Ron’s Short Review: Tough slog of a book for me but some interesting parallels in history.
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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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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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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
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.
Ron’s Short Review: Classic book on Character and Virtue, the real issues behind great leadership.
Ron’s Short Review: I’m not sure we’ll see another Lincoln but building a team out of rivals is very powerful and we’re all trying to build teams out of people with very diverse points of view. Or at least we should be.
Ron’s Short Review: The Heath brothers write great books on story telling and how it can move us and our colleagues, clients, or customers.
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:
• 
Creativity
• 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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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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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
The links in the post above are “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will add value to my readers. I am disclosing this in accordance with the FTC’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”
Why are so many feeling that our Work-Life Balance is out of whack? In this series, I will explore four categories of issues that contribute to the feeling (and actuality):
Another moment in our career lives when things seem to get out of balance is during times of transition or transformation.
Transition
I was working with a client recently who may be one of the smartest and quickest people I work with. She had recently (about 8 weeks ago) taken over a new division within the company that was going to require the exercising of new leadership and management muscles that she hadn’t developed in her previous assignment. When I met with her she was expressing a great deal of personal frustration that she still didn’t know how to answer questions in certain areas and more importantly, didn’t know if a certain question or piece of information might be critical or just another piece of information.
During times of transition there seems to be two time frames that exhibit some consistency. The first is that it just takes about three months for you to get a handle on a new job. My client had stepped into her new role at the beginning of November. So, while she had been in the job for two months, with all of the holidays and vacation time taken during that time of year, she had really only experienced about a month of actual job time. I encouraged her to keep her frustration in check for a couple of more months and felt sure she would be feeling better about her job knowledge by the end of February.
The second time frame to pay attention to is something called the “window of opportunity.” The window usually opens about nine months into a new assignment and closes again at about the one-year tenure. If possible I recommend that new leaders not make any major changes (people, organization, vision, mission, etc.) before the window opens up at about nine months. If a leader makes these major moves before about nine months, people often wonder if they gave the incumbent person, system or process time to prove themselves. If the leader is still running things as usual after a year, people also wonder what new value the leader brought to the position. Now, there are always exceptions to this rule but if you’re feeling the stress of a new assignment, you might evaluate what are realistic expectations at this point in the transition.
Transformation
Transformation happens when you or someone else (or outside condition) is forcing a major transformation change on how work gets done. If you are the one being affected by the transformation, there is always the natural fear that you won’t have the ability or skills to perform and thrive in the new environment. This is the time to devout yourself to being open and learning what the new requirements and expectations are going to be. It is not the time to complain or lament about the way things used to be. Change happens. Get ahead of it.
If you’re the one driving the transformation, one thing I have always observed is that you will come to a point where it feels like failure. The new environment or approach hasn’t taken hold, the new vision or expectations are not emerging, or people are complaining and wanting to go back to the old way of doing things. To get through this one, turn to chapter 16 of my book “Trust Me” that’s titled Endurance. If you’ve taken all of the right steps (previous chapters) and know you’re headed in the right direction, stick with it. It’s always the darkest before the dawn.
Why are so many feeling that our Work-Life Balance is out of whack? In this series, I will explore four categories of issues that contribute to the feeling (and actuality):
Several years ago I learned some very interesting lessons about time management. I was working with a high level leadership team, all vice-presidents and above. While we were offsite spending time on leadership development issues one of the VP’s on the team finally stopped the process and said something like the following:
“Ron, we think all of these leadership issues you’re trying to teach us are wonderful and important, but until you help us with our time management problems, we can’t even think about putting more effort into improving our leadership skills. We’re all working at least 60 hours a week as it is. We’re destroying our health and our families. Help us with our time management first and then we’ll be ready to learn new leadership skills from you.”
He was right. They were worn out and suffering. I turned to a time management model put forth by Steven Covey in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change
His premise was that once we fulfill all of the tasks in Quadrant I (both urgent and important) we tend to go on to tasks that fall primarily in Quadrant III (Urgent but not necessarily important).
I sent the team off to record where all of their time went over the next two weeks. When they returned with the record of approximately 120 hours each had expended over the last two weeks, we listed every activity for each participant on a flip chart and posted it on the wall. Then we went through a very interesting exercise. Line-item by line-item we went through each chart and identified into which quadrant it should be placed. A very interesting pattern began to emerge. On several of the line-items, the owner of the sheet would say that he/she had spend a number of hours producing a particular report (as an example) that was urgent but not important and they intended to stop performing that task in the future. However, once stated, there always seemed to be a challenge from the room. Someone would say, “If you don’t produce that report, I can’t get my job done. It must be placed in the important row.”
But, when we began to look into what data in the report was required, there often seemed to be a simple solution to the second persons needs that still eliminated the effort needed to produce the report (it’s on the web site, a quick email, it can be found in another location, etc.) The problem was solved and the bulk of the work eliminated.
Once we completed all of the “negotiations” around the room and everyone had agreed on the quadrants into which all work had been placed, a horrifying statistic emerged. Only 20% of all the work fell into the “Important” row. One VP hung his head and said:
“Do you mean to tell me that I just spend 24 hours of meaningful work over the last two weeks and all the rest was just thrashing?”
I’m afraid so.
The lessons that I have learned from this experience (conducted now several times) include:
- It’s difficult (impossible) to determine on your own how much of your work falls into which quadrants. There is always someone else that needs to be brought into the negotiations.
- It takes team support to stick with the decisions. Even after everyone agrees that you have some quadrant III work that can be dropped, there will be those who still want you to do it. It takes a team to help you say “no”.
- If more than 70% of your work falls into quadrant I (both urgent and important), you’re headed for burn out and failure somewhere down the line because you are not doing enough important but not urgent work (prevention, production capability, relationship building, big picture thinking, etc.)
The links in the post above are “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will add value to my readers. I am disclosing this in accordance with the FTC’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”