphone volumes. Unbelievable.

Our competitors aren't taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem.

How did we get to this point? Why did we fall behind when the world around us evolved? This is what I have been trying to understand. I believe at least some of it has been due to our attitude inside Nokia. We poured gasoline on our own burning platform. I believe we have lacked accountability and leadership to align and direct the company through these disruptive times. We had a series of misses. We haven't been delivering innovation fast enough. We're not collaborating internally.

Nokia, our platform is burning."

Pretty powerful. The candor with which Elop delivered his message is the reason his memo had Twitter, Facebook, and the blogging community abuzz, and his employees on the edge of their seats. But while the oil worker survived, Nokia may not be so fortunate. In what may prove to be a final strategic blunder, Elop, a former Microsoft executive, announced later that week that the key to Nokia's viability and success is to use Windows Phone 7 for its smartphone. At their joint announcement, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, said, "I am excited about this partnership with Nokia. Ecosystems thrive when fueled by speed, innovation and scale."

Tru dat. Unfortunately, with apologies to my friends in both companies, apart from Xbox Kinect, neither Microsoft nor Nokia has demonstrated speed, innovation and scale for at least a decade, so it's no surprise that Nokia's employees, customers, and shareholders expressed dismay at this decision; in fact, many employees took the next day off, as PTO, in protest.

With so many shocked employees, partners — think Intel — and shareholders, Nokia provides a current example of a company that has arrived, gradually, then suddenly, at the edge of disaster with a workforce of emphatically unengaged employees, one failed, one missing conversation at a time. It's unlikely that things will go smoothly in the execution department.

Elop may be brilliant and his decision may be the right one. I sincerely hope it is. But if he fails to re-engage his unengaged workforce, he is in no danger of a smooth implementation because he cannot mandate accountability, innovation or collaboration. No one can. These are private, non-negotiable choices individuals make about how to live their lives, about how much of themselves to bring in the door each day.

We all know that if employees aren't engaged, companies will suffer. Good people will quit, defect, disappear; or worse, they'll show up every day — in body — but only bringing a tiny piece of themselves in spirit. They'll become disgruntled, disenchanted, disillusioned, which profoundly affects the bottom line. Yet, despite all the hype about what companies are doing to promote employee inclusion and engagement (these go hand-in-hand), many still see this as a soft topic, nice to do, something that makes people feel good. Of course, employee inclusion and engagement makes people feel good. AND increases productivity and builds revenue.

I think of it this way: Inclusion + engagement = execution muscle ...plus happy people, but as far as I'm concerned, without execution muscle, you might as well hang it up. Let's define terms.

Employee inclusion suggests that people of every stripe — gender, age, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, aspiration, disability, position or title and whatever other differences are possible in the human population - feel that they have a place at the table, that they are seen, heard and valued and that, given stellar performance, they have an opportunity to advance. That they do not feel marginalized, "less than", left out, over-looked, invisible, made wrong, taken advantage of, disrespected, ignored or mistreated. At its heart, inclusion is about membership, belonging to a community.

The overriding theme of employee engagement is a heightened emotional connection that an employee feels for his or her organization, that influences him or her to exert greater discretionary effort. And the direct relationship with one's manager is the strongest driver of employee engagement.

Employee engagement and inclusion isn't a cognitive issue. It's an emotional issue. The problem isn't out there. It's in here. We want employees to be engaged and feel included, while we ourselves are detached, distracted, disengaged, focused on our To Do lists and the stock price. We want others to bring that elusive, coveted "discretionary effort" in the door with them every day but we don't have time to engage in the kind of conversations that could enrich our relationships with them.

The fact is, not having those conversations will take longer and cost more in the long term. When you disengage from the world, the world disengages too, in equal measure. It's a two-step, you and the world, you and your organization. Your employees lost interest in you because you lost interest in them. Calling them associates or partners is often window dressing. If you want high levels of employee engagement you must gain the capacity to connect with your employees - at a deep level - or lower your aim. And that connection occurs or fails to occur one conversation at a time. If you're a fan of Angry Birds, the eagle is to Angry Birds what human connectivity is to the relationships central to your success. It gets the job done!

What gets talked about in your company, how it gets talked about and who is invited to the conversation determines what will happen. Or won't happen. Your conversations must be fierce — conversations in which you and others come out from behind yourselves, into your conversations, and make them real. Once an organization crosses the line into "fierce" territory, very little else is required to create a culture of highly engaged, kick-ass employees. Without such conversations, your platform may be smoldering.

This is where it gets personal. In a very real sense, the progress of your organization depends on your progress as an individual now. Want high levels of engagement, cooperation and collaboration throughout your organization? Innovation? Agility? Execution muscle? Look to the conversations you are having. Are they confined to the C Suite? What is your level of candor and that of your direct reports? Are you seeking agreement or do you want the truth? Are you different when your conversations are over?

And what if your company is doing fine? I recently gave a keynote to a company poised to distribute millions in profit sharing, a cause for celebration. Meanwhile, one of the divisions is troubled, unhappy. How much of the CEO's attention does this require, given that his board just gave him an A on his report card?

Let's revisit the oil rig, Piper Alpha.

Investigators traced the cause to a missing component on a condensate pump. The pressure safety valve on pump A was removed for maintenance. Paperwork prohibiting the pump from being used was lost or misplaced. When pump B broke down, pump A was switched on. Gas began to leak, alarms were triggered, and the platform was rocked by a huge explosion. At this stage there were probably only a few casualties, but things were about to get much worse. Despite a mayday call from Piper Alpha, two neighboring rigs did not shut down their operations. Oil continued to be pumped into a communal pipe and towards the stricken rig. You see where this is going. Another enormous explosion rocked Piper Alpha and the rig fell into the sea.

It is likely that the magnitude of the disaster would have been much less had the neighboring rigs shut down immediately. But with the huge losses incurred by shutting down production on an oil rig, it was a case of profit before safety, profit before lives.

What's to be learned? When Madeleine Albright was asked what advice she would give to world leaders. She said, "I would tell them that what matters anywhere, matters everywhere." Better men and women than I have written about the galactic implications. But let's point the telescope at your company. What matters anywhere in your organization, matters everywhere in your organization. Organizations are webs of relationships. Each conversation, each meeting creates a chain reaction, like a Rube Goldberg contraption.

You, all by your lonesome, are having an impressive impact on your world. Your conversations with your assistant affect his self esteem and his impression of what matters to you, which he conveys in every conversation he has with all of the people in your world. Your conversations with peers affect their willingness to collaborate and cooperate with you when they could fake it if they wanted to. They pass on their opinions and experience of you to others in the company. Your conversations with customers, partners, and vendors ultimately win or lose the day.

What to do? Stop talking about inclusion and engagement and start including and engaging! It may help to picture your organization as a huge beach ball.

A Sampling from our Bookstore

2010-12-27T18:36:00.000-08:00

See more selections at: http://www.soaringeagleent.com/bookstore.htm

Monday Mentor-Week 52-Gaps, SWOTs and Segments

2010-12-27T10:05:00.000-08:00

Most managers and leaders are familiar with the common organizational analysis tools of SWOT and Gap but these tools are largely ineffectual when not properly segmented. Using a segmented approach will deliver greater value to these time worn tools.

SWOT is an acronym for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. When performed normally, this type of analysis yields almost cursory and useless results. Typical responses when looking at an organization as a whole include comments about having good people (a strength), lacking suitable space (a weakness), growth of a business in a strong economic market (an opportunity) or the presence of a competitor (a threat). This provides a brief snapshot of where an organization is and what might be on the horizon in very high overview. This approach contains only the singular dimension of flat area.

Gap analysis is even more of a simplistic approach. It is linear and clearly defines where an organization is and where it wants to be. The gap between the then and now represent a self-writing action plan when a company identifies how to move from the now to the future. Like SWOT, it is flat and, unique to gap, it is a single straight line.

Now imagine these analysis tools in three dimensions with depth and breadth added. That is what adding segmentation to these tools will achieve. Starting with SWOT, instead of looking at the organization as a whole, segmentation forces the same analysis except broken down in the key operating areas of the company. First the organization defines the key operating areas and many of those are common to all organizations. Typical ones include human talent, financial, facilities, technology, core products and services and regulatory or legal issues.

For example, the training department at High Stakes Motors wants to begin the strategic planning process for 2008 and rather than beginning with a SWOT analysis of the department, they segment their approach and begin with the people in the department. They determine that there are some core strengths and individuals who could be called strong. They also determine there are some general deficiencies and weaknesses among their staff. They look at opportunities to improve personnel skill levels and cross-train key team members and they identify the threats of organizations that have higher compensation or benefit packages. From this view, the management team for the training department at High Stakes Motors can craft a 2008 plan that capitalizes on their strengths, addresses the weaknesses, captures some opportunities and strategically positions to minimize the threats.

Wash, rinse and repeat for all the major segments of the High Stakes Motors training department for all aspects of their operation including their facilities, the technology used, strategic partnerships, financial structure and core training offering. The end result is a significantly more detailed, more useable and more reliable way of looking at this operation.

Now imagine a Chia pet. One that has been watered and is beginning to grow a bit. That is what we are going to create instead of a linear gap analysis. With the center point of segmented gap being the “where we want to be” mark, the lines out from that point will represent where we are based on the same segments used in the segmented SWOT analysis. So, for the High Stakes Motors training department we have one line to the center for technology, one for human talent, one for core products and services offered, one for customer service level, one for facilities and so forth. Each line begins at a different spot because, as in most organizations, these segments are in different stages and degrees of closeness to the ideal.

The really helpful part of segmented gap analysis is that it allows for the construction of simultaneous action planning and action plans that can be interdependent upon other action plans. So rather than approaching the organization linearly, the organization is viewed in full three dimensions and strategic planning can be built to attack all segments at once.

Is a segmented approach more difficult and time consuming? Absolutely but the results will dramatically improve the ability of an organization to plan effectively for the coming years.

Gap and SWOT analysis have been around for a long time and are great strategic planning tools. Tools and not the end game. A common misconception in strategic planning is that gap and SWOT analysis are a result and not a tool to help achieve a results.

In it’s most simple form, gap analysis is a view of where we are, where we want to be and mapping a process of how to get there. This can be a powerful process when crafting strategic objectives and actions plans. It is also extremely helpful in the honest assessment of where an organization or department is currently performing.

SWOT analysis is a little more in-depth and detailed. It helps identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (thus the SWOT). This too, is very powerful, especially when identifying action plan items.

Effective leaders embrace and use these tools in a collaborative and participatory manner within the overall strategic planning process.

Monday Mentor-Week 50-Decision Making Ownership

2010-12-13T09:30:00.000-08:00

At the end of the day, the decision was yours. Even with collaboration and using systems thinking, you made the call. The decision is part of your leadership record and legacy.

Effective leaders cannot run from their decisions. They cannot blame others. They cannot blame the economy. They cannot hedge or try to escape accountability. It was your decision.

When right on target a decision is a glorious thing. Your hard work paid off and you chose the correct course of action. Everything fell into place nicely and the return was better than anticipated. It is pretty easy to own that type of decision.

The harder decisions to own are the clunkers. The ones that don’t work out so well or the choice that just did not pan out. Those are hard to swallow and to have your name attached.

Effective leaders own decisions that are both good and bad. With good decisions, the leader will share credit with the team, those that provided valuable input and any stakeholder that gave clues about outcomes or consequences.

When the decision is a poor choice you are on your own buddy. Can’t blame the data or any person. It is all you.

With bad decisions, there are a couple of additional decision points that come into play. The poorest choice is to defend and continue to cheerlead for a bad decision. This is simply digging a bigger hole and drawing more attention and potentially, criticism to a bad decision.

The effective leader must admit the mistake and work diligently to fix it. Simply say that you made a mistake, you are sorry and you will get it fixed. Use plenty of personal pronouns to make sure the ownership of the decision is clear. You may not get beaten up for a bad decision but you will certainly loose credibility if you try to run from it.

When looking at a poor decision, first check and see if you gave yourself enough time to analyze and diagnose the situation and all of the potential impacts. This is the most common reason for poor decisions. Then, retrace the system thinking and seek a different and wider scope of input that focuses on why the first decision failed and that the issue still exists. Never compound a poor decision with a rash or arbitrary fix that is simply designed to save face.

Monday Mentor-Week 49-Critical Objectives

2010-12-06T09:38:00.000-08:00

Goals. Targets. Objectives. Milestones. All the same thing with a little different nomenclature.

Critical objectives are those measurable, meaningful, comparable and important benchmarks that track progress towards the vision of an organization or unit within a company. These objectives are usually expressed in annual terms but can be created for less than a year in start-ups and environments requiring significant turnaround.

This is another part of strategic planning in which minimizing is better. Five to seven objectives per year is the top end. More will convolute your ability to achieve real ownership and buy-in into these objectives. Our teams must be able to remember them and lock onto them as the year progresses.

Each objective must incorporate a significant business segment. Most commonly, strategic planning will incorporate objectives related to revenue or sales volume, customer service quality, productivity, quality of work or product, team member satisfaction and expense control. These major headings represent not only important areas of organizational success but also those areas in which each individual team member can contribute and participate. They are also the categories that can be easily measured and reported.

The best format of a strategic objective includes a comparable element to a prior year or prior period. By example this would look like “Improve Customer Satisfaction by 4% Over 2010.” This example also includes the measurability required in good strategic planning. By contrast, the example of “Improve Customer Service” meets neither of these requirements. Measurability and comparability are important to demonstrate progress and to connect to important business elements.

The incorporation of comparability also assists the effective leader in promoting improvement and growth. From year to year or period to period, the leader is able to raise the bar in some or all strategic areas of performance. The one required element in this area is that the growth factor cannot be some arbitrary number. The best tool for this is a standard progression analysis that looks at change and improvement from year to year and uses that as the improvement factor for the coming period. Another tool for that purpose is to diagnose capacity for maximum performance and factor that over a three to five year period.

Two final notes on critical objectives include the ability to connect each objective back to a line or element in the company vision and mission. This connectivity will insure that proper progress in being made towards the ultimate target described in the vision. The other final element is the reminder to make sure that all of the critical objectives can be impacted by team members. For example, team members can contribute to revenue but have very little impact on net income.

Monday Mentor-Week 48-Consistent and Fair in Tone Setting

2010-11-29T07:33:00.000-08:00

One of the challenges associated with tone setting is the need to be consistent and apply tone setting fairly and equitably. It is painfully easy to be upbeat, build relationships and greet those team members that have always been nice to us. For the team members that have been supportive, complimentary in 360 degree reviews and volunteer for more work, tone setting is a walk in the park. Just like talking with treasured friends and family.

Where many leaders find challenge is to provide the same amount of tone setting behaviors and skills to those team members that may be or may have been a little problematic. Those team members that question, challenge or irritate are a tough crowd and it is easy to justify why you would not tone set with them. After all, they are a bitter and nasty bunch.

Another challenge to consistency are the team members that rebuff tone setting. The ones that do not open up when trying to build a relationship or the ones that may even tell you “it is none of your business.” In reality, it is these two populations that need your tone setting more than any other. These people are screaming to be engaged by the leader. Here, your resilience will play a big part in continuing to reach out and try to build rapport.

Think about the impact of your eyes for a moment. Too frequently our eyes point out what is different about others and not what we may have in common. Look at the common little pockets of team members in a parking lot or break room and you will see that groups often form around age, gender or ethnicity. The effective leader has to ignore the messages of the eyes and reach out to all populations, regardless of difficulties, and build an excellent tone base with each of them.

Monday Mentor-Week 47-Thanksgiving for Leaders

2010-11-22T08:46:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving offers a unique time of the year to offer thanks and appreciation for those around us and the good fortune in which we have been bestowed. The usual thankfulness involves family, friends, health, security and the availability of four days of football games.

In addition to the standard items, people in leadership positions need to be thankful for more.

Team Members

The jobs of supervisors, managers and executives are uniquely dependent upon the ability and effort of those that they lead. No matter what kind of relationship you may have with your boss, it is your team members that keep you in your job day in and day out. When they perform well, you are successful. When you fail to keep their support, you will fail.

Take a few moments this week and sincerely thank and appreciate the efforts of your team members.

Customers

Both internal and external customers drive the business need for your existence. Without them, there is no need for your department or your organization. Yes, they can sometimes be demanding, problematic and downright difficult but you need them desperately. Your customers are the life's blood of the company.

Far too often we assume that customers have no choice in their decisions or are locked in with us. Even internal customers can choose to outsource the service that your group provides.

Find a way to communicate your appreciation to your customers this week.

Challenges and Opportunities

Leadership is challenging. Problems roll up to your level. Tough decisions need to be made and guidance needs to be provided. You have to craft direction, coach team members and build strategic relationships with difficult people.

Thank goodness for all of those things. It is these types of challenges that define your value to the organization and hone your skills. If leadership were easy, anyone could do it.

Support Systems

All of us have support systems in which we rely upon nearly every day. Spouses, friends, mentors and even our pets.

When times are tough, they hear us out. They encourage us and sometimes challenge us to continue to meet the rigors of our jobs. They keep us going.

In the most sincere manner available, thank them.

Soaring Eagle Enterprises Promotional Video

2010-11-15T20:42:00.000-08:00

Monday Mentor-Week 46-Collaborative Decision Making

2010-11-15T15:52:00.000-08:00

Two great leadership fears are associated with collaborative decision making. Like most fears, they are baseless and concocted by the enemy that resides on your shoulders.

Some people in leadership positions fear using a collaborative approach in decision making because it would make them look weak and indecisive. Nothing could be further from the truth. First, the leader always retains the right and responsibility to make the final decision and veto the input from others. This is not always prudent but no one removes a leader’s ability to make the final choice after seeking input and collaboration.

The other fear that leaders often connect to collaborative decision making is that through seeking input the decision will become a popularity contest and the pig with the best lipstick will win. Again this is a baseless fear and collaboration is not about incorporating democracy and voting to an issue, it is simply about seeking input.

To obtain collaboration, the leader must create an environment in which team members and peer leaders feel safe and that their opinion is valued. There can be no besmirching, belittling or dismissing of input. All input, even those contrary to your opinion must be appreciated and valued. This is not about changing your mind but about selecting the best course of action and decision for the organization.

Many traditional methods of collaboration don’t work. Brain storming and the unwarned introduction of a topic yield very little results. To get someone’s thoughts on a subject, process or decision point, effective leaders have found that a private, direct and previewed approach work best. The leader will announce that one of the subjects during one-on-one meetings will be a particular decision or direction element and that gives team members or peers a chance to think about it and process their own conclusions. The privacy element also reduces any team member’s trepidation about public comment or fear of embarrassment.

Collaboration also implies that the leader will be open to suggestions and different perspectives. If that is not the case, future attempts at collaboration and seeking input will be hampered.

A collaborative approach to decision making is more time consuming and requires more effort but it yields significantly better decisions when done well. Ownership of the decision is enhanced through feedback and input. Unintended consequences are uncovered. Different perspectives are considered. New ideas are found.

Monday Mentor-Week 45-Object Oriented Innovation

2010-11-08T08:08:00.000-08:00

An excellent resource in innovation and improvement is the use of Object Oriented Innovation. OOI is a very simple approach that yields the highest success in innovation and creativity.

The starting point of OOI is to define the end point. What is the desired outcome? What is the product or process that you need to achieve? What is the end game? Equally important as defining the ending point in which you want to achieve is insuring that the end point has value and is valued by the organization. You must connect the end product or process to the core values and mission of the organization. If it fits, you keep going. If it does not fit, you have to look to see if it should be eliminated, discontinued or repackaged in such a way that it will fit.

Without deference to how it is done now or who is involved now, the next phase of OOI is to determine how the end point is achieved. Identify the needed steps to deliver the product, service or project. Again, the challenging point in this step is to ignore how it is currently being done or how it was done before and concentrate on how it needs to be done. The step must include identifying resources needed, labor and time, regulations, laws and other requirements.

Since no leader works in a vacuum, the next step in OOI is to identify the areas of impact. What other departments will have to change the way they do things? Is there an impact on customers and end users? Are there organizational considerations and the egos of other leaders that may be in play? What is the human resource impacts such as changed hours or more or less people? What are the financial considerations? The effective innovation leader must now reconcile these realities without overly compromising the desired outcome and make some good judgments and decisions about the next course of action.

The final OOI step involves converting the identified process steps to action and delivering the desired outcome.

Monday Mentor-Week 44-Ethical Litmus Tests

2010-11-01T10:35:00.000-07:00

There are several ways to tell if you have made good ethical decisions or not. The most simple is a three step test that can be used by individuals for simple decisions or by entire organizations for more far-sweeping decisions.

The first step is the gut check. Sometimes known as the butterfly test or the sleep test, this simply asks whether you can live with the decision comfortably without life interruption. If stomach butterflies, tormented sleep or great anxiety exists, the decision likely has some ethical problems and may not conform with your company’s values. By contrast, if sleep, eating and life are not a problem, your decision was probably ethically correct.

There is one problem with this test because it requires a conscience. With people that have no conscience, personal value set or the ability to shrug away any concern with poor ethical choices, this test will not work effectively. One other challenge related to this ethical test step is that group decisions will often eliminate any guilt associated with the poor ethical choice. The personal reconciliation point is that the other two committee members voted for it so my responsibility is eliminated.

The second ethical litmus test is the authority test. This test asks how you would feel is someone in authority or someone that you hold in high regard would feel about your decision. A boss, your spouse, a trusted friend. How would they react to your choice? What would they say? Would they be supportive or would they question your actions? Would they be proud of you or disappointed in you? Those are the key questions that make this test step work.

Some organizations have actually codified this test step by creating an ethics officer or ethics manager in their company. Usually found in larger companies which also have to deal with a highly regulated environment, these people are the person in authority that adjudges decisions and directions as ethical or not. It is the responsibility of the ethics officer to ask the questions and test decisions against the values of the organization.

The final ethical test is related to media coverage. How would it look if your decision was on the front page of the local newspaper? Could you defend your actions to 60 Minutes without slamming the door on Morley Shafer? Would you have to say “no comment” or could you articulate your position clearly? These questions assume that we would choose more carefully if the media were watching our every move.

There is no perfect way to test for ethical treatment and ethical decision but when the three tests are performed sequentially, it is helpful in staying out of trouble. At the end of the day, ethical decisions are made by ethical people and unethical decisions are made by unethical people.

Monday Mentor Week 43-Non Verbal Communication and Tone

2010-10-25T07:18:00.000-07:00

A great deal has been written about the importance of non-verbal elements in the totality of the communication picture. Ranging between sixty and eighty percent of either message content or message richness, all experts agree that body language, facial expressions and tones account for a big part of the message received.

In addressing tone, a good communicator must understand their environment and situation. During corrective coaching, a leader cannot be overly upbeat or friendly in tone. When having relationship based dialog or during tone setting, you cannot come across in a flat, monotone or disinterested tone. Tone, in communication is an interesting dynamic that is driven by attitude. When the attitude is strong and healthy, a person is more likely to correctly adapt to different tone situations. When attitude is poor, tone adaptations are less likely to occur or, at the least, occur in a well done manner.

The great mirror of tone, and attitude for that matter, is the human face. Very few leaders are truly in tune with how their face looks during communication. Many are unaware of the wrinkled brow, scowl or stares of indifference that they cast on a regular basis. Under stress and with a poor or sinking attitude, managing facial expressions becomes a remote after-thought.

Effective leaders and great communicators make a special point of being aware of and managing their facial expressions. They understand what others see on their face and they actively work to create facial expressions that add to, and not distract from the message. This facial management is an important part of the non-verbal communication package and very important in controlling the tone of any dialog.

A couple of other non-verbal messages to be aware of include crossed arms, hands in pockets and single finger pointing. The crossed arm position, especially prevalent in sitting positions and during colder temperatures, shows a closed and uninterested position. For men more than women, the hands in pants pocket message is very common. When those hands slide in the front pockets it demonstrates a nervousness or disinterested position. Many people show this when standing for introductions or in other uncomfortable situations.

First recognized by the airline industry, the single finger point is a very aggressive piece of body language. Many people report that they feel assaulted or at the least, uncomfortable when others point. And as we all remember from our parents, it is rude. An interesting side note on single finger pointing is that many studies conclude that the aggressive nature of this piece of body language is not limited to pointing at a person but rather is equally aggressive when pointing towards other objects.

We can’t put them in our pockets, cross them, put them around our mouth or point them, so what do we do with our hands and arms. Effective leaders have found great value to engaging their hands and arms as message accentuation tools. Quite simply this means to use your hand and arms to assist in adding emphasis and enthusiasm to the message package. A little hand and arm movement shows you are engaged and believe your message as well.

Monday Mentor-Week 42-Maintaining and Reparing Relationships

2010-10-18T10:16:00.000-07:00

As simple as beginning to build a relationship seems, maintaining a relationship in the working environment becomes tricky and difficult. The first order of business is to insure that the relationship is reciprocal and not one sided. People must not feel, perceive or detect that you are using them or manipulating them in the relationship.

This means that you must provide assistance and openness when required and without strings attached. You must be willing to help, mentor and coach when there is no immediate gain for your or your part of the organization. You must also spend time with the people you have built relationships with and continue to communication and build rapport. Effective relationships also require a healthy dose of forgiveness. The forgiveness of faux pas, the forgives of neglect, the forgiveness of lack of understanding, the forgiveness of neglect and the forgiveness of the lack of reciprocation.

Forgiveness is a funny equation. We all admit we need it for our own mistakes and misspeaks but we tend to be a little stingy in providing it. As openly as we seek forgiveness of others, we must provide it to others.

Repairing
The final element of fully engaging relationship power is the need to repair relationships in the working environment. Repairing relationships that have been strained over time or not tended to because of the demands of our jobs.

Repairing will require a big amount of swallowing your pride and ego to do the right thing. Relationships are about building a long lasting power base and sometimes you have to subordinate your own ego to get this done.

Like in building relationships, this is not about you waiting for others to approach you. This is about you taking the initiative and responsibility for the relationship and reaching out to those in which the relationship has become strained. This will also require you to apologize for something that, in many cases, you have not done wrong. You are apologizing for the strain or apologizing for the miscommunication or apologizing for the neglect. It is the first step in repair and may not always be reciprocated but it is a starting point.

Monday Mentor-Week 41-The Starting Points of Coaching

2010-10-11T15:24:00.000-07:00

Coaching is defined in many ways, terms and contexts. For our purpose, coaching is a stream of communication from the leader to team members for the purpose of maintaining and improving performance.

Often times, coaching is viewed as an athletic function and visions of Bobby Knight, Dean Smith, Tom Osborne or Lou Holtz are summoned. The model provided by the athletic version of coaching is not far off from the business model but there are some distinct differences.

One of the comments that has often been expressed about coaching is the lack of time to devote to this activity. This is a classic symptom of a leader being too involved in doing and not involved in leading. When debunked this comment is really more about a lack of comfort in coaching skills than it is about available time.

Team members who do not receive regular coaching often feel disengaged from the organization and leader. Morale will suffer and in the absence of good coaching, team members will take an active role in defining what is good and bad in the organization. Strong personalities, sometimes for very bad reasons, will rise to an unofficial position of importance and drive team effectiveness. Team members with no coaching will also become fearful, tentative and resentful of the lack of knowing where they stand.

When effective coaching is present, the opposite will occur. Team members are engaged, upbeat, clear in their direction and clear in their understanding of where there performance is at. Team members will develop a much clearer understanding of the organization’s needs and how they fit in the big picture with good coaching. They also will see hope in their own growth.

The core coaching competency is good communication skills. To coach you must be able to communicate. In groups, with individuals, following-up in writing; a leader must be able to express their comments, suggestions, praise and encouragement effectively.

The other core competency in coaching is the need to be a people person. Although this phrase is pretty grossly overused, you must enjoy interacting with team members to be an effective coach. The boss that hides in her office and buries her nose in projects and paper work is often expressing a discomfort with dealing with people and thus avoiding coaching activities.

The journey into effective and excellent coaching will begin with breaking coaching into three separate pieces. The first piece is feedback. Feedback is providing either positive or corrective information to team members about their performance or behavior. This is the most common form of coaching and should represent a big part of a leader’s coaching interactions.

The second tenet of coaching is teaching and mentoring. This is different from feedback in that it takes a more long-term and nurturing approach. Teaching and mentoring is about providing skills to be successful and growing people for maximum results.

The final piece of the coaching puzzle is a catch-all wing that includes decisions to release team members, game planning and protecting team members. For the purpose of simplicity, we will call this operational coaching.

No single part of coaching is more important than another and none are effective without the other. For team success, feedback is needed, mentoring and teaching are needed and the operational elements of coaching are certainly engaged. Equally important and equally distributed from a leadership perspective.

Monday Mentor-Week 40-Avoiding Change for Change's Sake

2010-10-04T15:07:00.000-07:00

New is not automatically better. New is just new.

Trying and testing new methods is absolutely positive and effective leaders must constantly force the issue of challenging the status quo. That does not mean that the leader is blindly committed to new methods.

Some organizations have embraced an innovation only to find that the desired outcome has not been realized. The efficiency and improvement were no where to be found and the ease of implementation has been an oxymoron. In fact, during and after the change, things became much worse but unfortunately, no leader had the courage to raise a stop sign and cease the insanity.

An important part of innovation is to insure that the new method, process or product actually delivers the desired result set. The effective leader must monitor and test all of the assumptions associated with the innovation effort to insure that it is on track. If the results slip, the effective leader must be honest in their assessment and in some cases, stop the innovation.

One sure way to disengage team members and breed a jaded response to change is to narrowly assume that all that is new must be better.

Monday Mentor-Week 39-The Coach as Mentor

2010-09-27T15:45:00.000-07:00

The final role for the coaching leader is that of mentor. Mentoring has a lot of dynamics and sub-competencies and can be the most rewarding of all the coaching related activities.

At it’s core, mentoring is the growing of talent. Growing talent to take your place. Growing talent so you can be more easily promoted. Growing talent to ease your workload and increase team member satisfaction. Growing talent to increase your organizational influence by the promotion and transfer of people you have mentored. Growing talent to create a pool of succession for your organization.

The first mentoring dynamic is finding someone to mentor. This needs to be a collaborative operation. Not everyone you think will be a good successor wants to be mentored. Not everyone who wants to be mentored will be a good candidate for future promotion or advancement. The process needs to be available to all but utilized with only a few at a time. As a rule of thumb, you should only consider directly mentoring two people at any one time. You will have to conduct some courageous conversations with people to both encourage and dissuade participation in mentoring.

The reason that mentoring is done in plural with two people is because stuff happens. People quit. They may not be exactly what you thought they were. You need to have points of comparison and need to have choices when opportunities arise. Placing all of your mentoring stock in one candidate is risky and often backfires.

Identifying mentoring candidates will require you to do a little career counseling. You will need to discover what they want out of this job and their career in whole. What are they looking for and what are their key motivations and satisfaction points. This process is just like hiring for correct fit.

After you have identified a couple of mentoring candidates, the first step is to solidify relationships with them. Discover commonalities, reconcile differences in style and appearances and build bonds on a deeper level. This relationship base will further establish trust and communication comfort which is important in the mentoring process. Get to know the mentoring participants. Let them tell their stories. Know their biography. Both you and the mentored team member must feel good about expression and deeper communication intimacy.

The effective leader now wants to add some quality doses of storytelling. Not of the bedtime variety but the types of stories that reinforce how to be a successful leader. The challenges you faced. Things you have seen. Lessons you have learned. Not related in a I’m-The-Best-Thing-Since-White-Sliced-Bread type of approach but in narrative of lessons and matter-of-fact approach. This is uncomfortable for many leaders but priceless for those being mentored.

After relational and storytelling activities, the leader must begin the process of delegating, empowering and developing the mentoring participants. You must be able to let go of some key tasks, allow the team members to perform them using their techniques and styles and debrief their decisions and performance. Much more about this process in found in the Sheep Breeding Commandment.

Another powerful mentoring tool is job shadowing. This allows mentored participants to gain a feel and firsthand appreciation for higher level jobs and functions. Job shadowing should be done in a programmatic and long –term approach that gives a sustained look at the job.

The other key mentoring piece is to allow mentored team members to act in your behalf and for you at key meetings and during times of your absence. This is an important step of translating their learning from storytelling, delegation and job shadowing into the practical world of acting and performing. During any period when a mentored candidate acts for you, even if it is very brief, a debrief dialog is critical. This dialog is designed to see what went well and what could have been done better. When done in a non-comparing and non-judgmental form, this is a great form of learning for mentored participants.

Mentoring requires a good time commitment. A time commitment that is not always returned in the near term but an investment that will pay dividends to you and your organization for years to come.

Monday Mentor-Week 38-Creativity Dampeners

2010-09-19T16:17:00.000-07:00

Before delving into the leadership role in driving innovation, a few comments and notes about creativity.

Creativity can be stymied in individuals and in organizations in a variety of ways. Among the most common dampeners of creativity is a lack of recognition for ideas. When an idea falls on deaf ears and is not acknowledged or validated in any manner, people will not provide creative solutions. Even worse than ignoring an idea, is if an idea is openly besmirched or ridiculed. When that occurs, ideas and creativity will be greatly diminished in the long term and people will be hesitant to ever participate in creative solutions or suggestions.

Other common dampeners include the proliferation of policy and procedure in a company. When all behaviors are defined by the dreaded P and P, there is little room for creative thought. Add a cumbersome process to revise policy and you will have a great recipe for no creativity.

Hyper rigidity is also a contributor to lack of creativity. When there are rules for the sake of rules and adherence to those rules are more important than achievement of results, creativity is diminished. Creativity is not stimulated through sameness.

A final piece of creative dampening is history. History is a poor indicator and predictor of what may work now. Many people look back and remember how something failed previously as an excuse to not try it again. Your history and your organization’s history should never be used to not attempt something anew. After all, people have changed, the environment has changed and it just might work this time around.

Stimulating creativity requires that an organization consistently reminds itself and the team members in the organization of what is really important. Is quality service more important than clocking in at eight? Is performance more important than rigidity? Is the quality of the end product more important than attendance at the mandatory Monday meeting?

Another creativity stimulant comes from a concept linked in this section. Personal change will tend to drive creative though process and stimulate the mind to seek different paths. Trying a new drive to work, rearranging your office and new working hours all stimulate creative thought. Change some patterns and habits and grow your creative output.

Without venturing into the spiritual or metaphysical realms, there are some other creative stimulants like listening to music (softly, of course), getting fresh air and exercise that are effective as well. One of the most overlooked creative stimulants is the gift of time to think. Supervisors, managers and leaders at all levels are very often consumed by their schedule. Things to do. Meetings. Tasks. None of that provides any time to sit back and sit back and think and be creative. The most effective leaders provide themselves some time to reflect, review and be creative. No interruptions, just thinking and being creative.

Monday Mentor-Week 37-The Courage to Say an Honest "No"

2010-09-13T18:37:00.000-07:00

Yes. Sure. You bet.

The easiest words to say in the English language. Makes sure that you remain popular. People come to you and you become the “go to person” in the organization. You take on all things asked.

Unfortunately, this is also a very self defeating leadership behavior. What happens when you can’t, don’t have the capacity or should not? Do you still say yes or do you deliver a honest no?

In the simplest form, the honest no needs courage when the boss asks you to take on something that you simply do not have the capacity to handle. In your attempt to please, you take on the project, move around other strategically important tasks to satisfy the boss or do a poor job on everything to just get things done. The better approach would be an honest no delivered to the boss with the explanation why. If the boss persists, you need to make the value decisions to move other things around to do a good job on what you were just given.

More complicated no responses are those delivered to team members. It is easy to grant a little time off, allow a deadline to be moved or accommodate other requests. What takes significantly more leadership courage is to say no and deny the requests when needed. It will harm your short term credibility but it will maintain your long term effectiveness and respect.

Monday Mentor-Week 36-Continuous Process Improvement

2010-09-06T18:48:00.000-07:00

Continuous process improvement is the process of insuring that procedures, processes and operational elements are always working at peak efficiency and delivering the highest quality product.

Many organizations have implemented elaborate procedures and established committees to insure that they are always improving their processes. This section will describe a simpler method with equally powerful results.

Big time wrestling, boxing and mixed martial arts all utilize a champion/challenger system. Each of these sports (?) have a champion by weight class or experience level or by endorsing agency. This champion has established himself as the current best in the sport.

In order to continue to be the champion, the current title holder must take on challengers. If the current champion wins, that person remains the champion. If the challenger wins, that person will become the champion and prepare to take on new challengers.

The current way in which you do a thing is the champion. It does not have to be a big thing or it can be a very big thing but it is the champion. An innovative approach to continuous process improvement requires you to test a challenger against the current way that you are doing a piece of your business. If a new way or challenger is better, it becomes the new method. If a new way is not better, you stick with the way you are currently doing it.

The best part of this method is the lack of risk involved in the process. If the challenger is not better, you have not abandoned the existing methods. You have just challenged them. The champion/challenger method also insures that you do not engage in change and innovation for change and innovation’s sake.

Monday Mentor-Week 35-Overusing Reward, Threat and Organizational Power

2010-08-30T16:20:00.000-07:00

Threat power is a form of “if, then” equation. It is the direct or intimated threat that if a team member fails, something bad will happen to them. A little bit of threat power is needed in any leadership dynamic but if overused, can drain the spirit and desire to perform from any team.

The necessary application of threat power is usually reserved for formal disciplinary actions when coaching has not produced a successful turnaround in a team member’s performance. In formal disciplinary action, there is the “if, then” that relates to continued failure could result in more disciplinary action or termination. Beyond this application, threat power serves no good purpose in leadership.

Like threat power, reward power is an “if, then” type of proposition. The only difference is that reward power provides for a positive reward or carrot at the end of a stick upon achieving a desired result. Also like threat power, it is necessary but in small doses.

Two areas of concern for any leader is the ongoing availability of rewards. If rewards dry up, now what? The other area of concern is why people work for and perform for a leader. Is the leader really building loyalty and relationships or simply offering compensation and spiffs on a regular basis. Many times the leader that is over-reliant on reward power is compensating for a lack of true relationships with team members and trying to buy performance.

Organizational or legitimate power is the actual authority granted to a leader based on their position and title. It is where you live in the organizational chart. It is your authority to approve things, initiate action and operate independently. It can also be seen as “do it because I said so.” It is very common in military and paramilitary type organizations which rely on a rigid hierarchy.

Unfortunately, too much emphasis on organizational power will lead to bottlenecked decision making, lack of innovation and failure to take risks. It can also be a contributing factor in sheep breeding and the lack of success associated with that. The use of organizational power can also become territorial and hoarding with people waging turf wars to insure their areas of influence are protected and insulated.

The effective leader should never have to order anyone to do anything or beg anyone to do anything. The effective leader creates a climate and the relationships needed for team members to want to do the work prescribed and direction defined by the leader.

Monday Mentor-Week 34-Feedback from Others

2010-08-12T13:57:00.000-07:00

The third and final source of information related to understanding yourself comes from the feedback of others. This can be in two subsets, formal and informal. Formal feedback from other people includes performance reviews and 360 degree evaluations. Performance reviews are usually not a very good source of self understanding and awareness because they are done infrequently and they are generally not done well.

The formal process of gathering leadership, performance and behavioral information from others is commonly referred to as a 360 degree assessment. It obtains feedback from those you lead, your boss and others, including vendors and customers, in which you exercise influence. The best versions of these instruments contain both quantified and numeric ratings about key leadership indicators but also include a section for anonymous comments. The most helpful information is often found in the comment section under headings that include behaviors to stop, behaviors to begin, things the person does well and things the person could do better.

The one intellectual honesty risk with 360 degree feedback comes from selecting the audience to comment and evaluate. Two errors occur frequently in choosing either people that you know will be very supportive and positive or choosing people that will be very critical. Both populations do not provide an accurate picture of you or your style. Evaluators and comment providers must be a cross section of those who love you and those who do not.

Informal methods of gaining feedback include the highly complex transaction of (gasp) asking people how you are doing. One of the best leadership sources of this information come from those being led. Simply asking how you are doing as a leader, what you could do better and what is working well is a great source of feedback to understand yourself and uncover some important blind spots.

Another great source of the same type of information comes from peers or near peers. Since they have no real vested interest in how you lead, their degree of honesty would be pretty high. This works especially well if you can create a peer mentoring type of relationship where the feedback is shared between both of you.

As with all types of self understanding feedback, this also contains a warning tale or two. The first time out of the gate, many people will not provide you with direct and fully honest information. In fact, your subordinates and peers may sugar coat things or deny that there is anything in you that needs to be changed. They may even openly think you are up to no good in this questioning. It is only through a consistent approach in which you have demonstrated no repercussions that team members will provide you with complete honesty and feedback that you need. You must ask several times across multiple months and show that no one is going to get hurt to get the self management information you want.

The final cautionary tale about direct feedback is the desire that many people have to dismiss the source. In informal feedback, if you hear something you don’t like from someone you don’t like, it is easy to discredit the information. You might say things like “you know Bob, nothing ever pleases him” or “Mary has not had a good thing to say about a boss in ten years.” Unfortunately, even when the source is not valued, some of the feedback is important. Even when wrapped in exaggeration or dislike, important information about you might lay below the surface and underneath some emotion. Focus on the message and not the messenger.

The three ingredients of understanding yourself are what you already know and believe, feedback from personality assessments and profiles and the feedback from others. Armed with this information you are now ready to begin the final step of self awareness and understanding.

Monday Mentor-Week 33-Collaborative Innovation

2010-08-12T13:56:00.000-07:00

Brainstorming does not work.

That’s right. Brainstorming as most people think of it is highly ineffective and does not achieve the level of collaborative input desired. The brainstorming that incorporates twenty or so of your team members and peers with the obligatory facilitator, flip chart pad and colored markers does not work.

There is a pretty large population of people that will not share their ideas, suggestions and thoughts in this type of forum. Some people fear embarrassment, ridicule or even just speaking in front of a group. No matter how comfortable you make the environment, they are going to contribute very little or nothing at all. Worse yet, they may even openly mock the process because of their discomfort and pollute the participation of others. These people have great ideas, they just will not share them in a traditional brainstorming environment.

There is also a population of people that require time to process information and formulate ideas. They do not do well in an environment that rewards near auctioneer speed in conveying thoughts. They want to collect themselves, play around with various scenarios and have time to form something that meets their standards. Brainstorming sessions exclude the great ideas from this group.

Before we visit what processes work to achieve collaboration in innovation, we must examine why collaborative innovation is desirable. If you are an effective leader and have great ideas, why do you need the input from others?

The effective leader is looking for innovation partners and not just innovation participants. Ownership and buy-in are only achieved with participation. You cannot demand buy-in, sell buy-in or purchase buy-in. It is only achieved when others can willing participate in the process. As the leader, you get a team that believes they designed the innovation rather than was victimized by the innovation.

A collaborative approach to innovation also assists the leader in seeing potential unintended consequences of an new approach or change. The different views from your team and the perspectives they represent can be real eye-opening to the leader. They have operational level and daily knowledge that even the most in-tune leader will never know. Quite simply, they know what works and often, what is best for the customer or end user.

There is a short process to obtain collaborative input from your team or others in an innovation process. The first step is to announce the issue or process that you would like input about. As a general rule of thumb, give people a ten to twenty day window of time to think about what you want them to have ideas about.

The second step is to require, yes require, input. That is achieved by sending your team members a note or form with the identified issue or process and requesting that each team member produce three suggestions or ideas for how to perform it better. Establish a deadline and build a follow-up mechanism to insure you receive feedback from each team member or organizational participant. Upon receipt, be sure to thank each team member for the input, no matter the quality.

The next immediate interim step is to reconcile the written comments from your team. There are two areas of awe that occur here. First is the feedback that you will receive from the quietest members of your group. The ones that never speak in a staff meeting or traditional brainstorming session will come up with and articulate some great ideas. The second awe point relates to the degree of commonality. Commonality between your approach and theirs and commonality between their suggestions. Leaders who utilize this method report that out of hundreds of individual ideas, they can be edited down into a dozen or so common responses. Different words but same processes or suggestions.

The final step of this collaborative innovation model is the only public airing and it is a relatively brief one compared to traditional brainstorming. A group meeting is conducted and all the ideas are presented equally. The leader can include his or her suggestions and ideas on equal footing with other input and feedback at this time. With each idea out in the open, the leader or facilitator will begin reconciling ideas by pairing people, then in groups of four, groups of eight and finally the entire group to build ideas and suggestions that represent the entire group. Everyone participates and everyone is represented in this reconciliation. Ideas are formulated, documented and fully vetted. Each of the consolidation steps are time sensitive with short deadline periods to avoid over-pontification by any one group member. The team leader often excuses himself or herself from this process because of the influence they carry among team members.

Collaborative innovation takes a little more time and work but the results and the buy-in of affected stakeholders is dramatically better than dictated ideas and solutions.

Monday Mentor-Week 32-Overuse of Expert Power

2010-08-08T09:44:00.000-07:00

The overuse of expert power is one of the most common challenges among new and emerging leaders and can lead to some serious disconnects with a work team.

Expert power is the technical skills, knowledge and expertise that you have amassed during your career. It is your experience and understanding of how things get done and how they should be done. It is you being an expert in your field. It is also the organizational savvy you have grown to understand during your tenure with your company. It is the who does what to whom and what can and cannot be done within the organizational culture.

As indicated previously, some expertise is needed to preserve credibility with your team and within the organization. You must know the basic functions of what goes on and how it is done but you do not have to know everything. That is why you have team members.

The challenge with new and emerging leaders comes from the fact that most of them are promoted from the ranks in which they will now supervise and manage. They were expert doers so now they will become the leader of doers. It is the promotion of people for technical abilities and success and not based on leadership skills and competencies that cause problems here.

It also is a challenge in smaller environments when the owner, founder or original entrepreneur begins to hire team members.

New and emerging leaders often struggle with the awkwardness of leadership. The communication, tone setting, coaching and decision making needed to be effective is difficult for them so they retreat back to where they were previously successful. Doing things. Things that should be done by team members. After all, they were promoted because they were the best doer. What occurs in this environment is a complete drain of leadership and results will suffer shortly.

The other phenomenon attached to the overuse of expert power is that team members have room to participate or contribute. This will lead directly and quickly to sheep breeding. Why should they make suggestions or innovate, when you have all the answers and expertise? The effective leader must be more concerned with sharing expertise and growing the knowledge base of team members rather than protecting and reinforcing their own expert power.

Monday Mentor-Week 31-Building Relationships with Team Members

2010-07-30T14:48:00.001-07:00

Building appropriate and genuine relationships with team members is also an important skills and competency for leaders. These relationships are built on establishing commonalities, listening effectively, providing respect and knowing a little bit about each team member. These relationships represent the core ingredient in loyalty and the desire for someone to push them in working for you.

When building relationships with team members, remember to spend significantly more time in finding out who they are as compared to telling them who you are. To paraphrase Covey: seek first to understand and then seek understanding. Also be very in-tune with the clues that your team gives you. Look for pictures, bumper stickers or clothing themes that provide a hint about someone’s interests, passions or family composition. Largely, people enjoy talking about their family, their pets, where they are from and in what they are interested. Let them and use that information for future follow-up.

Being an effective leader does not require superhuman memory skills as much as it requires the desire to be interested and the desire to remember team member information. In the pre-proliferation-of-computers era, leaders made index cards that included some key information from relationship building as well as important dates such as work anniversary, promotion date and birthday. That information was reviewed periodically prior to interacting with team members. In the more modern world, many leaders note key information about team members in contact management software and databases for future reference.

One great dividing line of good leaders and a very challenging line for new supervisors is the difference between friendly and friends. Effective leaders bridge the pitfalls related to the appearance of favoritism, clouded judgment and poor perception by being friendly with all their employees but friends with none of them. This is an important distinguishing line that often requires the use of “no, I am sorry I can’t” when responding to an after work drink invitation.

Monday Mentor-Week 30-Leading Others Through Change

2010-07-26T07:10:00.000-07:00

Just because you are comfortable and supportive of a change does not mean your job is done. You have to lead others through that change.

A couple of common pitfalls to avoid in leadership include assuming that everyone else is as comfortable with change as you are and that you cannot have any impact on the cycle of change. The truth is that you have great influence over how the cycle of change impacts your organization and no two people will react to change in the same manner. Your role as effective leader compels you to guide your team through the change event with the minimum loss of results and with maximum effectiveness.

Your role in leading others through change has an interesting little rub point. Just suppose for a moment that you do not agree with or support the change and cannot reconcile even the slightest elements of it. That does not let you off the hook in guiding your team through the change. Whether you support it or not, you must be a willing and enthusiastic leader during changing times. This is your responsibility to your team and your organization.

There are three primary ingredients needed to helping others and an organization as a whole deal with change. The first and a very critical element is input. The best time to seek input on change is before change occurs but that is not always possible because of business needs or issues outside of the control of the organization. Input from those affected is the biggest cure to the depth of the mourning phase in the change cycle.

In the most simple terms, it is allowing team members and other stakeholders to define key elements of the needed change. It is soliciting opinions about how to accomplish the desired outcomes and looking for the unintended consequences that were previously discussed. The effective leader lays out what the desired outcome is and then allows team members to provide input on how to accomplish those objectives.

This is not allowing the inmates to run the prison but rather an attempt to achieve full buy-in and support for a change initiative. Just because you are seeking input does not imply you are running your company or department as a democracy. You are still free and empowered to enact the direction or change that you choose. People are far more likely to embrace change when they have input and feel as if they were part of the decision making and direction.

This cannot be overstated. Input equals buy-in. It cannot be bought. It cannot be achieved in a slide show. Buy-in only occurs with input.

The second key ingredient of leading others in change is communication. Input reduces or eliminates the depth of mourning in the change cycle and communication will reduce the amount of time the mourning and embracing parts of the cycle last.

As a person in a leadership position, you have heard things like “no one likes surprises” or “I wish someone would have told me this was coming.” Those statements and those like it are cries for information. Information that can only be delivered through frequent communication.

In order to guide team members through a change event, communication prior to the event occurring is critical. Your team needs time to process the changes, see how it impacts them and find the positive outcomes. Through your personal communication, you will provide them with the answers and give reassurances that the changes are needed and the impacts will be minimized. Without the communication, they will fill in the blanks for themselves and you risk them focusing only on risk based or failure based outcomes.

The standard rule of thumb for change based communication is to over-communicate. If you meet with your team twice a month, double that in a changing environment to focus on those changes and provide redundant information. Send out weekly or even daily status updates that talk about the change and how it is going. Be more open than ever to answer questions and address concerns.

The most surefire way to raise anxiety about change and lengthen the time of coping and embracing is to effect the change behind closed doors. Changes need to occur with transparency and in full view.

The final element of leading others through change is developing cultural tolerances and conditioning about change. Without the consultant speak, that is putting your team or the entire organization on notice that you and your team will be nimble and in a constant state of evolution.

Easily said but a little bit harder to actually pull off. There are several techniques to utilize including reminding team members about the previous changes that they have encountered, worked through and embraced. Another technique is not to focus on the history of the company or department and focus more on the future or vision and the need to change to in order to achieve that future view.

Change tolerance can also be achieved in a daily operational manner. If you routinely change and modify work flows and assignments (i.e. rotating jobs and schedules), dealing with larger scale organizational change is easier. Condition nimbleness by rotating assignments, hours and even where a person sits. That also helps with reducing the comfort to complacency equation.

The final reminder about leading others in change is about you. Remember that the example that you set in change management is extremely important and the team you lead will take a big clue about how to deal with change from how you deal with change.

Monday Mentor Week 29-What You Need is Not What They Need

2010-07-19T07:50:00.000-07:00

Another stumbling block in the correct application of positive feedback is using your own need for it as a model for giving to everyone else.

Leaders have greater self-management. Leaders have a greater resiliency. Leaders have greater mechanisms for providing honest feedback internally. You know when you have done well. You may even have a small, internal celebration. Unfortunately, many leaders assume that all team members have the same internal dynamics.

People need to feel appreciated and that their contributions are valued. This goes beyond a paycheck and they desperately want to hear some positive feedback from their leaders.

In a perfect organizational climate and culture, line level leaders are hearing positive feedback from mid-level managers. Mid-level managers are hearing positive feedback from division leaders. Division leaders are hearing positive feedback from senior executives. That is the way it should be.

Reality check. Sadly, in many organizations, positive feedback needs to be provided to team members even when that leader is not hearing any positive feedback. It is easier when you receive it but just because you might not, it is not an excuse to not provide it to your team members.

There is another message here as well. Some team members will attempt to rebuff or minimize any positive feedback. They will even tell you that they don’t need it. Don’t buy into their shtick. They want positive feedback and need it as much as any other person.

Monday Mentor-Week 28-Corrective Feedback

2010-07-12T08:45:00.000-07:00

The polar opposite of positive feedback is corrective feedback. The purpose of positive feedback is to achieve the replication of a valued event or behavior. Therefore, the purpose of corrective feedback is to reduce or eliminate a poor event or behavior.

Corrective feedback, in large part, is the process of establishing expectations and boundaries for team members. It is not punitive. It is not a form of discipline. It is rather a very direct response to a situation when a team member does not produce or behave in needed areas.

A great disconnect occurs in many organizations because of a hesitancy or fear in providing regular corrective feedback. When asked, team members will pretty universally want to know where they stand. They want to know what they are doing well and what they could do better. In the other corner, many leaders have trepidations and fears associated with providing corrective feedback and would rather defer or save the information for later. Some would rather put it in writing or surprise a team member with the corrective feedback in an annual review.

The remarkable thing about corrective feedback is that the many of the skills and techniques associated with positive feedback are used for corrective feedback. Immediacy in corrective feedback is very important to make sure that the risk of a poor piece of performance or bad behavior is not replicated. In corrective feedback, this risk takes on a multiplier effect because other team members see when a team member errors and is not coached about the event. This could cause greater performance slippage among the team and now you will be coaching multiple people instead of a single team member.

One of the reasons that immediacy of corrective coaching is often missed is because of an avoidance tendency in many leaders. Fearing a confrontation or not wanting to risk their likeability, some leaders will defer a corrective coaching interaction until later. Unfortunately, later rarely happens and some leaders use justifying statements such as “I will talk to her if she does it again” or “the next time he does that, I will talk with him” or “it really wasn’t that big of a deal.” These types of deferrals must be fought off and the feedback must be provided immediately when performance or behavior is unacceptable.

Another shared skill with corrective feedback and positive feedback is using a direct and matter-of-fact communication method. In positive feedback, a direct approach is used to improve clarity and make sure team members understand what they have done well in the most simple terms. With corrective feedback, clarity is also important but directness is used to make sure the leader does not use too many words or paint themselves into a corner. Simply indicate the failure point, iterate the expectation and make sure the message was understood.

In narrative form, that sounds like “Bob, you were late today. I need you here every morning at 8:00am. Are you clear with that?” Or in another form it is “Mary, your report is not accurate. You need to go back and check the numbers in the farthest right columns. This report must be accurate because of the impact it has on our financial statements. Do you understand what I need?”

Some people will look at this type of dialog and perceive harshness. Harsh is a tone element and not the words you use. Direct is necessary to insure the team member clearly understands the intent of the coaching interaction and clearly understands the expectations for performance or behavior. It is not harsh but just direct and to the point.

Monday Mentor Week 27-The Levels of Decision Making

2010-06-28T16:37:00.000-07:00

It is important to note that not all decisions are created equally nor do they require the same type of thought and analysis.

To improve the ability to make decisions, effective leaders must first analyze and determine the decision level in which they are dealing. There are basically five levels of decision making and each have a different set of consequences and impacts.

Rudimentary decisions are those base levels of decisions that you process on a reactionary and almost automatic mode. Should I go to the bathroom? Should I eat now or later? Should I use this word or another, more colorful word? These are processed in very quick terms with little thought and usually very little impact. The sphere of impact is limited usually to you and you alone.

Operational level decisions are those decisions that are usually produced in the day-to-day flow of business operations and many times dictated by a formalized authority matrix. Approving checks, signing requests for time off, authorizing refunds, providing credit and allowing overtime are common examples of operational level decisions.

A significant issue in many businesses is that too many operational level decisions require far too high of a level of approval. The most healthy organizations press down decision making authorities to the most appropriate level and require line level team members to make the bulk of operational decisions, especially those that affect customers or end users. When decisions are consistently pressed upward, organizational efficiency is dramatically reduced and the ability of a company to respond to customer needs and changing environments is impaired.

Ninety percent of all operational level decisions should be made at the team member level. If more than ten percent of operational decisions are coming up to a leadership level, there is wasted time and efficiency could be improved. Some leaders, not the effective ones, are very comfortable in making more than ten percent of the operational level decisions because it insures their importance and reinforces their need to the team.

Tactical decisions are those that affect how business is done. This is more related to the mission than to the vision of an organization. Common tactical level decisions include staffing levels, scheduling, budget submissions, procedural elements and processes. Tactical decisions should be left to the leadership level that is most closely connected to the front line team members. This level of leadership is most expert in the tactics needed to deliver products and services and should be charged with the lion’s share of tactical decision making.

Like with operational decisions, some more senior level leaders like to insert themselves into tactical level decision making. Even with one-up approvals on tactical issues, this will hamper effectiveness and neuter lower level leadership innovation, decision making and ownership.

The next level of decision making is strategic. Strategic decisions define overall direction of an organization or unit within an organization. These are the very important decisions with major impact such as strategic planning, growth or contraction, product lines, pricing, locations and overall corporate strategy. This type of thinking is not limited only to senior and c level leaders but it is most commonly associated with that level in an organization.

With each of the four levels of decision making identified above, there is an increasing bar of impact for each level. Impact increases as the decision level increases and with that, the amount of time, thought and analysis must increase as well. It should not take weeks to make an operational level decision and strategic decisions should not be made in thirty seconds.

Another dynamic of the decision making levels is the longevity of the outcome. Operational level decisions have short life spans while strategic decisions will have lasting and sometimes legacy levels of life. Also with these levels is the ability to unwind the decision. Operational and tactical decisions are relatively easy to reverse while strategic decisions are much harder, more complicated and have a greater cost to change.

As a strategy to reduce rash and arbitrary decision making, triage decisions into the categories above before moving into other decision making steps. This will assist the effective leader in determining the amount of input from others and time required to effect a great decision.

Monday Mentor Week 26-Stop Being the Answer Man (or Woman)

2010-06-28T08:11:00.000-07:00

One of my most frustrating childhood memories involves asking my mom how to spell a word and receiving her stock response of “look it up.” She knew how to spell the word and she knew that her answer frustrated me but she said it consistently and constantly until I stopped asking.

Stopped asking her to spell the word and looking for it first in the dictionary. She taught me how to problem solve and think. She could have answered my question but I would not have grown and learned on my own. Well done mom.

The first step in reducing and eliminating sheep and sheep-like behavior in your team is to cease being the answer man.

This is an area in which the enemy you fight has an outpost on the top of your shoulders. It is powerful to have the answers. People look to you as the brightest bulb in a room. You are a walking Wikipedia of work knowledge.

With every question that you answer, you are strengthening the chain of co-dependence to you and micromanaging the work environment. When you answer the question of a team member, you are subtly telling them that they do not need to think because you will provide all the answers that they need.

Don’t underestimate this ego battle. It is so cool to ride your white horse to the rescue of your team members and fix their dilemmas. They need you. They tell you how important you are. It feels good. You have the knowledge and the power and they love you for it. Bah.

The most effective leader will inquire behind team member questions about what they believe is right. That sounds like “what do you think you should do Leon?” Further ratcheting this up response you might say something like “Terri, you saw the same issue last week and worked through it nicely.”

Some leaders will hesitate asking questions back because they fear it will make them look weak and unknowing. The opposite is quite true. It is the leader secure in his or her skill set and competencies as a leader that will not rely on being the answer person and seek to grow the knowledge and abilities of their team.

The absolute most effective leaders create and share power and not just store it up. In the equation of forcing team members to think and articulate their own solutions, you are shifting power to them and creating real growth in your team.

When asked, ask back. Don’t be the leader with all the answers, be the leader with all the questions. If you persist in having all the answers, congratulations, you have made yourself invaluable and you are in the last job you will ever have.

Monday Mentor-Week 25-Persistence and Resilience

2010-06-18T17:42:00.000-07:00

When I was a child, I always wanted the blow up clown that when you punched his nose, he bounced right back up. Never got it but always wanted it.

That clown teaches us a valuable lesson in the resilience needed by effective leaders. The one certainty is that you will get smacked down. You will have obstacles. You will have setbacks and defeats. You will get criticized. You will not always be liked or even loved.

The true measure of an effective leader is not about the setbacks or obstacles but how you choose to respond after them. The effective leader must be resilient and bounce back just like the inflatable clown. Smacked. Right back in the game. No pouting time allowed.

Resilience is affected by many factors. Your physical health, emotional well being and rest all impact your resilience responses. When you are tired, worn down and beat up, resilience is hard to summon. If you have dysfunction in your personal life, resilience at work is difficult.

Restoring and maintaining resilience is often a matter of being in close contact with your physical and emotional status. How does your body feel and what is it telling you? How is your emotional composition? Do you feel sad, blue or down? When you hear these signs it is time for a recharge because your resilient responses will be down.

One of the best tools for restoring resilience is to immediately return to a productive activity. There is nothing like a full task list or appointment schedule to take your mind off of a set back or defeat like immediately getting busy. This strategy is also an important sign to your team that you will not be distracted by minor bumps in the road. When you are down, get right back to work doing something different.

The old saying goes that the best way to cheer yourself up is to cheer up someone else. As a skill, assisting others is a powerful method to restoring your own resilience. The self-satisfaction obtained by helping out someone or encouraging someone is a tremendous method to restore your own personal resilience. When beat up, down or losing battles, go an help someone else.

Another tool to restore resilience is to redirect energy into an area in which you know you will be successful. You have areas in your life in which you are very good. Go do those things and restore your confidence in your abilities. Maybe you are a good golfer. Go golf. Maybe you are artistic. Create a masterpiece. Maybe you coach a soccer team. Go engage with them.

A final tip for restoring resilience is about surrounding yourself with positive people and those whom you can rely upon to provide some positive feedback. When you are feeling a little down, seek out the trusted sources that can pick you up and restore your responsiveness.

Persistence is also a necessary ingredient in effective leadership. Leaders must persist in doing the right thing without becoming stubborn or pesky. You must have the judgment to know when to continue plowing forward and when to give up, defer and move to other issues.

One of the most common challenges to persistence is related to the disciplining or firing of a team member. In some organizations, the human resource function produces obstacles and barriers to eliminating a team member. The effective leader responds to these obstacles in a persistent manner and enhances documentation, completes another probationary period or provides additional coaching to the employee. Unfortunately, some leaders respond to the obstacles by giving up and declaring the team member cannot be terminated.

Persistence is also challenged by organizational realities and sacred cows. When a leader wants to innovate and they run headlong into a pet project or sacred cow, only through persistence can they achieve the desired change. Often the best persistence comes in the form of a temporary withdrawal followed by seeking a new path beyond the barriers or obstacles being faced. Poking an issue in the same manner over and over again is not persistence. It is stubborn and unyielding.

Monday Mentor Week 24-The Why Bother Phenomenon

2010-06-14T06:51:00.000-07:00

In about twenty years of consulting and training work, we have documented an incredible phenomenon related to the lack of positive feedback in working environments. It is the “Why Bother” phenomenon.

Basically, what happens is that a team member does something well and the leader does not acknowledge or appreciate the activity. The first time around, there is not much harm because intrinsic motivation and pride will drive the team member to do well again. Unfortunately by the second or third time with not acknowledgement, thanks or reasonable belief that any appreciation is coming, the team member will develop a “why bother” approach and begin performing at minimum or worse levels.

This phenomenon also occurs when a leader is seen only in the role of critic in chief. The only time we hear from the boss is when something is wrong or she always tells people how to do it better so, “why bother.”

“Why bother” can become pervasive in workplaces and organizational culture when there is no expectation for positive feedback. It is very common when a leader ascribes to the “I pay them to do a good job” or “I expect them to do a good job” or the “when they don’t see me they know they are doing well” philosophies. Arcane and fatally flawed, you can’t produce replicated good performance through ignoring people.

Another contributor to “why bother” is the systems used in place of human interaction positive feedback. Annual performance reviews, employee of the month plaques and bonus checks have value but do not come close to the immediate reinforcement needed reproduce good performance.

As a leader, if you want to jump start the performance of team members or recharge an entire work group that you think is under-achieving, positive feedback can cure the “why bother” phenomenon quickly and re-motivate team members.

Monday Mentor Week 23-Change Resistance

2010-06-07T10:25:00.000-07:00

To fully understand change we must examine why people are resistant to change and there are many reasons and underlying factors.

In a working environment, change is resisted because it will lead to a loss of power. A person is currently performing at a high level and has achieved expertise in their area. With a change to a process or function, they will no longer have that level of expert power and they fear that their personal performance will no longer be recognized at a high level. Visualize someone typing along at 85 words per minute on their IBM Selectric typewriter and how they feel that their performance and expertise will be threatened by the introduction of the personal computer and word processing software.

Another primary cause of change resistance is found in a basic human dynamic. Humans need to have levels of stability in their lives. Attachment, connection and some predictability. For many people that stability is found at home or in connections outside of work. They have stable relationships with friends, relatives and community members. They have lived in the same place for a good chunk of time. There is predictability outside of work.

Other people do not have that stability at home and thusly seek it at work. Imagine someone who’s life is chaotic outside of work. No stability in relationships or predictability in routine or interactions. They come to work to seek the stability and attachment that is not there in their personal lives. These people will tend to be a little more resistant, if not down right hostile, towards change. This is another example of how important it is for a leader to know and understand their team members to lead effectively, especially in a changing environment.

Among the most common factors in change resistance is also a personal dynamic related to human behavior. I am married. I love my wife but there is an aging factor that occurs in relationships with individuals and organizations that is related. Early in our relationship, I opened all the doors, bought flowers for no reason, purchased mushy Hallmark cards and beat a path to be helpful around the house. Twenty five years later I still love my wife but my diligence on some of those early behavior has waned.

What occurs in interpersonal relationships, like with me and my wife, is comfort develops after performance is stabilized. Far more dangerous is that complacency follows comfort in most instances. In organizations, a person develops comfort in their job, performance and methods. Complacency and an auto-response type approach frequency follow. Another day, another dollar. Going through the motions. Punching the clock.

Any element of change rocks that complacency. It forces people off of the treadmill and requires them to think instead of auto-process. It makes the complacent uncomfortable.

Fear of the unknown is also a common factor in change resistance. When the future is defined and clear, with a known path towards it, there is little fear. When the future or even just tomorrow is unknown, clouded or veiled, the little darkroom of fear begins to process potential outcomes. Those outcomes, for a variety of reasons, is most often negative consequences associated with the change. That is where the “oh my gosh, I am going to loose my job” and “things will never be good or the same” type of comments originate.

The final change resistance factor is rather odd because it does not occur universally but it does occur with high frequency. Some people resist change because they fail to recognize any positive outcome from the change event or the changed process. They focus only on the loss of the current and not on any benefit derived from changing and evolving. My mother hates computers. Not for any particular reason but she hates them and everything about them. She will not touch them and experiments to help her embrace email and on-line banking have failed miserably. She see no benefit and only bad. Her identity will be stolen, viruses will infect, it costs too much, it wont work correctly.

Some of my mother’s octogenarian peers have discovered the joys of social networking, the efficiency of email and the fun of creating photo albums on the computer. Not my mom, all she sees is the negative outcome.

Monday Mentor-Week 22-Personal Power and the Effectiveness Equation

2010-05-31T16:46:00.000-07:00

Every leader needs personal power to operate in an organizational and corporate environment. Personal power is what a leader uses to get the job done and achieve results. Personal power is necessary and must be carefully balanced for optimum leadership effect.

There are five types of personal power for leaders. They include threat, reward, organizational or legitimate, expert and relational or relevant power. The effective leader must combine the use of all five and avoid the overuse in any particular power area.

This all leads to a very important concept and manageable competency. Leadership effectiveness is comprised of 25 percent job and technical knowledge, 25 percent integrity and ethical values and 50 percent relationships. The first two areas, job knowledge and ethical values represent core leadership credibility while the relationship piece is how a leader accomplishes his or her objectives.

This leadership effectiveness equation must be managed daily to insure that one area does not over-shadow any other. If technical and job knowledge is more in play than relationships, team performance, tone and loyalty will suffer. If integrity and ethics are at a higher than needed level, crusading and lack of approachability will occur. When relationships are weighted more than 50 percent, the team may not trust the leader. Balance in this effectiveness equation must be kept constant (LE = .25 JK + .25 I/E = .50 RE).

Monday Mentor-Week 21-Saving People from Themselves

2010-05-23T08:56:00.000-07:00

For those of us that are parents, we realize all the oxygen we used to tell the kids to not touch the stove when lit was absolutely wasted. We showed them. We told them it would burn. We said it was dangerous.

They touched it anyways.

It hurt. They learned their lesson.

And with that transaction, leaders should see a valuable lesson in how team members learn and grow. You will never be able to save your team members from themselves and you will never be able to warn them of all potential outcomes until they try something and fail themselves.

Like our children, the most valuable lessons for team members in their growth and development is often failure. Success teaches some lessons but the ones that stick with us the most are the points of our failure. As leaders, we need to allow our team members to fail for their ultimate growth and development.

Now a special note to those who may think this is reckless. When the risks associated with failure include physical harm, loss of organizational integrity or credibility, significant financial harm or even the loss of a great customer, the leader must mitigate this risk and prevent horrible things from occurring. By contrast, if the risks associated with failure are minor, even when you know the team member is going to fail, you must let them. They will never learn and grow if you do not let them fail.

Another area of allowing failure is in pure job performance. You cannot compromise your expectations of performance and behavior. If you compromise once, you will need to be prepared to compromise often. If the team member is not meeting expectations, they are not meeting expectations and need to receive your best efforts from a coaching perspective. If they are still not performing, the failure is theirs and not yours.

Not every team member is in the right job at the right organization. Effective leadership is not about saving everyone but about making sure the right people are in the right roles. It is not a failure on your part when you have to let a team member go after the right amount of coaching and teaching. If they have to go, they have to go. Both the team member and the organization need this transaction.

Monday Mentor Week 20-Common Ethical Challenges

2010-05-15T12:45:00.000-07:00

Ethical challenges for leaders come in all sizes and shapes. The most common challenge relates to the appearance of favoritism and the impact of that in the working environment.

Real favoritism is a devastating phenomenon. Favoritism is the open disparate treatment of subordinate team members in favor of another or other team members. Favoritism can suck the life out of a working unit. It will kill morale. It will segment team members against each other.

As damaging as real favoritism is the appearance of favoritism. This most often occurs when a leader attempts to maintain a friendship with one or more of their subordinate team members. It begins as a peer level friendship and then one friend is promoted and they attempt to maintain the friendship.

This never works. It may look like it is working but it never works. People will say things such as “we know the roles at work” or “she respects that I am the boss at work and we never cross over into our personal relationship.” Those statements are self-serving and naïve. No matter how you try, a friendship with a subordinate will cause grief and create an ethical dilemma.

The first thing you must consider is what the other team members see and feel. Regardless of your protests, they will always see an insider and someone who has your ear. Every decision you make will be questioned related to the maintained friendship. Divisions and segments will develop that may not be able to be repaired.

To be effective and to eliminate this ethical challenge, the effective leader rises and separates from friendships at subordinate levels. They leave all questions about equitable and fair treatment behind by closing off the friend level relationships they had at a peer level.

Monday Mentor-Week 19-The Mechanics of Tone Setting

2010-05-10T08:15:00.000-07:00

Good tone setting requires a couple of basic behaviors and skills that are applied on a consistent basis. Some leaders utilize these skills on almost a naturalized level, while others must embrace the skills on a more mechanical level.

The first step of good tone setting is the initial greeting of team members. For most environments that is the “good morning” at the start of the work day. To pull this off correctly, the greeting must sound sincere, upbeat and not, on any level, forced. The great tone setters will also include some relational dialog about family, interests or just the drive to work.

One epiphany moment exists in the initial greeting of team members. Leaders have a significant choice at the start of each day. On one side they have their office or cubicle where all of their work lives. New email, yellow sticky notes, files and stuff. On the other side is the team. You know, the people who do the work so you can be the leader.

When a leader chooses to take a few minutes and go to the office prior to greeting team members, they are telling the team that, at best, they are secondary in importance. Don’t be naïve. Your team notices that choice.

Another great tone setting skill is to demonstrate interest in team members. One of the many tests that we often administer in leadership training is to quiz the depth of knowledge about team members. Most leaders can recite the family composition of team members. Some leaders can talk about the interests, passion points and motivations of team members and a few can provide insight into location of origin, pets or other details.

A leader’s ability to show interest is a powerful tool. When you are able to follow-up on a sick spouse, inquire about the results of a soccer tournament or check on vacation plans, team members feel connected, respected and valued. Those are the team members that will work harder, faster and stay with you longer.

Another weapon in successful tone setting is the ability to laugh and lighten the mood. We always do serious work but often take ourselves too seriously. When the leader laughs, especially when times are challenging and tough, the team will respond in a very positive manner. Tense people do not work well and are not very productive and that message of tense is set by the leader.

Monday Mentor-Week 18-Work Ethic and Results Orientation

2010-05-03T07:50:00.000-07:00

The final personal leadership self management competency set relates to work ethic and a little reminder about breeding sheep. Effective leadership requires a work ethic that is strong and committed. Committed to the betterment of the organization and the results required to be successful. Not committed to personal comfort and self-gain.

Work ethic is sometimes described as an intangible that is learned early in life or somehow genetically encoded in people. Work ethic is also derided by prior generations as being non-existent or diminishing in subsequent generations of team members. As a matter of historical record, this comparing work ethic unfavorably from generation to generation has been occurring for ages. The fact is that work ethic and commitment are learned skills and competencies like all others. When reward and feedback is provided for work ethic behaviors, work ethic improves. When no feedback or reward is provided for work ethic, it will be non-existent.

The effective leader must demonstrate a balanced approach to work ethic. You must not become a workaholic or work more hours just to work more hours. Your role is to work the amount needed to get the job done and be effective. You must also me a model of efficient behavior to get the most done with the most effective use of time.

Two very different challenges exist in leadership work ethic. The first is the challenge to personal comfort and self-interest. An effective leader must subordinate their own interests and comfort for the greater good of organizational successes. This will mean sometimes skipping a lunch, not leaving right at five or even cancelling a vacation. The effective leader is prepared to do this, not because of what it shows and demonstrates but because it is occasionally necessary. The effective leader also demonstrates this commitment silently and without grandstanding about it.

With companies and organizations going through difficult times, many leaders have learned negative lessons about commitment and work ethic. Some people translate layoffs, downsizings and reductions in compensation as the signal to disregard work ethic and commitment. This could not be further from the truth. Even if your company does not recognize or reward work ethic, you must set aside your self-interest and selfish motivations for greater organizational objectives.

The second challenge to work ethic is an over exaggeration of needed time on the job and becoming a workaholic. No one likes to work for a workaholic because they will never demonstrate the hours or commitment that he or she does. Followers will come to resent it and far too often workaholic leaders compare the time they put in to those of their team members.

Leaders must work and work hard but not fall victim to the mandatory seventy hour rule. Work when you have to. Be efficient in your use of time. Go home and have some balance in your life.

Results orientation is a simple competency for effective leaders. It is the drive and focus towards meaningful results for the organization. From a self-management perspective, it requires the discipline to recognize the behaviors and activities that are not productive and the resolve to redirect team members towards the achievement of results.

The orientation to results also require effective leaders to not overly rely on procedures, processes and policies but focus rather on the bottom line achievement. Within the boundaries of legal, ethical and safe, it is not the “how” that matters, it is the “what.” Result orientation also allows greater levels of participation and innovation from team members and avoids the dreaded “micro manager” label often assigned to leaders who are overly concerned with the discipline of process and not results.

Result orientation and sheep breeding are very closely related. In order to have a nimble, thinking, responsive team, you cannot breed sheep. Similarly, to achieve results and have effective result orientation, you cannot breed sheep. Effective leaders will challenge themselves to not manage the process but lead their team to the desired results.

Monday Mentor-Week 17-Communication Clarity

2010-04-25T10:05:00.001-07:00

One of the most common challenges associated with leadership communication is message clarity. Fortunately, this is also the easiest issue to fix.

Quite simply, to improve clarity, use less words.

Visualize this setting for a moment. The leader requests to have a corrective coaching session with a team member. Starting with “you know that you have been a very effective employee here and we appreciate your hard work, attention to detail and reliability.” Continuing without a breath to “In fact, the time back in 05 when you came in early during the computer transition was especially valuable and recently when you helped with the holiday party was very valuable.” Droning on with “The bottom line is that we need more people like you but unfortunately, we cannot tolerate you not getting along well with your fellow, and equally valuable, team members.”

Clarity was impacted early and often in the above interaction. The point of the dialog was to discuss the team member’s relationship with peers. Did the team member understand that or was he completely disengaged by the time that point was made? It is extremely likely in the above model that the team member did not get the point and was entirely uninterested by the time the point was communicated.

Think about another example related to a changed procedure for a minute. The leader begins by saying “when we began processing orders in the late nineties, there were only a few of us working on about thirty orders every day.” “From there, we installed the first automated processing system, that a few of you long-timers can remember; and I am sure you remember the problems we had with that conversion.” “We are now at a great crossroads in our department where I had to hire a consulting team to work with our order processes and hope to devise a method to handle the new increased volume, mostly from the internet, without hiring an army of new people.” “With that said, we will need to, effective immediately, begin coding our orders with a separate source identifier when it is an internet or email order.” Even the most eager and high energy team members will be long gone by the time the punch line rolls around on this one.

In both examples, the leader needed to engage in object oriented communication which is the articulation of the objective first and then holding all other detail for counter-punching opportunities or to respond to questions. This means to express the important part first to make sure communication receiver is engaged and to not jumble the message with unimportant fluff or unneeded explanations.

Some people are a little too anxious to add explanations and history when none is necessary. Still others will try a little too hard to provide mounds of information in support of their position. When this is done, in an unsolicited or in an environment that is not needed, the speaker loses credibility. Many subordinates will see through the overly pontificating boss rather quickly and this loss of respect will be hard to recover.

Monday Mentor-Week 16-Your Role in Organizational Culture

2010-04-19T07:35:00.000-07:00

There are four primary functions that you, the leader, must play in reference to organizational culture. Your first role is to determine organizational culture and the impact of that culture on your sphere of influence within the organization. This is no easy task and you will occasionally receive mixed messages on culture. Some people around you and above you will walk the talk while others balk at it. You will have to gauge key objectives, vision, mission, core values and the tone of leaders to determine the culture.

When the culture is built on solid ground and clearly defined, your second role related to culture is relatively easy. Simply support it and build upon the strengths found in the organization’s culture. The one challenge point in this area will be your ability to subordinate some of the strong feelings that you have related to how things “should be” with how thing actually “are.” Your support of the organizational culture is critical to how your team will respond within the culture and your overall leadership message of support and oneness.

When an organization’s culture is a little fuzzy or you are unable to reconcile what the culture really is all about, you will need to provide some fine tuning for your team. This requires you to find the strongest and most positive messages within the culture and constantly reinforce those messages. It will also require you to quash the messages that are counterproductive or not helpful to the organization and redirect team members to the strong and positive points of the organization’s culture.

The final role that you may have to play related to organizational culture is that of definer. You may be the one that establishes values, connects to the vision and provides clear messages related to the organization. Many new, emerging and growing organizations lack an organizational culture and leaders, at all levels, must work to define that culture and produce the environment that cultural drivers have the correct balance. This is also seen when there is a change in senior leadership and the previous keepers of organizational culture are replaced. When in the role of definer it is important to see the needs of team members, customers and all stakeholders and to determine what cultural elements will produce the highest degrees of success for all.

Monday Mentor-Week 15-Communication Richness and Frequency

2010-04-12T15:43:00.000-07:00

The needs for effective communication in a leadership role are indisputable. The role of poor communication patterns and skills is equally known and understood. In fact, most issues surrounding team morale, lack of involvement, poor accountability and bad performance can be traced back to the communication of a group’s leader.

Communication is a tricky combination of art and science. In it’s basic form, communication is the flow of information between humans. The last part about being a human phenomenon is important to remember. Communication is a human connectivity that is critical to the leadership role because it enjoins people in a unique and personal way to the tasks and mission of an organization. It also relates directly to the personal nature of leadership and the connection point of why people will follow a leader. To have people to want to follow, the leader must communicate with them.

If you look at leadership as the consistent and constant application of skill sets, communication is the foundation upon all others will be built. Failed communication is the cardinal sin of leadership. Effective communication will be the rock on which the other skill sets rest.

Richness

The first concept of communication effectiveness in leadership is to understand message richness. Richness describes the total content within any communication and the connect points that a communication receiver is able connect. Richness is also highly related to the emotional nature of humans. Our team members are creatures of emotion and not creatures of logic. The greater the degree of richness, the greater the emotional connection to the message.

In-person interaction has the highest degree of richness because all parts of the message sender and receiver can be evaluated and processed. Body language can be read. Tone can be interpreted with accuracy. Clarification can be requested. Understanding can be evaluated. Rapport can be built. By far and away, one-on-one personal dialog has the highest richness.

When using the telephone, richness begins to diminish. Although tone can still be evaluated and clarification can be achieved, there are no non-verbal messages to evaluate. Similarly, in public communications, meetings and presentations, richness also fades because of the lack of interactive elements related to clarification and understanding.

Richness takes a final hit when we convert communication to the written word. With the exception of Nobel Laureate winners, most people cannot achieve any type of meaningful connectivity in writing. Even with emoticons, colored backgrounds and dancing symbols, emails have a coldness and lack any ability for clarification. Written communication also has a high probability for misinterpretation and misunderstanding. Humor and personality can rarely be translated in the written word.

One challenge to consider is compare the amount of time spent recovering from a misunderstood email to the amount of time spent to walk down the hall and talk to the recipient. Consider how much time you might spend repairing a relationship from a terse one line email. When possible, engage in interpersonal, one-on-one communication.

Frequency and Not Volume

As far as leadership job go, the strong, silent type need not apply. Leadership requires a consistent stream of quality communication to team members. Communication frequency is at the core of group performance issues like trust, understanding direction, achieving objectives and even integrity.

One common mistake made by leaders is that volume makes up for frequency. So instead of talking frequently with team members, the leader simply conducts a marathon staff meeting once a month. During that meeting, the leader pines endlessly about all the issues past and current and indulges in a pontification designed to prove their commitment to quality communication. A three hour state of the organization address does not make up for a lack of consistent and frequent communication on a more personal and individual level.

In comparing volume and frequency, consider the human disconnect point in communication. In any dialog, humans report that somewhere between ninety seconds and three minutes, when the object of the dialog is not forthcoming and the content has suspect value, people disengage and cease listening. So, as a leader drones on endlessly, the target audience is left day dreaming. Visualize a Far Side cartoon when the dogs hear “blah, blah, blah, spot.” More frequent and shorter interactions will cure this phenomenon.

The other big issue surrounding communication frequency is trust. Without frequent communication, team members will often mistrust the motive of the leader and lack the personal connection and loyalty needed to be as effective as possible. Equate this to personal relationships. When communication is infrequent, trust will often sag dramatically. When communication occurs, even in troubled relationships, trust can be established as a baseline for moving forward. Relationship therapists will always work to establish frequent communication prior resolving other issues in the relationship.

Team members also report that one of their largest frustration is not knowing where they stand with the boss. They are unsure of their future and don’t know where they fit in the organization. All of these issues are curable by increasing the frequency of leadership frequency.

The easy way to improve frequency is to remember that the leadership legacy is about other people’s achievement and not your own work flow. With increased communication, your team will gain trust and work harder for you.

Monday Mentor-Week 14-Breeding Sheep in the Workplace

2010-04-05T16:33:00.000-07:00

Sheep.

Need constant attention. Need to be told and shown every step along the way. Not thinking. Not deciding. Not innovating. Just following and doing what they are told. Nothing more and nothing less.

Bah.

Sheep in the Workplace

Even if you have never left the comfortable confines of the big city, you have been exposed to sheep at work.

They are the people that require constant direction, sometimes the same direction, over and over again. They cannot solve problems, cannot think creatively, cannot deal with change and cannot make decisions. There will never be independent risk taking. They develop a co-dependence on leaders to guide them on a constant and continuous basis. They require a great deal of time to get even simple things accomplished.

There is no correlation between the amount of money paid to, the education level of or the type of job in which sheep congregate. Sheep come in all sizes, salary levels and ages.

Why Sheep are Bad?

When sheep become pervasive in a working environment, they will suck all of the valuable time and energy from a leader. They are very needy and require tons of time to manage.

Sheep also place a grossly unfair burden on leaders to have all of the answers and all of the ideas. Effective leadership must be able to capitalize on the ideas of his or her team and not just rely on their own creativity or innovation skills.

The presence of sheep in the workplace also create a paradigm shift in many leaders. When forced to deal with sheep, many leaders will micro-manage everyone using the assumption that all team members need that level of instruction and daily direction. Nothing will alienate a leader and render them ineffective faster than consistent micromanagement.

Sheep also have a significant impact on overall performance of an organization and the quality of service provided to your customers. Because decisions are bottlenecked back to the leader, effectiveness in reduced. When customer issues require leadership intervention, the service experience suffers.

Who is Responsible for Sheep?

Now for the hard part. You may struggle swallowing this for a minute but if you are truly self-honest, it should resonate.

To truly understand the origin of workplace sheep, we must examine recruiting, hiring and interviewing processes. Do you look for smart, experienced and thinking job candidates? In the interview process, do the job candidates indicate that they will need instruction on every step of the way and will need you to answer the same question multiple times? Do you pride yourself on being an employer of choice?

Well, if indeed you hire bright candidates that claim to have some levels of decision making and independence, where, when and how do they become sheep-like?

This is where the answer becomes a little painful. We breed them.

Through our management and supervision skills we breed sheep. Through our organization’s policies and procedures we breed sheep. Through our lack of providing feedback we breed sheep and through our taking a quick approach rather than a long term approach, we breed sheep.

Like it or not, we play the most significant role in turning a team member from a bright and ambitious rising star into a sheep. When we provide all the answers, avoid positive feedback and stifle innovation, we are building our flock.

Monday Mentor-Week 13-Opening the Listening Channels

2010-03-28T15:32:00.000-07:00

An overlooked facet of the leadership communication puzzle is the ability to listen effectively. Listening skills, when not properly engaged will result in significant communication and relational disconnects with peers and team members.

The easiest method of improving the listening side of communication is to manage the environment in which listening is performed. If the dialog is important, and not just to you, the environment must be conducive to listening. This means that interruptions and distractions must be significantly reduced or eliminated. If your phone will disrupt an important dialog, silence it. If your cellular phone vibrating will move your attention to who is calling, turn it off for an important conversation. If the traffic by your office distracts your eyes and your attention, move to a more private or less traveled location.

Two important elements to consider about distraction values and listening. First is the time investment of how long it would take you to reconnect with a conversation after distraction compared with managing the distraction in the beginning. Or worse still, how much time will it take to repair the error that you make because you missed important details in the conversation.

The final consideration related to listening distraction is the not-so-subtle message of disrespect. In a conversation, you look down to see who is calling. How does that make the other person in the conversation feel? Are they the most important or is that dependant upon who is calling you on your cell phone? This disrespectful lack of focus on listening will often cause greater dysfunction in a relationship and many times impact future approachability and trust.

Another barrier to effective listening is the concept of assumptive responding. Assumptive responding is providing a response, not based on what you just heard, but rather on what you believed was said. This can be based on the situation or with whom you are having a dialog. Imagine for a moment, a team member has spent the last several days complaining about Ed, their co-worker. The team member asks if you have a moment to talk about Ed. Regardless of what is actually said in that conversation, there is a pretty good chance that your recollection of the dialog will include the team member complaining about Ed.

Those of you that have done what you have done for a living for five or more years are more likely to be candidates of assumptive responding. Having “been there, done that” or “heard it all before” will greatly impact your ability to truly listen compared to assumptive responding. Unlike managing your listening environment, dealing with assumptive responding is a little tougher. The skill is cognitive and requires both an improved focus and a reduction in the time desired to move into response mode. The bottom line is don’t be so anxious to judge the situation and hear something coming out of your mouth.

One additional listening skill is the use of complimentary validation. This is an extraordinary skill that really improves the flow of information while validating the comments of a communication sender. Complimentary validation is providing a compliment when key information is heard or processed in the listening cycle. Many people do this almost naturally or automatically and we often comment about those people that they were great listeners or they were excellent communicators or relationship builders.

In a typical conversation, routine relational dialog occurs. When you ask what someone did this past weekend and the person in dialog responds and says “we sat around and watched the grass grow.” Right behind that comment you will need to add a complimentary statement such as “those relaxing weekends are the best, that is outstanding you were able to do that.” In another conversation, you ask where someone is from and they indicate “Pawtucket.” You fire back a comment about what a great part of the country or pretty city that is Pawtucket.

The purpose of complimentary validation is simple. You are providing the acknowledgement that you were listening and, more importantly, you are providing the communication feedback that you want to hear more and are legitimately interested in the dialog. Using this skill will allow you to obtain far more information from a person than by using more traditional validation methods.

Listening is an important element in leadership communication that must be managed as actively as the rest of the communication cycle. Failure to engage good listening skills can have an adverse reaction in relationship management and the ability to communicate effectively in the future.

New DiSC Profile and Assessment Catalog is On-Line

2010-03-26T18:23:00.000-07:00

New DiSC profile and assessment catalog is on-line: http://www.soaringeagleent.com/DiSCCatalog.htm

Monday Mentor Week 12-Self Regulation, Control and Discipline

2010-03-22T09:15:00.000-07:00

The best definition of self control is resisting the urges to act and speak when not appropriate. This is about holding your emotions, your tongue and desire to behave when you know it is inappropriate or even when you have doubt on the appropriateness of the behavior.

One of the most important concepts for leaders to embrace is that of hot buttons. We all have them. They come in a lot of shapes, sizes and colors. Some even have the names of people attached to them. A hot button is any event, issue, subject, situation or person that will evoke a negative, sarcastic or edgy response from you. A person or event pushes the hot button and you react in an adverse manner.

A critical point about hot buttons is the transfer of power that occurs when pushed and a reaction occurs. The button pusher gains power and situational control when you react. You lose power by reacting to your button being pushed. They win. You lose.

Related to this phenomenon is the learning that occurs by the button pusher. Whoever pushed your button and you reacted will remember this event and return to that newly learned skill again and again. Those of us that are parents understand this circle well.

An effective leader must identify their personal hot buttons and do everything possible to not react when those buttons are pushed. That includes avoiding situations and people that push buttons and confronting button pushers directly and tell them to cease pressing your buttons. Remember, we condition others that button pushing is effective and we can also begin the process of reconditioning them to cease pressing.

One of the most common occurrences in management, leadership and supervision is over-emotionalism. Often labeled with the highly scientific and technical term of crack pot. Effective leadership and over-emotionalism do not work. A leader must be calm and cool in all situations and events and be level-headed in all interactions.

A crack pot leader will fly off the handle and become angry when things do not go his or her way. They often blame that on being passionate about their job but in reality these type of bosses are alienating their followers. They will reduce their approachability and actually have their team avoid any contact out of the fear of an angry reaction. When upset by an event or circumstances, you know it and deal with it by going for a walk, workout, take some time off or get some coffee. Anything to blow off your steam except to interact with your team.

When angry or disappointed it is also important to resist the urge to vent unless to a trusted friend, peer level leader or family member. Venting to a team member is never appropriate and credibility may be lost when venting to your boss.

Another symptom of the crack pot type leader is pouting. Hiding in the office. Avoiding all contact. Sullen and unapproachable. Often occurs when things don’t go quite right or when a leader has suffered a set back. Remember, your team looks to you for tone, optimism and hope and if you pout, you are telling them that things must really be bad.

As a sub-type of the crack pot type leader is the Chicken Little. You remember from either the childhood story or the Disney movie, Chicken Little is the predictor of the sky falling. Chicken Little predicts doom and gloom at every opportunity. As with the character, a leader that loses his or her calm when times are difficult will lose credibility.

Our team members look to us for calm and optimism in time of difficulty. They do not want a leader that commiserates and sees only the negative. They desperately want their leaders to pick them up and pull them through the difficulties.

The concept that we most often teach and coach is battlefield cool. This important leadership skill comes from the American civil war when the government forces under the direction of U. S. Grant camped a little too close to their Confederate adversaries. One particular morning, the command tent of General Grant was overwhelmed with cannon fire. The scene was chaotic and confusing. General Grant’s primary aide was decapitated.

General Grant’s response? To make a pot of coffee. He responded to the most hectic and desperate events by making coffee. When asked about this, he indicated there was plenty of time to withdraw and he was not going to be shaken by immediate events.

His troops response? To rally behind his battlefield calm and rout the Confederates that morning.
Poise under pressure and difficult circumstances is tough but it is a necessary competency of effective leaders.

NYT-The Secret to Having Happy Employees

2010-03-16T10:47:00.000-07:00

About 10 years ago I was having my annual holiday party, and my niece had come with her newly minted M.B.A. boyfriend. As he looked around the room, he noted that my employees seemed happy. I told him that I thought they were.

Then, figuring I would take his new degree for a test drive, I asked him how he thought I did that. "I'm sure you treat them well," he replied.

"That's half of it," I said. "Do you know what the other half is?"

Read the article at: http://www.linkedin.com/news?viewArticle=&articleID=115335182&gid=2234494&articleURL=http%3A%2F%2Ffinance%2Eyahoo%2Ecom%2Fcareer-work%2Farticle%2F109063%2Fthe-secret-to-having-happy-employees%3Fmod%3Dcareer-leadership&urlhash=qypA&trk=news_discuss

Monday Mentor-Week 11-Postive Feedback: The Unchained Melody and Eligible Populations

2010-03-11T17:29:00.000-08:00

Unchained Melody
One of the most important rules of coaching involves connecting positive and corrective feedback messages. This method has been used for years and even achieved a name: The Sandwich Method. This describes the abhorrent practice of placing corrective feedback between two pieces of positive feedback.

Nothing could be more ineffectual than combining or enjoining types of feedback. The self-critical will only remember the corrective piece. The halo effect types will only remember the positive feedback. At a bare minimum, the person receiving the feedback will be confused. “Did
I receive praise or did I get chewed out?”

The most common expression of chained feedback comes in the form of “you did a great job with that customer, but you needed to complete the order form in a more timely manner.” The big but. You can even see some team members expecting it. When they hear a piece of positive feedback, they wait for the other shoe to drop and hear the but statement.

The interesting part of this method is for whom it is designed. It certainly does not help provide a clear message to the team member receiving the feedback. It certainly doesn’t insure good spirit and the replication of great results from the person receiving the feedback. This method was designed for the ease of delivery from the person providing the coaching. Easy; yes. Effective; absolutely not.

Feedback needs to be delivered in separate event formats. If the performance was good, the team member receives positive feedback without chained conditions or comparisons. If the performance was not good, the team member receives corrective feedback without glossy coating. Positive feedback and corrective feedback. The two shall not be joined together.
Correctly so, some people have discussed performance where the bulk of the performance was good but there were legitimately some things the team members could have done better. This is a situation in which the leader must use some judgment and decide what type of feedback is most appropriate and what type of feedback could be better deferred to a teaching or mentoring type of session. When the bulk of the performance is positive, provide positive feedback and wait on any discussion of things that could be tuned or done better.

Eligible Populations-The Superstars
One of the bigger stigma points related to positive feedback is wrapped around the eligible populations and who receives it.

Most organizations, regardless of type and size, have between five and ten percent of their team members that are exceptional contributors. The “A” players. These are the people that consistently achieve more, work harder and generally aspire to higher responsibility levels. Not only do they receive positive feedback regularly, they often demand it. They are the team members that will often tell you what they have done well or the leader is well aware of their awesome performance.

One temptation to avoid is to take superstar type of performance for granted. Believing that these star players provide their own internal feedback or that more feedback for more good performance may spoil them will lead them down the path of “why bother.”

Eligible Populations-The Average Joe
Most organizations also have a large population of team members that are “just doing their job.” Nothing spectacular. No superstar status. Just doing what we need them to do. These team members are often the polarity of a working unit and are likely to be eighty to ninety percent of a total team population.

The epiphany question about this population is whether or not they are deserving of positive feedback. The simple answer to this is yes. The more complex answer is yes.

The population of standard performers is the population that is most at risk of leaving the organization because they are not appreciated, engaged or acknowledged. They toil away at what we need and ask of them but rarely hear from us unless something is wrong. This population is also at risk to deteriorate their performance to levels beyond acceptable.

The only way to encourage their continued contributions to organizational success is to provide them with the positive feedback earned from achieving their objectives.

Eligible Populations-The Problems
To complete the bell curve, we also have between five and ten percent of team members that perform below standard or are problematic on behavioral levels.
A typical pattern develops with these team members. After they have been coached, counseled and documented, supervisors and managers go out of their way to hyper-scrutinize their performance. Looking for additional mistakes, stumbles and failures. When found, more coaching, more discipline and more forms are engaged.

And that course of action has achieved what? Further disgruntled and detached team members. Team members that feel hopeless. Team members that become our biggest critics and are toxic in the working environment is what we are creating with this method.
Documentation and formal discipline has a place and need. It is necessary from a compliance perspective. It is necessary to show good faith and fairness. What it does not do is make someone a better or more successful team member.

With the same vigor that is used find more mistakes and issues, effective leaders go out of their way to provide positive feedback when a problem team member does something well. This technique will have a greater success rate than the continued hyper-scrutiny of a team member’s performance. Not a panacea with tough team members but another tool to use.

Monday Mentor-Week 10-Ethics, Morality and Communicating Values

2010-03-07T09:09:00.000-08:00

The high road in this commandment describes a commitment to and consistency with ethical behavior in the working environment. Even beyond the workplace, it is the application of value sets to daily decision making and interactions with the team being lead. It is also a core competency related to protecting the credibility of the leader.

First, a little background and contrast. Ethics are not morals. Morality is a very personal code of behavior that is individually owned. Morality has fluidity based on social and societal norms that change over time. Imagine for a minute the reaction to Brittney Spears if she appeared on the Ed Sullivan show in the 1960’s. Imagine the lack of reaction if Elvis Pressley appeared on TRL (this is an MTV show for my more experienced readers) and gyrated his pelvis. Society and media will tend to have influence on relative morality and how certain personal behaviors are accepted or not accepted.

Morality is also greatly influenced by upbringing, parents, other relatives of influence, religion, school and geographic region. The most unique aspect of morality is that it is owned solely by the individual. You own your moral values.
By contrast, ethics are a prescribed set of values that are owned by an organization or company. That entity, your employer, tells you what is ethical behavior and what is not ethical behavior. Some organizations do a better job of clarity and communication of these ethics than others but each organization has ethical coding.

When discussing ethics, the word prescribed becomes an important characteristic. If you go to a medical doctor with a hold, he or she prescribes a medication related to that illness and a medication that will, hopefully, cure that illness. Like that doctor visit, an ethical value is prescribed to a particular behavior in hopes of curing or eliminating that behavior. No organization has a crystal ball that will predict all future ethical lapses so they react to inappropriate behaviors by prescribing an ethical value.

To illustrate that point, imagine about ten years ago when internet access become widespread on every team member’s desktop. When an executive walked by someone’s screen and in horror discovered an employee viewing a less than appropriate image, internet use policy was born. The first company wide email inviting everyone over for a Tupperware party begat email use policy. Event occurs and the organization prescribes an ethical value.

Ethics also have another unique dynamic related to people. Ethics and ethical values are only as good as the people that operate within the organization. For every prescribed ethic, there may be a person trying to thwart the value and the system designed to track ethical behaviors. This means to be a truly ethical organization, values must be synchronized to the hiring and screening process of new team members.

Like morals, ethics have a variety of influences. The most common influence in ethics is the industry type. Highly regulated industries such as banking, utilities, public safety, engineering and insurance will often have a much more formal and rigid set of ethical values. They will also frequency have very elaborate systems in place for tracking and insuring compliance with those values. Other industry types often do not have the degree of formality or depth associated with ethics.

Other important influences include the senior leadership team of an organization and their commitment to ethical practices and their personal value set. This influence is most important when it comes to the enforcement of ethical codes and the consistency in which ethical violations are handled. Senior leaders without strong ethical commitments will often make inconsistent judgments related to a violation or even look the other way in certain circumstances while those senior leaders with high ethical commitment will be consistent in judgment and constant in their vigilance.

The bottom line is that you own your morality and the company or organization owns and prescribes the ethical behavior.

Communicating Ethical Values

To any organization and any leader, the biggest challenge in ethics is in clearly and consistently communicating values.

The best run organizations with the highest commitment to ethics use a multi-tiered approach. The first step is the creation of core organizational values. These values become the foundation for all future ethical polices and statements. Usually somewhere between five and ten value statements are enough to describe what is important to the organization and not too voluminous so team members cannot lock onto some key aspects of them. Value statements need to be written and documented in a very simple and straight-forward manner. Use action statements and highlight the most significant word in the statement.

Behind core values is the creation, implementation and enforcement of a code of conduct. A code of conduct is a more detailed listing of both required and prohibited behaviors for all team members. Typically, this is a pretty fluid listing and it is revisited and updated often. An often overlooked dynamic is that an organization can use multiple levels of a code of conduct. There can be one for the entire company and others at department and division levels based on their unique needs or business practices. When the multiple tier approach is used, it is important to make sure the lower tier conduct rules are as strong or stronger than the higher level or corporate level rules.

A key element with a code of conduct is communicating the rules to all team members on a regular basis. Twice a year with an acknowledgement of understanding is a good rule of thumb. For team members to embrace these ethical standards, they must see them regularly.
This next little part is tough to talk about. One of the best ways to communicate and reinforce ethical values with team members is when a team member is terminated or aggressively disciplined for a violation. The myth of secrecy regarding these events is just that. Depending on the organization, within days, hours or minutes, most team members will hear the story of how someone was fired for insubordination. The flow of this story and team talk about it will often serve as important reminders about the importance of ethical conduct.

By contrast, the message sent when it is widely known that someone “got let off the hook” in reference to an ethical lapse is also powerful. The exceptions granted and the leniency given will also tell team members how serious you and your organization regard company ethics.
The most important method of communicating ethical rules to team members is through the example provided by company leadership. Including you, all supervisors, managers and executives, how you “walk the talk” is more powerful than value statements, codes of conduct or policies. Your, and all leader’s, examples are the best method of communicating the commitment to ethics.

Monday Mentor-Week 9-Courage for Decisions, Stretching and the Right Thing

2010-02-20T09:38:00.000-08:00

Courage to Make Decisions
One of the more interesting organizational dynamics that we have witnessed in the past few years is upward delegation. This really has nothing to do with sending your boss a box of your filing that needs to be done or forwarding your overflow email to your manager. Upward delegation is the hesitancy, reluctance and avoidance of making a decision at the appropriate level and rolling it up to the higher organizational level.

As a symptom of a company’s toxicity, this is pretty predictive. When pervasive, this indicates an organization has not supported past decisions, hyper-criticized decisions, not provided positive feedback when decisions were good and not created leaders that are encouraged to make decisions. This bottlenecked approach will lead to dramatically reduced results and extremely poor morale.

Sometimes upward delegation is dressed in the form of “just wanted you to know” or “just wanted to see what you think.” Benign in presentation, these are just labels for “please make the decision for me” and if it goes bad, I can always come back and say that is what you suggested.
Effective leaders have two distinct responsibilities related to decision making. First, when the decision is appropriate for you and your level in the organization; make it. Think about it, review options and make the decision. Support and defend it if necessary but make the decision.
A special note to the over-thinkers in the group. There will never be all of the information needed to make a decision. You will have to utilize courage and select the most comfortable amount of information available to avoid delay and loss of opportunity. Delayed decisions from leaders also contribute to a significant loss in credibility.

A special note to the gunslinger types. Even though the best decision is often your first decision, take a little time and process consequences and outcomes. You don’t have to be the universal expert that has immediate responses to all situations. Take a little time to avoid pitfalls and unintended consequences and gather some information to support your decision.

Every leader has a little bit different tolerance for decision making, the time required for a decision and the information needed for a proper and correct decision. As a rule of thumb, the decision should come with less information than you are comfortable with but more than just your gut reaction. Timing in decision making is important as well. With delay and deferral, your credibility is lost in the eyes of subordinates and peer team members.

The best decision is the right decision. The next best decision is the wrong decision and the worst decision is no decision.

Courage to Stretch
The 110% myth is just that. A myth.
You are not giving 110%. You are probably giving somewhere around 30% to 40% of your capacity both intellectually and in energy.

Self-challenge is one of the more difficult leadership and work related hurdles you will face. Effective leaders are in a constant mode of self-challenge and self-push and gets them close to true capacity. They are looking for ways to accomplish more, produce more and achieve more. They are looking to kill off unproductive and unrelated behaviors that often derail this effort.
The leader that engages in self-challenge will need some courage to defer unproductive behaviors, avoid idle activities and really extend themselves beyond what they think they could produce.

The courage to stretch also has another side related to management of the status quo compared to true leadership. Many people in a leadership position see themselves as caretakers of the system and guardians of the way we do it now. Effective leaders stretch beyond the boundaries of what is occurring today, no matter how successful it might be, and focus on what the organization can become. This requires the courage to constantly ask questions and push the envelope of performance and innovation that is not always popular or welcome.

Courage to Do the Right Thing
A couple of times in each leader’s career they are faced with a choice about doing the right thing or doing the expedient thing. Thankfully, these types of choices only occur infrequently but they do happen.

Often these types of choices involve dealing with team members or how a team member situation is handled. Many times these choices also involve ethical dilemmas.
You are aware that your boss is harassing a new team member in another department. You have seen it and the team member has confided in you that the harassment is occurring but she needs this job and fears retaliation if she says anything. If you report it, you could face retaliation, up to and including the loss of your job. The easy answer is the put the burden on the team member being harassed but the harder answer is for you to stand up and do the right thing. Could there be consequences? Absolutely. Is reporting the harassment the right thing? Equally absolutely.

Betty is a long term team member in the twilight of her career. She is set to retire in a year but has become increasingly sloppy with her punctuality and is tardy two and three times a week. You have coached her and provided corrective feedback but she scoffed at the interaction and openly talks about her tenure with the company and how you really cannot do anything about it. You know that when you send paperwork to human resources, they are not going to let you discipline her formally. Do you write her up or do you just wait out the retirement party? Is there risks associated with attempting to discipline her at this stage in her career? The effective leader does what is right for the company and the team without deference to individual team member comfort or status. Will this require courage on your part? Yes and a healthy dose of stamina as well.

Some principles are going to be more important that your current job. The effective leader faces these obstacles directly and in a courageous and forthright manner.

Monday Mentor-Week 8-Open, Available and Visible

2010-02-20T09:36:00.000-08:00

The tone setting competencies of openness, availability and visibility incorporate communication tone, situational responses, timing and physical environment.

Openness describes your approachability as a leader. Are you open to questions, comments and ideas in a one to one environment? Are you dismissive or are you accommodating? Openness is also one of the core service qualities associated with effective leaders. Leaders with a genuine heart for service and care for their team will often be more open and approachable.

The first step in achieving openness is to carefully manage your response to requests for your time. This is much more about your tone you choose rather than the words you use. When interrupted, you need to insure that you do not sound hurried or aggravated. Although the interruption is not the most important thing going on with you, it is the most important thing going on with your team member. Be polite, appreciative of their time and control the urge to hustle them through a response. The hurried or huffing response is a complete openness killer.

Another dynamic of openness is the response to ideas and suggestions. It is extremely important not to be dismissive of any idea, no matter how unrealistic it might be to implement. Thank people for their idea, commit to think about it and encourage them to keep thinking and coming up with ideas. One surefire way to keep ideas from coming to you is to dismiss one in a patronizing manner. One more idea flow killer is to constantly reply in a justifying manner that includes responses that you are aware of it and that you are already working on it. That sends the message that you are all seeing, all knowing and on top of everything and there is no need to share future ideas or suggestions with you.

As a competency, availability is much more physical and logistical than it is attitudinal. Beginning with the work environment, availability is greatly hindered when your desk or workspace is setup in a way that puts your back towards people. Many of your team member will pass by and dismiss any interaction with you because you look busy. With you facing forward, many more people will stop and interact. The long term value of this is the flow of direct and accurate information to you will be much greater and your ability to evaluate the culture and tone for the environment will be much more accurate.

Availability is also about your approachability in informal settings. If you are only seen with a phone in your ear or responding to email on your PDA, your availability is hurt. Another behavior to avoid is the walking in packs syndrome that many manager types embrace. They stroll down the hall in a group of other managers. This will absolutely condemn any approachability from your team. Some of the best interactions and information gathering that you will achieve will be during hallway walks, break periods and other informal settings and you must insure that you appear available during those times.

Some people will misinterpret availability as an opportunity to micromanage. Being available and approachable is not your chance to tell people what to do as much as it is your chance to interact and aid them in finding the correct answers themselves. In another leadership commandment we talk about breeding and not breeding sheep. This will be an important tool set to remember when you improve your availability.

Michael Eisner, the former chairman of the Disney corporation, may have pioneered the programmed and systemic approach to visibility. He calendared a block of time each day to interact with a different area of his company. In some cases, he used more than an hour in this “management by wandering” style. The reason that he performed this ritual was to make sure he was connected to almost all team members in his organization, insure the culture that he visualized was being lived and to improve the accurate flow of information he needed to run the company. His visibility also demonstrated that he was connected to the line level of the operation and that he was in tune with the needs and challenges facing his team members.

No supervisor, manager or executive can lead their area via email or through a spreadsheet. You cannot hide in your office and expect your vision to be realized. You must be the highly visible symbol of everything that you want from your team. They must see you, see your caring and see your engagement for them to be engaged and caring. Over the years we have seen some very stark, and sometimes painful, examples of the difference between the impact of good visible leadership and those environments that only see the leader when something is wrong.

A cautionary note about visibility must be made about the difference between visibility and an inspection tour. Some leaders use the impetus of visibility to note and point out things that are wrong. There are plenty of chances and opportunities for inspections and quality control. When you are working on visibility, you are building relationships, setting the tone, getting to know your team and demonstrating support. After you launch down the path of an inspection tour, you will be amazed at how quickly people will hide from you on future tries to be visible.

From a programmed and systemic perspective, the best way to insure that your visibility remains high is to plan and calendar the activity. No different from any other appointment or calendar entry. Prioritized with the same urgency that you would give any other activity. Some managers, supervisors and leaders will struggle with visibility activities because they do not see it as a productive action. Remember, as a leader, your role is to insure the productivity of others and visibility is an ingredient to their production.

The Great Tone Setting Penalty

As many of you have already figured out, the most difficult challenge associated with all of the tone setting actions is being consistent. Being upbeat every day. Being optimistic, visible and approachable every day. Greeting team members every day. Showing interest, listening and being open every day.

This also leads us to one of the most significant penalties associated with leadership. You don’t get the luxury of having a bad day. We allow our team members to have bad days. We even compromise performance expectations when someone is struggling at home. You don’t get that. Not that you are immune to problems or even feeling ill, you just don’t get to share it with others or intimate you are struggling.

Many leader types come to work no matter what is going on at home or how poorly they feel. One of the most underutilized tools available to a leader is sick time. Compare for a moment the damage you cause by setting a poor tone compared with taking a single sick day to get yourself well. Contrast the poor morale you create when you could take a personal day to get your act together. Stop dragging yourself to work when the long term impact could be significantly bad.

Leading in 2010-From ASTD

2010-02-19T17:55:00.000-08:00

To effectively motivate and lead people as the market recovers over the new year, leaders should focus their efforts on four critical qualities. First is transparency.

Employees are extremely skittish due to growing unemployment, so it is important that leaders be open with employees. A good strategy is to hold town hall-style meetings where employees are encouraged to ask any question, and leaders answer honestly and openly.

Second, it is important to make employees feel appreciated. Let your best employees know just how much they are valued, which will keep them motivated during difficult times. Third, show respect for your employees, their jobs, and their skills.

The days of one-size-fits all jobs and inflexible hours are over. Modern workers want to be treated as individuals, and will stay longer in a job that is designed for his or her unique needs and skills. Fourth, be as honest as possible. As the economy recovers, employees need to know that rewards will return. Having an honest conversation during difficult times will make leaders more credible as conditions improve, provided organizations promise to deliver on their promises of rewards for loyalty and hard work during difficult times.

Read the entire article at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/08/AR2010010803780.html

You Can Teach an "Old" Employee New Tricks-From ASTD

2010-02-19T17:53:00.000-08:00

At 54, Dan Johns wanted to find his future, and he decided it would be in renewable energy.

He'd spent nine years in the same role as leader of construction and engineering insurance for insurer RSA in Toronto, and was ready for a change. Captivated by the green movement himself, he also saw a niche the company had not yet tapped and felt there was opportunity for both to benefit.

But nobody at the company was approaching him to do anything different - and, he says, "you always have the question they might not think it's worth the investment at my age."

Read the article at: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/you-can-teach-an-old-employee-new-tricks/article1454215/

Monday Mentor-Week 7-The Written Word

2010-02-14T10:10:00.000-08:00

You have heard the comments. “I didn’t read the memo.” You have been frustrated by “the procedure was in the manual.” You felt like screaming when someone said “I read it but didn’t get it” or “I started to read it but didn’t get to that part.”

A common frustration among people in leadership positions is that much of what is provided in writing is not understood or misunderstood or ignored entirely. They send the memo or email and nothing changes. They send the memo or email and get fifty back in response. Still nothing changes. Someone accuses you of being mad or upset because of a two line email you sent. Unfortunately, all of this is a reflection of the written communication skills used by leaders.

We must also come to grips with the societal fact that many people in the workplace are reading at a significantly lower comprehension level compared to just ten years ago. Many more people are not native to English but rather to another language. The bottom line is, unless we write well and for the audience intended, much of it will be for naught.

Often described as the elephant in the room that no one can see, written communication skills in leadership is under-valued and frequently used poorly. A leader with overall general good communication habits and skills can lose a great deal of credibility with just one poor email.
Looking back in history for a moment, one of the primary reasons that the causality rate in the American Civil War was so high was the use of 17th and 18th century tactics with technology from the 19th century. Quite simply, they were using conical shaped bullets with rifle bored muskets, capable of accurate shots at well over two hundred yards, and lining up fifty yards from each other in straight lines.

Bringing us back to the present, we are experiencing the same phenomenon related to email and other electronic forms of communication. Twenty-first century technology being used with twentieth century tactics. Email is a great tool. It works well for follow-up, documenting previous conversations or meetings and to contact someone when no other method is available. As a primary communication tool, email is pretty bad and extremely over used.

First, a couple of simple rules about email. If the email is going outside the organization or outside of your circle of close associates, it should have all of the style elements of a standard business letter. That includes the address header, salutation and closing. It should be in block format using black, twelve point Arial or Times New Roman font and a plain white background. No smiley faces or dancing elves at the bottom. The simple point is that your email represents you and your organization and you want it to be professional in appearance.

The second easy rule about an email is to gauge both the urgency and the need to use email rather than the phone or an in-person visit. When you use written communication, you miss the tone and non-verbal elements of richness so the use should be limited to when no other source is available or there is the need to document the communication. Often, people use email as an avoidance to truly interacting with other people and this will lead to misunderstandings and mis-readings of the tone or intent of the email. If you can walk down the hall and talk to someone, do so, rather than sending the email.

One other point about email is learning to use the reply and reply all features. Reply all sends your message to everyone on the original distribution list, including the copy recipients. Reply sends it to the single sender of the original email. Avoid the killing of cyber trees by understanding that basic functionality.

We all assume that our written word is pretty important stuff and a lot of people would be interested in it. The final email comment is about how many people we choose to copy on emails. If you need to demonstrate to someone that you have followed-up on something that they requested, send the copy. If you just think they may be interested or you are trying to cover your posterior, don’t send the copy. There are some relatively current estimates of unnecessary email copies in larger organizations that account for 25% to 30% of total email volume.

Beyond just email, the leader’s word in writing is looked at a little different that a memo or note from anyone else. Many people try to look for hidden meaning. Others will try to look for spelling or grammatical mistakes. Because, after all, as the leader, you should be smarter than that.

When writing a memo, letter or email, the leader must practice the art of tone-setting. This is using the first sentence to thank, appreciate or praise the efforts of the group and can look like “Thanks to all of you, we are making great headway in the current fiscal year” or “I really appreciate all of your contributions and work this month.” This opening line invites any reader to continue and teaches the reader that your notes and emails are not to be feared. When closing a document, the tone-setting should be repeated and can just about be a mirror image of the opening line.

A common pitfall in written communication is the need to be overly wordy. As indicated previously, the best way to improve understanding and clarity is to use less words. This is especially true for written communication. Assume that all readers will tune out your document at about the 45 second mark. Make sure you get to substance and get to it quickly or you will lose understanding. The use of numbered lists or bullet points help this greatly.

The final thought on leadership written communication is the use of both spell and grammar check prior to pressing send or print. One more quality step would be to enlist a peer review prior to distribution. This final piece avoids the embarrassment over the use of their, there or they’re which will pass all spell check features.

It may not seem like much but when the leader commits his or her words to writing, they will live in perpetuity. Make sure those works make sense and reflect well on you and your credibility.

Beware of this ADA Trap in Your Hiring Process

2010-02-12T11:11:00.000-08:00

February 5, 2010 by Tim Gould

Supervisors beware: Here’s new evidence of how easy it is to run afoul of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) during the hiring process.
The case involves a temp worker for an Alabama electronics firm who applied for a permanent position with the company

As part of the pre-employment process, the applicant was required to take a drug test. The man suffered from epilepsy, which was controlled through a prescription for barbiturates.
Questionable questions

When his drug test came back positive for the drug, the man was called into his supervisor’s office. The applicant explained he had a doctor’s prescription for the barbiturates. The supervisor later sat in a room as a doctor asked the employee a series of questions about the medication and his condition.

After that discussion, the company canceled its job offer. The man sued, claiming the company violated the ADA during the testing process.

An appeals court agreed. Although employers have the right to ask questions about the results of a failed drug test, they’re prohibited from “targeted disability-related inquiries.” The doctor’s questions – posed in a situation where the supervisor could overhear the responses – violated that prohibition, the judge ruled.

Cite: Harrison v. Benchmark Electronics

10 Great Questions to Ask to Assess Your Own (and Others') Productivity

2010-02-12T10:15:00.001-08:00

As some smart person once said, "There is no such thing as a stupid question - only stupid mistakes." Learn to ask questions before you make a mistake and to help yourself stay productive.

1. When you call someone on the phone or stop by someone's office, ask, "Good time, bad time?" This can become a standard question that you ask - such that people expect it of you and are ready to tell you the truth. This allows them to be more productive and you to be more productive. This question alone is worth more than the price of this article. You could stop reading now.
2. Ask, "When would be a better time?" You can ask this question if the answer to #1 was, "Bad time," or just when you perceive that someone is not quite ready to talk or meet or proceed on a project. Just ask.
3. Query, "Is this the right time for us to talk about this?" You can ask this question of an individual or an entire team. Note: It is also not a bad question to ask at home sometimes.

Read the entire article at: http://ezinearticles.com/?10-Great-Questions-to-Ask-to-Assess-Your-Own-(and-Others)-Productivity&id=3710874

Linkage Leader: 8 Indicators of an Extraordinary Group

2010-02-10T16:04:00.000-08:00

Watch an extraordinary group in action and you will see...

1. Compelling Purpose, inspiring members, stretching them as they make the group's work the
priority.

2. Shared Leadership, demonstrating members' mutual responsibility for initiating toward
group success.

3. Just-Enough-Structure, moving the group forward together without becoming fixed or
burdensome.

4. Full Engagement, showing in everyone's readiness to dive in with focus, enthusiasm, and
passion--often chaotically.

5. Embracing of Differences, resulting in a widened group perspective, creativity, and more
options for action.

6. Unexpected Learning, going beyond the immediate task and useful in other work, groups,
and life.

Read the entire article at: http://www.linkageinc.com/thinking/linkageleader/Documents/Geoff_Bellman_Kathleen_Ryan_Eight_Indicators_of_an_Extraordinary_Group.pdf?CC=TLL10-EM2

Employee Engagement is More than Satisfaction-Linkage

2010-02-10T15:54:00.000-08:00

Engagement encompasses more than traditional notions of job satisfaction. It consists of an
active commitment to doing the job well and helping the organization achieve its goals and
strategies. Engaged employees take pride in their organization and work; take ownership of
their projects; talk positively about themselves, their employer, and the goods and services they
help deliver; view working for their organization as a career, not just a job; and, above all,
perform better. A growing body of evidence is emerging to show that engagement is one of the
essential levers of individual and organizational productivity and success.

Read the Article/Report: http://www.linkageinc.com/thinking/linkageleader/Documents/Deborah_Schroeder_Saulnier_Employee_Engagement.pdf?CC=TLL10-EM2

TrainingIndustry.com-What Happens After Training is as Important as the Training

2010-02-10T15:33:00.000-08:00

**EXCELLENT ARTICLE AND WHITEPAPER**

A great deal of Learning & Development effort goes into
providing the right training: good content targeting specific
needs; well designed; and delivered in the best possible
way. Quite right too. The problem is that we think it’s all
over once the training is delivered. There is much to do, so
as soon as the training finishes, our attention turns to
making the next programme happen.

The fact is that when training finishes, we have only just
begun the process of converting training into business
benefit (the reason why we do training in the first place).
Think of the process as having three stages:

Stage 1: Good training causes learning to happen.

Stage 2: Learners use what they have learned, their
skills increase and they become more productive.

Stage 3: Greater productivity leads to business benefit.

Stage 2 is pivotal – unless learners use what they learn,
how can any learning convert into business benefit? And
yet this is precisely the point where we usually stop paying
attention, and turn to the next programme.

As we’ll see later, our data shows that a quarter of all
training fails to yield significant performance improvement.
This paper will show you how we arrive at that figure, and
we’ll also show how you can go about reducing it.

Read the report at: http://www.trainingindustry.com/media/2624955/knowledgepool-they%20think%20it%27s%20all%20over.pdf

Or: http://www.trainingindustry.com/training-outsourcing/white-papers/they-think-it%27s-all-over.aspx

From Biz Brief: Walt Disney's 8 Secrets to Success

2010-02-09T07:41:00.000-08:00

Walt Disney was an innovator and a visionary. But he was also one of the most successful business leaders of his time. Here are eight principles that made Walt Disney one of the greatest icons of the 20th century:

1. Provide a promise, not a product: The legend goes that Walt Disney was sitting on a bench watching his daughters ride a carousel when he came up with the concept for Disney World. He noticed amusement parks and state fairs were always littered and poorly organized, and the employees were generally rude and resentful.His wife once asked, “Why do you want to build an amusement park? They’re so dirty.” To which Walt replied, “That’s the point. Mine won’t be.” From day one, Disney has focused on “the experience” as a key component to increasing the value of its parks.

Read the rest of the article at: http://www.businessbrief.com/walt-disneys-8-secrets-to-success/

Monday Mentor-Week 6-Leadership Influence in Turnover and Morale

2010-02-05T16:04:00.000-08:00

Turnover and the Role of the Leader

Many organizations have an exit interview process that is usually administered by the human resources function. Almost without fail, the exit interviewer asks why the person is leaving. Almost equally without fail, the exiting team member says something about compensation. Box checked. Exit interview complete. Statistics now tell this organization that turnover is due to compensation issues.

Unfortunately, most organizations are asking the wrong questions in exit interviews. Rather than ask about why someone is leaving, ask why someone started looking for a new job. Why did they put themselves through resume’ updates, interviews and background checks for just a few more disposable dollars per year? It is with this line of questioning that you receive significantly different responses and ones that are more connected to the leadership within an organization.

With the “why were you looking” question, you will tend to hear more about how they were unappreciated by their boss, not connected to the group or never built a relationship with the leader. All of those point directly back to the personal connection of leadership and the impact it has on turnover.

The finance department does not have a turnover problem, it has a leadership problem. There is not a turnover issue in the Pawtucket branch, there is a leadership problem in that location.
Reasonable stability in employment will be a good measure of leadership quality within a working unit. There are some economic factors in play, especially with entry level team members, but this is largely about the leader.

There is an additional extrapolation in this topic. Good people want to work for good leadership. Conversely, poor team members will often tolerate poor leadership. Poor and difficult team members will struggle with good leadership because it challenges them and undermines their power over the working environment.

Morale and the Role of the Leader

Just as with turnover, the personal connection of leadership plays and important part of team morale. The marketing unit does not have a morale problem, there is a leadership failure in the marketing unit.

Just as children will follow the tone lead of their parents, team members will derive their queues for attitude and morale from the work leader. If the work leader is consistently upbeat and in good morale, the team will demonstrate the same. By contrast, if the leader is sullen, unresponsive, abrasive or hidden, that will suck the life out of the team.

The second leading question that we often ask in leadership training programs is if you can motivate someone else. About half to two-thirds of a typical group will respond in the affirmative while the remainder believes that motivation is an individual and personal function. The second group is correct but the example of how to be motivated is provided by the group’s leader. Motivation is personal but the role model is the leader. Motivation is personal but the spark to ignite motivation is often provided by the leader.

In the absence of a high quality, tone setting leader, other voices become stronger. The complainers set the tone. The whiners are the tone makers. The pot-stirrers become powerful. Team morale is not slightly dependent upon the leader, it is wholly dependent upon the leader.

Overcoming Cynicism, Misconceptions, and Apathy about Employee Engagement

2010-02-04T15:53:00.000-08:00

Written by: Leigh Branham and published with permission by Canadian Management Centre

Will the new decade bring new hope or just more cynicism to the business world? You may have seen this recent Dilbert cartoon, printed last month in the winter of our recessionary discontent:
Dilbert's Boss: "We need more of what the management experts call employee engagement. I don't know the details, but it has something to do with you idiots working harder for the same pay."Dilbert: "Is anything different on your end?"Dilbert's Boss: "I think I'm supposed to be happier."

The cartoon was an instant classic. Unfortunately, it captured the deep employee cynicism about the most highly misunderstood business buzzword of the decade just ended. As the cartoon suggests, many employers have earned the cynicism by invoking the term "employee engagement" to mean "doing more with less"-aburden to be borne by employees. Consider the following recent survey reports:

Seventy-two percent of companies have reduced their workforces in response to the recession, according to Towers Perrin

The number of actively disengaged workers increased from 3 percent to 24 percent in organizations that have laid off employees, Gallup researchers found Watson Wyatt's Employee Engagement Index declined 9 percent for all employees from 2008 to 2009. More importantly, among top-performing employees, engagement dropped a much steeper 23 percent.

Read the entire article: http://www.trainingindustry.com/training-outsourcing/articles/overcoming-cynicism.aspx

Monday Mentor-Refresher 5-Courage to Confront

2010-01-29T21:53:00.000-08:00

Courage is not Rude or Rash

Some people confuse being courageous and speaking up with being rude. Real courage, like real confidence, is not a spoken or boisterous competency. It is quiet, thoughtful and polite. Real courage is not about interrupting others, talking over someone, using emotional fits to win a point or even using bullying tactics. It is certainly not about blind copying an email to embarrass someone.

Conversely, people who come across as polite and deliberate should not be misjudged as lacking courage. The loudest person in the room is not the one with the real courage. In fact, the cool leader will use courage more effectively and with better judgment.
Being rash is covered in detail in an upcoming commandment but suffice to say that risk must always be mitigated and analyzed. Jumping blindly off a cliff is not risk taking. It is just dumb.

Courage to Confront

The first and most used competency for leaders is the courage to confront. This becomes almost a daily function for many supervisors, managers and executives and it is a fundamental part of the coaching function. The courage to confront is simply the desire to discuss poor performance and behavior in a direct and immediate manner.

Not being rash, this is an unemotional approach to coaching team members who do not meet expectations. Most commonly, this is a leader directed coaching dialog in which an expectations for performance or behavior has not been met. Many leaders fear and avoid these interactions for a variety of reasons but the most common avoidance excuse is the loss of popularity or the risk of a full blown and ugly confrontation. Both of those lines of reasoning create a grossly ineffective leader. As a supervisor, manager or executive, you are not there to be loved. Your responsibility and accountability is to the organization and not the feelings of your team members. You are not running for homecoming queen.

The desire for popularity is an interesting dynamic. Everyone wants to be liked and loved. We humans are wired for it. Unfortunately, this becomes counter-effective and counter-productive in a leadership role. Leaders must shift their need to be liked to a need to be effective and a need to be respected. Many times a leader that makes decisions to remain popular will greatly compromise their respect quotient. More simply, the leader that fails to confront failed performance in one team member because of a desire to remain liked by that team member will loose respect and credibility with other team members.

Effective leaders make one more shift related to popularity. They move the desire to be liked out of the workplace and move it home or in other settings. This shift provides for the need to be popular and liked but keeps it from compromising important actions in the working environment.

Another obstacle to the courage to confront is performance comparatives. In it’s most simple terms, a performance comparative is looking at total team member value compared to a failure or error event. It is the failure to address today’s dress code violation because the team member usually looks good or because they are a star performer in other areas. It is not talking to a team member about their surly approach with the receptionist because they produce more than any of the other team members. It is the fearing the loss of good characteristics, behaviors and performance when addressing a deficiency.

This paradigm is most easily challenged by asking a real star performer wants to be a star performer in all areas. Also challenging this belief is the fact that team members want to know where they stand and how they are doing. Real star performers want an opportunity to be a star in all areas and fix anything that does not rise to star level. Remember, when providing this type of coaching to only focus on the single behavior that needs improvement and not the total value of the team member.

The final obstacle related to the courage to confront is the fear that a coaching session about poor performance or behavior will result in an explosion from the team member. Ugly, yelling explosion. Maybe even a complaint to human resources about you. Crying, denying and accusing. Unattractive stuff.

First, go back and read the skills and techniques to be used in these types of coaching sessions in the immediate preceding chapter and commandment. Coaching team members is not easy but it is a core skill needed in effective leadership.

Challenge yourself to understand why some team members explode during a coaching dialog about poor performance and behavior. They explode. You respond in kind. You may even say something you regret. You may say something that causes liability to you and your company. They win. Without exception, explosive behavior from team members are designed to derail your mission as an effective and coaching leader. We have taught these team members that if they explode, the supervisor backs off. And better still, the leader becomes leery of future conversations about performance.

Another example is when a team member breaks down and even cries. They cry. Your empathy turns to sympathy. You back away from the performance or behavior dialog. They win. Lesson learned and it will be used again and again.

More common is the false belief that these types of dialogs always result in ugliness. In fact arguing, crying and fussing are relatively rare. Much more common is the desire for the team member to know where they have erred and how they can remedy it.

The “No Surprise Principle” tells us that team members would much rather have a conversation about their performance that read it as a surprise on their annual performance review. That is almost guaranteed to get a nasty response. Team members need to know how they are doing and effective leaders tell them.

As a final note in this section, also consider how this skills translates into other areas of your life. If you had a dog that was digging up your backyard and did nothing to confront the behavior, would the dog continue to dig? Would your other dog be encouraged to also dig? Your child has a tantrum and you back off from your dialog, what has she learned? Will your other kids mimic that behavior?

Monday Mentor-Refresher 4-The Basics of Positive Feedback

2010-01-22T16:46:00.000-08:00

The correct and frequent delivery of positive feedback is one of the most powerful tools available to any leader. Unfortunately, it is also one of the most widely misunderstood, misused and underused tools as well.

Positive feedback is providing appreciation and acknowledgement when a team member performs at their role expectation or higher. It is simply designed to replicate the positive behavior or performance from the team member and create a culture where others strive for the positive feedback and acknowledgement.

For those of us who are dog owners and those of us that have previously enjoyed the company of man’s best friend, we can compare positive feedback in work team members to the process of conditioning dog responses. When you throw the tennis ball to the dog and he brings it back, you say “good dog.” When you throw the ball again and he brings it back, you again say “good dog.”

In the event that you cease saying “good dog” the dog will stop bringing the ball back. You say “good dog” to praise a positive event and encourage the replication of an appreciated behavior.

For those of us who have raised children, we can also compare our interactions with them to the correct use of positive feedback at work. When a child brings home a good report card, we say “good job, nicely done.” The intent is to reward the good grades and encourage more good grades. Every time the grades come back well, we repeat the praise.

Please don’t get this comparison wrong. Adult working humans are very much different from dogs and children. Or are they?

Adults react to reinforcement conditioning in the same way as children and dogs. When positive feedback exists, they will replicate the behavior. When no positive feedback exists, there is little motivation to replicate the performance.

Why Bother
In about twenty years of consulting and training work, we have documented an incredible phenomenon related to the lack of positive feedback in working environments. It is the “Why Bother” phenomenon.

Basically, what happens is that a team member does something well and the leader does not acknowledge or appreciate the activity. The first time around, there is not much harm because intrinsic motivation and pride will drive the team member to do well again. Unfortunately by the second or third time with not acknowledgement, thanks or reasonable belief that any appreciation is coming, the team member will develop a “why bother” approach and begin performing at minimum or worse levels.

This phenomenon also occurs when a leader is seen only in the role of critic in chief. The only time we hear from the boss is when something is wrong or she always tells people how to do it better so, “why bother.”

“Why bother” can become pervasive in workplaces and organizational culture when there is no expectation for positive feedback. It is very common when a leader ascribes to the “I pay them to do a good job” or “I expect them to do a good job” or the “when they don’t see me they know they are doing well” philosophies. Arcane and fatally flawed, you can’t produce replicated good performance through ignoring people.

Another contributor to “why bother” are the systems used in place of human interaction positive feedback. Annual performance reviews, employee of the month plaques and bonus checks have value but do not come close to the immediate reinforcement needed reproduce good performance.

As a leader, if you want to jump start the performance of team members or recharge an entire work group that you think is under-achieving, positive feedback can cure the “why bother” phenomenon quickly and re-motivate team members.

Do Women Make Better Managers

2010-01-20T09:15:00.000-08:00

An interesting read and set of findings:

http://businessonmain.msn.com/knowledgeexchange/articles/managingpeople.aspx?cp-documentid=19055985&source=msneditorial&gt1=25049

Career Builder-13 Things Not to Share with Co-Workers

2010-01-19T08:38:00.000-08:00

By Rachel Zupek, CareerBuilder.com writer

It's happened to everyone before. The constant flow of words that just keep coming, long after you've made your point (if there ever was one) and even longer after people stopped caring. The kind of gibberish that just won't stop unless someone else starts talking. The type of chatter that inevitably ends with you wishing you'd put a sock in it.

Yes, verbal diarrhea is never a good thing -- but it can be worse in some places more than others.

Like the workplace.

There are certain things co-workers need not know about each other -- your baby-making plans and stomach issues, for example -- but some folks just can't seem to keep their mouths shut.

Some people talk to hear the sound of their own voice; others share because they don't really have a life and, by revealing details you'd rather not know, they create the illusion of one, says Linda Lopeke, a career advancement expert and creator of SmartStart Virtual Mentoring Programs. "Then there is the person who believes gossip, even about them, creates instant emotional intimacy. It doesn't."

Read the Entire Article: http://msn.careerbuilder.com/Article/MSN-1219-Workplace-Issues-13-Things-Not-to-Share-with-Your-Co-workers/?sc_extcmp=JS_1219_advice&SiteId=cbmsn41219

Fast Company-Carpet People and Tile People

2010-01-18T16:08:00.000-08:00

The "Tile People" Versus the "Carpet People"
By Roberta Matuson

A while back I encountered an interesting phenomenon, while conducting employee focus group meetings. Employees kept talking about “the carpet people” and the “tile people.” At first I thought these terms were industry specific. However, after hearing several sarcastic comments, it became clear to me these terms were being used to differentiate between professional employees, who sat in nicely carpeted offices and cubicles, and manufacturing personnel, who had tile beneath them.

Confused, I probed further. It was then that one of the “tile people” informed me that there was a distinct line (a door) where the tile ended and the carpeting began. In management’s defense, the work space set up for those “tile people” assembling the product seemed in line with other light manufacturing environments that I’ve seen. It seems the real issue wasn’t the carpet or the tile. It was the door that had been put up between the two workspaces to insulate both areas from hall conversations.

Do you have barriers to productivity that you don't even know are there? Here's how you can find out and what you can do about it:

Read the Entire Article at: http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/roberta-matuson/management-escalator/tile-people-versus-carpet-people

Monday Mentor-Refresher 3-Correct Fit: The Beginning and The End

2010-01-16T10:24:00.000-08:00

Correct Fit-The Beginning

The first interaction a leader has with a team member is during the hiring and recruiting process. Although usually brief, this first meeting needs to be used to assess the proper fit for a potential team member.

Traditionally, interviews were used to discuss qualifications, education and experience. All of those things have value but not nearly as much as fit and interpersonal skills. To drive this point home, look at your current problematic team members. The ones with two inch thick files. The ones that come off and on disciplinary action with regularity. The ones that constantly are causing trouble but avoid termination.

Now, as you look at those problematic team members, critically review why they are problematic. Is it because of a lack of technical skills, qualification and education or is it because of a lack of fit with the existing team or lack of interpersonal skills? Most managers and leaders agree it is because of the latter and not the former. Interpersonal skills and ability to fit with the existing team are far greater predictors of workplace success than technical ability or education.

Back to the interview. The leader’s job in the interview process is to determine if someone will fit properly with the existing group and in the culture built by the leader and team. This is most often discovered in situational questions about how a job candidate would respond and react to the common scenarios in your working environment. The leader can then compare the job candidate’s response to the desired outcome or how his or her team currently responds and reacts. This is also a great technique for behavioral interviewing.

The leader must also check and test a potential team member’s interpersonal skills. How they work with others. How they communicate. How they solve problems. How they handle adversity. How they operate under pressure and stress. What do terms like accountability and responsibility mean to them? These are the interpersonal skill check points that are so critical in the modern working environment.

The effective leader recruits team members based on interpersonal skills and fit and avoids the common over-emphasis on experience and education.

Correct Fit-The End

The most difficult role of coaching is ending someone’s employment on your team. Difficult but necessary.

In fact, many managers and supervisors make a far bigger mistake by extending employment longer than they should and providing way too many opportunities for improvement and change. This is not an invitation to be rash and take these decisions lightly, but the impact of not terminating a team member when required is far greater than terminating a team member too soon.
The Lakota Sioux tribes of the northern and western plains had a saying. They believed “when you encounter a dead horse, it is best to dismount.” Not comparing team members to dead horses but good leaders recognize when someone is not fitting or not performing pretty early in the team relationship. When the determination is made that the team member will not perform or will not fit after appropriate coaching and counseling, the leader must end their employment.

In the modern working dynamic, most firing decision require multiple levels of approval and many sets of documentation and hoops to jump through. One of the biggest leadership mistakes is to look at these obstacles as insurmountable. Some mangers and supervisors, when told to obtain additional documentation, simply give up and label the team member as fire-proof or protected. This mistake, although convenient at the time, will lead to greater performance and behavior problems with the entire team.

Dragging a termination decision or action too long sends a horrible message to other team members. Rewarding poor performance or behavior will tell the team that those actions work. As a leader, you will also be faced with people that dare you to fire them. Don’t back down. Do them the favor for which they are asking.

Chief Learning Officer-Engagement Leads to Growth

2010-01-16T10:21:00.000-08:00

Research Connects Employee Engagement and Pride to Business Growth
Thursday January 14, 2010

Chicago — Jan. 14New research released by Chicago-based human capital management consulting firm HR Solutions Inc. found employee pride to be at a high level according to its international database.

Close to three-quarters of employees (71 percent) answered favorably to the statement, “I would proudly recommend this organization as a good place to work to a friend or relative.” Seventy-five percent agreed that their “work is personally rewarding,” and lastly, 71 percent of employees “leave work often with a good feeling of accomplishment about the work they did that day.” These three statistics have a direct relationship to employees’ sense of pride in their work. Employees who find great pride in their work naturally have a high engagement level. Engaged employees are more likely to recommend their company products and services to their friends and family as well as recommend their company to other customers, attributing to company growth. Employee engagement translates into employee loyalty and pride, which then drives employee productivity and business outcomes. “Employee engagement has a great impact on the turnover and the financial performance of the company.

Engaged employees are six times more likely to stay with their organization than their disengaged counterparts. To create a sense of pride in one’s work, a high level of employee engagement is imperative. In turn, this prevents turnover, lessening any strain on the company financially, allowing for business success,” explained Kevin Sheridan, CEO of HR Solutions Inc. These organizations have been shown to outperform their competitors on financial metrics. Employees who are engaged and take pride in their work have a sense of ownership that allows for satisfied customers and company growth.

For more info: http://www.hrsolutionsinc.com

About.com-How to Change Your Organizational Culture

2010-01-16T09:21:00.001-08:00

By Susan M. Heathfield, About.com Guide

Changing your organizational culture is the toughest task you will ever take on. Your organizational culture was formed over years of interaction between the participants in the organization. Changing the accepted organizational culture1 can feel like rolling rocks uphill.
Organizational cultures form for a reason. Perhaps the current organizational culture matches the style and comfort zone of the company founder. Culture frequently echoes the prevailing management style. Since managers tend to hire people just like themselves, the established organizational culture is reinforced by new hires.

Organizational culture grows over time. People are comfortable with the current organizational culture. For people to consider culture change, usually a significant event must occur. An event that rocks their world such as flirting with bankruptcy, a significant loss of sales and customers, or losing a million dollars, might get people's attention.

Read the entire article: http://humanresources.about.com/od/organizationalculture/a/culture_change.htm?nl=1

NYT-The Good and Bad of Workplace Jargon

2010-01-16T09:12:00.000-08:00

NEW YORK (AP) -- At the end of the day, it's important to achieve a win-win solution. Be sure to think outside the box to demonstrate thought leadership. And harness key learnings to change the game on that mission-critical project.

Confused? You have company. Many workers say they're fed up with business jargon and corporate buzzwords.

Every industry has its own lingo. In technology, employees use ''bandwidth'' in conversations that have nothing to do with the Internet, saying things like, ''I don't have the bandwidth to deal with this situation.''

Read the article at: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/01/11/business/AP-US-Your-Career-Workplace-Jargon.html?_r=3

The Conan/Leno Debacle? A Giant Lesson in What-Not-to-Do with Talent.

2010-01-14T06:58:00.000-08:00

From Fistful of Talent

I've always been a Letterman fan although these days, I default to Charlie Rose and Tavis Smiley for my late night fix. (Yes, I'm that boring.) But, because I'm a news junkie, the fiasco playing out at NBC with Conan and Leno has been unavoidable.

Personally, I'm always fascinated when it comes to talent plays in the sports and entertainment world. If I could have my hand in recruiting/casting and hiring talent for a movie, or a TV show, or MLB team... that might be a dream job. So, to get a glimpse into the kinds of issues that might come up via the Conan/Leno debacle? Well, as you can imagine, I'm salivating. And there are a ton of lessons to be learned. But I'll make it simple for you. File this ENTIRE situation in your "what not to do" folder.

Read the entire article: http://www.fistfuloftalent.com/2010/01/nbc-you-stink.html

Inc. Magazine-There is No Substitute for Great Service

2010-01-14T06:56:00.000-08:00

Small businesses should keep good, old-fashioned customer service in mind when implementing new technology.

By Lauren Folino Nov 3, 2009

Small businesses struggling to keep customers and entice new ones can test out new call center technology or sign up for social media sites or even implement customer relationship management (CRM) software, but there's no substitution for treating customers well. Experts suggest that small business owners keep this in mind when looking at new technologies.

According to customer service expert Kristina Evey, president of the Grand Rapids, Michigan-based customer service management company Centric Strategies, people don't buy products or services – they buy relationships.

Read the entire article: http://www.inc.com/news/articles/2009/11/customer-service.html

Ten Predictions for Learning and Training from TrainingIndustry.com

2010-01-14T06:54:00.000-08:00

By Doug Harward, CEO, Training Industry, Inc.

2009 was as challenging a year for the training industry as we’ve had in the past twenty. The good news is that it’s over. Now it’s time to get up, dust ourselves off, and begin the task of making 2010 the best that it can be.

As in previous years, the staff here at TrainingIndustry.com looked into our crystal ball to provide our annual predictions on how we see the training marketplace changing and performing in the upcoming year. Our intent is to provide a sense of visibility that helps you in strategic planning and decision-making on managing, developing and delivering training. We form these predictions based on our research, our industry knowledge and our ongoing communications with the buyers and suppliers of strategic training services. We believe our combined experiences give us insights into how corporate executives, training management and learning and technology suppliers are driving the market.

Read the entire article at: http://www.trainingindustry.com/articles/10-predictions-for-2010.aspx

Monday Mentor-Refresher 2-Self Management, Owning Your Behaviors, Blindspots and Obstacles to Personal Change

2010-01-08T15:20:00.000-08:00

The most difficult person that you will manage in your leadership career is you.

That is a very hard statement to get your hands around and grasp but managing yourself is a very challenging task. Without good self-management, the delicate balance between leader and follower is jeopardized. You can loose credibility. You can damage relationships. You can completely become irrelevant.

Background on Self Management
First, a little background on self management. Self management is half of the science of emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence tells us that eighty percent of our reactions, responses and projections are driven by emotion and not by logic or processed thought.
Many leaders struggle with this concept because they fancy themselves as creatures of pure, unemotional logic. This is nothing but a fallacy designed as a cover for the true nature of decisions and responses.

Emotional intelligence is split in two distinct and different pieces. The second piece is external and relational management and the first piece is self management. Working with the skills associated with both of these pieces, a complete emotionally intelligent leader is produced.
Another point of emotional intelligence and self management relate to age and experience. There is absolutely no correlation between calendar age and emotional intelligence. Some twelve year olds can have outstanding self management and emotional intelligence while some fifty year olds can have very poor emotional intelligence.

A final bit of background information about emotional intelligence is that organizations of all types and sizes have found that good self management is a great predictor of workplace success. Much more so that experience, formal education or technical skills, team members and leaders with good emotional intelligence and self management are much more likely to be successful than those with poor or lacking skills in this area.

What this has caused is that more and more companies are testing, screening and interviewing for emotional intelligence and self management. Your next career move may become dependent on how well you can manage yourself.

Complete Understanding is the First Step
The first, and perhaps hardest part of self management begins with full understanding of the subject matter. That would be you.

You will never completely understand yourself and about the time you think you have a handle on all of your behaviors and personality traits, new iterations of you and your style will emerge. Understanding yourself is not a singular event but a necessary leadership process that needs to be frequently addressed and consistently administered.

There are three sources of information for self understanding. The first is the most overused and most unreliable source related to effective leadership. Far too many leaders rely solely on their own discovery and feelings to try to understand themselves. Unfortunately, this source is full of pitfalls and lies. Often, self talk and intuitive feedback is more about who we would like to be rather than who we really are. Internally produced feedback is a part of understanding yourself but it is a highly unreliable source.

Another reason that self feedback is not a good sole source of understanding is that many leaders have a tendency to be either very hypercritical of themselves or self aggrandizing. The hypercritical feedbacks leads to many negative thoughts that are very counterproductive in self management. The puffing that comes from believing you are more and better than you really are can lead to alienation and loss of followers. Self feedback needs to be balanced with information from other and more objective sources.

Assessments and Profile Tools
One of the best sources of leadership self-understanding comes from psychometric personality tests. Great examples include the DiSC profile and the Myers-Briggs assessments. A psychometric instrument or test is a fully validated and predictive tool that can be used in a variety of settings including coaching, counseling, team building and leadership development. Test like color coding, what Star Wars Character I Am and handwriting analysis might be fun but they are not valid or predictive of your behavior and attitude traits.

One of the great dynamics witnessed in the past twenty years of coaching leaders relates to the use of personality tests. Almost without exception, people will find a piece of language in one of the DiSC profiles and just fall in love with it. Things like “works well under pressure”, “considers the feelings of others”, “builds relationships and teams effectively” or “takes charge and accepts challenges.” They will just ooze with pride when reading and reviewing results like those.
Without missing as much as a breath, the same people will read language such as “can become manipulative and quarrelsome”, “easily distracted by interruptions”, “overly concerned with details” or “appears artificial or disingenuous” and react with contempt for the validity of the survey, assessment or test.

The difficult bottom line about psychometric instruments for feedback is that you cannot embrace the good comments and trends without owning and being accountable for the other behaviors and traits in which you don’t like or don’t agree. We always encourage leaders to note all the statements in these instruments in which they disagree and then ask someone else to review the statements and provide honest feedback. The results: almost unanimously, other people reviewing the results fully validate the accuracy of what is said. Like it or not, it is you and your behavior.

Many times, the information from psychometric assessments and tests in which the leader does not agree represent behavioral blind spots. Blind spots are those pieces of behavior, or in the case of leadership, stylistic elements that the person does not recognize but all other people see with perfect clarity.

If unmanaged, blind spots can be very damaging to a leader. The blind spots can alienate followers, harm and strain relationships and create poor image elements that can damage a career. Blind spots can also be a very limiting factor in the growth and ongoing development of leaders.

If Three People Call You an Ass, You Should Buy a Bridle
The third and final source of information related to understanding yourself comes from the feedback of others. This can be in two subsets, formal and informal. Formal feedback from other people includes performance reviews and 360 degree evaluations. Performance reviews are usually not a very good source of self understanding and awareness because they are done infrequently and they are generally not done well.

The formal process of gathering leadership, performance and behavioral information from others is commonly referred to as a 360 degree assessment. It obtains feedback from those you lead, your boss and others, including vendors and customers, in which you exercise influence. The best versions of these instruments contain both quantified and numeric ratings about key leadership indicators but also include a section for anonymous comments. The most helpful information is often found in the comment section under headings that include behaviors to stop, behaviors to begin, things the person does well and things the person could do better.

The one intellectual honesty risk with 360 degree feedback comes from selecting the audience to comment and evaluate. Two errors occur frequently in choosing either people that you know will be very supportive and positive or choosing people that will be very critical. Both populations do not provide an accurate picture of you or your style. Evaluators and comment providers must be a cross section of those who love you and those who do not.

Informal methods of gaining feedback include the highly complex transaction of (gasp) asking people how you are doing. One of the best leadership sources of this information come from those being led. Simply asking how you are doing as a leader, what you could do better and what is working well is a great source of feedback to understand yourself and uncover some important blind spots.

Another great source of the same type of information comes from peers or near peers. Since they have no real vested interest in how you lead, their degree of honesty would be pretty high. This works especially well if you can create a peer mentoring type of relationship where the feedback is shared between both of you.

As with all types of self understanding feedback, this also contains a warning tale or two. The first time out of the gate, many people will not provide you with direct and fully honest information. In fact, your subordinates and peers may sugar coat things or deny that there is anything in you that needs to be changed. They may even openly think you are up to no good in this questioning. It is only through a consistent approach in which you have demonstrated no repercussions that team members will provide you with complete honesty and feedback that you need. You must ask several times across multiple months and show that no one is going to get hurt to get the self management information you want.

The final cautionary tale about direct feedback is the desire that many people have to dismiss the source. In informal feedback, if you hear something you don’t like from someone you don’t like, it is easy to discredit the information. You might say things like “you know Bob, nothing ever pleases him” or “Mary has not had a good thing to say about a boss in ten years.” Unfortunately, even when the source is not valued, some of the feedback is important. Even when wrapped in exaggeration or dislike, important information about you might lay below the surface and underneath some emotion. Focus on the message and not the messenger.

The three ingredients of understanding yourself are what you already know and believe, feedback from personality assessments and profiles and the feedback from others. Armed with this information you are now ready to begin the final step of self awareness and understanding.

Owning Your Behaviors
Like it. Love it. Hate it.
It is you.
The final piece of self understanding and awareness is to begin to reconcile all of the feedback you receive and owning who you are. The good and the not so good. The parts you like and the parts you don’t like. The effective leader owns all of those pieces of who they are.
From this point, most effective leaders will construct a plan to deal with the areas in which need improvement or need to be corrected. This is a longer term approach in which your behaviors and style are modified through consistent application of better skills and competencies that take the place of the old behaviors. This type of change and progression takes time, persistence and dedication.

Difficult? Absolutely. An absolutely necessary to your success as a leader.

A Little Note About Personal Change and Growth
The biggest obstacle that most leaders face in their own growth and development is success.

That is a tough concept.

When things are going well. You get good raises. Your performance reviews are solid. Results are good. Everything is peachy. What is your motivation to change, improve and grow?

Success often creates an artificial sense and aura of need to continue to grow, develop and change. Success can be a fog that blurs reality. Success can blind leaders into believing they are doing everything well and nothing needs to be tuned.

The most changeable and development desiring leaders are those who are coming off of a failure event and not a success event. Those feeling and experience failure embrace growth while those experiencing success often rebuff it.

Let the impetus for your leadership growth and development be success and not failure.

From ASTD: The State of E-Learning

2010-01-08T15:14:00.000-08:00

Click on the image for a full view of the graphic.

Read the article and narrative here:
http://www.astd.org/TD/Archives/2010/Jan/Free/1001_eLearning_Whats_Old.htm

From CLO: The Power of Paradox

2010-01-05T09:48:00.000-08:00

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” In contrast to Fitzgerald, the polemical nature of today’s domestic and international political and social diatribe offers a cautionary tale for those of us who are leading the cultivation of intelligence in the corporate arena. It is painful to watch people suffer while their leaders defend self-interested, partisan positions. These leaders seem to have the inability or unwillingness to see beyond their position to a greater good.

More than a decade ago, Jerry Porras and Jim Collins cited research from which they concluded that leaders who last and make a lasting difference have the exceptional ability to deal with paradoxes and seeming contradictions rather than yielding to the “tyranny of the ‘or.’” This is the tyranny that pushes people to believe that things must be either A or B, but not both. They were speaking of conflict between notions such as the following:

You can have change or stability, but not both.
You can be conservative or bold.
You can have low cost or high quality.
You can have creative autonomy or consistency.
You can invest for the future or do well in the short term.
You can make progress by methodical planning or by opportunistic groping.
You can be idealistic (values-driven) or pragmatic (profit-driven).

Read the entire article: http://www.clomedia.com/columnists/2010/January/2841/index.php

Monday Mentor-Refresher 1-Communication Style

2010-01-04T09:36:00.000-08:00

People communicate in dramatically different methods and styles. Almost as if there are sub-languages within each major language.

Image for a moment that, as the leader, someone in Berlin must perform a series of tasks to complete an objective. You speak in your native tongue of English. The Berliner smiles and nods their head approvingly. Communication complete and successful, right?

Just as different languages will lead to communication disconnects, different communication styles will often cause a lack of information flow and impede any real communication. Five or more years ago, the leader would often proclaim that “I am who I am” and it is your job to adapt. Sometimes it was followed by the gentle reminder “or leave.” More recently, successful leadership communication has become a more chameleon-like and adaptive approach.

The most commonly identified communication styles include direct, relational, low-key and detailed. The direct style often communicates in a very blunt, matter-of-fact or bullet point method. There is not a lot of language wasted on pleasantries and not a lot of background or supporting data is provided. Many times an assertive tone, implied urgency and rapid pacing comes along with the direct style.

By contrast, the relational communicator is often more wordy and those words are designed to build rapport. Usually, an upbeat demeanor and an eagerness to contact people are included in this style, as is an animation in non-verbal messages. These people are often labeled as chatty and optimistic.

The two additional styles of communication are a little harder to peg and pigeon hole. The low-key style is seen as reserved and speaks with a flat demeanor. They prefer a very soft, methodically paced and predictable approach to interpersonal communication. The detailed communicator is one that is data driven and often prefers a low-key tone. One unique trait of the detailed communicator is they will tend to answer the why question first and provide multiple sides of a point prior to communicating the resolution.

Now imagine for a moment all of these style thrown into a working environment and told to perform. Just as foreign languages cause disconnects, non-modified communication styles will do the same. A relational style leader attempts to communicate with a key team member who prefers a direct style. A low-key team member tries to interact with a direct style boss and soon loses her in minutiae.

The effective leader will bridge this disconnect with adaptive communication styles. He or she will read the style of the receiver very quickly and adapt appropriately. Quite simply, that means to know your communication style and learn how to read the style of others and adapt your style to that of the communication receiver. When that is done, messages will be transmitted with greater clarity and less misunderstanding. Subconsciously, team members recognize and appreciate the leader’s attempt at adaptation and better connection.

With people that you know, assessing their communication style is relatively easy. You have observed them. You have communicated with them previously. You have seen what style of communication works and does not work with them. What about new contacts and those people who are not as well known?

One technique that works with a high degree of accuracy is to assess the response to the “how are you?” question. Direct style communicators will respond quickly with one word and one word only. Relational communicators will provide between three and five words and many times, inquire about you. Low-key and high detail communicators will often express a brief pause while they assess the reason for your inquiry and the need to respond in an accurate manner.

The final word on communication style is back to the reason why adaptation is important. If, as a leader, your communication style disconnects with some people and the messages that you send are not followed, you lose. If you adapt your style and more people engage to the messages you send, you win.

Remember These People During Christmas

2009-12-17T12:10:00.000-08:00

http://www.vegasrescue.org/

http://www.calvarydowntownoutreach.org/

http://www.happyfactorylasvegas.org/

http://www.lvhddachshundclub.com/

When to Disobey the Boss-MSN Money

2009-12-17T12:01:00.000-08:00

Recently, the manager of an Abercrombie & Fitch store in Virginia Beach decided to keep, what some deemed, risqué photos of models hung up on his store walls even though local police told him to take the pictures down.

Why didn’t he listen to the cops? Because the manager’s corporate bosses asked him to display the photos.

Read the rest of the article: http://msn.careerbuilder.com/Article/MSN-1318-Workplace-Issues-When-to-Disobey-the-Boss/?sc_extcmp=JS_1318_msnbc&SiteId=cbmsnbc41318&ArticleID=1318&gt1=23000&cbRecursionCnt=1&cbsid=3486fbd78ef44ec69f7f5a0248adb957-314377224-x2-6

Supreme Court to Rule on Text Privacy-Washington Post

2009-12-17T11:47:00.000-08:00

The Supreme Court will decide whether employees have a reasonable expectation of privacy for the text messages they send on devices owned by their employers.

The case the court accepted Monday involves public employees, but a broadly written decision could hold a blueprint for private-workplace rules in a world in which communication via computers, e-mail and text messages plays a very large role.

Read the Entire Article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/14/AR2009121403689.html

Business Week: The Year in Innovation

2009-12-17T11:42:00.000-08:00

In 2009 the world was no longer flat; much of it was flat broke. Deflated by slumping sales and income, companies roundly did what innovation consultants say they never should—they cut spending on research and development. The U.S. drug industry, historically one of the most lavish spenders on research and development, announced the elimination of a record 69,000 jobs this year, up 60% from 2008. At many companies, quick hits and line extensions replaced more costly, though potentially more rewarding, investments in game-changing inventions.

Still, creativity lives on. Among fresh or fringe approaches that became mainstream tools in 2009: trickle-up innovation, design thinking, and open innovation. And while innovation may no longer be the golden goose it was in flusher times, the penny-pinching has forced companies to break some bad habits—such as wantonly pursuing every new idea—which could help them roll out new money-making products and services as the recession eases and an economic recovery takes hold.

Read the Entire Article: http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/dec2009/id20091216_670846.htm

Is Optimism Undermining America? -From Psychology Today

2009-12-17T11:40:00.000-08:00

Optimism has never had a good name, at least among the intellectually elite. We actually know when the word “optimism” entered common parlance — with the publication of Voltaire’s (1759) Candide and the embodiment of foolish optimism in the annoying character Dr. Pangloss.

Empirical research over the past few decades showing that optimism has many benefits—for achievement, social relationships, and health—is therefore interesting and important (Peterson, 2000). Studies of optimism helped usher in the field of positive psychology by demonstrating the importance of “positive” constructs above-and-beyond the absence of “negative” constructs.

Read the rest of the article at: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-good-life/200912/is-optimism-undermining-america

Team Members Say Temperature in Office Affects Productivity

2009-12-17T11:37:00.001-08:00

One-third of workers say office temperature affects their productivity
As winter sets in across the country and companies turn up the heat, they may need to readjust the thermostat to keep their workers productive.

According to a new CareerBuilder survey, when asked if the temperature at work affected their ability to get work done, more than one-in-five (22 percent) workers said that a too hot work environment made it difficult to concentrate. Eleven percent of workers said the same about a too cold work place.

Overall, more than a quarter (27 percent) of workers describe the temperature at their work place as too hot. On the flip side, 19 percent reported that the temperature was too cold, while 54 percent said it was just right.

Differing opinions on what is too hot or too cold for the office can sometimes cause conflict among cubicle mates. In fact, 10 percent of workers said they have fought with a co-worker over the office temperature. Worker disputes over temperature aren’t the only thing affecting work place climate; the economy is also playing a part. In an effort to save money, nearly one-in-five (19 percent) workers feel that their company has turned down the office temperature this year.

There are many factors that can affect work place productivity, said Rosemary Haefner, vice president of human resources for CareerBuilder. Everything from morale, burnout, and as our survey finds, temperature, can have an impact on workers’ ability to get their work done. If temperature is a concern, workers and employers can easily work together to find common ground so productivity does not suffer.

Source: CareerBuilder.com.

Self Control, Discipline and Regulation

2009-12-07T15:56:00.000-08:00

One of the most important concepts for leaders to embrace is that of hot buttons. We all have them. They come in a lot of shapes, sizes and colors. Some even have the names of people attached to them. A hot button is any event, issue, subject, situation or person that will evoke a negative, sarcastic or edgy response from you. A person or event pushes the hot button and you react in an adverse manner.

A critical point about hot buttons is the transfer of power that occurs when pushed and a reaction occurs. The button pusher gains power and situational control when you react. You lose power by reacting to your button being pushed. They win. You lose.

Related to this phenomenon is the learning that occurs by the button pusher. Whoever pushed your button and you reacted will remember this event and return to that newly learned skill again and again. Those of us that are parents understand this circle well.

An effective leader must identify their personal hot buttons and do everything possible to not react when those buttons are pushed. That includes avoiding situations and people that push buttons and confronting button pushers directly and tell them to cease pressing your buttons. Remember, we condition others that button pushing is effective and we can also begin the process of reconditioning them to cease pressing.

One of the most common occurrences in management, leadership and supervision is over-emotionalism. Often labeled with the highly scientific and technical term of crack pot. Effective leadership and over-emotionalism do not work. A leader must be calm and cool in all situations and events and be level-headed in all interactions.

A crack pot leader will fly off the handle and become angry when things do not go his or her way. They often blame that on being passionate about their job but in reality these type of bosses are alienating their followers. They will reduce their approachability and actually have their team avoid any contact out of the fear of an angry reaction. When upset by an event or circumstances, you know it and deal with it by going for a walk, workout, take some time off or get some coffee. Anything to blow off your steam except to interact with your team.

When angry or disappointed it is also important to resist the urge to vent unless to a trusted friend, peer level leader or family member. Venting to a team member is never appropriate and credibility may be lost when venting to your boss.

Another symptom of the crack pot type leader is pouting. Hiding in the office. Avoiding all contact. Sullen and unapproachable. Often occurs when things don’t go quite right or when a leader has suffered a set back. Remember, your team looks to you for tone, optimism and hope and if you pout, you are telling them that things must really be bad.

As a sub-type of the crack pot type leader is the Chicken Little. You remember from either the childhood story or the Disney movie, Chicken Little is the predictor of the sky falling. Chicken Little predicts doom and gloom at every opportunity. As with the character, a leader that loses his or her calm when times are difficult will lose credibility.

Our team members look to us for calm and optimism in time of difficulty. They do not want a leader that commiserates and sees only the negative. They desperately want their leaders to pick them up and pull them through the difficulties.

The concept that we most often teach and coach is battlefield cool. This important leadership skill comes from the American civil war when the government forces under the direction of U. S. Grant camped a little too close to their Confederate adversaries. One particular morning, the command tent of General Grant was overwhelmed with cannon fire. The scene was chaotic and confusing. General Grant’s primary aide was decapitated.

General Grant’s response? To make a pot of coffee. He responded to the most hectic and desperate events by making coffee. When asked about this, he indicated there was plenty of time to withdraw and he was not going to be shaken by immediate events.

His troops response? To rally behind his battlefield calm and rout the Confederates that morning.

Poise under pressure and difficult circumstances is tough but it is a necessary competency of effective leaders.

From Linkage: The Business Case for Mentoring

2009-12-07T07:31:00.000-08:00

It is the end of a difficult calendar year for most companies, leaders, and employees. A year when incredibly tough decisions were made—to save money, preserve core assets and talent, and in the most challenging cases to ensure the very existence of the business.

For most professionals, attention is now split between the wrap up of 2009 activities and the planning and budgeting for 2010.

What will 2010 bring? Depending on the economists you follow or media you consult, the timelines vary but most agree that we are in the midst of a slow climb up, out of recession. 2010 will continue to force hard choices. It is a time when talent retention and development couldn’t be more important.

Read the rest of the article: http://www.linkageinc.com/thinking/linkageleader/Documents/Kimberly_Vappie_The_Business_Case_for_Mentoring.pdf?CC=TLL09-EM12

From Linkage: Improving ROI: Three Leadership Development Practices

2009-12-07T07:27:00.000-08:00

Most firms have leadership programs that are highly rated in terms of the experience of participants but have little or no connection to rigorous application of the learning on the job. Despite all the excitement over action learning and connecting classroom experiences to on-the job assignments, this is still the biggest, most common gap in leadership development-often due to the difficulty of coordinating assignments and the discomfort many internal leaders feel when working as mentors and coaches. Training groups rarely determine how participation in the leadership training will integrate with larger talent and succession planning for on-the-job assignments and participation on task forces or initiatives. Even with the advent of communities
of practice and electronic means of connecting globally, most leaders don't know how to build networks among those experiencing common leadership transitions and dilemmas.

Read the rest of the article: http://www.linkageinc.com/thinking/linkageleader/Documents/David_Giber_Improving_ROI_Three_Best_Practices.pdf?CC=TLL09-EM12

Challenges to Integrity

2009-11-30T17:19:00.000-08:00

From the Leadership Excellence: Ethics and Integrity Training Program

When integrity lapses, there will be a failure in either ethics or morality. Common challenges to integrity include:

Relativism
• Someone else does it.
• Other people do it all the time.
• It is okay in other environments.

Sense of Invincibility
• Previously has gotten away with an ethical or moral lapse.
• Little or no penalty for prior offenses.
• Organizational position has little control or supervision.
• Well thought of and valued in the organization.
• Enforces laws and codes.

Alcohol and Drugs
• Loosens the tongue and integrity.
• Silences the little voice of good.
• Lubricates away many inhibitions.

Group Think and Peer Pressure
• No one wants to be the lone dissenter.
• Feeling of safety within a group.
• Self doubt about value system when in a minority position.

Sense of Invisibility/Sense of Isolation
• Will never get caught.
• False sense of power based on organizational position or value.
• Geographically isolated or remote.
• Too much available time and resources.

WSJ: The Difference Between Leadership and Management

2009-11-30T17:16:00.000-08:00

Leadership and management must go hand in hand. They are not the same thing. But they are necessarily linked, and complementary. Any effort to separate the two is likely to cause more problems than it solves.

Still, much ink has been spent delineating the differences. The manager’s job is to plan, organize and coordinate. The leader’s job is to inspire and motivate. In his 1989 book “On Becoming a Leader,” Warren Bennis composed a list of the differences:

Read the Entire Article: http://guides.wsj.com/management/developing-a-leadership-style/what-is-the-difference-between-management-and-leadership/

Leadership Breakthrough is Here

2009-11-23T09:58:00.000-08:00

Two days. Exceptional material. Guest speakers. A personalized focus on your skills and competencies. Individual coaching follow-up. Greater understanding of yourself, others and how the role of the leader impacts performance. Opportunities to interact with other leaders.

That is what you will get from the Leadership Breakthrough from Soaring Eagle Enterprises. Offered only twice a year and with a small enrollment, secure your opportunity in this great program today.

Specific learning elements and skills you will obtain include:
Effective Leadership Communication
Leadership Style and Impact
Building Rapport and Enhancing Relationship Power
Coaching to Maximize Results
Understanding and Building Morale and Team Member Engagement
Strategic Planning and Personal Action/Development Planning
Innovation Enhancement
Emotional Intelligence for Leaders

You will come away with a full tool set to energize your personal leadership mission and passion to set your organization on fire.
Just real leadership skills at a great value. Delivered by professionals. Supported and connected.

Learn more at: www.soaringeagleent.com

Top Talent, Top Strength

2009-11-21T14:17:00.000-08:00

Recently, I've read commentary that forecasts job changes by a surprisingly large percentage of employees when the economy stabilizes. Given this prediction, plus the fact that baby boomers have already begun to retire, it's clear that supply management leaders face a grave threat to business success in the near future. In short, intelligence might walk out the door precisely at the moment when business begins to boom again.

For this reason, it's imperative that we refocus today. Retaining high performers is a top priority. Now more than ever, talent management is critical to our companies' success.

Like so many people with whom I've spoken recently, you might operate under the assumption that, due to the current business environment, your employees are simply thankful to have jobs. You might assume they're not being recruited or looking for the next opportunity. In reality, however, recruiters are actively contacting your high-performing supply management professionals — especially those in leadership roles.

Read the rest of the Article: http://www.ism.ws/pubs/ISMMag/ismarticle.cfm?ItemNumber=19816

I am Thankful For . . .

2009-11-20T17:14:00.000-08:00

I AM THANKFUL FOR……

I am thankful for the mess to clean after a party
because it means I have been surrounded by friends.

I am thankful for the taxes I pay
because it means that I am employed.

I am thankful for the clothes that fit a little too snug
because it means I have enough to eat.

I am thankful for my shadow who watches me work
because it means I am out in the sunshine.

I am thankful for a lawn that needs mowing, windows
that need cleaning and gutters that need fixing
because that means I have a home.

I am thankful for the spot I find at the far end of
the parking lot because it means I am capable of walking.

I am thankful for all the complaining I hear about our
government because it means we have freedom of speech.

I am thankful for the lady behind me in church who sings off
key because it means I can hear.

I am thankful for the piles of laundry and ironing
because it means my loved ones are nearby.

I am thankful for my huge heating bill
because it means that I am warm.

I am thankful for the alarm that goes off in
the early morning hours because it means that I am alive.

I am thankful for the weariness and aching muscles
at the end of the day because it means that I have been productive.

Barriers to Delegation and Empowerment

2009-11-20T08:34:00.000-08:00

From the Soaring Eagle Enterprises' training program Coaching II-Delegation, Development and Empowerment.

1. Insecurity
Fear of losing control and fear of criticism prevent some leaders from delegating. Ultimately, they are afraid of losing their job.

2. Lack of Confidence in Others
Some believe their team members are not competent to take on a task, but through delegation, they can improve their skills and competence.

3. Lack Of Ability To Train Others
If proper training is not provided, team members will fail and become resentful. Some leaders lack the ability or desire to articulate directions and desired outcomes.

4. Personal Enjoyment
Some things are hard to let go of, but leaders should not retain control of a task simply because they enjoy doing it.

5. Habit
If a task becomes simple and repetitive, it should be delegated to free up your time for more complex issues and responsibilities

6. Reluctance Caused by Past Failures
Determine the cause of failure. Failed delegation is typically due to a poor match, lack of training or poor tracking of delegated tasks. Avoid the mistake, not delegation.

7. Lack of Time
Training, preparation, and delegation require a time investment. While it may take time in the short term, it will be a time saver in the long term.

8. “I Can Do It Best”
Leaders who think that to do something right, they have to do it themselves will achieve very little strategically.

The Cost of Not Developing Your Leaders Now-From HR Esquire

2009-11-20T08:31:00.000-08:00

The benefits of developing current and emerging leaders are well known to most senior business executives. What may not be as well known, and what can be more damaging to the organization in the long-term, are the hidden costs of not developing leaders in these economic times, especially after a layoff.

Typically ignored in the planning for a layoff are support mechanisms for those employees who stay. Layoff survivors, both managers and front-line workers, are shouldering heavy, if less obvious, burdens of their own, including an infectious sense of anxiety and the uncomfortable feeling that they ought to be grateful just to have a job.

Read the entire article at: http://www.humanresourcesiq.com/article.cfm?externalID=913&shownewswindow=1&mac=HRIQ_Ext_SMO_LI_Q409&SID=LinkedIn&utm_campaign=Linkedin&utm_medium=SMO&utm_source=e-bim&utm_content=Nov16news&utm_term=TEST