Next Level Blog

Memorial Day Weekend Reprise

As we move into the unofficial beginning of Summer in the United States with the start of Memorial Day weekend, I want to give a reprise to a post I ran at the beginning of last year, What I Learned on an Aircraft Carrier.  As is often noted, only two percent of the U.S. population serves in the military that provides protection for us around the globe.  As part of the 98 percent who rely on the two percent, I’m very grateful that I had the opportunity last year to see firsthand how good these professionals are at  their jobs.

So, in the midst of the swimming pools opening, the cookouts and the fun this weekend, let’s take a little time to stop and say, “Thank you for your service,” to the active duty and retired men and women of the U.S. armed forces.   As we’ve seen again and again, they do amazing work for us in very challenging conditions.

Five Steps to Stay on TRACK With Your Delegation

Yesterday marked the beginning of another Next Level Leadership™ group coaching program with a cohort of high potential leaders at one of our client companies. One of the big events in the first day of the program is to review the results of 360 degree surveys we run for the participants prior to session one. The 360 presents the assessments of colleagues on a range of leadership behaviors that people taking on more responsibility need to master.

Like most groups of high potential leaders I’ve coached over the past five years, the group that started yesterday has a lot of opportunity to make a bigger impact by delegating more effectively to the people on their teams. The kinds of delegation behaviors that regularly show up in the Next Level 360 survey as opportunities for leaders include:

• Regularly takes time to step back and define or redefine what needs to be done.
• Spend less time using his/her functional skills and more time encouraging team members to use theirs.
• Makes clear to his/her team the best ways to involve him/her in the process of achieving the desired result.
• Gets involved in determining solutions only when there is a clear and significant value in him/her doing so.
• Sets up and uses systems to monitor results and the progress towards them.

With the increasing volume of work that everyone expects to get done, more and more of my clients are asking for help on improving their delegation skills. Based on the best practices of leaders who are really excellent at delegation, I’ve come up with a five step approach called TRACK™.

Here’s how it works:

Lead As If You're Still Going To Be Here

As I write this, it is Sunday afternoon and I'm happy to report that, contrary to a firm prediction from the founder of Family Radio, we're all still here. The world didn't end. I have to say that I wasn't really that worried because I've had direct experience with people who were convinced the end of the world was imminent.

Older readers may remember the guy who used to wear a rainbow colored Afro wig and a John 3:16 t shirt and had a knack for getting himself on TV at sporting events in the late 1970’s and 1980s. His name was Rock’n’ Rollen Stewart.  My best friend, Ty, and I met him when we were in college and went to Atlanta one weekend to see the PGA Championship. Stewart was standing beside us in the crowd in full regalia and we started talking with him. He wanted to head up to the US Open tennis tournament later in the weekend and was trying to convince us to wear a couple of his extra wigs and represent him in Atlanta as he drove to Flushing Meadows, NY.  We politely declined the request but asked him what motivated him to do what he did. He told us that he thought the world was going to end on a particular date in the near future (I don't remember the date but it was going to be on a Friday.) and he wanted to get his message out before then. One of us asked him what he'd do if the world didn't end that day. He told us that he'd take the weekend off and come back the following Monday.

What's Love Got to Do with It? (i.e. Love, Leadership and Profits)

Today I'm at the annual alumni conference for the Georgetown Leadership Coaching Program.  The first session I attended was on Love and the Bottom Line led by two fabulous coaches, Sandy Mobley of The Learning Advantage and Lori Zukin of Booz Allen Hamilton. 

We began the hour by talking in small conversations about remembering a time when we felt very loved and appreciated at work and a time when we didn't.  It was easy for me to come up with an example of the first because every time I come back to a group of Georgetown coaching grads I feel so loved and appreciated as a faculty member that it's practically overwhelming. I had to go pretty far back for an unloved example and landed on the year when I was a first year associate at a now defunct firm on Wall Street.  Even though one of the firm's 10 stated values was have fun, we had absolutely none because we were treated like functions of production who, if you weren't still in the office at 10:00 pm, you were a slacker. When I finally got home in the evening to my new wife, I ate too much, drank too many beers and gained 20 pounds that year.

My conversation partner had a similar experience (without the excessive beer drinking) in her last year of a corporate job that went from great to awful. What really struck me about talking with her though was her story of the team she led before she was promoted and got a new boss who was function of production rather than love oriented. My partner told me that when she was first bringing her team together she was very intentional about leading with love and appreciation for her team. The results were so dramatic that she was promoted into the job where she had to report to the boss that took the opposite approach. 

As the session with Sandy and Lori went on, we talked about the small actions that can make a big difference in creating an environment in the workplace where people feel loved and appreciated.  They're things like really being fully present and attentive in conversations, creating a welcoming space for the people you work with and what Sandy calls GAP, asking people what they're grateful for, what they've accomplished and what they're proud of.

There is an increasing amount of research that demonstrates from a neuroscience perspective the strong correlation between love, appreciation and productivity. (See Barbara Fredrickson's book, Positivity, for an example.)  If you really stop and think about it, you likely know from experience the correlation between love and appreciation and your own productivity. 

What will you do today to show the love? What difference do you want it to make?

Four Dogs, One Hero

This has been quite a week for high profile people in leadership positions behaving like dogs.  

First, we have the head of the IMF, Dominique Strauss Kahn, charged with sexually assaulting a housekeeper in his $3,000 a night hotel room.  And, with that, what I would suspect is the only recorded episode of someone staying at both the Sofitel and Riker’s Island within a 48 hour period.  As Maureen Dowd writes in her New York Times column, the housekeeper was a young West African woman trying to make her way in the United States. Since Strauss Kahn was arrested at JFK less than four hours after the alleged assault, I can only assume that the management of the hotel immediately backed up and acted on the housekeeper’s report. Kudos to them for supporting their employee.

Next, we have the case of the Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, acknowledging that he fathered a child with a household staffer over ten years ago. I first learned of that story when I was with a client who had a flat screen in her office tuned to CNN.  As I said to her, you could have knocked me over with a feather that Schwarzenegger was involved in such a situation. Not.

Then, we have the shocking announcement that Donald Trump made at NBC’s annual meeting previewing its Fall TV schedule.  Apparently, Trump believes that he can best serve Americans by coming back as the host of Celebrity Apprentice rather than running for President. Of course, as he pointed out, he would have won if he had decided to run.  It’s always good to have options.

Finally, we have a dog who is a hero and is actually a dog.  You’ve likely heard by now of Cairo, the highly trained German Shepherd scout dog who went in with the Navy SEALS who got bin Laden.   Earlier this week,  I read an article in Fast Company about dogs like Cairo and the amazing high tech bullet proof vests they wear.  The vests enable the dogs to be harnessed in with their handlers so they can both repel down lines from helicopters into dangerous places like bin Laden’s compound. Once they were on the ground at bin Laden’s place, the SEAL handler sent Cairo ahead to scout the situation. As we know, that  worked pretty well since the vest Cairo wears is equipped with a high def, see in the dark camera and has audio speakers that enable the handler to whisper commands to Cairo about what to do next. (Too bad some of the leaders mentioned above weren’t equipped with a similar bark and act on command vest.)

Apart from the obvious, what’s the difference between hero dog Cairo (along with the Navy SEALS who went with him) and the figurative dogs mentioned earlier? Unlike his human counterparts (who give dogs a bad name), Cairo knows what the rules are and understands that he has to play by them.  I’m also guessing that if he has any ego at all, Cairo has it under control.  Finally, on those rare occasions when he might do something stupid, I suspect that Cairo is immediately corrected and set back on the right path. Can you imagine how things might have turned out for Cairo if he was surrounded by enablers and sycophants who reinforced his bad behavior on a regular basis? Good thing he’s a Navy SEAL dog and not running the IMF or the State of California. He might do a great job, though, hosting Celebrity Apprentice.