Leadership and Learning

Posts Tagged ‘results’

There is a great old story about a great old drummer named Bernard Purdie, who, if you’ve not heard of him, played on records by James Brown, Frank Sinatra, BB King, Aretha Franklin, Miles Davis and Steely Dan.

Bernard has a beautiful sense of time. When you hear him playing a simple beat, you want to move. (For an example of that, click on the following link.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FX_84iWPLU

The story goes that when Bernard was hired for a session, he would come in, set up his drums, and then before beginning to play, would also put up two signs, one on each side of his drum set.

One sign read: “You done it.”

The other sign read: “You done hired the hit-maker, Bernard ‘Pretty’ Purdie.”

That’s pretty bold.

If you watch the video clip above, you’ll understand why he was so bold. If you watch this video clip below, you’ll hear Walter Fagen and Water Becker (they are Steely Dan) talking about Bernard’s signs.

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

“Boldness” is a word used in coaching that turns out to have some real significance. Boldness is about confidence, belief, passion and conviction.

It may be easier to understand by its opposite: lack of confidence, lack of belief, lack of passion and lack of conviction.

Boldness comes from processed experience. That means that not only have you lived something successful, but you have thought about it, and consciously concluded you have reason to be bold about something. (Sometimes people are very good at something, but taking a page from the “aw, shucks. It’s just little old me” playbook, they downplay or minimize their contribution. Not recommended.)

A key with boldness is to find where it naturally occurs in your work. Where do you find your voice? What gives you energy? Where does fear dissipate?

Where can you put up your own signs?

One dismaying fact — and I would argue a growing trend with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator — is the series of misconceptions that regularly arise in its interpretation. This is mainly due to increasingly compressed timeframes in which the theory is taught.

I would like to do my part to lay to rest one of the myths, and I want to do that with a story, in order to help others understand what the MBTI really is.

You have probably heard someone complain that the MBTI “puts people in boxes.” The hypothesis of a preference is somehow seen as tagging someone with a label from which he or she cannot escape.

I know I’d be unhappy if that were the case, but it’s not. Type simply describes preferences we bring to life, work, relationships and situations. In fact, we have to use all the functions every day in order to survive, but some we prefer to others.

Type describes where you start, but it says nothing about where you wind up. In fact, one of the most important concepts in Type – Type development – is all about how you develop the less-preferred parts of the personality in order to be more well-rounded, adaptive and, as Carl Jung said, “individuated.”

I have always believed it is healthy to engage in activity that is the opposite of preference – that it is a good idea for introverts to work on speaking up more, for extraverts to take a little more time before speaking, and so on.

In my own Type – ENTP – I have a very clear preference for Intuition over Sensing. Intuition is about the big picture, patterns, concepts, themes and the future. Sensing is about the details, specifics, concrete facts, the knowable and more the immediate reality.

And now to the story.

I don’t remember exactly how it happened, or if it involved some arm twisting, cold beers, volunteer guilting or — in the way so many volunteer jobs work — a profound lack of understanding of what I was getting into, but I wound up in a role as something called “Clerk of Course” for my daughter’s summer swim team. Clerk of Course may sound like an official, even bureaucratic function involving a sharpened pencil and perhaps a banker’s lamp, but it’s not.

No, Clerk of Course is physically located right in the middle of the central nervous system of a meet. It includes mayhem, stress, elevated pulse rates and a never-ending fear of jacking up and delaying the running of a meet, at which point hundreds of over-ambitious, time-starved parents can hate you, let alone the swimmers who are inconvenienced.

The job of Clerk of Course each Saturday morning during the season is to get 272 excited swimmers to the right lane, at the right time, for the right race. Some of these swimmers are 8 years old and younger, meaning they suddenly realize they need to go to the bathroom right before a race, and want you to tell them it’s OK to do so.

If you think that’s bad, try corralling the 15-18 age group, the chief goal of which seems to be strutting, preening and occasional chest-beating (the boys) and quietly talking about each other and relationships (the girls). Both genders are more interested in what is on their iPods than anything an old guy wants to tell them about getting lined up. They have far more important things on their minds that actually checking in at the Clerk of Course, which is required under Northern Virginia Swim League rules, people. Please.

But one error, and the wrath of the NVSL (and remember, the parents) can befall the Clerk of Course, hence the stress mentioned above.

Now, all of my dear and wonderful colleagues will readily tell you that attention to details is not exactly my strong suit. They would probably tell you this while rolling their eyes, and they would probably say it in a more colorful and extreme fashion than I just wrote. There’s a good reason for this. For those of you who have studied Type, it is my Inferior Function, meaning it comes last in my own batting order for dealing with the world of Intuition, Thinking, Feeling, and then, dead last, Sensing.

But here’s the real point: I knew the volunteer job would require me to develop my own Sensing and attention to details, and that’s actually why I took it. I knew it would stretch me.

And, in retrospect, I wouldn’t have traded it for the world.

Each Saturday during the swim season, I had to completely focus attention on each of those 272 names, making sure the right person got to the right lane, etc. An earthquake could have taken place, a helicopter could have made an emergency landing in the pool, the Obama motorcade could have driven by and I would have never noticed. Total focus.

After the initial panic and sense of being overwhelmed, which went on for 4 or 5 years, I actually started to get into the rhythm of the job, finding the best ways to make sure everything worked. In fact, I began to take pride in the mastery of the details, and the running of an error-free meet. After some time, it became clear to me it was like a ballet and a mosh pit, a seamless and rhythmic orchestrating of unruly, youthful crowds. It was a beautiful thing when each race ended and the next race was ready to take off. The time-challenged parents loved that.

Before all this took place, in the early morning when the pool was just starting to awaken, I would go to the staging area and clean it up, arrange the benches, make sure the ground was clear of any objects. It was a quiet, introverted devotion to details. To be honest, it was kind of a reverence, a caring about the details.

Type describes where you start, but not where you wind up. I may still struggle with some details at work, but doing this activity increased my confidence that I can flex to sensing when needed.

I did the gig for eight years, and with a daughter going to college now, it’s over. More than 10,000 swimmers later, my work there is done, and I will miss it terribly. It was a great opportunity, a lot of fun in between the moments of sheer terror, and I hope a service to all those wonderful kids.

You never know what Type development opportunities might open up for you.

Part of my mid-life and daughter-going-to-college-soon plan involves building a recording studio in my basement. (There are worse ways to handle this phase of life.) I like to play the guitar and drums, and apart from occasional purchases that have to be carefully explained in advance of the credit card statement arriving, it’s all good.

If you thought some of your friends were snobs about their stereo sound systems or home theatres, you ought to talk to musicians. They salivate and practically genuflect over the really good equipment, and go out of their way to trash-talk inferior products – it’s almost personal to them. They get angry about bad product.

In looking for the equipment I need – mixers, mics, audio interfaces, DI boxes, pre-amps, etc. – one thing I have noticed is that some companies go to great lengths to build a box that makes their product look very sleek and high end. But when you read the reviews and user opinions they are withering in their criticism.

It’s an interesting strategy – make your product look like something it’s not. Maybe you can fool enough people to get rich, like if you put a really attractive label on a bad bottle of wine.

Where does your energy and effort go? Is it about building something great, or making something mediocre look great? Is it mostly about packaging, “messaging” and covering?

No one faults beautiful design that covers beautiful product, but most people figure out eventually when there is a mismatch.

The great organizational sin of flashy PowerPoint slides must be mentioned here. Some people, with few original ideas, valuable contributions or insights will spend a lot of time making their presentation look oh so good.

Others spend the time on the ideas and concepts, and focus on conveying those clearly and effectively. If you have ever sat through a whizzy PowerPoint presentation but not really know what the point was at the end, you know what I’m talking about.

What’s in your box?

The team over here at 8230 Leesburg Pike has been through a lot lately, let me tell you.

From a variety of sources, we have been buffeted by new demands, expectations, rapidly changing circumstances and other factors that all created what can safely be described as enormous stress.

It started in the autumn, so it’s not like it’s been just a short-term thing.

What helps you get through stress?

One thing I learned, or maybe relearned, or maybe learned more experientially is that a tight team really counts.

By tight team, I mean a group of people who genuinely care about each other, who are willing to put in extra effort to help others, and who actually appreciate and enjoy the opportunity to do so. There’s a certain pleasure and satisfaction in knowing that you are directly helping someone you care about. There’s an iron commitment in knowing you will go the wall for others.

There is something magical in this. It’s beyond the pure, very limited, self-interest Adam Smith wrote about. (Free-marketers, settle down out there. Nothing wrong with self-interest. It’s just that it’s only one part of a much larger picture.) It’s transcendent. It’s not really described in any competency model, strategic plan or other official artifact, because it’s not an official, organizational process. It’s an organic, grass-roots, person-centered state of being, grounded in relationships. The most an organization can officially do is to create the space, the grounds, for it to happen. Some military environments and sports organizations seem to be the best at fostering it. (Hmmm. I wonder if that’s because their performance is measured so carefully, because it’s so important?) But the people have to be the ones to make it happen.

Mot people have been fortunate enough to be on a tight team at some point in their lives. It could have been in a sport, a committee at church, a neighborhood or anywhere else. There is no real predicting it – it certainly can’t be guaranteed. But sometimes, it just happens. If it’s happened for you, you understand its power, and the difference it makes. If you shoveled snow off an elderly neighbor’s drive-way, and your other neighbors came out to help . . that feeling that you had, together? That’s what I’m talking about.

When I think about how the team I’m on might have fared through the stress we experienced if we had not been a tight team, I just shake my head. I don’t think it could have happened.

It’s the glue that keeps people connected. It’s a beautiful thing.

This time of year tends to be full of milestone events. Weddings, big vacations, and graduations are at the top of the to-do list. In the case of graduations, valedictorians, thought leaders and celebrities of all kinds tend to include a common thread about the importance of success in their commencement speeches. Those messages tend to go something like this:

Education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world.
(Nelson Mandela)

Don’t live down to expectations. Go out there and do something remarkable.  (Wendy Wasserstein)

Do not follow where the path may lead.  Go, instead, where there is no path and leave a trail.  (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

No pressure, right?

It has been some time since I was in college and longer than I’d care to count since I was in high school. And yet, one thing remains true today as if it was just yesterday: nobody I know gets up in the morning with the intention to fail. I’m no exception; I appreciate and strive for success as much as anyone else, and I like to be surrounded by people who do the same. Failure does happen though, and it often serves as an important milepost on the journey to success. For leaders, in fact, the learning that comes through and as a result of failure can be as important – if not more so – than the achievement of a successful outcome.

Leaders who are able to withstand and overcome setbacks give themselves and their teams the permission to fail in pursuit of learning and excellence. This is an adaptive capability that is not always easy for leaders to develop. It requires some resilience and humility along with a willingness to let go of what you think you know sometimes, for the sake of learning.

Here are three tips that I’ve used myself and that I’ve offered to executive coaching clients who seek to build this particular leadership muscle.

• What’s your definition? Look at your current definitions of success and failure and assess where you may need to let go of some long-held assumptions. Where did your definitions come from? Are they still serving you? If not, rewrite them.

• Experiment! Choose a small project that presents an opportunity for you to experiment with the possibility of failure. Include learning milestones for yourself in addition to project milestones – things you can observe and learn about yourself and your leadership style, in addition to the tangible project outcome. What you learn about yourself during times of “failure” may turn out to be mini-successes all in their own right, whether you achieve the overall outcome as originally planned or not.

• Involve others. Talk with your team about the effort you are making to build your adaptive capabilities by experimenting with failure. Engage them in the process by inviting their feedback on how you react, respond, and recover when things go differently than you’d planned. Be sure to tell your supervisor and other key stakeholders too so their expectations are set accordingly. After all, leaders are expected to manage and mitigate risks. Your first experiment should be big enough to provide learning but not so big that you put your organization at risk for the sake of your personal development.

In her commencement speech at Harvard two years ago, author J.K. Rowling talked about the “fringe benefits” of failure. Her short, 20-minute talk is one of my favorites because she is transparent about how she benefited from giving herself permission to fail for the sake of her own learning. You may not become a best-selling author as she has, but what would become possible if you gave yourself permission to fail…the room to learn?

Run an experiment or two and share your learning with me. No cap and gown required for this one!

Some of my colleagues and I spend more time watching an incredible internet EagleCam than we probably should. This is a weather-proof camcorder trained on an eagle’s nest, where we have been watching the mom and dad raise three Bald Eagle chicks. It is something like one of those wonderful nature shows, delivered through a browser.

Someone asked about how the young eagles learn to fly. Do they just go for it and potentially fall? Get a lift from a parent? Start from the ground?

In the bird world, there is a verb called “branching,” where the birds hop out of the nest to a nearby, adjacent branch with a little assist from a flap of the wings. (They start to build the muscle needed to flap their wings while still in the nest. They stand around and beat their wings in a process called “wingercising.”) Next time, maybe they flap a couple of times, reaching for a farther branch. In the process, they are building muscle, improving coordination and balance.

At some indeterminate point, the “branching” becomes “flying.”

What does this have to do with a Leadership and Learning?

A lot, actually.

Apart from justifying the time spent watching this fascinating development, the point can be made that participants in leadership development classes and programs often get stuck around what they do now. How do they start to move toward what they want? Do they bet the ranch? Just go for it?

This is frightening to most human beings. (It’s akin to potentially falling to the ground, if it doesn’t work.)

Much better is “branching.” We recommend people pick one specific behavior they want to change, and then slowly, one step at a time, try something new. It should be in a safe environment, with people they know, respect and trust.

Examples of this could include listening more, eliciting others’ opinions, clarifying disagreements, trying to see other perspectives, or articulating more clearly the vision and mission.

All we really ask is that one modest step in the direction of the change be made. For example, in learning to listen more, I urge people to hang in there one more sentence before replying. That’s just a start. The fact is, once people see they can do that one little thing, they are more emboldened to do it again, perhaps longer or more reliably. This is building capacity, and hopping to farther branches.

Eventually, the new behavior “crowds out” the old behavior, and a new capability is present.

Taking this perspective relieves huge pressures on already-pressured leaders. One step, one stride, one thing – in the direction you want.

One other thing: The way the parents get the eaglets to start making forays out of the nest is to stop bringing them food. The hungry birds start to realize they have to change what they’re doing if they’re going to stay alive.

And, of course, this is exactly how change comes about in our lives. We need to adapt and change because the situation we’re in has changed.

What changes are you being asked to make by the environment, your people, your market? How can you “branch” and get started on that?

If you’ve been a homeowner for some time, you have probably experienced the following phenomenon: You see a faucet slowly dripping, think “big deal” and then get the surprise water bill at the end of the month.

What does this have to do with development?

Participants in leadership development often struggle with application. They “get” the content, see the possibilities for change . . . and then get stuck in application. They go back to old habits; fail to break new ground.

There are powerful reinforcers for this. For one thing, the brain likes to keep things in patterns and habits. It conserves energy that way. Change is hard, mentally.

But one way to think about, and act on, development goals is to pick just one thing – this creates focus rather than the confusion of many goals – and then use the power of time.

The power of time is what’s behind your water bill, and it can be turned to your advantage in working on a new behavior, whether it’s listening more, speaking up when you need to, remaining calm in conflict, or anything else.

 The point is this: if you keep taking steady, even modest, small steps in the direction you want, over time you will find yourself building capability and competence. The sheer force of time, and repetition of what you want, almost guarantees you’re going to create an impact.

Of course, you need reflection and feedback along the way – subjects of other posts – but if you stick with something that has real focus and definition – and let this occur over an extended period of time, you’re going to be in a different place.

The How of the What

A lot of management and even leadership thinking focuses on the “what” of work – deadlines, meetings, delegation, feedback, and so on. These are defined activities with a purpose, result and presumably some kind of measure.

What is often missed in mechanistic models of workplace performance, however, is an understanding, let alone embracing of the “how.”

The how is subjective, nuanced and very often the difference between success and failure. Here’s an example.

Let’s say you’re giving feedback to an employee on a busted deadline. The what here is pretty straight-forward – identify what happened, causes of that, what can be changed to make the next deadline, and so on.

However, it is easy to see that artful feedback would help the other person own the problem, not feel personally attacked, and come up with great ideas for a solution. The difference between a defensive, arm’s length and strained conversation, and one in which honestly, directness, support and a genuine intention to help is the how. It’s the difference between the sheet music and the playing. It is art.

 It is easy to nominally check a what box. Harder to assess, but crucial to success, is how the what is achieved.

Go into your neighborhood bookstore and you will find countless titles on leadership.
(350,000+ on Amazon.com.) Competency models can contain dozens of things a leader is
expected to do, and we all relate to ideas of what effective leadership is really all about
from our own experience – good and bad.

It can be confusing, and overwhelming.

Given this, an interesting question is: What does the empirical, data-driven work show us
about truly effective leadership? What do we know from real research?

Fortunately, there is exhaustive research in the books cited below that takes us beyond
intuitive, personal ideas about leadership to which we can look to solidly ground thinking
and action. The following mine data in particularly powerful ways:

• The Extraordinary Leader, by Joseph Folkman and John Zenger 
• Good to Great, by Jim Collins
• The Leadership Challenge, by James Kouzes and Barry Posner

Let’s summarize each, and then look at some connecting points:

The Extraordinary Leader

Joseph Folkman and John Zenger start out in The Extraordinary Leader with a simple
question: What differentiates the best- and worst-performing leaders, as judged by the
results of 360-degree assessments? They studied more than 200,000 such assessments on
20,000 leaders. They conclude with a metaphor of a tent, with the “long pole” in the
middle representing character. The other keys to leadership effectiveness are
interpersonal skills, focus on results, personal capability, and leading organizational
change.
Good to Great

Jim Collins takes a completely different approach in Good to Great. Rather than relying
on internal perceptions of leadership effectiveness, he takes the analysis outside. He and
his small army of researchers spent 15,000 hours carefully evaluating Fortune 500
companies that had posted significantly better-than-peer results over a sustained period of
time. They simply looked for who had been doing the best, the longest.

Collins took a deliberately agnostic view of everything, holding no theories or ideas
about what differentiated these companies. Instead, he backed up from the outstanding
results to find out what was going on inside the “black box” that accounted for the
results.

His first finding is that these companies had what he calls Level 5 leadership in all cases.
A Level 5 leader moves beyond individual effectiveness, beyond being a good team
player, and beyond being a competent manager or leader into the rarified air of building
enduring greatness through a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional
will.

The enduring greatness Collins writes about relates to the organization rather than from
the leader. This view connects to the personal humility he identifies next: the notion that
the leader is not an ego-propelled, publicity-seeking figure. Collins’ leaders stand in stark
contrast to some leader personalities we see today. He even notes that Level 5 leadership
is at odds with the personal ambition that drives many people into positions of leadership.

Collins’ work makes it ultimately practical for any leader to ask himself or herself: Is this
about me, or the organization?
Emotional Intelligence

Daniel Goleman reviewed huge databases of performance in coming to his model of
emotional intelligence, which consists of self-awareness, self-regulation, social
awareness and relationship management.

What is most striking about Goleman’s work is his contention, buttressed
again and again by empirical data, that emotional intelligence is a far better predictor of
success in performance, and particularly leadership, than technical competence. Further,
Goleman’s research consistently shows that emotional intelligence matters more and
more the higher up one goes in a leadership position.
The Leadership Challenge

Kouzes and Posner studied tens of thousands of leaders, using a proprietary
instrument called the Leadership Practices Inventory, as well as interviews and
observations. They identified five fundamental attributes of leadership: challenging the
process, inspiring a shared vision, enabling others to act, modeling the way, and
encouraging the heart.
Integration points:

Clearly, this research shows that leadership starts with deeply internal characteristics of
leaders, including character, humility and self-awareness.

From there, and in a more extraverted, behavioral sense, the keys appear to be balancing
unquestioned commitment to the work and organization’s goals with an interest and focus
on the people doing that work. It’s a both/and, rather than an either/or.

The goal focus calls in Collins’ professional will, Zenger and Folkman’s thinking about
results, and the emphasis by Kouzes and Posner on the shared vision that creates the
desire for those results. The need to change in order to meet those goals is underlined in
Kouzes and Posner’s work.

The focus on people is highlighted in Goleman’s work, including his research on self-
regulation, social awareness and relationship management. The interpersonal skills cited
by Zenger and Folkman, and the attribute of encouraging the heart are all evidence of the
people side of leadership.

The net seems to be a combination of caring about something to accomplish, and caring
about the people who are going to do that.

It’s a “both/and,” rather than an “either/or.”