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Team Elements – Respect: Envy, Anger, Grudges

by Ron Potter March 28, 2019

We’re continuing our series on building great teams. Great teams happen when we have

Truth
Respect
Elegance
Commitment

We’re still working our way through the Respect series with the final set of circumstances of Envy, Anger, and Grudges. No, great teams don’t possess these attributes, great teams avoid these attributes. Envy, Anger, and Grudges are team weaknesses that can be lethal to your team’s well-being.

Envy

Envy is the first of the team weaknesses we’ll discuss. Great teams snuff out envy whenever it rears its ugly head. Here are some attributes of Envy:

Discontented or resentful by someone else’s possessions, qualities, luck, or accomplishments, style or attribute.
An emotion which occurs when a person lacks another’s superior quality or achievement.
Desires to deprive another of what they have.
Delights in degrading those who are more deserving.

Envy occurs when someone feels inferior to others and will do what they can to undermine or chop down those who possess more or achieve more than themselves.

At its roots, this is a comparison issue. Always comparing yourself to others is a losing battle. Jordan Peterson in his book 12 Rules of Life: An antidote to chaos states in rule number 4 “Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.” Comparing yourself to who you were yesterday puts you on the path of growth.

I once had a pastor who was fond of talking about the little boy pushing his wagon up a hill. As soon as he sat down in the wagon to rest, he found himself at the bottom of the hill. Never stop growing! Never stop learning! As soon as you give up on your own growth and development, envy creeps in. You begin to be resentful of what others have or what others have become.

Envy is destructive. Its first target is yourself. Its second target is those around you. As Jordan Peterson says, an antidote to chaos is to continue growing.

Anger

As the second of the team weaknesses, Anger that is directed at circumstances or failures can be healthy if it is channeled properly. Eruptions of anger are seldom positive. Expressing anger and disappointment in a safe environment can help everyone deal with the loss and adversity.

I’ve often run exercises with teams that have experienced great loss and disappointment. Working in small groups I allow each person to express their emotions by writing them on flip charts. No holds barred. Get it all out. Once the teams have exhausted the extent of their anger, we take the flip charts that were created, post them on the wall, share them with each other and then hand every chart out to members of the team. They are then instructed to tear the flip charts into as many pieces as possible, throw the pieces into the middle of the floor (expressing as much anger as they can while doing so) and then we all jump on the pile of pieces and stomp on them as viciously as possible. By the time the stomping has slowed to a stop I always witness a moment of somber quiet. But then someone breaks out in a big grin. Another joins them. It soon turns to laughter and people start expressing how cathartic the exercise was. In one form or another people shout out “Wow, I haven’t felt this good in a long time!” The anger dissipates. Calm heads return. And a new determination emerges in the room to move on, work hard, figure out how to overcome and get better.

All too often the anger remains covert. People assume they must hold their head up high, don’t complain and keep going. When things remain covert it’s almost impossible to deal with them. Once we brought out the anger in an overt but healthy way, new energy emerges from the team and it makes it possible to move forward.

Grudges

The third and most subtle of the team weaknesses, Grudges can be caused be either envy or anger but they just keep resurfacing over time. It’s probably because it remains overt until that moment when it erupts once again.

One of my teams referred to the practices as “replaying old tapes.” Something would happen on the team that didn’t seem to make sense to me and finally, someone else would explain, “Oh, they’re just replaying old tapes from what happened a few years ago.” A few years ago? Are you kidding me? People are still holding and expressing grudges after a few years and no one has dealt with it yet? Amazing.

Leaders and teams must call out grudges and put a stop to them. Maybe it will take a team exercise like the anger one described above. Maybe it will take some one-on-one discussions with the leader or a coach. Maybe a leader needs to decide to help a team member move on if they can’t get past old issues. Grudges can be like deep infections. They continue to resurface. Sometimes a mild antibiotic will heal an infection. I dealt with one of those antibiotic-resistant infections a few years ago. It took a direct injection of the most powerful antibiotic every three hours for six weeks.

Infections can be tough to deal with. Grudges can be just as tough because they pop to the surface periodically. You must get to the root of them and deal with them to have healthy teams.

In this post, we’ve talked about the team weaknesses you should avoid to build great teams. In the previous post, we talked about the positive things that need to be present to develop great Respect within teams. We’ll wrap up Respect with our next post to pull it all together with focus.

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Blog Trust Me

Humility and Endurance: The Two Pillars of Leadership

by Ron Potter March 25, 2019

My book Trust Me is centered on eight principles of successful leadership. What we call the “two pillars”—the key principles that support and are intertwined with the others—are humility and endurance. A leader who desires to build a great team must first become a leader of humility and endurance. Pride and despair always force leaders to choose incorrect methods and solutions.

It is difficult to build a team when you need to be the center of attention, the only voice, the only one with an idea, and the only one who can make a decision. It is also difficult to build a team when, at every sour turn, the team stumbles and fails or doesn’t learn from failure. Endurance means pushing through struggles together until the results are positive. Leaders, by the way they respond to crisis and chaos, often cause teams to quit sooner than necessary.

Understand, Accept, and Communicate Change

Since the 1980s—or earlier—the business world has begun to see the need for entirely new models of management in order to succeed in regaining and defending competitiveness in today’s world economy. The old paradigm of management that had guided the U.S. economy since the rise of the railroads and the large corporations of the Industrial Revolution no longer seemed to work. Firms struggled to remake themselves in order to be competitive. They followed the advice of many writers and consultants to become organizations that stepped away from Management by Objective and adopted a strategy of learning.

Today we live in a rapidly changing postindustrial society that is becoming increasingly complex and fluid. It is an environment that requires decision making and sometimes rapid change within organizations. Surviving and thriving in this rapidly changing landscape becomes a function of an organization’s ability to learn, grow, and break down institutional structures within the organization that impede growth. Organizations that are ideologically committed to growth and change will be at an advantage in the postindustrial era.

In his book Leading Change, John Kotter explains how leaders can effectively communicate change in their organizations. All of us at one time or another fully understand the confusion caused by change. Kotter writes,

Because the communication of vision [change] is often such a difficult activity, it can easily turn into a screeching, one-way broadcast in which useful feedback is ignored and employees are inadvertently made to feel unimportant. In highly successful change efforts, this rarely happens, because communication always becomes a two-way endeavor.

Even more important than two-way discussion are methods used to help people answer all the questions that occur during times of change and chaos. Clear, simple, often-repeated communication that comes from multiple sources and is inclusive of people’s opinions and fears is extremely helpful and productive.

Humility and endurance guide a ship experiencing change and chaos. A leader who builds a team, but their leadership style, upon the foundation of humility and endurance will see their team through difficult days.

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Blog Team Team Series

Team Elements – Respect: Patience, Kindness

by Ron Potter March 21, 2019

In our last post, we looked at the first three elements of great respect: Humility, Development, and Compassion.

Respect is the second component of great teamwork.

This week we’ll unpack further elements of Respect: Patience and Kindness.

In our final post on Patience, we’ll explore Anger and Grudges.

Patience

In today’s high paced world of do, do, do and go, go, go, we seldom think of patience as being an element of great teams. The early Greek word that Aristotle would have used always related to people, not projects.

One of our modern-day dictionary definitions says:

Stay calm and not get annoyed. Especially when something takes a long time, or when someone is not doing what you want them to do.

Another definition talks about not responding with annoyance or anger when faced with pain or suffering. Patience doesn’t happen without suffering.

How often do you get annoyed by the pain and suffering of delay or what we see as incompetence? If you’re like me, the answer is “way too often.” However, it’s important to make sure that we don’t distribute the frustration and annoyance evenly.

When we’re part of a team it means we have responsibility and accountability to the team and team members. Situations can be annoying. Systems can be annoying. People can be annoying. But, if our goal is to grow the team, experience our own growth within the team, and accomplish some great things together than we must keep our annoyance in check when it comes to people.

Annoyance can and will be triggered for many different reasons. I could never list all the reasons but many that come to mind for me include:

Someone moving too fast or too slow to satisfy me.
Not doing the work the way I think it should be done.
Focusing on the long-term when we have pressing issues in the short term. And vica versa.
Not honoring the values of the team in their work

Without going into great detail let’s look at some quick answers or reasons why you shouldn’t think of them as annoying

Everyone moves at a different speed. The key is to know what deadlines are real and sticking to them. Hold team members accountable when deadlines are missed.
We each work in different ways. The key is the outcome. Did you or the teammate get the results that were expected and needed? If not, make sure clarification is achieved with everyone. I’ve found that teams at high levels don’t spend enough time on clarification because they assume they’ve been there before, they assume they understand what is needed, they assume their pace and approach will be sufficient. Notice the word assume used in every case. I still remember a high school teacher explaining that “assume” makes an “ass” of “u” and “me.” Don’t be an ass. Don’t assume.
Each of our brains works in different ways. On the Myers-Briggs assessment, there is a function referred to as the perceiving function. Those who land on the “intuitive” side of perception think in conceptual terms. They focus on the future and must have an image of what that future should be in order to deal with the daily details. Those who fall on the sensing side of that function, work very much in the “here and now” so that they can understand how to get to a future state. Both ways of perceiving are valid. But each can also annoy the other. Appreciate, honor and use the differences to help the team achieve at the highest level.

Kindness

I’m going to go back to Aristotle’s original word for this category which is Love. I’ve converted his original word to Respect because I believe business teams are less confused by the word Respect. As I’ve mentioned earlier, the Greeks had several words that English translates into the word love. The word that Aristotle used was agape. I’m going to use a definition that I believe was put forth by Chip Ingram.

“Giving someone what they

- need the most
- deserve the least
- at great personal expense.”

Need the most

This implies that you’ve gotten to know a person well enough to know what they may need at the moment. Do you know your teammates as human beings or simply as human doings (know them for what they do, not who they are)?

Deserve the least

I haven’t met many business leaders or team members that have bad intentions. However, I’ve observed a lot of bad action. People often do things that are counter to their intentions. A person may have just done something that makes us think they don’t deserve help, assistance, care, understanding, etc.

At great personal expense

Kindness requires that we sacrifice some of our own needs to provide what another person needs the most at the moment. It may require us to provide the time that we don’t seem to have at the moment. It may require us to have the courage to step into a situation that would be must easier to simply avoid. It may require us to delay crucial decisions to build team unity. There is a cost.

I’m going to close this section with a line from one of my favorite books titled Anyway – The Paradoxical Commandments by Kent Keith.

People really need help but may attack you if you do help them. Help people anyway.

Patience and Kindness are at the heart of building great teams!

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Blog Team Team Series

Team Elements – Respect: Humility, Development, Compassion

by Ron Potter March 14, 2019

Teams are at the heart of great performance, great happiness, and the best memories. These blogs are built on the 4 Levels of Happiness by Aristotle. In his framework, Aristotle says that the highest level of happiness will be achieved at Level 4. In describing Level 4 Happiness, Aristotle Used five words:

Truth
Love
Purpose
Beauty
Unity

Love (Respect)

The Greeks had several words that are all translated into the English word “love.” The Greek word for Love that Aristotle used had nothing to do with emotions or the feeling of love that we have for another person. This word referred to treating the other person with respect. It’s about what we do, not how we feel.

As human beings, we seem to have an innate sense that someone respects us or not. Great teams require great respect (love) for each other.

In unpacking the concept of Respect (or love), we will look at the following concepts over the next couple of posts:

Three elements of building Trust: Humility, Development, Compassion
Patience
Kindness
Envy
Anger
Grudges

In our last post, we looked at Psychological Safety (both Truth and Respect being at their highest level). Research has indicated that Psychological Safety is one of the best indicators of high team performance.

This post will start a series digging deeper into the concept of Respect. How do we define it? How do we use it?

Humility, Development, and Compassion

These are three of the eight concepts that we learn from my book, Trust Me are present with great leadership. Let’s look at each one and see how they relate to Respect.

Humility

When someone does not demonstrate humility, it’s hard to believe they have respect for others. Lack of humility becomes self-focused. When someone is self-focused, they are not “other” focused. Humility means that I have an interest in your opinion. Steven Covey listed one of his 7 Habits of Highly Effective People as “Seek to understand first before being understood.” When someone wants to know what I think before sharing with me what they think, I feel respected. I feel like my opinion counts. I’m more interested in their opinion because they were interested in my opinion first. I feel respected.

Development

When a leader believes it’s worth their time to grow and develop me, I feel respected. Leaders dedicated to development will provide straight and meaningful feedback.

I once worked with a client who told me their boss was a wonderful person, always positive and encouraging but not very useful. They went on to explain that all of their performance reviews were great with nothing but good feedback. However, it gave them nothing to work with. There were no suggestions for growth or betterment. Therefore, it just wasn’t very useful.

Positive Development means straightforward feedback about what’s working and what is not working with suggestions for development and follow-up on efforts. Taking the time to develop people demonstrates respect.

Compassion

I would often get negative comments about this topic when we first published Trust Me. Many managers would express the sentiment that they were not running a charitable organization; they were running a business and business was rough and tumble, not soft and cushy!

I started dealing with this question by asking these rough and tumble leaders about their doctors. Did they like doctors that looked at the lab results only and treated them as numbers on a graph or did they like doctors that related to them as human beings first and then talked to them about how the clinical numbers might be affecting their quality of life. They all like doctors who were professionally competent but treated them as human beings first and foremost. The same is true with your teammates.

You want a teammate who tells it to you straight but knows you as a human being first. We are not motivated or encouraged by people who treat us as a human ‘doing’ (relating to what we do rather than who we are) rather than a human being. If we’re treated as human beings (which means we’re respected) first, we are much more likely to respond to our fullest.

Patience, Kindness, Envy, Anger, and Grudges.

These are concepts that we’ll look at in our next post about Respect.

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Blog Trust Me

Working Together, Not Against

by Ron Potter March 11, 2019

Leaders at all levels grapple with the challenge of getting people to pool their talents and work with, not against, one another.

Often frustrating to leaders is a team that consists entirely of “stars” who can’t or won’t play together as a team to “win the championship.” In an era of knowledge workers, leaders find themselves with nonfunctioning teams of all-stars who can easily undermine them. (Peter Drucker defines knowledge workers as those who “know more about their job than their boss does and in fact know more about their job than anybody else in the organization.”)

Chuck Daly, the first coach of America’s Dream Team, found himself needing to take basketball players like Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, and Larry Bird and build a team of champions, not just a group of incredible superstars. Coach Daly used all his coaching experience, leadership ability, and basketball knowledge to mold this group of all-stars into a team.

The team dominated headlines as well as the competition. Everywhere they went, the media followed. And the animated, trash-talking practices were sometimes bigger news than the games. In their first Olympic game together, the Dream Team trounced Angola 116-48 and never looked back, going 8-0 en route to the gold.

They were the only undefeated team in the tournament, averaging an Olympic record of 117.3 points a game. They won their games by an average of 43.8 points, and the closest any opponent could come was 32 points (Croatia in the gold-medal final).

“You will see a team of professionals in the Olympics again,” said Daly. “But I don’t think you’ll see another team quite like this. This was a majestic team.”

Coach Daly could not mold these incredibly talented basketball stars into the successful team they became by keeping the focus on himself. On the other hand, he could not surrender the basic basketball concepts he knew would help the team win a gold medal. He was a builder and a success at developing teams.

Teamwork doesn’t just happen. A winning team is not formed by a miracle of nature. You cannot just throw people together (even knowledge workers or pro basketball stars) and expect them to function as a high-performance team. It takes work. And at the core of team building is the desire to develop people and create a calm environment in which productive growth and seasoning can occur.

When leaders tolerate poor teams or even promote them through their own leadership style, organizations find themselves misaligned. Employees use this out-of-plumb structure just like children who play off each quibbling parent to get their own way. Leaders need to stop this behavior and get teams realigned. Leaders sometimes empower direct-reports to perform tasks or projects that are actually opposed to each other.

When team members come to us, they also have questions. Typically the questions team members ask are about themselves: “How do I deal with difficult team members?” or “How do I get heard?” These are self-directed questions. The team members are concerned about themselves—getting heard, getting ahead, getting along, and getting their jobs done.

In most cases the leader has not developed the team to the point of understanding the full value of synergy. The team members do not understand that the sum of their collective output will be greater than the work they could do individually.

Worse, many executive teams are not convinced that synergy can happen at the leadership level. “Authors Robert Lefton and V. R. Buzzotta, long-time counselors to top management, systematically examined 26 top-level teams, ranging in size from six to 20 people (usually a CEO or president and vice presidents); 20 of the firms are in the Fortune 500 club. In a nutshell, the authors found little teamwork, virtually no ‘synergy’ from these collections of wise heads, and a lot of wasted time and childish behavior.”

It falls on leaders to get teams excited about working together—about creating synergy. Many of the team members’ questions and wants can be overcome when they feel the power of working together and achieving the goals of the team.

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Blog Culture Organizational Integrity Trust Me

Organizational Integrity: Prioritizing People-Development

by Ron Potter December 10, 2018

For the next few Monday posts, I want to provide some snapshots into what makes up organizational integrity.

To have a great organization, integrity must be widespread. It won’t do to be a saintly leader of highest integrity if the rest of the team consists of liars, backbiters, and thieves. Integrity must exist from top to bottom. There are some key qualities that need to be modeled by leadership in order for an organization to embrace integrity.

Last week we started with self-disclosure. This week we explore Prioritizing People-Development.

Prioritizing People-Development

In 1997 Dennis Brozak, the president of Design Basics, a company with revenues of $4 million, handed over day-to-day operations to Linda Reimer, a highly qualified fifty-three-year-old whom he had found three years earlier at, of all places, a copy machine. Brozak saw that Reimer had management potential, but the intensive systematic training he gave her was the key to her rapid advancement in the company.

Back in 1991, Reimer was a longtime preschool director who wanted a part-time summer job. She took a low-level job photocopying blue prints for Design Basics, a company based in Omaha, Neb., that sells blueprints for homes via catalog. She did that job so well that Brozak hired her full-time in1994.

Over the next two years, Brozak gave Reimer various assignments that tested the potential executive’s leadership capabilities. First, he made her a human resources director and asked her to switch the department’s focus from advocating employees’ rights to developing their professional growth. She succeeded. Brozak began challenging her more and more. “I wanted to find out a lot about her,” he says. “Can she manage and motivate people? Can she delegate accurately and appropriately? And she had to be able to fire people when necessary. She has a big heart,
but she passed that test, too.”

Then, to see if she understood the market and the industry,
Brozak put Reimer in charge of one product, a catalog. The catalog’s home designs sold well. Brozak then evaluated her financial acumen
by making her an operations director, and he watched how well she used the company’s money. Again, he says, she did well. So Brozak
gave her control over all the company’s publishing. Once more, she produced a hit.

Finally, Brozak tested Reimer, by then a vice president, with new product development. He figured that assignment would show whether she was a big-picture thinker. Reimer identified a new niche that has become a major profit center for the company. “She changed the direction of our sales,” Brozaksays. By 1996, after 13 years at the company’s helm, Brozak wanted more free time. He began passing day-to-day operations to Reimer, giving her new responsibilities gradually to make sure she was ready to be promoted. In April 1997, Reimer officially became president.

Mike Hoffman, “The Leader Within,” Inc.,September 1998

If leaders want to develop others, they need to embrace these assumptions:

“Everyone wants to feel worthwhile.

Everyone needs and responds to encouragement.

People buy into the leader before they buy into the plan.

Most people don’t know how to be successful.

People are naturally motivated.

Most people will move once they receive permission and equipping.”

John C. Maxwell, The Maxwell Leadership Bible: Developing Leaders from the Word of God (Nashville: Nelson, 2002), 1437.

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Being Genuine Blog Culture

Being Genuine – Part IV

by Ron Potter December 6, 2018

This series of blog posts is based on an article written by Travis Bradberry in Forbes titled “12 Habits of Genuine People.” You can read the previous post here.

Here is his list of 12:

They don’t try to make people like them.
They don’t pass judgment.
They forge their own paths.
They are generous.
They treat everyone with respect.
They aren’t motivated by material things.
They are Trustworthy.
They are thick-skinned.
They put away their phones.
They aren’t driven by ego.
They aren’t hypocrites.
They don’t brag.

In this blog, I would like to consolidate points 4 and 6.

Generous and not motivated by material things.

For several years I have been using Aristotle’s framework of the pursuit of happiness to talk about leadership and team building.

Aristotle concluded that what makes us uniquely human is our pursuit of happiness. No other animal gets up in the morning trying to figure out what will make them happy. Our forefathers thought this concept was so important that they included it in the opening paragraph of our Declaration of Independence.

We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable; that all men are created equal and independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Psychology Today says that Aristotle was discovering “the best way to lead our lives and give it meaning.”

Aristotle defines four levels in our pursuit of happiness. While there is a progression from levels 1 to 4 in our pursuit of a meaningful life, it is also obvious that we’re constantly cycling through the levels, never leaving any one of them entirely behind. But, Aristotle does tell us that at any point in time, one of the four levels will identify our dominant pursuit of happiness at the moment.

Level One: Sensual, maximum pleasure, minimum pain. Searching for happiness through our senses; sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch.

Level Two: Ego and pride. Winning, achieving, producing, being the top dog.

Level Three: Beatitudes. Blessing others

Level four: Sublime Beatitudes. Accomplishing great things together.

Level Two, our ego and pride are the toughest one to overcome and move on to the Blessings. We’re hard-wired to function at the first two levels. It takes discipline, understanding and need for personal growth to move towards “the best way to lead our lives and give it meaning.”

Being generous and not being motivated by material things is the result of moving from level two to level three happiness.

Genuine people live predominately in pursuit of happiness at level 3.

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Blog Leadership

Dilemma is Leadership

by Ron Potter October 18, 2018

There’s an old joke about a sign over a shop that says

High Quality
Fast
Cheap
Chose any two of the three

For most of the industrial age, this has been the Holy Grail. Get things out the door at the lowest possible cost and yet maintain good quality. There have been several books written on this exact theme. Inc. magazine recently ran an article titled “Why Faster, Better, Cheaper is no longer good enough.”

Most of the things written seem to be adding additional components that must now be included along with Faster, Better and Cheaper (FBC). I would like to take a slightly different slant.

If you’re focused on FBC and any of the additional components being mentioned today, you’re not a leader you’re a manager. Managers are looking for the Holy Grail believing that if we just do these things better than the competition, we’ll win. Not true. Or even if it is true the victory will be painfully short in today’s rapid pace of change.

Leaders focus on Dilemmas

Leaders don’t focus on FBC. Leaders focus on dilemmas.

di·lem·ma: a situation in which a difficult choice has to be made between two or more alternatives, especially equally undesirable ones.

Synonyms: quandary, predicament, Catch-22, vicious circle, plight, mess, muddle

You’ll notice that all the synonyms have no answer. It’s simply the choice between two equally undesirable answers. In business, it’s sometimes the choice between to desirable answers. Both alternatives are good and may even be requirements, you just don’t have the resources to do both. You’re on the horns of a dilemma.

The point of this ancient saying “horns of a dilemma” is that you’re going to get gored either way. Whichever choice you make there will be blood.

Let’s say you must make a choice between fixing a short-term problem and investing in long-term success. You just don’t have the resources to do both. You’re on the horns of a dilemma. If you chose the short-term solution the long-term results are going to gore you and vice versa.

The point of this post is to evaluate what types of decisions you and your team making? If it fits into the FBC categories, you’re managing. If you’re dealing with dilemmas, you’re trying to lead through difficult decisions.

Lead by facing the Dilemmas

If you’re not dealing with dilemmas you’re not leading. If your leadership team is not dealing with dilemmas, you’ve already lost.

Leadership Obstacles

One of the major obstacles keeping leadership teams from dealing with dilemmas is second-guessing. It’s very easy to look at the damage caused by choosing one side or the other of a dilemma and ask,

Why did you make this decision?
Who made this mistake?
How could you have missed the consequences?

These and other forms of second guessing don’t take into account that a choice had to be made and it was a dilemma. It’s not that the decision makers weren’t aware of the damage that would occur with either decision. It’s just that the dilemma is forgotten or misunderstood or misrepresented at some point in the future.

Leaders and Leadership teams must be dealing with dilemmas. However, it’s critically important that the decision made is recorded and understood when the resulting damage occurs.

Dealing with dilemmas is difficult.

Dealing with dilemmas is acknowledging the damage that will be done either way.

Dealing with dilemmas is leadership. Leadership is difficult. Be a good leader anyway.

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Blog Trust Me

Leading Others By Putting Them First – Part I

by Ron Potter September 24, 2018

Are you a you-first leader? One way to find out is by asking the following questions:

Do others grow as individuals under your leadership? While benefiting from your compassion, do others become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, and more likely themselves to develop a “you-first” attitude?

If you’re unsure, developing a few characteristics may bring about the fruit of you-first leadership on your team.

Commitment to the growth of people

In their book The Leadership Challenge, James Kouzes and Barry Posner write, “Any leadership practice that increases another’s sense of self-confidence, self-determination, and personal effectiveness makes that person more powerful and greatly enhances the possibility of success.”

A commitment to growing people is not a temporary fix, a quick solution to a problem, or a short-term shot in the arm that helps them only today. Commitment to growth is a long-term investment in other people. It increases their opportunities to grow, learn, and use what they have learned to its greatest benefit. When their growth multiplies, the organization’s growth and maturity multiplies.

Listening

What made a difference for me was when I finally grasped the concept of listening with the intent to understand. I had always listened with the intent to respond. The entire time I was listening, my mind was developing responses, recording counterpoints, cataloging quick points that I was sure the other person would find helpful when I responded. Listening with the intent to respond is not compassionate. It is not humble. It’s self-focused. Listening with the intent to understand is indeed focused on the other person.

As I work with leaders and spend time listening with the intent to understand, I’m amazed at how much they are willing to share with me when they know I fully intend not to just hear them but also to understand.

Awareness

Both self-awareness and general awareness direct leaders to better understand situations and people. Robert Greenleaf wrote,

Awareness is not a giver of solace—it is just the opposite. It is a disturber and an awakener. Able leaders are usually sharply awake and reasonably disturbed. They are not seekers after solace. They have their own inner serenity.

Awareness helps leaders discern how to properly put others first.

These first three. qualities of a you-first leader will certainly build up your team and create an others-focused team. Next week, we’ll discuss the next three qualities.

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Blog Leadership

Circle of Influence – Part I

by Ron Potter August 23, 2018

Have you ever heard the Serenity Prayer? It goes like this:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.

Keep that prayer in mind as we talk about something called the Circle of Influence.

I’ve seen this concept put forth in several areas. I believe one of them was in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People written by Stephen Covey. You have two concentric circles, the smaller inner circle can be labeled, “influence.” The larger outer circle can be labeled, “concern.”

The point is to be very clear about the areas of an organization you can influence versus the areas of an organization that you have concern for.

Your concern may be very well placed. It may be a concern for

The overall growth and development of the company
Future opportunities
The obstacle that you face
The competence of people making decisions in other parts of the company

Having a true concern for the greater whole is a wonderful thing. However, you need to be very clear about the areas that you influence versus the areas in which you may have a concern.

The purpose of the Circle of Influence is to be clear where you have genuine influence and where you can only express concern. Don’t believe that you can influence your area of concern.

Trying to influence your area of concern often leads to disastrous results and increases the stress within organizations. Many of the leaders I work with express a genuine concern for other pieces of the organization, good or bad. However, when they believe their concern justifies their

Engagement
Meddling
Hands-on involvement
planting that ideas that those people over there just aren’t performing well.

they have now tried to move their influence into their circle of concern.

Go back to the serenity prayer. The last line of says, “Give me the wisdom to know the difference.”

It’s one thing to be smart. It’s a very different thing to be wise. It’s good to be concerned for the company and its success, but you can only influence your circle of influence. Trying to influence, control, exert power over your area of concern will only lead to bad results.

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Blog Caring in Action Trust Me

Caring in Action: Challenge

by Ron Potter August 13, 2018

Caring becomes real to another person only when some action occurs. I believe that communication, confrontation, and challenge are three of the best ways a leader puts “feet” to true caring.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve unpacked each of these aspects of caring and will conclude this week with challenge.

Challenge

An often overlooked aspect of compassion is the desire to help a person grow. Compassion includes challenging others to attain high-quality results on projects that stretch them. People need challenge in their lives, and leaders need to help their employees see the value of it not only for their own well-being but for the well-being of the organization as well.

This concept often reminds me of a story my co-writer Wayne would tell. Some years ago, he was asked to tackle an impossible task. He assumed leadership for a company division that had underperformed for several years. He inherited a group of salespeople whose only motivation was retirement. In addition, the division was overstocked with wrong inventory, and customer complaints were stacked high.

He rolled up my sleeves and began working to pull the department together. The first goal was the sales team. Together they worked out some new incentive programs and some additional benefits if sales quotas were met. Then they turned our attention to the customers, and, one by one, they solved their problems, creating a renewed commitment to service within the division. Next came sales and marketing strategies. With the team’s help, they launched a new marketing campaign that began to increase sales. They aggressively sold off the old inventory and partnered with a supplier to provide them with fresh stock from his facility. They were on a roll!

In three months sales and profits were up, and the crew (all but one stayed with the program) was happy and productive.

One day Wayne’s boss put his arm around his shoulders and asked him if he was aware that he had accomplished what many thought was impossible. His boss asked him what he had learned from the experience and told Wayne, “I’m sorry for all the extra work the last few months. I hope you understand—I did this to help you grow into a better manager.”

This man challenged Wayne to be better. His desire was to help him grow by throwing him into the middle of an almost impossible situation. Sure, the company prospered, but his goal also included Wayne’s personal growth and development.

How have you been challenged to grow? How might you challenge those who report to you to grow?

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Blog Trust Me

Getting Effective Feedback

by Ron Potter July 2, 2018

Can your team speak freely?

Leadership today is all about two words: It’s all about truth and trust.

When they trust you, you’ll get truth. And if you get truth, you get speed. If you get speed, you’re going to act. That’s how it works.

You and others are willing to work long and hard to accomplish goals. However, as we’ve seen from the stories in recent posts, our efforts can become very scattered and focused on the “urgent.” We need to build accurate, open, reliable feedback systems.

A team leader needs to create a learning environment in which every team member is appreciated, listened to, and respected. In this kind of environment, the opinions of team members are fully explored and understood and are incorporated into the decision-making process. The team actively learns from all members who express their positions and opinions, and as a result, the team is stronger and more efficient.

In the end it will be the ability to endure through the challenges, criticisms, and doubts that distinguishes the great leaders. But if you have staked your reputation on a wrong or unachievable goal, enduring through the challenges will only take your team or organization down the wrong path. What keeps you from that wrong path is good solid feedback. But good solid feedback is hard to come by, especially the higher you climb in an organization.

The power of effective feedback

People don’t like to give the boss bad news or news that doesn’t agree with the boss’s stated position. But without it comes only failure.

Effective Feedback. It’s not just something you ask for. It’s a cherished gift. It’s a wonderful reward for building a trusting organization or team.

An effective feedback apparatus starts with humility. Humble leaders create an atmosphere where feedback from others is desired and honestly requested. Leaders who are focused on growing their people build that growth on feedback. When people know that a leader is committed and wants honest feedback to help reach stated goals, they are more likely to provide the open and honest feedback required. Compassion, integrity, peacemaking—upcoming chapters that will all lead to an atmosphere and culture that is open to and thrives on honest and timely feedback.

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