Want to Lead? #4 of 7. It’s Time to Ask and Answer a Difficult Question

Note: the Seven Key Questions for Ambitious, Aspiring Leaders, are presented in the book, Practical Lessons in Leadership by Art Petty and Rich Petro.  I’ll explore each question here at Building Better Leaders through individual “Leadership Tip of the Day” posts, offering ideas for investigation and discussion.

The first three questions in this series challenged you to think through issues that are both philosophical and powerfully practical:

• Why do you want to lead?
• Do you understand the true role of a leader?
• Do you understand that the skills that made you successful as an individual contributor are not the skills that will carry you forward?

The next question in the series builds on #3 by asking you to consider whether you are truly willing to let go of some of that expertise as part of your transformation as a leader.

#4:  Are you prepared to give up domain expertise as your foundation for results?

Consider the cases of the brilliant surgeon that takes on the role as Chief of Staff, or, the skilled tradesperson that becomes a superintendent.  Add in the successful teacher that becomes a school principal and the successful law enforcement officer that is promoted to ride a desk.  While  prior experience and  long-developed skills will prove valuable in the new pursuits, a very different set of skills are required for success.

The new skills focus more on supporting and serving others through teaching, mentoring and guiding.  Instead of being the expert, the newly minted leader is now in charge of helping others develop expertise. For many moving from the role of individual contributor or knowledge worker to the role of leader, this loss of sense of self and the need to reinvent prove traumatic.

For good or bad, we tend to identify not only with our jobs but with the work and skills that others acknowledge us for in our daily lives.  Thoroughly investigating and forming answers for questions 1-3 is a critical first step.  Once you’ve progressed through those important questions, it’s time to stare in the mirror and ask and answer  question #4. If you conclude that you cannot let go…that your skills are who you are, then say no.  If you are OK with the notion of reinventing yourself, then keep moving forward.

The only mistake is to not ask and answer these questions honestly.

Want to Lead? #3 of 7-Your Individual Contributor Skills No Longer Count!

Note: the Seven Key Questions for Ambitious, Aspiring Leaders, are presented in the book, Practical Lessons in Leadership by Art Petty and Rich Petro.  I’ll explore each question here at Building Better Leaders through individual “Leadership Tip of the Day” posts, offering ideas for investigation and discussion.

The prior questions challenged you to ask and answer, “Why do you want to lead?”  and “Do You Understand the Role of a Leader?” The third question focuses on the issue of skill sets.  For too many early career leaders, it comes as a shock that the skills that brought them to the dance are not the skills that will help them win the contest.

Question number 3. Do you understand that the skills that make you successful as an individual contributor are not the  skills you need to succeed as a leader?

I’ve noticed that new leaders on technical teams (software development, engineering, IT), often struggle with this issue. In part, the dilemma is created when senior leaders promote the best technicians into leadership roles, and then fail to provide the proper mentoring for the new role. This freshly minted leader is used to surviving and prospering on their technical prowess, and without proper context for their new priorities, they emphasize the technical topics over the issues of motivating, leading and guiding others.

One senior manager observing this repeated pattern, offered, “give a technical professional a choice between a technical or a people issue, and I guarantee which way they will go.”

While technical competence is important in many roles, the demands of leadership require that you shift your focus to priorities that emphasize forging an effective working environment and facilitating the development, coaching and achievement of others.  Your job is to help create other technically adept team members, and to use your skills as a tool to cross-check on key decisions and encourage broader and bigger thinking.

Your value as an expert is now worth less than your value as someone that is responsible for creating experts. It’s critical that you focus on internalizing your new role and shift your focus to the people and teams in your environment.

Want to Lead? Answer These Questions! #2 of 7

Note: the Seven Key Questions for Ambitious, Aspiring Leaders, are presented in the book, Practical Lessons in Leadership by Art Petty and Rich Petro.  I’ll explore each question here at Building Better Leaders through individual “Leadership Tip of the Day” posts, offering ideas for investigation and discussion.

The prior question challenged you to ask and answer, “Why do you want to lead?”  This question focused on motivation, while our question today goes to understanding of the role of a leader. Clear answers for both are essential for making an informed decision on whether a role as a leader is proper for you.

The Second Question: “What do you think the true role of a leader is?“

This is a good open-ended question that can ferret out whether the ambitious professional has proper context for the role and purpose of a leader or whether he is preoccupied with advancement and perceives this as the best and fastest way.

I encourage people to talk to experienced leaders that seem to enjoy their work.  Let them know that you are interested in pursuing a leadership role. Ask them the following questions:

• How would you describe your role as a leader?
• How has your view on this role changed over your career?
• Last and not least, what are your leadership priorities?

I have a sneaking suspicion that you will very quickly hear words and phrases like: developing others; coaching, providing feedback, clearing a path by knocking down obstacles and helping set goals.

Take good notes and think long and hard about whether the priority tasks described by experienced leaders fit well with your interest in leading. If yes, you’re on your way to building a solid foundation for your leadership career.

Oh, and for my two-cents worth on the role of a leader, check out my post at Management Excellence, “Leader, What’s Your Charter?”

Want to Lead? Answer These Questions! Number 1 of 7

Note: the Seven Key Questions for Ambitious, Aspiring Leaders are presented in Practical Lessons in Leadership by Art Petty and Rich Petro. I’ll explore each question here at Building Better Leaders through individual “Leadership Tip of the Day” posts, offering ideas for investigation.

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One of the fundamental tasks of any leader is to identify and develop his/her leadership bench strength.

In the ideal situation, the leader is watching her associates for signs of effective informal leadership skills, and then providing developmental assignments to those individuals interested in moving into more formal leadership roles. In this case, the aspiring leader gains valuable context for the role and challenges of leading and the manager is able to provide feedback and coaching.

Another scenario occurs when individual contributors or early career professionals recognize the potential benefits of a leadership role (usually it’s about money or title), and declare to their manager that they are ready to lead a team. Ask any experienced leader if they have been on the receiving end of someone walking into their office and making this declaration, and the leader will likely smile.

In either situation, the leader in charge can benefit from some simple but powerful questions to guide the ensuing discussions and activities.

The First Question:

1. Why do you want to lead other people?

This straightforward question can be disarming to the erstwhile leader. Often, well-intentioned professionals have not thought through what it is about leading others that they find appealing.

If the motivation is simply money, title or overall advancement (all reasonable desires), this question provides the opportunity to draw these objectives out and begin discussing the many ways that advancement can occur.  Often, this question will clearly indicate that the individual does not have proper context for the true role of a leader, again opening the door for an important discussion.

The aspiring leader or coach/manager of the aspiring leader can use this simple question to encourage exploration and investigation into this heady topic.  Try talking about the motivation to lead with other leaders of varying experience levels.  A senior engineering manager offered to me that his motivation was very straight-forward: “I can contribute more to the firm by helping a group of engineers, than I can by working on my own.”  Another people-savvy manager had discovered that one of her strengths was building coalitions across organizational silos.  She found the ability to do this nearly-full time in support of helping people achieve their goals to be a rewarding experience and her primary motivation for leading.

Until the aspiring leader can plainly and genuinely articulate the answer to “Why?” they are unprepared to lead.

Innovation is for Everyone

Innovation isn’t just the domain of engineers, designers and other creative product types and functions inside organizations.  Everyone and every function has the opportunity to innovate in pursuit of serving internal or external customers, improving business processes and helping the firm achieve strategic objectives.

It’s too bad that many of us don’t recognize our innovation obligation and opportunity.

People focus on the all-new, all-new product and technology innovations that make our news headlines.  This discontinuous innovation while exciting and big and sometimes transformational, is actually quite rare.  Most innovation is continuous in nature…more incremental than of the all new variety.

My working definition of innovation is: “solving vexing problems in unique and reproducible ways.” While I have no doubt that there may be better and even shorter definitions, mine opens up the innovation frontier to the broad range of “problems” inside and outside of organizations.  My only catch is that the solution be both unique and reproducible.

Jump-starting your innovation thinking can be as simple as brainstorming with your colleagues on the headaches, time and cost wasters and bottlenecks that affect your customers and impede goal achievement.  Pick one, apply my definition and solve.

Rinse and repeat.  Happy innovating!

7 Signs that Your Leadership Approach is Working

It’s often difficult to gauge whether your leadership practices are helping improve your team’s situation.  I encourage leaders to look for these signs as evidence that things are heading in the proper direction:

The Seven Indicators of the Effective Work Environment

1. Individuals and teams display a great deal of pride, collaboration and cooperation to meet and exceed objectives.
2. Failure to meet or exceed objectives is met with healthy frustration that quickly is channeled into lessons-learned and “what we’ll do better” discussions.
3. Regardless of individual roles, teams spontaneously assemble to meet specific challenges and then dissolve once the challenges have been met.
4. The group becomes self-policing on quality, timeliness and conduct.
5. The drive to innovate and create value comes from within the team not from management.
6. The teams learn how to fight and to play together.
7. Output tangibly supports strategic objectives and improves the ability of the organization to meet customer needs.

While there is a great deal of subjectivity in judging the Seven Indicators, I’m OK with a little, “you’ll know it when you see and feel it or when you don’t” type of measurement. The weatherman can give you all of the meteorological reasons behind the sunny day you see through the window, but until you step outside of your Chicago office in July and feel the humidity swallow you up like a wet blanket, you don’t truly know what it’s like out there.

The best leaders are critically aware of their role and power in shaping the environment on their teams and inside their organizations. They are also aware that almost no one will ever provide the boss honest, actionable feedback on performance. I encourage leaders to develop an extreme awareness of what is going on around them as the best indicator of their effectiveness. Pay attention, look, listen and then ask questions and take actions that help people solve problems.

Tripping Points and the Leader

Note from Art: this post originally appeared as The Five Tripping Points of Emerging Leaders at my Management Excellence blog. The five points are important and bear repeating.

Firms and teams run into natural Tripping Points in the form of infrastructure and know-how as they work to grow a firm from start-up to $10 million or from $10 million to $25 million and so on.  Often, the only viable solution to get beyond a Tripping Point is to retool the management team with people that have experience creating the infrastructure and programs/teams/processes needed to reach the next few levels.

I can easily apply Tripping Point thinking to the challenges that we as professionals face in advancing our careers and in particular, in developing as leaders.  Awareness of your prospective Tripping Points is an important first step in creating your personal and professional development plan.

The Five Tripping Points of Leaders:

1. Strategic thinking skills-the ability to see the big picture, to look at patterns in the marketplace and assemble pictures that others don’t see into competitive, value-creating strategies.

2. Business acumen-Ram Charan describes this as the ability of the leader to understand how the firm makes money in the language of a street vendor.

3. Inbound communication skills-especially the ability to ask questions, listen intently and interpret what people truly mean or are thinking, which is often different than the words they are voicing.

4. Outbound communication skills-the ability to translate complex ideas into simple concepts that resonate with others and that promote positive action.

5. Diplomatic skills-the ability to broker value-creating relationships and resolve disputes with the finesse of an ambassador.
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The Tripping Points have profound implications for us as we seek to grow and expand in our careers, and they are THE issues we need to focus on as we seek to develop others around us.

As simple as the points are, we are often blind to our own limitations in these areas.  So are the people you are seeking to develop.

Use the Tripping Points as filters to evaluate the advancement and maturity of your team members, and as the basis for creating developmental assignments.  Use these points as the basis for coaching and feedback.

For your own purposes, seek feedback and coaching about the perception of your competence and maturity in each of these areas. Be aware of your limitations and areas of discomfort, and if necessary, design your own developmental assignments to ensure that you gain experience and refine your skills in the right areas.

We all have Tripping Points, and while perhaps there are truly limits to our individual abilities, I remain convinced that with awareness, focused effort and coaching, we can advance our skils and increase our contributions to our firms.

4 Ideas for Avoiding Groupthink on Your Team

Groupthink is one of the most common and nefarious decision-making traps of otherwise well-intentioned teams.

While many of us have heard of Groupthink and the historical example that is frequently cited in textbooks, the Kennedy administration’s Bay of Pigs fiasco, this decision-making trap is not just reserved for executives and Presidents.

Know the Signs:

Groupthink occurs when team members are more concerned about consensus than anything else.  Good judgment disappears, as does tolerance for doubts and doubters. The pursuit of outside information is rejected or avoided, and alternative opinions are not actively sought after.

Groups heading down this path often begin to develop a false sense of overconfidence and even an attitude of invulnerability. Doubters are pushed out of the way and requests for outside information are ignored.

5 Ideas to Stop Groupthink Before You Slide Too Far:

If you sense the slide down the slippery slope of Groupthink, there are a number of actions that can help save the day and prevent a decision-making disaster:

1. Engage outside opinions, pronto!

2. Ratchet up the robust dialogue.  Overcome the social niceties and start talking about the tough issues confronting the team.

3. Unleash the Devil’s Advocate and let him/her challenge the group’s thinking.

4. Gain help from an external facilitator and incorporate alternative methods of evaluation and idea/risk generation.  The Delphi technique or Six Hats Thinking are both powerful approaches that reduce the tendency towards aberrant group behaviors.

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Don’t fool yourself.  This trap is easy to fall into and difficult to extract yourself from once you’re caught.  Learn the signs and take quick action to save the day and the decision!

It’s Time to Confront Your Fear of Public Speaking

There are few skills that will take you further and help you more than developing your speaking skills. Your writing skills are a close second.

It’s time to confront your fear of speaking and make this critical skill a valuable part of who you are as a professional.

Leaders communicate. While listening and asking questions are core to a leader’s communications arsenal, when you talk, people listen. Make it count by being comfortable, confident and concise!

6 Tips for Improving Your Speaking Skills:

1. Practice! Seek out some easy opportunities to practice. Departmental or team updates can be fairly non-threatening.  Alternatives include community events, classroom visits, or school committees.

2. Seek feedback. Ask your boss and peers for specific feedback on your speaking performance and effectiveness.  What should you do more of?  Where do you  need to improve.  Don’t settle for, “that was great!”  No one gets better by being told they were great.

3. Practice some more… in a safe and constructive environment.  Search on “Toastmasters” and find a local chapter and join!

4. Reference a good book. My favorite is: “The Exceptional Presenter” by Timothy Koegel.

5, Find a coach. While the price is often not cheap, the impact is priceless!  Read the book, listen to your coach, practice and video record yourself. You’ll be shocked, but at least you will be seeing and hearing what everyone else is seeing and hearing.

6. Volunteer for other opportunities. Yep, you heard me. After a lifetime of dodging this bullet, you’ll find that embracing it is exhilarating.

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Don’t let a common but irrational fear get in the way of your success.  Conquer this one and the world is yours!

5 Actions to Improve Leadership Development in Your Firm

When it comes to leadership development, sweeping corporate mandates and expensive training initiatives are rarely as effective as consistent blocking and tackling.

Your own practices are capable of creating a new and next generation of professionals that carry the right approaches and ultimately innovate and improve upon your achievements.

5 Actions You Can Take Now To Start a Leadership Revolution in your Firm:

1.  Always strive to set the the example of the effective leader. No one is perfect, but word travels fast through an organization when some one and some team is meeting and beating targets, innovating, problem solving and somehow becoming a magnet for talent from other areas.

2.  Be a relentless developer of talent: your support of the development of others through coaching, feedback, a supply of increasingly more difficult challenges and your encouragement of risk-taking in pursuit of innovation are all powerful tools at your disposal. You don’t need a budget or a training program to do any of this.

3. Encourage your team members to branch out into the organization. The better a developer of talent and the more success that you have at propagating your former team members into roles around the organization, the more likely you are to see your best leadership practices popping up all over the place.

4. Work leadership development into the corporate conversation. Ensure that strategy discussions ultimately encompass talent discussions…because no strategy can be executed without the right talent in place.  Once there is broader awareness, encourage your peers to engage in activities that promote discussions and that lead to actions. An example is the simple, low-cost “leadership book club” activity that I’ve seen work so successfully at the senior and front-line leadership levels. Tie development actions to lessons-learned from the reading activities.

5. Build leadership development accountability into the organization. Hold your managers accountable for proving that they get it and are living it in the prosecution of their jobs.

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NOTE: Don’t miss the latest Management Excellence newsletter with newsletter-only features on “Coping with Leadership Fatigue” and “A Summer of Ideas.” Register to receive the newsletter at either Building Better Leaders or at the Management Excellence blog. (Right column)

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