Leader's Beacon | The Leadership Experts

In his short, wonderful book, Helping, Edgar Schein presents us, whether we are a professional coach or a manager playing a coaching role, with three ways to respond to a request for coaching/mentoring help (or, for that matter, advice with a problem on the job).

We can be:

1. an expert resource who provides information or steps in and solves the problem,
2. more like a doctor who prescribes a solution for the client to follow,
3. or a process consultant who works to get the client to come up with a solution.

The first two approaches are similar and I find they all too frequently represent the default response of managers when asked for help from their employees. Often it is for advice around a technical problem relating to work (e.g. how to go about solving a large machine’s breakdown). More often than not the more experienced boss has a good answer. The problem is that responses #1 & 2 build dependency on the boss and leave the employee feeling “one down,” lower in status to the manager. This mostly happens at a subconscious level. The lectured employee doesn’t consciously think, “Oh what a show off. I feel stupid having him give me the answer.”

When I am coaching a client, I have to be continuously mindful of the temptation to switch too soon from a process consultant role to just telling my client what to do. And when I push my advice or solution, unless my client is truly stuck, I receive back a shot of resentment and resistance from him (her).

My unwelcome advice makes her feel a tad inferior. Not surprisingly, she doesn’t like that feeling. Not a good mindset for your employee to be in if your goal is to help her learn and grow in knowledge, skill, and self-reliance.

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It being New Year’s time again, Bill George recently blogged about “Five Resolutions for Aspiring Leaders.” He talked about things you can do to develop yourself, beyond what you do in your direct job: such as finding a mentor, setting up a mastermind type group with other emerging and aspiring leaders,volunteering in the community in a leadership role, and traveling beyond your nation’s borders.

If you are serious about growing your leadership potential, these are all excellent ideas.

A mentor is like a scalpel, someone with whom you can address specific questions and problems you face.

What George calls a “leadership development group” provides you with an ongoing team of colleagues who will challenge you to risk and grow and hold your feet to the fire, all the while supporting you on your journey. (Note: Check out my Sept. 7/11 post, “Accelerate Your Growth with a Mastermind Group.”)

Civic and charitable organizations are always looking for people to volunteer for leadership roles on their board or on key initiatives. This is a great way to test your mettle at a higher level of responsibility than you may have in your current job. The learning you gain is totally transferrable to your career. Many municipalities and counties have community leadership organizations. For example, I have been active for years in Leadership Fairfax, Inc.

Travel, of course, forces you to deal with diversity and–if you opt to get around on your own, rather than through a charter tour company–function outside your comfort zone.

You don’t have to wait for your next promotion to grow your talents. How about making 2012 a year of continuous personal leadership development going on in the background.

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In my leadership workshops and keynote speeches I sometimes ask the group/audience to think of the best boss and worse boss they’ve ever had, what each did, and what effect it had on you.

People come up with all kinds of descriptors and behaviors of both bosses. But one thing emerges about the best boss ever (BBE). He or she is someone you want to work for…and keep working for.

Furthermore, a BBE is almost always someone that others in the organization would like to work for too. When an internal posting for a position in this manager’s department opens up, many people apply. They know that he/she will inspire them, give them opportunities to do their best work, encourage them, challenge them, and develop them. And that BBE doesn’t take himself/herself too seriously; there’s a refreshing humility present here.

BBE’s are “talent magnets.” I really like that term. I love the visual image of their drawing excellence to them and then of the synergy that results when all that talent starts working together.

But these “best bosses ever” don’t just aggregate talented employees. They nurture and grow the capacity and potential of their people. And, more than is the case with average managers, their people move on and up in the organization to new and greater contributions to the enterprise’s success. In other words, with the most talented employees, a form of reverse polarity at some point takes place.

Alas, methinks I stretch the magnet metaphor a bit too far.

Other articles you might like:

• This Year…What is Your “Edge for Development?”
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The name and work of Carol Dweck keeps coming up in discussions among experts in cognitive development. I wrote a review of her important book, MindSet. In it she talks about two fundamental mindsets in people (and, therefore, of course, in employees): Fixed and Growth.

Someone with a Fixed mindset believes they can’t get any better, improve their skills, or turn around a failure. Growth mindset people believe the opposite. Therefore, they are much more open to feedback, to learning from their mistakes, and trying out new ways and behaviors.

Here’s what is particularly interesting, from the research. When parents praise their kids for their intelligence when they do well, it tends to breed young adults who operate with a fixed mindset. What fosters a growth mindset is praising the process their kids use to achieve a positive result. In other words, how they took on a difficult challenge or used a different approach or persisted in the face of discouragement.

Do you see an parallel in giving feedback to an employee? It suggests to me that a way to crack an employee’s fixed mindset or reinforce his/her growth mindset is to draw attention to his/her methodology or behavior behind a positive result. You could say something like…

“Wow, that mistake is interesting. What can you do now to turn it around? What did you learn from it? What will you do differently if this sort of situation comes up again?”

When you praise traits and competencies linked to their performance results it feels final, immutable, WYSIWYG . Processes, however, are almost always capable of being improved. By focusing your positive feedback on your staff member’s approach, strategy or methodology, vs. their traits like creativity, sense of humor, or intelligence, you keep open the potential for yet further growth.

Hey, life (and work) is a process, no?

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A recent study reinforces the value of coaching by managers throughout the organization. Here are a few key points it makes:

• Business results were 21% higher in enterprises where senior leaders very frequently make an effort to coach others.
• This increased when organizations had a culture that supports coaching and makes managers accountable for engaging in it.
• Despite this, only 11% of senior leaders are “true believers” in the value of coaching and having their managers coach.
• Furthermore, most managers need to be trained on how to coach, with special emphasis on using open-ended questions, listening actively, and reinforcing positive behavior

In our management training workshops around effective performance & motivation conversations, we are increasingly emphasizing coaching type skills. Compared to the traditional performance appraisal where the conversation tends to look back in time and play “gotcha” around what was “wrong,” coaching looks forward. It emphasizes building on the employee’s strengths and accomplishments, and it identifies the particular behavior that is needed instead of current behavior that is producing performance shortfalls.

It makes business sense for an organization to deliberately foster a culture where managers are trained in coaching skills and are expected to use them in conversations around performance, both during the year and in the final review discussion. Such a culture requires visible and tangible support from the top and an HR department dedicated to making it a reality.

This isn’t an overnight fix and a few managers will not be able to master even the basic skills of coaching. But it is the smart way to go.

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I ran across a recent posting from the Gallup Management Journal that made a point have I never thought about before:

“Raised through a childhood in which each new year brought novel opportunities, playing at ever more difficult levels of sports, growing physically, educated in a system of cleanly delineated grades — freshman, sophomore, junior, senior — many employees find themselves several years into their career wondering what happened to the momentum they used to enjoy. Being both conditioned and naturally wired to look forward to differences between seventh and eighth grade or high school and college, many workers are disappointed to discover there will be no dramatic difference between their experience as a 25-year-old employee and their experience as a 26-year-old employee.”

The full article talks about the plethora of studies that show what a powerful motivator is personal and professional growth, learning, and rising to a tough-but-attainable challenge.

So many people, in their jobs, no longer feel any sense of increasing their capacity and moving on to more challenging tasks. Each day is the same, each year essentially a clone of the last one. Clearly, one cause of this is structural. Some jobs, especially in manufacturing and straight forward service functions, are repetitive and have had any meaningful discretion engineered out of them.

But, in the vast number of jobs, this is not the case. Here it is incumbent upon managers to periodically ask what their employees have learned and how they have grown over the last year. Better still, however, let’s get out in front of the curve. At least once a year–perhaps at performance review time–ask each of your staff members,

“What do would like to learn/know/be able to do 12 months from today that you don’t know or can’t do today?”

I believe the best bosses are catalysts for the never-ending growth of every employee in their charge.

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It’s been a smart idea for years. When good employees leave your organization for greener pastures and the departure is amicable, why not keep in contact? You never know, some may find that that grass isn’t, in fact, greener and that your firm was a pretty good place to work after all.

A recent WSJ article shares what some firms, especially the larger professional consulting firms, are doing to maintain a former employee “alumni network.” These can be elaborate initiatives involving message boards, news/blogs from your organization, jobs you post externally, features on former employee alumni, and even social gatherings.

The main benefits of this strategy are to:

• recruit former employees
• get referrals from them for other potential job candidates
• generate business with their new employer

You don’t have to get that elaborate or invest a lot in a fancy alumni network. But I think it would be wise to consider those individuals who have left over the past few years that would be worth getting–and keeping–in touch with and how you might do it.

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My alma mater, the Industrial and Labor Relations School of Cornell University recently hosted a conference on “The Quality of Jobs.” They looked at how trends in what they call the “intensification” of work, the restructuring of jobs, and classic downsizing have impacted the quality of jobs and the levels of satisfaction employees (who are left) are experiencing.

While papers with their findings will be published in the new year, one clear finding is that these job and work disruptions are real and that they are widespread:

• People are doing more and working longer hours to pick up the slack from those let go.
• There is more “fire fighting” and handling of short-term issues and crises.
• Employees, therefore, have less time to get at the most interesting and longer-term impact tasks of their job–the elements of their work that provide the most job satisfaction.

Trends like these can only restrict the degree of job satisfaction we experience and the sense that we are making a real difference through the work that we do. Add in the stress of this situation and that we have no sense of when it will end; this keeps us physically and psychologically in a state of heightened alert. Except for limited, short-run challenges, this state prevents us from focusing and doing our best work. Another downer.

So, when you see an employee’s level of enthusiasm drop off, when he or she appears to have become less engaged in their work, sit down and have a conversation about it. And when you do, be ready to probe for and acknowledge the presence of these types of forces and whether they are contributing to the decreased satisfaction.

The proverbial “moose” is on the table. Get real. Let’s not pretend it isn’t there.

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The BBC’s Katty Kay and ABC’s Claire Shipman co-authored a book a couple of years back called Womenomics. In it they cite, among other things, a number of companies where the presence of women in among top leadership had a positive effect on the firm’s financial success. For example:

• Accounting firm Ernst & Young’s research found that companies with more women in senior management make more money.
• McKinsey & Co. found that greater gender diversity in management of European firms led to higher-than-average stock performance.
• Pepperdine University found that Fortune 500 firms with the best records of putting women in top jobs were 18% to 69% more profitable than the median companies in their industries.

I think that the ways women tend to approach tasks and projects reflects the methods employed by the most effective leaders of either gender. The complexity of today’s work requires a more complex approach to doing that work. It calls for bringing to bear on our challenges a wider range of opinions and perspectives. It calls for a more collaborative approach and teamwork. It calls for genuinely wanting to bring out the best in our employees and helping them grow.

All three of these approaches coincide more closely with what women bring to the table of enterprise than what men bring. This is a generalization, of course, but it is surely what I have observed in teams and management groups with which I have worked.

That said, the most vibrant teams and the most engaged workshop classes I have experienced have had a healthy mix of males and females in them. I hate to say it but, from my experience, all-female classes are not sufficiently challenging of one another as they work the material presented and all-male groups have an excess of edginess and jockeying in their deliberations.

Give me the ol’ mixture of Yin & Yang any day.

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Edgar Schein, a titan of the field of organizational development, says in his recent book, Helping, that there are four questions on the minds of new members of any team. While these concerns operate at a subconscious level, nevertheless, any team member must become comfortable with the answers before he or she can relax and start to really contribute to team goals. These personal issues are:

Members work out at least some initial answers during the very first stage of team development, the so-called “forming” stage, where people start to get to know the other members and test out where they stand, to what degree they will be accepted into the team, where they fit in the group’s power structure (sometimes called the “pecking order”), and whether or not this will be a positive experience.

The wise leader understands this reality and does all she can to enable team members to get these questions answered for themselves so they can quickly proceed to establish the solid foundation of trust which team high performance always requires.

This is why when I facilitate a team building process I always allocate significant time for the team to collaborate on their goals & priorities, core values, and how they agree to work together. I show them how to use the Teamwork Palette tool to foster conversations and decisions that reflect a consensus about how they will “be” as a team. While this is going on, individual members begin to discover their own place–how they will “be”–in the group.

The result: they find acceptable answers for themselves to Edgar Schein’s four questions.

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The most frequently cited quality of exceptional leaders is authenticity/integrity. With the best leaders, what you see is what you get, they walk their talk, and so forth.

But situations arise that call upon the leader to fake it. They have to become an actor. They have to temporarily take on a persona different from their own. Here are three examples:

1. In tough times (like these days) they must project a confident belief in the organization’s ability to weather the storm and come out of it OK in the end. This, even though they may be uncertain about the future themselves.
2. An introverted leader addressing an all-staff meeting has to, at least for the duration of the presentation, express a higher level of passion and and exude greater extraverted energy than feels comfortable.
3. Coaching a talented employee who is facing a bout of lethargy or self-doubt, a boss whose style is typically calm and measured may choose to confront the staffer with a tough, direct, in your face, challenge, one you might hear from a marine drill sergeant.

As long as the leader is taking on the role in full awareness of what he/she is doing and has a positive, caring spirit of intent, it is still authentic behavior.

The managers who are the best leaders have reached a higher stage of adult development. They know themselves and are aware whenever their intentions and behavior take them away from being their authentic self. They know it when they are acting…and they know why.

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Back in the 90′s the Royal Bank of Canada had a series of TV commercials touting the theme, “Building a Better Bank, One Customer at a Time.” The message, as I recall, was that RBC treats each customer as a unique individual and strives to win them over, one-at-a-time.

I frequently refer to this ad campaign in my management development workshops. The parallels are natural…

• RBC has customers, current and new. Managers have employees, current and newly hired.
• RBC seeks to understand the individual needs of each customer and then find a way to satisfy them. The best managers learn what their employees want from working and, in return for good performance, try hard to satisfy this.
• Customers who are treated as individuals and given good service will become customers that stay and continue to bring their business to the bank. Employees who feel cared about and whose needs are met from their job are employees who remain fully engaged and deliver solid performance.
• Finally, RBC customers who are treated this way will reinforce the message by telling other RBC customers and prospective customers. Employees who are treated this way will tell other employees and overall loyalty to the employer will go up.

The lesson for managers is to really get to know your staff, what they are looking for in their job, and what they aspire to down the road. Periodically, check in on how your people are doing, whether they are still satisfied and engaged, and if there is any way you (the manager) can help them be more successful in performing their job.

Your employees are different. They have different personalities. Each one is unique. Each responds to specific motivators and these shift over time.

The best bosses win their team members’ loyalty, engagement, and retentionone employee at at time!

Other articles you might like:

• How to Build Great Teams to Get the Job Done
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We hear so much about collaboration these days. Our work is more complex. The best solutions require input from diverse perspectives.

We at Fulcrum Associates have just started working with a fascinating simulation learning event, Friday Night at the ER. In it participants experience the challenge of working in a system where the unit managers must ultimately collaborate in the interest of the whole system. Otherwise, when one unit/part gets the best results for itself, other units–which, make no mistake, are connected in a process–suffer serious quality and financial shortfalls.

The folks at FNER use a simple model that lays out five levels of collaboration. Each level involves a greater amount of involvement and accountability on the part of the system players:

1. Minimal CommunicationWe share just enough information to respond to the basic questions and requests of others in the system. At least, we have the illusion of working together.
2. Communicate Needed InformationWe make the effort to find out what our colleague units’ needs are and give them the information they require.
3. Treat Peers as CustomersWe move beyond just information to actively inquire how we can cooperate with and support our colleagues in delivering on the demands they face and the commitments they have made. We are still essentially operating, however, from a “silo” perspective.
4. Jointly PlanWe deliberately get together with all of our colleague units to see how we can make this system we are all in work for all of us.
5. Share ResponsibilityWe now put the success of the wider system ahead of our own part of the system.

I don’t think we are truly “collaborating” until we reach level 4.

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Bill George, an author whom I have reviewed and whom I respect, has just come out with a new book, True North Groups. This is a more structured version of the classic “mastermind group” which many of my speaker colleagues have formed or joined.

This new publication just reminds me to urge you to form or join a mastermind group. For over a decade I have belonged to a group of 12 owners of non-competing businesses. Since this blog is for managers, I suggest you form your group around fellow managers, preferably–but not necessarily–from your employer organization.

A strong group will challenge you, support you, advise you, and link you to other people and resources. The goal is to fast-rack your own development and success. You also learn a ton by imparting your wisdom, experience and sometimes tough love to your group colleagues.

Here are some useful links to information on mastermind groups:

• What a mastermind group is
• How to create and run a mastermind group
• How to select the right members for your group

Don’t delay!

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I am a fan of the theory and research linking one’s level of adult development to one’s effectiveness as a leader. One of the hallmarks of more highly developed human beings (and bosses too, of course, they being humans and all) is their degree of in-the-moment self-awareness.

Let’s look at just three levels of awareness:

1. Some managers are not at all aware of their own behavior or its impact. For example, a manager who is curt and cool with her staff when they don’t get right down to the business at-hand. She shuts down even the briefest bit of rapport, such as asking “how has your day been going?” (and waiting for the answer). Not only that, she has no idea how this behavior distances her from her staff.
2. The manager comes to realize that she does this. She wants to change what, she realizes, is a deeply ingrained behavioral pattern that is not serving her well as a leader. So she adopts a new habit–doing a bit of a reflection after she has a meeting or shorter interaction with a staff member. She runs back over in her mind how she started the meeting and what the employee’s reaction was. She draws some conclusions as to how well she did applying her more “connecting” approach and vows to do better next time.
3. The manager has developed her awareness to where it occurs in the present, not after-the-fact. Now, as her employees enter her office, she is conscious–in real time–of what she is saying to establish a personal connection and how they are responding to her approach. If she doesn’t feel that enough rapport has been created, she extends the casual conversation a bit longer until it does feel right.

My self-awareness example was around the human acknowledgement and connecting we, as a species, seem programmed to need before we interact. In fact, you can apply these three simple levels to any behavior you, as a manager, engage in.

The most effective leaders have mastered this competency. They know what they are doing, saying, thinking, feeling and responding as it is happening. They are exhibiting Emotional Intelligence.

Other articles you might like:

• Praise their Process Over their Competence
• Great Interactions
• All the World’s a Stage…and Sometimes for Leaders too
• 47 Ways to Build Valuable Connections … And Make Them Count!
• Success Disguised

Do you ask your employees as often as you tell them what to do and what you think?

In my experience, most managers don’t, not even close. Elsewhere in my blog (Build Best Bosses) I have offered four reasons why this is so.

But if you have no answer to the above question, I invite you to spend a week or so watching yourself–as a third party would–as you interact daily with your staff.

• If your employee is struggling to collect more accurate data for his weekly status report, do you jump in with your advice or ask what he has tried or what he could try?
• If your employee’s performance falls off, do you tell her HOW she has to work differently or do you get her to come up with some ideas?
• When your team meets to discuss a problem like why production is falling, do you offer/impose your opinions or ask them first?
• And when the team comes up with some ideas, do you probe their thinking further or simply acknowledge these and then trump them with your own answers?

I have no scientific data on what the asking-to-telling ratio is for the best bosses but I suspect it lies somewhere between 3-to-1 and 5-to-1.

I wonder what a week of tracking this will yield for you?

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• Can Trainers Guarantee Results?
• Leadership Malpractice
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