Next Level Blog

How to Take a Personal Leadership Offsite

One of my coaching clients is taking his leadership team to Phoenix next week for an offsite planning meeting.  (He invited me to come and help out, but my schedule wouldn’t allow it. Too bad, Phoenix is nice this time of year!)  If you’ve been around as an organizational leader for awhile, you’ve no doubt participated in leadership team offsites. Whether they gather at a nice hotel in a warm place or someplace less exotic, it’s a good idea for an organization’s leaders to periodically change the scenery and step back to reflect on what’s happened and look ahead to future goals.

Here’s my question for you. When was the last time you took a personal leadership offsite?  I ask that question regularly of my clients and groups that I’m speaking to. Occasionally, someone will say that they’ve had one recently, but most people have not. This trend reminds me of the old line about the shoemaker’s children having no shoes. Leaders tend to give so much time and attention to the development of their organizations that they often leave little space for their own development.

I’m not exactly sure how we decided to start, but my wife, Diane, and I have taken an annual Fall/Winter retreat for the past 15 years. The first couple of years were at a $25 a night one room cabin on a farm in Pocahontas County, West Virginia. Since then, we’ve held it at some places that are a little less rustic.  Whether it’s a rural or an urban setting, we’ve come up with a routine that works for us. Since this is the time of year when people are beginning to look back on the past 12 months and look ahead to the next 12, I thought I’d share some of our lessons learned about how to take a personal leadership offsite.

What Leaders Can Learn from Lab Rats: Five Tips for Beating Stress

Have you ever noticed that the more stressed you get, the more likely you are to keep doing things that aren’t that productive (e.g. waste another 10 minutes surfing the web or eat that second piece of cake)?  Well, I don’t know if this will make you feel any better, but it turns out that lab rats do the same thing.

As reported in the New York Times this week, new research out of Portugal shows that chronically stressed rats keep doing the same thing over and over (like compulsively pressing a bar for food they’re not going to eat), because they’re too stressed to do anything more productive. Of course, you might be stressed too if, like the lab rats, you had to live with dominant bully rats or periodically got zapped by a mild electric current. (Come to think of it, that doesn’t sound a whole lot different than getting buzzed by your Blackberry 200 times a day.)

But, don’t despair; there is good news in Rat Town. It turns out that when the rats got some time away from their stressful environment they came back with all kinds of innovative problem solving and coping skills. Researchers concluded that some time to recharge allowed the synapses in the prefrontal cortex of the rats’ brains to grow stronger while the dendrite weeds in the habit forming parts of their brains were pruned back a bit. (I guess the researchers must have some rat size MRI’s that they’re using.)

So, I know what you’re thinking. “Lucky rats. I’d be more productive too if I got some time away.” That’s right, you would be. Vacations are a good thing. But, you don’t have to take a week off to give your brain a chance to recharge and come up with some more productive behaviors. Over the past few years, I’ve seen dozens of high potential leader clients in our Next Level Leadership™ group coaching program increase their overall effectiveness (as measured by feedback from colleagues) by building in some simple recharging routines into their days.

Here are five routines from my clients that stand out:

1. Leave your Blackberry in your office: Several clients have made a commitment to themselves that they will leave their Blackberry in their office when they’re attending meetings. As a result, they’ve found that they’re more present and productive in the meetings and back in their office.

2. Schedule planning and review time: Some of my clients have had great success by scheduling an hour of planning time on Monday and an hour of review time on Fridays. Others have taken a different approach by doing the same thing daily with 15 minutes at the beginning and end of the day.

3. Start doing something you used to love to do: One of my clients used to love to swim when she was in high school and college.  When we went through the Life GPS® planning process as part of the group coaching program, she realized how much she missed swimming. She started swimming at 7:00 am every morning instead of logging on to her email. Six months later, she had lost 25 pounds and was thriving in a new role at work.

4. Go out for lunch: Lots of people either skip lunch or grab something to eat at their desk.  A client who lived a few minutes from his office decided he would go home for lunch a couple of days a week to visit with his wife.  If you don’t work close to home, then find some places you’d like to go where you can think about something other than work during lunch a couple of days a week.

5. E-mail free time: It’s all too common to let the e-mails intrude on personal and family time.  A number of my clients have set some boundaries on this by setting blocks of time each evening when the computer is turned off and the Blackberry is put in a drawer. Some of them use this time to hang out with the family and others have used it to work out.  One guy lost 15 pounds this way. (I think I’m going to start an executive weight loss program.)

So, those are five simple yet effective ideas for taking a break from the stress that can lead to non-productive habits.  What’s worked for you on this front?

Vote Early and Vote Often

Being the political junkie that I am, “Vote early and vote often,” has always been one of my favorite silly political jokes.  Well today, I am asking you to vote early. Vote for what you ask?  Well, I’m happy to let you know that the Next Level Blog has been selected as one of the “10 Best Leadership Blogs for 2009.”  While voting often is highly frowned upon (and actually not technically possible), I highly encourage the voting early part. You can do so by clicking on the Best of Leadership Blogs logo and selecting the Next Level Blog from the list.

You’ll see that the Next Level Blog is in some pretty impressive company on the list so, as they say at the Academy Awards, “It’s an honor just to be nominated.”  That said, I’d really like it if you’d vote for the Next Level Blog and, for make me really, really happy bonus points, please pass this post on to your colleagues and ask them to vote too.

Thanks for reading. Thanks for leading. And thanks for your vote!

Questions for Conscious Leaders

My goal this Friday morning is to leave you with some food for thought over the next few days.  This has been a week when I’ve had the opportunity to coach leaders in a number of different situations and settings.  I’ve been impressed and humbled in each instance by the conscious nature of leadership that I’ve seen.  My main contribution has been to frame up some questions and create some space for the leaders to observe themselves and determine what their next moves should be.  I thought I’d share some of those questions with you today.

5 + 5 = 10 Mistakes to Avoid

Based on a study of 11,000 360 degree surveys, leadership feedback gurus Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman have identified ten behaviors found in the bottom 10% of leaders.

The top five mistakes they make are:

1. Lack energy and enthusiasm
2. Accept their own mediocre performance
3. Lack clear vision and direction
4. Have poor judgment
5. Don’t collaborate

Pretty easy to see how leaders in the bottom 10% would have characteristics like that.  But what about leaders in the top 10% or 20%?  How do they run off the rails?  (And they do up to 40% of the time.)

In our Next Level Leadership™ group coaching program, we’ve run a 360 over the past three years on the skills and behaviors that rising executives need to exhibit to make successful transitions. We’ve run it with almost 400 high potential executives at this point and, out of 72 specific behaviors, the bottom five in our database are:

1. Paces himself/herself by building in regular breaks from work.
2. Manages workload so that he/she has time for unexpected problems or issues.
3. Spends less time using his/her functional skills and more time encouraging team members to use theirs.
4. Regularly takes time to step back and define or redefine what needs to be done.
5. Focuses less on day to day operations and more on identifying and taking advantage of strategic opportunities.

What do these low ranking characteristics of high potential leaders have in common?  One of the most important threads is that they are all behaviors of "go to people."  These are the people who are going to get the job done no matter what even if (especially if?) that means taking heroic measures at the 11th hour.  Of course, the challenge for go to people who have risen to the next level is that there is simply too much to do for that approach to continue to work. 

If you’re like me, when you see a list of ten mistakes to avoid, you immediately start scanning it with the question in mind, “OK, am I doing any of these?”  If you find one from the first list of five, my advice is to step back and examine your motivation for the role that you're in.  What could you do to reconnect to the purpose of your work?

If you find that you have an opportunity in the bottom five, pick one to work on that you think will make the biggest difference and enlist the help of some trusted colleagues for advice on how to be better.  Look for opportunities to practice some of their ideas in the "school of real life."