Guess what Mercers and SMITH magazine just found from a survey of readers as reported in Canadian HR Reporter? 7000 people entered their Six Words About Work contest and these emerged. As they point out these four have remained constant despite the recession and continuing turbulence.

As far back as the dark ages (just before the dot.com bubble burst and was accused of busting the War For Talent) around y2k, I started using the top five that AON found in one of their massive surveys – and guess what? They found the same items in the same order, with just a little more definition of what those ideas mean.

We could enter this in the “how many times do we have to prove the same thing” contest, but why carp at reinforcing what we all need to keep in mind about the modern workforce? Good times or bad, employees want respect, which incidentally reflects instantly in leaders’ stance on work-life balance, which is why that issue ranks so high on employees’ want lists. If you respect people, you support them taking the time they need, when they need it, to get life in order.

Good leadership is about challenging people to be the best they can be and supporting them in their striving to succeed (and gain promotions, which is where the bigger salary increases come from).

Ethics, which the new survey can’t seem to find a word for, includes everyone being honest, but especially the pride employees want to feel that a company is delivering a decent product or service for the money, something that came out loud and clear in this survey. It slides into AON’s finding that employees want “fairness” which included fair rewards (the good do better than the poor performers) and fair in relation to what other companies pay, but also fair to other stakeholders and customers.

Quality people is about training and supporting staff who can thus deliver those good products and services as part of a team. as virtually all surveys find. All four or five, depending on how you count them, wrap into each other.

You can’t leave one or more out and expect the whole to hold together. Engagement comes when all these are ticking along smoothly most of the time and leaders are walking the talk as well as routinely talking about it in lofty vision and values statements.

And then along comes Yahoo, a modern, up-to-date company enlightened enough to hire a solid woman as CEO. and then. oops, as of early September, fire her. over the phone. Ever want to know a highly visible way to show your employees how much you do or don’t respect people or treat them fairly? This will generally go down as one way to make the point unmistakably.

Does one blunder invalidate everything you’ve put in place before that? Generally not, but if you can treat your CEO this way, I’d be looking over my shoulder as an employee for sure. and maybe tidying up my resume ‘just in case.’ If you want your employees thinking that way, just violate those four or five seemingly basic, but apparently challenging principles that we all know, that operate in good times and bad. Do we need to hear them proven again? Apparently some major operators do.

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Those comments, which he’s consistently made about the movie stand in some contrast to reviews of the book on which it’s based, Moneyball, by baseball aficionado, Michael Lewis. Reviewers tend to emphasize what also shows up a lot in the film – the statistical method called sabermetric s that a number of teams now use to analyze players’ skills in contrast to the old baseball scouts’ methods of assessing talent on factors they developed in their association with the game - some might call it instinct.

The real story here is a version of successfully blending “high tech/high touch.” Today we have massively higher powered tools for recruiting. It’s easy to calculate statistics, although not many people picked out the most helpful ones in baseball that would lead to assembling the full skill set for a winning team. The main protagonist, Billy Beane, did, and took the Oakland A’s all the way to ultimate victory despite being unable to afford the salaries of any great star players that the other teams constantly bid into the stratosphere.

The high touch part gets somewhat shorter shrift in reviews, typical of how we evaluate the role of HR versus finance in organizations. Of course, it’s always harder to explain, to point to and demonstrate, but teamwork is the essential ingredient and that, in turn, is based on trust, respect, engagement of everyone in the team goals and learning to work together smoothly to achieve the overall result. It’s a bit oversimplified to say that if you sprinkle a few extremely highly paid prima donnas in among your core players, you immediately set the stage for jealousies, for attempts to show “I’m better than he is,” rather than for everyone to work closely in collaboration, setting up and supporting success by their teammates instead of worrying about how big their own next contract will be.

The same points have been made in hockey – that Wayne Gretzky, for instance, got vast numbers of points for ‘assists’ (for helping other players score) and that was a significant part of what made him the greatest player of the time. You can be a superstar and be a team player, too. It’s just that very few superstars work that way. and we need to develop more of this in every organization.

Plexus Institute (the Complexity Science group) has turned more and more toward these questions and just sent out a newsletter headlining a lead story with some excellent points called Superstars or Super Collaborators. After pointing to similar “moneyball” approaches now used for building winning soccer teams, author Prucia Buscell makes the outstanding point at the end that perhaps the best solution isn’t “either/or” but “both/and.” Just posing the question that way is a major contribution to the evolving discussion, highlighting as it does the central question. Can we do without either when our organizations need both to succeed at the top of their industries?

There will undoubtedly be more to say when we’ve all actually seen the movie. I for one will be looking most closely at how Pitt handles the team collaboration questions. A key criteria, as I understood it from earlier descriptions, was that the lack of superstars helped when they tried to bring the team together to function smoothly and support each other. In retrospect, though, you have to conclude that if you can being a team of superstars or one with at least some superstars to function well, you should have an advantage. as long as, by selecting those, you don’t depend so excessively on them that you forgo assembling all the varied, diverse skills a complete team needs. As we’ve discussed before, diversity is more challenging to manage, but ultimately far more rewarding in results.

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It got me to questioning the use of the term Talent Management itself. I have always taken it to be an umbrella that takes in finding, recruiting, orienting, developing, managing and tracking performance and then moving people up through effective succession planning all the way through their careers. That definitely calls for integration of many HR functions and beyond since line managers have to be central in many of the pieces – from supportive coaching on the development side to career planning conversations with individuals. They are definitely needed for effective succession planning discussions among groups of managers so everyone agrees on how to rotate people through progressively challenging assignments across different divisions to season their leadership knowledge and skills.

So I’m all for adding “Integrated” to make the point since, as i4CP notes, HR is splintered and hasn’t made nearly as much progress as it should have in most companies at breaking down the silos that would allow true integration of these operations.

We need this now, but at a job search presentation I gave recently an audience member came up afterward to ask about my use of the word “talent” in the phrase, “Sell your talent, not your skills.” Her understanding was talent meant born-in skills. Mine (and the source I’d quoted) mean something more like “your global skill set viewed by what it can achieve rather than the individual skills: your overall ‘talent’ for. whatever”. In other words, I sell my ability (or talent) to get upset groups of people cooperating together for common solutions, not the separate component skills like conflict management, consensus-building, etc. – a ‘sell results’ view rather than a nuts and bolts view of what I do.

This definitely highlights a difficulty with the generic term ‘talent.’ Some senior executives still take this to mean the handful of ‘highly talented’ individuals they depend on to drive the business – the so-called A-players. This can mean programs set up for the rare few who show really outstanding performance or qualities. In fact Talent Management as it needs to be practiced for bigger impact on organizational results requires that the program take in far more people – including pretty much everyone in any sort of leadership role in the organization. I mentioned a book a couple of months back (Talent is Overrated) about the folly of thinking people are ‘born with talent’ or that if they haven’t got it, you can’t build it. Geoff Colvin in his excellent book debunks that neatly by showing even the most ‘talented’ musicians, for instance, get there by endless practice at their chosen field. Malcolm Gladwell gets at the same points in his book Outliers.

So while Talent Management is a term that’s grown rapidly in popularity, it probably has for the wrong reasons – because for many it calls forth the mental image of the sole super-contributor, the knight on a white horse – exactly the picture of leadership that is now outmoded and that is holding back results for so many organizations. Instead they need the up-and-coming, innovative, learners who are keen to try new ideas – guided by some seasoned veterans who can help them manage risk (ie: avoid pitfalls the younger set haven’t experienced), but still forge ahead with continual improvement. That’s a very different need from the all-knowing, all-powerful ‘talented few’ that many still hope for and imagine exist.

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Such paradoxes aren’t just important for tactical application to day-to-day. They are critical to how managers establish the environment for greatest engagement and innovation. They say the devil is in the details and nowhere is this more evident than in this sort of puzzle.

Early on I read a lots of philosophy as a hobby (looking for answers to life problems of the time). I settled on Zen, which seemed to offer the most value. Through understanding that life is made up of paradoxes, of which this is just one example. It focuses on how to handle them, though not in the easiest format. I concluded you should simply accept both parts of the paradox and work with them equally, seeking a solution that acknowledged both – in this case ‘you should micromanage, but not micromanage.’

Either/or is fatal. Finding a resolution to a paradox is different from finding a single solution to a problem because the paradox never goes away or is fully ‘settled,’ but a ‘resolution’ is a working solution for most cases nonetheless. This almost always involves understanding the dilemma that’s posed and a balance of what is in play, using common sense even when the alternatives seem initially at odds.

In this case, yes, it is important for managers to follow up often. But you can do so without what’s usually meant by micromanaging or nagging. There are dozens of excuses to bump into employees in the course of a day or two. It’s logical to ask how things are going. If you also ask how they are (meaning personally) you establish some rapport generally, so ‘how are you doing’ and ‘how’s it going’ gets you into ‘how’s that project coming along?’ Sometimes you need to mention which one, but very often it will be obvious when you ask how things are going that you mean ‘that’ project, the one you’re regularly worrying about.

Employees will recognize what you’re asking about nine times out of ten, but won’t resent it if it’s done casually in the context of asking rather than instructing them on how to do it or when, or formally reminding them of their responsibilities and deadlines. In fact, they’ll appreciate that you trust them enough not to ask those detailed questions, but at the same time you achieve the objective mentioned in the bnet article – making sure the project stays close to top of mind with the employee.

So it’s a fine line, or one might say, a balance between following up a lot, but not nagging or micromanaging by repeatedly telling employees the steps they need to follow.

This works with bosses, too, and line managers where you can’t ‘tell’ them anyway. Things can be overlooked if there aren’t reminders. Sometimes just your presence reminds line managers to think about the HR aspects of their current challenges, but doesn’t require you to formally remind them at all.

This week’s Canadian HR Reporter reports on a recent study by HRPA and Knightsbridge about how HR people can show they ‘understand the business.’ One key to that is this sort of approach. You understand that supervisors and front line managers have to work at things in their own way. You don’t try to tell them too much in detail or enforce the letter of HR programs, but you DO keep reminding them gently that the HR objectives (of engagement, fairness, honesty, etc.) are there and need to be worked into daily routines until they become habitual for everyone. A single lapse doesn’t get you into ‘instruction’ mode, but if you’re there, paying attention, managers will notice you noticing and slowly, but surely try to adapt toward something better in future. Bashing at details probably isn’t ‘business friendly,’ but being a reminder of the value of working toward principles certainly is.

Often it isn’t the behavior, like continual reminders, but HOW it’s delivered. That, too, is a habit worth developing.

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Here’s a young person doing what many great writers have done for centuries – looking for leaders in the past who made powerful impacts and essentially suggesting we copy them. That is to say perpetuate behavior that may not be the best, but for various reasons was the most powerful that could be achieved at the time. The mass of those leaders we know have tended to be military or political, but similar arguments apply regardless. They are people who stood out as incredibly unique, as if no one else contributed to whatever success – stand alone, one-of-a-kind, seeming to achieve single-handedly and certainly the driving, motive force behind events.

Those sorts of leaders will undoubtedly continue to exist. They will be remembered as uniquely fitting into their time and circumstances, to form a seemingly perfect match for the needs of their moment and place at least as seen by many, often millions, rightly or wrongly. Like Churchill in World War II England, a man who had studied and prepared his whole life for a conflict he believed was coming and which did eventually come with Germany, who was able to successfully micromanage a fierce and incredibly important series of battles over six years. But how many wars, for instance, need not have been fought and lives not lost, but for a controlling, demanding single leader who was capable of starting a war for their own and what they believed was their constituents benefit – World War II being a frightening example. What if Hitler has never been elected because the danger of such concentrated power had been recognized? Remember his “achievements” were disastrous for his own followers as well as so many millions of others.

By contrast, we have an opportunity to learn from new kinds of leaders in the present and imagine even better for the future. to be inspired by what could be rather than be instructed mainly by what appeared to succeed or fail in the past. That’s why Google’s recent work stands out as a key example with great potential to serve as a model for our time and the possibly the future. It represents what can be achieved. Not all of it universally used for good as many point out, since almost every achievement offers potentially a double-edged sword, but on balance a massive positive. Moreover the way they are attempting to achieve it is instructive – not satisfied with any past models of leadership, yet recognizing leadership is the most powerful force for advancing their strategies and setting out to discover for themselves what works best, for the betterment of all at least in their ideals. And how different the leadership style and results from, say, Enron or the big failed banks to pick examples from recent history and similar spheres of endeavor.

It’s not surprising that two young people might have started in leading their company without the models of the past limiting their approach. It’s impressive and valuable that they’ve arrived at studying so statistically and scientifically what worked in their own situation, rather than what has been done by countless leaders in the past, writing out their own potentially flawed and biased opinions of what made them successful as we might guess Mark Zuckerberg may eventually do or as we find others doing about him. Varied styles of leadership will continue to exist. These searches for a ‘best’ type of leader will continue. But does one route seem on balance the choice we should spend more effort on developing? Many more questions to ask..

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Sound familiar? It’s a conversation I hear repeated everywhere I go in one form or another. Is this an HR strategy issue?

With a capable operator like Google (plus hundreds of others) proving leadership is by far the biggest key to productivity and both organization and team results, you bet. And if we take their “8″ keys to effective leadership, which they proved leaders could be coached to apply, the answer to whether anyone can become a leader is yes. So the question becomes how?

If you analyze Google’s list of 8 skill sets, the one they define as most important really encompasses most of the others. To coach well absolutely requires that you empower those you coach, care about their health, well-being, careers and more – an all around, whole-human-being orientation. It requires you to be results-oriented, to push, but know when to step back and find a balance, to be a good communicator in both directions, but especially listening. And clearly you need a clear vision of the desired result and technical skills that allow you to help, even though as a coach rather than teacher your skills don’t have to be better than your protege.

A coach, by definition, cares about, pays attention to and works with the people in their care. No one would dream of saying ‘he served the CEO, but no one else’ about an effective coach. A coach fundamentally understands the work their proteges do is more important in the long run than what they can accomplish alone in their limited time. They put coaching either first or at least very high on their priority list. They don’t complain about the time it takes. The role of a coach is to extend the productivity of their team and each of its members to that together they accomplish more than any one, including the leader, could do alone, so the time is more than worth it in the end. Coaching is the primary work of an effective leader. That seems totally obvious from Google’s numbers-driven research.

So, as I write this, I think, “perhaps one key strategic step we could take is to label every leader Coach first.” Executive Coach, Media Team, for instance? Senior Vice President Coach, HR. Perhaps that hard working individual who currently holds that position wouldn’t have wanted that role. at first. Perhaps they’d say, ‘not me, I’m not good with people, I don’t want to have to work with them like that.’ But chances are, to get promotions and more money, most budding executives would take a shot at improving their abilities, would be interested in taking training, would welcome being evaluated and coached themselves on these critical skills. if they wanted careers in leadership roles.

Final observations: Since it’s a well-accepted fact that leaders tend to hire and promote those they see as most like themselves whether they set out to or not, if we can make coaching the primary factor in every leader’s profile all our leaders would strive to hire those who can coach best instead of the rather non-people-skill mix we see today. We would never get to 100% and might not want that anyway. Diversity is helpful, but we need to reverse the current preponderance of command-and-control leaders. If coaching eventually becomes the primary criterion instead of some of the other questionable grounds managers have for ruling people in or out of positions that would be a benefit, too. This sounds like strategic talent management to me.

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It was great to hear from Bob Sutton about my previous post as well. He seemed just as puzzled about why Denning trashed his work as promoting “Dilbert-style Management.” My take on it is that we bloggers tend to go looking for straw men to tear down and Denning picked something from the Internet, took a quick look at Sutton’s book perhaps and leapt to misinterpret things as limited in such a way that Denning could make points he wanted to emphasize. (Somewhat the way I’ve probably done with his work above.)

Leaders in general tend to be guilty of this, I think. Everyone is incredibly busy. There’s mountains of information. It’s hard to pick out what’s valuable when we have so little time to give to it, so we try to categorize people and ideas and then find what’s wrong so as to get a handle on what would be better. By not stepping back and putting the pieces in context of a larger picture we’re all failing to deliver useful advice. It isn’t just ‘delighting the customer’ or ‘ending command and control leadership’ or any one focus that will take us to the next level. We all know it, but we fail to keep that front and center.

The scary fact is we expect all things from our leaders and no one can be all things to any individual, let alone to an entire team or organization. Or can they? It depends on the definition of ‘all things.’ Perhaps there’s a realistic one we can shoot for – not one person being all things, but one person facilitating and helping build and coordinate ‘all things’ from ‘all contributions’ from staff.

A first key is leaders have to be continual learners, willing to listen, ask sensible, real questions they don’t know the answers to (not just rhetorical ones) and apply positive people skills with an aim of achieving the organizations goals – including delighting the customer, but also sustainability, productivity and more for multiple stakeholders – way more stakeholders today than ever before, so way more goals to coordinate. Painting a vision, whether using story-telling as a key tool or finding other ways to engage people in a larger purpose is a critical kick-off point, but making people feel secure enough to contribute novel, potentially risky ideas and implement them with some judicious trial and error without fear of reprisals is also critical.

I often liken leadership to juggling many balls at once. It is the coordination and balance the leader brings to the challenges that seem to make it work overall. To do that they have to be adept at as many of the component parts as possible and willing to let others fill in without micromanaging them so that the whole becomes greater than any one individual.

This is what we miss in so many of our efforts to say, ‘no, no, no, you’re missing the point’ in our blogging and development programs. It isn’t missing the point as much as missing how all the points fit together – the most important piece of the puzzle – the ultimate picture. The leader doesn’t have to be the top expert in any one area, but in how others get involved and how they’re managed so the whole pattern works.

Meanwhile, Google recently revealed its very interesting work on identifying ‘the 8 keys to leadership.’ Beyond being ‘one more getting into the act’ of laying out ‘what’s most important’ is Google’s huge ability to justify their findings with statistics worthy of the best engineers. I’m going to focus on that and what it tells us beyond what Google learned in upcoming posts, but you can get the background here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/business/13hire.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

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We’re all struggling toward something new in management and trying to figure out what’s wrong with the old and why it so persistently hangs on when there is so much evidence around us of better approaches. The challenge is the new methods are complex where the old was relatively much simpler – just line up a group and make them run as fast as possible in the same direction – the old, military-like ‘command and control’ style in which a single general knows what needs to be done and hammers everyone into going along on pain of punishment.

Reading Denning’s other stuff, including his own synopsis of his book, (it’s also covered in several Amazon reviews and in his own video on that page as well) it certainly appears he’s on the right track with much of what he recommends that he feels is ‘radical.’ (I’m not sure just how radical when we can see evolution toward it occurring all around us and practical examples in Toyota, Southwest Air and the other significant models we all continually point out.)

He rails away at ‘traditional management’ (ie: command and control) as so many of us do now, but what I fail to understand is why he doesn’t come at this from what it takes to become a non-traditional manager rather than just what’s wrong. He points at it indirectly in what he writes, describing conditions he hopes for, like ‘self-directed teams,’ but then slams Sutton as just one example of the great many authors he insists are pushing in the wrong direction by trying to reform old style managers.

Perhaps his point is we can’t easily reform traditional managers and so have to somehow blow up their style and the old system entirely and radically reinvent management. Beyond suggesting a need for self-directed teams he doesn’t seem to put forward a way to get there. While such teams are one way of improving things (but just one of many ways) they don’t appear magically by themselves. They need specific management style just as much as any other teams (just a very different type) and they rarely last quite the way he seems to think they would unless someone is consistently nurturing them.

I suppose I’ll have to read or at least skim his book to find out if there are any substantive recommendations for HOW to get where he’d like to go. That’s the true question. We now generally know where management needs to go, but we don’t know how to get there and make it stick, how to build the culture habits we need to really move organizations forward. Reading about his work, I’m impressed by what seem to be valid observations and examples of how much better “radical management” works, but frustrated by the lack of help figuring out how to motivate progress toward it.

As he points out, there are some 11,000 or more business books per year published and no one can hope to read all. So what motivates me to read one that seems to contain such obvious flaws? I’m sort of annoyed with myself for letting the need to investigate a negative motivate me more than looking for a book that might take me toward a positive answer. But then we often find ideas by contrast. by clearly understanding what’s wrong in something else. Certainly hope to report that’s what happens in future revelations on this work.

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We all know something’s wrong with management the way we’ve been doing it. and yet the tools we’d been using were great for getting us out of the industrial revolution into scientific management and through the amazing economic and technical progress that got us to computers, the Internet, incessant world-travel and fabulous education for vast numbers of people. The pace of learning and change has been frantic and appears not to be slowing in the least, as well it might not given how many of us are contributing. It’s a double-edged sword. Our prolific contributions are making it harder to pick out effective strategies, even though the sheer volume seems to focus now in one single direction.

With Steve Denning’s piece we’re faced with a puzzle. There are so many brilliant minds competing to dump their ideas on the Internet and into seminars and conferences on every imaginable subject, where can we find anyone stepping back and making sense of the whole thing. Boards and executives undoubtedly are paying attention to advice for better management, but the cacophony of comment and criticism has to be deafening and confusing.

It turns out, when I dug further into Denning’s work, that he’s a recognized advanced thinker in these areas, yet his premise that Sutton’s work is worthless is inane. Stanford’s Sutton is author of “The No Asshole Rule,” which I’ve mentioned positively before, and more recently “Good Boss, Bad Boss” and he went on to have the most popular blog post last year on HBR blogs – 12 Things Good Bosses Believe. Denning mistakenly trashes Sutton’s premise that managers should care about employees.

This alone is worth taking time to debunk because the tsunami of opinion is running totally in favor of Sutton’s view, not Denning’s. The fact a major management guru can bash this is news indeed. but it also shows the limits of individuals attempting to deal logically with the full subject of what needs to change in managing organizations.

Denning argues Sutton is pandering to an ineffective philosophy when he claims we ought to value employees and treat them decently, that this is a Dilbert approach where middle managers ‘do nothing but try to get by’ and mollify employees. This seems like a truly weird argument to me on all counts. I appreciate that creative minds make mistakes on the way to new insights, but Denning’s main point seems ridiculous as a standalone. The only thing that counts he insists is that every manager and employee strive to “delight the customer” and moving our focus off that to worry about employees is foolish.

Right off the top, why does this have to be a standalone objective? Why either/or? Have we not progressed past the simple view that we can focus on only one thing at a time? Why can’t we help delight customers by treating employees as we want them to treat customers – a truism that Sears Roebuck demonstrated as a measurable example of success some 20 years ago.

Pretty much everyone can surely relate. One personal example – on vacation visits to Florida my spouse absolutely insists on shopping at Publix over its main competitor there, Winn Dixie, and I agree. When you look at the stores, I’d guess Winn Dixie’s are a bit more modern and widely stocked where we go, aiming to ‘delight’ customers with product, but what distinguishes Publix is tough to copy or buy – they truly seem to treat staff decently, who in turn treat each other and customers like real individual people, from the managers to the checkout staff to the mentally challenged baggers they often employ. The difference is palpable and it more than makes up for lacking new, glitzy or massive stores. We just flat out feel better in their stores. They delight us.

What even a single example illustrates is that you can do both, that’s it’s not either/or. So where have we failed with Denning to get this very basic idea across? Why is there such a divide between effective, decent HR strategy and line-management thinking that even a guru misses it entirely? It’s surely not rocket science to suggest that customers are more likely to be ‘delighted’ shopping with happy, friendly people serving than with sour, grumpy workers who are treated badly by managers.

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Often what’s taught in such programs is more supervisory basics – how to discipline, how to give and follow up an assignment. That’s hardly advanced leadership. In fact, the concepts of the boss setting fixed goals, following up and disciplining shortfalls, if over-used, are certain to detract from the deeper objectives of leadership, which would have to include coaching and encouraging employees to take initiative, risk trying their own new ideas and driving further than the coach/leader expects.

So if training isn’t extensive, how do our leaders get the 10,000 hours of concentrated practice needed to develop true skill at this highly complex task. The answer seems to be that in most cases (82% as we’ve pointed out from one study previously) they don’t. They remain at a ‘starter’ level of leadership skill that in turn extinguishes employee engagement with a few months.

The best practice organizations in leadership development utilize a range of tactics. They train, they ensure coaching and mentoring (whether internally or externally provided), they send people on developmental visits, they rotate people from assignment to assignment designed to fill in gaps in their experience and background. They try to ensure these on-the-job projects and roles are increasingly challenging and they try to support learning continuously.

If the best we can expect is about half a manager’s time dedicated to new or ‘leadership’ tasks versus routine stuff, it would take about ten years to get 10,000 experience on those skills. That’s probably pretty optimistic since most people won’t be continuously challenged, but will be marking time at least some of those years. Moreover they may not have support or guidance steadily to push progress.

However, we know that, given the right background, some individuals can learn at highly accelerated rates in jobs they’re ‘not quite ready for,’ that challenge them enormously in ways they haven’t experienced before, but find an ability to live up to. The person who suddenly finds themselves in charge in a crisis and excels is a well-known phenomenon. That way you pack 10,000 hours into a much shorter duration.

The problem is we can’t always engineer that sort of exceptional learning experience. As with so many events in life, it’s only if the individual decides for themselves they want to try and exerts immense effort that this can work. You could throw lots of people into challenges that seem over their heads only to find that they are in fact swamped and you’ve hurt that individual’s chances. Some would do better in the next challenge, but there is no guarantee of that and mean time, you’ve created a bad result for the organization as well.

From a Complexity Science view your best bet is to assume it may take at least ten years to hone leaders skills and set them on a path with continuous learning challenges, support and varied experiences, watching all the time for those who seem to have the potential to make a significant learning jump in a very large challenge. Complexity Science, however, doesn’t suggest the success rate will be 100%. More likely fewer than half would survive a ‘big jump’ in responsibility. The Science shows situations advance through continual trial and error with the emphasis on a few succeeding while many fail. So it’s probably better to encourage a great many managers to try small jumps, take relatively small risks and see who emerges with greatest effectiveness. At least then you have a learning culture that supports the bigger jumps when they occur.

If the penalties for small failures are negligible you can move those who don’t do as well to a new learning experience quickly and keep them growing. The more you can engineer this right across the board in your organization, the more effective leaders will begin to emerge along the way. And these will be true leaders who can take the organization far into the future faster, exactly the type we need for the continuous innovation companies today need to survive and thrive.

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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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Senior GM execs had a private elevator key that allowed them to get from their guarded top floor suite to their private garage without stopping at any other floors to let anyone on, Rattner notes as a typical example. Perhaps not quite as obviously dreadful as flying in private corporate jets to ask the President for bailout money, but maybe more significant. At least one can argue the economic value of a corporate plane – sort of.

Cutting oneself off from team members and from their casual input on a day-to-day basis, even as much as one might pick up in an elevator ride, is deadly to leadership. Worse, it reinforces your status as untouchable by rank and file. The message is clear – don’t tell us anything, we’re not interested. If relationships never develop on any sort of casual basis, people will hesitate and decide not to approach you about things they worry might be important, but not important enough to risk embarrassment if you turn away or get annoyed.

Not everyone fears speaking to a senior executive just because of their title, but many do. Seeing others engage in casual conversation helps everyone feel OK about it, too. Every leader has to constantly work toward encouraging all sorts of comments. It doesn’t just happen by accident that people keep their leaders up to date. So the private key isn’t just a symbol, but one more actual roadblock that only the worst sort of leaders set up.

Hannibal drank from puddles alongside his troops; Genghis Khan rode with them. No one doubted who was in charge, and you can bet they talked. If you’re afraid to talk to your boss about every day work stuff, you can bet most others including his or her highest lieutenants are, too – so nothing is getting through. Time to be dusting off the resume.

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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.

More on this in future posts.

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Perhaps the most important concept is that happiness isn’t a single thing. When thought of as if it were you tend to think of leisure and joyful moments, but it really runs much deeper. Todd Kashdan makes the point in his excellent brand new book Curious? that we might not even want to set happiness as the most important goal in life. That’s carried through in the very interesting Positive Psychology News Daily (PPND) web site authored by graduates of the first MA programs in the field.

In fact, the PPND site impressed me with several graphics or “image maps” that allow you to click on elements that make up, for instance, ‘a life well lived image map‘ and find the components to a ‘positive emotions image map‘ and other facets of living well. The concepts they capture reinforce Kashdan’s point that maybe we’re barking up the wrong tree trying to focus on happiness alone.

A similar point emerges from another new book, The Happiness Equation, by others of the Positive Psych movement. It gives brief information about 100 items that add to or subtract from happiness and well-being – quite a list, from which you can generate a score to assess how happy you are relative to others, but even more importantly you can see from that which factors are contributing or are missing that create a sense of a good life.

Once again one of the most impressive things about this is the vast amount of research and publication that’s been done in the few short years since this field of study emerged. It really puts in perspective the sort of counseling that goes with mild mood prescriptions to form what Jonathon Haidt and others have shown to be the best antidotes to depression and how closely some of these relate to the elements needed for people to be happy and engaged at work.

While it might seem that these are intensely personal concerns, the fact is that happy employees have consistently been shown to produce better results. It isn’t either/or, but both/and. We can do the right thing by helping people identify what would make them happier and simultaneously improve profits and market share. What a concept! Great to see it born out again and again in modern research.

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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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