Why We Do Too Much
From Andy Stanley in Next Generation Leader: 5 Essentials for Those Who Will Shape the Future:
The primary reason we do too much is that we have never taken the time to discover the portion of what we do that makes the biggest difference.
Seth Godin: Don’t be Mediocre
An Example of Bad Management
This is the opposite of how managers should think of their employees. From Leadership Skills for Managers:
Students of American automotive history know that at one point in Ford’s history, Henry Ford appointed himself as the maker of all decisions — large and small. Believe it or not, he actually had corporate spies skulking around, trying to catch his managers in the act of making decisions by themselves. Needless to say, productivity declined, as did morale.
Profits plummeted as well. Not until 15 years later did the company make a profit and the managers make their own decisions.
Don’t be Negative: You Can Always Find the Positive
Negativity is all a matter of perspective. Negative people can make any situation, no matter how great, seem like the end of the world. And positive people can make any situation, no matter how bad, seem great.
Mark Sanborn illustrates this well with a common story in his book You Don’t Need a Title to Be a Leader: How Anyone, Anywhere, Can Make a Positive Difference:
An old favorite joke of mine illustrates the positive attitude of a person who takes responsibility for his or her life, even in those circumstances they don’t completely control.
Twin boys were born to two happy parents. But as the children grew, the parents noticed a dramatic difference in the outlook each had on life.
One boy was completely negative. His perspective was consistently one of gloom and doom. No matter what happened, he was downhearted. He was able to find a rain cloud in the sunniest sky.
The other boy was buoyant and looked at everything positively. No matter what happened, he could find the silver lining in the darkest cloud.
The parents began to worry that each child had a problem. So one Christmas they attempted a bold experiment to try to change their son’s dispositions.
For the boy with the negative attitude, they bought the most wonderful gifts: a new bike, a train set, board games, and other fun diversions.
To the boy with the positive attitude, they gave a pile of horse manure.
On Christmas morning, the boy who was negative was led into a room containing all his wonderful gifts. But rather than being delighted, he complained, “The bike will become dirty and scratched the first time I ride it, and the other toys will break or wear out.”
Their other son, upon seeing the pile of manure, shocked his parents by instantly shouting in glee.
“Why are you so excited?” they exclaimed.
He replied, “With all this manure, there’s got to be a pony in here somewhere!”
My point? When something bad happens, the challenge is to search for the pony, not with the naive enthusiasm of the boy in the story but with the informed optimism of a leader.
And, of course, this is biblical:
1 Thessalonians 5:16-18: Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.
5 Key Characteristics of Effective Leaders
Here are 5 key characteristics of effective leaders, from Mark Sanborn’s You Don’t Need a Title to Be a Leader: How Anyone, Anywhere, Can Make a Positive Difference. Effective leaders:
- Believe they can positively shape their lives and careers.
- Lead through their relationships with people, as opposed to their control over people.
- Collaborate rather than control.
- Persuade others to contribute, rather than order them to.
- Get others to follow them out of respect and commitment rather than fear and compliance.
Controlling Medical Costs by Knowing the Purpose of a Hospital
On Friday we discussed Rudy Giulian’s point that leadership involves applying a well-thought-out set of beliefs to the real world. Then we gave education as one example. Health care is another good example that Giuliani gives, also from his book Leadership:
I practiced the same discipline in examining the purpose of New York City’s hospitals — asking why they existed. In most cities, about 5 percent of hospital beds at most were operated by the municipality. In New York, the number was 20 to 25 percent. That was one of the reasons health-care spending averaged about $4,720 per person annually in New York, compared to about $3,77 in the rest of the country.
The hospitals were supposed to be about caring for the sick and curing the ill. Unfortunately, the politically powerful union that represented hospital workers thought the purpose of the enterprise was to employ as many people as possible. They didn’t want a system in which the best nurse got a bigger raise than the worst. Increased productivity from the best performers might result in someone noticing the worst employees weren’t carrying their weight.
The system had so many people working in it that I was able to reduce the workforce by 12,000 yet still increase performance. We had some hospitals with 20 percent more employees than needed. In the most ironic form of featherbedding, people were literally taking care of empty beds.
I went back to core purpose, and by concentrating on patient care, every measure we took helped performance — from finishing the year in the black over the last three years of my administration (after years of routine deficits), to full accreditation for all facilities, to cutting the waiting time for prenatal care in half.
Assigning too many people to a task significantly reduces the quality of performance. It’s tempting to think, “There’s no harm in having more than we need” — but staff hanging around uselessly encourages others to do likewise.
Oversupplying personnel is of course supported anywhere with a heavy union presence, but this is not a benign thing. Would it be benign to add several more surgeons to an operation? Or pilots to a cockpit? Any system functions best when the right number of staff is used, and any exces money can be employed to rebuild the business and reward high performers. Further, a surplus of labor makes it much more difficult for the hard workers. Their performance either deteriorates, or they leave.
As with the school system, the hospitals had many excellent, hard-working employees. But the purpose of the hospital system as it stood was not to provide jobs and job protection, but to provide health care. Understanding that mindset and establishing my own decidedly different viewpoint were critical to future dealings with teh system and its union leaders.
Google’s Two-Front War with Apple and Facebook
A good look at current and upcoming developments by Scoble. Here’s the first sentence:
I’ve now heard from three separate Google employees that Google will release a news feed that will compete with Facebook and Twitter.
Seth Godin on Social Networking for Business
The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint
Edward Tufte’s The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within is a fantastic — and humorous — article on the abuse of PowerPoint. I highly recommend checking it out.
In it he talks about how PowerPoint is commonly misused, how to use PowerPoint right, how to avoid the boring use of bullet points, and how bad PowerPoint deserves part of the blame for the Challenger space shuttle disaster back in 1985.
The one problem is that the article is not available online for free. However, an abbreviated version called PowerPoint is Evil appeared in Wired a few years ago. It’s worth checking out; and if you’re interested, you can obtain the entire article at Amazon.
Educating Students or Protecting Jobs?
After discussing how the job of leadership entails applying beliefs to real-world situations, Giuliani gives the New York City school system as an example of how this works out:
The New York City school system was never really going to improve until its purpose, its core mission, was made clear. What the system should have been about was educating its million children as well as possible. Instead, it existed to provide jobs for the people who worked in it, and to preserve those jobs regardless of performance.
That’s not to say that there weren’t committed professionals at every level within the system. There were, and that’s the shame of it. Those with their hearts in the right place were the ones who suffered the most.
Until I could get everyone involved to sit together and agree that the system existed to educate children, fixing little bits of it was symbolic at best. Band-Aid solutions can do more harm than good. The system needed a new philosophy. It needed to say we’re not a job protection system but a system at its core about children’s enrichment.
All rewards and risks must flow from the performance of the children. If you took a broken system and repaired just enough so that it could limp along, you lessened the chance that a real and lasting solution could be reached.
Leadership: Applying Beliefs to Real-World Situations
That’s what a good leader does, because good leaders are governed by a set of guiding principles and core ideas. In his book Leadership, Rudy Giuliani makes this point well in regard to his own leadership:
Great leaders lead by ideas. Ideology is enormously important when running any large organization.
….
My goal as a leader was to apply my beliefs and philosophy to real-world situations. As mayor, I insisted that everyone on my staff should concentrate on the core purpose of whichever agency or division we oversaw.
In politics, even more than in business, the reply to queries is far too often “Because we’ve always done it this way.” My goal was to move the agenda forward with every action, to back strong beliefs with specific plans of action.
Applying Strengths to Leadership
For an overview of what it looks like to apply strengths-based thinking to leadership, I recommend:
It’s a quick read and goes to the core. It covers the three primary keys in applying strengths thinking to leadership:
- Knowing your strengths and investing in others’ strengths.
- Getting people with the right strengths on your team.
- Understanding and meeting the four basic needs of those who look to you for leadership.
Applying Strengths to Parenting and Education
The underlying philosophy in most of the school systems I’ve encountered (growing up and as a parent, with one notable exception) seems to be based on the assumption that a student’s greatest opportunities for growth are in his areas of weakness.
Obviously students do need to develop their skills in areas where they don’t demonstrate their strongest aptitude. You can’t just say “math is not this student’s strength, so he’s not going to study math.”
Yet it would be wrong to infer from this that the educational system should focus most attention on improving a student’s weakest areas. For this takes focus away from sharpening and building the student’s strengths, which are where the greatest potential for growth lies.
One reason focusing on strengths results in the greatest growth is because it is motivating. People like to do what makes them feel strong (the definition of a strength — note, a strength is not merely what you are good at), and so they are intrinsically motivated to do it more. Thus, they get better at it, and the cycle continues. Further, this cycle has “spillover effects.” By getting better at something, your general sense of self-efficacy improves (note: that is very different from self-esteem), and you become better at other things as well.
Focusing on weaknesses, on the other hand, is demotivating. As someone has very rightly said, “if you focus on someone’s weaknesses, they lose confidence.” This can backfire entirely, such that the student not only fails to grow significantly in their weak areas, but also ends up being frustrated with their educational growth all together.
Usually I’m thinking about how strengths-based thinking applies in the workplace. But as our oldest child is now in the middle of first grade, my wife and I are beginning to think hard about what strengths-based thinking means for their education.
The above are some of the ways we’ve begun to think about how to take a strengths-based approach to educating our children. But being in the midst of a school system that seems to have the opposite approach, we’re on the lookout for good resources to help us develop our thinking on this. Which is why we were so glad to recently come across this book:
Your Child’s Strengths: Discover Them, Develop Them, Use Them
Here’s the review from Publisher’s Weekly:
Fox, head of a girl’s boarding school in New Jersey, writes about a strengths-based curriculum she developed and implemented with great success. She not only presents a workbook that can be utilized by educators and parents, but also offers a convincing argument in favor of over-turning outdated curriculums and teaching methods. Instead of focusing on weaknesses, Fox submits that children do far better when the focus is on their strengths. Childhood is for “creative dreaming,” not preparation for standardized tests. Fox identifies three types of strengths: activity, learning and relationship strengths, and helps parents guide their children toward self-discovery, explaining that true strengths include not only what a child is good at, but what she enjoys and makes her feel strong. The book is written in a lively and engaging style, and sprinkled with anecdotes from Fox’s teaching life and her own experiences as a student who was frustrated and uncomfortable in a traditional school setting. Clearly, writing is one of Fox’s strengths, as is her inspiring passion for helping kids lead meaningful lives.
Tom Peters: Work on Your Writing!
A good word from Tom Peters:
(How does this harmonize with my linking last week to Penelope Trunk’s post on not making a big deal out of typos on blogs? Peters is addressing a larger and more macro issue — he’s not talking about typos. However, eliminating typos would be a sub-set, for sure, of good writing.
Further, Trunk wasn’t saying that lots of typos are good or that we shouldn’t care about them at all; her point in general was that in the medium of blogging and the press for time that comes from it being avocational for most, an occasional typo isn’t such a big deal.)
HT: BNET
The Biggest Sin in Your Church
A recent post by Ed Stetzer. Here are two paragraphs from it:
If I preach about gay marriage, everybody cheers. If I preach about sin you can hear the amens ring. But those aren’t the real problems. I tell people that the biggest sin in our church is you sitting there doing nothing and still calling yourself a follower of Jesus.
…
The elephant in the evangelical room is that we’re not making disciples. People are still struggling through how to do that. We studied 2,500 Protestant church attendees and did so again a year later and the spiritual development was shocking and frustrating.
HT: Ekklesia 521
What Leaders Really Do
John Kotter’s classic article What Leaders Really Do is one of the most helpful things I have ever read.
Conclusions Should Not Summarize Arguments
From a recent book by Harvard Business Press:
The conclusion [in a presentation] should not summarize your arguments; rather, it should appeal to the audience for its understanding, its action, and its approval — whatever it is you want the audience to do or think.
So don’t fall into the trap of telling your audience what you’ve already said. Summing it up is a surefire way to kill any enthusiasm your presentation may have generated. So forget about a summary; instead, tell your audience what it should think or do.
Why Do New Leaders Often Get a Bad Start?
From The Top Ten Mistakes Leaders Make:
- We replicate the poor leadership habits of others.
- We lead as we were led.
- We aren’t born with leadership skills [note: skills and talent are different]
- We lack good models and mentors.
- We lack formal training.
Data Supporting the Importance of Being Strength-Based
From Strengths-Based Leadership, summarizing the findings of a Gallup study:
In the worklplace, when an organization’s leadership fails to focus on individuals’ strengths, the odds of an employee being engaged are a dismal 1 in 11 (9%). But when an organization’s leadership focuses on the strengths of its employees, the odds soar to almost 3 in 4 (73%).
So that means when leaders focus on and invest in their employees’ strengths, the odds of each person being engaged goes up eightfold.
…This increase in engagement translates into substantial gains for the organization’s bottom line and each employee’s well-being.
About Matt Perman
Follower of Christ. Husband of one, father of three. Director of strategy at Desiring God. This blog exists to help equip Christians in good works, because that's what productivity is really about.
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