Limited resources, personnel, financial, and material, are a constraining reality faced by every business. These constraints prevent leaders from executing on business activities and in some avoidable cases result in customers not receiving the goods and services to which they are entitled. In other instances, business operations cease altogether. While demand spikes cannot be perfectly anticipated, policy-induced limitations are fully avoidable and often inexcusable. An executable authority succession pan is one such mechanism used to avoid a policy-driven operational stoppage.

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5. Tactical Execution – Introduction

About the Reference

How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie is the timeless classic that reveals how leaders can engage and motivate individuals to become teams; joining together to achieve a common purpose and produce more than the sum of their singular efforts. This book unveils:

• The six ways to make people like you
• The twelve ways to win people to your way of thinking
• The nine ways to change people without arousing resentment

Benefits of Using this Reference

StrategyDriven Contributors like How to Win Friends and Influence People because is provides the reader with easily understood and actionable methods of influencing people without being manipulative; engaging and motivating them to achieve more together than they could as individuals.

StrategyDriven Contributors believe that while leaders naturally act to serve and promote their self interests, it is equally important to benefit those who are supporting those initiatives. Dale Carnegie’s prescription for advancing one’s agenda is a benevolent, win-win approach that influences instead of manipulates. His ‘honorable’ approach to winning people’s support makes How to Win Friends and Influence People a StrategyDriven recommended read.

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Landing in the Executive Chair: How to Excel in the Hot Seat by Linda Henman   In today’s fast-paced, unprecedented, and unpredictable economy, many executives simply don’t know what to do. Conventional methods-which many never entirely understood in the first place-often don’t work during economic upheaval. Executives, especially CEOs, need something better. They need a guide that identifies the roadblocks and points out the landmines. In her more than 30 years of working with hundreds of executives, Dr. Linda Henman has observed the critical elements of success, both for the new leader and the one who aspires to the next level of success. In Landing in the Executive Chair, you’ll learn how to: Avoid the pitfalls and identify a clear plan for personal and organizational stress. Leverage the first months in a new executive position- that time of transition that promises opportunity and challenge, but also brings a period of great vulnerability. Create a competitive advantage, set the right tone, make effective decisions, keep talent inside your doors, and establish credibility-all while navigating unfamiliar and turbulent waters. As organizations expand and grow, the skills that led to success often won’t sustain further development in a more complex, high-stakes environment. Present and future executives need more. They need Landing in the Executive Chair.

• Make sure people and their jobs match. Too often people want to move to management when they are better solo performers, or they prefer to work individually, but the job requires collaboration. People perform better when they and their jobs are in synch.
• Give feedback. Top performers will be more engaged when they receive constructive information about what they do well and what they need to improve.
• Delegate. Give each person whole projects instead of pieces or parts of a project. Grant authority and freedom to get the job done.
• ‘A’ players want access—to you, your top clients, investors, and anyone else who is important to the organization. Give them this access, and they will engage.
• Start the year by establishing realistic and achievable objectives. Stretch people; don’t snap them. Dangling the carrot just beyond the donkey’s reach will just make for a very angry donkey.
• Star performers expect recognition. When you don’t provide it, they feel cheated and devalued. Stars require praise, but unless you offer it sincerely and specifically, they will dismiss it. When you provide it, they repay you with loyalty and exceptional performance.
• Compensate fairly. Don’t pay an average wage unless you want average performers.
• Allow for life balance. Top performers tend to be overachievers in all aspects of their lives. Just as they expect to do exceptional work when they are on the job, they insist on outstanding relationships in their private lives. Clever people know the difference between critical and unimportant uses of their time. If you insist on long hours, rigid schedules, and busy work, they will disengage.
• Don’t micromanage. Communicate, set timeframes, establish goals, and get out of the way. Talk to others about what needs to be done, but let them decide how they will go about it.
• Establish trust as a two-way street. People who don’t trust their leaders lose their motivation first and their desire to work for the un-trusted leader next. Be consistent in behavior, mood, and policies. Conduct your personal life with the same integrity that you do business, and trust others.

Star performers, by definition, come through your door motivated and ready to engage. They want to contribute to the success of an important organization and work with other ‘A’ players. Make your organization a place where the clever choose to work, and your stars will become your best magnets for other top performers – and all will stay engaged throughout the year.

About the Author

Dr. Linda Henman, the catalyst for virtuoso organizations, is the author of Landing in the Executive Chair, among other works. She is an expert on setting strategy, planning succession, and developing talent. For more than 30 years she has helped executives and boards in Fortune 500 Companies and privately-held organizations dramatically grow their businesses. She was one of eight succession planning experts who worked directly with John Tyson after his company’s acquisition of International Beef Products. Some of her other clients include Emerson Electric, Avon, Kraft Foods, Edward Jones, and Boeing. She can be reached in St. Louis at www.henmanperformancegroup.com.

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Building a Winning Business: 70 Takeaways for Creating a Strong Company during Good and Bad Economic Times by Tom Salonek Use this book as a blueprint for successfully competing in good times or bad. Building a Winning Business is organized around 70 short, practical and highly useful ‘takeaways’ that allow readers to easily digest the book in a few hours. Includes 20-plus downloadable templates and tools.

• Speak your mind
• Be critical of our business
• Stay on point
• Respect confidentiality
• Be on time
• Have fun!

Speak your mind. This means what it says. I want people to share what they’re thinking , not think about how they are going to position it. That said if you have an argument, you do need to think through your position and the things that support your position. We often discuss the same story when this topic comes up at meetings.

A customer hired us to teach a class only for their team. The manager stood up at the start of class and said, “We paid for Intertech to just teach us so we could have an environment where we can discuss anything.” He then paused and said, “Well folks, what questions do you have?” There was a long silence and a lot of looks between the team. One of the newer employees raised his hand and asked a question. While he was mid-way thru his question, the manager interrupted and said, “WHAT! You don’t KNOW THAT! What is wrong with you?” Needless to say that was the only question asked that week when the instructor was in the room.

Be critical of our business. When we have discussions, I usually say “We can be hard on our business or our competitors would be more than happy to do the work.” For both of the past two yearly strategic planning sessions, I was not in agreement with half of the leadership team on a key initiative. In both cases they ‘won out’ we did their approach, and guess what? They were right. One of those decisions, our push into virtual training, is responsible for 40% of our public enrollments today.

Stay on point. I can’t stand people who ramble, use their floor time as a chance to remind us of how smart they are, or someone who takes us on a wild ride of tangents just to arrive at a point that could have stated in a couple of sentences. To be honest, it’s one of the reasons that I prefer giving back to the community thru our Intertech Foundation instead of being on the board of a non-profit , where, in my experience, people love to hear themselves speak.

Respect confidentiality. It’s hard to have a ‘real’ discussion if you’re concerned about information about a decision or an event getting back to folks not in the room. In years past, we used to have several non-leadership team members involved with our two-day offsite. I found members of our team not bringing up positions because they were concerned about the discussion getting back to the group at large. Today in addition to having just the leadership team at the offsite planning, every Friday just the leadership team goes out for lunch together. While the purpose of the lunch is to have an informal meal together, I’ve noticed that when issues come up there’s no hesitation to jump right in and discuss the matter.

Disagreements can be one of the best triggers for innovation, strategy and great business decisions. I can certainly point to a lot of money we never would have made without them!

About the Author

Tom Salonek is the founder and CEO of Intertech, a successful technology and training company in the upper midwest. Intertech twice has been awarded a place on the Inc 500 list of fastest growing companies in the nation and is a seven-time ‘Best Places to Work’ winner in Minnesota. Building a Winning Business 70 Takeways is Tom’s first book. He also blogs at TomSalonek.com. To read Tom Salonek’s complete biography, click here.

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No Nonsense Retention: Painless Strategies To Retain Your Best People by Jeff Kortes Why are some organizations able to retain their best people while others struggle with above average turnover? Jeff Kortes presents the key components of retention in a practical, ‘no nonsense’ book that is easy to read and entertaining. Whether you are in an office, factory or on a construction site, the principles presented will improve your retention and enable you to save your organization thousands of dollars due to lost productivity, poor quality and customer service issues. You will learn: How to avoid the dreaded meeting where you have to say, “We are letting you go because you just aren’t a good fit.” Money isn’t the answer to retention. Size of the organization does not matter. Practical ideas you can use immediately to improve retention. Why good employees leave your organization, and how to stop it. It’s the “little” things that matter and what they are. How to build a comprehensive strategy (or game plan) for your department, facility or entire organization that improves retention. What poor retention is costing you. Retention is going to be the most important factor in the survival of companies in the next 15 years. Changing demographics will leave a shortage of workers that will become critical. Only those organizations that are able to retain their best people will be able to compete and survive in the future. Jeff’s anecdotes, common sense tips and ‘no nonsense notes’ make the book easy to follow and remember. The techniques you will learn are nothing fancy. However, when performed together, your department, plant or organization will be transformed into a sophisticated retention machine that will be the envy of your fellow managers or competitors. You will find yourself wondering why you didn’t use these techniques in the past and immediately become a believer in No Nonsense Retention… Painless Strategies to Retain Your Best People.

You can’t hide behind ‘the team’. You are out there on your own. This creates a certain sense of urgency and determination to win. It’s embarrassing to be beaten in front of hundreds of spectators… much less be pinned!

The negative aspect of the emphasis on the ‘the team’ in this country is that people can point the finger at someone else for the team’s failure… and often they do. In wrestling you are part of a team… but there is more personal accountability because of the visibility when you succeed or fail. If every individual member of the team performs… and part of performing is working together as a team… the team wins. Pretty simple.

With the emphasis on ‘the team’ that has pervaded organizations more and more today, I see coaches/leaders less willing to sit a person down and hold people accountable for individual performance. This… along with our reluctance to make people feel bad… has caused us to overlook substandard individual performance. If people felt bad when they screwed up… they might actually start to perform. Like wrestling… if… when you lose… you feel bad… you will resolve to address what caused the pain of feeling bad so it doesn’t happen again. Don’t get me wrong. I am not advocating ripping someone to shreds when they make mistakes. I am advocating holding individuals accountable… like when you lose in wrestling… so you don’t want it to happen again. That’s what changes behavior! That is what drives performance… along with the positive reinforcement you as a leader/parent can provide when you see positive performance.

As leaders in an organization… we can’t be afraid to address substandard performance and hold people individually accountable because someone will feel bad! If we do… there will be no reason for that individual to change. Ask yourself if the people below will do what it takes to 1) keep performing well or 2) change what they did wrong to perform better and avoid the pain of failure. The answer is a resounding ‘yes!’ Why? Because they are held accountable… or rewarded… based on their individual performance!

About the Author

Jeff Kortes is known as the ‘No Nonsense Guy.’ He is the President of Human Asset Management LLC, a human resource consulting firm specializing in executive search and leadership training. He has trained hundreds of first-line supervisors, managers, and executives during his career. His approach to training is no-nonsense, and practical.

Jeff is also a member of the National Speakers Association and a regular speaker on the topics of retention, recruiting and leadership. For more information, visit www.SlugProofYourTeam.com.

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Landing in the Executive Chair: How to Excel in the Hot Seat by Linda Henman   In today’s fast-paced, unprecedented, and unpredictable economy, many executives simply don’t know what to do. Conventional methods-which many never entirely understood in the first place-often don’t work during economic upheaval. Executives, especially CEOs, need something better. They need a guide that identifies the roadblocks and points out the landmines. In her more than 30 years of working with hundreds of executives, Dr. Linda Henman has observed the critical elements of success, both for the new leader and the one who aspires to the next level of success. In Landing in the Executive Chair, you’ll learn how to: Avoid the pitfalls and identify a clear plan for personal and organizational stress. Leverage the first months in a new executive position- that time of transition that promises opportunity and challenge, but also brings a period of great vulnerability. Create a competitive advantage, set the right tone, make effective decisions, keep talent inside your doors, and establish credibility-all while navigating unfamiliar and turbulent waters. As organizations expand and grow, the skills that led to success often won’t sustain further development in a more complex, high-stakes environment. Present and future executives need more. They need Landing in the Executive Chair.

Here are five suggestions for enlisting in this august body of leaders:

1. Practice F2 Leader Leadership – What explains the differences between the leader who rises steadily through the ranks versus the one whose career mysteriously jumps the track short of an executive position? If people find the fast track in the first place, they probably know how to get the job done, have displayed integrity, and offer enough intellectual acumen to succeed. When a leader offers all these and still fails, flawed leadership style may be the culprit. F2 Leaders – firm but fair leaders whom others trust – commit themselves to both relationship behavior and task accomplishment.
2. Move beyond Problem Solving to Innovative Decision Making – As you climbed the stairs to your current position, others called on you to solve problems. The status quo changed; you figured out the cause for the change; and you returned things to the way they were. But this process only restores the status quo. It doesn’t take the company into the future. Decision making, on the other hand, requires innovative thinking and separates those who land in the executive chair from those who don’t.
3. Tie Strategy and Execution Together – A breakthrough product, dazzling service, or cutting-edge technology can put you in the game, but only rock-solid execution of a well-developed strategy can keep you there. Effective execution pushes you to decipher your broad-brush theoretical understanding of the strategy into intimate familiarity with how it will work, who will take charge of it, how long it will take, how much it will cost, and how it will affect the organization overall.
4. Plan Succession – The previously perceived quiet crisis of succession is now sounding its siren, and smart companies are responding by creating disciplined approaches to managing their futures. These companies realize replacement planning isn’t enough. These leaders understand you need a systematic approach to talent development.

When people characterize those who land in the executive chair, they often offer ‘vision’ as their most important attribute. Without question, effective leadership requires a strategic focus. But remember. People in mental institutions have visions, too. Seeing into the future is not enough. Those who land in the executive chair and excel there understand they must outrun their competitors, all the while inspiring loyalty among those who follow them.

About the Author

For more than 30 years, Linda Henman has helped leaders in Fortune 500 Companies, small businesses, and military organizations define their direction and select the best people to put their strategies in motion.

Linda holds a Ph.D. in organizational systems, two Master of Arts degrees in interpersonal communication and organizational development, and a Bachelor of Science degree in communication. By combining her experience as an organizational consultant with her education in business, she offers her clients selection, coaching, and consulting solutions that are pragmatic in their approach and sound in their foundation.

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Special Edition 61 – An Interview with John Maxwell, author of The 5 Levels of Leadership explores the five level of leadership, how our leadership appears differently to different individuals, and why there appears to be a growing shortage of leaders today. During our discussion, John Maxwell, author of The 5 Levels of Leadership: Proven Steps to Maximize Your Potential, shares with us his insights and experiences regarding:

• the five levels of leadership everyone must go through on their leadership development journey
• the difference between the popularized ‘level five leader’ and an individual who reaches what John defines as the fifth level of leadership
• how leaders may appear to function at different leadership levels to different people and whether or not a leader should strive to achieve a level five leadership relationship with everyone
• the leadership level most individuals operate at and how this contributes to the sense that there is a shortage of leaders today

Additional Information

In addition to the outstanding insights John shares in The 5 Levels of Leadership and this special edition podcast are the resources accessible from his website, www.JohnMaxwellOnLeadership.com.   John’s book, The 5 Levels of Leadership, can be purchased by clicking here.

Final Request…

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About the Author

John Maxwell, author of The 5 Levels of Leadership, is the founder of EQUIP and the John Maxwell Company, a leadership development firm. Each year he speaks to leaders at Fortune 500 companies, foreign governments, the National Football League, the United States Military Academy at West Point, and the United Nations. In total, John has trained more than 5 million leaders worldwide. To read John’s complete biography, click here.

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No Nonsense Retention: Painless Strategies To Retain Your Best People by Jeff Kortes Why are some organizations able to retain their best people while others struggle with above average turnover? Jeff Kortes presents the key components of retention in a practical, ‘no nonsense’ book that is easy to read and entertaining. Whether you are in an office, factory or on a construction site, the principles presented will improve your retention and enable you to save your organization thousands of dollars due to lost productivity, poor quality and customer service issues. You will learn: How to avoid the dreaded meeting where you have to say, “We are letting you go because you just aren’t a good fit.” Money isn’t the answer to retention. Size of the organization does not matter. Practical ideas you can use immediately to improve retention. Why good employees leave your organization, and how to stop it. It’s the “little” things that matter and what they are. How to build a comprehensive strategy (or game plan) for your department, facility or entire organization that improves retention. What poor retention is costing you. Retention is going to be the most important factor in the survival of companies in the next 15 years. Changing demographics will leave a shortage of workers that will become critical. Only those organizations that are able to retain their best people will be able to compete and survive in the future. Jeff’s anecdotes, common sense tips and ‘no nonsense notes’ make the book easy to follow and remember. The techniques you will learn are nothing fancy. However, when performed together, your department, plant or organization will be transformed into a sophisticated retention machine that will be the envy of your fellow managers or competitors. You will find yourself wondering why you didn’t use these techniques in the past and immediately become a believer in No Nonsense Retention… Painless Strategies to Retain Your Best People.

Our discussion got me thinking about how we often fail to have discussions about development goals with our kids… or our employees. The discussions tend to be more spur of the moment… not that it’s a bad thing to have discussions when the moment arises… but certainly no substitute for structured discussions that force the parties to think about where they want to go in their career.

When having those discussions they need to take into consideration career goals but… almost as importantly… how the career goals fit in with their life goals. This is particularly important when dealing with employees early in their career. Those discussions can have a significant impact on someone’s long-term success and your ability to get the best out of your people. Another side benefit to you as a leader (or a parent), is the satisfaction of seeing the impact you can have on that person’s life. In the end… you will find that is one of the most satisfying things you will ever do as a leader. Seeing them succeed is truly worth the time and effort spent!

Unfortunately, he lost an incredibly close 6-4 match in the semi-finals the next day. After the loss, we talked about his goals for the tournament… as well as the season. Discussing his goals enabled him to refocus… and… ultimately win his final match to place at the tournament. (In sudden death overtime no less!) I am convinced that without those goals to keep him focused… he would not have experienced the satisfaction that we both felt as he stood on the podium and received his medal for placing at the State wrestling tournament.

About the Author

Jeff Kortes is known as the ‘No Nonsense Guy.’ He is the President of Human Asset Management LLC, a human resource consulting firm specializing in executive search and leadership training. He has trained hundreds of first-line supervisors, managers, and executives during his career. His approach to training is no-nonsense, and practical.

Jeff is also a member of the National Speakers Association and a regular speaker on the topics of retention, recruiting and leadership. For more information, visit www.SlugProofYourTeam.com.

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The Benevolent Dictator: Empower Your Employees, Build Your Business, and Outwit the Competition by Michael Feuer and Dustin Klein What does it require to take a concept rapidly and effectively from mind to market? The Benevolent Dictator recognizes that entrepreneurship is a gauntlet. Those who succeed are benevolent dictators – able to make the intricate process happen in days, weeks and months to win. The Benevolent Dictator gives you no-nonsense how-to advice and examples that have worked. This non-traditional, gung-ho guide is not afraid to lay out the leadership methods that can effectively get a new business off the ground, and through the requisite fast-track growth phases that produce tangible success measured by your bottom line and your wallet. Learn critical specifics on how to move from idea development to build-out, through steps for continuous improvement, and on to the big cash out Features proven tools, strategies, and tactics that will help you bottle entrepreneurial lightning over and over again As the co-founder of office retail giant OfficeMax, the author turned a $3 million investment into a $1.5 billion sale in his 16 years as CEO Beating the competition is never easy. For those times when you need an iron hand, then you also need the wisdom to know when and how to use it. Whether you’re a business student, aspiring entrepreneur, or a practicing executive, you need to discover the winning ways of The Benevolent Dictator.

We’ve also encountered the sanctimonious perfectionist, the attention-seeking prima donna, the unhelpful duty-shirker, and many others.

Sure, it’s funny on TV… but in the real world, dealing with these characters can make leaders want to pull out their hair or throw in the towel entirely. Before you resign yourself to living in your own not-so-amusing TV show, let me offer some commonsense management advice.

First, know that there is no need for you to waste your time with poor performers or high maintenance employees who have an inflated sense of their own importance and ability.

It’s best to let them know straightaway that they aren’t a good fit for your organization. The dilemma, though, occurs when self-appointed superstars or other difficult types really are terrific and get the job done. And it’s even worse when they believe they’re irreplaceable, along with everybody else – including you.

I speak from experience. I launched a number of successful business ventures, including OfficeMax and my newest business, Max-Wellness, a new and unique health and wellness retail chain.

The lessons I learned have convinced me that leaders are most likely to succeed when their management style mirrors that of a benevolent dictator: At the end of the day, the ‘dictator’ side of you calls the shots and makes the difficult decisions, but your ‘benevolent’ side does so while putting the interests of the organization, your team, and your customers ahead of your own. And though it’s not easy, this means reining in your hard-to-handle employees while still developing their talents.

Once you identify an employee who is good, but whose personality or habits might present a problem, you have two choices. You can simply get rid of the troublesome employee and risk the consequences of lost productivity. Or you can take the more profitable route and find a way for peaceful coexistence by learning how to deal with the performer’s shortcomings while taking advantage of his or her strengths.
If option number two sounds better to you, then read on to learn about the three most common types of challenging performers, and how best to manage them:

1. The Prima Donna Modus Operandi (M.O.): He might announce a brilliant solution to a longstanding problem, or he might unfailingly woo the biggest customers. But through it all, your prima donna wants to be applauded, coddled, admired, and generally treated like a celebrity. This behavior consumes your time, disturbs day-to-day operations, and alienates other team members.

   The Live with ’Em Solution: The easiest solution here is to put your cards on the table. Tell your prima donna how valuable he is and how grateful you are for his work, but also let him know that he’s a real pain to deal with, and that he’s approaching a crossroads. Ask what you can do to avoid future problems and stress that your door is always open – but make it clear that these behaviors need to change (or else).

   Make him a part of the solution by putting the onus on him to come up with a fix for a peaceful and productive coexistence. Allow him to win, but on your terms, not his. Remember that most prima donnas are typically okay people deep down inside. Usually, their egos have been stroked too much in the past, or they’re hiding a major inferiority complex – or both.

   Sure, prima donnas require more of your time and attention, but the alternative is losing a high performer – potentially forsaking productivity and inciting some major anxiety. If you figure out what makes your prima donna tick, you’ll be a big step closer to neutralizing the annoyance factor while preserving productivity.

2. The Mr. or Ms. ‘It’s Not My Job’ M.O.: Technically, this person isn’t breaking the rules. She does everything her job description says she should, and she does it very well. But when she’s asked to go above and beyond, expand her role, or pitch in on another project, she responds with, “It’s not my job.”

   The Live with ’Em Solution: Not everything an employee is asked to do is going to fit comfortably into their pre-determined job description. But the fact is, a successful organization is a team effort, and sometimes people need to do more to help out.

   I have come close to firing employees on the spot for refusing to help on the grounds that the task at hand wasn’t their responsibility. Now, I make sure that every member of my team knows that ‘whatever it takes’ isn’t an option – it’s a requirement. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if someone is an administrative assistant or a vice president – it’s all for one and one for all.

   If you’re a leader, it’s your job to make it clear in no uncertain terms that contributing to success – in any way necessary – is everybody’s job. Oh – and if you’re interviewing someone from a company that went caput, make sure that the interviewee’s attitude didn’t contribute to the downfall.

3. The Perfectionist M.O.: Nobody can deny that your resident perfectionist is a hard worker. He makes sure every ‘i’ is dotted and every ‘t’ is crossed – every time. He’ll continue to tweak a report or project hours after someone else would have declared it complete.

   The Live with ’Em Solution: Normally, an employee who thinks that a half-baked effort is unacceptable would be an asset. The problem is, when it comes to not accepting anything less than perfection, there can be too much of a good thing. As a leader, you must make sure that your employees don’t sacrifice too much time – or end up failing to achieve anything at all – in a quest for the best.

   Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that you should encourage lackluster performances or tell your team that they shouldn’t worry about getting it right the first time. After all, it can cost your organization quite a bit if time and energy aren’t used wisely. Remember that if you’re putting out a fire in a garbage can, you need only a few gallons of water – not an entire water tanker!

   Try to help resident perfectionists distinguish between tasks that must be done to the letter, and those that can be done just adequately enough to move on to the next step or support another initiative. This is often a learned skill that can be difficult for people – especially those who are fearful of making a misstep – to embrace at first! Therefore, be very clear and cautious when you’re explaining what must be done…and how much time and energy each task is worth.

Remember that most major personnel problems within organizations get that way because leaders have ignored a series of smaller issues along the way. You should absolutely deal with your most difficult personality types—and watch out for budding prima donnas, perfectionists, and unhelpful types in the making! And always keep in mind that you aren’t marrying these employees. You just need to be able to occasionally dance with them.

About the Authors

Michael Feuer cofounded OfficeMax in 1988 starting with one store and $20,000 of his own money, a partner, and a small group of investors. As CEO, he grew it to more than 1,000 stores worldwide with annual sales topping $5 billion. He is also CEO of Max-Ventures, a venture capital and retail consulting firm, and founder and CEO of Max-Wellness, a comprehensive health and wellness retail chain that launched in 2010. After opening initial laboratory test stores in Florida and Ohio, a national roll-out is now underway. To read Michael Feuer’s complete biography, click here.

Dustin S. Klein, contributor and editor of The Benevolent Dictator, is the publisher and executive editor of Smart Business Network, publishers of Smart Business, the nation’s second-largest chain of regional business publications. He has interviewed thousands of senior executives and civic leaders across America. He is a regular presenter on business-related issues for public and private business audiences and is a frequent guest on television, radio, and Internet programs. To read Dustin Klein’s complete biography, click here.

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Special Edition 60 – An Interview with Doug Moran, author of If You Will Lead explores the four key questions every leader must answer and the principles behind those questions every leader must embrace in order to be truly effective. During our discussion, Doug Moran, author of If You Will Lead: Enduring Wisdom for 21st-Century Leaders, shares with us his insights and experiences regarding:

• the four critical questions every leader must answer
• how a leader can identify who he/she is and what he/she believes in
• how a leader can convey their beliefs and values to followers in a way that is constructive and understandable
• what leaders must do to earn the right to lead others

Additional Information

In addition to the outstanding insights Doug shares in If You Will Lead and this special edition podcast are the resources accessible from his website, www.IfYouWillLead.net.   Doug’s book, If You Will Lead, can be purchased by clicking here.

Final Request…

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About the Author

Doug Moran, author of If You Will Lead, is the founder of If You Will Lead, LLC, a firm providing leadership development and executive coaching advisory services. Throughout his career, Doug has served in leadership roles including several executive positions within Capital One Financial Services and as Virginia’s Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Resources. To read Doug’s complete biography, click here.

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No Nonsense Retention: Painless Strategies To Retain Your Best People by Jeff Kortes Why are some organizations able to retain their best people while others struggle with above average turnover? Jeff Kortes presents the key components of retention in a practical, ‘no nonsense’ book that is easy to read and entertaining. Whether you are in an office, factory or on a construction site, the principles presented will improve your retention and enable you to save your organization thousands of dollars due to lost productivity, poor quality and customer service issues. You will learn: How to avoid the dreaded meeting where you have to say, “We are letting you go because you just aren’t a good fit.” Money isn’t the answer to retention. Size of the organization does not matter. Practical ideas you can use immediately to improve retention. Why good employees leave your organization, and how to stop it. It’s the “little” things that matter and what they are. How to build a comprehensive strategy (or game plan) for your department, facility or entire organization that improves retention. What poor retention is costing you. Retention is going to be the most important factor in the survival of companies in the next 15 years. Changing demographics will leave a shortage of workers that will become critical. Only those organizations that are able to retain their best people will be able to compete and survive in the future. Jeff’s anecdotes, common sense tips and ‘no nonsense notes’ make the book easy to follow and remember. The techniques you will learn are nothing fancy. However, when performed together, your department, plant or organization will be transformed into a sophisticated retention machine that will be the envy of your fellow managers or competitors. You will find yourself wondering why you didn’t use these techniques in the past and immediately become a believer in No Nonsense Retention… Painless Strategies to Retain Your Best People.

My youngest son won a tournament by beating the prior state champion in the finals. It was an incredible match and he wrestled impressively. As he came off the mat, I shook his hand and congratulated him… telling him that this was the best I’d ever seen him wrestle. Then, in the next breathe, I nearly said… ”BUT you look like you we running out of gas and need to do some extra running so that your stamina improves.” The kid has just wrestled the best match of his life and here the old man is thinking what he could have done better. That’s a sad commentary on what has happened to us.

Fortunately… the light bulb went on and I actually remembered the stuff I teach participants in my Execution Focused Leadership^® series. I bit my tongue and let him enjoy the moment. I talk to supervisors and managers that using the ‘BUT’ word is the ‘great eraser’… by using it; you wipe out all the positive things you have just said. Instead of using the moment to praise someone and POSITIVELY REINFORCE the behavior we want, we destroy it with one simple word..

Fifteen minutes later my son asked to see the video of his match so he could see what he needed to work on. That was the right time for me to say what he needed to work on in order to continuously improve. There will always be an opportunity to look at continuous improvement in our personal and work lives. That time is not immediately after a success. Let your people enjoy an accomplishment and feel good about what they just did. Don’t take what is a positive accomplishment and wipe it out by using the great eraser… ‘BUT.’

About the Author

Jeff Kortes is known as the ‘No Nonsense Guy.’ He is the President of Human Asset Management LLC, a human resource consulting firm specializing in executive search and leadership training. He has trained hundreds of first-line supervisors, managers, and executives during his career. His approach to training is no-nonsense, and practical.

Jeff is also a member of the National Speakers Association and a regular speaker on the topics of retention, recruiting and leadership. For more information, visit www.SlugProofYourTeam.com.

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Discovery-Driven Growth: A Breakthrough Process to Reduce Risk and Seize Opportunity by Rita McGrath Companies have long struggled to generate sustained profitable growth – and few have succeeded. Time after time, new initiatives and projects are rolled out with great fanfare only to end up abandoned and dubbed expensive flops. Yet for the small handful of companies that have managed to drive growth consistently – even through tough times – the payoff is great. How do they do it? In Discovery-Driven Growth, Rita McGrath and Ian MacMillan challenge what you thought you knew about managing growth. They explain that capitalizing on uncertain opportunities requires a starkly different mindset than when pursuing strategy in your core business. In fact, the very same practices that work for ‘business-as-usual’ can be lethal when your challenge is growth. For instance, intelligent failures can add more value than predictable successes, and low-cost experimentation trumps analysis. Based on a combined thirty years of research and experience, Rita and Ian’s book provides a breakthrough system for managing strategic growth. You will learn how to identify and prioritize your company’s full portfolio of opportunities – from new product lines to entirely new businesses. The authors then show how to best execute specific initiatives, test major project assumptions, and develop a culture that values disciplined experimentation and learning over meeting mindless and unrealistic goals. Tools for each challenge are presented, backed by examples from companies – from small firms to global giants – that have successfully put these methods into practice. The discovery-driven approach will dramatically change how you lead strategic growth. Using it, your company can greatly improve the success of new strategic initiatives, significantly reduce growth costs, minimize surprises, and know when to disengage from questionable projects before too much money is spent. With Discovery-Driven Growth, Rita and Ian offer managers everywhere a time-tested blueprint for planning and executing a strategic growth agenda with confidence – in any market.

1. Leave the definition of success fuzzy – I conduct a lot of post-mortems – you know, those meetings where warring parties come together to argue about whose fault it was that something went horribly wrong. Actually, when well designed, post-mortem meetings can be quite productive. I begin by going back in time and reconstructing what people were thinking at the time the project or initiative was started. Amazingly, by the time it has failed, the original goals for the project are often forgotten and there is no documentation or human memory of what they were. This situation creates the conditions for blaming and acrimony, none of which add value. So, before you start any new strategic project, get it in writing: what are we trying to accomplish, by when, and whose responsibility will it be to get to closure?
2. Don’t plan the disengagement – Organizations have processes for just about everything, it seems. Ironically, however, when it comes to handling failure, in most organizations it’s an awful, improvised process that leaves trust, careers and feelings in tatters. It doesn’t have to be that way. Instead, I recommend developing a disengagement plan. In a solid disengagement plan, all those with a stake in the project are considered and it is someone’s specific job to find a way to make them if not whole, at least to address the worst of the issues that a closure means for them.
3. Overspend – Big flops are bad flops. These are the ones that leave you scratching your head and asking “what were they thinking?” Cue recent examples such as Cisco’s $590 million acquisition of the company behind the Flip video camera or Google’s $200M+ exit from the real-life radio ad business. One could argue (as some have done) that there will be valuable learning coming out of these negative experiences, but surely some lessons didn’t have to be so expensive! Instead, I recommend following the old Silicon Valley adage: Fail Fast, Fail Cheap, Move On.
4. Have no way to distinguish bad luck from bad management – Failure creates a paradox: On the one hand, nobody likes failure; while on the other, you don’t want to reward managers who fail foolishly. What is needed is some way to determine whether the executives in charge made the right decision given what was known at the time, and therefore whether the failure was the result of something they should have known. I find that keeping careful track of assumptions, particularly at key project turning points, can help make this distinction. This in turn, makes it possible to reward ‘intelligent’ failures and prove to people that your organization can take risks and learn, even when things go wrong.

Of course nobody likes to fail. Failure, however, is one of the few things you can be guaranteed in uncertain and high-velocity environments. The real skill lies in making the most of it.

On October 3-7, 2011, Rita McGrath, Associate Professor, Management at Columbia Business School, will teach ‘Leading Strategic Growth and Change’ at Columbia Business School Executive Education. Professor McGrath developed the program in order to instruct participants on how to thrive in rapidly changing, highly uncertain environment. To learn more, visit the Columbia website.

About the Author

Rita McGrath, a Professor at Columbia Business School in New York, is one of the world’s leading experts on strategy in highly uncertain and volatile environments. She works with both Global 1,000 icons and smaller, but fast-growing organizations. Some current clients include F-Secure, Nokia, Microsoft, (and its CEO Summit), AXA Equitable, General Electric, Novartis, PPG Industries, the Stena Group and the World Economic Forum. She is a popular speaker and consults to senior leadership teams. In 2009, she was inducted as a Fellow of the Strategic Management Society, an honor accorded to those who have had a significant impact on the field. To read Rita’s complete biography, click here.

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How to Lead by THE BOOK: Proverbs, Parables, and Principles to Tackle Your Toughest Business Challenges by Dave Anderson   Concise, to-the-point, and highly useable, How to Lead by THE BOOK presents a series of personal and business challenges recognizable to leaders, then deals with each through insight, personal experience, and a discussion of why conventional approaches often fail. Each section then concludes with winning proverbs, parables, or principles that offers applicable strategies to solve the issue. In this practical and inspiring guide, you’ll discover proven methods and advice to shape young leaders, stretch veteran leaders, become a better communicator, maintain your work-life balance, deal with dishonesty among competitors, and much more. Shows why typical approaches to leadership problems often fail, while biblical wisdom succeeds Covers both day-to-day dilemmas and larger questions of management, accountability, and vision From the bestselling author of How to Run Your Business by THE BOOK, Up Your Business, and If You Don’t Make Waves You’ll Drown What is the number one downfall for leaders? When is the best time to make a decision? How do you hold others accountable? How do you survive success with your principles intact? What does the Bible say about time management? Get the answers to these and many more practical business questions when you discover the winning wisdom of How to Lead by THE BOOK.

Making poor hiring decisions will cost both your company coffers and your company culture dearly. It’s much better to be temporarily short-staffed than to lower your standards. Learn to use the interview process to knock out the candidates who aren’t the right fit for you, and you’ll end up with a new team member who will be an asset to your brand, your morale, your momentum, and your productivity for a long time to come.

The purpose of a knockout interview is to eliminate candidates from consideration using smart, rigorous, values-shaped standards, and to do it without wasting time. Knockout interviews help upgrade hiring from an inclusive process to an elimination process, thus saving your most valuable resource – time. To that end, knockout interviews are invaluable.

The knockout interview begins before you ever meet a candidate face to face. In fact, your goal is to avoid face time with as many applicants as possible. As soon as you receive the first stack of résumés, you should start looking for reasons to cut individuals from consideration.

This method may initially seem somewhat ruthless and cutthroat – certainly not in keeping with Christian grace and mercy. However, a closer look at the Bible reveals numerous warnings to prevent even the smallest bit of false teaching or vulgar values from entering into your organization because one bad apple truly does spoil the entire bunch. It’s much more prudent to identify undesirables before they’ve landed a position on your payroll.

Plus, from a financial standpoint, hiring hastily can be extremely expensive. Think about it: If you have to let someone go, you’re facing numerous expenses, including administrative costs, possible severance pay, and possible unemployment compensation. Then you’ll have to pay for attracting a new candidate and providing training for that person. And all the while, you might have to pay others overtime to complete essential tasks. When you look at it this way, it becomes pretty clear that when you’re more discriminating upfront, you’re a better steward of your organization’s resources.

I used to think that I needed to talk to a lot of people in order to find a great job candidate. Over the years, though, I’ve changed my philosophy. Frankly, it’s exhausting to speak to a lot of people if they are the wrong people! I now judge the strength of my organization’s interview process by how few folks we meet face to face.

Ultimately, because of the knockout interview process, I am assured that the handful of people who make the cut are likely to possess the right stuff, and to add to my organization instead of costing it.

If you would like to put the knockout interview to work for your own organization, read on for five things to keep in mind:

Look for an ability to be faithful in the little things. When it comes to hiring a new person to be a member of your team, no detail is too small to overlook. The fact is, how well a person performs on the little things is indicative of how well she will – or won’t – perform on the big things. And you can start to evaluate this capability as soon as the first batch of résumés lands on your desk. As you read through them, consciously look for reasons to put some of those résumés in the ‘reject’ pile, keeping in mind that you want to uphold your organization’s standards of excellence.

Look for use of professional language and correctly spelled words. If these aren’t present, it’s a reason for disqualification. Recently, my organization hired a new administrative assistant. One application for the job had multiple spelling and grammatical errors. Knockout! One person sent emails in all lowercase letters. Knockout! And unbelievably, one person even spelled his own last name incorrectly in one spot, which was a definite knockout! I knew that we didn’t want these sorts of slip-ups officially representing our company.

Make sure the candidate has the basic ability to do the job. After you’ve cut the dead weight from the résumés you’ve collected, it’s time to start conducting phone interviews. In addition to making sure that candidates communicate clearly and respectfully, your task at this point is to ensure that they can fulfill the non-negotiables of the position.

You may want to ask applicants about whether they’re available to work certain days or hours, or if they’re comfortable performing specific tasks. If, for example, you need someone to work Saturdays and a particular applicant is unable to do so, why would you want to wait until he has come to your office and wasted your – and his – time to discover this? A phone interview is the time for these kinds of knockouts to happen.

Let them do the talking. When conducting face-to-face interviews, many employers try to put interviewees at ease by doing most of the talking and spending much of the interview telling the candidate about how great the company is. However, your job as a leader isn’t to have a friendly chat – it’s to assess an applicant’s character and competency. Specifically, you should avoid:

• Talking too much – you need to learn about the candidate, not vice versa
• Having a time-wasting, good-old-boy, get-acquainted session
• Conducting the interview as though it were a casual conversation
• Degrading the interview into a sales pitch

There’s no need to intimidate or to be unduly overbearing toward an interviewee, but keep in mind that your objective is to evaluate her past accomplishments, because past performance is much more telling than past experience. Dig into her life and try to determine what her key traits, such as character, talent, attitude, energy, and drive, look like. Those are the things that will strengthen or weaken your team, not how glibly she can carry on a conversation. If you don’t hear the candidate articulately expressing these critical components, then it’s time for another knockout.

Look at their journey, not their location. Just as you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, you shouldn’t judge a job candidate by his location on life’s ladder. Do not judge applicants strictly by the station they have reached in life. Dig deeper and determine what he overcame to get where he is. The fact is, some people are given a generous head start in life, while others have been forced to negotiate potholes, obstacles, and stumbling blocks.

I’m not saying that you should disregard people who have had an easier road through life. Simply acknowledge that they may not have had the opportunity to face certain challenges that can forge strength of character and develop persistence. It may be that the best candidate was born with the proverbial silver spoon, but in order to find out, you’ll have to dig deep. You won’t be able to judge this strictly by the impressive job titles on his résumé.

Share your core values before hiring. The objective of the knockout interview model is to find a reason to say ‘no’ to a job candidate. By sharing your core values with applicants, though, you may find that they ‘knock’ themselves ‘out’ for you. Share your organization’s core values and behavioral expectations before extending an offer. Let applicants know that you have non-negotiable standards for integrity, teamwork, attitude, attention to detail, etc. Then describe what these behaviors look like in practice, and be honest about the consequences for not living up to these standards.

Frankly, many people are repelled by character-driven companies with high ethical standards. Whether on a conscious level or not, they realize that their selfishness, dishonesty, and the like will be discovered. It’s better to let these folks turn away voluntarily before they’re on your payroll, where they’ll infect attitudes, lower morale, and undermine your own credibility as a leader.

Ultimately, knockout interviews work because they force a candidate to show through her actions that she has initiative, that she really wants a job, and that she would like to work for your organization in particular. And since these techniques reveal whether a candidate is prepared or not, they’ll prevent your existing team members from having to bail out an unqualified newcomer. Knockout interviews give you, as a leader, the power to serve as a sentry for your organization and to protect and preserve its culture, values, and people.

About the Author

Dave Anderson, author of How to Lead by THE BOOK: Proverbs, Parables, and Principles to Tackle Your Toughest Business Challenges, is president of Learn to Lead, and has given over 1,000 leadership presentations in thirteen countries. He is also the author of How to Run Your Business by THE BOOK: A Biblical Blueprint to Bless Your Business; If You Don’t Make Waves, You’ll Drown; Up Your Business!; How to Deal with Difficult Customers; and the TKO business series. He and his wife, Rhonda, are cofounders of The Matthew 25:35 Foundation, which helps feed, educate, and house under-resourced people throughout the world. To read Dave complete biography, click here.

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5. Refusing to Hire the Unemployed

No Nonsense Retention: Painless Strategies To Retain Your Best People by Jeff Kortes Why are some organizations able to retain their best people while others struggle with above average turnover? Jeff Kortes presents the key components of retention in a practical, ‘no nonsense’ book that is easy to read and entertaining. Whether you are in an office, factory or on a construction site, the principles presented will improve your retention and enable you to save your organization thousands of dollars due to lost productivity, poor quality and customer service issues. You will learn: How to avoid the dreaded meeting where you have to say, “We are letting you go because you just aren’t a good fit.” Money isn’t the answer to retention. Size of the organization does not matter. Practical ideas you can use immediately to improve retention. Why good employees leave your organization, and how to stop it. It’s the “little” things that matter and what they are. How to build a comprehensive strategy (or game plan) for your department, facility or entire organization that improves retention. What poor retention is costing you. Retention is going to be the most important factor in the survival of companies in the next 15 years. Changing demographics will leave a shortage of workers that will become critical. Only those organizations that are able to retain their best people will be able to compete and survive in the future. Kortes’ andecdotes, common sense tips and ‘no nonsense notes’ make the book easy to follow and remember. The techniques you will learn are nothing fancy. However, when performed together, your department, plant or organization will be transformed into a sophisticated retention machine that will be the envy of your fellow managers or competitors. You will find yourself wondering why you didn’t use these techniques in the past and immediately become a believer in No Nonsense Retention…Painless Strategies to Retain Your Best People.

It’s doesn’t have to be all bad. There’s good turnover and bad turnover.

Firing a non-performer is good turnover. When a top performer leaves to go elsewhere and leaves your organization with a huge void, that’s bad turnover. It can affect the performance of the whole organization.

If you are going to maximize your organization’s performance you have to make a conscious, binding top-down management decision and commitment to develop a no nonsense approach to retention. The following are several must-do actions items for retaining the high-value human assets you’ve worked so hard to acquire:

1. Start at the top! Assess your supervisory and management team! Seventy percent of the people say that the worst thing about their job is the boss. Find out what’s wrong and fix it! Identify the prima donnas and micromanaging control freaks, the whiners, complainers, and blamers. Get them basic supervisory training and improve their performance continuously. If you are the boss, take ownership!
2. Clean Up the House! Identify the non-performers. Identify the poor managers and supervisors. If they do not respond to training and show significant improvement, remove them from an influential role and replace them with someone that does what is truly desired and required for the role and position they are in.
3. Manage Visibly! Get out of the ivory tower. Begin each day by walking around. Stroll around the floor several times a day. Meet the customers, talk with employees, visit with the supervisors, greet the vendors, help the delivery trucks load and unload. Get out of your office. Let people know you are there and that you care. The point here is that you set lead by example. If they like you they are less likely to leave you. Visibility drives retention.
4. Care About Your People! If you don’t really care about your people, your business is doomed. Caring is the reason why people stay. Get to know your people. Learn what each person likes and enjoys. Listen to them and learn about their interests, families, and hobbies. Protect your people from harm and from others in your organization. People are loyal to those who care about them and care for them.
5. Keep your door open 80% of the time. Let your people know you are accessible to them. Avoid telling people to make an appointment or come back later. Make sure the time you do spend with your people is quality time.
6. Focus on Employee Assistance Actively. Sit down with the other managers in your organization and identify the problems that are faced by people in your workforce. Develop innovative ideas and deploy specific new plans to provide employees with more flexibility in their work, support for their common needs, and help for dealing with personal issues that impact their life.
7. Treat Everyone with Respect Always! Every leader and manager and supervisor must set the standard that respectful behavior and sincere open appreciation are expected with no exceptions! Investigate and take immediate action for all non-respectful behavior incidents. Have the managers and supervisors bring food to be shared on a regular basis! Break bread with your people regularly instead of forcing people to eat baloney.
8. Ask Your People What They Want! Sit down with your people and ask them what they want out of their work. Identify what they want to grow, to develop greater control, autonomy and responsibility for the work they do for you. Help them achieve these goals specifically and incrementally. Meaningful engagement in their own future drives commitment and loyalty.
9. Tell Your People What You Want of Them! Be specific and be clear but make sure you explain what you expect of them. Give them the tools, support and the time they need to get the work done. If they do not meet your expectations, bring them in and talk with them and find out what it will take to get them on track.
10. Fire the Slugs. Hold your people accountable for their performance. If they don’t solve the problem, then terminate them with respect and dignity. Your good performers will love you.

About the Author

Jeff Kortes is known as the ‘No Nonsense Guy.’ He is the President of Human Asset Management LLC, a human resource consulting firm specializing in executive search and leadership training. He has trained hundreds of first-line supervisors, managers, and executives during his career. His approach to training is no-nonsense, and practical.

Jeff is also a member of the National Speakers Association and a regular speaker on the topics of retention, recruiting and leadership. For more information, visit www.SlugProofYourTeam.com.

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5. Management Would be Easy if You Didn’t Have to Deal with People, part 1 of 3

The strategic principle doesn’t merely aggregate a collection of objectives.

Landing in the Executive Chair: How to Excel in the Hot Seat by Linda Henman   In today’s fast-paced, unprecedented, and unpredictable economy, many executives simply don’t know what to do. Conventional methods-which many never entirely understood in the first place-often don’t work during economic upheaval. Executives, especially CEOs, need something better. They need a guide that identifies the roadblocks and points out the landmines. In her more than 30 years of working with hundreds of executives, Dr. Linda Henman has observed the critical elements of success, both for the new leader and the one who aspires to the next level of success. In Landing in the Executive Chair, you’ll learn how to: Avoid the pitfalls and identify a clear plan for personal and organizational stress. Leverage the first months in a new executive position- that time of transition that promises opportunity and challenge, but also brings a period of great vulnerability. Create a competitive advantage, set the right tone, make effective decisions, keep talent inside your doors, and establish credibility-all while navigating unfamiliar and turbulent waters. As organizations expand and grow, the skills that led to success often won’t sustain further development in a more complex, high-stakes environment. Present and future executives need more. They need Landing in the Executive Chair.

Rather, this simple statement captures the thinking required to build a sustainable competitive advantage that forces trade-offs among competing resources, tests the soundness of particular initiatives, and sets clear boundaries within which decision makers must operate.

Creating and adhering to a concise, unforgettable, action phrase can help everyone keep an eye on the ball at all times. Wal-Mart offers one of the most well-known strategic principles: Low prices, every day.
A well-thought-out strategic principle pinpoints the intersection of the organization’s passion, excellence, and profitability, or in the case of not-for-profit organizations, its unique contribution. As you can see from the graphic, success lies at the intersection of the three. (See Figure 1)

If your organization operates in section one, you will probably experience some short-term success. People who can do the work they feel passionate about and engage in work that rewards efforts with large monetary compensation, can often stay in the game for the short run. But if you aren’t the best, the competition will soon surpass you.

Figure 1: Strategic Success

Passion and excellence without profitability, or section two, won’t even allow you a short run. This undisciplined orientation – to do what you like and are good at – without consideration of the market, won’t provide anything other than some short-lived fun, which should last right up until the time your bills come.

Section three is a recipe for burn out. You can work hard at something you’re good at and that makes you significant money, but you won’t excel at it for long unless you feel some passion for it.

Sustained success lies in area four, the intersection of passion, excellence, and profitability. Only here can your organization thrive as you work diligently to produce a product or service that your competition can’t match.

When companies face change or turmoil, the strategic principle acts as a beacon that keeps the ships from running aground. It helps maintain consistency but gives managers the freedom to make decisions that are right for their part of the organization. Even when the leadership changes, or the economic landscape shifts, the strategic principle remains the same. It helps decision makers know when to develop new practices, products, and markets. When they face a choice, decision-makers will be able to test their options against the strategic principle by simply applying the three-part litmus tests:

• Are we passionate about his work?
• Can we do it better than our competitors?
• Will it make us money?

When designed and executed well, a strategic principle gives people clear direction while inspiring them to be flexible and take risks. It offers a disciplined way to think about decisions, strategy, and execution and challenges people to play an ever-evolving better game.

About the Author

For more than 30 years, Linda Henman has helped leaders in Fortune 500 Companies, small businesses, and military organizations define their direction and select the best people to put their strategies in motion.

Linda holds a Ph.D. in organizational systems, two Master of Arts degrees in interpersonal communication and organizational development, and a Bachelor of Science degree in communication. By combining her experience as an organizational consultant with her education in business, she offers her clients selection, coaching, and consulting solutions that are pragmatic in their approach and sound in their foundation.

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3. Strategic Planning – Why Do Organizations Need Strategic Planning
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A pure fact of transformational leadership is that you can accomplish only a small portion of the requisite forward movement on your own. Therefore, if you are to transform a company you must inspire others to follow you. What are the qualities of a leader that inspire others and impel them to follow?

Front Runners – Lap Your Competition With 10 Game-Changing Strategies For Total Business Transformation by Mahesh Rao   Practical and well-tested, Front Runners: Lap Your Competition With 10 Game-Changing Strategies For Total Business Transformation shares author Mahesh Rao’s 10 strategic steps successfully implemented by numerous executives of Fortune 100 companies during the last decade. The down-to-earth lessons found in Front Runners can be applied to a wide range of corporate, academic, and social arenas. Discover how industry leaders get ahead and stay there and apply the same skills and strategies to your business and personal lives. You will learn to: Assess and analyze your current situation Nurture leaders at all levels Proactively identify and resolve potential challenges and roadblocks Build a learning organization that thrives on change Innovate and build products and services customers love to use Assist cross-functional teams in being more effective Improve communication at all levels Make critical decisions faster, with deeper buy-in from stakeholders Win the hearts and minds of individuals, so they share and work toward your organization’s goals Front Runners step-by-step program includes case studies, illustrations, graphs, glossary, and bibliography.

• Honesty: People follow enthusiastically only those whom they trust. A reputation for truthfulness and transparency – for a forthright approach that leaves no residual feelings of hidden agendas or deception – is essential to garnering widespread support.
• Energy: People are called to action by leaders who display genuine enthusiasm – even passion – for the vision they espouse. By energizing others, you transform them, and in turn they will help you transform the company.
• Eloquence: Reckless energy dissipates and loses its effect. For maximum impact you need to express yourself clearly. Only by communicating your vision in a clear and compelling way will you lead others to sense a common goal. Only then will you alter perceptions of the present and expectations for the future so as to align with that vision.
• Modeling: Talk without action is hollow. Exhibit the behaviors you expect of others. If you want your company’s leadership and employees to be forward looking, imaginative, and open to innovation, you need to pursue innovative approaches yourself – to the business as a whole, to the processes involved, and to the products or services you produce. You need to be particularly aggressive about keeping the sheen on your company’s competitive differentiators, i.e., those characteristics that keep your company standing above the rest in particular ways.
• Sincerity: You need to show that you genuinely care about and value everyone. Announce tangible progress. Celebrate it, and praise those responsible for it. Encourage everyone’s efforts, and convince them that you are doing all you can to help everyone succeed. Show that you are genuine and human – a person worth following and emulating. Then you will have converted them from employees doing a daily job to believers who see themselves as members of a team going someplace special. They will begin to feel themselves transformed – a heady feeling that will fuel still greater progress.

Persevere

Dead ends and failures – even occasional crises – are inevitable. The only way to avoid encountering problems is to do nothing (which itself is a problem). Look for silver linings, for opportunities hiding within problems. Know that adversity is itself a form of energy on which you can feed. By adopting an attitude that improvement will be a continuous, uphill climb, and that you will not turn away from the challenge of the climb or permit the energy of those who follow you to flag, you’ll arrive in a good place. Show yourself to others as an upbeat and determined leader – a visible, accountable, and honest leader whose pursuit of excellence will not be stopped. If you persevere, others will follow you like troops behind a courageous general leading them into battle. Transformation is not for the faint of heart.

A Perspective

Through two decades as an executive consultant to Fortune 100 companies aspiring to transform themselves, I have come to believe that transformation is there for the taking, whatever the circumstance. The key is to establish true transformational leadership. I perceive companies as participants in a race, running lap after lap in an effort to position themselves at the head of the pack. That is why I titled my book on the subject Front Runners, and refer to the chapters as ‘laps.’ In Front Runners you’ll read greater detail about how to observe and speculate (laps 2-4), prepare and adapt (laps 5-8), and inspire (laps 5-9) as a transformational leader – along with other thoughts and strategies.

Because our world changes in the blinking of an eye, ‘transformational leader’ has become synonymous with ‘effective leader.’ To let important events and developments pass while you and your company stand tethered to old ground is to invite regret. You need to take the helm and steer your company into a harbor of optimal success. As was true five centuries ago, someone will ask Why go? Why take such risks? Maybe we’ll be OK where we are.” That’s not a safe bet. The risk of inaction is greater than the risk of action, because everything is moving constantly. You and your company will move either backward or forward. Backward movement comes from waiting for change to happen. Forward movement comes from making change happen in your favor.

About the Author

Mahesh Rao, a dynamic, creative, and highly-skilled executive consultant with more than 20 years of business experience, holds 14 US and international patents. Some have been industry-shaping. In 2005 he won the Japanese government’s Most Valuable Patent award. Mahesh has received numerous corporate, client, and industry accolades for coaching senior executives at Fortune 100 companies to become successful transformation leaders and organizational innovators. He has also founded startups that were taken through acquisition. His work with large global companies, including Mitsubishi – and his wide exposure to numerous industries, schools of thought, practices, organizational needs, and corporate responsibilities – account for his consummate ability to advance a vision through strategizing, planning, and execution on a global scale while managing risks. Mahesh Rao’s extensive travel and keen cultural awareness, along with his MBA from the Kellogg School of Management, contribute to his ability to see processes clearly, from the big picture to the details. To read Mahesh Rao’s complete biography, click here.

To contact the author write to: Mahesh@BeFrontRunner.com.

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2. StrategyDriven Podcast Special Edition 53 – An Interview with Randy Dobbs, author of Transformational Leadership
3. StrategyDriven Podcast Special Edition 40b – An Interview with Frank McIntosh, author of The Relational Leader, part 2 of 2
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5. “Trust Me, I’m a Leader”: Why Building a Culture of Trust Will Boost Employee Performance – and Maybe Even Save Your Company

Unusually Excellent: The Necessary Nine Skills Required for the Practice of Great Leadership by John Hamm   Unusually Excellent is a back-to-basics reference book that offers both seasoned and aspiring leaders a framework for understanding and a guide for applying the battle-tested fundamentals of leadership at every stage of their careers. Most employees have been hurt or disappointed, at some point in their careers, by the hand of power in an organization. That’s why nine times out of ten leaders are in ‘negative trust territory’ before they make their first request of an employee to do something. Before a team can reach its full potential, leaders must act in ways that transcend employees’ fears of organizational power.

It’s because they’ve been infected with a disease I call ‘failing elegantly.’

Failing elegantly is a very sophisticated and veiled set of coping behaviors by individuals, the purpose of which is to avoid the oncoming train of embarrassment when the cover comes off the lousy results that we’d prefer no one ever see. In other words, it’s a fancy way to lose.

Essentially, this debilitating syndrome sets in when people stop believing they can be successful and start devoting their energy to how best to lose.

There is no obvious moment when the danger of failure comes riding in on a pale horse. But there is that moment, and everyone can feel it, when a project or the commitment to the promised results enters the risk zone – when challenges arise and there are no clear answers or remedies. It is precisely at this fork in the road – when egos and reputations get shaky – that leaders must recognize the signs of an impending crisis of confidence and intervene with specific messages and actions aimed at getting everyone back into the winner’s mindset.

The driving elements of failing elegantly are 1) having a sophisticated explanation for the loss, and 2) making sure we appear to have tried everything in our power to avoid this unwanted outcome. But what this mentality forgets is the following harsh reality: There are no style points for second place.

The following are a few leadership mistakes that put your team in danger of failing elegantly – along with some remedies to get them back into the winner’s mindset.

Setting impossible goals. Leading the goal-setting process to arrive at objectives that are perfectly sized is very tricky work, but this effort has never been more important to success than it is in today’s geographically dispersed, virtual organizations. Taskmasters and pacesetting leaders need to learn the fine line between an invigorating challenge and a wholly deflating expectation. They also need to realize that everyone on the team may not share their level of maniacal commitment.

While top performers are inspired by ‘stretch’ goals that seem slightly out of their reach, smart team members will not waste their time training for a ‘three-minute mile.’ Goals that are clearly beyond any reasonable confidence of achievement are worse than easy goals – they actually disengage your team’s energy. The predictable and natural response is “Why bother?”

Letting people get pseudo-wins by ‘majoring in the minors.’ Very talented people can and do lose focus on the critical path problems that must be solved to transform an idea into reality. Those are often the knottiest problems, and sometimes we resist them for a period of time, preferring to create some satisfying momentum on simpler tasks, or ones that are simply more fun.

Leaders must develop an eye and ear for this weakness – and must try to listen for it in every conversation and look for it in every ops review. They must relentlessly redirect energy to the hard problems, realizing that it is human nature to drift from the tough stuff in favor of more emotionally fulfilling and easier project modules.

Tolerating ‘The dog ate my homework’ and other common excuses. In an organization, too much tolerance can be a dangerous notion, mainly because without a clear line in the sand defining acceptable and unacceptable, a blurred line between success and failure follows. When you’re failing elegantly, for example, you tolerate ‘The dog ate my homework’ and other classic excuses. No results plus a good excuse is presented in lieu of results – and tolerated. Massive amounts of energy are poured into sophisticated justifications and rationalizations for certain courses of action, and there is veiled blame for everything outside the team’s control.

What you want, and what the winner’s mindset demands, are insightful explanations for the gap between expected and actual performance. These are informed guesses – as informed and objective as they can be, untainted by the effort expended in dodging responsibility. There is tolerance of the simple fact that we don’t have control over every variable in the game, so at times – through either forces outside our influence or simply not having run our best play – the results are not as we wish.

Allowing sloppiness and imprecision. The nice guy in you wants to avoid the perception of being a hardcore hard-ass and will politely look the other way, or catalog it away with some good-natured humor, allowing a corner to be cut, a report to be incomplete, or some shoddy work to pass as acceptable. Shoddy work and sloppiness almost always stem from being lazy or uncommitted or not having enough pride in the finished work.

Leaders want to be good people, and they want to show others that they have the wisdom to accept human frailty. So they allow themselves to tolerate a little sloppiness here and a little imprecision there in their subordinates’ work. But high reliability organizations never allow sloppiness, because they know it equals death. Unusually excellent leaders have a zero tolerance policy for sloppiness.

Encouraging ‘editorialized’ data. One of the most pernicious points where failure can take hold is in the feedback process. Leaders, being eternal optimists and enthusiasts, also have a dangerous tendency to signal, often unconsciously, their dislike of bad news, their inner revulsion toward failure. When that happens – especially when that leader hasn’t regularly established an absolute demand for accurate, objective data -subordinates will begin to shape and color the data to meet the leader’s hopeful expectations and emotional needs, rather than the leader’s intellectual needs. The feedback data starts becoming corrupted, and that in turn begins to undermine the overall strategy – until the likelihood of success itself begins to plummet.

Unusually excellent leaders demand that performance feedback data be delivered promptly and be uncolored, objective, plentiful, and robust. This data is used to figure out what is working and what isn’t, so that corrections to course and speed can be made.

Failing to measure what matters. The right metrics will serve you in enormously useful ways. As the Crosby Quality Institute reminds us: You will get what you inspect, not what you expect.

One CEO who was constantly entertaining requests from his sales force for changes to the company’s product line – change orders – in response to ‘customer requests.’ In this case very few of these requested changes, which came at great expense in engineering time and cost, resulted in orders from the people who had passionately argued the case. Instead of getting upset about it, the CEO simply asked that the team begin to track the percentage of change orders resulting in sales orders, and – what do you know? – this costly practice came to a screeching halt as soon as the sales force knew their bosses were looking at this data, by salesperson, every month.

Measuring what matters is perhaps the very highest use of leadership authority in leading the domain of execution. Once the plan is set, the resources and funding are committed, and the action starts, there is mostly just feedback and response to the unknowns of the battle to be managed. The one thing you must have, to make the real-time course corrections that will inevitably be required, is good data. Invest in the design and the machinery required to gather, analyze, and present the data you need – quickly, accurately, and easily. This, more than anything else, will serve your leadership needs in the arena of live ammo – where the score is kept, the winners get to keep playing, and the losers go home.

Allowing an absolute commitment to winning to slip. A tolerance for excuses, corrupt data that compromises strategy, and a distorted view of what is really happening ‘out there’ is akin to boiling a frog one degree at a time. The frog can’t tell how hot the water has gotten until it is dead. But if you put all these factors together and add the heightened sense of urgency that always characterizes the execution phase, you’ll have plenty of the necessary ingredients in place for systematic failure. The key factor is the resignation and rationalization that occurs when we conclude that winning seems out of reach.

These are dark moments for any team. And yet, we all know that we should leave it all on the field and, as the saying goes, ‘win or die trying.’ But when you’ve already begun to distance yourself from your absolute commitment to winning, you start blaming everything and everyone – your teammates, the strategy, bad luck, crooked competitors, insufficient support, and, most of all, the man or woman in charge. The fact that many people – the honest and secure ones first – see what’s happening and hold the behavior in contempt often proves to be an effective vaccine against the contagion spreading.

Passive acceptance of failure, and the rationalization that always goes with it, is a cancer that can begin anywhere in the organization, then metastasize to every office, including your own. You can prevent it by setting clear and precise standards of behavior for everyone on the team, as well as clear consequences for the violation of those standards. And you can control it through continuous and open communication with every member of your team.

About the Author

John Hamm is one of the top leadership experts in Silicon Valley. He was named one of the country’s Top 100 venture capitalists in 2009 by AlwaysOn and has led investments in many successful high-growth companies as a partner at several Bay Area VC firms. Hamm has also been a CEO, a board member at over thirty companies, and a CEO adviser and executive coach to senior leaders at companies such as Documentum, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, TaylorMade-adidas Golf and McAfee. John teaches leadership at the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University. To read John Hamm’s full biography, click here.

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Just as the courageous, skillful sea captain of long ago took up a compass, charted a course, and led others across the unknown, so must today’s captains of business and industry.

Front Runners – Lap Your Competition With 10 Game-Changing Strategies For Total Business Transformation by Mahesh Rao   Practical and well-tested, Front Runners: Lap Your Competition With 10 Game-Changing Strategies For Total Business Transformation shares author Mahesh Rao’s 10 strategic steps successfully implemented by numerous executives of Fortune 100 companies during the last decade. The down-to-earth lessons found in Front Runners can be applied to a wide range of corporate, academic, and social arenas. Discover how industry leaders get ahead and stay there and apply the same skills and strategies to your business and personal lives. You will learn to: Assess and analyze your current situation Nurture leaders at all levels Proactively identify and resolve potential challenges and roadblocks Build a learning organization that thrives on change Innovate and build products and services customers love to use Assist cross-functional teams in being more effective Improve communication at all levels Make critical decisions faster, with deeper buy-in from stakeholders Win the hearts and minds of individuals, so they share and work toward your organization’s goals Front Runners step-by-step program includes case studies, illustrations, graphs, glossary, and bibliography.

Today’s call is even more urgent. The world of the sixteenth century changed under people’s feet year by year; it changes under our feet day by day. The status quo is a death knell. Business leaders of today need to call up visions of a new world in which their businesses might reside.

They need to dedicate themselves to crossing the intervening seas, and inspire others to follow – and they need to become the compass that makes crossing possible. In the language of today, they need to take on the mantle of ‘transformational leadership.’

Assuming that you aspire to be a transformational leader, what traits will you exhibit? First, you’ll have the wisdom and insight to know that transformation has no beginning and end: you’ll have your business in a perpetual state of transformation if you want to stay ahead of the curve and become a front runner. Second, you’ll spearhead a series of processes necessary to keeping transformation alive: observe and speculate, prepare and adapt, inspire, and persevere.

Observe and Speculate

Before you can take charge of transforming your company you’ll need to know where it is and where you believe it should go. These are some of the questions you’ll pursue.

• How competent is your leadership team, and how prepared are they to help you catapult the company into the future? Do you have in them the imagination needed to help you flesh out a vision for the company’s future, and the skills needed to help make that vision a reality? If not, how will you imbue your leadership with what you need from them – or where will you go to acquire it?
• How well do you know your employees’ skills, work ethic, and willingness to embrace change? Do you have in place the people you’ll need to take care of all the details you expect to arise as you move forward?
• What internal capabilities do you see in your company (strengths and weaknesses)?
• What external forces do you see affecting your company (opportunities and threats)?
• How well do you know your customers’ needs, i.e., the job the customer is trying to get done? Are there ways to put yourself in the shoes of your customers by studying the problems they are trying to solve?
• How well does your product accommodate the customers’ needs? What can you learn by observing their use of your products or services? (The importance of this is that your greatest prosperity will never come at the customers’ expense, but rather will surface after your product or service enables your customers to prosper.)
• What trends do you see in the market, and how does your competition relate to them?
• How clear are you about the criteria for success?
• How well equipped are you to measure your company against those criteria?

Prepare and Adapt

The transformational leader predicts the direction of tomorrow’s wind and prepares to use it to advantage. The transformational leader believes the adage that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure – that preventing fires is preferable to fighting them – and so exercises imagination today that will lead to preparation and adaptation tomorrow.

• Seeing a potential problem down the road, prepare to solve it. If time shows your solution to be needed, you’ll be a front runner while others scramble to catch up. If time shows your solution unneeded, you can quietly store it away and retrieve it later if a need arises.
• Think in terms of raising the bar and challenging your competition to clear it. To establish the criteria for others is to assume the role of front runner.
• As the 16th Century navigator aligned his galleon with the stars and made constant adjustments to stay on course, align your organizational structure, employee and leadership competencies, products/services, governance and engagement models, and success metrics, with your vision and make adjustments as needed along the way.

No one has a crystal ball. No matter how diligently you try to prepare and adapt, you’ll never foresee all the details and make all the right moves. But if you let your vision be your guiding light, it will keep you headed in the right direction until details become clear.

About the Author

Mahesh Rao, a dynamic, creative, and highly-skilled executive consultant with more than 20 years of business experience, holds 14 US and international patents. Some have been industry-shaping. In 2005 he won the Japanese government’s Most Valuable Patent award. Mahesh has received numerous corporate, client, and industry accolades for coaching senior executives at Fortune 100 companies to become successful transformation leaders and organizational innovators. He has also founded startups that were taken through acquisition. His work with large global companies, including Mitsubishi – and his wide exposure to numerous industries, schools of thought, practices, organizational needs, and corporate responsibilities – account for his consummate ability to advance a vision through strategizing, planning, and execution on a global scale while managing risks. Mahesh Rao’s extensive travel and keen cultural awareness, along with his MBA from the Kellogg School of Management, contribute to his ability to see processes clearly, from the big picture to the details. To read Mahesh Rao’s complete biography, click here.

To contact the author write to: Mahesh@BeFrontRunner.com.

Relate Articles:

1. StrategyDriven Podcast Special Edition 53 – An Interview with Randy Dobbs, author of Transformational Leadership
2. StrategyDriven Podcast Special Edition 40a – An Interview with Frank McIntosh, author of The Relational Leader, part 1 of 2
3. StrategyDriven Podcast Special Edition 40b – An Interview with Frank McIntosh, author of The Relational Leader, part 2 of 2
4. “Trust Me, I’m a Leader”: Why Building a Culture of Trust Will Boost Employee Performance – and Maybe Even Save Your Company
5. StrategyDriven Podcast Special Edition 41 – An Interview with Susan Bagyura, author of The Visionary Leader

Black Box Corporation is a trusted provider of comprehensive communications and infrastructure solutions. As a value-added reseller of platforms and applications from the industry’s top manufacturers, and a provider of our own line of technology products and services, we design, build, and maintain today’s complex voice and data networks. Headquartered in Lawrence, Pennsylvania, Black Box Network Services has the largest footprint in the industry, with 194 offices serving 141 countries. With more than 4500 Team Members worldwide, we serve more than 175,000 clients in every major industry sector.

As a business owner or IT manager, you need tips and tactics on striking the right balance. We offer seven strategies:

1. Accept that employees are going to have the need to conduct some personal business. Limited usage of for example Gmail or Yahoo! Mail personal accounts should be allowed to give employees a connection to their personal lives.
2. Use a tool that can help you accurately measure and report internet bandwidth usage. Establishing a benchmark allows you to fairly assess the situation and address the most frequented sites and the heaviest individual bandwidth users.
3. Take a more granular approach that allows the use of certain sites, but at a throttled down bandwidth level so business processes are not slowed. By slowing the access to a site such as Facebook, employees can use the site, but might get frustrated at slow-loading page. They can then be subtly pushed back towards work-related tasks.
4. Treat employees like grownups! Don’t publicly shame those who visit undesirable sites or who spend too much time online. Work with them to establish clear best practices.
5. Beware of the workarounds! If you take draconian measures and restrict all personal internet usage, employees might use proxy sites or other tricks which introduce your business to malware and are difficult to manage and detect.
6. Frame your need to limit personal web use in terms of business performance. For example, describe how streaming movies at work is severely interrupting the CRM system, which will affect everyone at bonus time.
7. Consider tailoring access by department or individual. Marketing might need greater bandwidth for YouTube campaigns, for example.

About the Author

Keith Ross is product manager for Networking products at Black Box Corporation. His product line includes Ethernet switches, media converters, network security, and WAN optimization products. Keith has over 10 years experience in telecommunications and data networking. He worked at FORE Systems, Marconi, and Ericsson previously. Keith has a BSEE from Carnegie-Mellon and an MSEM from Stanford University. To learn more about Black Box, click here.

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5. The Exchange: Four Tips for Having Conflict-Busting Conversations in the Workplace

The Exchange: A Bold and Proven Approach to Resolving Workplace Conflict by Steven Dinkin, Barbara Filner, and Lisa Maxwell The Exchange supplies readers with proven tools for resolving emotionally charged disputes. The Exchange itself is a four-stage, structured process specifically designed to encourage discussion of all the issues in a dispute – even the intense, emotional issues – in ways that are more productive than a gripe session. It derives from the conflict resolution model used successfully by National Conflict Resolution Center mediators for more than 25 years and includes constructive techniques to use in face-to-face meetings with disputing or disruptive employees. You can use this process to break down barriers – and to create changes that have a positive effect on your whole workforce. It’s important to note that The Exchange was designed by mediators for managers. Managers learn a structure and skills similar to those mediators know and use, but it also takes into account managers’ responsibilities, both to their companies and their employees. A key difference between managers and mediators is that managers are not expected to be neutral. They have the responsibility of reinforcing the interests of the department and the company for which they work. The Exchange teaches managers the right combination of skills and structure, as well as the finesse, to express the needs of the company. The Exchange begins with you – the manager – and ends with employees meeting with the manager to develop effective solutions. Like most managers, you probably did not set out to be a conflict resolver. And you probably find it more than a little frustrating to be your company’s resident fire chief. The Exchange teaches you to resist the temptation to simply tell people what to do. Actively engaging your employees in problem solving helps them take responsibility for the problem and for the solution. When you know how to address workplace conflicts properly, these challenging situations can lead to creative resolutions that re-energize the workplace and bring new ideas to old problems.

Disagreements, disputes, and honest differences are normal in any workplace. When these normal occurrences are treated as opportunities for exploring new ideas about projects, they can become catalysts for increased energy and productivity. Getting to that place starts with an honest discussion.

The following tips – excerpted from The Exchange – will teach you how to turn your next meeting with conflicting employees into a productive conversation.

Start with an icebreaker. Most people will be ready to complain, debate, or argue at the beginning of any conflict-based conversation. They have marshaled their most compelling arguments and are ready for battle. If you go straight to the topic of controversy, most people will quickly get stuck in defending their positions and attacking their opponents.

That’s why you need to do something different. The Exchange teaches that you should begin with an icebreaker. This is not just a light introductory activity. It is a way to non-confrontationally initiate a conversation about difficult issues. An ideal icebreaker asks for a person’s own take on something that’s both work-related and positive. For example, if the conflict involves two employees involved in the same project, you might break the ice by asking each of them how they became involved in the project and what they hoped to achieve.

Listen. Conflict resolution is tricky because too many managers ignore the fact that sometimes what they aren’t saying is more important than what they are saying. Often the best resolutions come from listening carefully to what the other person has to say. Being an active listener sends the message that you are genuinely concerned about him or her and the dispute. Put plain and simply, it’s the best way to get good information.

Ask an open-ended question. It can be as simple as, “So, tell me, what’s going on?” Then listen carefully to that person’s side of the story. You’ll know it’s time to insert yourself into the conversation when the discussion turns negative.

You can acknowledge someone’s emotions without seeming like you are taking his or her side. Especially at the beginning of talking about a conflict, you’re building rapport, even if it’s with an employee you’ve spoken with millions of times before. When there’s a conflict, you’re treading on new ground, and showing that person you are willing to see his or her side of the story is how you will set the foundation for working toward a solution.

Use and encourage positive language. This one might seem like a no-brainer, but any frustrated manager knows how easy it can be to slip into negativity after a conflict has affected a workgroup. Always think before you speak. Use positive, easy-to-understand language. Don’t fall into repeating, verbatim, paragraphs from your company’s HR manual.

Remember, you’re having a conversation, not a trial. If you keep the language positive, whoever you’re addressing will likely mirror what you’re doing. Even referring to the department’s needs can be stated in very positive terms, which will lead to a more collaborative (rather than punitive) tone in the discussion. For example, if the manager says, “This has increasingly affected the entire team, and we need to address it so we can get everyone focused back on the project goals and having a comfortable working environment. I am looking forward to establishing a good working relationship between the two of you and improving morale for everyone on the team,” it will set a constructive atmosphere. When you keep things positive, you can work toward great solutions efficiently and effectively.

Work toward SMART solutions. Sustainable solutions are SMART solutions. That means they’re:

• Specific: Be clear about who will do what, when, where, and how.
• Measurable: Be clear about how you will all be able to tell that something has been done, achieved, or completed.
• Achievable: Make sure that whatever solution you agree on fits the situation; that it complies with both the law and organizational policy; that everyone involved has the ability and opportunity to do what is required of them. Don’t set up anyone to fail.
• Realistic: Check calendar dates for holidays and vacations; look at past performance to predict future actions; allow extra time for glitches and delays; don’t assume that the best-case scenarios will come true.
• Timed: Create reasonable deadlines or target dates; include a few ideas about what to do if something unexpected occurs; be willing to set new dates if necessary.

Once you have your SMART solutions in place, immediately put them in writing. Putting solutions in writing is very important, and not just for legal reasons (and for covering your back). It’s a way to honor the work that you and your employees have accomplished. It’s also a way to keep people’s memories from diverging from the agreed-upon solutions. Verbal agreements have a way of being remembered very differently by different people—and then becoming the subject of another conflict. It’s safer and easier for everyone to have the solutions written down, in order to be able to easily verify them later.

Disputes, full of emotional complexities and interpersonal histories, are the headaches of the workplace. They’re always going to pop up, even in the most cordial of workplace environments. The good news is that when you’re armed with the tools you need to work toward productive resolutions, you and your employees can use them to strengthen your organization rather than harm it.

About the Authors

Steven P. Dinkin is president of NCRC. He received his law degree from George Washington University, where he taught a mediation clinic as an adjunct law professor. He has also taught mediation courses in the United States, Europe, and Latin America. For several years with the Center for Dispute Settlement in Washington, D.C., Steve served as an employment and workplace mediator for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and other federal agencies. In 2003, he moved to San Diego to lead NCRC. His experience managing a talented and opinionated staff has contributed to the realism of this book. To read Steven Dinkin’s complete biography, click here.

Barbara Filner was the director of training for NCRC from 1984-2010. She currently works as a consultant for NCRC. Barbara has a master’s degree in teaching from Indiana University and has worked as a teacher, a labor union official, and an analyst in local and state government. She has designed and conducted workshops on mediation and conflict resolution in the workplace in both the United States and Europe. She has lived in Pakistan, India, and Egypt, and thus brings a multicultural perspective to this book. She has also co-written two books about culture and conflict, Conflict Resolution Across Cultures and Mediation Across Cultures. To read Barbara Filner’s complete biography, click here.

Lisa Maxwell is currently the director of the training institute at NCRC. She has traveled all over the world as a trainer for NCRC for almost 20 years. Lisa has a master’s degree in education from San Diego State University and has developed curricula and taught courses at the high school and university levels. Mrs. Maxwell developed and is the lead trainer in The Exchange Training. Lisa has worked with businesses, with the military, and with nonprofit organizations on finding creative, effective ways to manage conflicts. To read Lisa Maxwell’s complete biography, click here.

To learn more about the NCRC, or to attend one of its upcoming training sessions, visit its Web site, www.ncrconline.com.

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Unusually Excellent: The Necessary Nine Skills Required for the Practice of Great Leadership by John Hamm   Unusually Excellent is a back-to-basics reference book that offers both seasoned and aspiring leaders a framework for understanding and a guide for applying the battle-tested fundamentals of leadership at every stage of their careers. Most employees have been hurt or disappointed, at some point in their careers, by the hand of power in an organization. That’s why nine times out of ten leaders are in “negative trust territory” before they make their first request of an employee to do something. Before a team can reach its full potential, leaders must act in ways that transcend employees’ fears of organizational power.

Why is trust so pivotal? It’s a matter of human nature: When employees don’t trust their leaders, they don’t feel safe. And when they don’t feel safe, they don’t take risks – and where there is no risk taken, there is less innovation, less ‘going the extra mile,’ and therefore, very little unexpected upside.

Feeling safe is a primal human need. When that need isn’t met, our natural response is to focus energy toward a showdown with the perceived threat.

Our attention on whatever scares us increases until we either fight or run in the other direction, or until the threat diminishes on its own. Without trust, people respond with distraction, fear, and, at the extreme, paralysis. And that response is hidden inside ‘business’ behaviors – sandbagging quotas, hedging on stretch goals, and avoiding accountability or commitment.

Trustworthiness is the most noble and powerful of all the attributes of leadership. Leaders become trustworthy by building a track record of honesty, fairness, and integrity. Cultivating this trust isn’t just a moral issue; it’s a practical one.

Trust is the currency you will need when the time comes for you to make unreasonable performance demands on your teams. And when you’re in that tight spot, it’s quite possible that the level of willingness your employees have to meet those demands could make or break your company.

The first step starts with you. As a leader, you must ‘go first’ – and model trustworthiness for everyone else. Being trustworthy creates trust, yes. But beyond that, there are very specific things you can do to provide Unusually Excellent, trust-building leadership at your organization:

First, realize that being trustworthy doesn’t mean you have to be a Boy Scout. You don’t even have to be a warm or kind person. On the contrary, history teaches us that some of the most trustworthy people can be harsh, tough, or socially awkward—but their promises must be inviolate and their decisions fair.

As anachronistic as it may sound in the twenty-first century, men and women whose word is their honor, and who can be absolutely trusted to be fair, honest, and forthright, are more likely to command the respect of others than, say, the nicest guy in the room. You can be tough. You can be demanding. You can be authentically whoever you really are. But as long as you are fair, as long as you do what you say consistently, you will still be trusted.

Look for chances to reveal some vulnerability. We trust people we believe are real and also human (imperfect and flawed) – just like us. And that usually means allowing others to get a glimpse of our personal vulnerability – some authentic (not fabricated) weakness or fear or raw emotion that allows others to see us as like them, and therefore relate to us at the human level.

Carl, a self-made success and CEO of a venture-backed software company, is a great example. Carl had a Ph.D. and held senior management positions at several large IT companies. But he came from a family with humble roots. In fact, he was the first kid in his family to go to college. The stories Carl used when leading his team came from his own rural upbringing. He told them from the heart and with great humility. He would emphasize a point not by reference to some academic theory, but rather with a story about working in the corn fields. His team not only trusted him more because he wasn’t afraid to show that side of himself, but they loved him for it.

Carl knew that if he was authentic, it would be much easier for him to earn his team’s trust. The best leaders consciously present themselves as accessible and open and vulnerable – that is, they talk about their fears, challenges, and failures with humility, candor, and at times even some humor – so as to break down the barriers with those whom they wish to know. They know this does not threaten their power, but, rather, increases their influence.

No matter how tempted you are, don’t bullsh*t your employees. Tell the truth, match your actions with your words, and match those words with the truth we all see in the world: no spin, no BS, no fancy justifications or revisionist history – just tell the truth.

Telling the truth when it is not convenient or popular, or when it will make you look bad, can be tough. Yet, it’s essential to your reputation. Your task as a leader is to be as forthright and transparent as is realistically possible. Strive to disclose the maximum amount of information appropriate to the situation. When you feel yourself starting to bend what you know is the truth or withhold the bare facts, find a way to stop, reformat your communication, and tell the truth.

Never, ever make the ‘adulterer’s guarantee.’ This happens when you say to an employee, in effect, “I just lied to (someone else), but you can trust me because I’d never lie to you.” When an employee sees you committing any act of dishonesty or two-facedness, they’ll assume that you’ll do the same to them. They’ll start thinking back through all of their conversations with you, wondering what was real and what was disingenuous.

In my book, I describe an incident that took place at a famous, fast-growing technology company. A young, inexperienced, but talented associate had what he thought was a plan for a powerful new marketing initiative. So he asked the CMO to broker a meeting with the CEO to make a presentation on the subject. The CMO agreed, and the meeting took place.

During the presentation the CEO was polite, if noncommittal. He gave the presenter a sort of passive accepting feedback – “Nice point,” “Interesting,” and so on – and wrapped up the meeting quickly, thanking the presenter for his initiative. But the CMO could sense a duplicity in the CEO’s behavior and attitude as the parties all headed back to their respective offices. Then, ten minutes after the meeting, the CEO called the CMO into his office and said, in essence, “That presentation was absolutely terrible. That guy’s an idiot. I want you to fire him, today.”

The story of this harsh and unjust firing spread (as it always does) throughout the company, morale slipped, and the CMO never completely trusted his boss again. The CEO’s reputation for trustworthiness had been wounded forever. The wreckage from one seemingly small act of dishonesty was strewn all over the company and could never be completely cleaned up.

Don’t punish ‘good failures.’ This is one of the stupidest things an organization can do – yet it happens all the time. A ‘good failure’ is a term used in Silicon Valley to describe a new business start-up or mature company initiative that, by most measures, is well planned, well run, and well organized – yet for reasons beyond its control (an unexpected competitive product, a change in the market or economy) it fails. In other words, ‘good failures’ occur when you play well, but still lose. When they’re punished, you instill a fear of risk-taking in your employees, and with that you stifle creativity and innovation. Instead, you should strive to create a ‘digital camera’ culture.

There is no expense associated with an imperfect digital photograph – financial or otherwise. You just hit the ‘delete’ button, and it disappears. No wasted film, slides, or prints. And we are aware of this relationship between mistakes and the consequences when we pick up the camera – so we click away, taking many more photos digitally than we would have in a world of costly film. Because we know failure is free, we take chances, and in that effort we often get that one amazing picture that we wouldn’t have if we were paying a price for all the mistakes.

Don’t squelch the flow of ‘bad’ news. Do you (or others under you) shoot the messenger when she brings you bad news? If so, you can be certain that the messenger’s priority is not bringing you the information you need: It’s protecting her own hide. That’s why in most organizations good news zooms to the top of the organization, while bad news – data that reveals goals missed, problems lurking, or feedback that challenges or defeats your strategy – flows uphill like molasses in January.

We must install a confidence and a trust that leaders in the organization value the facts, the truth, and the speed of delivery, not the judgments or interpretations of ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ and that messengers are valued, not shot. Make it crystal clear to your employees that you expect the truth and nothing but the truth from them. And always, always hold up your end of that deal. Don’t ever shoot the messenger and don’t ever dole out some irrational consequence.

Unusually excellent leaders build a primary and insatiable demand for the unvarnished facts, the raw data, the actual measurements, the honest feedback, the real information. Very few efforts will yield the payback associated with improving the speed and accuracy of the information you need most to make difficult or complex decisions.

Constantly tap into your ‘fairness conscience.’ Precise agreements about what is fair are hard to negotiate, because each of us has our own sense of fairness. But at the level of general principle, there is seldom any confusion about what fair looks like. Just ask yourself: Would most people see this as fair or unfair? You’ll know the answer (indeed, as a leader, you’re paid to know it).

If you treat your followers fairly, and do so consistently, you will set a pattern of behavior for the entire organization. This sense of fairness, critical to the creation of a safe environment, can be reinforced not only by complimenting fair practices but also by privately speaking to – or if necessary, censuring – subordinates who behave unfairly to others in the organization.

Don’t take shortcuts. Every organization wants to succeed. That’s why, inevitably, there is a constant pressure to let the end justify the means. This pressure becomes especially acute when either victory or failure is in immediate sight. That’s when the usual ethical and moral constraints are sometimes abandoned – always for good reasons, and always ‘just this once’ – in the name of expediency.

Sometimes this strategy even works. But it sets the precedent for repeatedly using these tactics at critical moments – not to mention a kind of ‘mission creep’ by which corner-cutting begins to invade operations even when they aren’t at a critical crossroads.

Plus, when employees see you breaking the ‘code’ of organizational honor and integrity to which your company is supposed to adhere, they lose trust in you.

Betray your organization’s stated values when you’re feeling desperate – by lying to clients or ‘spinning’ the numbers to get out of trouble with your boss – and you devalue the importance of trust and honesty in their eyes. They see you breaking your own rules and suddenly they see you as less trustworthy. After all, if the client or the company’s executive suite can’t trust you, why should they?
Separate the bad apples from the apples who just need a little direction. The cost of untruths to an organization can be huge in terms of time, money, trust, and reputation. As a leader, you have to recognize that you are not going to be able to ‘fix’ a thief, a pathological liar, or a professional con artist—all of these must go, immediately.

In my coaching practice, there are three failure modes that I will decline to coach: integrity, commitment, and chronic selfishness, that is, manipulating outcomes for individual gain at the expense of the larger opportunity. These are character traits, not matters of skill, practice, knowledge, or experience.

That said, one huge mistake leaders make is to doubt or distrust someone because their work or performance disappoints us. Performance problems should be managed fairly and with little judgment of the person’s underlying character, unless that is the issue at the root of the trouble. Ultimately, unlike my failure modes, improving performance is often merely a matter of feedback, course correction, and some coaching.

Trustworthiness is never entirely pure. Everyone fails to achieve perfection. So the goal for a leader is to make those wrong choices as rarely as possible; admit them quickly, completely, and with humility; fix them as quickly as you can; and make full recompense when you cannot. Trust is the most powerful, and most fragile, asset in an organization, and it is almost exclusively created, or hampered, by the actions of the senior leader on the team.

A working environment of trust is a place where teams stay focused, give their utmost effort, and in the end do their best work. It’s a place where we can trust ourselves, trust others, trust our surroundings, or – best of all – trust all three.

About the Author

John Hamm is one of the top leadership experts in Silicon Valley. He was named one of the country’s Top 100 venture capitalists in 2009 by AlwaysOn and has led investments in many successful high-growth companies as a partner at several Bay Area VC firms. Hamm has also been a CEO, a board member at over thirty companies, and a CEO adviser and executive coach to senior leaders at companies such as Documentum, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, TaylorMade-adidas Golf and McAfee. John teaches leadership at the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University. To read John Hamm’s full biography, click here.

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No Nonsense Retention: Painless Strategies To Retain Your Best People by Jeff Kortes Why are some organizations able to retain their best people while others struggle with above average turnover? Jeff Kortes presents the key components of retention in a practical, ‘no nonsense’ book that is easy to read and entertaining. Whether you are in an office, factory or on a construction site, the principles presented will improve your retention and enable you to save your organization thousands of dollars due to lost productivity, poor quality and customer service issues. You will learn: How to avoid the dreaded meeting where you have to say, “We are letting you go because you just aren’t a good fit.” Money isn’t the answer to retention. Size of the organization does not matter. Practical ideas you can use immediately to improve retention. Why good employees leave your organization, and how to stop it. It’s the “little” things that matter and what they are. How to build a comprehensive strategy (or game plan) for your department, facility or entire organization that improves retention. What poor retention is costing you. Retention is going to be the most important factor in the survival of companies in the next 15 years. Changing demographics will leave a shortage of workers that will become critical. Only those organizations that are able to retain their best people will be able to compete and survive in the future. Kortes’ andecdotes, common sense tips and ‘no nonsense notes’ make the book easy to follow and remember. The techniques you will learn are nothing fancy. However, when performed together, your department, plant or organization will be transformed into a sophisticated retention machine that will be the envy of your fellow managers or competitors. You will find yourself wondering why you didn’t use these techniques in the past and immediately become a believer in No Nonsense Retention…Painless Strategies to Retain Your Best People.

• Your attitude… develop an upbeat attitude.
• How well you communicate.
• How you treat people… it should be with respect… always!
• Lead by being a positive example.
• Care for your people.
• Be genuine.

How you treat your people has more to do with turnover than anything else. You have seen it yourself in organizations you have worked in. Certain managers tend to churn thru people… even the ones the managers hire themselves. And, no one is happy in their departments. They are running the corporate version of a jail. People are doing time because they have to and will get out as soon as they can. Others tend to be people magnets who everyone wants to work for. They have people who will go the extra mile for you and you can feel the positive energy when in those areas. 75% of the people in this country say the worst part about their job is their boss!

Keep the tips listed above in mind and I guarantee that you will have one of the more happy and productive departments in your organization. Just as important you will have a department that people will not want to quit being a part of. Remember, people quit their boss… not the company!
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

About the Author

Jeff Kortes is known as the ‘No Nonsense Guy.’ He is the President of Human Asset Management LLC, a human resource consulting firm specializing in executive search and leadership training. He has trained hundreds of first-line supervisors, managers, and executives during his career. His approach to training is no-nonsense, and practical.

Jeff is also a member of the National Speakers Association and a regular speaker on the topics of retention, recruiting and leadership. For more information, visit www.thenononsenseguy.com.

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Would they tell you to take your greatest strengths and run with them?
Or
Would they suggest some areas to work on?

The 8 Dimensions of Leadership: DiSC Strategies for Becoming a Better Leader co-authored by Emma Wilhelm To be an effective leader you need to know your strengths—but that’s only part of the story. You also need a broad perspective on all the behaviors needed to be an effective leader. This book provides both. Using the third-generation DiSC® online personality assessment – one of the most scientifically validated tools available – The 8 Dimensions of Leadership helps you identify your primary leadership dimension. Whether you are a Pioneering, Energizing, Affirming, Inclusive, Humble, Deliberate, Resolute, or Commanding leader, the authors help you understand the psychological drivers, motivations, and ‘blind spots’ characteristic of your style. But no single style will take you all the way. A Humble leader may have a hard time making tough decisions. A Commanding leader may run roughshod over potential allies. The authors detail the lessons all leaders can learn from each style, enabling you to craft a multidimensional approach to becoming the leader you aspire to be.

Would their advice make you nod your head?
Or
Would their insights surprise you?

For many leaders, the thought of asking for advice is quite fear-provoking, but why? If the goal is better leadership – better results – why wouldn’t you want better perspective? For instance, your direct reports, your manager, and your peers might be able to help you identify some leadership ‘blind spots’ that you simply can’t (or don’t want to) see.

You may be wondering, “What is a leadership ‘blind spot?’” Well, it’s not all that different from the kind you encounter while driving! It’s an element of your personality – a psychological driver such as tough-mindedness – that can hold you back as a leader, often without your knowledge. You may be aware of the benefits that a particular personality trait offers but unable to recognize the limitations that the very same trait produces.

Ask yourself: How could tough-mindedness be a benefit as a leader? How could it limit effectiveness?

How can YOU begin to explore your leadership blind spots? To be sure, there’s a lot of value in systematically collecting feedback about your effectiveness as a leader – say, in a 360° assessment. But an even simpler starting point is taking a look in the mirror through honest self-assessment.

It’s Not Just About Strengths
For several years, my colleagues and I have been studying the intersection of leadership and personality. Initially, we wondered: “How are personality characteristics relevant to leadership?” and, more specifically, “Can leaders get away with focusing on those interpersonal behaviors that come most naturally to them – aka their strengths?”

In our research program, we collected more than 3,000 sets of observations from 360° assessments, conducted an extensive review of contemporary leadership literature, and interviewed leaders at all levels of organizations.

When working with leaders, we identified their leadership styles – what we call their ‘primary leadership dimensions,’ such as Pioneering, Energizing, Affirming, Inclusive, Humble, Deliberate, Resolute, or Commanding. We also looked at the global leadership effectiveness ratings given to them and their performance ratings on each of the eight dimensions – not just their primary dimensions.

What we found surprised us. Those leaders who were given globally high ratings of leadership effectiveness not only excelled in particular areas of strength such as their primary leadership dimensions, but they also were able to stretch beyond their default settings. They were able to adopt a wide range of leadership behaviors.

The Good News
By gaining an understanding of your personality as a leader – the good, the bad, and the ugly – you’ll be better prepared to determine what areas you need to work on. And you’re not stuck in your primary leadership dimension. You can address your blind spots head-on, and once you’ve done so, you’ll be ready to learn valuable leadership lessons from other leaders. Quite often, the lessons you need to learn are from those leaders whose strengths are quite different from your own! With introspection and practice, you can become more multidimensional.

More effective leadership isn’t about changing who you are. We like to think of it as leading like you, only better. There aren’t five magical steps to better leadership, and what works for your friend Bob won’t necessarily work for you. Leadership is a highly personal pursuit, and to reach your full potential, you need to do the hard work of assessing where you’re at and where you need to go.

About the Author

Emma Wilhelm, M.S., is senior writer and product developer at Inscape Publishing, where she helps to develop innovative training and development products. Along with Jeffrey Sugerman, Ph.D., and Mark Scullard, Ph.D., she is coauthor of The 8 Dimensions of Leadership: DiSC Strategies for Becoming a Better Leader. To read Emma’s complete biography, click here.

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Unusually Excellent: The Necessary Nine Skills Required for the Practice of Great Leadership by John Hamm   Unusually Excellent explains why your employees may not see you as a leader…and what you can do to change their hearts and minds. Unusually Excellent is a back-to-basics reference book that offers both seasoned and aspiring leaders a framework for understanding and a guide for applying the battle-tested fundamentals of leadership at every stage of their careers. Often, when leaders experience trouble, they look to blame an outside source or expect a small tweak to right their ship. But many times they’ve actually lost their grip on the very basic foundation of leadership. The business environment may change, but no management trend can displace the core laws, proven over centuries, of excellent leadership. Unusually Excellent is an essential resource for leaders that brings these fundamentals together in a new and comprehensive way. This book will help leaders at any level keep their focus on the bedrock principles that will make them extraordinary. Thoroughly practical, day-to-day primer for achieving and maintaining their highest level of leadership, for today and for a lifetime The author’s Harvard Business Review articles are among the most highly read in the magazine’s history Written for all leaders who need to develop and renew their leadership skills Using a sports analogy, the author breaks the work of leaders into three parts: pregame: a matter of character; game day: a matter of competence; and post-game: a matter of consequence.

You’re really just masquerading. You haven’t yet earned the right to lead.

When times are good, not-so-great leaders can get by. They’re cushioned by a surplus of cash, and their missteps are covered up by the thrill of top-line growth, which hides a multitude of sins. But when the cloak of prosperity falls away, their mediocrity is ruthlessly exposed.

Real leadership equity is only earned, not bestowed. Just because you have been granted authority doesn’t mean you’re getting the full, collaborative engagement of your employees. You may have their bodies and time forty or fifty hours a week, but until you earn the privilege, from their point of view, you’ll never have their hearts and minds.

These aren’t radically new ideas. Human nature hasn’t changed that much over the millennia, so neither have the core laws of leadership. It’s just that in the heat of the day-to-day battle, leaders inevitably lose their grip on the basic principles of leadership. In other cases, they never learned these fundamentals or mastered them earlier in their career. And finally, sad to say, some people just aren’t cut out to lead and need to understand why.

“Normal” leadership is a complex system of behaviors that can tolerate a lot of little mistakes. Extraordinary leadership cannot.

Think about it this way: Anyone can snap a photo that looks okay or cook a meal that satiates hunger. However, when an award-winning photographer takes the picture, or a five-star chef prepares dinner, anyone can tell a master has been at work. The same is true of leadership. The small deficiencies in how the novice leads, as opposed to the unusually excellent professional, create a radical difference in the outcome.

So how can you tell whether you really are a great leader in the minds of your employees – or whether, to paraphrase the old television commercial, you’re just playing one on TV? Unfortunately, the depth and breadth of the mistakes you make often tell the true tale.

Below, excerpted from Unusually Excellent, are ten of the most common, deeply destructive mistakes organizational leaders make:

MISTAKE #1: “Role playing” authenticity rather than living it. Authenticity is about owning your failures and shortcomings. It’s about allowing others to really know you, vulnerabilities, warts, and all. It’s about having the guts to seek feedback from others in a sincere and genuine fashion. And it’s about being able to maintain your authentic self in a situation of meaningful consequence – where your decisions affect others, sometimes on a grand scale and sometimes in very personal or dramatic ways.

Knowing who you really are and holding true to yourself in the most difficult moments is the ‘ground zero’ of leadership credibility. It’s the only way to create the trusted connections you need to lead with real influence. Unfortunately, leaders stumble for a variety of reasons: They get scared and veer away at the last moment, or they sacrifice the truth on the altar of protecting other people’s feelings, or they simply seek to avoid the pain of conflict.

When we make the decision to compromise our authenticity, we end up delivering a message that may feel ‘easier’ but that isn’t truly what we want or need to say. Deception conspires with fear and seduces us down a dark road of believing we can ‘fake it,’ just this one time and it will all be okay.

But the downstream impact of making such a choice in a moment of stress or carelessness can be devastating. For one thing, it compromises the integrity of that all-important communications channel between leader and follower by changing expectations about the behavior of both. Worse, it sets a precedent for this type of authentic behavior that over time can trap a leader into an expectation or pattern of always behaving that way – and over the course of years this is a soul-destroying situation.

MISTAKE #2: Underestimating the impact of small acts of dishonesty. In my book, I recount an incident that took place at a famous, fast-growing technology company. A young, inexperienced, but talented associate had what he thought was a plan for a powerful new marketing initiative. So he asked the CMO to broker a meeting with the CEO to make a presentation on the subject. The CMO agreed, and the meeting took place.

During the presentation the CEO was polite, if noncommittal. He gave the presenter a sort of passively accepting feedback – ‘Nice point,’ ‘Interesting,’ and so on – and wrapped up the meeting quickly, thanking the presenter for his initiative. But the CMO could sense a duplicity in the CEO’s behavior and attitude as the parties all headed back to their respective offices. Then, ten minutes after the meeting, the CEO called the CMO into his office and said, in essence, “That presentation was absolutely terrible. That guy’s an idiot. I want you to fire him, today.”

The story of the firing spread (as it always does) throughout the company, morale slipped, and the CMO never completely trusted his boss again. The CEO’s reputation for trustworthiness had been wounded forever. The wreckage from one seemingly small act of dishonesty was strewn all over the company and could never be completely cleaned up.

MISTAKE #3: Being two-faced (and assuming others won’t notice). In another scenario, a CEO had one executive on his team whom he really trusted and in whom he could confide. One day, a couple of other members of that company’s executive team made a presentation at a board meeting that didn’t go so well. Later, as they were walking down a hallway, the CEO turned to his trusted executive and said, “We need to get rid of those guys. They were a disaster at the board meeting – they embarrassed me.”

But then nothing happened. Life at the company went on as before, and the targeted executives remained in their jobs. In the months that passed, the trusted executive found himself in meetings attended by both the CEO and the targeted executives. And it was as if the whole incident had never happened. The CEO joked with the men, complimented them on their work, and treated them as long-term team members.

As the trusted executive watched this, he asked himself: Did the boss mean what he said? Does he ever mean what he says? Did he change his mind – and when did that happen? Or is he too gutless to follow through with his plans? And if he’s willing to stab those guys in the back and then pretend to be their trusting partner, how do I know he hasn’t been doing the same thing with me? Just how duplicitous is this guy?

Such are the dangers of shooting from the hip without realizing that a communication such as the one just described does not qualify as a ‘casual’ comment – once said, it must be resolved, and if it is not, there is a lingering odor that in one way or another, will remain smelly until fixed.

MISTAKE #4: Squelching the flow of bad news. Do you (or others under you) shoot the messenger when she brings you bad news? If so, you can be certain that the messenger’s priority is not bringing you the information you need: It’s protecting her own hide. That’s why in most organizations good news zooms to the top, while bad news – data that reveals goals missed, problems lurking, or feedback that challenges or defeats our strategy – flows uphill like molasses in January.

Unusually excellent leaders understand this reality. To combat it they work hard to build a primary and insatiable demand for the unvarnished facts, the raw data, the actual measurements, the honest feedback, the real information.

We must install a confidence and a trust that leaders in the organization value the facts, the truth, and the speed of delivery, not the judgments or interpretations of ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ and that messengers are valued, not shot. If we can do this then the entire behavior pattern of performance information flow will change for the better… Very few efforts will yield the payback associated with improving the speed and accuracy of the information you need most to make difficult or complex decisions.

MISTAKE #5: Punishing ‘good failures.’ Great organizations encourage risk-taking. Why? Because innovation requires it. There can be no reward without risk. But if your employees take a risk and fail, and you come down on them like a hammer, guess what? They’ll never risk anything again. Unusually excellent leaders deliberately create high-risk, low-cost environments – a.k.a. cultures of trust—where people don’t live in fear of the consequences of failure.

A digital camera is the perfect analogy to the kind of culture you want to create.

There is no expense associated with a flawed digital photograph – financial or otherwise. You just hit the ‘delete’ button, and it disappears. No wasted film, slides, or prints. And we are aware of this relationship between mistakes and consequences when we pick up the camera – so we click away, taking many more photos digitally than we would have in a world of costly film. Because we know failure is free, we take chances, and in that effort we often get that one amazing picture that we wouldn’t have if we were paying for all the mistakes.

MISTAKE #6: Letting employee enthusiasm fizzle. A big part of a leader’s job is to be compelling. That means you must recruit ‘A players’ through a big vision of the future and a personal commitment to a mission. But it’s not enough to recruit once and then move on. Never assume “once enrolled, always enrolled.” Even the best followers need to be reminded again and again how fun, rewarding, and meaningful their work is.

In other words, when people seem to be losing their spark, they need to become ‘born again’ employees. (Time to put on your evangelist cloak!)

Enthusiasm is a renewable resource. Part of being compelling is reminding yourself that people want and need to be re-enrolled all the time. This message doesn’t have to be over the top to be compelling. It may just entail reminding your team, once per quarter, why you come to the office every day, and letting them reflect on the reason they do the same.

MISTAKE #7: Refusing to deal with your ‘weakest links.’ Chronic under-performers spoil things for everyone else. They create resentment among employees who are giving it their all, and they drag down productivity. Leaders must have a plan for getting these problem children off the playground – and they must act on that plan without procrastination.

The worst scenario of all is to have a plan for dealing with under-performers, to identify who those individuals are, and then not pull the trigger on the announced consequences, for reasons of sentimentality, weakness, or favoritism – or worst of all, an attempt to preserve leadership popularity.

Nothing can be more damaging to the morale and esprit de corps of a team than that kind of leadership. It destroys your authenticity, your trustworthiness, and your ability to compel others to act. It is the end of you as a leader. Indeed, it is better to have no weakest-link plan at all than one with obvious liabilities.

MISTAKE #8: Allowing people to -fail elegantly.- There are two basic operating modes for organizations under high-stakes execution pressure. One is the mentality of winning, which we know about; the other, less obvious to the untrained eye, the disease of failing elegantly, is a very sophisticated and veiled set of coping behaviors by individuals, the purpose of which is to avoid the oncoming train of embarrassment when the cover comes off the lousy results that we’d prefer no one ever sees.

Essentially, when people stop believing they can win, some then devote their energy to how best to lose. This fancy losing often manifests as excuse-making, blaming, tolerating cut corners, and manipulating and editorializing data. Unusually excellent leaders know how to recognize these symptoms and intervene with urgency and strength of conviction to get everyone on the high road – a.k.a., the winner’s mindset.

Passive acceptance of failure, and the rationalization that always goes with it, is a cancer that can begin anywhere in the organization, then metastasize to every office, including your own. You can prevent it by setting clear and precise standards of behavior for everyone on the team, as well as clear consequences for the violation of those standards. And you can control it through continuous and open communication with every member of your team (some who will spot the problem before you do) and, where necessary, redundant processes and systems.

Most of all, you can cure the acceptance of failure by setting yourself as an example of zero tolerance (along with a welcome for honest admissions of error), of precision and care in all of your work, a clear-eyed focus on unvarnished results, and most of all, an unyielding and unwavering commitment to your success.

MISTAKE #9: Delaying decisions until it’s too late. Not making a decision is almost always worse than making a bad decision. As long as they aren’t utterly ill-advised and catastrophic, bad decisions at least keep the organization moving in pace with changing events – and thus can often be rectified by a course correction.

Not making a decision at all, although it may seem the safe choice – because, intellectually, it positions you to make the right move when the reality of the situation is more revealed – actually strips your organization of its momentum, stalling it at the starting line, and makes it highly unlikely that you can ever get up to speed in time to be a serious player.

Unusually excellent leaders don’t just make decisions; they pursue them. Because the speed of the organization is often its destiny – and because that speed directly correlates with the speed with which its decisions are made or not made – these leaders are haunted by the fear that somewhere in the organization a critical decision is being left orphaned and unmade.

MISTAKE #10: Underestimating the weight your words – and your moods – carry. Consider the story of John Adler, who, prior to his CEO tenure at Adaptec, was a senior vice president at Amdahl, one of the pioneering computer companies of Silicon Valley. One morning as he was walking down the long hallway to his office, he encountered some maintenance guys who were doing repairs. He greeted them cheerfully and then, just to make conversation, mentioned how difficult it must be to work in such a dark hallway.

The next morning when Adler came to work, he was surprised to find five maintenance men all carefully replacing every light bulb in the hallway. When he questioned the flurry of activity, the men said, “We’re replacing the light bulbs, boss. You said it was too dark in here.” This story illustrates why leaders need to think carefully about every word they say – because others certainly will.

Every conversation with, and every communication from, a leader carries added weight because of the authority of the position behind it. Have a bad day and snap at one of your subordinates, and that person may go back to a cramped cubicle and start updating his résumé, or go out and get drunk, or miss a night’s sleep. Your momentary bad day could be his nightmare – and something he will remember forever. Your mood matters; don’t make it your employees’ problem.

So if you recognize any of these mistakes in yourself, are you forever doomed as a leader? Of course not. We’re all human, and we can all learn from our errors and redeem ourselves. And yet, there is no shame in realizing that leadership is not for everyone – or in declining to lead if it’s not for you. (In your heart you probably already know.)

Leadership is a choice. It is a deep, burning desire to engage with people and rally a community to achieve greatness. Leadership can be difficult, thankless, frustrating, maddening work at times. It is only the passion of leading on the field – the thrill of looking other human beings in the eyes and seeing their energy, willingness, trust, and commitment – that makes it all worthwhile, in a very quiet, private way.

About the Author

John Hamm is one of the top leadership experts in Silicon Valley. He was named one of the country’s Top 100 venture capitalists in 2009 by AlwaysOn and has led investments in many successful high-growth companies as a partner at several Bay Area VC firms. Hamm has also been a CEO, a board member at over thirty companies, and a CEO adviser and executive coach to senior leaders at companies such as Documentum, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, TaylorMade-adidas Golf and McAfee. John teaches leadership at the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University.

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Built on Values: Creating an Enviable Culture that Outperforms the Competition by Ann Rhoades   Stephen Covey, author of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, is a believer in Ann Rhoades’ method of creating enviable cultures. In the foreword to Built on Values, he says: “In order to be successful in a volatile world, you must unleash the goodwill and creativity of your people. You must organize your culture in a way that will help your people achieve great things without constant supervision from above. Set this up right, and people will astonish you regularly with their great ideas and ability to take your organization to a higher level. Built on Values shows exactly how to organize your culture to make that happen. It is a practical guidebook for transforming an entire organization or just your little corner of the world into a place of caring and passion.” Companies all over the country have implemented Ann Rhoades’ methods, developed when she was an executive at JetBlue, Southwest, Doubletree and others and perfected at her consulting company, People Ink. It is not a difficult method to understand and implement, but it is certainly more effective than lofty statements of purpose sanctified in a mission statement to inspire day-to-day excellence. Many leaders want to believe that all they need to do is proclaim a set of values and culture will magically change—but that does nothing to retool the actual values that control day-to-day actions on the front line. The method in Built on Values, on the other hand, allows culture to arise from outstanding values. “The productivity that will be unleashed is likely to be nothing short of astonishing,” says Covey.

My company, People Ink, assists companies in identifying their underlying values and building their cultures on those shared values, but there is no reason why the people in your department cannot do it on their own. The key is identifying your best employees – your A Players – and spread their values by hiring people who share those values and motivate all employees to live those values every day. And please realize: A Players don’t just come from management ranks; there are outstanding players on your front line that deserve a chance to help you.

We call this the Values Blueprint method of changing culture and we recommend you engage in a two-day retreat with a group of your best players to hammer out what your values should be and what behaviors best exemplify those values. I have seen this method effect culture change over and over, in large companies and small, for-profits, nonprofits and every iteration in between. Single departments and workgroups can also use this to create islands of excellence, even if your top leaders are not ready to buy in. Perhaps you can lead them to it though demonstrated results.

I have also found that even though culture change will be driven by different values in every organization, six fundamental principles inform every successful values-based culture change.

1. You can’t force culture. You can only create environment. A culture is the culmination of the leadership, values, language, people processes, rules, and other conditions, good or bad, present within the organization. But you can and should convene a team of A Players to help you analyze what the culture in your department currently is, how it is holding your performance back, and the values and associated behaviors that would change it in a positive way. However, realize that even the best employees cannot “create culture.” They can only help you create the right conditions for a good culture to arise.

    

2. You are on the outside what you are on the inside… no debate. What many managers don’t understand, except perhaps intellectually, is that you cannot create a great customer service organization if you treat employees badly. You can’t force people to smile and treat customers well, especially when they feel ill-used themselves. Not surprisingly, those organizations that do customer service best also treat their employees best. The bottom line? The service you provide for your customers will never be greater than the service you provide to your employees.

    

3. Success is doing the right things the right way. One of the best reasons for redefining corporate culture is that well-defined values can help you – and your employees – make better decisions. In values-rich companies, the front line is where most decisions about customer service can be made. In a company where good customer service is one of the values, one of the behaviors tied to it could be empowering front-line people with tools and knowledge to handle problems personally and immediately. A win there is a happy customer who did not have to speak to a supervisor. By defining your values and the behaviors based on them, you also simplify the task of day-to-day decision making: “Does that make sense in light of our values?” is all you or your employees have to ask yourselves.

    

4. People do exactly what they are incented to do. Our model of culture requires rewarding the behaviors you do want, taking into account how they lead to an outcome. This is made easier with simple values-based performance metrics, with rewards tied, as closely as possible, to achieving those metrics. Hiring and performance appraisal methods, too, must be revised to select people who display the values important to you. And you must be courageous enough to fire those who don’t. Even long-time employees. Even managers. Otherwise, they will render your ideal culture impossible.

    

5. Input = Output. Organizations will only get out of something what they are willing to put into it. Values maintenance—what we call continuous improvement—is as important as values creation. In other words, you are never fully “done” with culture change; you must be always vigilant that no one backslides into old ways. This requires regular monitoring of progress toward full implementation of the model, as well as values-based leadership development and succession planning.

    

6. The environment you want can be built on shared, strategic values and financial responsibility. Conscious action, beginning with determining a set of shared values, can set up the necessary condition for encouraging a culture that will make an organization into a leader in its industry. It should almost go without saying that those values should also be vetted in terms of responsible fiscal management. Happy-talk values that result in spending huge sums of money on questionable programs are not values that are sustainable in the long run. But neither should you let financial concerns derail the project in its infancy. Counsel your financial people to give it a chance – a values-rich culture is likely to save buckets of money sooner rather than later as turnover and training costs go down. It can even help companies avoid the high cost of layoffs – which then should no longer be a first resort to cut costs.

    

A culture based on the solid values of your A Players are most critical when making tough decisions, but that is also when they come in handiest to illuminate the way forward.

About the Author

Ann Rhoades, author Built on Values: Creating an Enviable Culture that Outperforms the Competition, is president of People Ink, a culture-change consulting firm. Ann serves on the Board of Directors for JetBlue and P.F. Chang’s. She was one of the five founding executives of JetBlue Airways; Chief People Officer for Southwest Airlines; and Executive Vice President of Team Services at Doubletree and Promus Hotel Corporations. To read Ann’s complete biography, click here.

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5. Be Good to Your Employees and They Will be Good to You

We realize that so far this empowerment process looks fairly easy. Set the goals for everyone, establish their boundaries, and set ‘em all loose.

As you might guess, it isn’t quite that simple. But it’s not too far off really.

6 Habits of Highly Successful Managers by John Cioffi   6 Habits of Highly Successful Managers offers six commonsense habits that create a systematic framework useful to managers, entrepreneurs, and executives, providing them with: Clear hard-hitting content that is easy to understand Numerous real-company anecdotes that bring the concepts to life The building blocks, neither faddish nor outdated, of a successful business A means of creating a company culture of achievement and accountability Detailed guidance on how to execute the key concepts, with a focus on goals

Before a manager can put a team member in an empowered environment, the manager must be satisfied that the team member can meet some very specific conditions. They’re quite straightforward, but they are absolutely critical.

There are three steps that we follow to ensure that our employees are correctly empowered – that they have both the responsibility and authority to conduct their activities effectively. We’ve already talked a bit about the first two: establishing goals and boundaries.

The third step is to ensure that the correct conditions exist between the manager and the employee. This third step is critical, but oftentimes it isn’t even considered. We’ve found that without these conditions, the employee and the manager are doomed to failure. There are three of these conditions, all of which are equally important, and all of which must be demonstrated by the employee to the manager:

• Shared Principles
• Reliability
• Competency

The diagram below illustrates these three conditions. In order for anyone to be empowered effectively, they must share the principles of the manager and the organization, be reliable, and be competent.

Figure 6: Conditions for Empowerment

All three of these conditions are necessary, and this is depicted by the rounded triangular area in the middle of the diagram. Two out of three isn’t enough – the person in the position must exhibit all three conditions in order for a manager to empower her to achieve her goals on time and within bounds.

Principles include those moral, ethical, and other issues that must be shared, and agreed to, between supervisor and employee. These are standard rules of personal conduct that reflect the underlying beliefs of the company. Only when your principles are shared by your employees should you be willing to empower them to conduct activities on your behalf.

Reliability is critical because you need to know that your employees will do what they say. You can’t manage effectively if you are constantly encountering crises at the 11th hour.

Competency is obviously necessary. None of us would purposely put incompetent people in any position, especially positions of high influence. You want your team to have the skills, knowledge, and natural abilities required for them to perform at a high level.

Wide Boulevards, High Curbs

When you have the right people, who you can fully empower, you can give them increasing responsibilities and goals. As a result, they can accomplish great things.

We think of this as ‘wide boulevards, high curbs.’ The team has lots of latitude, but the goals and the boundaries are clear and unambiguous.

The Process as a Diagnostic Tool

Establishing the framework for empowerment is a key step for your organization, and the empowerment process we’ve described here is designed to guide everyone in your organization in achieving their goals. It establishes the goals, sets boundaries, and provides criteria for the conditions that must exist for empowerment to occur.

The empowerment process also is a very effective means for diagnosing why goals are not being met. In this case, you can look at the boundaries, to ensure that they have been properly set and explained, and you also can look at the three-circle diagram to determine if there is some lack of principles, reliability, or competence. Then you’ll know how to take corrective action.

About the Author

John Cioffi received his first business education in his family’s restaurant and lodging business. He later held executive positions in several companies, ranging from start-ups to a Fortune 100. He has been a business coach for more than 15 years, is a frequent business speaker, and is a partner in GoalMakers Management Consultants. He received a BA from Colby College, a master’s degree from Dartmouth, and an MBA from Wharton.

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Faster Cheaper Better: The 9 Levers for Transforming How Work Gets Done by Lisa W. Hershman and Dr. Michael Hammer   Based on more than a decade of research to understand the nuts and bolts of how work gets done at companies in every imaginable business – from oil refineries to software developers, factories, retailers, and hospitals – Faster Cheaper Better shows how to harness the amazing power of end-to-end processes to become more profitable and competitive. Michael Hammer and Lisa Hershman provide the tools for focusing on work that creates real value for customers, including: How to get people to move from ‘worm’s-eye view’ of thier jobs to a ‘bird’s-eye view’ – to understand what the company really does and the role they have in achieving results. How to start measuring the factors that are most critical to the success of the business and identify the metrics that express them. How the new job of process owner can tie together the separate silos that characterize the traditional organization to change the way work is done and how people relate to one another. How to create a cadre of professionals at every level – people who focus not just on limited tasks but the overall outcome and ensure that the company gets and keeps happy customers. Faster Cheaper Better provides the pragmatic program for change that will endure; change that enables you to prosper in good times and bad.

“I don’t know what time I’ll be home,” he shouted to his wife as he bolted out the door, jumped into his car, and sped to the plant.

Jerry was on guard duty at the gate and greeted Bob warmly. He was accustomed to Bob showing up at all hours of the day and night. Bob went straight to the shipping dock. Sure enough, the box was sitting there ready to go, and it didn’t contain the wiring diagram. It took Bob an hour to track down a copy of the diagram, put it in the box, and reseal it for shipment. He got home at midnight.

That’s the kind of thing Bob does all the time. And the bosses recognize his devotion and applaud it often. He’s gotten raises and been promoted, and he’s been named Employee of the Month five times in the past two years. Many of his co- workers now emulate Bob and give an extra measure, too.

No doubt about it, Bob’s a great guy. Trouble is, his company’s approach to getting work done is a raging disaster.

Bob is forced to be a hero because he’s a loyal and ambitious employee struggling to overcome his company’s chaotic processes for getting things done. He gets lots of credit for making the fix to save the customer, but he’s constantly creating dramatic work-arounds because the existing processes create problems that shouldn’t exist. Worse still, Bob’s behavior and the accolades he receives simply reinforce the notion that everyone should work around the system. No one seems to grasp that if the system were fixed, there would be no need for heroes like Bob.

There are lots of companies like Bob’s, fragmented and inefficient. They survive despite themselves only because people like Bob are constantly fixing things. It may take thirty days to fill a customer order, but only three of those days involve real work. The rest of the time people are arguing about who’s responsible for some part of the order or the order is languishing in someone’s in- box.

For well over a century managers have achieved increasing productivity on ever larger scales by dividing and subdividing work into smaller and smaller units. The modern corporation that has evolved as a result consists of many specialized functional departments, such as sales, engineering, marketing, manufacturing, operations, and finance. The people who work in a given department all focus on the same departmental goal— advertising promotes sales, shipping moves the product, procurement buys the parts— and they report to the executive in charge of their department, who measures their performance and rewards or penalizes them according to the department’s own metrics.

Most companies get metrics all wrong. They allow each department to determine what it wants to measure. And because you get what you measure, each department gets a different and often uncoordinated result.

There is an alternative to the fragmented work process, and it allows us to be faster, cheaper, and better. It isn’t easy and it won’t happen overnight, but for those who master it the results are astounding.

The only way to survive in this ever-changing, expanding, globalizing economy is to continually adapt. Often this requires examining our processes from a macro-level. Getting a 50,000-foot picture of our operations illustrates outdated, cumbersome, inefficient processes. Rather than a series of discrete steps, work becomes an end- to- end continuum. People no longer focus entirely on their own jobs with no notion of how their work affects their colleagues’ ability to do their jobs or even the customer. Instead, they are thinking about the whole and not the parts, about outcomes instead of activities, about the collective rather than the individual.

About the Authors

Michael Hammer was a bold and revolutionary thinker, the coauthor of Reengineering the Corporation, the most important business book of the 1990s. Named to Time magazine’s first list of the twenty-five most influential Americans, the business world lost one of its rare geniuses when he passed away in September of 2008. Dr. Hammer was also the author of The Agenda: What Every Business Must Do to Dominate the Decade as well as articles in the Harvard Business Review, The Economist, MIT Sloan Management and other publications. To read Michael’s complete biography, click here.

Lisa W. Hershman is the Chief Executive Officer of Hammer and Company. She is a seasoned business professional and author, who brings a wealth of real-world experience and an innovative style to her position at Hammer and Company. Lisa is the co-author of the business guide Faster Cheaper Better: The 9 Levers for Transforming How Work Gets Done (rated 8 out of 10 by Inc. Magazine) and an inspirational and sought-after speaker and conference moderator/leader both in the United States and internationally. She is a regular contributor to BusinessWeek and her columns have appeared in Forbes.com and Foxnews.com. She has appeared as a business expert on Fox Business News, the Jim Bohannon Show, the Ron Insana Show, and other nationally syndicated business radio programs.

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Special Edition 58 – An Interview with Steve Boehlke, author of 50 Lessons on Leading introduces a method of self-reflection and growth that individuals can use to become better leaders and to foster leadership excellence within their organization. During our discussion, Steve Boehlke, author of 50 Lessons on Leading for Those with Little Time for Reading, shares with us his leadership insights and experiences regarding:

• his most important leadership lesson and why each individual’s most important lesson is necessarily different
• how to translate the fifty leadership lessons into day-to-day actions
• how executives and managers can use the fifty leadership lessons to further develop the leadership skills of those who report to them

Additional Information

In addition to the outstanding insights Steve shares in 50 Lessons on Leading and this special edition podcast are the resources accessible from his website, www.50LessonsOnLeading.com.   Steve’s book, 50 Lessons on Leading, can be purchased by clicking here.

Final Request…

The strength of our community grows with the additional insights brought by our expanding member base. Please consider voting for us on Podcast Alley by clicking here. Casting your vote for the StrategyDriven Podcast improves our ranking and helps us attract new listeners which, in turn, helps us grow our community. Thank you again for listening to the StrategyDriven Podcast!

About the Author

Steve Boehlke, author of 50 Lessons on Leading, is the principal architect and creator of Politics of Creativity^TM, a distinctive and groundbreaking leadership framework that fosters creativity and innovation by helping leaders develop the needed political skills to address ‘taboo’ topics that inhibit innovation and undermine productivity. He is a frequent keynote speaker and facilitator at conferences and seminars worldwide. To read Steve’s complete biography, click here.

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We’re going to use some diagrams to show you how this all works. In all of the diagrams, we use a target as a symbol for the goals of the position and an ‘X’ as a symbol for the starting place of the person in that position (they are about to begin to achieve their goals).

Figure 1: Manager’s Route to a Goal

Manager’s route to a goal

The first diagram, labeled Manager’s Route to a Goal, illustrates the path that you would take to achieve the goal. Perhaps you started the business or the department, or perhaps you already held the position responsible for this goal. Nevertheless, you’ve already acquired the skills and experience to achieve this goal, and you know exactly how to do it. To you, it’s a straight line – you do some activities in a certain way, and there you are at the goal. Simple.

Establishing the boundaries

Your knowledge of how to achieve the goal becomes especially important as you move from being hands-on to being a task manager. As you begin to have other people around to help you, you perhaps couldn’t be more certain that you know how to get things done. After all, you invented the method, and all these other folks report to you. So, you’ll likely be inclined to instruct others to do things as you did (‘do it my way’).

But you simply can’t do everyone’s job for them. And you shouldn’t. You should be planning your business, determining what your customers want, and coaching your team to achieve their goals.

So, the next step is to give the employees as much responsibility and authority as they can assume to reach their goals. The less intervention required by you, the more time you have for other things.

But you can’t merely set them loose. That would be chaos. You need to help them understand their boundaries.

Figure 2: Enabling Empowerment – Establishing the Boundaries

In the next diagram, the employee has a goal, but you’re not allowing him to do absolutely anything to reach it. You’re asking him to work within defined boundaries, ground rules, and principles. For example, you won’t allow your folks to do anything illegal or unethical.

So, let’s be clear about what this diagram tells your employees. It says that they can achieve their goals however they see fit, as long as they stay within bounds. You’ll notice also that ‘time’ is one of the boundaries – the goals must be achieved within a certain time period.

These ideas can be challenging to a manager. Some managers want to continue to closely manage the day to day moves of their employees, while others might feel that this is actually too structured – that employees should be left totally to themselves.

This empowerment model, however, has proven itself over time to be an effective means of achieving goals (which virtually all employees want), while avoiding micromanagement. It focuses everyone on goals, rather than on doing things a certain way.

Early steps to goal achievement

Figure 3: Enabling Empowerment – Early Steps to Goal Achievement

In the next diagram, we witness the early progress of the employee in attempting to achieve his goals. Although he’s still in bounds, he’s zig-zagging all over the place. He’s simply not doing things the way the manager would do them. And this is what drives many managers crazy. Why is he doing all that zig-zagging?

Realize, however, that the path to the goal is straight only because you defined it that way. You concluded that your way was the correct way. But is it the only correct way?

You can begin to free yourself of the management-crisis dilemma when you appreciate two basic facts. First, you can become a highly successful manager only when you can empower others to carry out your vision. Second, the means that others use to reach the goals may be different than yours, while still being effective.

Thus, you can enable others to reach the goals by allowing them to choose their own means of getting there. So, do you get what you want? Yes, if what you want is attaining the goals. No, if what you want is strict conformity to your means of getting there.

Out of Bounds

Figure 4: Enabling Empowerment – Corrective Action Needed

Now let’s look at what happens when the employee doesn’t stay within bounds. In this case, the employee has crossed the boundaries. Perhaps he is behind schedule. Or perhaps he has violated the guidelines for dealing with customers. For whatever reason, he’s out of bounds.

So what happens next? This is where the manager gets involved in establishing some corrective action and some coaching. The company simply won’t allow this.

If this employee behavior happens infrequently, as is usually the case, you will expect your coaching to produce improved performance. If it happens more than you expect, you may need to find that employee a new position, and perhaps that position is with another company. But the behavior won’t be allowed to continue.

You’ll notice that the employee came very close to the boundary earlier on in the process. Perhaps it appeared that he would miss a deadline. At this point, or even beforehand, the supervisor may have coached him to get him back on track – or perhaps he figured it out on his own. Since he got back on track, it appears that something worked.

One of the virtues of this system is that the goals and boundaries are clear. Everyone knows when they are on track or not, and they know when corrective action is needed.

Reaching the Goal

Figure 5: Enabling Empowerment – Reaching the Goal

Ok, let’s give this a happy ending. Take a look at the last diagram in this series.

The employee has now reached his goal. He has stayed within bounds, perhaps with a bit of extra coaching when he got very close to the boundary. But he achieved his goal, and he achieved it on time. Don’t forget that achieving the goal within a certain time is one of the boundaries.

Although he didn’t take the ‘straight line’ you might have taken, he accomplished his goal on time. He was, therefore, successful. He didn’t do it your way, but he succeeded.

Continue on to Management Would be Easy if You Didn’t Have to Deal with People, part 3 of 3 coming next week.
 
 
 
 
 
 

About the Author

John Cioffi received his first business education in his family’s restaurant and lodging business. He later held executive positions in several companies, ranging from start-ups to a Fortune 100. He has been a business coach for more than 15 years, is a frequent business speaker, and is a partner in GoalMakers Management Consultants. He received a BA from Colby College, a master’s degree from Dartmouth, and an MBA from Wharton.

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