Archives for August 2013

Imparting practical and effective wisdom for improving leadership skill and workplace performance, Henry Cloud is the author of more than 20 books, including the four-million selling Boundaries series.

Here are my notes on Henry Cloud’s session, which was fantastic just like his message two years ago on three kinds of people .

As leaders, you are people who take charge and do stuff.

Leaders take the stewardship God has given them and exert their energy in that space to lead people and take ownership of that.

The hardest thing a leader has to be in charge of is himself.

Some leaders get results, and some don’t.

Some in the middle of here to there hit a block in the middle and start to stumble and fall because they can’t lead themselves.

How does a downward spiral of a leader happen?

The leaders who can stop a spiral: they think, feel, and behave differently than the ones who spiral out.

They put the smart guys who were pessimists, and the no-nothings who were optimistic, and the no-things out performed by 53%. The ones who believe they can will win every single time. The biggest factor on whether you will get from here to there is whether or not you believe it can be done. The number one factor is “do you believe that it can happen.” All leaders believe it can happen when they start, but then something happens—they get into a circumstance (and it will happen to you) where they become out of control (that is, not of their own doing—they are out of control of the circumstances behind them, and that begins to change their brain: learned helplessness).

We are designed by God to be in a cause and effect universe. But when we find ourselves in a circumstance where there are things we cannot control that are affecting us. What happens to the brain in a situation that you can’t control? It begins to change—in some predictable ways. The three Ps.

The brain begins to change in the ways it interprets everything around you.

The Spiral

1. Personal

The brain begins to interpret that in a personal way. “Why didn’t that sale happen? I’m no good.” Or a failed capital campaign. Or whatever. You interpret in a way that “I’m not good enough.” Every leader does stuff that doesn’t work. But the “dummies” don’t take it personally. They say “I guess they weren’t ready, or I need to tweak the presentation.” But they don’t conclude it’s because “I’m not good enough.” And they go on to succeed.

But for those who take it personally, the brain begins to shut down, and goes to the next P.

2. Pervasive

They then generalize from this. “My whole life sucks.” It goes to a different region of the brain and everything goes bad. Then there’s another event. You get an email that’s critical. It reinforces the first to Ps. Then to the third p:

3. Permanent

You think it’s permanent. Once the brain begins to go into this state, even the best performers can get here, but there’s a way out.

Science and the Bible always agree in a place called reality. If they’re not agreeing, you have goofy science or whacky Christians, and there’s no shortage of either.

We see David in the Bible going here. We see great leaders here.

When your brain is going negative, the things you can do to change things—you don’t do them anymore.

How do you get out of it? You have to reverse the three Ps.

Reversing the Spiral

1. Log them and dispute them

Write down the negative thoughts. 99% of will be absolutely false. Then you find the themes, and start to dispute them. You dispute it with God’s word. “What do you mean you aren’t good enough? You are my workmanship (Eph 2:10).” There is a difference between your brain and your mind. Your brain is a physiological organ that can give off false signals.

Dispute the personal stuff, dispute the pervasive stuff. One client might be mad at you, but another one loves you. It’s not pervasive. When you begin to look at the whole picture, life changes. Your life is a movie, not a scene. Every great movie has crisis scenes in it. It’s the people that see it as a scene that make it through. And it’s not permanent because there’s a hope for you.

2. Get back in control

What caused this problem? The loss of control. Write two columns. What you can control and what you can’t control. Obsessive about what you can’t control as hard as you can—for five minutes. Then take action on the stuff you can control.

Some passengers said about an airline: “It’s like they hate us. It’s like they don’t want us to be here.”

Dispute the negative noise and get back in control of what you can do.

3. Connect

Your brain turns to a cesspool of stress if it is focused on things it can’t control. The brain runs on oxygen, glucose, and relationships. So you must connect.

The opposite of bad is love. You don’t start trying to do good to feel better. You connect—relationships. Once you start to feel good in relationship, you forget about whether you are doing good or bad, and you begin to solve problems.

Study: when they connected, the brain changed.

Connect, connect, connect. When you feel the spiral starting, connect and your brain will change.

A can-do attitude is something that will give you confidence. What God wants for you is a “find-a-way” thinking.

Vijay Govindarajan is a Top 50 Management Thinker and Professor, Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business

Ongoing operations are at odds with innovation.

Strategy is not about celebrating the past but leadership in the future. And the world keeps changing in the future. So if you want to be a leader in the future, you need to adapt to change. Which is innovation. So strategy is innovation.

Manage the present, selectively abandon the past, create the future. Most organizations over focus on box 1, and think they are doing strategy.

Competition for the present is about efficiency; competition for the future is about innovation. Both are important. So how do you create the future while maintaining the present?

Innovation is more than ideas. People mistake innovation as creativity. Innovation is commercializing creativity. Creativity is the idea; innovation is commercializing the idea. Innovation takes massive work. The idea is only 1% of the process. The bulk of the challenge lays in the execution.

innovation = idea + leader + team + plan

“Effective innovative leaders are subversives fighting the system. “ “Making innovation happen is not just the job of the leader. It’s not just about breaking all the rules. You have to work with the bureaucracy. The role of the leader is not to subvert but to harness the core capabilities of the core business.”

Innovation killers: 1. Assume that innovation can happen inside the performance engine. The performance engine is built for one purpose: to promote efficiency. But innovation is the opposite of efficiency. It is about flexibility. 2. Not constitute the team and the plan correctly.

You need to separate out the team and have them devoted to innovation outside the framework of regular operations. Innovation is a non-linear shift. It’s not just an improvement on the existing model; it’s a creation of a new model altogether.

NY Times digital should not be thought of as a newspaper on a digital platform. You have to create a distinct team. This means you can have different processes, metrics, culture, people. Almost assume you are a Silicon Valley startup. But must be linked to the performance engine, because it has assets that can be leveraged (100 years of digital archives, etc.—a SV startup cannot even imagine having that). The dedicated team is the new logic; the performance engine is the dominant logic. When they interact, there is difficulty!

You have to protect the performance engine and plant seeds. If you want a tree five years from now, you have to start today—not in five years.

Conflicts are not bad in organizations. Conflicts are healthy, provided you know how to manage them.

“Innovation is unmanageable chaos.” Innovation is non-routine. Ongoing operations are predictable; innovations are unpredictable. So you have to go about planning differently.

Zero-based planning. In ongoing operations, you are responding to clear signals. In Box 3, the future (innovation), you are responding to weak signals and non-linear shifts, because box 3 is about the future, and the future is less clear. Weak signals: don’t know size of the market, what the customer wants, etc. So the job in box three is to learn to resolve unknowns. In box 1 you can plan, because you have strong signals. In box 3, it’s very hard to plan because you have weak signals. So it’s about testing assumptions. Spend a little, learn a lot. Low cost experimentation.

How do you track and judge whether an innovation is working and you should keep investing in it? A performance engine you can evaluate on the basis of present results. It’s a known system. Box 3 is an experiment. You can’t evaluate it on the basis of short-term financial results, for it’s a bet about the future. So how do you evaluate? On the basis of the ability to learn. Can you set up your hypothesis or assumptions? Can you set up low cost experiments to test those hypotheses? The way you evaluate the performance of a leader here is their ability to conduct low-cost experiments and continuously learn.

Joseph Grenny is Co-Founder of Vital Smarts and a best-selling author of many books.

I’ve never mentioned him on the blog for some reason, but Joseph Grenny is one of my favorite authors. His book Crucial Conversations Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High is one of the best I’ve read. Very clear, profound, and wise. And his book Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change, Second Editionshould be required reading for every Christian.

Today in his message he talked about mastering the skill of influence. Here is the chief point that stood out to me: When we want to influence people, we often focus just on motivation. Motivation is indeed a big part of change. But ability is just as crucial. In fact, most people who become effective actually start with ability and then move to motivation.

Hence, helping people develop skills is an essential part of influence.

The most effective way to develop a skill is through deliberate practice. “If you and I want more influence, we need to involve more people in deliberate practice.” In deliberate practice, the practice setting must approximate the real world; practice is done in small bites with intense focus for brief periods, and the person receives immediate feedback.

“You want to change the world? Learn how to change behavior.” And you help change behavior not simply through motivation, but through helping people develop skills.

I really enjoyed Hybels’ interview with Mark Burnett, four-time Emmy award winner and executive producer of the Apprentice, Survivor, and the recent Bible series on the History Channel.

Here’s the best quote:

“Making Christian movies or shows doesn’t give you the permission to make it crappy.”

And here’s how Hybels ended the day yesterday, which was excellent (note: this is slightly paraphrased):

Whether you are a lawyer, in advertising, in construction, in film, or whatever you do: Do it for God. Make the difference you can with the skills and talents he has given you. You only have the time now to do something beyond yourself and that will serve others.

I loved Liz’s message. (Her book is Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter.) The main point is that there are two types of leaders:

1. Diminishers
2. Multipliers

Have you ever worked around someone who made you feel smarter and more capable? That person is a multiplier.

Have you ever worked around someone who made you question your intelligence? That person is a diminisher. Some leaders literally shut down brainpower in the people around them.

Multipliers get so much brainpower from their people that the workforce is effectively doubled for free.

Conversely, organizations can’t afford diminishers! (And, it’s disrespectful.) Diminshers on average get about 43% of a person’s capability. Multipliers on average get 91%.

Why do some leaders drain intelligence while others multiply it?

At root, multipliers believe that people are smart.

The multiplier approach is to let people weigh in. Because when people weigh in on something important, you get buy-in in the process.

Multipliers are liberators. They create space. Space for people to do their very best thinking. But a bit of a deal—what do they owe the multiplier back in return? their best thinking.

They are challengers. They ask people to do hard things. They invite people into the space of difficult and challenge, and they don’t apologize for it. They are debate makers. They give others the responsibility and put them in charge. They create owners, not hirlings in their organizations.

Lencioni’s message is based on his excellent book The Three Signs of a Miserable Job. This was the first Lencioni book I read and which got me interested in his work. Here are my notes from his message. (You might also be interested in a blog series I wrote on Lenionci’s book a few years ago.)

“The content of this book is the reason I started my career. My dad would come home from work every day and complain every night because his company drove him crazy. It was really a pain. I was only 8-9 and I felt really bad for my dad. I thought ‘wouldn’t it be great to do something about that.'”

Not about a good job or bad job, but a fulfilling job or a miserable job.

There are three things that cause misery in a job:

1. Anonymity.
2. Irrelevance
3. Immeasurement

Anonymity

It doesn’t matter if you are head of marketing or a professional sports player, if your manager doesn’t care about you, your job easily becomes miserable. Good people don’t want to leave jobs where they’re known.

Irrelevance

“I think we are called to love the people who work for us.”

What if your manager doesn’t take interest in you—do you leave? Minister upward to your manager. Take an interest in them. It will change their perspective and they will probably reflect it back to you.

God made us with an innate desire to love others. If there is nothing of that in our job, we feel irrelevant.

Immeasurement

People need to be able to assess for themselves if they are doing a good job.

Money is a satisfier. These things are drivers—you can never have too much of them.

“I can’t imagine being a Christ-like leader without getting to know the people who work for us and showing how what they do connects to others.”

“Management is a ministry. It’s great to be at a place where I can say that out loud.”

As I thought might happen, I’m ditching (for the time being) my attempt to focus on just one thing from each talk. So, here are my notes from Colin Powell’s message and then his Q&A with Bill Hybels.

Leadership is getting more out of people than the science of management says you can. You lead by having a vision. By believing in yourself, having courage in your convictions, inspiring people to reach beyond themselves.

“Even though I’m the leader, I’m not the one getting the work done. It’s the followers who get the work done.”

Purpose is “what are we doing this for? How are we making a contribution to society by what we’re doing?”

“I couldn’t achieve my purpose as secretary of state if she didn’t achieve her purpose of cleaning the room.”

You have to constantly show people that they are important. The best organizations I’ve been in are those that not only cast a vision, but also how everybody in the organization has an individual purpose. It is the collectivization of those purposes that give you the momentum to accomplish the vision.

You have to invest in people and give them what they need to get the job done.

Mentors: family, community, the church he grew up in as a kid.

Reagan’s point: “I trust people to do things without bringing everything to me.”

Always empower people. Empowering people means taking risks.

You have to empower people so they feel important. When treated like tools who cannot make judgments and take initiative, people feel demeaned. You have to empower subordinates and trust them. And you have to gain their trust.

What makes a great leader is a vision and a sense of purpose. Simple themes, constantly repeated, that people understand. That’s what leaders do.

“If you want to be a great leader, take care of your troops. If you want to make sure to keep moving forward, always have a destination.” It’s not just planning, it’s execution. Execute and review how you are doing.

Soldiers aren’t looking for sympathy, but for their service to be respected. They want to talk about and share about their experience. “Never say sorry.” Obviously devastated that they’ve been injured, but you say “I know it had to be tough.”

“You have an obligation to reach back, reach down, reach across to help someone out.” Colin Powell

You might have had a terrible day, and things look so bleak at night. It will look better in the morning. “You know why it’s going to be better? We’re going to make it better.”

Successful leaders are really those who infect their people with optimism.

“Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.” In the military, you always look for ways to make your force more powerful. As a leader, one of the most significant ways of doing this is through optimism.

People look to the leader for confidence, to solve problems.

“People think generals go around saying “that’s an order.” I never said that in my whole life. The reason is, American people and soldiers don’t respond to that. You have to show people it is in their interest to share the organizational interest, and not order them around. And they will do anything needed.”

“Get mad, then get over it.” “Mad is a bad attitude.” “Mad is a human emotion, but I don’t find that if you act while you are mad, you are at your best. So get mad if you have to, then get over it.” You can’t stay mad, or the whole organization is contaminated.

How do you know when to fire somebody, and when to give that same person a second chance? “I’ve always tried to adapt to the personality of my subordinates. No two human beings are identical. It was my job to find the strengths and weaknesses of my subordinates, building on their strengths, working with them on their weaknesses. But the thing you can’t do is get someone to believe in the vision if they just don’t want to. People are often waiting for the leader to have the guts to do something about the culture killers. Leaders are people who solve problems; if you don’t solve these kind of problems, you lose the trust of your subordinates.”

The worst effect of not being a problem solver is that people think you don’t care.

What’s a red flag for an emerging leader? Ego. Many who are incredibly talented, but somewhere along the way nobody taught them humility. They start to think they turned the sun on that morning. I just can’t work with them.

Many are perfect at the level they are at, but they shouldn’t go higher. “You promote people on the basis of their potential, not past performance.”

You’ve been a church attender your whole life. What challenge would you give to pastors and preachers? “We come to church to learn more about our faith and more about the Bible, and we also want it made relevant to the world in which we are living. So tell us how to apply. Tell us how our faith and the Bible makes us relevant to the world we are living in and how to apply it.”

I loved Hybels’ message kicking off the Summit today. I’m seeking to avoid my standard inclination to write down everything that is said in the sessions, and instead am just going to hit one core point from each session. (We’ll see how that goes…)

Here’s my main take-away from Hybels: One of the most critical skills required in leadership also seems very basic. But don’t let how basic it is fool you—it is very hard. That skill is courage.

Whatever vision God gives you is going to put your courage to the test. Every time a leader seeks to move people from here to there, a certain percentage of people are going to resist going. Another group will have a wait and see attitude and will need persuasion over time. And another group knows how ugly it would be to move people half way and not be able to finish the job, and fear grips them.

Lots of incredible initiatives die for lack of courage. What do a lot of leaders do when they receive a vision from God? They abort the mission secretly. They kill it off without telling anyone about it—because fear grips them.

“God has sent millions life-enhancing visions to leaders all over the world, only to have those visions snuffed out because the potential for failure seemed to great.” “These deaths occur behind a veil of secrecy and silence” because the leaders don’t tell anyone of what God has put in their heart.

Don’t do this! Don’t let your vision die for lack of courage. Be willing to step out, take a risk, and take bold action to do the right thing.

I’m at Willow Creek today blogging the Global Leadership Summit. Once again, it should be an exciting time with lots of excellent content.

In previous years I basically took notes over each session, writing down everything I thought was interesting. This year, I think I might try to do a 500 word summary after each session with 1-2 application points. We’ll see if I’m able to do that!

Here’s the schedule.

I’ll also be posting some core take-aways on twitter.