Next Level Blog

Feeling the Listening Love

One of the highlights of the week for me came yesterday when I led a day long workshop on leadership coaching for a group of candidates for the Federal Senior Executive Service. We talked a lot about how important it is for leaders to know how to coach and worked on different skills and models for coaching. 

Of course, a core skill for any coach is listening. We worked on that skill by grouping up in threes with one person talking about something that mattered to them, another person listening and asking questions and the third person observing the listener. After three or four minutes of conversation between the first two people, the observer offered a minute or two of feedback to the listener. The feedback consisted of two or three things the observer appreciated about how the listener listened and one suggestion for how to be an even more effective listener. We did three rounds of this so everyone could be in each of the three roles.

As the second round ended, I asked the group to bring their attention back to me for a second so I could ask them if they were feeling what I was noticing watching them. What I was noticing was the love in the room.  Here's what I mean by that and what it might mean to you.

Five Ways to Survive an Impossible Job

Late last week, the Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, resigned from his job after a little more than a year in the job. As reporting in the Washington Post points out, Blair’s replacement will be the fourth person to hold the DNI job in just over five years. In legislation passed after 9/11, the DNI’s charge is to coordinate the collaborative work of 16 different intelligence agencies including the CIA. Just about every informed observer believes that it’s an extremely difficult job, maybe even impossible.  

In some ways (and obviously not in others), the DNI role is like a lot of other leadership roles in a matrixed organizational structure. More and more these days, leaders find themselves in jobs with a lot of responsibility but not a lot of direct authority. With a mixture of dotted lines, solid lines and no lines at all in the org chart, leaders in a matrixed environment have the unenviable task of herding the cats. 

What can you do to survive one of these jobs? It seems pretty clear that you can’t act as if you have a lot of authority to command things get done when, practically speaking, there are all kinds of ways for others to avoid or ignore doing what you want them to do. Especially in the first year or so, surviving in a matrixed leadership role depends a lot on effective change management. With that idea in mind, here are five strategies to increase the chance of survival in one of these roles:

Video Book Club: FYI - For Your Improvement

In this week’s installment of the VBC, I’m featuring what I think is an indispensable part of a leadership coach’s (and most leaders for that matter) tool kit. It’s a book called FYI - For Your Improvement by Mike Lombardo and Bob Eichinger.

FYI is the fruit of years and years of research by Lombardo and Eichinger on leadership competencies and skills. The book is basically a one stop shop for practical, simple descriptions of specific skills with actionable suggestions on how to improve. It’s the kind of book you’ll use again and again.

In this clip, I share a bit more info on FYI, how it’s organized and how to use it.

Predicting the Future by Reading the Present

Thirty years ago, John Naisbitt took the publishing world by storm with his book, Megatrends. It was a best seller for two years and sold nine million copies. Naisbitt identified ten big trends for the future by doing a deep analysis of current news stories and looking for the patterns within them. It was a classic case of what Harvard leadership strategist Ron Heifetz calls getting off the dance floor and onto the balcony. From that “pull the lens back” perspective, Naisbitt correctly called trends such as moving from an industrial to an information economy, from technology being forced into use to being pulled into use and moving from hierarchies to networks. All of that sounds like conventional wisdom now, but remember he was making those calls 30 years ago.

Naisbitt came to mind a few days ago when I was reading a column in the Financial Times titled, “Rising Powers Do Not Want to Play by the West’s Rules.”  In writing about Brazil’s and Turkey’s efforts to resolve the concern over Iran’s development of enriched uranium, the author, Phillip Stevens, cited a report from the U.S. National Intelligence Council called Global Trends 2025. I had not heard of the report, so I looked it up and downloaded it (that information-based, technology pull economy that Naisbitt predicted at work). If for no other reason than it’s a great example of outside-in thinking and analysis, I encourage you to download the report and take a look.

The executive summary begins with a table of “Relative Certainties” and their “Likely Impact.” For instance, the emergence of a global multipolar system likely means that “a single international community of nation-states will no longer exist” and new players will bring new rules. Or, for example, absent a dramatic change in employment conditions, the increase in the youth population in countries such as Afghanistan, Nigeria, Pakistan and Yemen will lead to continued instability.

The process outlined in Global Trends 2025 raises some interesting opportunities and questions for leaders. When you step up to the balcony and look at your organization and its operating environment with a broader lens, what relevant certainties do you see? What are the likely impacts of those relative certainties? What are your options for responding? Who else needs to be involved in the conversation and what role should they play in shaping the future?

Why We Need An MBA Oath

You may have heard about The MBA Oath. It was created by a couple of Harvard Business School students last year and has spread to business school campuses around the world and led to a book on the topic. As the Financial Times reports, it’s supported by the new dean of Harvard Business School but a significant percentage of the students there won’t be taking the oath on Class Day this year. Some say it’s not necessary, others say it’s cheesy. 

You can read the entire oath at mbaoath.org. For now, here are some selected excerpts:

My decisions affect the well-being of individuals inside and outside my enterprise, today and tomorrow.

Therefore, I promise that:

• I will manage my enterprise with loyalty and care, and will not advance my personal interests at the expense of my enterprise or society.
• I will understand and uphold, in letter and spirit, the laws and contracts governing my conduct and that of my enterprise.
• I will protect the right of future generations to advance their standard of living and enjoy a healthy planet.
• I will report the performance and risks of my enterprise accurately and honestly.

So, is it pointless or cheesy for future business leaders (or leaders in any sector for that matter) to take such an oath? Watch this report from 60 Minutes’ Scott Pelley about the connection between management decisions and the oil rig blowout that led to the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico and then see what you think. What difference might it have made if the leaders of BP started their meetings by standing up and repeating The MBA Oath? Would it have made a difference in the way things developed? Who knows?

One thing I do know, however, is (as I wrote here a few weeks ago) what doesn’t get said, doesn’t get heard. If the MBA Oath causes even a few leaders to stand up and say out loud how they intend to conduct themselves then it was worth the effort of writing and promoting it.

That’s what I think. What do you think?