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.

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.

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.

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.