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Unity

by Ron Potter

Joe Biden’s Unity Address at the inauguration on January 20, 2021 was the title of an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal written by their editorial board.  In the opening paragraph, they write “The peaceful transfer of power from one party to another is a sign of underlying democratic strength no matter our current political distemper.”

I have always believed that this is one of the true strengths of our republic and our constitution.  If you look back through history, I believe that we are the only country that has pulled off this peaceful transfer of power for over two hundred years.  It makes me very proud.

Unity

But this blog is titled “Unity”, not the transfer of power.

Some of President Biden’s words were “Politics doesn’t have to be a raging fire” and “Disagreement should not lead to disunion.”  Unfortunately, politics does remain a raging fire, regardless of which party is in power.  But my focus here is not politics, but teams and corporate cultures.  The second statement is the one I want us to hang on to because it is one of the elements of high-performance teams:  “Disagreement should not lead to disunion.”

Disagreement

Some people believe that you can’t have unity if you have a disagreement.  I believe the unity that comes out of trusting and respecting disagreement is the most powerful unity that you can experience.  From our ancient philosophers, we find that the idea of truth, love, beauty, and unity is the highest level of happiness.  I use these four concepts to help teams bring about unity from disagreement.

Truth

I’m not talking about truth being the opposite of lies.  I’m talking about what you know and have experienced as your truth.  I often marvel at the concept that there are no two snowflakes exactly alike.  I would put forth the premise that there are no two human beings that are exactly alike.

I’m one of four siblings in my family.  We all had the same father and mother.  We all lived in the same house for most of our lives.  We all grew up in the same small town for most of our lives.  I say “most of our lives” because my father died when my youngest sister was still in her teens which altered her life a great deal.  But what I have found very fascinating through our adult years is how the “truth” of those formative years was so different for each of us.  I remember one discussion between myself and my siblings as adults when I finally said “Who are you talking about?”  They said “Our father”.  My reaction was, “That’s not the father I knew or grew up with”.  Even how we ranked from youngest to oldest changed how we experienced our parents.

In order to build a strong unity, we must share with each other what we see as the truth of the situation.  Both of my daughters and all four of my grandchildren have lived overseas.  They have experienced different “truths”.  I believe this will serve them well through life.

I’ve told this story before but it’s very powerful for me.  During my consulting years, I almost always conducted a session with each team that I called “Human Beings, not Human Doings”.   In these sessions, participants were asked to share about someone or some event that they know profoundly affected their lives and values.  We never made it through a single session without tears flowing.

Knowing each other’s experiences, values, and truths, is the first very powerful step towards unity.

Love

The second of the unity elements was termed “love” by the Ancients.  Unfortunately, that word loses something in the translation and how we think of it today.  In the Greek Language which most of these ancients spoke, they have at least four words (I’ve seen as many as six) that all get translated into the word love in English.  Our English is very limiting.

  • Philia – deep friendship.  The city of Philadelphia is based on this word.
  • Eros – sexual passion.  We get the word erotica from Eros.
  • Philautia – love of the self.  We would translate this word as narcissism — self-obsessed and focused.
  • Agape – love for everyone.

Agape is the word for love that I associate with teams.  I often used the word “respect” to convey this idea.  Do we show respect for the other person regardless of their “truth” being in alignment with ours or not?  Do we listen with the intent to understand?  We didn’t have the same experiences as the other person.  We must listen with a willingness to learn and understand about the background that would bring them to their truth.   Only then can we begin to develop true and powerful unity.

Beauty

This is another word that’s difficult to understand in the business context.  We’ve heard that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  That makes beauty unique to each individual.  I don’t think that works well with teams.

I’ve come to think of beauty as elegance.  One definition is being pleasingly ingenious and simple.  I think this definition works well with teams.  Ingenuity or innovation is a very strong skill in high-performance teams.  Although sometimes it seems counter-intuitive, simplicity is also a strong point for high-performance teams.  Adding complexity and complications to projects or decision making is not a trait in high-performance teams.

Unity

Unity can be a hard thing to detect at times.  Especially if a team is good at working through their differences.  What does make unity visible is commitment.  When every member of a team shows commitment to decisions made, even if they personally see things differently, that’s unity.  Each member has to carefully demonstrate the commitment.  For others to hear the words “Well, I don’t agree with it but that’s what we decided as a team” is not unity.  But when people know that while we may have initially disagreed with the results and yet see full commitment on our part, they know that we’re committed to the team and the team’s decisions.

Truth, Love, Beauty, Unity

Truth, Respect, Elegance, Commitment

These are the elements of unity.  Check your own attitude and the behavior of others with each element.  Building high-performance teams require putting all of the elements in place.

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BlogTeam

Divided

by Ron Potter

I hesitated to use the word Racism in the title of this blog.  Many would say there is no way I could understand because I’m a gray-haired white male.  I’m sure there is some truth to that statement.  But, I was a young adult, going to college and living in southern Michigan when the Detroit riots occurred in the late sixties.  Those riots left me confused, hurting, and even angry.  I wasn’t sure what I should do.

Pastor of local Black Church

When the riots hit the city where I now live, many of those same feelings of confusion, hurting, and not knowing what to do surfaced again.  Turning into a gray-haired, old white male didn’t seem to help much.

Then I had an opportunity to listen to a teaching pastor at a local black church.  I really wanted to learn from what he had to say.  I found it interesting that he was “struggling, frustrated, angry, and hurting.”  He was not gray-haired or white but he expressed the same feelings I had been experiencing.

Five things that will help

It turns out that the scripture passage we were studying was about being peaceable.  When the local pastor was asked what it took to be Peaceable he gave a well thought out and knowledgable answer.

  1. Slow to Judge
  2. Quick to Listen
  3. Eager to learn
  4. Willing to identify
  5. Ready to speak up and act.

Slow to Judge

In today’s social media, internet-based, global world, it’s very easy to judge and too many people judge too quickly.  Maybe it’s a liberal or conservative making the statement and instead of listening what is said, people instantly write it off because it was said by the “other side”.

Maybe it’s a statement made by a European or Asian and people in the US judge it quickly as meaningless because they “don’t understand” how things work in the US.

The list would be too long to identify all of the times we’re quick to judge.  When you’re quick to judge, you leave no room for learning.

Quick to Listen

Do you listen with the intent to respond?  Or do you listen with the intent to understand?  Most of us, most of the time are listening with the intent to respond.  While the other person is talking (or shouting) we’re keeping track of each point made and creating our “checklist” of either reinforcing or countering the point being made.

How does that make the other person feel?

  • You’re not listening.
  • You’re stupid (or at least ignorant).
  • You want to win the argument which makes me want to say it louder and more forcefully.
  • The louder voice “wins.”

But, how does the other person feel if you demonstrate your desire to understand?

  • You’re truly interested in what they have to say.
  • You’re trying to expand your knowledge base to understand where they’re coming from
  • You’re not trying to win a shouting match.
  • Maybe we can reach a mutual understanding because they now may want to know what you have to say.

Eager to Learn

Socrates believed that knowledge was the ultimate virtue, best used to help people improve their lives. “The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance,”

Notice that Socrates said knowledge helped improve lives.  Ignorance is (not stupidity) is the lack of knowledge.  Why do some people remain Ignorant?  They refuse to learn.

Each person is coming from a perspective that is real and “true” to them.  For instance, I grew up in a small town.  But in my adult years, my business took me all over the world.  That changed my perspective.  I now saw the world differently than my friends and family who remained in that small town.

That doesn’t make it wrong, it just gives them a different perspective.  The best way to develop relationships and understanding is to understand someone’s perspective.  This requires the first two elements, Slow to Judge, and Quick to Listen.

Psychology tells us that cognitive dissonance is the mental stress or discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time, or is confronted by new information that conflicts with existing beliefs, ideas, or values.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous quote says “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

The world is full of opposing ideas and perspectives.  Don’t hold on to yours to the point of stress and discomfort.  Learn!

Willing to Identify

In my mind, this may be the most difficult.  Not because we don’t want to identify with the other person but because our perspectives become so strong in our lives.  I don’t have the same experiences as someone else.  They also don’t have the same experiences that I have.  We can identify by hearing their story, listening to their experiences, and finally relating it to some experience we’ve had.  Then we begin to identify.

Don’t take the position that “You just don’t understand!  You haven’t had the experiences I have!”  That’s true.  I haven’t had the experiences you’ve had.  But I’ve had good and bad experiences.  And I can empathize with what you’re experiencing.  It’s how we grow together.

Ready to Speak up and Act

There are a lot of forces in our lives that tell us to just be quiet.  It actually starts in elementary school.  The teacher often told us to sit down and be quiet.

We’ve also been told by people (with different perspectives) that our ideas and words are stupid.  So we sit quietly because we don’t want to look stupid.

In today’s world of social media, we can quickly be criticized for our thoughts and ideas.  In this anonymous and divided world, it can quickly be labeled as hate language.  There is a fear of being labeled for our thoughts.

I experienced it writing this blog.  What if I push a wrong button and it is all of a sudden seen as hateful rather than helpful.  I just want to speak up in an effort to help.  But I have this fear of pushing the wrong button.  One I’m not even aware of.

And what about unconscious bias?  We hear that phrase a lot today.  And people are being accused of having unconscious bias as if it’s a flaw.  But what do the words mean?  Unconscious: the part of the mind which is inaccessible to the conscious mind.  It’s inaccessible!  It’s ignorance, not stupidity.

I’ve chosen through the years to keep this blog focused on building team, leadership, and corporate cultures.  I didn’t want to venture into politics, religion, or racism because of this fear of being misunderstood.  But the pastor’s five steps ends with “Be ready to speak up and act.”

I don’t’ know if he intended to put them in order but I do suggest that we don’t speak up until we’ve progressed openly through the first four steps.

Teams

And just to get back to more familiar ground, these five steps also help grow great teams.

  1. Slow to Judge
  2. Quick to Listen
  3. Eager to learn
  4. Willing to identify
  5. Ready to speak up and act.

Learn and practice the five steps to address division.  They help us become better people and build better teams.

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BlogTrust Me

Managing Conflict

by Ron Potter

In his book The Fellowship of the Ring, the first book in the series The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien describes the camaraderie of a diverse group banded together by a common cause. Called “the fellowship of the ring,” their quest is to destroy the power of the Dark Lord by destroying the ring in which that power resides. Though they differ in nearly every way—racially, physically, temperamentally—the fellowship is united in its opposition of the Dark Lord.

In a section omitted in the movie, a heated conflict breaks out among the crusaders. Axes are drawn. Bows are bent. Harsh words are spoken. Disaster nearly strikes the small band. When peace finally prevails, a wise counselor observes, “Indeed in nothing is the power of the Dark Lord more clearly shown than in the estrangement that divides all those who still oppose him.”

Conflict causes estrangement within teams, even the best teams. Therefore, managing conflict is at the heart of the dilemma of the leader who has good relations with individual team members but cannot get the group to work together.

Rivalry causes division. Debate causes hurt feelings or a sense of not being heard or understood. How does a leader keep an aggressive person and a person who easily withdraws engaged?

Kenneth W. Thomas and Ralph H. Kilmann created the Conflict Mode Instrument, which is “designed to assess an individual’s behavior in conflict situations.” It measures people’s behavior along two basic dimensions: “(1) assertiveness—the extent to which an individual attempts to satisfy his or her concerns, and (2) cooperativeness—the extent to which an individual attempts to satisfy the other person’s concerns. These two dimensions of behavior can be used to identify five specific methods of dealing with conflicts.” The methods are described as follows:

  1. Avoiding—Low assertiveness and low cooperativeness. The goal is to delay.
  2. Competing—High assertiveness and low cooperativeness. The goal is to win.
  3. Accommodating—Low assertiveness and high cooperativeness. The goal is to yield.
  4. Compromising—Moderate assertiveness and moderate cooperativeness. The goal is to find a middle ground.
  5. Collaborating—High assertiveness and high cooperativeness. The goal is to find a win-win situation.8

Leaders need to use the peacemaking qualities defined by the two pillars of humility and endurance to bring conflict to the highest level of resolution: collaboration. The cooperative environment means “I need to be humble.” The assertive environment means “I need to endure.” The two pillars, taken together, cause people to listen, yet hold firm in solving conflict through collaboration. When collaborating, individuals seek to work with others to find a solution that satisfies all parties. It involves digging into hidden concerns, learning, and listening but not competing.

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BlogTeamTeam Series

Team Elements – Respect: Envy, Anger, Grudges

by Ron Potter

We’re continuing our series on building great teams.  Great teams happen when we have

We’re still working our way through the Respect series with the final set of circumstances of Envy, Anger, and Grudges.  No, great teams don’t possess these attributes, great teams avoid these attributes. Envy, Anger, and Grudges are team weaknesses that can be lethal to your team’s well-being.

Envy

Envy is the first of the team weaknesses we’ll discuss. Great teams snuff out envy whenever it rears its ugly head.  Here are some attributes of Envy:

  • Discontented or resentful by someone else’s possessions, qualities, luck, or accomplishments, style or attribute.
  • An emotion which occurs when a person lacks another’s superior quality or achievement.
  • Desires to deprive another of what they have.
  • Delights in degrading those who are more deserving.

Envy occurs when someone feels inferior to others and will do what they can to undermine or chop down those who possess more or achieve more than themselves.

At its roots, this is a comparison issue.  Always comparing yourself to others is a losing battle.  Jordan Peterson in his book 12 Rules of Life: An antidote to chaos states in rule number 4 “Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.”  Comparing yourself to who you were yesterday puts you on the path of growth.

I once had a pastor who was fond of talking about the little boy pushing his wagon up a hill.  As soon as he sat down in the wagon to rest, he found himself at the bottom of the hill.  Never stop growing!  Never stop learning!  As soon as you give up on your own growth and development, envy creeps in.   You begin to be resentful of what others have or what others have become.

Envy is destructive.  Its first target is yourself.  Its second target is those around you.  As Jordan Peterson says, an antidote to chaos is to continue growing.

Anger

As the second of the team weaknesses, Anger that is directed at circumstances or failures can be healthy if it is channeled properly.  Eruptions of anger are seldom positive.  Expressing anger and disappointment in a safe environment can help everyone deal with the loss and adversity.

I’ve often run exercises with teams that have experienced great loss and disappointment.  Working in small groups I allow each person to express their emotions by writing them on flip charts.  No holds barred.  Get it all out.  Once the teams have exhausted the extent of their anger, we take the flip charts that were created, post them on the wall, share them with each other and then hand every chart out to members of the team.  They are then instructed to tear the flip charts into as many pieces as possible, throw the pieces into the middle of the floor (expressing as much anger as they can while doing so) and then we all jump on the pile of pieces and stomp on them as viciously as possible.  By the time the stomping has slowed to a stop I always witness a moment of somber quiet.  But then someone breaks out in a big grin.  Another joins them.  It soon turns to laughter and people start expressing how cathartic the exercise was.  In one form or another people shout out “Wow, I haven’t felt this good in a long time!”  The anger dissipates.  Calm heads return.  And a new determination emerges in the room to move on, work hard, figure out how to overcome and get better.

All too often the anger remains covert.  People assume they must hold their head up high, don’t complain and keep going.  When things remain covert it’s almost impossible to deal with them.  Once we brought out the anger in an overt but healthy way, new energy emerges from the team and it makes it possible to move forward.

Grudges

The third and most subtle of the team weaknesses, Grudges can be caused be either envy or anger but they just keep resurfacing over time.  It’s probably because it remains overt until that moment when it erupts once again.

One of my teams referred to the practices as “replaying old tapes.”  Something would happen on the team that didn’t seem to make sense to me and finally, someone else would explain, “Oh, they’re just replaying old tapes from what happened a few years ago.”  A few years ago?  Are you kidding me?  People are still holding and expressing grudges after a few years and no one has dealt with it yet?  Amazing.

Leaders and teams must call out grudges and put a stop to them.  Maybe it will take a team exercise like the anger one described above.  Maybe it will take some one-on-one discussions with the leader or a coach.  Maybe a leader needs to decide to help a team member move on if they can’t get past old issues.  Grudges can be like deep infections.  They continue to resurface.  Sometimes a mild antibiotic will heal an infection.  I dealt with one of those antibiotic-resistant infections a few years ago.  It took a direct injection of the most powerful antibiotic every three hours for six weeks.

Infections can be tough to deal with.  Grudges can be just as tough because they pop to the surface periodically.  You must get to the root of them and deal with them to have healthy teams.

In this post, we’ve talked about the team weaknesses you should avoid to build great teams.  In the previous post, we talked about the positive things that need to be present to develop great Respect within teams.  We’ll wrap up Respect with our next post to pull it all together with focus.

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BlogTrust Me

Humility and Endurance: The Two Pillars of Leadership

by Ron Potter

My book Trust Me is centered on eight principles of successful leadership. What we call the “two pillars”—the key principles that support and are intertwined with the others—are humility and endurance. A leader who desires to build a great team must first become a leader of humility and endurance. Pride and despair always force leaders to choose incorrect methods and solutions.

It is difficult to build a team when you need to be the center of attention, the only voice, the only one with an idea, and the only one who can make a decision. It is also difficult to build a team when, at every sour turn, the team stumbles and fails or doesn’t learn from failure. Endurance means pushing through struggles together until the results are positive. Leaders, by the way they respond to crisis and chaos, often cause teams to quit sooner than necessary.

Understand, Accept, and Communicate Change

Since the 1980s—or earlier—the business world has begun to see the need for entirely new models of management in order to succeed in regaining and defending competitiveness in today’s world economy. The old paradigm of management that had guided the U.S. economy since the rise of the railroads and the large corporations of the Industrial Revolution no longer seemed to work. Firms struggled to remake themselves in order to be competitive. They followed the advice of many writers and consultants to become organizations that stepped away from Management by Objective and adopted a strategy of learning.

Today we live in a rapidly changing postindustrial society that is becoming increasingly complex and fluid. It is an environment that requires decision making and sometimes rapid change within organizations. Surviving and thriving in this rapidly changing landscape becomes a function of an organization’s ability to learn, grow, and break down institutional structures within the organization that impede growth. Organizations that are ideologically committed to growth and change will be at an advantage in the postindustrial era.

In his book Leading Change, John Kotter explains how leaders can effectively communicate change in their organizations. All of us at one time or another fully understand the confusion caused by change. Kotter writes,

Because the communication of vision [change] is often such a difficult activity, it can easily turn into a screeching, one-way broadcast in which useful feedback is ignored and employees are inadvertently made to feel unimportant. In highly successful change efforts, this rarely happens, because communication always becomes a two-way endeavor.

Even more important than two-way discussion are methods used to help people answer all the questions that occur during times of change and chaos. Clear, simple, often-repeated communication that comes from multiple sources and is inclusive of people’s opinions and fears is extremely helpful and productive.

Humility and endurance guide a ship experiencing change and chaos. A leader who builds a team, but their leadership style, upon the foundation of humility and endurance will see their team through difficult days.

Humility and Endurance quote

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BlogTrust Me

Working Together, Not Against

by Ron Potter

Leaders at all levels grapple with the challenge of getting people to pool their talents and work with, not against, one another.

Often frustrating to leaders is a team that consists entirely of “stars” who can’t or won’t play together as a team to “win the championship.” In an era of knowledge workers, leaders find themselves with nonfunctioning teams of all-stars who can easily undermine them. (Peter Drucker defines knowledge workers as those who “know more about their job than their boss does and in fact know more about their job than anybody else in the organization.”)

Chuck Daly, the first coach of America’s Dream Team, found himself needing to take basketball players like Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, and Larry Bird and build a team of champions, not just a group of incredible superstars. Coach Daly used all his coaching experience, leadership ability, and basketball knowledge to mold this group of all-stars into a team.

The team dominated headlines as well as the competition. Everywhere they went, the media followed. And the animated, trash-talking practices were sometimes bigger news than the games. In their first Olympic game together, the Dream Team trounced Angola 116-48 and never looked back, going 8-0 en route to the gold.

They were the only undefeated team in the tournament, averaging an Olympic record of 117.3 points a game. They won their games by an average of 43.8 points, and the closest any opponent could come was 32 points (Croatia in the gold-medal final).

“You will see a team of professionals in the Olympics again,” said Daly. “But I don’t think you’ll see another team quite like this. This was a majestic team.”

Coach Daly could not mold these incredibly talented basketball stars into the successful team they became by keeping the focus on himself. On the other hand, he could not surrender the basic basketball concepts he knew would help the team win a gold medal. He was a builder and a success at developing teams.

Teamwork doesn’t just happen. A winning team is not formed by a miracle of nature. You cannot just throw people together (even knowledge workers or pro basketball stars) and expect them to function as a high-performance team. It takes work. And at the core of team building is the desire to develop people and create a calm environment in which productive growth and seasoning can occur.

When leaders tolerate poor teams or even promote them through their own leadership style, organizations find themselves misaligned. Employees use this out-of-plumb structure just like children who play off each quibbling parent to get their own way. Leaders need to stop this behavior and get teams realigned. Leaders sometimes empower direct-reports to perform tasks or projects that are actually opposed to each other.

When team members come to us, they also have questions. Typically the questions team members ask are about themselves: “How do I deal with difficult team members?” or “How do I get heard?” These are self-directed questions. The team members are concerned about themselves—getting heard, getting ahead, getting along, and getting their jobs done.

In most cases the leader has not developed the team to the point of understanding the full value of synergy. The team members do not understand that the sum of their collective output will be greater than the work they could do individually.

Worse, many executive teams are not convinced that synergy can happen at the leadership level. “Authors Robert Lefton and V. R. Buzzotta, long-time counselors to top management, systematically examined 26 top-level teams, ranging in size from six to 20 people (usually a CEO or president and vice presidents); 20 of the firms are in the Fortune 500 club. In a nutshell, the authors found little teamwork, virtually no ‘synergy’ from these collections of wise heads, and a lot of wasted time and childish behavior.”

It falls on leaders to get teams excited about working together—about creating synergy. Many of the team members’ questions and wants can be overcome when they feel the power of working together and achieving the goals of the team.

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BlogTrust Me

Peacemaking On Your Team

by Ron Potter

Peacemaking Leaders

The times demand that leaders bring peace to their organizations and teams. Peacemaking can be rare in our cultural climate, but that doesn’t have to be true in your company.

A peacemaking leader is a leader who:

  • seeks to create calm within the storms of business.
  • understands the positive role of conflict in building a solid team.
  • is creative, energy-filled calm when employees can feel under siege and at the mercy of chaos.
  • who stays steady in the turbulence and work with them to create new answers, new plans, and a new future.

Planting Seeds of Peace

This kind of leader can bring about peace by making meaning out of the mess. The times demand that flexibility and humility replace rigid systems and pride.

The predictable environment is outdated, but to ensure quality, solid staff relationships, and employee achievement, leaders must embrace the peacemaker role and bring meaning to everything that is done or will be done.

This may sound like a daunting task. But even spreading a few small seeds of peace consistently will make such a difference—long term. Max Lucado put it this way:

Take a seed the size of a freckle. Put it under several inches of dirt. Give it enough water, light, and fertilizer. And get ready. A mountain will be moved. It doesn’t matter that the ground is a zillion times the weight of the seed. The seed will push it back.

Every spring, dreamers around the world plant tiny hopes in overturned soil. And every spring, their hopes press against impossible odds and blossom.

Never underestimate the power of a seed.

As far as I know, James, the epistle writer, wasn’t a farmer. But he knew the power of a seed sown in fertile soil.

“Those who are peacemakers will plant seeds of peace and reap a harvest of goodness.”

Become a leader who sows seeds of peace.

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BlogTrust Me

Peacemaking Leadership

by Ron Potter

Does it seem puzzling to find the term peacemaker included in a list of qualities necessary for a trusted leader? Does peace sound a bit too passive in today’s business environment?

We are desperately in need of some peace and quiet. Work—all of life—is more stressful than ever before. James Citrin writes:

Late nights in the office. Early mornings to clear overnight e-mails. Weekends to catch up on all the things you didn’t have time to do during the week. Most people in business simply cannot work harder or faster than they are at present—we’re all sprinting just to keep up. As the old saw says, the race goes to the swift. And in the now-distant boom times, being first to market and hurrying obsessively to get out ahead made working in overdrive the norm.

But in our collective rush to get ahead, maybe we have lost something…certain actions, decisions, and initiatives do have their own rhythms, and we should be sensitive to them. Don’t you agree that on some days, things just flow, while on other days, no matter how hard you push, things just don’t move forward?

A peacemaker is a leader who seeks to create calm within the storms of office politics, decision making, shareholder demands, cash-flow crunches, and the endless change of things the organization cannot control such as the economy, the weather, the fleeting loyalty of today’s consumer, and a host of other constantly evolving issues.

One of the jobs of a leader is to prepare the organization for times of great demand. There have been many studies on the effects of overtime work. When additional hours of work are initially introduced, productivity climbs. However, research also shows that if the overtime continues for more than about two months, productivity falls back to its original level in spite of the additional hours worked. Leaders who neglect to give the organization rest will not be prepared when the real push comes. And, in fact, they are not getting a good return on their investment by keeping everyone working long hours over extended periods of time.

Leaders need to know when to let the organization (people) slow down and rest a bit so that they are ready to go when those two or three tough times during the year require that extra effort.

Take a look at your world. Some people on your team are fed up with the daily push and shove. They are overworked and worn out. They feel vulnerable and fearful, and they are seeking personal peace to do a job they feel they can do but for whatever reason cannot.

A good leader knows the value of bringing some calm to stressful situations. As Jesus once said to those under his leadership, “Peace I leave with you.… Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.”2

Peace means equilibrium, understanding, justice, mercy, caring, and harmony. To be a peacemaker means to quench the desire for revenge and replace it with the desire to put others first for their well-being.

However, peacemaking does not mean seeking peace at any cost, for the peacemaker realizes that peace at any price will usually result in events that are anything but peaceful. A peacemaker is not an appeaser. He or she is not a person who is easy to shove around and who refuses to take a position. We are not talking about wimpy leaders who avoid confrontation. Quite the contrary. A peacemaker understands the positive role of conflict in building a solid team. A peacemaker is one who through strength and knowledge establishes good relationships between estranged parties—relationships based on truth and fairness.

Peacemaking leaders encourage open discussion and honest debate, which actually improves relationships. Harmony comes from the trust that is developed, not from the suppression of discussion and debate. In fact, great peacemaking leaders create more energized debate than normal.

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BlogLeadership

Dilemma is Leadership

by Ron Potter

There’s an old joke about a sign over a shop that says

  • High Quality
  • Fast
  • Cheap
  • Chose any two of the three

For most of the industrial age, this has been the Holy Grail. Get things out the door at the lowest possible cost and yet maintain good quality. There have been several books written on this exact theme. Inc. magazine recently ran an article titled “Why Faster, Better, Cheaper is no longer good enough.”

Most of the things written seem to be adding additional components that must now be included along with Faster, Better and Cheaper (FBC). I would like to take a slightly different slant.

If you’re focused on FBC and any of the additional components being mentioned today, you’re not a leader you’re a manager. Managers are looking for the Holy Grail believing that if we just do these things better than the competition, we’ll win. Not true. Or even if it is true the victory will be painfully short in today’s rapid pace of change.

Leaders focus on Dilemmas

Leaders don’t focus on FBC. Leaders focus on dilemmas.

di·lem·ma: a situation in which a difficult choice has to be made between two or more alternatives, especially equally undesirable ones.

Synonyms: quandary, predicament, Catch-22, vicious circle, plight, mess, muddle

You’ll notice that all the synonyms have no answer. It’s simply the choice between two equally undesirable answers. In business, it’s sometimes the choice between to desirable answers. Both alternatives are good and may even be requirements, you just don’t have the resources to do both. You’re on the horns of a dilemma.

The point of this ancient saying “horns of a dilemma” is that you’re going to get gored either way. Whichever choice you make there will be blood.

Let’s say you must make a choice between fixing a short-term problem and investing in long-term success. You just don’t have the resources to do both. You’re on the horns of a dilemma. If you chose the short-term solution the long-term results are going to gore you and vice versa.

The point of this post is to evaluate what types of decisions you and your team making? If it fits into the FBC categories, you’re managing. If you’re dealing with dilemmas, you’re trying to lead through difficult decisions.

Lead by facing the Dilemmas

If you’re not dealing with dilemmas you’re not leading. If your leadership team is not dealing with dilemmas, you’ve already lost.

Leadership Obstacles

One of the major obstacles keeping leadership teams from dealing with dilemmas is second-guessing. It’s very easy to look at the damage caused by choosing one side or the other of a dilemma and ask,

  • Why did you make this decision?
  • Who made this mistake?
  • How could you have missed the consequences?

These and other forms of second guessing don’t take into account that a choice had to be made and it was a dilemma. It’s not that the decision makers weren’t aware of the damage that would occur with either decision. It’s just that the dilemma is forgotten or misunderstood or misrepresented at some point in the future.

Leaders and Leadership teams must be dealing with dilemmas. However, it’s critically important that the decision made is recorded and understood when the resulting damage occurs.

Dealing with dilemmas is difficult.

Dealing with dilemmas is acknowledging the damage that will be done either way.

Dealing with dilemmas is leadership. Leadership is difficult. Be a good leader anyway.

 

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Build Up or Blow Up

by Ron Potter

Edify or Power

Edify: Build, Construct. Install, Teach, Instruct; Improve.

Power: Greek = Dynamikos – Strength, Control, Mastery, Lordship, Dominion

This word Edify is almost always associated with relationships.

  • Marriage
  • Friendship
  • Acquaintance
  • Colleagues
  • Team Mates

When it comes to relationships, you should always be in the “Building Up” mode.

Another closely associated word is power. However, the root word for power is Dynamikos. This is the root word for dynamite. It’s tremendously powerful, but it’s designed to blow up, explode, and tear down.

Edify: build up.

Power: Tear down or blow up.

What’s going on in your team?

Often, while teams are in the room together there seems to be great camaraderie. But what happens outside the room? Do team members begin complaining about colleagues? Do they express doubt about motives or direction of action? Are they concerned members are not aligned with the team goals?

What do you do in that case? Do you continue to blow things up? Or, do you edify?

“No, you’re wrong. That person listened, participated, shared, was vulnerable, was open. They performed very honorably.”

Now that language,

  • Begins to edify the other person.
  • Starts changing the attitude within the corporation about that other person.

Agree to Disagree

At one company I was working with the CEO and leadership team down through the VP, Director and manager levels. I began to see what I would describe as an all-out war between two groups of people. It was being very disruptive, very costly, and there seemed to be no effort on either team’s part to reconcile the difference and come to an agreement that was going to advance the needs of the company.

As I began looking for the root of that division, it led upward. Right up to the executive team. It became clear that two members of the executive team totally disagreed on the approach to an issue. As I talked to each of them individually and confidentially, they explained their disagreement with the words “We have simply agreed to disagree.” On the surface, that seems very honorable.

“We’re not going to get into conflict, we’re not going to fight with each other. We know that we have a disagreement on this. We’re just going to calmly and politely agree to disagree.”

The cost of Power versus Edification

The cost of that disagreement would be almost impossible to calculate. It was costing that company a tremendous amount of money, creativity, human health, and focus.

The top team cannot agree to disagree! If you’re a part of the executive team, you’re there to reach agreement. Not just reach agreement on the simple stuff. Reach agreement on the things that are very difficult, that create huge dilemmas. You may have absolutely opposite beliefs and assumptions but it’s still your job to reach that agreement so that the corporation can move forward effectively.

Did those two leaders edify each other? No. They simply said to their organization:

So-and-so doesn’t agree. They think this is the wrong way to go. We’re not going to agree with that. We’re going to do our own thing.

United teams must reach an agreement of difficult issues with edification.

We do have some very different opinions here, but everyone has been honorable, direct, and vulnerable in where they are on this. Despite those different opinions, we have reached an agreement. Everyone is behind this and everyone is contributing their part.

Now we’re getting somewhere. Now we just eliminated huge frictional cost within the organization, simply because we used edification versus power.

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NEXT

by Ron Potter

What will you do next? This one question may be the key to success.

Our lives are filled with events. This list is long and complex, especially when you add personal experiences, but I’ll just stick with corporate issues in this blog post.

Events can include issues such as:

  • A competitor surprises you with a new product or strategy in the marketplace.
  • A disruptive new technology catches you off guard.
  • You fail at an assignment.
  • A teammate seems to be cutting you down behind your back.
  • Your boss seems to be showing favorites on the team.
  • You just experienced great corporate, team or personal success.

As you can see these events can range from outside your control, to personal experiences, failures, successes and everything in between.

With each of these, we will experience emotions. These emotions will vary as wildly at the events themselves and range from good to bad. We may experience:

  • A desire to retaliate.
  • Feelings of failure.
  • Wanting to react immediately.
  • Being a victim.

Again, our reaction, emotions, and immediate feelings will be all over the board. They’re natural and they will happen. Don’t assume that “as an adult” you should keep your emotions under control and feel bad about your reactions. They’re human. They will happen.

But, what you do next will determine your success or failure now and throughout life. Having the initial reaction is involuntary. What you do next is a choice.

If you’re part of a team or maybe even the team leader, you should intentionally talk about what you do next to deal with the issue.

If you’re dealing with a failure:

  • don’t stick your head in the sand
  • don’t ignore the truth
  • don’t hang on to some false or out of date view of the world
  • don’t write it off as bad luck

If you’re dealing with success:

  • Don’t let it go to your head
  • Don’t assume you’ve got everything figured out
  • Don’t assume your success will last more than a day
  • Don’t stop figuring out how to get better every day

Whatever the circumstances, figure out what to do next.

Great individuals and teams are constantly learning and growing. They’re figuring out what to do next.

Enjoy your success. Mourn your failures. But in all circumstances constantly be asking “What should we (I) being doing next?”

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