Ron’s Short Review: Although Steve Jobs is never talked about, it help me understand his genius “taking” personality a bit more.
Ron’s Short Review: No organization has ever been managed out of a crises, they have all been led. Sinek brings a great view of leadership.
Ron’s Short Review: This one really convinces you that managers have answers, true leaders have questions, provoke questions and teach their teams to constantly question.
Ron’s Short Review: When I read this book I thought I only got one point. Then I heard Marquet speak and he said “There is only one point to the book.” That made me feel better and honestly, it is one powerful point.
Ron’s Short Review: Very well written and seemingly unbiased biography of Steve Jobs. I actually understood more about him when I read the book “Give and Take.”
Ron’s Short Review: Great follow-up book to Daniel Pink’s “Whole New Mind”. Now that the world is in a state of perpetual change, how do you lead?
Ron’s Short Review: Pink’s third book that really helps us understand our own motives and approaches.
Image Source: Kristina D.C. Hoeppner, Creative Commons
In previous blogs you have heard me talk about the difference of listening with the intent to understand versus listening with the intent to respond. So often while we’re “listening” our minds are working rapidly trying to figure out how we are going to respond to what the person is saying rather than trying to figure out what they’re trying to communicate.
Two of my readings recently touched on the power and aspect of listening. One comes from an HBR blog by Ram Charan of June 21, 2012 titled “The Discipline of Listening.” In the article Ram gives several good practical approaches to improving your listening skills but I want to share a few words with you from the end of his blog:
“For leaders, listening is a central competence for success. At its core, listening is connecting. Your ability to understand the true spirit of a message as it is intended to be communicated, and demonstrate your understanding, is paramount in forming connections and leading effectively. Truly empathetic listening requires courage – the willingness to let go of the old habits and embrace new ones that may, at first, feel time-consuming and inefficient. But once acquired, these listening habits are the very skills that turn would-be leaders into true ones.”
Notice that it’s the difference between “would-be” leaders and real ones. So many people believe that it’s what they know that makes them great leaders. In reality it’s what they continually learn that make them great leaders. You can only learn through listening.
I’ve also just begun reading The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed
Adam poses an interesting question at the beginning of the Passionate Curiosity chapter:
“Imagine one hundred people working in a large company. They’re roughly the same age, around thirty five. They’re all vice presidents and share many of the same qualities that got them where they are. They’re smart, collegial, and hardworking. They consider themselves team players. They have positive attitudes and they’re good communicators. They’re conscientious about their jobs. They have integrity. If everyone shares these qualities, what is going to determine who gets the next promotion?”
Adam goes on to discuss a few key principles that allows some of these hundred people to eventually make it to the office of CEO. Number one on that set of principles is Passionate Curiosity. He says of these people:
“They wonder why things work and the way they do and whether those things can be improved upon. They want to know people’s stories and what they do.” Adam goes on to say “The CEO’s are not necessarily the smartest people in the room, but they are the best students. They learn, they teach, and they understand people and the business world, and then bring all that knowledge together to drive their organizations forward.”
In all the research that has been done in the world, we have never found any correlation between success and being smart. However, we find great correlation between success and listening.
Are you truly listening today or just trying to help other people see how smart you are?
Ron’s Short Review: This one will scare you because it scientifically proves that when we’re the most certain, we’re probably also the most wrong.
Ron’s Short Review: Denison’s culture survey is still the only one that I know of that relates culture to bottom-line performance. More examples from companies around the world.
Image Source: Azhar Khan, Creative Commons
My recent blog on Getting Past Failure reminded of me an experience I had with a client years ago.
I was working with a new president of a major company. He had taken over an organization that had just seemed to be stagnant for many years. His first instinct was to spend time out in the field riding with his sales representatives to find out what their daily experiences were like. He was looking at the organization from the ground up. His early impressions were that the organization was simply hesitant to make any decisive moves. He thought there were sales to be made and market share gains to be had but the entire organization was simply too cautious, afraid to make any major mistakes and not even willing to ask customers for a commitment.
At the same time, I had seen a National Geographic special that had followed a pride of lions. The lead female is the hunter for the pride. She will decide which prey to attack and direct the hunting party how to help her gain an advantage over the targeted animal. But she is the one who makes the kill. As she was in hot pursuit of her targeted zebra she rapidly moved in to make the kill and leaped for the attack just as the zebra came to a fallen log. The zebra jumped over the log and at the same time kicked hard at the attacking lion and caught her right in the side of the head. This kick sent the lion tumbling through the brush and the kill was lost. For the next several weeks the routine seemed to be exactly the same as it had always been but just as the lioness came to the moment of kill, she shied away. She was obviously afraid of being kicked in the head. Over the coming weeks as the pride became more and more hungry, younger females and even a few of the younger males began to challenge her dominance and position as the lead hunter. Rebellion was increasing when she finally regained her confidence or more likely overcame her own fear and finally made another kill. She and the pride quickly returned to their normal and successful routine.
The company above had experienced some of their own “kicks in the head.” They had received a regulatory citation about some of their sales practices. They had experienced some product failures as well as some competitor products gaining great advantage over their own. And they had experienced their own leadership failing to help them out of this funk. They were acting like the lioness who had been kicked in the head.
As the new president began to instill a level of confidence in their sales ability, in the quality of their products and in their strategic plan for being successful in the market place (through a combination of face-to-face meetings as well as large scale meetings) you could see the “pride” begin to return. Sales began to climb (even with no change to the product mix or market conditions) and by the time they launched a new product the following year (that product became the largest selling product in its category) the team was pumped up and ready to go. He had helped them recover from their kick in the head. In overcoming fear, the new president was able to lead his team to success.
Where have you and your team been kicked in the head? Things happen beyond our control. I’ve mentioned before a great book titled The Road Less Traveled, Timeless Edition: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth
Image Source: damien_p58, Creative Commons
The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization
A mile marker is one of the people, events, experience, or moments of learning that when you look back have influenced, shaped, or directed you along your way. I can identify specific “markers” in my mid to late twenties that clearly lead me to the consulting/coaching business. My wife was putting together a scrap book of our early lives recently and made the comment that I must have had consulting/coaching skills as a young child based of the comments classmates had written. Mile markers are important to identify to understand our own growth, development and direction.
The Fifth Discipline was one of those books for me. I had been educated in the discipline of Project Management at the engineering school of the University of Michigan. Managing and running things was a scientific discipline that could be learned and applied to getting things done. But, right from the start I had always felt that the most productive thing I could do was to help people grow, develop, learn and help the teams function well together. I believed that if we could improve the people side of the business, the business would be successful. Here was a book that “scientifically” presented these principles in an organized form.
What are the five disciplines?
- Personal Mastery
- Mental Models
- Building Shared Vision
- Team Learning
- Systems Thinking (Fusing it all together)
For this discussion I want to focus on number five, Systems Thinking.
We tend to be aware of System Structures “out there” in the “real world”. Physical structures like a manufacturing plant are visible to us. We can see the raw materials and parts coming in one end of the plant with the finished product exiting the other end. We can see what happens when parts don’t show up on time. We can identify “bottle necks” in the system and work to alleviate the restriction. We can even see the systems that are not so physical such as cost and demand relationships. The Fed works with a “system” to determine interest rates as they try to manage (manipulate) the economic structure. But what we don’t really see or more importantly don’t believe is that our individual human behavior works in a system across our team and company. Until we can step back and see things in a systemic way, we will fail to change the behavior that is causing the bottle necks and disruptions to our peak performance.
One of the reasons we don’t see “the system” in our teams and companies is what Senge describes as “Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space”. That’s one of the reasons I like business simulations. They allow us to act out and see the system at work in a closely related time and space. That brings me to the rest of my blog title: Paper Planes and The Beer Game. But, that’s all the time and space I have for this post. Tune in to Paper Planes and Beer Games in the next post.