Who on the team can you go to for honest, constructive feedback about your working style or communication effectiveness? What would be involved in developing such a relationship?
The Working Cultures Blog
June 20th, 2008
Why Would I Trust You With My Future?
We are asserting that your firm’s success might be deeply connected to the success of your individual team members. (Be sure to catch up on the entire series Influencing Others.)
Imagine how much more committed to the company’s goals employees would be if they believed you were committed to helping them achieve their career goals. They’d go all-out for you.
Let’s say you rewrote your job description to include a responsibility to help your key players reach their professional goals whether or not those goals involved staying in your employ. What a great leader you’d be, right?! You wouldn’t know what to do with all the loyalty and energy and dedication that would result.
BUT
And this is a big but.
It’s not really safe to tell you
my professional aspirations, is it?
If you knew I was working my way toward a transfer to another department, a credential for another field, a transition to another part of the country, or a promotion that would complicate your own plans, would you really choose to use that knowledge for my benefit? Or would your commitment to yourself and the firm take over and ultimately use the information against me?
Even if you could resist the temptation, is there any reason for me to trust you? After all, you have the power in the relationship. The risk of revealing my career aspirations is entirely mine.
Think about it.
What could you do to build trust and create a safe environment for everyone to celebrate and support each others’ career trajectories regardless whether they involve each other?
Wouldn’t three to five years of over-the-top engagement be better than ten to fifteen years of squeezing out the-bare-minimum?
June 19th, 2008
Listen In -> Influencing Others #4: Organizing for Trust and Results
We close out our podcast series on Influencing Others with a conversation about organizing in such a way that builds trust and results.
If you were to write out your company goals in one column and the professional goals of your team members in another, how much overlap or dove-tailing would you find?
Could there be significant clues about the direction where your company might find the most success in the directions your key players are most passionate about?
Listen in.
June 17th, 2008
President McCain or Obama? Insist on Substance over Rhetoric
When candidates say what they have to say in order to get elected, how can you know who you’re really voting for?
How about insisting on substantive answers to meaningful questions? Check out this list of 15 questions developed by the Center for Public Leadership and the Ken Blanchard Companies. Link to this post or directly to the Center’s blog post and get your friends and associates insisting on substance over rhetoric.
Who are You Really?
1. Values: What are your five core values and how do they shape how you lead?
2. Attributes & Competencies: What are the attributes and competencies you value most in yourself that will serve you well in the White House?
3. Weaknesses & Mistakes: Recent American history has many examples of leaders whose weaknesses brought them down. What are your tendencies that could cause your presidency to fail?
4. People I Have Learned From: What historical figure has exercised leadership in a way that you aspire to? What were their strengths? Tell us about a situation that tested their leadership.
5. Multicultural Experience/World View: What experiences have helped you deeply understand the mindset and values of other cultures?
Who Will Be at The Table With You?
6. Building a Team: Tell us about a high performing team that you’ve built. What made it high-performing?
7. Coalition Building: Can you share some examples of when you were a catalyst who brought groups with polarized opinions together so that all voices were at the table?
8. Increasing Participation: The internet and technology have flattened the political playing field, allowing for more participation and collective decision making. How will you create a more participatory democracy and give people the opportunity to influence decision making?
9. Increasing Participation: Young people have engaged in this election in greater numbers than ever before. Please give us some examples of how you have listened and responded to the next generation in your campaign. How will you keep the next generation engaged?
How Will You Decide?
10. Decision Making Style: The president’s role requires decisiveness. Please share some examples of your ability and willingness to be decisive. Can you tell us about a time when a lack of decisiveness got you into trouble. In retrospect, what would you have done differently?
11. Judgment: Tell us about a time when your judgment was tested in crisis. What do you want us to appreciate about your judgment?
How Will You Act? And What Will You Act On?
12. Leading Change: Can you give us an example of how you have overcome resistance to bring about a needed change?
13. Innovative Thinking: How will you create an environment for innovation within your leadership team?
14. Building the Confidence of Others: What are the first few things you’ll do to raise confidence at home and abroad?
15. Priorities Indicative of Values: The USA ranks 1st in incarceration and 18th in high school graduation. What leadership skills and values do you bring to the challenge of reversing these numbers? Can you point to three things in your past that will help us understand that you care about this challenge?
June 16th, 2008
Entitlement Mentality is a Poor Excuse
Some worry that organizing around the team will foster an entitlement mentality among employees that will backfire on the well-meaning leader. Empowerment will lead to unrealistic expectations that in turn will force the leader to buckle to ever-increasing demands that will eventually break the organization.
I’m sorry, but I’m not sympathetic to this line of thinking. It’s what I call a leadership excuse. And, of course, since our hallmark is No Excuses Leadership™, we don’t go there.
There are unexpected complications, extenuating circumstances, and disingenuous employees everywhere. These are the leadership realities we face and never form the basis of a rationale for poor results, weak decisions or ineffective policies.
Back to entitlement. How employees respond to radical empowerment varies. Hence the tight link with accountability for results.
To forfeit the potential of an empowered, fully engaged team in order to avoid the occasional risk of destructive entitlement mentalities is like giving up the benefits of a regular exercise routine because there’s a risk of injury. The risk is real, sure, but the solution erased your only chance for success. What good is that?
Where do your solutions remove more than the presenting problem and inadvertently undermine what you need to make progress?
Catch up on the entire Influencing Others series here.
June 12th, 2008
Listen In -> Influencing Others #3: Clarity and Commitment to the Team
Does it matter who’s in the chair?
In this week’s podcast, we discuss the hard fact that working with people requires knowing who those people are. Who they are and what they bring to the table. Their personalities, their strengths, their skills, their working styles and their professional passions to name a few.
Most leaders use organizational charts and job descriptions as a basis for hiring. What if the job descriptions and organizational charts flowed from the make-up of the people chosen to be on the team?
Think about it, and then listen in.
June 11th, 2008
Question of the Week
How might you quantify what procrastination is costing you?
