Tag Archive for: communication

Leadership: Lessons From My Father

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As Father’s Day approaches this weekend, I have been reflecting on my late father, Harlie, one of the first leaders in my life. He was a true mentor leader – even though I didn’t fully realize it when he was alive. Here’s some lessons I learned from him and hopefully you can relate them to your work as a leader.

  1. Give what you expect from others. Harlie engaged me by first being engaged himself. Leadership is about energy, and if you want energy on your team, you must bring energy to your team. Energy – whether it’s positive or negative – is contagious. Harlie was passionate about so many things. He was passionate about learning, about growing, and about life. As a former national gymnastics champion, he kept himself in great shape. He lived what he led. If you want engagement from others, you must be engaged. We cannot give what we do not have.
  2. Be motivated by love. Great leadership is largely a matter of love. If you are uncomfortable with that word, call it caring, because leadership involves caring about people, not manipulating them. Dad was tough on me when I needed it, but I never doubted his motive: he genuinely cared. He cared more about me than the results which were a means to a higher end. Harlie was motivated by love. You can’t fabricate love; people will see right through you. What you can do is decide to care about people. People don’t care how much you know until they know  how  much you care.
  3. Live your passion. Our basement was filled with evidence of Dad’s passion: exercise equipment, a tumbling mat, weights. Every morning Dad would exercise at the crack of dawn. Although he couldn’t always get me engaged, especially in my early years, he lived his passion. He preached the importance of exercise without saying a word. When I was in junior high, Dad took me to the YMCA to teach me how to exercise on the parallel bars. I didn’t have the strength to lift myself up, much less do any maneuvers on them. After several disappointing attempts, Dad soon got the message: I was just not meant to be a gymnast. Even though I have memories of him being disappointed that he couldn’t engage me in gymnastics, he kept his own passion alive.
  4. Tune in to what drives people. When I was 14, dad was teaching me to drive our old 1954 Chevy truck. When I pulled over into a farm yard a mile from our home, dad sensed that something was wrong. We sat in silence for a few moments and I opened up about an incident in physical education class. “We ran a mile  and I couldn’t finish it without walking… I came in last, but I want to be the best miler in our zone track meet next year.” Dad knew little about running, so we went to the library and found every book we could on running. Dad became my coach, and the next spring I won the mile race in our zone track meet. Everyone has a passion. Everyone is engaged about something. The key is to create the space to listen and tune in to what matters to people. When you are committed to helping people find and express their voice – their unique gifts and passion, you’ll get engagement.
  5. Have a vision of greatness. Greatness wasn’t an external thing for my father. His life was about making a difference, not making a buck. He never had a mission statement. But he had a mission and it was expressed in how he lived his life. When you have a vision, whether it’s expressed explicitly or implicitly by your actions, it inspires people. In his “I have dream speech,” Martin Luther King did not say, “I have a strategic plan.” While plans may be necessary, it is dreams that inspire, uplift, and engage us. “If you want to build a ship,” writes Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, “don’t herd people together to collect wood, and don’t assign them to tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” Whatever your vision, live it well and you will inspire others to engage with you.
  6. Be a good gardener. Dad was a good gardener and he taught me a lot about leadership by the way he gardened. No plants ever grow better because you demand that they do so or because you threaten them. Plants grow only when they have the right conditions and are given proper care. Creating the space and providing the proper nourishment for plants – and people as well – is a matter of continual investigation and vigilance. But another reality about gardening is that you really don’t have much control over the harvest. Despite your best efforts, for a myriad of reasons, some plants simply won’t make it. You can’t engage everyone. It’s a reality we all live with.

Power is Derived By The Power of Your Attention

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Whatever you focus on will grow. In other words, focus on what you want. If you are married or in a significant relationship and you want it to grow, put your focus on what you love about your partner. If you want your workplace to be a better place to come to work, focus on what you love about your job and where you work. If you want a better life, focus on what you are grateful for.

If you wish to change some aspect of your life, this power of focus can also relate to your habits. Tie your attention to the solution, not the problem. Shift your focus. If you have a bad habit when you come home from work, such as overeating, find a good habit that will replace it. If you have a good exercise regime or practice, but go through your day dreading it, shift your focus. See it as an opportunity to experience the power of your body.

If you aren’t enjoying your job, before you think of leaving it, discover a higher purpose for your work and shift your focus from misery to possibility. Tap into your potential and end the cycle of drudgery and pain in your life. The joy of that possibility can imbue your day. In the end, it is all a matter of where you place your attention.

What is Culture? Are You Wasting Your Time With Fancy Value Statements?

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Value statements don’t make a culture. Ask Enron, whose values were communication, respect, integrity, and excellence. How many companies have you known who have the value of “safety” written fancily on their web site and the walls of their offices, but in reality, have a deplorable safety rating? There’s a big difference between value statements and values. Value statements are what we claim to be. Values are what we actually do. Your culture is not your statements. Your culture is your actions.

So…What is culture? Culture is the “the way things are done around here.” You get an indication of your culture by listening to what people talk about when the boss isn’t in theroom, or how you describe your workplace with your closest friends. If you want to know what you culture is, don’t read the web site or look at the fancy value statements on the wall. Look at who you hire. Look at who you promote and what actions get recognized and rewarded in your organization. Culture is no different than life: How you act will speak so loudly that people won’t hear what you say. Culture isn’t a noun. Culture, like love, is a verb.

Does this mean that developing clear statements of values is a waste of time? No. It’s important to clarify the values and principles that you expect should guide the actions of every employee in your organization. The mistake that most executive teams make is that they think that writing down the values is all it takes. Executives make a huge mistake when they take their senior management team to the mountains and return to “roll out” the “10 Commandments” in a communication strategy from the front of the room.

In reality, clarifying the values is just the beginning of building an aligned, engaged, accountable culture.

Once you get the value statements on the web site and the walls, you have to create the conversation. You have to make noise about the document. Ask questions. Challenge respectfully. Tell the stories. If you haven’t found contradictions in the values and the guiding principles you espouse, you haven’t had deep enough conversations. You haven’t invested enough. You have to turn the statements into actions, and actions into promises. You have to hold people accountable – at every level – for living the values.

It’s okay to be misaligned. That’s human. Don’t be afraid to see the misalignment. While you will want to focus on the positive, and shine a light on actions that demonstrate a support of the values, don’t be afraid to embrace the negative. Invite people, especially your direct reports, to challenge you when they see the misalignment. Having a standard gives you something to aim at.

Are you wasting your time with fancy value statements on the wall? Not if you are committed to getting these off the wall and into the hearts and hands of every employee.

It doesn’t really matter that you understand what culture is. What matters is that your design and deliver one that matters.

How Honest Can You Be With Your Boss?

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My colleague and friend, Murray Hiebert, world renowned in the field of helping professionals become more powerful and useful in their organization (www.Powerful2Lead.com), recently shared some intriguing trivia: Most airline crashes in the last few decades have taken place while the senior pilot, the Captain, not the less experienced and lower-ranked First Officer, was flying the aircraft. Most crashes are a series of errors culminating with poor Captain-First Officer communication. Most of these crashes occurred in airlines where the “Power Distance Index”— the degree people of lesser status may challenge those of higher status— is greatest. Did you know Captains generally use commands, while First Officers predominantly use hints?

Murray cited Malcolm Gladwell, best-selling author of The Tipping Point and Blink, as to how many airline crashes have been caused by power differentials and cultural norms (from Outliers). “It’s not that the pilot has to negotiate some critical maneuver and fails. The kinds of errors thatcause plane crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and communication. One pilot knows something important and somehow doesn’t tell the other pilot. Airlines have worked hard at lowering the ‘Power Distance Index’ to encourage open, straightforward communication between air safety employees of unlike status. Typically, First Officers need to step up the strength of their requests, while Captains need to lower their barriers.”

How hard is your organization working at lowering your own “Power Distance Index?” How hard are you, as an employee, working to strengthen your requests, and how hard are you, as a positional leader, working at lowering your barriers? Do you have a culture where, when you see ethics violated, you can speak up against it, even if it is your boss or a person with higher positional power than you?

Here are three ways to lower the “Power Distance Index” in your organization:

  1. Practice speaking up in a respectful way.
    Challenge the status quo. Ask good questions that push for positive change. As long as your motive is to build, to move the organization forward, then challenges are both necessary and useful.
  2. Get used to being challenged.
    I’m not talking about criticism. There’s no place for blind criticism without a supporting solution. What I’m talking about is being open to learning. The best leaders are humble. They are confident because they learn not to take a challenge personally. It’s about working for the greater good, not protecting people’s egos.
  3. Encourage a “speak out culture.”
    Former GE CEO Jack Welch lauded a “speak out culture”—an organizational atmosphere where all are encouraged to speak what is on their minds. Jim Collins recommended much the same in Good to Great where his research showed great organizations “Confront the brutal facts.” I wonder how much of the tragedy in the Penn State football program would have been prevented had they established a “speak out culture.” Jerry Sandusky’s sickness would not have been allowed to spread if people would have spoken up. Penn State showed us that the “brutal facts” will come out eventually.

How honest can you be with your boss or with people who depend on you in  your organization and in your life? If you are a boss, how honest are people with you? Do you find your employees coming with the “brutal facts?” Speaking out respectfully is a muscle that is under-used in many organizational cultures. It needs strengthening. And strengthening requires patient, persistent practice.

What are you doing to encourage a “speak out culture” in your organization? It’s also something to encourage in your family or any place where you spend your time.