Speaking of Leadership
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Jul
18
Can we make it any CLEARER?
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Friends,
Thanks to the 800+ of you who responded to last week’s survey, we’ve got a crystal clear picture of what people want in a boss . . . and what’s often missing. Here’s the bummer: What we most want is what’s most often missing: CLARITY! So, this morning’s invitation to everyday leaders is to double back and clarify.
For those who didn’t take the survey or check out the full results, here’s the top takeaway: When asked to select from a list, what three attributes were most important in a boss, people said as follows: Honesty 43.2%; Clear goals 43.1%; and Clear feedback 38.5%. People want their boss to be straightforward in saying where they’re going, and to tell them clearly how they’re performing along the way. Here are the survey’s top answers:
What is remarkable is that when I offered people a host of negative boss behaviors, and asked which ones were most frequent, 4 of the top 5 had to do with these same attributes of honesty and clarity. Topping the list were: vagueness, mixed messages, favoritism, lack of feedback and flip-flopping. Here are the top vote-getters:
The message could not be clearer for all of us. Clarify the goals, the ends, the aims – what it is we’re trying to accomplish, and frequently and clearly let people know how they are doing against those objectives. Do it to:
Lead with your best self,
Dan
Jul
11
Bosses Good and Not So
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Friends,
This week on my Everyday Leadership radio show we’ll hear from Curt Coffman, who with Marcus Buckingham co-authored the highly popular Gallup-data based book, First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently. They weren’t the first to say it, but said it best: when it comes to employee satisfaction and engagement, “managers trump companies.” They argue persuasively that you’re better off with a great manager in an average company, than with an average manager in a great company. To help build knowledge and learn what people think makes a good (or a vexing) boss, please take the 3-question survey; it will immediately give you results.
Introducing some great real managers. In the Habitat for Humanity First Family Build, forty five of my relatives came together over two weeks for a “family reunion with a purpose,” and we built a home from scratch. I was uplifted by the managers on the project. Jackie Frencher ran our construction project. I’m of a gender-and-generation that I confess to doing a double-take when I watch a twenty-some year old, African American woman instructing everyone on a building site, and when I see her wielding tools like the working class men in my neighborhood whose hands were greasy, strong, and a little gnarly. (They got some yucks out of my dad whose idea of using his hands was tying a necktie or bow tie.) On the work site, we all looked up to Jackie for her skills, but also for her calm and her wisdom. I watched her with admiration, not just for the amazing breadth of her knowledge but also for how she sought advice and listened to input. I love a boss confident enough to ask for help.
My “direct supervisor” was Renee, a real estate agent who spends every Wednesday and Saturday volunteering for Habitat. (The beautiful thing about volunteer work is you can usually pick your boss). I picked Renee because she had great tools (I mean her skills, as well as her overflowing toolbelt), and because she had an outrageous laugh, kindly aimed half the time at others and half the time at herself. Aren’t those further examples of self confidence in a leader?
Renee had two more skills I look for in a leader: tremendous competence at what she does, and the ability to continually empower others. She could do anything five times faster than most volunteers (and ten times faster than I), but she kept giving us instructions, and then slack to try. We could go back to her if we were confused or struggling. She’d give advice, but she never took the job back. I was a bit timid. After all, I hated the idea that Kenyota’s house would end up with mold or crooked siding on account of my botched workmanship. But with Renee’s patience we workers learned our jobs, climbed the learning curve (sometimes by redoing things we did wrong), and performed in a satisfactory way. By being given opportunities we learned both our limits – what we weren’t quite ready to take on – as well as our limitlessness, as we tried power tools, caulk guns, and drills that were at first intimidating.
I look forward to Curt Coffman’s wisdom. And I will look back to Renee’s: to wit: share my tools, believe in my team members, be ready to help, and keep laughing at myself! Do take two minutes to complete the survey to let us know what you think makes a great or a lousy boss.
Lead with your best self!
Dan
Jul
5
I Blew it on Independence Day
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Friends,
Last week I wrote – boasted? – that I was going to work on my repetitive behavior patterns, “because too often I repeat irritations, avoidances, and misunderstandings.” And on the 4th of July I completely missed a chance to do so. I completely blew it. I was judging the behavior of a family member, and I knee-jerk confronted, then knee-jerk turned my “inquiry” of them into a debate and then an indictment. And I caused real hurt.
I felt bad about it all the next day. On a long run and then a long car ride, my mind went through the same old mental muscle memory cycles: proving I was justified, finding fault in the other, then slowly beginning to think through ways I could take responsibility for my role. I thought of things to say, explanations, even apologies, but my mind, kept slipping into the same rut, screaming: “Heck, I was right in the first place, I was the one affronted, and it wasn’t my problem.” I am totally convinced that what I experienced may be a one-two mental trap that costs us billions in productivity and billions of hours of personal heartbreak. Trap number one: for some reason, we see others’ behavior and we feel attacked. We counter-attack. And our counter-attack creates a total self-fulfilling prophecy. How? Well, the other strikes back, just as we predicted! We knew they were a threat! We mentally play out their offenses (glossing over our own) over and over to prove we are right, victims, trapped not by our thoughts but by them.
A second possibility – and a second trap – may present themselves. If we are lucky enough, blessed enough by wise counselors and friends and lovers, we realize we’re really not perfect, we probably contributed to the problem, so we should figure out how and what to do. But so comes the second vicious rut that I described above. We feel attacked by ourselves for our failings (or feel attacked by a friend when we start to confide in them and they try to help us see how perhaps we have contributed to the problem). It’s feels like a psychic auto-immune disease, our mind or conscience is attacking us. So we fight away the thought. Our defensive mind “reasons” that the “other” person is still out there – our wife, or brother-in-law, sales competitor, or political enemy – lurking on some horizon, probably poised for another round of attack. We can’t let our guard down, undermining ourselves, and revealing our weakness. So, what do we do? We beat back the self-recrimination, as I did on my long run and continue to play the old tape: “I was right” and “s/he has wronged me.”
I am grateful that my daughter Kate has worn enough paths for me to get a little ways out of my ruts of self defense. And tonight Jennifer helped me to step up to my bad behavior and see what I needed to acknowledge and apologize for. Now, I’ve got to watch for that tendency to judge in the future – tomorrow and the next day. We humans are nuts! Why we create the need to initially judge others and turn them into adversaries is itself peculiar. Why we help to then create or evoke this lousy reality into being is further mystery. And how we find the ability to calm the sense of attack and fear of our self-inquiry is yet another hill to climb (trusted, loving fellow travelers seem essential on that trip). I suspect that this journey is really worth it. How many marriages, businesses, or political wars might be eased if we managed our own mental patterns a little more effectively?
I’m deeply curious about your thoughts and especially your experience with this anatomy of judgment, hurt and denial, and especially with your experiences of early awareness and mental adjustment.
Searching for best-self leadership,
Dan
Jun
27
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Friends,
I was running in New York City two weeks ago. Up and down Central Park’s hills (yes, it’s hilly in the middle of Manhattan!) The teeming life caused me to overrun my stamina, so I wearily began ambling home – west and about 30 blocks south from the northern edge of the park. I was grateful for New York’s pragmatically numbered streets. I took Columbus Avenue and ticked down 97th, 96th, 95th, turned west on 92nd, jogging over to Amsterdam, where I turned left and headed further south. I kept it up: south a handful of streets then turning west to the next avenue.
As I turned from Broadway to 81st Street something happened that’s happened to me on a hundred runs – in woods, trails or cities. I had turned at the exact same corner Jennifer and I had turned after dinner the night before. A trivial repetition? Of course! A coincidence? NOT. The body repeats patterns. Whether the muscle memory resides in the mind or in the muscles, as some scientists now argue, it resides and it operates a lot. Maybe it’s some ancient evolutionary survival technique, as my mind in a neural firing, yanked me down 81st, as if it were saying, “You were safe on this (strange city) street yesterday, so odds are good it’ll be safe today.” Or, maybe the mind was lowering anxiety in a more general way to free up RAM for other tasks.
Have you experienced this uncanny power of repetition? Even the most quirky, random and imaginative of us will head to the coffee pot or flip on the computer on Monday morning in the exact same way as we did on Friday. We start our toothbrush or floss in the very same spot – top, right back molar, maybe – sit in the same seat on the bus, stop at the same gas station. But in an incredibly fast and changing world, our automatic moves – like my turn at 81st Street and Broadway – may not be as useful as they were the week before. For kids, work, computer programs, the competition are constantly morphing. Repetition may not be so safe.
With 4th of July coming I plan to raise my awareness of my own freedom and especially the ways I limit it. Last night I reviewed my goals from January (can you believe we’re at the midpoint of 2010?), because those goals are a map of free intention not repetition. I am recommitting to my values, because they are my guides of free intention not repetition. And I am going to watch my behavior patterns with others, because too often I repeat irritations, avoidances, and misunderstandings. I want to set paths of learning and creativity and engagement instead. Care to join me – on the intention of freedom?
I hope Mick (the Poet from the Keewenaw Peninsula) will weigh in on the topic today. He’s been sharing with me how he’s really found a radical freedom, where his mind has been released from tired and tiring, repetitive patterns, and he’s seeing things afresh. Let us hear from you, Mick! I welcome all comments on freedom at our blog community. How free are you? What gets you free to see with new eyes and turn down new streets? How have you made choices that re-sparked work or relationships, dislodging them from old patterns that just weren’t so helpful any longer? And if it’s your pattern to occasionally think “I should write a comment one of these day,” but you never do, maybe it’s your day to cut a new swath, to be free and to
Lead with your best self!
Dan
Jun
20
Christine Leads A Family Reunion With a Purpose
Filed Under All Posts, Leaders and how they lead [people specific], Reading for Leading | 9 Comments
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Friends,
It began with the desire to do something good. I have had a deep love for New Orleans since the early ’80s when I ran a neighborhood social service center for the Catholic Diocese there. Watching Katrina/Rita and seeing the maps of flooding were personally painful. So, I’d been thinking I’d do something. The next time I did a life-planning retreat down there I’d invite my clients to take an extra day and work on a Habitat for Humanity site. My love was rekindled when I dropped off my daughter Cece for a year of service with City Year New Orleans. And I was so impressed and proud when I heard my cousin Christine Bitonti and my Aunt Susan Sanitate had visited her when they, of all things, went to the 9th Ward for a week-long blitz build with Habitat. For some reason, though, my thinking about helping changed…
Much as New Orleans needed and needs help, I thought: Let Brad Pitt and the Neville Brothers and Dr. John do that work, but Detroit has been hit by its own hurricane and is beset with its own difficulties. So, why go to New Orleans? Why not organize a family reunion of sorts, where we build a house in our own homeland, Detroit? Maybe on Garland, the street that my mom and Christine’s mom grew up on. I knew I neither had the time, nor the skills to organize it. So I called Christine and pitched her on it: What if we get the family together for a reunion with a purpose, stop whining about “what’s happened to Detroit” and instead we’ll “happen” to Detroit. I explained that I couldn’t make it happen but I thought she’d be great, and she answered with three words, “I’m your girl.”
That was about 6 months ago. With Christine’s leadership we’ve raised over $15,000 to help pay for the house. This past week with brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, my 79-year old mom, and lots of other awesome Habitat volunteers, we put up walls, roof, studs aplenty, and siding. Now the skilled tradesmen are in. We reconvene after July 4th for a week to complete the house – cabinets, trim, paint, sod – the whole works. Our relatives are coming back from NY, Delaware, Illinois, Florida, California and other parts to make it happen; forty in all have committed to work. My sister Ann and niece Gigi were there every day this week. Christine was there too. She’d run the Facebook page, coordinated volunteers, worked with Habitat; if that wasn’t enough she and her husband Lou provided food for 100 workers at the site on Thursday. Chris’ mom raised 8 kids, then became a school secretary, and then published two novels. Chris is fast in her mom’s footsteps, leading at home, the most important place we’ll lead, and then organizing a much bigger corner of the world.
I salute her this morning, an everyday leader, leading with her best self!
Dan
P.S. When my Aunt Margaret, the senior member of my dad’s side of the family – herself a mother of eight – heard what we were doing, she said the Mulhern’s are going to do it, too, and look out cousins, she’s on the phone!!! Is your family due for a reunion?
Jun
13
Home Leadership – Father’s Week
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Friends,
“Sorry. We did not find any results with the search terms you provided. Please try your search again.” I’ll leave you to wonder for a second what I was searching for on the Barnes & Noble magazine database. Frustrated at finding nothing, I searched for “parents” and got 59 results. Of the first 10, one had only text on the cover; of those with cover photos, nine had babies or toddlers, seven had moms (or mom-models), and one had a dog. Maybe you can guess who was missing. I went through the other 6 screens of 10 magazines at the site. Kudos to Family Digest and Catholic Digest – the only ones with a dad (the former, further exceptional in that it had an African American family). Oh, the first search of course was for “dad” or “fathers” – no magazines turned up.
With Father’s Day ahead I’m thinking about dads and moms. Cheers to moms!!! Especially those who parent the 30% of all American children who won’t have a dad present at home. Moms are rocking it out. Not just leading at home but often at work as well.
And kudos to so many dads stepping up in new ways. But Man! we’ve got a long way to go with so many men not stepping up, and so many of us trying to adjust to the new rules. Still, the future can be golden. As men increasingly step up to the opportunity to lead at home, we’ll have stronger and happier children, grateful and freer women, and men who are more whole and fulfilled. It’s the trifecta – everyone stands to win!
So as we enter Father’s Week (heck, we need much more than a day), how can we support men as they see and seize this fantastic opportunity to lead at home, and sometimes to lead our wives from behind?! Here’s some conversation-starter questions and an invitation for you to share yours:
1. Ask a man this week what’s the best part of being a dad (and or grandpa).
2. Ask a man to what degree he sees his leading at home as an opportunity and to what degree he sees it as obligation.
3. Ask a man if it’s better to be a husband/dad/man now, or when his dad was living the role. How does he see the role changed and changing?
4. Ask a man what he was raised to think “strength” is, and what he would say “strength” is today.
5. Ask a boy what he thinks about becoming a stay-at-home dad for part of his period of child-rearing when he grows up.
I wonder two more things and invite your thoughts about them and/or the conversation-starters above. First, to men in particular: are you more comfortable talking about these things with a woman or with another man? Talk to me! To men and women: how (or should we) change the way we are raising men in this world of women’s ascendancy? How do we prepare boys for roles that men my age were never trained for?
It’s a cool time to be a dude. I only wish I had more years and more young children to continue to learn to be a good dad and to
Lead with my best self,
Dan
Jun
6
Just a minute here!
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Friends,
Life is so crazy – how one day, one minute, even one split second, and one interaction can change everything. Over the weekend a friend told me about a guy he’s befriended who’s hoping for parole. This prisoner was a good athlete, student, kid and had a manager’s job in his early 20s when he made one crazy stupid decision. Someone was killed as a result, and he’s now been in prison for over half his life, with no end in sight.
In a minute’s time, back in 1999, my wife made the decision to mentor Britney, an 8-year old girl. Brit’s parents had perhaps faced two or three of those split second decisions of their own – only they chose poorly. Britney ended up first homeless, then in foster care, motherless, and finally adopted by Sheila – a step-sister in Georgia whom she hardly knew. Sheila rose up heroically in her own moment of fate. Last week Jennifer flew to Atlanta and drove hours on the back roads of rural Georgia; and the three women – Jen, Sheila, and Britney – shared a celebratory moment, savoring Britney’s graduation from high school and enrollment in college.
My troika of stories ends with Bert and Monique – he a full-time lawyer and longtime little league coach and board member for the utterly awesome non-profit Think Detroit PAL, and she the executive director of a great eastside community service center called Franklin Wright Settlement. Parents themselves, with full-time and extra-curricular commitments to kids, for the last year or so they’ve been doing the real life version of The Blind Side. They welcomed a young man on the edge into their own home, treating him like their own.
“Just a minute, ” we say, often adding, “I’m busy here.” Just a minute. And just a minute can change everything: news of an accident, a doctor’s sober tone, a phone call from your kids or the school. I took a minute to visit a young friend in the Ingham County juvenile detention facility yesterday. I left with Michelle Obama’s words ringing in my head. I’ve heard her say about youth who are spiritually, socially, and emotionally needy: They didn’t choose to be born in dangerous neighborhoods, to have broken schools and a lack of role models. It’s up to us, she says, adults – not children- to make the difference in their lives.
I’ve always been fond of two lines from scripture. The first, often sung between readings, says: “If today you hear God’s voice, harden not your hearts.” And it comes together with the other in which Jesus rests his hands on the shoulders of a small child before him and says, “Whoever welcomes a child like this one, in my name, welcomes me.” Busy as we all are, when we are awake to this kind of moment, we may find the most life(s)-changing opportunity to truly
Lead with your best self,
Dan
If you’re thinking this might be your moment, check out : Mentor Michigan, or if you’re outside Michigan, go to Mentoring.org.
May
31
You’re a Stick Figure – or Two
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Friends,
“Lead with your best self” is the way I close my RFL columns, and I thought in the next few weeks I’d share some of the seeds at the core of that expression. Fundamental to this exhortation is the notion that you can present to yourself and to others all kinds of versions of you – some awesome and some way less than your best. And, in each moment, and in a thousand accumulating moments over time, you have a choice of the self with which you’ll lead.
If there is one great enemy to your best, it is fear. I know a young guy who’s awesome with other people. He can meet other young people or adults and has an uncanny way of making them feel cared about and connected. Yet he gets very nervous at the notion of stretching beyond his usual boundaries. He can hardly stand the conversation about joining a new league, activity, or camp. His flight instincts get activated, quite literally, sending him not only out of the conversation, but right out of the room. Once I drew for him a picture that I’d seen Mary Ann (M.A.) Hastings, my sage business partner, draw for a client: I drew one stick figure about an inch high; and to its right I drew another about 4 inches high. Quoting M.A., I said, while pointing to the small figure, “This one is how you see yourself sometimes; and this one,” pointing to the giant figure next to it, I said, “is how others see you. You are so much more than you imagine yourself to be.”
When that guy learns to manage his natural fears and thereby lead with his best self, oh what a force he will be. I’m convinced that it is fear – natural, biological, genetic, and developmental – that puts him, and us inside that small and, we imagine, safe little stick figure on the left. Perhaps you ask: fear of what? All kinds of things: embarrassment, failure, attack, being wrong, being isolated, being different, getting fired! Note that each is a variant of our most deep and ancient fears: isolation, pain, death.
To lead with your best means to choose to step outside the seeming safety and to engage. Your big stick-figure self will learn so much more by engaging than by laying back and playing small. So, find your best self – the values or observations or work product or love – that are the best you have and see if there isn’t a way fearlessly to share them in this short week ahead. Seems like a great game to play and one that will help in the long run for you to
Lead with your best self,
Dan
May
23
Manage the Manager
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Friends,
I shouldn’t have been surprised that Meryl Runion, who has a series of books on “Power Phrases” and a website called speakstrong.com would pierce the red dot in the center of the target. She did, as I was interviewing her this past week on the topic of ASSERTIVENESS. (The show and any of twenty-five other episodes of the Everyday Leadership Radio are now available with one-click at my website www.danmulhern.com.)
Meryl said: “we (do) need to manage our managers, even more than they need to manage us.” Do you agree? And agree from both sides of the equation? Do you agree with respect to your manager – should you manage her or him? And do you agree with respect to those whom you manage – should they manage you? I replayed Meryl’s line later in the show, and my guest Dorothy Leeds said, “managers don’t want to hear that.” I pushed back with Dorothy and today perhaps with you, because Meryl’s paradigm shift makes too much sense to let anything stand in the way.*
Let me offer an example from my experience. My mind gravitates toward possibility and the big picture. I’m also persuasive, so I can get people to follow me on missions that seem awesome but may be incredibly hard to execute and come with great opportunity costs in terms of the time and energy they will drain from other worthy projects. Now I am probably in the bottom quartile of the population when it comes to my natural skills to estimate how long things take, how much resource they demand, how much resistance they’ll evoke, and the sequential execution needs. It took me twenty years in management to realize that I often had people working “for” me, like my former assistant Tara Adams, who were a thousand time smarter when it came to what I’d call “the intelligence of the practical.” So I learned to let Tara manage me in regular two-week meetings and then in between them. I set priorities, but she asked the realistic questions that tempered my enthusiasm, pointed to the opportunity costs, and generally multiplied my abilities to execute.
Aspects of this situation are unique to my peculiar abilities and disabilities. What’s not unique is that people on our teams have skills we don’t and they see things we can’t. They see their own work. They are often closer to the problem, the client, the customer, and other people who can make a difference. We should push them to manage us. Ask them questions like, “How can I help you succeed? What do you need from me? Is there one thing I can offer that will help you to do your job better?” We have to take one giant step further. For in years in passive classrooms and authoritarian households and typical workplaces, many workers have been steeped like soggy tea bags in the culture of dependence. They wait, they listen. So we have to proactively give more than permission, but the expectation, that they should see it as their job to manage us to get results.
On the other side of the equation, we don’t have to wait for permission to be assertive and – surreptitiously, if necessary – manage our managers. We can begin by asking ourselves: “What could my boss do differently to get more out of me?” It might be: give me more clarity about goals; or, share more information that affects my job; or, help me understand, “of everything you want me to do, what’s most important to you?” There’s some great advice on my show on how to assert yourself in these ways, how to manage your manager to get what you need. But it all begins with the notion that you – not your boss – are responsible for working (with) him or her to get what you need to succeed. If this makes you uncomfortable as a boss, please push back with a comment and engage in the discussion this week to
Lead with your best self,
Dan
* In fairness to Dorothy, she explained that it wasn’t the concept of managing the manager that she thought would be offensive to managers, but only the language or sound of managing your boss. Indeed, she has a brilliant approach to using questions that can level the ground with a higher-up so that the worker has genuine power in the situation.
May
16
Leaders: Compelling, Persuasive, Articulate – Forget That!
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Friends,
Think of leaders who were powerful communicators: there’s Lincoln’s simple elegance at Gettysburg, FDR on “nothing to fear,” JFK on “ask not what your country can do for you…” and Churchill exhorting England “Never, never, never give up.” We think of Iacocoa on TV, or Reagan telling Gorbachev, “Tear down that wall.” Just this month, British voters were surprised and moved by Liberal Party candidate Nick Clegg whose debating skills helped bring down Gordon Brown. We think of Steve Jobs’ brilliant technology talks and Warren Buffet’s convincing homespun speech.
Talk. Talk. Talk. 300 channels of tv talk. Movies so full of surround sound – like Robin Hood I saw this weekend – and Black Eyes Peas thump-stuttering-truncating-Imabe – that it’s just too fast. A billion tweets a day. Txts on top of emails. “Know your brand. Stick to your message. Get your 20-second elevator pitch ready.” Who the heck has time to listen? Am I mirroring any kind of franticness and stimulus overload you feel on a Monday?
What if the most powerful leadership – from home, to shop or office, to city or even nation – comes from listening deeply and fully? Perhaps what President Obama heard from President Karzai last week was more important for American foreign policy than what our President said to him. If the job of a leader – whether she’s the boss or not – is to get the best out of others, doesn’t it stand to reason that how she listens may generate more knowledge and more buy-in than what she has to say? Maybe it’s less important to figure out what to say to your kids about their future, drugs, or grades, than how to listen to your kids about these and other topics that matter to them. Maybe heightened listening can take your staff and co-workers and boss to greater clarity, focus, and alignment.
So, why not begin the week considering the power of your listening. And if you’d like to learn better how to listen powerfully, find some quiet time to listen to my show from Saturday. I had tremendous expert guests who were all about – of all things – listening! (That episode and a bunch of other great shows are easily accessible now directly from my website.)
Listen to lead with your best self,
Dan
P.S. As I was perusing great Churchill quotes I came across this great one for everyday leadership: ”Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.”
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