Grow and lead for all of us

Leadership

Accountability and reliable promises, pt. 1

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Part 1 in a 3-part series

What do we mean by accountability? In a recent post, I suggested that it’s silly to hold someone responsible for fulfilling a promise when they never actually made a promise. After all, request + acceptance = promise.

Let’s connect this to an insightful take on the same question provided by Mark Graban of Lean Blog. He suggests that it’s unfair to hold accountable someone who isn’t responsible and quotes Deming’s advice to “fix the processes, not the people.”

Can we hold nurses and other staff accountable for not always following proper hand hygiene procedures when coming in and out of patient rooms?

Let’s say the foam canisters are empty outside a few rooms in a row (something I’ve seen recently). We can’t hold the nurses accountable. This is a system problem. “Writing up” or punishing the nurses would be counterproductive. We need to ask why the canisters are empty? Is there somebody to hold accountable for not restocking the canisters? Maybe not – what if it’s a bad process, where there’s no “standardized work” and no clear cut assignment of who refills the canisters (“everybody?”).

[Read more…] about Accountability and reliable promises, pt. 1

Learning to lead

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The challenge lies in making use of on-the-job experiences. This means finding better ways to identify developmentally significant jobs, to move the right people to them and to help talented people learn from them. How well these things are done is far more important than how formal or elegant the procedures are.

—The Lessons of Experience by McCall, Lombardo, and Morrison, 1988

In 1988, the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) published an important study. Important because of the insights it contained, and important because it has largely been ignored for the past 25 years. CCL interviewed successful executives to better understand how they got better at leading. These were in-depth interviews, the kind that allow participants to tell stories about their experiences and reveal what they had learned.

The researchers found that the primary way successful executives learned was from on-the-job experience. Not training, not books, but the work itself. Hence the title of their book, The Lessons of Experience. [Read more…] about Learning to lead

The race of our lives

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The success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervenor.
—Bill O’Brien, former CEO of Hanover Insurance Company

We’re in the race of our lives. It’s not between the “good guys” and “bad guys” but between the complexity of our world and the capacity of our minds to manage this complexity.

Jim Collins’s survey of 1400 companies showed that transforming from “good to great” requires Level 5 leadership: a paradoxical blend of professional ambition and personal humility. We also know from longitudinal research of small- and mid-sized organizations that companies’ capacity to transform is directly related to top executives’ own capacities. In particular their ability to integrate different perspectives, use a broad repertoire of power approaches, and self-correct. [Read more…] about The race of our lives

Self-experimentation – sharing the lessons more widely

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This post is a first. I’ve decided to tear down the walls between my identity as an executive coach and my commitment to self-experimentation in lifestyle design, health, and well being. Over the past two years, I’ve written 155 posts about these adventures exclusively for a couple handfuls of close family and friends. Starting today, I will be sharing new insights and provocations in these areas with my clients, professional colleagues, and broader readership.

Here is why: I’m learning truckloads from my own life about some of the very things I get paid to help others learn. How do you maintain physical and emotional energy throughout the day? How do you manage commitments to yourself and others? What are innovative ways of scheduling your time? How can you squeeze important reflection and preparation into a busy life of action? And, perhaps most importantly, what is it like to be outrageously ambitious about the impact you will have on the world and astoundingly humble about your own path of learning?

Unlike bloggers who focus on entrepreneurship and the path out of corporate life, I will continue to write primarily for managers in large organizations, executives in smaller organizations, and the consultants and coaches who serve them. I’m not interested in teaching anyone how to be like me. In fact, I only have enough energy to help one person be fully me, and that’s a lifetime occupation. I do hope that my own explorations will be useful and relevant to you.

In the zone…with the boss

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Recently, I sat down with a leader I’ve been coaching and his boss to discuss the leader’s progress in raising his game. The leader–let’s call him Bill–was in the zone: confident, visionary, and fully engaged. He spoke with conviction, asked questions with curiosity, and had three times more “executive presence” than in any of our previous 2-on-1 meetings. As we walked out afterwards, I said to him, “Wow, you were on fire!”

What’s remarkable isn’t that Bill did this–after all, he is a visionary with a passion for ideas–but that he did it in the presence of his boss.

And Bill isn’t alone. Have you ever noticed how often talented people lose their mojo when talking with their bosses? Why is this? And what allows people to buck the trend and stay in the zone? [Read more…] about In the zone…with the boss

Seeing Possibility While Being Real

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In my left hand, I’m holding Authentic Happiness, a book about how to use positive psychology to improve your life. Glancing at the cover leaves me content and hopeful. This feels good.

In my right hand I’m holding Hoodwinked, a story about the “predatory mutant virus” of capitalism as it is practiced today. The image on the cover of an economic hit man warms my chest, too, but in a different way. The uncovering of the forces behind the world’s economic woes brings a sense of indignation and clarity. This feels real.

I put the two books down in front of me and take a deep breath. What’s going on here? How is it that a book about being happy and a book about how the world is screwed up both feel like they belong in my hands? [Read more…] about Seeing Possibility While Being Real

What is the financial value of strong leadership?

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Wall Street is monetizing human assets. Our question is: why aren’t you helping them?

—Bruce Avolio, management professor, to a group of HR executives

The idea that Wall Street values leadership is not new. For more than a decade, research has shown the importance in firms’ stock prices of intangibles like brand, reputation and leadership. But until I heard a talk by Bruce Avolio and Susan Dunn at a recent event on strategic HR, I hadn’t fully realized how much attention equity analysts on the Street pay to leadership.

Avolio, a management professor at the University of Washington, and Dunn, a partner at Mercer Consulting, conducted a fascinating study. They interviewed dozens of equity analysts, the folks who study public companies to determine their overall financial worth, about what factors influence their assessments and what processes they use to make these assessments. What they learned is that these analysts – on both the buy and sell side – don’t just closely study companies’ top leaders, but actually use their (often gut level) take on the quality of this leadership as quantifiable adjustment factors in their valuation of firms. When they said this, I could see a lot of jaws (beside my own) dropping in the room.

How many companies’ heads of investor relations are aware of this? How many people running HR organizations?

And, if you were a really smart company, wouldn’t you be getting your SVP of HR, CFO ,and head of investor relations into a room together to talk about how to strengthen the company’s senior leadership and make this visible to Wall Street?

The implications are potentially enormous. In fact, I’ll be writing more about this in upcoming posts.