Listening to Kevin Cashman this week on the update of his well-known leadership book offered a chance to reflect on the extent to which the climate in which HR (Human Resources) operates is changing… or isn’t. Interesting that Cashman’s writing retains its Zen flavor, something one might think wouldn’t sell well in the corporate world, but he’s been consistent for more than ten years now.

Cashman updated his book to include more research and case studies that confirm the value of its recommendations – that to create change, a leader must first change him or herself. It’s a message more leaders need to hear. In fact, in my piece for Canadian HR Reporter, I make the point that this is why there are so many bad leaders, a question we constantly hear. A leader who thinks their role is to tell others to change, but has no intention or expectation of changing themselves is a bad leader and there are lots.

Cashman’s point with the update is there are many companies beginning to notice this principle and use it to hire or promote better CEOs who in turn create and lead better executive teams, who in turn lead more effectively for results. The problem is that “many” is a relative term. Where before there might have been a handful of such companies, now there are twice or three times as many – still a handful compared to the vast number of organizations out there.

Listening to Cashman and knowing he’s been stumping the world at conference after conference for years makes one wonder how many of have to push this message out before it becomes everyday stuff for leaders in organizations. Somewhere there is a tipping point, to borrow Malcolm Gladwell’s book title and concept. It can’t come too soon for all the people who continue to struggle in companies that haven’t picked up on this message.

As it happens, it’s my pleasure to MC a Gladwell book launch event shortly after his new book, Outliers, hits the shelves finally next Tuesday. I’m grateful to have this opportunity to finally meet him as well as hear directly what he has to say. Of course, I’ll be posting about it shortly after that.

Times are really changing for leadership and HR when such information is absorbed so readily and more people seek to put it to use. How Outliers is received will be the next measure of how much.

Maybe the title gives this away, but maybe not. With Coaching-style Leadership, there are still times when more directive leadership makes the most sense. Speaking at the HR program I mentioned a few days ago, there were a number of professional coach trainers in the audience. One who is totally committed to coaching as the best solution for all situations took me to task on this after my presentation, zeroing in on this one comment.

I’d said there are times when command and control is still the most appropriate style – and used an example of a sinking ship where you want the person who knows best what to do to assume control and direct the best actions for everyone, the more firmly the better – no panic, life jackets, lifeboats, line up here!

The coach trainer insisted that even on the Titanic, if the captain had coached, everyone might have been saved. In fact, it would undoubtedly have led to a better outcome if the captain had coached the crew sufficiently before the emergency so they knew how to take charge, but I can’t honestly see the opportunity to coach once the iceberg was hit. If you think about the coaching process and questions, is it really an appropriate time to ask people “how’s it going, what do you really want, what should our strategy be, what needs to be different and what will we do now?” Or do you hope the crew lines people up firmly, guides them into lifeboats and tells them how to launch?

The one antidote to panic is clear confidence from a leader who remains calm and balanced and seems to know what to do when you don’t. This is true for any situation, but in true emergencies, it can take a pretty directive leader to convince people. Once things are underway, you hope individuals will take initiative and you may be able to coach that once everyone’s in boats and away, but in those first stages of crisis finding the right balance of command first before coaching seems wisest.

A benefit of being invited to speak at events, albeit as a last minute fill-in, is you get to hear other presenters. At the Conference Board of Canada HR 2008 annual conference last week, it was a pleasure to hear Bill MacKinnon, CEO, KPMG Canada, discuss how he’s helped them embrace great leadership as a true objective throughout the organization. He keynoted the main conference theme – Influential Leadership - anchored to how this improves results.

He kicked off with the emphasis on why paying attention to leadership is becoming so much more important – because organizations, the challenges they face and the tasks of managing and leading them have become so much more complex. He proceeded to virtually itemize the same five key elements I build on.
Most striking of all, he very much emphasized the importance of leaders remaining “calm” (to use his term) in the face of the daily onslaught of challenges we now face. In other words, developing and maintaining the skills of balance in the midst of furious activity ended up being the point he stressed more than any other. I couldn’t agree more.

And balance, of course, involves including all the elements that must be balanced together so you don’t get blindsided by something you’ve forgotten about… like people’s attitudes and engagement, for instance, while you are nonetheless pushing for results. “Both/and” becomes a big challenge of complexity that many managers struggle with. Practice makes perfect. It was great to hear a CEO of a major organization put it in such a “must have, every day” light!

A steady stream of items reflecting progress in human resources arrives every week now. Momentum is picking up. Each step takes us further on the way to full recognition that HR is, in Jack Welch’s words, “the second most important job in any organization.”

Widely reported in the past week, major retail jewelry operator, Zale Corporation, promoted it’s EVP of HR, Legal and Corporate Strategy, Theo Killion, to President. Now you might expect as in years past this would be a legal expert serving as in-house counsel who makes deals and plans strategy from a legal-financial perspective and, oh yes, happens to have HR tucked under his wing. In this case Mr. Killion is a 30-year HR veteran who worked his way up to over-see the other jobs. HR is first in his background. Moreover he is tasked in part with continuing to promote diversity, which he personally exemplifies - a forward-looking strategy for results as well as doing the right thing.

Then the mail bag brought the latest “People & Strategy” - the journal of the Human Resource Planning Society - filled with a series of articles about CEO succession (and pay).

No great news on managing pay better I fear. Boards continue to struggle with the best ways to pay CEOs. Although the theory is firming up they should be paid for on-going performance once they’ve been attracted with a competitive base salary, the problem is how to measure the connection with performance. One article proposed a system that was then nearly universally dumped on by a half dozen experts.

So, what’s good on the horizon for the future?

As an aside, I hear from sources in various industries that top HR salaries are getting into the ozone, too, giving CFOs some concern they might be eclipsed pay-wise. The same group noted they are seeing more MBA students who have chosen the HR track in the belief this is where the action will be. They are right. Hopefully they are getting that advice from their MBA schools, too. The goal really isn’t to get paid well just for the money, but to see HR and what it does for organizations recognized and given the clout at least on a par with other senior roles.

The four main articles on succession were right on, backed up well, agreed on the same key points and made sense. What really stood out were two listing competencies for CEOs of the future - among them both explicitly emphasized a heavy dose of humility along with confidence - in balance. It was refreshing to see it clearly spelled out as a specific requirement!

CEOs need courage to take risks in rapidly changing environments and at the same time the ability to listen, absorb advice and ideas from others in the Board and the organization and meld all of that into best guesses. All this requires the humility to understand no one person has the ultimate right answer to any situation any more and Boards seem finally to be getting that. Complexity is the driving factor and makes the ability to assimilate diversity of opinion, knowledge and experience increasingly crucial.

And why is humility in a CEO such a gain for the HR perspective? For a dozen reasons including primarily that people work best when they are included, listened to and worked with cooperatively. HR struggles to promote this in vain in many organizations where the whims of individual leaders take precedence over team work and cooperation, where the majority of senior executives quite often follow the (bad) example of the CEO. With the right choice of CEO, having senior execs copy the new behavior would be a huge advance.

By now you’ve read that multitasking isn’t what people imagine and largely distracts us from effective work (Slashdot link, for instance). It’s really switching quickly back and forth between two or more tasks and each switch wastes time as we struggle to re-orient to the next item. That’s been well researched.

The problem is we all do it. And actually, if you think about it, a certain type of multitasking is necessary and worthwhile, though much isn’t. We need to understand the difference.

What helps is if we pay attention to the one key multitasking that helps us to be most effective, a facet we often overlook. While doing anything, the key question is what its effect will be on other people - will they be more motivated and more capable of helping get things done as a result of what we do?

Everything we do connects with others - customers, co-workers, family members, even other drivers on the road. If we plough through task after task to get "things" done as quickly as we can, it’s inevitable that we start ignoring people - the loud cell conversations in crowded places, the calls taken during meetings and dinners, the brush-offs of co-workers when we "absolutely" have to make something else a priority. No one learns from us, except that in future they’d rather have less to do with us.

The real multitasking requirement we all face is how our work can get done and at the same time people can be helped along the way so they, too, can be optimally productive, learn new skills, improve, grow and thrive. What else are we in business and in life for? And, by the way, some of that greater productivity and improvement will come back to help us get more things done faster ourselves. If we model helping, we will be helped in return. Reciprocity is our human link.

Do you get much out of webinars?  I hear people say if they got one thing it was worthwhile.  Is it any wonder Gen Xers prefer faster media like texting and short You Tube videos?  Often the best ideas come from very short comments. But you may not even notice them without context.

A webinar today on the subject of effective coaching from Bluepoint by the authors of their new book, Unleashed, suggested we can often benefit from the following question in lots of situations and expect many people to jump to answer this: "who knows a dangerous conversation we need to have?"

In context this is a brilliant observation.  If you’re coaching someone it could be the dangerous conversation they need to have is with themselves or with some significant other - as spouse, a boss, a coworker or any of a dozen other possibilities.

Perhaps even more importantly, this would almost always seem helpful in team meetings.  Maybe change the wording slightly to "dangerous questions we need to ask?"  How many times have you been at a meeting, knowing people are sitting with concerns, but feeling unable to ask for speak up?

Another option: "Who knows a challenging question we should ask?"  The possibilities and the opportunities are endless.  Are there situations where you can apply this today?  Is there a dangerous question you can ask yourself?

Multimedia is an up and coming way to get ideas across. Here’s a link to a Internet radio interview in which I describe how my five key principles work - from ThatRadio.com, a Toronto Internet radio start up.

You can listen right now by clicking the “play” button” (the triangle) in the player below. (For IE7 there is not need to download Quicktime, but you will need it for Firefox and others.) If you prefer to save it or listen later, you can “right click” on the link above, click “save target as” and make sure to pay attention to where you save it so you can find it later. This group impressed me with their business-like approach and the progress they’re making. The show is about 50 minutes, but the advantage of an archived version is that you can skip around, stop and come back, all without much difficulty.

I was lucky that a friend, John Klotz, has expanded his TorontoTalks.org small business presenters line-up to this i-radio format. I think it really works and have listened to several earlier archived shows. I’ve found Internet radio to be so superior as a medium I find myself listening to far more than I ever expected I would. When you can’t listen live, it’s completely straight forward to download and listen later. That way you can access topics when you need them or even download them to listen to while commuting or working out via iPod or MP3. 

The point I’m trying make both in this blog and on the radio is that the same principles of success apply to every situation - work or personal, front-line worker, family member or executive officer. They also work in any medium and any business or non-profit. Sometimes it helps to read, hear, see and try out things in various ways so you get a complete overview. I wouldn’t try to communicate solely by any one medium because each contributes things you can’t get from the others.

Last week here consultants from McKinsey presented research on what makes Human Resources strategies succeed and produce better business results in organizations. More studies are being done in this area, in this case based on over 115,000 questionnaires from executives in 230 companies. Their original research is described by Forbes with a link to their write-up provided. To see their longer article you need a free membership as it will tell you at that link, but if you work in HR it’s definitely a valuable newsletter to get.

I’ve long pointed out my objective isn’t to do research myself. Several people, noting my interest, have suggested I start a PhD. Not for me, thanks. I love working with actual clients way too much. Their needs are usually short and easy compared to the time needed academic work. Besides there are others who enjoy it more and are probably better at it. I see my role as simplifying a lot of hot new findings and relating them to what produces results for individuals and organizations.

This relatively new (last year) McKinsey work deserves a much wider audience. It reinforces much of what we already know, but puts some solid proof behind it. And it simplifies quite usefully.

The take-away is this: you or your organization can get far better results from people by focusing on just two things. First, stop doing dumb things or using patently bad practices. Second, focus on three to five key practices that work together. Pursing practices that don’t work together or choosing single "quick fixes" is one of the bad things you should stop doing.

That raises two questions. How do you figure out what’s bad? Easy. Most people already know because others have told them many times, but they don’t want to admit it. A sure-fire way is to ask others what you do that bugs them. Then stop it. At a company level, my old employer persisted with a bonus plan everyone laughed at. The biggest gainer each year was a guy who purposely set stretch goals and failed to meet them. The problem was his goals happened to be to reduce his sales to ease the company out of his line of business. Each year he didn’t make the effort to reduce so his sales far exceeded the low target he set. Paradoxically that meant he beat people who set targets to raise sales and failed to make as much over target as he did. A simple fix could have made this logical, but senior management refused to change anything several years in a row. So the entire bonus plan became a joke… and a serious irritant. Similarly bosses have often been told not to yell at employees. These things aren’t rocket science. Just stop. But many executives can’t seem to grasp this.

Interestingly, the key HR practices that the McKinsey guys found reliably improve results turned out to be very close to the five I recommend at every level, for all size of situations from individual to total organization. In their findings, these boiled down to setting a clear, inspiring vision of the goals needed, then developing a culture of positive trust and openness (honesty) and finally helping each person see clearly what their own role is in achieving these goals. I would only add - keeping these factors in balance as you move forward. That’s captured in their insistence that these only work if they work together. When one or two are allowed to dominate and aren’t balanced with the others, things break down.

They go on to point out, as I do, that neither individuals nor organizations need to be perfect. Far from it they say. What’s needed is consistent effort. And their stats show companies who do this versus those that don’t end up with double the results financially (and every other way) over the courses of a year or two. You can see why I get a kick out of following such research. It consistently validates what I show people how to do. Pretty simple, but highly effective.

Yes. Learning to tolerate uncertainty. Once you have, you’re home free.

We’re finally beginning to understand complexity and it turns out to be simpler than expected. In virtually all complex situations a small set of principles makes you most successful… with one caveat: you can’t predict the exact outcome or when it will occur. In all complex situations there are no guarantees. Some solutions will fail and some will succeed beyond anything imaginable when you begin.

The good news is that when working with people, we know the small set of principles and we know that successful outcomes outnumber failures by a vast margin - in the order of 99 to 1… if you stick to the principles that work most often. I’ve covered those before on my web site… here. http://www.crispstrategies.com/index.php?src=news&category=Articles+about+the+Five+Skills

The challenge is that you need to apply the five skills consistently for as long as it takes to succeed. You can’t know for sure how long that is. You can’t be absolutely certain it will work (although 99% of the time it will. This is astronomically better than the odds you get when gambling which are usually far more than 99% tilted toward losing. But the results of gambling are usually instant, which makes it the most appealing behavior on Earth, the most addictive and difficult to walk away from. This is the opposite. It can be very challenging for anyone to stick with a long, slow, uncertain process.

If nothing else, you may just feel stupid hanging in. That’s a really bad feeling. I recall how difficult it was doing my first major search for a new job at age 33. I wanted to make a change from being a rank-and-file teacher/guidance counselor with no obvious management experience to a business-managerial role in some totally different industry where I had no experience. I had to sit at lunch ever day for a year with a bunch of other teachers who thought I was attempting something insane and impossible. Though few commented, I could feel the weight of their skepticism adding to my own every day. But I plodded along. As a result I ended up in a dream job that led to a dream career with results so far beyond what I could have achieved in my old role that it’s hard to compare them in the same breath. Talk about tripling your results… and then some.

The neat thing is that you don’t have to let yourself feel stupid. No one really knows or cares how you feel. It helps to use the five skills constantly in all sorts of situations. That way you soon see them working in one way or another. Confidence develops and you realize you can succeed at virtually anything more than 99% of the time if you just keep at these daily. After a while they become second nature and you do them without any conscious effort. They become habits you always apply automatically, not stressful, not time-consuming, easy to fit in with whatever else you want to do - in a word: EASY!

Gregg Thompson writes, in the newsletter for Tom Peters’ spin-off "Blue Point Development" that we shouldn’t believe all those articles we see promising leadership "secrets." He’s right to point out there aren’t really any secrets. We know what there is to know, but he goes on to explain why so we see so many of these articles by saying we know all about leadership, but, "It’s just tough, and we’d like to find an easier way to do it." 

I beg to differ. I rarely found leadership tough at all. In fact, I often felt I had one of the easiest jobs in the world. What’s tough is to struggle under bosses who don’t let you do anything, who constantly dish out orders and keep you from leading or doing anything your way. I was lucky that most of my bosses over the years didn’t exert that sort of strangling control. And I worked steadily on ways to get out from under that sort of supervision.

The key to leadership is that you have to have a clear point of view of your own, not someone else’s. You need to pursue it steadily, not change directions constantly as many managers and companies do. Not everyone will buy in initially, so you have to persuade, convince people with small results demonstrating reliability along the way. And along with persistence, you have to listen and adjust to incorporate what others need to see along the way while still moving in your chosen direction.

The balance between stubbornly persisting along your own route and incorporating others’ opinions is the big challenge. Fortunately you don’t have to be perfect. There will be times when you annoy people by sticking to your way and other times when you accuse yourself of being wishy-washy because you gave in to easily on some key point. If you constantly pay attention and remember that you are stretching the envelope, you’ll notice these and adjust continuously without ever giving up on your overall objective.

That probably sounds tough. It really isn’t. It just takes focus - paying attention consistently and not forgetting where you’re trying to get to. It becomes habit, pushing slowly, but steadily toward your goal while doing your best to take others along with you. At times progress will seem slow or non-existent. At others you’ll be startled by major leaps forward. Either way, you mustn’t give up your efforts to move forward step by step (I’d use the word "slogging," but that makes it sound hard and it isn’t). Just persist steadily at a pace and pressure level you can comfortably sustain. Make sure you get distractions and relaxation in there to recharge your batteries. The end result belongs to those who keep going, not those putting in the greatest one-time effort. Enjoy the journey. You only pass this way once.