On Saturday, January 8, 2011, a gunman killed six people and wounded fourteen others at a gathering in Tucson, Arizona. That seemingly has nothing to do with your personal development as a leader; yet, everyone seriously interested in leadership needs to be thinking hard about what happened in Tucson.

I’m not going to offer you an explanation for what happened, because frankly I don’t have one. It appears to be a very complex issue, and those have no easy answers. Anyone that claims cause and effect are obvious in this tragedy probably hasn’t learned anything new in a very long time.

Understanding complex issues and events requires disciplined thinking. Leaders striving for maturity in their thinking wrestle with the discomfort of admitting to themselves and others that they may never fully understand. Babes, on the other hand, content with the warm milk of their dogmatic thinking, settle for quick and easy solutions and then cry like hell when things don’t go their way.

You thinking about Tucson can’t fix what happened there or prevent something like it from happening somewhere else again tomorrow. But developing the discipline of thinking about complex issues will leave you better prepared to work with others to provide effective solutions to the thorny problems that have been plaguing your business for far too long.

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The Easy Way Out Usually Leads Back In

Today I am once again participating in the orientation of new MBA students at The University of Nevada, Reno. For last year’s orientation, I wrote the post “My Advice To New MBA Students.”  My three main points from last year, which are still my three main points today, are 1) assume full responsibility for yourself, 2) hold yourself accountable for your results, and 3) be remarkable by doing things your peers are not willing to do.

Way too many students think it is my responsibility to make them learn, they blame me when they don’t get the results they want (e.g. an A on every assignment), and they settle into the comfortable morass of mediocrity by patterning their expectations and behavior off of their peers. This is a mistake for a student at any level, but for an MBA student it is simply unacceptable.

If you spend two years in an MBA program and never change your behavior, you have cheated yourself and wasted your time. Don’t think for a minute that your MBA program is going to change you – only YOU can make that happen. The MBA program can help if and only if you are willing to discover your own wisdom.

Use your MBA program to help you improve your ability to learn how to learn. Sustainable competitive advantage will always belong to those that can learn faster than their competitors; these folks raise the bar and force others to play catch-up. Competitive parity belongs to those with only enough courage and capacity to copy what others have already done.

If you have the attitude that you already know it all, then you have nothing left to learn. The primary barriers to your success are self-imposed. It’s what’s between your ears, how you think and how you think about how to think, that either set’s you apart or holds you back.

As you begin your new MBA adventure, take a good look in the mirror. If you see a big gap between where you are and where you think you need to be, and you can learn to hold creative tension while you work on closing that gap, then you are in good shape. I look forward to meeting you if you find your way into one of my classes. I will do my best to help you empower yourself.

If you don’t see a gap, that’s bad news, not the good news you think it is. Good luck to you.

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Give Yourself Permission To Be Excellent

Respectful Engagement

Yesterday, a young man came to my office and apologized for the unacceptable way he treated me recently. He recognized his lapse in good judgment, offered no excuses (e.g. well, I did it because you did this…), and accepted full responsibility for his behavior. There was no mistaking his sincerity.

I was very proud of him; however, I must admit I was surprised.

In my 12 years of teaching, I have to tell you honestly that I witness poor behavior in every class I teach. But in all those years, only a handful of students have had the strength of character to do what this young man did.

I was glad to have the opportunity to tell him that I think he has unlimited potential. Even after his instance of poor behavior, I continued to believe that he had that rare combination of intelligence, charisma, and drive that would enable him to accomplish anything he puts his mind to.

Equally rare is the ability to recognize there is a gap between where you currently are and where you need to be. Most of us avoid living with the discomfort of that gap by refusing to tell ourselves the truth about our current condition.

It’s simply easier and safer to compare ourselves to others and think that we are doing just fine.

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The reason this third law of Peter Senge’s “The Fifth Discipline” is true is because of compensating feedback from the system. If your intervention is at the symptom level, you might be able to eliminate or improve the symptom in the short term, but watch out. Unless you address the root cause of the symptom, you are likely to see an even uglier version of it again.

For example, if your business is struggling to turn a profit because of declining revenues, you can fix that by cutting back on line items (e.g. lay people off, reduce pay, use cheaper raw materials). You might be able to maintain a steady bottom line in the face of evaporating revenues, but the actions you take to cut costs can hurt your growth in the long run. Shoddy products get shipped, customers get worse service, your facilities are not maintained properly and become unimpressive – all of these will hurt your top line, necessitating more and more short-sighted intervention on line items.

Your problem is more about revenue than about costs, and unless you change your assumptions about how to drive revenue growth in your business, you will be chasing an increasingly elusive bottom line.

Symptom thinking is a hard task master. It is very skilled at hiding its lessons from those unable and unwilling to learn. And we are very skilled at hiding our learning disability from ourselves and others.

Resist the temptation to apply any solution until you thoroughly understand the root causes of the problem you face. Master the causes of your problems or become constrained by the symptoms.

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My new post is up at The Student Branding Blog. In this post, I recommend Peter Senge’s classic book “The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of The Learning Organization.” There is no book I have recommended more over the years. The ideas in this book continue to heavily influence my own thinking and practice of leadership.

I also describe how the book was given to me by a friend, someone who I believe changed the trajectory of my life. You can read my post by clicking here.

Check it out!

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Creative Tension

According to W.E. Deming:

With the storehouse of skills and knowledge contained in its millions of unemployed, and with the even more appalling underuse, misuse, and abuse of skills and knowledge in the army of employed people in all ranks in all industries, the United States may be today the most underdeveloped nation in the world. (Out of the Crisis, p. 6).

Deming published those words in 1982. I don’t think his observation is any less accurate today.

The “crisis” that Deming was trying to call us out of was a crisis of management. He did not advocate improvement in management. Decades of competitive complacency got us into our crisis and Deming understood that incrementalism could not deliver us. Deming called for a purposeful, radical transformation of management that he acknowledged would take decades.

Deming believed that part of the problem is how we measure the performance of management:

Failure of management to plan for the future and to forsee problems has brought about waste of manpower, of materials, and of machine time, all of which raise the manufacturer’s cost and price that the purchaser must pay. The consumer is not always willing to subsidize this waste. The inevitable result is loss of market. Loss of market begets unemployment. Performance of management should be measured by potential to stay in business, to protect investment, to ensure future dividends and jobs through improvement or product and service for the future, not quarterly dividends. (p. ix).

Our current economic crisis shows that the transformation Deming called for is at best incomplete. We are still not very good at planning for the future and forseeing problems, and the root is still an overemphasis on short-term financial gain instead of long-term growth through excellence of product and service.

Drastic changes are required. The first step in the transformation is to learn how to change.. (p. x)

I don’t know about where you live, but my state is being devastated by our economic malaise. It is bad enough that we did not plan for the future and forsee our problems, but what is most alarming to me is that we are failing to learn how to change.

In this era of overwhelming and instantaneous information and knowledge, have we actually reached the end of our ability to learn how to change? Ironically, the explosion and availability of knowledge has in many ways increased rather than decreased the complexity and corresponding uncertainty of the challenges we face.

I personally believe that we are living in the age of the end of understanding.

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The eighth principle of Advanced Change Theory (ACT) is inspire others to enact their best self.  While we always maintain reverence for those involved in change, as we push action toward the edge of chaos in pursuit of our vision for the common good, we have to ask our followers for “stretch efforts.”

In asking for “stretch efforts,” the leader continually models the courage, integrity, competence and concern expected of followers. In this way, mutuality is created between the leader and the follower. (p. 8 )

Because we expect the highest standards from our people, as leaders we have to serve as role models for high standards.  If we are really stretching, there will always be a gap between where we are and what we are trying to become.  Those gaps take time to close, and they make us uncomfortable because they reveal our vulnerabilities.  As a leader, you can find strength in vulnerability if you can learn to live with the creative tension that exists in the gap between where you are and where you need to be.

Don’t surrender to the expediency of pulling the vision down to your current level of competence. Model the way in allowing the vision to pull you forward.  Your folks need to see you struggling with imperfection in your pursuit of transformational learning.  Only then will they know for sure it is safe for them to do the same.

None of us can ever become our best self unless and until we confront our imperfect self.  Model the way for your folks in this continual process of transformation and improvement.

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Leadership integrity: Touchy-feely crap?

The first principle in Advanced Change Theory (ACT), Create an Emergent System, tells us to take our eyes off ourselves and focus instead on understanding our role as purposeful actors in a larger system.  Because of the tremendous complexity in both the internal and external environments of our organizations, the principle of emergence tells us we have less control than we think over where our organizations will be at any point in time.  Need an example?  Just ask any leader in an organization that is still operating if three years ago they predicted how things would be today.

The thing we have the most control over is our own choices and behavior; hence, ACT encourages us to change others by changing ourselves.  Our look inward begins with the second principle of ACT, Recognize Hypocrisy and Patterns of Self-Deception.  The third principle, Personal Change Through Value Clarification and Alignment of Behavior, is a natural extension of the second.

ACT maintains that the process of engaging and reducing personal integrity gaps leads to value clarification and the personal confidence necessary to relinquish control, accept short-term defeats, identify and explore negative feelings, and trust the uncontrollable emergent process. This is the essence of the vision-driven and growing individual. (p. 152).

It takes real courage and discipline to confront our integrity gaps and deal with the discomfort of changing our behavior.  I’ve never known anyone to confront a problem they did not first admit existed.  Not only do we need to clarify our values, but once we do so we should make them public and invite others to help us hold ourselves accountable to those values.  As leaders, we readily accept that it’s our job to hold our followers accountable for aligning their behavior with stated organizational values.  But how many of us have radically shifted our power paradigm and made it an explicit expectation of our followers to also hold us accountable for the alignment of our behavior?

If you are truly a purposeful leader, you have to make that shift.  When it’s not about YOU, then honest, even painful feedback is good news.  But if you are an egocentric leader, you won’t choose this path because despite your lofty rhetoric, we can tell by your actions that the preservation and extension of your power and position is your top priority.

What do you stand for? How do your people know? How do you know that they know? Do you behave as if you truly believe you are behaving utterly consistent with your values, or are you willing to model the way in addressing your need for continual improvement?

To be open to this painful but exciting process of learning by doing means that you will continue to adapt and thrive.  To be closed to this process means that you will be the last one to acknowledge your own decay and to notice how close you are to the precipice.

Stay tuned!

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Creative Tension

Thomas Friedman wrote a great opinion piece in The New York Times yesterday called “The New Untouchables.” I buy his arguments about a broken education system, but for the purposes of this blog I want to focus on the type of worker he says is surviving and thriving in the current economic crisis:

Those who are waiting for this recession to end so someone can again hand them work could have a long wait. Those with the imagination to make themselves untouchables — to invent smarter ways to do old jobs, energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old customers or new ways to combine existing technologies — will thrive.

I get that message loud and clear. It is one of the big reasons why I started this website and now am working feverishly to make it and myself better. I have no control over whether or not the state will fund my job in the future, but I know I am not waiting around to find out. I am looking for new and innovative ways to leverage my value platform so that I never find myself in this position again – ever. Excuses are irrelevant.

Grit, not strength, is what it takes to become untouchable. I think you are making a huge mistake if you have bought the strength-based leadership mirage and are trying to compete on fixed talent and not on learning and growth. 

As leaders, we need people that are open to learning, willing to confront challenges, able to stick to difficult tasks, and capable of bouncing back from failures (Dweck, 2008). Stop praising people for fixed qualities like talent and strength and start developing and rewarding malleable qualities like effort, flexibility, collaboration, and innovation.

Teach your people to give themselves permission to do something different.

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Your employees have a secret.  They don’t love you and your organization as much as you think they do.

A February 2009 survey by salary.com suggests that employers underestimate how many unsatisfied employees they have and overestimate the number of extremely satisfied employees nearly 2 to 1.  This could be happening for one of two simple reasons.

First, you don’t have a basic measure of job satisfaction.  As I have written here before, a simple measure of employee satisfaction and commitment is one of the most useful pieces of information an organization can have.  If you are not measuring this on a regular basis, I think you are making a big mistake.  If you contact the College of Business at your state’s major university you can probably find someone that will help you do this for free.

Second, your insistence on having a positive work environment is blinding you to reality. If you systematically eliminate the folks that don’t absolutely conform to your desired image of perfection, the ones that are not your true sycophants will learn to appear as if they are when you are around.

Is there too much pressure to be positive at work? Timothy Judge and Charlice Hurst raise this interesting question in their chapter in the book Positive Organizational Behavior.  If your company is paying big bucks for an employee engagement program, you are going to have a hard time avoiding the very real pressure to be positive.

Positivity has considerable merit.  But how you pay attention to the negative is one of the most important ways you can make things more positive.  Treat negativity, resistance, and withdrawl as symptomatic rather than problematic and you have a powerful opportunity to learn and improve when things are not quite right.

Embrace the creative tension that exists in the gap between your aspiration and your reality.