Introversion Revisited

Author: Dave Crisp

11 Jan

Just when you think you’ll have time to write, life intervenes it seems. In the next while I’ll concentrate on interesting tidbits. In the online HR MBA class I assist with this article justifying introverts in business got some good discussion and seemed to reassure people they had a chance to get ahead.

It correctly notes about 40% of leaders in business (and elsewhere) are actually introverts. That shouldn’t be such a surprise, but it usually is. Being quiet, thoughtful and liking ‘alone time’ has never stopped actors, singers, speakers and leaders in other supposedly ‘extraverted’ endeavors from excelling. It’s not as clearly understood as other ‘obvious’ leadership traits that we are normally trained to think of, but introversion can contribute a lot. We need balance, and who better to understand how to balance the demands for being out in public with thoughtfulness than people who can see both.

In a presentation I have coming up for a senior university class on leadership, I thought I should show some photos of myself as a kid so these younger students could related to the gray-haired, bespectacled guy in front of them – someone who was a super shy, introverted kid who ultimately was able to learn to succeed as an executive and speaker. To me the transformation has always seemed almost unbelievable. I dragged out some old shots and was surprised to find I didn’t look as scrawny and geeky as I thought and I could actually see the progress, in increments, from that kid to the full fledged executive I ultimately became.

The kid……….. the union leader……… the graying executive.

So I thought I’d go find a photo of someone somewhat ‘geeky’ looking like what I had in my mind when I thought of myself in those teenage years. What turned up was a photo I will show the class with the comment, “As a kid I was convinced no one who looked the following guy, like how I thought I was, could ever be a leader, let alone someone who could make real contributions.” Nobody ever told me leaders could be like this unless they more or less walked on water. I think the message here is, when you see yourself as weak and introverted, it almost doesn’t matter what you look like – you’ve put limits on yourself that no one else is seeing. Thankfully I had experiences that slowly, but surely helped me develop a different style of behavior, yet I continued to see myself as the shy kid I was once. Here’s that photo: I wish.!

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Filed under: 1 Balance - Judgment, All That We Know, Building A Career, Coaching Yourself

Mintzberg’s New Book “Managing”

Author: Dave Crisp

23 Nov

Wow. This is the next “Good to Great” – and only 7 years after that, not 20 as Collins’ book was after “In Search of Excellence.” Mintzberg once and for all establishes that management and leadership are immensely complex and have to be learned in the heat of practicing them, not from books or traditional courses. It’s one thing to say this to people and quite another to assemble a massive review, in very short, but dense form, proving it in the words and findings of a century of researchers.

I wrote the rest of this post to a friend, another keen observer, David Creelman of Creelman Research, who brought it to my attention. I realize this is actually a review:

Just finished Managing and have some thoughts it seems good to put down here. It’s an impressive assembly of far-reaching thinking. I think it will probably frustrate and confuse a lot of readers, which is too bad, but possibly an inevitable step in recognizing what really works. The management/leadership complex is just that – very, very complex without any clear single answers, very situational and requiring unique fit or adaptability to succeed at. I agree with the general premise, but would word it a bit differently. I would say not have said we are wrong to hold up leaders as worthy of examination and sometimes praise, but we are wrong to deify the idea of leader and leadership (and wrong to talk about it as a set of things that can be learned by the usual rote learning we get in schools). However, I believe that leaders do make a difference if they operate as Mintzberg outlines – constantly learning and reflecting and by trial and error efforts to improve things. I’m sure he would agree and wonder a bit why he didn’t make that more clear.

As I see it, organizations solidify the ossified structures they form in hopes of sustaining themselves as the original driving leader(s) move on. Theoretically the structure that worked should be able to adapt with new people coming into the slots and changing them to fit changing circumstances, but we haven’t paid nearly enough attention to that concept. We treat the structure almost as sacred once it’s in place (despite the tendency to constantly ‘re-organize’ to solve every problem, which really amounts to re-arranging the deck chairs – it doesn’t really change much – the power hierarchy is too attractive to those rising in it). To some extent the organization structure does ensure some continuity, but for how long if it doesn’t evolve?

It’s easy for those appointed to assume that they somehow inherit the stature of those who built the organization in the first place, not realizing it wasn’t a one-person show, but a cooperative effort that may be seen from outside to be one person. The fact that some initial leaders are strong-man types who create by force and maintain power by force leads to confusion as well. When we know that 90% plus of leaders believe they’re in the smartest 10%, it’s easy to see why they are so willing to try to impose their vision as Mintzberg points out is so common among those newly promoted. At that moment you’re at the peak of confidence in your infallibility; it’s just been proven, so why not impose it? Then it’s hard to back down and reveal your uncertainty as things begin not to work. You may not even realize it isn’t working and just apply more force to drive things the way you ’see they will work if only everyone cooperates (with your vision).’

We need to help people see that maintaining and developing existing organizations is no less challenging, but very different from the initiating, entrepreneurial phase, that a different type of leader, adept with equally difficult, but different challenges, is needed – one who needs to manage and lead in a very different way, with more visible involvement of others typically, building a truly learning organization, which has to start with a learning leader.

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Filed under: 1 Balance - Judgment, All That We Know, Coaching Others, Coaching over Command Leadership, Fix The Jerks, Leaders of the Future, Learning Organization

Who Makes Bad Leaders?

Author: Dave Crisp

17 Aug

Or are leaders bad all on their own? Among recent blog posts one asked whether employees are setting bosses up for failure by expecting perfection on every issue. Can bosses actually succeed? Why does it seem so many are vilified? What can be done about it? It does sometimes seem as if bosses can never please employees. How much is up to the employee?

These are powerful, important questions that we’re finally beginning to see asked and answered more often. I like this practical answer at Chief Learning Officer magazine online. But it’s important to understand the role employees play and what anyone can do about it.

This came to mind again with a phone call from a colleague wanting to know what makes a good leader and venting about two hours they’d just spent listening to a manager gripe about their CEO in a small company. “The boss is selfish, lazy, uninterested in anyone’s ideas for improvements,” went the complaint, “My great talents aren’t being used; I’m only staying for the money.” Sound familiar? We’re told about half of all employees or more feel this way much of the time.

In varying degrees we hear this everywhere. I’ve quoted Bob Eichinger of Lominger/Korn Ferry before – that only about 18% of managers have the key people skills for leading and developing others, that these skills fall in the lowest 20% of skills among most managers. Yet, to answer my friend’s question about what leadership is, people skills ARE leadership, so the scarcity of them indicates exactly how scarce effective leadership is in organizations. If we could raise that just 10% or 15% across the board, results would skyrocket.

Once a company grows beyond about 25 to 50 employees in size, employees can no longer be simply extensions of the leaders abilities. Until then a really hardworking boss can probably get around and tell each employee exactly what to do and how every day. Above that size the futility of that should be obvious. Employees have to be empowered and entrusted to take initiative and do things the boss hasn’t specifically ordered or blessed, so the leader’s role becomes encouraging, stimulating creativity, coordinating and supporting initiative where it makes sense – a very different job than controlling every activity day by day.

We shouldn’t be vilifying weak leaders as much as asking ourselves how best to improve their skills and help them transition from command and control styles to coaching and developing. Companies, even many of the biggest and best funded, some of whom spend millions on leadership training, are doing a lousy job of this in the main. How else to account for the finding that 82% of leaders lack the most critical skills for their roles. Hopefully the blizzard of articles and books on what it takes to get results with people will start to make a dent in that gap.

A Happier Life?

Author: Dave Crisp

27 Jul

As you may have noticed, I took considerable time off posting to contemplate a number of things.

First my interest in studying happiness led me to attend the First World Congress of the International Positive Psychology Association based around the first MA course set up Marty Seligman of Penn State, whose book, Learned Optimism, I always highly recommend). The inexpensive, well-attended (1500) conference was great and all the ‘who’s who’ of Positive Psych presented – Diener, Haidt, Fredrickson (many of whom I’ve mentioned in posts previously) and many others, some known, others not so much. An amazing amount of research has been done in 10 years of the concept’s short life and a number of countries have actually absorbed the general principles as a way of measuring the success of government policy. After all, what is the purpose of government if not to create the environment for happier lives. Perhaps this is even a concept business might look at. We know for a fact that happier employees are more productive. More on this as we go forward.

Second, I spent considerable time thinking about why I don’t post more. And concluded, not totally surprisingly, that I only feel like doing so when I think I have something of value to say. What a novel concept. Of course, it’s very personal since, like most sites now, there is some unknown, potentially large number of people who MAY be reading some of this, but typically a lot fewer than 1% comment, so you have no real measure. Perhaps there are thousands of people out there just dying to hear everything that pops into my head. Somehow I pretty much doubt that. If so, I apologize, but you’re always welcome to let me know.

In the mean time, I will stick to my new timetable – whenever something is significant in my opinion. I’m not in this to pump out posts every day or attract business or a huge following, but to see if ideas can evolve into useful forward movement. With so many blogs and discussion groups desperate for readers, attention and significance, I’m happy not to compete every day. It will either add up to value in the long run or it won’t. Over time the Internet needs better ways to help people locate material of true interest to them. Maybe then the right people will find what they need here. In the mean time I’ll keep at it. occasionally.

Third, this coincided with some thinking about ‘full retirement’ whatever that might look like. I concluded that for me it probably looks like what I’m doing – bits of this and that – work, volunteering, travel, etc., all melded together. My idea of great travel was going to the conference, for instance. And I’m blessed with a spouse who is happy to tour those towns on her own and then guide me to the best parts we can share together.

My main conclusion was I should stop soul-searching about all of it – the ‘worry’ was a drag and I enjoy the stuff I do. While I don’t market, the work coming in is just fine. I like to be engaged and hopefully always will be, but not at the expense of a strenuous sales effort. Again, either people are interested or they’re not. Wouldn’t it be great if the world could work this way for everyone. It’s great that people write about what they and others are doing and keep us aware of new products and services. We all want to hear about things we think might improve our lot, but. do we really want the hard-driving sales ‘attack’ that so many businesses feel they must keep up?

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Filed under: All That We Know, Coaching Yourself, Happiness, Science, Time Management

Traits for Success at Pretty Much Anything

Author: Dave Crisp

22 May

Of the “Big Five” personality traits, the two David Brooks (my last post) culled from research that are more common among big company CEOs should be no surprise. For workers in general the most important has always been known – Conscientiousness. That is about following through, doing what you said you would, delivering the result. There’s an overtone of dogged persistence, true, but lots of people stick to their word without seeming to have fixate on detail or being ‘grinders.’

The second trait he pulled out is Emotional Stability. Is it any wonder a big company CEO might need the skills or temperament to tolerate rocky surroundings and keep on trucking? You can’t get to the top without being severely buffeted by conflicting demands, crazy work expectations and dramatically challenging personalities around you. To forge ahead Conscientiously in that environment takes Emotional Stability, for sure. We hope in personal life to have it a bit smoother, but for many it isn’t too different.

The fact these traits are possessed by pretty much every big company exec – and needed in most of what we ourselves do – stick-to-it-iveness and the emotional balance to persist long enough to get results – should be no surprise. So they’re ‘common’ to everyone. But that’s not to say these are their only traits nor that having them makes them ‘dull’ as Brooks argues. The top notch people I mentioned are or were highly unique personalities that we’d describe as anything, but dull.

The problem is exactly that these two are not ‘enough’ to get the very best results. Beyond sticking to it and staying the course, we need to be creative, able to work well in teams and energetic enough to care to, whatever the origin of that energy – belief, faith, commitment to a great goal, faith in people, whatever. These other three can all come from very different sources, hence the uniqueness of personality and style we see. When we look deeper we see that the first two traits can come from very different sources, too, not just gritting our teeth discipline.

Viva variety. Yet we see the five core needs for success are pretty much the same five in every endeavor, for every person. HOW they achieve them can be unique, but not whether they work. These are the five skill areas I work to help people discover and develop – ones that turn up in every book on success and which anyone can build for themselves if they simply keep focused and keep adding to steadily, conscientiously. throughout our entire lives: it isn’t over till it’s over. unless you flat out give up.

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Filed under: 5 Skills - Instant Leadership, All That We Know, Coaching Yourself, Happiness, How Simplicity Works

Work-life Balance Getting Better?

Author: Dave Crisp

8 Feb

Just when you might be depressed by the thought that work pressure only goes up, up, up and things only get worse, recent reports note the opposite only a few months ago in mutually confirming studies.

While it remains to be seen whether the current economic crisis will reverse this again, it’s reassuring to know things can improve. In the UK concerns about work stress seemed to be reaching an all time high when I spoke to their national HR group a couple of years ago. Recently the same group noted cautiously that work hours are falling and that this seems to indicate that individuals are exerting more control.

At the same time, Queen’s University’s Industrial Relations Centre highlights an international study of nearly 10,000 executives from the Journal of Applied Psychology (2008, Vol 93, #4, pp.789-805) showing some male and female managers achieve better work-life balance and, moreover, those who do actually have higher career advancement potential.

Interestingly, an HBR book published last May, Total Leadership, by Stewart Friedman, founding Director of Wharton’s Leadership Program, reinforces this, arguing convincingly that leaders can only improve their work performance by simultaneously improving in four areas of life – work, community, family and self. The subtitle: “Be a better leader; have a better life!” Balance!! Need I say it again?

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Filed under: 1 Balance - Judgment, All That We Know, Business/Strategy, Coaching Others, Leaders of the Future

HR wisdom from unlikely sources

Author: Dave Crisp

1 Jan

Oddly I’ve never truly appreciated holidays. They interrupt routine, which as a Zen philosopher I hold in high regard. Routine helps you build steadily, day by day, toward your goals. Nevertheless, breaks inevitably lead to unusual insights you wouldn’t typically stumble on and evoke great memories forgotten.

Two in particular come to mind this season. Vertex One, an unusual Canadian investment company, always sends an unusual book to its clients. This year: A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage. His “first glass” describes plausibly how beer likely was one of the great forces pushing humans to create cities, leaving behind 150,000 years of wandering in hunter-gatherer bands virtually overnight a mere 10,000 years ago. From there we’ve evolved the amazing science, technology and organizations that offer us totally different lives today. Yet beer continues to exert an influence. Such time scales change the way we look at our present, miraculous information evolution in less than a generation via the Internet. I would never have thought such a book would be worth reading, let alone the source of numerous amazing insights.

That led to recalling the phrase “remember how unlikely is your birth” – each one of us being entirely unique. Shaped by millions of interwoven circumstances, we’re both significant and amazingly insignificant in the grand flow of time and the universe. This is a line from a Monty Python song from one of my favorite movies, highly irreverent “The Meaning of Life,” mostly forgotten in the daily flow of minute by minute.

It’s one of those ‘you have to see it’ things. Fortunately you can, though whether it should be legally free is another puzzling question from our instant communication revolution. It’s here on YouTube via Stumbleupon, another Canadian success story.

The best part of holidays for me is the time to ponder the imponderable. I’m always glad to get back to practical challenges, but with a new perspective. Have a great new year!

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Filed under: 2 Positive - Feelings, 3 Strategic - Thinking, All That We Know, Science

Supreme Court Ruling Boosts Need for HR, Leadership

Author: Dave Crisp

15 Oct

In a surprising reversal of its own prior rulings, Canadian employees will now over time gain stronger rights to bargain and probably to strike to get their way. HR practitioners and leaders take note: this won’t happen overnight, but employees in general will slowly gain considerably more say in organizations where they may have been ignored before. As Canada “internationalizes” its labor laws, so will the US in time.

Many have argued unions have served their purpose and are no longer needed in our modern era because employees have all the rights they should expect. Yet bullying, arbitrary terminations and capricious management decisions continue to occur in most organizations.

I’m relatively a conservative who would sometimes take a dim view of this. However there is no doubt, not a shadow, that there is still room for employees to be increasingly involved in decisions and management of organizations. How this happens will be very important. This ruling allows it to evolve over a long period of time, through lengthy and expensive court challenges that will define a further new era in employee involvement. Although costly for the few “bad actors” who will be involved directly, this way of staging change “slowly, but surely” should actually prove beneficial, far better than some sudden leap to new legislation.

Whatever your view on this, you might want to take a look at this article by Queen’s law professor, Kevin Banks, which concisely explains how the Canadian Supreme Court has determined to open up labor laws to further, perhaps endless, challenges that unions can now undertake to extend worker rights.

The upshot is to give added impetus to what HR managers have been saying for decades – you get the unions you deserve if you act poorly, and you prevent third party involvement if you proactively ensure your employees are involved, engaged and consulted. This will slowly drive less HR-conscious companies to get with the program and start involving people more broadly. Stats show this actually pays off in far superior results, but if that carrot hasn’t provided enough incentive, this will certainly continue the “stick” threat toward much deeper and more complete implementation of effective practices.

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Filed under: All That We Know, Business/Strategy, Current Affairs, Fix The Jerks

Getting Management Buy-In

Author: Dave Crisp

6 Oct

Under the heading Management buy-in key to learning, the UK’s widely read Training Zone (free) newsletter reports this (which applies worldwide): Lack of line management buy-in is the key barrier to learning retention, according to 40% of people who responded to a World of Learning on-line poll. The survey also revealed that 37% of the 300 respondents believed that the lack of follow-up further hindered the success of learning retention. Another 25% felt that lack of coaching/mentoring negatively affected the effectiveness of learning and development opportunities. A similar proportion – 24% – felt that lack of learner buy-in was a major issue.

Of course, these are really the same four issues. Buy-in by managers would mean they would follow up their staff’s training with coaching and mentoring thus producing learner buy-in. So how do we get this? The most successful answer is to start at the coaching-leadership end of the chain. If managers work in a culture where they’re expected to coach and they have some experience (and training) in how to do it, it becomes natural for them to be following up regularly with how people are doing. Training is paying attention

When you lead by coaching, you work in a pattern of coaching all the time as the primary way of managing every issue. On daily coaching rounds with staff, you naturally ask, “how’s it going” and hear about their experience at training. You enquire what they plan to do with it – “what they really want” from it and that would lead to mutual objectives that you would be asking about in future conversations. This is far from rocket science as they say.

Experiences employees have, whether in training, attending meetings, conferences internally or externally, working on teams and projects and so forth all are things a great leader keeps up with, asks about and takes an interest in. When follow up is just “the way we always do things here” we have a culture of effective leadership. Questions about “buy-in” just don’t arise. If managers and staff aren’t bought in it’s because they have no mutual interests in what’s going on daily.

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Filed under: 3 Strategic - Thinking, All That We Know, Coaching Issues, Learning Organization

Convergence in HR and Leadership Ideas

Author: Dave Crisp

30 Jul

While making new attempts to convince an audience in a speech yesterday I found myself clarifying convergence between HR, leadership and people skills in ways I had not fully thought through before. Sometimes when you talk and think about ideas for a while they suddenly start to make sense in entirely new ways. Conversation drives insight. This led to more ideas later that will cause me to revise my presentations to emphasize where we are in “the state of the art” today.

Several very different factors are evolving rapidly in society, having begun 30 or 40 years ago, now becoming The power of conversations visible in many places. Best known, most obvious is the impact of the PC dating from the first Apple computers built in Steve Jobs’ garage in 1975. Not only have these changed world history, but we don’t yet know how much or what the most powerful impacts will be. From pure record-keeping to social networking the story is far from finished.

Less well known, but now quite clear in direction, we can date recognition of the amazing power of effective HR from the takeover of GM’s Fremont, California car plant by Toyota, who were able to double production with the same people, machines, suppliers, etc., in just two years and have continued to boost productivity steadily since – for 25 more years – a management/human resources process that in incredibly powerful.

Then Complexity theory, with roots in biology and mathematical systems, least well understood, tells us that complex situations behave in similar ways in all endeavors, all challenges from physics to human behavior. HR – or human behavior – is the most complex area of all.

Complexity theory tells us that thousands or millions of “independent agents” working on problems will evolve rapidly to produce amazingly powerful, unexpected answers that turn out to be based on simple principles. Of course this is exactly what we’re seeing on the Internet… and at Toyota’s Fremont adventure called NUMMI – notice their simple principles: teamwork, equity, involvement, mutual trust and respect, and safety.

With blogging and social networking conversations, often truncated, halting and confusing, by millions of people someone will stumble on answers and ideas that will change the world in dramatic ways – and some of those will be further clarity in HR and leadership.

We now know HR process can revolutionize results. What we don’t fully understand yet are the simple principles that work together to create the right framework for this to occur in the widely varied organizational situations we face. We know what work on auto assembly lines.

Hospitals are struggling to apply complexity theory directly, a confusing path based on the concept of “positive deviance” or “copying the successful people from thousands of attempts” at solving a problem like rampant, drug resistant infections. More of these efforts are being tested world wide. The potential to solve political and organizational problems never before resolved logically is enormous. Those whose conversations lead them to the best solutions stand to reap equally enormous benefits.

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Filed under: 3 Strategic - Thinking, All That We Know, How Simplicity Works, Learning Organization

Archive for the ‘All That We Know’ Category

Introversion Revisited

Mintzberg’s New Book “Managing”

Who Makes Bad Leaders?

A Happier Life?

Traits for Success at Pretty Much Anything

Work-life Balance Getting Better?

HR wisdom from unlikely sources

Supreme Court Ruling Boosts Need for HR, Leadership

Getting Management Buy-In

Convergence in HR and Leadership Ideas

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