Thursday, February 18, 2010
Leaders Who Build Trust Will Accelerate Their Organisation's Success
Positive Leadership Begins With Values
A strategy begins and ends with values - a prioritised listing of what is important to you. This is Positive Leadership.
Once you know what you value as a leader, you can set goals to help you bring about end-results that are aligned with your values.
That is a strategy, and it is bigger than individual goals, and every bit as important. Without an overall strategy, you may climb the ladder of success. However, when you get to the top you may find that it is leaning against the wrong tree. You may find that the one with all of the fruit is just out of reach, if you haven't developed a good strategy to get there. Make sense?
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
The Power of Positive Interactions
So what does this mean for you? For most of us, it means we need to increase the number of positive interactions we have at home and at work and reduce our negative interactions. We need to engage each other with more smiles, kind words, encouragement, gratitude, meaningful conversations, honest dialogues and sincere positive interactions. And to foster these actions we need to create personal and team rituals that help us interact more positively. If we make them part of our organisational process and individual habits they are more likely to happen.
For instance, at home you might decide to take a walk with your spouse each night after dinner and talk about the positive things that happened at work. The more you practice this the more it will become ingrained in your life. At work you might make it a point to smile at your co-workers and customers more often. As a manager you would spend more time praising your employees for the things they do right rather than always focusing on what everyone is doing wrong. Make it a point to personally praise 5 people every week. As an organisation you might gather all of your employees on a call once a day to share a positive message. Or perhaps you might gather your sales team together each week and have your team members share success stories. The ideas are infinite. The key is to intentionally cultivate more positive interactions to fuel success.
However, please know that this doesn't mean we should never have negative interactions. There is research by Barbara Fredrickson from the University of Michigan that shows if a work group in a company experiences a positive to negative interaction ratio of 13 to 1 the work group will be less effective. This implies that no one is willing to confront the real problems and challenges that are holding them back. Sometimes we need to confront a situation to move past it and, as we know, ignoring problems that stare us in the face doesn't work. Negative interactions are necessary so long as they occur much less frequently than positive interactions.
Positive interactions are essential to a healthy marriage, positive work environment and individual and team success. In this spirit when you are finished reading this, we encourage you to go thank someone at work or at home and let them know how they impacted your life in a positive way. Then make it a habit.
How to Become a Positive Leader
In the words of a 19th century American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, “ No man can for any considerable time wear one face to himself and another to the multitude without finally getting bewildered as to which is the true one.” You should therefore concentrate on building your inner character rather than building reputation or image. D. L. Moody said “if I take care of my character, my reputation will take care of itself.”.
To become a person of integrity and a positive influencer, you need to develop the following qualities:
1. Fulfill your commitments-one of the surest ways to break trust with people is to renege on a promise. Hence never promise anything you can’t or don’t intend to keep.
2. Live honestly- choose to be truthful; avoid telling lies. Avoid hypocrisy and duplicity; be consistent in your character with everyone. This will make people have good impressions about you.
3. Exemplify humility-People tend to distrust someone they perceive to be driven by ego, jealousy or an air of superiority. Humility is one of the hallmarks of an effective leader and a positive influencer.
4. Imbibe an attitude of service- leadership is all about serving others and not an opportunity to be served. Sir Wilfred T. Grenfell says “the service that we render to others is really the rent that we pay for our room on this earth.” Leaders are to give of their time, energy and gifts to others.
5. Do the first things first- Resist the temptation to do the easy and quick activities because these are often the trivial things. Zig Ziglar says “when you do the things you have to do when you have to do them, the day will come when you can do the things you want to do when you want to do them.”
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Why Sport Matters
Governments don’t back sport simply for its economic value. They back it because it provides such a powerful tool for nation-building.
Spectators, on the other hand, love sport because it offers mythic lessons in the great themes of life. Sport is about the rewards of courage, self-discipline and faith in oneself. Sport is unflinching proof that every hero’s fate – and by association our own — is ultimately one of defeat either by an opponent, by circumstance or by age. Sport reveals that victory and defeat balance the same equation, that there cannot be one without the other and that it’s important for the winner to honour the loser. Sport teaches humility. Sport demonstrates that time is the master of all. Sport reminds us that we all live in the fleeting moment and that at some point we, too, must arrive at that one last moment that is all we have and all we will ever have. Sport affirms the moment’s value.
The public response to sport is a measure of its importance.
Approximately half the population of the planet is expected to watch the Vancouver and Whistler Olympics on television. This audience isn’t coerced, it is self-selecting. The audience alone reflects a degree of interest that opponents of sport as spectacles prefer to ignore.
The Role of 'Positivity' in Peak Performance
In Sustainable Peak Performance, authors Dr Mike Pratt and his wife Helga have demonstrated the role of ‘positivity’ in sustaining peak performance and the links between sustainability, happiness and performance. Part of the book shows how the three concepts of 1. wellbeing (happiness), 2. working in “flow” or full engagement, and 3. making a difference as an enterprise can create the context for performance.
At the personal level, happiness comes through choice and action. The choice part is about ensuring both self-discipline over mind / body / spirit and self-determination of our own fate across all walks of life. The action part is about activities that provide gratification through progressing meaningful goals and activities that simply provide pleasure.
To quote a key passage from Sustainable Peak Performance:
To quote a key passage from Sustainable Peak Performance:
“… happy people appear to choose meaningful personal and work-related goals, undertake activities that enable them to exercise their ‘signature strengths’ and virtues, make meaningful progress towards the achievement of their goals, and embrace altruistic goals and activities.”
Monday, February 15, 2010
Constant Communication is a Key to Effective Leadership
‘Whether you have a really small team or a really big team, communication needs to be at the forefront. It needs to be simple. It needs to be consistent. And even when you’re tired of what the message is, you need to do it again and again and again. Because everybody listens at different levels, and everybody comes to the table with a different perspective and a different experience. And the same words mean different things to different people. On some very key things, people need to internalise it, and they need to own it. And when they do, you’ll know that you’re effective as a leader, because you hear them saying it.’
Susan Docherty, General Motors
The Top 5 Deadly Sins for Leaders
Whether it’s yelling, screaming, and berating, or a more subtle approach to letting everyone else don’t they don’t matter, everybody can’t stand an arrogant leader.
2. Not listening
Not listening is another way of displaying arrogance and insensitivity, even if you don’t mean to be.
3. Manipulative
Getting things done by manipulating people shows a lack of authenticity and keeps people guessing what your true intentions are. It fosters a lack of trust.
4. Lack of integrity
Lying, cheating, blaming others for your mistakes – it only takes one mistake to ruin a reputation for life.
5. Selfishness
A “me first” approach, inability to collaborate or build a team, and unwillingness to collaborate.
If you’ve ever been told you display any of these traits, then do yourself and everyone around you a big favour – get some help!
The Most Effective Leaders Focus On Their People's Strengths
Strengths-Based Leadership
is a book which is well worth reading. Why? For a start, on page 10 the authors assert that great historical leaders, such as Winston Churchill or Mahatma Gandhi, have more differences than similarities and that it was the differences that defined them and made them great. Then, their basis for the book is decades of Gallup studies on this topic; the research firm's data includes more than 20000 in-depth interviews with senior leaders, studies of more than a million work teams, and 50 years of polls regarding the world's most admired leaders.
is a book which is well worth reading. Why? For a start, on page 10 the authors assert that great historical leaders, such as Winston Churchill or Mahatma Gandhi, have more differences than similarities and that it was the differences that defined them and made them great. Then, their basis for the book is decades of Gallup studies on this topic; the research firm's data includes more than 20000 in-depth interviews with senior leaders, studies of more than a million work teams, and 50 years of polls regarding the world's most admired leaders.Three interesting findings emerge, which add to our insights into leadership.
The first of these is that the most effective leaders focus on their people's strengths, not their weaknesses. Gallup research shows that focusing on staff strength results in staff who are eight times more engaged in their work than those whose leaders focus on their weaknesses.
Some background is required on the "strengths" referred to in the title. Donald Clifton, an educational psychologist, developed the Clifton Strengths Finder, a measure of personal talent that identifies the areas in which an individual has the greatest potential for growth.
In the last years of his life, Clifton was asked what he had discovered from his 30 years of leadership research. His answer was that a leader needed to know his strengths as a carpenter needed to know his or her tools, so he or she could use the right one at the right time. This, he concluded, was probably all that leaders could be said to have in common. If you spend your life trying to be good at everything, you will never be great at anything. Being "well rounded" inadvertently breeds mediocrity, and in the area of leadership this is no less true. While the best leaders are not well rounded, the best teams are.
This brings us to the second finding, that the most effective leaders surround themselves with the right people. Think of the team in which you work; the chances are high that members were not recruited because of their complimentary differences. This is as true at entry level as it is at board level. The leader, unaware of the issue of strengths, is most likely to surround himself with people who agree with him and who have similar backgrounds and personalities. A company like this will not grow, adapt or change, and this has been verified by Gallup research on thousands of executive teams.
There are 34 themes in the Strengths Finder model and they cluster about four domains of leadership strength: executing, influencing, relationship building, and strategic thinking. A leader who is strong at influencing may well be strong in very different ways, using very different strengths, compared to another fine leader also strong in the general domain of influencing. This is because each of the four domains has eight or nine themes and great leaders appear to be strongest only in four or five of these. Where they are not strong, they will call on team members to supplement, resulting in a work group that works.
The third finding to emerge is that the most effective leaders understand their followers' needs. Most of the research conducted in the field of leadership has focused on leaders to the exclusion of followers - an oddity if you consider that you cannot be a leader if no one wants to follow you. One could argue that studying the impact of the leaders should be good enough: did they consistently produce great results in the classroom, boardroom or operating room? But, as Peter Drucker notes, the leaders who made the greatest impact on the 20th century were Hitler, Stalin and Mao and "if that's leadership, I want no part of it".
To explore why people follow, Gallup conducted a formal study of 10000 followers between 2005 and 2008. The questions were very simply and very clever. What leader has the most positive influence in your daily life? (Pause here and answer this for yourself.) Now identify three words that best describe what that person contributes to your life. (Pause again.) What emerged from their research was trust, compassion, stability and hope (or words to that effect.) These concepts deserve reflection: to know I can trust you, that you treat me like a fellow human, that you assure my present and show me the way to a future.
There is much to ponder in this book.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Leadership Means Building a Winning Team
“You win in the locker room first. Then you win on the field.”
Whether we’re talking sports, business, education, healthcare, etc. the key to success is to build a winning team first. Of course this seems obvious but with increasing pressure to reach certain targets and goals and a challenging economy it’s easy for leaders and their teams to become outward focused on numbers and outcomes rather than inward focused on building the right environment, culture, attitude and synergy.
We must remember that it’s not the numbers that drive the people but the people and team that drive the numbers.
The power comes from the inside and then it extends outward. Just as physical trainers will tell you that to build a strong body you must build your core, to build a strong organisation you must build your core foundation-consisting of your people and team. Without a strong core you’ll have weak energy, weak performance and weak results.
The New Orleans Saints were able to perform at a high level in the recent Super Bowl and as Drew Brees, their quarterback said, “We came together as a team and we believed in each other.” Without this belief, synergy and unity do you think it would have been possible for them to win the Super Bowl?
The same goes for the game of business and life.
Now more than ever it’s time to energise your people, communicate with them and move them in the right direction with a shared vision, focus and purpose. Negativity and fear are knocking your people off balance. It’s time to regroup, refocus, re-energise and create a strong core. With a solid foundation and a winning team you create strength on the inside that can withstand the negativity, naysayers and adversity on the outside.
Culture, players and coaches win championships. It’s their beliefs, actions, talent and teamwork that make the difference.
Ideas for Developing Your Leadership Skills
1. Be resilient and retain the the desire to succeed
The boxer is characterised by a drive to complete and win many rounds of punishment. The boxer also has to demonstrate huge commitment to training, which is driven by desire – this in turn is based on a personal ambition that is nurtured and encouraged over many years and pushes an individual to go beyond the normal boundaries of performance. (One of the reasons sport is probably a good vehicle for testing desire is that it engages the emotions in a way that business sometimes fails to do for many people.)
2. Develop passion to inspire genius
To be a true genius, people must have heart; geniuses possess a passion that makes them do extraordinary things. How can we expect people to raise their games if they are not inspired by what is happening to them in the workplace? Therefore, senior managers and business owners need to understand what makes people tick – their core values and beliefs, for example. Emotional intelligence teaches us to be self-aware so that we can appreciate what drives our people.
3. Be positive and address situations
A positive mental attitude is built around a self-belief that makes you a winner whatever the circumstances. It always seeks a solution to problematic situations; it does not lay blame to others and rarely looks backwards, accepting what has happened and building on it. In business, management often spend too much time investigating why they find themselves in a predicament, and too little time addressing the situation.
4. Bring out the charisma
One of the key elements of leaders operating in team-based environments is charisma. Charisma can be interpreted as the personal character that attracts and engages followers. This can take many different forms; even if leaders aren’t overtly charismatic, they can earn the respect of their followers by their undying commitment.
5. Be inspirational through good times and bad
In a team environment, inspiration is the leader’s ability to transfer all of their relevant personal characteristics to the rest of the team. The leader uses his charisma to inspire the other team players to push their own boundaries. If the team has the right people, the leader should be able to inspire people to push their personal performance limits when they probably least want to, when the pressure is on.
6. Banish your ego
Ego is one of the key reasons for an individual failing to succeed. Ego stops an individual from learning and developing the attributes to succeed in the long term; it makes them think they are better than they actually are. Boxing is ideal for removing the ego, as a lack of awareness of your personal weaknesses can have painful repercussions.
7. Take the knocks – and get back up
The boxer’s road is long and lonely. Coaches are a great help, but a huge percentage of drive is personal. When things are not going well, the easiest route is to pull out and give in. A special character is needed to get up seven times after being knocked down six times (as demonstrated by Rocky). In the ring, the pressure pushes the individual forward. But self motivation is key to personal development when there is no pressure to succeed. Drive is the ability to channel energy in the required direction; it ensures the individual focuses on the end result and does not lose sight of the objectives to be achieved.
8. Be confident that you can drive change
Self-confidence is different from ego, in that it encourages learning and does not think that the individual is ‘too good’ to improve. The boxer needs self-confidence to make the other elements work. The business leader needs to believe that he or she can make a difference and alter the path that the organisation is taking. One of the biggest obstacles to decision-making is the fear of making a mistake. In business, leaders are great at hiding their fear and disguising it in different ways. In boxing, fear leads to indecision which means you will lose. Something needs to be done.
9. Hone your inner strength to maintain your will to win
Many people feel the boxer’s strength is their physical attributes. However, the very best boxers’ key attribute is their inner strength. The physical body is likely to give in quite early on in proceedings, depending on the level of training. However, there are numerous instances when the biggest and most physical boxer has failed to win against a physically weaker opponent. Inner strength drives determination and a will to win.
10. Push yourself – mentally and physically
Boxing involves the greatest integration between the mind and body. Leaders need to explore how far they can push their physical being, and in doing so develop their mental strength. Physical training that pushes the individual beyond their boundaries tests their determination and mental will to progress.
Leading through Facilitation
For more, see - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/business/17corner.html?ref=business
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Leadership Requires Self Discipline Throughout the Organisation
The Positive Leadership™ game plan for winning provides a seamless link between the values of Positive Leadership™, the strategically aligned results which must flow from these values and the ability to sustain these values and deliver these results, even when under pressure.
The market is the ultimate test or competitive arena for those who share the values of Positive Leadership™. Preparing to win and win consistently in such an arena requires exceptional talent, preparation and support. Being a successful competitor in business is at the heart of leadership, in the same way that it is in sport. Positive Leadership™ draws extensively on lessons from elite sport and recognises the importance of developing the ability to thrive under pressure and use the competitive arena as a source of advantage over others. The winning edge requires the ability to display mental toughness, confidence and poise.
Any Scots who follow this blog will know that in today’s Six Nations Rugby international versus Wales, Scotland unfortunately showed what happens to the desired result when a team fails to display the values of Positive Leadership™ when under pressure.
However of much more importance than the result is the health of injured Scotland winger Thom Evans. Our thoughts are with him.
However of much more importance than the result is the health of injured Scotland winger Thom Evans. Our thoughts are with him.
Four Actions to Survive the Recession and Emerge Triumphant
'In these difficult days, doing nothing is not an option. Passivity will only make things worse. But what can we do when there is little or no new investment? Here are four useful actions I've seen work effectively.
Move while others are distracted. This is the strategy of a very successful long-term CEO who has steered a European company into global prominence as one of a handful of industry leaders. He cultivates important relationships during times of crisis when competitors are looking elsewhere, enabling him to make acquisitions others coveted but couldn't get.
This is also how Continental Airlines, under Gordon Bethune, profited when the Northeast electric power grid went down for two days in 2003. Other airlines cancelled hundreds of flights, while confident Continental's empowered employees kept their flights going. Noting the stranded passengers from other airlines when LaGuardia and Kennedy airports closed, Continental ran extra flights from Newark, thereby rescuing the passengers and making millions of extra dollars for those two days. Competitors lost money and goodwill.
Announce and own a grand concept. Okay, you might not be able to raise money for it nor do much about it now, but you will be well-prepared when markets recover. Ideas are cheap to begin to articulate and brand--and priceless once established.
In early November, as the financial crisis was still fresh in its horror (and Obama's election still fresh in its exuberance), Sam Palmisano announced "Smart Planet," a new IBM concept, via a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. The intention for now is to stimulate discussion and pin down the idea of intelligent networks for future infrastructure, or any of the other aspects of a smarter (more information-infused) capacity for roads, buildings, supply chains, etc. With a modest communications effort, IBM can put the "smart planet" idea on public policy agendas and "own" an idea ripe for action whenever recovery occurs.
You don't have to be an IBM to own ideas. A few years ago, colleagues and I at Harvard floated the idea of ‘Advanced Leadership’, a new stage of higher education and kept the idea alive even through a standstill at Harvard during a transition of presidents. We did things that cost nothing, such as writing a working paper, speaking at conferences, and getting colleagues interested. We were ready when new initiatives were supported again, and we "own" a well-received innovation idea.
Get rid of things that have outlived their usefulness. This is a personal lesson, since I deal with crisis by removing basement clutter or giving away old clothes - nothing like that clean closet feeling and the action is under my control. The same principle applies to businesses. Turbulent times demand that resources go to the high potential areas. If a company is still too cluttered with product SKUs that proliferated unnoticed, declining lines of business, meaningless rules or reports, or the like, do the housecleaning, fast. Even those who don't like it will understand.
Concentrate on helping your users, clients, or customers succeed. Always good advice, but now we have to really mean it. Obviously, companies dependent on their revenue-paying customers cannot afford to stand by while those customers decline. Sometimes that involves giving them extras for nothing.
Leaders of a large consulting firm have told their staff that they should worry more about their clients than about themselves, thinking up ways their clients can survive, even if every microsecond isn't billable. Or if you are a supplier of a diagnostic tool to hospitals, for example, and see a cost-saving idea outside of your area of expertise while hanging around the hospital, pass it on.
Generosity might not get you anything now, but you'll be well-positioned for the future, hopefully with healthier customers and bigger ideas.'
Friday, February 12, 2010
Leadership Means Getting The Best From Your Team
A team is a collection of individuals and the leader’s job is to create an environment for the team to achieve ever-greater things together. While in theory it is a good idea to treat everyone the same, reality is quite different. Everyone is special.
Some high-achieving individuals are giving you their best effort most all of the time. They are totally devoted to the company and have been known to work day and night to do their best, while others simply don't have that kind of dedication or self-motivation.
So next time you stand in front of everyone in the company and implore the entire team to dig deeper and try harder, you stand a chance of pushing "Mr. or Mrs. Hard Driver" right off the cliff. “What does he want from me? I’m working as hard and as fast as I can. I’ve devoted my entire life to this company.” Meanwhile, “Mr. Low Achiever” is wondering what he is going to order for lunch and is minimally fazed by your exultation's.
Oftentimes you need to spend one-on-one time helping over-achievers to throttle back the engine a bit. They need balance in their life to keep performing at a high level and the leader is uniquely qualified to make certain they stay fresh and motivated as the high achiever is the last person you want to lose. They will appreciate the extra attention and if you are going to focus on lifting the effort it is always best to lift the effort and spend valuable management time with your best employees.
That is why leaders need to choose their words with more care when they are speaking to large gatherings of diverse team members.
Leadership is Critical to Success
Effective leadership has proven results, from the release of employees’ potential to improved financial performance at the bottom line. If you need convincing, take a look at the research:
- According to the Institute for Strategic Change, the "stock price of 'well-led' companies grew by over 900% over 10 years, compared with 74% for poorly led companies".
- In research with Harvard Business School, executive search consultants Odgers, Ray & Berndtson found that the quality of leadership accounts for some 15-20% of the total variance in companies' performance.
- Ineffective leadership was found to be the cause for the removal of CEOs in 73% of cases, exceeded only by financial or ethical malpractice and mental or physical incapacity.
According to the Chartered Institute of Personnel & Development’s (CIPD) training and development survey 2005 which measured the attitudes of 664 training managers, “91% believe there is a direct link between investment in leadership development and business performance” and “98% believe that well-designed leadership activities can have a positive impact on the bottom line.”
Five Ways for a Leader to Motivate the Team
2. Jump into the Trenches – You need to be humble and hungry. Humble in that you seek to learn, grow, and improve every day, and hungry with a passion to work harder than everyone else. Now is not a time to be barricaded in your office. Now is a time to be in the trenches with your people, leading, working, and building a successful future.
3. Fill the Void - These are uncertain times. Employees are questioning how their industries and jobs will be impacted by the current economy. They’re unsure about what actions to take. Unfortunately this uncertainly creates a void and where there is a void, negativity will fill it. In the absence of clear and positive communication, people start to assume the worst, and they will act accordingly. Make transparency the norm, not the exception—after all, the more you communicate, the more you foster trust, and the more loyalty is built. Talk to your team members often, and let them know where they stand. Host frequent town hall meetings, host a weekly conference call, send out a daily email, and share your positive vision for the future. As a leader, you must continually communicate, communicate, and communicate.
4. Share a Positive Vision – Rally your team around a positive vision for the road ahead. Instead of being disappointed about where you are, decide to be optimistic about where you are going. Vision helps you and your team see the road ahead and it gives you something meaningful and valuable to strive towards. Discuss where you have been, where you are going and why you are going there. Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream/vision and he changed the world with it. Share your dream and improve your organisation with it. After all, if you think your best days are behind you, they are. If you think your best days are ahead of you, they are.
5. Teach Your People to Be Heroes, Not Victims - Heroes and victims get knocked down. The distinction between the two groups lies in the fact that heroes get back up while victims simply give up. Help your employees to realise that they are not victims of circumstance. Rather, remind them that they have a high locus of control—in other words, they have a significant influence over how things turn out. Faith and belief in a positive future lead to powerful actions today! Life is a story, and the story we tell ourselves and the role we play determines the quality and direction of our life. The most successful people and teams are able to overcome adversity by telling themselves a more positive story than the rest. Instead of a drama or a horror movie, they define their life as an inspirational tale. Instead of being the victim, they see themselves as a fighter and over-comer.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
A Positive Video That Every Leader Should Watch
Purpose: An Essential Component of Positive Leadership
We all have personal stories that define our purpose and direction in life. The question becomes, is that personal purpose aligned with the purpose of your organisation? It is the leaders of the organisation who must make sure that the company's purpose is clearly defined and understood, fostered and reinforced. If leaders also encourage employees to understand their own purpose and direction and how it connects with the company's, employee engagement, personal satisfaction and performance increase.
In his book, It's Not What You Sell, It's What You Stand For: Why Every Extraordinary Business Is Driven by Purpose
, Roy M. Spence Jr. writes: "A real purpose can't just be words on paper. It has to get under the skin of every member of your organisation....If you get it right, people will feel great about what they're doing, clear about their goals, and excited to get to work every morning."This is especially important in turbulent times. Dupont CEO Ellen Kullman talked about the importance of purpose during tough times at Wharton's 2009 annual Leadership Conference when she was describing her crisis leadership principles. She was surprised during weekly informal meetings with employees that the "number one question was about whether we are going to stick with our mission." She realised that people were scared and wanted clear direction. "Making sure that people understand the mission — and linking their daily activities to the company's broader purpose — is essential to reducing fear, maintaining morale and keeping employees motivated," she said.
The economic meltdown has provided us with many lessons from leaders of embattled companies and they all point to one clear approach for success: Leaders must keep their company's purpose alive and in the forefront.
Here are some questions to consider as you examine whether you are bringing your purpose to life in your company and the marketplace:
- Do your employees know what the company's purpose really is?
- Do they feel like they have a personal connection to that purpose and their role in achieving it?
- Do your clients and customers clearly understand your purpose and what it means to them?
- Are you willing to make the hard decisions that need to be made to remain true to your organisation's purpose?
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Great Teams Should Always Have an Enemy
Recently, in an “employees only” town hall style meeting a few days after the iPad launch, Jobs demonstrated that he’s also a master motivator of employees.
This excerpt, as reported by Wired, is a stunning example of uniting the troops against a common enemy:
'Jobs, characteristically, did not mince words as he spoke to the assembled, according to a person who was there …
On Google: We did not enter the search business, Jobs said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them, he says. Someone else asks something on a different topic, but there’s no getting Jobs off this rant. I want to go back to that other question first and say one more thing, he says. This don’t be evil mantra: “It’s b***s***.” Audience roars.
In addition to taking some pretty pointed stabs at software-maker Adobe, mostly related to its notoriously buggy Flash software - which the iPhone still does not support - Jobs throws down the gauntlet when he challenges Android/Google to ”keep up with Apple’s iPhone updates.” '
In retaliation, the Google faithful are shooting back at Jobs, according to gawker.com’s Valleywag blog:
“I don’t know where people get the idea that competition is evil,” writes Paul Buchheit, the ex-Googler who invented “Don’t Be Evil,” along with Gmail and FriendFeed. One current Googler says he plans to tack up Jobs’ “very motivational” quote beside his monitor; another says Jobs myopically “sees all competition as zero-sum.”
Rivalries like this one, while appearing to be somewhat juvenile and over-the-top, can have a powerful impact by galvanising employee’s resolve to develop groundbreaking products and meet critical and often extremely challenging product deadlines.
While we hoist Apple’s Steve Jobs up on a superstar-CEO pedestal, one of his relatively unexplored talents is his ability to inspire groups of developers to great heights. For example, he told the first Macintosh design team that they were there to “make a dent in the universe.” And they did.
It should come as no surprise therefore that we think it is important that: “Great teams always have an enemy.”
How Leaders Can Develop More Effective Thinking in their Organisation
Here are 5 ways for leaders to devlop more effective thinking within their organisations:
1. Cultivate big-picture thinking - this means clearly outlining the team vision and promoting teamwork in such a way that team members see the "big-picture" and how their individual roles fit with that of their teammates. Remember, big-picture thinking can keep you and your team focused (on target), striving for what many others cannot see (beyond the here-and-now), and ready to seize the moment at just the right time.
2. Engage in focused thinking - this means thinking about issues with a sense of clarity. In doing so, be sure to prioritise any short- and long-term goals, remove any potential and existing distractions, and maintain a "strength focus" (i.e., spend the majority of your time using your gifts, talents, and best skills). Take the time to focus your thinking (especially when surrounded by multi-taskers). In the long run, you will be more efficient and get more done by focusing on one task at a time.
3. Harness creative thinking - this means taking what you have learned and experienced in the past and turning these experiences into something even better. Your creativity (i.e., ideas) might very well be your most valuable coaching resource. And your ideas do not have to be original or new. Creativity generally has its seed from the past and is often modeled from those whom have gone before you. In the end, creative thinking will help you learn more, challenge the status quo, and draw others toward you and your ideas; especially those that are looking for "options" on the road to success.
4. Employ realistic thinking - this means understanding the difference between what you wish to happen and what is most likely to happen. It is absolutely necessary for you (the coach) to define reality and set the stage for what is to come. Realistic thinking takes away the "wish factor" and helps to provide a solid foundation from which to start. Realistic thinking also takes away the "hope factor" as it requires your team to face reality, better define their goals, and more clearly understand the strategies needed to carry out the game plan. In addition, you can help to alleviate unneeded worry and doubt by assessing the pros and cons of the situation and examining the "worst-case" scenarios (so that you are ready for things if they don't go as planned).
5. Utilise strategic thinking - this means planning beyond one day at a time. And it's more than planning one week at a time. Strategic thinking is about looking far enough "down the road" to have the needed time to develop the most direct path toward achieving your goals and objectives. Such thinking allows for efficiency in planning, time to maximise strengths, and time to customise the best plan of action. So, be sure to break down the long-term plan, identify the real issues ahead of you, match your resources and personnel, and build on the fundamentals that are already in place.
Tuesday, February 09, 2010
Leadership and the Onside Kick
Here are some more reactions to ‘the play’ in Sunday night’s Super Bowl:
‘Sean Payton's risky Super Bowl play exemplifies effective decision-making in the presence of ambivalence.
What drives a leader to make the kind of creative, game-changing decision that New Orleans Saints’ coach Sean Payton came up with in the locker room on Sunday night while The Who were cranking out 12 minutes of the same-old, same-old during the Super Bowl half time show?
It's hard to be sure in Payton's case, but, strangely enough, ambivalence may play a key role. As in: The greater a leader's ambivalence toward a strategic situation, the greater the likelihood he or she will respond by taking action in a novel, risky way.
Payton's decision was definitely both novel and risky: When the Saints came back onto the field, they refused to simply kick the ball to the opposition, as has happened at the beginning of every other half in Super Bowl history. Instead, they tried their very best to keep it for themselves. The onside kick trick worked (barely), and New Orleans ended up with the ball. The Saints went on to get a touchdown that eventually led them to their win over the Colts.
The question of why some leaders come up with bold ideas in tough situations and some don't has been an obsession for many researchers. Nils Plambeck of HEC in France and Klaus Weber of Northwestern studied the attitudes and actions of 104 German CEOs who were confronting a complex strategic issue a few years back—namely, the looming enlargement of the European Union. The researchers found that if a CEO simultaneously viewed the coming event as potentially both positive and negative—and if those simultaneous convictions were intensely held—the leader was more likely to take organisational action in response. Not only that, the action was likely to be of greater scope, novelty, and riskiness.
"A top executive's ambivalence about an issue does not get in the way of reacting," Plambeck and Weber write in a recent issue of Organization Science, nor does it "paralyse organisational action responses." Instead, the leader's view of a situation as both good and bad creates what psychologists call "emotional arousal" and heightened alertness. That's partly because CEOs, like the rest of us, typically are quick to categorise developments as good or bad, black or white. When an issue shapes up as both positive and negative, there's a resulting "sense of unusualness" that stimulates "a more creative and deliberate" search for responses, Plambeck and Weber write.
So was there something about the Saints' situation at half time on Sunday night that seemed both positive and negative? Or was Payton already in a state of "emotional arousal" from simply having taken New Orleans to its first Super Bowl? Either way, his sense of the unusualness of the situation led to very creative search for solutions. That's more than can be said for the remnants of The Who, who found no particular reason to do anything creative despite the unusualness of their playing in front of tens of millions of people.'
Provided by Harvard Business — Where Leaders Get Their Edge
Obtaining the Most from Your Team
The Hall of Fame baseball manager, Casey Stengel, put the same lesson another way when he was asked, What has made you the best baseball coach in the world? He replied, 'I don't trip my players on their way out of the dugout.'
Countless organisations and leaders create impediments that prevent their employees from delivering on the promise of their value proposition. Don't you fall into this trap!
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