Memorial Day: Leadership, sacrifice and recognition

Friends,

Consider two stories about teamwork, recognition and leadership. My former business partner and I ran a course called “Real Leadership” and invited our participants to bring in an object that was special to them and related to their leadership. One fellow talked about how he had worked part time through college and law school at the Joe Louis Arena (or “the Joe” as it’s called) where the Detroit Red Wings play. He sold beer at games. He talked about his feelings of embarrassment when his law school classmates teased him about the menial work he was doing. He talked about how awkward he felt when he was recognized by them or by local lawyers or judges at games.

Then he talked about what it was like after the Red Wings won the Stanley Cup as champions of the National Hockey League, and the team’s owner Mike Ilitch minted and presented a replica Stanley Cup ring to every employee of the Red Wings and the Joe. With a shaking voice and teary eyes, he showed us his ring, his pride, and his undying sense of gratitude to the Ilitch family.

I was thinking about that story on Memorial Day. As Governor, my wife issued a proclamation in December of 2003 that flags throughout the state of Michigan be flown half-staff on the day of the funeral of any soldier from Michigan killed in service to country. Sixty-six men and one woman have been so honored in that time. On Thursday morning we hosted the families of these fallen heroes at the Governor’s residence. The names of the deceased were read. Their families stood. It was striking to hear over and over. “22 years old.” “21 years old.” “23 years old.” Sometimes “35 years old.” Who wasn’t wondering, “What might they have become?” The bible says, “No greater love hath any man than to lay down his life for his friends.”

Some have suggested that flying the flag at half-staff should be reserved for heads of state or other “great” American heroes. I don’t agree. I wonder what Mike Ilitch’s take might be. And I wonder what the guy who sold beer at the Joe would think. But most of all I wonder about the families of those fallen soldiers, and about the soldiers who continue to put their lives on the line for our flag and our country every day.

It’s worth pondering who is really “great” on your team. Who sacrifices? Who matters? Who is a leader? Perhaps some of those who lead best, lead without title, attention or accolades. How do you show that you recognize their leadership and their sacrifice?

Let’s remember today, those who lead with their whole self,

Dan

A Lesson from the Bikers

Friends,

Saturday evening we held the annual celebration of the Governor’s Service Awards. The fabulous Fox Theater in downtown Detroit was teeming with leadership stories, as forty finalists in eight different categories were feted for their efforts to build communities from the western edge of the Upper Peninsula and all the way across the Lower.

The show stoppers - quite literally, for it took about 10 minutes for them all to get on and off the stage - were the members of the Wolverine Harley-Davidson HOG Chapter #1332. Many of these folks pride themselves on being out of the box, as individuals. They love their independence - their freedom to hit the open road, which symbolizes a broader desire to be free to live their own way.

The Chapter as a whole has gotten way out of the box of what most of us would think a Harley club would be about. They won the Governor’s Award for the “Exemplary Community Service Program.” They do four huge charity rides a year, often with over a thousand riders and raise between $20,000 and $50,000. They have given financial support to a variety of causes such as the Muscular Dystrophy Association and Toys for Tots. Recently they have organized an event which reunites children with their former foster familes, and the cool thing about it is that they offer the kids transportation to the party, on the back of a Harley. (If RFL were a little more tech-snazzy, I’d link to the video clip with happy little kids posing like tough bikers!)

The real life results have been wide and profound for the HOGS and the people and charities they have served, yet the leadership lesson may seem overly simple. Steven Covey boiled it down to two words, in the first of his 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Be proactive! The HOGS are innovating, creating from scratch, and doing what few would expect of them. What might you do this week that’s out of the box, unexpected of you, perhaps surprises people, but expresses some desire you have to make a difference in the world you are in? You’ve got to be proactive to…

Lead with your best self,
Dan

Getting people to go above and beyond

Friends,

Last Thursday I was helping facilitate on a “high ropes” course with the participants in Leadership Detroit. These 60 leaders had been meeting once a month since September to learn about the Detroit region and about leadership. In this last session, we challenged them to strap on harnesses and safety ropes, and climb forty or fifty feet up the tall pine trees and maneuver across cables suspended between the trees. The exercises were demanding physically and emotionally. And nearly every participant excelled beyond what they thought was possible for them when they first walked back into the pine trees in the morning. I found myself wondering why, and asking what relevance it had for everyday leadership. Four things stuck out.

First, they were safe to fail. Some didn’t have the upper body strength to get to the top. They climbed as high as they could. Some lost their balance and fell. They were caught. Some tried techniques that didn’t work, but were offered better ways. In short, everyone was freed up to do their best. Mistakes were part of the learning. Consider the opposite: in a work culture where making mistakes gets you in trouble, who is going to try something with any degree of difficulty?

Second, the vocal praise and encouragement clearly took people beyond their limits. Someone was asked after he came down, “What difference did the vocal support make from your team below?” He answered, “It was everything. It was everything.” One line heard all the time on the course was “You can do this.” (That’s the Detroit Free Press Marathon’s motto, by the way.) In everyday life it can feel hokey to say, but seldom do we mind hearing, “You can do this! You can do it.” Try it out. See if people aren’t appreciative.

Third, people wanted to excel at something difficult. Perhaps we don’t say “you can do it” very often, precisely because people know they can do what we’re asking them. So, why aren’t we asking them to do things that they not sure they can accomplish? Why aren’t we leading them to the thrill of trying something hard . . . and therefore something satisfying? It’s easy to slide into our routines and habits of pretty average expectations. On the other hand, it’s exhilarating to try something new and challenging and scary. Why not challenge your people to step up to the high ropes and get their adrenaline going?

Finally, the sum total of these things created a culture of excel-lence. It became the norm for people to take on something scary and succeed. Many climbed for the simple reason that everyone else was doing it. We are social creatures. We react to peer pressure. We do what we see others do. Authorities know that the “norms” that get created will dictatee performance. So filling the culture with these first points - safety to risk, tons of encouragement and abundant challenges - can lead to a culture where a bunch of people are taking on challenge. And once you can get that bunch going, nearly all will follow.

Set some high sights this week for your people. You can’t fail, but can only learn. You can do this; you can set big challenges. In fact, everyone is doing it! Climb those trees to…

Lead with your best self,

Dan

Authority brings push back

Friends,

A great book has triggered a memory rich in meaning. This RFL is for authority figures - parents, teachers, principals, bosses, and those heading organizations. It’s about what the book calls “crucial conversations:” “where the stakes are high, opinions vary, and emotions run strong.”*

My client was a top-level manager who loved to experiment, had high standards, good business instincts, and a market he was growing in. He wanted to reorganize his offices, because the outside business had changed, and he wanted me to help him sell the reorg. He said, “I want the employees to see this is best for them, and I think you can get them to see it as their idea.” I countered by suggesting that we instead convene the employees, share his picture of the reasons for change, invite them to enrich that picture, and then get them to design a reorganization plan to meet the company’s needs. I would structure the meeting so that he and his management team had plenty of opportunities to add missing data, or point out problems with proposed reorganization plans that might not address the full set of business needs that he saw. I suggested that this approach would both get him great ideas (perhaps exactly what he was thinking) and truly have people committed to the solution they had created. He was nervous that the meeting might somehow go astray, but he agreed to do it.

The first part went tremendously. People were super-engaged, saw the same kinds of mismatches between their structure and the needs of their clients that the top manager had talked to me about, and they came up with plans very similar to the one he had envisioned. We were in the middle of the exciting but difficult last conversations about competing plans. And then the train left the tracks. Someone asserted that one of the plans assumed that the employees were not dependable and needed more close supervision than was necessary. With a bit of an accusatory tone he asked for more autonomy. It hit a nerve. The top manager began by saying the comment was unfair because people were not over-supervised, and then he got really wound up, talking about how much trust he gave them, how much freedom - maybe too much! - and veering into how well paid people were, and how they should be grateful, and maybe he shouldn’t have even given them this opportunity to weigh in. Maybe he should have just told them how it was to be. The effect? It felt like someone sucked the oxygen and the joy right out of that room. Employees who had been unbelievably fired up 5 minutes ago, and were on the verge of giving him 95% of what he wanted (and arguably 15% more that he hadn’t seen from his vantage point), now felt chastised, demoralized, and unsure. I tried to work with it, but the tape could be rewound, but not erased; some of the damage was done. The reorganization went forward successfully but without the powerful buy-in that was there for the taking.

This memory was triggered because I have been reading an awesome book, Crucial Conversations: Tools for talking when stakes are high. The authors provide a very compelling description of the ways in which we get threatened in important conversations, and we turn to “violence or silence.” Their preferred alternative is dialogue, through which two parties “enrich the pool of shared knowledge,” so the participants can make the best decisions possible. They offer many ways to monitor our thoughts, feels and speech in such precarious conversations, so that we don’t verbally attack our kids, workers, spouses or students, or just avoid tough but essential issues. In the story above, that manager - in one of the eternal struggles between those organizing the work and those doing the work - got his buttons pushed. He felt attacked, and with his ancient human wiring he did what animals do when they feel attacked: he fought back. And in doing so, he turned essential allies into enemies. I can’t summarize the wisdom from this exceptional book in an RFL, but I want to merely offer this thought: great leaders listen to the tough stuff. They work to hear what their people are saying - even when it feels like an attack on them. They learn. And they keep their teams learning. In turn and in time, they share their perspectives. But they don’t turn messengers into enemies.

If you have patterns of attack or escape from important conversations at home or at work, i.e., if you’re human, I highly recommend a look at www.crucialconversations.com (or take a shortcut to http://www.vitalsmarts.com/CrucialSkills/FreeStuff/ to see some of their free information and tools and see if their book interests you. You have to manage your powerful emotions in order to:

Lead with your best self.
Dan

* Patterson, Grenny, McMillan, Switzler, Crucial Conversations: Tools for talking when stakes are high, (McGraw Hill, 2002), p. 2

May I have your attention?

Friends,

My wife has declared this week “State Employee Recognition Week.” Her request is that those inside and outside state government recognize the thousands of people who work on our roads and bridges, care for our foster care children, protect us from criminals, tend to the mentally ill, and work in hundreds of other ways to promote our quality of life. So, a few thoughts on recognition seem in order.

Recognition energizes people, whether they are employees, peers, volunteers, children, or even spouses. Now, here’s the challenge. Who hasn’t noticed that “familiarity breeds contempt,” or to be more kind, and more accurate: “familiarity breeds inattention?” In other words, when someone is often kind or smart or graceful, or tough or ignorant or dull; well, we just expect that from them. We assign them to those boxes in our minds: She’s smart. He’s tedious. She’s a hard worker. And that’s about it. Unless they do something wildly outside our expectations, their behavior routinely fulfills our historic expectations. We hardly notice them or their behavior.

This familiarity creates problems with our great folks, because we take them for granted, and fail to see their excellence. Familiarity also creates a problem with our challenging folks, because we continually expect them to mess up and don’t even see when they are marginally improving. Think about that last point. I don’t know about you, but when it comes to the stuff that matters to me these days: getting better as a dad, husband, leader, writer, son, guitar player, or runner, the vast majority of my improvement is just that: marginal. It’s darned hard to see where I’m getting better. Hard even for me to notice improvement. And especially hard for someone outside (who’s put me in their perceptual boxes) to see that change.

So, here’s the point: To be good at recognition, you’ve got to pay attention! You can’t say it to them, if you don’t see it from them. With your good folks, you gotta wake yourself up and say, “Hey, I haven’t told you this in a while, but you are awesome.” Most of us “recognize talent” when we hire someone, but then we soon take them for granted. We cease to recognize just how extraordinary they may be. And better than that general recognition, pay very specific attention. Perhaps the most valuable specific recognition comes when you are paying attention to and speaking about something they are working on. It is such a powerful motivator when I am working at something that doesn’t come naturally and someone says, “Wow, you’re really getting good at that.” That makes me want to get right in and work harder at it.

So, today re-cognize someone, literally: See them again, as for the first time. And pay close attention to their specific efforts to excel, so you can…

Lead with your best self.
Dan