Leadership, Do You Seek Excellence Only in Extremes?

June 17, 2014 by

leadership-extremesWhen we picture leadership, we often visualize strength, courage and boldness. All worthy traits. Yet great leadership also has its roots in listening, understanding, perspective, good judgment, and balance. This moderation provides a solid base of support for bold leaps that  prevent disasters.

Some leaders focus mostly on the elements of strength and boldness because they mistakenly believe that moderation means mediocrity, (It doesn’t!)  As they seek excellence only through extremes, they destabilize the organization with wild swings and are surprised when the business slides.

Moderation doesn’t mean mediocrity. It’s a balanced approach that builds a strong base of support for bold leaps!”

Leadership:  Do You Seek Excellence Only in Extremes?

As you assess your leadership style, take a deeper look at where you might be falling into these dangerous extremes.

 1. The Myopia of Metrics. Are you leading from metrics? Are you measuring everything in the belief that if you can’t measure it, your organization will have mediocre performance? Metrics are valuable but an extreme view of metrics leads the organization down a dangerous road.

You will lose productivity measuring things that aren’t worth measuring. Your view will be skewed to the comfort of metrics. You will breed a status quo work culture that is afraid of change and innovation because the data isn’t there to prove it’s OK to step into the new.

Everything than can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.”
~Albert Einstein

Lead from vision and use metrics as one indicator of success. Remember to tap diverse experience, engage employee talent, exercise critical thinking, and use committed action to make the vision come to life. Moderating all these elements is the good judgment of great leadership.

2. The bomb of boldness. Sometimes bold risks pay off. Boldness can also bomb out when it is actually self-absorbed tunnel vision. Leading without any feedback puts you all in a bubble that can suddenly burst.  Acting purely through hunches is leadership folly. Silencing diverse views detours you from realistic optimism to dreamy-eyed denial.

Have a bold vision. Inspire all to work toward it. Ask and engage great questions, tap critical thoughts and experience. Address the change resistant pessimistic naysayers with clear communication. Yet never confuse great action-oriented questions with complaining. They are distinctly different. Moderating all these factors minimizes risk.

3. The burn of bluntness. When high level leaders interact with their direct reports who are also leaders, they often use the extreme form of honesty — bluntness — and it is  accepted. The premise is that it cuts through obstacles to reach excellence more quickly.

When you use the same bluntness on team members at the staff level, it burns and inflicts emotional scars.  It leaves employees cautious and less willing to engage and take risks. This is not a path to excellence.

Some leaders react to this response by labeling employees as too sensitive. They tell them to toughen up and not take things personally else the organization will wallow in feelings.  How ironic it is that this view is, itself, a feeling not a fact.

The truth is that the more authority and direct responsibility you have for success, the easier it is to accept bluntness.  You can see the bluntness as protective and helpful. You also feel empowered to make changes to prevent additional blunt barbs.  The further you are from the responsibility and authority, the more the bluntness feels like criticism and disdain.

Leaders, moderate your approach to deal with this truth.  With staff, speak honestly with care not blunt with emotion.  Honesty is the key. An example: “Stop being so slow and lazy” is blunt with emotion. “I need you to move more quickly on this …” is honesty with care.

Moderation does not slow excellence. It doesn’t block success. It simply counterbalances risk. It builds a strong base of support out of awareness, information, broad understanding, and critical thinking.  From there, the bold leaps that you make are far more likely to produce excellence and success.

What other extremes detour success & how do you moderate them? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

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Won’t the real YOU please stand up? – Authentic Leadership

June 13, 2014 by

Authentic-LeaderAll any of us want deep down is to be ourselves and to know that those with whom we have a working relationship are the real deal, what to expect from them and that we can trust them.

The Corporate Metamorphosis – It’s 6:00am Monday morning and you’re washing away the last thoughts of the weekend when you were a mother, a father, a partner, the laugh of the party, the bookworm, the sports coach for the local kids’ team. You set your hair in stone, select your corporate power suit, and then in the time between waltzing out your front gate and marching through the revolving glass door, the transition’s complete; you’ve morphed into the corporate you, your corporate avatar. Subconsciously, you manage your avatar, carefully removing unfortunate traces of personality that conflict with the corporate image you wish to project – the image you believe is expected of you and most guaranteed for success.

News Flash – this image is a waste of valuable time and energy. It’s the real you they want, and it’s the real you that is the best manager you can be.

Authentic Leadership

Authentic Leadership is not disguising yourself to suit a role, it’s using your strengths and weaknesses to connect openly. A centuries-old awareness, the ancient Greeks knew the importance and value of Authentic Leadership: Socrates words, “Know thyself”[i], implored us more than 2000 years ago to learn/discover all we could about ourselves on the path to our ultimate destination.

Leadership success is derived from, open and honest relationships, genuine appreciation and valuation of the input of followers, and commitment to ethical management. Authentic leaders build trust and engender employee engagement through the relationships they build with their team.

“Authentic leaders are self-aware and genuine. Authentic leaders are self-actualized individuals who are aware of their strengths, their limitations, and their emotions. They also show their real selves to their followers. They do not act one way in private and another in public; they don’t hide their mistakes or weaknesses out of fear of looking weak. They also realize that being self-actualized is an endless journey, never complete.”[ii]

Great leaders transition from weekend to weekday seamlessly, not fearing vulnerability, failure or even success.

What Characterises an Authentic Leader?

Authentic leaders lead to their fullest potential, maximising the value in relationships and looking forward to a future with shared success. Authenticity is no simple achievement, and carries no guarantee of great leadership, but is well worth the effort. You need first to understand yourself before you can play to your strengths.

Authentic leaders:

  • put team goals ahead of their own personal aspirations. The team’s success is their success. When the group wins, the leader stands on the podium alongside team mates.
  • act with their heart and intuition. They are comfortable with and not afraid or ashamed to display their emotions.
  • tell it like it is, but with empathy. They’re willing to give you the real, sometimes tough message, but leave you knowing where you stand.
  • focus both on present and future goals, weathering the storm now with the vision to look to the calm seas and potential ahead.
  • have strong self-awareness, critically considering the impact of their behaviour on others.

“He was always impatient and quick to anger. When people brought bad news, he would attack the messanger.so people stopped telling him things. He had no idea he frightened people.

She videotaped him in action and then replayed the tape for him, pointing out the effect his habitual forbidding facial expression had on people. It was a revelation: “when he realised how he was coming across, he got tears in his eyes, ”…[iii]

Recently I undertook the Life Styles Inventory (LSI), a review of my leadership behavioural and thinking styles. The LSI revealed my opinion/perception of my leadership behaviours/thinking patterns was very close to that of my reports, peers and managers, telling me my behaviour is authentic, the real me. It doesn’t automatically make me a great manager. I could behave like a complete prat, know it and have my team know it. That would be authentic. And I wasn’t free of opportunities for improvement by any means, but I am aware of them and have ideas/actions for improving my patterns of behaviour and thought.

Sorry – There’s No Leadership Blueprint

When developing personal relationships with other people, as a friend or a partner, we take the time to get to know the real them. We develop rapport, mutual trust, and identify and align our values. We team with them. The most effective personal and working relationships are formed on this basis.

There is no perfect leader or leadership blueprint. There are, however, many great leaders, with many and varied characteristics that reflect their individual personalities.

“During the past 50 years, leadership scholars have conducted more than 1,000 studies in an attempt to determine the definitive styles, characteristics, or personality traits of great leaders. None of these studies has produced a clear profile of the ideal leader. Thank goodness. If scholars had produced a cookie-cutter leadership style, individuals would be forever trying to imitate it. They would make themselves into personae, not people, and others would see through them immediately.”[iv]

You know what? It’s more than ok just to be you. Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

 

[i] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_thyself

[ii] http://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinkruse/2013/05/12/what-is-authentic-leadership/#./?&_suid=139864930292908536648577576342

[iii] Goleman, D 1999, Working with Emotional Intelligence, Bloomsbury Publishing, London

[iv] http://hbr.org/2007/02/discovering-your-authentic-leadership/ar/1

 

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Emotional agility: The Key to Leadership Success

May 30, 2014 by

Leadership-Agility-Business-EmotionalAll the top clients were in the room and all eyes were on the CEO. He walked up with a smile and began “It has been a great year for us. We have grown and continue to grow. We are looking at Asia to grow.” and continued in this vein for ten minutes.  I am not sure if he noticed the luke warm applause that followed his self-centered speech that could have been delivered easily by a junior intern ! In this defense he did learn a few words in the foreign language of the audience in an attempt to connect with them but I could not help but think it is emotions and not linguistics which is the international language of leadership.

It is the language of emotions that leaders must develop greater fluency and agility in, if they want to connect people to a vision or inspire them to action. They must develop emotional agility to leverage the privilege of the platform that leadership provides to them. I define emotional agility as the skill a leader has to tap into the right emotion at the right time for the right purpose. One can think of it as a specific subset of emotional intelligence which taps into a larger domain of the management and regulation of emotions.  The more I look around the more evidence I gather of lack of emotional agility in leaders around the globe . One has to only look at the recent ill fated MH370 Malaysia flight that disappeared to see the lack of emotional agility of the team. They informed people of having lost their loved ones first via text messages. Leadership is not just about management of information but also management of emotions.

How can we acquire and display emotional agility?

 

1. Learn more about yourself:

Like most things in leadership the fluency begins with self awareness and discovering what is our own level of comfort with dealing with emotions – that of self or others. Some of us are more expressive and willing to be vulnerable in the moment while others hide behind personas by adopting masks that prevent people from seeing the real you. Needless to say the former have an edge in being emotionally agile but even in the latter situation it is a skill that can be learnt. In the day and age of flat structures the emotional accessibility of the leader help connect them with the people they lead.

If you observe a pattern in the situations where you often encounter an impasse for instance, it may be time to step back and consider if expression/acknowledgement of emotions of the parties involved was in anyway at the root of it all. We all have blind-spots about the way we deal with emotions and those must be overcome for developing emotional agility.

2. Learn more about the culture seek to influence:

Different cultures deal differently with emotions. While smiling even at a stranger or greeting them as you meet them on the street maybe common in some western countries, it may be seen as intrusion and be met with distrust in some Eastern ones. In Japan for instance, customers service reps have had to be taught to smile by holding pencils between their teeth as traditionally smiling has been equated with the attempt to hide something. Casual banter from senior leaders may be acceptable in the US but is not so common in China. So the context of the expression of emotion matters. Incidentally, you don’t have to go East or be in China for this to apply. Given the global world we live in, your colleagues might treat the expression of emotion differently than you.

3. Learn to be a great storyteller:

Given my work on corporate storytelling, I have come to the conclusion that there is a strong correlation between great storytelling and emotional agility. Being a good storyteller requires you to go beyond the knowledge of story structures, formulas and scripts to the wisdom of which story to tell, when to tell it and to whom. Stories harness emotions like no other expression. They cut across cultural and functional boundaries.

The best example I see of this is the relationship between India and Pakistan where both parties have been at war more than once and the relations can become strained on many issues but Pakistani plays are highly popular in India as are Bollywood films in Pakistan. When immersed in stories we experience a safe space for connection and so adding storytelling to your repertoire increases your emotional agility. As Christina Baldwin famously put it – words are how we think but stories are how we link.

Logic may lead us to a conclusion but it is emotions that move us to action. And a leader that can inspire action is a force to reckon with anywhere in the world!

What do you think about emotional agility? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

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Want Better Employee Engagement? Change may be the Answer.

March 26, 2013 by

Employee-Engagement-William-PowellUnless you have been sleeping under a rock for the past 10 years or so, employee engagement has quickly taken front and center. Its influence on bottom line numbers has been researched extensively and CEOs and other organizational leaders are sitting up and taking notice. According to a Boston Consulting Group report, companies that focus on being “People” Companies have “outperformed the market average in eight out of ten years“. In 2011, that difference was 99 percentage points in favor of “People” Companies. What’s a People Company? One that is committed to investing in the development of people as a means to enjoy better economic performance.

Employee engagement has to meet organizational goals and still add value to the personal and professional goals of the individual. The moment this balance is skewed in favor of one party over another, they both lose. If you’re not up to scratch on your engagement efforts and feel like you’re trying to sort out how to begin eating this elephant, take heart. You can utilize something that may already be on your radar to help.

There is little in the life of a business that captures its attention more than significant change. A laser-like focus begins to develop and people are at least expecting something new as a means to navigate the yet unfamiliar territory change tends to bring in its wake. Change provides an opportunity for questions, the openness to communicate uncertainty and the need to become more human with others in your organization.

Questions. Open communication. Human vulnerability. All key components to good engagement. Change also gives you enough latitude to revisit your values and cultural norms. Change that’s going to come anyway may be the best excuse to get off your duff and get cracking on improving your engagement levels and work towards becoming one of those mysteriously profitable “People” Companies.

Questions. Open communication. Human vulnerability. All key components to good engagement.”~William Powell Tweet this

Here are a few tips to help make change a great catalyst for improving your engagement levels:

  1. Critique your values – Will your current values support the change AND facilitate engagement? Be true to your organizational DNA, but make sure the language around your values has adequate purpose to communicate effectively enough to increase engagement. It has to speak to individual – as well as organizational – needs, desires and goals.
  2. Re-visit your mission statement – I’ve seen many organizations spend so much time crafting language around values and engagement and cultural refinement then not even touch their mission statement. Often times, this can lead to a seriously mixed message and actually decrease engagement. It’s tough to engage in something that is confusing or contradictory.
  3. Communicate alignment – As you reinforce the ranks to be prepared for change, take that opportunity to connect their roles to the vision and values and how that will make the change less painful. When people know HOW they are contributing to the success of something bigger than themselves, engagement happens much more easily.
  4. Challenge leadership – Don’t let your leaders sit in the corner and chew their nails while they wait to get run over by the change train. Completely uncool and unfruitful. Rally them around the benefits of navigating the change. How will the change develop them as a team? As leaders? What will be the individual win and the organizational win? Have them be active in the process and the communication of the benefits of it. This will drive engagement.
  5. Get your hands dirty – Find out where people feel overwhelmed and ask how you can help make it less ominous. Everyone needs to be responsible for their own engagement, but leadership is responsible for creating an atmosphere that facilitates that ownership. Provide an opportunity for people to communicate their anxieties and perceptions of the situation. Simple dialogue can do wonders for engagement.
  6. Include others – There needs to be a plan of action to effectively navigate the change. People doing the job probably have some great insight into how best to make it more effective and productive. You hired adults, so instead of being a babysitter with a manager title, listen to what they have to say. The more influence you can give them, the more effort they will put into implementing the solution they helped develop.

Change doesn’t have to be a four-letter word. It can be the biggest blessing your organization can receive if positioned properly. Imagine coming out on the other side of change stronger and more engaged, instead of beat up and only having survived the process. It’s time to make a difference. What will you do?

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