ChoinqueCast

This choinquecast was scripted while on a morning flight from Denver to Tampa, after we finished a three-day Academy Leadership Excellence Course in Colorado Springs. A common theme during our several days together was the desire to occupy a leadership role, but the tendency to stay in a management, or task-oriented mode most of the time. One of the more courageous in the group admitted exasperation at being in “crisis mode” every day, and how exhausting it had become over the past couple years. Most of the attendees were program or project managers, who in their hearts, really want to operate more from a leadership mindset.

This brought to mind Alan Berson and Richard Stieglitz’s terrific Leadership Conversations, which challenges readers in Chapter 1 with the question “Do I want to be a Leader” and systematically outlines comparative management and leadership styles within four conversation types. Their book seems perfectly suited for Project Management Professionals (PMPs), those thrust into relatively new leadership positions, and those ready to advance their leadership level.

Upon landing in Tampa, the next stop was the Project Management Institute, or PMI Tampa Chapter annual symposium, for an energizing three and a half hour workshop for over a hundred local professionals. By facilitating six exercises, the idea was to offer a set of leadership tools, so that everyone could leave the symposium ready to build something new and lasting, including their personal influence as leaders. The first five workshops were:

Multitasking exercise
Johari Window exercise
Clarity of Intentions and Energy exercise
Brief-back exercise
Conflict Scenarios role-play

The last workshop was more advanced, a set of case studies which introduced effective decision-making, including a comparison of time and development-based decision making styles. Working as teams, everyone really poured their hearts into the workshop, and learned that leaders can make decisions based on developing others, not just based on cost and schedule. It was illuminating listening to the revelations from everyone in the symposium.

What conversations do you have as a leader? Does your decision-making process focus on development of others? Great leaders focus conversations and decisions in order to develop others.

Executive presence. What it that? This has come up several times during coaching sessions recently, including a one-on-one with the advocate for a director who will soon move to the C-Suite. In both sessions, the discussions included meetings, and how performance could be improved during them, along with increased executive presence.

Here’s a couple ideas to consider.

Try the 2 + 2 Rule, mentioned by Dr. Mindy Hall in Leading with Intention. Dr. Hall learned of the 2 + 2 rule from a trusted senior executive. Here’s how it works. First, before any meeting, think of two questions to bring up during the meeting. Maybe on the walk to the meeting. At a minimum, it will demonstrate curiosity, willingness to learn, engagement, and that you are actually listening. Second, think of two things to contribute during the meeting. Perhaps an observation, something you picked up reading a book, or an interesting article about your industry. Maybe it’s a valuable insight you are able to share with a colleague or recognition of something special someone in the organization did. It takes very little time, but forces you to reorient the way you approach the meeting, and your attitude, which will be readily visible to others.

Do you have weekly team meetings? What is the format of these meetings and who chairs them? In my last “corporate” executive role, we called our team the six-pack, which also corresponded to the maximum number of direct reports I was effective at actually coaching. After an off-site meeting, we set up several ground rules for weekly meetings. The first rule was that we would rotate who actually chaired, or facilitated the meeting each week. This included our entire team, including our administrator, and directors in Florida, Indiana, Arizona, and Kanata, Ontario. Everyone had a different style, highlighted different people and activities, and we quickly learned a lot more about each other. The next ground rule was that the first meeting item was recognition of something a team member did in the last week that was admirable, or just really cool and likely unknown to the rest of the group. After a couple weeks, it was amazing to find out all of the things going on in our group, and humbling to anyone who really thought they knew “what was going on” all the time. Oh, and a wonderful side benefit - our average meeting time dropped from just under 30 minutes to not more than 15 - since we were better connected throughout the week. The last rule, a hard commitment - one 30 minute session, one-one-one between me and each direct report. Since we were geographically diverse, this was usually a phone call. Needless to say, this was a very high performing team.

What does executive presence mean to you? How do you demonstrate it daily, weekly, and over time? Great leaders lead meetings.

One of my coaching clients is eager to implement numerous improvements in a rapidly changing information technology organization. Among the targeted improvements is more open and candid communication, especially in meetings. Over lunch, we discussed techniques and ideas worth trying. Three topics came up.

First, use of our personal leadership philosophy. Setting expectations, which may include how we should communicate with each other, is a vital part of anyone leader’s compass. We may even call out the need to keep key stakeholders in mind when making critical decisions, especially when leading teams in a support role to a larger enterprise.

Second we discussed how a safe environment may be created. We discussed our recent Academy Leadership Advanced Communications Workshop, which showcases Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan & Al Switzler’s pathfinder Crucial Conversations. The authors share that people who are gifted at dialogue keep a constant vigil on safety; or paying attention to the content of the conversation — that’s the easier part — and further, watch for signs that people are becoming fearful. Think about all the wasted time spent in meetings where real issues are avoided, or the conversation is entirely one-way information sharing. Listening to my client, it sounded as though historical conflict avoidance still exists, and needs to be addressed.

Which leads to our third topic, from Jeff Sutherland’s SCRUM, where he shares how poorly we are at estimating factors such as program cost and schedule. However, Sutherland notes, we are pretty good at making comparative assessments.

So we put it all together. The client, in a coaching role, can ask the team, on a scale of 1 to 10, with one unsafe, ten extremely safe, how safe they feel bringing up difficult topics and working through them. Let’s say the consensus today is a three for the group. My client can now request that the team work on improving their environment, and perhaps increasing the number from three to five or six in the next several months. It’s also a good idea to see if this new expectation is supported by his leadership philosophy, which he is actively sharing with the group.

How well does your team communicate? Does your team tackle substantive conflict, or tend to avoid uncomfortable topics? Great leaders create a safe environment.

During a “catch-up call” with a client, my colleague shared that her prior company was acquired by a larger one. During the acquisition, despite a generous offer, she made a decision to seek a new opportunity at another small company rather than stay with the larger one. The new firm sounds technically sophisticated, hip and rapidly growing - overall a fun place to work and develop at the same time. 

Curious, I asked her how in her HR role she could make the biggest difference from a leadership development perspective. Soon the discussion turned to culture. It sounded very familiar, and brought back my own startup-up CEO memories. The new company is tightly run by a CEO and CTO, or Chief Technology Officer, with an aggressive goal of tripling revenue in three years and has recently added 30 new employees. There is concern at the company about retaining the culture during this period of rapid growth, which appears to be guided today by an unwritten set of core values that everyone more or less “just knows.”

Recall that during an Academy Leadership Excellence Course, all attendees draft a written Personal Leadership Philosophy, as part of their Leader’s Compass, or True North. It’s a pretty unusual kind of thing to write, and also a powerful way to share who we are and what we believe in. Perhaps more importantly, a good leadership philosophy has humility, and makes a commitment to receiving feedback, or accountability, so that we may continue growing as leaders. In an Academy Leadership Advanced Leadership Course, all attendees go further, and develop succinct definitions of their organization’s core values along with normative behavioral statements, or clearly written descriptions of what each of the values looks like in action. We can take another step and develop an Organizational Constitution, as S. Chris Edmonds advises in the culture engine. These exercises are meant to discover, or reveal culture, not “impose” it. Think about that.

The timing sounds perfect and my impression is that my colleague is just where she wants to be, at just the right time. Well-known business leaders such as Tony Hseih of Zappos learned the time to codify core values and make critical decisions such as hiring or firing based on them, is before rapid growth, not after.

What are your core values? What is your leadership philosophy? What informs your decisions as a leader? Great leaders focus on culture.

During a recent in-house Academy Leadership Excellence Course, we shared ideas at the end of day one to improve the second and third days of the course. The first suggested improvement was that we share more with each other. Well, by day three the group really took the comment to heart. One attendee was struggling with an underperforming subordinate meeting a critical deadline during the course, and another shared a harrowing personal cancer scare. In short, we learned quite a bit about each other - we connected.

Recall one of the key takeaways from a Leadership Excellence Course is creating a written Personal Leadership Philosophy, which includes listing our deeply held core values, and often formative personal stories describing their origins. Within this particular group, the sharing we solicited from each other was captured as introductory phrases in several of the leadership philosophies. They were magnificent. For example, when one of the attendees shared that a cancer scare taught her the value of empathy, and that everyone has value, we could all feel the power and authenticity of that leadership philosophy.

In Faisal Hoque’s Everything Connects, he cautions us that static processes and thinking often prevent agility while connectivity and clusters of diverse talent predict success. He includes a great coaching question:

“And, also, can I give you a growth path into something you would like to be in two or three years?”

How well do you know yourself? And how well do you know those in your charge? Do you know their hopes and dreams? Great leaders connect.

During an Advanced Leadership Course with six attendees, we found ourselves repeatedly comparing development-driven decision making with time-driven decision making. For some in the group, the whole idea of a development-driven decision may have been a brand new idea. This should be no surprise. Imaging you are a project manager. Most metrics are tied to fundamental criteria such as cost and schedule, or time.

In a time-driven decision making model, we use decision quality, implementation, and cost as our criteria, with a short-term focus. Think of the typical quarterly financial reports to Wall Street for a publicly-traded company. This model uses the least amount of time to obtain a high quality decision that is effectively implemented. Notice anything that is missing? The time-driven model attaches no value to the development of people. This probably explains why training and development budgets are frequently the first budgets cut when belt-tightening. 

In a development-driven decision making model, we use decision quality, implementation, and development as our criteria, with a long-term focus. Think of the best professional sports team, which often have successful farm teams. Think of the companies mentioned by authors such as Jim Collins in Built to Last. The development-driven model uses the most developmental alternative consistent with a high quality decision that is effectively implemented. This model also attaches no value to time. 

We revisited Coaching Tips for The Average Performer from our prior Coaching to Develop People workshop, such as finding out what motivates them, teaching them to set goals and rewarding them whenever possible. You see, how we coach, or develop the average performer, over time, will be our long-term report card for leadership effectiveness. If all we care about is cost and schedule, and never people, our report card probably won’t look very good. However, if we adopt a development-driven leadership style, on average the people who work for us will continue to grow and become more successful. Imagine what that report card will look like.

What style do you use? Have you ever tried development-driven decision making? Leaders Use Development-Driven Decision Models.

By the third follow-on executive coaching session after a three-day Leadership Excellence Course, a chemistry usually forms between coach and learner. It is important to understand that the best coaching relationships are two-way: for sharing, for learning, and for continuously improving. Two positive indicators of substantial learning and ongoing chemistry from a recent coaching session come to mind. The first involves conflict. Most of us seem to naturally avoid conflict, let’s just say years of observation support the claim. It was a delight then to hear that the client wishes to work on conflict leadership. His words: Conflict Leadership. Not just conflict, or difficult people. He used the word leadership. That was a terrific sign he really got a lot out of our Academy Leadership Leveraging the Power of Conflict workshop. It also made me think of all the things we usually do to avoid conflict which can hold us, and our teams, and our organizations back. In Michael Roberto’s extremely well-researched book Why Great Leaders Don’t Take Yes For An Answer, he argues that leaders must cultivate constructive conflict in order to enhance the level of critical and divergent thinking, while simultaneously building consensus in order to facilitate the timely and efficient implementation of the choices they make. A very strong argument.

The second indicator was my favorite part - we discussed books, what we learned from them, and most importantly, what we are doing differently afterward. Many of us become so busy, we seem to lose our curiosity, which in turn leads to further losses we probably are not even aware of. My client emailed a list of books, all worthy of reading and reviewing, and I asked my client to look on the choinque bookshelf page online to view my recent review of Whitney Johnson’s S-Curve diagram from Build an A Team. You see, one of the issues my client faces is reluctance to learn, reluctance to change, among several more experienced team members, legacy employees, who have become rather set in their ways. In his industry, travel, innovate or die is existential reality. He thought Whitney’s S-Curve perfectly captured his situation. We both learned a lot in that session.

Who coaches you? Who do you coach? How do you constructively cultivate conflict? Are you and your team curious? Leaders Embrace Conflict and Disruption.

In Episode 19, we turn the tables on the host, Jim Emerick. Rather than have Jim interview an author, leader, or influencer, we’ll learn a bit more about the choinquecast host, and how this all started. Our interviewer today, Amy Coppola, attended Jim’s first Leadership Boot Camp over seven years ago, and has stayed in touch with Jim ever since.

August is time for vacation, and it’s also time for the fall semester for college students. After a successful two-day drive returning our daughter to her apartment and roommates, we had a day together before leaving Tori to begin her senior year. It was a gorgeous morning and we found ourselves at Buttermilk Falls State Park, just southwest of Ithaca, NY, for a discovery hike. After just a few minutes it was pretty obvious who was focusing on hiking first, and who prioritized discovery. A feeble defense is in order. You see, Tori is very observant, and enjoys all creatures, great and small. We climbed alongside the falls, which were to our left, while steep, terraced slate rock rose above to our right. Lots of nooks and crannies. Temperature, humidity and lighting were perfect. By the time I noticed several species of spiders, including a few very animated daddy longlegs, Tori had found an abundance of creatures, including a brightly colored, and not small, millipede. She was ecstatic, in her element.

Daniel Kahneman would have smiled at this scene. In his landmark book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, he introduces two modes of thinking: Fast Thinking, often impulsive or instinctive, and Slow Thinking, deliberate, often rational, and frequently in conflict with Fast Thinking. Guess who was thinking fast, and who was thinking slow? Kahneman closes his work with chapters on Experienced Well-Being and Thinking About Life. Some of that seemed to be happening, especially when slowing down attempting to observe through my daughter’s eyes. 

After multiple admonishments to slow down, and missing a frog, three more millipedes and the occasional slug, I relaxed and followed. Immediately, it was noticeable that virtually all the other visitors to the park — save a lone photographer carefully awaiting the perfect combination of light, water and background —hurriedly rushed past us while mostly looking down at their smartphones.

It was clear who was the leader that morning. We experienced well-being and shared thoughts about life throughout the day. Great Leaders Pace Themselves.

In Episode 18, we meet S Chris Edmonds, founder and CEO of The Purposeful Culture Group. For nearly three decades, industry-leading executives have sought Chris out to help them build and sustain values-aligned cultures that are purposeful, positive, and productive.

When it comes to improving workplace cultures, Chris cut his teeth in the trenches, through 15 years of leading and managing teams. Realizing he had a knack and a passion for getting people on the same page and working well together, Chris launched his consultancy in 1990. A few years later, he also became a highly regarded senior consultant for The Ken Blanchard Companies.

Today, Chris is a sought-after speaker, author, and executive consultant. He’s the author or co-author of seven books, including two Amazon best-sellers: The Culture Engine and Leading at a Higher Level with Ken Blanchard. Chris is an avid blogger and video-caster and is regularly featured by global news outlets such as Forbes and The Economist.