Leadership and Millennials

In the November 2012 issue of Inc Magazine Jeremy Quittner offers an intriguing summary of strategies that companies are using successfully to engage and motivate Millennials.

This generation of workers prefers electronic communication — email, instant messaging, and video or web conferencing — over face-to-face meetings. They also are reluctant to embrace organizations built around traditional, hierarchical management. Instead, they are best motivated in collaborative settings with a minimum of bureaucracy and management overhead.

This is leading many forward-thinking companies to experiment with alternative leadership styles. Among the more interesting approaches that Quittner mentions is one “in which leaders emerge on a project-by-project basis, according to their particular strengths and experiences.”

Interestingly, this approach has an established history in military special forces communities, where the nature of a particular mission determines which member of the team should lead. Such a fluid concept of leadership stands in marked contrast to typical military leadership philosophy, where the person with the highest rank is by default the leader.

Quittner does not draw a parallel with the military world, but he does contrast this “project-by-project” style of leadership with the heavy management layers of traditional corporations like Boeing. He also cites examples of companies who have adopted a hybrid approach, blending the strengths of hierarchical management with the flexibility of this newer, more adaptive style of leadership.

Very thought-provoking ideas. You can see the full article online at Inc.com.

Delegation and Dysfunction

Failure to delegate properly is a fundamental root cause of organizational dysfunction. Most commonly this type of dysfunction rears its ugly head in one of four ways.

First is insufficient (or even non-existent) delegation. In this case delegation is so limited that decision-making bottle-necks are prevalent in the organization. Communication likewise suffers because of choke points and bottle-necks. As a result, progress slows, momentum is lost, innovation loses traction, frustration mounts, and morale sinks.

Second is improper delegation. This involves delegation to someone who is unprepared for the role, whether due to lack of ability, perspective, technical knowledge, people skills, initiative, span of control, or work habits. In general, if anything is worse than not delegating at all, it is delegating to the wrong person.

Third is partial delegation. This entails a situation in which someone is held accountable for a specific responsibility, but not given the level of authority or discretion which the responsibility calls for. Few positions are more frustrating than to be held accountable when you lack sufficient authority (whether in fact or in the perception of others) to fulfill the underlying responsibility.

Fourth is exploited delegation. This is the term I use to describe settings in which delegation does indeed occur, but the boss takes all of the credit for what is achieved. When this behavior persists, people soon respond to their delegated duties with notably less enthusiasm, determination, and creativity. After all, why kill yourself doing something if someone else will hog all the credit? Ironically, bosses who are eager to take full credit when things go right are typically the first to deflect blame from themselves to others when things go wrong.

Poor delegation is hardly the sole source of dysfunction in an organization. But whenever dysfunction is present, look for delegation failures to be a prime contributor.

What’s Your Attitude, Pilot?

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Piloting an aircraft means constant management of its attitude. That’s pilot lingo for whether the nose is pointed upward or downward.

Pointing the nose up confers more lift to the wings. Pointing it down diminishes lift.

That’s a good metaphor for our personal self-management. Upbeat attitudes put lift under our wings. Downbeat attitudes put us quickly in a nose dive.

Novice pilots soon learn that a nose-down attitude translates rapidly into increased speed. Not only is the plane descending. It’s building up speed in the process.

The same is true of personal attitudes. Negative attitudes feed off of one another and intensify one another. They build momentum easily, until our motivation and enthusiasm are plummeting.

In terms of self-management, therefore, nothing is more vital than staying attuned to our attitudes and keeping them aligned for success.

Years ago I was teaching a class on approaching life with a sense of stewardship. I asked, “Of all the things that we have responsibility for, where is it most important to exercise good stewardship.” A woman near the back, who had said nothing during several class sessions, immediately spoke up and said, “Attitudes.”

I was caught off guard by her answer, because I had never thought about stewardship of attitudes. But having thought about it a lot since then, I now recognize the profound wisdom in her response.

A pilot myself at the time, her reply brought to mind the steady warnings of my first flight instructor:  “Watch your attitude!!” Whenever I heard him bark those words, I knew that I had let the nose drop and was losing altitude; or that I had the nose too high and was risking a stall.

What he was telling me to do was to make an “attitude adjustment,” the name for moving the nose of an aircraft up or down. Even slight attitude adjustments have a telling effect on the plane’s overall performance. Pilots learn to constantly make subtle, but vital adjustments to keep their craft stable and on course.

In a cockpit, directly in front of the pilot’s eyes, is an instrument called the attitude indicator It’s usually the largest display on the primary instrument panel. This makes it easy to monitor the plane’s attitude while scanning other gauges to keep tabs on performance.

We weren’t created with an attitude indicator in the middle of our field of vision. But in our mind’s eye, we need to put one there.  Many things contribute to our success. We need to pay heed to all of them. But we must never take our eye off our attitudes for more than a brief moment.

Encouraging Words: A Leadership Priority

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Wise leaders practice continuous encouragement. They presume that their people are more discouraged than they appear to be; more uncertain than they profess to be; and more insecure than they seem to be.

It’s not our nature to voice our self-doubts to others. And rarely do we voice them to leaders.

Yet people who never have self-doubts are either arrogant beyond measure, narcissistic to the core, or totally oblivious to their short-falls.

But being aware of our self-doubts is one thing. Expressing them to others is an altogether different matter.

Early in life we learn to be guarded about confessing self-doubts. Such confessions rarely evoke a helpful response.

Most typically the response is dismissive: “Oh, you don’t need to worry about that. You’ll do just fine.” Unfortunately, dismissiveness does nothing to probe the roots of the self-doubt or to develop strategies for getting beyond it.

On other occasions a confession of self-doubt closes doors of opportunity. Managers, supervisors, and decision-makers don’t always make careful distinctions between occasional self-doubts (which is normal) and doubting yourself in general (which is unproductive).

Once they see you as doubting yourself in general, they are unlikely to entrust you with critical or career-advancing responsibilities. Most people therefore avoid this risk by keeping self-doubts to themselves.

Leaders, especially, can undercut themselves by speaking candidly about self-doubts. People want leaders who exude self-confidence. Any talk of self-doubt is therefore fraught with peril, since it threatens the leader’s reputation for self-confidence.

As a consequence, we quickly learn that being open about our self-doubts pays few dividends. If admitting to our self-doubts is not taken seriously by others, or if it demeans us in their eyes, why bother? Thus, outside of perhaps a very trusted circle, we typically struggle with self-doubts in silence.

Meanwhile, we put on a demeanor of absolute self-confidence, void of any self-doubt whatsoever. And we learn to wear the mask convincingly.

Leaders see this mask on its most artful display. After all, people want their leaders to see them as competent, confident, and accomplished. If we ever put on our best face, it’s around our leaders.

Knowing this, insightful leaders refuse to be seduced by the display. They know that unspoken self-doubts probably lurk behind the mask. So they presume these self-doubts in their communication. To this end they studiously avoid language that might aggravate underlying self-doubts, even in the least.

Instead, they choose language that is up-building. And they never relent in offering encouraging words. Self-doubts don’t take holidays. Neither should encouraging words and actions aimed at countering those doubts.

The word “encouragement” literally means “the act of building courage into someone.” We think of courage as the antidote to fear and paralyzing anxiety. It is no less the antidote to self-doubt.

Good leaders dispense the antidote generously. They know that self-doubt is always a silent enemy in their midst. To disarm this enemy, they go out of their way to maintain a spirit of encouragement in all that they say and do.

 

The Leadership Challenge for Introverts

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Jim Collins’ widely read volume Good to Great underscores the ability of introverts to be great leaders. Of the CEOs whose success he chronicles, the overwhelming majority were introverts.

The demands of management and leadership, however, do not always align neatly with the inherent traits of introversion. Introverts, by their very nature, enjoy and make good use of time to themselves. They don’t feel compelled to be with people and to interact with others constantly, the way extroverts are prone to do.

Now, I’m using “extroversion” and “introversion” in keeping with their psychological definition, not the way that people speak of extroverts and introverts in day-to-day speech.

Usually when people describe a person as extroverted, they want to convey the image of someone who is dynamic and outgoing, someone who is forceful and animated when speaking to a group, someone whose presence exudes energy and confidence. In this sense “extrovert” is the opposite of a quiet, passive personality.

But introverts (psychologically speaking) are fully capable of being energetic, dynamic, and outgoing. Many of the most accomplished actors and political figures in history have been pronounced introverts.

From a psychological viewpoint, the primary difference between extroverts and introverts is determined by the way that they recharge when their emotional batteries run down. Extroverts recharge by surrounding themselves with people, often in settings which involve tons of activity.

Introverts, however, recharge by pursuing quieter activities (such as reading or taking a long walk). And they pursue this activity either alone or at most with only a handful of people.

Why these contrasting approaches? Because heavy interaction with people has opposite effects on extroverts and introverts. For extroverts prolonged interaction with people is a net energy gain. For introverts it’s a net energy drain.

So extroverts recharge by putting themselves in a crowd of people, where there are constant opportunities for interaction. Introverts recharge by getting away from people.

And this creates the challenge for introverts as leaders. Leadership is a decidedly interactive, interpersonal process. You may manage behind a closed door. But you can’t lead from there. Leadership by its very nature demands constant involvement with people.

But when the demands get heavy, when the going gets tough, when the pace is exhausting, introverts are sorely tempted to withdraw, to go into a self-imposed isolation to re-energize. Without even realizing it, they may slip into subtle work patterns that signal disengagement from their people.

I don’t mean that they go off to live in a monastery. But they may easily shift into a mode in which they interact less with people, seem frequently preoccupied with something other than the immediate conversation, or absorb themselves in projects that give them a rationale to work solo for hours at a time.

None of these patterns, sustained for an extended period of time, is good for effective leadership. But I’ve described these patterns as temptations, not as a path that the introvert necessarily chooses.

In fact, introverts must purposefully choose to stay engaged in the leadership process, even when their natural inclination is to hole up and recharge. It’s a choice that effective introverted leaders have made for eons. But it means going against the way that introverts are wired.

The starting point for introverted leaders is thus to come to recognize their introverted nature and acknowledge it. They must accept that their introversion will often nudge them in directions that are not conducive to good leadership practices.

Then, having accepted this reality, they must be constantly vigilant, guarding against any tendency to react to stress and exacting demands by diminishing their level of interactive engagement.

And finally, when they feel the temptation to pull back in ways that are counterproductive to good leadership, they must have the discipline to resist the temptation.

Does this mean that introverts must forego the opportunity to recharge? Not at all. Everyone must recharge. Introverts must simply find ways to do so at times when their leadership responsibilities are not at the forefront. They must carefully manage their work-life balance to have sufficient time to themselves to renew their batteries.

All of this makes for a tall order, but not an impossible one. The successful CEOs whom Collins studied had clearly mastered the marriage of introversion and leadership. If you are an introvert, you can do so as well.

 

Building High Team Trust

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I’ve written in the past about my interaction with 42Projects and Trust 2.0, a pair of closely-related grassroots programs at Microsoft. (See my article on Microsoft’s Trust 2.0 Initiative.)

The goal of 42Projects and Trust 2.0 is to promote greater innovation by strategically and purposefully building trust.

Yesterday I had lunch with Ross Smith, the architect behind this effort, and Brian Lounsberry, one of the first at Microsoft to see the potential of the concept. Three years into the initiative, I wanted to find out if higher trust was indeed yielding greater innovation

Ross answered with an unequivocal “Yes!” He cited example after example to substantiate the correlation between high trust and expanded innovation within his team. Then our conversation turned to specific techniques that the team has used to enhance trust.

One method particularly intrigued me. They call it “Trust Subversion Analysis.” Instead of focusing on what builds trust, this approach focuses on behaviors that subvert it. Armed with this analysis, the team then establishes an alternate set of behaviors to replace the subversive ones.

Why this approach? Because it’s often easier to identify the essence of a quality if we examine what happens when it’s missing.

To make this analysis more meaningful, the team decided to deal with only one aspect of trust-building at a time. They began with the need to foster an atmosphere of respect.

Rather than listing behaviors that communicate respect, they compiled a list of behaviors that leave people feeling disrespected. This list quickly became extensive.

Each team member then identified the three behaviors from the list that he or she had noticed most often in team meetings. When the results were tallied, the three most common subversive behaviors were 1) dominating the conversation; 2) not being inclusive; and 3) not listening or paying attention.

The team then flipped these behaviors around — reversed them so to speak –  to create a set of behavioral standards for themselves. The desired behaviors became 1) Don’t dominate; 2) Be inclusive; and 3) Pay attention/listen.

For each of these standards the team spelled out specific behaviors that they would expect of themselves. These behaviors have become rules of engagement for team interaction.

Ross and his colleagues are writing extensively about their experience. When their assessment is published, I hope to provide links to their seminal work both here and at TrustIsPower.com.

I’ve shared this preliminary summary because their methodology is so simple and straightforward that any organization can do something similar. You don’t need to start with respect. Feel free to pick some other aspect of trust-building. If your results are anything like the outcomes on Ross’ team, the exercise will clearly be worth the effort.

Incidentally, if you are interested in knowing more about what Ross and his team have done, check out the 42 Projects web site.

Manage What You Can Control, And the Rest . . . ?

Yesterday I was interviewed on a major television station in Nairobi for a segment on their business news program.

As we were waiting for the floor crew to finalize camera and light angles, the interviewer began joking about his rather diminutive stature.

He commented, “We have a saying in Africa that your height is given to you by God, but your girth you give yourself.”

I found it a delightful proverb, and one that points to a vital principle. There are many things in life that we cannot control. And these “uncontrollables” often limit our options, confront us with difficulties, or even cause us heartache.

It’s easy to sit around lamenting these misfortunes, as though lamenting them would make them go away. But no amount of wallowing in disappointment about things beyond our control lessens their hold on us, not one iota.

Far better to devote our time to managing the things that we can control.

To borrow the TV journalist’s proverb again, I’m one of those people who has given himself too much girth in recent years. I can’t control the fact that the body is getting older and that it takes more work to keep it in shape. But that doesn’t excuse the fact that I could do a better job of controlling my weight.

Yet our tendency is to complain about things that we cannot control and to make excuses for the things that we could manage, but fail to do so.

I’ve got a ready-made excuse for my weight. It was given me 40 years ago by a short-order cook in a place that I frequented for breakfast. She and I became cordial acquaintances, so that we were always jesting with one another.

When I told her one day to “drain all that fattening grease off the bacon,” she turned her body of considerable girth in my direction, shook her spatula at me, and said, “Mr. Armour, it ain’t the fattenin’ grease that does it. You just turn thirty and spread.”

Unfortunately, there was as much truth as humor in her words. And I’m tempted at times to fall back on her explanation to justify my weight. But that’s not taking responsibility for things I can control.

Successful people and successful leaders, I’ve found, have mastered the art of focusing on what they can control, managing them well, and dismissing everything else as beyond their influence. They fret very little about what they cannot do. Instead, they stay riveted on what the can do.

That’s why some of the most unlikely people have become great leaders. Conventional wisdom would have dismissed their potential because of some limitation in talent, resources, or social status.

But ignoring conventional wisdom, these men and women capitalized on the capabilities available to them. And through sheer application of determination and persistence, they ended up making a lasting mark.

So manage what you can control. And don’t fret about the rest. And if you’re under thirty, watch out!! The days are coming when you’ll just turn thirty and spread.

How Much Is an Idea Worth?

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How much is an idea worth? Absolutely nothing!

Until we take action on it, an idea has no value at all.

Have you ever seen people making money with a new product or service that you once thought about creating yourself? Most of us have.

But with us the idea languished. With the people who made money off of it, the idea turned into action.

In a world begging for innovation, we do not have an under-supply of good ideas. We have a shortage of execution.

That’s why saying, “I have a million dollar idea” is merely deluding ourselves. However inventive our idea may be, it’s not worth one red cent until we harness it to a plan to action, then execute the plan.

We can always offer a myriad of reasons for postponing action, some of them valid, others less so. But they all add up to the same thing: inaction.

A mediocre idea in the hands of someone who takes action on it is far preferred to a brilliant idea that lies forever idle.

In recent decades we’ve seen the emergence of so-called “think tanks.” They produce tons of great ideas. But they implement none of them. Most of their effort thus eventually sits on a bookshelf, gathering dust.

Because think tanks hold such prestige, it’s easy to conclude that we are doing something prestigious by coming up with brilliant ideas. What makes think tanks significant, however, is that once in a while someone else takes one of their ideas and runs with it. Otherwise think tanks would be fairly worthless.

Perhaps in this great “wiki” age of ours, we need an online repository where people can go and post items to this effect: “Here is a great idea I have, but I’m not going to do anything with it. If it excites you, feel free to take it run with it.”

You know, thinking about it, that’s a great idea! But I’m not going to do anything with it. So perhaps this is the first posting to go on the wiki.

In the final analysis the world has a general bias toward action. Nature and business alike reward activity. They rarely reward inactivity.

So quit congratulating yourself on your fantastic ideas. Take one of them and do something with it.

Choose Your Words Carefully: They Have Life

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There’s an adage that four things can never be retrieved:

  • a stone thrown
  • time wasted
  • an opportune moment missed
  • a word spoken

Most of us don’t throw stones or miss opportune moments on a daily basis. But we probably waste time every day. And with great regularity we speak words that we wish we could recall.

Which brings me to a contrast that has long intrigued me. It’s the contrast between our modern view of words and the way they were viewed by people of the ancient Middle East.

As moderns we think of words as mere symbols, strung together in phrases and sentences to convey meaning. People of the ancient Middle East, however, thought of words differently. From their perspective, words were living beings. They were not inert. They had enduring life.

In some quarters of the Middle East this concept of words still prevails. As naive as the concept may appear at first, there is profound wisdom behind it.

Can you think of a time in the past when someone said something hurtful and cutting to you? How do you feel when you revisit that episode? Do you still feel something of the probing pain that their words caused?

And conversely, can you recall something that someone said to you years ago that made you feel terrific about yourself? And how do you feel when you recall those words today? Do you spirits lift just by hearing the words again?

Because words have such power to bring either pain or joy long after they were spoken, the ancients saw them as anything but lifeless. Nothing that is dead can have such far-reaching effect, they believed. So they treated words with special respect.

How would our approach to communication change if we really considered the words we speak as being alive. As having vibrant, breathing life. Many of us who would never strike someone with our fist routinely strike people with our words. And in my experience, bruises from fists typically heal much quicker than deep wounds from words.

There is a Hebrew proverb which says, “A word fitly spoken is like golden apples set in a network of silver.” Bring some gold and silver into the life of people around you today. And every day. Choose only words that you want to live on.

Leadership is Solution Focused

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Earlier this month Mike Huckabee interviewed three freshman Congressman on his TV show. He asked about their biggest surprises since coming to Congress.

Each answer was interesting. But one was particularly intriguing.

The Congressman said, “I’ve been amazed at how much time we spend talking about problems and how little time we give to finding solutions.” He went on to say that Congress, of all places, should be where people look for solutions.

His words apply equally to leadership. In a recent LeaderPerfect Tweet Tip I noted that “Leadership never forgets the problem, but it maintains its focus on solutions.”

It’s far easier for people (leaders included) to identify problems than to work out solutions. But the reason that we need leaders is because we need solutions. We turn to leaders to provide them or to provide mechanisms for finding them.

It would be interesting to chart our leadership conversations and find out what percentage of time is given to lamenting problems and what percentage is given to seeking creative solutions. It takes no particular genius to point out what’s wrong with things. It takes persistence and hard work to find lasting solutions.

That’s why laziness is never becoming to a leader. Lazy people can be adept at pointing out problems. But they rarely spearhead solutions.

Simply put, if there were no problems to solve, there would be no need for leadership. Leaders are problem-solvers, first and foremost.

In a simpler day, when societies were built around clans and tribes, the problems demanding leadership were also simpler. One exceptional person could easily embody all of the requisite wisdom needed to offer solutions to the most urgent problems

With each advance in social complexity, the complexity of the leadership challenge grows, as well. Leaders move from being the singular source of solutions to being facilitators who enable a solution-finding process. But the leadership task remains the same: finding solutions.

Forty years ago I heard a group of ministers bemoaning the fact that so many colleagues were leaving ministry. The group began enumerating various church problems which were triggering this exodus. Meanwhile an older man in the group remained silent, never uttering a word.

Noticing his silence, the group finally asked his feelings on the subject. He replied, “The way I see it, the only reason that we need ministers is because there are problems to solve. So when people tell me that they are leaving ministry because there are too many problems, it just may be that they entered ministry for the wrong reasons in the first place.”

The same may be said of leaders in every sphere. Leaders exist to steer the solution-finding process. When we lose sight of this reality, we veer off course as leaders, leaving problems to fester and organizations to languish.