Tag Archives: Leadership

How to build accountability…….

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Soccer as a metaphor for life

A reflection from soccer…………………

We had our first neighbourhood soccer game on Sunday at a local park.  The game went well, people had fun, and everyone agreed it would be great to do every Sunday morning.

The group discussed what time to start each week, what the competition was doing (under 10 years Australian Football League games and other neighbourhood soccer teams) and how to recruit more talent to the team.

Our brave organiser – the game was organised by one of our neighbours – was quite rightly concerned about whether people would continue to come.

And here’s where the accountability bit comes in….

Someone remembered a friendly soccer game they used to run in London.  They said that after some very poor attendances, the team set up a scoring system with one of the scores being for attendance. The scores were shared with everyone on the team after each week’s game.

That’s it!

 

Comments, thoughts, tweets welcome

Doing what you want

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Was just watching KD Lang on the Adam Hills show In Gordon Street Tonight.

A lot of the conversation was about her time as an artist and how she’s now at the stage, after 27 years in the music industry, of being able to do what she wants.

One of the things KD Lang said was that now that she can do what she wants, she’s much more open to listening to others.

My reflection is that the confidence that comes from following our vision and direction as a leader also provides us with the opportunity to being open to change.

Amanda

Your leadership brand

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All you need is love

Graffiti: All you need is love

Your Leadership Branding

Leadership branding sounds like yet another fad.

But there are many leaders who have used their leadership voice or brand to promote the cause or objective that they are supporting.  Some great examples:  the Beatles (all you need is love), Al Gore, Ghandi, Aung San Suu Kyi, Nelson Mandela, Oprah, Olivia Newton-John, Bill Gates…

Who we are and what we stand for influences our success as leaders.

5 ways to build your leadership brand are:

1. Identify what your story is and find places to tell that story

Create your personal positioning statement and the story that goes with it.  You may feel uncomfortable about this initially but telling a credible story about you is particularly important in ensuring that a program of change is effective. The Center for Creative Leadership talks about the importance of you as a leader telling your story during change and building trust with the people you’re leading.  People need to know who you are to trust you.

2. Build your personal position statement

I’m____________________________________(always helps to tell people your name)

What’s important to me is__________________(reflects your values)

Where I’ve come from is___________________(tells people where you come from)

How I’d like to work with you is______________(creates certainty about how you’re going to work)

Ways you can connect with me are___________(call, email, visit etc)

Continue to tell your story often and in many forums – until you’re sick of hearing it.

3. Decide your goals for communicating

It’s important as a leader to identify your communication goals.  Successful leaders never go into meetings and situations without identifying what they want to achieve, who they will be communicating with and what communication style will be most effective.

Practical actions you can take are:

  • Before going into a meeting, spending 5 minutes reflecting on what you want to communicate and what goals you want to achieve
  • Take 5 minutes in each meeting to reinforce your vision for the area
  • Speak up! About your team’s or group’s achievements and goals in meetings, presentations and in discussions with peers.

4. Be yourself—and let your personality shine.

You are unique. In a branding sense you can’t be copied. So tell people about you, your values, your vision, your goals, your dreams.

5. Measure your impact

Find a mentor and trusted advisors who can give you honest feedback on your behaviour, effectiveness and leadership from different perspectives.

Heady heights of leadership: are you asking the right questions?

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Bendigo tower

Reflecting on the heady heights of leadership

Ten questions for leaders

Seth Godin often influences my thinking about how influence works and the other day he challenged my thinking about leadership…

From Seth Godin

Do you let the facts get in the way of a good story?

What do you do with people who disagree with you… do you call them names in order to shut them down?

Are you open to multiple points of view or you demand compliance and uniformity?

Is it okay if someone else gets the credit?

How often are you able to change your position?

Do you have a goal that can be reached in multiple ways?

If someone else can get us there faster, are you willing to let them?

My questions for leaders…

Are you part of the team?

Who do you leave out of decision making?

How often do you ask questions?

As Seth Godin says – “No textbook answers… It’s easy to get tripped up by these. In fact, most leaders I know do.”

4 books that will improve your leadership

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Leaders' journeys have many tracks and many companions

4 top leadership books

The Leadership Think Tank is a LinkedIn Group. One of the discussion threads explores the leadership books that have made a difference.  And while the debate continues, here are my top 6 in no particular order.

  1. 1. The leader on the couch – Manfred Kets de Vries

Manfred Kets de Vries delivers leadership and coaching skilling programs for INSEAD. I was lucky enough to be part of a small group that explored leadership development with him and his team in August last year.

Their leader and coach development program leads to improvements in leadership behaviour that are outstanding.  Leader on the couch provides leaders with many opportunities to reflect on their own behaviour and that of the people around them.  It also provides a deeper dig into how organizations work and how to challenge and change what’s happening.

  1. 2. Leadership on the line – Ronald A Heifetz and Marty Linsky

Leadership on the line gave me some important reminders about leadership. The chapters on getting on the balcony and thinking politically were very helpful and provided practical tactics that could be implemented fast.  And the book talks about keeping your heart whole while taking on the difficult job of leadership.

  1. 3. Quiet leadership – David Rock

David Rock has created the Neuroleadership Institute to build thinking about the intersection between cognitive neuroscience and leadership and what this means for the practical action that leaders need to take to be successful (I don’t have an affiliation to David Rock by the way, other than having his books and being a member of the Neuroleadership Institute).

David Rock’s books provide some really practical and quickly implementable steps to coaching people and also ways improving your own leadership thinking.

  1. 4. Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamics – Ralph Stacey

Ralph Stacey writes about organizations, their complexity and the ways that people interact with them.  He gives us tools to analyse what’s really going on in organizations and what happens when things go wrong.

Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamics is one of his foundational books and a number of people have adapted his work for use in organizations – see Anthony Suchmans’ website. He has also written many other books on creativity, complexity, organizations, and leadership.

How these books can improve your leadership

  • They provide tools that you can use immediately  – David Rock’s six step approach to helping someone make a decision is great, as is Ralph Stacey’s approach to managing organizational politics (p116 of the 2000 edition)
  • Help leaders reflect – a difficult thing to do when you’re busy, and often not a preference for leaders at the best of times
  • Provide frameworks to help you think through issues you are facing and what is driving your behaviour – see any of Manfred Kets de Vries’s books for this.

What leadership books have changed your work?

Innovative thinking

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Seth Godin – Need I say more

Possum and Cat Innovation

 

The only possible response…isn’t was a recent blog post and has been sitting in the back of my mind every day since. That’s power and influence as well as innovation.

Running a forum on innovative leadership this week and I’m hoping for a few Seth Godin moments in the session…..

What phrase, picture or action has affected you powerfully this week?

Amanda

How to develop your leadership skills: increasing your performance

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Leadership and all that jazz

3 ways to develop your leadership skills

  1. Keep learning!
  2. Keep listening!
  3. Keep looking!

Learning keeps you sharp and provides challenges that you won’t get any other way.

Deliberately seeking out learning opportunities that shift you out of your comfort zone or professional expertise, push you to achieve (and occasionally fail) and sometimes have you looking a little different (see the great photo below)….and can give you an enormous sense of achievement and help to build your strength as a leader.

Check out this leadership learning experience

Listening gives you the opportunity to hear others and to create a stronger coaching environment with your staff and your team.

When we work with people on their leadership development, listening often comes up through 360 feedback.  Mostly the skill required is being able to listen without thinking about your response while the other person is still talking.

Listening as a skill takes practice and the ability to empty your mind of your own thoughts while you listen.

To be a better listener (and leader) try this:

In your next meeting with someone at work focus on listening.  Prepare first by planning to practice listening.  Ask questions.  Reflect back their key points.  Don’t comment unless asked. Thank them.  When the meeting is over review what worked well, what could have worked better and how you thought they responded.

Then practice again.  And again.

Looking means being open and observant to what is happening around you.

It’s easy for leaders to get wrapped in their own thinking and not see what’s happening for their staff, managers, families and friends.

This can be one reason that leaders get surprised by the “shock” resignation of a colleague or staff member.  Or by feedback that they’re seen as arrogant, underperforming or not ready for promotion.

Spending time looking also provides you with the opportunity to identify how people are treating each other, your organisation’s cultural characteristics and how clients are treated.   Which all help with your ability to be a successful leader.

One way of looking at what’s going on has been developed by Edgar Schein who provides a tool to identify the elements of culture.

What are your leadership development tips?

What else are you doing to build your leadership skills?

Amanda

Bring back nice!

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Bring back smiles

 

Being nasty costs a lot at work.

 Nice costs nothing and can in fact provide you with fantastic pay-offs. 

 The cost of nastiness

When I started researching this blog entry I was just looking for a bit of information about the impact of nastiness in the workplace to counterpoint what I was thinking about the impact of niceness.  What I found was research about the impact of bullying in the workplace that stunned me. 

A 2005 study found that the cost of one form of nastiness – sexual harassment – for Fortune 500 companies was more than $US 6 million per year.  http://www.bullyonline.org/workbully/usa.htm

 A UK study indicated that the cost of bullying including loss of productivity is more than 32million pounds per year http://www.bullyonline.org/workbully/typical.htm

 Yesterday Seth Godin talked in his blog about fear as the driver of bad behaviour.

http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d83451b31569e20120a8d06726970b

 And cognitive neuroscience research tells us that when circumstances push us into flight or fight and fear, we need to be conscious, or mindful of what is happening to us. If not, we can become the person with the nasty attitude instead of the leader who is building a positive culture.

 Nastiness is often subtle and has a way of rippling through and crippling your team and organization.  But you can do something about it…. 

 Creating nice

Some practical things you can do as a leader are: 

  1. Reflect on what your own behaviour is saying to others: look in the mirror and seek feedback
  2. Have a zero-tolerance for poor behaviour and tell people about it
  3. When bad behaviour happens, challenge it – even if it’s coming from your most “valuable” performer
  4. Investigate rumours or concerns raised by staff because nastiness is often subtle
  5. Invest in anonymous post-leaving interviews to find patterns or individuals generating problems.

For more see the article by Christine M Pearson and Christine L Porath On the nature, consequences and remedies for workplace incivility: no time for “nice”? Think again Academy of Management Executive: 2005, Vol.19 No.1.

 Bring back your smile

Some simple things you can do to get your smile back are:

  • Make sure you say your hellos and goodbyes at work each day which connects you to the people you spend a lot of time with (see Siimon Reynolds’ book Why people fail for more)
  • Tell people what you appreciate about what they’re doing both in delivering tasks and in terms of behaviour (see Siimon Reynolds’ book Why people fail for more)
  • Smile –fake it even if you don’t feel like it – there’s some evidence from research into emotions that while the smile starts off as a fake, it soon becomes real. (see Stefan Klein’s Science of Happiness p7-21 for the secrets of smiling)

 “Unhappiness comes on its own, but we have to work for happiness.” Stefan Klein Science of Happiness p21.

 Your smile

What are you doing to bring your smile back?

4 ways to make change work

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Sally not managing change………

Leadership and change – why change is so hard and what to do about it

Over the past few weeks I’ve had the chance to explore change extensively at the personal level.  Going through the home buying and selling process pushes many change buttons – and not only with the human part of the family (our hunkered-down cats really aren’t happy about prospective buyers viewing their house – Sally has a very malevolent stare)!

What we’re experiencing at home is a microcosm of what happens in organisations every day…

75% of change efforts fail

Much of the change management advice and literature talks about managing change and using a series of steps to successfully deliver this change.  However, surveys of senior executives (see Pierre Mourier & Martin Smith, Ph.D., Conquering Organizational Change, 2001) tell us that more than 75% of change management efforts fail to deliver what stakeholders expect.  This means that only 25% succeed!

If you cast your mind back a few weeks/months/years, I’m sure you’ve been part of failed or stuttering change efforts – new structures, new IT systems, new policies, new innovations (and personally: new resolutions, diets, exercise and learning strategies).

So what’s going wrong……?

Change hurts

Cognitive neuroscience is telling us that trying to identify how a change will affect us into the future is almost impossible, particularly where we haven’t experienced the world the change could create.  So we’re far more likely to focus on the problem rather than the solution.

Also, we can only focus on one major cognitive shift at a time.  So if there are multiple problems facing us, we run out of processing capacity fast.

See David Rock’s books Your brain at work and Quiet Leadership for more details http://neuroleadership.org/.

Change exhausts us

Chip and Dan Heath in their book Switch talk about the results of an experiment with students who were asked to either restrain from or to eat cookies.

Those who had to restrain (mentally supervise) themselves to stop eating the cookies were much less able to perform a further task than those who were not required to use the same level of restraint.

For more details go to Fast Company

We need praise to go the extra mile required for change

Jonah Lehrer in his book The decisive moment: how the brain makes up its mind (pages 54-58) outlines a set of experiments by Carol Dweck, a psychologist at Stanford University who was studying learning in children.

Children who were praised for their intelligence were more easily discouraged and less likely to take risks in learning.

However, when children in the classroom were praised for effort and therefore able to make mistakes to support learning, they were much more likely to choose to take on more challenging tasks.

4 ways leaders can make change work

  1. Focus on one major change. Organisations often embark on multiple change initiatives at once, delivered by different parts of the organisation which don’t connect the dots for the person being affected by the change.
  2. Create links or package the changes up so that they make connected sense to the people involved – visuals are very helpful
  3. Let people eat the cookies, that is: ensure the change processes use positive patterns of behaviour that are already embedded.
  4. Praise people for their effort– and as a leader, even if you’re not running a change effort this is helpful as a leadership strategy!

Amanda

3 ways to more effectively lead change

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3 ways to lead change and reduce helplessness

Icecream isn't always helpful

A few years ago I attended a 5-day workshop facilitated by a great man, Max Clayton.

Max’s facilitation process was wonderful, wise and at times incredibly confronting for me.  There was one space in between workshop sessions where Max, who at that time wasn’t well, was moving chairs around.

I offered to help.  Max said something like “helping is your problem, not mine”.  It doesn’t sound like much but it’s shaped my leadership and organizational change work since then.

Why helping doesn’t help

  1. Helping creates a power and control dynamic, the helper and the helpless
  2. The helpless don’t actually have to do anything, that’s the helper’s job
  3. Helplessness gets embedded through learned behaviour, thinking and organisational systems. Symptoms are:
  • people not stepping up as leaders because of the energy required to help everyone (in the education arena this was reflected in the number of school principal vacancies)
  • policies assuming the worst case scenario and try to cover all eventualities
  • new ideas generated by the leadership cohort, rather than being generated throughout the organization.

Shifting from helplessness

Martin Seligman has explored both learned helplessness and ways to address this through positive psychology.  The University of Pennsylvania website has some great tools etc to explore.

Positive psychology and its associated thinking tools which aim to build happiness are applicable to us as individuals, teams, organizations, and communities.

3 ways to be a better leader (and not helper)

  1. Find your own strengths and use them to create better engagement with those around you.  You should also celebrate your strengths and greatness – see Martin Seligman’s website at www.authentichappiness.org.
  2. Recognise and reward the strengths of the person you’re leading or coaching. It’s so easy to respond to the “F” results and “fix” them, rather than the “A’s” (See Chip and Dan Heath’s book Switch which I’m still reading – p47 – and yes I know I mentioned it yesterday but it’s really interesting).
  3. Be mindful of your assumptions. Before you start a leadership or coaching conversation, be aware of what you are assuming about the person you’re meeting with ie am I helping because I’m assuming this person is weak in this area? Write these assumptions down as a pre-meeting exercise.

Some References

Heath, C and Heath D (2010) Switch: how to change things when change is hard Broadway Books, Random House Group Limited, Chatham UK

Seligman, M.E.P. (1998). Learned Optimism. New York: Pocket Books (Simon and Schuster).
Gillham, J.E. (Ed). (2000). The Science of Optimism and Hope: Research Essays in Honor of Martin E. P. Seligman. Radnor, PA: Templeton Foundation Press.

Seligman, M.E.P. (2002). Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment. New York: Free Press.
Peterson, Christopher & Seligman, M.E.P. (2004). Character Strengths and Virtues A Handbook and Classification. Washington, D.C.: APA Press and Oxford University Press.