Next Level Blog

Redskins Leadership Lessons Redux – The Video

Regular readers may recall that I ran a post last week on the leadership lessons that can be learned from not doing what Redskins’ owner Dan Snyder is doing with his organization. In the category of “doesn’t happen every day,” I got a call from a producer at DC’s Fox TV affiliate to ask if I’d do an interview on what I was hearing from fans about the situation. Fox 5 ran the piece on a few of their broadcasts following the Redskins’ Monday night loss to the Eagles this week. Roll the tape:

The original post cited nine things that Snyder and his EVP of football operations Vinny Cerrato are doing that leaders shouldn’t do.  When I went to the Fox studio to do the interview, the producer told me that when she mentioned to her colleagues that I’d come up with a list of nine things, the universal response was, “Only nine?”

It turns out that they were right. There are more than nine. Two new ones that emerged this week are treating your customers like criminals (as reported by the Washington Post’s Dan Steinberg on how Redskins security ripped up the sign of a fan who was trying to send a message of love to her husband in Afghanistan) and playing the blame game in public (see this article on Redskins EVP Vinny Cerrato arguing that he gave Coach Jim Zorn a playoff caliber team).

I will make a promise that I’m not going to turn this into a Sports blog. I’m done (for now anyway) with what we can learn from the Redskins. Thought you might be interested in the rest of the story (so far). 

Learning from the Navy’s Commitment to Leadership Development

The next time you’re feeling challenged about how to reach a goal, think of the sailors from the USS Carl Vinson. As reported in the Washington Post,  30 sailors from the Vinson set a goal to make last Sunday's Marine Corps Marathon their first 26.2 mile race.  More and more people are running marathons these days, but not very many have their training space limited to the confines of a Nimitz class aircraft carrier. The sailors from the Vinson were inspired by the example set by their former commanding officer, Walter Carter, a recently promoted rear admiral who shared his enthusiasm for running with his crew.  Carter has left the Vinson for his next assignment but came back to DC to run the race with his men. Through his own commitment to fitness and his and camaraderie with his team, Rear Admiral Carter is the embodiment of what a positive leadership footprint looks like.

I’m honored to report that I got a first hand account of how the race turned out for the sailors from the Carl Vinson when I was one of the opening speakers last Sunday for the Navy’s annual Flag Officer and Executive Training Symposium at a federal training center in the suburbs of DC.  (This is a week long annual event for the newly promoted admirals and their civilian colleagues in the federal Senior Executive Service. )

The speaker that followed me on Sunday was the head of the Navy’s Fitness program. She was there to brief the participants and their spouses on the range of support available to help these leaders stay fit in their very demanding roles. As she wrapped up her remarks, she read from the Post story and asked if Rear Admiral Carter was in the room. He was indeed and reported that all 30 of his sailors had successfully completed the race and that he had finished it in 3 hours and 36 minutes himself.  Bear in mind that this briefing came about six hours following the marathon.  Let it be noted that the admiral did not have the bearing or tone of someone who had just run 26.2 miles in under four hours.  He pretty much looked fresh as a daisy!

There were a number of  things I took away from the Sunday session that I think are worth offering as food for thought for leaders. Let me share three of them here.

Keeping Your Best Engaged

The tough economic environment of the past year and a half has made organizational leadership an even more challenging job than usual. A recent article in HR Executive Online by Lin Grensing-Pophal reports on a somewhat surprising aspect of that leadership challenge.

Drawing on a recent study conducted by Watson-Wyatt and World at Work, Pophal notes that employee engagement levels during the recession have dropped by nine percent since last year. That’s not so surprising given everything that’s gone on in the past year. The news that leaders should pay extra attention to, however, is that the engagement of top performers is down by a whopping 25 percent.

The combination of economic uncertainty and the need to do more with less can take a toll on everyone. Of course, on both a short and long term basis, leaders need to pay particular attention to the high performers who can deliver results. Pophal offers some good suggestion in her article about how to do that including developmental assignments and flexible work arrangements.

She also mentions connection to the bigger picture as a key way to provide the intrinsic motivation that keeps the best engaged. As I’ve written here before, Bill Bridges’ four P’s communications model is one of the best frameworks I know of for making that connection. Like most good leadership tools, it’s simple and easy to remember:

• Purpose: why are we here and what difference does that make?
• Picture: what will things look like when we’re fully successful?
• Plan: how will we get to that picture of success?
• Part to Play: this is how what you do fits into the plan that creates the picture that fulfills the purpose.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to speak with leaders from GE Energy, the U.S. Coast Guard and Department of Homeland Security, Booz Allen Hamilton and the U.S. Senate. One of the things that all of those leaders have in common is that they’re working for organizations that make a difference. I actually think that most of us work for organizations that make a difference. Leaders often overlook the opportunity to connect people with the larger purpose of what their organizations do. If you’re a leader who wants to keep your best people engaged, I encourage you to give that some thought. What can you say about how what they’re doing makes a difference?

The Power of the Obvious Question

When faced with an intractable or complex problem, it’s easy for leaders to get bogged down in the minutiae when trying to come up with a solution.  Another trap is to go binary – it’s either this or it’s that – too soon in the decision making process.  Rather than opening up options and possibilities, we sometimes try to solve complex problems by settling for the least painful of the most obvious options.

It’s at times like this, that’s it’s helpful to have someone in the room who can step back, get up on the balcony and ask some questions that seem obvious in retrospect but maybe weren’t asked because everyone else was too close to the situation at hand.

There was a great example of this in a recent Newsweek article by Holly Bailey and Evan Thomas on Vice President Joe Biden.  Here’s an extended excerpt that paints the picture:

"Joe Biden had a question. During a long Sunday meeting with President Obama and top national-security advisers on Sept. 13, the VP interjected, ‘Can I just clarify a factual point? How much will we spend this year on Afghanistan?’ Someone provided the figure: $65 billion. ‘And how much will we spend on Pakistan?’ Another figure was supplied: $2.25 billion. ‘Well, by my calculations that's a 30-to-1 ratio in favor of Afghanistan. So I have a question. Al Qaeda is almost all in Pakistan, and Pakistan has nuclear weapons. And yet for every dollar we're spending in Pakistan, we're spending $30 in Afghanistan. Does that make strategic sense?’ The White House Situation Room fell silent. But the questions had their desired effect: those gathered began putting more thought into Pakistan as the key theater in the region.”

There are several things I find instructive in this story.  First, Biden is making his point based on facts that may have been lost in the discussion.  Second, he links those facts to a bigger picture.  Third, he uses those facts and that bigger picture to cause his colleagues to pull up and challenge their assumptions.

What obvious questions do you need to ask to help your team challenge their assumptions?  Are you even the best person to ask those questions or is that role better played by designating someone on your team to play the role of devil’s advocate?  What are the pros and cons of either approach?

Learning What Not to Do From the Leadership of the Washington Redskins

There’s an old, old saying that, “A fish rots from the head down.”  It dates in English from at least 1674 and has probably hung around all these years because it’s true.  The Washington Redskins are one of the latest examples of the truth of this aphorism.

Since the NFL season began, I’ve thought of writing a post on what can be learned about how not to lead an organization from analyzing the Redskins’ owner Dan Snyder.  After Sunday’s 14 – 6 loss to the previously winless Kansas City Chiefs that included a safety in the closing minutes, the time finally seems right.  After all, the Redskins have lost to the 1 and 22 Detroit Lions and haven’t beaten a team this year with a winning record.  As the Washington Post has reported, the team sues its fans who have fallen on hard times and can’t honor their ticket contracts.  They have one of the most bloated payrolls in the NFL and week by week, publicly humiliate their head coach Jim Zorn (a classic example of what I refer to as an NGB – “nice guy, but…”) by removing one more aspect of his duties.  (This week it was play calling.)

Seriously, if we can’t learn something about how not to lead an organization from watching Dan Snyder then it’s probably time to move onto another topic.  What are his secrets for leading a rotten organization?  Here are a few that catch my attention: