Ron’s Short Review: While this book was written for the Chrisian audience, the principles apply directly to any Leadership Team. You’ll have no trouble translating them directly to the corporate environment.
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Do you provide answers or ask questions? Think about it a minute. When someone walks into your office, when you take that phone call, how about when you open the email or text, or even when you join the meeting, do you find yourself providing more answers or asking more questions?
Transition from Manager to Leader
All of my corporate work is conducted with leaders: CEO’s, presidents, vice presidents, and directors. Seldom am I working at the management or lower levels. And to me this question of providing answers, not asking questions is a clear indication of whether someone has successfully made that transition from manager to leader. Throughout your early career, you are rewarded and promoted for providing answers. But as your success carries you into the leadership rank of director and above, you should be shifting to a more questioning style that gets others to think, explore, and maybe even learn from your experience. Managers provide answers. Leaders use powerful questioning.
“Judge a man by his questions. Not by his answers” – Voltaire
Avoid losing your job to a computer
A couple of good books lately have made a very strong point of this. One is The Second Machine Age by Erik Bryn Jolfsson and Andrew McAfee and the second one is A More Beautiful Questions by Warren Berger. Erik and Andrew in their book note that this ability to think of good questions, not just come up with the right answer, is what distinguishes us from the most powerful computers. This is still the unique human element. Even with as many jobs as the computer has already taken over, their use in the workplace is about to accelerate even more. Your ability to avoid losing your job to a computer that is good at coming up with answers will only be avoided by honing your creativity and coming up with great questions.
And even if you’re in that stage of your career when you’re being paid to provide answers and complete tasks, hone your skills of asking “why.” You’ll begin to stand out from the crowd and may reach the leadership ranks sooner than you think.
Cut your email by 40%
Here’s a simple but powerful example of questions vs. answers. Almost every leader will complain to me that they are overwhelmed with email. I’ll ask them if they would like to instantly cut their email volume by 40%. Although they’re always skeptical, they agree they would like to experience that kind of reduction.
I tell them to stop providing answers. Leaders tend to be good at problem solving. That’s what got them here. So the natural instinct when an email comes in is to give the answer or solve the problem. Stop doing that! Leaders are supposed to encourage and grow others to solve the problem. I guarantee that you will substantially reduce your email volume if you respond to the email with one simple question: “Why are you sending me this email?”
That simple question will lead to some great discussions about accountability and problem solving, as well as with teamwork and collaboration.
Managers provide answers. Leaders use powerful questioning.
Management’s imperative is to cultivate its human resources. —Zig Ziglar, Top Performance
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Leaders are defined by the leaders they develop. If they cannot or choose not to develop others, chances are good they will not be leaders for long.
Personal humility establishes a healthy foundation in a leader’s outlook. Leaders also need to develop the right qualities in ourselves and others.
C. William Pollard, chairman of the board at ServiceMaster, relates how he and his team finally grasped this principle:
Several years ago the ServiceMaster board of directors had a two-day session with Peter Drucker. The purpose of our time was to review how we could be more effective in our planning and governance. Peter started off the seminar with one of his famous questions: “What is your business?” The responses were varied and included the identification of markets we serve, such as our health care, education, and residential; and the services we deliver, such as food service, housekeeping, and maid service.
After about five minutes of listening to the responses regarding our markets and services, Peter told our board something that I have never been able to tell them. He said, “You are all wrong. Your business is simply the training and development of people. You package it all different ways to meet the needs and demands of the customer, but your basic business is people training and motivation. You are delivering services. You can’t deliver services without people. You can’t deliver quality service to the customer without motivated and trained people.”
Development requires a humble attitude and a long-term commitment to growth and improvement. Benjamin Franklin once said, “You can’t expect an empty bag to stand up straight.” Neither can leaders expect people to grow, achieve goals, and improve the organization without investing the time necessary to develop them into top performers and men and women of character.
Growth must first take place in leaders’ lives. There are some attitudes and habits close to home that must be cleaned up. Some strenuous self-examination is always a good first step.
After we let go of a few personal “planks” and seek to understand the reality of the environment where we lead, we will then be ready to powerfully develop others.
In my previous blog on the book “American Icon” by Bryce Hoffman, I commented on the leadership style exhibited by Alan Mulally as he led the Ford Motor Company through some of their darkest days. He exhibited two key characteristics, Humility and Endurance that are hallmarks of great leadership and may have helped him save Ford.
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Dedication to Teamwork
But it may have been his dedication to teamwork that was equally important to the survival of Ford. The auto industry and Ford in particular were not pillars of teamwork at the top. While I’ve worked with many great teams within the auto companies, the warring chiefdoms of the larger corporation often seemed to be the culture de jour.
Self-Selection
When Mulally first arrived in Detroit, both the existing leadership team and the outside community (mainly the press) assumed there would be a clean sweep as Alan brought in his trusted team members from his years at Boeing. But, Mulally surprised them all when he answered one of the first reporters that his team was already in place, meaning the previous team members of Bill Ford’s team. He commented with a very particular statement that I have shared with many of the leaders that I’ve worked with through the years. Build the right vision and culture and the people who don’t belong there and won’t work out in the end will self-select out. Once they realize that you, as a new leader, are truly taking the team or company in a new direction and you endure through all of the setbacks, they’ll either get on board (as Mark Fields did in the book and is now the current CEO of Ford) or they’ll realize they don’t belong and figure out how to save face and move on.
The Tyranny of Competence
This may be the more difficult issue to deal with when creating great teams. The Tyranny of Competence is a title Chapter in Robert Quinn’s book Deep Change. Quinn states that “It is fairly easy to find an extraordinarily competent person who plays a particularly powerful role in the organization.” “The person often argues, ‘The only thing that should matter is how well someone does the job.’” In Mulally’s case, it happened to be the Chief Financial Officer (CFO). This was not only a powerful role but a critical role. Hoffman writes of the CFO “[He] had devoted his life to Ford and worked as hard or harder than anyone else in the building to save it. But he was dividing the company at a time when it needed to be united like never before. He had to go.”
The Darkest Moment
In this darkest moment, when you would think that you need all of the hard working competency you can find, Mulally decided that teamwork was more important than experience and hardworking competency. And he acted. Mulally, was not looking for blind loyalty, he had demonstrated time and time again that he preferred to hear contrary opinions and radical ideas. But the CFO was making decisions on his own that were contrary to the team decisions and enforcing them in spite of where the team and Mulally thought they should be going. This was not going to work. Teamwork was more crucial in the darkest of days.
What have you seen or how hard have you worked at really building team? A lot gets written about teamwork in companies. What are you actually experiencing? Share some stories with us.
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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.
While consulting with a large department store chain, we encountered such a situation with a particular store employee. The management team just did not respect this guy because he did not fit the mold of the “perfect” floor salesperson. He dressed way too shabby. He wore his hair very long. His humor was caustic. He talked too loudly and joked too much. The only thing standing between him and a pink slip was the small matter of performance. He was positively brilliant at what he did!
His specialty was the children’s clothing department where the kids (and moms) loved him. To them, he was a funny, warm, and highly entertaining friend, a trusted adviser in selecting the best things to wear. Because the customers understood this man’s intentions—he loved meeting kids on their level and serving them—his counter-cultural appearance and behavior didn’t matter much. As long as his creative approach and personality accomplished the mission, he deserved to be a hero of management, not a personnel headache.
This man definitely was a diamond in the rough.
Sure, this example may be a bit extreme, but it illustrates the principle beautifully: 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.
Many times a humble leader discovers strengths in his or her coworkers that even they have failed to detect. Sometimes you just don’t know what precious unexpected gems are buried beneath the surface of another human being.
A humble leader—one not caught up constantly in personal needs—is able to explore, develop, and encourage the strengths in others.
A humble leader wants to create a company of giants, to help people become “bigger” than they ever dreamed possible.
Humility absolutely fuels high staff morale and achievement in an organization. This is possible because the leader’s ego isn’t sucking all the air out of the creative environment. There is plenty of oxygen left over for others to breathe and make significant contributions.
And it’s fun. Yes, it can be positively exhilarating to learn what qualities have been “hard-wired” into others.
If our hippie friend’s potential had not been recognized by a humble leader, how would the children’s clothing department in that store suffered?
Humility is costly, but there are incredible and often surprising rewards for leaders who recognize their own personal strengths and limitations while seeing and encouraging the greatness in others.
Are people surprised when you select that person that has complimentary skills to your own? Or do they expect you to appreciate and promote similar skills?
I’m just finishing the book American Icon: Alan Mulally and the Fight to Save Ford Motor Company
Photo Source: Wikipedia, Ford World Headquarters
Being around and occasionally consulting in the auto industry, I knew many of the stories that Hoffman shares in his book. But when you start stringing the stories together and when they’re put into the context of the darkest days of the American auto industry it becomes a great story about leadership and teamwork.
Two Pillars of Leadership
Mulally displays several characteristics of great leadership but the two most powerful are humility and endurance. If you look in my book Trust Me you’ll find these two characteristics as the book-ends of eight leadership styles of great leaders. If you look in the Jim Collins book Good to Great (written many years before this story occurred) he also points out what he labeled the “Level 5” leader exhibiting humility and a very strong will (endurance). Mulally seemed to possess and demonstrate these characteristics in spades.
Humility
Mulally always seemed to have a smile on his face, openly greeted any member of the Ford team regardless of their level in the organization and demonstrated a true desire to learn from their point of view. This was so contrary to the general level of behavior from the auto industry leaders that it often took people a long time before they actually believed that Alan was genuine in his desire to learn from anyone. I have seen this single characteristic move leaders into a higher class of leadership through the years. Not only do they actually learn by being genuinely open to others, they develop a dedicated organization around them that strives to accomplish the vision just because they feel the leaders has listened to and understood them.
Endurance
There are many times in the story when the economy is falling away faster than the auto company can react even though they are cutting deeper and faster than the industry had ever seen. These were terrifying and crushing days. And yet Alan would constantly check his belief in the process and the goal by always accepting the reality of the situation and then, if he still believed they were on the right track, bear down and continue to pursue the expected results even with the entire industry collapsing around them. This was not Pollyannaish and there were many times when failure was at their doorstep but they endured through unbelievable pressure.
I’ve had a few of my clients suffer through major changes in their industry and the struggle is real. Especially if like Ford, they had been a successfully run businesses for decades and even centuries. I believe there are two very critical conditions that can give companies their best chance of survival, great leadership and pressure-tested teamwork. In my next blog I’ll talk about some of the team work I discovered in Hoffman’s book and I’ve seen in the market place.
What do you think? Can great leadership save a company or are market conditions just too much for any leadership style?
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Three things were born in 1948.
Two of them have dramatically changed the world. The third has been a very interested observer.
One—the transistor. It came out of bell labs and Wikipedia describes it as, “The fundamental building block of modern electronic devices.”
Two—the bit. Short for binary digit is the basic unit of information in computer and digital communication.
Three—Ron Potter. Substantially less impactful than the first two.
For whatever reason, I have long felt to be a part of and intertwined with this growing digital world. The programmable microprocessor (which made the PC possible) was born the year I graduated from engineering school.
But in spite of this fascination and enjoyment of this gadget world, I have been more interested by the human mind, spirit and soul. Who we are and how all things human work together is much more fascinating and complex than anything man made.
Alvin Toffler wrote the book Future Shock
The advantage provided by the instantaneous, world-wide communication that these technologies have brought won’t work if we don’t build trust and stay connected as human beings.
In fact, without building the human connected trust required, these high-tech solutions can actually turn destructive. We’ve all seen reputations and relationships damaged or even destroyed through electronic communication.
Be careful. Get to know and understand people. Build trust. We’ve been identified as human “beings,” not human “doings.”
If you’ll build the relationships, trust, understanding, and respect needed for a great team to work, the high technology can greatly enhance everything. Without trust it can quickly become destructive.
Build trust!
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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? Let’s take a closer look:
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Expect the best of others
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. Put 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.
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Learn to listen
An ancient adage says “Be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow anger.” Being quick to listen implies that a leader is paying attention, that he or she 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.
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Reward honest communication
How do you react when someone tells you bad news? Does the messenger become a target for your arrows? Our reaction to feedback will make all the difference in being able to move forward.
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Admit your mistakes
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.
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Commit to developing others
Developing others first takes personal commitment and desire. It means taking the time to know people—their preferences, skills, and goals. This is most often accomplished in personal relationships.
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Seek commitment
Once people understand your goals and you begin to understand their needs and potential, you can then seek their commitment. Good leaders understand the need to develop committed people.
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Share the dream
Leaders often make the mistake of not being open or sharing their vision and goals with their people. Your vision is not something to hide. Sharing it with others helps them understand what they need to contribute. You can then develop their potential around a shared vision. A shared vision is the only way to create team unity.
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Set goals
Developing people’s potential (and then being open to their ideas) involves setting mutually agreed-upon goals. Individuals also need to know whether they are meeting the standard.
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Reward and recognize
In addition to setting goals, it is important to make people feel appreciated. Money simply levels the playing field. Employees believe you are simply providing fair compensation for their additional efforts; therefore, money pays only for what they have already given. A true rewards recognize peoples potential and goals and helps them develop the needed skills.
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Allow for midcourse corrections
Do not be rigid in your planning with people. Invariably, changes in market conditions, employee needs, and other factors will alter plans and goals. That’s life; that’s okay. Developing someone’s potential is not a fixed proposition but rather a fluid system that responds to his or her needs and skills as well as your needs and vision.
Humility is costly, but there are incredible and often surprising rewards for leaders who recognize their own personal strengths and limitations while seeing and encouraging the greatness in others. Sometimes the ramifications of this timeless insight bring a smile.
Please share a “smile” with us today!
As I struggled with some major health issues last year, I noticed an interesting phenomenon.
The first question people often asked me was “How are you doing?” It amazed me that my answer back tended to be, “I’m well.”
That’s interesting. I dealt with health issues that affect less than one percent of the patients in my situation. I was not physically well. And yet, when I said, “I’m well.” I actually meant it. Why?
As I analyzed this it became clear to me that my wellness statement was related to my hope, not to my physical well being.
Did I have hope that my future would be better?
Did I have hope that the present pain and suffering would pay off in a healthier future?
If the hope of a better future was there, then I could honestly answer, “I am well” when people asked how I was doing.
Providing Hope
Our business environments seem to spend almost equal time being sick and being healthy. There are times when our strategy is working, the customers are responding, margins are good, life is good, but it never lasts. We also go through times of radical market shifts, take-over bids, collapsed market place and other disruptions that leave our workplaces very ill. People are stressed and overworked. Stress brings out the micro-manager in us. There are conflicts and blame games. It’s just not a healthy environment. But when asked, “How are you doing?” can you or your people honestly answer, “I’m well?”
The answer is “yes” if you and your people have hope for the future.
I’m not talking about blind faith. That is not hope. Hope has a confidence that we’re on the right track, we have a good strategy, and our hard work can turn this thing aground. It’s not blind faith and it’s not complete confidence. It’s believing we are doing the right things to get to a better future.
Leaders MUST Provide Hope
We must provide our people with this kind of hope, especially through difficult times. With this hope, people will say they are well in spite of the stress and hard work.
Leaders CAN Provide Hope
We can provide this kind of hope as leaders if we’re transparent and realistic. If we’re open about our views, our fears, and our need to work through this thing together. When team members feel engaged, when they believe they’re getting the total unvarnished story. When they can also express their creative ideas as well as their fears, they also feel more in control.
Giving people a clear hope for the future, will keep them “Well!”
Do you provide answers or ask questions?
Think about it a minute. When someone walks into your office, when you take that phone call, how about when you open the email or text, or even when you join the meeting, do you find yourself providing more answers or asking more questions?
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All of my corporate work is conducted with leaders: CEO’s, presidents, vice presidents, and directors. Seldom am I working at the management or lower levels. And to me this issue of providing answers or asking good questions is a clear indication of whether someone has successfully made that transition from manager to leader.
Throughout your early career, you are rewarded and promoted for providing answers. But as your success carries you into the leadership rank of director and above, you should be shifting to a more questioning style that gets others to think, explore, and maybe even learn from your experience. Managers provide answers. Leaders use powerful questioning.
Judge a man by his questions. Not by his answers—Voltaire
A couple of good books lately have made a very strong point of this. One is The Second Machine Age by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee and the second one is A More Beautiful Question by Warren Berger. Erik and Andrew in their book note that this ability to think of good questions, not just come up with the right answer, is what still distinguishes us from the most powerful computers. This is still the unique human element. Even with as many jobs as the computer has already taken over, their use in the workplace is about to accelerate even more. Your ability to avoid losing your job to a computer that is good at coming up with answers will only be avoided by honing your creativity and coming up with great questions.
And even if you’re in that stage of your career when you’re being paid to provide answers and complete tasks, hone your skills of asking “why.” You’ll begin to stand out from the crowd and may reach the leadership ranks sooner than you think.
Here’s a simple but powerful example of questions vs. answers.
Almost every leader will complain to me that they are overwhelmed with email. I’ll ask them if they would like to instantly cut their email volume by 40%. Although they’re always skeptical, they agree they would like to experience that kind of reduction.
I tell them to stop providing answers. Leaders tend to be good at problem solving. That’s what got them here. So the natural instinct when an email comes in is to give the answer or solve the problem. Stop doing that! Leaders are supposed to encourage and grow others to solve the problem. I guarantee that you will substantially reduce your email volume if you respond to the email with one simple question: “Why are you sending me this email?” Don’t be vindictive about it or belittling, simply be curious about why they felt the need to send you that email. Turn it into a learning opportunity. Ask them the bigger broader question that they haven’t thought of yet but you’ve had the experience to get beyond solving the task in front of them. Grow and develop them through your questions.
That simple questioning approach will lead to some great discussions about accountability and problem solving, as well as with teamwork and collaboration.
Managers provide answers. Leaders ask powerful questioning.
Ron’s Short Review: You need grit, fortitude and desire to finish this tome. But, if you really have a desire to understand what made Einstein so recognizable (genius, showman and flaws) and even if you want to gain a better understanding of his science, it’s worth the read.
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Many times a humble leader discovers strengths in his or her coworkers that even they have failed to detect. Sometimes you just don’t know what precious gems are buried beneath the surface of another human being. We call this process “finding Sparky.”
Say again? Let us explain with this story.
When he was a young boy, his friends gave him the nickname “Sparky” after a horse in the Barney Google comic strip. Though he was quite intelligent, Sparky’s shyness and timidity made school an agonizing experience. High school was especially challenging. He was a small, 136-pound pimply nobody. No one seemed to care about him. He remembered being astonished whenever anyone said hello. He had some skill in golf but lost an important match. He was a fair artist, but even the staff of his high-school yearbook would not publish his drawings. No one, including Sparky, seemed to think he had much to offer. He later said about this period in his life, “I never regarded myself as being much and I never regarded myself as being good-looking and I never had a date in high school, because I thought, who’d want to date me?”
After high school he completed a correspondence course in art. He wrote a letter to Walt Disney Studios, hoping to be a cartoonist there. The studios requested drawings, and he worked many hours on them before mailing them to Disney. His reply from the studios: “rejected.”
How did Sparky respond? He began drawing an autobiographical series of cartoons about a chronic underachiever, a boy whose kite would never fly. It wasn’t that long before the whole world became acquainted with this character named Charlie Brown—as well as friends of his named Lucy, Linus, Pig Pen, and Snoopy. Sparky—Charles Schulz—became the most famous and wealthy cartoonist ever. At the height of his popularity, his cartoon strip Peanuts appeared in 2,600 papers in twenty-one languages in seventy-five countries. In 1978 he was named International Cartoonist of the Year. The whole Peanuts cartoon gang once appeared on a cover of Time magazine. This “loser” in high school really had some potential after all.
A humble leader is always looking for Sparkies.
Each person with whom a leader works has hidden gifts and talents, and someone may even have the enormous potential of a Sparky. We need to help them uncover, develop, and use those talents. Humble leaders relish the idea of helping people find their unique niche. They enjoy moving people along to bigger and better things. They celebrate the victories and provide encouragement when their people are discouraged or fearful of moving ahead.
Take Gary, for example. He worked in the mailroom for one of my clients. Unknown to his employer, Gary was a computer genius. When the president of the company needed help, I suggested Gary, and he delivered. Today, Gary is a highly respected computer executive. He got his start from an executive who was open and humble.
Many leaders focus on people’s weaknesses. They are always trying to “fix” someone. They fail to recognize potential and help people develop a path for personal success and reward.
Share with us some “sparky” stories about that person who just blossomed when you or someone helped them see their strength. Maybe someone saw you as a “sparky.” Please share.