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November 4th, 2008

Obama’s Leadership Style | Lessons in Commanding Attention and Message Control

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obamas leadership style

I’ve studied the leadership styles of America’s presidents for the past 15 years. I particularly pay attention to the types of people that presidents like to have around them. It says a lot about a man’s (or a woman’s) character to know whether they encourage a difference of opinion, or whether they like to be surrounded by “yes” men. It’s a tipoff to whether a president has an open, curious mind, capable of learning and adapting, or whether a president is essentially intolerant of dissent.

Nixon and Reagan were famous for surrounding themselves with people who thought like they did. George Herbert Walker Bush, in contrast, invited a variety of opinion. Clinton is famous for changing his mind frequently – and being too undisciplined.

Reading The Sunday New York Times this week, I’m remembering the old McCain, the pre-campaign McCain who was always up for a good intellectual fight. Maureen Dowd’s column asks pointedly, where did that McCain disappear to? I also remember the current President Bush in his Texas days, when he was seen as a uniter, not a divider. How did Texas George transmogrify into Guantanamo George? (For that matter, how did he wind up with Karl Rove and Dick Cheney?)

Obama is keenly aware of his place in history.  He’s run a very disciplined campaign, a campaign that thinks strategically, looks at every option carefully, makes tough choices, and then executes. We need the same in the White House. We need to see the same Obama that we’ve come to admire during the campaign. The next few weeks will be interesting to watch as President Obama begins to assemble his team. It will tell us a lot about what we can expect over the next four years.

Update: Here is a good follow up article on Obama’s leadership style called “Lessons from Brand Obama” Use the president’s message control strategies to command attention.

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October 5th, 2008

Challenges in Leadership: The Big Leap


challenges in leadership

I worked last week with a group of scientists and clinicians. Their mission is to understand, prevent and treat autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders. The goal of this day-long meeting was to figure out what the faculty could do to best achieve their mission.

One scientist talked about specialization. “We are very specialized in our individual research,” she said. “That’s how we win our grants and get money. And we are becoming increasingly specialized.  It’s like the expanding universe. All our stars are flying farther apart from each other.”

“That’s very true,” said another scientist. “Yet to be effective in solving this very complex puzzle, we need to get closer to each other. We need to build understanding of what each of us is learning. Bridging that gap is our biggest challenge.”

Another person jumped in. “In my last project, we put together an inter-disciplinary team. We met twice each week as a team. At first I hated having so many meetings. But that project yielded surprising and important breakthroughs in understanding how our immune system affects early childhood development. Communication was key to our success.”

“That’s right,” another person said. “The breakthroughs occur when we understand what happens at three levels – behavior, development, and biology. We need to bridge those gaps.”

“But that’s a huge leap,” another person said. “Each of those is a different world with a different history and protocols and language. How can we possibly do that?”

People make the same leap when they become leaders, I said. When people are promoted into leadership roles, they have to rethink how they add value. The biggest leap is understanding the importance of communication. Those who succeed as leaders build good systems of communication. They make sure there’s enough communication so that everyone understands how they can best work together and achieve the organization’s goals.

“So who is responsible for that here?” someone asked.

“Good question,” I said. “What do you think?”

“I guess we all are.”

“So how can you build systems of communication?” I asked.

People started to toss out ideas. Within an hour, we had identified five new strategies to build communication. The faculty agreed to try all of them. They also agreed to meet each quarter to assess how well they were communicating. I was happy. They were making the leap.

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September 7th, 2008

California in Crisis: My Modest Budget Proposal


california_0

The great California budget deadlock of 2008 has now reached record territory. The business of the state has ground to a halt, programs aren’t able to move forward, schools are in disarray, people aren’t being paid – all because the governor and legislative leaders have boxed themselves into a corner. It is easy to say it represents a new low in California politics. It’s harder to say what the long-term solution might be.

Over dinner tonight, a friend of mine, a former state senator, suggested a constitutional convention. “We need to rethink everything,” he said. “We need to rethink how we elect people, the initiative process, the two-thirds vote. Everything.”

I suggested the solution was in my book “Straight Talk.” The key, I said, is that the players need to agree on the process up front. They need clear ground rules, and there needs to be a neutral facilitator. One of the ground rules should be that legislators and staff don’t get paid once the deadline expires. Another should be that no one can take a hard position in advance. For example, no signed statements against a tax increase or against a particular funding category. Another rule should be that lawmakers agree to support whatever budget comes out of the process.

“Do you really think it would work?” he asked.

“Yes, it would, if everyone agreed that the status quo is unacceptable.”

“Ah,” he said, ” I knew there was a catch!”

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August 7th, 2008

Managing Too Many Clients with Productive Communication


Our Clients

For management consultants, one of the basic credos is “know who your client is.” This is drilled into us as professionals.  If you don’t know who your client is, then you can’t determine how best to serve their interests. That can lead to all sorts of problems.

Yesterday, I discovered during the contracting process that who I thought was the client, isn’t the client, and who I thought was a stakeholder is the client – at least in their minds.  Sound confusing? It was. But I also realized that I could potentially use this contracting conflict as an opportunity to force the issue around roles and responsibilities and get it resolved. That would help both “clients” become much more productive in their relationship with each other. Assuming, of course, they are willing to go through that process. The question is: Are they both open to re-defining their relationship?

Stay tuned. This will be interesting!

Next blog article: “Managing Tough Conversations“

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June 17th, 2008

Ground Rules for Business Meetings | Rules of the River


ground rules for business

I had a reunion with an old college friend of mine named Shaw. We’d been on many adventures together – exploring in Peru, hiking in Corsica, sailing in Maine. Unfortunately, we had only two days, and we had to settle for an adventure relatively close to Boston. We picked a canoe trip down the Saco River in New Hampshire.

We were shuttled to our put-in point by Dave, the garrulous owner of the canoe rental company. It was a hot June morning. Our wet bags contained rain gear, sleeping bags, tent, and enough food for our entire reunion class.

We pulled into the quick-moving silver waters of the Saco, with stately Mt. Washington sheathed in clouds above us. I jumped into the bow, Shaw into the stern. The bowman leads the boat. The stern’s job is to follow the bowman’s lead. This is important to know for what happened later.

We barreled along the river, navigating the Class II riffles with relative ease. There were many boulders to avoid, but the river’s currents were not too treacherous. The greatest danger was from trees, uprooted and tossed into the river by winter storms, sucking the currents underneath them.

We rounded a curve in the river. I looked ahead. The river’s pace quickened as the channel narrowed. Suddenly, I saw a major problem. A birch tree lay horizontally across the river between two rocks. “Tree,” I shouted. There was two feet of clearance beneath the tree. “We can make it.”

“No,” called Shaw. “Head for the beach. Beach!”

“We can make it!” I shouted. “Dig, dig!”

With my determination to go for it, and Shaw’s desire to exercise caution, the canoe responded accordingly. The stern swung around into the current, heading straight toward the tree. Scared of hitting the tree backwards, I executed a deep draw stroke and swung the bow in the right direction. But not enough. We came onto the tree sideways.

“Duck,” I shouted. We both flattened ourselves into the bottom of the canoe. I held my breath. The tree cleared my nose by inches. I listened for a scrape or a thump from the stern. Hearing none, I exhaled. We’d made it!

I stuck up my head and looked at Shaw, who burst out laughing. “That was classic!” he shouted. “A textbook example of what not to do!”

We high-fived and paddled to a sandy beach where we stretched our legs and replayed what had happened. “Our mistake is we didn’t work out our ground rules in advance,” I said. “We need a rule that if one of us wants to stop, we have to stop – no questions asked.”

“I agree,” said Shaw. “And when in doubt, revert to rule number one.”

 We proceeded to navigate several more treacherous spots with no mishaps. Later, while cooking steaks over our campfire, I recounted for Shaw the hundreds of times I’d worked with teams and helped them develop their ground rules.

“It’s a key thing for effective teams to do,” I said. “And it’s interesting and ironic that we overlooked that crucial step.”

Download Ground Rules for Productive Conversations Leadership Tool

Next blog article, “The Pygmalion Effect: How High Expectation Creates High Performance”

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May 28th, 2008

Managing Tough Business Conversations


The CEO of a retail chain wanted his leadership team to learn how to have tough conversations. Too many issues were being buried, he said. Team members needed to bring their issues to the table and learn how to resolve them. He asked me to design a three-hour team-building workshop.

I began the workshop by asking the team to develop a set of operating principles. Here’s what they came up with:

  1. Our first responsibility is to the success of the entire organization, not to our own departments.
  2. We are responsible for helping one another achieve important organizational goals. That is how we can be most effective as a team.
  3. As team members, we need to view each other as supports, not threats.
  4. As team members, we have a right to hear first from each other about issues that affect us, not second-hand or via the “grapevine.”
  5. Since we have a responsibility to help each other, we must bring tough issues to the table and discuss them with each other.
  6. When discussing difficult topics, we need to tackle the issue, not each other.
  7. We have a responsibility to ask questions first before we reach conclusions.

After they developed these principles, I introduced them to the GROW model of productive conversation (first described by John Whitmore in his book “Coaching for Performance” ). In a nutshell, the GROW model says that productive conversations follow this sequence: first, we need to understand the Goal (both of the current discussion and the long-range goal), then the current Reality, then our Options, and finally what we Will do next and when.

Once the team understood the model, I asked them to practice it on two current, tough issues. The CTO immediately raised an issue that no one was aware of – but that affected the entire organization. Off they went! Then the CFO raised a second issue dealing with financial statements. Again, the discussion was electrifying. In each case the team followed the GROW model. After experiencing these two discussions, the team added three more operating principles:

  1. Our meetings must have an agenda and a facilitator.
  2. We keep a record of our action items and hold each other accountable.
  3. No interruptions – we honor this work as our highest priority.

Afterwards, people raved about the quality of the teamwork. As one person said: “There are a lot of conversations we need to have now!”

Next blog article: “Our Change Management Model – Three Principles”

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