Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Effective Leadership Practices, Part 3

 Intermittently over the past several weeks, we have been looking at effective leadership practices as outlined by Kent M. Keith in The Case for Servant Leadership.  Key practices have been self-awareness and listening, changing the pyramid and developing your colleagues, and this week we’ll explore coaching (not controlling) and unleashing the energy and intelligence of others.

Servant leadership espoused a coaching approach to working with others long before it became popular.  The idea behind this tenet, as Keith (2008) notes, is that no one really controls anyone else.  As leaders we can motivate and inspire, we can remove barriers to self-direction, and on the negative side we can compel compliance by exerting threats or pleas, but ultimately people choose their own actions.  A leader who thinks she truly controls her team is delusional. If you’ve ever ridden a horse, you understand that the horse is much more powerful than the rider and the rider is only directing the horse because the horse chooses to be cooperative.  Leading a team is much the same. 

Displays of power and authority can get people to act, but they often produce the appearance of compliance and inspire large amounts of defiance instead.  Servant leaders coach.  They teach, they mentor, and they facilitate.  They understand that everything they do is done via relationships with those who are closer to the customer, the client, or the public that is served by the organization.  So, as Keith (2008, p. 48) states, “The issue for the servant-leader is not how to control others, but how to build strong, positive relationships with others.”  That is coaching, not controlling.

One of the ways they do that is the second effective leadership practice we will discuss today: unleashing the energy and intelligence of others.  Servant leaders remove the barriers to self-efficacy for others, allowing them to tap into their own internal motivation.  They also identify and grow the talents of their colleagues, they include their team members in decisions and major activities, like goal setting and evaluation, and they coach them along the way. 

This does not mean that they abdicate the responsibility to hold others accountable, or let a dysfunctional colleague dominate or alienate the team.  Servant leaders hold themselves responsible to the needs of their team colleagues, but they also work in service of the needs and goals of the organization.  When an individual hijacks that process through noncooperation or toxic behavior, the servant leader, like other types of leaders, takes remedial action to correct the situation, or terminates the employment if no other remedy works.  The servant leader does not allow one person’s dysfunctional choices to corrupt the development and work of others.

Through these methods – coaching and unleashing the energy and intelligence of others – the effective leader can leverage the talents and abilities of his team, fully engaging his colleagues to choose to do their best.

Cited:

Keith, K. M. (2008). The case for servant leadership. Westfield, IN:  The Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership.

Monday, November 18, 2013

This Week’s Inspiration

This blog is written for the benefit of the graduate and professional students at the UGA Gwinnett Campus, and anyone else who’s interested in leadership topics.  We are located on a university campus, and it’s the time in our fall semester when inspiration, energy, and motivation are likely waning.  You’ve progressed through the multitude of duties, assignments, and tasks in the past few months and you have just a bit more to go before the academic part of your life can take a rest, if not the professional and personal. 


Leaders are called to inspire others, but they also must be inspired themselves.  So this week, I’d like to help you “fill your tank” with something positive that will help you push through this final part of the semester.  I’d like to share with you some Ted Talks that you may find will provide you with a little of that inspiration.  I recommend the talk by Steve Jobs on how to live before you die and the Shawn Anchor talk on the happy secret to better work.

Monday, November 11, 2013

Leadership Presence, Part 1: Light Up The Brain with Storytelling

Leadership presence is a critical factor for leaders and often can determine or significantly influence their success.  So what is leadership presence?  You may not know the formal definition yet but you undoubtedly have experienced it.  Presence, on its most basic level, is the ability to command attention, and leadership presence, as defined by Halpern and Lubar (2004, p. 8) as “the ability to connect authentically with the thoughts and feelings of others in order to motivate and inspire them to achieve a desired outcome.”

You’ve been in a room with someone who has presence and maybe you’ve seen them give a presentation.  Presence is that thing that makes you want to listen to them.  At this point, you might be thinking presence is a talent that you’re born with.  “How is one blog post going to make me into George Clooney or Angelina Jolie?” you ask.  It’s true that there are no magic wands here, but you can learn to develop your leadership presence skills. One of those skills is storytelling.

Imagine you are listening to two presentations.  The first presentation is about the invention of Scotch tape. And the presenter does a competent job of presenting facts, nicely summarized in bullets and arranged in beautiful PowerPoint slides.  The second presenter talks about a similar topic, the origin of the Post-It note.  This presenter also has bullets and slides but also tells you this:

It was 1968 and just past the Summer of Love, a scientist for 3M invented an adhesive that had some interesting qualities but wasn’t consistently sticky enough to work on tape. He played around with it for a while but just couldn’t make it work with any of his projects, so he shelved it.  In 1974, another 3M scientist named Art Fry had a problem at church.  He sang in the choir and his bookmarks tended to fall out of his hymnal, so when he had to sing the same songs at the church’s second service, he would fumble around because he’d lost the pages he’d previously marked.  A bookmark didn’t work but tape wouldn’t work either.  Mr. Fry needed something in between, something that would stay in place but wasn’t permanent.  He went back to the lab and applied a bit of this odd adhesive he’d heard about to little slips of paper.  He tried them out on a Sunday and…and voila!  No more lost places in the hymnal!  Hallelujah!

Which presentation would you rather listen to?  More importantly, which content would you remember? 

Our brains are hard-wired to respond to stories.  Neuroscience researchers have found that the sensory cortex of our brain lights up when we hear descriptive phrases like, “The singer had a velvet voice.”  Action descriptions – “Pablo kicked the ball” – and scent descriptions – “The delicious scent of coffee” – light up the parts of our brains associated with action and scent, respectively. 

Based on this and other studies, brain researchers now believe that our brains don’t make much of a distinction between experiencing something, like that velvet voice or that wonderful coffee, and hearing about it.  Hearing facts and figures ignites your neurons, sure, but hearing facts within a descriptive story engages many more parts of your brain, including your emotions, thus increasing the likelihood of engaging you and helping you remember what was said.

Leaders must do this every day.  Leaders have to have a vision but they must also engage others in that vision and inspire them to act.  Storytelling, then, is a critical communication skill for leaders.

Now that you know the “what” of leadership storytelling, next week we will get into the “hows” of specific tips for strengthening your storytelling ability. 

Cited:
Lubar, K. & Halpern, B.L. (2004). Presence:  What actors have that leaders need.  In Leadership Presence (p. 3).  New York: Gotham.

Thursday, October 31, 2013

Effective Leadership Practices, Part 2

During the past several weeks, we’ve been exploring servant leadership, a leadership philosophy whose fundamental basis is leaving a team or group better than you found them.  This week, we will continue our deeper dive into what servant leadership looks like by outlining two more key practices, as defined by Kent M. Keith (2008) in The Case of Servant Leadership.  (See this post for a discussion of the first two key practices.)

The third key practice is changing the pyramid. Robert Greenleaf founded servant leadership and he believed that the typical management hierarchy – usually communicated as a pyramid – was detrimental to the leader at the top of it.  Over many years of working at AT&T and consulting with other organizations, he came to understand the effects of power, namely its tendency to corrupt.  Some have called this “power poisoning” and it has been established in many studies.  He noted that most leaders aren’t genuinely questioned or even communicated with honestly, leading to information that is inaccurate and an inflated belief in their own effectiveness.  Greenleaf believed that the pyramid should be expanded at the top to accommodate more peers in the leadership role, to prevent the corrupting influence of isolation and “happy talk” from subordinates.  He believed that leaders should function as a “first among equals” in order to obtain more honest feedback and appropriate challenges to their ideas and functions.  The leader’s role within this idea is to listen, to set the vision and mission of the organization, then step back into the group structure to facilitate solutions and ideas. 

Keith (2008) notes the examples of faculty governance in higher education – in which faculty elect one of their own to head a department who then governs (typically) with a very light hand.  He also cites a company, The Schneider Corporation, that has created a “Primus Council” based on this servant leadership principle.  This group is composed of members from various parts of the company and “focuses on strategic planning and vision, furthering the company’s culture, the growth and development of the entire staff, and major organizational policies” (p. 41).  The Schneider Corporation has seen significant growth since adopting the servant leadership philosophy and practices.

The fourth key practice is developing your colleagues.  If you’ve read other parts of this series, you’ve read the basic tenet of servant leadership, as outlined by Robert Greenleaf:  “The best test, and difficult to administer is: do those served grow as persons?  Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants?” (2008, p. 15).  Greenleaf’s quote gets to the heart of this practice, which is about whether you help your team improve and help them to become better people and professionals.  This practice does not mean that you take your eye off the goals of your organization or that you focus on improving your team to the exclusion of accomplishing things.  It’s about understanding that the investment you put into helping your team improve, whether it’s their ethics, their skills, or their interpersonal functioning, pays huge dividends as those colleagues improve their work and become more effective.  This has direct benefits to an organization in both the short- and long-terms.  A developmental approach improves work on a day-to-day basis and also improves loyalty and cohesiveness, which benefits the larger organization in the long-term.

What do you think about these leadership practices?  What benefits to this approach do you have and what concerns you about it?

Cited:
Keith, K. M. (2008). The case for servant leadership. Westfield, IN:  The Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership.

Greenleaf, R. K. (2008).  The servant as leader. Westfield, IN:  The Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership.


Friday, October 25, 2013

Can You Hear Me Now? Listening As Critical Leadership Skill

Picture this.  You need to talk to someone about something.  Maybe it’s your boss, maybe it’s a colleague, maybe it’s your significant other.  You sit down to talk and the other person checks his phone every few minutes, makes minimal eye contact, interrupts you, and appears to spend the times you are talking composing his response in his head.  Would you leave feeling like you were heard?  Would the outcome of the conversation be positive or constructive? 

If you are thinking you weren’t heard and the outcome would be far from what you intended (probably nothing), you are most likely right.  It’s possible the person heard part of what you said but didn’t listen well enough to truly get what you were communicating.

We’ve all had this experience.  We know how it makes us feel and we also know its impact on work settings.  How can anything get done – new ideas and approaches tried, solutions brokered, relationships formed – when listening isn’t happening? 

Listening is commonly named as an essential leadership skill and it’s easy to see why.  Last week, we saw how listening is critical to servant leadership.  We all have a certain level of listening skill but we all can also improve.  Here are some tips on how to become a more active listener:
  1. Be here, now.  The first step in active listening is attention.  It’s increasingly difficult to shut off distractions like phones and that “new email sound” from your computer, but it’s critical to focus if you want to be a good listener.  Even harder is stopping the “monkey mind” or process of jumping among the thousand other thoughts in your head that most of us live with.  Active listening requires you take a breath, commit yourself to giving your attention, and refocus whenever you get distracted.
  2. Send signals.  It is critical that you let the speaker know that you are “there” with him.  Asking question is important.  Other signals that you’re clued in are nodding, eye contact, and verbal cues like “uh huh.”
  3. Listen comprehensively.  Active listening involves paying attention not only to the words someone is saying but also attending to the tone, her body language, and even sometimes what she’s not saying.  Listen for content but also listen for any emotions.  Is the speaker frustrated?  Angry?  Excited?  That’s as important as the content because it will guide how you respond.
  4. Look for the important stuff.  Ram Charan tells a story of a CEO who would divide his notepad paper into two sections.  He’d draw a line down the middle of the sheet where he would take notes, making the right side section about ¼ the width of the paper and the other side ¾ the width.  On the wider left section, he’d write his notes from the conversation and on the smaller right hand section, he’d jot down the two to three word “nuggets” that were the important take-aways from each part of the conversation.  Whether you do this or not, you can still seek out the key points whenever you are listening.
  5. Try on their shoes.  It’s critical that you understand what’s being said from the perspective of the speaker.  You don’t have to agree with it, but you need to see the issue through her eyes before you can truly understand what she's saying.  Defer your judgment of what you’re hearing until you really understand the other person’s perspective.  Check in with him to see how accurate you are.  “What I hear you saying is…” is a very useful tool in summarizing your understanding and letting the speaker comment on how well you got it.  Even if you got it totally wrong, if you humbly give the other person the chance to correct you, she will usually be very happy that you cared enough to listen and check.
  6. Practice, practice, practice.  Active listening is a skill and, like all skills, it must be practiced to be maintained.  Also like other skills, everyone can get better.  Pro sports players and actors don’t stop practicing once they get to the big time and neither should you.  Charan recommends soliciting feedback from colleagues or others who will be honest with you about how well you’re listening.  He also recommends you take a moment to evaluate yourself after each conversation, asking yourself how you did and how you can improve.  


Listening skills often decline the busier we get.  It’s easier, we tell ourselves, to just issue directives or get conversations over with.  That may be true in the short-term but most of us who fall into this mindset lose in the long-term.  Miscommunications and people around you who rarely feel heard cost you.  Active listening really connects your communication, preventing mistakes and misguided efforts, and also builds your relationships.  Listening is critical to your success.


Cited:  Charan, R. (2012). The discipline of listening. Found at: http://blogs.hbr.org/2012/06/the-discipline-of-listening/

Friday, October 18, 2013

Effective Leadership Practices, Part 1

For the past several weeks, we’ve been exploring servant leadership, a style of leadership that turns many aspects of traditional, “command and control” leadership on their heads.  Any time you discover a new leadership style or model, you probably want to know more about what the model looks like in action, so for the next three weeks, I’ll be taking servant leadership closer to ground level.  I’ll be summarizing the essential practices of servant leaders, as described by Kent M. Keith, in The Case for Servant Leadership

The first two key leadership practices Keith describes are self-awareness and listening.  It’s not a coincidence that self-awareness is the first practice because, in the “physician, heal thyself” tradition, change begins with us.  Self-awareness is the “mother skill” because it allows the development of the other skills.  If you aren’t aware of your strengths and growth opportunities, how can you turn the latter into the former?  How can you make your strengths even better?  You can’t. 

Further, self-awareness is important because robust teams – the outcome of good leadership – can’t be formed by a leader who doesn’t understand her impact.  Leaders in a group have enormous influence.  Keith and others describe the many studies that demonstrate that people’s behavior changes around a leader.  They literally look to the leader, either consciously or unconsciously, for his reaction and often mirror it.  Leaders set the tone.

A friend’s father understood this and had a nice way of teaching it.  He managed a plant for many years and he was well known for his positive style.  When speaking about the importance of self-awareness, he put it succinctly: “Leaders don’t have the luxury of bad moods.”  He recognized that those in leadership positions have many perks – such as the power to set the tone as just described – but there were many corollary responsibilities as well and one of those is refraining from taking out a bad mood on a team or infecting them with one.  In other words, a leader’s enthusiastic, motivated mood catches on, as does a negative, uncooperative mood.  Yes, we all have our Debbie Downer days, but leaders must find a way to deal with theirs privately lest they infect their teams with their bad moods.

The second essential practice of servant leadership is listening.  Many leadership experts extol the power of listening as a leadership skill and there are numerous ways to improve your listening skills.  Entire books have been written about this topic, so we’ll dive deeper into this skill at a later time.  But for now, it’s important to know that Robert Greenleaf, the father of servant leadership, said, “Only a natural servant automatically responds to any problem by listening first” (2008, p. 18). Stephen Covey understood the necessity of listening to the extent that he made it one of his seven habits:  Seek first to understand, then to be understood.  Keith (2008, p. 38) sums it up well:  “The main point is this: Servant-leaders don’t begin with the answer, the program, the product, the procedure, the facility.  They don’t begin with their own knowledge or expertise.  They begin with questions that will help identify the needs of others.”  (Those “others” also include the needs of the organization.)    

Self-awareness and listening are foundational practices of effective leadership.  The good news is that you can start immediately. What can you do this week to notice your effect on others and listen better?

Cited:
Keith, K. M. (2008). The case for servant leadership. Westfield, IN:  The Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership.

Greenleaf, R. K. (2008).  The servant as leader. Westfield, IN:  The Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership.

Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Want to Become a Master at Something? Learn from Kobe Bryant and Mozart

I just discovered this really powerful article on how you get to be a true expert at something.  I first encountered this idea in the work of Malcolm Gladwell, but this post takes the idea further and makes it more accurate, I believe.  An excellent read for anyone dedicated to getting better.

Friday, October 4, 2013

C’mon, All the Cool Kids are Doing It: What Other Leaders Say About Servant Leadership


For the past several weeks, I’ve been posting about servant leadership.  Servant leadership contrasts pretty significantly from some of the more traditional ways people view leadership.  But even though many people are turned off by the power-hungry practices of many old school leaders, servant leadership can feel unfamiliar.  Sometimes something that’s different can feel strange and you can hesitate about learning more about it.  If that’s you, would you be interested in knowing what other famous leaders say about servant leadership?

Stephen Covey was a fan.  Mr. Covey, as you know, was famous for espousing character-based leadership, which he described in his book, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and many other publications over the years.  He said, “Of all these fundamental, timeless principles [which he says “have governed, and always will govern, all enduring successes”] is the idea of servant leadership, and I am convinced that it will continue to dramatically increase in its relevance….” (Covey, as cited in Keith, 2008, pp. 32-33).

Not a Covey disciple?  Well, how about Peter Drucker?  You know, the guy who is, in many ways, the father of modern management theory?  According to Keith (2008, p. 33), Drucker “described the effective executive as someone who is focused on contribution and focused on others – a good definition of servant leadership in business.” 

But wait!  There’s more!  Jim Collins, the author of Good to Great, describes various levels of leaders, with the higher levels corresponding to better leaders.  The highest level – Level 5 – leaders, “channel their ego needs away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a great company.  It is not that Level 5 leaders have no ego or self-interest.  Indeed, they are incredibly ambitious – but their ambition is first and foremost for the institution, not themselves” (as cited in Keith, 2008, p. 33).

Surely by now you’re convinced that servant leadership is awesome, right?  If you’re a Peter Senge fan -- and if you’re not, get thee to a library, read The Fifth Discipline, and become one, stat -- you’ll be glad to know he’s a servant leadership proponent: “I believe that the book Servant Leadership, and in particular the essay, “The Servant as Leader,” which starts the book off, is the most singular and useful statement on leadership that I have read in the last 20 years…if you are really serious about the deeper territory of true leadership…read Greenleaf” (Senge, as cited in Keith, 2008, p. 34).

You may be saying, “Yes, but what about real organizations?  How does all this work in the real world and why should I learn more about it?”  OK, I hear you.  The Fortune Magazine 100 Best Companies to Work For list contains several companies among its ranks that have initiated servant leadership principles and are highly successful.  They include “TDIndustries, Southwest Airlines, Synovus Financial Corporation, The Container Store, and AFLAC” (Keith, 2008, p. 35).  The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Great Colleges to Work For listing similarly contains many institutions that have adopted servant leadership principles and practices.

Not only do well-respected leadership experts agree that servant leadership is the way to go, but the success of many organizations prove it.  So…what are you waiting for?  You in?


Cited: Keith, K. M. (2008). The case for servant leadership. Westfield, IN:  The Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership.

Thursday, September 26, 2013

Mr. Burns, Gordon Gekko, and Other Power-Oriented Leaders, or Power Is a Means Not an End

Power is critical to leadership, but very often leaders (and those who follow them) misunderstand it.  The traditional view of leadership is often Machiavellian, meaning it’s about getting and maintaining power in a zero-sum world where one person’s increase in power is another person’s deficit.  This model lacks an ethical center and success is defined only in terms of who has the most power, regardless of the process used to get it.  Power is an end, in and of itself.  Those who enact this philosophy typically leave casualties in the wake of their climb to the top of the power pyramid, creating a sea of animosity, which they often mistake for envy.  Often the power-oriented leader is ultimately dissatisfied.  In that world, there is never enough power to go around, they must constantly guard against other power-grabbers (which is exhausting), and many are left at the end of a career or life surrounded by those who are interested in them only to the extent that they can offer a transactional power benefit. 

Many people see these types of games play out and, unwilling to make the ethical sacrifices to grab power (and afraid of becoming a real-life Mr. Burns), they end up opting out, believing that leadership isn’t for them.  Servant leadership and similar leadership philosophies offer an antidote.  Servant leadership defines success not in terms of who has the most of anything, power included, but who accomplishes the most through helping others to grow beyond expectations.  Kent Keith says “Power-oriented leaders want to make people do things. Servant-leaders want to help people do things” (Keith, 2008, p. 29).  Servant leadership offers an alternative to the Gordon Gekko-style, “me-first” pursuit of power often offered by the traditional power model of leadership. It offers a way to accomplish a great deal for organizations and individuals while maintaining ethics and building skills in self and others.

It’s important to avoid any false dichotomies when considering the power and servant leadership models.  It’s not a matter of choosing to have power or not have power and servant leaders do not ignore or eschew power.  Servant leaders understand power (including its dangers), recognizing it as a valuable tool that can be used to shape outcomes and create value for others.  Servant leaders do not worship power nor do they see power as an end in a winner-take-all game.    Servant leaders use the influence of power to gather the right people and get the best outcomes for the clients, customers, students, and organizations they serve and for their team members.  Servant leaders work from an abundance mentality, empowering others to reach their full potential, with the understanding that power takes many forms and can be obtained by all.


Citation:

Keith, K. M. (2008). The case for servant leadership. Westfield, IN:  The Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership.

Monday, September 23, 2013

Letting Others Encourage Us

I'm reading a book about women who became college presidents and they all cite people who encouraged them along the way.  The author made an interesting observation:  "I would argue that many women are given acknowledgement, recognition, and encouragement but only a small fraction of them hear and believe what they are told.  Many women have the habit of dismissing comments as not accurate or significant...People can make profound differences in emerging leaders, but only if the leaders let them."  What compliments are you dismissing?  What would happen if we believed the positive feedback others give us?

Friday, September 20, 2013

Power Poisoning and the Servant Leadership Remedy

"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power."
~~Abraham Lincoln

An understanding of power is central to all leadership.  In fact, you could even say that power  -- its nature and its uses – is almost synonymous with leadership.  Everyone has been on the receiving end of power and has at least some understanding of the effects of power on teams.  But most leaders have little understanding of the effects of power on them.  Understanding the effect of power is critical to avoiding some of the pitfalls associated with it.

Several researchers, including Robert Sutton, have investigated the effects of power on leaders and have reached some pretty interesting conclusions, which have been confirmed in literally hundreds of studies.  To keep this post brief, I’ll summarize them.  You can find out more by looking at the links below.

The effects of power can be summarized by the word “disinhibition.”  Basically, power acts on us to lower inhibitions, much like alcohol.  Specifically, those with power become, over time:·     
  • Overly confident, often misjudging the potential dangers in a situation and refusing to take advice;
  • Oblivious to what others think;
  • More focused on themselves and pursuing their own wants;
  • More likely to believe “the rules” apply to others but not to them;
  • Less able to accurately judge how others react to them;
  • More likely to stereotype others;
  • More likely to engage in risky behavior. 


This understanding of the pitfalls of power is not new.  Lord Acton, a 19th century English historian and baron, is famous for summarizing it:  “Power corrupts.  Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  The modern term for this is “power poisoning.”

Power is an unavoidable part of leadership, but how should we guard against this subtle but almost inevitable transformation?  One way is to adopt a leadership philosophy that teaches specific skills that prevent this de-evolution and encourages an overall viewpoint that remedies the ego inflation of power.  Servant leadership does just that.  In coming weeks, we will be learning the critical practices of servant leadership, which counter the disinhibiting and corrosive effects of power.

For more information: 
The Detrimental Effects of Power on Confidence, Advice Taking, and Accuracy,” by Kelly E. See, Elizabeth W. Morrison, Naomi B. Rothman, and Jack B. Soll

Friday, September 6, 2013

What Do We Mean by “Servant” Leader?

When first hearing about servant leadership, many people don’t think twice about the use of the term “servant,” but others trip over the word a bit.  The word “servant” connotes to some subservience, passivity, or a lack of freedom and free thinking.  Additionally, many populations – women, African Americans, and so on – have historically been forced into servitude with no options for escape.  This leads some to respond negatively to the word “servant” in servant leadership. 


The word “servant” was chosen intentionally by the founder, Robert Greenleaf, to communicate the service orientation of his leadership model.  He worked on the model for decades, beginning his journey in the mid-twentieth century, when understanding of the experiences of oppressed populations wasn’t as common and when the word “servant” wasn’t laden with as much association with those additional layers of meaning.  Greenleaf intends servant leadership to be a choice and an orientation, meaning the servant leader puts the needs of her team as equal to her own and generally sees that choice as a moral one.  Another way of saying this is that servant leadership is a “people first” model, as opposed to an “ego first” or “power first” way of leading.  The term “servant” is balanced with the term “leadership,” so servant leaders are not servile as some connotations of the word “servant” would indicate.  They facilitate growth in others but they do lead, they do make hard decisions, and they do value the organization for which they work but they chose to serve others in the process.  

Wednesday, August 28, 2013

12 Things Successful Women Do Differently

Twelve Things Successful Women Do Differently is a great piece that should be required reading for every woman trying to make it all fit.  (Men, I think a lot of the advice applies to you, too.)  I hope you'll take a moment to read it.


Friday, August 23, 2013

Make it Better: An Introduction to Servant Leadership

All of us have encountered leaders of varying types in our lives.  Think back to those people who have had the most positive influence on you.  Did you have a teacher who told you were smart or a good writer?  Was it a Scout or clergy leader who encouraged you?  Maybe a supervisor showed you what working with integrity meant?  Chances are that the person who had the most positive impact on you was a servant leader, a person who believed in you and placed your development as a higher priority than their own need for power. 

While some of the basic concepts of servant leadership have existed for millennia, Robert K. Greenleaf is the person credited with consolidating and developing the idea in the modern era.  Greenleaf worked for AT&T and he was charged with creating training and development opportunities for their staff.  In doing so, he began to question the traditional authoritarian power model of leadership and he set out to create an alternative.  Through years of voraciously exploring ideas, cultures, and beliefs, he formulated servant leadership.

When we hear the word “leader,” most of us think of positional leaders – those who lead by virtue of their title and role within an organization – but leaders exist in many places beyond those in positions of power.  Greenleaf, in The Servant as Leader (page 15), define this style of leadership in this way:

“[Servant leadership] begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve first.  Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead.  That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions….the best test, and difficult to administer, is: Do those served grow as persons?  Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants?  And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society?  Will they benefit or at least not be further deprived?”


This desire to have a positive impact, to help make people and situations better because you were there, is the heart of servant leadership and it is what we will be exploring over the coming weeks. Future topics include the use of the word “servant,” a primer on the power model that contrasts with servant leadership, and critical practices of servant leaders. I hope you will read each post and ask any questions or make observations along the way.

Thursday, April 25, 2013

Making Mistakes


This week I’d like to refer you to a blog post that contains some good laughs and also some reassurance, which could come in handy this time in the academic year.  When you make mistakes – and we all do it – never believe that you can’t recover or that it’s the end of the world, even though the big ones feel that way sometimes.  You can’t accomplish anything of value or originality that doesn’t occasionally involve an “oops” or two.  Take a minute to read, “Why You Should Make More Mistakes,” and take another minute to click on the stories linked in the piece about famous people’s work flubs.  You will smile and you’ll also feel better about your own faux pas. 

Friday, April 19, 2013

The Golden Hour


It’s that time of the semester again, when academic lives heat up, work is probably calling, and personal events like graduations, recitals, and parties ramp up as well.  Stormy weather is typical in the spring and I’ve always thought it was apropos, given the often chaotic schedules that many have this time of year.  Now is the time to be extra vigilant of your time and productivity.  So how do you cope? 

One strategy is to pay close attention to what you do during that first hour of your work day.  Emergency medicine says that the first hour (or so) after a trauma is the most important to intervene to prevent worsening injury or death.  This is known as the golden hour.  What I’m suggesting is you implement your own golden hour, not to prevent death (yikes), but to encourage productivity and success.

Julie Morgenstern wrote a book called Never Check Email in the Morning (a work-life management book I recommend) and, while refraining from email all morning is probably not possible for most of us, what is possible is to delay checking email for an hour after you get to work.  (If your work culture simply won’t accommodate that – and by that I mean you would get fired or be professionally damaged -- an alternative is to scan email for absolutely critical stuff, spend a few minutes responding, and then turn it off for an hour.) Now, wait…I hear my fellow email addicts crying and gnashing your teeth. Before you tear your clothes and run in to the street to protest this madness I’m recommending, hear me out.  Email is hardly ever the source of high level or crisis information that simply must be addressed first thing.  Those things usually come in the form of a call or a text.  Email is great at getting you off task and distracted from what is critical, so it’s important to not think of email as “instant messaging” that requires that kind of immediacy. 

So what do you with that hour?  There are many ideas. Here are the best:

  1. Work on the one thing that is necessary -- not preferable…necessary --  that you do that day.  What task or project would have the most impact on your work or would advance your goals?  What activity needs to be done so that you feel you actually got something accomplished that day?  Work on that.  I frequently end my day thinking about the next day’s first hour.  I write that activity down on a Post-It placed on my computer keyboard so that I see it first thing.  To earn extra “organization goddess/guru” points, you can even assemble all the materials you need to do for your activity and have them ready to go in your “first hour” file.
  2. Do the hardest thing first.  Need to have a difficult conversation with someone?  Hate to look over your budget spreadsheets?  Whatever it is, get it done right away, so that it won’t be weighing on you through the rest of the day.
  3. Feel empowered.  Some recommend that you use at least a few minutes of that hour to get inspired, because that will drive you, and possibly insulate you from other stressors, for the rest of the day.  

Other factors to support this golden hour, according to Ilya Pozin,  are to eliminate distractions, to eliminate multi-tasking, and use the phone instead of emails when conversation is what’s needed.  (How do you know when a call is better?  When the email string comes back twice or more.)

Then, after your golden hour has passed and you’ve completed or made progress on your task, open your door, turn on email, and let the day come in!

Have you used this strategy?  How did it go?  What other recommendations for maximizing this time do you have?


Friday, April 12, 2013

Leadership and Influence Summit


We are winding down another busy semester and so, to accommodate your ever-expanding list of things to do, I want to point you to a resource that allows for “bite sized” leadership moments.  I have used this resource myself.  It’s called the Leadership and Influence Summit and “it’s a free, on-demand, online event featuring instant access to video messages from over 30 leading authorities. Each speaker shares 6-20 minute recorded video messages on how to maximize leadership and influence effectiveness.”  You can access it as needed.  There are many videos and the good news is that the selection allows you to find something that interests you, but it can be a bit mystifying as to where to start.  I recommend the videos by Barry Posner (Truth about Leadership), Jim Kouzes (Leadership Challenge), and Bob Sutton (Good Boss, Bad Boss) as good places to start  All are engaging speakers who have important information to share.  You can access the Leadership and Influence Summit here.  You have to register but it’s free and there doesn’t seem to be any solicitation that follows your registration.  Enjoy!

Friday, April 5, 2013

Knowing Without Knowing: The Role of Intuition in Leadership


You walk into a house that is for sale and instantly know that it is right for your family.  A friend has a first date and tells you she has met the person she will marry and she is right.  How did you and your friend know?

Over the last few weeks, we’ve explored the role of thoughts and emotions in leadership and life, but there are many – Oprah, Einstein, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Colin Powell, Malcolm Gladwell -- who say that intuition is also an important part of good decisions and successful leadership.  Intuition is, according to Dale Myers, “the ability to aquire knowledge without inference or the use of reason.”  Intuition provides you with a way to gather information and make decisions that, when used correctly, supplements more objective data.  (Intuition can even be turned into a business, if it is particularly strong.)  To some, intuition can seem fanciful, or new age-y, but it is actually a scientific phenomenon that has been measured, studied, and located in the brain.

How do you recognize intuitive thinkers (other than by using your gut, that is)?  According to Dave Myers, some people are naturally wired to be intuitive and their traits include:

·         Using a limited set of analytical filters.  The more parameters you have for filtering information, the more complex your process will be but the less intuitive it will be. Intuition happens quickly.

·         Focusing on the big picture, instead of details. 

·         Being confident and focusing on the potential (as opposed to the risks) a decision.  Intuitive thinkers trust their instincts and don’t spend time worrying about the risks of their actions.  They are more interested in the potential of a situation.

·         Being good at instantly reading non-verbals, like body language.  This is the source of much of intuition: quick readings of information that is fleeting, like expressions.

Whether or not you fit these characteristics, how do you strengthen your intuition?

·         Use your intuition in areas you are experienced in. Intuition is better after you’ve had years of practice and experience in a particular area.  That knowledge gained through experience becomes unconscious and you are able to skip ahead to sound decisions.

·         Use specific techniques to improve intuitionThese include:
o   Journaling, which helps you see when your intuition was right in the past, thereby strengthening your confidence in it;
o   Engaging in creative activities more often, like painting or dancing, helps you access your non-analytical brain; and
o   Meditation or even siting in a quiet, still place for a few minutes helps you tune out distractions and focus on what your instinct is telling you. 

·         Practice using your intuition.  When waiting at a bank of elevators, try guessing which one will reach you first, or guessing who is calling on the phone before you pick up, and so on.  Try noting your first reaction to any given situation, such as guessing whether a waiter will provide good service before he speaks.  Then notice as time progresses whether you were correct. 

·         Understand its limits.  The problem with intuition – and why it should not be the sole source of information for major decisions – is that it is subject to our emotional states, as well as unconscious biases and prejudices, sometimes called “implicit associations.” (You can test yours here). We all carry these biases around unconsciously and intuition can tap into them against our will.  Intuition has great power.  Malcolm Gladwell notes two examples of this power in “Blink:  The Power of Thinking Without Thinking”:  Despite evidence in front of him, a firefighter instinctively tells his team to withdraw from a room seconds before the floor collapses, saving them from certain death in the fiery basement below.  On the other end of the spectrum, four police officers kill unarmed Amadou Diallo in New York City based on split-second gut reactions that he was a serial rapist suspect.  Not everyone will face life or death decisions, but the power of intuition should still be used wisely.

In the end, I believe Colin Powell gave the best advice on the use of intuition:  “Dig up all the information you can, then go with your instincts.  We all have a certain intuition, and the older we get, the more we trust it…I use my intellect to inform my instinct.  Then I use my instinct to test all this data.”

When have you followed your intuition and it turned out to be right?  Has it ever steered you wrong?

Friday, March 29, 2013

Emotions are Good Consultants but Bad Executives


A stressful event happens – say, a fight with your significant other or a negative performance review at work – and you feel angry and hurt.  What do you do?  Do you stuff those feelings and carry on as if nothing happened?  Do you give yourself over to your emotions, venting them at your partner or boss in a blinding rush, and let the consequences happen?

A couple of weeks ago, we learned about thinking accurately and exorcising unreasonable or irrational thoughts that hold us back.  But what about emotions?  Emotions play an integral part to our humanity and to our success as leaders. They are the basis for most of the good things in life:  They allow us to form relationships, to experience art, to empathize and be kind.   But unfettered emotions can also damage our credibility and relationships as much as they help. 

Much has been written about this ability to manage emotions as a critical function, from Wayne Payne and Daniel Goleman’s ideas about emotional intelligence to Art Chickering and Linda Reisser’s Seven Vectors of Identity Development, of which “managing emotions” is a key piece.  Noam Shpancer, Ph. D., builds on those ideas, providing us some key tips to managing the emotions that we all have. 

The first tip is to avoid denying emotions you are feeling.  We’ve all known – or been -- this person, the stoic who never seems to be affected by anything that happens.  Individuals have different levels of natural emotionality, but denying or suppressing your emotions excessively has serious emotional and physical side effects, including depression, fatigue, high blood pressure, and over-eating.  “Stuffing” emotions usually makes them worse and they eventually come out anyway. 

The second tip is to avoid what Shpancer calls “blind obedience” to your emotions, or believing that your emotions are always telling you the truth about a situation and you must do anything they tell you to do.  Putting your emotions in charge leads to all kind of havoc, including lost relationships and jobs and makes you the kind of leader others avoid.

The best approach is to think of your emotions, as Shpancer says, as valued consultants, providing you with critical input, but do not make them executives, issuing orders that must be followed.  Yes, I know this differs from all the "follow your heart" advice given so often -- sorry, romantics -- but it's true.  Good leadership means paying attention to your emotions, and balancing them with your rational thoughts and other factors that have to be weighed, or following your heart and your head. 

What tips or tricks do you use to manage your emotions?  How do emotions in a leader affect their team?  How do you balance managing your emotions with maintaining your authenticity?

Friday, March 15, 2013

Everyone is Fighting a Battle


Today is the Friday of Spring Break and the weather has turned gorgeous (finally!) so I’ll keep it short today.  Plato said, "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle" and he's right. Empathy is one of the most important leadership skills and this video demonstrates that beautifully.  I hope you’ll take a couple of minutes to watch. 

Do you agree that empathy is an important servant leadership skill?  How do you cultivate and improve it in your leadership practice?  How do you balance your empathy for an individual with doing what’s right for the larger group or organization, in situations where those two don't necessarily overlap?

Friday, March 8, 2013

Thinking About Thinking


Rene Descartes gave us the famous aphorism, “I think; therefore I am,” but your thoughts do more than prove that you exist.  They also help determine how you exist, including whether you succeed or fail as a leader.  Many people believe that their thoughts are like wild animals, beyond their ability to control. But thoughts can, in fact, be managed and must be managed in order to succeed as a leader.

Noam Shpancer, Ph.D., gives some helpful recommendations about how to get rid of ineffective habits of mind, or what  Albert Ellis called “irrational beliefs.”  To enact thought management, Shpancer recommends you begin by becoming aware of how you talk to yourself and what stories you tell.  Bad habits of mind to look out for include:
·         All or nothing thinking:  “If I don’t succeed 100%, I’m a total failure.”  The reality is, no there are many degrees within any dichotomy, whether it’s success or failure, good or bad, happy or sad, and so on.  Focusing only on the poles is misleading.
·         Mind reading:  “I know exactly what you’re thinking.”  The reality is you are not psychic and never know exactly what others are thinking.  They’re probably thinking about lunch.
·         Catastrophyzing, also known as “awfulizing”:  “If X doesn’t happen – or Y does happen – my life as I know it is over.”  Things happen or don’t happen every day of your life and you’ve survived, and even thrived, so far.  You can handle it.
·         Overgeneralization:  “I’ve been let down by three co-workers, so all my co-workers care undependable.”  Everyone is unique and making overgeneralized assumptions can lead to the dreaded self-fulfilling prophecy.
·         “Should” and “must”: “I must have a child to be happy.  I should want to move up in my career.”  (Cheeky Albert Ellis called this “shoulding all over yourself” and “musterbating.”)  The reality?  It’s normal to want things, but telling yourself that those things determine your entire future happiness is a fool-proof (or is fool-ful?) recipe for failure.   

After becoming aware of these bad thinking habits, the next step is to, as Shpancer recommends, “understand that thoughts are not facts but hypotheses.”  Read that part again.  Thoughts are deceptive because they often seem so true, but your first thought about anything may or may not be accurate or even what you want.  To get to that best thought, the final step is to consider possible alternatives and choose the one that is best supported by evidence.  Shpancer helpfully compares this to buying shoes:  You don’t walk into a store and immediately purchase the first thing you see.  You look around, consider options, think about your preferences and the cost, then you make a decision.  

You already do this kind of thought choosing now.  If a loved one makes you really angry, do you go with your first thought, which may involve doing something you regret (frying pan, cranium, etc.)?  No.  You don’t.  You probably take a moment and think out the best way to proceed, or at least the way that won’t land you in court.  Managing your thoughts is really just about taking that same “stop and think” habit and expanding it into all parts of your thinking, not just those with potentially life-changing consequences.

The process described above may feel uncomfortable at first if you are not used to doing it, but cultivating this thought awareness – fancy term: metacognition -- and replacing bad mental habits becomes…well, a habit once you begin doing it, and it’s a habit will pay you many dividends.    

Thursday, February 28, 2013

Leadership Styles of the SEC: Mark Richt



Last week, we learned about leadership lessons from Steve Jobs and this week we’ll look at UGA Head Football Coach Mark Richt.  (For those who are in college football withdrawal, I can’t promise this will help but we can always try).  Much attention was given to the outcomes his team produces but do you ever wonder about the leadership style that lead to those outcomes? 

Profiles of any coach demonstrate that they all have the same goal – winning – and each has a multi-faceted approach to getting there, but for Mark Richt, what’s important is how his actions match his values.  Coach Richt wants to win and works hard to achieve that, but he believes he’s failed if he gets the journey to that goal wrong.  As he told Dan Wetzel, “’Do I want to win a national championship…Sure I do. I want to win. Everybody who has ever won a national championship wanted to win the national championship…But it is about a process. Doing things right, fundamentally, schematically and football-wise. But hopefully [it's also about doing it] morally, within the rules of the game, educating young men, educating them academically, educating them about life, helping them understand right and wrong, how to be a good husband, how to be a good father, how to function in this society properly. I'm in the business of doing that. And you do that well for long enough maybe you have a chance to win a national championship. I want to win,’ he reiterated, ‘but it's all important to me.’"

Wetzel asked him: “Does that balance help…when Georgia has fallen short?” and Richt replied: "’Fallen short of what? If we're doing the best we can every day and we're doing it in a first-class manner so that when I go home at night I can lay my head on the pillow and God would be pleased with the decisions I made, how I treated players and the coaches, the media, my wife and kids, I'm OK with that.’"

It’s easy to see that Coach Richt’s focus is on his values, which determine his priorities.  Although he clearly understands the need to win, his values define his priorities and how he measures success. That was reiterated last fall in this press conference.  He was largely applauded for pushing back against an insulting question but a close listen reveals he was making his thoughts clear when a reporter asked about things that weren’t important.  Like Steve Jobs, he is focused on what’s important and doesn’t waste time addressing every single detractor or distraction. 


As a leader, you have goals but how important is the process for achieving those goals?  What values or priorities guide you?  What do you do when your professional priorities don’t match those of other key stakeholders?  How have your priorities altered how you define success and failure?  

Friday, February 15, 2013

Leadership Lessons from Steve Jobs


Steve Jobs revolutionized several industries and was a leader who accomplished amazing things.  It is natural that many want to study him to glean lessons and, while some elements of his personal style couldn’t (and shouldn’t) be imitated by most aspiring leaders, his biographer, Walter Isaacson, recently published a piece that I’ve been thinking about all week.  There are several leadership insights in the article that apply across organizational types.  The entire article is worth a look and can be found here

Focus and Simplicity
Apple’s products are noted for their beauty and simplicity of design.  This was a direct result of Jobs’ Zen training and his strong belief in focusing on what really matters.  Isaacson relates a story of Jobs coming back to Apple after being ousted and sitting through weeks of meetings about the dozens of products Apple was making.  One day he stopped the meeting, went to a white board, and drew a two by two grid.  He told the team that they would be making four great products, one each for consumer and pro, desktop and portable.  All other products were eliminated.  He also pushed his designers to make everything as simple as possible, even famously eliminating the on/off button on the iPod.  That stringent focus and simple design aesthetic birthed a revolution.

Everyone knows they should be the best they can be but that is impossible if you are running in fifty directions.  Focus on the unique thing your organization provides to your community and do it extremely well.

Empathy and Accountability
Jobs was not famous for his empathy with his staff.  His empathy with the people buying Apple’s products, however, was immense and he used it to fuel his demand that his teams create the best products and experiences possible.  He didn’t rely on focus groups but he cared deeply about what people needed and wanted from Apple products.  He understood their frustrations with competitors’ products and remedied those frustrations in Apple’s.  If you work for a company, the lesson is obvious, but what if you work at a non-profit or in education?  The lesson is the same:  Use empathy to understand your constituency – students, parents, beneficiaries – and their needs on an intimate level and understand how those needs aren’t being met well enough by others in your field.   Become so in tune with them that you can, as Jobs would say, “read what’s not on the page.”

Empathy is a key skill but should not, in Jobs’ belief system, be misplaced.  Jobs held others to very high standards and was direct in how he communicated that.  He believed that mediocre people stuck around in an organization when their managers were too timid to address performance problems – he called this “the bozo explosion” -- and this emphasis on excellence was a key to Apple’s success.  The details of Jobs’ particular style would not work in most organizations but direct communication, timely feedback and holding teams (including yourself) to high standards are critical to success and can be practiced without Jobs’ abrasive stylistic specifics. 

Priorities
A final lesson is priorities.  Apple went downhill after Jobs was ousted in the 1980s because more traditional, sales-oriented approaches were adopted at the cost of the innovative, intuitive products Jobs had initiated.  When Jobs returned, he put the focus relentlessly back on what was truly important – the product and the experience of users – and the profits followed.  All organizations are subject to this problem. Budgets will always be important.  They, after all, make the good work we are doing possible.  But a singular focus on profits, or prestige, or other less important factors takes the focus away from the group you serve, and will always lead to mediocrity.

What could be simplified in your own work?  How well do you really know your constituency or customers?  What is your vision for creating new ways to engage or serve them?  What is really important about what you do and how can you focus on it more clearly?