Leadership and Learning

Posts Tagged ‘success’

I often compare the emerging, new story of supervision and leadership to the loading of a huge new program on your computer. You know — the blue status bar creeps slowly across the screen, so you go get a cup of coffee rather than staring at it for a long time.

This new story loading onto the computers we call ourselves and our organizations is contrasted thus:

• Commitment versus compliance
• Initiative versus status quo
• Communication versus need-to-know
• Engagement versus apathy
• Listening versus just telling
• Connectedness versus fragmentation
• Spirit versus emotional void
• Caring versus not caring
• Excitement versus depression
• Winning versus just getting by

The blue status bar just lurched forward a bit with the news that the U.S. Office of Personnel Management is going to widen the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) out to all federal employees. It currently goes to about one-third.

http://www.fedview.opm.gov/2011/Reports/

(Caution: Descending into the survey results can result in a lot of time going by. The results are endlessly fascinating, and OPM has brilliantly made the data available in a way that can be sliced and diced across multiple dimensions, such as age, gender, supervisory status, HQ versus field, etc.)

OPM Director John Berry said the survey is becoming more important in how federal agencies address their challenges.

Now, let’s just stop here for a moment and have a pulse check.

One interesting thing that we run into from time to time in our work is supervisors’ and leaders’ reactions to hearing the concept that they are going to receive feedback from employees reporting to them. This is often in the form of the 360-degree assessment, an instrument that is rapidly growing.

There is simply no way to comprehend the sanity or utility of such an idea if you believe supervision and leadership are about control, command, only telling, using power to punish dissenters, and most of all, that the “people stuff” in work is irrelevant.

Sorry to tell you ladies and gentlemen, this mental model is much more common than many people think. Old habits die hard.

And so, here we are in 2012 with the federal government tripling the size of one of the most powerful surveys by which the workplace, supervisors and leaders are evaluated. It’s only been around 10 years, and now it’s being rolled out to all employees.

There is an expression command-and-control types use whenever employee perceptions, recommendations or even actions come into the mix. “The lunatics are running the asylum.”

This is a dark, depressing expression on several levels. It name-calls – a very primitive defense against uncomfortable things — and it compares work to an asylum. Some other expressions you have probably heard include, “When I want your opinion I’ll ask for it,” or “That’s not your area.”

I have often said that we are living in a fascinating time. The old story of leadership is slowly, agonizingly slowly, headed toward the door, mainly through the room called retirement. Showing up in its place, and championed by Generation Y, is an entirely new mental model around what leadership and supervision are.

The voice of employees is about to get a lot louder.

Ed Frauenheim has written a tremendous blog on workforce.com that everyone who feels busy should read.

http://www.workforce.com/article/20120113/BLOGS05/120119976/when-agility-adopts-the-symptoms-of-a-d-d#

To be fair, he is actually summarizing work done by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, who wrote in the January issue of the McKinsey Quarterly. But he does a nice job, and here is what he (and they) are saying:

Organizational life, work, pace and culture have stumbled into a condition that they call Strategic Attention Deficit Disorder (yes, SADD). It is characterized by leaders careening from one priority to another, always jumping to the next thing. In the process, they demoralize the workforce and “kill meaning” at work.

This only matters if you care about motivation and people feeling that what they do makes sense. If you don’t mind low morale and employee perceptions that work is meaningless, then you can disregard the piece.

Here’s the kicker: What seems to be driving at least some of this is one of the latest, recycled buzzwords of “agility.”
Who can argue with being agile? We all have to be this way – at times.

The problem is that it has become code for constantly shifting priorities that confuse employees, and who learn to see the pattern of “here today, gone tomorrow,” as the organization grasps for the next new thing. Maybe it will be operational excellence. Or customer-centricity. Or core competency.

Seriously, we can go back in the literature and pull these things out at any time – although it is best to wait until most of the organizational memory is erased around the initiative. (The one that still has not been dead long enough to remove the memories is TQM, and its key word: “empowerment.” When you use those terms with a government group, there is usually a groan, and this dates back to the 1980s.)

The desire for the silver bullet – that one, key linking piece that will forever resolve all the problems, anxieties, confusion and pain – will never go away, I suspect. It’s why a bazillion books have been written on leadership and organizations. Everyone is looking for The Answer.

It also speaks to how our brains work. We are hard-wired to notice what is bright and shiny, something exciting and new. We want to be sure we don’t miss the boat, or incur a threat. So we give a lot of air time to whatever is new, even while not really following through on what is already in place. So agile becomes fragile.

My friend Katherine McGraw calls the age in which we live “global speed-up.” I believe a symptom of the age is SADD, and wise leaders will recognize the problem and perhaps slow the ever-accelerating merry-go-round to ask some new questions.

One of those might be how to get the workforce really behind and supporting whatever the new initiative is. The answer? Engage them in the process. This creates a commitment that makes change efforts more likely to succeed.

The subjective perception of time is fascinating. After all, it objectively ticks away one reliable second at a time. There is no deviation. The atomic clock rules.

Yet, there are times when time seems to slow down. We sit at a long traffic light, ensure a boring speech, clean out a basement – we might feel like, “How long has this been going on?” and be surprised it was just a few minutes.

On the other hand, it is good to know there are at least two things that happen really fast — shockingly fast — so you can be prepared. The first is brief and personal; the second relates to you and your career.

Kids leaving home happens fast. I remember bringing my daughter Emma home from the hospital after birth, and in a blink, she is headed off to college. As my colleague Scott Boozer would say, “Yay!” We are thrilled for her, and (we think) we’re all ready. We’ll see about that with some experiential learning in the drive back from drop-off, and yes, we know it is uncool for parents to linger or get all emotional.

Here’s the other thing that happens really fast: your career.

We go to work day by day, navigating the terrain as best we can, getting a promotion here or there, an assignment to here or there. We do what we do, and the days roll into weeks, the weeks into months and then “Wow! I’ve been here 5 years!” What happened?”

That turns into a decade faster than the first 5 years took, and then amazing things start to happen. People start talking about retirement more, the little ones go to college (see above) and start their careers, you notice the retirement account and wonder about how your lifestyle will be. There are more and more retirement parties, the people in your office get younger and younger (and gosh, certainly dress and behave differently than you do!).

It all flies by. In a blink, and maybe before you know what happened, your career is over.

What was your plan? What was your vision for your working life? To get by? To make the mortgage?

Only you can figure out the vision for you. This means the mental picture of the future you want. HR will not tell you, neither will your boss. It’s yours.

It’s good to know what it is that you want, because the clock is ticking. It feels like it is speeding up.

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!