2011 | Bishop House Consulting

Seeking Authentic Leadership

We know authentic leadership when we see it and at times in the absence of it. Authenticity, that genuine, honorable, right stuff that is revealed as leaders walk forward ahead of their teams behaving in ways which portray the culture they believe can be built.

We teach managers to become leaders through adaptation of behaviors and development of key skills. But authenticity is difficult if not impossible to teach. We often look to rules, policies, laws, and regulations to guide behavior and instill a sense of expectations for situations in which leaders may find themselves. Leaders grow up following the organizational and societal structures which enable them to effectively lead within the organizations and industries they have chosen. We understand that the banking executive’s environment is much different than that of a software executive and still different from that of a hotel executive.

But there is a higher standard that cannot be found in law or a policy or a handbook or Roberts Rules of Order. There is a standard to which, in my opinion, all leaders should judge themselves. The standard of what’s appropriate, what’s the right thing to do when the rule book just doesn’t go far enough in detailing every imaginable scenario. The standard that demands the leader make non-selfish decisions and to put the good of employees – individually and in total – ahead of self-interests.

The year is coming to a close and now is an opportune time to assess if you been an authentic leader or a selfish leader? I recommend you invest an hour in reviewing your decisions and the trend line of your actions through the year. Think through your motivations and rationalizations for decisions and conversations.

Worried about investing a whole hour? Maybe that worry is a good place to start your assessment.

Play A Game

Looking for a creative and cheap way to practice your leadership skills? Be a kid again and play some games. Here are some game ideas and the associated skill areas.

Blokus, Chess or Backgammon – strategic thinking, patience
Charades – situational agility, team work
Halo – executive politics
Rock Band – team work
Twister – relationship building
Monopoly – winning it all. . . and putting it all back in the box
Nerf Gun Wars – focusing, agility
Scrabble – performance review terminology
Settlers of Catan – budgeting, resource planning
Wii Fit – stamina
Risk – strategic thinking, execution, agility and decisiveness
Bananagrams! – creativity, flexibility, adjusting course

Gather a few peers, play a game and increase your leadership skills. And maybe you’ll laugh a bit along the way.

Have a game you’d like to add to our list? Share your game idea on our Leadership Learning Moments Blog.

The New Guy

How effectively are you integrating new employees into your company? Into your team?

To be honest orientation programs suck. From an employee’s perspective being loaded down with hours of mind-numbing data dumping and stale presentations on the vision-mission-values of the company sets the stage for personal soul searching regarding if they have made the right decision. A new employee can often spend their 1st week on the job not seeing their boss, not knowing where to get a good lunch and not knowing with whom they will be sharing blood, sweat and tears with for 8 to 10 hours a day.

Onboarding new employees should be focused on how quickly can we get them acclimated and up to full productivity. The assimilation process starts before he arrives and should continue for several months. Onboarding should be flexible. Does the newly hired single 25 year old woman desire the same depth and breadth of information as the newly hired 35 year father of four? How about the new hires who will be working in IT versus the new hires in customer service?

Do one thing better: On the morning your new employee arrives invest 15 minutes to personally say hello, welcome and I’m very excited to have you on board. Setup a specific time within the next 24 hours that the two of you will get together to talk about expectations of each other.

But if you can’t seem to spare time from your back-to-back meetings that morning, no worries. I’m sure the new employee will fully understand. Why should he think this company would be any different than the one he just abandoned. He’ll have ample time to ponder this and the organization’s vision-mission-values as revealed on slides 18 through 67 of the PowerPoint presentation viewed — alone — at 2:30 pm that 1st day on the job.

The 3 Most Requested Leadership Practices

In a validation study for a tool (363 for Leaders) we utilize to help leaders understand their impact on the organization, three leadership practices were consistently requested most often of leaders. The three most requested practices in order are:

Stretching the Boundaries – Pioneering leaders encourage the group to think creatively about its options and take chances on new opportunities pushing beyond comfort zones and envisioning a new way of doing things.
Rallying People to Achieve Goals – Energizing leaders motivate people to see, feel, sense, grasp, and believe in a transcendent purpose. Employees appreciate a strong leader’s ability to bring the group together around a vision for the future.
Improving Methods – Resolute leaders seek success for their teams and the company in creating urgency around greater efficiency and seeking practical, common-sense approaches to innovate and constantly improve as a cultural norm.

Why are these three the most requested out of the possible 24 practices? Not sure. But possibly the more important question is why would most leaders not rate these as the practices as those they believe their employees, peers and bosses desire of them?

Our natural approach to leading emanates from our preferred communications style. We all gain leadership wisdom – well most everyone – as we lead daily, develop skills through training, and situationally review/assess the impacts of our decisions through the filter of our mentors and bosses. The leadership practices that come naturally are those which line up with your natural communications style. The other leadership practices need to be absorbed, learned and remembered. And this is why leadership is a job and not an entitlement.

Learn more about the 24 Leadership Practices. See page 4 of our sample 363 for Leaders Report.

Want to take a free assessment to learn about your primary leadership dimension? Send an email to Mike Holland and we’ll get a link to you for the online assessment.

How Emotionally Strong is Your Team?

I recently delivered a speech on emotional intelligence – the ability to recognize and understand emotions in yourself and others, and your ability to use this awareness to manage your behavior and relationships – to an audience of senior executives and provided them with insight regarding how they can assess and grow their emotional intelligence (EI). For leaders a key aspect of EI is the opportunity and challenge to harmonize emotions and thought and then manage behavior. The investment of energy to understand/assess your EI can be doable at 9:30 in the morning but much more difficult at 2:30 pm after 4 back-to-back meetings and no lunch.

A really interesting aspect of EI is to then ponder your team’s EI. And further, how does the team’s cumulative EI impact team performance?

Try this non-scientific approach: At your next team huddle, ask each person to describe the 1 or 2 things which scare them today. As team members respond, look for their level of vulnerability, for their trust in the group, for their confidence in managing their emotion regarding the issue/item and maybe most importantly their capability to articulate their message.

Need a primer on EI? Wikipedia has a decent summary: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_intelligence

Why Do They Stay? What Do They Want?

Most managers think that employees can only be satisfied by getting more money and that, as managers, they have little control over how much is doled out at annual review time. Wrong! Studies continue to show that once an employee’s basic monetary needs are met, their satisfaction is no longer tied to their paychecks. Instead they are looking for exciting and challenging work, opportunities to learn and grow, the chance to make a difference through their work and the opportunity to work with great people. As a manager you can impact most of these things through your management of the work and the team. Are you talking with each person about what they enjoy doing and what else they’d like to do? Are you offering opportunities for your employees to learn more? Do you provide opportunities for the team to interact and develop positive work relationships? All of these items directly impact an employee’s satisfaction well beyond the paycheck.

Hit your local or virtual book store and order the book “1 ^st Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently” by Marcus Buckingham. Too much trouble to buy and read the book? Here are the 12 key employee questions from their survey.

Do I know what is expected of me at work?
Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?
At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work?
Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?
Is there someone at work who encourages my development?
At work, do my opinions seem to count?
Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel my job is important?
Do I have a best friend at work?
In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress?
Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work?
This last year, have I had opportunities at work to learn and grow?

Create, Cultivate Your Peer Networks

A leader can often feel quite lonely as the day passes into the evening. The “to do” list is still too long and emails await responses. A recent employee issue weighs heavily on the mind. Tomorrow’s calendar is already full with back-to-back meetings.

A network of peer leaders can be tremendously helpful in providing not only keen advice for situational leadership, but a strong sense that you have allies and are not alone in the continual juggle. Peer insight and advice can prove to be a strong motivating force for you, as you dig deep into your personal energy bucket.

Set up a schedule to meet with one peer – either in your company or at another company – once per week. Make a rotation of 4 to 5 peers, who you will meet once every 4 to 5 weeks and develop, enrich and cultivate the relationships. In moments of need, reach out to your network for advice, counsel, affirmation and, ideas on managing through a situation. Gain perspective or simply know that you are not alone.

Perception of Performance: Which Lens Are You Using Today?

The successful performance in a role by someone who reports to you is based more on your perception of their performance than the actual work delivered. Technically you have cognitive bias in the way you see traits, characteristics, behaviors which create a halo of perception with regard to performance.

Practically speaking: Your perception is driven by the lens which you choose to use.

Your positive lens filters your perception of performance with a beam of warmth like a bright spring morning. Those little problems or mistakes do muck up progress but no-one can be perfect all the time. And growth comes with learning from mistakes and gaining wisdom.
Your negative lens filters your perception of performance with a negative fog that envelopes your view of work being performed. Every step, every task, every interaction, every project seems to be less than satisfactory.

A difficult wisdom-building step for leaders is gaining the capability to ascertain the exact moment in time when the tipping point occurs in your frustration with an individual’s performance and you decide to change the lens from warmth to fog. Most leaders just seem to find themselves past the point of no return with fog engulfing the view of performance for an employee and anything she does never quite measures up. A self-fulfilling prophesy (a declared truth which is actually false but influences/confuses people regarding the behavior that ultimately fulfills the once false prophecy) will undoubtedly play out and the employee will quickly find themselves on the back end of a performance improvement plan.

To Think About

Have you been a good leader without bias while perceiving performance of those you are charged to lead? Were you performing at 100% in your role? Were you wearing the correct lens?
Do you consciously decide when to place on the appropriate lens?
Are you truly perceiving performance or is your vision a bit blurry? Are you nearsighted? Farsighted?
On a personal level, when in your life have you been basking in the sunshine & warmth or the desolation of the fog? Was the perception of your performance accurate?

The List

See if you can answer these questions.

What team won the last Super Bowl? Name the last 5 Super Bowl winning teams.
Who won on last season’s Survivor reality TV show? Who were the last 5 winners?
What team won the World Series this year? Name the last 5 World Series winners.
Who won the Grammy for Best Female Country Vocal Performance in 2011? Who were the last 5 winners?
Which TV Comedy Series won the Golden Globe Award earlier this year for that category? What shows won for the last 5 years?
Who were/are the 5 people who most impacted your professional life?

My guess is you may have been able to get some answers to questions 1 thru 5, especially the most recent winner, but you were likely challenged with remembering the last 5 winners. But how did you do with question #6? Most people can quickly come up with 5 people who had a direct and substantial impact on their professional lives. The mentoring, guidance, patience, support, wisdom provided were the building blocks to how you act and behave in your leadership role. What they told you, and more importantly how they acted and behaved, taught you how you can be successful.

Take Action

Quickly, make a list of those 5 people. Invest one minute on each person capturing what you learned from each. Take 2 minutes in a power pose (feet up on desk, hands behind the head) and ponder the value of the wisdom you have gained from those folks on your list.

Now, ask yourself. . . if your employees were asked the same series of questions above would your name be on their list in #6?

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Curious on the answers to the questions? Follow these links to see the answers.

Huddle Up

Far too many staff meetings are drudgery for attendees yet these meetings do provide some valuable information. Spice up your staff meetings by changing the dynamics of the meeting through Huddles, a simple, fast and effective meeting format that requires attendees to communicate time critical information efficiently.

Here are some rules for the Huddle Up meeting:

Huddles last for 9 minutes.
Huddles are run standing up. ALL attendees must remain standing for the meeting.
Pick a unique time of the day that works well with the flow of your team’s work. Try one of these times to get started.
- Start of day: 8:56 am
- Morning Break: 9:21 am
- Before Lunch: 11:51 am
- End of day: 4:41
Huddle agendas require just 2 items for each participant:
- what’s going on today in your world which will impact others in the room
- is there something specific you need to be successful today
Muzzle all electronic devices; everyone – including you – can wait up to 9 minutes to get to that voicemail.
There’s no room for food at the huddle.

You must manage the quick flow of the huddle. While encouraging the give and take of information be sure to lead your team to develop a cadence for the level of communication that works well. If a more lengthy discussion is needed on a topic, park the topic to be dealt with in a separate meeting at a different location than the huddle.

Here are some ideas to make the huddle even more engaging.

Use a stuffed animal as the microphone. Have fun passing the stuffed animal around/across the meeting to the next speaker.
Pick the speaking spot for the room. Rotate the whole group in a circle through the spot stopping for each participant to speak as needed.
Hold the meeting in a small space to create a comfortable, crowded feeling.
Have attendees draw numbers or letters from a hat on the way into the meeting designating their order.

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Bishop House Consulting, Inc.