Tag: power

Categories
General

Jettison Habits that Are Holding You Back

I just reread an interesting book[1] by social worker and psychotherapist Amy Morin. When I’ve assigned it in my classes, students have found it helpful. It occurred to me that Morin’s work might be just the thing I need for a project in development. Let me share her central messages: you might find them helpful too.

Morin’s main argument goes something like this. Life is tough for everyone, and we need mental strength to tackle the challenges life sends our way. We grow our mental strength by increasing what we know about our capacities and about the habits that hold us back.

We all set goals for ourselves, and they are usually pretty good. We know ourselves and the problems we face: our goals are ways to resolve big concerns that are stressing us out or holding us back.

The best of intentions, however, are too often derailed not by the quality or relevance of the goals we set for ourselves, but rather by the tacit habits of mind that block our ability to do what we need to do to achieve them.

Our bad habits drag us down – and we’re only as good as our worse habits!  We strengthen our personal capacities and resolve, therefore, when we identify what we do that repeatedly gets in our way. Quite simply, we need to identify what we have to stop doing and let ourselves succeed!

Morin identifies 13 dysfunctional habits she has seen in her own life and practice, and notes that people who feel strong and successful in their lives just don’t do these 13 things. Here’s her list of habits that are very good to break:

1. Don’t waste time feeling sorry for yourself. Get on with what must be done to get back on track and moving ahead in the ways you want.

2. Don’t give away your power. We always have more power than we believe we do. Identify your sources of power, and use them!

3. Don’t shy away from change. Change is the only constant in life. Learn to embrace flexibility as a central life skill, and you’ll go far.

4. Don’t waste time on things you can’t change. There is no reason to keep hitting your head against an unmovable wall!

5. Don’t worry about pleasing people. Do what’s right and must be done, and you’ll please yourself. Good people are attracted to that!

6. Don’t fear calculated risks. Everyone has fear of the unknown, and that kind of fear need not hold you back. Make a list of the pros and cons, the costs and benefits of the risk; and invest your energy realistically assessing those.

7. Don’t dwell on the past. The past is the past: you can do nothing about it now!

8. Don’t make the same mistakes, again and again. Mistakes are only disastrous when we learn nothing from them. Failure is the best teacher.

9. Don’t resent others’ success. Invest your energies in creating your own. Success is not a fixed commodity: you and others can all have it.

10. Don’t give up in the face of failure. The best things are worth working and fighting for. Figure out what went wrong; then pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and get back to working on your goal.

11. Don’t fear time alone. Learn to be your own best friend, and use quiet time to invest in building your skills, knowledge, and resilience. Read! Read! Read!

12. Don’t feel the world owes you anything. Work for what you want, and the satisfaction in  getting it will be magnified by the fact that you have become a stronger and smarter person from your efforts.

13. Don’t expect results immediately. Anything really worth achieving takes time.

We all need to build capacities to stand strong and thrive in the face of difficult situations. How does Morin’s list help you see your strengths and flat sides? Where are you strongest? Which areas and practices need shoring up?

Why not create an action plan for growing the supports and habits you need for your long-term success? Amy Morin has identified common mindsets and behaviors that can hold you back. Which dysfunctional habits are you holding onto, and what is your prioritized plan for jettisoning them – one by one?

[1] Amy Morin (2014). 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do: Take Back Your Power, Embrace Change, Face Your Fears, and Training Your Brain for Happiness and Success. New York: William Morrow.

Categories
General

Leading in a Global World Requires Global Eyes and Heart: Let Theater Be Your Guide

There’s nothing like live theater for learning about ourselves and life’s complexities.

It lets us walk in another’s shoes and immerse ourselves in new ways of thinking and being!  We listen, observe, and witness – and experience one of the few times when we significantly engage with others who speak directly to us that we do not talk or set our minds to work preparing responses to what they say before they even finish speaking. Theater slows life down and encourages us to study our reactions to it.

Quite simply, theater traffics in human understanding – and understanding one’s internal and external worlds is at the heart of leadership effectiveness. 

The major challenges in leading – understanding and working with those who are different from us, seeing situations through another’s eyes or different lenses, forging shared interests and common goals, motivating, influencing while remaining open to new learning, understanding the roots of competing interests and conflicts, finding lasting solutions to complex problems – echo life’s larger challenges.

Different cultures, ethnicities, upbringings, experiences, and social traditions can separate us. But broadening our perspectives and minds takes us to rich, new heights and toward common ground despite our differences. Theater lays out these grand dilemmas in accessible form and invites us to watch, reflect, and learn from them. I’ve been reminded of this by a recent event.

clip_image002I saw “Hear Word! Naija Woman Talk True” – Ifeoma Fafunwa’s beautiful, honest, high-energy production about the complex intersections among gender, culture, abuse, and inequity in Nigeria; and had opportunity to engage with the playwright post-performance. What powerful learning for today’s fast-paced, global world!

The show has been a phenomenon in Nigeria, playing to sold-out crowds in theaters, as well as standing-room-only, pop-up performances in markets, city squares, and other public places. It stars ten famous Nigerian stage and screen actresses, and is having its first full run in the U.S. at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

No question, the production is artistically magical, the cast and musicians superb, and the playwright a courageous and visionary leader in bringing cultural secrets to the light of day. This is an experience you won’t want to miss!

clip_image004Given the show’s subject matter and the added wallop of  “Nollywood” stars as messengers – think about the role of Hollywood women in the U.S. #MeToo and #TimesUp movements – it is a major intervention for social justice and women’s empowerment in Nigeria and beyond. 

The subject of women’s abuse and inequity is raw and rings brutally true in the production. The script is based on interviews with women in Nigeria across age, socio-economic class, place, and social circumstances and is a strategic series of song and dance-infused vignettes in the spirit of Anna Deavere Smith’s ethnographically-based work. The production (especially act 1) takes the audience, in the words of WGBH’s Jared Bowen, “right into the heart of abuse." There is pain for sure. But there is also great hope in bearing witness to the enduring spirit, fearlessness, defiance, and authenticity of women claiming voice, power, and personal agency: let change begin with me – a reminder to everyday leaders of their job to make the world a better place in whatever ways they can!

Leading in a global world requires global eyes and heart: the ability to understand and accept diverse cultures, see differences as the springboard to innovation, and work with grace and sensitivities when others hold values and beliefs far different from our own.

In today’s world, management educators and authors do leaders-in-training a disservice when they forget that or convey the illusion of simplicity or control with models and theories that portray work and life as linear, rational, neat, and tidy. Human nature is complicated, and social processes like leadership and management are steeped in ambiguity, confusion, competing values, and choice. Good theater acknowledges that and plays out human nature in its messy fullness. Let our understandings of leadership embrace the same.

Internal struggles, confusion, ambiguity, and doubts of the soul are all par for the course – and recognizing that enables us to summon the courage and persistence to stay the course. Real leadership looks more like the gritty and human process that it is – and less glamorous and heroic – when seen through the difficult choices and challenges of compelling characters, like the women in “Hear Word! Naija Woman Talk True”.

Life is not always fair nor power and resources equally distributed, and there is much work – globally and locally, personally and organizationally – to do. That’s why we need leaders fully prepared for the road ahead and able to embrace an increasingly diverse world without fear of loss!

Categories
General

Leadership, Gender, and Confidence: Another Take

Another take on leadership, gender, and confidence from Jill Flynn, Kathryn Heath, and Mary Davis Holt, authors of the new book, Break Your Own Rules: How to Change the Patterns of Thinking that Block Women’s Paths to Power – and good advice for women and men seeking to increase their impact. 

The book is a fascinating read – and a recommendation that women finally discard the rules that have traditionally guided their leadership (and have been seen as women’s “strengths”). Women are a mere 11% of senior leadership in corporate American, and that number hasn’t changed in 30 years. The authors suggest it’s time to think seriously about how to make that change happen. 

Their advice: out with the old, please, and in with the new.  Reframe the everyday beliefs that women bring about how to lead and do themselves in the workplace.  For example:

Traditional approach: focus on others — New advice: take center stage

Traditional approach: seek approval — New advice: proceed until apprehended

Traditional approach: be modest — New advice: project personal power

Traditional approach: work harder — New advice: be politically savvy

Traditional approach: play it safe — New advice: play to win

Traditional approach: it’s all or nothing — New advice: it’s both-and

I’m not doing he book justice, but I want to get back to the confidence theme from my last post:

In a recent post of the HBR site, the authors assert they found – and “by a wide margin” – that the primary criticism men have about their female colleagues at work is that the women exhibit low self-confidence.

imageThe authors concede this may partly be perception — men can interpret a willingness to share credit or defer judgment as a lack of confidence. But they also note that there is plenty of research that suggests women feel less self-assured at work. See yesterday’s blog post, for one example. Another is a 2011 workforce study by Europe’s Institute of Leadership and Management that reports:

Men were more confident across all age groups: 70% of the men reported high or very high levels of self-confidence, compared to 50% of the women

Half of women managers admitted feelings of self-doubt about their performance and career, 31% of men reported the same

Lack of confidence makes women more cautious in applying for jobs and promotions: 20% of men said they would apply despite only partially meeting its job description, compared to 14% of women.

The authors turned to their own data and identified four specific low-confidence behaviors cited by male and female managers alike:

Being overly modest. Men are more willing to take public credit for their successes. Women believe their accomplishments should speak for themselves. They may – or they may be overlooked by all the busy people around them.

Not asking. Not asking means you’ve lost the chance to get what you need.  No more need be said on that one!

Blending in. The authors note that some women go to great lengths to avoid attention in the workplace. They want to do their work, stay professional, and wait to be appreciated.  A perfect strategy for remaining invisible!

Remaining silent. Don’t speak up and you won’t get in the conversation – or the game.

The author’s conclusion: Career momentum is not just about adding job skills. It’s about changing everyday thinking and behaviors.  Amen! 

Glad I could bring you these helpful insights. I ask you to share them – and this blog site – with others interested in improving their leadership.  I’d love to attract more readers – and I have plenty more to say about how to lead and how to lead for greater impact.

So how am I doing?  I’m practicing the suggested new behaviors!  Are you?

Categories
General

Study Leadership with a Few Nights at the Movies

If you read my blog regularly, you know I believe we can learn much about leadership and life from the arts. 30 deans at the top business schools agree.  They offered their suggestions for a silver-screen curriculum on leadership, ethics, power, and relationships at work. Click here for their list and something about each film. 

Popcorn, anyone? 

Categories
General

The Sexual Politics of Materialism and the Good Life: The Case of the Little Third

Along with growing economic and social opportunities in China is the rise in divorce and philandering. There’s an equal opportunity explanation for both.

A mistress – or a “little third” as she is known in China – now seems de rigueur for men of rising affluence and status. China Daily and the New York Times reported, for example, that 90% of provincial- or ministerial-level officials found guilty of corruption in the past seven years also confessed to having engaged in extra-marital affairs – and some cities have even ordered their officials to stay faithful to their wives.

Young women see a married lover as a way to a better life: cash, a car, and a condo. The stars have aligned for trysts – but wives are finding out, getting mad, and wanting back their fair share of their misspent common assets. Rapid social change and economic gains are making for strange bedfellows in China today, literally.

China is in the process of revising its marriage law in response; and we’ll soon know the soap opera-like details as to whether a wife can sue her husband’s mistress to recover goods, the mistress can sue her lover if he reneges on financial promises, or the wayward husband has any recourse in any of this.

It’s an interesting case history about culture and change in China, but the story also raises larger questions for us all. Why the interplay between materialism and sexual politics?  What does it mean? Where have we seen it before?  And how in our own countries and cultures do we play out the same dynamics in our bedrooms? In our boardrooms?

Are sexual liberation and exploitation bourgeois sports: predictable activities fueled by affluence and the growing desire to consume – things and people? Do they feed the development of a distorted sense of power, property, and entitlement – or vice versa? Do they warp our shared views of responsibility, professionalism, and an ethic of care?

The case of the “little third” is raising debate across China about the erosion of traditional values with the pursuit of materialism — about the definition of a good life and the costs to a nation and a culture in pursuing unbridled economic prosperity and material comforts at a head-spinning pace.

What’s the good life for you today? What are the costs? Any internal debates about that?

Categories
General

Power is Good: Are You Willing to Claim Yours?

Do you like power? Are you willing to claim yours? Your answers say something important about your capacity to lead.

Leaders need power, and effective leaders understand and are comfortable with that. Power is the ability to mobilize resources and support to get things done. Do you have the power you need to advance your mission?  If not, how can you get it?

We always have more power than we think we do or use. I’m surprised how often experienced managers and leaders at all levels forget that. I know I do.

Power is the property of interpersonal relationships, and others will see you as powerful for a variety of reasons: your title, position, expertise, experience, personal style, charisma, attractiveness, valuable information – or control of it, communication skills, networks and relationships, proximity or access to influential others, powerful allies – or just lots of regular ones, control of rewards or punishments, ability to frame (or reframe) a situation, political savvy, and more.

What are your current sources of power? Which ones do you use? Which ones are you apt to overlook? How could you increase your sources of power?  Take stock of your power situation, be strategic in enhancing your influence, and you’ll take better control of your professional life. 

Bottom-line, we lead best from the head or the foot of the table when we know clearly what we are bringing to the party. 

Categories
General

Leading in a World of Social Media Technologies

The happenings in the Middle East say much about the power of social media technologies. They are revolutionizing the practice of leadership.

Followers need a simple cell phone to organize a groundswell in support or opposition to any leader, product, or cause. Huge crowds can be assembled with a simple text message and that powerful contemporary closer: “Pass this message on.”

Strangers with shared interests or common beliefs forge virtual communities and become cyber allies through vehicles like Facebook and Twitter. Building solidarity, commitment, and shared purpose no longer require face-to-face meetings – or even residency in the same nation or on the same continent.

A twitter revolution or a smart mob a la Howard Rheingold is no novelty. Social media technologies created the conditions to topple a controlling, military-backed, thirty year regime in a seemingly stable country like Egypt; and they continue to send aftershocks through a host of other nations. They will continue to do so.

What does all this mean for contemporary leadership?  What is important to remember? 

1. Leadership is vital. At its core, leading is a social process rooted in relationship, collaboration, and mutual interest. Advances in technology and the ease of electronic communications and social networking provide additional tools for building the networks of relationship and shared purpose needed for success.

At the same time, they also expand the need for leadership. We have mind-boggling capabilities at our finger-tips to forge global alliances, further causes, and foster organizational agendas – to create, in the language of super-blogger Seth Godin, tribes of ten or ten million who care passionately about the same things that we do. All these new groups need direction, cohesion, and contribution. They need leadership from people like you or me.

2. Leaders know and respect their followers. Perhaps there were times in history when leaders could ignore the needs and collective power of their followers. Those have passed. Then President Mubarak, sitting in his palace telling world leaders that the disturbances in Egypt will pass, is a symbol of a leader in denial and out of touch. Leaders know their followers well. Social technologies can help them in this.

3. Leaders listen to, learn from, use, and manage the social groundswell. Contemporary leaders need to take their heads out of the sand about social media technologies. They are powerful and here to stay. When United States senators twitter their constituencies, and the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies talk to their constituents through Facebook, something about leading has definitely changed.

Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff provide a wealth of strategies for working the groundswell,using it to inform and energize your leadership and organization, and turning the power of social media to your advantage. I’ve learned a lot from their book, appropriately titled Groundswell. 

Categories
General

Mubarak Steps Down: A Reminder of the Interactive Nature of Leadership

The resignation of former President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt brings home powerful understandings about the interactive nature of leadership.

All who aspire to lead from either the head or the foot of the table can learn something important about power, influence, and authority.

Leadership is all about relationships, and it is followers – not leaders – who ultimately control the balance of power. Part of the unstated contract between leaders and followers is the leader’s willingness to accept and respect that.

Leaders focused on their dominance, ego, image, or past success can forget the fragile nature of the bargain – and we have seen in 24/7 media coverage from Egypt over the past days what the result can be.

Followers, after all, give leaders their power and authority in exchange for the leader’s willingness to provide important services like protection, direction, and the allocation of important resources. The call for leadership – more leadership, better leadership – is always loudest in times of need. 

We want leaders with the presumed knowledge, wisdom, experience, and skill to deliver. And we are willing to accord them power – our willingness to follow and to be influenced by them – in exchange for their responding to our needs.

It’s only a matter of time for leaders who can’t deliver or who lose touch with their followers’ needs. In the age of twitter revolutions, the fragile balance of power can shift in a matter of days.

It may be easier to see this tacit leader-follower power bargain when played out in public sector leadership as in Egypt. But organizational leaders, be forewarned. The same dynamic applies to you.  Anyone who has tried to lead a department or unit where subordinates have lost confidence in your ability to deliver, an organization without the support of your board, a group who doesn’t believe you understand their needs, an enterprise from the lame duck status of being yesterday’s leadership news knows exactly what I mean.