Audio Tidbits

Jackson, Brad and Ken Parry. A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book About Studying Leadership. Los Angeles: SAGE Publications, Ltd., 2008.

You have some clear convictions about what you think constitutes the right and the wrong way to lead someone or to be led by someone.

While the importance of the role of individual leaders tends to be overestimated, the significance of leadership itself should never be underestimated.

If you do not aspire to change something and you don't have a good reason for changing it, you cannot and should not lead.

In summary, the trait approach to leadership has had problems, has been discredited, and is really not valid now.

If you strike the right balance between concern for people and concern for production, you will be the most effective leader.

The behavioural approach to leadership has also gone out of favour in recent years, with the exception that transformational leadership has been criticized as another behavioural theory under a different guise.

The trait approach to leadership seemed to say that men were better leaders than women. The behavioural approach now seems to suggest that women demonstrate better leadership than men do, on average. Actually, there is no consensus in the literature about gender differences in leadership styles. For example, only weak evidence exists suggesting that women display more transformational leadership than men. …

The bottom line is that gender differences with regard to leadership, even if significant, are slight. There seems to be little mileage in pursuing this as a specific research direction, unless gender is couched as a social identity rather than as a biological binary relationship.

…a conception of the leader as someone who defines organizational reality through the articulation of a vision, and the generation of strategies to realize that vision.

Charismatic leadership really is a function of the whole situation. It is leader identity, leader behaviour, follower identity, sociocultural context and organizational setting all working together concurrently.

While equilibrium is achieved between followers and leaders, leadership will be sustained. When it begins to become unbalanced, that is, leaders and followers are providing too little and/or taking too much, then the relationship ultimately has to be renegotiated.

It's important to recognize that you cannot train leaders. You can, however, help to develop certain behaviours and skills that can assist individuals in leading others. Training in interpersonal communication skills, presentation skills, decision-making skills and facilitation skills can be very helpful. But these are merely means to an end. Many leaders have got by without fully developing these skills. What's really important is the ability continually to learn from your experiences.

Chapter 3 – The Crisis State

Initially, it may be difficult to make the conceptual transition from “conflict” to “crisis.” If so, the difficulty probably lies in a tendency to think about crisis and then trying to understand the crisis state. If someone is extremely upset, angry, or depressed, we are first aware of the intensity of his emotional state. In late chapters, we will talk about crisis communication, and we will see that crisis intervention responds first to these intense emotions. Nonetheless, our ability to help the individual in crisis depends on our sensitivity to and awareness of crisis itself. Just as conflict exists within the interaction between the individual and his situation, crisis is also a product of that same interaction. The individual is in crisis; the crisis is not in the individual. He is caught up in “the crisis state.” What is the crisis state? It is nothing more or less than a limited and special instance of the conflict state. As we will see, the interaction between the individual and his total situation has become so conflicted that it has temporarily gotten out of hand. Why did the conflict get out of hand? What happened that intervention is now required? …

THE PRECIPITATING EVENT

In Figure 3, the individual has shifted from the conflict state to the crisis state. What happened? Either suddenly or gradually a new conflict within his interaction developed or an already existing conflict worsened. We will call the causes of such a crisis state the “precipitating event.” Whatever happened, an existing conflict worsened or a serious new conflict developed. We will say that the precipitating event “set off” or caused the crisis. When we are dealing with people in crisis, then, one of our first questions will be: “What happened?” Our effort here is to move gradually toward crisis reduction.

When seeking precipitating events, the tendency is to look for complex psychological or social causes. This leads to very complicated notions of cause and to considering factors, situations, conditions, and circumstances substantially removed in time from the crisis. In the social interaction model, emphasis is place on a precipitating event immediately preceding the present crisis. The individual in crisis is a complex human being; his total situation is similarly complex. Moreover, the conflict between the individual and his situation may be complex. However, the precipitating event tends to have the quality of the “straw that broke the camel’s back.” Something relatively definable brought the interaction to a crisis point.

Aaron, age twenty-two, comes in to the twenty-four-hour drop-in service at 3:30 a.m. He tells a rather confused and disconnected story, indicating that he could not sleep and had to talk to someone. His wife is five months’ pregnant and has worked at a Laundromat for two years. She is twenty-three. He has lived in this area for five years but has no close relatives or friends. Until a few months ago, she was fine. They talked about what they would name the baby and how things would be after the baby arrived. He pays her support, the rent on her apartment, doctor bills, and so on. She always wanted a baby, but she also seemed to want everything else: a new car, furniture, clothes, vacations, and so on. She has left him before. Last February, she was gone but sent him a beautiful card expressing her love and telling him how much she cared for him. They have been married for almost four years and have a beautiful house. His father-in-law does not like him and will not have anything to do with him. His mother-in-law says she is sorry but there is nothing she can do. They do everything for his brothers-in-law and their families but never seem to help him and his wife when they need help. They always tell her she’s better off without him. This hurts him,

Where and When are Leadership Connections Initiated

As Figure 3 in Ecological Human Services Management shows, leadership connections can be planned or unplanned, as represented in the left column of the figure. Additionally, they can be Leadership Team member initiated or stakeholder initiated, as represented in the middle and right columns of the figure. The result is leadership connections that are planned and member initiated, planned and stakeholder initiated, unplanned and member initiated, and unplanned and stakeholder initiated. If the Leadership Team restricts its membership to people who do well on the earlier Leadership Team membership assessment, the four types of connection initiations shown in Figure Three are manageable for the members. They are comfortable with all four types.

Let's expand on the four initiation types. Planned initiations are those where either the member or the stakeholder decides ahead of time to initiate a connection and then pursues the connection. This may start with a letter or phone call, but may as commonly start with either the member or stakeholder planning ahead of time to introduce himself or herself at a meeting or other gathering.

A few cautions are in order when considering planned connections. The Leadership Team member should initiate the connection personally. If possible, do not have someone else make the arrangements. For example, do not have a secretary, co-worker, or another stakeholder arrange for the first meeting. If initiating the connection by letter or phone, do not ask the stakeholder to contact you. For example, if you leave a message on voice mail, let the person know who you are, briefly why you are calling, and that you will try again at another time. You can leave your number at the end, letting the person know returning the call is fine if they prefer. Just do not give any hint you expect them to call you. €“ When calling anyone, take a minute to decide before you place the call exactly what you will say, if you need to leave a voice message. Do not wait until you hear the beep to think about what you want to say.

Additionally, never initiate a connection by email. In general, avoid emails with stakeholders all together, unless the other person sends an email to you. Even then, a phone call is better and a face-to-face contact is better yet. Email is just too impersonal for leadership connections. Also, do not stop by someone's home or office without an appointment, expecting the person to meet with you. This is both rude and inconsiderate. …

Further, do not call a stakeholder on his or her cell phone or send him a text message, unless he has given you the number personally and asked you to use the number. Do not send text messages to stakeholders unless you are replying to a text message the stakeholder sent to you.

For both planned and unplanned connection initiations, there is one exception to the above caution about personally initiating a connection. When at a meeting or other gathering, asking someone you already know to introduce you to someone they already know is usually acceptable to the potential stakeholder. You can then say as part of the introduction you were hoping you would get a chance to talk with him or her. This lets him know you have an agenda beyond the social pleasantry and starts your relationship on an open and honest basis and clarifies the role of the person making the introductions. If it is not awkward under the circumstances, ask the potential stakeholder if you can call him later to arrange a time to talk more. Do not try to pursue your agenda then unless the potential stakeholder specifically asks you to do so. Just give him your card and call later, if he agrees. As we saw earlier, good Team members are never pushy.

Have you ever wondered how frustrated people manage to be so frustrating? Well, it requires a set of skills that most people don't have but can develop, with practice. If you aspire to be among the frustrating elite, here is a full dozen of the most useful techniques for totally frustrating people. With time and concentration, even amateurs can become proficient at frustrating most anyone. The only requirement is to creatively expand these techniques to numerous relationships and to add new and innovative techniques as you go along. Read and judge for yourself.

1. Always play it safe; and above all, don't take any chances. If it is not in writing, either get it in writing or refuse to do it until it is in writing. If it is already in writing, ask for clarification. Once you have gotten clarification, check with a few other people to see what their understanding is and then ask for a meeting to discuss the confusion everyone is experiencing.

2. Put most of your time and energy into worrying and hoping nothing changes. When things do change, ask for written procedures and clarification. Once you get clarification, suggest that the changes be put off until everyone has had an opportunity to provide input and to discuss the long-term implications of the changes. After everything has been discussed at least twice, take your sweet old time getting with the new program, letting everyone you talk to know that the changes are causing things to back up and nothing is getting done.

3. Avoid taking responsibility for anything. Certainly don't volunteer and be reluctant even if asked. If you can't avoid it, ask for written instructions and check back often for additional instructions and clarification. If someone tells you, "If you can't handle this, I will find someone who can," you should say, "That's an excellent idea. I really have too many other responsibilities to handle this right now anyway."

4. Don't put up with the quirks and idiosyncrasies of other people. You know how to behave and they should too. If there is anything about them or the way they do things that you know isn't the way people should act, mention it to a few people. Say something like, "I suppose you have heard what people are saying about so-and-so." Not one person in a hundred will resist saying, "No, what?" Now just lay it out, being careful to emphasize that, although you don't feel that way personally, other people are getting pretty fed up with it and that you just want to give everyone a head's up about the problems that are brewing out there.

5. Since someone is going to screw something up sooner or later, you might as well just assume that things are a mess. Even if they seem okay right now, all you need to do is wait around for a while. To be on the safe side, you can bring it up in casual conversations now and then. You need only pick a couple of things that could go wrong since they likely will; and if not, something equally bad will happen. As sincerely as you can, say something like this, "Have you thought about the consequences of this or that happening? Don't you think we better think this through more carefully and not be so quick to jump into things we don't thoroughly understand? We have done that before and it looks like we would learn. I would hate to see us end up with egg on our faces again." (If asked, you can mention most anything that didn't work out at anytime in the past.) Now, when something down-the-road does not work out as expected, and something will not work out, you then only need to say in your most concerned voice, "I was worried that this might happen. I will certainly pitch in and help you with your problem but I'm sure not optimistic. It's too bad things are such a mess around here."

6. Since most people are out for themselves, never take anyone on an "as is" basis. Just assume that what they are saying to you and what they are really...

Hogan, Robert. Personality and the Fate of Organizations. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 2007.

…all managerial jobs have one important feature in common: They help accomplish the work of an organization through other people. This means that managers are responsible for the performance of their staffs.

The word leadership has two meanings. On the one hand, leadership refers to a certain kind of position in an organization--a leadership position. On the other hand, leadership refers to a kind of performance--behaving in a leader-like way.

By definition, managers are in positions of leadership; whether they exercise it appropriately is another question.

The published literature on leadership is immense--actually overwhelming--and growing daily.

Effective leaders tend to be resilient and handle stress well, they promote a vision and develop strategies to translate the vision into reality, they solve tactical and strategic problems, they set high goals and work hard to achieve them, they project a sense of self-confidence, they build relationships, they build teams, they follow through on their commitments and treat people fairly, and they plan and organize work. These attributes are no guarantee of success, but they improve the odds of a person being able to build a high-performing team that achieves results.

…bad management is the primary cause of employee dissatisfaction--the best predictor of employee dissatisfaction is poor leadership.

…bad managers create turnover--people do not quit organizations, they quit bad bosses. …

…perceived integrity--keeping one's word, fulfilling one's promises, not playing favorites, not taking advantage of one's position, and not claiming special privileges.

…visionary—they [leaders] can explain why the team's activity is important and how it contributes to the future success and well-being of the members.

Leaders are leaders are leaders, even when they are bad.

…the primary task of leaders is to build a group, persuade the individuals to work together, and then maintain their performance.

Leaders with imagination can project a vision that participants find attractive, morally compelling, and worthy of allegiance, whereas incompetent leaders unwittingly project visions that are distasteful to people.

…leaders must be perceived as having integrity, decisiveness, competence, vision, persistence, and humility.

Give people clear, frequent, and accurate feedback.

This unusually complex strategy starts with being as quick to tell people what they have done right as you are to tell them what they have done wrong. That does not sound difficult, does it?

What if the order is reversed though?

Be as quick to tell people what they have done wrong as you are to tell them what they have done right.

Now it sounds odd. It seems like I am suggesting that equal attention needs to be given to both what's right and what's wrong. There you go. That is exactly the point.

It is not necessary to go into a lot of detail about leaders who only relate to team members in terms of problems and things they have done wrong. They also point fingers and know every problem is someone else's fault. Their major activity is finding someone, anyone to criticize or blame. You are also well-aware of leaders who appropriately point out problems but seldom point out good work. It is not unusual to see the compliment criticism balance favoring criticism. …

I certainly recommend that leaders carefully attend to keeping the balance in balance.

For a proactive leader, finding and keeping the balance is based on taking it for granted that people are trying to do a good job. They do not intentionally screw things up, make mistakes, or perform below their abilities. Even more, most everyone on the team consciously and intentionally gives the little extra that moves good work into the excellent category. Their commitment to excellence is a major reason why they are on the team, and excellence is what you get from them, the first time, on time, every time.

Here is the rub. With highly successful teams, the expectation is that team members perform at the excellent level every time, no exceptions, no excuses. People are extraordinarily good at what they do. With teams like this, compliments and praise are plentiful and lavish. Even when people are not being complimented directly, they receive indirect compliments and praise from customers and others in the external environment. They are among the best and they know it. It helps to attend to direct praise and acknowledgment of superior performance, but this is merely an extra quality touch in an already self-reinforcing environment. If a team is not doing well, compliments and praise will not, by themselves, help much. If it is doing well, additional praise and compliments will not add much to its success.

The real issue here is criticism. Of course, a proactive leader praises publicly and only criticizes in private. He also is very careful to assure his criticism is an exact fit with the problem or issue, not overdoing it or under doing it. Criticism, no matter how well it is managed, introduces a negative element into a fast-moving, stressful environment where people are already on edge and pushing themselves to their limits. The affect is the person who is criticized and those who are coincidentally in the immediate environment become apprehensive and less productive, at least for the moment.

The point is that criticism is always temporarily counterproductive. For this reason, a proactive leader is quick to praise but very cautious when criticizing anyone, for any reason.

Clear, accurate, and frequent feedback is certainly important.

a proactive leader knows as well that providing constructive and effective criticism is the most delicate area of the feedback balancing act. If this feedback is inappropriate or excessive, the person will overreact or withdraw and the outcome is often worse than the original problem. If criticism is not forthcoming when it is appropriate or is not focused enough, the problem or issue persists and likely will get worse. Getting criticism just right, the first time, on time, every time is critical for any leader and an es...

To the inexperienced observer, “crisis” and “the individual in crisis” represent nearly equivalent notions. We say that an individual is “suicidal.” Why? Because he is depressed. We say that an individual is nervous and shaking. Why? Because he is upset. When we take the next step and ask why the individual is depressed or upset, the assumption is that the answer will point to there being something wrong with the individual or with his situation. “You are just being silly.”… “If I were you, I would get out of that situation and not put up with it anymore.”… “If you would just straighten up and deal with it, things would be better.”… “You can’t blame yourself. It’s not your fault. If they didn’t act the way they do, things would be okay.” By the inexperienced observer, then, the ‘crisis’ is interpreted to be something that is either in the individual or in the situation.

As we examine the conflict state in this chapter and focus more specifically on the crisis state in Chapter 3, we will find that the “crisis” is neither within the individual nor within the situation. The crisis lies in how you are or are not getting along within your situation.

Frequently there is conflict between the individual and his world. This situational conflict is an everyday thing. Life is full of its hassles, difficulties, and annoyances. Sometimes, though, the conflict becomes intensified to such an extent that we can accurately think of it as “a crisis state.” Understanding the crisis state and helping the people who are caught up in it is our objective. First, however, we want to carefully examine and come to understand the conflict state from which crises develop. Figure 1 illustrates conflict in terms of the individual, the situation, and the interaction between the two. A careful look at each of these three perspectives is, then, where we will start to develop an understanding of and a feeling for the social interaction approach to crisis intervention. …

THE INDIVIDUAL

Basic to an understanding of the individual in relationship to crisis is the recognition that physical development and physical health are important to everyone at every stage of the developmental process. From birth to about the age of three, children are primarily concerned with physical development. They learn how to sit, walk, talk, use the bathroom, feed themselves, manipulate objects, run, climb, and do all the things they will need to do as they grow and mature. For people of all ages, physical skills, abilities, capacities, needs, and so on, are very important to their sense of who they are and to their ability to cope with their life situation. We can see, then, that whenever an individual is experiencing some physical difficulty he also will have problems in coping with his responsibilities and opportunities. This difficulty in coping may at times be more than the individual can handle. For example, children with serious physical difficulties may become overwhelmed with feelings of inadequacy and helplessness when they are unable to participate in normal activities, do the kinds of things other children do, be accepted by other children as equals, and so on. Adults may suddenly find themselves in a position where they are unable to work, unable to drive, unable to carry out their day-to-day responsibilities, unable to cope with simple routines like getting to the store, and generally feeling inadequate and useless. Elderly people frequently become depressed and overwhelmed by their recent inability to hear, see, walk, and so on. Throughout the life cycle, physical difficulties and health problems represent a serious liability and frequently contribute to social and emotional crises.

Similarly, emotional development is an important dimension. An individual’s emotional makeup receives its primary developmental structure during the preschool years.

This episode of the Audio Tidbits Podcast is an eight-minute lesson in leadership. It shows us that leadership comes last, always. Perhaps it might have been better named as the five prerequisites to leadership. Either way, leadership is at the end of the learning curve, not where it starts.

Hesselbein, Frances and Rob Johnston. On Mission and Leadership: A Leader to Leader Guide. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2002.

Intellectual capital is an organization's primary asset. Knowledge workers seek meaning and purpose in their work, a climate of trust and optimism, and results.

Technical competence: business literacy and grasp of one's field

Conceptual skill: a facility for abstract or strategic thinking

Track record: a history of achieving results

People skills: an ability to communicate, motivate, and delegate

Taste: an ability to identify and cultivate talent

Judgment: making difficult decisions in a short time frame with imperfect data

Character: the qualities that define who we are

… constituents seek four things: meaning or direction, trust in and from the leader, a sense of hope and optimism, and results. …

Effective leaders bring passion, perspective, and significance to the process of defining organizational purpose.

…constituents want not just a vision of where we're heading but also where they've been and where they are now.

In short, every exemplary leader that I have met has what seems to be an unwarranted degree of optimism--and that helps generate the energy and commitment necessary to achieve results.

Emotional intelligence is more important to successful leadership than I Q or technical expertise. Emotional intelligence includes self-awareness and the abilities to manage one's emotions and impulses, motivate others, show empathy, and stay connected.

A leader who is self-effacing and lacks charisma may fail to inspire confidence. A charismatic leader who believes that he or she is more important than others eventually will lose followers. To inspire both loyalty and excitement, a leader needs to couple humility with charisma.

Leaders must communicate their organization's mission to all parts of the organization. The mission provides a reference point, an anchor, and a source of hope in times of change. When it connects with people's values, it brings purpose and meaning to those who are fulfilling the mission and provides the impetus for creativity, productivity, and quality in the work and in personal development.

The first responsibility of a leader is to manage his or her own character, integrity, humility, knowledge, words, and acts. Refuting the idea that management is an exercise of authority over those below, chaordic leadership is based on follower ship -- a voluntary response to a clear, constructive purpose and compelling ethical principles. Chaordic leaders focus upward and sideward as well as downward. They do not dictate; they modify conditions that prevent synergy and accomplishment.

Managing quietly involves knowing that a leader is not the sum total of an organization. It involves inspiring, encouraging, and enabling others by creating a culture of openness, trust, community, and energy. Quiet leaders are low-key but engaging and interactive. They tend to their organizations and spend more time preventing problems than fixing them. They infuse values and slow, profound change for which everyone takes responsibility while holding other things steady -- a natural continuous improvement.

Hackman, Richard J. Collaborative Intelligence: Using Teams to Solve Hard Problems. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2011.

A team is akin to an audio amplifier: whatever comes in, be it Mozart or ear-grating static, comes out louder.

To perform well, any team must include members who have the knowledge and skill that the task requires; it must recognize which members have which capabilities; and it must properly weight members' inputs--avoiding the trap of being more influenced by those who have high status or who are highly vocal than by those who actually know what they are talking about.

The benefits of teamwork come only when capable people work together interdependently to achieve some collective purpose.

Face-to-face teams are indicated when creating a high-quality product requires coordinated contributions in real time from a diversity of members who have complementary expertise, experience, and perspectives.

We have seen that the five common types of teams discussed--surgical, coacting, face-to-face, distributed, and sand dune--are appropriate in some task and organizational circumstances, but not in others.

The social processes the team uses in carrying out the work enhance members' capability to work together interdependently in the future.

An effective team is a more capable performing unit when it has finished a piece of work than it was when the work began. …

here is the rub: research has shown that leader behavior makes the most constructive difference for teams that are reasonably well structured and supported in the first place. If a team is poorly composed, has an ambiguous or unimportant purpose, and operates in an organization that discourages rather than supports teamwork, there is no way that a leader's hands-on interventions with that team can turn things around.

The six enabling conditions are: creating a real team , specifying a compelling direction or purpose for the team, putting the right number of the right people on the team, specifying clear norms of conduct for team behavior, providing a supportive organizational context, and making competent team-focused coaching available to the team.

If what holds members tightly together is a shared wish to maintain harmony and good interpersonal relationships, the risks of dysfunction are high. But if cohesiveness stems from a shared commitment to accomplishing the team's task, it can unleash members' energies and talents to generate synergies that never would be seen in a loosely bounded group.

One way to lessen the likelihood of purpose-related problems in managerial and professional teams is to establish, as a team's first and most important task, the development of an agreed-upon statement of the team's main purposes.

Someone who is internally motivated feels great when he or she has done well, and feels bad when things have gone poorly. It is those internally generated feelings that fuel motivation, not extrinsic rewards or prods from a supervisor.

…leaders often put too many people on the team in the first place, either to make sure the team has enough members to accomplish the work or to include at least one representative of every constituency with a stake in the outcome. The perverse result can be such an excess of members than the team has little chance to perform at a level that will please those same constituencies.

Psychological safety is a shared belief that the team is a place where one can take personal and interpersonal risks. Members of psychologically safe teams are better able to admit mistakes, more likely to ask for help from teammates, more open about what they do and do not know, and more likely to learn from the expertise of others.