The way of a fool seems right to him, but a wise man listens to advice (Proverbs 12:15).

Leadership is about influence, relationships, real change, shared purpose, and doing the right thing. I agree with Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus that an important part of leadership is a set of skills “that can be learned by anyone, taught to everyone, and denied to no one.” (p. 25)

Learning to develop leadership skills is your responsibility. The ability to self-reflect on your behavior and then to marshal the courage to self-authorize continual change and improvement is the foundation of assuming full responsibility for yourself. As Chris Argyris correctly asserts, there are a lot of “smart” people that are unaware of their unwillingness and inability to learn.

Henry Cloud wisely states that “the fool tries to adjust the truth so he does not have to adjust to it.” (p. 133). Fools often surround themselves with other fools, which renders them unable to recognize and close their integrity gaps. Many leaders deceive themselves into thinking they are wise because they seek the trusted advice of carefully vetted advisers. Unfortunately, advisers that formulate and confirm their advice only with each other can never offer wise counsel.

Fools are reactive listeners. They have “open door” policies and claim to be ever available to answer our questions and concerns. Their feel-good approach to listening rarely leads to substantive learning. We learn very quickly that the orifice of the oracle leader is actually a black hole instead of a source of light.

The wise are proactive listeners that initiate the process of listening with their own questions about what needs to change and how to make things better. The wise are proficient meta-learners, continually improving their ability to know what they know and their capacity to understand how to use knowledge to change their behavior.

Does your leadership development reflect foolishness or wisdom? How do you know? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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Faster Is Slower

I had the great pleasure of delivering this presentation on “The Progress Principle” to a group of folks at Arvato Digital Services here in Reno last week. I spoke to them in June this year with a presentation entitled “Empowering Work Relationships.”

They are getting ready to go through some pretty significant organizational change, but instead of talking about how to deal with change or stress, I decided to talk about the concept of inner work life from Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer’s fantastic new evidence-based management book. I think we all realized that we can’t stop change, but the best way to “manage” it might be to make sure we take care of each other by choosing to focus on helping others make daily progress in meaningful work and to be catalysts for our organization and nourishers to our colleagues.

I also stressed my strong belief that there is no substitute for either performance or caring. At the end of every day, you need to be able to look yourself in the mirror and know that you gave your best effort to perform your given responsibilities, that you tried to improve the work that you do, that you demonstrated good citizenship by helping others as needed, and that you sincerely cared about what you did, who you did it with, and who you did it for. If you ever reach the point where you can no longer do that in your current job, then it’s time to either change your behavior or change jobs.

Helping others make daily progress in meaningful work that they care about can’t insulate us from the mess of change, but it might be able to inoculate us from it’s most harmful effects. Change might make us sick sometimes, but it can’t kill us without our complicity.

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I ran my second Twin Cities Marathon in October 2005. It was my third marathon, so I considered myself relatively “experienced.” Race day was unusually warm, humid, and windy, which sucks for a marathon.

About 6 miles into the race, I noticed two women about my age running together using a method I had never seen. They worked together to run a certain distance, then they would stop and walk for a precise period of time (they were using a stop watch) before running again. I thought it was crazy, and I scoffed at what they were doing because I did not consider it “real” running.

I was determined not to let these two women with their unorthodox method beat me. But at about mile 14, when the weather conditions were really starting to take their toll on me, they passed me and I never caught up to them again. They kicked my experienced and arrogant butt.

Even though I’d seen it in action once, I was still discounting the run/walk method when I ran my eighth marathon in June of 2007. A number of folks in our training group were preparing using the run/walk method, but my group of “real” runners trained separately so I never saw them in action. On the day of the race the conditions were once again horribly warm and humid. I ran my worst race ever, but a few of the run/walkers finished with very impressive times.  Never again will I scoff at the run/walk method.

There is a reason why the method works. Even if I never use the full method myself, if I understand why it works, I might be able to incorporate some of the principles into what I do. I don’t have to totally abandon methods that have worked for me and others in the past, but if I want to continue to get better results, I must continue to improve my methods and change my behavior. That principle applies to everything I do – running, parenting, teaching, writing, speaking, learning, and leading.

Is your leadership experience limiting your leadership development?  The toughest competitor you have to continually train to beat is yourself. Don’t let your own experience slow you down, or worse yet, disqualify you from staying in the race.

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Give Yourself Permission

You just returned from a day of training on how to improve the performance of your team. You were told that to improve the performance of your team, you need to focus on these four things:

• Management processes (e.g. hiring, training, performance evaluation, rewards)
• Collaborative leadership
• Relationships with team members
• Your personal development

All of these are critical to your success, but which one is the most important? Which one of these four is your indispensible, core performance technology?

Your personal development is your core performance technology.

You can learn how to improve processes, be more collaborative, and build relationships with your team members; however, your ability to continually grow in these areas will always be constrained by your capacity to learn. There is no single skill more critical to your personal and organizational success than your ability to learn how to learn.

Peter Senge defines a mess as “a complicated problem where there is no leverage to be found because the leverage lies in interactions that cannot be seen from looking only at the piece you are holding”. (The Fifth Discipline, p. 67).  You and your team cannot be delivered from your mess by leadership, management, or relationships alone. Only through continual learning can you master your mess.

Now more than ever, the land of excellence belongs to those that learn faster than their competitors, continue to learn how to learn, and can model the way for others to do the same.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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A version of this post originally appeared on The Student Branding Blog, March 1, 2010. I’m reposting it here today because today is the last day of my first semester long course in personal branding for MBA students at UNR.

There is no book that I have recommended more than Peter Senge’s “The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization.” It’s a bit abstract, however, abstract thinking is an important skill to develop and I would encourage you to struggle through it.

The fifth discipline is systems thinking. Systems thinking is the ability to “see the big picture,” to understand cause and effect, and to know how to take actions today that will produce significant and lasting results now and in the future. I firmly believe that anyone who masters the discipline of systems thinking will be a much better leader than someone who only sees their situations as snapshots.

My copy of Senge’s book was given to me in 1994 by my mentor, Mary A. Newman.  Mary was one of the professors I met during my master’s degree studies. Not only did Mary turn me on to systems thinking, she was also the one that encouraged me to go on and get my Ph.D. – something I had never even considered doing before I met her.

I did not know it in 1994, but I see clearly now that Mary helped change the trajectory of my life. If I had never met Mary, I am certain that I would not be writing the blog post you are reading right now. Before I met Mary, I never considered that professors could be friends with their students. Now that I am a professor myself, I count several of my former students as good friends.  Mary and I have been friends now for over 16 years.

We can only see how people changed our lives by looking in our rear-view mirrors. When it becomes clear to you that someone had a profound effect on your life, make sure to take the time to find them and thank them.

Always be aware of how things you do for others in the course of your life might seem small at the time but could end up having a huge impact. When you give yourself to others simply for the opportunity to help them in some small way, you become truly remarkable.

Don’t miss the big picture. If you want to have a remarkable brand a year from now, you have to give yourself permission to behave like a remarkable person today. Seeing your personal big picture is hard enough; assuming responsibility for changing it requires real courage and wisdom.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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Excellence Is A Form Of Deviance

In a brilliant but largely unnoticed book, “Leadership for the Twenty-First Century,” Joseph Rost offers one of my favorite ways to think about leadership:

Leadership is an influence relationship among leaders and followers who intend real changes that reflect their shared purpose (p. 102).

When I include this concept in talks to groups or my MBA classes, I usually focus on relationship and shared purpose and spend little time highlighting real changes. In his book, Rost says the following about real changes (p. 103):

1. Intend means that leaders and followers purposefully desire certain changes
2. Real means that the changes the leaders and followers purposefully intend must be substantive and transforming
3. Leaders and followers do not have to produce changes in order for leadership to occur. They intend changes in the present; the changes take place in the future if they take place at all
4. Leaders and followers intend several changes at once

Our words and actions over time show our true intentions. Real leaders – those focused on real change – never veil their true intentions because they understand that right relationships are built on reciprocal trust, and we simply don’t trust people with opaque, corrupt, or selfish intentions.

Reveal your intentions and the purpose behind them and you will create division, not unity. Leadership drives a wedge between those that hunger for excellence and those that grow fat from the comfortable mediocrity of the status quo. Disguised as leaders, laggards will fight hard to maintain their fiefdoms.

Leadership requires the courage to fight every battle and the wisdom to realize you don’t have to win every battle to win the war for real changes. Leadership fights hard to move the standard up the mountain and prepares others for both the glory of planting the flag at the summit, and for the hard work of coming down from the pinnacle and identifying the next mountain to climb.

Relationships and purpose expose leadership lies and separate real changes and honest intentions from pretense and venality. If you love the nature of leadership, consider carefully these words from Rost:

Change is the most distinguishing element of leadership, and if the integrity of that word is not preserved, people cannot possibly distinguish leadership from other social processes. Preserving the integrity of the word change is accomplished in this definition by modifying it with the word real. Intending pseudo changes will not qualify. Make-believe, sham, fakery, pretense, posturing, masquerading, hypocrisy, simulation, and other dishonest behaviors that suggest the leaders and followers are not serious about intending real changes are unacceptable in applying this definition. Only when leaders and followers actually intend real changes is a leadership relationship possible. (p. 115).

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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I am very pleased to feature this guest post by Tanveer Naseer. I found Tanveer on Twitter and have been following and enjoying his blog for about a year. His brief bio follows this thought provoking post (please leave a comment!). Thanks, Tanveer!

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported the results of an interesting survey that should encourage some reflection and review by both university graduates and businesses, and hopefully the various educational institutions as well.

From April to June of this year, over 10 000 currently employed university graduates (graduated university between 1999 to 2010) were asked to rate how satisfied they were with their current career path.  Naturally, the result which has received the most attention is the rather low satisfaction rate found among psychology majors, who ranked almost 20-percentage points lower than the second-to last group on the scale.  While the title of the Wall Street Journal article succinctly explains the reason behind this low satisfaction rate among psychology majors, there’s something more disturbing about the overall findings that should really the focus here.

Looking at the group of university graduates that ranked as the most satisfied in terms of their current career path, we see that only 54% of respondents replied in the affirmative.  And this result comes from a group of employees that the survey authors define as working “within a set of jobs deemed satisfying, well-paid, and with growth potential”.  In other words, regardless of what discipline you study while attending university, there’s a 50% or more chance that you won’t be satisfied with the career path it helps you to take.

Evidently, businesses are doing their part through offering opportunities for growth and reasonable financial renumeration, given the profile of the respondents that were the focus of this study.  So what then can we make of this discrepancy among employees who are well-paid and have those desired opportunities for professional growth, and their assessment that their career path hasn’t lived up to what they hoped for?  Looking at the other key player in this equation, it’s clear that the disconnect seen here comes from the educational institutions that people attend.  Specifically, with their expectations of how their education will help them secure the career path they wish to undertake and what they actually experience once they’re out in the ‘real world’.

This is where many will argue that the point of seeking a university education is not simply to get a better job, but to develop a sense of knowledge and understanding about a particular discipline or field of study.  But here is where I think we need to cast aside such lofty assumptions and ask instead what is the purpose of education? Certainly one purpose of educational institutions is to serve the community in which it’s based, namely in helping to guide individuals toward becoming productive members of that community, instead of mere drains on their resources.

This in many ways reflects the role of leadership as well, where one of the responsibilities of being a leader is to encourage the development of their employee’s strengths, both for the benefit of the organization as well as the individual.

Another responsibility of leadership is to seek out those individuals who can best help you to reach your organization’s objectives.  Here again, we see a common thread between leadership and our educational systems as universities regularly seek out individuals, both students and professors, who they believe will help them achieve the goals they have for their institution.

This line of thought, though, leads to another key question we need to ask in light of such findings and that is what are we expecting in terms of results from our educational systems?  The easy answer is to have students who achieve high levels of success, as defined by earning a high average class percentile.  But in looking at the results of the survey above, is this really the result we should be expecting?  Or is it instead answering the question are we ensuring that our methods and processes are serving the needs of our students?  The results above certainly provide us with the answer to that question.

And this is where we have to admit that in addressing all the problems we’re currently seeing in our educational systems, it’s not merely a question of inadequate funding or insufficient numbers of teachers, though those are certainly problems that need to be addressed.  No, the bigger issue that first needs to be addressed here is a failure of leadership; of failing to serve the needs of those who join these institutions not merely to help raise them in prominence and perceived success, but to gain something that will help them grow in the direction of their desired career path.

It’s not enough to continue to perpetuate the image of the ivory tower, of us warning students about to graduate about what it’s really like ‘out there in the real world’.  It’s not enough to accept good intentions over expected results of contributing our time, effort, and resources.  What is required instead is something Peter Drucker once spoke of in discussing the education system of tomorrow:

(American) education tomorrow will have to think through who its constituents are.  It will have to learn to establish relations with them.  It will have to learn, above all, to get across to them what each constituency can and should expect from the school and what the school can and should expect from each constituency.

The results of this new survey should hopefully serve as a wakeup call, both to the education system and its “constituents”, to address this dramatic disconnect by understanding the true nature of leadership that is needed here – that of serving the needs of others in order to help them to not only grow, but also to achieve the objectives that compelled them to join our group, while at the same time ensuring their help in reaching the goals we set out for the organization.

Tanveer Naseer is a business coach who works with small businesses and entrepreneurs to develop new strategies for growth and development that keeps the focus on what makes them passionate about their business.

Thanks to his diverse experiences working in the scientific and business worlds, he has developed a keen understanding of leadership and work practices, if not also a novel approach to taking on new challenges or situations.  You can read more of his writings on leadership and workplace interactions on his blog at TanveerNaseer.com.  You can also follow him on Twitter – @TanveerNaseer.

My newest article at The Leader Lab is entitled “Creating Satisfaction at Work: No Instant Pudding.“  In it, I discuss some recent research that shows employees with a positive core self-evaluation (a personality trait) are more likely to be satisfied at work and more likely to behave in ways (e.g. seek more complex tasks) that enhance their satisfaction.

That opens up the familiar can of worms about is it the people that make the place, or the place that make the people? In reality, it’s both. Getting both the right people and the right work environment to drive satisfaction is not easy.

Please wander over to The Leader Lab and check out the full article now!

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In his excellent new book, “Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age,” Clay Shirky argues quite persuasively that we always have and always will find time and effort to do the things that interest us. Any single individual might not have a lot, but in the aggregate the potential cognitive surplus of a large group of people can be significant and powerful. The internet and the proliferation of social sites that are increasingly easy to use create opportunities for huge numbers of people to spend their cognitive surplus in a multitude of ways. Some opportunities create productive value; many others are simply fun.

How do you spend your cognitive surplus online?

Do you spend your time mostly playing around or gathering with relatively small numbers of people to share photos, stories, and laughs? If you are spending your cognitive surplus in ways that primarily create personal or limited communal value, you are part of what Shirky calls the Invisible High School.

Or do you spend your time and energy committed to working hard with others, ignoring distracting or entertaining material, to stay focused on projects that create organizational, public, or civic value? If your cognitive surplus is spent organizing and working with others to create productive value, then you are part of what Shirky calls the Invisible University.

Getting an Invisible University means mastering the art of creating groups that commit themselves to working together outside existing market and managerial structures, in order to create opportunities for planet-scale sharing. This work is not easy, and it never goes smoothly. Because we are hopelessly committed to both individual satisfaction and group effectiveness, groups committed to public and civic value are rarely permanent. Instead, groups need to acquire a culture that rewards their members for doing that hard work. It takes this kind of group effort to get what we need, not just what we want; understanding how to create and maintain it is one of the great challenges of our era. (pp. 180-181).

Do you spend your cognitive surplus at the online playground, or do you invest your cognitive surplus providing leadership in a group that is trying to make some kind of a difference?  I submit to you that to be a real leader in your organization and community, you must graduate from the Invisible High School and begin the more rigorous but rewarding work done by colleagues in an Invisible University.

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Our Purpose Is Our Best Guide

I saw this great report last night on The NBC Nightly News. The co-founder of The Tribute WTC Visitor Center wants to make the entire story of what happened on September 11, 2001 required reading in this nation’s schools. I think that is a great idea.

This man is a retired fire fighter, and his son Jonathon was one of the firefighters that died on 9/11. “9/11 has to be taught, or students might only learn history through the prism on today’s headlines.” Real history, even if it is painful history, has to be taught to keep it from being repeated.

Take a few minutes to watch this video. It’s a story of real leadership.

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