Looking for comments on new blogging efforts….  

Blogging Hints and Comments
After some trial and error the new blog is up and running and I’m enjoying adding articles to it. The focus is instant people skills (and how they apply to leaders of the future). Getting into this has helped focus my speaking topics much more, which is good in many ways. It’s much easier to market and explain to people what you are marketing when you’re more focused. You can take a look at http://crispstrategies.com/blog and add comments directly to the blog or by sending them to me at dcrisp@CrispStrategies.com.
  
Why Blog and How Blog Feeds Work  
Not everyone is familiar with blogs, why people write them and the fact that many businesses are finding them useful to explain professional topics. Then there is the puzzle of blog “feeds,” the way you set things up if you want to read numerous blogs via their headlines only, with the option to “click for more.” Given that this is new to many, I wrote up my own learning about feeds HERE.
  
More Articles Available Easily via the Blog   
Since starting the blog at the end of January, I’ve added nine articles and find it easier every time. It may even develop into the long-awaited book eventually. If not, at least, the concepts are similar: short pieces on leadership and people skills that make individuals and organizations successful. So far these are all available either on the main blog page or by categories at the right of the page (http://crispstrategies.com/blog).
 
The value of blogging over regular web sites is multifold. Readers can more easily comment or get into discussion. Search engines rate blogging activity more highly due in part to greater frequency of posting, making topics easier to find. It lends itself to making more, shorter articles available as well as making them easier to find and scroll through on the site via categories that can be set to store them. Each article can have it’s own “permalink” so it can be bookmarked or found easily later, but can also be sent to others, re-posted or referred to on other sites more easily.
 
And some of the new articles are:

The main idea – how core skills make people more effective: HERE. A quick overview of the five key skills.
 
The power of coaching over command-style leadership: HERE. As the shift continues toward a better style of leadership in organizations, this is at the bottom of it.
 
Complexity theory and leadership: HERE. Little by little new books like the ones mentioned here are making leadership a simpler science.
 
Instant leadership and a link with stories: HERE. There’s nothing like actual stories of how people overcame challenges to illustrate “instant leadership.”
 
The opening article of a series on the power of positive comments: HERE. Starting into explaining why leaders ought to be positive more often than negative helped me realize the value of being very specific about the reasons.  
  
Quote of the Month – and a new site! 
   
“Let’s drive not just breakthroughs in new products, but new ways to give more and more people access to these inventions and their benefits. This is a broad and important mission, and I believe we all have a part to play in it.” – Bill Gates
 
Those who know my interest in quotations as short sources of wisdom may be interested in this new find: http://www.ThinkExist.com, where this item may be found. 

Newsletters To Become Occasional

After considerable thought, these newsletters will change from monthly to occasional, less frequent issues to facilitate addition of a blog to the www.CrispStrategies.com website at some point. Blogging allows readers to express ideas and ask questions more easily, for more frequent, shorter comments on the changing scene and for broader connections to relevant links.

The blog will focus on key issues related to “complete skills for leadership of the future.” In some sense this narrows the topic focus toward leadership issues, but also broadens it to include developing challenges that affect the way we work to achieve results and indirectly how our lives are lived, since work is such a large part of that.

The newsletter or “push communication” medium is more suited to selling – informing potential clients about upcoming events, offers and programs. This hasn’t evolved as the purpose of Insight News or the business. Fortunately there hasn’t been the need to sell powerfully and most “events” are in-house ones either not open or not applicable to readers. In keeping with the idea that effectiveness is achievable more easily through simplicity, there isn’t the need to flog tons of “product.” A blog is in some sense “self-advertising” because one can sign up for “pull communication” via RSS feeds to stay informed of updates to the extent the reader wishes. As these mechanisms become better known and more widely used, newsletters can become more occasional reminders of what’s available.

Once the blog is well up and running, there will be a newsletter announcement or you could check the web site periodically.

Your continued readership has been much appreciated and comments are always welcome. There is no action required at this point to continue to receive occasional newsletters in future.  

Question On Friends

Last month’s item about how having three or more close friends contributes to happiness drew a reader’s observation that male and female friendship patterns may differ significantly. Research shows this is true, with the caveat that the two patterns overlap. Some women will follow more of a “male” pattern and vice versa with a wide range of intermediate variations. In very general terms the experts tell us men often have more friends in total, possibly in wider-ranging networks, but stay away from intimate or “self-disclosing” conversations to a greater extent, generally preferring to relate on the basis of activities in common like sports, work or hobbies. Women on the other hand may average fewer friends in total, but with a larger proportion falling within close family relationships and more intimate friends with whom they feel they can more thoroughly discuss many more aspects of their lives.

The happy note is that despite these differences and challenges, people of both sexes who can maintain at least three or more positive friendships of the type they define as “close” by their standards are able to remain significantly happier and more stable emotionally at every stage of life. Hermits are generally observed to become increasingly odd, idiosyncratic… and it turns out, unhappy. We are social creatures, though only a relatively small circle of close associates seems to be required to sustain us in good shape.

Book of the Month

Somewhere there had to be one and I ran across it last week: a definitive book on the value and methods of developing habits. Dan Robey’s “The Power of Habit” is a short, easy read on how to chose and build a very useful range of life, health and success habits most quickly and effectively. He makes the point that you can often find the right habit that will solve any particular problem easily and quickly. Then you can begin to benefit from it right away, with further gains accumulating with momentum as you develop and practice it.

I had just concluded that the ultimate core of my 5 “complete skills” for leadership and success is the skill of building positive habits. At least now I don’t have to write the “how to” book. Robey actually provides a list of 81 habits, each set out in a page or two, that he recommends for life and work.

It’s interesting, too, to see the negative comments about the book on Amazon as well as lots of positive ones. The nay-sayers complain the book is too short and offers nothing new. On the contrary, it’s simplicity makes it more usable than more complex works that bury their advice in so many stories and variations that it’s difficult to pick out exactly what you should do in any given situation. Simplicity is crucial if one wants to apply a skill, so that it’s clear what to practice.

I’ve long since stopped worrying that someone has written exactly the book I’d like to have created. Each of us has contributions to make. We learn from the others. When a book comes along that captures so much of what you’d like to say, it becomes a great resource to refer people to for more information in particular areas that you believe are important. This is just such a book. You can read about it HERE. But you’ll notice it’s already out of print though published in 2003. I got a copy from the library and I see you can get the eBook version at http://www.thepowerofpositivehabits.com/. However, please note I haven’t read and I’m not endorsing any of the many other “products” packaged on that site, just this one item.

A Second Book

Another easy read is Zen Golf by Joseph Parent. It’s actually as much about Zen as Golf and makes an great introduction if anyone is interested in either. I no longer golf, but it’s by far the best new Zen book I’ve seen in years. It helps a bit if you’ve tried golf yourself since that makes it easier to see his point – why we have such a difficult time managing ourselves while trying to improve at new activities. However, it’s an easy leap to apply the same ideas to any other behavior you’re trying to master that you’re finding difficult. The same principles apply. There’s great advice on calming your mind, the “chattering monkey” that distracts us, as the Masters say, and an interesting collection of well-known and not so well-known Zen stories applied to real life activity. The Amazon page is HERE. This one is readily available and there’s a web site as well (http://www.zengolf.com/) though that’s really mostly about golf.

Life Balance in Law?

Harry Arthurs’ report was finally published in October and offers some very interesting social reasoning about better principles of life balance at work. He was hired by the Canadian government two years ago to make recommendations to update the federal labour standards for hours of work and has extended this to include human rights issues including bullying, harassment and abuse versus values and respect. These are all notoriously difficult issues to grapple with. Harry does a great job of finding a balance. Nothing, as he points out, will ever produce a perfect set of rules, but understanding why that’s so can take us a long way toward a set of principles for humane management as well as for formal labour law.

The report is available HERE. I found the most interesting parts, especially for casual readers like me, to be in chapters six, seven and ten. It remains to be seen if governments can take the next steps effectively, but the rationale here is outstanding.

♦ SUCCESS, HAPPINESS AND FRIENDS: Feature Story 

To expand on last month’s discussion of Jonathon Haidt’s new book, The Happiness Hypothesis, we often associate “success” primarily with money, status, job advancement and possessions. It’s important to stop and reflect occasionally on the fact that there’s not only more to it, but actually a completely different meaning to what is most gratifying.

Another recent book for comparison is Vital Friends, by Tom Rath, one of the Gallup research team, which expands on their most peculiar finding. When studying what makes for strong employee engagement (and happy employees generally) they use their Q12, a 12 question survey that shows high engagement if employees answer positively. The most controversial question (among others like, ‘do you have the right tools to do your job’) is this: “Do you have a best friend at work?” Most people react to hearing this – is it valid, is it ethical to ask and how can it be relevant? The fact is high scorers show engagement behavior 84% of the time versus low scores only 12% of whom are engaged.

Rath cites lots of justifying facts, some startling, some less so, that incidentally make a lot of sense and point to the key role of happiness at work. First let’s point out that we don’t know or need to know the exact definition of “best friend,” only that people who say yes are happier and highly engaged, whatever definition they have in mind when answering.

The book makes the point that these individuals work more safely, are concerned about others, feel obligated to some extent, but willingly so, and are following well-proven principles form other studies. For instance, surprisingly, when people are asked when they’re happiest, they put “time with friends” higher than time with… relatives (2nd), spouses (3rd), children (4th), all the way down a list to the very bottom person – “my boss.” Time with my boss ranks just below “cleaning the house.” Bosses have a long way to go to create better climates.
They note that the worst bosses are those who ignore you and only speak to criticize. The ideal boss pays attention and gives positive feedback, but even a tough, critical boss who pays attention is rated much higher than one who is silent. We like relationships with people. And apparently the easiest are with “friends,” easier than relatives, spouses, and others to varying degrees.  
People with at least one friend (at work or otherwise) tend to be healthier and more successful overall. With three or more friends they reach an even higher peak and then level off beyond that. So it isn’t a limitless opportunity and manageable for  most people. If any of those friends follow a particularly healthy diet or lifestyle, for instance, that raises the chances that we will, too, by several hundred percent, substantially reducing the rate of adverse events such as heart attacks.
When we pair these findings with Haidt’s collection of what makes people happy, we get a well-rounded picture. Haidt points to the value of positive, consistent habits at three levels: physical, mental or logical and spiritual. Our physical happiness “set point” or normal level of happiness can be raised over time by consistently developing habits of meditation or “talk therapy” as well as, in difficult cases, the use of Prozac-like drugs, which today have many fewer side effects than earlier pharmaceuticals.
On the logic side, we need to train ourselves in habits of thinking positively and finding things to be thankful for or appreciate regularly in our lives. Spiritually, religion offers a solution for many, a set of comforting beliefs reinforced by the fact that others believe, too. It’s been shown again and again that individuals who don’t share common beliefs with others may do as well, but more of them are prone to depressive, less happy lives.
A clear common theme: at every level – physical, mental and spiritual – “friends” can make a difference. They are people with less of a stake in our measurable success (money and possessions) than relatives, spouses or children. They provide a recognized form of “talk therapy” – so much so, in fact, that experts in workplace wellness have shown that the first line of counseling in every business is a person’s co-workers. Individuals will turn to them for help, advice and an “ear” long before talking with a supervisor or employee assistance counselor. Some companies now train employees in better listening skills specifically to ensure a healthier, happier, more engaged workplace.
At the logical and spiritual levels as well it’s easy to see the role of “friends” in reinforcing our sense of accomplishment, appreciation and beliefs, both on a practical, workplace culture basis as well as the more complex “spiritual” level.

I was intrigued and somewhat surprised by just how logical and well-proven this “friends” value is and how well it fit into what we know about happiness and engagement when you pay attention to what it really means. The Amazon review page for Vital Friends is HERE. 
 
♦ What’s In Progress?

Over time, the major goal is to offer more value via the web site. The new site infrastructure allows easier editing and now that it can be done, I can see there’s plenty of opportunity to make pages more accessible and add more useful information via cross-linking and cross-referencing within the site. More information appears daily on key subjects of interest to everyone who faces leadership opportunities and challenges. Getting at that information easily and making sense of it are the main challenges we all face. In time my hope for the site it that it becomes a repository for a growing body of knowledge of what really works and how it can be made simple enough for everyone to use so that everyone can contribute. Only in this way will we see the world truly make the progress we’re capable of.   
 
♦  Bonus Book Comment: Fit In, Stand Out

This book provides great reading for anyone wanting to expand their career horizons in business corporations especially, but organizations in general. Author Blythe McGarvie was one of the first ten female Fortune 500 CFOs and takes an interesting look at what it takes to get to the top. She recommends that you first learn to fit in, then stand out in six key areas of business: financial acuity (expected for a CFO), integrity, linkages (with others), learning, perspective and global citizenship.

In a refreshingly direct, easy to read format she makes her points and ends each chapter with short bullets on how exactly she recommends you act to fit in and then to stand out. I like the paradoxical nature of the advice. The ability to see paradoxical opposites as both necessary and value-added aspects is rare to see in such clear, easy to digest form. The Amazon review page is HERE. 
 
♦ Resources of Interest 

The key interwoven aspects of success in life and work seem to be: engagement, friendly relationships and happiness. It seems the three are present together more often than not and lead to success rather than being a result of it.

I recalled writing about some of this before and clearly these books take the study one step further. A quick search of our web site for the main researcher in the area of positive (or happiness) psychology turned up the February 2005 newsletter HERE and another reference in the exercises I often use and recommend to people as the first key step in presentations for defining their major goals: HERE.

Marty Seligman who has spent his life in this research and developed a Masters program in positive psychology offers a number of useful ways of assessing our levels of happiness and optimism (a key ingredient) on his site HERE.

While there will undoubtedly continue to be considerable scepticism in business circles about these factors and their relevance to financial results, the increasing evidence is powerful. From any personal point of view it’s reassuring to know that not only do we not have to be miserable to be successful at work, the pursuit of friendships and happiness are actually positive contributors. The implications of this for future workplace strategies are just now being recognized. 
 
 ♦ Quote of the Month

“The leaders who rise to the top are approachable. They roll up their sleeves and fit into their teams. At the same time, they stand out as beacons of confidence and trust. they lead from the front as stewards of the organization, it’s brand, reputation, values and people.” 

     – Joe W. Forehand, Chairman, Accenture in the forward to Fit In, Stand Out
 

IN THIS ISSUE: Feature Story on Work Life Balance, New Format Notes, What’s In Progress? The Happiness Hypothesis, Book Highlights and related Quote of the Month

Feature Story: Work Life Balance
Introducing a new section dedicated to this key topic on the web site is an outline of how little has changed in 20 centuries of human history when it comes to over-work and stress. Read more about this and lessons we can learn from “This Ancient Problem” HERE.

Format Notes:
Welcome to the new format. All comments will be appreciated!
Content headings are designed to show what’s here in the way of summaries that link to complete articles on our site or elsewhere. We’ll still link to Past Newsletters, but the aim is to create more ways to find or rediscover articles you’ve read along with others on the same lines.
Please feel free to report errors or send comments or questions via email. A sign-off link still appears at the bottom of every issue or email us.

What’s In Progress?
Monthly features will aim for useful insights on new books, ideas and other material to shed light on our primary goal of linking simpler ways to develop more effective results with people, including yourself. In fact, successfully working with others begins with understanding what works for ourselves. The challenge with newsletters is to make them connect more immediately with useable information as well as easier to read.

Book – The Happiness Hypothesis:
Although not quite through this new book by Jonathon Haidt I have to say it’s one of the best I’ve read for understanding what creates happiness and how we can manage the elements better. This matters because we are drawn toward what makes us happy and spend time on becoming better at it. If we don’t know or understand, then we’re trying to force ourselves to spend time on things we won’t become good at and won’t benefit from. Understanding happiness points us in the right directions to resolve other key problems we face. Stay tuned for a more complete review next month. In the mean time, Amazon reviews are HERE.

Some Highlights from the Happiness Book:
Summarizing the two keys to happiness as doing two things well – Love and Work, Haidt observes, “Only by knowing the kinds of beings that we actually are, with the complex mental and emotional architecture that we happen to possess, can anyone even begin to ask about what would count as a meaningful life. …psychologists can now tell us how love and work get converted into happiness and a sense of meaning.” He goes on to explain how in easy to read terms.

One key he notes is to understand that those who have some say in how they get things done are far happier than those who must simply follow orders. This echoes unspoken advice from our Feature Article to work at your own pace, ideally at tasks you find meaningful. Doing so is the surest path to both productive work and effort that pays back to the worker in both income and satisfaction.

Haidt has definitely managed to craft a philosophical guide not only to happiness, but success. It provides the simple suggestions we desperately need in today’s complex world.

Quote of the Month:
Haidt quotes the usually flowery Kahlil Gibran: “Work is love made visible.” It’s one of his briefer and clearer comments. See more his quotes: HERE.

The message – one of three possible routes: make sure you choose work you can love! Or alternatively, learn to love your work. Or seek ways to make it into something you can love! Whichever of these you choose, work at it consistently until habits form and you truly enjoy and profit from what you will inevitably spend your life doing.

PS: the Gibran link is to the Quoteopia site (www.Quoteopia.com), a comprehensive Google-like source of quotations, recently discovered. Quotes, especially short ones, can often help us recall and develop key ideas we need to work on.

Tolerating “Difficult” Talented Leaders?

A recent seminar by highly respected expert Professor Jeffrey Gandz of Ivey business school highlighted the critical need that organizations face today for recruiting and retaining highly talented leaders. He is not alone in repeatedly referring to such individuals as “difficult.” We all chuckled knowingly because we’ve all seen it.

The myth that we must tolerate difficult leaders because of their talent is flawed. Of course we want strong individuals with clear opinions and the unshakable persistence to drive them into practice. Nothing in that suggests they must drive people crazy doing it.

But what does “difficult” really tell us? It means one of two things. Some organizations perceive these talented people as difficult and are so inflexible as to stifle such creativity in leadership to the point where these individuals leave. The alternative? The individual actually is difficult and we tolerate such would-be leaders inhumanity to others in order to encourage them to ride rough-shod over opposition, ignoring valid points others may be making. Either way we need to identify the nature of the problem clearly and the approach needs to change.

Humans tend to err toward being black and white on issues. This is a good example of how we must incorporate both in order to succeed. First, we need to tolerate the efforts of creative leaders to overturn organizational sacred cows because we need them to change things. We can’t let ingrained corporate habits dominate or improvements will never be possible. Every improvement involves change that almost always feels uncomfortable.

Second, how leaders do it is another matter. In the heroic model, leaders shout and threaten in order to drive home their points. Giving orders predominates. This may be tolerable in emergencies. Perhaps for this reason, we tend to characterize every day as a series of crises. Most of the time we’re kidding ourselves. Few things are that earth-shaking, but characterizing them that way provides an excuse – no time to do things carefully. It seems to justify shortcuts and less civil behavior.

In reality, the best leaders take the time to explain, support people through change and ensure that their objectives fit into the clear requirements of situations they deal with so the people support them in return. Abraham Lincoln once commented, “If I had eight hours to cut down a tree, I’d spend seven hours sharpening the axe.” Getting people ready for change is almost certainly more important than the change itself.

Today we see many excellent strategies fail for lack of effective execution. Leaders bemoan the fact there is resistance from their organizations. Whose fault is that? Who must take responsibility for changing it? What is the job of a leader if not to rally disorganized individuals into a powerful, committed, focused force? To imagine that a “difficult” so-called leader can achieve this by upsetting everyone is the height of fantasy.

It’s not that command-style leadership is dead. As noted, we need leaders to be hard-driving. It takes strong will to convince large organizations to change. But command leadership is not sufficient in today’s complex situations. We have to add in the skills of motivating and engaging teamwork to a far greater degree than in the past. This is a challenge to include “both/and,” not make it “either/or.”

We are beginning to ask senior leaders to take a more in-depth, complex approach to managing their organizations. It won’t happen overnight. Repeated reviews of the core challenges from different perspectives will help. The key is to support driving hard toward change, but using humane, positive, supportive methods that allow people time and give them help to become engaged. Speed is always cited as the biggest barrier. We need everything yesterday. It takes considerable courage on the part of senior executives to ensure the necessary preparation is provided for people. When they do that, it turns out that change can happen almost instantaneously. The “right strategy” for any change must always include a “right strategy for people.”

Additional Views of Heroic Flaws

More is being written today than ever before on these issues. When we look at most organizations though, we might wonder if anyone is reading. It can help to encourage people to pay attention to the nuances of these issues. For example www.selfhelpmagazine.com/articles/wf/heroic.html. Clearly there are those who seem to disagree, such as: www.chrislowney.com/heroic/index.html, where I believe the misunderstanding is largely semantic. Debate is healthy. We can see persistent, committed individuals as heroic in meeting obstacles without buying the entire heroic leadership model of command-and-control. It’s easy to see, however, how words can create confusion.

One of the better descriptions of the new “post-heroic” model as it’s being called is this: www.refresher.com/arssheroic.html.

The Critical Need For Leaders

Did you ever work for a boss who would have been great except for one glaring flaw? Most of us have.

I recall a top executive who one day gave me an assignment and sent me off to spend several millions of dollars to get it done. A few weeks later I ran into another of his reports who said he had just been given the same assignment and was about to start spending money and hiring people. Fortunately I was able to iron things out, but similar incidents of inconsistent behavior by this individual eventually cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars. And ultimately cost him his job.

Meeting The Need Should Be Easier

Developing effective leaders is now easier and pays off in greater value than ever before, yet the gap between the numbers of leaders needed and how many are trained keeps increasing. Even today most leaders are dropped into jobs and left to figure out for themselves how to motivate, guide, coach and maximize the contributions of their operations.

Organizations are flatter, more widely-dispersed, leaner and are composed of more sophisticated jobs. This stretches right down to front-line workers who must resolve complex customer problems that require far more initiative and leadership-style thinking than ever before. With repeated changes in strategies and processes, the need for self-motivated learners and innovative thinkers means that far more staff require leadership-type skills.

A typical organization in the past might have had 5 to 7% of its people in formal management or leadership roles with another 7% of key staff showing significant individual leadership in the way they carried out their jobs, for a total of perhaps 15% of staff needing to show leadership. Today this need has ballooned to 50 to 60% – four times as many – requiring initiative, creative, independent thinking and often broader leadership skills for teams, task forces, joint ventures, research initiatives and organizational responsibilities.

At the same time we have a more educated workforce, capable of learning faster, thinking critically and exercising initiative, whether managing just themselves, providing effective one-on-one customer service or leading others in formal roles.

That should be great news because it means we have the material required to develop the many more leaders we need. Moreover this workforce has been raised to continually seek self-improvement and fulfilling jobs and careers.

Many Challenges Remain

There is a down-side however. With higher salaries, more skills and often more family support than in the past, many are freer to drop out of jobs that offer little challenge or bad bosses. More of them can quit pretty much whenever they like and take their time finding a better, fulfilling job that today’s society encourages them to seek. Although this is most pronounced in developed countries, most nations are finding their educated workers require better leaders to keep them engaged and get maximum productivity.

We know from studies that as many as 70% of employees believe they work for a “toxic” boss and are routinely circulating résumés for which there are far more channels than ever before. As many as 80% in the workforce are said to be “disengaged.” We have all heard the saying that employees do not leave companies they leave poor leaders.

The need, not only for leaders, but better, more effective ones is dramatically higher and so is the payback for companies that excel at developing them. An overview of major stock markets shows companies that do this well can now achieve a total market value averaging as much as four times book value or the original cost of all concrete inputs into the company, which used to be about maximum value for most companies. This extra “intangible value” now represents as much as 75% or more of the value of top-notch organizations. Annual profit advantages of four to 10 times the competition are routinely noted in research. It is estimated that half to two-thirds of this extra value results from the effectiveness of a company’s leaders — not just those at the top, but at every level throughout the organization.

Research Confirms What’s Needed

At the same time we have the knowledge we need to develop leaders effectively. Mounting research affirms the skills effective leaders have reported as critical for generations and places them in context along with what it takes to develop them. The core skills are easier to learn in practical situations than a classroom. In my practice I define and illustrate them as simply as possible – leaders must develop habits of: being positive, being honest, asking what and how continually to develop better creative ideas for solutions, using those ideas to build better habits and finally, developing a habit of keeping all five of these habits or “skills” in balance.

Missing capability in any one of these five critical areas is fatal to effective leadership. Just think of a boss you’ve had who was weak in one of these areas. For instance that senior boss I worked for, who lost money and got himself fired, was very skilled at being positive and a great motivator. He was also very honest about the problems we faced, had great ideas, vision and strategies, but his flaw was tremendous inconsistency. His behavior did not produce reliable habits or skills in his people nor did it follow consistent patterns, but jumped all over the map. As a result all of us were routinely off-balance. That one basic flaw brought down his entire operation.

This individual’s one glaring gap had not turned up in more than 20 reference checks on his background. For most of his career he had worked under a very focused, consistent boss who evidently filled this gap he suffered. With us, as a top leader, no one was there to restrain him. Many such experiences confirmed for me what research shows — that the most effective leadership development comes from coaching and mentoring executives as they rotate through varied, challenging positions. We need to make sure they are tested in a wide variety of challenges. They benefit most from individual development plans and assistance that focus strengths and weaknesses among these seemingly simple five skills that every effective leader needs.

Leaders Develop Leaders

It is truly said that leaders develop leaders. That will occur provided the senior leaders (a) understand that developing others is a significant, perhaps most important, part of their role and (b) they have in turn developed sufficient skill to coach. Building a coaching culture in which every leader learns those skills is essential and unfortunately still rare. It is also highly cost effective because once the culture is established more senior leaders develop up-and-coming juniors as part of their day-to-day work, with little direct cost and considerable leverage in improved profits and value. The burgeoning executive coaching industry provides evidence that more companies are recognizing the need to give their senior executives these skills. But ultimately most of the work must be done in-house by people who understand the need and the tools involved. Guidance helps, but an overall culture is needed.

Similar Opinions

Forbes published the following article by leadership guru, Kevin Cashman, this month (I happen to be quoted in another article on recruiting in the same issue although it isn’t on-line – August 14): Here. This is a topic that won’t go away. We’re at a crossroads when leadership needs are escalating and the nature of what makes leaders effective is dramatically expanding. This is a by-product of the faster-paced, more individualized world in which we live and work – opening great opportunities, but posing equally great challenges.

Mentoring Questions

Why is mentoring rare? Perhaps because it’s seen as having fewer immediate payoffs than the focused coaching that we expect every manager to do.

Last month’s newsletter about leader development drew interesting comments. We noted that today’s employees respond less well to orders from command-and-control leaders. They need to be “engaged” at work, not “bossed.” Yet many companies still seek for and promote charismatic, command-and-control style managers. They continue to look for “magic bullet” or “white knight” managers who in theory solve every problem single-handedly.

The puzzle is that to develop leaders effectively we need to build on strengths, but only about one in five who are promoted seem to have strengths in areas that produce effective, development-style leadership. Most are great individual contributors, but have difficulty developing people or dealing with conflict or challenges from them. Of developmental challenges, mentoring is perhaps the most misunderstood and distant, yet it is relatively straight forward in essence.

Mentoring Seen As Much Needed

Of the top ten influences leaders cite as most helpful in their own development, coaching, mentoring and frank discussions rate very highly. A number of readers specifically mentioned the need for mentors. Since so few existing managers are naturally good at these skills, what can we do? The key is to make the skills easy for individual contributors to become good at. If we can make it clear what they need to actually DO, many will do it.

The skills turn out to be fairly straight forward. Every leader, as much as possible, needs to be encouraged to mentor and coach others. Coaching is becoming better understood and is the easier task. Just five key questions make one effective at it: What is it you want to achieve? What would have to happen for that to occur? What would need to be different from current circumstances? What could you start with to make that happen? And when can we get back together to see if that worked?

Effective coaching simply means asking the person you are coaching these questions at each meeting. It can be handled quite informally as long as you follow this flow of inquiry. You can brainstorm with them if they seem stuck, but essentially we need to encourage employees regularly to solve their own issues. After all, isn’t that what we hired them to do? If we thought they could not achieve goals without specific instruction from us, we definitely hired the wrong people.

Every leader can practice asking these questions when managing people instead of issuing orders. If they have done the up-front job required in most companies – that is: helping their people develop mutually understood objectives and goals at the outset, then there should not be a direct need to issue orders.

If the employee knows what the goals are they should be able to answer these questions. For a manager, putting the questions forth in a supportive, earnestly helpful manner should “engage” employees to the maximum in their work. Of course, many command-and-control managers ask only rhetorically, using the question as a pretext to begin telling the employee what to do. That defeats the purpose. But if a manager truly practices these questions in every reasonably possible situation they will become adept at coaching.

Mentoring Is A Bigger Challenge

What we call mentoring is a bigger challenge. It usually means that a manager other than one’s immediate boss takes an interest in a less defined form of coaching. This can range from using the same coaching questions above to simply trading ideas. It includes giving the employee a wider perspective, a context in which to see their present work as part of a larger career path and a wider company goal than simply today’s tasks.

It is a purely voluntary discussion, unlike direct boss-employee, which must happen to get work done. Therefore good will and openness is needed on both sides to make mentoring work. That occurs more rarely in most companies because the underlying culture of guiding others is often missing.

Effective mentors can come from within or outside one’s present employer. They keep confidential the discussions that occur. They seek to broaden an employee’s outlook, to show other career paths, to suggest committees, assignments, alternative courses of action and different views of situations than the employee or even their boss might take. Their primary effect is to give employees confidence that someone believes they have potential bigger than their present job and suggest how that potential could be put to use sooner rather than later.

Nothing stops a boss from mentoring their own people, but that can be confusing for both. When an employee’s potential could take them away from their present duties, that can be difficult for a boss to genuinely recommend, whereas an outside manager would have fewer qualms about suggesting it. Direct bosses are usually best to stick to coaching on more immediate goals except for occasional career discussions, but the overall effects are similar. Both methods encourage employees to try new approaches, to build confidence and to think longer term and more broadly than they otherwise might.

Both mentoring and coaching flourish better in environments where they are explicitly supported by strategy and intentions of senior management… in short by the “culture” of the company. The two sets of skills are similar, except that a mentor has less of a stake in getting the immediate work done and so can spend more time asking the employee to think broadly about what they might contribute over the longer term rather than immediately.

Getting managers into coaching mode sets up a much greater likelihood that they will also mentor staff beyond their own reports when they notice potential. Once a manager learns to coach, they tend to apply those skills in many situations because they are so much more effective in the long run than command-and-control. As they develop confidence in coaching, they naturally tend toward mentoring as well.

At the same time people comfortable with coaching tend to look to others for input for themselves as well. They are more likely to be seen by their own senior managers as more “coach-able” or “mentor-able.” That makes it more worthwhile for those senior managers to invest the time and effort to coach and mentor, so the overall environment grows more friendly toward these processes over time.

Building A Culture Over Time

Positive cultures can actually develop fairly quickly if there is a concerted effort to engage more managers in applying coaching. The steps for this are clear, and their use is relatively easy to measure by asking in employee surveys. We can also see where managers fall short in this area by identifying where attitude problems, absenteeism and poor productivity occur.

Strategies encouraging coaching and mentoring along with positive examples from senior managers go a long way to installing the right culture sooner rather than later. We know from much research that these are the most powerful influences we can put in place to improve company results. They take no more, in fact almost certainly less, time than command-and-control leadership with its error-prone results. This is why the most successful larger companies today would not think of targeting any other style. Once under way the effects are self-reinforcing and will spread widely barring the hiring of new senior management with destructive command-and-control attitudes. All it takes is some basic training and the right strategies, backed by people who consistently apply and support them.

More In Depth Resources

Mentoring is a widely discussed topic. Not all of the information is useful, as usual. For a sense of the breadth, this site lists some good articles, mostly available online: http://www.mentors.ca/mentorpapers.html. As always I find that keeping the basics such as the above in mind makes it easier to assess, interpret and apply such readings.

©Dave Crisp 2006