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Re-Invention: Another Word for Change

by Ron Potter
Image Source: Werner Bartmann, Creative Commons

Image Source: Werner Bartmann, Creative Commons

There is constant talk of reinvention. Companies need to reinvent themselves. People need to reinvent themselves. I live in a state (Michigan) that needs to reinvent itself.

How does a state reinvent itself? The state of Michigan has been associated with the auto industry for over 100 years. During the peak of the auto industry, Michigan was one of the wealthiest states in the nation. Today it is one of the poorest and the only state that has lost population between the last two census reports. I’ve often tried to think of what Michigan would look like if Henry Ford, R.E. Olds, and many of the other pioneers of the auto industry had started in Ohio (or some other state) rather than Michigan. I have to assume that we would have an economy and state government geared to a level of a different and maybe less robust industry. We also have the cereal industry started by W.K. Kellogg and C.W. Post. Our tourist industry is outstanding and we even have a thriving oil and gas industry. But… the state would look much different today had we not had the auto industry. How do we rethink who we are?

I can only draw on my personal experiences when I think about reinventing ourselves individually. My career seems to have progressed in decades. For the first ten years of my working career I worked in the engineering/construction business, building large power plants around the country and learning the project management business. Then one day I saw my first microcomputer and decided that this little box (actually a 35 pound “luggable” machine in the early days) was going to change our lives. Six months later I was developing software for the new and growing microcomputer industry. After ten years of working with computers and software I had to ask myself the age old question “what do I really want to do when I grow up” and came to the conclusion that I had felt fulfilled working in two very different industries because my goal everyday was to create (and be) the best leaders and develop the best functioning teams. I believed that if I could grow myself, help grow the people and develop good team dynamics, the business would take care of itself. My developing vision was helping leaders and teams continually improve their performance. I thought that would be fun if I could get up and do that every day. Thus began twenty years (and counting) of consulting and coaching in the leadership development and team building arena.

What fulfills you? Have you stopped to ask yourself that question? It may be scary and risky but it will also help you to continually reinvent yourself. A necessity in today’s rapidly changing world.

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Curiosity Killed the Cat

by Ron Potter

But, Lack of Curiosity killed the DOG (DialOGue)

Dialogue is a wonderful experience. Unfortunately, most of the time we end up discussing topics. As shared in previous blogs, the word discussion has the same root word as percussion; Banging the drum; Beating on the table; Clanging the symbol. Discussion is “won” by percussing the loudest or most persistent. Not the best way to reach conclusions on difficult or contentious issues.

So why do we discuss rather than dialogue?

Because discussing is taking a side, defending your beliefs, getting your point of view across, winning an argument. Dialoguing is being open to others ideas; opening up your mind to alternatives or innovative ideas that haven’t been discovered yet.

The form of listening you use will go a long way in determining whether you discuss to win a point or dialogue to reach a better solution.

Image Source: Ky, Creative Commons

Image Source: Ky, Creative Commons

When we listen with the intent to respond, we’re preparing for discussion. We’re loading up our ammunition to either counter or reinforce any and every given point that is being discussed. We’re getting ready to beat our drum louder

But, when we listen with the intent to understand we’re preparing for dialogue. We’re getting as clear as we can about the issues, belief and assumptions and goals of each participant. The best way to accomplish this is through curiosity. There are many things in our lives that we’re curious about. When we’re curious about a topic we listen deeply, we probe to improve our understanding, we read as much as we can about the topic, we want to know why and when things happen, we want to know the meaning behind the causes.

When you’re facing a tough decision with strong opinions on each side, start with curiosity. Listen with the intent to understand. Dialogue the topic by getting everyone on the same side of the table and actively improving each side of the argument one side at a time. You’ll discover improved decision making.

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BlogLeadership

Afraid of Failure

by Ron Potter
Afraid of Failure

Image Source: True New Zealand Advent, Creative Commons

I am not a trekker. Although I do own a trekking stick (very high tech with a camera mount on the top) and for a while I did subscribe to a trekking magazine with wonderful, high gloss photos of small groups of people in their hiking boots, cargo pants and trekking sticks walking across pristine landscapes in Scotland and Ireland with periodic stops for wine and cheese and their porters ferrying their luggage to be waiting for them at the next B&B. While adventuresome is portrayed a very serine and safe journey.

But recently, I read an article about Carmichael. His day time job is the CEO of a high-end coffee supply company. His avocation is Trekking. Real Trekking! Having accomplished treks across some of the most remote and inhospitable places in the world, his latest challenge is Death Valley. Hard-core trekkers regard Death Valley as undoable and there is no known record of any human being accomplishing the task. He had just failed at his second attempt to trek across the valley. Listen to some of his words:

“Everyone focuses on risk and failure. What happens if you fail? How do you mitigate the risk? I look around and see people who live in the safest places in the world, and they are preoccupied with anxieties and fears because they don’t know what risk is anymore.”

Once he said it I realized that I observe this exact behavior in all of the people I meet and even in the corporate cultures that I work with. Some people take on entirely new careers in their lives while others make one shift to a different team in a company they’ve worked at for twenty and think “phew, I made that leap without failing”. Some corporate cultures are moving into emerging parts of the world with processes and technology totally different from what they’ve used for fifty years while others will make a merger offer and then back away from it as too risky when a slightly increased counter offer is presented. We seem to use the same scale for measuring risk as if we are a kid contemplating jumping across a puddle or if we’re walking steel 200 feet in the air (a personal experience of mine ;-).

After his second failed attempt to trek across Death Valley, Carmichael said “That’s it. It’s over dude.” At that moment of failure he didn’t see any way that he would ever attempt this one again. But later he had begun to absorb his experience.

“The word that goes through your mind is fail, fail, fail. But once you get some perspective you realize that you learned something important. In the end, it’s not about how many tries you needed to get something done. It’s about not quitting and keeping at it until you achieve the goal. So, no, I didn’t fail. Failure is if it broke me. I just didn’t make it – this time.”

How do we break out of our own ring of risk? That bubble that we live in where the most risky thing inside our bubble looks like the riskiest thing anywhere? We get outside of our bubble! We get to know people who live in other bubbles. We learn of their efforts, failures, successes, heart aches, joys and start seeing the world through a different set of eyes. Suddenly when we look back into our own bubble, we realize that that daunting risk that we’ve been facing is nothing more than a little puddle. If you only see the world through your own perspective, it can become a very risky place and you will become very risk averse.

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BlogCulture

I’ve Solved the Education Problem

by Ron Potter
Image Source: Corey Leopold, Creative Commons

Image Source: Corey Leopold, Creative Commons

Well, I haven’t actually solved the education problem but I think I have the solution. And it’s not exactly my idea but it’s still a great idea. In other words, for the first time I believe the solution is out there to our education problem. And we do indeed have an education problem. In spite of what we might hear from the NEA or the government, ranking in the bottom half of the top 34 countries of the world is a complete failure of the system as near as I can see.

Over the last several years, I’ve had a great concern and burden for our education system. Beyond the global rankings it seems to me that the system is failing on all fronts. In depressed areas like Detroit, the percentages of kids that even make it through the secondary system in abysmal. And even in areas where there is a functioning high school system, look at the number of parents who are choosing either home schooling or private schooling while still carrying the tax burden of supporting their local public schools simply because they can see that the public school is not going to prepare their children for the globally competitive future.

I’ve done a great deal of reading, thinking and talking to people about how we solve this problem. Bill Gates and his foundation have donated a great deal of money to the system and haven’t come up with much yet. One of the more inspiring books I’ve read is A Thomas Jefferson Education: Teaching a Generation of Leaders for the Twenty-First Century by Oliver DeMille. It is inspiring in describing the elements of a good and powerful education. It is depressing when it explains the original design and purpose of public education and you realize it was never intended to produce a high quality, globally competitive education.

So, what’s this great solution that “I’ve” come up with? Sal Khan is the guy who really came up with the solution. If you haven’t already seen what’s he’s doing (and yes, he has also caught the eye of Bill Gates) check it out ASAP. I immediately wrote to my two daughters and recommended that if they want their kids (actually they’re my grandkids, I just loan them to their parents while they’re growing up) to get a great education, tap into the Khan Academy. There is way too much to explain in this blog so I’ll let you explore on your own (the YouTube reference will give you a great overview) but I do want to focus on a few of the elements that I believe provide the solution to our education system.

The first thing that struck me is that the teachers no longer teach, they help the kids learn. That shifts us from a teaching environment to a learning environment. In a teaching environment we’re dependent on the skills and knowledge of the teacher. Recently a teacher that I know said that 70% of his class was failing and didn’t even seem to understand it was an indication of teacher failure, not student failure.

It also eliminates the one-size-fits-all approach to teaching. Once the teacher finishes a segment, the exam is taken, the student receives their score (A to E) and we move on to the next segment. How many students achieve mastery of the topic? Virtually none and based on the current system, it doesn’t make any difference anyway. The teacher disseminated the information, the students were scored, move on!

But, once we shift to a learning environment, the students are encouraged to experiment, fail and finally master the subject. Can you imagine the power instilled in the student when they actually master a topic? They can’t wait to get to the next level. And, they’re better equipped to master the next level. Under the current system, a good student might get 85% on the exam. But, what happens when that 15% lack of understanding makes it even more difficult to learn at the next level. And so-on and so-on. It’s a system that will indeed produce failure at some point.

I think there is much more to learn about this topic and I want to encourage as many of you as possible to check out the Khan Academy and talk to parents in your local public, private or home school. This will change your own kids (grandkids) lives and improve our education system. Notice that the Khan Academy is available to the world, not just the United States. If we don’t adopt this approach, we will rapidly fall even farther behind.

I will pick up on this topic more in future blogs and I also believe there is great learning here to be applied to leadership as well. Enjoy and be inspired by my solution to the education system. Ha!

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BlogLeadership

Opposite of Victim

by Ron Potter
Image Source: /\ \/\/ /\, Creative Commons

Image Source: /\ \/\/ /\, Creative Commons

Some people I’ve worked with have what we might think of as that victim mentality. The Leadership Style instrument I use (LSI from Human Synergistics) measures two areas titled Dependent and Avoidance that collectively describe a style that starts with the assumption that they are the victim in most circumstances. Some of the descriptions include:

A tendency to be easily influenced, not taking independent action
A strong tendency to deny responsibility or accountability
A passive attitude
Feelings of helplessness and/or guilt over real or imagined mistakes
The presence of rapid change or traumatic set-backs
A lack of self-respect
Extreme fear of failure

Someone asked me the other day what was the opposite of the victim mentality. That ignited a lively dialogue which came to the conclusion that Creativity is the opposite of victim mentality. Isn’t that a great picture? If we eliminate policies, procedures, governance, or leadership styles that create or assume a victim mentality, we unleash creativity. Although my work is focused on leadership within corporations, the first thing that came to mind was our law makers. Start evaluating all of the bills that are coming through congress (or ones that have been part of the landscape for many years) and begin to evaluate them in terms of “Do they create victims or do they instill creativity?” Many of the laws of this nation seem to start with the assumption that you are (or should be) a victim. And then they tend to perpetuate that belief. Our only opportunity in this rapidly changing global economy is to be creative and innovative. Shouldn’t we stop passing laws that push us toward or assume we are or should be victims?

But, closer to home, can you evaluate your or others leadership style on this victim-creativity balance beam? It’s always easiest to see it in others but the first step in great leadership is self-awareness, self-assessment, and humility. Have a discussion with your team. Maybe start by evaluating the group of people that work for you. Do they behave as victims or creators? What about our leadership style is causing that? How do we change the way we lead to increase the creative nature of our company?

My wife and I recently had the opportunity to listen to Condoleezza Rice when she made a speaking engagement in our home town. During the question and answer period one of the first question was “How did a young person of color from Birmingham, Alabama make it all the way to Secretary of State?” The first words out of her mouth without hesitation were “We were never allowed to be victims!”

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People on the Bus – Part II

by Ron Potter
Image Source: Jack Snell, Creative Commons

Image Source: Jack Snell, Creative Commons

In my last post, I talk about getting the wrong person off the bus. In this post I want to share three patterns that I have seen through the years.

Self-Selection
One is the story in the previous People on the Bus post when a person for various reasons decides to self-select out. They quit, they retire, they take another job but it’s their decision. And then as soon as it happens, you immediately experience the relief and freshness in the organization that feels like everyone exhaling a deep breath and then saying, “let’s get to work” with a renewed energy.

Still in Place 1.0 to 2.0
Every organization I’m working with is going through some sort of transformation. Things in this world are changing rapidly and it requires continued renewal and reinvention to keep up with the changes. It’s very easy to keep dancing to the tune that got you here. Although I see this in many cases of varying degrees, I’m thinking of one individual who has been very successful in his career for nearly thirty years. He has run large chunks of an organization, has been rewarded with bonus, salary and promotions through a steady career of successes. However, while he is currently responsible for over one hundred people, technology advancements in recent years have rendered what they do redundant. The entire organization needs to stop what they’ve been doing for the last couple of decades and begin doing things differently to continue to add value to the company. He’s in charge of the transformation. But, he doesn’t know what to do. He’s also afraid that he won’t be valued in the new environment. He’s spent thirty years honing skills that have been rewarded and now he’s getting the message that those skills are no longer valued. If he actually transforms his organization into what they need to be, there won’t be a need for his job (how he’s done it for the last many years). He can’t (or is not willing) to reinvent himself therefore he is not transforming his organization. Something will break soon. The company can no longer afford to have this large group of people producing daily work that is no longer of value.

But what about the leaders in this situation you might ask? Why is his boss allowing this to go on? This gets tough. Here is a guy who has performed well for three decades. He may know more about the job (as it used to be) than anyone else. As recently as two years ago he had received nothing but the highest annual evaluations and a steady string of promotions. And, he’s a great guy! “What am I supposed to do, fire him?”, asks the boss. Maybe.

It has become obvious that he is now the wrong person on the bus. We don’t want to just put him off the bus standing by the curb. And we certainly don’t want to throw him under the bus. But we do need to get him on a different bus or maybe in a different seat on the bus if he wants to go to the new destination where the bus is now headed. Leaving him where he is will become increasingly detrimental to himself, his team and the company.

Steady but Slow Improvement

A third thing that makes it difficult to get the wrong people off the bus is that they actually get better. Slowly.

Realistic time frames can be one of the most effective ways for dealing with getting the wrong people off the bus. In most cases the leaders (and even the individual themselves) know what the new behavior and approach needs to be and how it should work. And in many cases, the leader does a really good job of identifying the six (or 5 or 8 or 10) changes that need to take place in order for the person to be successful and valued on the new bus ride. The problem happens when after setting these new behaviors and competencies as goals for individual growth; the person only gets better at one or maybe two of the areas of required growth. During their performance review a year later they’ve improved performance on one of the areas but still need improvement in the other five. Then another year later they’ve improved a little bit on another area of the list but only marginally. However, because she see’s improvement the leader is reluctant to take the steps to get them off the bus. But a year or more has gone by and they haven’t moved on from behavior 1.0 to rev 2.0. In the meantime things are changing so rapidly that they really need to be transforming from 2.0 to 3.0. What I have experienced is that it takes nearly six months of consistent new behavior to develop some level of competency and acceptance and another six months of consistent behavior for it to sink in as second nature. But, if a person is still working on a new behavior in a year without essentially conquering it, it’s not likely that they will accomplish the needed goal in a reasonable time frame. It’s now time to help them onto another bus.

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People on the Bus – Part I

by Ron Potter
Image Source: MD111, Creative Commons

Image Source: MD111, Creative Commons

I was reminded the other day that when I was in kindergarten, I invited a friend to come home with me on the bus. Now, we didn’t make official arrangements like checking with parents or getting permission, I just asked this friend to get on my bus as we were headed home after school. As an adult I can now imagine the turmoil that must have ensued when this five year old girl ended up on the wrong bus.

Jim Collins in his book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t talks about the importance of getting the right people on the bus, and while I certainly understand the concept of having the right people on your team, the full magnitude of that concept never really hit me until I began thinking about how much angst and commotion must have occurred because I had the wrong person on the bus.

Jim Collins focuses on getting the right people on the bus but I think the harder part of leadership is getting the wrong people off the bus. My young friend and I were unaware of the great disturbance we had caused by enjoying our ride home and looking forward to playing together. It was the adults, the supervisors, the leaders that could easily see the chaos caused by our decision and their efforts were focused on getting the wrong person off this bus and back on the right bus.

Today when I was with a client, I was notified that a person in the company had decided to resign. While no one was really rejoicing, it was very obvious that there was a relief in the room and a sense of “finally, we can move on” because this had been one of those people who were on the wrong bus. Now, before you jump to conclusions I want you to know that he was a fine human being, with a long track record of great success in a highly visible (and paid) leadership position. This was not some sloth who everyone knew should depart. It’s just that the school bus was on a new route and he hadn’t adapted to the new route and scenery. He remained stuck in doing things the way they had always been done. He had not re-invented himself (new word for change) along with the company and the team as they were re-inventing themselves to cope with the new realities.

In my next post, I’ll talk about three patterns that I see of the wrong person on the bus.

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BlogLeadership

Mentors are important. Be one.

by Ron Potter
Image Source: Victor Nuno, Creative Commons

Image Source: Victor Nuno, Creative Commons

How important are mentors?

I’ve experienced a few true mentors through my life, the first being my dad and mom. Dad seems to still influence me today, over 35 years after his death.

Then there was my high school physics teacher. He always seemed to demand more from me and I didn’t fully understand until years later what a great gift that had been. I returned to see him after I had graduated from college and he had retired just to thank him for mentoring me. We had a great conversation.

My list would also have to include Bill Bottum. The opening chapter of my book Trust Me, tells the story of Bill and how he set the foundation for my belief system about work and how that has become the basis for my consulting career.

But, there has been one other couple who have truly been life-long mentors to me and also my wife. Keith and Gladys (affectionately known as Rusty) Hunt. From them has come discipleship, training, encouragement, correction, love, care, hospitality, rescue and the list goes on and on.

From this list you might assume that Keith and Rusty have been in our lives nearly every day along the way. They moved into a home down the road from me when I was a teenager. Even though they had careers that included a great deal of travel they always seemed to have the time to invite the local teenagers into their home for stimulating conversations and thought provoking Bible study. Later, after they had moved I ended up at university in the same town their relocation had taken them. Once again they were influencing my life in many positive ways. Later in life when my family needed to move across country, they were there with an extra room for me to bunk in and the advice and encouragement for a new stage of my life. Through their moves and ours, there were always changes. Sometimes there were great geographical distances between us, sometimes we lived in the same town. But they were always close and there was always the discipleship, training, encouraging…. well, you get the picture.

Just the other day one of those high school teenage friends tracked us down to ask if we had Keith and Rusty’s number. He was just thinking about them and wanted to call or visit. Their mentor-ship touched many.

We lost Rusty recently. After a long battle with her heart she went to be with the Lord. The loss is deep. And even though I know her influence will continue through her memories and her books this world won’t quite be the same without Rusty.

Who are you mentoring? When I’ve thought about those who have mentored me, I often feel selfish that I fully accept, appreciate and enjoy the fact that they have cared enough for me to provide the role of a mentor and yet wonder if I have given anything near that effort to others.

Who are you mentoring? Beyond that child and grandchild or even that employee where we are placed in natural mentoring roles, who are you mentoring? Keith and Rusty have never been our parents or our boss (well, I did mow their lawn during those teenage years) but they have definitely been our mentors.

Maybe it’s that teenager down the street. Maybe it’s that mail room clerk. Maybe it’s the young couple at church. Maybe…. Don’t let the list always be a list of “maybes”. Think about whom you could be mentoring and come along side that person.

And yet that leaves us with the bigger question of “Do I feel worthy to mentor another?” Good question and one that we should ponder and work through. However, I’ll suggest that if you’re just willing to truly listen to another person, you’re on your way to being a good mentor.

Mentors are important. Be one.

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BlogMyers-Briggs

Logical Business Decisions

by Ron Potter
Image Source: Rae Allen, Creative Commons

Image Source: Rae Allen, Creative Commons

Over the last twenty years of business consulting I’ve collected a nice little Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) data base of a couple of thousand business leaders. I’ve also been fortunate to compare my data base with a huge data base of business leaders collected by the Center for Creative Leadership and our percentages were nearly an identical match. Although there are a couple of outstanding features in the data, one feature in particular stands out above all others.

The 3rd of the four functions is called your “deciding” function. People fall into two categories: Thinking and Feeling. Thinking types tend to make decisions logically and feeling types tend to use values and knowing how people will react to make their decisions. In our data bases of business leaders, 84% rate themselves as T’s and 16% are identified as F’s. This means that the vast majority of business leaders believe they make decisions on a logical basis.

But, let’s examine the science. One new book about recent brain mapping and neuroscience, Management Rewired: Why Feedback Doesn’t Work and Other Surprising Lessons from the Latest Brain Science says:

“But perhaps the most surprising discovery has come from mapping the path information travels from our sense organs to our awareness of the world we live in. Not only are the perceptual areas of the brain involved, so are the areas responsible for our memories, our feelings, our beliefs, and our aspirations. Our minds aren’t objectively recording our experience of the world; they’re creating it, and that creation is influenced by everything else going on in the brain. Each of us lives in a mental world of our own making. The world we know is only what we think it to be, and we can’t assume other people will think the same way we do. Reasoning has nothing to do with the way we solve problems, make decisions, and plan for the future. At best, logic is just a way to justify conclusions we have already reached unconsciously.”

Wow! None of us actually has a grasp on reality. We’re each making up our own picture and story as we go along. We may be making logical decisions but they’re based on our personally developed and perceived logic. We know from our marketing guru’s that people make purchases based on emotions and then justify the purchase with logic (Once, while admiring a Chevy Corvette my wife said “I see no logical reason to buy a Corvette.” So, what does logic have to do with it ;-).

I’m afraid we make decisions the same way. We make them based on emotions (memories, feelings, beliefs, aspirations, etc) and then seem to justify the decision based on some sort of logic. This finding has a great deal of impact on teamwork, leadership and corporate cultures (TLC) that we’ll explore in the future.

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BlogLeadership

Humility (AGAIN!)

by Ron Potter

A few weeks ago IBM’s Institute for Business Value released the results of a survey they had conducted with 1,500 CEO’s across 60 nations and 30 industries. They asked these CEO’s from both the corporate and public sector to identify the one leadership competency they valued above all others. Here is the rank order of the results:

• A photo by Kelly Sikkema. unsplash.com/photos/KkDWcP7gYXECreativity
• Integrity
• Global Thinking
• Influence
• Openness
• Dedication
• Focus on sustainability
• Humility
• Fairness

Within days a colleague (thanks Chris) sent me an email asking what I thought about the ranking (knowing my belief that humility should carry a very high ranking). My reaction was that you can’t enjoy the top seven without first having humility.

It’s likely that their understanding of humility is probably skewed. From our book “Trust Me”, Wayne and I make these points about humility:

• Being humble and teachable means learning to trust others and their opinions and instincts.
• It means listening with the intent of learning instead of simply responding.
• It means seeking personal development from every situation, experience (both good and bad), and transaction.

I don’t think it takes a lot of imagination to see how humility is the basic foundation for achieving nearly every one of the competencies listed higher on the list.

Humility still rules.

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BlogTeam

Patience

by Ron Potter
Image Source: Biking Nikon SFO, Creative Commons

Image Source: Biking Nikon SFO, Creative Commons

It takes as much work to build great teams as it does to build or become a great leader.

I believe that if you were to ask my family (wife and two daughters) they would tell you that I’m the most patient man in the world…. until I’m not! I seem to have a great deal of patience for most situations but when I run out of patience I don’t come down gradually. Nor do I stair step down one level at a time. My patience ends like a rock being kicked off a 1,000 foot cliff that plummets with the acceleration of gravity until it smashes on the floor of the canyon. My girls actually developed into an early warning system for me. When I would see them quickly jump up and bolt from the room in unison, I began to understand that my patience was approaching the cliff and they had picked up the warning signs.

One of my clients currently has a similar trait. He has a great deal of desire and compassion to grow and develop his team and constantly pushes them to become better then they were the year before. He will start a project that is going to challenge and grow them over time and then gives them enough time to accomplish the task. But, if he is not seeing sufficient progress as critical deadlines approach, his rock will eventually get kicked over the cliff and then he jumps in with great fury and gets the task completed.

Why do we reach this cliff where things go bad in a hurry? A couple of reasons are very obvious to me.
1. Leaders mistakenly assume that members of their team will “see it” (understand all that needs to be figured out in order for the growth spurt to take place) or will figure it out along the way in their effort to complete the task or project
2. A basic misunderstanding of good project management

By definition, a growth experience can’t necessarily be figured out ahead of time. It’s a new experience. You’re figuring out something that you’ve never seen or experienced before. You’ll either not see it at all or if you do you may not execute in a very efficient or effective manner. Leaders often forget their own learning curve experiences. They made these same mistakes years ago or even if it was only recently that they figured it out, they now only remember the end state of the new knowledge, not what they went through to learn the new behavior or understanding.

Leaders must work harder then they expect to help people understand the new expectations, learn the processes it will take to get there, and have a vision of the new normal. Develop patience for the sake of your teams.

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BlogLeadership

Time Management

by Ron Potter
Image Source: Nick, Creative Commons

Image Source: Nick, Creative Commons

I was scheduled to teleconference with one of my clients last week. We had one hour for our conference call but were not able to connect until 15 minutes before our time was up. What do you think the topic was that he wanted to talk about when we finally did connect? Time management!

This client is actually at the top of his game and in many respects at the peak of his career. He’s doing wonderful things at the top of a company that is improving quarterly and is a highly respected leader and team member. But he was feeling overwhelmed and over run. What could he do to improve and get back on top of things?

When we did talk a week later, these are a few of the topics that were discussed:
• Meetings
• Quadrant II – Urgent vs Important (discussed in an earlier blog)
• Planning and early execution
• Empowerment/Delegation
• Systems and Support

Let’s discuss meetings.

How much of your time for the week or month is pre-booked in meetings before you even start? Even if you’re working 50 or 60 hour weeks, if 90% of your time is booked in meetings before you even start your week, than you really only have 5 or 6 hours for the week to get your non-meeting work done.

I hesitate to call non-meeting work your “real work” because much of your real work is conducted in well run meetings. But, if you have more than 60% of your available time pre-booked in meetings before you even start the week, you should probably question if you need to be in the meeting or not.

Efficiency and Effectiveness of meetings

Even if the meetings are important, how much effort is put into analyzing the efficiency and effectiveness of the time spent in the meeting? This topic can have multiple sub-headings but a couple right off the top should be:
• Who’s running/facilitating the meeting?
• What’s the purpose of the meeting? Information? Prioritization? Decision making?
• If a decision is to be made, what type of decision? Consensus? Consultative? Unilateral?
• If it should be a unilateral decision, why are we having this meeting?
• If it’s to be consensus, who are the right players and are we willing to take the necessary time?
• If it’s to be consultative, who owns the decision?

You might enjoy a book titled: Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable…About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business

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