What's Your Motivational Focus?

Everyone has motivators and understands, in a leadership context, that motivating others is critical to individual and team success. According to Dr. Heidi Grant Halvorson and Dr. E. Tory Higgins, there are two primary ways in which we work to fulfill personal and professional goals:  (1) through a focus on promotion, or the opportunity to advance, grow, and avoid missing opportunities; or (2) through a focus on prevention, or a concentration on staying safe, not losing anything or incurring detrimental effects.  Promotion- and prevention-focused people can be recognized this way:

“Promotion-focused people:

• Work quickly
• Consider lots of alternatives and are great brainstormers
• Are open to new opportunities
• Are optimists
• Plan only for best-case scenarios
• Seek positive feedback and lose steam without it
• Feel dejected or depressed when things go wrong

Prevention-focused people

• Work slowly and deliberately
• Tend to be accurate
• Are prepared for the worst
• Are stressed by short deadlines
• Stick to tried-and-true ways of doing things
• Are uncomfortable with praise or optimism
• Feel worried or anxious when things go wrong”

Each type has its own strengths and weaknesses and most teams, regardless of industry, thrive when both types are involved.  Knowing your focus can help you choose a field in which your motivational focus strengths are utilized and understanding the focus of your supervisor and your team is critical to effectively persuading and motivating them.  For example, promotion-focused people can be best motivated through praise, inspirational stories, and understanding what they gain when they achieve something.  Prevention-focused individuals are motivated by understanding what they did wrong (criticism), cautionary tales, and understanding what they will lose if they don’t achieve something. 

I’d also like to point you to an hour-long webinar presented by Dr. Halvorson in which she delves deeper into this interesting topic, including describing how your focus can be changed by circumstances and by different domains, such as work and parenthood.  She also gives specific advice about working with people of both types of motivational focus.  I highly recommend it.

Dr. Halvorsen says you can figure out your motivational focus by reading the descriptions.  I’m pretty sure I’m a promotion-focused person.  What’s your focus?  Does reading the description immediately make you think of people you know who fit into them?

The Almighty Cover Letter

I rarely use this space for personal reflections but this week is an exception.  After 15 years of being involved in hiring, I have seen more applicant packages than I can count.  One of the most common places I see applicants go wrong (and right) is the cover letter.  Given that spring graduation is fast approaching and it’s the time of year that many people begin a job search process, I want to provide a list of dos and don’ts to help you make your cover letter or email as strong as it can be.  If you’d like to read more from the experts, go here, and here, and here. 

First the dos:

1. Do your research.  One of the quickest ways to get into the “take a second look” pile of resumes is to show that you have taken the time to do research on the position and organization to which you are applying.  It shows respect for the hiring authorities and that you are a knowledgeable professional.
2. Do have other people look over your cover letter and resume.  Faulkner and Hemmingway had editors, and you need one, too.  It’s important to have at least one other person look at your cover letter and resume before you submit it to look for typos and mistakes.  It’s important to choose reviewers who are good communicators and who will give you honest, constructive feedback.  If you are a student at a university, you have a built-in option – career services – that will help. These services are also often available to alumni as well. 
3. Do show definite interest in the position and organization.  Any reader of your cover letter should be able, after reading it, to state back why you are interested in that specific position at that specific organization.
4. Be honest and authentic.  Don’t over- or under-sell your experiences and accomplishments, and don’t gush when expressing interest.
5. Do state why you believe you are right for the job and frame it as how you can help the organization solve a problem or address a need. Most cover letters are all about the applicant.  That’s natural on some level, but you need to connect the dots for the hiring manager about how you can help the organization address a need. This is also one reason why #1 above is so important.
6. Do talk about your values and how they match the organizational mission and/or culture.  Don’t just highlight your experiences.   Also spend a sentence or two outlining your values and how those match the organization’s.  (Again, research!)
7. Do explain gaps in the resume.  A hiring authority has never met you.  If there are gaps in your resume when you weren’t employed – say a two-year timeframe where you returned to school full-time to get a master’s or started your own business – it’s important that you explain this.  Most applicant packages have literally seconds to make an impression so hiring authorities won’t take the time to piece together where you were for those two years. At worst, they may think you are trying to hide something, so it’s important to address the gaps concisely.

And now the don’ts:

1. Don’t ever send a generic cover letter. Ever.  “To whom it may concern, I am interested in a position at your company…” The message this type of letter sends is that you don’t care enough to even insert the organization’s name in the letter.  It’s the equivalent of never learning anyone’s name and just calling everyone “hey you.” In an age of social media and ubiquitous Google, you can find a name to whom to address your letter or email.  Of course, you should also double-check that you have the right organization listed as it is equally bad to send a cover letter that is specifically addressed…but sent to the wrong organization.
2. Don’t use humor.  Everyone loves a fun person to work with but humor is extremely difficult to convey in writing to people who’ve never met you, so it almost always falls flat.  Just don’t use it. 
3. Don’t try to be cute or clever.  You can write a letter that demonstrates your “voice” and point of view, but, along the same lines as #2 above, let your accomplishments and research set you apart.  Cuteness will make you look immature and unprofessional.   If you work in a creative field where creativity is a major differentiator, by all means ignore the second part of this advice and do something like this. But for everyone else, spend your energy on making your cover letter as correct and clear as it can be.

What other tips can you offer your fellow job seekers?  Want more?  How about some social media tips for job seekers?  Done.

Creating Gender-Inclusive Environments

Recent research indicates that both women and men are twice as likely to hire a man than a woman, even if the woman is more qualified.   This study pertains to business hiring, but research also exists demonstrating a similar hiring and pay bias for academic jobs in the STEM fields and the stories of women in those fields provide support for those conclusions. 

Both studies indicate that the biases exist in both men and women hiring authorities.  So how does a fair-minded leader remedy this?  Will Yakowicz offers three great suggestions:

1. Make gender bias a business issue, not a women’s issue:  An organization that is choosing less qualified men over more able women is going to lose in the long run, because their talent will go elsewhere or otherwise not be fully engaged. 
2. Educate yourself (regardless of your gender) instead of asking women to change:  Women tend to under-sell their abilities, while men tend to over-sell theirs.  When women are assertive about their abilities, they are perceived negatively and penalized.  So the burden is on the leader to understand this no-win dynamic for women and compensate for it rather than asking women to brag more about themselves.
3. Look for bias in hiring policies and systems:  Many hiring authorities believe that candidates who self-promote are the best, despite what’s noted above.  It’s important that they become aware of this erroneous bias and look for other ways to identify competence and ambition.

Samuel Bacharach offers some additional tips for leading in a way that includes everyone.

Do the stories of this kind of bias match with your experiences or observations?  If you work in a female-dominated field, do you see this playing out?  

The Greatest Barrier to Success is…Success?

Most of us think that there is a direct, linear relationship between effort and success.  The more time we spend working on something, the better results we see, right?  (The term education researchers use for this is “time on task.”) Greg McKeown is a leadership researcher and teacher, and his findings call that notion into question.  In a blog post called “The Unimportance of Practically Everything” and a 5-minute video he describes the principal he’s discovered by studying some of the most successful leaders and some who are talented and hardworking but never “break through” as they should.  That concept is essentialism, or as he calls it, “the disciplined pursuit of less.”  McKeown’s findings indicate that, as he says, “the biggest barrier to success is success” because it means an increasing number of opportunities and options, which overwhelm us and take away the mental space we need to separate the essential from the inessential in our lives.  He posits that you will never accomplish what you want at home or at work unless you actively eliminate these distractions. Effort, in other words, does not equal success unless it’s spent in the most important areas.  This is not a new idea – Covey fans will think back to the “first things first” habit – but it’s an important message nonetheless.  He gives you a tip that you can get started with today and provides real-life examples of how others, like Warren Buffett, have put this idea into action.  I hope you’ll take a look.

How do you eliminate the inessential in your own life?  Have you learned to say no effectively? What stops you from paring down the list of things you spend time on?

Three Words That Will Transform Your Career

Sometimes we like to keep it simple at Leadership Unleashed and with Snowjam 2014 exploding everyone’s plans, this seemed like a good week for simplicity.  So for this week's post, I'll point you to a piece called Three Words That Will Transform Your Career.  Many headlines these days seem to oversell what follows, so this post is a nice contrast because I actually think it undersells the content.  I think these are three words that could change not just your career, but your life.  This is seemingly simple but pretty profound advice.   Enjoy!

Taming the Email Beast

One resource that leaders never have enough of is time.  Strong time management requires you to say no and set priorities, which is something most of us can continually improve.  One of the biggest time-wasters is email.

Don’t get me wrong:  Email has provided some helpful benefits.  It allows you to keep a record of your communications and allows you to send information to people without being concerned about whether they are available at that time.  But most people use email a little addictively, checking it constantly and allowing it to take time away from more important tasks.  We also use it a little delusionally, believing it’s possible to check email while being productive at other things, despite the neuroscience research that explodes the multi-tasking myth.  Smartphones have only magnified this phenomenon.

So how do we fix this?  How do we put email in its place and use it as a tool but not a driver of our work lives?  Here are some tips.  (Some of these come from a book called, appropriately enough, Never Check Email in the Morning by Julie Morgenstern, which I highly recommend). 

1. Like Ms. Morganstern says, don’t check email until at least an hour into your day.  I’ll give you a minute to pick yourself up off the floor.  Yes.  I said wait an hour to check your email.  Use that hour to do the most critical task of that day.  Spend a minute or two at the end of the previous day deciding what that will be and then do it.  You will start your day with an important accomplishment, regardless of what vortex of crazy ensues from that point forward.  If you work in an industry that has mission-critical emails first thing in the morning, such as orders that come in overnight and must be filled immediately, move that hour to immediately after you look at the critical emails.
2. Turn off your email and only read and answer emails during set times during the day.  Most people fear that they are missing out on something by doing this, but it’s important to begin seeing that email is not for urgent matters.  Try setting times – say, 10 am, 2 pm, and 4 pm – as email times.
3. Answer emails immediately if you can do it in 2 minutes or less.  Productivity expert David Allen recommends that emails that require more than two minutes should be delayed.  You can move it to the end of your designated email checking time or to another of those time slots later in the day.  Then you can power through the quickies and reserve time for your more thoughtful responses.
4. If you genuinely can’t turn off your email or need to baby-step your way into it, at least turn the email alert sound off.  It’s almost impossible to ignore and takes you out of the flow of whatever you are working on.
5. If an email string involves two or more replies, use the phone or in-person discussions to address the issue.  If you need a record of what was decided, send a quick summary email after you talk.
6. Set your outbox so that it delays sending by 5 minutes to help avoid those “Oops, I forgot to include this” follow up emails.  This will also help you avoid the dreaded “I really wish I hadn’t sent that” emails.
7. Train yourself and others.  Ask them to use the phone or in-person discussions if an email is more than two paragraphs.  Morganstern recommends that you should state right at the top or in the subject line what you want from the receiver – please review and advise, double-check, etc. -- especially if you simply must send a long email.   Help others understand that email is not instant message and anything urgent should be handled by phone, text, or in person.
8. Realign your priorities.  If you wear your “I leave every day at zero inbox” priority like a badge of honor, rethink this.  In most workplaces, there are much more important tasks to be done each day than responding to each and every email on the same day. 
9. Use the organization tools in your email solution.  Some allow you to set rules so that newsletters, blog updates, and “FYI” type emails will go to a file to be read later.  Set alerts to remind you to reply to an email by a certain date or time.

These are a few tips to get you started with keeping email in perspective, allowing it to serve you and not vice versa. 

What other tips have you found to be helpful in taming the email beast?

The Happy Life or the Meaningful Life?

I recently read some fascinating research out of Stanford University that examines the happy life and the meaningful life.  I think it provides some insight for both leaders and graduate students, both of whom engage in activities that may require sacrifice and difficulty.  These actions may not make us happy in the immediate sense, but they add depth and meaning to our lives and those of others.

The full article can be found here, and I recommend it.  It’s not a lengthy piece.  Here are the points I’ve been chewing on since reading it:

1.  The happy life and the meaningful life are often not the same.  Meaningful experiences almost always mean that you will encounter stresses, obstacles, and challenges; otherwise, the opportunity for impact would not exist.  Examples would be parenting, doing social work, or being in graduate school.  Happiness is about getting what you want and need without challenges and struggles, which brings zing to our lives but not necessarily meaning.
2. Happiness is often about superficial things and taking, while meaning is about deeper relationships and giving.  Having coffee with a friend where you are silly and laugh a lot makes you happy but doesn’t ultimately provide much meaning.  Having coffee with a friend who you counsel and advise through a terrible personal situation may be stressful, but it has tremendous impact and meaning. 
3. The in-the-moment, “hakuna matata” mindset makes you happy but linking together past, present, and future increases meaningfulness. (You’re welcome for the hakuna matata earworm, by the way.)  The Stanford research showed that thinking about the past, present, and future makes you less happy but it’s the only way to create a more meaningful life.  

For most of us, our goal is to balance both superficial happiness and deeper meaning.  But I think this research could help with some of those more challenging...er, meaningful times.  The next time you have to talk to a colleague about something stressful or you have to sacrifice doing something fun to do your academic work, think about this idea.  Understand that you are increasing the meaning in your life and the lives of others through your actions today.

This research was somewhat surprising to me, as I’d never thought of happiness and meaning as so dichotomous.  What is your reaction?

I tend to believe that a meaningful life is the path to a happy life, but this research would seem to cast doubt on this idea.  What do you think?

How do you help colleagues, friends, and family to find create meaningful lives or find meaning in difficulty?

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.

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.

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.

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/

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.

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.

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.  

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?

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!

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 intuition.  These 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?

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?

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.    

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?