Credibility The Foundation For Leadership

There are many leadership qualities that must be present in the leader if people are going to trust them to the point of following.  It is very important to be committed, competent and inspiring but without credibility especially today people will see you as a fake and be totally turned off.

The bottom line is regardless of how visionary the message if they cannot believe in the messenger then trust is destroyed.  People may show up for work but their heart is not in it and although they seem positive in front of superiors they are constantly critical with their peers in private.

If leaders are to maintain credibility they have to walk the talk and personally practice what they preach.  When their actions are inconsistent with their words and they do not follow through on their promises then they are no longer seen as authentic.

When team members work on a project for a long time and produce great results only to see the leader take an inappropriate amount of the credit they feel burned.  They want to see leaders who give credit to others and assume personal responsibility when they make mistakes.

If the leader is seen as real when things are not going well people will give them the benefit of the doubt every time.  When leaders are hypocritical and things are even going well they will get polite support but in reality they have lost the confidence of their team and sadly don’t even know it.

 

Interview Process

When it is all said and done all potential employees will be evaluated under the two broad categories of character and competency.  The more important of the two is character because you can help most people through training to improve their skill set but you may never be able to overcome who they are as a person.

Once you have narrowed the number of resumes down to the people that you may be interested in it is very helpful to conduct an initial phone interview.  It is very important to learn how to ask open ended questions that will allow the person to talk beyond the typical scripted answers.  As quickly as possible find out what they are passionate about and what they are capable of doing.

The next step is to send them a series of questions and assessment tools that will give you an even clearer understanding of the person’s strengths and personality tendencies.  This should be compared to a very detailed reference resource form that looks for the not so obvious information.  A good question might be if you were to see them in a totally different field of work what would it be and why?

By the time you get to a face to face interview the issue is more about character and chemistry than it is competency.  I have found it very beneficial to involve other team members in this process to see how they read the fit for our organizational culture.

I would never hire anyone for any kind of significant role without first meeting their spouse.  Seeing a couple interact with each other can tell you a lot about the person.  Probably one of the most important things to do is get the person in several casual settings where they will not have their game face on and you can listen and observe how they interact with other people.

This entire process could take several months but remember the only thing worse than not having a position filled is to have it filled with the wrong person.  When in doubt move on to the next person because as a leader your gut is probably right.

 

Organizational Culture Change

According to John Kotter there are many reasons change initiatives fail especially in large organizations.  The number one reason is there is not a clear sense of urgency for change that makes everyone willing to pay the short term price of pain due to change to gain the long term benefit of progress.

Many times the communications part of the process breaks down and the implementers do not get enough information to really buy in.  The importance of creating short term wins for establishing credibility for the entire process cannot be overstated. 

When the new of change becomes the norm there are several key factors that let you know it is now firmly in the D.N.A. of your organizational culture:

1.       More change, not less:  The guiding coalition uses the credibility afforded by short-term wins to tackle additional and bigger change projects.

2.      More help:  Additional people are brought in, promoted, and developed to help with all the changes.

3.      Leadership from senior management:  Senior people focus on maintaining clarity of shared purpose for the overall effort and keeping urgency levels up.

4.      Project management and leadership from below:  Lower ranks in the hierarchy both provide leadership and specific projects and manage those projects.

5.      Reduction of unnecessary interdependencies:  To make change easier in both the short and long term, managers identify unnecessary interdependencies and eliminate them.

When everyone in the organization starts to articulate the new vision in their own words as if it were their idea then you know they own the process.  It is time to start looking for what needs to be changed next, the process never stops.

 

 

Level Five Leaders

In my opinion the best organizational leadership book that has been written is Good to Great by Jim Collins.  It proves beyond any doubt some things we have always know about effective leadership but he discovers some key principles that fly in the face of everything we have been taught in the past.

One thing that is really not new but clearly prioritized in his book is the importance of character in the life of any leader.  Character ensures that the motives of the leader are always focused on what is best for the people they are leading and not for themselves.

The most significant myth that this book destroys about great leaders is that they all must be very outgoing cheerleader type personalities and that they have to lead with an authoritarian dictatorial style to be effective.

According to Collins, “Level 5 leaders display a compelling modesty, are self-effacing and understated.  In contrast, two thirds of the comparison companies had leaders with gargantuan personal egos that contributed to the demise or continued mediocrity of the company.”

This personality type should never be mistaken for laid back soft leaders who don’t have the strength to make the hard calls.  As a matter of fact they combine humility with an incredible strong will to make sure the right things are getting done.  If they have to they would fire their mother if that is what was necessary for the long term benefit of the organization.

They also give credit to others when things are going well and when they are not they assume personal responsibility.  This combination of personal humility and professional will make for the type of leader anyone would want to follow.

Problems With The Boss

All of us have worked at some point in time for someone who at worst just could not get it done or at best was personality challenged.   We come into our jobs with the hope that we can be a part of the solution and yet there are times when we don’t see the progress we had hoped for.

I changed jobs three times in the first five years out of college because I thought the problem was external.  If I could just get with the right company with a great boss then I would be successful.  To my shock I realized that the real problems were internal and I was simply carrying all of my personal issues from one company to the next expecting different results.

These are some of the things I have learned over the years about problems with the boss:

1.       Check Your Motives—make sure that your real agenda is to do what is best for the organization and not for yourself.  When you make it a priority to help make your boss successful then it becomes a win-win for everyone.

2.      Keep It Real—when things are not changing at the pace you had hoped you have a choice to make.  You can get your feelings hurt and start telling people what they want to hear and emotionally quit or you can have the character to tell the truth with a respectful attitude.

3.      Watch Your Tongue—if you allow your concerns to become public in an inappropriate way then you just became part of the problem and not part of the solution.  You should never say anything negative about another person to someone else because it will only spread disunity and destroy team moral.

4.      Do Your Job—when we get in the negative cycle not only are we causing problems for other people we are not focused on getting our own jobs done with excellence.  We must show up every day with a clean heart and high level of commitment to be and do our best.

 

 I can promise you it is not in your job description to change your boss or even your organization for that matter.  What is there is a clear set of priorities that need to be done by a person who is mature enough to stay positive when things don’t go their way and passionate enough to never settle for anything less than their personal best every day.

 

 

Corporate Shepherd

There are many leaders today that want to move beyond just making a profit to really making a difference.  They want to be successful and that’s great but they also want the significance that only comes from adding value to other people.

When leadership is approached from a Christian perspective a new model starts to develop where the leader becomes more of a shepherd to their people than a boss to their employees.  They do care about performance and productivity but they also feel responsible for developing alignment around core values and creating the right culture for work-life balance for their people.

They also see life beyond the immediate pressures of planning, project management, staffing, goal setting and execution.  The legacy they want to create for their life and organization includes eternal metrics that must be included when talking about the ultimate bottom line.

The clear plan for every Christian is to use your professional life as a platform for ministry because we are all in full time Christian service.  Our lives should no longer be seen as segmented into faith, family, friends, recreation and entertainment but become totally integrated into being one life on mission for God.  The various roles that we fulfill are no longer competing with each other but complimenting the calling God has for our lives.

In the end there is only one performance review that really matters.  The evaluation criteria is simple, How faithful were you with all that I entrusted to your care?  Thinking about that moment should overwhelm us with gratitude and give us a renewed sense of passion to hear well done my good and faithful servant.

The Winning Attitude

Lou Holtz the famous football coach once said, “Ability is what you’re capable of doing, motivation determines what you do and attitude determines how well you do it.” We have heard all our lives how important a role our attitude plays in everything we do every day.

In John Maxwell’s book The Winning Attitude he says that it is absolutely your key to personal success.  His list several key principles about how attitude impacts every part of our lives:

1.       Our attitude determines our approach to life

2.      Our attitude determines our relationships with people

3.      Often our attitude is the only difference between success and failure

4.      Our attitude at the beginning of a task will affect its outcome more than anything else

5.      Our attitude can turn our problems into blessings

6.      Our attitude can give us an uncommonly positive perspective

Maintaing the proper perspective is probably the most important one for me.  We are all going to encounter problems and setbacks in our lives.  It is very important to remember when you are going through difficult times not to focus on what you have lost but what you still have to be thankful for all around you.  When you choose to see the glass for the way it is more than half full it will give you the perspective you need to deal with all the other issues.

I found the following to be very helpful about What is an attitude?

It is the “advance man” of our true selves

Its roots are inward but its fruit is outward

It is our best friend or our worst enemy

It is more honest and more consistent that our words

It is an outward look based on past experiences

It is a thing which draws people to us or repels them away

It is never content until it is expressed

It is the librarian of our past

It is the speaker of our present

It is the prophet of our future

 

 

 

Six Ways To Make Emotional Deposits

We are all familiar with the metaphor of making emotional deposits and taking withdrawals from another person both personally and professionally.  When you end up taking more than you give to another person you end up with a negative balance and believe me there are serious fees and late charges involved.

Stephen Covey in his great book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People gives us six ways that we can make sure we are making deposits on a consistent basis with another person:

1.      Understanding the Individual—really seeking to understand another person is probably one of the most important deposits you can make, and it is the key to every other deposit.  You simply don’t know what constitutes a deposit to another person until you understand that individual.

2.      Attending to the Little Things—the little kindnesses and courtesies are so important.  Small discourtesies, little unkindness’s, little forms of disrespect make large withdrawals.  In relationships, the little things are the big things.

3.      Keeping Commitments—keeping a commitment or a promise is a major deposit; breaking one is a major withdrawal.  In fact, there’s probably not a more massive withdrawal than to make a promise that’s important to someone and then not to come through.

4.      Clarifying Expectations—the cause of almost all relationship difficulties is rooted in conflicting or ambiguous expectations around roles and goals.  That’s why it’s so important whenever you come into a new situation to get all the expectations out on the table.

5.      Showing Personal Integrity—personal integrity generates trust and is the basis of many different kinds of deposits. One of the most important ways to manifest integrity is to be loyal to those who are not present because that builds trust with those who are.

6.      Apologizing Sincerely When You Make a Withdrawal—when we make withdrawals from the Emotional Bank Account, we need to apologize and we need to do in sincerely.  Great deposits come in the sincere words we share with the people we have hurt.

Law Of The Inner Circle

This by far is one of the most important principles identified by John Maxwell in the realm of leadership.  The simple definition of the law is that a leader’s potential is determined by those closest to them.

As any organization continues to grow the leader cannot continue to spend equal time with every person on staff because of time constraints alone.  This means that eventually the majority of a leader’s time will be need to be spent with the top 20% of their leadership team.

It is a proven leadership principle that they in turn will produce at least 80% of the desired results because of the scope of their impact throughout the entire organization.  The leader is incredibly dependent upon this inner circle because they are responsible for providing the best information possible upward for decision making and they are also responsible for the downward execution of all planning.

Leaders of large organizations should still spend some time managing by walking around and maintain some personal contact with all levels of staff.  However the purpose of this interaction is for personal encouragement and visibility and not for problem solving and day to day decision making.  The leader can be involved to some degree with everyone but they must invest themselves only in the inner circle because they are the key to continued growth and outstanding performance.

 

 

 

Rinsing Your Cottage Cheese

There were many profound conclusions reached by Jim Collins research team that were documented in his bestselling book Good to Great.  The principle of rinsing your cottage cheese received a small amount of space in the book but may be one of the key principles that separate those organizations who merely survive in this economy and those who thrive.

This analogy comes from a disciplined world-class athlete named Dave Scott, who won the Hawaii Ironman Triathlon six times.  Even though he had a training schedule that would burn at least 5,000 calories per day he would still rinse his cottage cheese to get the extra fat off.

From a business planning model this represents the last 10 percent of work that most people are not willing to do or even know exists to make their project or program  the best it possibly could be.  Most people are willing to settle for 75-90% effort and feel that should really represent the best they can produce.

Sometimes the last 10% represents seemingly little things like a spot on the carpet or windows that have not been cleaned.  However that can be the very thing that a customer will notice and come to the conclusion that if you do not care about those areas what else are you not doing to be your best that they cannot see.

Collins writes, “Everyone would like to be the best, but most organizations lack the discipline to figure out with egoless clarity what they can be the best at and the will to do whatever it takes to turn that potential into reality.”  Bottom line they lack the character and the discipline to rinse their cottage cheese.

 

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