Change Leadership... session 3

What needs to stick, of course, is change in human behavior. Replace your office furniture and the change will stay put with no effort on your part. The same cannot be said for getting everyone to respond differently to customers, cooperate across functional lines, or implement those new quality measures. If you want organizational changes to stick, implement the leadership initiatives described in this week’s podcast...

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Change Leadership... session 2

Change is different from transition, and leaders ignore transition at their peril.

What’s the difference? Change is an observable event that often occurs very quickly – e.g. you sell your Hummer for a Prius. Transition is an inner state – how long it takes you to get used to driving the Prius. As noted in the previous session, transition is difficult because it requires new learning, new patterns of behavior, and emotional regrouping. This podcast outlines seven actions effective leaders can take to manage transitions.
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Change Leadership... session 1

Conventional wisdom is that people inherently resist change, automatically making organizational change difficult. This assumption can get in the way of effective change leadership. It’s worth thinking a little deeper.

What people resist isn’t necessarily change itself. What people resist is the pain, discomfort, fear, stress, loss, and expending of excess energy and attention that comes with some kinds of change. The ideas presented in this coaching podcast will help leaders understand the nuances of change and better prepare themselves to address real challenges.
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You clearly want to make your message appealing, brilliant, and convincing. You want to make it authoritative and bold… or at the very least, comprehensible.

To deliver a message that sticks, think ABC -- Attention, Brevity, Clarity. This article explores how...

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Tags: Top Performance

Bringing out the best brainpower and talent in meetings is expedited by a high level of energy. Does the energy level in your meetings slump the longer the meeting continues?
This last “coachcast” in the Meetings That Work series covers seven specific strategies that leaders can use immediately in meetings to maintain and increase energy, attention, and vitality.
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More than anything else, the capacity of people to have a meaningful dialogue is what adds value to meetings by drawing out the brainpower and tacit knowledge around the table. Rich discussion, dialogue, and debate differentiate meetings where work gets done from time wasters that keep people from their work.

This session outlines seven ways that effective leaders encourage meeting dialogue:
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What’s the purpose of your meeting? Simply to share information? Retrospective information can be useful, but in the most productive meetings participants focus on achieving outcomes that are prospective in nature: alignment, attunement, and action.

This session explores how to encourage alignment, attunement, and action in your meetings...and the traps to avoid!

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To make the most of the talent and knowledge your people have to offer requires meaningful dialogue.

Why? Explicit knowledge can be shared in directives, reports and presentations, but tacit knowledge is brought out by rich dialogue, discussion, and interaction - and tacit knowledge is what gives organizations a competitive edge.

This is especially noticeable in meetings. In our knowledge-based economy, a meeting should be a time when work gets done, not an event that keeps people from their “real” work. In many organizations, meetings seem to be little more than people giving reports. These kind of meetings tend to focus on retrospective information (e.g. last month’s financial report or summaries of projects that people are doing outside of the meeting) - a formula for unproductive and boring meetings. Retrospective information can be useful, but in the most productive and valuable meetings the participants actively focus on aligning their thinking, attuning their values, and planning for action - tasks requiring tacit as well as explicit knowledge.

This article covers eight ways that effective leaders use to encourage dialogue: Read More...

Jack Nicklaus said, "Learn the fundamentals of the game and stick to them. Band-Aid remedies never last."
The same can be said of meetings. If meetings in your organization need work, first ensure you routinely practice the seven basics covered in this podcast before working on anything else.
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Yesterday I had the pleasure of hearing Carolina Hurricanes head coach Paul Maurice speak at a local meeting of the Association of Corporate Growth. Especially given the recent track record of the Canes (i.e. a 12 game losing streak), Maurice’s comments reflected lessons from the school of hard knocks. An excellent story about the event was reported in the News and Observer.

To summarize takeaway ideas... whether your team is winning or struggling, work on building the team must be relentless. Maurice noted three stages of team development - trust, support, and identity.

Trust
Trust is when everyone on the team is doing something, contributes, has a place. Team members must pass the “shirt-off test” where it’s unmistakably clear who is working out and in shape (and who is not). Team members need to trust that everyone is working hard. Trust in a team is either building up or breaking down, there is no middle ground.

Support
Do team members support or blame each other? Maurice notes the most telling indicator of support is where players sit for lunch. When they sit in cliques - highest paid players at one, europeans at another, lower tier players at another - spending their time complaining how the team would be better if only the other groups got their act together, then both trust and support has eroded. Coaches (or leaders) need to intervene by pulling aside key players, and getting them to intentionally mix and reach out to those at other tables.

Identity
Maurice notes you can watch videos of great teams and quickly describe what makes them great. They have consistency in what they do and how they do it that is readily apparent. Not so with mediocre teams. Part of the identity of a winning team always includes owning up when performance falls short, and stepping up to do what needs doing.

Maurice’s insights are spot-on, applicable to any leader wanting to sustain an exceptional organization.

Go Canes!!

Tom Stevens© 2009

______________________

I am proud to serve on the board of the Association of Corporate Growth, Raleigh Durham Chapter. Our mission is to be a catalyst for business growth by providing businesses with relevant knowledge, sources of capital, and other resources. Our vision is to create a business climate where regional companies thrive, contribute to the prosperity and vitality of the community, and serve as models of sound, ethical leadership and sustainable growth.
www.acgrpt.org

$175 million. That is the financial savings realized by Michigan hospitals once they implemented a very simple tool.

Are you looking for something to help you be more organized, think smarter, foster team alignment, and become a more influential leader? Maybe save millions? Consider these seven simple tools.

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Leadership is much more than telling people to go down the yellow brick road...

Seventy years ago MGM produced one of the best and most beloved movies of all time, based on L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The original book was published in 1900, the first of 14 Oz books written by Baum, to be followed by dozens more from other authors. The 1939 film, starring Judy Garland, is so well crafted it continues to enchant audiences today… and also offers some important leadership lessons.

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Do you truly want to rise above average? Do you want to accelerate achievement?

A strengths focus is critical to fostering excellence and avoiding mediocrity - for yourself and your organization.

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Has your board or leadership team scheduled a planning retreat or meeting?

This 7 Ideas Coach audio “coachcast” reviews:

• 3 all-too-common errors that organizations make while creating their strategic or action plans;
• 3 best practices that will help a group avoid these mistakes;
• Plus the single most important thing to get right so everything else falls in place.

In short, 7 ideas that will help make your planning effort a success.
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Want to get everyone on the same page?
One of the best strategies is literally doing so - get your strategic plan refined to a one pager.
This coachcast discusses:

• Why one page is a great way to go to enhance your organization.
• Who can use a one page plan or strategy map. (Hint...businesses, non-profits, and public agencies.)
• Timing and triggers for one pagers.
• The four things every one pager should include.
• And three ways an organization can maximize benefit from a one page plan.
  

links to related resources
THINK! leadership article: One Page Way
About Strategy Maps
Article on Hillsborough’s use of Strategy Maps and Balanced Scorecard
One Page Way consulting and facilitation

If you liked this coachcast, you'll love the resource guide for productive meetings...

Any endeavor that involves the work of more than one person requires some form of management to align people’s efforts. In short, you have to get everyone on the same page. One of the best tools for getting people on the same page is literally doing so - get your strategic plan refined to a single page.

Whatever the industry, size, or sector of the organization, there are immense benefits for establishing clear strategic objectives for the organization, and organizing these on a single-page easily understood document.

This article reviews why organizations choose to make a one page strategic plan, alternative models, and what every plan should include.

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June 3, 2009
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
The SAC® Release

How Business Needs to Prepare
To Exploit the Economic Recovery

The Society for Advancement of Consulting® (SAC®) asked its global membership to evaluate the current ideas to maximize the exploitation of the economic recovery when it inevitably arrives.

“We had nearly 50 reports from around the word,” noted Alan Weiss, PhD, the SAC CEO, “so I’ve distilled the representative samples.

Read on for dozens of tips and expert advice...
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Communicating for Influence Coachcast Series



Leadership is about influencing others so they choose to follow. To become more skilled in the art of communicating for influence, one must first understand these essential and often counter-intuitive communication principles.

• One cannot not communicate
• The message intended is not necessarily the message received
• Communication is multi-channel
• We think in ‘clouds’ of associations, not words
• Emotions are always “on”
• Most thinking and behavior is unconscious
• Human interaction is more like a living ecology than a machine - think cultivate, not operate
  

Change and Transition Coachcast Series



In his book Solving Tough Problems, Adam Kahane identifies three types of complexity:

• Dynamic Complexity - how close cause and effect are together in space and time;
• Generative Complexity - how much the future is or is not like the past; and
• Social Complexity - how much people connected to an issue have common assumptions, values, objectives, experiences, and perceptions.
  

Implications for leaders…

• The Level of Complexity is Increasing for All Organizations Whether Large and Small or Business, Public, or Non-profit
• Increased Complexity Requires a Different Kind of Action
• Highly Complex Issues Require Increased Need for a Facilitative Leadership Style
• Increasing Complexity Impacts Personal and Organizational Leadership Development
  

Leaders who are exceptional, who transform organizations and make a difference in the world, will need to demonstrate a full range of character - courage to take bold action, humanity to connect with others, wisdom in understanding the world, and resilience to embrace creative change.

links:
related article: Complexity and Leadership Style
book review - Solving Tough Problems (coming soon)
assessing leadership style with Tilt360

A strategy map, or strat-map, is a one page document that shows how specific high level objectives link strategically in accomplishing the organization’s mission and vision. While deceptively simple, a well-constructed strat-map reflects the “DNA” of an organization, and becomes the source of an organization’s planning, budgeting, and decision making at both a strategic and tactical level. In short, a strat-map is a terrific tool for getting people in your organization “on the same page.”

This entry provides basic background information about strat-maps - their key elements, how they differ for businesses and non-profits, and how organizations create one.
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Change and Transition Coachcast Series




Is your organization experiencing a big shift, or getting ready to? In this turbulent economic climate, many organizations are having change thrust upon them - while others are choosing to make bold changes to address new customer needs or take advantage of opportunities.

Here’s seven things to think about...

• Change is not necessarily difficult, or something that people resist.
• What trips up most people, and organizational change effort, is not change but transition.
• Transition requires new learning and new patterns of behavior.
• Transition requires emotional regrouping.
• Transitions typically take us away from a sense of routine into other states of ending, abeyance, or starting.
• Transition requires large energy and attention expenditures - loss of productivity is practically inevitable.
• Leaders and managers do well to give as much emphasis to planning how to manage transitions as they do to what change to make.
  

"Change" is different from "transition," and leaders ignore transition at their peril. This episode lays the groundwork for a new coachcast series on leading change and managing transition.

corresponding article: Worry About Transitions, Not Change

April Fools Edition




Are you up to your you know what in alligators, and tired of hearing about how the swamp needs draining?

For reason’s I won’t disclose, my cousin Tim is doing this week’s podcast and he is a master at animal metaphors. Just as the lead goose breaks wind for the rest of the flock, leaders will agree that this episode breaks wind.

Lead boldly, stand out, and make it a team effort - and remember that if you lie down with dogs you get fleas, an elephant always remembers you called him fat, and there's a fine line between being the cat’s meow and a nasty hairball.

PDF of quotations from this podcast

A study at Bell Labs found all their engineers performed their engineering functions the same way. What differentiated top engineers from the average? Top performers created relationships that measurably contributed to effectiveness, e.g. top performers had telephone calls returned in an average of 20 minutes, compared to 4 hours for less stellar peers.

I continue to hear a theme from clients, business leaders, and other colleagues, that as the world becomes more high tech, there will be a corresponding need for high touch. Many executives fear that high touch environments get in the way of goals, or else they simply waste resources and time. The evidence is compelling, however, that high touch environments accelerate success and add value. However high touch environments require more advanced and developed leadership talent to bring out that value.

Seven Ideas for Leaders - Play Well to Excel

• Ensure development opportunities for people competencies are readily available.
• Build in playing well into performance management system.
• Leadership sets the example.
• Celebrate milestones, create rituals for transitions, and debrief significant events.
• Help people use inherent talents and interests.
• Don’t let people get away with toxic behavior.
• Help people to find fun and humor in their work.

Play Well to Excel resource links:
Read the full leadership article
Power of Nice book review
No Asshole Rule book review

THINK! and 7 Ideas Coach subscribers receive free pdf versions of our leadership articles - subscribe today - it’s free, and we never give your email to anyone else

Tom Stevens (c)2004, 2009

The Power of Nice
How to Conquer the Business World with Kindness
Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval (2006)

"Nice is the toughest four letter word you'll ever hear."
Or so the authors tell us in this small volume. We reminded that nice does not mean Pollyanna, passive, or wimpy. Nice brings business success.
I acquired this book from the authors following an excellent presentation at the National Speakers Association National Conference. The book is short, easy to read in one sitting (or on a plane trip), and anecdotal. There are plenty of stories and examples to illustrate the author’s points. We are reminded to be respectful, empathetic, and upbeat to everyone, not simply to people who can immediately benefit us. Be nice to everybody, because you never know...is certainly not a bad strategy to go about life. There are plenty of other tips offered - “nice” is too narrow concept for the broad interpersonal best practices covered in this book.
Anyone reasonably well-read in business literature won’t find much unexpected or particularly new. That being said, it's a nice book, a pleasant read, providing reminders of things we need to hear no matter how sophisticated a leader or professional we may be. Jay Leno does the forward - how nice is that!

Yesterday I heard a story that is repeated endlessly in organizations, although there’s a genuine effort from leadership to implement needed changes, nothing happens.

Change efforts often suffer from what preeminent executive coach Marshall Goldsmith calls the 1, 2, 3, 7 problem - implementing change is a 7 step process, but leaders often leave out steps 4, 5, and 6.

Seven Steps for Change

• Assess Situation
• Identify Solutions
• Plan Action
• Seek Buy-in Up
• Seek Buy-in Across
• Seek Buy-in Down
• Implement Changes

The notion of wooing up, across, and down makes sense from within hierarchical organizations. However many leaders seek changes in organizations that aren’t so clearly stratified. Think bout any kind of community change, consider how our President, or any leader, seeks to implement a change in our nation or the world for that matter. Steps 4, 5, and 6 could easily read:

• Seek Buy-in from Key Opinion Leaders
• Seek Buy-in from Constituent Groups
• Seek Buy-in from People Most Impacted

Remember these steps apply to personal change as well as organizational change. Whenever you are trying to change any habit - e.g. stop smoking, increase patience, speak confidently - the people around you can easily impede the change unless you include them in the process.

Resist the prevailing mood of doom and gloom, take charge of your attitude, but guard against denial. Here are seven ways how, from Mayor Tom’s recent State of the Town address.

• Master your attitude
• Face reality while keeping faith
• Stick to your knitting
• Diligently seek and seize opportunities
• Focus on action within our control
• Foster partnerships and collaborations
• Live with renewed intention

resources
complete leadership article and podcast on Resisting the Mood of Doom
About Stone Soup
Collaborations Across Boundaries
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Critical Questions About Increasing Your Top Line


Understand Customers
What extra steps are you taking to understand what your customer needs in today’s environment?

Seize Opportunities
Are you prepared to take advantage of opportunities this tough market offers? (e.g. to gain market share?)

Know Your Biz
Do you know your profit zone? (i.e. do you know which products and services actually add to your bottom line?)

Focus, Focus, Focus
Are you focusing efforts externally on your market or internally on your organization?

Align Everything
How aligned is your sales compensation plan with current realities, profitability, and positive cash generation?

Make Everything Count
How are you assessing what marketing efforts, people, processes, profit centers, even customers, are marginal? What are you going to do about it?

Excel at Leadership
How are you engaging employees so everyone in the company is a salesperson?

See panel presentation The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Doing Business In Today’s Economy: Increasing Your Top Line

Increasing Your Top LIne was a panel I moderated this week, with distinguished panelists Marco Fregenal and Armistead “Buck” Burwell. The panel was part of “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Doing Business in Today’s Economy” seminar sponsored by our local chapter of the Association for Corporate Growth (www.acgraleighdurham.org) and the Turnaround Management Association (TMA Carolinas). Buck and Marco are experienced, knowledgeable, and articulate CEOs, and provided a wealth of information.

I’ve uploaded a video of the entire panel discussion, about 1 hour and 10 minutes.

C-level executives of mid-sized companies, or anyone who is involved in private equity or M&A, will likely find membership in ACG beneficial.

Marco Fregenal is founder and CEO of Carpio Solutions, and has co-founded and led several companies including PAGENET Brazil and HowStuffWorks.com.
Buck Burwell has a 20+ year track record of partnering with private equity investors to lead underperforming companies to their next level of growth, most recently CAM Fabrication, Inc.
more about the panelists

What if meetings were something we bragged about? "Hey honey, we had the most awesome meeting at work today!"
All too often we brag about how bad they are. Stop complaining and start adding value. If you're in a leadership role teach others how to do the same. Here are seven ways how...

• Speak up but say something new.
• Learn to Summarize.
• Acknowledge Other People’s Contributions.
• Ask Good Questions.
• Check-in With the Group.
• Frame Issues for Results.
• Foster Accountability.
  

Article on Summarizing for Sharper Thinking

Seventy years ago MGM produced one of the best and most beloved movies of all time, based on L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The film is so well crafted it continues to enchant today - and it offers some unexpected leadership lessons.

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Just one of these simple tools helped Michigan Hospitals avoid $175 million in extra medical costs while saving hundreds of lives.
Use these simple, common, and under-appreciated tools to be more organized, think smarter, foster team alignment, and become a more influential leader.
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Trust is not neutral - trust will either accelerate or erode leadership capacity. This podcast outlines seven strategies effective leaders can use to constantly cultivate high levels of trust.

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Something a little different to start 7 Ideas Coach in the New Year!

This excerpt from the Tao Te Ching is the best advice for living life I have ever read, as valid today as some 2500 years ago when it was written.

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