Leaders In the Know

Social Media: More mindset than media

Charlie and I are developing a course for American Management Association called Making Sense of Web 2.0: Levaraging Social Media in Your Organization.  (The consensus was that social computing - while perhaps more accurate  than social media - sounds too geeky.)  But regardless of  what you call it, the modern web is mostly about mindset.

Web 2.0 is familiar turf for marketers, project managers, consultants and developers. There are many, many fantastic examples of how it's used with internal and external audiences.

But when you cut past the flash, Web 2.0 works best when we stop selling and telling and engage in listening and learning.

It sounds so simple: we need to treat customers as people with something valuable to say. We need to treat employees as responsible adults. But how many organizations actually do? After all, there aren't any extra "Hay points" in it. And it could get us in trouble.  Not much of an incentive there for the average corporate soldier.

You may want to look into Pfizerpedia (Pfizer's version of wikipedia). You can read about it on a number of sites. I'd like to suggest Karl Kapp's blog. Considering the sensitivities of large corporations, with signficant investment in intellectual property, in a highly regulated industry in which compliance dominates behavior,  accustomed to strictly following processes and protocol -embracing Web 2.0 is nothing short of a major shift in mindset.  Even though I've given away the plot, I still highly recommend the movie:

meet Jessica

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: web_2.0 enterprise_2.0)

The current economic crisis may reveal that companies really see Web 2.0 as a "nice to have" rather than the necessity it is for "keeping the lights on." If so, those companies may have snazzy Web 2.0 sites - but not a Web 2.0 mindset.

Wharton Leadership Conference

Yesterday was Wharton's  12th Annual Leadership Conference.  Every year the buzz at the reception is that this was the best one ever and last evening was no exception.

I'm sure in the days and weeks to come, more will be reported and captured in  Knowledge@Wharton.  In the meanwhile, here are my take-aways.

David Gurgen, noted commentator, author, presidential advisor:  There are two types of  leadership qualities, those that are timeless and those that are contextual.  After 40 years of getting up front and personal with US presidents, Gugen's personal favorites for the timeless ones are: judgment, character and ambition (not for oneself, but for others). In the context of our times today, he believes that the leadership qualities the country needs most in our next president are: cross-cultural sophisticatation, transparency (in terms of accountability), toughness (not a push-over) and a consensus builder (at home and internationally).  He also told a good joke about a frog who never got the chance to turn into a princess.

Ken Chenault, Chairman and CEO of American Express, widely admired for his leadership capabilities: A leader is someone whose EQ (executional ability) equals his IQ.  Since two of the leadership traits he thinks are important are integrity and concern for people, I suspect there's a double entendre there.  Chenault talks about leadership often, including this piece from last fall in Fortune.

Stew Friedman, Director of the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project: To be a better leader, you need to balance four domains of your life: work/career, home/family, community/society and self: mind, body, spirit. Read his new book Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life to learn how. 

Peter Capelli, Director of the Wharton Center for Human Resources: Despite the fact that CEOs rank "recruiting and retaining top talent" at the top of their toughest challenges list,  many don't do much "workforce planning" any more. Development can be very expensive, only to have the talent go elsewhere. Some companies are getting smarter. They can bring the cost of development way down, with more effective results. How? Match the projects no one has time or resources to do with the person who steps up to take it on as a development opportunity - while continuing to do their regular job.  Make sense? Think about your own career. What was the best development experience you had? To learn more, read Peter's new book Talent on Demand: Managing Talent in an Age of Uncertainty.

Joe Nocera, business writer and columnist for the New York Times:  Joe's list of "good guy" CEO's:  Jeff Immelt, Herb Kelleher, and (my personal favorite) Indra Nooyi.  I won't mention the list of "bad guys."  But you can read the whole list and the stories behind his calls in Good Guys and Bad Guys: Behind the Scenes of American Business (and Everything in Between).  Words to live by: You can't be a [jerk - my word not his] and think anyone's going to stay and work for you if they've got other options. Or words to that effect.

Bill Weldon, Chariman and CEO of Johnson & Johnson: Hearing Weldon, it's no doubt that leaders are born but it's clear that with a lot of hard work, over time, they're also made. It's impossible to do justice to Bill's presentation on the leadership development process at J&J.  What struck me most is the sense of integrity that just oozes out of him. This is definitely a guy whose EQ matches his IQ.

S.A. Ibrahim, CEO, Radian Group: Someone's got to bottle this guy's enthusiasm, good will and street smarts. Did I mention that Radian is in the mortgage insurance business? And he still has a sense of humor.  Ibrahim told a great story about how Radian's technology was built.  After the technologists met with him to find out what the project was all about, they came back with "this long list of tasks, a huge project plan, very beautifully done with all kinds of charts".  Ibrahim thought, well, it's a little like when you go to the doctor. You really don't understand them, but you dare not take the risk that they're wrong. You just do what they say because you have to trust them.  At the end of the meeting, Ibrahim told tech team this: What will make this technology successful is if it makes it easy for the sales people to sell and for the customer to buy. I'm going to evaluate you the same way I do everyone else: based on the number of loans that go through the system. The punch line: Radian won an award for the technology without even applying. Ahh, if only Charlie had been there to hear it.

The annual leadership marathon ended with Mike Useem, Director of the Wharton Center for Leadership and Change engaging in a captivating dialog with Colleen Barrett, President of Southwest Airlines: Who could possibly replace the legendary Herb Kelleher?  As it turns out, it's the woman who started out as his legal secretary and stayed with him as his assistant for 35 years. That's got to be a record. Southwest is arguably the contender for any "Best" list there is.  Suffice it to say, hearing her talk and watching her employees on video, it's easy to see why. Colleen makes it sound like just plain 'ole common sense combined with a sense of humor and a big heart. I think everyone in the audience wanted to take her home with them.

Armed with my summer reading list, the day ended, with much to think about.

Power of Persuasian: "Don't Waste My Time"

Last evening I had the pleasure of representing Wharton as a part of a panel entitled, The Power of Persausion, at a meeting of the Entrepreneurs Forum of Greater Philadelphia.

Each of us on the panel was assigned a different aspect of the art of persuasion; in my case, techniques for influencing a team.

We all know that just because we're in charge doesn't mean we have influence over a team. Even when we think we do. Or everyone acts as though we do.  Just ask your kids.

One way to have influence over a team is to honor their biggest concern: "Don't waste my time."  Right now, teams across the world are forming. Can't you almost hear the collective groan?

Whether you are leading a team or a team member, one positive effect you can have is to ask yourself what you can do to not waste your own time or anyone else's. There would be shorter meetings, for one.

Here are five specific time-wasting-busters we might do differently when working on a team:

1. Make sure we all know why we're on this team (or in this meeting) and agree it's worthwhile.
2. Limit the agenda to top priority items and decisons that need to be made.
3. Verify that resources (time, money, people, technology) are available to do the job.
4. Agree on how decisions will be made up front rather than wait for the inevitable disagreement to crop up.
5. Recap progress - so the team can see the finish line ahead!

If you want to have influence, don't drop the ball - or sit by and idly watch one of your team mates drop it. That's probably one of the biggest time wasters of all.

So who's ready for another team meeting? I bet you can't wait.

Communication: A New Leadership Skill?

This week's Workspan Weekly e-newlsetter published by the Corporate Compensation professionals' association, World At Work  flashed the headline "Survey Reveals Need for New Leadership Skills". 

Wow, I thought, a new leadership skill. I wonder what it could be.

Turns out, a survey conducted by the highly-regarded Center for Creative Leadership found that 70% of the executive respondents indicated that communication, specifically skills required for virtual leadership, is the new leadership skill. Two factors, frequency and clarity of communication, were cited as of particular importance.

As anyone who has had the pleasure of working for someone who feels the need to follow up every hour (or the polar opposite, the boss with an open door but  is never in the office or available to talk), frequency of communication is a big deal in the physical world as well.

Similarly, we all know how difficult it is to achieve real clarity. How many times did you ask someone to do something "as soon as possible," (meaning this minute), which they interpret to mean "when I can get to it"?  (Do any of you have kids?)

Which, I guess, brings us to "active listening," a technique whereby the listener repeats, summarizes or paraphrases what the speaker has said to check for agreement of understanding. A great idea, but not always practical in every interaction. (Have you ever had the experience of explaining what you want a system to do and get pages and pages of uninterpretable "specs" come back to you for concurrence?) 

"The modern executive must learn an entirely new set of skills to direct and motivate people worldwide in the age of e-mail, voice mail, instant messaging, telecommuting, and computer conferencing," according to survey results.

Overlay the challenges of crossing the chasm introduced by globalization,
multiculturalism, complexity, distances of time and space - let alone the multi-media nature of communication - and this becomes no small feat for mere mortals.

Communication continues to be as challenging today as it  has since time eternal, not just for leaders but for all of us. The bigger challenge for leaders of the modern workplace is accepting that the web changes the very character of these communications: they are more casual in tone, more boldly put forth, more interactive. 

Leaders have long espoused "two way communication" - but you wouldn't always know it based on the reactions that come back down.

It can never hurt to become a better communicator, in any medium.

It may prove a lot harder on the ego to carve out a relevant and meaningful role for leaders when "direction and motivation" come from the group and not from the leader.

Please share your thoughts.

Mercer Study Shows Respect is #1 with Employees Worldwide

Engagement seems to have replaced  "empowerment" as the Holy Grail of corporate relationship with people. We want you to be engaged with our company, our goals, our stock, our products, our website ... you get the idea.

To couples all over the world engagement represents love, loyalty and commitment ... presumably leading to life-long marriage. 

It's easier to make the analogy with customers. Think Tide, Ivory Soap, Kleenex. Many of us use the same familiar products we grew up with.  But are there any employees (in Corporate America, at least), even those most engaged, who believe that in exchange, their employers will be equally engaged to them?

If you've ever worked on a team, chances are you've experienced some pretty dysfunctional relationships. While more pleasant, I've found it's not essential for us to form deep interpersonal relationships with the people we work with.  It makes sense; we rarely form these relationships with anyone. Yet, sometimes despite ourselves, we can work together to get the job done.

On the other hand, respect is the one element a team can't do without. Team members can't give it their all unless they know the others can and will deliver (or at least give it their all). 

But there's a rub. We don't all see respect in the same way. For some, it's earned; for others, it's a given, unless lost.  It's shaped by our life experiences.

I was excited to learn that the large HR consulting group Mercer found the same result. The firm's  What's Working study asked employees in 22 countries around the world about their attitudes and perceptions of 12 factors that contribute to  engagement. You can go the site to download a free pdf of "Engaging Employees to Drive Global Success."

Worldwide, of the 12 factors, respect was rated overall as the one that most influences their engagement at work.  It was rated first with employees in the US.

Not so with employees working in different countries. For example, workers in France and India chose type of work  for the top slot.  They found some big differences from country to country. For workers in the UK, being able to provide good customer service was rated highly but not so in Japan, where it was ranked last.

The researchers learned that differences in national cultural, the state of economic development and  economic conditions accounted for very different answers. Organizational differences also have a big impact.

This means context matters. There's no silver bullet or cookie-cutter solution to encourage employee engagement. But if you haven't surveyed your employees about what gets them charged up about your company, it seems you can't go too far afield starting with fostering respect.

What To Do When Your Boss Just Doesn't Get It

There's still time to register for our webinar this  Friday, December 14th at 10AM PST, 1PM here in New Jersey. Click here to register for Leading Teams to Do Great Things: How to succeed when you have all the responsibility and no authority!

In anticipation of the webinar, I wrote an article for The Pragmatic Marketing Update, a newsletter for technology product managers and marketers.

When was the last time you attended a seminar, let's say on best practices? When it comes time for the Q & A, isn't there always someone in the room who asks how to get their boss (or their boss' boss) to buy-in to the program? 

We've all experienced what it's like to come back to work, all jazzed up, only to be brought back to the practical reality of reporting to someone who resists new ideas or ways of doing things.  It's demoralizing. It's frustrating. It makes you wonder why you even bothered.

I wrote the article for the folks who risk being shut down because they honestly believe the result will be a better way to do things. 

What can you do to improve the chances of convincing your boss to champion the cause?  Here are ten ideas that could help. Click here to read the article.

Feel free to add your ideas to the list. Post your thoughts below.

Who Wants To Take On The Boss?

You got that right: no one.

In Encouraging Dissent in Decision Making, the lead article of the current Harvard Business School Working Knowledge newsletter, author Garry Emmons talks about what most of us already know. People remain silent rather than disagree with or bring bad news to their boss. What surprised the researchers was that people are just as reluctant to bring forward a good idea even if it's about something important.

Somehow, I never mastered that skill.  A senior executive and I were riding an empty elevator down to his office following a meeting with the CEO. "Anne," he said with a sigh, "must you always tell the CEO that his idea may be based on wrong assumptions? Do you think he really wants to hear how his ok idea can be turned into a great idea?" My answer, "Well, he hasn't stopped asking me to meet with him. If it's going to upset you like this, maybe you shouldn't come next time." Although he didn't respond, I'm sure you can imagine what he was thinking. I have to admit it wasn't my most tactful moment. Much to my surprise, he let me go on my own after that.

According to the HBS article, people don't offer a dissenting view either because they think it's a bad career move or they believe their ideas will be rejected or ignored. I'm not sure if "the boss may yell at me" or, even worse, " will make me look dumb in front of my peers" were possible choices. All in all, a lose-lose no matter how you look at it.

I began to think about why it's easier for me than others to actually believe, "What do you all think?" is a question to take seriously.

• Bosses are grown ups and in charge. They're not shy about not inviting you to a meeting, asking your opinion or, in any number of ways, to discourage you from ever speaking out again. So, I've never really been worried about losing my job even if maybe I should have.
• As a former child and now as a mother of three, I'm used to being told I don't know what I'm talking about. For the same reasons - and having spent a lot of time in New York City -  I've been yelled at quite a number of times. I've actually come to expect this sort of thing.
• I am totally intrigued by business problems and thinking of better ways to solve them. I forget that not everyone gets as engaged and enthusiastic as I do.
• I have a hard time hearing "no." For some strange reason, my brain processes "no" as "not now" or "not that way" or "not you." So I'm not easily offended if others don't agree with me.

Now, for all of you leaders out there. Think about the last time someone on your team came to you with a legitimate concern, complaint, to tell you things are not going well on a project, that a customer is upset, or to just blow off steam. If it's been more than a week, you might want to re-think how approachable you are. How many times have you heard a manager say, "My door is always open?" Often the door is open, but the office is empty or the manager is on the phone. Some things are better said in person; they just don't come across well in a text message.

I hope you'll read the article. It's got some great advice about how to encourage dissent. But the fact of the matter is it's incredibly hard to do. So many things get in the way:

• People shy away from disagreement and conflict. That goes for being on the giving end, receiving end, caught in the middle - or just plain being anywhere near it.
• Ditto for hearing someone criticized in public.
• Some folks believe that lying is a legitimate way to avoid confrontation or communicating news someone else doesn't want to hear.
• Some people believe that disagreement with the boss is disloyal, disrespectful, disruptive, distracting or somehow implies that they don't know what they're doing. Same goes for disagreeing with an expert.
• People tend to want things to stay more or less the same. It's easier that way.
• People get tired of hearing, "Don't come to me with a problem. Come with a solution."
• The words, "That won't work" seem to be an almost spontaneous reaction to just about any new idea.

We've all done at least one of these things.

Personally, I prefer to think of dissent in a couple of ways.

One is to think of dissent as a problem to be solved rather than a conflict to win or a confrontation to be avoided. At the very least, it helps to diffuse emotions. At it's best, dissent can be dealt with in ways that are more comfortable in a business setting: coming up with and weighing alternatives, assessing the impact of possible options, and focusing on implementing a decision rather than rehashing the disagreement.

You may think it's hokey but in some ways dissent can be a gift. It can spare you from being wrong. It can get everyone to take an interest in an issue and become vested in the final decision. It reinforces that nothing too awful will come of having the courage to speak up; with practice, something even better might emerge. The goal is for dissent to become part of how your team sets strategy and agrees on tactics. With luck, eventually those who have a habit of disagreeing inappropriately will not do so as often. Arguing for argument's sake is no longer an effective way to draw attention to themselves.

Bottom line: Decision making improves when informed people can discuss all sides of an issue and bring thoughtful candor to the table.

If you have some observations you'd like to share, we'd like to hear from you!

Great People, Great Team? Not always.

Why is it that great people, working together, don't necessarily become a great team? 

Management gurus have had a lot to say about this. I suppose Jim Collins would say they aren't in the right seat on the bus. Marshall Goldsmith might say it's because they each keep trying to make the other people on the team change. Patrick Lencioni suggests that the core problem of a dysfunctional team is lack of trust.

While there's certainly truth in what they say, I just don't think they offer much of a practical solution to the problem. Frankly, many team leaders just don't have the training, insights or finesse (let alone, the time or patience) to be able to do much to fix these things.

It's tough enough to manage a team when everyone is physically together or working for the same company. Who has the luxury of that? No longer the exclusive domain of traveling salesmen, regularly working from home or another off-site location at least one day a week has become the norm. Between outsourcing and the use of independent contractors, teams often consist of people whose paychecks are from different employers.

Leading a diverse team consisting of people from different divisions (or the five boroughs of New York) can be quite the cultural and language challenge. Global teaming can be exponentially more complex. No longer a problem to be faced largely by large multinationals, today, even the smallest company can easily go global.

Even if we didn't have time, distance and boundaries to conquer, there's still the issue of human frailty. We're not perfect. We come to the team with different capabilities and agendas, baggage and personalities.

So how can great people become a great team?

I believe the answer is clarity. Specifically, clarity on nine specific dimensions, without which teams get stymied, off-track and disrupted:

1. Clarity of purpose, or reason for everyone to give it the time and energy they would otherwise devote to something else.
2. Clarity of organizational support, or endorsement by the folks that matter and backed by resources.
3. Clarity of role, not just understanding what's expected of each member, but also gaining their buy-in.
4. Clarity of process, or how the team will function to get things done.
5. Clarity of decision making, or how the team will disagree, resolve conflict and eliminate roadblocks so it can move forward with a single voice (even if individuals don't think every decision is best.)
6. Clarity of interpersonal relationships, or what team members both need and are expected to do in order to demonstrate respect for one another.
7. Clarity of planning so that everyone knows who, what, where and when things need to get done.
8. Clarity of measures so that everyone can mark progress and direction.
9. Clarity of shared accountability so that the entire team shares the glory, the bonus or the disappointment.

Clarity can be most elusive.

We can start out thinking we mean the same thing. Even when we use the same words, in the same language, our mental models of those things can be different. We don't find out until quite farther down the road that we didn't mean the same thing at all. A great example is the word, "project," which clearly means something very different to an accountant, a marketer or an engineer.

We can agree, for example, on the goals or strategy of a particular team activity. But, as the project evolves over time, we can see a situation that was quite clear several months earlier very differently. Circumstances change. More information becomes known. Priorities change.

And then there's decision making. Any team that fails to answer early on, "who decides" is bound for trouble. It would be fantastic to also know "how are we going to decide"  - but if I can only have one, give me "who" over "how" any day.

Teams are uncomfortable talking about the decision making process. Decision making gets tied up with emotions around power, comfort with disagreement and dealing with conflict. Teams that can look at decision making as problem solving will find it a whole lot easier and less personal.

Often you'll hear a team say the group just doesn't get along. People describe in detail who said or did what to whom. As grown ups we all know we don't have to become best friends with the people we work with. Some may say there are good reasons not to. But the team can and should insist on professional respect within the team. There are so many influences on how we define respect as we grow up. Just ask the question, "Is respect is something everyone deserves (but could be lost) or whether it is something that must be earned?" and you'll see what I mean.

When people complain about their team not working well together, you'd be surprised how often it boils down to lack of clarity.

By back-tracking, starting with the purpose and moving through each of the nine dimensions listed above, you'll find out exactly where the breakdown in communication occurred. As real clarity - shared understanding using the same words, shared meaning and effect, and shared agreement - is achieved, great people can indeed become great teams.

A Mutiny... in Florida?

When you have a daughter living in New Orleans, just seeing the word "hurricane" in a headline catches the attention. Like many other students at Tulane University, despite an unexpected detour following Hurricane Katrina, my daughter stayed on in NOLA (she as a Tulane medical student.) Katrina is not "yesterday's news" to us.

Given my fascination with leadership - where the goal is not only to keep the job but actually live up to it - well, let's just say you don't hear a mutiny story every day. Except where hurricanes are involved, I guess. (Anyone remember Michael Brown?) So today's headline story in the New York Times entitled, Hurricane Center's Director Is Replaced After a Mutiny was a must-read.

For those of you who may have skipped it, the long and short of the story is that the director of the National Hurrican Center in Miami, X. William Proenza, first upset his bosses with public criticisms of spending priorities and predictions of disaster caused by a failure to replace an aging satellite named QuikScat. You'd think his employees would have lauded his efforts to call attention to their urgent need for more funding. But you'd be wrong. According to the Times, nearly half signed a petition to send him packing. And they got it.

Forecasters at the Hurricane Center took exception to their ill-informed, outspoken leader (who lacked recent hurricane forecasting experience by the way). By overstating the problem, they claimed, Proenza raised worries unnecessarily and undermined the Center’s (and, I suppose, their own) credibility.

So it seems that professionalism and dedication can trump rank and increased funding. (Yes!)

What I don't get is the next part.  One of the meteorologists at the Center (who presumably didn't sign the petition) is quoted in the article as saying,

“What bothers me the most is Bill was sharply reprimanded for his public statements about the lack of funding for certain things and the way certain funds were being used. Where is the reprimand for what amounts to a mutiny by a group of federal employees, the likes of which has never been seen in NOAA? Bill’s removal is going to come across to some that a public rebellion — meaning going to the media — is O.K."

Would you want to be this guy in the company cafeteria today?

Ah for the good old days when a mutiny meant curtains for the mutineers. How 1980's.

Several reactions to this story leaped to mind:

• Shouldn't we expect leaders to be taken to task for what is, in effect, irresponsibly "yelling smoke in a crowded movie theater"?
• You don't need to be an expert to lead, but shouldn't we expect a leader to be informed before speaking publicly?
• Sure, dated experience doesn't mean no experience, but shouldn't we expect a leader to recognize that the world has changed in the interim? Surely this should be even more obvious when working in a scientific realm.
• Signing a petition to have their boss removed has crossed everybody's mind at least once during their career. Who says government workers don't have moxie? How much you want to bet they never thought it would actually happen?

But the last statement really blew me away. "Bill’s removal is going to come across to some that a public rebellion — meaning going to the media — is O.K." Wow. In a Web 2.0 world is there anyone out there who seriously believes that even a whispered conversation among 23 people - let alone an actual uprising - won't find its way to the Internet? OK, maybe 23 renegade weathermen won't be as big a deal as Angelina and Brad, but you take my point.

I'd love to hear what you think and hope you'll post a comment.

Authentic Leaders Steer Toward True North

Starting to think about your summer reading? You should read True North, by Harvard Professor Bill George with Peter Sims. It's an easy read with lots of terrific sound bytes, anecdotes and stories.

A lot of stories. George and Sims interviewed 125 leaders (some you'll recognize and some you won't) representative of leaders in their 20's, 30's, 40's, 50's, 60's and yes, even over 70. What they learned is that it's all about their stories.

"Reading through three thousand pages of transcripts," George writes, "our team was startled to see that these leaders did not identify any universal characteristics, traits, skills, or styles that led to their success. Rather, their leadership emerged from their life stories. By constantly testing themselves through real-world experiences and by reframing thier life stories to understand who they are, these leaders unleashed their passions and discovered the purpose of their leadership."

Today's Harvard Business School e-newsletter HBS WorkingKnowledge contains the following link:

Podcast: The Authentic Leader: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5664.html

The best leaders are not the "follow me over the hill" type, says Professor Bill George. Rather, they're the people who lead from the heart as well as the head, and whose leadership style springs from their fundamental character and values. George discusses his new book True North, co-written with Peter Sims.