Ron’s Short Review: Rich Karlgaard has become one of my favorite authors. He builds a great case for why the first word in the name of my company is Team. Team, Leadership, Culture. You need all three but it doesn’t work without Team.
Source: Pedro Ribeiro Simões, Creative Commons
In an article for LinkedIn, Dr. Travis Bradberry, Coauthor of Emotional Intelligence 2.0 & President at TalentSmart says:
It’s easy for leaders to get caught up in their own worlds as there are many systems in place that make it all about them. These leaders identify so strongly with their leadership roles that instead of remembering that the only reason they’re there is to serve others, they start thinking, ‘It’s my world, and we’ll do things my way.’ Being a good leader requires remembering that you’re there for a reason, and the reason certainly isn’t to have your way. High-integrity leaders not only welcome questioning and criticism, they insist on it.
I don’t think Integrity lands on a continuum. You don’t hear people saying “Ruth scores higher on the integrity scale that Ralph does.” What you do hear is “Ruth has integrity. Ralph doesn’t.”
It’s amazing to me how visible this becomes. I have the opportunity to spend time with leaders of different businesses in different industries all the time. When there is lack of integrity in a company you can sense it from the time you walk in the door. It’s in the air. You can see it in the way people greet each other in the hall way or conference rooms. You can hear it during the conversations on the phone or more importantly in the conversations after the phone call ends. You can taste it in that sour feeling after difficult conversations. You get the point. Your senses know.
But, note Dr. Bradberry’s last sentence, high-integrity leaders welcome and insist on questioning and criticism.
One view of questioning and criticism is encapsulated in the term feedback. I’ve told the story in some of my previous blog’s that the term feedback was coined during the early days of rocketry when the scientists figured out they needed to develop good “feedback” systems in order to hit a target. Great thrust without great feedback is just an out-of-control rocket. High-integrity leaders accept feedback and develop great feedback systems for everyone.
Another view of the questioning and criticism quote is to view it during team discussions or problem solving sessions. Are the contrary views heard and even encouraged? Do the teams have a mechanism, dialogue being one of the best, for sorting through the contrary views? Is everyone heard, listened to and understood? You can feel the integrity when it exists during the team sessions.
Integrity is not something you either have or not. It’s something you build over time and for leaders who are getting higher and higher on the leadership ladder, it’s something you maintain and develop as it becomes easier for people to tell you what they think you want to hear rather than the contrary view.
Check out the Integrity chapter in our book, Trust Me. It’s one of the eight essential principles of great leadership.
As a young engineer I learned how to test the integrity of concrete by pressure testing. On large concrete pours (sometimes several feet thick) we needed to know if the concrete was strong, healthy and had integrity before we could erect the large heavy structures it was meant to support.
After the concrete had cured for the proper amount of time we would take a large cutting machine and extract a “core” of concrete. This was a cylinder about 4 inches in diameter and about one foot long. We would then take this core of concrete and place it in a large hydraulic press and slowly begin to build the pressure over time.
The pressures would build to enormous values before the concrete would “fail”. But the way concrete failed was always fascinating to me. It didn’t just break in half or fracture along a few fault lines, it would disintegrate. It almost exploded into thousands of small fragments. Each piece flying in its own direction so there was nothing left of this strong concrete core.
Teams Under Pressure
I have found teams to function in much the same way. The pressure can come from any number of sources but as you watch the pressure build the team holds together for a while but finally fails. And when the failure happens, it looks just like that solid core of concrete, it disintegrates. Each member seems to head for cover in their own direction.
Reinforcing Concrete
In the concrete world, to counter this tendency to disintegrate when the pressure became too great we had a simple solution: reinforcing bar (sometimes called rebar). Those long rods of steel that we placed in a cage form within the walls of the concrete pour. Concrete is at its best under pressure from compression. What it lacks is tensile strength. Take your two hands and put together in front of you and start pushing one hand against the other. That’s compression. Now, have one hand clasp the other hand in a “hand shake” and start pulling them apart. That’s tensile strength. Concrete needs both to function well. So do teams.
Reinforcing Teams
Teams need a lot of tensile strength to withstand the pressures of today’s fast changing world and the fact that many of our teams are global and/or virtual. We need team rebar!
Increasing the tensile strength of a team requires the “rebar” of trust! If you’re not taking the time to build trust on your team, you’re not putting in the proper tensile strength to withstand today’s pressures.
- Who are these other people?
- Can I trust them when the pressure builds?
- Have I stood next to them, looked them in the eye and exchanged a hearty and caring hand shake?
- What are their values? Do we share values?
- How do I know what is motivating them? How will that play out when we’re experiencing pressure?
- And a ton of other reinforcing questions to be answered together.
Your team is faced with tasks that must be accomplished under tight deadlines and seemingly impossible pressure to perform. If you haven’t built in the tensile strength of trust, you’ll likely fail the task in the long run.
Image Source: Kevin Dooley, Creative Commons
It’s all well and good to be a focused leader. That’s essential for helping an entire organization lock in and stay on target. But the supreme returns are reserved for focused teams. Just as every leader needs to clarify issues concerning personal passion and achievement, the team must undergo a similar process. A focused leader needs to lead a focused team.
Ron Rex, field vice president of Allstate Insurance, says:
On any given Monday, American businesses opens up their doors with no clue as to what or when to focus. A leader creates extreme focus!… In order to create extreme focus a leader must develop a constant flow of information that describes the progress toward a goal. On any given day, the culture of an organization will create distractions to goals. These distractions can be the normal business flow of others to out and out combat against current achievement. A leader that intends to create extreme focus on a goal or set of goals must be prepared to fend off organizational disruption from those led. This is achieved by creating an atmosphere of work and information that at times may seem attacking to the status quo but must always lure the team to focus harder on fewer things. In American business today, focus is the one weapon that is not subject to the decisions of others.
While consulting with one client organization on leadership matters, my colleague Wayne and I kept hearing from the high-level executive team that they were all averaging more than eighty hours a week. During the training we did with this group, the topic of the heavy work schedule kept surfacing.
We decided to put what we were doing on pause and take a closer look. Some questions needed answering: First, how could these executives keep up this schedule without destroying themselves, their families, and their teams? Second, with such demands on their time, how would they be able to change ingrained habits and actually start doing this “leadership thing” that they knew was important, but they never seemed able to focus on long enough to accomplish? Would our recommendations, if followed, now cause them to have to work ninety hours per week?
To get hard data on how these executives were allocating their time resources, we decided to use the Stephen Covey view of time management found in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change
We asked the team to spend two weeks tracking their time and scrupulously recording what they were doing during these 80-hour marathons. We tallied the results and created a page on a flip chart for each person, cataloging that 8 of their 80 hours went to task A, 6 hours went to task B, and so on. All 160 hours were accounted for in this way.
The group assembled to hear the results. We wish we had a videotape of the assorted jaw-dropping responses we observed as we first revealed individual patterns and then moved on through a discussion process for the entire group. It was interesting and a bit entertaining when one person would identify an item as Quadrant III (urgent, but not important) and someone else would say, “Time out! If you don’t do that task for me, I can’t get my work done (Quadrant I)!” It took a great deal of negotiation to reach a team consensus on which activities belonged in which quadrants. However, through those negotiations, we discovered just exactly what each person needed.
In many cases one person or team was generating an entire report that took a great deal of time, while the person who needed the data might use only a single crucial piece of data from the entire report. Once we determined that the one piece of data could be generated easily and, in many cases, could be retrieved on demand by the recipient from a database, a gigantic amount of busywork was eliminated.
After completing the negotiations over quadrant assignments, we added up all the hours and determined that about 20 percent of the hours fell in Quadrants I and II (the categories that really matter if you want to focus the team), while 80 percent fell in the less important Quadrant III.
You can imagine the stunned silence that settled like a black cloud in the room. Finally one executive said, “You mean we accomplished all of our important work in sixteen hours and the other sixty-four hours each week were spent on busywork?” The answer was yes. More silence followed.
How had this bright, talented, and obviously hard working “band” gotten so out of tune, so unbalanced? For one thing, they had never sat down together for this kind of discussion and negotiation. The positive result was that they eliminated a tremendous amount of busywork right on the spot. As a team, they came to grips with the focus-destroying enemy called “the tyranny of the urgent.”
If we stopped by your place of business and did the same exercise, what might the results be? Have you and your team identified the important versus the urgent? Do you spend your time and energy on the important?
Don’t let that happen in your organization. Work hard at focusing the team.
Image source: Creativity103, Creative Commons
In a blog post a few weeks ago, I mentioned I’ve been reading Warren Berger’s book A More Beautiful Question. Warren’s subtitle is “The power of inquiry to spark breakthrough ideas.” I cannot agree with him more. In fact, beyond innovative ideas, I believe this is a good approach to leadership in general.
In an HBR article written by Warren, he talks about how Tim Brown of IDEO uses the phrase “How might we.” Tim goes on to further the phrase like this:
- How: assumes there are solutions
- Might: Allows to think about what might and what might not work
- We: Do it together. Build on each others ideas.
“We” is hard.
I really like this train of thought and the power of those words. But based on my experience through the years, of the three words, (How, Might, We) “We” may be the most difficult to pull off.
In fact, if I think of the teams that I’m currently working with, one in particular strikes me as having the ability to really put this phrase to work effectively. But, this team has been together for several years and has dedicated a great deal of their time into becoming an effective team. I believe they leverage the “We” part of this phrase into something powerful.
Trust is the Key
However, other teams that haven’t spent the time and energy to build a trusting foundation would have no opportunity to take advantage of the “We” in this statement. In fact those teams will have difficulty with the “Might” word. To take full advantage of the “Might,” you have to be open and willing to give credibility to the “might not” opportunities. Teams that have not build the required foundation of trust have no ability to legitimately explore both the “might” and the “might not.” They will tend to put down or write off the foolish, ridiculous, ill thought out “might nots” offered by other team members when the trust and respect has not been previously established.
Isn’t that interesting? This simple phrase “how might we” could lead to some of the most innovative breakthroughs in the industry. But if we haven’t taken the time, effort, or willingness to build a powerful team first, we can barely get past “how.”
Have you built a trusting team that can effortlessly get through “might” and powerfully move into “we?” If not, don’t try this at home. It won’t produce much in way of results.
Build strong teams; they’re the key to innovation.
In Warren Berger’s book, A More Beautiful Question, he writes
“The term stepping back is often used when we talk about questioning—step back and ask why, step back and reconsider, and so forth. But what are we stepping back from?”
Image Source: Tim Green, Creative Commons
Later he says:
“It’s necessary to stop doing and stop knowing in order to start asking.”
I have noticed—as has Warren—that the stop doing part is actually the hardest in the business environment. In another blog, I write about a destructive attitude that I see in the business world today. That’s the attitude of quick deciding. When we enter meetings with the attitude that we must decide quickly we tend to shut down the diversity of thinking and questioning that may “slow down” the deciding process and yet it’s those diverse thoughts and “why” questions that most often lead to better, more innovative decisions.
Stepping back from the fast paced, globally connected, task oriented work world is difficult.
Years ago one of my CEO clients asked me what key elements I had observed in building great teams. I was pretty quick to answer because I had seen the pattern so quickly and consistently.
Teams need to be BUILT.
Teams that get offsite twice a year to focus on team building and leadership continue to improve year over year. But, it’s critical that during these meetings you have to put down the bats and balls. You can’t be reviewing the business and the numbers. You’ve got to kick off your shoes, get real with each other and deal with each other as human beings, not human doings.
I can elaborate later on the importance of these meetings and the things that tend to sabotage them, but for now, notice that this is a way of stepping back from the business in order to gain clarity about the business. I’ve experienced time and time again that stepping back from the numbers, pressures, and routines of the business and focusing just for a couple days on team, leadership, and culture brings a tremendous amount of clarity about the business.
Management is about providing answers; leadership is about figuring out the right questions. Are you and your team stepping back enough to see that questions that will propel you in the future or are you simply frazzled trying to come up with answers day after day? Step back! You, your team, and your company need it.
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.
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.
Photo credit: John Spooner, Creative Commons
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.
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?
Hidden Danger in the Perceiving Function
I mentioned in the previous post on Myers-Briggs that most successful business people have figured out that they need to balance this function. This balancing act most often takes the form of a trusted partner, colleague or consultant.
Great appreciation on a peer basis
I find that my Sensing leaders love to get together with their more natural iNtuitive colleagues. The say things to me like:
“I just love the way Margaret breaks me out of my “down in the weeds” focus. She gets me thinking about big-picture, long-term implications of my decisions and how we need to think about making these decisions.”
Similarly, my more natural iNutiive clients will often praise their more Sensing colleagues.
“Steve really gets me out of the clouds and grounds me in what’s going on right now and pointing out the issues that if we don’t fix soon will prevent us from achieving our long-term vision.”
Danger in employee evaluations
However, that appreciation seems to be limited to the peer-to-peer relationships. Often that same appreciation is not offered to subordinates.
I will always ask the iNtuitive types on a team which preference (sensing or iNtuition) they would prefer to have working for them. Their answer is always an overwhelming “Sensing!” Why? Because they know that while they would prefer to stay at the 40,000 foot level, watching what is going on around them and looking to the future, they need people working for them that are clearly paying attention to the day-to-day ups and downs of the business.
But what’s interesting is that when I ask the Sensing types which preference would they prefer to have working for them, their answer is also an overwhelming “Sensing!” Why? Because if they’re preference is to pay attention to the details and you’re working for them, you had be at least as good if not better at paying attention to the detail.
Here’s the problem
Even though the iNtuitive types appreciate the skills and attention to detail that the Sensing types provide, they may also be thinking “That person is great but I’m not sure they could take over my job because they don’t think broad enough.”
And while a Sensing type may have a creative, innovative iNtuitive type working for them, iNtuitives are often known for making “error of fact”. That “failure” really bothers the Sensing type and therefore are more likely to give poor performance reports.
We tend to fall back on our natural preference more when we’re evaluating people who work for us than the honor and appreciation of other types when we’re dealing them on a peer basis.
Honor and appreciate all types in all cases and people will begin viewing you as a very honorable and appreciative leader.
Myers-Briggs In-Depth is a blog series in which I dive into each MBTI function with more detail, providing some practical applications for creating better dynamics and better decision making. Click here to read the entire series.
Interested in an overview of each of the four Myers-Briggs functions? Click here to read the Using MBTI to Great Advantage series.
Photo credit: Anne-Lise Heinrich, Creative Commons
I have observed what I believe to be a very detrimental shift in thinking within our corporate cultures over the last 15 years.
We’ve been inundated with instant communication that is with us everywhere 24/7 (I had one of the first Blackberrys as soon as it hit the market in early 1999). To be clear, I’m not railing against this technology. I love it and I couldn’t imagine running my business or staying in touch with my family and the world without it. But it has interjected a sense of speed and quickness that is altering the way we think and decide as we try to conduct business in a globally connected world.
However, this belief that we must decide quickly changes the dynamics of decision making in a detrimental way. Good decision making (See my post on Prudence) requires good deliberation. However, if we’re in a quick deciding frame of mind we get defensive when:
- someone raises an issue that feels like it is not in line with the current thinking or
- will open that proverbial “can of worms” if we entertain the idea, or
- they simply don’t agree with the current approach.
Teams have developed all kinds of behavior to suppress, shut down or discount the questioning view point. This eliminates good deliberation and will lead to an inferior (or even wrong) decision.
The shift we need to make is back to a quick learning attitude and then use a good process to make good decisions. What’s interesting to me is that teams who have mastered this quick learning leading to good decision approach, consistently make decisions quicker than those with the quick deciding attitude (not to mention better decisions).
Get better at
-
- Quick learning with a…
- Team of diverse points of view and…
- Practicing good deliberation techniques to…
- Reach great and lasting decisions.
You and your team will feel more productive, less stressed and will also begin to gain the reputation as high achievers.
I read Jeffrey Katsenberg’s book, “Hard Things About Hard Things.”
I just listened to Ruth Chan’s TED talk, “Hard Choices.”
So here’s the Hard Thing about Hard Choices:
Ruth explains that any choice that can be quantified is an easy choice because all numeric values can be related to each other based on their comparative amounts but hard choices are based on values.
Values can’t be quantified and compared to each other. Values are based on who we are and who we want to be. Ruth goes on to look at the dilemma from a person’s point of view and concludes that taking the quantitative approach is the safest way out. Making a value based decision forces us to choose who we want to be. I agree. This is a great personal growth philosophy.
But here’s the hard part: I work with corporate leadership teams where I help individuals make their own personal value and growth decisions through my personal coaching. The problem is we also have to make hard team decisions.
I believe most corporate teams fool themselves into believing they only make logical, fact based decisions or believe all decisions can be reduced to a number exercise so that the >=< analysis can be made. But as Ruth explains, hard choices are not quantitative in nature; they’re value based.
So how do you get a bunch of MBA trained financial experts, engineers, marketers, and scientists to make the hard choices based on value?
You need to build team.
Not just a team with defined roles and responsibilities, not just a team with clearly defined interfaces and decision gates. Not just a team of various functions that get together to discuss and coordinate the business. Not a team, but TEAM!
Teams are built on respect and trust. Teams honor and appreciate the diversity of thinking, attitudes, and beliefs that we bring to the table. Teams know who we are and what shapes us and what values we hold dear and what values we won’t violate.
These teams are fully capable of making the hard decisions and are fully capable of making them work.
If you want to build a great company, build a great TEAM.
Have you been fortunate enough to be part of a great team? Share with us how that happened. What made it work? What’s keeping your current team from being a great team?