Month: February 2011

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The Leadership Fallacy: You See What I See

Leaders need to understand their world in order to influence it.  This requires sharp sense-making skills.  Sense-making on the surface seems like a cinch: you notice something, decide what to make of it, and determine what to do about it. Humans are pretty fast at this, and therein lies the problem. We tend to overlook four limiting features of the process.

1. Sense-making is always incomplete. Humans can attend to only a small portion of the information and experiences available to them. Our non-conscious is always hard at work attending to some data and screening out others. We rarely reflect on what and how much we ignore.

Stop reading for a minute and think about what’s happening around you. Are there sounds? A humming printer? Buzzing ceiling lights? Colleagues bustling in the background? What about movements? People passing your door? Traffic visible out your window?  How about light? Objects in your periphery vision? What’s the comfort level of your chair? The feel of your hands resting on your desk/lap/keyboard? Is the room hot or cold? You get the point. We always know more than we know we do. 

2. Sense-making is very personal. Individuals’ values, education, past experience, cognitive capacities, physical abilities, and developmental limitations influence what they see. But since sense-making occurs so quickly and tacitly, the everyday explanations leaders construct feel so obvious and real to them that they seem more like Truth and the way the world really is than the individual creations and interpretations that they are.

This can blind leaders to available alternatives, gaps in their thinking, and biases. It also leaves them feeling little incentive to question their interpretations.

3. Sense-making is interpretive. When thrown into life’s ongoing stream of experiences, people create explanations of what things mean – and often assume that others either see things the same way or, if they don’t, they are wrong. 

4. Sense-making is action-oriented. People’s personal interpretations contain implicit prescriptions for how they and others should respond.

 

If  you conclude, for example, that your unit’s budget problems result from over-spending, you’ll cut expenses. If you see the problem as inadequate allocations, you’ll lobby for more. If you bemoan inattention to revenue generation, you’ll develop new programs, services, or products.  If it’s embezzlement, you’ll call the police. 

You can see the ease and the potential complications in all this for leaders.  They’re off and running before they’re even sure what’s most important and where they should really be heading.  And they’re rarely aware that this is what they are doing.  For more, check out Reframing Academic Leadership (Jossey-Bass, 2011), Chapter 2: Sense-making and the Power of Reframing.

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The Art at the Heart of Leadership: Sense-making

How are your sense-making skills – your capacities to look at a complex situation and understand what’s really happening?  If you expect to lead well and powerfully, your answer to that question could be the key to a long and strong career.

Sense-making is the difficult art at the heart of leadership. We’d all like clarity about the complexities that we face in resolving the problems we encounter or in leading our organizations forward in a competitive world, but we are rarely that fortunate. The world is filled with ambiguity, and all leaders face the task of making sense out of what they find.  They get in trouble when they assume that what they see and understand is the same reality that others see and accept. That just ain’t so.

We all bring our own ways of interpreting what we see as we step midstream into organizations and groups that have evolved distinctive histories, cultures, and traditions. Even our ideas about how to lead – and what leadership is all about – are based on tacit and deeply-personal values and belief systems about what’s important and how things work.

A key challenge for any leader is how to make accurate sense of complex circumstances, recognize available choices, choose the best path forward, and convey all that to others in a compelling manner.  Whether we call this wisdom, executive judgment, reflective practice, or learning from experience, the lesson is clear. Effectiveness requires untangling the conundrums of the organizations we seek to lead and the realities of our current situation and translating both into sensible choices and actions for self and others.

We lead best when we understand the organizational cards we’ve been dealt: who has real power, what gives them their influence, how are things done around here, where do the sacred cows and landmines rest, where (and why) will change be welcome, and more – and when we recognize that others around us have their own answers to those same diagnostic questions.

Organizational sense-making is never as easy and straight-forward as we would wish.  In our recent book, Reframing Academic Leadership (Jossey-Bass, 2011), Lee Bolman and I tease out why.  Subsequent posts will explore those reasons.

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Raise your Joy Quotient (JQ): Step III – Look Around with Different Eyes

The final step for raising your joy quotient is a variation on the old adage, bloom where you are planted.

Life doesn’t work such that most of us can pick up and find new opportunities to express our evolving talents. And sometimes we can find ourselves far down a path that seems, if anything, to be leading us further away from where we hope to be. But that doesn’t mean that we’re stuck in a joyless work life. It means that we’ll need to look at our current situation with different eyes to discover the untapped opportunities or experiences that can build toward others we want.

Part of this is attitude adjustment. Feel stuck and you are. See yourself as wasting time, and you will. How can you find ways to make the most of what you have until you go?

The other part is building your capacities for creative visioning and for recognizing hidden opportunities in everything you do. Where you are may be exactly where you need to be to fine-tune skills, get valuable experiences, or establish professional networks and supports.  Are you taking full advantage of all this?

Are you, for example, thinking about your current job in too limited a fashion? Are you really as constrained as you feel? 

Can a job that now uses too little of your true talents be redesigned?  Enriched?  Are there other opportunities in your organization that you want to alert folks of your interest in? Can current networks be used to enhance your reputation in other areas? Can volunteer opportunities at work or outside help you make progress toward your new goal?

The ability to look at the potential in events and situations and to see how they can be leveraged to help achieve your future plans can reframe a dead-in now into an important stepping stone for a brighter tomorrow.  There’s great joy in that.

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Raise your Joy Quotient (JQ): Step II – Using your Full Self

Nothing signals leadership like confidence, and those who seek influence are warned to develop theirs. It takes confidence to stand for something. It requires confidence to stay strong in the face of inevitable resistance and to listen carefully and openly to others’ concerns while advancing your own.

Confidence comes in two measures. One is basic – the self-assurance from having done your homework: knowing the situation you face, what you believe, what needs to happen, what you plan to do, and what you can anticipate. This part is tied to preparation, resolve, and readiness for action. Determination is its close companion.

A second part is more personal – and is the direct link to joy. It involves the unabashed and uncensored use of your talents, leveraging your full self with its full range of quirks, to your efforts. This is not advocacy to shoot from the hip and let it all hang out. Leadership is a strategic art and science. Rather, we increase our effectiveness – and raise our capacity for joy – when we implement our plans in ways that don’t stress and stifle us.

Students and executives too often come to leadership training and weigh themselves down with a self-imposed, heavy leadership mantle. In their search for more skill, impact, and effective, they get stiff and serious.  Seriousness about learning and making a difference is not the same as becoming rigid or downright dour in how you handle your professional self.  Nor does it mean that you’ll succeed by learning to be like someone else.

You have your best shot of success when you bring a light heart and confidence that you have something to offer. People will want to connect with you – and leadership, after all, is all about relationships.

Here’s where leaders – and leaders-in-training – can learn from artists who often exhibit a professional confidence and public comfort with their idiosyncrasies.

I’m very big these days on the PS22 5th grade Chorus from Staten Island. (See previous post. Check the Chorus out on YouTube. Mark your calendar to watch them on the 83rd Annual Academy Awards, February 27.)

As a leadership scholar, I like studying their leader, Gregg Breinberg.  Mr. B’s a terrific musician and teacher, no question about that. But I particularly enjoy his authenticity – he’s been clear about his vision, unyielding on his focus, and relating to the kids and audiences in the same manner since the Chorus’s founding.   The teaching point for leaders is his willingness to do whatever it takes to keep the Chorus positive, on key, and performing to their best – without feeling in any way self-conscious or as if he needs to become “more professional or serious” or to acquiesce to those with more status as the Chorus’s status rises.  Those who have watched him work describe his style as that of an “overgrown 5th grader.”  He is proud to claim his own “inner clown.”

“Watch my face. I can help you,” you hear repeated across rehearsal and performance tapes – and he’ll use his face, movements, body, humor, and energy the same whether he is in front of Oprah Winfrey, a famous musician who’s come to hear the Chorus, or the kids in the school auditorium during rehearsal.

No evidence of any worries about how to lead or of that nagging inner voice that leadership students report – the self-evaluations that keep them questioning themselves and just a little off-center.  Am I dressed for success? Am I doing it right? Do I have the right stuff? How will others respond? Am I leading yet? What will my boss think?  

So prepare, and then let go and act.  Be the leader you were made to be.  Give yourself the freedom to work in ways that fit your talents and style.  It’ll make your work — and life — more joyful.

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Raise your Joy Quotient (JQ): Step I – Find your Passions, True Talents, and Contributions

It’s time to add another form of intelligence to the list.  We have IQ to measure cognitive intelligence, EQ for emotional intelligence, CQ for cultural intelligence.  Why do we not encourage people to enhance their JQ – their capacity to find and express joy through their work? We’d advance their quality of life and their leadership acumen and stamina if we did.

There’s nothing simple about raising your JQ. In the same way you can’t boost your IQ by reading one book, enhancing JQ takes time and effort. Three steps can set the process in motion.  (I’ll tackle one today, the others  in subsequent posts.)

STEP I: Find your passions, true talents, and contributions.  A high JQ isn’t hedonism.  Nor is it hakuna matata or a don’t worry-be happy philosophy – although an easy going spirit and the ability to wear life loosely are good life traits to possess.

We raise our JQ as the result of self-reflection and thoughtful experimentation over time that enable us to (a) identify our true talents and passions and (b) find ways to express those.  True is the operative word.

We are all good at many things, but our true talents coincide with our deep interests and passions. They energize us with use. Engaging in activities that use them makes time fly.  What are your true talents?  How can you identify them for yourself? 

In their chapter “The Traces of Talent” in my edited book Business Leadership (Jossey-Bass, pp. 79-86), Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton suggest monitoring four areas:

1. spontaneous reactions – the ways you naturally respond to similar situations over time. Rising successfully to the challenges of project organizer in every crisis, for example, tells you something about your organizational and executive talents. 

2. yearnings – things that have fascinated you from an early age. Architect Frank Gehry remembers building avant guard wooden structures at age 4 from wood scrapes on the floor of his father’s hardware store. At 10, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck were meeting regularly at school to plan their  creative projects. Picasso was in adult art school by age 13 and loving it.

3. rapid learnings – things that come quickly and powerfully. Matisse was a sickly law clerk when his mother gave him a box of paints to pass the time. A new world opened for him, and he never looked back. He filled his days with paining and drawing from then on and was accepted into Paris’s most prestigious art school four years later.

4. deep satisfaction – consistent good feelings from an action.  In neurobiological language, this is a physiological response to the use of your strongest synaptic connections. Gregg Breinberg, music director of the PS 22 Chorus, and Gustavo Dudamel of the LA Phil (discussed in previous posts) are good examples of this.

We alone know our true talents.  We need time and a process to find them — and the confidence to believe in what we discover.  

Sometimes advice from others is helpful: it can give us an outside perspective on ourselves.  But be forewarned: not always.  It may encourage us to short-cut self-discovery or be unduly influenced by the contributions important others want us to make.  “You can’t make money with an art degree, so major in business.” “Be a teacher. You’ll have summers off with your children.” “You’re good at math. Take a job on Wall Street where bonuses are still big despite the economy.” 

A joyless life is one spent convincing ourselves that we should like what others value in us more than who we really are.

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Finding your Competitive Leadership Advantage: Joy

Joy is not the first thing we associate with leadership. Influence, power, strategy skills, achievement, change management, tolerance for complexity – absolutely. Joy? Rarely makes anyone’s Top Ten list.

Experience and years of seeing talented and dedicated executives burdened – or burned out – by the demands of their work have brought joy to the top of my list of leadership requisites. It’s every leader’s under-appreciated, competitive advantage – and the best way to wed great accomplishment with health and balance. 

What’s the role of joy in your work life? How can you find more? 

That’s not an easy question for many of us to answer, nor is it one we often contemplate.  Professional training in all fields focuses heavily on skills,  knowledge,  acumen,  practice,  responsibility – learning more, doing more, doing better.  Joy takes a side seat, if even allowed to the table.  Without joy, the stage is set for a career characterized by stress, strain, and an ethic of just keep pushing harder.     

To illustrate my point on the power of joy – and to add joy to your day – take a look at a leader-in-action video.  As you watch,  think about the leader’s power, influence, impact, efforts, and achievement. Then take a look at his joy. What do you notice? 

Hint:  Joy drives everything – and it has made great things happen.

The leader is Gregg Breinberg, music teacher and director of the fifth grade PS22 Chorus at a large public school in Graniteville, Staten Island, New York. Gregg founded the chorus in 2000, and the world will have a chance to see the fruits of his labors when the group performs at the Oscars in Hollywood later this month. [See Anne Hathaway’s surprise visit to the 11th Annual Winter Concert to invite the group.]

I’m a relative new comer to the PS22 Chorus, but they’ve been an internet phenomenon with more than 28 million hits since Gregg began his postings more than five years ago.   Anne Hathaway said she’s been following the PS 22 Chorus for years – and yes, they have brought her a lot of joy. 

So take a look and a listen. The kids are adorable. The music is great. The leadership lesson, profound.  This is one of the group’s best – and had the flu not derailed me, I’d have beaten the Huffington Post to press in reporting on their terrific rendition of Ariel Pink’s “Round and Round.”