Many of these students are disheartened when I tell them there are certain critical skills that cannot be taught in a classroom. Because they are largely attitudinal and hence only learned from experience. These are the attitudes that drive success – our aspiration level, our resilience and our perspective. Though I can provide the direction on getting started, these are lessons that must be self taught as the requisite skills are honed through unexpected everyday events and challenging interpersonal encounters.
We live in difficult, troubling and sometimes chaotic times, when unrelenting, complex and discontinuous change dominates virtually every important activity or decision. We know life is not fair, that talent doesn’t always count and dedication guarantees nothing. As they say, stuff happens. Regrets, failures and disappointment are also a part of life’s incredible journey. If we choose to dwell on these things, we can easily get angry, distracted and even depressed. We can become fearful, insecure and bitter. But this response to the circumstances that befall us just wastes a lot of valuable time – time that could be spent doing other, more important things. Life isn’t forever.
You may not be able to control what happens in your life but you can control what happens in your mind. For it is the repository of your attitudes and beliefs. And beliefs determine behaviour. I know that successful people are not possessed by a victim mentality. They may be healthy skeptics at times but they are surely not cynics. Cynicism and its close cousin, negativism, arise from a loss of faith in oneself, from taking things too personally and from playing the blame game.
The victim mentality, simply defined, is an outlook which says: my life is essentially at the mercy of vast powerful forces beyond my control. As a consequence, it makes little difference what I want out of life; since I am relatively powerless, I must learn to settle for whatever I can get. This self-serving but self-defeating attitude discharges you from taking any responsibility for your decisions. For, clearly, what is happening to you is not your fault.
There are, of course, times when we are indeed faced with circumstances and events over which we have little or no control – hurricanes, earthquakes, the uncertainty and fears of terrorism or pandemics. Members of minority groups, the poor, homeless or downtrodden offer compelling evidence of the injustices with which they must contend – discrimination, racism, sexism, uncaring bureaucrats and politicians, idiotic laws, and the like. But there is a huge difference between being a victim and having a victim mentality. This is the attitude that says I give up. What's the use? Why even try? I have no power. I’m not smart. I was never given that opportunity. The things you suggest may help other people, but they certainly offer no hope to me.
Leaders do not have a victim mentality. Rather, elite performance requires a sincere belief in your cause, your course and ultimately yourself. This attitude is the fuel that drives talent, creates opportunities, solves vexatious problems and, for leaders, inspires others to follow and do great things. This belief makes you get up every morning with a sense of purpose, with big ideas and with the passion to execute them. Emerson once said “to believe in one’s thoughts is genius.” Successful people conscientiously endeavour to liberate the genius within.
The world is full of people who lack a sincere belief in their own unique capabilities. They are the underachievers. But it’s also full of successful people. Read about them. Better still, find a few and spend some time with them. Their stories will help orient you, keep you centered and grounded. When needed, they will provide a source of motivation. Of course, you will still make bad decisions and screw up. Because stuff does happens and no one can bat a thousand. The opportunity embedded in failure lies in knowing how to deal with it when it occurs.
Failure is inevitable. At worst, it’s a mixed blessing – it hurts when it happens but pays off eventually in growth and wisdom. Research tells us adversity is necessary for people to be happy, successful and fulfilled. You can’t teach resilience but you can learn it from failing. Almost every successful person has suffered a major setback in his or her life. This illustrious group includes people like Steve Jobs, J.K. Rowling, Walt Disney, Oprah Winfrey, Henry Ford, Winston Churchill and Thomas Edison. Michael Jordan, perhaps the greatest basketball player of all time, tells us he has “failed over and over again, and that is why I succeed.”
All learning is error driven. But these missteps invariably serve to grab our attention, force us to integrate new information, initiate the search for new meanings, quicken our mastery of new skills and, in a roundabout way, lead us to the discovery of true happiness. Admittedly, there are a few antidotes for treating the affliction of failure that can hasten the process of personal growth. These include:
The difference between people who pull themselves out of the funk of failure and those who don’t is pretty straightforward – the latter dwell on their circumstances rather than making the choice to move forward. Again, it’s their attitude that determines their altitude. We are able to “move on” when we can develop a calming sense of perspective, see failure as learning rather than stupidity, and recalibrate our beliefs about what we can (and have yet to) accomplish. In short, with failure must come a commitment to change something.
There is a story about a man who wanted to change the world. As hard as he tried, he accomplished little if anything. So, instead, he thought he should just try to change his country. He had no success with that either. Then he tried to change his city, then his neighbourhood. Still without results. Then he thought he could at least change his family. But he failed at that also. So he decided to change himself. And a surprising thing happened. As he changed himself, his family changed. And, as his family changed, his neighbourhood changed. As his neighbourhood changed, his city changed. As his city changed, his country changed. And, as his country changed, the world changed.
The moral is obvious: If you can change your mind, you can change the world. Because change is an evolutionary process that reaps progressive benefits. The steps are incremental and experimental – much like tossing a pebble in a pond, it reverberates and feeds on itself as an energy source. But all intentional change begins with a simple declaration, followed by an initial action step. This involves answering two fundamental questions and doing so with sincere commitment. These questions are:
1. What am I going to do about it?
2. When will I do it?
Carpe diem. – Horace, 23 BC
]]>Contrary to conventional wisdom, people don’t resist change. Rather, they resist the negative perception that the proposed change might have on them and their routines. Resistance is simply a consequence of a perceived loss of control, a sense of vulnerability or a reluctance to change habitual behaviours. Resistance can be either active or passive. The latter is the worst kind. Like carbon monoxide, you may not see it or smell it, but eventually it will kill you. The antidote is to get it out in the open where you can deal with it.
Resistance is acted out in many ways. It can be described as stonewalling, foot dragging, lack of buy-in, push back or just a "ton of questions." It can run the gamut, perceptually, from an innocent question or a roll of the eyes to subversive behaviours or even sabotage. Active resistance includes deliberate opposition, sullen hostility, agitating others, denial, not reporting problems, chronic complaints and a planned reduction in productivity. Passive resistance can be withholding information, not supporting initiatives, over-complicating the new way and diminished enthusiasm, as in "but we’ve always done it this way."
People resist change for a variety of reasons ranging from enlightened self-interest and a desire to preserve the past to a genuine concern for the organization. Resisters might oppose your change agenda because they see it as more work, feel incompetent in performing new tasks ("it just doesn’t feel right"), don’t see or fully comprehend the reasons for change or just because they believe, probably from past experience, that "this too shall pass."
You cannot talk people out of how they are feeling. Resistance is the indirect expression of hidden reservations and concerns as well as outright confusion. But feelings pass and are altered when they are allowed to be expressed openly. When you choose to fight the resistance, all you likely succeed in doing is to energize, legitimize and intensify it.
Smart leaders deal with resistance differently than those who are vexed, annoyed or confused by the challenge. Simply stated, their attitude is one of engagement, not dismissal. They ask "if I viewed this as useful feedback, what might I learn from it?" Minimally, they discover what the resisters don’t know. Optimally, they learn what they don’t know, but should.
Resisters can also be a useful source of alternative ideas borne of devil’s advocacy or heretical thinking. And they do possess an uncanny capacity to point out faulty assumptions or missing pieces in the plan. Resistance can bring needed perspective to unbridled optimism.
Remember too that most resisters have "been there before." These valuable history lessons can enable leaders to better understand the prevailing concerns and biases within the workforce, thereby aiding the diagnosis of an ingrained layer of immunity to accepting new ways of doing things. This type of immunity is cultural and the antithesis of innovation. Hence, the very act of empathic listening or offering some recognition of past errors could be sufficient to put needed salve on open wounds.
Smart leaders use resistance to advantage by seeing it as a way to:
Engaging resisters can help build one’s credibility in the eyes of the team – an opportunity to be seen as open-minded, respectful and receptive to all points of view. You are more likely to get buy-in to your ideas when you demonstrate a willingness to listen to theirs. Many resisters simply want to be heard.
Should you judge the resistance to be invalid, you must be mindful of these steps:
The lesson is this: don’t see resistance as a problem; frame it as an opportunity. How you deal with resistance as a leader will make you either vulnerable or stronger. The goal is not necessarily to agree or capitulate but to engage and be better informed. In the process, you may discover that resisters are not enemies but rather the ones bold enough or who care enough to speak truth to power about the pitfalls in the change strategy.
]]>While the second cause stated in each case is much more common, the vast majority of people choose the first one. You are thirty times more likely to die from falling airplane parts than from a shark attack. And while most people think we’re twice as likely to die from an accident as from a stroke, in fact we are forty times more likely to die of a stroke. (I am indebted to Thomas Kida for this data.)
One of the great paradoxes of our time is that we are healthier, wealthier, wiser and live longer than ever before, yet we are increasingly afraid of the unpredictability and complexity inherent in an exponentially changing world and the attendant risks we associate with that uncertainty.
We confront a modern world full of risks (and opportunities) with a prehistoric brain, one wired primarily for fight or flight. When faced with fear and risk-reward choices, the amygdala (the cortical real estate where most of our emotions are situated) reacts before the pre-frontal cortex (the seat of reason and judgement) has taken the time to examine and assess, especially when those decisions are couched in unknowns. In neurological terms, risk assessment occurs largely in the dopaminergic (emotional response) processing area of the brain.
Beyond the physiological basis of risk appraisal, our brains are poorly equipped to evaluate uncertainty and discontinuity for a variety of other reasons. In short, our brains are both efficient and "lazy" – they rely on heuristics, or mental short-cuts, to simplify complicated issues. These heuristics include such compensating adjustments to incoming stimuli as the attraction of similarity (if a phenomenon does not fit a pre-existing category, we add or subtract information to make it fit), stereotyping, availability of information and anchoring (or the impact of initial information on our mental processing).
In addition to our penchant to simplify and categorize for the purpose of "making sense" of the information, we tend to worry more about possibilities while ignoring probabilities. The greater the fear, the less we calculate the odds of it actually happening.
Some people, for example, have a morbid fear of flying, preferring instead to drive. About 44,000 people die annually in car accidents as opposed to around 200 who perish in aeronautical incidents (indeed, more people will drown in their own bathtubs on an annual basis – around 325 – than will die from flying). While the odds are clearly stacked against drivers, the cognitive debilitating phobia associated with flight prevents them from computing the actual probability of death. Following the terrorist attack of 9/11, many people stopped flying. As a result of actuarial data, we know that a further 1,595 additional people died in car accidents as a consequence of that choice. On analysis, before the chance of being in a plane crash would exceed 50%, you would have to fly on an airline every day for 18,000 years.
There are countless other examples of the inability, if not inherent irrationality, of assessing risk. A few years ago, despite the almost worldwide fear of the Avian flu, no one died of this disease in North America. Yet the common flu kills about 40,000 people a year. While 18 humans died of West Nile Virus in 2001, 875 Americans choked to death on their food. Far more people die on beaches from falling into sand castle holes (16 people/year) than do from shark attacks. While humans kill 26 million sharks annually, the chances of being killed by a shark today are about 1 in 280 million.
Since you are unlikely to be confronted by a shark in your lifetime, consider the risk associated with the decision to choose a partner – something almost every person contemplates in his or her early adulthood. Some 94% of Canadians believe that marriage to that special someone will last the rest of their lives, yet in fact 52% get divorced. The point is simply that good data can bring needed perspective to evaluating risk.
Nor are we much better in our ability to predict the occurrence of risk. In his book, Expert Political Judgement, Philip Tetlock analyzed 82,361 predictions by acknowledged and well established experts in their fields and found the accuracy rate at much less than 50%. On that number of predictions, flipping a coin would actually serve to increase your ability to prognosticate rather than accept their expertise at face value. (Tetlock also notes that when these experts were asked to recall their predictions, they revised them closer to what actually happened.)
Accurately predicting the movement of the market and managing risks for investors, despite what the gurus might tell you, is little more than a mug’s game. Yet there are over 200,000 investment advisers in North America today who try to convince us this can be done. Again, consider the evidence. The number of funds that have performed in the top 50% for four years running is 4%, less than what chance alone would predict.
Regardless of the arena of expertise offered, whether the analysis is based on charts, "market fundamentals" or other technical criteria, no adviser has ever produced consistent above-average returns. Indeed, 46 of 48 economic forecasts from America’s major forecasters and think tanks over a 25 year period could not predict the economy’s major turning points. This is simply because the market is a psychological soup of fear, greed, hope and superstition, all of which generates chaos and complexity ... which are inherently unpredictable.
So how can today’s leaders become more adept at predicting, assessing and managing risk? The answer lies in enhancing one’s risk intelligence – reducing uncertainty by making strategic choices based on knowledge developed through observation, exploration, learning and sharing. While some risks are learnable, i.e., principally a matter of identifying and closing knowledge gaps, others are random or indeterminate. In which case, no amount of knowledge will reduce the uncertainty. (The antidote to this situation will be covered in a future article.)
George Day and Paul Shoemaker (Peripheral Vision: Detecting the Weak Signals That Will Make Or Break Your Company, Harvard Business School, 2006) claim that "97% of executives today lack an early warning system for detecting high impact surprises." Indeed, few organizations today pay sufficient attention to building such an early detection capability, one that enables the key decision makers to identify, interpret and act on the signals that connote either risk or opportunity. Mark Penn’s research and counsel are instructive on this point (Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes. Twelve, 2007).
To build a risk intelligence capability in your organization, find ways to use more of what people know and give people more to know that is useful – knowledge increases when widely shared. Allow people free time to think, minimize meaningless bureaucracy, create information-sharing networks (not hierarchies or silos) and incentivize high performance. Moreover, seek to gather, then synthesize, the kind of information that enables you to answer questions like those David Agar suggests (Risk Intelligence: Learning to Manage What We Don’t Know. Harvard Business School, 2006):
Like just about every other leadership capability, anticipatory prowess is a skill that can be developed and strengthened. You do it by listening to the mavericks and the complainers (without unnecessarily energizing them), being insatiably curious and asking "horizon" questions, harvesting the knowledge of departing intellectual capital, probing the minds of key users and influencers and always testing, challenging and experimenting with your "antennae" raised.
]]>Resilience is the capacity to "bounce back" after disappointment, setbacks or even disasters. It is a leadership attribute that is crucial in unpredictable times or in the face of tough circumstances. It is rightfully acknowledged to be a critical component in one’s emotional health and therefore, one might argue, for organizational wellbeing and sustainability as well.
Resilient people can detect the seeds of opportunity and the enormous potential for learning in difficult and trying situations. They can resist being swept up in the anxiety or panic of the moment and are more willing to adapt as creatively as possible to seemingly daunting challenges. And when this adversity is conscientiously dealt with and subsequently overcome, resilience is strengthened.
As with most personality traits, the roots of one’s resilience are typically developed in early childhood, especially when one is confronted by difficult or adverse events – perhaps something as traumatic as the loss of a parent. (Having lost both of my parents at an early age, I can personally attest to the depth of the despair.) Bouncing back when the bedrock of your life has fallen away is surely a sign of a resilient individual.
I wrote about the research undertaken by Howard Gardner on this topic in a previous article (see Anatomy of Leadership), particularly his identification of "early markers" that define future leaders. He observes that leaders are those who experienced failure or adversity early in their lives. More specifically, he notes evidence that future leaders have often lost their fathers at an early age. In one example cited, over 60% of major British political leaders lost a parent during their childhood, most often the father. In the absence of a father, he argues, one is forced to make his or her own choices and thus to have a greater inclination toward risk taking as well as being willing to go to extreme lengths to achieve their ends. In other words, they are resilient.
A fascinating account of how many parents today underestimate – and therefore undermine – the resilience of their children at the expense of their freedom is provided by Carl Honore (Under Pressure: Rescuing Childhood from the Culture of Hyper-Parenting, Knopf, 2008). He advises that obsessive over-parenting, while well intentioned, does more harm than good. Research is now telling us that, by not allowing children to experience hardship in their lives or simply to be alone to work through their problems, we will see a generation of kids who "are fatter, more myopic, more injured, more depressed and more medicated than any previous generation." Tests confirm that micro-managed children are much less creative than those who are allowed to experience the magic, the challenges and the innocence of childhood.
The application of these research findings ought not be lost on the leadership of organizations that seek innovation as a way of achieving competitive advantage. Letting people fail in pursuit of their own ideas but insisting that they learn as a result of the experience is one method among many for ensuring the organization’s DNA for innovation is in good health.
Just as there are no short-cuts to acquiring emotional health, you cannot become resilient overnight. It’s not about wishful thinking or willpower; nor can it be taught in the classroom or read in the latest book on the subject. Rather, resilience is acquired through increased self-awareness. You need constructive but critical feedback on your performance and you need to consider the advice given as objectively as possible. You need to expose yourself to difficult or challenging circumstances and learn from the experiences, whether you are successful in overcoming them or not.
In short, you need to accept failure as learning. Organizations that take direct responsibility in their annual reports for negative events or lower than expected earnings have higher stock prices one year later than firms which choose to blame their lack of performance on external circumstances. Fessing up, whether in corporate or personal life, signals that you are not a victim of fate but rather are in control of your destiny.
You need to defy your fears and become more comfortable in taking risks. Preferring the "safe" way out, accepting the tried-and-true strategy or embracing conventional wisdom will not build your resilience quotient. Risk aversion is yet another learned but greatly limiting attribute but, here too, with skill and practice its effect on your life or your business prospects can be considerably lessened. (See also my article on Understanding Risk: A Core Competency of Leaders.)
Once acquired, resilience becomes a way of perceiving and living differently, if not also a way of leading others to bounce back in the face of tough times, hardship or adversity. With resilience, one’s internal stress level and penchant for thoughtless adrenal responses that limit choices is greatly reduced. And when that happens, clear thinking, an action orientation, and the willingness to imagine and then navigate new realities prevail.
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The research on failed business decisions indicates clearly that the key decision makers knew their world was changing yet chose not to respond in a timely fashion ... and sometimes not at all. Leader after leader, when faced with severe and daunting challenges, chose not to "think through" their new reality.
Sydney Finkelstein, in his 2004 analysis of why smart executives fail, found that precipitous business failures are caused by four destructive patterns of behaviour that set in, without anyone noticing them, well before a business goes under. These four syndromes involve:
The normally assumed reasons for business failures – that leaders are stupid, couldn’t have known what was coming, weren’t trying hard enough, lacked the necessary resources or were simply a bunch of crooks – are not supported by the evidence. Rather, Finkelstein suggests that "Most of the great destroyers of (corporate) value are people of unusual intelligence and remarkable talent. They are almost always capable of being irresistibly charming, exercising great personal magnetism and inspiring others. Yet when it comes to the crunch, these people fail monumentally."
Why is this so? Madeline Van Hecke (Blind Spots: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things, Prometheus, 2007) has some answers worthy of reflection. She advises that it is our hard-wired "blind spots" that prevent us from understanding perspectives that don’t fit normal expectations. And, in a complex, exponentially changing, discontinuous business environment, these are surely becoming the norm. If we don’t know what these mental barriers are, how can we compensate for them?
Van Hecke claims that "People who achieve Nobel Prizes do so not because their work involves a high level of abstraction but because they overcame blind spots. They saw possibilities others rejected out of hand or grasped a perspective no one else had considered." In other words, they chose to take a different course than did their colleagues – simply in stopping to think, for a long time, about phenomenon that others seemingly took for granted.
And what are some of these blind spots or mental traps?
There are, of course, other blind spots, but these are sufficient to demonstrate the point. So, as a consequence, when leaders fail, it is likely because they:
Leadership is a long process of self-development and self-discovery. For genius to succeed, it must listen, truly listen, without pre-conceived notions or premature judgment, to an inner voice that acknowledges and reconciles (vs. rationalizes) the mental barriers that plague us all as human beings. True genius – the readiness to find or draw novel distinctions, explore new and often contrary perspectives and display a keen sensitivity to context and nuance – is reconciling the necessity for superior confidence with the requirement of profound humility. That is the only talent that can enable leaders to survive and thrive when others fall victim to their own certitude.
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That said, those who aspire to positions of leadership within their industry might do well to reflect on their proficiency in getting others to do their bidding when technical knowledge or an expertise in business processes alone is insufficient for the task. In the accounting profession, for example, mastering the numbers is not the recipe for elevating the CFO to the position of COO or CEO.
A twenty-year study of leadership effectiveness conducted by Stanford University’s School of Business concluded that about 15% of one’s success in leading organizations comes from technical skills and knowledge, while 85% comes from the ability to connect with people and engender trust and mutual understanding. The problem however lies not in this remarkable data, which surely must be somewhat compelling for those who think they already have what it takes.
The real issue lies in delusional thinking about our people-handling competence. Reality likely belies your self-assessment. Over 96% of executives today believe they have "above average" people skills. This, of course, is a statistical improbability. It is what psychologists call motivated reasoning, which means that once we decide something is true (for whatever reason) we make up reasons for believing it to be true. Most of us believe we are smarter, fairer, more considerate, more dependable and more creative than average. But we cannot all be "above average."
This is not behavioural; it is neurological – it is hard-wired into the brains of normal, healthy people. Studies confirm that 75% of North American CEOs believe they are "better" than other leaders in their industry, 90% of physicians, pilots and investment bankers (specialists who cannot afford to second-guess their decisions) rate themselves in the top 10% of their field, and 94% of university professors say they are above average teachers. Simply put, successful people are incredibly delusional about their skills. But beware: as Andy Grove (retired Chair Emeritus of Intel) once advised "Success breeds complacency and complacency breeds failure."
To illustrate the critical importance of process skills as the imperative for leadership success, it is surely a truism in organizations today that people are far more willing to will act on their own ideas before they are likely to act on yours, despite the conviction behind your directions. The art of leadership is getting people to believe your ideas are really theirs, and then to agree with and support them. Not only are people empowered, they are more strongly committed to ownership and follow-through. And, without that, change is impossible – there can be no accountability, productivity or competitive advantage.
According to Howard Gardner, Professor of Cognition at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, those with disciplined minds (such as is the case for accredited professionals) possess a distinctive mode of reasoning borne of a specific scholarly education and further honed by one’s craft. They have mastered the skills of planning, executing and critiquing. But their thinking style is one of a compulsive rationalizer, which results in premature judgment and criticism that kills new ideas in their infancy. Hardly the way to turn on people to new ways of doing things in a rapidly changing business environment. Gardner suggests an individual with this analytical predisposition "acquires his professional designation and then coasts on his laurels for the next 30 or even 50 years."
The disciplined mind is highly susceptible to conformation bias – the psychological need to always be right, which ignores voices that oppose one’s ideas, beliefs and values. While we tend to believe our thinking is not biased, it is simply not the case. Some 61% of medical students say they are not influenced by drug company gifts yet only 16% believe their colleagues are equally uninfluenced. This is another statistical contradiction. Learning about our thinking "blind spots" and developing new skills for reducing or eliminating them is what leadership development is all about. That is if you truly aspire to leadership in your field.
The job of the 21st century leader is to develop human capabilities, not to oversee the numbers or plan a sound strategic direction. The task is to increase the organization’s capacity to be focused, agile and resilient. Therefore the primary focus must be on creating, harnessing and leveraging intellectual capital (i.e., people skills) rather than deploying other assets. This kind of leader doesn’t need to know everything there is to know. (Although many analytical thinkers presume that to be their life’s mission, it is a practical impossibility.) On the contrary, these leaders will want to be surrounded by people who know a whole lot more than they do but who will trust them implicitly to weigh their competing claims and advice.
In study after study about the purpose of leadership in this millennium, getting results – making money – doesn’t even figure in the top requirements. What does figure is making sure the right people are talking to one another about the right things and have the right tools to do what they decide needs doing. When that happens, good results inevitably follow.
Today’s leader focuses her attention squarely on the things that produce results. And that requires superb people skills. Technical prowess will not enable you to build an organizational culture of respect, accountability and innovation and nothing of any great consequence can ever be achieved without leadership that inspires people to truly make a difference.
As but one example, the most important managerial skill needed to encourage a culture of innovation is the ability to genuinely listen to people. Since God gave us two ears, most of us assume we do this quite naturally. Think again. Research confirms that the listening proficiency level of over 95% of people tested for same falls between 17 and 29%. Perhaps you are in the very small minority of exceptional listeners but, even so, you still don’t get it all. That’s because listening, like thinking, is a skill. It can be learned and therefore improved. Unless, like others, you assume you are "above average" and don’t require such training – a choice that may be ego gratifying but also career limiting.
More than ever before, we need more people who are willing to lead. That means people who have the skills to motivate others to get the job done. There are positions of higher executive responsibility awaiting, provided you are willing to invest in learning those skills.
]]>Gardner’s central thesis is that leaders fashion great stories – principally stories of identity. While it is important that a leader be a good storyteller, it is crucial that the story be embodied in his or her life. In the current vernacular, the story verifies that they walk the talk. Gardner endeavours to demonstrate his contention by examining the leadership style of eleven unquestionable leaders: Margaret Mead, Robert Oppenheimer, Robert Maynard Hutchins, Alfred Sloan, George Marshall, Pope John XXIII, Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Margaret Thatcher, Jean Monnet and Mahatma Gandhi.
Stories of identity are simplified narratives that help people think about who they are, where they come from and where they are headed. As such it helps them to understand their lives and frame their future options. And, for Gardner, this constitutes the most powerful weapon in the leader’s literary arsenal. As Harry Truman once observed, "a leader is a man who has the ability to get other people to do what they don’t want to do and like it." Gardner, as always, puts it much more succinctly: "Leaders can actually lead."
Apart from the insights derived from examining the lives of the leaders noted, two things in Gardner’s research strike a responsive chord for me. The first, which I have yet to find in other literature on leadership, is an identification of the "early markers" that likely define future leaders. Some are obvious while others are positively enlightening (at least to me).
Gardner notes that leaders are those who experienced failure early in their lives. More specifically, he has found evidence that future leaders have often lost their fathers at an early age. As one example cited, over 60% of major British political leaders lost a parent during their childhood, most often the father. In the absence of a father, one is forced to make his (or her) own choices and thus have a greater inclination for risk taking and are willing to go to extreme lengths to achieve their ends.
Other early markers are these – future leaders are:
Not surprisingly, given his breakthrough analysis of intelligence, Gardner concludes that leaders posses good political and linguistic intelligences – they know how to reach and affect others and they have the capacity and skills to tell their stories persuasively. (The concept of political intelligence deserves further embellishment, which I intend to do in a future article.)
Distilling Gardner’s research and insights on the eleven leaders he examines leads to several notable findings on the essence and attributes of leadership (or, as Gardner seeks to accomplish, defining an anatomy of leadership). For this author, exemplary leaders must:
The recipe for success implicit in Gardner’s writing, as always, mirrors a prescription for developing smart leader skill sets. Examining "lives led" is an effective way of learning important lessons about leadership. And, in my judgement, any book authored by Gardner is a worthwhile investment.
]]>Clearly, followers hunger for authenticity. It is the quality that drives our productivity and harmony in our relationships, determines whom we believe, how we feel and act. As but one example, we prefer to vote for political candidates we deem to be authentic.
Authenticity is directly correlated with a sense of self-respect and well being. Acting in accordance with our self-concept, a trait called self-determination, is a basic psychological need. According to Daniel Goleman, it is a requisite ingredient in emotional intelligence, the immutable repository of our identities.
According to Psychology Today magazine, "authenticity is something too intangible to measure objectively." Yet, for the term itself to have authenticity, it must be capable of having identifiable, concrete components. Clearly, the first and most fundamental of these must be self-awareness – a knowledge of and trust in one’s own motives, emotions, preferences and capabilities. Authenticity requires an acknowledgment of both personal strengths and weaknesses. It means acting in a manner congruent with one’s values.
Do leaders learn (or invent) their authenticity or do they discover it? Depends on your point of view. Every school of philosophical thought offers a different answer. Today’s psychologists argue that our notion of selfhood needs to encompass multiple realities and ever-shifting perspectives. One reason for these differing opinions is that accurate self-knowledge, and our attempts to reconcile it with life’s circumstances, can be rather painful and (as a consequence) biased. After all, it is human to rationalize our weaknesses. Which is why, surely, authenticity requires accurate self-diagnosis. Without it, there is no possibility of making informed choices about your future (or, for that matter, about the direction and destiny of your organization).
Authenticity requires an unraveling of the mystery of selfhood – critically examining our assumptions, beliefs and learned mental maps about what constitutes responsibility and accountability, satisfaction and happiness, success and failure. And learning from the reflection and conclusions.
How do leaders develop an authentic approach to their lives and their business challenges? Here are some suggestions:
Authenticity is more than this. But these thoughts are surely among the critical steps one needs to take along the path toward being a smart leader. The self is fluid, dynamic and complex. Its nourishment requires breaking with the routine, replacing the power of habit with the power of focus. It means listening to oneself and trusting one’s moral compass to guide decisions and behaviours.
]]>To build a culture of innovation, you must minimally:
Culture building is designed at the top and implemented in the middle. Therefore it requires good managers to enable others to "get with the program." In this regard, good managers are people who:
Stress the importance of collaborative efforts. Innovative ideas invariably come from groups sharing information and insights with one another. It is therefore critical that operating silos be broken down and teamwork, networking and multi-tasking encouraged.
Don’t hammer down the nail that sticks out. Oddballs, deviants and heretics are the lifeblood of innovation. Encourage and respect the diverse views of every member of your organization and reward them for venturing forth unconventional notions. These may not result in immediately useful ideas or applications but, once seeds are planted, they become fruitful. There are lots of reasons to abandon a seemingly interesting idea in favour of something that appears more promising. Remember the back-burner, discuss it with others and let it simmer for awhile.
Know how to encourage genuine brainstorming. While the rules for brainstorming sound simple, few actually know how to ensure the exercise works. (See the Discussion Forum on this topic.) Properly done, brainstorming brings out the best in people and enables participants with different backgrounds and views to understand what each can uniquely contribute to the team. Learn to role model the behaviour that leads to breakthrough ideas and encourage everyone, especially the shy ones, to contribute their thoughts.
Look outside the organization for different points of view. Hire an outside expert or resource person. Good ones are well worth the investment and don’t be put off by their operational naivete. The brainpower you may need is not always inside the organization (though never underestimate what you already have available, if properly nurtured). Often a different perspective is all that’s needed to get a project kick-started or back on track.
A culture of innovation is the by-product of several simple (but nonetheless essential) principles. Among them are these:
Innovation comes from acquiring and using multi-disciplinary skill sets, from encouraging bi-polar thinking capabilities and from consciously seeking out the eclecticism in people’s diverse experiences and their learning. A workplace that quashes unconventional thinking, that does not know how to constructively challenge and question routine ways of doing things, will be stuck in the past for a long time. Nothing should be considered sacrosanct. "No stone unturned" is the mantra of the innovative organization. Conscientiously apply these key principles and have patience – Rome wasn’t built in a day and an innovative workplace culture will not happen overnight either.
]]>Mr. Burns’ thesis is as follows "There is a widely held view that employees are inherently resistant to change. I disagree. Employees are resistant to change only when it will adversely affect them. If a new system could eliminate their jobs, do you blame them? But if the change does not threaten their jobs, they are more likely to accept and even welcome the change." In other words, if the change is beneficial, behaviours are easily changed.
I don’t share his optimism. Many things may be simple to understand but they’re certainly not easy to do. That’s my view of change management borne of considerable experience. In studies of patients who have undergone coronary bypass surgery, only one in nine adopts a healthier lifestyle. Even though the consequences may be life or death, and the benefits therefore rather obvious, they don’t see the value of changing their behaviour. Now multiply that bizarre, counterintuitive finding by the number of employees within your organization. Think your task of changing mindsets and behaviours is going to be easy?
I have long argued that it is far more productive to study human behaviour – why people do the things they do – and to seek benefit from the learning than it is to try to fight it. Human behavior in today’s workplace, faced with the daunting challenge of a turbo-charged competitive world, doesn’t work the way many executives think it does. This helps to explain why so many well intentioned change initiatives are destined to fail. (Numerous studies suggest the actual failure rate is somewhere between 66 and 80 percent.)
Smart leaders, I believe, are those who have taken the time to understand the relevance of recent discoveries in the behavioural and cognitive sciences to their mission of leading change and ensuring relentless innovation. Many of these findings, however, go against the grain of traditional management thinking and would have been deemed quite wrongheaded just a decade ago.
Gary Hamel, author of The Future of Management (2007) puts it this way: "Managers are captives of a paradigm that places the pursuit of efficiency ahead of every other goal. This is hardly surprising, since modern management was invented to solve the problem of inefficiency." He believes that management today is simply out of date – less adaptable than they need to be, less innovative than they could be and not having as much fun as they should be. He tells us that "Management as currently practised is a drag on success," that management beliefs were inherited from a time long since past and that most managers have never taken the time or trouble to question their approach to managing. The consequence is that "prodigious quantities of human imagination and initiative is squandered."
Conventional humanistic approaches to changing behaviours don’t sufficiently engage people today. The manager as an understanding nurturer, based on the precepts of Carl Rogers and Maslow, dates back to the sixties when Douglas McGregor wrote The Human Side of Enterprise and proposed a new approach to management called Theory Y. This school postulates that people are self-motivated problem solvers who look for meaning in their work. It assumes that addressing self-esteem and self-actualization issues in the workplace provides leverage for behavioral change. (In reality, true self-actualization might lead someone to quit her job for newer self-fulfilling opportunities.) The presumption here is that empathic listening and persuasion enable consensus to emerge.
The reality is different – managers have neither the time nor the skills to do this. Modern leadership acknowledges that human beings have an innate desire to create. When people are given permission and the accountability to solve problems themselves, in a self-directed manner, the brain releases a rush of pleasing neurotransmitters that enable an embracing of new ways of doing things. The human brain actually wants to solve problems and, when it isn’t allowed to do so, it enters a state of passive receptivity to commands. Why? Because it’s easier and there are no inherent rewards in doing otherwise.
This is why smart leaders view their primary role as one of asking rather than telling. The ability to change behaviors by asking questions goes back to the time of Socrates. But even the Socratic method misfires when wielded by someone in authority trying to use his positional leverage to convince others of a particular course of action. I like to say that people love to buy but hate to be sold. This is because they can detect the difference between authentic inquiry and efforts to force, persuade or manipulate.
Any kind of change is psychologically and physiologically stressful. Much of what managers do is so well routinized that it literally becomes hardwired in the brain. Changing those deeply ingrained habits can be difficult and is always uncomfortable. Resistance is far easier. And the reason has more to do with our neural circuitry than our attitudes – trying to change routine behaviours sends out strong messages in the brain that something just isn’t as it ought to be. These messages can even overpower rational thinking and certainly neutralize creative tendencies. This is why change agents cannot underestimate the care, diligence and time required to bring needed changes to fruition.
Change efforts today that are based primarily on incentives or threats rarely succeed. Changing behaviours is not as simple as applying the principles of Pavlov’s conditioned response. Every individual and every generation of workers has a different set of needs, aspirations and motivators. Despite this obvious fundamental principle, many managers today believe that change comes about through the adroit use of carrot and stick or similar persuasive measures. It does not.
Our acquired mental models play an important role in how we perform. We see what we want to see, what we have been taught to see and what suits our purpose at any given moment. This is why a placebo is proven to be so effective; if we think it can heal us, it will.
Behavioural change necessitates a paradigm shift. This begins when some event, story or experience enables people to provoke themselves to change their attitudes and behaviours more dramatically than they normally would. In other words, on their own volition, workers must "own" the change initiative for it to be successful. Someone who sees today’s consumers as savvy, sophisticated and affluent, with an endless array of options, listens differently than the seller who has traditionally viewed and thus treated their customers as children.
Behaviours repeatedly recognized and purposefully reinforced are sustainable and lasting. An insightful study conducted by Baruch College researchers (1997) found that training programs alone can increase productivity by 28% but that follow-up coaching and reinforcement can increase it by 88%. The best training you can offer is teaching people how to work smart. That means teaching people how to achieve their full potential in the 21st century, how to think differently, learn better and manage their most precious asset more productively – the one for which, either way, your business pays dearly – their time.
The most successful change practices adhere to these basic principles. This is how workers become engaged, more productive and even innovative. Yet too many managers are uncomfortable putting these principles into practice. Why? For starters, it requires managers to change their behaviours first and to see execute their roles differently. As noted, that is not easy. Second, the prevailing change management methodology is top-down not bottom-up. A structure that emphasizes the creation of self-directed teams is the easiest way to bring about changes in individual and thus also in organizational behaviours.
You pay people to think, be creative, use initiative and judgment, solve problems and optimize their time. The acknowledged failure rate reveals how difficult this can be. But the answer lies in applying some new principles of behavioural psychology and neurology, not in being held captive to traditional mental models of change management.
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