First Look: Leadership Books for May 2012
Here's a look at some of the best leadership books to be released in May.
The 3 Power Values: How Commitment, Integrity, and Transparency Clear the Roadblocks to Performance by David Gebler
Flip the Script: How to Turn the Tables and Win in Business and Life by Bill Wackermann
Leading With Honor: Leadership Lessons from the Hanoi Hilton by Lee Ellis
Adaptability: The Art of Winning In An Age of Uncertainty by Max McKeown
It Worked for Me: In Life and Leadership by Colin Powell
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“You are the same today you’ll be five years from now except for the books you read and the people you meet.”
— Charlie Tremendous Jones
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LeadershipNow 140: April 2012 Compilation
Here are a selection of tweets from April 2012 that you might have missed:
- The Yin and Yang of Business by @TomAsacker
- @Leadershipfreak: If you know more than everyone on your team, you have a weak team. "8 Ways to Find Freedom"
- lead:ology - Leaders vs Managers: A False Dichotomy
- Choice Point: Do Not Let Your Culture Kill You by Robert Quinn @LeadWithLift
- @KevinEikenberry How Leaders Can Use Pinterest
- A Silent Leadership Killer by @mjasmus
- Read: Inspire People to Change by @greatleadership
- @Jim_Kouzes: People are most likely to be creative when intrinsically motivated say Teresa Amabile and Steve Kramer
- It’s time to diversify diversity. By @INSEAD @HalGregersen.
- The Steve Jobs Way Leaders can learn a lot from the late Apple CEO, but not all of it should be emulated. @stratandbiz
- Stedman Graham asks, “Would your behavior in working with others change if you knew in advance that your...
- @tom_peters: "Human Touch Saved JAL." Superb interview with interim CEO Kazuo Inamori. Key words: "Kind, gentle, caring."
- Read The Source Of Integrity? by @LollyDaskal
- @TheStyleGent: The true indicator of elegance is the way we act each and every day.
- To John W. Gardner, "Judgment" was the #1 attribute of a leader. By @DennyCoates
- The Surest Way to a Positive Attitude by @KevinEikenberry
- @johnmaeda: White paper on the future of learning by Lego folks.
- Give away which you most wish to receive by @LollyDaskal
- Who knew? A person's life span can be predicted by the size of their smile.
- a href="http://bit.ly/I2FVPv" target="_blank">The Myth of Potential by @mikemyatt Potential is unrealized attainment – nothing more and nothing less.
- Robert Fry, Chairman at McKinney Rogers in London wrote in a letter to the Financial Times, that “to be average...
- @wilsonquarterly: Thought-provoking read from Gertrude Himmelfarb on the decline of civil society
- Change versus Transformation. Change requires that you become more familiar with the current situation to make...
- The Experience of Being Coached by @mjasmus >How you can profit from it.
- FT: Make the most of dead time
- @Bill_George: Using True North Groups with patients Enhance healing in mind, body & spirit & reduce costs
- Good read from @tomasacker > A brand is energy made visible.
- TEDx Eugene Lee - Breathing Together - Leadership Lessons from Musical Ensembles
- Good read from @KateNasser >Leaders, Are We Accomplices to Passive Aggressive Team Members?
- Self Made? No. Self Created? Yes by @JamesStrock
- Is Goldman Sachs filled with rogue tribes? by @davelogan1
- @jamesstrock: To Best Serve Others, Keep Promises to Yourself
- How to Criticize — and Be Loved for it. By @workawesome
- @RosabethKanter: Doing nothing is easy. Acting requires courage - and it is courage that makes change possible
- Why Were You Not? by @LollyDaskal
- Why School Principals Need More Authority by Chester E. Finn Jr.from @TheAtlantic
- @Envisia: Download your free chapter of "Clueless: Coaching People Who Just Don't Get It"
- A Lesson on Doing Good Work by @wallybock
- Excuses . . . They Are Worse than You Think by @KevinEikenberry
- @TLCTalk: Leadership is not about I or me. It's about we and us.
- @wallybock: Boss's TOTD: Your pace is not their pace
- The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs - HBR
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When Good Employees Do Bad: Six Surprising Behaviors that May Precede a Scandal
Good intentions can lead to bad outcomes in business. This is especially true in organizations that have toxic cultures in which leaders tout worthy values—and then put up roadblocks that prevent employees from living those values. For example, if a company claims it welcomes innovation and risk taking, but then only rewards employees who toe the company line and reinforce the status quo, sooner or later people will simply stop asking questions, innovating, and stretching themselves. Instead, they will conform in order to please their bosses. While the company's competitive edge plummets, leaders may be left wondering: What happened to our core value of innovation and risk taking?
When we look at companies that have faced scandals such as recalls, ethical violations, or crimes, the problem often comes down to employees whose surprisingly positive behavior was distorted by a toxic culture and clueless leaders. Here are six seemingly benign behaviors that may come back to bite a company if they become exaggerated and throw the organization out of alignment:
Commitment to meeting deadlines.
One would think that a company where employees are encouraged to meet deadlines and rewarded for doing so consistently would lead to super-productivity and efficiency. In fact, it can lead to disaster. At Johnson & Johnson, the understood directive to get product to market on tough deadlines created a culture of "Don't ask too many questions" and resulted in a series of dangerous drug recalls that badly sullied the company's reputation.
Excessive optimism.
When a person is sick, optimism can buoy his spirits and help healing. When a company is unhealthy, "Everything is going to be okay" is not what you need to hear from those in authority positions. Take David Myers, former controller of WorldCom. By his own account, he saw the problems of the now-defunct company through rose-colored glasses. He simply kept believing--and telling his frightened staff--that the problems would resolve themselves eventually. By the time he came to his senses, he was under arrest for accounting fraud.
Staying focused on a goal.
Telling employees to keep their eye on the prize is not intrinsically a bad thing. But when the goal becomes more important to management than the underlying values of the organization, it can lead to a dysfunctional culture. For example, in the 1990s, Sears gave its auto repair mechanics a mandatory sales goal of $147 per hour. It wasn't long before customers began to be overcharged or sold unnecessary repairs.
Having a competitive mindset.
Boeing is known for its highly competitive employees and work culture. That's a good thing, right? Not so in 1996, when the company lost billions in government contracts for ethics violations after an employee stole 25,000 pages of proprietary documents from Lockheed. Flash forward to 2005, when employees were still so competitive that their own work teams were known to keep useful information secret from other teams in the company to make sure they stayed on top. Too much competition can erode cultural values, leading to disaster.
Sticking to a budget.
Most managers would be thrilled if their employees were doggedly determined to stay on budget and not cost the company any unnecessary money. But a good intention can go bad when financial performance becomes the only metric that matters. That was the case, many believe, behind the fatal mistake made on the BP oil platform in the Gulf. Before the explosion in April 2012 caused by a safety shortcut, BP's Macondo project was more than $40 million over budget. You know the rest.
Wanting to please higher-ups.
What's more attractive than a hardworking employee who wants his bosses to approve of him, based on high performance and outstanding results? A lot, in the case of French trader Jérôme Kerviel at the Société Générale banking group. His need to be liked led to $4.9 billion in massive financial fraud by means of elaborate computer manipulations. Kerviel is thought not to have profited personally from his crimes. He said he was just working to increase the bank's profits and make his bosses happy.
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Why Leaders Can NOT Procrastinate
You're about to end a conference call, and someone says, "Great, we'll send you some materials right away." A day goes by, and then a week. What happens to your confidence in that person? Surely, you may continue to do business together, but you'll always wonder if they'll do what they said they'd do, in the time they promised.
So, now is the time to look in the mirror Are you putting something off? Because you forgot, or is it on purpose? Are you missing key resources? Are you waiting for key data before you can make the next decision? Or, are you procrastinating? Begin by exploring your own daily routines. When you understand HOW you work, you can get things done more effectively. Here's an activity you can experiment with this week.
Write down the approximate time you arrive and leave the office every day. This represents your “work-week.” (I call this the "window of professional productivity.") For each single hour you were working, you made choices about what to focus on as “priority.” You also chose what did not get done!
Here are three ways to get going and sustain an action-orientation to your own productivity:
- Choose smaller verbs. One of the reasons that people don't do things as they think of them (especially entrepreneurs and senior leaders) is because of their skill at Visionary Thinking. Because they CAN think big, they do. Chunk your objectives into smaller markers along your path to success. Recently, I worked with a Managing Partner of a Fortune 500 company who realized that more important than managing time is her need to more effectively direct her focus within the small chunks of time she has to work.
- Find, create, utilize and assess the extra time you have each day. Arrive to an off-site meeting somewhere early? Other people running late? Maybe you get a last-minute cancellation of an appointment you had scheduled. What can you do during that time? Get ready for 15-minute blocks of time (what I call "bonus time") throughout the day. Why 15 minutes? That window is long enough to actually "do" something and short enough to find!
- Focus on what has happened. Regularly through the day (before lunch, and before you go home), take a moment and mentally check off what is complete. Oftentimes, there is so much going on, and so much you can think of that is UNDONE, you tend to forget how much is finished. This is your chance to recharge – as acknowledging completion is a quick way to get back on track. (Have you ever made a list of to-dos…after you’ve already done them?!)
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Restoring Your Ability to Choose
We all like to think we are in charge of our choices. But the fact is that most of the time we are reacting, not choosing. Most of what we label choice is habit. We’re really on automatic. It can even lead us to think that we have no choice. Only when we pause—slow-down to think and reflect—are we exercising our ability to choose.
Today you need the ability to discern what lies beneath people’s words, their reactions, or their silence. If you don’t build the neuropathways in your brain to pause, to momentarily disengage your automatic reactions, you can trigger a chain reaction that derails your best intentions and strategies.Guilmartin lists seven cues that a pause is in your best interest. It’s time to pause if you are thinking, feeling, or saying:
- I have no choice.
- This doesn’t make sense. How could he-she-they do that (to me)?
- I have to act now or else “they” will beat me to it.
- I can’t believe this is happening again.
- We’re not on the same page.
- This isn’t what I expected.
- I know the answer, and I’m not interested in what someone else thinks.
Professional Effectiveness and Personal Fulfillment
Not surprisingly, the equation references an all-important addend, humility. Humility should fuel your curiosity and drive the need to pause. Guilmartin explains that “in situations where you think you know enough, pausing to wonder what you don’t know is a vital, even game-changing leadership skill.”
The twelve practices are:
- Drive your choices instead of being driven. Apply the Power of Pause to take back self-control and recognize you always have a choice.
- Be aware of your filters (and theirs). Remember that filters can lead to unconscious misinterpretations.
- Give the benefit of the doubt. Check your assumptions. Meaning isn’t in the words: it’s in the interpretation of them—by you and others. When in doubt, ask, “Can you help me see what you see?”
- Stop putting deposits in your resentment bank account. Resist jumping to premature conclusions or depositing frustrations based on your perception of “the facts.”
- Use rephrasing as a Twenty-First-Century risk management tool. Stick your neck out: rephrase what you think someone meant by what he said; it builds trust.
- Use the Get Curious Not Furious approach. “Missed understandings” happen—a lot! They're normal. Try not to take them personally.
- Ask: What’s on your plate? Understand someone else’s priorities while you also acknowledge your own. Remember to ask yourself, “What’s on my plate?”
- Ask: What don’t I know I don’t know? In order to drive success with an extra measure of humility, ask, What don’t I know I don’t know? About what’s driving me or them in the situation?
- Take responsibility for being understood: reverse rephrase. Reverse rephrase to confirm that you were understood; welcome the chance to clear up any “missed understandings.”
- Make withdrawals from your resentment bank account. Withdraw earlier deposits to prevent them from building up negative energy in your account.
- Know your trigger points (and theirs). Prevent yourself or others from being caught in self-defeating patterns. Become aware of who or what triggers you so that you can respond instead of react.
- Strengthen relationships: offer timely, specific appreciation. Put the Power of Pause in action with timely, specific recognition of what works and why. Help people also know what they can do to be even more effective and how you can support them in being their best.
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Of Related Interest:
Consider: Harnessing the Power of Reflective Thinking in Your Organization
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Master the PRIMES
Faced with the need for transformative change, a leader’s ability to form and sustain effective groups is critical. The Primes will help you to understand the reasons behind what is blocking the progress of your group.
Each of the Primes that McGoff identifies challenges you to take a look at fundamental components of group dynamics by asking key questions. For example the Change versus Transformation Prime asks, “Are you fixing or creating?” The distinction between fixing or creating is important and requires a different approach. What kind of problem are you trying to solve? Fixing is about making a better, faster, cheaper past. Fixing involves corporate improvement programs like Activity Based Costing, Six Sigma and others.”These tools are effective when a better past is the desired outcome, but they’re dead weight in the business of transformation.” Creating is about transformation—imagination, declaration, invention, and innovation.
The Trust the Universe Prime asks, “Is your vision limited to what you have already seen?” This Prime is a mindset that understands that we don’t know what we don’t know and whatever we need to realize is out there in the future somewhere. But…“Trust in the Universe is a myth. It’s a required myth, an essential myth for any true leader, but a myth just the same. Embracing this Prime is the only real way to create transformative possibilities.” Importantly, McGoff adds, “Leaders understand that although Trust in the Universe promises no guarantees, it gives us the ability to imagine without limit and watch what shows up.”
The section on gaining a shared perspective asks questions like, “How do you help people to see the ‘whole thing’?” and “How do you help people to see the same ‘whole thing’?” The S-Curves Prime is recognizing that “every system has a time of ‘figuring it out,’ a period of growth, and then an inevitable collapse if no change is made. But there is hope: you can build a second curve before the first one goes down. However, you have to get the new curve started before the first one even begins to peak.” The question is, “Where are you on your current S-curve?
The Facts, Stories, and Beliefs Prime is the need to distinguish facts from stories from beliefs. There is one of each in the following sentences: “Our revenue was $50 million last year (FACT), and that is simply not enough (STORY). Marketing is inept (BELIEF).”
One of the last Primes discussed is an increasingly difficult one: A Clearing. How skilled are you at creating nothing? A clearing in your schedule, your office or meeting place, or your mind: a space where possibilities can exist.
The Primes leaves you with plenty to think about. Each concept is illustrated with “back-of-the-napkin” style illustrations, and explained with tangible examples. The Primes will show you where you can grow as a leader.
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