Positive Leadership: Let Ideas Flow

Business innovator Nilofer Merchant (Twitter @nilofer) thinks deeply about the frameworks, strategies and cultural values of companies. She has been helping to grow businesses -- from Fortune 500s to web startups -- for 20 years. Today she serves on boards for both public and private companies, and writes books about collaboration. 

In this TED talk, she suggests a small idea that just might have a big impact on your life and health: next time you have a one-on-one meeting, make it into a "walking meeting" -- and let ideas flow while you walk and talk.  

For more, see: http://nilofermerchant.com/

And here is an interesting and challenging (for many reasons) comment on the above talk from Korea!

'Enjoyed the video. Great idea! I am a high school student in Korea, and we have to stay more than 11 hours a day sitting. Much exceeding the sleeping hours, 6 hours maximum. I really do want to adopt your idea to my usual life, because girls here are experiencing the serious effects of sitting all day; we are getting rounder and rounder every day. However, I cannot really think of a way. Any good advise?? :('

Positive Leadership: Let Ideas Flow

Positive Leadership: Collaboration Opportunities

Positive Leadership: Collaboration Opportunities

Positive Leadership: The Importance of Social Intelligence

Why does social intelligence emerge as the make-or-break leadership skill set? For one, leadership is the art of accomplishing goals through other people.

Technical skills and self-mastery alone allow you to be an outstanding individual contributor. But to lead, you need an additional interpersonal skill set: you've got to listen, communicate, persuade, collaborate.

A leader's competencies are synergistic. The more different competencies a leader displays at strength, the greater her business results. But there's another critically important rule-of-thumb: some competencies matter more than others, particularly at the higher levels of leadership. For C-level executives, for example, technical expertise matters far less than the art of influence: you can hire people with great technical skills, but then you've got to motivate, guide and inspire them.

Specifically, there are threshold competencies, the abilities every leader needs to some degree, and then there are distinguishing competencies, the abilities you find only in the stars.

You can be the most brilliant innovator, problem-solver or strategic thinker, but if you can't inspire and motivate, build relationships or communicate powerfully, those talents will get you nowhere. 

Social intelligence is the secret sauce in top-performing leadership.

Lacking social intelligence, no other combination of competences is likely to get much traction. Along with whatever other strengths they may have, the must-have is social intelligence.

So how do you spot this skill set? An executive with a long track record of satisfactory hires told us how his organisation assessed social intelligence in a prospect during the round of interviews, group sessions, meals, and parties that candidates there routinely went through.

"We'd watch carefully to see if she talks to everyone at the party or a dinner, not just the people who might be helpful to her," he said. One of the social intelligence indicators: during a getting-to-know you conversation, does the candidate ask about the other person or engage in a self-centred monologue? At the same time, does she talk about herself in a natural way? At the end of the conversation, you should feel you know the person, not just the social self she tries to project.

Positive Leadership: The Importance of Social Intelligence

Positive Leadership: Leadership & Capability

Former HP ceo, Carly Fiorina explains that leadership is about three things: capability, collaboration and character. 

She stresses the importance of capability, which is about asking questions and listening to answers. It is also about celebrating new ideas and taking initiative to try new things. She insists that a continuous learning process is important to strengthen an entrepreneur's capability

Positive Leadership: Leadership & Capability

Positive Leadership: Build Collaboration

All successful influencers cultivate collaboration to form productive relationships. Effective influence results from two-way dialogue, not manipulation. 

Here are six questions to ask yourself when forming productive partnerships: 

• What do I want to achieve from this relationship?
• What does my potential colleague want to achieve?
• How can I weave these sets of wants together so we are both satisfied?
• What can I give up without undermining my overall goal?
• What can my counterpart bring to the table that might not be immediately obvious?
• What new solutions serve our common goal?

"The secret is to gang up on the problem, rather than each other." - Thomas Stallkamp 

Positive Leadership: Build Collaboration

What is Collaborative Leadership?

Common Purpose (http://www.commonpurpose.org.uk/) asked Albert Tucker, Consultant and Non-Executive Director, Big Lottery Fund and Places for People; Janet Paraskeva, First Civil Service Commissioner, Office of the Civil Service; Anthony Salz, Executive Vice Chairman, Rothschild; Crawford Gillies, Chairman of Scottish Enterprise; and Richard Greenhalgh, Chairman, CIHE for their thoughts:

What is Collaborative Leadership?

Take "the Other" to Lunch

Elizabeth Lesser is the co-founder of Omega Institute, the US’ largest lifelong learning centre focusing on health, wellness, spirituality, creativity and social change. She’s the author of Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

In this talk, she explores the two sides of human nature within us (call them "the mystic" and "the warrior”) that can be harnessed to elevate the way we treat each other. She shares a simple way to begin real dialogue -- by going to lunch with someone who doesn't agree with you, and asking them three questions to find out what's really in their hearts. 

Take "the Other" to Lunch

Success Takes Time

‘Instant Success Takes Time - new products, people, or ideas that appear to burst on the scene unheralded and soar to the top quickly have often been preceded by a long period of preparation, rehearsal, and trial-and-error experimentation.

One of the more mundane differences between perpetual winners and long-term losers among businesses, sports teams, and other organisations is that the winners simply work harder.  Winners are more likely to take the time to keep honing skills and testing ideas in preparation for change. That's not too dramatic or glamorous, but it's among the biggest differentiators.

In contrast, teams or organisations headed for losing streaks lurch from tactic to tactic without any apparent long-term direction. They lack discipline, do not always rely on facts before chasing fads, and panic under pressure.

Those building winning streaks remain calm and professional. Winners learn and experiment in a disciplined manner with a commitment to enduring principles and a long-term purpose that help them be patient on what can be a long road to victory.

Eventual winners have invested in three underpinnings of confidence:

First is accountability. They have faced facts honestly and taken responsibility for their own actions.

Second is collaboration. They make allies and partners, not enemies.

Last but not least is initiative. They encourage constant small innovations rather than relying only on the occasional blockbuster hit.

In short, winners are not necessarily flashy nor endowed with the hottest new thing; they are simply steady, disciplined, and prepared. They have some "instant successes" but even better, they have fewer outright failures. They bounce back faster from setbacks and can weather attacks because they stand on a firm foundation.

Success Takes Time

What Drives Our Leadership Impact?

“Where others see hierarchies, the new leaders see connections”, writes Emmanuel Gobillot in his book, The Connected Leader: Creating Agile Organisations for People, Performance and Profit.

What differentiates a connected leader is the way in which they impact and influence those around them and this is largely determined by the way in which they view good leadership. More than even our individual skill-set, how we see the role of leadership greatly determines the impact we have on others and the success we will have as leaders.

Our impact is the result of a number of factors. Using the iceberg metaphor, above the waterline for all to see, are skills and knowledge. Gobillot writes; “Skills and knowledge are important because they give the leader the ability to take part in the game. On their own, they do not differentiate between average and superior performance…. But it is below the waterline that the real differentiators lie. …Below the waterline, the drivers of impact can be found. Performance will differ depending on how people see their role. If doctors believe that their primary role is solving problems, their behaviour is likely to be different from that of surgeons who see their roles as healers.”


We need to examine our beliefs if we are to change our impact and effectiveness with those around us. 

Often we adopt the "smartest person in the room" or "the leader of all leaders" mind-set when thinking about leadership. With this mentality we won't have the necessary ability to work well with other leaders and  develop community. As Jean Lipman-Blumen wrote in Connective Leadership: Managing in a Changing World, "leaders cannot just issue orders; instead, they have to join forces, persuade, and negotiate to resolve conflicts."

Your ability to do this is largely determined by the "below the waterline" type factors.

What Drives Our Leadership Impact?

The New 21st Century Leaders

Here is some fascinating insight into a new leadership model for the 21st century from Harvard Professor Bill George:

'During the last half of the 20th century, business leadership became an elite profession, dominated by managers who ruled their enterprises from the top down. Influenced by two World Wars and the Depression, organisational hierarchies were structured along military lines, with multi-layered structures to establish control through rules and processes. People climbed the ranks in search of power, status, money and perquisites.

In the last quarter of the twentieth century the stock market became increasingly short-term, causing corporate leaders to concentrate on quarterly earnings, often to the exclusion of long-term growth. In the past decade it all blew up, from the ethical scandals exposed by Enron and WorldCom to the Wall Street meltdown. As a result, people lost trust in business leaders to build sustainable institutions instead of serving themselves and short-term shareholders.

What happened? The hierarchical model simply doesn't work anymore.

The craftsman-apprentice model has been replaced by learning organisations, filled with knowledge workers who don't respond to "top down" leadership. Seeking opportunities to lead, young people are unwilling to spend ten years waiting in line. Most important, people are searching for genuine satisfaction and meaning from their work, not just money.

In response to these changes, a new generation of leaders is reshaping the best-led global companies. Authentic leaders focused on customers are replacing hierarchical leaders that focus on serving short-term shareholders. Typical of these leaders is Unilever CEO Paul Polman, who recently told the Financial Times, "I don't work for the shareholder. I work for consumers and my customers."

In the 21st century the most successful leaders will focus on sustaining superior performance by aligning people around mission and values and empowering leaders at all levels, while concentrating on serving customers and collaborating throughout the organisation.

Aligning: The leader's most difficult task is to align people around the organisation's mission and shared values, which is far more challenging than making short-term numbers. Gaining alignment is especially difficult in far-flung global organisations where local employees may be more loyal to native cultures than their employers, especially regarding business practices.

Traditional leaders thought they could solve this problem with rulebooks, training programmes and compliance systems, and were shocked when people deviated. Aligned employees commit to the mission and values of the organisation, and want to be part of something greater than themselves. Johnson & Johnson is a classic case of an aligned organisation that uses its famed Credo to guide global employees in their actions.

Empowering: Hierarchical leaders delegate limited amounts of power in order to retain control. In contrast, 21st century leaders empower leaders at all levels, combined with sophisticated accountability systems to ensure commitments are met.

Front-line leaders without direct reports are especially needed. Here's an empowered leader who sets standards of excellence for other employees  in Medtronic's heart valve facility. A Laotian immigrant, she told me, "I make heart valves that save people's life. I do my own quality control, because if one of the valves I make fails, someone will die. At Medtronic 99.9 percent quality is very good, but I couldn't live with causing someone's death. My satisfaction comes from the 5,000 people alive today because of heart valves I made."

Serving: As Polman points out, the leader's first obligation is not to shareholders, but rather to customers. CEOs who spend too much time listening to Wall Street risk ignoring their most important stakeholder — their customers. Any organisation that doesn't provide its customers with superior value relative to competitors will find itself going out of business. Employees are much more motivated by serving customers than they are by getting stock prices up, and that's what leads to innovation and superior customer service. Satisfied customers and motivated employees are key to sustaining revenue growth and, ultimately, shareholder value.

Collaborating: The challenges businesses face these days are too complex to be solved by individuals or even single organisations. Collaboration — within the organisation and with customers, suppliers, and even competitors — is required to achieve lasting solutions. Leaders must foster this collaborative spirit, eliminating internal politics and focusing on internal cooperation. After becoming CEO of IBM, Sam Palmisano transformed IBM's long-standing bureaucracy into an "integrated global network," shifting to "leading by values" and breaking down silos that kept people from collaborating.

The ultimate measure of effectiveness for leaders is the ability to sustain superior results over an extended period of time. Organisations filled with aligned, empowered and collaborative employees focused on serving customers will outperform hierarchical organizations every time. Top-down leaders may achieve near-term results, but only authentic leaders can galvanise the entire organisation to sustain long-term performance.

We need them to rebuild the trust that has been lost in capitalism.'

For more, see - http://blogs.hbr.org/imagining-the-future-of-leadership/2010/04/the-new-21st-century-leaders-1.html

The New 21st Century Leaders

Why a Collaborative Culture is Essential in Business

Business leaders around the world are increasingly realising that "silo mentality" and knowledge hoarding behaviours are wasting the kind of collective brainpower that could save their organisation millions, or lead to the discovery of a revolutionary new process or product, or, in the current economic climate, help keep their company afloat when others are sinking!

And it's not just corporate profits that suffer when collaboration is low: the workforce loses something too. Individuals lose the opportunity to work in the kind of inclusive environment that energises teams, releases creativity and makes working together both productive and joyful.

Here are seven insights for harnessing the power of collaboration:

1. Collaboration is a leadership issue. In trying to capture and communicate the cumulative wisdom of a workforce, the public and private sectors have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in portals, software, and intranets. But collaboration is more than the technology that supports it, and even more than a business strategy aimed at optimising an organisation's experience and expertise. Collaboration is, first and foremost, a change in attitude and behaviour of people throughout an organisation. Successful collaboration is a leadership issue.

2. Collaboration is essential for organisational change. Regardless of how creative, clever and savvy a leader may be, he or she can't transform an organisation, a department or a team without the brain power and commitment of others. Whether the change involves creating new products, services, processes – or a total reinvention of how the organisation must look, operate, and position itself for the future – success dictates that the individuals impacted by change be involved in the change from the very beginning. 

3. Visioning is a team sport. Today's most successful leaders guide their organisations not through command and control, but through a shared purpose and vision. These leaders adopt and communicate a vision of the future that impels people beyond the boundaries and limits of the past. But if the future vision belongs only to top management, it will never be an effective motivator for the workforce. The power of a vision comes truly into play only when the employees themselves have had some part in its creation.

4. Diversity is crucial. Experiments at the University of Michigan found that, when challenged with a difficult problem, groups composed of highly adept members performed worse than groups whose members had varying levels of skill and knowledge. The reason for this seemingly odd outcome has to do with the power of diverse thinking. Diversity causes people to consider perspectives and possibilities that would otherwise be ignored. Group members who think alike or are trained in similar disciplines with similar bases of knowledge run the risk of becoming insular in their ideas. Instead of exploring alternatives, a confirmation bias takes over and members tend to reinforce one another's predisposition.

5. Relationships are key. The outcome of any collaborative effort is dependent upon well-developed personal relationships among participants. Not allowing time for this can be a costly mistake. For example, all too often, in the rush to get started on a project, team leaders put people together and tell them to "get to work." This approach proves less than productive, as the group hasn't had time to get to know one another, to discover each other's strengths and weaknesses, to build trust, nor to develop a common understanding and vision for the project.

6. Trust is the glue. Trust is the belief or confidence that one party has in the reliability, integrity and honesty of another party. It is the expectation that the faith one places in someone else will be honoured. In many businesses today, there is a crisis of trust: suspicious and cynical employees are disinclined to collaborate – sharing knowledge is still perceived as weakening a personal "power base." And, despite lots of lip service to the contrary, too many corporate leaders still don't trust employees with the kind of open communication that is the foundation of informed collaboration.

7. Body language matters.  Leaders often make "body language blunders".  For example, have you ever been in an important meeting, and heard the presenter telling the group how much he welcomed any input the group could provide? But at the same time he was using both his hands to nonverbally push the entire group away!

Today's corporation exists in an increasingly complex and ever-shifting ocean of change. As a result, leaders need to rely more than ever on the intelligence and resourcefulness of their staff. Collaboration is not a "nice to have" organisational philosophy. It is an essential ingredient for organisational survival and success.

Why a Collaborative Culture is Essential in Business

Social Media and Leadership

Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead (J-B Warren Bennis Series) by Charlene Li argues that a new organisational structure is required to accommodate and benefit from the culture of sharing that social media has fuelled over the last four years. The information flow we all experience daily can no longer be organised into neat org-chart silos. Instead, it demands a new kind of leadership — one based on letting go of the command-and-control model and embracing openness and relationship building.

Information sharing and dialogue, both internal and external, are key to the openness Li prescribes. But how can leaders be open in a world where they need to be in control? “If you think you are in control, you’re fooling yourself. As soon as you start listening, you realise you’re not in control.” Li proclaimed. “And letting go will yield more and better results.”

Here’s a distilled version of the five steps she laid out for achieving open leadership:

1. Have an open — but not undisciplined — strategy. Align openness with your organisation’s strategic goals. Examine your 2010 goals, pick one in which both openness and social media can have an impact, and start there.  “Every organisation is both open and closed. You must be strategic with what you are open about and not,” Li advises.

2. Understand the upside. Clearly define your goals.  What is the value of an open approach — beyond ROI?  Customer lifetime value, for example, should include the value of new customers that come from referrals, the value that their new insights bring to your product offering and the value of their word-of-mouth support. New customers who come with valuable networks — which you can then tap into — are the most valuable. The more open and engaged you are, the more you’ll be able to get value out of these expanded networks.

3. Find and gather support from others who are realists/optimists. Seek out leaders on your team who are open, rather than the pessimists or worried sceptics who are conditioned to default to a command-and-control mindset. The stakes for embracing openness are high, but the costs of not engaging optimistic allies are also high.

4. Manage risk with ‘sandbox covenants’. Clearly define the outlines and risks of your experiments so your team members feel secure rather than threatened by change. At the same time, be sure to let them know that these experiments in openness are not going to stay small forever.

5. Embrace failure. In same way you have a success file, keep an accessible failure file.  This is an important way to stay authentic and open to the fact that not everything succeeds.  Team members will recognise that all true relationships involve failure and success. 

Social Media and Leadership

Leading by Collaborating

Vineet Nayar is the chief executive of HCL Technologies, an I.T. services company based in India. To help bridge the gap between ceo and the rank and file, he once danced (awkwardly) to a famous Bollywood song at an employee event. Here is what he has to say about how his company handles business planning:

‘As my kids became teenagers, I started looking at Facebook a little more closely. It was a significant amount of collaboration. There was open understanding. They didn’t have a problem sharing their status. Nothing seemed to be secret, and they were living their lives very openly, and friends were commenting on each other and it was working.

Here is my generation, which is very security-conscious and privacy-conscious, and I thought, what are the differences? This is the generation coming to work for us. It’s not my generation.

So we started having people make their presentations and record them for our internal Web site. We open that for review to a 360-degree workshop, which means your subordinates will review it. Your managers will read it. Your peers will read it, and everybody will comment on it. I will be, or your manager will be, one of the many who read it. So, every presentation was reviewed by 300, 400 people.

What happened? There were two very interesting lessons that I learned. One, because your subordinates are going to see the plan, you cannot lie. You have to be honest. Two, because your peers are going to see it, you are going to put your best work into it. Third, you didn’t learn from me. You learned by reviewing somebody else’s presentation. You learned from the comments somebody else gave you. For the 8,000 people who participated, there was a massive collaborative learning that took place.’

For more, see - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/business/14cornerweb.html?pagewanted=1&ref=business

Leading by Collaborating

How Leaders Can Reap Big Results From Collaborating

Here is some interesting perspective from Morten T. Hansen, the author of Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results. He is a management professor at University of California, Berkeley, School of Information.

'Recently, President Obama strode into the White House Briefing Room, surprising the reporters there. He had just held the first of a new string of meetings — a bipartisan gathering involving congressional leaders from both parties...This is a good effort, but it comes a year late. Obama came into office promising to end the politics of division. A year later, it seems we have more division and less collaboration.

It's a lesson in how not to collaborate, and it applies equally to business leaders. All leaders and managers can learn from five key mistakes made by the White House:

1. Wrong language by the rank-and-file. 

President Obama says many of the right things about the need for bipartisanship and collaboration. But his team does not follow suit. Rahm Emanuel, most notably, is often making news with heated rhetoric, most recently when he called people with whom he disagreed "F—ing retarded" (and they were Democrats!). As I argue in my book Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results, how leaders talk matters a great deal. In a fascinating experiment at Stanford University, students played a game where they chose to cooperate or compete. When it was called "the community game," given the impression that it was about cooperation, 70 percent chose to cooperate. When it was called "the Wall Street game," suggesting market competition, 70 percent chose to compete — the exact opposite! Rhetoric shapes behaviours.

To get people motivated to collaborate, you need to talk the language of collaboration, all the time. And you can't extol it one day and then say something differently another day. The White House can learn from the example of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California who came into office callinghis opponents "girlie men." That rhetoric led to even more division, but once he cooled the rhetoric, he was able to get a lot done by collaborating.

2. Confusing delegation with collaboration. 

President Obama pledged to work with Congress; but he has been criticized for delegating major legislative initiatives like health care reform to the Democratic leaders in Congress. What's the difference? Delegation means letting other people do the work, with little oversight. Collaboration, in contrast, means that leaders are actively involved — they sit around the table, sweat through difficult discussions, given and take, and forge solutions. President Obama's relatively recent hands-on involvement with health care legislation is a good sign that he is rectifying this particular mistake.

3. No meaningful outreach to opponents. 

The Republicans have complained that they haven't really been listened to during last year's legislative meetings on health care. It's of course hard for outsiders to judge what really went on, but this brings up a vital point: real collaboration means bringing in all parties — including those who disagree with you — to the debate early in the process, and not later when many decisions have already been made.

To collaborate well, you must involve all parties in a meaningful way: invite people to propose divergent views and promote vigorous debate (some call this constructive conflict). Let robust ideas and solutions get a fair chance, even if you may not like them much.

4. No hard compromises. In 2006, when Governor Schwarzenegger turned collaborative, he and the democratic leaders in California passed major legislation because they made some tough compromises. Consider the increase in minimum wage to $8 per hour. The Governor compromised by agreeing to an increase (which he had twice vetoed before), while the Democrats compromised by dropping their insistence on an automatic adjustment pegged to inflation. They both made painful choices.

Good collaborative leaders have learned the art of compromising. 

5. Lack of a compelling common goal. In 1961, President Kennedy pronounced his famous "man on the moon" goal. It was a great goal because it unified. People set aside their own agendas and ideologies. For example, Wernher von Braun, a towering figure in space exploration, set aside his agency's cherished method to get to the moon ("earth orbit") and embraced a rival's method ("lunar orbit"), precisely so that they could reach Kennedy's goal in time.

Has President Obama articulated a "moon goal" for healthcare that can unite all parties, even many Republicans? Great collaborative leaders craft such common goals, and they lead people like von Braun (or the Republican leader John A. Boehner....) to set aside own agendas in pursuit of a compelling unifying goal.

Had President Obama and his team avoided these five missteps and practiced the five corresponding good collaborative practices, things may have looked differently today. But there is still time to practice good collaboration, for all of us.

Examine your own organisation: do you have compelling unifying goals that unite people from different units? As a leader, do you set a tone that invites collaboration? Do you foster real debate early in the process, reach out to those who disagree, and stay hands-on in major initiatives? And — when the process stalls — have you been willing to make hard choices?'

How Leaders Can Reap Big Results From Collaborating

Leading through Facilitation

Successful executives focus not on handing down orders, but rather on facilitating collaboration, says SunGard CEO Cristóbal Conde. To make that happen, Conde uses a Twitter-like platform to enable his global workforce to share ideas and brag about their successes. "It's more like being the producer of the show, rather than being the lead," he says. "By creating an atmosphere of collaboration, the people who are consistently right get a huge following."

For  more, see - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/business/17corner.html?ref=business

Leading through Facilitation