Why You’re Not Getting the Truth

“They shoot the messenger.” The phrase has its origin from antiquity, but has just as much meaning today. If you’re the leader, you may be the shooter. When you’re the boss, people want to please you. Whether you’re the CEO or a front-line supervisor, your team wants to keep you happy. Nobody wants a frown on the boss’s face. You may not be getting the truth because you respond so badly when you do.

It takes courage to deliver bad news and especially to deliver it to the boss. That’s especially true when the boss has a tendency to start firing. When we believe we’ll get “shot” by delivering bad news, we protect ourselves by sharing only the good stuff. When the boss asks, “How’s that project going?” the likely answer will be, “Just fine.”

A good leader is a good teacher. Disappointments and challenges are opportunities to build skills and to build trust. Trust is the glue that holds a productive team together. A leader needs to create a safe environment for the team. The team works best when there is an open exchange – good news and bad news, early and often. If you tend to respond with anger at bad news, you’re not creating a productive environment. You’re fostering fear.

If you tend to shoot the messenger, here are 3 ways to start a peaceful, productive approach:

1. Announce a ceasefire. Have the courage to tell your team that you are aware of your previous tendency to respond with anger. Communicate openly that you will respond differently then be sure that you really do.
2. Ask for the tough stuff.  Request to hear concerns or problems. You might have to really dig for it since folks have been reluctant in the past. Ask, “What are you concerned about?” “Where do you see a threat?” “What challenges are you facing?”
3. Teach.  Discipline yourself to change your response. If you’ve had a record of shooting, your new way of responding will be closely watched. Take a breath and create an opportunity for learning: “What approach are you taking to problem-solving?” “What are the three best possible solutions?” “What are you learning?”

A leader’s job is to create trusting teams. Put down your weapon.

3 Ways to Find the Truth about Your Leadership

“Am I a good leader?”  “How can I be a better leader?” If you’re asking those questions, that’s good, but I suggest that you go to the source. The question is yours to answer. Here’s why: A guiding principle of leadership is self-awareness.   Ask yourself how you can be a better leader.

Self-awareness is critical to leadership because, quite simply, leaders have power and people don’t easily speak truth to power.   That power causes pressure to please. Direct reports and colleagues needs things from you and giving you anything but good news might get in the way of that. People want your approval when you’re a leader so speaking the truth–even when it is requested–is not likely to happen.

Here are 3 Ways to Find the Truth about Your Leadership Style

1. Educate yourself.   Understand the leadership model for your organization. Read books about leadership. Read blogs from leadership thinkers. If you’re paid to lead, then start learning about it. If you’re serious about your profession, don’t wait for a leadership development program. Ask yourself if you know enough about the art of leadership.
2. Find role models. Consider the influential people in your life. Maybe it was your 5^th-grade teacher or your scout leader. Identify why and how they influenced you and what the effect was.   Ask yourself if you are embodying what you admired in them.
3. Set your standards. When you understand more about the art and science of leadership and your own role models, then create standards for yourself.   Decide what you will strive to do and how you’ll do it. Create your own competency model to be the kind of leader you want to be. Ask yourself if you are living up to your own standards everyday.

In short: Actively seek the truth, from yourself, about how you lead.

Take Note – Improve Performance through Reflection

Charles Jennings, Liz Keever, Heather Rutherford

I think you’re missing opportunities. Yep, I do. Here’s why: You have an opportunity to learn from every experience you have. By considering what happened, both good and not good, you can determine what to change and what to keep. When you learn, you can become more productive.  I suspect you might be letting a lot of those learning opportunities pass you by.

I attended the ASTD Conference in Washington DC this week. I was there to meet the co-founders of the 70:20:10 Forum (Charles Jennings and Heather Rutherford).   The 70:20:10 framework is based on the idea that most (70%) of what we learn at work is from our experience and observing others. It’s cultural. We do as others do. Social learning (engaging in learning conversations or “how to” demonstrations) makes up about 20% and being in a workshop or webinar accounts for only about 10%.   Informal learning makes up 90% of how we learn at work.  Doing the math here, we know that there are lots of opportunities for you to learn on the job. My suspicion is that you might be missing a lot of them.

One very powerful way to learn through on-the-job experience is reflection. It has been recognized for years, by learning experts, as being essential for learning. Simply by thinking about what happened, and why, can help you determine what worked – so you can repeat it — and what didn’t work so you can avoid it. Two professors from Harvard Business School recently conducted research (click here to read about it) that reveals that reflection on-the-job can improve performance approximately 20%. Now that’s worth thinking about, isn’t it?

Reflection is not even the best, or only, way the HBS research showed how to improve productivity. Sharing knowledge and insights is the very best way to improve productivity. Sharing, in this research, was the act of taking “detailed notes on particular strategies employed” in an experience knowing they would be shared with others.

So what?

Take notes and share them.   The research tells us there’s more to gain by taking notes than when you only think and talk (although that’s valuable). Taking notes can help you organize your thoughts – especially when you know someone else will be reading them.

Notes may be taken by yourself or with a group. After an experience, write the “take aways.” Do not write down all that happened – these aren’t “minutes.” Simply, write down what’s important to remember, what you realized. Keep it clear and succinct.

Share those notes any way that makes sense – but do share them. Let learning multiply.  Lessons you learned can be very valuable to others. You may want to post them on a SharePoint site or e-mail them, whatever helps the learning cascade to others.

In short: You can improve productivity by reflecting on experiences, taking notes and sharing them with others.

Coaching in a Group = More Insights

A research study determined that 92% of executives who had worked with a coach would do so again.   Coaching is highly-regarded as a successful way to learn although one-on-one coaching is costly.  Not only costly, but perhaps even not as rich an experience as in a group.

Learning is a social activity.  When we are matched with others who have the same motivation and the same learning needs, rather than with a single tutor, our growth can increase exponentially.  We can bounce ideas off each other, learn from the experience of others and get reality checks.

The Oxford dictionary defines insight as:

the capacity to gain an accurate and deep intuitive understanding of a person or thing

We know that the best way to do that it is to view something through various lenses over time.

My partner, Jill Lesko, and I will start coaching in groups the week of October 14, 2013.   Our first group will be for New Leaders.  Our groups will be Insight Circles in which we will provide a framework for learning and freedom for self-determination.

We will vet participants to ensure that the group is well-matched and aligned.   If you’d like to have a conversation about joining, please contact me.

Why Coaching in a Group is Better

 “We all need somebody to lean on.” Those words, from the HBR blog, “How to Cultivate a Peer Coaching Network” , simply state a key benefit of a coaching group.  As the old saying goes, “two is better than one” and even more people to lean on is even better.

An Insight Circle is a group of 6-8 carefully-selected professionals who share a need to develop a new set of skills.  Each participant offers a unique perspective to the wisdom of the group, with the guidance of the coach.  Each participant also benefits from the experiences and insights of his or her peers.  Coaching has been proven again and again to be a very effective way for leaders to develop.  Yet coaching one-on-one can be expensive and lacks the benefits of a group experience.

Here’s a list of the advantages that coaching in a group has over one-on-one:

1. A group can provide a wider perspective than any individual coach
2. Peers often have more credibility than a coach does in certain areas
3. Individuals are typically more accountable to a group than to one other person
4. The self-direction of the group offers learning in real-time for real work situations
5. Participants build a network of supportive colleagues that will last beyond the coaching group

Our first Insight Circle is for New Leaders and starts in September 2013 in Manhattan.  Please contact me to talk about it.

5 Tips for Collaboration — Give,Take and Learn

Co-labor is the root of the word collaboration but Dang! — It is not so easy to truly collaborate with others.  Years ago I worked with a fellow who divided up responsibilities on a project — had us all go away then reconvene wherein he would criticize our work.  His comment to me was “If that’s not collaboration, then I don’t know what it is!”  Well…respectfully, I will say — I don’t believe he knows what it is.

Collaboration is talked about so much in leadership and in learning these days — which is great because it’s long over due!  Learning is social.  We learn from each other.  “Leadership is a relationship” — is the founding principle for famed thought-leaders, Kouzes and Posner.  Our Guided Learning Experience is very collaborative and we’ll be talking about June 9 from 1:00 to 2:00 pm EDT in our webinar.  You can register at orationgroup.com.  We’d love to have you join us.

You can find lots of models for collaboration and as many as 12 principles about it.  I’m a believer in keeping things simple so I’m sharing 5 tips here that I’ve learned in my years as a training facilitator, executive coach and co-worker.  I hope you find them useful.

1.  Agree on the goal and standards.  What are you out to achieve and how well will you achieve it?

2.  Agree on how you’re going to communicate.  Frequency, method, managing conflict?  Make sure face-to-face communication is often in the mix.

3.  Agree on priorities.   Maintaining the relationship should be near the top of the list.  It is critical that trust be maintained.  Priorities are not always about the work.

4.  Choose your battles.  That old adage is all about collaboration.  Each participant on the project must feel heard and respected.  Control freaks are not welcome. 

5.  Admit failure.  Failure is, indeed, an option.  A very human one.  It does not mean the end, for heaven’s sake.  It just means you failed.  If it is wasted, covered-up, lied about or not a learning opportunity then you’re in trouble.

Enjoy working together !

A Vision for Learning: Four Tips to Create It

We often ask children “What do you want to be when you grow up?”  We presume that children have a vision for their future.  In fact, we expect them to!  As children know, to attain your vision — you’ll need to learn.  Aspiring to a hoped-for future state, means learning, stretching and reaching for it.

We cannot wait for our leader to have a vision.  We need to be responsible for our own future state — whatever it may be.   We need to be responsible for our own motivation.  Intrinsic motivators are those that are internal to us and the ones that really do put the fire in our belly.

Reaching your vision will mean that you’ll need to learn how to be a good learner.  In other words, focus your vision for learning.

I’m passionate about guiding motivated learners.  We’ll talk about that in our highly-interactive webinar:  Developing Leaders Virtually:  A Guided Learning Experience.  June 9 from 1:00 to 2:00 EDT.  Register at www.orationgroup.com

Meanwhile, here are 4 tips to create your own vision for learning:

1. Create a Learning Journal.  Write your goals.  What do you want to learn?
2. Know the benefits.  How will you benefit from knowing this?  How will others benefit?
3. Recollect your best learning experiences.  Identify what was so good about that learning experience?  Why was it so good?  How can it be recreated?
4. Leverage your learning style.  Are you visual?  Tactile?  Do you need to talk it through with someone?  Do you prefer to step back and reflect?

Virtual Learning for Leaders

Yes indeed, virtual learning for leaders can be done!  Not a webinar, not just blended learning, not e-learning modules — but a hybrid of coaching, group work, learning partners and reflective practice.  All of those are complimented by videos and Podcasts — and that is what we call a Guided Learning Experience.

Training Journal has published my article on it in the March issue. It is called “Picking Up the Pieces: The Guided Learning Experience.” The Guided Learning Experience is our “blended learning on steroids” and sometimes is entirely virtual. The article explains it and provides three brief case studies.

Let me know what you think!

Presence is Focus

Here is my interview on Leadership and Presence with Shaku Selvakumar, blogger at The Heart of Change and WW Web & Social Media Strategist for IBM.

http://shakus.wordpress.com/author/shakus/