Category:

Leadership

One Key Element to Success

by Ron Potter February 16, 2017

Your Real Value

We had just finished a global conference. The forty plus leaders from three continents had left and were headed back to their different parts of the world. The CEO and I were relaxing in his office recounting the lessons learned from the session. His words to me went something like this:

We’ve developed a leadership team that is doing some astounding things. I have never experienced a team working at this level.
I’ve learned so much about leadership over the last couple of years. It’s amazing how differently I now think about leadership compared to what I thought I should be doing earlier in my career.
This global culture that we’ve built is going to help us weather almost any foreseeable storm. We could be in better shape.

At this point, I have to admit that I was feeling pretty good about myself and the work we had done together. He had just hit the three main function of my company: Team, Leadership, Culture. I must be doing something right. But then he said something that really shook me. He said, “But your real value is…” I had no ideas what he was about to say. What else was there beyond Team, Leadership and Culture? He continued, your real value is when we just sit and talk like this. At that moment I understood the value of executive coaching.

When You’re Already the Best

Years ago, I had an opportunity to visit the Colonial Golf Tournament in Fort Worth, Texas. I had chosen to walk the course with a few of the players rather than stay in one location.

Tom Watson was at the top of his game during those years. He may have been the best player at the time. Certainly nobody knew more about the game of golf or his personal golf game than Tom Watson. He is a real student of the game. Toward the end of his round I noticed that he began to lose his drives to the left.

On the 18th tee his hook was so pronounced that he almost hit it in the water down the left side. He finished his round very calmly, but as he was exiting the 18th green I noticed that he looked very directly at one person and seemed to nod his head as if saying, “Come with me!” It turned out to be his swing coach and they headed off to the practice tee.

As I observed from a distance (I could not hear their words) Tom had lost that calm demeanor and was franticly motioning to his coach that something had gone dramatically wrong with his golf swing. As his coach calmed him back down and suggested he try a couple of minor corrections, his practice drives began to sail long and true. With a smile of contentment, he hit drive after drive right down the middle. Even though he may have been the best in the world at that point, he still needed a coach to help him correct minor flaws that had creeped into his game.

Are You Selling Drugs?

Those words were asked of me a little too seriously by and Executive Admin that I had come to know. My slightly shocked response was, “Of course not!”, why would she ask? She told me that her CEO never gave more than an hour of his schedule to anyone. Yet, when I showed up once a month he would clear his calendar for an entire afternoon and she would hear us in his office talking and laughing for many hours.

Was I selling drugs? Not the pharmaceutical kind but yes, I was providing the CEO with something that helped him deal with his stressful and complex business life. Time to think, talk, and ask questions with a trusted coach.

Reboot Your Heart and Mind

Rich Karlgaard is one of the authors that I like to read. Last year he wrote one of his regular contribution articles to Forbes magazine with the above title. He was speaking of Bill Campbell, one of the Silicon Valley legends that had recently passed away. Bill was a successful leader in his own right but Rich was explaining that he would be remembered most as a great coach to several of the valleys biggest names. This role of being a sounding board, a safe listener, a wise counsel is present in the lives of many successful leaders.

Have you found this person(s) in your life? Are you even looking? Are you serving that role for other people? Listening, sharing and asking meaningful questions. We all need coaches.

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Being Wrong or Sorry: Which is most dangerous?

by Ron Potter December 8, 2016

One of my clients recently made the statement that it was harder to say “I’m wrong” than it was to say “I’m sorry.” Therefore, he was always quick to admit when he was wrong (Thanks Simon). Isn’t that interesting? He had learned that it was easier to take the hard route than it was to take the easy route.

I didn’t have much time to think about that statement the rest of that day but then I had a long plane ride home and that thought kept bouncing around in my head. I knew there was more to that simple statement than what was being said on the surface but I learned a long time ago that if there was something nagging at my brain, my best approach was to alternate between consciously thinking about it and then let it settle into the subconscious while I distracted myself with other thoughts, reading or quiet time. Being on an airplane (sometimes) offers the perfect environment for that process.

Soon a very old book began to emerge in my thoughts. The Road Less Traveled written in 1978 by M. Scott Peck. The opening sentence of that book is three simple words: “Life is Difficult.” Think about all the complaining, whining, protesting, etc. that you hear today and if you look behind those actions you’ll find a belief that life is supposed to be easy. It isn’t. Life is difficult.

What I remember about that book is that after that opening sentence, Dr. Peck, a psychiatrist, spends the rest of the book describing how the avoidance of pain and suffering leads to mental illness. I have seen this principle played out in corporate leadership teams over many years. Leaders and teams who subtly but consistently avoid the pain and suffering associated with hard decisions began to create an environment and culture that could easily be labeled as mentally ill. These leaders and teams begin avoiding almost all decisions because they’ve built up the habit of not dealing with the difficult decisions. Life is difficult. Don’t assume that if you make all of the right decisions, personal and professional, that you’ll cruise through life and just won’t have to deal with the hard stuff.

As my client says, he always takes the hard route of admitting he was wrong. It actually makes the difficulties of life, leading and teaming easier to deal with.

Remember, it’s harder to say you’re wrong than say you’re sorry. Do the hard thing. It’s always easier in the long run.

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Blog Leadership

The two pillars of great leadership

by Ron Potter November 28, 2016

The temptation in leadership will always be to head toward the dominant preferences inside us and on every side in our environment.
Over the last several years, investors suddenly began looking for CEOs who could shake things up and put an end to what was perceived as a business-as-usual approach. A new breed of corporate leader emerged: the charismatic CEO. A fervent and often irrational faith in the power of dynamic leaders became part of our culture.
Rakesh Khurana writes,

Faith is an invaluable, even indispensable gift in human affairs.… In the sphere of business, the faith of entrepreneurs, leaders, and ordinary employees in a company, a product, or an idea can unleash tremendous amounts of innovation and productivity. Yet today’s extraordinary trust in the power of the charismatic CEO resembles less a mature faith than it does a belief in magic. If, however, we are willing to begin rethinking our ideas about leadership, the age of faith can be followed by an era of faith and reason.

The adventure of looking for the charismatic leader sometimes asked us to turn our backs on attributes such as honesty, integrity, sensitivity, commitment, achievement, nurturing, trustworthiness, peacemaking, and courage.
But as Jim Collins explained so convincingly in his best-selling book Good to Great, it is the non-charismatic leader who seems to endure and shine in the long run. Collins writes:

Compared to high-profile leaders with big personalities who make headlines and become celebrities, the good-to-great leaders [leaders who have taken companies to unprecedented long-term growth] seem to have come from Mars. Self-effacing, quiet, reserved, even shy—these leaders are a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will. They are more like Lincoln and Socrates than Patton or Caesar.

There are two pillars that support the attributes of a great leader: humility and endurance. Focusing on these two pillars is like so many things (golf included) that are both simple and complex. However, our experience tells us that great leaders allow these two attributes, whether natural or not, to strongly influence their leadership style. They learn how to overcome or “position” their natural tendencies. They let the two pillars “pull them through” their swing of everyday leadership and team building.
Great leaders seek to be humble people who lift up others and keep the spotlight on their companies, not themselves. They have a burning ambition to see tasks completed, and they balance that desire with a deep concern for the growth and development of people. They want to nurture relationships, help others flourish, and shove the fuss away from themselves.

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Blog Leadership

Remember the Alamo: Thoughts on Leadership

by Ron Potter October 31, 2016

Creative Commons: Stuart Seeger

A phrase that to this day reminds Americans of selfless courage and heroic sacrifice is “Remember the Alamo.”
The early history of the Alamo did not signal that someday it would become a shrine of freedom. Originally named Misión San Antonio de Valero, the Alamo was used by missionaries for decades before the Spanish seized the site for nonreligious purposes in 1793.

The Alamo thereafter housed a changing guard of military units representing Spanish, Mexican, and rebel forces until December 1835 when Ben Milam led a group of Texan and Tejano volunteers in a siege against Mexican-occupied San Antonio. After several days of intense street fighting, Milam’s warriors drove the Mexicans from the city, and the Texans staked claim to and fortified the Alamo.

The Mexican General Santa Anna decided to teach the upstart rebels—and all Texans—a lesson. On about February 23, 1836, a contingent of thousands from Santa Anna’s army invaded San Antonio, and the battle was on. When the first shots were fired, only about 150 Texans were at the Alamo to mount a defense under the joint command of William B. Travis and Jim Bowie. The day after the battle began, Colonel Travis said: “I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible and die like a soldier who never forgets what is due to his own honor and that of his country—victory or death.”¹

Santa Anna’s troops battered the Alamo mercilessly. Travis and Bowie slipped couriers through enemy lines to go plead with residents of nearby communities to send reinforcements to defend San Antonio. On the eighth day of the siege, a small group of thirty-two volunteers from Gonzales finally arrived, bringing the number of defenders to about two hundred.² The battle raged for another five days. As the likelihood of defeat increased, Travis gathered the men and drew a line in the dirt, asking the men willing to stay and fight to the death to step over. All but one did. Among those who stayed was the famous frontiersman David Crockett.

“The final assault came before daybreak on the morning of March 6, as columns of Mexican soldiers emerged from the predawn darkness and headed for the Alamo’s walls. Cannon and small arms fire from inside the Alamo beat back several attacks. Regrouping, the Mexicans scaled the walls and rushed into the compound. Once inside, they turned captured cannon on the Long Barrack and church, blasting open the barricaded doors. The desperate struggle continued until the defenders were overwhelmed.”³

None of the 189 soldiers defending the Alamo lived. The Mexican attackers lost an estimated sixteen hundred men.⁴ The Texans may have lost the battle at the Alamo, but their sacrifice so enraged and energized others in the territory that just six weeks later the Mexicans were defeated for good at San Jacinto. The rallying cry in that great victory was “Remember the Alamo.”

Colonel Travis was a leader who understood that perseverance for “the cause” is essential. Personal values translate into organizational values, and it takes persistence to communicate those values to everyone in the organization. Every day there are reasons to stray from deep personal values, but great leaders do not easily give them up or modify them in the face of pressure.

This kind of perseverance comes from a deep sense of purpose for life and from trusting in something outside ourselves. Personally, we believe it involves looking beyond ourselves and seeking to trust God for the answers, the vision, and the hope to persevere.

_{1. ‑The Daughters of the Republic of Texas, “The Alamo’s Historic Past.” Found at http://www.thealamo.org/history/historicpast.html.

2. ‑From “Alamo,” The New Columbia Encyclopedia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), 46.

3. ‑The Daughters of the Republic of Texas, “The Alamo’s Historic Past.” Found at http://www.thealamo.org/history/historicpast.html.}

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Blog Leadership

Warmer-Warmer-Cold-Colder-Warmer

by Ron Potter October 6, 2016

My grandkids always loved that game where they search for the prize and are directed by words of “warmer” if they’re headed toward the hidden prize or “colder” if they are moving farther away.

Through the years I’ve met and worked with hundreds of executives in my consulting work. Some of them I seem to gain almost an instant connection with while others seem to take much longer and many times doesn’t develop into a close relationship. None of that has to do with respect or competence. I have great respect for many of them but have not necessarily developed close relationships.

It does however have to do with warmth.

One exercise that I’ve run through the years demonstrates this and always surprises me and others with the results. I’ll show a list of characteristic of a person they have not met but can assume are valid. They include words like skillful, determined, intelligent, warm, practical and a few others.

I show a slightly different list to each half of the room (without the other half seeing the list) and then ask them to rate the individual on traits they might expect from that person. These traits are always presented in pairs such as: reliable – unreliable, ruthless – humane, dishonest – honest. The list is reasonable long and you can see the pattern.

When we finish the exercise one half of the room will give the nod to the more positive descriptors such as wise, happy, humorous, reliable, honest, unselfish while the other half of the room tends to give higher scores on the negative descriptors such as ungenerous, shrewd, irritable, unpopular and dishonest.

Why the difference? You’re getting warmer. Each half of the room received an identical list of characteristics with the exception of one word. One list contains the word warm, while the other list contains the word cold. Is the person seen as warm or cold? That was the only difference between the lists. Those with the word warm assumed the person had the positive traits listed above. Those with the world cold assumed the negative traits.

Now here’s the scary part. We judge a person as being warm or cold in the first 15 seconds of an exchange. Now that’s not confined to the first time you meet a person. It relates to the first 15 seconds of every exchange. I’ve often heard people say, “As soon as Dave walks in the door I know what kind of day it’s going to be.” That first 15 seconds.

Kids look for the prize of the game be getting warmer and warmer. You’ll also collect the brass ring if you work at getting warmer and warmer. Greet people so they know you’re genuinely glad to see them. Be warm in that first moment. You’ll tend to gain the benefit of the doubt throughout the day.

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Blog Leadership

Training Leaders

by Ron Potter September 29, 2016

One of my clients that I’ve worked with for many years asked me to get certified as an executive coach. Now I’ll leave the judgment of whether I’m a good or bad coach to others (more on that in a minute) but I’ve been functioning as an executive coach since before the concept became popular.

I had been working with one executive for a few years when we had just finished a session with his top 40 leaders from around the world. As he and I were relaxing in his office after the session and sharing some of our experiences over the last couple of days he said to me “You’ve helped me build my leadership team to a level of performance that I didn’t know existed. And, you’ve helped me become a better leader than I could have imagined. And, you’ve helped us build a culture that I believe will survive this coming global shake-out that we’re beginning to see.”

Now, for a guy who preaches that the first element of great leadership is humility, I have to admit that I was overflowing with pride at that moment. Remember, the name of my company is Team Leadership Culture and he had just put his experience at the top of each of those categories. What else could he have said that would have been more flattering? Then he said something that absolutely shook my confidence. “But, your real value is …..” In that flash of a moment a shock went through my system because I had no idea what he was about to say next. He had just put my entire consulting practice framework, Team Leadership Culture, at the top of the list. What else could he say?

“But your real value is when we sit and talk like this.” I never thought that this time spent with leaders when we just sat and talked, shared, mentored, coached, learned together was of great value. This was before the time when “Executive Coach” was a common word in our language but I learned that evening how valuable this was. A CEO Executive Assistant once asked me “Are you selling drugs?” I laughed because I hoped it was meant in a humorous way and said “no, why do you ask?” She said “Because our CEO never grants more than one hour to anyone but when you show up he shuts off his entire afternoon and I just hear you in there laughing and talking. Are you selling drugs?”

So why did I need my Executive Coaching Certificate? It had been a corporate decision. All Executive Coaches must be certified! I did comply and while I did experience some value, my greater learning is that certification programs train you toward the norm. Certification means you have been trained to meet certain standards. It assumes there is a right way to approach coaching with systems, techniques and practices. I find that coaching is completely unique with each individual and doing things a standard way can only lead to standard results at best. When I asked the client that was pressing me to get certified if they had seen any difference between certified and non-certified coaches the answer was “no.” There are good and bad certified coaches, good and bad non-certified coaches.

My conclusion to all of this rambling is that leadership is developed not trained. Training by definition says to “teach a particular skill or type of behavior through practice and instruction over a period of time.” A second definition is to point or aim toward something. Leadership is dealing with the unknown. Management is dealing with the known. You can train managers when you know what to aim for but you must develop leaders.

Development by definition says to “grow or cause to grow and become more mature, advanced, or elaborate.” Leaders need to be developed. Mentor them, coach them, disciple them but don’t train them. Leaders developing leaders takes time, dedication and the building of trust. Are you a trainer or developer? Are you being trained or developed? Be/seek out that coach. Be/seek out that mentor. Grow!

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Blog Leadership

Defeating Doubt, Arresting Avoidance

by Ron Potter September 19, 2016

“Holding the hill” when under fire can be a terrifying and lonely experience. A leader will face a long list of challenges, which, if not faced and disarmed, can turn the most competent person into a faltering coward. We have grouped these pitfalls to courage into two categories: doubt and avoidance.

Defeating Doubt

This foe of courageous leadership comes in a variety of flavors.

First, there are the personal doubts. We may doubt our abilities, our judgment, our talents, and even our faith. We look at a problem and cannot find a solution. We attempt to fix it but cannot. Doubt oozes into our minds, and we are frozen into inactivity.

Then there are the doubts about our teams or others we depend upon. Have you ever worked with people who are overwhelmed, stressed out, resistant to change, burned out, not working together, complainers, rumor spreaders, backstabbers, noncommunicators, whiners, stubborn hardheads, blamers, or unmotivated negative thinkers? When encountering such bad attitudes and behaviors that stall the progress of our teams, we are tempted to slide into despair, and our backbones turn to mush.

Next is doubt in the organization. We may see the company sliding down a hill to mediocre performance, abandoning the right values and a vibrant vision. It’s one thing to maintain your own personal courage in the place where you have influence. But it’s overwhelming to stand strong when the larger organization is waffling on its mission and embracing plans that seem doomed in the face of aggressive market competition. Your knees start to knock.

Also doubts may surface when organizational outsiders, like stockholders, start questioning our forecasts and plans.

To endure as a leader, you will have to disarm doubt with gritty courage.

Arresting Avoidance

Another courage-crippler is refusing to confront reality and act. If we employ avoidance tactics when we are tested and struggle, we will end up with even more frustration and trouble. We have seen organizations take giant steps to avoid any kind of pain and suffering. But the result is a dysfunctional organization, not a great company.

To quote Winston Churchill, “One ought never to turn one’s back on a threatened danger.… If you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half.” Avoidance confuses the entire organization. It causes “mental illness” in the company and on your team.

Avoidance-oriented people tend to move away from things that threaten them in order to protect themselves. Why? There are a number of reasons. Often it is due to excessive concern about embarrassment. We just don’t want to be embarrassed or, more often, to embarrass someone else. We hold back—we don’t tell the truth—and poor organizational or personal behaviors are perpetuated.

Fear is another culprit. Sometimes it just seems easier to run and hide. Maybe the issue will somehow just go away? That’s classic avoidance—a sign of cowardly leadership.

Another reason for avoiding problems can be oversensitivity to the feelings or opinions of others. We just don’t want to hurt anybody. The other person is so nice; why should she have her parade rained upon? Issues are circumvented, and facts are ignored. We avoid the short-term pain and inflict a longer-term problem within the team and the organization.

And then there is the old standby character quality that causes so many problems: unhealthy pride. Some of the people who are most adept at avoidance are very proud, especially if exploring the gory details of an organizational issue might make them look bad.

Leaders who develop a humble heart and a willingness to confront concerns do not allow pride to interfere. They are open to opportunities for self-growth because they are secure in who they are and are not preoccupied with themselves.

Avoidance holds back an organization whereas a commitment to improvement will positively influence your own development as well as the development of interpersonal relationships, teams, and overall company effectiveness.

It takes great courage to change a pattern of avoidance and seek instead to make improvements and overcome the pain or difficulty in making decisions, confronting people, or being overwhelmed by circumstances or self-doubt. It is not easy, but the benefits you will experience from making this change are far greater than the “benefits” of avoidance.

Freedom from avoidance enables leaders to focus attention on determining when a situation needs action and improvement.

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Blog Leadership

Putting ICE on it: Are Leaders Made or Born?

by Ron Potter July 1, 2016

I have worked with many leaders and many future leaders who believe that people are born with leadership skills. Some just “have it” and others don’t seem to have “it” or at least enough of it. For those who don’t have a belief one way or the other, they are often asking the question “Are leaders made or born?” The question often seems to be a self-reflective one, wondering if they have it or not.

Just having the open question often leaves leaders and teams hobbling around like they had a sprained ankle. So, what do we do to help sooth a sprained ankle? Put ICE on it!

I = Intelligence Quotient

From the time we started in school we have known about or had questions about IQ. How smart are you? Do you have a high IQ? Are you going to come up short in life if you don’t have that high IQ? IQ has been with us for a long time and here’s a few things we know about it:

IQ is often static throughout your lifetime and doesn’t seem to change much with learning.
It also seems to have many correlative factors such as: income, demographics, environmental factors, and can be influenced by hereditary or genetic factors.
But most importantly we have never found any correlation between IQ and success.

C = Cognitive Function

Cognitive Functions are not static. They will grow and develop over time and with age. However, don’t assume that aging alone will increase your Cognitive Function. Gray hair also comes with aging but that doesn’t make you any wiser. You need to intentionally practice and get better at your Cognitive Functions that include:

Focus: the ability to keep your attention focused on an issue in order to properly grabble with it. Lack of focus and interrupted attention are two prevalent problems I see in corporate leadership today.
Perception: That ability to understand that your perception of a problem or issue is just that, a perception. Individuals high in Cognitive Function seem to have the capacity to deal with many perceptions to an issue and hold them in high regard as they sort through difficult issues.
Executive Skills: This interestingly named function has to do with the brain’s frontal lobe and deals with decision making skills among others.

E = Emotional Intelligence

This function was put forth by Daniel Goleman in the early 2000’s and has proved to be highly correlated to good leadership. Elements that Goleman identified included the 5 S’s of:

Self-Awareness
Self-Regulation
Self-Motivation
Social Awareness
Social Skills

These skills are also skills that can be grown and developed over time. With practice you can increase and improve each one of these.

ICE = IQ + CQ + EQ

These are the elements of great leadership. And IQ is the only one we’re born with and also seems to be the least impactful on our success as a leader. Average IQ is all you need. Developing high CQ and EQ will turn you into a great leader.

Leaders are self-made!

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Blog Leadership

Become a Better Learner

by Ron Potter March 3, 2016

That’s the headline from a Harvard Business Review article I read today. Being a better and continual learner is one of the strong indicators of great leaders. All great leaders are great learners. But the first line of the article is what captured my interest even more. It said:

“Staying within your comfort zone is a good way to prepare for today but a terrible way to prepare for tomorrow.”

Now that is a wonderful line.

I’ve worked with Dr. Dan Denison for a number of years. Dan created the Denison Culture Survey which in my experience is still the best culture survey on the market today. But it was something Dan said years ago that has always captured my interest. Dan is an amateur race car driver and he really enjoys the sport. During one conversation he said “If you’re always in control as go around the track you’re not going fast enough to win.” Race winners are always out of control at some point during the circuit.

None of us likes to be out of control or out of our comfort zone for long. But personal learning and growth or even winning races require that we step out of that comfort zone or reach beyond our control at least some of the time.

One of the advancements we’ve all seen taking place the last few years is in “big data”. By analyzing huge amounts of data new learnings are beginning to emerge that were just impossible to see in the past. It’s amazing to me how IBM’s Watson is now being applied to medical situations and other environments to help the experts in the field see new information or see new patterns in the old information. However, I’ve also seen a dangerous pattern in corporate leadership that assumes more data and information will help leaders make more informed and better decisions about the future. Let me cycle back to the quote that started this post:

“Staying within your comfort zone is a good way to prepare for today but a terrible way to prepare for tomorrow.”

More data may help us prepare for and react better today, but we still need to get out of our comfort zone and let go of complete control to make good decisions about tomorrow. Making decisions about tomorrow requires a different skill set than making decisions about today.

You may be better skilled on one side of this equation or the other. Often I see partnerships where the Chief Operating Officer is good at making today’s decisions, the Chief Executive Officer is good at anticipating the future. Corporate Controllers are good at making today’s decisions, Chief Financial Officers are good at preparing for the future. I can think of this combination at almost every level of the organization. So how do you build both skills into the organization? TEAM. Building great teams that are good at all aspects of today and tomorrow and learning how to balance the needs of the company are the winners in the end. Sometimes you just need to get out of your comfort zone or let things get out of control for a moment to win!

Which side of this equation do you fall on? Who have your partnered or teamed with that helps balance your comfort zone or need for control?

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Blog Leadership

Decoding Leadership: What Really Matters

by Ron Potter January 21, 2016

That’s the title of a recent McKinsey Quarterly Report. Great stuff. What does really matter?

In typical McKinsey style they described their survey approach:

We started with our own list and relevant literature list of 20 traits.
We surveyed a large number of people
In a large number of organizations
Compared it to our healthy organization index
Boiled it down to 4 traits that explained 89% of the differences between strong and weak organizations in terms of leadership effectiveness.

Big organizations like McKinsey are really good at doing these large scale analysis projects and I really appreciate their ability to do it and their willingness to share it.

4 Traits explained nearly 90% of the difference between good and bad leadership effectiveness. What were the four (you should be asking at this point)?

Being supportive
Operate with strong results orientation
Seek different perspectives
Solve problems effectively

The article doesn’t indicate that these are in any particular order so for our evaluation let’s separate out the 2^nd one, Operate with strong results orientation. People want to accomplish things. People want to build, create, produce, provide goods and services that other people value. Without both sides of that equation: people wanting valuable products and people wanted to produce value, there would be no commerce at all. Yes, we all want results. All too often leaders assume that people don’t want to produce and don’t realize that it’s the culture and structure that they’ve created that prevents them from doing so.

The other three require a humility and openness to accomplish.

Being supportive requires that I’m interested in who you are, how you think and what you want to create and accomplish.

Being open to your perspectives requires that I’m interested in who you are, how you think and what you want to create and accomplish.

Being good at solving problems effectively requires that I’m interested in who you are, how you think and what you want to create and accomplish.

Being supportive, open and a good problem solver requires humility!

Every piece of valid research on leadership effectiveness you find will somehow have its foundation based on humility. Ego and hubris reflect the needs of the person in the leadership position. Humility starts with the needs of the people being led.

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Blog Leadership

Are you egocentric?

by Ron Potter December 17, 2015

Source: Kristoffer Trolle, Creative Commons

Here’s a clue… YES!

Elizabeth Bernstien, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal wrote a piece titled “But you never said…” In this column she quotes Dr. Michael Ross, professor emeritus in the psychology department at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada:

People also remember their own actions better. So they can recall what they did, just not what [the other person] did. Researchers call this an egocentric bias, and study it by asking people to recall their contributions to events. Whether the event is positive or negative, people tend to believe that they had more responsibility.

Your mood—both when an event happens and when you recall it later—plays a big part in memory, experts say. If you are in a positive mood or feeling positive about the other person, you will more likely recall a positive experience or give a positive interpretation to a negative experience. Similarly, negative moods tend to reap negative memories.

Negative moods may also cause stronger memories. A person who lost an argument remembers it more clearly than the person who won it, says Dr. Ross. And how often you recall an incident may affect your memory. It is quite possible to remember your most recent version of the story, not the way it actually happened.

Yes, we are egocentric. It’s natural and essential in many cases. But, if we tend to remember what we said or did more than what anyone else said or did, how do we build a great team solution rather than a narrow egocentric solution? Dialogue!

Dialogue is a practiced technique that will help you build better solutions to difficult problems. We each have our own memory and perspective. It’s important to remember that your view is not “right” it’s just your view. In dialogue we start by sharing our “beliefs and assumptions” about a situation. Once we’ve really heard each other than we can start building some common ground rather than simply fighting over who’s view is right thereby making the other views wrong. Many, many arguments are actually right vs right, not right vs wrong. Start with that assumption and you’ll begin to build better teams.

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Blog Leadership

Feedback, Truth, and Trust: The Need for Speed

by Ron Potter November 5, 2015

Source: Alan Levine, Creative Commons

And what does Feedback, Truth and Trust have to do with speed?

In an interview with Daniel Roth, Executive Editor at LinkedIn, Jack Welch said

You always want your people to know where they stand. See, one of the things about appraisals for people, appraisals shouldn’t be every year. The world changed in a year, they’ve changed in a year. You’ve got to let them know, ‘Here’s what you’re doing right, here’s what you can do to improve’. And you’ve got to be on them all the time.”

Leadership today is all about two words: It’s all about truth and trust.

When they trust you, you’ll get truth. And if you get truth, you get speed. If you get speed, you’re going to act. That’s how it works.

Feedback

In earlier posts, I’ve talked about the origins of the word ‘feedback’ forming in the early days of rocket development when the pioneers built rockets with enough thrust but couldn’t hit a target. They had to spend more effort developing what they termed “feedback” so they could adjust the thrusters of the rockets and actually hit their target. Now think about that a minute. If they had waited until the rocket finished its flight, determined how far it had missed the target and then built corrections into the next flight, in the end, the process wouldn’t be very efficient.

But, that’s exactly what happens in many corporations today. Annual targets are set then checked at the dreaded annual review. Did the employee hit the target or not? No help along the way, no feedback mechanism adjusting the thrusters. No chance to make any mid-course adjustments or even agree that the target moved or changed.

Throw out the annual appraisals. Regular and frequent feedback sessions are the only way to get meaningful results and generate speed from your team.

Truth

Getting to the “truth” of the matter is difficult if you assume you know the truth and everyone else has their perspective (implying perspective is different from the truth). We all have different perspectives and part of building a great team is understanding that these perspectives are strong and powerful and formed by our experiences, beliefs, values, and goals. A humble leader understands that outstanding and highly effective people will often have different perspectives and it’s our jobs as leaders to get all those perspectives on the table, listen, learn, be curious and in the long run align our perspectives so we’re all pulling in the same direction.

Trust

Trust is the key element to all of this. Annual appraisals don’t build trust, regular feedback builds trust. Demanding that your perspective is the only true way of looking at an issue doesn’t build trust. Trust is built through humility, development, focus, commitment, compassion, integrity, peacemaking and endurance.

Speed

If you want your team to act effectively with speed, build trust. It’s the only fuel with enough energy to win the race.

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