It's Time to Lead

Last night, as I was telling the kids goodnight, I noticed that the movie Tin Cup was on television.  I’m not a huge movie buff but that’s one of the classics in my opinion.  I happen to walk through the room just at the beginning of the scene where Roy McAvoy, with a chance to win the U.S. Open golf tournament, decides to risk it all to make the shot of a lifetime rather than playing it safe to preserve the win.  The scene is here if you care to watch it, it’s a great one.  No one could understand why McAvoy was throwing away the win, but he simply had a different definition of success.

Where is your definition of success taking you?

What success means to us determines how we live, how we work and how we interact with others.  In McAvoy’s case, he valued the immortality of doing something that had never been accomplished more than he valued winning the tournament, a feat duplicated every year.  As leaders, do you think we operate differently if our definition of success is building a global enterprise rather than simply making a comfortable living?  While both are admirable, they create two very different paths.

It’s easy to adopt the definition that others around us have if we haven’t already established one for ourselves.   Many leaders experience a time when success means the bigger staff or the larger office, the one with the corner windows and the solid wood furniture.  Candidly, I’ve been there too.  Over time though, I think many of the best leaders I’ve worked with go through a shift where what becomes more important are the things that last.  Developing others, building a sustainable enterprise and creating opportunity and capability for the people who work with them seem to become the new success.  Ironically, it often happens soon after they get the corner office and think… now what?

For some, the shift never happens.  That’s when we get the Enrons of the world, or any organization that goes completely off the cliff.  Examine any tragedy closely and you will usually find at the center of it, a leader who failed to shift their definition of success even after it became clear that the path they were on would not achieve the results they wanted to be known for.

Make no mistake, our vision of success will be the thing that drives us.  We have to be certain as leaders that we’ve thought long enough about it to be certain it’s the one that will take us where we truly want to go.

Tin Cup is a work of fiction but the parallels still exist.  Roy McAvoy knew that accomplishing something that would stand for all time was his vision of success, not merely becoming a name on a long list of tournament winners.  Because of that, he knew when it was time to depart from the conventional wisdom of what success meant, and stick to his own.

Why does your business exist?  No matter what kind of organization you are leading, whether you are an executive in a huge corporation or a solo entrepreneur, you have a concept of what your business is about.  How you think about that question will greatly determine what your business looks like a year from now.

In simple terms, you either believe your business is here to become better at what it does today, or to accomplish something different tomorrow.  The nature of your business is either to perpetuate its current function, or to grow into a new one.

You as a leader are either focused on the future, on innovation, creativity and risk or you are focused on process, precision, and attention to detail. While some extraordinary leaders have acquired the ability to be good at both of these things, it’s rare that one kind of leader can stand to live the other life for long.

Are you playing the right leadership role in your business?

Most leaders either have the mindset of let’s build something great on this land or let’s go conquer new territory.  It’s important to know which leader you want to be and which path is more invigorating for you.  If you are longing for new frontiers and find yourself charged with improving execution of a current process, it feels a little like playing tennis with a baseball bat.  If tweaking and perfecting are what you love and you are forced to focus on blue sky thinking, well that’s just as tough.

Continue reading Builder or Conqueror, Which Kind of Leader Are You?

Watching culture change happen within a business is something that makes a lasting impression.  There are many organizations that don’t understand why culture is so important and many more that want to change it but don’t know how.  I’ve even read articles like this one, that suggest it may not even be possible.

Culture change, to most business leaders, seems too big, too unwieldy and too slow to be worth the trouble.  That’s why many resort to more familiar tactics like, re-organization, re-engineering, a new performance management process or a training program, anything to avoid tackling culture change.  At least if those things don’t work,(and the research says they probably wont) they failed in a conventional way, rather than trying something rash like changing the culture.

When you get to watch it happen, and even be part of it, you understand that if you want to take an organization to the next level of growth and create sustainable success, changing the culture isn’t optional.

Will your culture help your business grow, or kill it

I’ve been working with a business that has started that cultural transformation and the improvements are already obvious and welcome to the people working there.  I’ve had the opportunity to engage with three levels of leadership in the company and at each level they are seeing tangible results in the way business is conducted and the way clients are served.

Continue reading Culture Change, It Could Happen

I was working with a leader recently who wanted the people on her team to treat their relationship differently.  Because she was approachable, compassionate and empathetic to her team, they began to share every trouble, woe and bit of drama in their lives with her, often when there were pressing business issues that needed to be discussed instead.

The question so many leaders face is how do I build a productive relationship with my team so that I can learn about the things that are important to them and what their goals and ambitions are without setting up a situation where they share the details of every life struggle with me.  People don’t just give up their personal goals and life’s desires to just anyone and without an understanding of those, our coaching will be ineffective.  But we really don’t want to spend critical work time hearing about the meddling sister or the friend who was rude to them over the weekend either.

The team will play on the field you define.

The solution is in a concept I like to call “chalking the field.”  If you think about the grounds crew preparing for a sporting event, they have to establish the limits of the playing field by where they place the chalk lines on the field.  Once the chalk (or in some cases paint) is placed on the field, everyone can see it, calls are made based on it, and there are no questions about what is in and out of bounds.

Continue reading Effective Leadership Means Stopping The Drama

Most of the companies I work with dedicate some percentage of their revenue toward developing the leaders in their business.   One of the discussions we often have up front is the difference between spending money to train leaders and investing to grow them.

I spend money on a nice dinner; I invest in my retirement.  So what’s the difference when it comes to leadership?

The difference is creating a system that ensures that you will have leaders growing in your business every day and learning to contribute more, develop stronger teams and drive employee engagement.  That’s investment.  Spending is when you come across a training program that will create some good will in the short run, but soon, like the nice dinner, it’s value is gone.

Are you consistently growing leaders with your investment?

Consider this; would a business invest in technology that they knew would be useful for only a few weeks or even days?  Would it invest in an advertising campaign that lasted less than a week?

Developing leaders is among the most important success factors for any business.  The decisions they make, the culture they create, the growth, or lack of it, that they cause has more impact on sustainable business success than almost any other factor.  And yet, we tackle their development in fits and starts with one-time events and short-term efforts.

Continue reading Leadership Development… Are You Investing, Or Just Spending?

It’s hard to work in the area of developing leaders without addressing the issue of management versus leadership.  Much debate has been had about what each of these words means in the business world and which one is more important.  Recently, I’ve even heard a lot of discussion about the issue of individuals leading too much and not managing enough.  One example of that is a recent article from Harvard Business Review that states:

“”Big picture only” leaders often make decisions without considering the constraints that affect the cost and time required to implement them, and even when evidence begins mounting that it is impossible or unwise to implement their grand ideas, they often choose to push forward anyway.”

Leadership has become, for some, an idea that you sit atop the organization and gaze upon it from a lofty perch where you make disconnected decisions and advance your own ideas.  That’s not leadership or management, that’s simply abuse of power.

The very notion that the focus of leadership is on the actions of the leader is flawed.  Leadership is about others.  It’s about being the catalyst for great things to be accomplished by those who otherwise might accomplish less.

Great leaders work on all of the components of leadership.

The definition of leadership I use when I work with clients is this: causing individuals, organizations, or communities to achieve more of their potential in a positive, sustainable way.  When working from that perspective, someone who makes uninformed decisions from a detached position isn’t a leader, no matter what position he or she happens to hold.  Those decisions can’t cause the organization and the individuals who make it up to achieve more, and often result in actually hampering the success of the business.

Continue reading Management vs. Leadership….Or Is It?

Often, when organizations are trying to make change happen, it comes down to a couple of levers that they need to pull to start the motion.  It might be organizational structure, or process, or communication.  Almost always, it’s a combination of things that need to be addressed in order to cause change to happen.  But every single time, part of the equation is human behavior.  When I ask the leaders in the companies I work with how they intend to change human behavior, the first thing they say usually revolves around compensation.

Money is a very small part of the motivation puzzle.

I’m certain that there has been a time when I’ve asked that question and gotten an answer that wasn’t related to compensation, but candidly, it’s pretty rare.  At least part of the answer is usually about adding the new behavior to the list of performance items that affect their bonus, or worse, threatening to take money off the table if they don’t perform the new trick.  It seems to be part of our business DNA that we use money to motivate people to do anything, anytime, in any way.

It’s ironic then, that anytime I work with a leader who has accomplished anything of significance and I ask them what motivated them to make it happen, they never say “I did it for the money.”  Maybe it really was the money, but they just don’t want to admit it.  If that’s the case, please ignore the rest of this article.

Continue reading Are Your People Telling You to Keep the Change?

I’ve worked with a lot of folks lately who have had a change in careers or are looking for a new one and one thing keeps becoming clearer to me as I have conversations with these folks.  It’s not about the ground gained, it’s about the potential created.

So many people who were focused on gaining yards and moving forward with their career find themselves back at the beginning, and now the game has new rules.

Most of us have observed others who worked every day with their sights set on the next promotion, the next opportunity to impress someone, or the next power shift they need to align with.  Managing up becomes the skill they master.

When things change, who you built is more important than the career you had.

It’s easy to understand; in fact, in many companies, it’s probably been one of the most lucrative skill sets you could possess.  Many a fortune has been made by reading the company politics and positioning yourself to be the next heir to the corner office.  There’s also no question that building effective relationships with the powers that be is necessary in any organization, and it’s not inherently a bad thing.

The challenge enters when it becomes how some individuals spend the bulk of their time at work.  We’ve all known people who made a living by telling the boss what they wanted to hear and keeping them happy.  They have focused years of energy in a direction that now has no lasting benefit.  It’s akin to a master’s degree in typewriter repair.

Continue reading Don’t Just Build a Career, Create Potential

I recently wrote an article about how leaders focus on things a little differently than others and that it’s not that they engage in different activities, as much as it is how they engage.  Leaders tend to think differently about their daily activities and focus on a different outcome, so they get exactly that.  One example that I used was that some of the best leaders I’ve worked with enter a meeting thinking about what they need to learn from their team and how to help them find solutions, while others may enter a meeting thinking about what they need to tell their team about how to execute better.  Both leaders had a meeting, but only one actually moved the business forward and increased the capability of the team.

Leadership is often about teaching others to fish for themselves.

One of the key points I was trying to get across is that leaders are typically thinking about how to best help others improve as they go through their daily activities, while many managers are focused more on what they need to get from others during those same activities.  There’s plenty of time for leaders to focus on what they themselves need, but that should be done when they aren’t around others in the business.  That’s precious time to learn and to understand different perspectives that others have.  The more leaders understand the perspectives of those around them, the more they are likely to broaden their own view, look at problems in new ways, and find new solutions and new avenues to greater success.

A few days after I wrote the article, I was taking my 5 year old son fishing and caught myself making the very mistake that I was asking leaders to be aware of.  I was standing there while he was fishing, but I wasn’t engaged in what was going on with him at all.  I was thinking about my own business and the things I needed to do to accomplish my own goals.  I was missing a leadership opportunity.  And although it wasn’t about business, it was still about leadership.  Becoming a leader isn’t just about business; it’s about others.

Continue reading Leadership Lessons From a Five Year Old

One of the most common questions I get when I am working with leaders who are trying to make a shift in how they lead themselves and others, goes something like this:  ”How am I supposed to do all of this other leadership and people stuff when it takes all of my time just to get my daily activities accomplished?”

It’s a valid question as long as your perspective is that leadership means doing more.  The question goes away when you think about leadership as not what you do, but how you do it. What that common question sometimes illustrates, is a completely different perspective on what great leadership looks like.

I often like to put the answer in a little different context.  Does Lance Armstrong stop pedaling the bike in order to focus on winning the race?  We all know the answer to that question.  Clearly he’s not focused on the mechanics of riding a bike when he’s trying to win a race with his team.  He’s thinking about the next stage, the next climb, the next adjustment and then operating the bike with those thoughts in mind.  One of my favorite Lance Armstrong quotes is “Winning is about heart, not just legs. It’s got to be in the right place.”  Becoming a better leader doesn’t always mean that we change the things we do.  It does mean that we change how we do those things by focusing on different things while we do them.

Are you spending time, or investing it?

It may not mean that we spend more time in meetings, on calls, or in one on one conversations; It does mean we get more engagement from others and better results for the time we do spend.  It may not mean that we write fewer emails but it does mean that the emails we write cause others to think differently about challenges and learn to tackle them on their own.  It may not mean that we have to interview fewer people but it does mean that the people we hire contribute more to the company for longer periods of time.

Continue reading Are We Investing Our Time, Or Spinning Our Wheels?