Ron’s Short Review: Can you develop leadership? Josh sheds some light on the age-old question of “Are leaders made or born”. In a very practical way he identifies exercises that will work you through the process of Understanding Yourself, Leading Yourself, Understanding Others, Leading Others.
People really need help but may attack you if you do help them. Help people anyway.Sometimes people want to remain victims. It doesn’t require any accountability.
Sometimes people feel inadequate and if you help them it just proves the point.
Sometimes people don’t want your help, they just want your friendship and support.
First, make sure you understand your own motives before you try to help. A welfare society appears to want to help but it’s about keeping power and control. Are your helping motives pure?
Sometimes we try to help because we feel superior and the other person is incapable of helping themselves. Helping supports our superior feelings. Are your helping motives pure?
Sometimes we’re just being helpful. No power, no reward, no motives, just lending a helping hand. But people may still attack. Help anyway.
Headlines from a wonderful little book titled Anyway by Kent Keith
As we approach the end of Farson’s book, it really gets meaty as he begins to speak very directly about leadership. He starts this section by saying “One of the great enemies of organizational effectiveness is our stereotypical image of a leader. We imagine a commanding figure perhaps standing in front of an audience, talking, not listening, with an entourage of assistants standing by. The real strength of a leader is the ability to elicit the strength of the group. Leadership is less the property of a person than the property of a group.”
Organization effectiveness depends on trusting and well function teams. True leaders build great teams. The name of my company is Team Leadership Culture. The order is important. Companies with the stereotypical commanding figure leader don’t often sustain their results. Companies with leaders who build great teams have much greater sustained results. Teams first. But, it takes great team-building leadership to create the teams. Farson reinforces this concept by saying “True leaders are defined by the groups they are serving, and they understand the job as being interdependent with the group. They define their task as evoking the knowledge, skills, and creativity of those who are already with the organization.”
There is so much richness in this section that I can’t possibly cover it in this short blog. I started this series about Management of the Absurd because I thought it was a wonderful little book that was worth the attention. I’ll encourage you to go beyond my blogs and pick up a copy for yourself. It’s worth making the effort.
Farson closes this section with some statements that are near and dear to my heart. “The best leaders are servants of their people. Studies show that those people who are most successful in achieving power did not dominate the group; rather they served it. Humility comes naturally to the best leaders. They seldom take credit themselves but instead give credit to the group with which they have worked. They characteristically make life easier for their employees. They are constantly arranging situations, engineering jobs, smoothing out the processes, removing the barriers. They think about who needs what. They define their job as finding ways of releasing the creative potential that exists within each individual employee and in each group with which they work.”
If you’ve read my book on Leadership Trust Me you’ll know that the first attribute is humility. Farson says that humility comes naturally to the best leaders. I’ll say that the best leaders learn how to keep their ego in check and rely on that natural humility that is sometimes buried deep inside. The world tells us to promote our ego, build your brand, take charge. Humility trumps all those approaches if your desire is to be a great leader.
There are no leaders, only leadership.
I’m continuing my series on an in-depth look at a wonderful little book that’s twenty years old this year. The title is Management of the Absurd by Richard Farson. You may want to consider dropping back and reading the previous blogs about ABSURD! I think it will put each new one in great context.
If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives. Do good anyway.A client said to me the other day “No matter what my motives are, everyone else believes I’m making some sort of land grab with my suggestions. How do I get them to see I’m not trying to control things, I’m just trying to come up with some good answers to our problems?”
My answer was to do good anyway. Not a very satisfactory answer in their mind. We want people to see us as being honorable and pure in our motives. They won’t. Our minds are very good at both projecting and remembering. People tend to project their own motives and intentions on others. If they would act in a less than honorable way in this situation they assume you will also.
We also have an interesting memory system that continually revises our memories. If we’ve had experiences in the past with people who didn’t have very good motives or intent, we’ll assume that may be the case here as well.
Do good anyway. It’s our only viable approach to life. We can’t worry about what other people believe our motive to be. We can only do good or not. Do good anyway.
Headlines from a wonderful little book titled Anyway by Kent Keith
Here’s a challenge: On a scale of 1 to 5, rate your need for control in various situations.
Overcontrol diminishes trust. Control-freak leaders have a hard time building truly great teams. Their lack of trust in subordinates hamstrings creativity and superior performance. Conversely, a humble leader, who is not too full of self, has the capacity and good sense to allow others to sparkle and make a difference.
A humble leader steps aside so that others can run by and seize the prize of their own greatness. But just how is this done? Here’s an overview:
Leaders who expect the best of others exert a powerful influence. Many times leaders get caught in the trap of judging others. They measure, categorize, and classify people and the jobs they perform. Ken Blanchard likes to talk about “catching people doing things right.” This idea puts the emphasis on solid behavior and good intentions. It forces managers to assume and reward the best. It helps leaders not make rigid rules that hold down employees who want to soar.
Being quick to listen implies the leader is not distracted but is actively hearing what the other person is saying. A humble leader listens with the intent of understanding rather than responding. Listening with the intent to understand triggers curious questions that help both the listener and speaker grow in their thinking and improve their conclusions.
How do you react when someone tells you bad news? Does the messenger become a target for your arrows? We know a man who confronted his boss over a matter that had the potential to really upset the company’s applecart. Instead of shooting the messenger, the supervisor commended the truth-bearer for his straightforward approach and creativity. He was able to look past the message to the employee’s intentions. The boss agreed with his employee in significant ways and changed his perspective. He rewarded open communication, and the company was better off because of it.
Humble, open leaders show vulnerability. And nothing demonstrates vulnerability quite like admitting mistakes. “I was wrong” is difficult to say, but it is one of the most freeing and powerful statements a leader can make. Admitting your mistakes allows others on the team to relax and admit their mistakes. It allows the team to breathe and grow. Admission of wrong, seeking and granting forgiveness, and moving on are powerful tools of a humble leader.
What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway.Including your reputation. I was once fired by a client because he believed I was dishonest and had lied. I was devastated. I spent several weeks wondering if I had been a fraud. Had all the building of a consulting business and reputation been a fraud? The title of the book I had written was Trust Me. Had I been fooling myself along with others?
After several weeks of soul searching my actions and memory, I just couldn’t come up with anything I had done to deserve the label so I decided to keep moving toward the future but I knew I was doing so feeling much more vulnerable that I had in the past. It took a while but I began to get my footing back and I continued to move forward. However, this client was a member of a very large global company and my reputation had certainly been dented.
A few years later, this client reached out to me and let me know that he had been misinformed and even deceived in believing that I had done something dishonorable. He has continued to hire me as a trusted consultant for many years since. I feel very fortunate for how this story turned out in my life but it could have easily been left unresolved and unfortunately, there are often lasting consequences.
It’s critically important that we are self-aware and self-reflective, constantly judging our actions. But sometimes our reputations and future are damaged through unrelated or untrue events. Don’t stop building. When you stop growing you wither very rapidly. Grow. Build. It gives us life.
Headline from a wonderful little book titled Anyway by Kent Keith
I love this statement by Farson: “Business and industry spend billions of dollars each year to train, encourage, and reward their employees – and to install security systems.”
I remember a statement by Steven Covey (author of 7 Habits of Highly Effective People) that he could always tell the level of trust in an organization by how many rules and systems they had in place. The more the rules, the less the trust. I have also found this to be true. To me, the apex of this is when every member of the top leadership team is expected to know every detail about their operation. It’s stated as an indication of competency but in reality, it’s an indication of lack of trust.
Farson further elaborates by saying, “Situations, more than individuals, are what produce the difficulties, even though it almost always looks as if it is individuals who are fouling up. The better managers try to fix situations, not people, by making structural changes in their organizations.”
In addition to the structural changes, my experience is that building trust must be a regular focus of leadership teams. Like any conditioning, if you’re not constantly working on trust, it slowly erodes. And like any erosion, at some point, the dam breaks and it’s completely washed away.
Farson makes the point that most employees are trying to do the best they can. I agree. People really want to be productive, successful, valued, encouraged, and encouraging. It’s usually the system, structure, leadership, and lack of trust that discourages them from doing their best.
One of his closing statements in this section is, “When we build a team of people, we may, at the outset, wish that its members were different from what they are—we think this one might be too shy, that one too boisterous, another too cerebral, and so on. But once the team is built and begins working together, something pleasantly surprising happens. Instead of continuing to want to change these people, all those characteristics that may have concerned us at the outset become qualities we come to appreciate as simply being part of the way these people are. Absurdly, we find that we really wouldn’t want it any other way.”
Diversity is the key to great teams. But not diversity alone. It’s when the diversity is honored, trusted and appreciated that makes great teams. How much are you working at honoring, trusting and appreciating your teammates?
I’m continuing my series on an in-depth look at a wonderful little book that’s twenty years old this year. The title is Management of the Absurd by Richard Farson. You may want to consider dropping back and reading the previous blog posts about ABSURD! I think it will put each new one in great context.
In previous blog posts, I wrote about the 1st and 2nd steps of becoming the best learner. The concept comes from Richard Feynman, the Nobel-winning Physicist. His description of the first step was to teach it to a child. Something I called teaching a 5th grader. The second was to review.
Feynman says that Step 3 is Simplify. I unpacked Review a few weeks ago, but let me expound a bit on it before we get in to Simplify.
In this step, he speaks of finding gaps in our knowledge, looking for the connections, understanding the concepts.
I believe he’s uncovering two important principles in this step. One is that if we don’t get something it’s not because we’re stupid, it’s because we’re ignorant. Ignorant simply means that we’re not aware or are uninformed about something. Stupid means that we’re unwise or senseless. We just need a bit more information or understanding.
The second principle is probably the most important one to learn. We’re simply looking at it from a different perspective. Another Nobel Prize winner, Max Planck said: “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” Learn to shift your perspectives and look at things from a different angle or how someone else might look at the same thing.
Organization is important but I believe the key principle here is Simplify. That doesn’t mean to dumb it down, it means to think of it in a simple, elegant way. Good presenters get their presentation slides down to one word, image or icon. That’s elegant and that’s what people remember.
If you can’t teach it to a fifth grader, you either haven’t understood it yourself or you haven’t put it into an elegant enough form to transmit it or teach it well. Keep trying.
What in your life do you need to let go of so you can become more humble?
Being humble and teachable means learning to trust others and their opinions and instincts. It means listening with the intent of learning instead of simply responding. It means seeking personal development from every situation, experience (both good and bad), and transaction.
Humility is the first pillar of a leader whom others will trust.
I know it may not make much sense, but humility is a prominent characteristic of truly great leaders. A humble person sticks to the basics and is not prone to exaggeration. How much better off would we be today if the leaders of some of our fallen corporate behemoths had kept their heads out of the ozone and their feet on the ground?
Perhaps the most significant quality of humble leaders is their steady, clear-eyed perception of truth. A proud leader is prone to spreading and believing exaggerations—from little white lies to whopping falsehoods. Which high-powered modern leaders, intent on vanquishing foes and surmounting tall challenges, ever want to be known as humble? Not many—until, of course, they find out, as we intend to demonstrate, that humility is a critical first step on the path that leads to leadership success.
Humble leaders take a different approach. They are not so self-absorbed as to think that they don’t need to listen and be open. Their spirits are not critical because they are always open and scanning their employees, customers, and systems for new and better ideas.
Humble leaders know that they cannot control people or circumstances. The irony is that the more they loosen their grip, the more they gain. The more flexibility—rather than control—that they can build into themselves, the more they succeed.
A humble leader welcomes change. Change often equals growth. But not change for the sake of change. A humble leader needs to discern the right change, a skill that is developed by being open and teachable.
Being humble and teachable means learning to trust others and their opinions and instincts. It means listening with the intent of learning instead of simply responding. It means seeking personal development from every situation, experience (both good and bad), and transaction.
So I pose my question once again: What in your life do you need to let go of so you can become more humble?
Zero Based Budgeting
This approach to annual budgeting has swept through many industries over the last few years. The old way of doing annual budgeting was to start with what your budget had been last year and then explain how much your budget was going to increase this year (it seldom went down) and explain the reasons for the increase with all kinds of documentation to justify the increase.
The new approach isn’t much different except for the starting point. Now, instead of starting with last year’s budget, you’re starting point is zero. Zero Based Budgeting. Now the justification includes everything and everyone from the ground up. If fact, the really disciplined versions start with the purpose of your group, department or project itself. Every expense from paperclips to the senior vice president must be justified.
I think the verdict is still out on how this idea will fare over time but for now, it’s certainly in vogue. But there’s one aspect of corporate life that I haven’t yet seen this applied where I think it would be particularly useful: Meetings!
The average corporate life these days seems to be; arrive at the office, grab your coffee and get to the first meeting of the day, followed by back-to-back meetings for six, seven and often eight straight hours or more. People are burnt out and suffering. Ah, but there’s more, they still need to get their work done. When does that happen? Early mornings when the office is quiet or at the coffee shop before you hit the office or get in an hour before the rest of the family wakes up. Staying late, get home when you can see the kids off to bed, get in a few more hours before you collapse. Saturdays, Sundays, holidays, vacations! All because meetings are taking up the entire work day.
But what if meetings were required to take the approach of Zero Based Budgeting? Start by justifying the purpose of the meeting itself. Then justify the resources you need; materials, equipment, people and time. Why do we need 12 people in the room when three of them will make the decision? Why do we need to sit through one or two hours when the only piece we needed to be there for happened in the first or last ten minutes? Why do we schedule in full hour increments? Why not 17-minute meetings? All meetings fill whatever time is allocated to them.
A client of mine put together one slide that explained the Vision and Mission of the company followed by the three key initiatives that needed to be accomplished that year for them to be successful. All meetings were required to start with that particular slide along with an explanation (justification) of how that particular meeting contributed to one or more of the key initiatives. If the meeting couldn’t be justified on those terms, the meeting was not allowed to be scheduled. Zero Based Meetings! That approach provided two great benefits. One, the purpose and goals of meetings became abundantly clear and two, they eliminated about 40% of the meetings from the calendar. Zero Based Meetings!
Zero-based budgeting for meetings.
Ron’s Short Review: Power, control, worry, change, fear, mistakes, resentment, expectations: these topics and more are covered and shown how mentally strong people deal with these issues.
“Like many men and women who have spent their lives struggling and are in many ways better for it, organizations that struggle develop a sense of pulling together, ways of coping that keep them afloat where others sink.”
I was with a group of men the other day and we were going through a set of questions to force us to think and help us grow. One question was “What encouraged you this week?” After we listened to several stories that covered topics of personal, family, work, aging and others, a very clear pattern became visible. Each story of encouragement started with a situation of great pain and struggle. To Farson’s point, great victories and times of plenty are not the first things we think of when asked about encouragement. Encouragement comes through coping with difficulties.
One of the most powerful books I’ve read is The Road Less Traveled by Scott Peck. The opening sentence in that book is “Life is difficult.” Dr. Peck goes on to explain that avoidance of pain and suffering will lead to mental illness. Life is difficult. We find encouragement dealing with the difficulties.
Farson relates this concept to our corporate world when he says, “Although individuals will acknowledge calamities as important in their development, managers are less likely to cite organizational calamity as the reason for change and growth. Calamities are an embarrassment to management and not likely to be regarded as the key to success.”
Flawless Execution. I’ve heard that concept being promoted in almost every company I work with. Bad idea? Absolutely not. We should always be striving to do our best and execute as quickly and elegantly as we can. Notice that I used the word elegantly, not flawlessly. Take as much friction out of the execution process as you can and operate flawlessly for as long as you can. Increasing your periods of flawless execution is a great goal. But, when you ingrain the idea of continuous flawless execution, you begin to bury the flaws, mistakes, and difficulties that help people and teams grow. You also rob them of encouragement. Encouragement comes through dealing with and overcoming difficulties.
How well do you handle setbacks as a leader? In our work lives, we look at mistakes and setbacks as failures. We need to shift them to learning experiences so that people are encouraged and reduce the number of mistakes and setbacks.
I’m continuing my series on an in-depth look at a wonderful little book that’s twenty years old this year. The title is Management of the Absurd by Richard Farson. You may want to consider dropping back and reading the previous blog posts about ABSURD! I think it will put each new one in great context.