ChoinqueCast

We’ve learned through authors such as Mark Crowley that engagement in the workplace has been flat for about thirty years. Maybe old habits don’t die at all. Maybe we just need a fresh way of looking at things. In Kim Scott’s refreshing book Radical Candor, she challenges the classical Nine-Box Matrix Talent Model, developed by McKinsey, which positions individuals into a box based on potential and performance. Scott’s a deep thinker, and found she didn’t like using the word potential, because she doesn’t think there is any such thing as a low-potential human being. It says a lot about her.

Scott has been successful at top companies such as Google and Apple — very competitive and very successful organizations. So it’s not a big surprise that for the first twenty years of her career, it NEVER occurred to her that some people didn’t want the next, bigger job. She talked with Scott Forstall, who built the iOS team working directly for Steve Jobs, and he proposed using the word “growth” instead of “potential.” It’s brilliant. 

Recall in our Energize2Lead (E2L) workshops we learn than 75% of people are wired completely differently that ourselves. We also learn that there may be deep, instinctive parts of our personalities that are largely hidden. Scott realized the same thing. She tells us:

“The most important thing you can do for your team collectively is to understand what growth trajectory each person wants to be on at a given time and whether that matches the needs and opportunities of the team. To do that, you are going to have to get to know each of your direct reports at a personal level. It’s also going to require you to have some of the hardest conversations you’ll ever have. Sometimes, you’ll even have to fire people.”

That’s Radical Candor. Leadership is hard. Building a team is hard. Leaders Understand Team Members Personally.

It’s refreshing when a professional reaches out and asks for help during a period of career growth - for executive coaching. Since this has happened quite a bit this month, Marshall Goldsmith and Mark Reiter’s terrific coaching book, Triggers, came to mind. You may have heard of Marshall before, he’s a really good coach and he’s been doing it at a very high level for decades.

Powerful and lasting growth usually requires objective evaluation and structured coaching. Notice that evaluation and coaching are different forms of feedback. A common example of objective evaluation is a 360 review with inputs from different groups such as peers, direct reports, supervisors, in addition to ourselves.

Triggers was written in part, because we all have many internal triggers that hold us back, especially when receiving feedback. So, how can we think, in a general sense, about how to overcome all of these internal switches we usually aren’t aware of?

Chapters Nine and Ten, The Power of Active Questions & The Engaging Questions, form the heart of Triggers, with numerous engaging coaching stories.  Goldsmith reflects when people are asked passive questions; they almost invariably provide “environmental” answers, often allowing a diversion from needed accountability. As a remedy, four magic moves are mentioned, which trigger decent behavior in others: Apologizing, Asking for help, Optimism, and asking active questions. Active questions can’t be answered with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ and the better we know someone, the better questions we may ask. Here’s an example: 

“Tell me something important to you that would allow me
to help you become more successful and happier?”

Now let’s introduce Goldsmith’s six engaging questions:

Did I do my best to set clear goals today?
Did I do my best to make progress toward my goals today?
Did I do my best to find meaning today?
Did I do my best to be happy today?
Did I do my best to build positive relationships today?
Did I do my best to be fully engaged today?

Notice that each of these questions challenge us, daily, to do good, or to be choinque. They trigger good behavior. We can call this self coaching. 

Good leaders coach others, and themselves. Leaders ask active and engaging questions.

Retention. Talent pipeline. We keep hearing these HR terms. In the past couple weeks, a military commander reached out wishing to improve low reenlistment numbers for first term airmen, a federal bankruptcy court shared plans for a 12-month regional leadership development program for junior team members and a local CEO seeking executive coaching connected on LinkedIn. What’s going on?

In Dr. Sydney Finkelstein’s meticulously researched masterwork, Superbosses, subtitled How Exceptional Leaders Master the Flow of Talent, he explains that superbosses fall into three distinct patterns: Iconoclasts, who care about their work and their passion, such as Miles Davis, and are often artistic. Next are the Glorious Bastards, who care solely about winning, and know they need the best people to win, such as Larry Ellison, who has spawned a breadth of talent in Silicon Valley. Last, are the Nurturers, or activist bosses, who consistently guide and teach their protégés, such as Bill Walsh, legendary coach of the San Francisco 49ers.

It seems each of these three recent events may be describing a need for a more nurturing environment. Finkelstein recognized that all superbosses deeply know their team members, in stark contract to clueless, distanced bosses - think Undercover Boss. We may have been conditioned, especially if we are baby boomers, to simply trust our position of authority, or rank as adequate for performance — leaving development and growth to perhaps a different department. Quite the opposite, superbosses disdain anything that may create physical or emotional distance from those in their charge. What superbosses give protégés, then, is something quite rare in professional life, an opportunity to rebrand themselves, or the ultimate alignment of one’s traits and abilities with not just a job, but also a lifetime path. 

Leaders are ultimately coaches. Leaders nurture. Super Leaders Deeply Know Their Team.

Has watching professional poker ever fascinated you? In Episode 14, we meet Annie Duke, author of Thinking in Bets, who has leveraged her expertise in the science of smart decision making to excel at pursuits as varied as championship poker to public speaking. For two decades, Annie was one of the top poker players in the world. In 2004, she bested a field of 234 players to win her first World Series of Poker (WSOP) bracelet. The same year, she triumphed in the $2 million winner-take-all, invitation-only WSOP Tournament of Champions. In 2010, she won the prestigious NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship. Prior to becoming a professional poker player, Annie was awarded the National Science Foundation Fellowship. Because of this fellowship, she studied Cognitive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Annie is also the co-founder of How I Decide, an educational nonprofit that works with urban, disadvantaged communities in the Philadelphia area.

Has anyone ever said to you that they or their organization embraces “continuous improvement.” It’s a pretty common buzzword, and don’t all of us want to get better at something? How can we think, and more importantly, do, something about that?

In Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool’s masterwork Peak, they describe a significant term —  deliberate practice — as a combination of purposeful practice and developing mental representations. 

Let’s summarize. Purposeful practice:

• Has well-defined, specific goal
• is focused
• involves feedback
• requires getting out of one’s comfort zone

Now that’s just a start. Deliberate practice also requires development of mental representations, or pre-existing patterns of information - facts, images, rules, relationships and so on - that are held in long-term memory, and are easy to access. The key to deliberate practice is to go beyond our potential, or to make possible things that were not possible before. The way to do this is to learn a new skill which will then trigger a structural change in the brain rather than simply continuing to practice a skill already learned.

Let’s summarize again. Deliberate practice:

• Develops skills that other people have already figured out how to do and for which effective training techniques have been established
• Takes place outside one's comfort zone and requires a student to constantly try things that are just beyond his or her abilities
• Involves well-defined, specific goals and often involves improving some aspect of the target performance
• Requires a person's full attention and conscious action
• Involves feedback and modifications of efforts in response to that feedback
• Both produces and depends on effective mental representations
• Nearly always involves building or modifying previously acquired skills by focusing on particular aspects of those skills and working to improve them specifically

An effective leader understands both purposeful practice and that the quality and quantity of mental representations are vitally important. Imagine a leader that not only practices deliberately themself, but one that prioritizes developing others through deliberate practice. Good leaders practice purposefully. Great leaders practice deliberately.

Have you ever made a decision with incomplete or imperfect information? How did it feel?

Many of us struggle with daily distractions, and the pressure of making decisions with imperfect or incomplete information. In Annie Duke’s amazing new book, Thinking in Bets, Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All The Facts, she informs us that is the normal state in poker, where over the course of a single hand of poker, one could be involved in up to twenty decisions. And each hand ends with a concrete result: Win money or lose money. 

Do you ever examine your decision-making process after a favorable outcome, or a business win? Many of us examine our decisions when the outcome isn’t favorable, or after a business proposal loss. Duke shares a poker player term for our tendency to equate the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome: “resulting.” It’s one of the worst habits for a poker player, and it’s one of the worst habits for a responsible leader. Life is a lot like poker.

When we don't review or assess our decisions, our minds are likely to create blind spots, such as hindsight bias, or the tendency, after an outcome is known, to see the outcome as having been inevitable.

It’s always a good idea to examine our decision-making process, especially when there’s been a good outcome. That’s why the military uses After Action Reviews. The best leaders do this. The best leaders accept uncertainty. Leaders make smart bets.

During a recent coaching session, a client mentioned employee turnover issues within their organization, in particular with newer, younger hires.  Among the factors brought up for the recent departures was low pay. I paused and asked how frequently coaching occurred between supervisors and subordinates. A culture check if you will. Let’s just say it got really quiet for a bit. You see, there’s often a significant disconnect between what we believe about people leaving an organization, and what really happened.

In Kelly and Robby Riggs’ eye-opening book, Counter Mentor Leadership, they cite:

89 percent of managers believe employees leave their jobs for more money; and
88 percent of employees reported they left for reasons other than money.

Many old-school manager types believe focusing on results only is all that matters - the proverbial bottom line. Matthew Lieberman has some pretty interesting findings in his article “Should Leaders Focus on Results, or on People?” Great question. His findings:

If a leader was considered strong in social skills, the person was seen as a great leader 12 percent of the time. Okay. What about that bottom line?
If a leader was perceived to be strong in focusing on results, the number increased to… 14 percent of the time. That’s all. Just two percent more.
For leaders who were strong in both results and social skills, the likelihood of being seen as a strong leader skyrocketed to 72%.

Pop quiz time: What percentage of leaders rate high on results focus and social skills? Take a guess.

Less than one percent. That’s why Kelly and Robby Riggs conclude Leadership is Freaking Hard. And they are right. Great leaders are unicorns. They focus on results. They focus on people. Great leaders are rare.

Are you a CPA, attorney, or a partner in a professional services firm? Choinquecast thirteen showcases Wesley Middleton’s personal and professional journey in his book Violent Leadership. Unsatisfied with the practice and lifestyle found within the usual managerial-styled CPA firm, Middleton has pioneered a different kind of firm, a twenty-first century CPA firm, MRZ Financial, based on a leadership model suitable for any professional services group.

Middleton is also the host of the Violent Leadership podcast, a member of the Royalwood Church band and a team leader of the church’s Men’s Group.

In our Academy Leadership Excellence Courses, self-evaluation scores at the beginning of the Setting Leadership Priorities workshops usually plummet - with distractions and interruptions common culprits. Perhaps never before has the opportunity for distraction been so commonplace. Yet, there are those who are still effective getting things done and those who are effective leaders.

Most of us probably don’t know who psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik was, but we ought to. By the way, she was one of the first Russian women to attend a university. She studied memory in relation to complete and incomplete tasks, and found that incomplete tasks are easier to remember than successful ones. This is now known as the Zeigarnik effect. What does that mean for us as leaders?

First, it means that the best way to finish a task is to start it, since the now incomplete task will occupy our minds with little energy required. Until it is done. Maybe that is why we sometimes say “sleep on it,” intuitively knowing the Zeigarnik effect will assist during our slumber.

Second, the best leaders, like the best athletes, are masters of energy management; aligning tasks, their assignment and their completion, minding these effects. The best leaders are Zeigarnik masters. Leaders manage energy.

Choinquecast twelves takes direct aim at generational differences in the workplace as we meet Kelly Riggs who has co-written - with his son Robby - Counter Mentor Leadership, a pathfinding generational work. Kelly is the founder of Business LockerRoom, host of the CounterMentors Show, and a dynamic thought leader in the fields of sales and leadership. He is also a business performance coach who walks the talk: As a business owner, as a national award-winning sales representative and sales manager.

Kelly hails from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and is passionate about supporting children, believing that the good we do for the young yields the greatest payoffs.