Next Level Blog

Three Warning Signs That You’re Setting Yourself Up For A Leadership FAIL

There’s a long-standing piece of advice to leaders that goes like this. They don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.

I’m thinking about that this morning having read an article in the Washington Post over the weekend about polling that shows DC mayor Adrian Fenty’s previously overwhelming lead in his reelection campaign has flipped to a 17 point deficit. Post reporter Mike DeBonis breaks down the numbers and offers an excellent analysis of how things have deteriorated for Fenty. He offers several reasons why Fenty is on the ropes.  When I read through the list, I saw three reasons that should serve as reality checks for leaders in any arena.

The common denominator question for leaders is do you, through your words and actions, show that you care about the people you’re leading? Here are the warning signs of an impending leadership fail that DeBonis identified in his article:

Three Tips for Beating the Jitters

It doesn’t matter how far you go as a leader, you’ll occasionally face situations that make you nervous. The reasons for the jitters can vary. It might be the first time you’ve led the senior staff meeting; it could be your first congressional hearing; it could be a crucial conversation with a key customer.  No matter what the situation, you need to show up at your best with your confidence dialed in at just the right spot.

How do you get yourself there? How do you pick up the confidence that you need to perform and let go of doubt about how you’ll show up?

I spent yesterday morning talking with about a hundred newly promoted leaders in their organization and this was a hot topic during the general session and during the breaks.

Based on a combination of what I shared with and heard from the leaders about what works for them, here are three tips for beating the jitters when the stakes are high:

A British Friend’s Take on BP

By the end of the day last Friday, I was ready to spend the rest of the afternoon talking with friends. One of them was my buddy Steve Bowling. Steve’s a coach and former HR exec based in New Jersey. He’s also a Brit who has lived in the States for the past ten years or so. Great guy and a lot of fun to hang out with and talk to.

We hadn’t talked since around May. After we caught up, I asked for his take on three topics – the World Cup (good tournament, but still smarting over England’s performance), David Cameron as PM of Great Britain (waiting to see how the cuts in social services will go down with the public) and his thoughts on how badly former BP CEO Tony Hayward had damaged the British brand.

Steve (who has given his blessing for me to recap our conversation) piqued my interest when he began by saying, “Well, here’s a somewhat cynical view. I think BP has handled the situation rather well if you look at the long term.”  I was a bit taken aback by Steve’s response because, like the author of a recent New York Times piece on how not to handle crisis communications, I was among the many people who thought BP’s response and, particularly Tony Hayward’s, to the spill in the Gulf was abysmal. (One of the wonderful things about writing a blog is your opinions are part of the permanent record. You can read one of my earlier takes on BP here.)

Here’s how Steve sees it.

Are They Stepping on Your Toes? Grow Bigger Feet.

One of the common things that keeps managers from becoming leaders is spending too much time and attention protecting their turf. Over time, their attention gets really internally focused on protecting and keeping order in their own little world. If you’ve seen the Lord of the Rings movies, it’s a little like Gollum maniacally coveting the ring while murmuring, “My precious, my precious.”  When managers are in that mode, they become blind to the bigger opportunities around them. Seizing those bigger opportunities is one of the differences between being a leader with management skills and just managing.

A lot of my coaching engagements with high potential leaders focus on that distinction.  The client has made their reputation by managing something really, really well.  The leadership opportunity comes when the range of expectations facing them becomes so broad that the only way they can succeed is by letting go of some of that turf they’ve been so carefully protecting.  When they make that shift, good things usually happen.  They have more bandwidth to see what’s going on around them and identify opportunities to contribute and lead on a wider range of issues.  At the same time, the people who felt constrained or frustrated by the turf protection approach become more productive because they have more freedom to think and decide on the best courses of action.  

The positive aspects of this kind of shift were summed up well by the colleague of a client I worked with a few years ago.  As I was conducting the closing round of feedback, this person told me that he used to be in regular conflict with my client about stepping on each other’s toes.  That changed, he said, when my client started focusing on contributing on broader issues in the organization and grew more influential and respected as a result.  The upshot, his colleague told me, was that “his feet have gotten so big he doesn’t feel me stepping on his toes anymore.”

What’s your experience?  Are most managers more concerned with their toes getting stepped on or growing bigger feet?  What’s your best advice for managers who want to increase the positive impact of their leadership footprint?

How to Perform When the Room Doesn’t Work

Not to get all prophetic or Inception on you, but today’s post is inspired by a dream I had last night. (Don’t worry, it’s nothing really weird or creepy.) So, I’m downtown somewhere and Kiss is supposed to be doing a concert (yes, I was a big fan in junior high). Turns out, though, that they’re playing in a department store window and the audience is out on the sidewalk watching through the glass. And it’s not the whole band, it’s just Gene Simmons singing a couple of songs by himself and his makeup doesn’t even look right. The crowd booed him off the stage (or out of the window) after two songs.

I have no idea why I had that dream (all of you Jungian analysts out there, I’d love to hear your theories). When I woke up, though, it reminded me of the many times when I’ve been booked as a speaker or presenter and shown up at the venue to find a room set up that was not at all optimal.  The situation has never been as bad as me being on one side of the window with the audience on the other (if you don’t include video conferences that is), but I have had some set-ups that have been close to that bad.

If you’ve spent very much time at all as a leader or presenter, you know how important the sense of connection between the speaker and the audience is to the success of the event. These days, audiences want to be engaged and interact with each other, the content and the speaker. The way the room is set up makes a big difference. My favorite is a nice, big space with round tables with the audience members sitting around the halves of the table facing the front of the room. I’ll have a nice size table up front for the projector, my notes and a bottle of water and a clip-on microphone that enables me to wander the room. 

Unfortunately, I rarely get everything I’d like in a room set up and you probably won’t either when you present. So what do you do to keep the connection going when the room doesn’t help? Here are five ideas that have worked for me over the years that I hope will work for you: