Coaching Tip: The Leadership Blog

Personal Leadership Philosophy

To create your personal leadership philosophy, you must define your principles or rules of conduct.  These principles you will live and work by are called maxims.  In the context of the leadership maxims approach, it is a short, personally meaningful, and easily explained statement that reflects one of your assumptions & beliefs about leadership.

Maxims do not contain buzzwords ( like leverage, optimize, outside the box, win-win ).  Maxims are simple, clear statements that serve as reminders for how you want to behave and lead and how you want your team members to behave.  When written well, your leadership maxims become simple daily reminders of how you should behave so your actions are consistent with who you want to be as a leader.

The all-encompassing nature of your leadership maxims provides you a means for living your leadership philosophy during every waking moment of your existence.  It is that constant application of your leadership maxims that strengthen the leader you are and will become.  Theory is nice.  Application is where you have an impact on the world around you.

The approach outlined in "One Piece of Paper" by Mike Figliuolo will help you to clarify, for yourself and others, the heart of your personal leadership philosophy, and to do so simply enough that you can capture it on a single piece of paper.  As you apply this method, you will write down fifteen to twenty emotionally powerful statements or reminders of personal events that will serve to guide your behaviors on a daily basis.

To get a complete view of your leadership philosophy, you need to evaluate four aspects of leadership:

Leading yourself: what motivates you and what are your rules of personal conduct?

Leading the thinking: where are you taking the organization and how will you innovate to drive change?

Leading your people: how can you lead them as individuals rather than treating them like faceless cogs in the machine?

Leading a balanced life: if you are burned out, you are worthless.

All four aspects of leadership are equally important.  If you truly want your philosophy to be well-constructed, the tools you use should all come from the same toolbox.  This book is that toolbox:

 Mike Figliuolo: One Piece of Paper: The Simple Approach to Powerful, Personal Leadership

Download "Can't Get Enough Leadership" to your computer: Add to Cart

Kindle Edition (preview or buy): John Agno: Can't Get Enough Leadership: Book Notes & Coaching Tips

 ePub/Nook Format: http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Cant-Get-Enough-Leadership/John-Agno/e/2940012474339

 Buy all ebook formats at Smashwords: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/64141

Why I Wrote Managing (Right) for the First Time

By Guest Author David C. Baker

As a management consultant, I’ve had the privilege of interviewing more than 10,000 employees across 600+ companies.   

Personally, I’ve been managed poorly, and I’ve been managed well.  I’ve managed others poorly, certainly.  And I like to think that my experiences have made me a better manager of others….though you’ll have to ask some of my old employees to get the full scoop. 

We spend a staggering percentage of our lives at work. Our friends come largely from workplace connections.  And what do we whine about after the end of a long day?  A boss who isn’t managing or a co-worker who isn’t being managed.  Managing right is worth talking about. 

We’re humans, after all, and at its core, managing is essentially a human activity.  As impactful as it is, it’s still sloppy, never-ending, unclear, and satisfying only at unpredictable moments.  That’s why you don’t find many good books on the topic, by the way. 

Because managing is essentially human. There’s little science to it. What’s more, everyone has a different style of managing and the notion of corralling all those “best practices” into something useful makes as much sense as asking all the best songwriters in the world to divulge their best practices. 

No, managing is individual, and that’s because it flows from who we are as individual people.  What that means is the best we can do is get the core principles right and forget about the rest. 

That’s what Managing (Right) for the First Time is about: the core principles for first time managers.  If you get those right, you’ll figure the rest of it out in time.

 David C. Baker: Managing (Right) for the First Time

Reluctant Leadership

It should come as no surprise that statistically most of us are not born leaders.  Though running a business or managing a department, does force the issue, creating unwitting, unprepared and usually poor leaders of many of us. 

Being a leader is tantamount to being a risk taker, which is essentially the same thing as being an entrepreneur.  Yet, many people become managers because it pays more salary and seems like a better job than what they have been doing---only to find as managers, they needed to take risks by making difficult decisions.  The result is managers the world over are looking for ways to get out of managing.  The benefits of management (prestige, control, money) are enough to keep them managing so that employment remains intact, but there are parts of their lives they would gladly give up and management is at the top of that list.

If you are typical, you have a sense about where to head with each decision, but fear of some sort is holding you back.  But not trusting your instincts leads to inaction, a choice--a decision-by-indecision--is typically worse than the wrong but more proactive choice.

How do you recognize a leader?

It is natural to expect an observed example of leadership ability to manifest itself in various situations.  But the exaggerated expectation of consistency is a common error.  We are prone to think that the world is more regular and predictable than it really is, because our memory automatically and continuously maintains a story about what is going on, and because the rules of memory tend to make that story as coherent as possible and to suppress alternatives. Fast thinking is not prone to doubt.

The confidence we experience as we make a judgment is not a reasoned evaluation of the probability that it is right. Confidence is a feeling, one determined mostly by the coherence of the story and by the ease with which it comes to mind, even when the evidence for the story is sparse and unreliable. The bias toward coherence favors overconfidence. An individual who expresses high confidence probably has a good story, which may or may not be true.  A good actor does not make an effective leader.

When a compelling impression of a particular event clashes with general knowledge, the impression commonly prevails.  And this goes for you, too.  The confidence you will experience in your future judgments will not be diminished by what you just read, even if you believe every word.

Improving Reluctant Leaders

A new book, "Managing Right for the First Time," by David C. Baker is a field guide for reluctant leaders who were promoted for the wrong reasons.  The author writes, "You cannot work too hard to avoid the inevitable grayness otherwise called management.  Instead, you should be trying to do the right thing, looking for ways to clarify your own plans for this group of people.  After all that deliberation, in the end you must step back and do it because it's the right thing.  Or at least because you think it might be, which could very well be as much certainty as you'll get."

"If you want to improve, the key is to do it, listening to a few principles in the background.  Here are a few of those principles:

First, just do it.  Unhealthy management environments are marked by managers who are doing the work of the firm instead of managing people of the firm.

Second, get a coach.  Any personal struggles will boil over into your management experience.  If you are struggling with your personal significance, intent on controlling every aspect of life and work, or highly fearful of confrontation, working through those issues will be time well spent.

Third, get a life. Quit trying to please everyone, particularly employees.

Fourth, articulate your personal vision.  What do you want to do when you grow up?  How does your current role fit into that plan?

True leadership is always mixed with some reluctance because it's always messy.  But you must move beyond your reluctance to lead, recognizing that you'll never shed that reluctance that properly comes from wanting to know you've done the right thing."

Source: The New York Times Magazine, October 23, 2011

 David C. Baker: Managing (Right) for the First Time

Download "Can't Get Enough Leadership" to your computer: Add to Cart

Kindle Edition (preview or buy): John Agno: Can't Get Enough Leadership: Book Notes & Coaching Tips

 ePub/Nook Format: http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Cant-Get-Enough-Leadership/John-Agno/e/2940012474339

 Buy all ebook formats at Smashwords: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/64141

Word-of-Mouth and Social Media

Ask a Las Vegas cab driver, 'What's the best show in town?'  He will probably reply with something like this, "Oh, Jay Leno!  My wife and I just went to see him. He gives a special show for taxi drivers at two in the morning.  Otherwise, we could never afford to go.  Kenny Rogers does the same thing when he's in town."
 
You wouldn't think that anyone as big in the entertainment field as Jay Leno and Kenny Rogers needs to give away their performances, but they do.  Both realize that some of the best word of mouth advertising they could have would be taxi drivers raving about their shows.
 
If you could do just one thing to help your customer and your business, what would that be?  The short answer is to give more of what you have away. 

Old-School Business + New-School Technologies = Success

Word-of-mouth was always the most reliable way to build a business and it still is: Studies show it positively influences a purchase at roughly 82%, compared with paid advertising at about 10% to 14%.   It makes perfect sense.  If you're looking for a great restaurant, who will you trust--a close friend, or a newspaper ad?

Social media has such an impact because it moves word-of-mouth marketing orders-of-magnitude faster than ever before.  People who like you and your business products or services will market your business for you.  For free.  Moreover, one person can now reach a lot of people who trust them on social networking sites.  In seconds.

People are "trust filters" for each other.  The difference now is that they're using simple yet sophisticated tools that allow conversations to spread farther, faster and wider.  When you start engaging in social media, you can get on people's radar relatively quickly.  Then, if they want to learn more about you, people will "Google" you.  They will scour your Facebook page.  They'll watch YouTube videos of you.

 Eric Harr: The Real Truth About Social Media

Good Times Goodbye, Hello Deflation!

The plight of America’s unemployed is terrible.

Yet, for the 91 percent of those in the U.S. labor force who do have a job, the numbers also tell a dark story. Take-home pay, adjusted for inflation, fell 0.3 percent in August, the third decrease in five months, the Commerce Dept. just reported. The declines followed news from the Census Bureau that median household income in 2010 fell to $49,445, the lowest in more than a decade, while the poverty rate jumped to 15.1 percent, a 17-year high. Salary and benefit growth “has been going nowhere,” says Mark Zandi, chief economist at (MCO) Moody’s Analytics in West Chester, Pa. “One of the key reasons the recovery has stalled is that real incomes have fallen."

Stock market losses are eroding personal wealth.  “It’s hard to see where consumers are going to get a lot of wherewithal to sustain strong spending,” says (JPM) JPMorgan Chase’s chief U.S. economist, Michael Feroli.

The share of households saying it was a bad time to buy goods and services was the highest in three years. A record 91 percent of consumers expect that growth in their incomes will match or fall behind price gains in the coming year, according to participants in the September (TRI)Thomson Reuters /University of Michigan sentiment survey, which dates back to 1978. Until people see their wages or the labor market get better, they will be “spending on necessities, not desires,” says Chris G. Christopher Jr., senior principal economist at IHS Global Insight.

The worsening outlook for incomes will cause “continued pressure on home prices and on the stock market,” says Malcolm E. Polley, who oversees $1 billion as chief investment officer at Stewart Capital Advisors in Indiana, Pa. There may be higher use of 401(k) loans as emergency funds. Americans will feel even poorer. “Perception is reality from the standpoint of consumers and investors,” Polley says. “We need people to start feeling good about themselves.”

As demonstrations took to the streets across the country to decry the excesses of Wall Street, a reporter asked President Barack Obama what he thought of them.  Obama allowed that he understood their anger and even offered a bit of carefully modulated praise.  Even before the protests started on September 17, the Administration had begun to move in that direction with a $447 billion job creation plan, to be funded by a tax on the rich.

"The protesters are giving voice to a broad-based frustration about how our financial system works," the President said at an October 6 press conference.  His kind words for Occupy Wall Street were a sign of the four-week-old grassroots leadership movement's success.

Source: Bloomberg BusinessWeek, October 17, 2011

Warning!  Social might is now moving toward your community, state, nation, as well as global corporations.

We have entered the age of empowered individuals, who use potent new technologies and harness social media to organize themselves.  Most are ordinary people with new tools to force you to listen to what they care about and to demand respect.  The institutions of modern developed societies, whether governments or companies, are not prepared for this social power. 

With unemployment terrible and employee take-home pay evaporating, how will your organization respond when a grassroots leadership movement demonstrates in your community or outside your place of work?

Creative Thinkering for Logical Thinkers

by Guest Author Michael Michalko

We are educated to be analytical, logical thinkers.  Consequently, we have the ability to make common associations between subjects that are related or at least remotely related.

We are far better at associating two things (for example, apples and bananas are both fruits) than we are at forcing ourselves to see connections between things that seem to have no association (for example, a can opener and a pea pod). 

Jeff Hawkins, in his book On Intelligence, explains how our ability to associate related concepts limits our ability to be creative. We form mental walls between associations of related concepts and concepts that are not related.  For example, if asked to improve the can opener, we will make connections between all our common experiences and associations with can openers. Our fixation with our common associations will produce ideas for can openers that are very similar to the can openers that exist. 

Developing the skill of forcing connections between unrelated things will tear down the walls between related and unrelated concepts.  What connections, for example, can you force yourself to see between a can opener and a pea pod?

The function of a can opener is “opening.”  How do things in other domains open?  For example, in nature a pea pod opens when a seam weakens as the pod ripens. Thinking simultaneously about a pea pod and a can opener in the same mental space will force a mental connection between the pea pod seam and a can opener.  This inspires the idea of opening a can by pulling a weak seam (like the one in a pea pod).  Instead of an idea to improve the can opener, we’ve produced an idea for a new can design. This idea is one you would never get using conventional thinking. 

This is an example of conceptual blending, which is the act of combining, or relating, unrelated items in order to solve problems, create new ideas, and even rework old ideas. It succeeds because it is not possible to think of two subjects, no matter how remote, without making connections between the two.  It is no coincidence that the most creative and innovative people throughout history have been experts at forcing new mental connections via the conceptual blending of unrelated subjects. 

Michael Michalko is the author of Creative Thinkering, Thinkertoys, Cracking Creativity, and ThinkPak. While an army officer, he organized a team of NATO intelligence specialists and international academics to find the best inventive thinking method. He has expanded and taught these techniques to numerous Fortune 500 companies and organizations. He lives in Rochester, New York.

 Michael Michalko: Creative Thinkering: Putting Your Imagination to Work

Building Leadership Trust

By Guest Author Mike Figliuolo, author of One Piece of Paper: The Simple Approach to Powerful, Personal Leadership. 

People follow leaders they trust.  Trust is based on predictability.  Sharing a clear, compelling leadership philosophy is the best way to become more predictable to your team (to see if your team trusts you, take this simple Trusted Leader Assessment).  

Many leadership philosophies are full of buzzwords.  That’s not authentic.  One Piece of Paper helps leaders articulate their philosophy through personal stories which humanize the leader and lead to real performance changes for the team.  Leaders must answer sixteen simple questions and those answers become a compelling, authentic leadership philosophy. 

The most important things leaders must understand are: 

• Be yourself.  Spare your team the corporate-speak and tell your personal story instead. They can spot a phony a mile away. 
• Give in to emotion.  Articulate your leadership philosophy as stories that have deep emotional meaning for you.  The stronger the emotions associated with the story, the more likely you are to change your behavior to be consistent with the lesson the story reminds you of. 
• Lead yourself.  You have to know where you want to go and define your personal code of conduct before you can expect to lead someone else.   
• Lead the thinking.  Your job is to set direction, challenge outdated thinking, and define standards.  Create reminders that force you to do these things on a regular basis. 
• Lead your people.  Get dirty. Know their jobs.  Know them as individuals – not as a box on an organization chart or a job title.  When they know you care about them as a person, they’re much more willing to give you everything they’ve got.   
• Lead a balanced life.  If you’re burned out, you’re worthless.  Set boundaries and stick to them.  Let everyone else know what they are.  Balance applies to your work too – have enough work you love to do to balance out all the mindless tasks you don’t enjoy. 
• Pull it together.  Document your reminders of how you want to behave on one piece of paper.  Tack it up on your wall.  Having that simple reminder of your approach to leadership always within arm’s reach will help you live up to that standard every day. 
• Share.  Tell people your personal story.  Help them understand the experiences that have made you who you are.  Sharing will help them understand you better.  That understanding builds trust between you and your team.

Mike Figliuolo is the managing director of thoughtLEADERS, LLC – a leadership development firm. 

 Mike Figliuolo: One Piece of Paper: The Simple Approach to Powerful, Personal Leadership

 David Horsager: The Trust Edge: How Top Leaders Gain Faster Results, Deeper Relationships, and a Stronger Bottom Line

  Vanessa Hall: The Truth About Trust in Business: How to Enrich the Bottom Line, Improve Retention, and Build Valuable Relationships for Success

Your Genius

Are you a genius?  This very question was asked at the 2010 TEDGlobal Conference in a powerful talk that redefined genius as something we all have, but need to find within.

 "No man is born into the world whose work is not born with him." James Russell Lowell

Yet, we've been conditioned to believe that geniuses are something we only read about in history books; Einstein and Mozart but not us.  Genius is about identifying your assets (skills, strengths, passions, creative abilities, assumptions/beliefs, values, guiding principles, vision and expertise) because these intangibles will lead you to your unique genius.

The place to start in assessing your genius is to take some self-assessments that help you know yourself better and identify your innate signature talents.  Then begin to identity your unique life purpose or life signature.

Your assets include all of your natural and cultivated aptitudes and skills.  The simplest way to view your assets is to think of them as professional capabilities that are predominantly cultivated on the left (logical) side of your brain. You have likely been programmed to assess your market value based on those attributes since you were a child.  For most people, the best measure of their human capital, at least in the workplace, is measured within the context of personal accomplishments.

Next, answer these five tough questions:

1. If you were on your deathbed and you wanted to tell your children -- or the young people to whom you are close -- the three most important things that you've learned in your life, what would they be?
2. What gives you the greatest joy, satisfaction and renewal in your life and how could you do more of it?

3. Who are you without your job, your money?  Describe in detail.

4. What activities could you add to your life that would be a source of richness and joy!

5. Think of someone you admire deeply--and explain why.

The message is: Life is not a dress rehearsal.  You can solve your problems using the mind you know you have.  You can stop seeking answers outside yourself.  You can look within where genius lives.

It should be noted that in the business world, we don't speak much about the heart.  Yet, since all businesses are ultimately people serving people, our life's work should come from the heart. Long after your products or services have been delivered, the feelings and knowledge shared during the business relationship remain. People need connection, belonging and meaningful contribution. They need to know that their life and work matter.  Many people find that personal or career transformation is an excellent time to better understand their life's work and direction.

Leadership Skills

Though there is a debate about whether leadership is an ability people are born with or is cultivated, these skills deal with your ability to manage teams to accomplish goals and to inspire initiative in others.  Leadership skills also involve your ability to maintain a productive climate and to motivate, mobilize and meet high performance standards.

A leader has the capacity and confidence to draw others toward a desired conclusion.  This quality has saved the day countless times through history and plays a crucial role in human events.

 Gina A Rudan: Practical Genius: The Real Smarts You Need to Get Your Talents and Passions Working for YOU

 Kevin W. McCarthy: The On-Purpose Business: Doing More of What You Do Best More Profitably

My Personal Coach

The concept of a coach is slippery. Coaches are not teachers, but they teach. They’re not your boss—in professional tennis, golf, and skating, the athlete hires and fires the coach—but they can be bossy. They don’t even have to be good at the sport. The famous Olympic gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi couldn’t do a split if his life depended on it. Mainly, they observe, they judge, and they guide.

Coaches are like editors, another slippery invention. Consider Maxwell Perkins, the great Scribner’s editor, who found, nurtured, and published such writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. “Perkins has the intangible faculty of giving you confidence in yourself and the book you are writing,” one of his writers said in a New Yorker Profile from 1944. “He never tells you what to do,” another writer said. “Instead, he suggests to you, in an extraordinarily inarticulate fashion, what you want to do yourself.”

The coaching model is different from the traditional conception of pedagogy, where there’s a presumption that, after a certain point, the student no longer needs instruction. You graduate. You’re done. You can go the rest of the way yourself.

Coaching considers the teaching model naïve about our human capacity for self-perfection. It holds that, no matter how well prepared people are in their formative years, few can achieve and maintain their best performance on their own.

So what is professional coaching and how does it differ from consulting?

Download and listen to this MP3 recording of a recent interview of Coach Agno for the answer to that question.

For example, Itzhak Perlman enjoyed the services of a personal coach all along.  “The great challenge in performing is listening to yourself,” he said. “Your physicality, the sensation that you have as you play the violin, interferes with your accuracy of listening.” What violinists perceive is often quite different from what audiences perceive.

"Outside ears and eyes" have been invaluable at every point.

 

Are Leaders Born or Made?

By Guest Author Jack Zenger

Few things in my life have the consistency of the following exchange. 

          Stranger:  “So what do you do for a living?”

          Me:  “I’m involved in the leadership development profession.  We usually work with large organizations in developing their leaders, using a variety of programs and instruments.”

          Stranger:  (Pause) Mmmmm.  “So do you think leaders can be made or are they born that way?”

(Obviously the words vary to some degree, but the main idea is incredibly consistent.  What’s more, this has been happening for several decades.)

What’s most fascinating to me is that these are smart, educated people who ask this question, and they do it with great sincerity.   They seem genuinely interested in my view.  Why doesn’t this question go away?

I have come to the conclusion that the question shouldn’t go away. 

It has some real legitimacy to it.  Furthermore, I think we in the profession have been way too dismissive of the issue.  We have been inclined to say that leaders can be developed and we proceed to give examples of that to prove our case.  I place myself in that group.  In a book I co-authored nearly a decade ago, we inserted a chapter about the U.S. Marine Corps that described how they went about developing leaders.  The purpose was to try to put this issue to rest.

But lingering in the back of the minds of most of us in the profession is that gnawing realization that there are some qualities that some possess that indeed seem to be there from an early age.  Whether it is an abiding self-confidence, a high energy level or plain IQ points, we know that some start with clear advantages.  What’s more, our scientist friends conduct studies that look at identical twins separated at birth, and provide convincing evidence that such twins behave in similar ways.  Without getting into the weeds, the overall conclusion is that about 1/3 of behavior is driven by genetics and 2/3 is determined by life experiences from their environment. 

So the statement that leaders are made is technically correct if you go with the weight of evidence.  But that ignores that 1/3 of the equation that clearly falls into the “born that way” realm.  I’m advocating that we acknowledge this combination of factors.  Maybe in so doing we can all be clearer about what we can change and what we can’t. 

The reason for my interest in this question is to provide clarity about what people in my profession can and can’t do.  Let’s admit that we are not going to make a total transformation in every leader’s behavior.  Even if the person was extremely motivated and wanting to change, some things are just beyond our reach.

However, there’s a great deal that is capable of being changed.  If people continue to believe leaders are born that way, then the motivation for self-improvement and the passion for helping in the development of your subordinates is clearly going to diminish. 

Jack Zenger is the co-founder and CEO of Zenger Folkman, a leadership development firm focused on building strengths of individuals, teams, and organizations. Jack is a co-author of the recent Harvard Business Review article “Making Yourself Indispensable.” To learn more leadership tips from Jack, subscribe to his leadership blog or follow him on Twitter: @zengerfolkman.

 Scott Shane: Born Entrepreneurs, Born Leaders: How Your Genes Affect Your Work Life