Next Level Blog

True Insincerity is Hard to Find

One of my mentors in high school was fond of saying, “True insincerity is hard to find.”  Running for reelection in Britain this week, prime minister Gordon Brown demonstrated what that line is all about. In case you haven’t heard, Brown was out in the neighborhoods talking to the “real people” about their concerns when he struck up a conversation with an older woman who had a list of complaints including her take on British immigration policy. Brown talked with her for five minutes, then left the scene in his motorcade. Unfortunately, he forgot to take the TV network’s wireless microphone off his lapel and, as he was driving away, was caught on tape referring to the lady as a “bigoted woman.” 

The conversation with the woman and his off camera remarks can be seen in this clip. It’s about five minutes long with Brown’s gaffe coming around the 4:50 mark. If you’re at all a student of leadership insincerity, I encourage you to watch the whole thing. It’s too rich.

If you want a recap of the overall story including the lady’s reaction when she heard Brown called her a bigot and Brown scrambling to recover from sticking his foot in his mouth, Jon Stewart had a very funny segment about it on The Daily Show:

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Apart from the sheer entertainment value of the episode, there are some great lessons in it in how to be truly insincere. All of this, of course, falls into the category of you can sometimes learn a lot about leadership by watching someone do what you shouldn’t do. Here’s the beginning of the list for Gordon Brown. Please do feel free to add to it:

Three Dozen Predictable Situations That Executives Will Face in Their Careers

There probably aren’t many kids who grow up thinking, “Someday I want to be a Wall Street executive and testify in front of a Senate committee that’s loaded for bear.” Yet, that’s what happened this week for eight or nine executives from Goldman Sachs. Who would have predicted that a few years ago? Probably about as many people who predicted the subprime mortgage crisis that Goldman shorted while selling a lot of their clients the long position. Call me strange if you like, but I spent a lot of the morning listening to the hearing on CNBC while I was working on the second edition of The Next Level (manuscript has to go to the publisher this week, hence the big push). There really wasn’t a lot of light shed on what actually happened but it was interesting to hear all the ways that questions could be asked and not answered. The star of the show had to be Fabian “Fabulous Fab” Tourre, the young Goldman banker who put together a lot of the questionable deals. For the color commentary, check out Dana Milbank’s column in the Washington Post.

The whole issue of predictable and unpredictable situations that executives will face in their career has been on my mind for the past couple of days. One of the appendices in the next edition of the book is an expanded Situation Solutions Guide in which I list a series of situations that executives will predictably face in their careers and provide some tips for how to deal with those situations. As I was thinking through the list last weekend, I put out a question to my friends on Linked In, Facebook and Twitter asking for their take on the situations that executives will likely face. The first person to respond was my blogging friend, Wally Bock at Three Star Leadership. We ended up having a nice conversation and talked through Wally’s experience in advising leaders in how to handle both predictable and unpredictable situations. 

So, testifying before Congress is probably on the unpredictable side of the equation. I did, however, hear back from a couple of dozen people with their predictable situations. It’s a really interesting list and I thought you’d want to see it. Here’s my two part request. First, what predictable situation would you add to the list?  Second, what’s your best advice for handling one of the situations already on the list? I’d really like to hear from you on either or both questions.

In the meantime, here’s the list. (It’s about a page long.  I think you’ll find it worth the read):

Video Book Club: Game Change

It’s not often when I knock off a 400 page plus book in a week, but that was the case with Game Change by John Heileman and Mark Halpern. If you enjoyed the drama and story arc of the 2008 presidential campaign, you’ll love this book. If you’re interested in how people in leadership roles respond under pressure, you’ll really love this book.

Take a look at the video with my special guest reviewer for more on Game Change:

Taking the Long Term Perspective

I read a couple of articles yesterday that provided clear explanations of some complex topics – the Securities and Exchange Commission’s fraud charge against Goldman Sachs and the Obama administration’s efforts on nuclear non-proliferation. Before you click away from this post, hang in there with me because there’s a quick leadership point the long term perspective that I want to make.

But first, here’s the set-up.

Five Traits of the Most Admired Leaders

Among the many things I like about our group coaching program, Next Level Leadership™,  one of my favorites is when the high potential leader participants share with each other what they learned in their senior executive shadow days. Here’s how the shadow day works. To broaden their perspective on the organizational presence aspect of leadership, the participants spend the day shadowing a senior leader in their business. The agenda is simple - be the senior executive’s shadow for the day. Attend her staff meetings, go to her briefings, sit in on meetings she has with the C suite or board members, meet with the customers. The high potential leader is there to observe and learn from whatever the senior exec is doing that day. If the senior executive is responsible for a different part of the organization than the high potential leader comes from, so much the better. It helps broaden the perspective of the high potential that much more.

It’s almost always an eye opening experience for the high potential leaders in the program. The fun part for me is listening to everyone come back together and tell their stories about what they did and saw on their shadow day. We had one of those sessions yesterday in a Next Level Leadership™ program. As we’ve been having these shadow day debriefing sessions in different companies over the past few years, I’ve been keeping some notes about the traits of the senior executives that the group coaching participants admire the most. Here are five traits of the most admired leaders that show up on the list again and again: