Can You Hear Me Now? But More Importantly, Are You Listening?

Think back to your best supervisors, teachers, volunteer leaders, clergy members, or other leaders you’ve come in contact with.  What made them great? Chances are that good listening skills are one thing that made them stand out.  This is not surprising.  One of Stephen Covey’s habits is “Seek first to understand, then be understood” and many prominent leadership educators have focused on this topic as well. In last week’s profile of Michael Mack’s failure and eventual success, listening to others was a key factor. 

Most people think they are great listeners, but they may only be great at hearing.  True listening means hearing with an open mind, with a willingness to be changed by what you hear, and that gets increasingly harder as our lives get busier, our list of devices grows, and our media diet becomes ever more saturated.  Even after you are attentive, you have to be an active listener and that takes practice.  Want to know more? You can find a brief but useful summary of specific skills to practice here. 

Why not spend the weekend practicing these active listening skills?  As you talk with individuals you encounter or even as you do reading or other homework, spend more time asking questions and learning about those you encounter, or the content you are studying, rather than focusing on what you think of the person or material.  When someone tells you a story about themselves, instead of telling one of your own, ask them questions about theirs.  You will gradually increase your skill level and you’ll strengthen relationships, too.  Happy listening!

Garden Fresh Leadership Lessons in Losing it All and Getting It All Back Again

Michael Mack built the company Garden Fresh (which would later become Sweet Tomatoes and Souplantation) from the ground up with a business partner, but in 1990, he was fired as CEO by his board.  Four years later, he was rehired, mainly because of the way he conducted himself and lessons he learned.  You can read a more complete account of his story here, but the main takeaways are:

1. There are no Lone Rangers among successful leaders.  Mack was fired, in part, because he focused too much the numbers and ignored the people.  He always thought his way was best and refused to listen to the ideas of others or involve them much in processes.  By his own description, he was “arrogant, self-righteous, and overly independent.”  We all learned this lesson in kindergarten and it’s true today: to succeed you must play nicely with others.
2. It’s not about you. After being fired, Mack says he learned to focus on the outcomes and not as much on micromanaging the way people got there or on work as an vehicle for his personal ambitions. We know from other research that a sense of autonomy is one of the biggest predictors of workplace satisfaction and productivity.  Mack learned that the autonomy of others mattered as much as his own and a productive, happy team stays longer and produces more.
3. Look for ways for everyone to get what they want.  One of the changes Mack made was to stop shooting out “yes, no” answers and start conversing with people about their priorities.  He found ways for priorities to align and others to get what they wanted, which created better solutions, a happier team, and, ultimately more success for the organization.
4. Unburned bridges are best.  As a founder of the company and investor, Mack stayed on the board after he was fired.   He overcame his anger, stayed professional, and focused on company goals.  This impressed the board and was a major factor in getting his job back.
5. Bad things can turn out to be blessings.  Mack got fired when his wife was 8 months pregnant.  Unable to find work other than consulting, he stayed home with his daughter for several years and built a relationship with her that was incredibly fulfilling to him.  That relationship – which wouldn’t have happened given his previous 100-hour work weeks – and the personal changes he made led him to call the firing “a gift.” 

Twelve Things You Were Not Taught in School About Creativity

I think one of the most important, but under-emphasized, qualities of effective leaders is creativity. When most people hear “creativity” they think of artists and will often say, “Oh, I like that stuff but I’m not a creative person myself.”  They couldn’t be more wrong. 

Creativity is more about thinking differently and seeing things from new perspectives.  Artists certainly do that and we reap the benefits, but it is possible to bring creativity to everything , and all of us can learn to be more creative.  Why do this?  We all encounter situations or problems or needs that require solutions.   We can come up with the “same old same old” but, as a very smart person once said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.”  Creative thinking is required to solve those problems, prevent others, and, most importantly, proactively innovate new ideas, solutions, products, and services for our organizations.  I believe creativity has never been more important, given the pace of change in our culture.  Creativity is needed now just to keep up and super creativity is needed to truly lead.

I recently read an excellent, brief piece about creativity that I highly recommend, called “Twelve Things You Were Not Taught in School About Creativity.”  In this piece, you will find clarification about creativity, tips for how to improve your creative thinking, and things to anticipate if you are a creative thinker.  I’ve read it a few times now and I highly recommend it.  

Is Your Integrity Showing?

I’ve been in my profession for almost 20 years and spent many more years observing successful and unsuccessful individuals and organizations.  After giving some thought to what the successful individuals and groups have in common, it became clear that we rise and fall on many qualities, but two are the most common:  integrity and communication.  I’ll write more about communication in another post but let’s focus on integrity today.  For the record, the definition of integrity I use is your values matching your actions, forming a unified ethical whole.  Most people associate integrity with honesty, but it goes further than that.

Integrity is like a good sense of humor or good driving skills:  Everyone thinks they have it.  Some would even argue – as did some recent college graduates I interviewed – that they always live in a state of integrity; they always live their values.  The truth is that no one has perfect, unfailing alignment between their values and actions.  We all occasionally – hopefully rarely -- do things that are out of step with what we believe we should do or be.  Some people, however, have more alignment than others, and organizations, like individuals, can “walk the walk” (or not), too.  This is important for ethical reasons, of course, but it also has pragmatic benefits as well:  That level of integrity is part of what determines success. 

The reason integrity is so important in terms of leadership and success is that it is one of the major factors in creating trust.  Without trust, you simply cannot have effective working relationships, whether it’s with supervisees, supervisors, colleagues, customers, constituents or any other group or individual you work with.  Can you work effectively with someone you can’t trust?  Probably not.  You can work with them, sure, but I’m guessing that you will be guarded, the interactions will take longer because of the need to verify and follow up, and you will almost always attempt to lessen or avoid contact with those untrustworthy individuals because working closely with them costs you too much emotionally and temporally.  Those relationships are the key to doing anything at all, whether it’s selling a car or teaching a student. Trust is the foundation of those relationships and integrity is the concrete that makes up that foundation.

So how do you know you have integrity?  Here are five ways to see if your professional integrity is showing.

What do you do to ensure trust and integrity?

Do You Work How You Dress?

Last week, I talked about Facebook profiles and what they say about potential team members you may be hiring (or about you, to potential supervisors).  But what about a low tech work influencer like your clothes?

We’ve all been given some form of advice about “dressing for success,” such as dressing “one step up” from your current position so that senior executives or administrators can more easily see you as one of them.  Most workplaces have a dress code and most of the time that code is about communicating what your clothes say about your organization.  “Business casual” clothes can send the message that you are a laid-back or fun organization while more formal attire or a uniform (such as a doctor’s coat) can send messages about authority and expertise.  Did you know, however, that how you dress at work can affect not only how others see you but how you actually perform?

New research shows that people do better on certain cognitive tasks when they are dressed in clothing that they associate with positive qualities like attentiveness or professionalism.  I have used this advice in the past when I had a phone interview I did from home.  It’s tempting to put on something casual for comfort, but I’ve found that wearing interview attire even when the interviewers can’t see me helps me get in the right frame of mind for the conversation. 

There’s a catch to all this, of course.  (Isn’t there always?)  To have such a positive influence, you have to be wearing clothes that you associate with professional qualities and that varies somewhat across individuals.  Wearing a suit, in other words, does not mean the same thing to everyone.  Read here to find out the full story and to start your thinking about the workplace attire of you and your team.

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Facebook Profiles and Job Success

We’ve all heard the advice to clear our Facebook pages of compromising photos and we know that potential hiring authorities peruse social media to see what we may have posted that is publically available.  If you’re in charge of hiring, you are doing this as well for your prospective hires and for current staff if a problem emerges.  (Some are even going too far by asking for their potential employees’ log in information, but that is a topic for another time).   These efforts are aimed at finding “dealbreaker” information about job candidates, such as a tendency to broadcast risky behavior.  It speaks to your maturity and judgment and can be used against you, as a Secret Service agent found out recently when he posted unprofessional comments on Facebook about his time protecting Sarah Palin.

But did you know that other things in your or your team members’ Facebook profiles could do more than predict failure, that those profiles could indicate success factors, too?  Researchers had participants take personality inventories that measured conscientiousness, emotional stability, agreeableness, extraversion, and openness.  Three raters looked at their Facebook profiles and rated them as well.  Six months after getting hired, supervisors rated each participant on job performance and there was a correlation between the Facebook ratings and performance, even stronger than the relationship between the personality inventories and success. 

Two quick caveats should be noted:  One, correlation is not causation, so no one is saying that having a great Facebook profile that shows how open to new cultures or fun you are causes success.  They are saying that the two are related, meaning that who you are in terms of those five characteristics and your likelihood of success are reflected in things like your Facebook profile.  Two, this is a small study so wholesale changes to screening policies based on these findings should wait until more research is done.

This story does provide you with a good chance to evaluate yourself, however.  You’ve already scanned for compromising things, but take a moment and look at your Facebook page as objectively as you can.  What does it say about you, when viewed through the lens of a potential employer?  Do you have lots of arguments with friends, venting or other caustic comments, or are you supportive and happy?  Do you talk about reading a smart new book (or classic old book)…or the latest trashy novel?  Do you have pictures of yourself on your trip abroad…or pictures of yourself doing something that would put off most supervisors as they picture you at a conference or trade show away from the office?  Take this opportunity to use Facebook as a mirror, showing you habits or trends in your life that you might want to rethink or change.  This type of feedback is vital to improvement.

Want to know more about the five characteristics mentioned here, in terms of this research?  Look here.