31 Days to Becoming a Better Leader

Day #17: Corporate Culture

Culture eats strategy for breakfast.- Peter Drucker

 Here’s a process for establishing a high-functioning corporate culture for any type of enterprise. If you are starting a new venture, it’s better to focus on the culture from the beginning, since it’s much more difficult to go back and correct habits that have already been established. It’s difficult anyway since people are accustomed to a top-down, autocratic, tell-me-what-to-do type of arrangement. This establishes a culture, in which each person shows up as a leader in their various roles and at the level of their responsibility.

Leadership is an individual skill. It’s also a culture of high-performing individuals. In music, when the choir or orchestra learns the notes, then we work together to develop a synergy we call “ensemble.” This higher state of community comes through intentionality and rehearsal with everyone in the group paying attention and focusing all their efforts on the group functioning. No individual gives up their skill, however, that skill is merged with the skill of others to create a higher performance standard.

Here are my steps in developing a high-performing culture:

Intentionality of purpose in creating a high-performing culture, along with mastering the skill needed, is the only way to build an excellent corporate culture.

Next: Day #18 - Getting Team “Buy-In"

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Day #16: Group Dynamics and Conflict

Peace is not absence of conflict, it is the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means. - Ronald Reagan

In human emotional systems, we see the good, bad, and ugly of others in good times and in times of stress. We show up like we showed up many times like we did and do in our family of origin. We have developed behaviors and responses over time, and sometimes are not aware of these behaviors or responses. This is not a judgment of good or bad. It is just recognition of reality. We are influenced greatly by our family of origin.

In learning about ourselves, we learn about how we influence others. If a leader is anxious, then that anxiety is contagious and spreads throughout the team. If we remain calm, then others respond calmly or limit their emotional state and might be able to limit their responses. Leaders influence others by their state of being.

Over the past 10 years, I have been studying the work of Murray Bowen, M.D. His work as a psychiatrist with families is important to leaders in any field. His body of work is referred to as Bowen Family Systems. Eight concepts guide our thinking and our discovery process of learning about ourselves. We learn to manage ourselves.

Groups are like families. We behave like we do in our family. We respond to others and they respond to us as we do and did in our family or origin. Learning about ourselves takes us out of responding emotionally and into thinking about group emotional systems and discovering our role in that system. We impact the system.

Learning about ourselves isn’t changing who we are. It’s discovering how we can manage ourselves. If you review the podcast about Guiding Principles, you will discover how personal guiding principles help us to manage ourselves. To manage conflict and other group dynamics, we must understand ourselves and what guides our behavior.

Here’s a list of the eight Bowen Concepts and how those are useful in observing group dynamics.

8 Concepts of Bowen Family Systems

Observe how these concepts enlighten your ability to observe the behaviors of others and your behaviors. We don’t change the behaviors of others. We change our behaviors and others respond to us.

Next: Day #17 - Corporate Culture

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Day #15: Team Agreements

Unless both sides win, no agreement can be permanent.- Jimmy Carter

Leaders set up problems in many ways. One clear way we set up conflict in teams is by assuming that everyone knows what you want and you know what they want. There is a personal satisfaction factor in working together. When we don’t clearly define our overall expectations with the position description and overall satisfaction, we create conflict.

We have conflict in every group. Conflict is a sign of energy and creativity. We never solve conflict. We manage conflict. We principally manage conflict by managing ourselves. The leader must approach conflict calmly and directly, addressing the facts and engaging the other person or persons in dialogue about the differences in expectations and involving them in problem-solving. Failures are then a learning opportunity. Our job as leaders is to address the issues directly and promptly. I’ll talk more about this in the next session.

Much of the conflict arises in groups due to the lack of a clear understanding by everyone of what’s expected. I learned about creating agreements from the “Revolutionary Attorney” Stewart Levine. He’s the expert in creating mutually beneficial agreements. There are 10 steps in his model for creating agreements. They can be found in his book, The Book of Agreement: 10 Essential Elements for Getting the Results You Want.

In this book, Stewart teaches you how to create agreements that keep conflict at a minimum and make conflict manageable when it does happen. We have conflict. We manage conflict. Being a leader means you deal with it.

Stewart’s agreement format ensures that everyone is on the same page, so to speak. After we discuss all the points 1-9 and we arrive at point 10, Agreement, then we know we all are in alignment and we have an agreement.

Here are the elements for agreement:

As you see, there are topics on his list that most leaders never consider exploring. Having a direct conversation with a partner, employee, or board member is a discovery process and a clarification process. It’s the leader’s job to listen with eyes and ears and to listen for intent in addition to content. Skipping this step sets up an unnecessary conflict.

Lead from the front and not from the back, trying to catch up when you didn’t cover what’s important and needed for a healthy group process.

Next: Day #16 - Group Dynamics

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Day #14: Roles & Responsibilities

However you envisage your role in life, all you can do is perform it as best you can.

- Brian Aldiss

The price of greatness is responsibility. - Winston Churchill

It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do. It makes more sense to hire smart people and train them enough so they start telling you what to do.

- Steve Jobs

Defining roles and responsibilities is key to understanding what individuals will do and accomplish inside any leadership container.

A role is not a job title and is certainly not the same as a responsibility. A role is a general nomenclature, and a responsibility is a specific results-based language. Roles come with responsibilities.

Job titles might come with a specific role. One person has a title, however several people might have the same, or similar, roles in the organization. Several people may have the same role, but a different discipline within that role - IT, design, analyst, etc.

Responsibilities define specific accomplishments or results. Individuals are responsible for their outcomes and are mutually accountable to others on the team independently, with a mind on the interdependence of the work. One person’s accomplishments impact the work of others on the team. Even though each person is responsible on their own, there’s an impact on others in meeting or not meeting deadlines or other expectations of quality and/or quantity.

In the old model of a “Job Description,” the practice has become making a list of tasks to complete, which is a form of micromanaging. It’s better to define the results of the work than to define the activities intended to achieve results. Each person needs to utilize their specific skills in accomplishing their deliverables.

Remembering the Steve Jobs quote at the top of this section, it’s important to empower team members to think on their own, using the best thinking skills, such as creative thinking, problem-solving, cognition, memory, and originality. These are all parts of J L Guilford’s Structure of Intellect theory. We want to measure more than mere IQ.

Here’s the process:

You are the leader and not the doer. You define and manage processes and lead people. Over-functioning by the leader (doing the action plans for them) results in the under-functioning of teams.

Lead, and don’t do. That’s your role and responsibility, your duty and delight.

Next: Day #15 - Team Agreements

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Relationships

Day #13: Team Competencies

Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results. - George Patton

You have created your strategic plan, right? If not, stop and go back to doing it now. It’s important to have the end in mind before starting the journey. Be sure that you are on the right pathway and have laid down the tracks for the journey.

In the template you got when you purchased the action guide, there’s a title for each component in the strategic plan. One of those titles is “Competencies.” If you want to accomplish your goals, then inventory the skills needed to make those goals happen.

Are you seeing how important having a strategy is for getting to where you want to be…for how you make your vision become reality? It’s what I call, “Paying the upfront cost.” This upfront cost is far less than the backend cost when you have to undo things that were done in error and backtrack to where you started and begin again, which is a waste of time and money.

In this action guide, there’s a template for recruiting team members for any type of group. You can certainly make your template and use it for boards, committees, staff, advisory groups, and other types of teams.

Down one side of the page, you list the specific skills needed and draw a line down the middle. On the other side, you list the names of potential candidates for the particular group. The skills list is numbered. Go down the list of people identify the skill they bring to the organization and put the corresponding line number by their name. Some names will have more than one number. Prioritize the people with the most needed competencies and begin to make an offer to join your team.

Here’s the outline for the process:

Assimilating and leading a high-performing team means that you become a high-performing leader.

Next: Day #14 - Roles and Responsibilities 

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Day #12: Personal Growth Plan

Income seldom exceeds personal development.- Jim Rohn

Jim Rohn influenced many, many high-income earners in his lifetime. He almost always said to work on yourself harder than you work on your business. The older I get, the more I resonate with that statement.

I constantly hear from entrepreneurs, especially, that they have read about leadership and want to focus on something important, implying that leadership isn’t as important as “getting things done.”

Let me be clear: NOTHING HAPPENS WITHOUT LEADERSHIP.

We have been taught leadership incorrectly and we have inherited systems that aren’t working. It’s time to reframe leadership and work on our skills to lead the organization we are responsible for taking forward to the fulfillment of its mission.

Hugh’s four leadership principles will empower you to lead any type of organization more effectively.

Here are my principles, expressed in general principles and in a musical conductor’s terms:

These principles are how a Transformational Leader influences and transforms ideas into results and people into high-performing cultures.

Here’s my list for maintaining a personal growth program:

Join the online Community for Community Builders to support your leadership growth at http://NonprofitCommunity.org

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Day #11: Skills and Gaps

The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds. - John F. Kennedy

The popular narrative on leadership is to focus on “Strengths” and “Weaknesses.” As you might have come to expect, my calling is to change the paradigm by changing the language. Many of us don’t think that we are “weak” just because there’s a particular skill that’s not at the top of our competency list. And being transparent and open about defining weaknesses is not a particular passion for me or for some other leaders I know.

For example, I’m a visionary and I develop concepts. I write about those concepts. My passion is not in editing or proofreading my documents. That’s a piece I can delegate and have done so for over a decade. That works for me because I can focus on what I do best. I can do the editing, however, that’s not where my passion is and it’s certainly not my top skill. I delegate this task to a person on my team who has editing and proofreading as a top skill and likes doing that task. Delegation is a leadership skill and is certainly not a weakness as some may have been led to believe.

Just because I don’t do some things at the highest level does not mean that I am weak. I let go of things others can do to focus on things that only I can do.

When I interviewed Cal Turner for my podcast, “Orchestrating Success,” his story of empowering his leadership team at Dollar General spoke to me loudly. I use his example of effective leadership in keynotes and workshops. You can find that on the podcast, “Orchestrating Success, Episode 15” where you subscribe to this podcast. Or read the transcription on my website at https://hughballou.com/podcast-15-legacy-interview-with-cal-turner-jr/

Take inventory of your skills (competencies) and rate each one with a number from 1-10, with 10 being a perfect score. Define which of those need to be your priority for growing (remember that learning is a life-long journey) and which should be delegated. I suggest that any skill with a score below 5 should be delegated unless you want to grow that particular skill.

Make a list for yourself and then get feedback from a peer - not your team…yet. It will be good to use yourself as a model when you roll this process out to your team members. It’s helpful to realize that we don’t need to be good at everything. And it’s good to talk to team members about this particular thinking. Team members should have an awareness of building their skills and realize that they don’t need to master everything they think they might be expected to do. If team members have nobody to delegate to, then this is a chance to develop collaborations in the team.

By the way, your strategy defines the competencies that are needed to complete the work. Pay attention to which of those belong to you.

Here’s my perspective… “Nobody is perfect. But parts of me are excellent.” I go with what’s excellent.

Next: Day #12 - Personal Growth Plan

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Day #10: Accountabilities and Metrics

If you are building a culture where honest expectations are communicated and peer accountability is the norm, then the group will address poor performance and attitudes.

- Henry Cloud

As previously noted, having a plan is essential to the fulfillment of a vision; however, having a plan is not insurance for achieving the vision. As the old saying, in its corrected form states, “The proof of the pudding’ is in the eatin’.”

Here’s where good intentions get set aside and we set up standards for excellence. This begins with the leader (that’s you!). Transforming an idea into results means transforming interested individuals into a high-performing culture. The ultimate and most critical transformation begins and continues with the leader.

Let’s define what I mean by metrics and accountabilities.

Metrics 

This is a tool for measuring performance, for example, how many donor presentations have been made in a month, or what percentage of the people or organizations completed a donation versus those that did not donate. Metrics are broad measures of success. A KPI (Key Performance Indicator) is a deeper measure of who made a presentation to what type of person or organization, over what period, etc. Both of these are standard procedures in many, but not all businesses, and few, if any nonprofit organizations.

Accountabilities

Fundamentally, accountability is a willingness to accept responsibility for one’s actions as an individual or an organization. Nonprofit boards are accountable for the organization’s finances and governance. All decisions on contracts and budgets rest with the board. The staff is accountable to the board. I teach that board members, staff, and committee members are accountable to each other and ultimately to the board. Too many nonprofit leaders want to make all staff and volunteers accountable to them, when, in fact, it’s more productive if the groups share a mutual accountability and interface with the leader, who guides the process and sets the desired outcomes.

In organizational work, just like in corporations, much of the accountability process is empowered by face-to-face meetings. Members of any group share weekly or monthly deliverables with the group. Every member of the group realizes that even though they each are independent in responsibility for their deliverables, there is interdependence between all members of the group. If one falls behind or fails, then it impacts the work of others.

The action plans to reach monthly milestones for completing the annual goals are created in a team setting with transparency and interactivity, with each person understanding how their mutual effort impacts the success of each other. Team members make a commitment when setting deliverables to the others on the team. In the successive meetings, it becomes obvious who is making progress and who isn’t making progress.

It’s the leader’s role to interface with each team member between meetings to mentor, correct, encourage, or assist, as needed. Building relationships is key to this process.

Also, micromanaging anyone completely takes away the desire of those whom we lead to take responsibility for their work. The difference between network mentoring and micromanaging is 180º. They are exact opposites.

Define the desired outcome, allow the team members to create the action items under your guidance, stay in touch between meetings, and use regularly scheduled meetings as reporting sessions and not work sessions. You will need work sessions, just not all the time.

By the way, everyone looks to the leader to model accountability. Work on your plan more than that of others. Be sure that you set the standard and that the standard is high.

Next: Day #11 - Skills and Gaps

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Day #9: The Performance Secret – DVDs

Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment. - Jim Rohn

We define magnificent vision and mission with incredible objectives and powerful goals, and then we sit back and go, “Wow!” It seems so big that we feel overwhelmed.

We just defined how to begin breaking down those bigger results into achievable steps. Here’s the genealogy:

What’s a DVD, anyway? 

Daily ValueDeliverables 

This one step will ensure your success more than any other one. Just think…if you define three small accomplishments per day, that’s 15 per week and 60 per month.

If you completed 60 baby steps per month, how much would that impact your overall success?

What if you installed this system into the culture you are responsible for leading?

Do the math…60 completed DVDs per month times 10 team members…now you are leading a high-performing team!

Next: Day #10 - Accountabilities and Metrics

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Day #8: Plans for Action

Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art.- Peter Drucker

This is where the “rubber hits the road,” as the saying goes. Once you complete your strategic plan and define your long-term objectives and short-term goals, what you have is simply a piece of paper with words. It’s a plan, for sure, but nothing happens without leadership.

Your vision is only as good as its implementation. Your implementation depends on you and the team you lead. Certainly, the leader can’t do it all, so it’s up to the leader to develop the skills to lead the team. Moving ideas into statements of accomplishments, and moving from the starting point to the desired outcomes, is where effective leaders stand out from everybody else.

Here’s what I know…when 100 people have an idea, only 3 of them do something about it. Out of those 3, about 10% will succeed. “Why?” you ask. My response is that most visionaries don’t reach out to get mentoring or coaching from an accomplished expert to ensure their success. Just because a visionary has an idea, even if it’s a great idea, there’s a gap between concept and performance. I call that leadership. It’s not something you read about in a book and then master on your own. It’s a well-rehearsed skill built over time with support from a mentor and/or coach.

I insert this sermon about leadership at this point because we are at a critical point in the process, in which there’s a 90% failure rate…right here…moving from concept to performance. In Day #12, the Personal Growth Plan, I’ll share ideas for building your skills for success and define the value of a mentor or coach. We can’t see our blind spots, so we need a skilled advisor to help identify and deal with those.

Action Plans are the key to manifesting ideas into results. There are three critical points to an action plan:

The skilled leader defines the outcomes clearly (you’ve done this in creating goals) and then works with the team to identify the key steps to achieve the outcomes. In between the short-term goal of 1 year or less, and the action plan, are 30-day milestones. Break the annual goal into 30-day steps, and then define what will be done weekly to accomplish those milestones.

Too much work? The answer varies with the question: How successful do you want to be and how soon do you want success?

It’s up to you. Effective leaders work with a plan, so team members know what to do and how to be engaged. 

Next: Day #9 - The Performance Secret - DVDs

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